The Master sighed. “We have four problems,” he said. “I ignore for the moment the question of Ms MacEvoy’s responsibility for two deaths.”
“Two?” Mirella said. “She did not get into Harris France’s head. That’s Folla. Or whatever. Dube.”
“Clearly,” the Master said, “the murder of Cornelia Rasczak was the first step in the erasure of both persons; it was more convenient—for Folla and his compeers, and perhaps for Ms MacEvoy—that Harris France either be exiled to the Colony, or be driven to suicide; but it is all—”
“All part of the same picture,” Mirella said. “Okay, I get it.”
The Master does not like interruptions. Not at all. But Mirella was a guest—and a fellow piranha-fancier. He gave her one glare, and said: “Thank you,” in a tone that made her pale just a little.
“Let it go,” I told him. “Please.” He turned to me with an expression I couldn’t read for a second, and chuckled.
“I intend to,” he said mildly, and to Mirella: “That out of the way for the moment, then, dear girl, we have four problems.” I translated his expression then, and felt uneasy all over again; I don’t usually try to deflect his irritation. But I just had.
Hilda was looking a little stunned at the peaceful moment, and I suppose I was, too. She was, all in all, the silentest dinner companion I could remember meeting, over any table. Maybe she just didn’t like to interrupt anybody, ever—or maybe she just liked listening.
“We have got to get out the word,” Mirella was saying slowly. “We have got to get believed. We have got to figure just exactly what word to get out. Three.”
“Those are simple,” the Master said. “But we must also, somehow, stop Folla—or, at the least, intermit his plans. Watchful waiting—which is the best expectable result from any notification—is a temporary expedient.”
Mirella considered for a second. Then she said: “Right. People will get tired and goof off. That Folla will go away by himself, we can’t hope for.”
“We may hope,” he said. “Hope is never forbidden. But— given an event we cannot, after all, reasonably expect—we must find a way to—ah—put a spoke in his wheel.”
Mirella took a long swallow of tea—in the Master’s house, always Irish Breakfast. “That,” she said, “sounds like a job.”
“Can it be done at all?” Hilda said.
“We are not without resources,” he said. He paused.
“Folla wants to build a machine,” I said. “The machine has some sort of specifications—materials, probably. We can find out—and put a watch on the materials involved.”
“Perhaps,” the Master said. “If the materials are, for instance, simple steel, oil, water, alcohol, it will be useless; but some may be more rare than that, or require forming in some way that will leave unusual traces.”
Hilda looked up. “We might also look at the purity of the materials required,” she said. “Nine-nines iron, for instance— or molybdenum of the same purity, or—well, if he must have materials exactly specified for composition, it might be possible to trace them.”
“Just so,” the Master said. “That possibility does exist; and thank you, Hilda.”
She gave him that odd spasm of a smile, and Mirella said: “Well, that’s part of what we want to get out to people, anyhow. Watch for whatever it is he needs.”
“So it is, dear girl,” the Master said. “But there is a more active path open to us. We can carry our opposition to Folla and his companions, and we must.”
“How do we do that?” I said. “We can’t get into his spaces, whatever they are, any more than he can get into ours. A Josephson junction isn’t a path into his spaces, it’s a path that doesn’t have space in it at all.”
“Quite so,” he said. “Although there exist possibilities— you will recall his having said that neither mass nor distance exist as such in his spaces, which provides us with a starting-point for thought.”
“Hell of a starting-point,” Mirella said. “No mass, no distance, and it is a space? Makes my head itch to think about.”
“Treat it as a mathematical abstraction,” the Master said. “A space is defined by its qualities; we know—or Folla has told us, which is admittedly not quite the same thing—qualities it does not have. We can theorize from that point, and perhaps arrive at some conclusion—though I am not hopeful.”
“But you have something else,” I said. “I am damned if I can see what. If we can’t get to his space—”
“But we can reach Folla himself,” the Master said. “Him, or his companions. As he has come to us.”
“But those were—” I stopped. “Oh, God,” I said. “Dreams. I talked back to Folla—got him to start a conversation with me—last time.”
“Exactly,” he said. “We will require Euglane’s help. But I said some time ago that we would have to discover, in the end, what dreams are, and what dreaming in fact is. We would appear to have done so.”
“Wait a minute,” Mirella said. “Folla shows up in a few dreams here and there, and from this we know about all dreams anyplace?”
“Dreaming,” the Master said, “is a means of communicating with—of visiting, in fact—other spaces. Some of those other spaces are inhabited, it now appears, by thinking beings—Folla and Dube and perhaps more. Communication is vague, and often confused and confusing, and the world—the space—the dreamer enters is used for his or her own purposes whenever possible, and distorted by the dreamer to serve those purposes. All that is admitted, ands it makes analysis no simpler. But if the space we enter in dreams exists as a communicative medium between ourselves and Folla’s spaces, then it so exists for humans in general; there is no reason to assume that we are all special cases.”
“People dream about everything and anything,” Mirella said.
“So they do,” the Master said. “They interpret the experiences they have—experiences of other spaces—in terms with which they are familiar, and in terms useful to them, terms they can recognize in dealing with their own lives and questions. Gielli, who share a single dream-world, may see these other spaces a bit more clearly. At any rate, they see them differently.”
