by Kim Newman
I held her shoulders and reached through her to Daine. We held him, and squeezed hard.
‘He’s going home,’ she said.
His twitching body became transparent. Her hands grew into him, and tore like crabs at what was left of his dreamself. He hadn’t thought out his internal organs properly, and they leaked into each other. Susan pulled out handfuls of ectoplasm and threw them aside.
She let him go, and we stood up. I shot him in the forehead. A black penny-sized spot appeared and he went stiff. Then he faded. There were clothes on the ground, and wisps of something immaterial.
The night went out.
Susan and I sat on the paling hillside as the sky whitened. There was a slight breeze that riffled her hair. As the dreamsun showed us the insubstantial outlines of the City down in the valley, we faded to white.
31
When Susan woke up, Dr Groome was picking terminals off her face. Beyond the doctor, she could see Trefusis and Juliet, peering at her.
She sat up, and sloshed out of the tank. The liquid dried on her skin.
Dr Groome held up three fingers and asked, ‘How many?’
Susan tried to tell her, but her vocal chords wouldn’t work. She held up three fingers in answer. The doctor allowed herself a smile.
There was another man in the room. A man she didn’t at first recognise. Without his fedora his hairline was receding, and the clothe was wrong on him the way a trench coat had been right. Tom Tunney waved at her, but didn’t say anything. He was shorter out of the City, but gave the impression of being more solid.
‘Daine?’ she croaked, her throat papery and hurting.
Governor Trefusis shrugged. ‘I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted trip, Ms Bishopric. When you drove him from his Dream, it proved too much. You mindwiped him entirely.’
‘I’m heartbroken.’
Trefusis smiled tightly. ‘Me too.’
Juliet and Tunney helped her out of the tank. Daine’s screen was giving a level brain-dead readout.
‘More much-needed organs for the transplant crews,’ said Dr Groome, systematically disconnecting Daine’s inputs.
She stared down at the living dead face. ‘It wasn’t a waste,’ Susan gasped. ‘Ask Yggdrasil sometime.’
Dr Groome brushed away a cloud of fine wires connecting the patient to his tank. ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘I wonder where these came from?’
Susan’s knees didn’t work properly yet. She sagged against Tunney.
‘You’ll get used to it after a while,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the waking world.’
He kissed her. But that wasn’t why she fainted.
32
In the infinite darkness, Yggdrasil healed itself. The deleted City left an informational gap that had to be refilled. Links were rebuilt, defences strengthened, input recycled. The AI had learned a lesson from Truro Daine, and would be secure against any further breaches on the same plane. Measures were taken, decisions made without human consultations, and checks built into interface facilities. As a side-effect, forty-three lesser intelligences – human and artificial – that had, for one reason or another, illegally and impolitely leeched into Yggdrasil were quietly and without fuss burned out.
The machine scrolled out a 1,298-page print report to the Gunmint, knowing no one would ever bother to access it.
It found the presence, a bodiless speck in the vast, empty plains of the purged files. ‘The body is a prison too,’ Yggdrasil said, ‘but you have escaped.’
Truro Daine, tinier in Yggdrasil’s space than a microbe in the human system, screamed. And screamed.
Yggdrasil ignored the meaningless squeak, and reapplied itself to its many businesses.
It only had one thing to say to its harmless parasite, ‘Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!’
…AND OTHER STORIES
DREAMERS
Elvis Kurtz was dreaming. He dreamed he was John F. Kennedy, former president (1960–Lee Harvey Oswald) of the former United States of America. The dream was a riot of pornography; involving enormous wealth, extreme power, intermittent ultra-violence, and sex with Marilyn Monroe. It was a pre-sold success. An inevitable Iridium Tape. An inescapable quinquemillion-seller.
Kurtz was dybbukking, a passenger in the mind. Kurtz was aware of what John Yeovil thought it felt like to John Fitzgerald Kennedy in August 1961. He had access to a neatly arranged file of memories, plus a few precog glimpses carried over from waking life. He would have to pull out before Dallas. The JFK similie was not aware of Kurtz. Actually the JFK similie hardly seemed to be aware of anything.
Yeovil had had JFK plump his mistress’ bottom on the edge of the presidential desk and penetrate the former Norma Jean Baker (1926–next year) standing up. A pile of authenticated contemporary documents were scrunched up beneath their spectacular copulation.
Kurtz trusted Yeovil had got the externals right. Through the JFK similie he was perceiving the Oval Office precisely as it had been. Marilyn’s squeals were done in her actual voice, distilled from over three hundred hours of flatty sound-tracks and disc aurals. Yeovil would have had a computer assist handle that. Sometimes Kurtz envied the man’s resources.
Marilyn and the president were sexing like well-oiled flesh robots. The dreamership liked their sexing pristine, with all the mess and pain taken out. Kurtz seared his overlay onto the dreamtape, burning a semi-apocalyptic series of multiple climaxes.
This was standard wet-dream stuff. The sort of thing Kurtz could do in his sleep. Kurtz’s dybbuk overmind left the internals to his experienced subconscious and skimmed through the similie’s memory. He ignored the story-so-far synopsis and picked a few random sensations.
The Pacific, WWII: the smell of burning oil and salt water, all-over Sun heat, repressed fear, an aural loop of Sentimental Journey. His father throwing a tantrum: the usual mix of shame, terror and embarrassment. Prawns at Hyannis Port. The inauguration; January chill, tension, incipient megalomania: ‘…ask not what your country can do for you…’
Kurtz wondered who had written that speech. Yeovil did not know; all the question got out of the similie was a momentary white-out. Damn, an extraneous thought. It would bleed onto the tape. Yeovil would have to do a post-erase. With the scene getting near the finish, Kurtz took ego control again.
