Shuteye for the Timebroker (28 page)

Cedric left the casino and squirted the funds to his account. No one would ever be the wiser.

He was opening a second celebratory beer when the police arrived.

“Cedric Swann, we have a warrant for your arrest. Please come with us.”

“But—but I didn’t do anything—”

“The Holland-Nancarrow freethinker swears otherwise.”

On the big wallscreen appeared the facial of the house’s freethinker: an image of former president Streisand. “That’s the man, officers.”

The house’s freethinker! But who would set a freethinker to monitor legitimate transactions originating in-house?

Paranoid parents, obviously.

Who the hell could think as deviously as a breeder?

* * *

Cedric’s possessions now amounted to a single scuffed biomer suitcase of clothing and his Palimpsest. Cedric and his suitcase called a single room in a flophouse in the Mission District their home. The flophouse was a rhizome-diatom hybrid, taking form as a soil-rooted silicaceous warren of chambers, threaded with arteries and nerves that served in place of utilities, all grown in place on a large lot where several older structures had stood until a terrorist attack demolished them. The site had been officially decontaminated, but Cedric wasn’t sure he believed that. Why had no one snapped up the valuable mid- town real estate, leaving the lot for such a low-rent use? In any case, Cedric felt like a bacteria living inside a sponge.

He supposed that such a lowly status was merely consonant with society’s regard for him, after his latest fuckup.

Instead of meeting Caresse at a restaurant as they had planned, Cedric had met her on the night of his arrest at the jailhouse where he had been taken by the cops. She came to bail him out, and he accepted her charity wordlessly, realizing there was nothing he could say to exculpate himself. He had been caught red-handed while submitting to his implacable vice.

Caresse had been silent also, except for formalities with the police. Cedric fully expected her to explode with anger and recriminations when he got into her car. But the calm disdain she unloaded on him was even more painful.

“You obviously have no regard for yourself, and none for me. I’ve tried to be understanding, Cedric, really, I have. I don’t think any woman could have cut you more slack, or tried harder to help you reform. But this is the absolute end. I’ve put up your bail money so that you can be free to plan your defense—as if you have any—and so that you won’t have to be humiliated by being in prison. But that’s the end of the road for you and me. I can’t have anything else to do with you in the future. Whatever existed between us is gone, thanks to your weak-willed selfishness.”

Cedric looked imploringly at Caresses beautiful profile with its gracefully sculpted jawline. She did not turn to spare him a glance, but kept her eyes resolutely on the busy midnight city street. He knew then that he had truly lost her forever, realized he had never fully appreciated her love. But he had neither the energy nor the hope to contest her death sentence on their relationship.

“I’m sorry, Caresse. I never meant to hurt you. Can you drop me off at my place?”

“Of course. I’ve got just enough time before my yoga class.”

The Holland-Nancarrows declined to press for any jail time for Cedric, considering that they had not actually lost any money, and nor had their precious children been harmed by the bad man. (The casino took back Cedric’s winnings on the basis of identity misrepresentation by the player.) But that did not stop the judge who heard Cedric’s case from imposing on Cedric a huge fine and five years’ probation. Cedric’s own court-appointed freethinker lawyer had not been receptive to the notion of an appeal.

Worst of all the repercussions of his crime, however, was that Cedric was double black-flagged, denied employment even as a nanny.

He had no choice but to go on welfare.

The welfare rolls of the sleeplessly booming U.S. economy had been pared to historic lows. Only the most vocationally intransigent or helpless indigents lived off the government dole.

And now Cedric was one of this caste. Unclean. Unseen.

And a sleeper as well. A living atavism.

The dole didn’t cover a-som drugs. Not even the fourth-generation, expired-shelf-date stuff shipped to Third World countries.

Being a sleeper was hell. It wasn’t that sleepers were persecuted against, legally or even covertly. Nor were they held in contempt. No, sleepers were simply ignored by the unsleeping. They were deemed irrelevant because they couldn’t keep up. They were living their lives a third slower than the general populace. After a night’s unconsciousness, a sleeper would awake to discover that he had a new congressional representative, or that the clothes he had worn yesterday were outmoded. New buzzwords were minted while he slept, new celebrities crowned, new political crises defused. The changes were not always so radical, but even on a slow Tuesday night they were incremental. Day by day, sleepers fell further and further behind the wave front of the culture, until at last they were living fossils.

Cedric could hardly believe that such was now his fate.

After his sentencing and his removal to the flophouse, once he had consumed the last of his a-som scrip, Cedric had managed to stay desperately awake for a little over forty-eight hours, thanks to massive coffee intake, some Mexican amphetamines purchased on a street corner, and a cheap kibe massage that left him reeking of machine lubricant from a leaky gasket on the kibe.

The ancient sensations flooding his mind and body exerted at first a kind of grim and perverse fascination. The whole experience was like watching the tide reclaim a sand castle. Sitting in his tiny room, on an actual bed, he monitored his helpless degeneration. His concentration wavered and faded, his limbs grew unwieldy, his speech confused. Despite raging against his loss, Cedric ultimately had no choice but to succumb.

And then he dreamed.

He had forgotten dreaming, the nightly activity of his childhood.

Forgotten that some dreams were nightmares.

He awoke from that initial sleep shaking and drenched with sweat, the night terrors mercifully fading from memory. He retained only vague images of teeth and crushing weights, falling through space and scrabbling for handholds.

Cedric got up, dressed, and went out into the streets.

Kibes running errands or patrolling for lawbreakers mingled with humans. The Mission District was not populated entirely by charity-case sleepers. Many of the people on the streets were citizens in fine standing. Here was a colorful clique of tawny Polynesian immigrants, adapting to life away from their sea-swamped island homes. Their happy, bright-eyed faces seemed to mock him. From Cedrics new vantage point down in the underbelly of the a-som society, everyone looked wired and jazzed up, restlessly active, spinning their wheels in a perpetual drag race toward an ever-receding finish line.

