Waking in Dreamland (50 page)

“Can we speed up at all?” Lum asked.

“I can tap the gestalt,” Glinn offered, “but bear in mind that Brom might snatch the power back at any time. He might even try to control us through me. We are all so near to becoming one entity that I have to fight all the time to keep my mind clear. If he does try, you might have to kill me to break the connection.”

“No fear, my lad,” Spar said, tapping the hilt of his sword. “Go on, then, give us a boost.”

“To the river,” Roan said.

Subtly at first, the bikes began to speed up. Their tires narrowed by half, then half again, humming on the road. At the next turn of influence, they changed back into horses. Bergold went from seal to man in the space of one pace, and clutched the back of his plump steed, which streamlined into a long-legged racer, speeding as smoothly as an express train. Faster and faster the hooves thundered on the slick roadbed. The landscape whipped by, and Roan concentrated on only what was ahead of him: Leonora, Brom, and the Alarm Clock.

Chapter 33

“The time has come,” Brom said. He stood with his hands raised beside his motorbike at the side of the road. “Maniune, Acton, to your guard posts. We must not be disturbed.”

Taboret raised her head. Over the headlands before them, she saw the majestic panorama of the Deep Mysteries, broad, purple-black peaks against the sky, wreathed with ruffs of white cloud. There, on the other side of the broad Lullay River, lay the answer to the question Brom posed, and there would be the end of everything as she knew it. Surely her next existence wouldn’t include a coat of tar. She hated her own smell, and she stuck to everything, including the bicycle seat and handlebars. Brom’s voice boomed out again, distracting her from her misery.

“It is time for the gestalt to fulfill its final promise!” he announced. “The failure to achieve unity the last time was because I did not evince sufficient leadership in our conjoining, and control the emotional feedback. Now, it will last. I will guide the transformation, and we will become that single, powerful entity that we have worked to become! We can take the last steps to our destination as if we were wearing a pair of seven-league boots! We will be one!”

Yes
, came the mind-voices through the link.

Taboret felt the excitement from her fellow apprentices, and looked at them with despair.
No!
she thought, but her thoughts were no longer under her control. Nine other minds pulled at her. Against her will, the diagram appeared before her mind’s eye, of a giant composite being, and the wonderful wheeled transportation device that it would ride, carrying the Alarm Clock as easily as one of them now carried a pencil.

The princess, who had become an ice-pale beauty with translucent blue-white skin, refusing to speak to any of them even after the silence spell had been removed from her, dismounted haughtily, and turned her back on Brom. The green motorbike’s frame arched up and outward like a spider capturing its prey, and reformed as a cage around her. She spun, almost saying something, then put her nose in the air in disdain.

“Apprentices, move your motorcycles together,” Brom ordered. “Then, come here to me.”

As one, the apprentices dismounted. Taboret resisted, but she was dragged by sheer influence toward the place the crucible would be formed. An impulse not her own pulled her hand to the center of the circle.

“Do we have to touch
that
?” Lurry asked, drawing back from the tar smeared on her skin. Most of the feathers had sunk into the resin or had fallen off.

“Certainly not,” Brom said. “I think the point has been made.” He drew his hand downward from his head to his feet, and Taboret felt the fresh air rush over her skin. She looked down, and found she was clean.

“Thank you, Master Brom,” she said, sincerely. He ignored her, staring off into space to visualize the parameters of the final transformation. Taboret put her hand lightly on top of Gano’s, and waited for Dowkin to cover hers.

When it came through her, the wave of power did have a different feeling than before. This time it was more coherent, more all-encompassing. Brom’s mind penetrated through it all, controlling, guiding, so that she had no conscious impact on the shape things were taking.

The motorcycles changed first. The white haze roiled around them, surrounding, concealing them. When the mist cleared, there was one single vehicle there, a giant cycle with six sets of handlebars.

“Concentrate on combining yourselves,” Brom said.

“Yes,” Doolin said. He stepped a pace closer to Dowkin, and the two of them moved toward, and into one another.

“Look at us!” Dowkin shouted. “We’re each other! Fantastic!” Then they started to lose their shape, broadening and flattening out into a single mass that flowed into the apprentices next to them.

