Dreams That Burn In The Night (19 page)

Zared, playing
buccaneer, leaped from the balcony. The fibra­foam enfolded him—then pushed back out, nudging him
upward to his feet as if he were a mushroom poking through peat moss. (They'd all seen mushrooms
at the Wichitopolis Green Quarter: obscene little beasts. Jarmster had asked if they were
mammals. "Of course not," Zared had said contemptuously, "they don't have fur.")

Now Zared was
saying, "You're making a joke of this, Melyna. When I say we should put in a native, I mean a
native.
Why, this area—according to the twelfth retaping of the
Encyklohomika,
you
know—was once a veritable Amerindic zoo!" Excited, he was bouncing a bit on the Ambersea. "It
ought to be easy for the HeDonStitute to take our specifications, feed them to the
Andro-lacrumizer, and deliver unto us a warrior. I want feathers, you see. I want feathers, and
parfleches, and flesh as sinewy as pem-mican. . ."

"Mmmmmm," said
Jarmster, caught up.

"All right," Melyna
said. "In May we had my Esquimau mama, for whatever she was worth. It
is
Zared's
turn."

But Melyna
sometimes wondered why they just didn't go up­stairs to old Rose Mashita, who was dwelling alone,
and give themselves  to 
her. 
As  repugnant  as  that 
thought  was   . . .
 
Jarmster and Zared, after
all, ran through WageAid units like slotballers, and in ten more years, at this rate, they'd be
out every life-unit allotted them and have to go waste-walking with the scurves of Wichitopolis
just to keep their bones together. "But to­morrow," Jarmster always said, incorrigible, "our bowl
may break and we wee little fishes die." He'd got that from a gum-machine guru-oracle in the
lobby of the Wichitopolis gypsum baths, and how he delighted in ratcheting it out whenever he
needed a justification for spreeing away their WageAids.

"Good," Zared said,
pulling a vineline out of the Blucite wall. "Let's call in our specs." He tapped the fonehead
into action on the base of the miniature Praxiteles (Aphrodite) in the middle of the room and
passed it over to Jarmster.

They called in
their specs.

A
native,
they specified.

Jarmster reeled off
the abstracts, insisting on (1) "intensity," (2) "mystery," and (3) "romantic
melancholy."

Melyna was given
the task of defining psycho-physico param­eters and so requested (1) "youth," (2) "beauty," and
(3) "feral intelligence."

And Zared supplied
the flavoring, the sensory correlatives of the qualities foregoing. (1) "Feathers," he said. (2)
"Parfleches," he said. And (3) "flesh," he said, "as sinewy as pemmican."

They'd had two
already, this triad. But the novelty had worn off, and they'd traded away their Androlacra (a
rascal Basque, an Esquimau mama) for four silent Barrymore films, a wardrobe of BodiSheeths, a
nucleoscape, and a seasonal supply of Virilitol, the Gentle Aphrodisiac.

But now they had
foned in their specs . . .

. . . And so the
HeDonStitute's ministers sent their computer aloft, and had it circle the plain underlying the
city, and asked it to conceive from auras and thermospoors and historiographic data ... an
Amerind. "And once you've conceived," they told the Androlacrumizer, "gestate us a gestalt as
gravid with authen­ticity as ever you may."

And the computer,
being a computer, did.

The triad went to
the HeDonStitute in their nucleoscaphe. They settled into the facility through the vehicle port.
In the circular Hall of Androlacra they found the Don of Affairs.

"Where is it?"
Jarmster asked, rubbing the bridge of his Bar­rymore put-on nose.

The Don's name was
Ridpath, and he led them over the Maplelux parquetry to the Blue Sky Room. Their feet went from
the waxy Reelwood to the nappy indigo of InsuSod, and the mustachioed Ridpath told them to sit in
hammock nets, to await what their WageAid units had bought.

Through a curtain
of blue Make-Me-Opaque polymer it came in to them, and Ridpath took its hand for the
introductions.

Zared was up on his
feet. "It's a woman!" he said.

The Don of Affairs
said, "You didn't specify sex."

"We had a woman
last time," Zared protested. "I wanted, you know, a ... warrior. Feathers. Parfleches. Flesh as .
. ."

