Captive Dreams

by Michael Flynn

  “Barbry! What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  “Nothing.” She shook her head. “Nothing. Someone’s died, is all.”

  “Died?” An unaccountable shiver ran through him. “Who?”

  She looked at him and he saw there were tears in both her eyes. Tiny tears. She seemed more wistfully sad than bereaved. She shook her head again. “No one you ever knew,” she said. “No one you ever knew.”

  She was in the library, sitting in her chair, but with her legs pulled up under her. She had a book open and she was reading it intently. A frown creased her brows and her lips moved silently as she followed the words across the page. He came up behind her and leaned on the back of the chair.

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  “The poems of Tennyson,” she replied. “Tennyson was h— Tennyson is my favorite poet; but I don’t remember any of his poems.”

  He rubbed her shoulders with his hands. “It was a bad accident,” he told her. “It will take a long time to remember everything. The doctors didn’t have much hope for you, you know. But we showed them, didn’t we?”

  She twisted and looked at him. She patted his hand. “Yes, we showed them. You’ll play the tapes for me again tonight, won’t you, dear?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. Meanwhile…” She turned back and re-opened her book. She ran her finger down the page. “This poem. Could you explain what it means? It’s called ‘Tears, Idle Tears.’ I’ll read it to you.”

  She hefted the book and cleared her throat. Then she began to recite:

  ‘Dear as remember’d kisses after death,

  And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d

  On lips that are for others; deep as love,

  Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

  O Death in Life, the days that are no more.’

  He felt it rise in his throat. A feeling of intense longing and loneliness. There was no question about it. The old Brit knew how to string words together. But why should those words affect him so?

  He felt the tears warm his cheeks. He tried to excuse himself to Barbry, but no words came out, only uncontrollable sobbing. It was embarrassing. He was crying like a baby. He had not cried like this since…Since…

  There was something that was supposed to have made him cry like this, but he had forgotten what it was. Forgotten when it was. Forgotten everything, except that he was supposed to have cried; and that now the crying may have come too late.

  Bill Canazetti fidgeted nervously by the front door, waiting for…her to get his coat. Dinner had been uncomfortable. A mostly silent affair, broken only by the tink of glasses and silverware. Afterwards, a few awkward sallies into conversation. Then he had made his excuses to leave.

  She brought his coat to him and helped him into it. “Now, be sure to button up, Bill. It’s chilly outside. The leaves are all off the trees. It’s a lot colder here than where we used to live. It’s too bad we don’t get together more often.”

  “It’s a long trip to Morristown,” he agreed. He only wanted to leave. To get away from this place. To forget everything he had seen.

  When he looked at his hostess, he saw Barbara Carter, smiling, waiting. He had always kissed her when leaving their house. A quick pass across the lips and a murmured quip about her husband finding out. It was a little game they had played between themselves; but there was no way this woman would know about it. Henry’s theories about the seven hidden dimensions holding a person’s soul and memories were just so much nonsense.

  Weren’t they?

  He put his hand on the doorknob and twisted. The chill autumn air swirled in around him. He hesitated. He had to know.

  “Barbara,” he said, turning around. “Tell me one thing.” He searched her eyes. “Are you Barbara?”

  Changes chased themselves across her eyes. Surprise. Curiosity. Wonder. Perhaps, wistfulness. “Most of the time,” she said. “More and more nowadays.”

  “But—”

  “But am I really her?” She laughed and shook her head. “No. I’m just an old junkie bag lady, me. He gave me something. A nano…”

  “Nanomachine.”

  “Yes, thank you. A nanomachine. It rebuilt my body. It rewired my brain. I remember Sadie; but it’s faint, like an old dream. And I remember some other things. Things that happened to Barbry. They’re faint, too. Did they come from the tapes? Or from somewhere else? I don’t know. And there are other odd memories. Things that never happened at all, either to Barbry or Sadie.”

  Canazetti’s throat felt tight. “Sadie’s memories patched onto different circuits. They’re hallucinatory, those memories.”

