‘So — these dreams are unpleasant?’
Grace looked up into Chorley’s eyes. ‘They’re nightmares.’
Chorley got up and paced. He made several circuits of the workbench before he spoke again. Then he said, ‘You should have told me.’
‘Why me and not him? He’s your friend. He should have told you. I only had suspicions and figured it out — he never actually talked to me about it.’ Grace raised her voice; she was fighting back. ‘And you made it quite clear to me that you only wanted to know so much and no more about what we did. About where the money came from, for God’s sake! All summer you’ve chiselled on about how you didn’t want the girls to Try. They came of age and suddenly you were full of prejudices about dreamhunting. But Laura and Rose were never going to turn into Tziga.’
‘Laura is exactly like him!’ Chorley yelled at his wife. ‘And the first time she goes In to catch a dream she catches something frightening. If that’s not like Tziga then what is?’
Grace began to cry again. ‘But Laura won’t get mixed up in the Body’s contracts. We’ll tell her not to. She and Rose always had very definite opinions about government contracts, if only because they saw Tziga being whipped off from Sisters Beach several times every summer.’
Chorley closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. ‘If Tziga was so troubled by his nightmares, why did he keep on delivering them?’
‘I don’t know. If I’m right about it — and how bad it’s been for him — I can’t imagine what would induce him to keep on. Perhaps he believes he’s doing good. He has always tended to think of himself as some kind of saviour.’
Grace patted the sofa beside her. ‘Sit down, please, Chorley. We have to decide what we’re going to do.’
Chorley relented. He came and sat beside Grace and she retrieved his hand and held it hard. After a while she said, ‘If Tziga is supposed to have disappeared — according to the Body — then I should get together an official search party. I have to do that so that the Body thinks I believe its story. I just don’t trust it. If it’s covering things up I don’t want to give it reason to think it has to cover up any further. We do want to find him.’
‘Something has happened to him,’ Chorley said.
Grace nodded.
‘What about Laura?’
Grace was silent for a long time. Then she said, ‘Perhaps we should try to persuade the Body to withhold Laura’s dreamhunter’s licence. They’re already alarmed by her talent — alarmed and fascinated in equal measures, I think. We might be able to put them off her.’ Grace thought for a little longer, then she told Chorley her plan.
Four
Laura was relieved when her aunt and uncle finally admitted to her that her father was missing. She’d known for days that they were hiding grave concerns about him, and waiting to know more before breaking the bad news.
Laura learnt that Grace was getting up a search party to look for her father. She pinned her hopes on her aunt’s search and tried to put her fears out of her mind. She had remarkably little trouble doing it.
Since first entering the Place Laura had changed. She seemed to be able to put all her feelings further away from her day-to-day self. It was as if she’d developed an inner hinterland, and, having entered the Place, she’d taken on some of its characteristic distance, silence and dryness.
Besides, she hadn’t really had time to talk to Rose properly. She felt much of what was happening to her was suspended and unreal till she could talk it all over with Rose.
The Body kept her busy. She was out for only one sleep in her old bed before being taken In again and to the site of another of those stable, benign dreams. She caught Beautiful Horse and Aerial Picnic. She went to sleep with examiners in the cabins in the garden of the Regulatory Body, airy buildings built of polished timber, with wide porches screened by white-painted louvres. She was tested again and again — but no more convicts appeared in her dreams.
On her way out with her fourth dream, a seasonal favourite called Great Players, concerning football, Laura met the four of her clutch who had been successful in catching Wild River. They were standing around the potbellied stove in the hall of the post, consulting charts. They were clustered together, talking in loud, self-important voices and glowing with excitement. Around their necks, proudly, outside their clothes, they were wearing the copper tags that were their licences.
The little group spotted Laura and began to whisper among themselves. Then, as one, they shuffled over to where she stood waiting for her guides to complete their paperwork.
The tallest boy — the boy from the infants’ beach — extended his hand to Laura. ‘Sandy Mason,’ he said.
