The Dream Master

by Roger Zelazny

  "You do it. My fingers know too many."

  Render punched random buttons. The Spinner moved onto the highway. Render asked speed of the vehicle then, and it moved into the high-acceleration lane.

  The Spinner's lights burnt holes in the darkness. The city backed away fast; it was a smoldering bonfire on both sides of the road, stirred by sudden gusts of wind, hidden by white swirlings, obscured by the steady fall of gray ash. Render knew his speed was only about sixty percent of what it would have been on a clear, dry night.

  He did not blank the windows, but leaned back and stared out through them. Eileen "looked" ahead into what light there was. Neither of them said anything for ten or fifteen minutes.

  The city shrank to sub-city as they sped on. After a time, short sections of open road began to appear.

  "Tell me what it looks like outside," she said.

  "Why didn't you ask me to describe your dinner, or the suit of armor beside our table?"

  "Because I tasted one and felt the other. This is different."

  "There is snow falling outside. Take it away and what you have left is black."

  "What else?"

  "There is slush on the road. When it starts to freeze, traffic will drop to a crawl unless we outrun this storm. The

  slush looks like an old, dark syrup, just starting to get sugary on top."

  "Anything else?"

  "That's it, lady."

  "Is it snowing harder or less hard than when we left the club?"

  "Harder, I should say."

  "Would you pour me a drink?" she asked him.

  "Certainly."

  They turned their seats inward and Render raised the table. He fetched two glasses from the cupboard.

  "Your health," said Render, after he had poured.

  "Here's looking at you."

  Render downed his drink. She sipped hers. He waited for her next comment. He knew that two cannot play at the Socratic game, and he expected more questions before she said what she wanted to say.

  She said: "What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?"

  Yes, he decided, he had guessed correctly.

  He replied without hesitation: "The sinking of Atlantis."

  "I was serious."

  *"So was I."

  "Would you care to elaborate?"

  "I sank Atlantis," he said, "personally."

  "It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies. There were bridges of opal, and crimson pennants and a milk-white river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu, as delicately constructed as musical in­struments, all swaying with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Green tenor sax play at sunset.

  "The Greek, of course, was a patient of mine—paranoiac. The etiology of the thing is rather complicated, but that's what I wandered into inside his mind. I gave him free

  rein for awhile, and in the end I had to split Atlantis in half and sink it full fathom five. He's playing again and you've doubtless heard his sounds, if you like such sounds at all. He's good. I still see him periodically, but he is no longer the last descendant of the greatest minstrel of Atlantis. He's just a fine, late twentieth-century sax-man.

  "Sometimes though, as I look back on the apocalypse I worked within his vision of grandeur, I experience a fleeting sense of lost beauty—because, for a single moment, his ab­normally intense feelings were my feelings, and he felt that his dream was the most beautiful thing in the world."

  He refilled their glasses.

  "That wasn't exactly what I meant," she said.

  "I know."

  "I meant something real."

  "It was more real than real, I assure you."

  "I don't doubt it, but..."

  "—But I destroyed the foundation you were laying for your argument. Okay, I apologize. I'll hand it back to you. Here's something that could be real:

  "We are moving along the edge of a great bowl of sand," he said. "Into it, the snow is gently drifting. In the spring the snow will melt, the waters will run down into the earth, or be evaporated away by the heat of the sun. Then only the sand will remain. Nothing grows in the sand, except for an occasional cactus. Nothing lives here but snakes, a few birds, insects, burrowing things, and a wandering coyote or two. In the afternoon these things will look for shade. Any place where there's an old fence post or a rock or a skull or a cactus to block out the sun, there you will witness life cowering before the elements. But the colors are beyond belief, and the elements are more lovely, almost, than the things they destroy."

  "There is no such place near here," she said.

  "If I say it, then there is. Isn't there? I've seen it."

  "Yes... You're right."

  "And it doesn't matter if it's a painting by a woman named

  O'Keefe, or something right outside our window, does it? If I've seen it?"

  "I acknowledge the truth of the diagnosis," she said. "Do you want to speak it for me?"

  "No, go ahead."

  He refilled the small glasses once more.

  "The damage is in my eyes," she told him, "not my brain."

  He lit her cigarette."

  "I can see with other eyes if I can enter other brains."

  He lit his own cigarette.

  "Neuroparticipation is based upon the fact that two ner­vous systems can share the same impulses, the same fantas­ies..."

  "Controlled fantasies."

  "I could perform therapy and at the same time experience genuine visual impressions."

  "No," said Render.

  "You don't know what it's like to be cut off from a whole area of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can ex­perience something you can never know—and that he cannot appreciate it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court of biological hapstance, in a place where there is no justice—only fortuity, pure and simple."

  "The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortu­nately, man must reside in the universe."

  "I'm not asking the universe to help me—I'm asking you."

  "I'm sorry," said Render.

  "Why won't you help me?"

  "At this moment you are demonstrating my main reason."

  "Which is ... ?"