  “Maybe. Still. I know who I am. Most of the time, anyway.”

  “Then why do you do it? Why do you stay with him and pretend? I’ve done some experimental work. With frogs. The nerves. When they change. It—” He didn’t know how to put it. “It must have been painful,” he said, not looking at her.

  “Yes. Yes, it was. Very painful. But Henry saw me through it.”

  He turned to her. “He might have killed you,” he blurted out. “He didn’t know enough to try it. We still don’t know enough to try it. Dammit, he had no right to do what he did to you!”

  “Bill, do you know what my life was like before he rescued me?”

  He shook his head.

  “How can I explain it? I can go to sleep and not be afraid that I’ll freeze to death before morning, or that some kids will set me on fire just for the hell of it. And my new body, it’s healthy. It don’t need snow or crack like my old body did. And I can see and understand so much that I couldn’t before, because my brain has been detoxed.”

  Canazetti looked past her shoulder, down the hallway, into the kitchen where he saw Henry carrying dinner dishes to the sink. He was humming to himself.

  “Do you love him, then?”

  “Yes. Both of us do.”

  His head jerked and he looked at her.

  “When I’m Barbry,” she explained, “I love him for Barbry’s sake. But Sadie loved him, too. Because he saved her life. Because he took care of her. He’s given her more than she ever dared to dream about. Except for one thing.”

  Canazetti’s voice was choked. “What’s that?”

  “He never told Sadie that he loved her. He never saw her.”

  “Damn him!”

  “No, don’t say that.”

  “But, what he did to you. What he put you through. The selfishness.”

  “He couldn’t love anyone else. He loved Her. He wasn’t rational. What would you have done in his place?”

  “I feel responsible, you know. It was my invention.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t blame yourself for that, Bill. He would have tried something, even without your nano. I don’t know. Brainwashing, maybe.”

  “I just can’t help thinking that he did something wicked. A crime. And he should be punished.”

  She turned and watched Henry through the kitchen doorway while he rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. He noticed them watching him and grinned and waved.

  “He is being punished,” she said. “The worst punishment of all. He thinks he’s happy.”

  AFTERWORD TO "REMEMBER'D KISSES"

  This was the first-written of these “neighborhood” stories, having been finished in March 1988. The immediate inspiration was in James Gleick’s book, Chaos: Making a New Science (Viking Penguin, 1987), where he discusses Michael Barnsley and his fern. This was a system of recursive equations that Barnsley devised that would create the form of a fern out of random initial inputs. It is discussed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnsley_fern

  Nothing in the equations says “this is how to draw a fern.” Yet a fern emerges no matter what random inputs are used. If this represents what actually happens in morphogenesis, it tosses all arguments involving probabilities of this or that outcome into a cocked hat, and the unlikely may be no more than inevitable.

&n
bsp; Years later, in 2010, the Craig Venter Institute succeeded in implanting a synthetic genome into a bacterium, causing it to act like the donating bacterium. That is pretty much what Henry was trying to do, in concept if not in complexity. But is it only the physical form that is built; or is the inner life of the organism built up also?

  “Remember’d Kisses” appeared in Analog (Dec 1988) and placed 4th in the AnLab. In it, Henry Carter is older than in “Melodies of the Heart,” and Singer has died. Peeler now runs SingerLabs. It was reprinted in The Nanotech Chronicles (Baen, 1991) and in the anthology Nanotech (Ace, 1998), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. It’s a story about letting go; or rather not letting go, and the terribly ambiguous consequences of doing so.

  BURIED HOPES

  The chair in the counselor’s office was soft and cool to the touch. Leather, perhaps, but almost like buckskin. It was a bit large and high off the floor, so that Rann felt smaller than usual. The walls were adorned with comforting diplomas, and the windows muted the raucous sounds of the Manhattan traffic far below. The décor was composed in gentle earth tones. On the table between them, the counselor had set bone china cups filled with tea. All the little tricks of the trade, deployed to put the patient at ease. He squirmed a bit in the chair, seeking that elusive ease. He did not care for tea, but it was the least obnoxious of the alternatives she had offered.

