Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies

by Greg Bear

  “In front of your enemies you are always watchful, and with your lovers you may relax and close your eyes.”

  “Then I understand,” Rebecca said. “For this might be a kind of war; and after the war is over, we may come together, former enemies, and celebrate the peace

  The sky became black as ink. The blossoms of the almond tree fell, and she saw, within the branches, that the almonds would be bitter this year

  “In peace the former enemies would close their eyes,” the lion said, “and sleep together peacefully.”

  “Then we must be enemies forever?”

  “For I am a zealous God. I am zealous of your eyes and your ears, which I gave you that you might avoid the agonies I visit upon you. I am zealous of your mind, which I made wary and facile, that you might always be thinking and planning ways to improve upon this world.”

  “Then I understand,” Rebecca said fearfully, her voice breaking, “that all our lives we must fight against you… but when we die?”

  The lamb scampered about the yard, but the lion reached out with a paw and laid the lamb out on the grass with its back broken. “This isthe Mystery,” the lion roared, consuming the lamb, leaving only a splash of blood steaming on the ground.

  Rebecca leaped from her chair, horrified, and held out her hands to fend off the prowling beast. “I understand!” she screamed “You are a selfish God, and Your creation is a toy You can mangle at will! You do not love; you do not care; you are cold and cruel.”

  The lion sat to lick its chops. ‘And?” it asked menacingly.

  Rebecca’s face flushed. She felt a sudden anger. “I am better than You,” she said quietly, “for I can love and feel compassion. How wrong we have been to send our prayers to You!”

  “And?” the lion asked with a growl.

  “There is much we can teach You!” she said. “For You do not know how to love or respect Your creation, or YourSelf! You are a wild beast, and it is our job to tame You and train You.”

  “Such dangerous knowledge,” the lion said. The dove landed among the hairs of its mane. “Catch Me if you can,” the dove sang. For an instant the Trinity shed its symbolic forms and revealed Its true Self, a thing beyond ugliness or beauty, a vast cyclic thing of no humanity whatsoever, dark and horribly young—and that truth reduced Rebecca to hysterics.

  Then the Trinity vanished, and the world continued for another year.

  But Rebecca was never the same again, for she had understood, and by her grace we have lived this added time.

  Through Road No Whither

  The long black Mercedes rumbled out of the fog on the road south from Dijon, moisture running in cold trickles across its windshield. Horst von Ranke carefully read the maps spread on his lap, eyeglasses perched low on his nose, while Waffen Schutzstaffel Oberleutnant Albert Fischer drove. “Thirty-five kilometers,” Von Ranke said under his breath. “No more.”

  “We are lost,” Fischer said. “We’ve already come thirty-six.”

  “Not quite that many. We should be there any minute now.”

  Fischer nodded and then shook his head. His high cheekbones and long, sharp nose only accentuated the black uniform with silver death’s heads on the high, tight collar. Von Ranke wore a broad-striped gray suit; he was an undersecretary in the Propaganda Ministry. They might have been brothers, yet one had grown up in Czechoslovakia, the other in the Ruhr; one was the son of a brewer, the other of a coal-miner. They had met and become close friends in Paris, two years before, and were now sightseeing on a three-day pass in the countryside.

  “Wait,” Von Ranke said, peering through the drops on the side window. “Stop.”

  Fischer braked the car and looked in the direction of Von Ranke’ s long finger. Near the roadside, beyond a copse of young trees, was a low, thatch-roofed house with dirty gray walls, almost hidden by the fog.

  “Looks empty,” Von Ranke said.

  “It is occupied; look at the smoke,” Fischer said. “Perhaps somebody can tell us where we are.”

  They pulled the car over and got out, Von Ranke leading the way across a mud path littered with wet straw. The hut looked even dirtier close-up. Smoke curled in a darker brown-gray twist from a hole in the peak of the thatch. Fischer nodded at his friend and they cautiously approached. Over the crude wooden door, letters wobbled unevenly in some alphabet neither knew, and between them they spoke nine languages. “Could that be Rom?” Fischer asked, frowning. “It does look familiar—like Slavic Rom.”

