Dreamsongs. Volume I
Page 49
The air behind him was black and choked by rock-dust, his ears were full of screams, and the far horizon was a glowering red wall beneath which yellow ants crawled and ate rock. But Trager kept his hard-on all across the plain as the automill shook beneath him.
THE CORPSES WERE COMPANY-OWNED; THEY STAYED IN THE COMPANY deadman depot. But Trager had a room, a slice of the space that was his own in a steel-and-concrete warehouse with a thousand other slices. He only knew a handful of his neighbors, but he knew all of them too; they were corpsehandlers. It was a world of silent shadowed corridors and endless closed doors. The lobby-lounge, all air and plastic, was a dusty deserted place where none of the tenants ever gathered.
The evenings were long there, the nights eternal. Trager had bought extra light-panels for his particular cube, and when all of them were on they burned so bright that his infrequent visitors blinked and complained about the glare. But always there came a time when he could read no more, and then he had to turn them out, and the darkness returned once more.
His father, long gone and barely remembered, had left a wealth of books and tapes, and Trager kept them still. The room was lined with them, and others stood in great piles against the foot of the bed and on either side of the bathroom door. Infrequently he went on with Cox and the others, to drink and joke and prowl for real women. He imitated them as best he could, but he always felt out of place. So most of his nights were spent at home, reading and listening to the music, remembering and thinking.
That week he thought long after he’d faded his light panels into black, and his thoughts were a frightened jumble. Payday was coming again, and Cox would be after him to return to the meathouse, and yes, yes, he wanted to. It had been good, exciting; for once he had felt confident and virile. But it was so easy, cheap, dirty. There had to be more, didn’t there? Love, whatever that was? It had to be better with a real woman, had to, and he wouldn’t find one of those in a meathouse. He’d never found one outside, either, but then he’d never really had the courage to try. But he had to try, had to, or what sort of life would he ever have?
Beneath the covers he masturbated, hardly thinking of it, while he resolved not to return to the meathouse.
BUT A FEW DAYS LATER, COX LAUGHED AT HIM AND HE HAD TO GO along. Somehow he felt it would prove something.
A different room this time, a different corpse. Fat and black, with bright orange hair, less attractive than his first, if that was possible. But Trager came to her ready and eager, and this time he lasted longer. Again, the performance was superb. Her rhythm matched his stroke for stroke, she came with him, she seemed to know exactly what he wanted.
Other visits; two of them, four, six. He was a regular now at the meathouse, along with the others, and he had stopped worrying about it. Cox and the others accepted him in a strange half-hearted way, but his dislike of them had grown, if anything. He was better than they were, he thought. He could hold his own in a meathouse, he could run his corpses and his automills as good as any of them, and he still thought and dreamed. In time he’d leave them all behind, leave Skrakky, be something. They would be meathouse men as long as they would live, but Trager knew he could do better. He believed. He would find love.
He found none in the meathouse, but the sex got better and better, though it was perfect to begin with. In bed with the corpses, Trager was never dissatisfied; he did everything he’d ever read about, heard about, dreamt about. The corpses knew his needs before he did. When he needed it slow, they were slow. When he wanted to have it hard and quick and brutal, then they gave it to him that way, perfectly. He used every orifice they had; they always knew which one to present to him.
His admiration of the meathouse handler grew steadily for months, until it was almost worship. Perhaps somehow he could meet her, he thought at last. Still a boy, still hopelessly naïve, he was sure he would love her. Then he would take her away from the meathouse to a clean, corpseless world where they could be happy together.
One day, in a moment of weakness, he told Cox and the others. Cox looked at him, shook his head, grinned. Somebody else snickered. Then they all began to laugh. “What an ass you are, Trager,” Cox said at last. “There is no fucking handler! Don’t tell me you never heard of a feedback circuit?”
He explained it all, to laughter; explained how each corpse was tuned to a controller built into its bed, explained how each customer handled his own meat, explained why non-handlers found meathouse women dead and still. And the boy realized suddenly why the sex was always perfect. He was a better handler than even he had thought.
That night, alone in his room with all the lights burning white and hot, Trager faced himself. And turned away, sickened. He was good at his job, he was proud of that, but the rest…
It was the meathouse, he decided. There was a trap there in the meathouse, a trap that could ruin him, destroy life and dream and hope. He would not go back; it was too easy. He would show Cox, show all of them. He could take the hard way, take the risks, feel the pain if he had to. And maybe the joy, maybe the love. He’d gone the other way too long.
Trager did not go back to the meathouse. Feeling strong and decisive and superior, he went back to his room. There, as years passed, he read and dreamed and waited for life to begin.
1
WHEN I WAS ONE-AND-TWENTY
JOSIE WAS THE FIRST.
She was beautiful, had always been beautiful, knew she was beautiful; all that had shaped her, made her what she was. She was a free spirit. She was aggressive, confident, conquering. Like Trager, she was only twenty when they met, but she had lived more than he had, and she seemed to have the answers. He loved her from the first.
