by James Gunn
Laurence watched the flow of life through the room and was content. No one came to him as they had come before. It was as if a pageant were being continued before his eyes, a pageant that had started somewhere else and would go on in still another place when it had left his room. Momentarily it paused here to gleam in this white room, silver on white.
The beads flowed together into larger beads and split apart, clinging until the final separation, into smaller beads again, whole and complete in themselves.
Everything happened so swiftly that he could not understand it, but clearly the flow of the young people had a pattern. He tried to understand what was going on, tried to make sense of it, but it was too complex for him. He sighed. He was content that the room was full of life again, as if the world had opened a casual hand and let its protean stuff surge in around him. He filled his eyes with movement and his ears with the sound of their mercurial voices and his nostrils with the perfume of their bodies.
“Father,” someone said. Laurence looked up hopefully, but it was, of course, his daughter Jenny. “Someone else wanted to meet you,” she said in a silvery voice. “I bring you Samuel. Samuel is a dreamer, and he dreams the most exquisite adventures."
Beside Jenny was the young man dressed in black, the young man around whom Virginia had danced her courtship. Now that he was near, Laurence could see that he was not so young but more an old-young man. He was thin, and he had a pale, drawn face and eyes that were weary and dark, and looked, sometimes, as if they were turned inward toward some interior vision of hell or heaven.
“I thought you would never return,” Laurence said to Jenny.
“You know, Father,” Jenny said, fidgeting on one foot as if staying in one place were painful. “Historians went out. Since then we have had musicians and painters and scientists and sculptors and composers and—oh, I forget them all. But now it is dreamers, and Samuel, Father, is the most precious dreamer.” Then she was gone.
Click.
The peripneumony which was epidemic about the same time, appeared in a burning fever, insatiable thirst, a black tongue, anxiety and pains about the heart, short breath, a cough, with expectoration of a mixed matter, open mouth, raging delirium, fury, red, turbid or black urine, restlessness, and watchings, black eruptions, anthraces, buboes, and in some, corroding ulcers over the whole body. The disease usually terminated the 4th day, sometimes not till the 7th. The blood was black and thick; but sometimes greenish and watery or yellowish.—Venesection was certain death. The disease baffled medical skill—the only remedies that appeared to relieve, were laxatives early administered, cupping and scarification, leeches applied to the hemorrhoids, and inwardly, infusions of mild, diaphoretic, attenuating, pectoral vegetables.
“I did want to meet you,” Samuel said in a slow, soft voice that contrasted with Jenny's volatility. “You have given me some of my most effective dreams—your Nero was magnificent, with all the intrigues and orgies and murders and persecutions and torture, and your Masada was almost as evocative, though of a different sort, of course."
Laurence looked at him. “I do not understand."
“You are my favorite historian,” Samuel said simply, turning out his hands as if to reveal their stigmata. “You must be very deep, full of exquisite passions, to make it all so real."
“I don't understand what you do,” Laurence said.
“I dream. That is all. I let your words—or someone else's words—I must move with the fashions in dreams, after all—flow over me like lava, engulfing me, consuming me—music plays—incense drifts through the air—my bed embraces me—sometimes I pop a little—not much, you understand, or what I dream would be someone else's dream, and what I produce would be secondhand, so to speak—just enough to get the juices flowing. But the most important part of the whole process is the material, and that you provide. We are sort of partners, you and I; you perform your research; you create a world and people it; and I produce the dream."
“You dream,” Laurence repeated.
A dark eyebrow lifted on Samuel's pale forehead. “You are an innocent, aren't you? Jenny said you were out-of-it, and I didn't believe her. You don't pop and you don't dream."
“I dream,” Laurence said. Dreams slithered through his nights like serpents or crept like snails, leaving their slimy trails across his waking memory.
“They dream,” Samuel said, waving a casual hand at the quicksilver children shifting behind him, never stopping long enough to assume a fixed shape. “You live. You're real."
“That's what Virginia said."
Try to hold quicksilver and it slips away, slides into other forms, breaks into tiny fragments, forms itself into heavy little balloons flattened on one side, unable to fly; try to close your fingers around it and it is not there.
Laurence tried to identify Virginia again and found her at last. She was involved in a kind of flickering, intricate pattern of movement with a young man, like a kind of feathered courtship performed to an unheard arabesque.
“I have a talent,” Samuel said. “I dream. I dream so vividly that my dreams are like memory, my memory like knowledge. And while I am dreaming, the little needles come and drink my blood, and then the laboratories analyze the proteins—the peptides, to be precise—and synthesize them, just as the brain does, and put them into little capsules, and the poppets pop it, you see? And then they live my dreams."
Click.