“Communication,” Mirella said. “With other spaces. Visiting whole other spaces. This is what dreams come to? Who’d have imagined?”
“This,” I said, “is going to take some thought.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“The Gielli share a single dream world,” Master Higsbee said.
“So Euglane says,” I put in.
“The question is,” he said, “is it the same world which we humans enter, in our dreams?”
Mirella shook her head. “Why should it be? They’re Gielli— they’re different, right?”
“Not that different, dear girl,” the Master said. “We exist in the same universe with Euglane; we share the same physical laws; we can communicate, we can act upon each other. Do our dreams also share a universe?”
I thought about it for a second. “I am damned if I know how anybody could tell,” I said. “We can’t take our dreams out and compare them—we can only compare descriptions, and vague descriptions at that.”
“We might,” the Master said, “compare specific objects, specific places, as experienced by humans and Gielli—or by humans and any other beings. But I agree; as humans, we use the world we encounter in dreams for our own purposes—interpreting what we experience in the light of our own needs and wishes, defining our experiences individually. It would not be possible to compare anything resembling objective data. The Gielli doubtless also use their shared dream-world, though to what degree their use is distorted by their needs and wishes I do not know. Euglane might know—but the question is not worth exploration. There are too many unknowns on our side of the equation.”
“And no way to cross over from one side to the other,” Hilda said. “There are no measurable objects in dreams—objectively measurable. We can’t compare Euglane’s dreams with mine, not and get anywhere.”
“With a question still more interesting,” he said. “We may assume that the world we enter in dreams has a real existence—though we distort it greatly. We may assume tentatively that this is also true of the shared Gielli dream-world; the two worlds may be the same, but no matter, for the present.” He turned his head to Mirella, to Hilda, then back to me again. I don’t know why he does that. “Folla exists in a different world—a different—ah—sheaf of spaces,” he said. “The question is: does he exist in either our dream-world, or the Gielli world—if the Gielli world is in fact different from our own.”
“Damn it, he has to,” I said. “He pops up in dreams. He has to exist to do that at all.”
“Ah, but you have missed the point, Gerald,” he said. “Is the dream-world his—ah—home space, so to speak, his natural universe? Or is he a visitor there, as we are periodic visitors there?”
“So the next time he shows up,” Mirella said, “we should ask him for a passport? Find out where he lives?”
“Somehow,” he said, “I doubt that he would provide a reply—or that, if he did, it would be easily comprehendable. But this question is, in fact, decidable.”
There was a little pause. His head swivelled again. Damn it, I told myself, he was enjoying this. He knew something we didn’t know.
“Let us suppose that Folla’s home space—the home space of these aliens—is our dream-world,” he said. “What follows from this? Surely, at once, two facts: first, that it might be possible for him to enter many, many thousands of dreams (though he has not)—and second, that he is familiar with our waking space.”
“Well,” Mirella said, “so maybe he can go into lots of dreams. We only know—how many?—four people he’s talked to, or this Dube talked to. MacEvoy, and Harris France, and Jerry here, and Hilda. Who says he didn’t talk to fifty thousand other people, anyplace?”
“I say it, dear girl,” Master Higsbee told her. “He (or Dube) has asked for aid from Hilda, from Ms MacEvoy, and from Gerald; whether he also asked for aid from Harris France we cannot know.”
“So?”
“He needs a mechanism constructed,” the Master said. “He has asked for aid from people who do not, as a rule, construct mechanisms. Ms MacEvoy, in particular, seems a very bad choice—but, given Ravenal, given even City Two, there are easily eight thousand choices superior to any we know he has made.”
“So he doesn’t know anything about people,” Mirella said. “So he’s just shooting in the dark.”
“No,” the Master said. “Think: we know that he was in contact with Harris France some time ago, in contact with Hilda during her hospital stay, months in the past. He has had time to approach many people; and he is still requesting aid of Gerald. Apparently he can only reach certain people; why this is, we do not know.”
“A Detective-Colonel in Homicide,” Mirella said, “A Survivor, a—chemist, right?” Hilda nodded. “And a woman in a wheelchair. So what is the common link?”
“Two are male,” Hilda said, “and two female. Might this be significant?”
The Master shook his head. “Anything might be significant,” he said. “There is no way for us to know on what basis contact is possible’ we do not know how Folla experiences our spaces, or what it is he sees—if seeing is his mode of experience, to be sure. There is one facet of character all four do share—a high level of what might be called determination. Strength. The inability, if you will, to surrender.”
“Stubbornness,” Mirella said.
“Just so,” the Master said. “Hilda owns it, as her decision to accept her blindness and live in terms of it will show. Harris France seems to have been a most decisive, firm, and decided person. This stubbornness, if that is the word, is one of Gerald’s most noticeable characteristics.”
“And Hester MacEvoy?” Mirella said.
“It would be far easier for her—as she has been described to me—to leave her life here, to return to Kingsley, to live out her life in the shallows of invalidism. She has not done so.”
“So he picks stubborn people,” Mirella said. “There are a lot of stubborn people.”
