The Dream Master (3 page)

“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to meet you,” she continued, raising her glass as the dishes rattled before her. “I want you to help me become a Shaper.”

Her shaded eyes, as vacant as a statue’s, sought him again.

“Yours is a completely unique situation,” he commented. “There has never been a congenitally blind neuroparticipant—for obvious reasons. I’d have to consider all the aspects of the situation before I could advise you. Let’s eat now, though. I’m starved.”

“All right. But my blindness does not mean that I have never seen.”

He did not ask her what she meant by that, because prime ribs were standing in front of him now and there was a bottle of Chambertin at his elbow. He did pause long enough to notice though, as she raised her left hand from beneath the table, that she wore no rings.

“I wonder if it’s still snowing,” he commented as they drank their coffee. “It was coming down pretty hard when I pulled into the dome.”

“I hope so,” she said, “even though it diffuses the light and I can’t ‘see’ anything at all through it. I like to feel it falling about me and blowing against my face.”

“How do you get about?”

“My dog, Sigmund—I gave him the night off,” she smiled—“he can guide me anywhere. He’s a mutie Shepherd.”

“Oh?” Render grew curious. “Can he talk much?”

She nodded.

“That operation wasn’t as successful on him as on some of them, though. He has a vocabulary of about four hundred words, but I think it causes him pain to speak. He’s quite intelligent. You’ll have to meet him sometime.”

Render began speculating immediately. He had spoken with such animals at recent medical conferences, and had been startled by their combination of reasoning ability and their devotion to their handlers. Much chromosome tinkering, followed by delicate embryo-surgery, was required to give a dog a brain capacity greater than a chimpanzee’s. Several followup operations were necessary to produce vocal abilities. Most such experiments ended in failure, and the dozen or so puppies a year on which they succeeded were valued in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars each. He realized then, as he lit a cigarette and held the light for a moment, that the stone in Miss Shallot’s medallion was a genuine ruby. He began to suspect that her admission to a medical school might, in addition to her academic record, have been based upon a sizable endowment to the college of her choice. Perhaps he was being unfair though, he chided himself.

“Yes,” he said, “we might do a paper on canine neuroses. Does he ever refer to his father as “that son of a female Shepherd’?”

“He never met his father,” she said, quite soberly. “He was raised apart from other dogs. His attitude could hardly be typical. I don’t think you’ll ever learn the functional psychology of the dog from a mutie.”

“I imagine you’re right,” he dismissed it. “More coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

Deciding it was time to continue the discussion, he said, “So you want to be a Shaper…”

“Yes.”

“I hate to be the one to destroy anybody’s high ambitions,” he told her. “Like poison, I hate it. Unless they have no foundation at all in reality. Then I can be ruthless. So—honestly, frankly, and in all sincerity, I do not see how it could ever be managed. Perhaps you’re a fine psychiatrist—but in my opinion, it is a physical and mental impossibility for you ever to become a neuroparticipant. As for my reasons—”

“Wait,” she said. “Not here, please. Humor me. I’m tired of this stuffy place—take me somewhere else to talk. I think I might be able to convince you there
is
a way.”

“Why not?” He shrugged. “I have plenty time. Sure—you call it. Where?”

“Blindspin?”

He suppressed an unwilling chuckle at the expression, but she laughed aloud.

“Fine,” he said, “but I’m still thirsty.”

A bottle of champagne was tallied and he signed the check despite her protests. It arrived in a colorful “Drink While You Drive” basket, and they stood then, and she was tall, but he was taller.

Blindspin.

A single name of a multitude of practices centered about the auto-driven auto. Flashing across the country in the sure hands of an invisible chauffeur, windows all opaque, night dark, sky high, tires assailing the road below like four phantom buzzsaws—and starting from scratch and ending in the same place, and never knowing where you are going or where you have been—it is possible, for a moment, to kindle some feeling of individuality in the coldest brainpan, to produce a momentary awareness of self by virtue of an apartness from all but a sense of motion. This is because movement through darkness is the ultimate abstraction of life itself—at least that’s what one of the Vital Comedians said, and everybody in the place laughed.