Laura took his hand and shook it.
The bandy-legged boy asked her, ‘How’s it going?’
‘Slowly,’ said Laura. ‘They tell me that they need to know whether I’ll provide dreams of consistent quality.’
The other girl in the clutch, who had succeeded in catching Wild River, said, ‘Why won’t they just licence you and see how your dreams do on the market? I thought the market sorted out the weak from the strong.’
‘It’s not a matter of weakness. It’s not that kind of problem with quality.’
‘You don’t think they’re making allowances, perhaps, letting you retest because you’re his daughter and they just can’t believe you’re a fizzer?’ the bandy-legged boy said, smirking at Laura.
‘My Aunt Grace often says that dreamhunters are envious and competitive. It seems to be true of you,’ Laura told the boy. ‘I caught a nightmare and the examiners say that’s a safety issue.’
‘Right,’ said the boy, dubious.
An adult approached Laura and the clutch. An expensively kitted-out dreamhunter with red hair and a taut-skinned, pale face. ‘Children,’ he said, ‘I realise it’s early days yet, but I’d like you to be aware of your options.’ He pulled a silver card case out of his breast pocket and flicked it open. He passed them all his card. ‘I often have occasion to hire dreamhunters as amplifiers. It is a very good way for novices to earn while they’re learning their trade and building up their own client base. What people don’t tell you — while they’re filling your head with visions of mastery, of ranging hunts and magnificent new dreams — is that you have to learn to out-walk and out-wake dozens of other keen hunters. Fit, seasoned dreamhunters. The drug Wakeful is a very bad habit to acquire at your age — and you will be tempted to take it up. There’s so much pressure to succeed quickly. I’m sure your families are very keen for you to start earning your fortunes.’ He looked from face to face, his expression inquiring. ‘Yes? Are you feeling the pressure already?’
The clutch all looked down at the card he’d handed them.
‘I don’t usually solicit children,’ the man said. ‘But I happened to be passing A–8 when you were there with your less successful fellows catching your first dream.’
‘Catching it and skinning it,’ the bandy-legged boy said, boastful and gloating.
‘Very good,’ said the man, and smiled at the boy. ‘A ranger on picket duty told me what was up and steered me away, but not before I felt one of you fall asleep — crash! Like a hangman’s trapdoor. I said to myself, “I’ll look that one up later. There is a dreamhunter among dreamhunters. I’ll offer him work.”’
‘It was me,’ said the bandy-legged boy. ‘I’m the one.’
‘Good for you,’ said the man, and gave the boy’s arm a squeeze.
‘I know who you are, sir,’ the boy said.
Laura knew too, and she wasn’t about to open her mouth in his presence. This was Maze Plasir, about whom her father and aunt always spoke with stiff disapproval.
The boy was saying, ‘My brother sampled you once.’
‘And he told you all about it?’ Maze Plasir shook his head and laughed.
‘Yes, he did.’ The boy had coloured up, his face and neck suffused with blood, his earlobes purpled, jutted, actually throbbed. He glanced around him at the clutch, t
hen seemed to decide to put them all aside. ‘Never mind this lot,’ he said. ‘They’re all nice kids from good homes — you know what I mean. My brother, he came home off his ship and he had a dose. He had to stay away from his girl, but he was — you know.’
‘I know,’ said Plasir, po-faced and sympathetic.
‘So he went to your place and tried your dream — Fresh.’
‘Ah,’ said Plasir, ‘I have Fresh tonight.’ He smiled and tapped his head with a forefinger. ‘It’s a favourite with my clients.’
The boy’s jaw dropped, so that all the others could see the glistening strings of spit strung between his tongue and the roof of his mouth.
Plasir said to the boy, ‘Think about this: after you’ve caught your very first dream your brain changes. Your mind becomes an amphitheatre in which any other dreamhunter can perform. Empty, you’re an amplifier. The greater the talent you have — the more capacity — the greater that amphitheatre is. You can make a good dreamer of a poor dreamer, and a great dreamer of a good. I’m a good dreamer, unique, versatile and — this is the important point — willing to experiment.’