This plague was so deadly that at least half or two-thirds of the human race perished in about 8 years. It was most fatal in cities, but in no place died less than a third of the inhabitants. In many cities perished nine out of ten of the people, and many places were wholly depopulated. In London 50,000 dead bodies were buried in one grave yard. In Norwich died about the same number. In Venice died 100,000—in Lubec, 90,000—in Florence the same number. In the east perished twenty millions in one year.—In Spain, the disease raged three years and carried off two-thirds of the people. Alfonso 2d. died with it while besieging Gibraltar.
“They feel my emotions, my fears, my anxieties, my hopes. Or someone else's—whoever happens to be popular that cycle."
“What are they dreaming now?” Laurence asked huskily, feeling his mouth and throat all dry. He put his hand on the slick console top. That, at least, was solid and real.
“The latest thing is some composer. They're in the allegro phase right now. See how briskly they move? They hear music—heavenly music, I understand. I wouldn't know. I don't pop—well, hardly at all, you know. Honestly, it's because I prefer my own dreams to someone else's, and I do enjoy the status. We're alike, we two. Real people. We keep the world spinning for the poppets."
“Are they always like this?"
“Oh, no,” Samuel said. “The largo really drags. And sometimes there are darker caps, grimmer dreams.... Oh, I must go. They're leaving. It must be time for another cycle to begin, and I don't want to miss it. This is my hour, you see. Dreamers are in, and I should enjoy it while I can. I may add to my psychic energy, my dream stuff, so to speak."
And then they disappeared, as if a time sequence had been reversed, and all the scattered silver beads drew back together into a liquid silver stream that poured back down the drop shaft and was gone....
The beautiful bright children poured into the room like honey, honey-slow and honey-sweet.
They were all languid grace and weary courtesy. They moved like dreamers, enraptured by events beyond their control.
Virginia came directly to Laurence, walking as if all the delicate bones in her delightful body were cushioned in oil.
Click.
Along the trade routes between China and Europe the Plague traveled. In 1346 it was passed on to a warrior horde, a band of Kipchaks who were besieging a Genoese trading post in the Crimea. Their own death was certain, but the Kipchak leader ordered that the plague-infected corpses be catapulted into the town, where the Plague immediately broke out.
Ten days had passed. Laurence had tried to work. He had
studied the original documents, trying to get a feeling for the era, trying to get inside the doomed people, and he had even dictated a few paragraphs, but they were worthless. The past no longer seemed as important. The present pressed in upon him, and the possibilities that awaited him in the uncertain future tormented his waking moments and disturbed his sleep. Perhaps he was innocent, but he was not a fool. He recalled all the old men in history and their infatuations with young girls, and he told himself how foolish they had been—and how foolish he was—and how it always ended badly.
He was not worldly-wise, but he knew something about people from his studies and he knew something about himself from the experience of projecting himself into the historical characters about whom he wrote. In his way, he told himself, he had lived a thousand lives already, more than any of these children, with their capsule fictions, whatever they were, could imagine.
He knew, then, that his fantasies were foolish, but he could not put them away.
Sugar in the gourd and honey in the horn, I never was so happy since the hour I was born.
And Virginia said to him in her slow, sweet voice, “I have come back."
“Yes,” Laurence said.
“I want you to talk to me again,” she said.
“I will do anything you say,” he said.
She sat at his feet while the rest of the children moved around them as if in an underwater ballet, and he spoke to her, at first hesitantly about generalities, and then as she listened attentively, her sunflower eyes focused on his face, he talked more swiftly, more confidently, almost as if he were dictating to the console. Only this console was a living creature, lovely and receptive.
He spoke to her about savages and civilizations, about wheels and wanderings, about monuments and minarets, about warriors and weapons, about serfs and soldiers, about farmers and farthings, about priests and prisoners, about philosophers and philanthropists, about forests and fortresses, about barristers and barbarians, about commerce and continents, about tigers and tarantulas, about alchemists and alloys, about scientists and sacrifices, about empires and emperors, about intrigue and incest ... about the vast movements of peoples, about changes in the earth, about the operation of chance or fate that put here a great idea, there a great discovery, and there a man or woman of iron will or whim, and things happened for good or ill and usually both.
But most of all he spoke about love and lovers, about kings and queens, about princes and princesses....
Click.
At the beginning of October, in the year of the Incarnation of the Son of God 1347, twelve Genoese galleys were fleeing from the vengeance which the Lord was taking on account of their nefarious deeds and entered the harbor of Messina in Sicily. In their bones they bore so virulent a disease that anyone who even spoke to them was seized by a mortal illness and in no manner could avoid death. When the citizens of Messina discovered that this sudden death came from the Genoese ships they hurriedly expelled them from the town and the harbor. But the evil remained in the town and caused a fearful outbreak of death.
While he was speaking, Virginia took his foot into her soft lap and stroked it. His voice shook then, and something in his chest trembled.
When his words slowed and he looked up, the others were gone. They were alone, he and Virginia, and she came slowly, liquidly, to her feet and said, “Come."