Actually now, the phenomenon known as blindspin first became prevalent (as might be suspected) among certain younger members of the community, when monitored highways deprived them of the means to exercise their automobiles in some of the more individualistic ways which had come to be frowned upon by the National Traffic Control Authority. Something had to be done.

It was.

The first, disastrous reaction involved the simple engineering feat of disconnecting the broadcast control unit after one had entered onto a monitored highway. This resulted in the car’s vanishing from the ken of the monitor and passing back into the control of its occupants. Jealous as a deity, a monitor will not tolerate that which denies its programmed omniscience; it will thunder and lightning in the Highway Control Station nearest the point of last contact, sending winged seraphs in search of that which has slipped from sight.

Often, however, this was too late in happening, for the roads are many and well-paved. Escape from detection was, at first, relatively easy to achieve.

Other vehicles, though, necessarily behave as if a rebel has no actual existence. Its presence cannot be allowed for.

Boxed-in, on a heavily-traveled section of roadway, the offender is subject to immediate annihilation in the event of any overall speedup or shift in traffic pattern which involves movement through his theoretically vacant position. This, in the early days of monitor-controls, caused a rapid series of collisions. Monitoring devices later became far more sophisticated, and mechanized cutoffs reduced the collision incidence subsequent to such an action. The quality of the pulpefactions and contusions which did occur, however remained unaltered.

The next reaction was based on a thing which had been overlooked because it was obvious. The monitors took people where they wanted to go only because people told them they wanted to go there. A person pressing a random series of coordinates, without reference to any map, would either be left with a stalled automobile and a “RECHECK YOUR COORDINATES” light, or would suddenly be whisked away in any direction. The latter possesses a certain romantic appeal in that it offers speed, unexpected sights, and free hands. Also, it is perfectly legal; and it is possible to navigate all over two continents in this manner, if one is possessed of sufficient wherewithal and gluteal stamina.

As is the case in all such matters, the practice diffused upwards through the age brackets. School teachers who only drove on Sundays fell into disrepute as selling points for used autos. Such is the way a world ends, said the entertainer.

End or no, the car designed to move on monitored highways is a mobile efficiency unit, complete with latrine, cupboard, refrigerator compartment and gaming table. It also sleeps two with ease and four with some crowding. On occasion, three can be a real crowd.

Render drove out of the dome and into the marginal aisle. He halted the car.

“Want to jab some coordinates?” he asked.

“You do it. My fingers know too many.”

Render punched random buttons. The Spinner moved onto the highway. Render asked speed of the vehicle then, and it moved into the high-acceleration lane.

The Spinner’s lights burnt holes in the darkness. The city backed away fast; it was a smoldering bonfire on both sides of the road, stirred by sudden gusts of wind, hidden by white swirlings, obscured by the steady fall of gray ash. Render knew his speed was only about sixty percent of what it would have been on a clear, dry night.

He did not blank the windows, but leaned back and stared out through them. Eileen “looked” ahead into what light there was. Neither of them said anything for ten or fifteen minutes.

The city shrank to sub-city as they sped on. After a time, short sections of open road began to appear.

“Tell me what it looks like outside,” she said.

“Why didn’t you ask me to describe your dinner, or the suit of armor beside our table?”

“Because I tasted one and felt the other. This is different.”

“There is snow falling outside. Take it away and what you have left is black.”

“What else?”

“There is slush on the road. When it starts to freeze, traffic will drop to a crawl unless we outrun this storm. The slush looks like an old, dark syrup, just starting to get sugary on top.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s it, lady.”

“Is it snowing harder or less hard than when we left the club?”

“Harder, I should say.”

“Would you pour me a drink?” she asked him.

“Certainly.”

They turned their seats inward and Render raised the table. He fetched two glasses from the cupboard.