The Androlacrum
was
a woman. She wore a heavy flowered dress made of trader cloth, and an ugly dun
blanket. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled back behind her ears. In her hands, a
leather parfleche tooled with a design of interlocking snakes.

"Hello," Melyna
said, nodding politely.

"Mmmmm," Jarmster
said, crossing his legs.

"Beauty," Zared
said. "Melyna said beauty. Is this beauty? I ask you. We
specified
beauty."

The Androlacrum
didn't flinch.

The Don of Affairs
said, "Whose standards would you impose? Yours, sir, or the milieu's from which we've distilled
her?"

"But she resembles
the Esquimau mama!"

"Who was
beautiful," said Jarmster. Then he said, "Well, Don Ridpath, what bunch is she of?"

"Tribe," Ridpath
corrected. Then he avowed, "A composite of the plains, good people. Kiowa, Comanche, Oglala
Sioux, Osage, Arapaho. A bit of them all."

"She . . .
smells!"
said Zared, circling her. The face of the Androlacrum was devoid of apology. "She
smells like . . . like Flav-O-Smoak, Bar-B-Q Piquant. And / don't like the Piquant."

"To some extent,"
Ridpath said, ignoring Zared, "a composite Amerind is a composite human being, so many such
people were hereabouts . . . once. This woman, in fact, is what one would have if he made a tree
from all trees, a flower from all flowers."

Experimenting with
the sound, Jarmster said,
"A tree from all trees . . ."
He liked the feel of it, Melyna
could tell.

Zared said, "I
didn't want a tree. I didn't want a flower. I wanted a warrior!"

"I'm sorry," the
Don of Affairs said. "Your Androlacrum, tak­ing into account every one of your specs, is a
quintessential Amerind, programmed with the lore of the land we've conjured her from. And our
contract, I hasten to add, is vocoded, Zared."

"Don't worry, Don
Ridpath," Melyna said. "We
do
want her, you know. But could you tell us her
name?"

"Certainly," said
Ridpath. "A sort of a story. Once 'born,' she asked how she got here . . ."

"She does talk,
then?" asked Zared, staring at the silent figure.

"Yes. Given a
little time. Anyhow, she asked how she got here. We told her. She understood. And that's how she
decided upon a name, you see. Because three of you collaborated in imagining her, she told us,
her name would have to be Three Dream Woman."

"Oh, that's
lovely," Melyna said. "Three Dream Woman.

And the
Androlacrum, once programmed, three times dreamed. A helix of artificial wishes, aroused by dead
dreams, moves her on a mechanical journey to the end of the night. Awake in the body, whispering
in the blood, bloodstream surging. I will plant you in the earth of my body.

In the body,
restless undercurrents, and the shore rising to cut an underocean of sleep. The artificial
wishes, the helix of specifications, beckoning. The empty fist of the triad arranges the fences
across the no-man's-land of their minds. Her eyes move with life. The blood, rising, dreams
through her skin. What did she dream?

A child with a
kickball, Moksiis they call you, little potbelly. Keep the ball of antelope hair up in the air. A
cause for laughter if it touches the earth. Touch the earth with your sisters, little Moksiis;
dream in your play, slowing from games into a cotton-wood womanhood, supple and stern, your
potbelly flattening into flanks not for touching. You're a girl with a kickball, a child in the
spring of her running.

The second dream is
the cottonwood womanhood of the em­bryo dreamer. A hide flesher you hold, also a digging stick.
The quick and the dead. Early sunups. The buffalo flow in your

dreams. Red Leaf
has died, those returning will tell you, and on the last day of summer your tree has
fallen.

The last dream is
of power, all praise to the crone you've slyly become. Sixty-five winters, grudgingly borne.
Dying's the final birth. . . .

Though only two
days old, Three Dream Woman, the Androla­crum, had thus dreamed her whole life. That was the way
the HeDonStitute did things, for the sake of reality, because even a spurious life can
comfort.

For the first time
in a month, Rose Mashita had put their Am-bersea ceiling on a thoroughly opaque setting. As a
result, their bowlcove was dark when they entered, and cool, and empty. It was the middle of
August. And Three Dream Woman had a blan­ket about her, a heavy Navaho weave.