And Trager? Trager before Josie, but years beyond the meathouse? He was taller now, broad and heavy with both muscle and fat, often moody, silent and self-contained. He ran a full five-crew in the ore fields, more than Cox, more than any of them. At night, he read books; sometimes in his room, sometimes in the lobby. He had long since forgotten that he went there to meet someone. Stable, solid, unemotional; that was Trager. He touched no one, and no one touched him. Even the tortures had stopped, though the scars remained inside. Trager hardly knew they were there; he never looked at them.
He fit in well now. With his corpses.
Yet—not completely. Inside, the dream. Something believed, something hungered, something yearned. It was strong enough to keep him away from the meathouse, from the vegetable life the others had all chosen. And sometimes, on bleak lonely nights, it would grow stronger still. Then Trager would rise from his empty bed, dress, and walk the corridors for hours with his hands shoved deep into his pockets while something twisted, clawed, and whimpered in his gut. Always, before his walks were over, he would resolve to do something, to change his life tomorrow.
But when tomorrow came, the silent gray corridors were half forgotten, the demons had faded, and he had six roaring, shaking automills to drive across the pit. He would lose himself in routine, and it would be long months before the feelings came again.
Then Josie. They met like this:
It was a new field, rich and unmined, a vast expanse of broken rock and rubble that filled the plain. Low hills a few weeks ago, but the company skimmers had leveled the area with systematic nuclear blast mining, and now the automills were moving in. Trager’s five-crew had been one of the first, and the change had been exhilarating at first. The old pit had been just about worked out; here there was a new terrain to contend with, boulders and jagged rock fragments, baseball-sized fists of stone that came shrieking at you on the dusty wind. It all seemed exciting, dangerous. Trager, wearing a leather jacket and filtermask and goggles and earplugs, drove his six machines and six bodies with a fierce pride, reducing boulders to powder, clearing a path for the later machines, fighting his way yard by yard to get whatever ore he could.
And one day, suddenly, one of the eye echoes suddenly caught his attention. A light flashed red on a corpse-driven automill. Trager reached, with his han
ds, with his mind, with five sets of corpse-hands. Six machines stopped, but still another light went red. Then another, and another. Then the whole board, all twelve. One of his automills was out. Cursing, he looked across the rock field towards the machine in question, used his corpse to give it a kick. The lights stayed red. He beamed out for a tech.
By the time she got there—in a one-man skimmer that looked like a teardrop of pitted black metal—Trager had unstrapped, climbed down the metal rings on the side of the automill, walked across the rocks to where the dead machine stopped. He was just starting to climb up when Josie arrived; they met at the foot of the yellow-metal mountain, in the shadow of its treads.
She was field-wise, he knew at once. She wore a handler’s coverall, earplugs, heavy goggles, and her face was smeared with grease to prevent dust abrasions. But still she was beautiful. Her hair was short, light brown, cut in a shag that was jumbled by the wind; her eyes, when she lifted the goggles, were bright green. She took charge immediately.
All business, she introduced herself, asked him a few questions, then opened a repair bay and crawled inside, into the guts of the drive and the ore-smelt and the refinery. It didn’t take her long; ten minutes, maybe, and she was back outside.
“Don’t go in there,” she said, tossing her hair from in front of her goggles with a flick of her head. “You’ve got a damper failure. The nukes are running away.”
“Oh,” said Trager. His mind was hardly on the automill, but he had to make an impression, made to say something intelligent. “Is it going to blow up?” he asked, and as soon as he said it he knew that that hadn’t been intelligent at all. Of course it wasn’t going to blow up; runaway nuclear reactors didn’t work that way, he knew that.
But Josie seemed amused. She smiled—the first time he saw her distinctive flashing grin—and seemed to see him, him, Trager, not just a corpsehandler. “No,” she said. “It will just melt itself down. Won’t even get hot out here, since you’ve got shields built into the walls. Just don’t go in there.”
“All right.” Pause. What could he say now? “What do I do?”
“Work the rest of your crew, I guess. This machine’ll have to be scrapped. It should have been overhauled a long time ago. From the looks of it, there’s been a lot of patching done in the past. Stupid. It breaks down, it breaks down, it breaks down, and they keep sending it out. Should realize that something is wrong. After that many failures, it’s sheer self-delusion to think the thing’s going to work right next time out.”
“I guess,” Trager said. Josie smiled at him again, sealed up the panel, and started to turn.
“Wait,” he said. It came out before he could stop it, almost in spite of him. Josie turned, cocked her head, looked at him questioningly. And Trager drew a sudden strength from the steel and the stone and the wind; under sulfur skies, his dreams seemed less impossible. Maybe, he thought. Maybe.
“Uh. I’m Greg Trager. Will I see you again?”
Josie grinned. “Sure. Come tonight.” She gave him the address.
He climbed back into his automill after she had left, exulting in his six strong bodies, all fire and life, and he chewed up rock with something near to joy. The dark red glow in the distance looked almost like a sunrise.
WHEN HE GOT TO JOSIE’S, HE FOUND FOUR OTHER PEOPLE THERE, friends of hers. It was a party of sorts. Josie threw a lot of parties and Trager—from that night on—went to all of them. Josie talked to him, laughed with him, liked him, and suddenly his life was no longer the same.