“Your health,” said Render, after he had poured.

“Here’s looking at you.”

Render downed his drink. She sipped hers. He waited for her next comment. He knew that two cannot play at the Socratic game, and he expected more questions before she said what she wanted to say.

She said: “What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?”

Yes, he decided, he had guessed correctly.

He replied without hesitation: “The sinking of Atlantis.”

“I was serious.”

*“So was I.”

“Would you care to elaborate?”

“I sank Atlantis,” he said, “personally.”

“It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies. There were bridges of opal, and crimson pennants and a milk-white river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu, as delicately constructed as musical instruments, all swaying with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Green tenor sax play at sunset.

“The Greek, of course, was a patient of mine—paranoiac. The etiology of the thing is rather complicated, but that’s what I wandered into inside his mind. I gave him free rein for awhile, and in the end I had to split Atlantis in half and sink it full fathom five. He’s playing again and you’ve doubtless heard his sounds, if you like such sounds at all. He’s good. I still see him periodically, but he is no longer the last descendant of the greatest minstrel of Atlantis. He’s just a fine, late twentieth-century sax-man.

“Sometimes though, as I look back on the apocalypse I worked within his vision of grandeur, I experience a fleeting sense of lost beauty—because, for a single moment, his abnormally intense feelings were my feelings, and he felt that his dream was the most beautiful thing in the world.”

He refilled their glasses.

“That wasn’t exactly what I meant,” she said.

“I know.”

“I meant something real.”

“It was more real than real, I assure you.”

“I don’t doubt it, but…”

“—But I destroyed the foundation you were laying for your argument. Okay, I apologize. I’ll hand it back to you. Here’s something that could be real:

“We are moving along the edge of a great bowl of sand,” he said. “Into it, the snow is gently drifting. In the spring the snow will melt, the waters will run down into the earth, or be evaporated away by the heat of the sun. Then only the sand will remain. Nothing grows in the sand, except for an occasional cactus. Nothing lives here but snakes, a few birds, insects, burrowing things, and a wandering coyote or two. In the afternoon these things will look for shade. Any place where there’s an old fence post or a rock or a skull or a cactus to block out the sun, there you will witness life cowering before the elements. But the colors are beyond belief, and the elements are more lovely, almost, than the things they destroy.”

“There is no such place near here,” she said.

“If I say it, then there is. Isn’t there? I’ve seen it.”

“Yes… You’re right.”

“And it doesn’t matter if it’s a painting by a woman named O’Keefe, or something right outside our window, does it? If I’ve seen it?”

“I acknowledge the truth of the diagnosis,” she said. “Do you want to speak it for me?”

“No, go ahead.”

He refilled the small glasses once more.

“The damage is in my eyes,” she told him, “not my brain.”

He lit her cigarette.”

“I can see with other eyes if I can enter other brains.”

He lit his own cigarette.

“Neuroparticipation is based upon the fact that two nervous systems can share the same impulses, the same fantasies…”

“Controlled
fantasies.”

“I could perform therapy and at the same time experience genuine visual impressions.”

“No,” said Render.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be cut off from a whole area of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can experience something you can never know—and that he cannot appreciate it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court of biological hapstance, in a place where there is no justice—only fortuity, pure and simple.”

“The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.”

“I’m not asking the universe to help me—I’m asking you.”

“I’m sorry,” said Render.

“Why won’t you help me?”

“At this moment you are demonstrating my main reason.”

“Which is…?”

“Emotion. This thing means far too much to you. When the therapist is in-phase with a patient he is narco-electrically removed from most of his own bodily sensations. This is necessary—because his mind must be completely absorbed by the task at hand. It is also necessary that his emotions undergo a similar suspension. This, of course, is impossible in the one sense that a person always emotes to some degree. But the therapist’s emotions are sublimated into a generalized feeling of exhilaration—or, as in my own case, into an artistic reverie. With you, however, the ‘seeing’ would be too much. You would be in constant danger of losing control of the dream.”