  “Gypsies? Romany don’t live in huts like this, and besides, I thought they were rounded up long ago.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Von Ranke repeated. “Still, maybe we can share some language, if only French.”

  He knocked on the door. After a long pause, he knocked again, and the door opened before his knuckles made the final rap. A woman too old to be alive stuck her long, wood-colored nose through the crack and peered at them with one good eye. The other was wrapped in a sunken caul of flesh. The hand that gripped the door edge was filthy, its nails long and black. Her toothless mouth cracked into a wrinkled grin. “Good evening,” she said in perfect, even elegant, German. “What can I do for you?”

  “We need to know if we are on the road to Dôle,” Von Ranke said, controlling his revulsion.

  “Then you’re asking the wrong guide,” the old woman said. Her hand withdrew and the door started to close. Fischer kicked out and pushed her back. The door swung open and began to lean on worn-out leather hinges.

  “You do not treat us with the proper respect,” he said. “What do you mean, ‘the wrong guide’? What kind of guide are you?”

  “So strong,” the old woman crooned, wrapping her hands in front of her withered chest and backing into the gloom. She wore ageless gray rags. Tattered knit sleeves extended to her wrists.

  “Answer me!” Fischer said, advancing despite the strong odor of urine and decay in the hut.

  “The maps I know are not for this land,” she sang, doddering before a cold and empty hearth.

  “She’s crazy,” Von Ranke said. “Let the local authorities take care of her. Let’s be off.” But a wild look was in Fischer’s eyes. So much filth, so much disarray, and impudence as well; these things made him angry.

  “What maps do you know, crazy woman?” he demanded.

  “Maps in time,” the old woman said. She let her hands fall to her sides and lowered her head as if, in admitting her specialty, she were suddenly humble.

  “Then tell us where we are,” Fischer sneered.

  “Come,” Von Ranke said, but he knew it was too late. There would be an end, but it would be on his friend’s terms, and it might not be pleasant.

  “On a through road no whither,” the old woman said.

  “What?” Fischer towered over her. She stared up as if at some prodigal son, her gums shining spittle.

  “If you wish a reading, sit,” she said, indicating a low table and three dilapidated cane and leather chairs. Fischer glanced at her, then at the table.

  “Very well,” he said, suddenly and falsely obsequious. Another game, Von Ranke realized. Cat and mouse.

  Fischer pulled out a chair for his friend and sat across from the old woman. “Put your hands on the table, palms down, both of them, both of you,” she said. They did so. She lay her ear to the table as if listening, eyes going to the beams of light sneaking through the thatch. “Arrogance,” she said. Fischer did not react.

  “A road going into fire and death,” she said. “Your cities in flame, your women and children shriveling to black dolls in the heat of their burning homes. The camps are found and you stand accused of hideous crimes. Many are tried and hung. Your nation is disgraced, your cause abhorred.” Now a peculiar gleam appeared in her eye. “Only psychotics will believe in you, the lowest of the low. Your nation will be divided between your enemies. All will be lost.”

  Fischer’s smile did not waver. He pulled a coin from his pocket and threw it down before the woman, then push
ed the chair back and stood. “Your maps are as crooked as your chin, you filthy old hag,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “I’ve been suggesting that,” Von Ranke said. Fischer made no move to leave. Von Ranke tugged on his arm but the SS Oberleutnant shrugged free of his friend’s grip.

  “Gypsies are few, now, hag,” he said. “Soon to be fewer by one.” Von Ranke managed to urge him just outside the door. The woman followed and shaded her eye against the misty light.

  “I am no gypsy,” she said. “You do not even recognize the words?” She pointed at the letters above the door.

  Fischer squinted, and the light of recognition dawned in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do, now. A dead language.”

  “What are they?” Von Ranke asked, uneasy.

  “Hebrew, I think,” Fischer said. “She is a Jewess.”

  “No!” the woman cackled. “I am no Jew.”

  Von Ranke thought the woman looked younger now, or at least stronger, and his unease deepened.

