Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (13 page)

The mason appeared to inspect the damage. The stone beside the gap was cracked. “The one in the water is probably chipped too,” he said. “They’ll both have to be replaced.”

“Do you hear that?” a guard said, and shoved the thief again. “You’ll both have to be replaced.”

“The stones,” the mason said, dogged and irritated. “I meant the stones.”

“We could have this scum wade in from the riverbank to get it out,” said the overseer.

“Yes. I
would
like to take a look at it,” the mason said.

“But if you’re sure it’s ruined …” the thief began, and was struck in the mouth. He was quiet for a while after that, his top lip skewered by a broken tooth.

The guards turned on the Lifer and pushed him along the bridge and onto the road. He scuttled, pursued by blows, down the bank to the river’s edge. He protected his head with his arms, then fell to his knees on the soggy ground and stared at the water. Its shallows were thick with curdled weeds. The thief dropped down beside him. The young man’s chin and throat were coated red. Over their heads a guard said, “Which of you dropped the block?”

“It was him,” said the young thief. “Look at his hands. He can’t keep a firm hold on anything.” He sounded desperate.

“All right, old man. Get in there.” The guard put his boot in the small of the Lifer’s back.

“Remove his shackles, for God’s sake!” the young man pleaded.

“Fine,” said a guard,
“You
can go, since you’re so concerned for his well-being.” The guard kicked the thief, who splashed into the water’s edge and caught himself on his hands. Black mud oozed up between his fingers till his hands were buried. The young man turned to the guards, eyes glimmering with fear. He edged around so that his feet and shackled ankles entered the water first. He crept backward, his hands groping and slithering on the sopping turf. He was looking into the Lifer’s eyes, and his gaze said, “No. Not now. Not when I’m nearly free.”

When he was up to his hips in the weeds, his feet slipped. His eyes flared with terror and he sank his fingers into the turf. He heaved and grappled his way back up the bank, clawing the thick coating of moss from the ground. He came out wallowing in mud, his front coated and face dappled. He lay on the bank, gasping, his hands still full of gobs of mud. He stared at what was in his hands, his
face quite mad for a moment, both horrified and exultant, as though he’d discovered them full of human flesh or the makings of a dreadful weapon.

The Lifer could see the thief’s face, and his expression, but the guards couldn’t. They were laughing, staggering with mirth, their feet slipping in the mire the thief had made. When they stopped laughing, they turned their attention to him. “Let’s see how he does.” They didn’t even put it
to
him. Only agreed among themselves that it was his turn. Then they began to kick at him, not hard, only coaxing, but they didn’t stop till he turned to try backing into the water.

“No!” The thief came to life, gave up nursing his handfuls of mud, shook his hands empty to reach—but was struck down.

The Lifer edged back into the river. The water was warmed by the sun, and by the vegetation. He went carefully, searching for safe footings. He went down in a fresh place, not in the muddy slot the thief had made in the bank. He looked over his shoulder and saw water textured by floating weeds, then, beyond that, smooth, its skin twitching only where touched by pond skimmers. He glanced up at the guards, who were quiet now, and at the bridge, the still forms of all the staring convicts, the beautiful carvings, the lucent scales of sunlit water reflected on the underside of the sandstone arch. He looked around, and then he slipped, slithered back, his hands tearing at the weeds. He saw the thief lunge forward and splash onto his belly, hands stretched out.

The weeds came loose in the Lifer’s grasp. He was holding on to them, but they had let go at the root. There was nothing behind his feet. The weeds parted and he went back into the water, his eyes open. Billowing clouds of mud followed him and he lost sight of the surface for a moment. Then it was back, as brackets of black ripples on a hot blue sky. His shackles drew him down into the channel, and the weeds closed over his head. He was engulfed in caressing green gloom.