  "Emotion. This thing means far too much to you. When the therapist is in-phase with a patient he is narco-electrical-ly removed from most of his own bodily sensations. This is necessary—because his mind must be completely absorbed by the task at hand. It is also necessary that his emotions under­go a similar suspension. This, of course, is impossible in the one sense that a person always emotes to some degree. But the therapist's emotions are sublimated into a generalized

  feeling of exhilaration—or, as in my own case, into an ar­tistic reverie. With you, however, the 'seeing' would be too much. You would be in constant danger of losing control of the dream."

  "I disagree with you."

  "Of course you do. But the fact remains that you would be dealing, and dealing constantly, with the abnormal. The power of a neurosis is unimaginable to ninety-nine point etcetera percent of the population, because we can never adequately judge the intensity of our own—let alone those of others, when we only see them from the outside. That is why no neuroparticipant will ever undertake to treat a full­blown psychotic. The few pioneers in that area are all themselves in therapy today. It would be like driving into a maelstrom. If the therapist loses the upper hand in an intense session he becomes the Shaped rather than the Shap-er. The synapses respond like a fission reaction when ner­vous impulses are artificially augmented. The transference effect is almost instantaneous.

  "I did an awful lot of skiing five years ago. This is be­cause I was a claustrophobe. I had to run and it took me six months to beat the thing—all because of one tiny lapse that oc
curred in a measureless fraction of an instant. I had to refer the patient to another therapist. And this was only a minor repercussion. If you were to go ga-ga over the scenery, girl, you could wind up in a rest home for life."

  She finished her drink and Render refilled the glass. The night raced by. They had left the city far behind them, and the road was open and clear. The darkness eased more and more of itself between the falling flakes. The Spinner picked up speed.

  "All right," she admitted, "maybe you're right. Still, though, I think you can help me."

  "How?" he asked.

  "Accustom me to seeing, so that the images will lose their novelty, the emotions wear off. Accept me as a patient and rid me of my sight-anxiety. Then what you have said so far will cease to apply. I will be able to undertake the training

  then, and give my full attention to therapy. Ill be able to sub­limate the sight-pleasure into something else."

  Render wondered.

  Perhaps it could be done. It would be a difficult undertak­ing, though.

  It might also make therapeutic history.

  No one was really qualified to try it, because no one had ever tried it before.

  But Eileen Shallot was a rarity—no, a unique item—for it was likely she was the only person in the world who combined the necessary technical background with the unique prob­lem.

  He drained his glass, refilled it, refilled hers.

  He was still considering the problem as the "RE-COOR­DINATE" light came on and the car pulled into a cutoff and stood there. He switched off the buzzer and sat there for a long while, thinking.

  It was not often that other persons heard him acknowledge his feelings regarding his skill. His colleagues considered him modest. Offhand, though, it might be noted that he was aware that the day a better neuroparticipant began practicing would be the day that a troubled Homo sapiens was to be treated by something but immeasurably less than angels.

  Two drinks remained. Then he tossed the emptied bottle into the backbin.

  "You know something?" he finally said.

  "What?"

  "It might be worth a try."

  He swiveled about then and leaned forward to re-coordin­ate, but she was there first. As he pressed the buttons and the S-7 swung around, she kissed him. Below her dark glasses her cheeks were moist.

  II

  the suicide bothered him more than it should have, and Mrs. Lambert had called the day before to cancel her ap­pointment. So Render decided to spend the morning being pensive. Accordingly, he entered the office wearing a cigar and a frown.

  "Did you see ... ?" asked Mrs. Hedges.

  "Yes." He pitched his coat onto the table that stood in the far corner of the room. He crossed to the window, stared down. "Yes," he repeated, "I was driving by with my windows clear. They were still cleaning up when I passed."

  "Did you know him?"

  "I don't even know the name yet. How could I?"

  "Priss Tully just called me—she's a receptionist for that en­gineering outfit up on the eighty-sixth. She says it was James Irizarry, an ad designer who had offices down the hall from them. That's a long way to fall. He must have been unconscious when he hit, huh? He bounced off the building. If you open the window and lean out you can see-off to the left there-where . .."

  "Never mind, Bennie. Your friend have any idea why he did it?"

  "Not really. His secretary came running up the hall, scream­ing. Seems she went in his office to see him about some draw­ings, just as he was getting up over the sill. There was a note on his board. 'I've had everything I wanted.' it said. 'Why wait around?' Sort of funny, huh? I don't mean funny...

  "Yeah... Know anything about his personal affairs?"

  "Married. Coupla kids. Good professional rep. Lots of

  business. Sober as anybody. He could afford an office in this building."

  "Good Lord!" Render turned. "Have you got a case file there or something?"

  "You know," she shrugged her thick shoulders, "I've got friends all over this hive. We always talk when things go slow. Prissy's my sister-in-law anyhow—"

  "You mean that if I dived through this window right now, my current biography would make the rounds in the next five minutes?"

  "Probably"—she twisted her bright lips into a smile—"give or take a couple. But don't do it today, huh? You know, it would be kind of anticlimactic, and it wouldn't get the same coverage as a solus.