With Josie, he saw parts of Skrakky he had never seen before, did things he had never done:
—he stood with her in the crowds that gathered on the streets at night, stood in the dusty wind and sickly yellow light between the windowless concrete buildings, stood and bet and cheered himself hoarse while grease-stained mechs raced yellow rumbly tractor-trucks up and down and down and up.
—he walked with her through the strangely silent and white and clean underground Offices, and sealed air-conditioned corridors where off-worlders and paper-shufflers and company executives lived and worked.
—he prowled the rec-malls with her, those huge low buildings so like a warehouse from the outside, but full of colored lights and game rooms and cafeterias and tape shops and endless bars where handlers made their rounds.
—he went with her to dormitory gyms, where they watched handlers less skillful than himself send their corpses against each other with clumsy fists.
—he sat with her and her friends, and they woke dark quiet taverns with their talk and with their laughter, and once Trager saw someone looking much like Cox staring at him from across the room, and he smiled and leaned a bit closer to Josie.
He hardly noticed the other people, the crowds that Josie surrounded herself with; when they went out on one of her wild jaunts, six of them or eight or ten, Trager would tell himself that he and Josie were going out, and that some others had come along with them.
Once in a great while, things would work out so they were alone together, at her place, or his. Then they would talk. Of distant worlds, of politics, of corpses and life on Skrakky, of the books they both consumed, of sports or games or friends they had in common. They shared a good deal. Trager talked a lot with Josie. And never said a word.
He loved her, of course. He suspected it the first month, and soon he was convinced of it. He loved her. This was the real thing, the thing he had been waiting for, and it had happened just as he knew it would.
But with his love: agony. He could not tell her. A dozen times he tried; the words would never come. What if she did not love him back?
His nights were still alone, in the small room with the white lights and the books and the pain. He was more alone than ever now; the peace of his routine, of his half-life with his corpses, was gone, stripped from him. By day he rode the great automills, moved his corpses, smashed rock and melted ore, and in his head rehearsed the words he’d say to Josie. And dreamed of those that she’d speak back. She was trapped too, he thought. She’d had men, of course, but she didn’t love them, she loved him. But she couldn’t tell him, any more than he could tell her. When he broke through, when he found the words and the courage, then everything would be all right. Each day he said that to himself, and dug swift and deep into the earth.
But back home, the sureness faded. Then, with awful despair, he knew that he was kidding himself. He was a friend to her, nothing more, never would be more. Why did he lie to himself? He’d had hints enough. They had never been lovers, never would be; on the few times he’d worked up the courage to touch her, she would smile, move away on some pretext, so he was never quite sure that he was being rejected. But he got the idea, and in the dark it tore at him. He walked the corridors weekly now, sullen, desperate, wanting to talk to someone without knowing how. And all the old scars woke up to bleed again.
Until the next day. When he would return to his machines, and believe again. He must believe in himself, he knew that, he shouted it out loud. He must stop feeling sorry for himself. He must do something. He must tell Josie. He would.
And she would love him, cried the day.
And she would laugh, the nights replied.
Trager chased her for a year, a year of pain and promise, the first year that he had ever lived. On that the night-fears and the day-voice agreed; he was alive now. He would never return to the emptiness of his time before Josie; he would never go back to the meathouse. That far, at least, he had come. He could change, and someday he would be strong enough to tell her.
JOSIE AND TWO FRIENDS DROPPED BY HIS ROOM THAT NIGHT, BUT THE friends had to leave early. For an hour or so they were alone, talking about nothing. Finally she had to go. Trager said he’d walk her home.
He kept his arm around her down the long corridors, and he watched her face, watched the play of light and shadow on her cheeks as they walked from light to darkness. “Josie,” he started. He felt so fine, so good, so warm, and it came out. “I love you.”
Trembling slightly, mouthing silent words, Trager held out his hand. Josie did not take it. He touched her cheek, gently, and wordless she spun away from him.
Then, for the first time ever, Trager shook. And the tears came.
Josie took him to her room. There, sitting across from each other on the floor, never touching, they talked.
J:…known it for a long time…tried to discourage you, Greg, but I didn’t just want to come right out and…I never wanted to hurt you…a good person…don’t worry….
T:…knew it all along…that it would never…lied to myself…wanted to believe, even if it wasn’t true…I’m sorry, Josie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorryimsorryimsorry….
J:…afraid you would go back to what you were…don’t Greg, promise me…can’t give up…have to believe….
T: why?
J:…stop believing, then you have nothing…dead…you can do better…a good handler…get off Skrakky, find something…no life here…someone…you will, you will, just believe, keep on believing….
T: …you…love you forever, Josie…forever…how can I find someone…never anyone like you, never…special…
J: …oh, Greg…lots of people…just look…open…
T: (laughter)…open?…first time I ever talked to anyone…
J:…talk to me again, if you have to…I can talk to you…had enough lovers, everyone wants to get to bed with me, better just to be friends….