He held his breath. He stretched his arms up. He felt the cool lightness of air on his knuckles, so he opened his hands, forced his gnarled fingers straight up into the air. He waited for a grip, a rope, a breath—

The green light turned red, the still water turbulent. His lungs ached, then opened. He sucked in water. There was nothing behind it, or beyond it. No air.
In a room beside the troublemaker’s cell, someone pushed back a down comforter. Maze Plasir turned up the flame of the lamp by the bed. The light was like a reprieve. The dreamhunter leaned back on his pillows and breathed deeply. He felt weak with gratitude just for waking up. It was absurd to feel that way, and Plasir waited patiently for the feeling to fade. While he waited, he hurried his recovery by saying to himself, “It is my nightmare, and so
I am
the river.”

Once the force of the nightmare’s end had faded, Plasir again began to feel dissatisfied with it. It wasn’t particularly strong, as far as nightmares went. But the Department of Corrections had chosen it from its description in the Regulatory Body’s Dream Almanac. The man next door, the troublemaker, had done something that Corrections thought would best be treated with a nightmare in which submersion and the weight of iron figured heavily. Plasir had no idea what the man had done. He just had to suppose that Corrections knew what
they
were doing.

The dreamhunter picked absentmindedly at a loose thread on the silk cord trim of his bolster. In a moment he’d lie down again and begin another cycle of the dream. He caught himself holding his breath as he strained to hear sounds on the other side of the wall. He remembered that there had been one subject who, for some reason unable to wake up, had stopped breathing.

The dream, Sunken, did end with a death. It was one of only a very few dreams that did so. Hame’s nightmare Buried Alive was so terrible that it was said no dreamhunter would be able to stay asleep long enough to see its end. Plasir wondered what would happen if an unconscious dreamhunter was set down on the site of Buried Alive. That would be an interesting experiment. But, sadly, no one could experiment with the
nightmare since no one knew where it was to be found. Tziga Hame had concealed the dream’s site, and Lazarus—whoever the hell
he
was—wasn’t volunteering information to anybody.

Plasir liked to experiment with dreams. He had learned to like this process as he became more experienced, and as he began to notice how much some dreams changed.

Second Sentence, for instance, was a split dream. For years Plasir had caught it but hadn’t known it was a split dream. Then the Body had had Jerome Tilley, one of the rare “Novelists” (as those who caught split dreams were called), take a good look at all its most effective “Think Again” dreams. The Body had wanted to check that—for instance—a dream Plasir had been catching, about the young woman attacked in her home, might not also have something from the point of view of the husband who discovered her bleeding body at the dream’s conclusion. It turned out that it did have, and the dream Violated became Violated and The Husband’s Horror. The Body then had all its dreamhunters with Corrections contracts catch the dream till they found one who could reliably catch only The Husband’s Horror. Jerome Tilley’s experiments were all part of the Body’s plan to develop more “targeted treatments” for hardened offenders.

Noting Tilley’s experiments, Plasir had begun to wonder about his own specialty dreams. After a time, just wondering seemed to make it possible for him to open some of them up. He never did catch a split dream—he wasn’t a Novelist—but he found that a few dreams he knew suddenly switched their point of view. And so it was that Second Sentence had thrown up the nightmare Plasir named, simply, Sunken. Sunken had the same setting as Second Sentence—a bridge under construction in a country town, on a hot day after harvesttime.

Maze Plasir stopped pulling threads on the bolster and held his breath again. He had realized something. That
Alexander Mason’s Water Diviner was
also
set in that place and at that time—the country town and valley full of the haze of smoke. Plasir concentrated; he looked very hard at his memory of the country town. It wasn’t anywhere he knew in life, and there was something about its reality that was off-kilter. There was the whittled elegance of the women’s skirts—skirts with higher hems than those women were wearing. There was the lack of jitters in the sleek motorcars. The town seemed real and not real at the same time (though, of course, all the dreams were
factual
, none had monsters, or unassisted flight, or any of the things true human dreams had). The country town of The Water Diviner, Sunken, and Second Sentence was strange to Plasir, yet, if he squinted through the brown haze at its distances, he thought he could see familiar hills, hills he’d seen somewhere he’d been as a child.