  “I do not care what you are,” Fischer said quietly. “I only wish we were in my father’s time.” He took a step toward her. She did not retreat. Her face became almost youthfully bland, and her bad eye seemed to fill in. “Then, there would be no regulations, no rules—I could take this pistol”—he tapped his holster—“and apply it to your filthy Kike head, and perhaps kill the last Jew in Europe.” He unstrapped the holster. The woman straightened in the dark hut, as if drawing strength from Fischer’s abusive tongue. Von Ranke feared for his friend. Rashness could get them in trouble.

  “This is not our fathers’ time,” he reminded Fischer.

  Fischer paused, pistol in hand, his finger curling around the trigger. “Filthy, smelly old woman.” She did not look nearly as old as when they had entered the hut, perhaps not old at all, and certainly not bent and crippled. “You have had a very narrow escape this afternoon.”

  “You have no idea who I am,” the woman half sang, half moaned.

  “Scheisse,” Fischer spat. “Now we will go to report you and your hovel.”

  “I am the scourge,” she breathed. Her breath smelled like burning stone even three strides away. She backed into the hut but her voice did not diminish. “I am the visible hand, the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night.”

  Fischer laughed. “You’re right,” he said to Von Ranke. “She isn’t worth our trouble.” He turned and stamped out the door. Von Ranke followed with one last glance over his shoulder into the gloom, the decay. No one has lived in this hut for years, he thought. Her shadow was gray and indefinite before the ancient stone hearth, behind the leaning, dust-covered table.

  In the car, Von Ranke sighed. “You do tend to arrogance, you know that?”

  Fischer grinned and shook his head. “You drive, old friend. I’ll look at the maps.” Von Ranke ramped up the Mercedes’ turbine until its whine was high and steady and its exhaust cut a swirling hole in the fog. “No wonder we’re lost,” Fischer said. He shook out the Pan-Deutschland map peevishly. “This is five years old—1979.”

  “We’ll find our way,” Von Ranke said.

  From the door of the hut, the old woman watched, head bobbing. “I am not a Jew,” she said, “but I loved them, too, oh, yes. I loved all my children.”

  She raised her hand as the long black car roared into the fog. “I will bring you to justice, wherever and whenever you live, and all your children, and their children’s children,” she said. She dropped a twist of smoke from her elbow to the dirt floor and waggled her finger. The smoke danced and drew black figures in the dirt. “Into the time of your fathers.” The fog grew thinner. She brought her arm down, and forty years melted away with the mist.

  High above, a deeper growl descended on the road. A wide-winged shadow passed over the hut, wings flashing stars, black and white invasion stripes, and cannon fire.

  “Hungry bird,” the shapeless figure said. “Time to feed.”

  Petra

  “‘God is dead, God is dead’... Perdition! When God dies, you’ll know it.”

  —Confessions of St. Argentine

  I’m an ugly son of stone and flesh, there’s no denying it. I don’t remember my mother. It’s possible she abandoned me shortly after my birth. More than likely she is dead. My father—ugly beaked, half-winged thing, if he resembles his son—I have never seen.

  Why should such an unfortunate aspire to be a historian? I think I can trace the moment my choice was made. It’s among my earliest memories, and it must have happened about thirty years ago, though I’m sure I lived many years before that—years now lost to me. I was squatting behind thick, dusty curtains in a vestibule, listening to a priest instructing other novitiates, all of pure flesh, about Mortdieu. His words are still vivid.

  “As near as I can discover,” he said, “Mortdieu occurred about seventy-seven years ago. Learned ones deny that magic was set loose on the world, but few deny that God, as such, had died.”

  Indeed. That’s putting it mildly. All the hinges of our once-great universe fell apart, the axis tilted, cosmic doors swung shut, and the rules of existence lost their foundations. The priest continued in measured, awed tones to describe that time.