She took his hand and led him to the altar-bed and unbelted his robe and pushed it from his shoulders. He let it slide down his body to the floor, feeling his senses come alive to her. Slowly, languorously, she drew him down to her, and she was sweet, honey-sweet, until he thought that he would drown.
He awoke, his body still languid and slow with its memories, the taste of honey sweet upon his tongue, and she was gone.
Panic paralyzed him. The honey turned sour in his mouth. His throat tightened. A chilly hand squeezed his stomach.
He sat up and searched the room with his eyes. There was no place for her to hide. The only pieces of furniture in the room were the console and the bed. The lavatory door was open, and he could see from here that it was empty. The kitchenette, with its autochef, its little round table and chairs, was empty too.
And he was empty.
What he had known the past twelve hours had been a dream, as fleeting and as impermanent.
He was alone. Now it was different. Now he knew he was alone.
Slowly he gathered himself together. Slowly he moved toward the lavatory. Slowly he showered. Slowly he took a new robe from the dispenser in the lavatory wall. Slowly he put it on. And felt someone watching him. He swung quickly toward the door.
Virginia was standing in the doorway, her eyes like polished volcanic glass.
He knew happiness again.
Joy was a lump of tears in his throat.
He could not speak. He held out his arms, and she came into them like a child.
Click.
I say, then, that the years of the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God had attained to the number of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, when into the notable city of Florence, fair over every other of Italy, there came the death-dealing pestilence, which, through the operation of the heavenly bodies or of our own iniquitous dealings, being sent down upon mankind for our correction by the just wrath of God, had some years before appeared in parts of the East and after having bereft these latter of an innumerable number of inhabitants, extending without cease from one place to another, had now unhappily spread towards the West.
A bit later he noticed the small case she held.
“With all my worldly goods—” she said. “You're wonderful in your way, Laurence, but you're a bit out-of-it, you know. You have no cap catalog, no dispenser, no injector niche. We'll have to fix that if I stay."
“If you stay...” he repeated.
She smiled at him, and he remembered sweetness. “Not to worry, Laurence. I'll stay. For now. But I had to get my hand injector and my favorite caps. It took some thinking, too, I can tell you, to weed them down to those I could carry. If I need the latest, I'll just have to go out."
He was filled with unreasoning fear. “I never want you to go out."
“Not out of the building, silly,” she said, putting both hands flat upon his chest. “You do fret! But I like that."
“When will we be married?” he asked.
“You mustn't get notions,” she said quickly. “That's not our way. Things change too fast. Enjoy. Enjoy. Happiness is now. Don't make it a prisoner."
Laurence shook his head, trying not to be concerned, realizing that he was irritating her with his importuning, conscious that he might lose her. He held a butterfly in his hands and he could not hold it too tightly: it might break its wings or, when he relaxed for a moment, it would fly away. But he could not help himself. “And I don't want you to take any more capsules."
She patted his cheek and then reached up to kiss him. “But that's what you like, Laurence,” she said as she leaned back. “And you'll like it even more. When I'm Helen, Cleopatra, or Poppaea, Isolde or Héloïse, Madame Pompadour or Mata Hari, and a dozen other women who have no names in history but are just as entrancing...."
“What do you know of those women?” he asked.
“I know what they did and how they felt...."
“You know what some dreamer thought they did and how they felt."
“But they're very good, the dreamers,” Virginia said. “Besides, what do you know of those women?” She smiled.
Click.
In men and women alike there appeared at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof some waxed of the bigness of a common apple, others like unto an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils. From these two parts the aforesaid death-bearing plague-boils proceeded, in brief space, to appear and come indifferently in every part of the body; wherefrom, after awhile, the fashion of the contagion began to change into black or livid blotches, which showed
themselves in many first on the arms and about the thighs and after spread to every other part of the person, in some large and sparse and in others small and thick-sown; and like as the plague-boils had been first (and yet were) a very certain token of coming death, even so were these for every one to whom they came....
She came to him as Helen and silenced his apprehensions with her consciousness of beauty that shone through her face and body like sunlight through alabaster.
She came to him as Cleopatra and the millennia-old incestuous royal blood heated her tutored body to an intensity that burned his flesh.
She came to him as Poppaea, and her corruption coiled around him like a leperous white snake.
She came to him as Isolde, and her guilt made their lovemaking a frantic coupling upon the slopes of smoking Mount Vesuvius.
She came to him as Héloïse, and her sin turned her to unresponsive ice that melted suddenly into boiling urgency and tears.
She came to him as Madame Pompadour, and her consciousness of courtly intrigue gave every word a dozen meanings, every act a myriad of purposes.
She came to him as Mata Hari, and her duplicity drove her to lay siege to his senses.
She came to him as a ballet dancer...
A pubescent girl...
A whore...