Plasir concentrated. He strained to know. Then he gave up, sighed, settled himself down on the bed, and went back to his first train of thought.

Sunken may have been set in the same place as Second Sentence, but it was very different. It showed the same events from a different point of view. The Lifer’s eyes lingered on everything because his thoughts dithered and doubled back on themselves. The man had gotten to the end of his life and seemed still to be trying to put his life together—like two plus two—to
make something of it.

Second Sentence, however, was from the point of view of the violin thief. The young man began the dream happy, because his sentence was nearly up, and because he’d been working with the mason, a man whose skill he admired. The heat wasn’t draining the young thief dry; he had his health, and hope. He had learned his lesson. He was full of a resolve to stay out of trouble, to spend the rest of his life out of the power of the law. The smoke-stained skies made him think of
music; the slow, green, waving weed made him think of music. Second Sentence was a constructive, reforming dream. It had lessons to teach, such as “Stick to your resolve” and “Keep your temper.” After the old Lifer drowned, straining up into the air, straightening his crippled fingers, the young man stared for a few seconds at his mud-caked hands and a thought flashed through his mind—or more a feeling than a thought, for the dreamhunter Plasir had never been able to make much sense of it. It was a thought about a belief or a story, and, like most of the thief’s thoughts, it had a kind of tune to it, a musical chant. “I’m not helpless,” the thief thought—as people in desperation do sometimes think the exact opposite of what is true and being proved to them. And then, in the dream, the young man lost his temper and surged up, took hold of a rifle in the hands of the nearest guard, the one standing slack-jawed and sated with cruelty. He tore the rifle away from the man, swung it, clubbing and clubbing, till other guards hauled him off. The guard had a broken skull, and the young thief, only weeks away from freedom, was then looking at years, at a second sentence.

Second Sentence was very effective, less a nightmare than a dream with a nasty, sobering turn at its end. But now that he was catching its other aspect, the dream seemed a lot less useful and positive to Plasir. The old man of Sunken had next to no experience of pity, yet how desperately he looked around him for it. He looked into all the faces. What he saw was what he already knew about the world—that it didn’t make any difference if you kept your temper or stuck to your good resolve, for there was malice, always close, and always ready to lend its icy hand.

Second Sentence showed a way out of trouble—though the young man didn’t take it. Sunken showed that it didn’t matter what you did, because accidents happened, and accidents were opportunities for evil. Second Sentence was a warning
dream. Sunken was a nightmare. Taken together, they were horribly incompatible, and Plasir couldn’t help but wonder what a Novelist like Grace Tiebold would make of the dream—for it was
one
dream, and Grace Tiebold would catch it intact, the old man and the young together. She’d catch both the terror and despair of one, and the rage and crushed hope of the other.

Maze Plasir closed his eyes. He would go back to sleep. He would give the troublemaker in the next room another dose. And he’d try to take a better look at the other thing about the dream that troubled him.

Plasir had
been
the thief, on and off, for years. He’d seen everything through his eyes. The thief knew his own past, of course, but he wasn’t really thinking about it on that morning. For instance, Plasir had known from Second Sentence that the thief played the violin, but only learned from Sunken that he had stolen his own instrument from a pawnshop. Plasir knew about the thief only what he’d managed to gather from the young man’s thoughts on that afternoon at the bridge. Then, when he first caught Sunken, the old Lifer had shown Plasir the
face
of the person through whose eyes he’d formerly seen everything.

There was something about that face. Something familiar. The thief looked healthy and happy, and wary and furtive—none of this strange in a criminal on light duty and near the end of his time. But when the stone fell into the river, and the guards turned their spite into sport, and the two convicts were driven to the river’s edge, and the old Lifer gazed into the young thief’s face and saw fear and pity—

“I know that person,”
Plasir thought. “I’ve seen that sensitive, stubborn mouth before. Not in a dream.” He pictured the mouth and the eyes. Eyes full of sadness and shame and resignation and, behind all that, power: pitiless, cold power.

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