Taboret felt the transformation begin on her. She cried out one final protest before her tongue became a tendon, and her teeth became sinews. Her limbs stretched out taut and grew stiff. It hurt. Her skull became a knee-bone, and her legs stretched out and bent forward, shaping into a single great foot. She felt the foot rise and come down on a bicycle pedal as large as a bed. She’d have screamed if she had any physical equipment left to scream with.

Brom’s great voice boomed through them.

“Together, now!” it cried. Taboret could no longer see through her own eyes, only through Brom’s eyes, who was the head of the giant body they had become. They stood taller than the treetops. To the north was the river, and the enormous waterfall that concealed their destination, the Hall of the Sleepers. To the south, she/they saw a cloud of dust, and the tiny figures riding toward them up the slope of the land. The great mouth smiled. Too late. With its left hand, the giant gestalt-being scooped up the Alarm Clock, then reached for Leonora with its right.

Taboret felt a shock run through the entire being, as she/ they realized that there was no right hand at the end of its arm. Glinn! she thought. That should have been his position, and he was gone. The monster roared out its frustration, making the ground shake.

“Those peaks are the Deep Mysteries,” Bergold said, peering at the massif, having consulted his map. He handed the map over to Misha for folding. “The oldest dreams of all the Collective Unconscious have been seen near the mountains everywhere in the Dreamland, but the deepest archetypes occur the most here at the source of the Lullay: dinosaurs, volcanoes, spirits, cavemen, angels, all things left over from when the world of the Sleepers was young.”

Roan caught a glimpse of movement among the undergrowth. He sat upright with a feeling of deep satisfaction. “There goes my caveman,” he said.

“Look!” Misha shouted, in great excitement. “A dragon! A big green dragon!” The huge, scaled beast zoomed overhead, seeming to skim the clouds with the tips of its wings. “Uh-oh, it’s coming back!”

“Duck!” Felan yelled. The party scrambled into the undergrowth, pulling the protesting steeds in behind them. The dragon made another pass, then went on in search of easier prey. Bergold took out his notebook and made several notes in great excitement. “This will be worth
at least
one paper,” he said. “My hat!”

“No!” Glinn cried out in a terrible voice. Roan reached out to help him. The apprentice scientist was tearing at his face, dislodging the blindfold. His eyes were wild beneath it.

“What’s wrong?” Roan asked. Glinn looked at him as if trying to say something, then his face went blank. It did not merely lose its expression, but its features as well. His head rounded and widened, joining to his shoulders and arms in one nearly featureless cylinder of flesh, like—like a wrist.

His legs went through the most fearsome transformation. They shrank and fused together, then separated from two into five extensions of flesh and bone, even growing nails on his altered feet.

“My soul,” Bergold said, staring. “He’s becoming a hand. A right hand.”

The forearm that was Glinn tottered and fell over in the saddle, sending Golden Schwinn crazy with fear as the enormous fingers dropped over her eyes. The mare galloped away, Glinn flopping helplessly. Roan leaped onto Cruiser’s back and kicked him into a canter. He pursued Schwinn down the slippery road until he could force her against the trees and grab for her reins. Cruiser was chary of the giant limb, too, but he stayed calm enough while Roan arranged the arm over Schwinn’s saddle.

The others caught up with him. Bergold met his eyes with a question in his own.

“If something so horrible is happening to this young man,” he asked, “what will become of Leonora?”

There’s no other hand, the mass-intelligence thought at Brom, looking at the arm that ended at the elbow. I/we can seize the princess or the Alarm Clock, but not both.

“We can have both!” the overarching Brom intelligence cried out. “Take her, mount the cycle, and begin pedaling!”

Obediently, the body bent down toward the tiny girl in white. She cowered away from it, feeling for the bars of her cage. Taboret saw it the moment she realized that there was no cage there any longer. The material comprising it had gone to make part of the singularity cycle.

Brom/they reached out for her with the stump of its right arm, but missed her by six feet, the length of the missing limb. Leonora scrambled to her feet, and started to back away. Brom/ they swiped at her again. It must capture her, it must use her. She wasn’t going to come quietly. She opened something between her hands and struck out at the stump of the arm with a jet of fire from a flamethrower. The Brom-being recoiled.