The boy was hooked, he was nodding as though he was sitting on a horse at a trot. He folded his chart and put it away.
‘Would you like to come with me?’ Plasir said. ‘Would you like to provide an amphitheatre for me to perform in? You can earn good money, and learn a thing or two.’
‘Am I allowed to?’
‘Don’t you know that a licensed dreamhunter is no longer a minor? That’s an allowance the law makes to get around the child-labour laws, the law that says you stay in school till you’re sixteen. But this —’ Plasir flicked the copper tags on the boy’s chest. ‘— this says you’re an adult.’
‘Great,’ the boy said. ‘You’re on. I’ll go with you.’
Plasir put an arm loosely around the boy’s shoulders and grinned at the others. ‘You keep those cards, children. Think about it,’ he said. He conducted the boy out to his car.
‘That man has nearly lost his licence many times,’ Laura said. ‘My father says Mr Plasir has reached some accommodation with the Body so it overlooks his excesses.’
‘I’m sorry about your father,’ the girl said to Laura. ‘You must be worried.’
Laura shook her head, not to deny that she was worried, but just because she felt that if she gave any sign of assent she’d be assenting to the fact that he had disappeared.
Sandy Mason said, ‘Fresh is something nasty about a beautiful young girl. I may come from a “good home” but I’ve heard talk. I never imagined I’d meet anyone who actually wanted to be Maze Plasir. But that guy did.’ The boy tossed Plasir’s business card on top of the stove where it humped, went brown, then burst into flame and flew up like a tiny black bird. ‘Everyone else wants to be your aunt,’ Sandy said to Laura.
‘Even me,’ said Laura.
‘That kid’s a liar too — and I don’t know why it suited Plasir to believe his boasting.’
‘Maybe Plasir just likes to collect corruptible youth,’ the girl said.
Mason pulled a face, then he said to Laura, ‘Anyway, as I was saying, it wasn’t snot-face who went down like the gallows’ trap. My guide was feeling for me, because my uncle is a dreamhunter who, when he has a dream, falls asleep with such a hard hit he knocks out whoever is in the room with him. Doctors sometimes use him instead of a general anaesthetic. That’s his special talent. My guide knew to look out for it in me. And I didn’t disappoint her, I did go hard — perhaps you felt me? Or maybe you felt snot-face from the slums, who my guide says nearly dumped her like a shaky stepping-stone. But you went after us all, Laura, and it was you who was Plasir’s “gallows’ trap” — except my guide described it as a landslide. It was a near thing, she said. She’s just a ranger, like the others there, and she reckoned half of them nearly fell in after you.’
‘No one told me that,’ Laura said.
‘No? Anyway — I believe you about the “safety issues” stuff.’ He put out a hand. ‘And I want to wish you good luck.’
Laura took his hand again, and shook it. She took the other hands she was offered.
‘Dreamhunters aren’t all envious and competitive,’ the girl said to Laura, gentle and reproachful.
‘Only competitive, maybe,’ said Mason, grinning. Then he took Plasir’s card from Laura and wrote his own name and address on the back of it. ‘Keep that,’ he said.
GRACE ORGANISED her search party. They set out, herself and six rangers. They walked eleven days In from Doorhandle, a day beyond the marker left by an earlier — surviving — expedition. They found no sign of Tziga Hame. They turned around and walked back out. Twenty-two days it took them. They emerged, thin, dehydrated, and several with suppurating blisters on their feet.
Grace had slept, so had caught and overwritten thirteen dreams altogether. Several were new to her, and some were unpleasant. She was forced to go off by herself to one of the dreamers’ retreats in the forest near Doorhandle, there to rest up and rid herself of the cacophonous jumble of incidents, characters and settings. She slept for hours at a time, woke only to feed herself, or draw water at the well, or sit on the veranda in the autumn sunshine watching wood pigeons with their bellies full of fermented berries, bumbling drunkenly from branch to branch and sometimes dropping out of the trees altogether.