But having this vision didn’t mean he still wouldn’t rejoin his ex-peers in a second, if he could.

Cedric was convinced that everyone could smell the sleep-stench rising from him, spot his saggy eyelids a block away. Eating in a cheap diner that allowed him to stretch his monthly money as far as possible, Cedric resolved to kill himself rather than go on like this.

But he didn’t. In a week, a month, he relearned how to function with a third of his life stolen by sleep, and became resigned to an indefinitely prolonged future of this vapid existence.

As role models for his new lifestyle, Cedric had the other inhabitants of his flophouse. He had expected his fellow sleepers to be vicious father-rapers or congenitally brain-damaged droolers or polycaine addicts. But to Cedric’s surprise, his fellow sleepers represented a wide range of intelligence and character, as extensive a spectrum of personalities as could be found anywhere else. In the short and desultory conversations Cedric allowed himself with them, he learned that some were deliberate holdouts against the a-som culture, while some were ex-members of the majority, like Cedric himself, professionals who had somehow lost their hold on the a-som pinnacle.

And then you had Doug Clearmountain.

Doug was the happiest person Cedric had ever met. Short, rugged, bald-crowned but with a fringe of long hair, Doug resembled a time- battered troll of indeterminate years.

The first time Doug made contact with Cedric, in the grottolike lobby of the flophouse, the older man introduced himself by saying, “Hey there, chum, I’m Morpheus. You want the red pill or the blue?”

“Huh?”

“Not a film buff, I see. Doug Clearmountain. And you are?”

“Cedric Swann.”

“Cedric, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Let’s grab a coffee.”

“Uh, sure.”

Over coffee Cedric learned that, before settling in San Francisco, Doug had been an elder of a religious community that featured, among other tenets of its creed, the renunciation of a-som drugs. The community—a syncretic mix of Sufism, Theravada Buddhism, and TM—had struggled in the wilds of Oregon for approximately fifteen years before bleeding away all its members to the siren call of 24/7 wakefulness. Doug had been the last adherent to remain. Then one day, when he finally admitted no one was coming back, he just walked away from the empty community.

“Decided it was time to do a little preaching amidst the unconverted.”

Cedric took a swig of coffee, desperate to wake up, to dispel the funk engendered by his nightly bad dreams. “Uh, yeah, how’s that working for you? You convinced many people to nod out?”

Undaunted by Cedric’s evident lack of interest, Doug radiated a serene confidence. “Not at all. Haven’t made one convert yet. But I’ve found something even more important to keep me busy.”

The coffee was giving Cedric a headache. A tic was tugging at the corner of his right eye. He had no patience for any messianic guff from this loony. “Sure, right, I bet you’re really busy working to engineer a rebellion that nobody in their right mind wants. Down with the time- brokers, right?”

“Hardly, Cedric, hardly. I’m actually doing essential work helping to prop our incessant society up. It can’t survive much longer on its own, you know. It’s like a spinning flywheel without a brake. But this is the course that the bulk of our species has chosen, so me and some others are just trying to shepherd them through it. But I can see that you have no interest in hearing about my mission at the moment. You’re too busy adjusting to your new life. We’ll talk more when you’re ready.”

Doug Clearmountain left then, having paid for both their coffees.

At least the nut wasn’t a cheapskate.

For the most part, Cedric resisted the impulse to reconnect with his old life, the glamorous satisfying round of timebrokering, gambling, and leisure pursuits. He spent his time giving mandatory Palimpsest interviews to his freethinker probation officer (whose federally approved facial was that of a sweater-wearing kiddie-show host who had retired before Cedric was born). He roamed the hilly streets of the city, seeking to exhaust his body and hopefully gain a solid night’s sleep. (Useless. The nightmares persisted.) He watched sports. He tried to calculate how long it would be before all his debts were paid off with the court-mandated pittance being deducted from his welfare stipend. (Approximately eleven hundred years.)

Once he tried to get in touch with Caresse. She couldn’t talk because she was in the middle of a massage, but she promised to call back.

She actually did.

But Cedric was asleep.

He took that as a sign not to try again.

Six months passed, and Cedric resembled a haunted, scarecrow model of his old self.

That’s when Doug Clearmountain approached him again, jovial and optimistic as ever.

“Congratulations on the fine job you’re doing, Cedric.”

Cedric had taken to hanging out at Fisherman’s Wharf, cadging spare change from the tourists via Palimpsest transactions. He was surprised to see Doug when he raised his dirty bearded face up from contemplating the ground.

“Go fuck yourself.”

Doug remained unfazed. “I’m not being sarcastic, son. I was just congratulating you on half a year as a sleeper. Do you realize how much of our planet’s finite resources you’ve saved?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re using a third less energy, a third less food than your erstwhile compatriots. I’m sure Gaia appreciates your sacrifice. When the a-som society came fully online globally, it was like adding another America to the planetary eco-burden. Ouch! Despite all the fancy new inventions, our planet is heading toward catastrophe faster than ever. All we’re doing lately is staving off the inevitable.”

“Big whoop. So I’m a tiny positive line item in the carbon budget.”

“Well, yes, your sacrifice is negligible, regarded in that light. But there’s another way you can be of more help. And that’s by dreaming.”

Cedric shuddered. “Dreams! Don’t say that word to me. I haven’t had a pleasant dream since I went cold turkey.”

Doug’s perpetual grin gave way to a look of sober concern. “I know that, Cedric. That’s because you’re not doing it right. You’re trying to go it alone. Would you like some help with your dreams?”

“What’ve you got? A-som? How much?”