  Rann said, “I don’t know why I’ve come here, doctor.”

  The counselor wore her hair in an authoritative bun and dressed in mannish, but mammalian fashion. Her large-framed glasses gave her a distancing, professional mien. She sat in a second chair facing him at an angle.

  “You don’t have to call me doctor,” she said. “Call me Liz, or Ms. Abbot, if that is more comfortable for you.”

  Yes, she was trying to reduce the doctor-patient distance while maintaining a professional detachment. Friendly, yet not too friendly; at least, not until she could understand how close she might come without breaching the wrong psychological barriers.

  Rann said, “Yes, ‘Ms. Abbot.’ Yes, that would be fine.” He could see from the way she cocked her head that she had heard the residue of his accent. Once it had been thicker and had drawn quizzical glances, but diligent practice over the years had shaved nearly all the edges from it.

  “Should I call you Mr. Velkran, or will Rann do?” she asked him.

  Rann considered the alternatives. If she was “Ms.” and he was “Rann,” that would place him on the wrong end of a parent-child divide; but “Ms.” and “Mr.” created another and broader divide. Rann thought he would rather like being treated as a child, at least for the next hour, and told her to call him Rann.

  “Is that short for ‘Randolph’?” she asked him as she made a note.

  He answered with a shrug into which she could read any answer she chose. “Don’t call me Randolph.”

  She looked up and arranged her notes in a leather folder against her knees. “Something is bothering you.”

  Rann looked for the question mark at the end, but of course it was not there. He would not have come to her if nothing bothered him. Rann said, “Depression, I think.”

  Ms. Abbot glanced at the questionnaire he had filled out. “Don’t you know?”

  “I’ve always been given to melancholy and nostalgia. It’s in my blood, and who can gage whether it is a little more or a little less. But it seems to me that it has deepened these past few weeks…”

  “What is it that causes you to feel depressed?”

  “I thought you might tell me. I mean, that’s your job, isn’t it?”

  Ms. Abbot made a brief moue with her lips. “My job is to help you tell yourself. To help you search, as it were. But why don’t we start with something else. Tell me a little about yourself. You live in New Jersey…” She tapped the forms he had filled out. “But you’ve come all the way into Manhattan to see me.”

  “You should feel flattered.”

  “I would if ‘Abbot’ were not the first listing in the index.”

  “Then I think you know why. I would rather not do this closer to home.”

  “There’s no stigma to seeing a counselor.”

  Rann answered with another shrug and then, when the silence had dragged on, suddenly blurted, “Did you know that the international space station was de-orbited?”

  Ms. Abbot seemed accustomed to conversational left turns. “I saw something about it on the news. It was worn out and abandoned, wasn’t it?”

  “It didn’t have to be. It could have been maintained, upgraded, replaced.”

  “Is that why you’ve been feeling depressed? Because the old space station was decommissioned?”

  “I…” Was it? he wondered. “I’m sentimental. I hate to see things end. The last moonwalker died…oh, years ago. No longer lives there anyone who has walked upon the moon.”

  “Ah, that was before my time, I’m afraid. And didn’t it turn out to be a hoax?”

  Rann leaped from the chair and began to pace the room, agitated beyond measure. “No, it was not! It was not!”

  Ms. Abbot maintained her composure and said mildly, “But if the story is true, it would mean that people went to the moon before they built a space station in Earth orbit. Does that make sense? To go all that way, and then to backtrack?”

  His pacing had brought him to the window and he looked down on the thumb-sized pedestrians teeming along the sidewalk. “It seemed a good idea at the time.”

  “Did the space program mean a lot to you? You don’t appear old enough to remember it.”