“Fools! You left her with a weapon!” Brom boomed. “Concentrate on the gestalt. Grow us a new right arm, now! Raise the power!”

But Taboret knew he had made a mistake in his calculations. The gestalt had no power and no concentration left. All its strength was taken up in maintaining the giant it had become. They began to sway. Leonora stared at them in horror.

“No, concentrate!” Brom cried. “We are one!”

And in one astonishing moment, they were one single being. Suddenly, the being began to grow smaller and weaker. Taboret knew now why such a thing had never been tried successfully in all the history of the Dreamland. Now that they were all one, they had only the strength of a single person. The crucible could not exist with only one part. In that moment, the gestalt began to collapse.

The Dowkin-Doolin part of the union was openly scornful at the failure of yet another attempt. The Taboret-Gano-Basil-Lurry-Bolmer-Carina-Mamovas part was terrified. The Brom part tried to cope with the loss of power and control, but realized that without Glinn, it had no good right hand. Taboret felt it all, heard it, was part of it, and knew that part of her was mourning Glinn’s loss, but also gloating. Roaring, the gestalt being rose up and reached to the sky. It needed more power, but this was all they were. It tried to reach out for Leonora again with the stump of its right arm, thinking to capture her, thinking to use her, and jarred the Alarm Clock, still held in its left hand. The bells echoed from tree to rock, through Taboret’s teeth-now-sinews.

Leonora waited no longer. She turned and ran off into the woods. Good, Taboret thought. Run.
Run
.

The bells rang on, clanging through her head. The gestalt-being heaved together painfully. Then it collapsed in a heap of people, coat hangers, and bicycles, with the litter containing the Alarm Clock on top of everything.

As they came to the edge of the river, the arm that was Glinn slung across Roan’s saddle started to fuss and kick. Roan reined in Cruiser as the huge limb began to take on detail, parts separating into legs and arms and a head, and finally a face. A restored Glinn lay over the saddle on his belly. His mouth opened, gasping.

“Something is happening,” Glinn panted. “I’m weak. All my influence has been drained away by the gestalt. There’s been a catastrophe.”

“Leonora!” Roan exclaimed, helping the scientist to sit up. “Is she all right? Where is she?”

“I . . . don’t . . . know,” Glinn said, drawing his brows down. He shook his head, as if trying to clear his mind. “Brom must have started the final plan, but I don’t think it went well. I can’t see anything, I mean, through anyone else’s eyes.
Something
has happened.”

Golden Schwinn and Cruiser set up an excited whinny. Roan looked at them in surprise.

“Leonora must be around somewhere,” he said. With all the influence he could muster, he molded the two horses into bloodhounds on leashes. At once, the dogs began to run, noses to the ground, raising their heads to bay.

From near the bottom of the heap of people and things, Taboret looked up, grateful to see with her own eyes once more, and saw a chain of paper clips dangling across the bridge of Brom’s nose.

“Touch hands!” Brom said, hoarsely. “Touch hands!”

Taboret found her hands. She thought she had absolutely no strength left, but she stretched one out, and helped form the crucible. It was a shock as Brom’s fingers clasped hers, because there was so little of the force of his personality behind it. To her secret delight, she could no longer hear Brom’s or anyone else’s thoughts. She was actually able to concentrate on his hands, the dry fingertips, slightly clammy skin, and the palm which widened even as she grasped it. He was changing in a burst of influence, in spite of his efforts not to, just like the rest of them.

The mist rose weakly above them. There wasn’t much, but it was enough to get the Alarm Clock off their backs. It was heavy as a boulder. When they were all on their feet once more, Brom took stock of the situation.

“We haven’t enough bicycles left for everyone, and there is no time to wait for more to mature,” he said. Taboret looked twice to realize that almost all the motorcycles had reverted to simple bicycles.

Maniune and Acton came racing back, standing up on the pedals of their steeds.

“What happened?” Maniune demanded, screeching to a halt before the ruin of the singularity cycle. “We heard the bells ringing, then this thing lost all its power!”

“The gestalt overloaded,” Brom said, already onto the next problem. He indicated armloads of the bicycle parts. “Put those together. And those.”