  “I have heard wise men speak of the slow decline. Where human thought was strong, reality’s sudden quaking was reduced to a tremor. Where thought was weak, reality disappeared completely, swallowed by chaos. Every delusion became as real as solid matter.” His voice trembled with emotion. “Blinding pain, blood catching fire in our veins, bones snapping and flesh powdering. Steel flowing like liquid. Amber raining from the sky. Crowds gathering in streets that no longer followed any maps, if the maps themselves had not altered. They knew not what to do. Their weak minds could not grab hold...”

  Most humans, I take it, were entirely too irrational to begin with. Whole nations vanished or were turned into incomprehensible whirlpools of misery and depravity. It is said that certain universities, libraries, and museums survived, but to this day we have little contact with them.

  I think often of those poor victims of the early days of Mortdieu. They had known a world of some stability; we have adapted since. They were shocked by cities turning into forests, by their nightmares taking shape before their eyes. Prodigal crows perched atop trees that had once been buildings, pigs ran through the streets on their hind legs... and so on. (The priest did not encourage contemplation of the oddities. “Excitement,” he said, “breeds even more monsters.”)

  Our Cathedral survived. Rationality in this neighborhood, however, had weakened some centuries before Mortdieu, replaced only by a kind of rote. The Cathedral suffered. Survivors—clergy and staff, worshipers seeking sanctuary—had wretched visions, dreamed wretched dreams. They saw the stone ornaments of the Cathedral come alive. With someone to see and believe, in a universe lacking any other foundation, my ancestors shook off stone and became flesh. Centuries of stone celibacy weighed upon them. Forty-nine nuns who had sought shelter in the Cathedral were discovered and were not entirely loath, so the coarser versions of the tale go. Mortdieu had had a surprising aphrodisiacal effect on the faithful and conjugation took place.

  No definite gestation period has been established, for at that time the great stone wheel had not been set twisting back and forth to count the hours. Nor had anyone been given the chair of Kronos to watch over the wheel and provide a baseline for everyday activities.

  But flesh did not reject stone, and there came into being the sons and daughters of flesh and stone, including me. Those who had fornicated with the inhuman figures were cast out to raise or reject their monstrous young in the highest hidden recesses. Those who had accepted the embraces of the stone saints and other human figures were less abused but still banished to the upper reaches. A wooden scaffolding was erected, dividing the great nave into two levels. A canvas drop cloth was fastened over the scaffold to prevent offal raining down, and on the second level of the Cathedral the more human offspring of stone and flesh set about cre
ating a new life.

  I have long tried to find out how some semblance of order came to the world. Legend has it that it was the archexistentialist Jansard crucifier of the beloved St. Argentine—who, realizing and repenting his error, discovered that mind and thought could calm the foaming sea of reality.

  The priest finished his all-too-sketchy lecture by touching on this point briefly: “With the passing of God’s watchful gaze, humanity had to reach out and grab hold the unraveling fabric of the world. Those left alive—those who had the wits to keep their bodies from falling apart—became the only cohesive force in the chaos.”

  I had picked up enough language to understand what he said; my memory was good—still is—and I was curious enough to want to know more.

  Creeping along stone walls behind the curtains, I listened to other priests and nuns intoning scripture to gaggles of flesh children. That was on the ground floor, and I was in great danger; the people of pure flesh looking on my kind as abominations. But it was worth it.

  I was able to steal a Psalter and learned to read. I stole other books; they defined my world by allowing me to compare it with others. At first I couldn’t believe the others had ever existed; only the Cathedral was real. I still have my doubts. I can look out a tiny round window on one side of my room and see the great forest and river that surround the Cathedral, but I can see nothing else. So my experience with other worlds is far from direct.

  No matter. I read a great deal, but I’m no scholar. What concerns me is recent history—the final focus of that germinal hour listening to the priest. From the metaphysical to the acutely personal.

  I am small—barely three English feet in height—but I can run quickly through most of the hidden passageways. This lets me observe without attracting attention. I may be the only historian in this whole structure. Others who claim the role disregard what’s before their eyes, in search of ultimate truths, or at least Big Pictures. So if you prefer history where the historian is not involved, look to the others. Objective as I try to be, I do have my favorite subjects.