  "Anyhow," she continued, "you're a mind-mixer. You wouldn't do it."

  "You're betting against statistics," he observed. "The medical profession, along with attorneys, manages about three times as many as most other work areas."

  "Hey!" She looked worried. "Go "way from my window!

  "I'd have to go to work for Dr. Hanson then," she added, "and he's a slob."

  He moved to her desk.

  "I never know when to take you seriously," she decided.

  "I appreciate your concern"—he nodded—"indeed I do. As a matter of fact, I have never been statistic-prone—I should have repercussed out of the neuropy game four years ago."

  "You'd be a headline, though," she mused. "All those reporters asking me about you... Hey, why do they do it, huh?"

  "Who?"

  "Anybody."

  "How should I know, Bennie? I'm only a humble psyche-stirrer. If I could pinpoint a general underlying cause— and then maybe figure a way to anticipate the thing—why, it might even be better than my jumping, for newscopy. But

  I can't do it, because there is no single, simple reason—I don't think."

  "Oh."

  "About thirty-five years ago it was the ninth leading cause of death in the United States. Now it's number six for north and South America. I think it's seventh in Europe."

  "And nobody will ever really know why Irizarry jumped?"

  Render swung a chair backwards and seated himself. He knocked an ash into her petite and gleaming tray. She emptied it into the waste-chute, hastily, and coughed a significant cough.

  "Oh, one can always speculate," he said, "and one in my profession will. The first thing to consider would be the personality traits which might predispose a man to periods of depression. People who keep their emotions under rigid control, people who are conscientious and rather compulsively concerned with small matters..." He knocked another fleck of ash into her tray and watched as she reached out to dump, then quickly drew her hand back again. He grinned an evil grin. "In short," he finished, "some of the characteristics of people in professions which require individual, rather than group performance—medicine, law, the arts."

  She regarded him speculatively.

  "Don't worry though—" he chuckled—"I'm pleased as hell with life."

  "You're kind of down in the mouth this morning."

  "Pete called me. He broke his ankle yesterday in gym class. They ought to supervise those things more closely. I'm thinking of changing his school."

  "Again?"

  "Maybe. I'll see. The headmaster is going to call me this afternoon. I don't like to keep shuffling him, but I do want him to finish school in one piece."

  "A kid can't grow up without an accident or two. It's— statistics."

  "Statistics aren't the same thing as destiny, Bennie. Every­body makes his own."

  "Statistics or destiny?"

  "Both, I guess."

  "I think that if something's going to happen, it's going to happen."

  "I don't. I happen to think that the human will, backed by a sane mind can exercise some measure of control over events. If I didn't think so, I wouldn't be in the racket I'm in."

  "The world's a machine—you know—cause, effect. Sta­tistics do imply the prob—"

  "The human mind is not a machine, and I do not know cause and effect. Nobody does."

  "You have a degree in chemistry, as I recall. You're a scientist, Doc."

  "So I'm a Trotskyite deviationist"—he smiled, stretching— "and you were once a ballet teacher." He got to his feet and picked up
his coat.

  "By the way, Miss Deville called, left a message. She said: 'How about St. Moritz?' "

  "Too ritzy," he decided aloud. "It's going to be Davos." Because the suicide bothered him more than it should have, Render closed the door of his office and turned off the win­dows and turned on the phonograph. He put on the desk light only.

  How has the quality of human life been changed, he wrote, since the beginnings of the industrial revolution?

  He picked up the paper and reread the sentence. It was the topic he had been asked to discuss that coming Satur­day. As was typical in such cases he did not know what to say because he had too much to say, and only an hour to say it in.

  He got up and began to pace the office, now filled with Beethoven's Eighth Symphony.

  "The power to hurt," he said, snapping on a lapel micro­phone and activating his recorder, "has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement." His imaginary audience grew quiet. He smiled. "Man's potential for work­ing simple mayhem has been multiplied by mass-production; his capacity for injuring the psyche through personal con-

  tacts has expanded in an exact ratio to improved communi­cation facilities. But these are all matters of common know­ledge, and are not the things I wish to consider tonight. Rather, I should like to discuss what I choose to call autopsy-chomimesis—the self-generated anxiety complexes which on first scrutiny appear quite similar to classic patterns, but which actually represent radical dispersions of psychic en­ergy. They are peculiar to our times..."

  He paused to dispose of his cigar and formulate his next words.

  "Autopsychomimesis," he thought aloud, "a self-perpetuated imitation complex—almost an attention-getting affair. A jazz­man, for example, who acted hopped-up half the time, even though he had never used an addictive narcotic and only dimly remembered anyone who had—because all the stimu­lants and tranquilizers of today are quite benign. Like Quixote, he aspired after a legend when his music alone should have been sufficient outlet for his tensions.

  "Or my Korean War Orphan, alive today by virtue of the Red Cross and UNICEF and foster parents whom he never met. He wanted a family so badly that he made one up. And what then?—He hated his imaginary father and he loved his imaginary mother quite dearly—for he was a highly intelligent boy, and he too longed after the half-true com­plexes of tradition. Why?"