She wrapped herself up and slept in the sun, gradually ploughing her monstrous mix of dreams back into the air.
GRACE LEFT IT to Chorley to tell Laura that the search party hadn’t found her father.
‘They didn’t find him dead, either,’ Laura said. ‘The intentions book may say “Across”, but how do you know that “Across” wasn’t his name for a dream?’
‘Darling, they didn’t find any sign of him, and he hasn’t turned up anywhere. It’s been nearly five weeks.’
‘But couldn’t “Across” be a dream?’
Laura wanted to cling to the last thing her father had done that seemed to her fully sane. Sane and reliable. She didn’t count his impatience with her on the station at Sisters Beach. She went looking in her memories and found herself in summer again, at the sand-sculpting competition. Her father was helping her and Rose make a reclining man from the sand on the beach below the Strand. ‘Dad?’ Laura said to her memory, peering back through time at his face, in the shadow of his sunhat. ‘Dad? What is it?’
‘Laura?’ Chorley shook her. She was sitting in a chair in the parlour of the Founderston house, staring off up into the corner of the room. She came to and crumpled. ‘Where is he?’ She was pleading.
Chorley held her. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, in tears too.
‘Where’s he gone?’ Laura said.
Rose was kneeling on the rug behind her father, who was on his knees before Laura, holding her to him. Rose wrung her hands and pressed them against her mouth. She was afraid to speak, afraid to interfere, afraid to join in their grief.
‘I don’t know where he’s gone,’ Chorley said, again.
‘Why didn’t he come home?’ Laura said, childish and dogged.
Rose scrambled across the floor and embraced Laura too.
‘I want him to come home,’ Laura said, sobbing.
Five
The offices of the Secretary of the Interior, pressed for space, had reclaimed the attics of the Palace of Governance, a building which, in former days, had been one of Founderston’s grand residences. The attics had been servants’ quarters, and narrow back stairs still ran all the way down from top to bottom of the four corners of the building. The stair on the east corner was enclosed for all its length, and the doors on every floor were fastened by locks, and by several coats of paint. At its foot this back stair opened on an alley beside one of Founderston’s brackish storm drains. At its top the staircase ended in a plain, panelled door. On the far side of that door was the office of the Secretary of the Interior, Cas Doran.
Doran’s large, low-roofed room had two old oval windows, whose solid fra
mes bulged above and below the window glass like swollen eyelids. Through the windows Doran’s visitors could appreciate keyhole views of the tower of the Dream Regulatory Body — one of Secretary Doran’s most tightly controlled departments.
Doran sat with his back to his view. It was his visitors who should be reminded that they were looking out at his domain. Those visitors whose appointments the Secretary scheduled for the early morning also could hardly fail to notice how Doran’s windows focused the low sun into his room like a burning glass.
Secretary Doran was an early riser. The people in his outer office were early risers too, because of the pressure of his expectations. They knew that the Secretary always asked certain people to come early. People he wished to catch on the hop.
It was just after seven when Dr Wilmot arrived in Doran’s outer office. The doctor was still pink from his bath. His hair was so freshly and heavily oiled that its scent was causing his eyes to water, so that he had several times to pop his monocle out of his sweaty eye socket and polish it. Wilmot was on time, but had to wait. He polished his monocle so often that it was smeared with cloudy iridescence.
The musical tinkle of a bell by Doran’s door signalled that the Secretary was ready for his next — or, Wilmot hoped, his first — appointment of the day.
The doctor was shown into Doran’s office.
The Secretary of the Interior did not get up from behind his desk. It was a desk like an altar stone, as heavy as carved masonry, but made of some tropical hardwood. Doran had one paper on this slick, dark desktop. Wilmot recognised his own letterhead.
‘Good of you to come,’ said Doran, and gestured at a chair.
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