  He turned from his contemplation. “It meant a lot to all of us,” he told the counselor. “If only we had at the time realized it.” He sought out the patient’s chair and sank once more into it. “Who knows what might be out there? On the moon, on, on Mars there might be…” Rann fell silent. “There might be anything. Now, how few are left! Sometimes…” He paused and ground one hand in the other, like a mortar in a pestle. “Sometimes,” he added more quietly, “I feel so lonely.”

  He saw the counselor nod, and he knew he had revealed something of himself. Automatically, the old guards went up. But then, why had he come here unless it was to reveal something of himself? “I miss the old country,” Rann said, deliberately. “The music, the foods, the festivals—oh, how the young boys and girls dressed so fine on those days! Even the sound of the old tongues on the lips of friends. Sometimes sees my mind over the Oorlong Hills the sun set so great and red, painting in every color the clouds.”

  “Have you ever gone back to visit?”

  Rann shook his head. “No. There are…difficulties.”

  Ms. Abbot said “ah” in such understanding tones. The world was full of people unwelcome in their own homelands. That was not precisely Rann’s problem, but he decided not to complicate matters. “It helps to talk about it,” he added.

  “Do you have family back there? Is there anyone in particular you miss?”

  For a moment Rann could see the Miss Kopál as if she stood directly before him, the dandi-flowers round her crown, the golden lace about her throat, the tattoos winding like vines along her arms. Then…the moment was lost and he realized that he no longer remembered what she had looked like. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for a kerchief, but the counselor leaned across to hand him a tissue. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry. There were, once. But they have all by now forgotten me.” He squared his shoulder, felt the unexpected crack of bone, and deliberately relaxed. “I suppose this seems silly to you. A bad case of homesickness.”

  “No, not silly at all. Have you been in this country long?”

  Rann looked at the floor and clasped his hands. He waited for the inevitable question.

  “If you are undocumented,” Ms. Abbot said, “don’t worry. My job is to help you deal with your depression, not to do the government’s work for them.” She reached out and touched Rann briefly on his wrist. Reflexively, Rann pulled back.

  “A double-dozen of us came to the, to the
New World together,” Rann admitted, “but we’ve to the drogo scattered and seldom anymore do we see one another.”

  “The drogo?”

  “Ah. Did I say that? I am falling into the rhythms of my suckling tongue. Drogo is in my country a seasonal wind—hot, dry, brisk—and as a way of speaking we say that we have blown off with it.”

  “Tell me, Rann, how long have you felt these pangs of loneliness?”

  “Always. Ever since we landed here. It was not so bad when we all lived near one another; but…”

  “But the old neighborhood has ‘scattered to the drogo.’ Tell me, is this feeling of loneliness persistent, or does it come and go? How did you feel, oh, last year? Two weeks ago?”

  Rann closed his eyes and tried to imagine what he had been doing a fortnight since. His neighbors had invited him to a cookout. There had been burgers and franks and beer, discussion of the Giants and the new cable series on Teddy Roosevelt. The neighborhood dogs did not like him much and the beer had upset his digestion, but…“If you had asked me then, I would have said I was reasonably happy. Perhaps no less happy than most people believe they are.”

  “Do you think everyone unhappy?”

  “Of course,” he said. “It is only a matter of one’s awareness. Have you no regrets, doctor? Is there nothing that in quiet moments might tinge with melancholy your thoughts? An old fiancé who slipped away? A brother or sister untimely gone? A childhood friend fallen out of touch? A…a calculation performed incorrectly?”

  “A calculation? You’re a mathematician, then?”

  “I teach at a small college in New Jersey.”

  Ms. Abbot nodded and added notes to the folder. Rann admired the way she could write of one thing while talking of another and without even a glance at her paper.

  “Then something happened,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Something happened. You were ordinarily happy…Very well, you were not too unhappy. Now two weeks later you are deeply depressed. The BDI-4 you filled out prior to our meeting…There were some anomalies, but it did indicate sadness, guilt feelings, past failures, weeping. But no self-dislike, loss of pleasure, or change in appetite. As I said, a mixed…”