“There are certainly other qualifications, so to speak,” the Master said. And the fact is, given our ignorance, we cannot judge of his needs—of the needs of these aliens—from the people known to have been accessed; they are too varied.” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “He has chosen those he must choose, and has hoped that one, at least, will be both capable and willing.”
“Like MacEvoy,” Mirella said. “She is willing to go shoot her own doctor. Maybe she is also willing to build this machine, whatever it is. She says no, but what does it mean she says anything?”
“He still searches,” the Master said.
Hilda looked up, uncomfortably. “He does search, Sir,” she said. “So he hasn’t got his machine yet. But perhaps something should be done about Ms MacEvoy—just in case.”
Mirella made a sound that was about half laugh and half snarl. I hadn’t known she had it in her, and in its way it was a pleasant surprise. “Like maybe get her arrested, at least,” she said. “The woman killed somebody. Maybe we should do something?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
But we tabled that—for a brief while. Mirella had been thinking about dreams.
“I have heard,” she said suddenly, “if you dream you die— then you do not wake up, you just drop dead in your sleep. Does anybody know is this true?”
The Master chuckled again. “I cannot imagine a way to decide the question,” he said. “Who could testify to its truth, but the dead? And there can be no testimony of its falsity; there are dreams of dying, and dreams of an afterlife—there exist even dreams in which the dreamer attends his own funeral. But there are no establishable dreams of death itself; we cannot say anything clearly about an experience no living being has yet had.”
“People have been clinically dead for a few minutes,” I said. “That’s been happening for centuries.”
“What difference exists between ‘clinically dead’ and ‘dead’ we cannot know,” he said. “But if it is reversible, it was not death; that much is a beginning.”
“Tell the truth,” Mirella said, “I do not truly want to be dead, and I am not much on being clinically dead either.”
“Nor am I, dear girl, nor is Gerald,” the Master said. “But the chance must be taken; we must treat with Folla. The alternative is to allow Folla and his fellows freely into our spaces— with what results we cannot know, but they are unlikely to be pleasant ones.”
“Telling people—” I said.
“Will maybe help out for maybe sixty days Standard,” Mirella said. “People get tired, people goof off. Then what? We cannot call Wolf every sixty days. The third time, nobody will listen.”
I sighed. “So we’re going to go and make a stand in our dreams,” I said. “Well, it’s a new experience.”
“Gerald,” the Master said, “some weeks ago you told me that you had a novel situation for me. We are all now beginning to see how very accurate your statement was.”
“That’s my Jerry,” Mirella said. “He hit it on the nose, right?”
The Master chuckled again. Damn it, it’s not a pleasant sound.
Euglane was in fairly good shape when we reached him by phone. He’d had some time to adjust, and he was adjusting fairly well. The Master filled him in as quickly as possible, and Euglane suggested we all head over to his place. “There is equipment here that may be helpful,” he said. “And if more is needed, there are labs at Lavoisier to which I have access.”
“Labs?” Mirella said. “I am not much good with lab stuff.”
“I’ll help you, if needed,” Euglane said. “It will be neither difficult nor threatening.”
Mirella sounded doubtful, but she said: “I take your word, okay,” and we piled into her car, the four of us, and headed on over to Euglane’s.
Four of us. Hilda had stayed firm
ly in the background all through our talk, but the Master asked her to come along. “It may be that your contribution will be a major one,” he told her.
She looked, and sounded, more doubtful than Mirella had, but all she said was: “If you think so, Sir.”
Mirella drove. I wouldn’t put it past the old helpless blind Master to be able to drive a car—through City Two traffic and in Ravenal’s complex traffic system—but he sat in back with Hilda, and let me share the front seat with Mirella. There was no conversation en route, just a general, stuffy atmosphere of worry.
And when we got to Euglane’s place, the first piece of equipment we used was the phone.
“It is a holding action, perhaps little more,” the Master said. “But it has value—and its value depends on our speed.”
There were five of us—not really enough, as Mirella and I had agreed. But there would be others; I knew one or two right on Ravenal, and the Master, to nobody’s surprise, knew what sounded like the entire top five per cent of the population of City Two, whether you ranked by intelligence or influence. “Some I have worked with,” he said, sounding as casual as a human being could sound after the list he’d given us. “Some I have met socially—despite my infirmities, I maintain what social life I may—and a few are old friends and acquaintances, reaching back to our days as students.”
I passed over the infirmities in silence—he was still using his cane, and it still handicapped him about as much as a pocket-handkerchief handicaps people—but I did have a little difficulty with the picture of Master Higsbee as a schoolboy. I suppose he must have been, once upon a time in the Pleistocene Era.
Euglane suggested calling a few of them first, but the Master shook his head. “It is not needed,” he said. “They know my word is good, and they cannot fear I would exaggerate. I shall explain matters to them at a convenient time; let us simply begin.”
So we started to run up Euglane’s phone bill. What we wanted was a connection to two people: the Governor-General on Ravenal, probably on his estate outside City One, and the Emperor of the Comity. In a pinch, the President of the Dichtung would do as stand-in for the Emperor, though the Emperor—as an elected official—would be closer to the people generally.
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