Jarmster said, "Let
me take your blanket."

Three Dream Woman
pulled it to her throat, and gazed about the bowlcove with contempt. "The world is dying," she
said. The first words she'd spoken since their departure from the HeDonSti­tute.

How old is she?
Melyna wondered. I specified youth and she looks no more than twenty—but her eyes are ageless.
Sixty-five years of false experience in the body of a woman-child.

Zared said, "Maybe
our 3-D lady would like the cool turned down."

Jarmster nodded and
turned the cool down. August seeped in like a gas. Beads of sweat appeared on Three Dream Woman's
brow. They would have to give her a BodiSheeth, Melyna thought, to spare her the discomforts of
meteorological annoy­ances, inside and out.

"Aren't we
blessed," said Jarmster, gesturing upward, "that Horror Show Mashita isn't ringside for the
unveiling?" He reached for Three Dream Woman's blanket.

"The world is
dying," Three Dream Woman said. "And I am not yours."

As he had done in
the Blue Sky Room, Zared circled the Androlacrum. "We
bought
you, 3-D lady. You're ours
because we bought you."

"It may be that you
have bought me, but I am not owned."

The triad was
stymied. Intensity they had in Three Dream Woman, and mystery, and intelligence, and all the
sensory cor­relatives Zared had asked for. What had gone wrong? "I know what it is," Zared said.
"It's the romantic melancholy Jarmster specified. Her melancholy isn't romantic at all: it's
fatalistic and classical, you see, and not even a bit self-pitying. Oriental, you could call it.
In any case, our contract is breached."

"No, Zared," Melyna
said. "Minimum grounds for annulment are seven out of nine specs. Eight and a half?
Never."

"You were the one,"
Jarmster told Zared, "who wanted some­thing indigenous, don't you remember? Melyna and I, we like
her fine."

"Ipso facto," Zared
said heatedly, glaring at them all. "I dis­robe her."

He pulled Three
Dream Woman's blanket away from her shoulders, tossed it over Aphrodite in the middle of the
bowlcove. He tore her dress of trader cloth, yanked it free, flung it aside. Three Dream Woman
did not move. In moccasins and calfhide breechpiece she stared at the flurried Zared. Melyna
wanted to put an arm around her naked shoulders and tell her not to stare so dauntingly. Zared
was a spoiled little boy. Jarmster smirked.

"Because I was born
only two days past," Three Dream Woman said, "I am a virgin. But in spite of this, I have
memories of lying with Red Leaf, my husband, and bearing him two sons and a daughter. My first
when I was sixteen snows old, the other in the years that followed. I am Virgin and Mother, a
woman of my people. How do you dare to touch me, when this is so?"

Stymied.

The triad averted
their eyes, and rubbed their hands together, seeking a solution. Only Melyna could smile, her
eyes amused at their predicament.

"This is Ridpath's
fault," Zared said. "For giving us a ... a 'composite.' It's Ridpath who's to blame."

They looked again
at their Androlacrum. Three Dream Woman was now sitting fully clothed at the base of the
Praxiteles, her legs to one side. The statue above her, Melyna thought, might have been a
cottonwood, the Ambersea beneath her a swatch of hard prairie.

"I'm hungry,"
Melyna said. And she sat down beside the
Androlacrum and pulsebeeped their bowlcove's contingency cart out of the
kitchen.

"You are hungry
because the world is dying," said Three Dream Woman, "and no once dances the sun to
life."

"Phaugh," said
Zared, disgusted.

He and Jarmster
stood with their arms folded, like spectators at an accident, wishing not to get involved. They
moved away from the Androlacrum and set the Make-Me-Opaque floor at trans­parency stage 2. For
the next two hours they played at voyeur. In that brief time a good deal of the world
died.

The Androlacrum
placed a cutting of her hair in the arms of Aphrodite. "My hair stands for the sagebrush," she
told them. Then, facing the statue, Three Dream Woman began her dance. The sun, she had told
them, was nowhere to be seen in this place Wichitopolis, and so she danced for the
sun.