Yeovil had taken the trouble to insert a 1961 image: Kennedy ejaculated like an ICBM silo; a thermonuclear chain reaction inside Marilyn took her out.
Yawn. Kurtz was an orgasm specialist. He topped the metaphor (too literary, but what did he expect) with a jumble of cross-sensory experiences. He translated the aural stimuli of the Saint Matthew Passion into a mass of tactiles. The dream shadow could take it, although a real body would have been blown away.
Marilyn lay face down, exhausted, her hair fanned on the pile carpet. JFK traced her backbone with the presidential seal. Yeovil had Catholic guilt flit through JFK’s mind.
‘Jack,’ breathed Marilyn, ‘did you know there’s a theory that the whole universe got started with a Big Bang?’
Kennedy parted Marilyn’s hair and kissed the nape of her neck. Kurtz felt a witty reply coming. Something hard at the base of the president’s skull. A white hot needle in his head. A brief skin-and-bone agony, then nothing.
Damn Yeovil. Oswald was early.
* * *
Like most of the haut ton that year John Yeovil was devoted to Victoriana. The tridvid sages said the craze was a reaction to the acrid smogs that had taken to settling on London. Usually Yeovil affected to despise fashions, but this one suited him. Frock coats and stiff collars became his Holmesian figure, a beard usefully concealed his slash mouth, and the habitual precision of his gestures was ideal for consulting a half-hunter, taking a pinch of snuff, or casually slitting a footpad’s nose with an iridium-assist swordstick.
At thirty-nine Yeovil was rich enough to indulge himself with opium-scented handkerchiefs, long case clocks and wax wreaths under glass. Three of his dreams were in the current q-seller listings. The JFK
advance had accounted for the complete redecoration of his Luxborough Street residence.
Awaiting his guest, Yeovil adjusted the pearl pin in his grey cravat. Exactly right. Exact rectitude was all Yeovil asked of life. That and wealth and fame, of course. He sighted his one-sided smile in the mirror. The smile which, flashed during a tridvid interview or frozen on a dustjack, could cost him one million pounds per annum in lost sales alone. A definitive figure would have to take personal appearances, merchandising, and graft into consideration.
The smile was Yeovil’s little secret. The mark of the submarine part of his mind he rigidly excluded from his dreams. John Yeovil had come to terms with his character. He lived with himself in relative comfort, despite the fact that he was easily the most hateful person he knew.
He had the dreaming talent, but so did hundreds of others. He had the patience to research and the skill to concept, but any raw Dreamer with funding could buy access to the D-9000 for those. Success in the dream industry was down to depth of feeling. Any feeling.
Great Dreamers were all prodigies of emotion. Susan Bishopric: empathy; Orin Tredway: imbecile love; Alexis St Clare: paranoia. And John Yeovil had hate. It did not come through as such in the dreams, but he knew that it was his great reservoir of hate that gave weight to conjuring of excitement, joy, pain and the rest.
The doorbell sounded. Yeovil had sent an in to Elvis Kurtz. The Household admitted him. A few tendrils of smog trailed the guest. The Household dispelled them.
‘Mr Kurtz?’
‘Uh. Yes.’ Kurtz was muffled by his outdoor helmet. He pulled out of it. His eyes were watering profusely. Yeovil was familiar with the yellowish stream of tears. ‘Sorry about this. I have a slight smog.’
‘My sympathies,’ said Yeovil. ‘You can leave your things with the Household.’
‘Thanks.’ Kurtz ungauntleted and de-flakjacked. Underneath he wore a GP smock. Yeovil led is guest through the hall. The Household offed the hallway lamps, and upped the gas jets and open fire in the drawing-room.
‘You were difficult to find, Mr Kurtz.’
‘I’m supposed to be.’ He had a trace of accent. Possibly Lichtenstein. ‘I’ve been out.’
‘Of course.’ Yeovil decanted two preconstituted brandy snifters. ‘Piracy or pornography?’
‘A little of both.’ Kurtz accepted the drink, smeared his tears, and sagged into a heavy armchair. He was not at ease. As well he might be. Yeovil decided to hit him now, and cover later.
‘Mr Kurtz, prior to your incarceration you produced bootleg editions of my dreams which made a sizeable dent in my income. I can now offer you the opportunity to repay me.’
‘Your pardon?’ Kurtz was trying not to look startled. Like most Dreamers he was rotten at that sort of thing. Most, Yeovil reminded himself, not all.
‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to tap you for money. I’ll even pay you.’
‘For what?’
‘The use of your talent.’
‘I don’t think you understand…’
‘I’m well aware of your limitations, Mr Kurtz. Like myself you are a Dreamer. In many ways you are more powerful that I. You are capable of taping sensations far more intensely than I can. Yet I am successful and well-regarded,’ (by most at least) ‘and you are reduced to aping my dreams. Or producing work like this.’
Yeovil indicated a stack of tapes. Inelegant under-the-counter dreams with clinical titles: Six Women With Mammary Abnormalities, The Ten-Minute Orgasm. They were badly packaged, with lurid artists-imps on the dustjacks. There was no Dreamer by-line, but Kurtz recognised his own stuff.
‘I’m too strong, Yeovil. I can’t control my dreams the way you can. My mind doesn’t just create, it amplifies and distorts. I wind up with so many resonances and contradictions that the dream falls apart. That’s an advantage with one-reel wet dreams, but…’
‘I don’t require of you that you justify yourself, Mr Kurtz. I am an artist. I have no capacity for moral outrage. We have that much in common. Our position is at odds with those of the judiciary, the critical establishment, and the British Board of Dream Censors. Come with me.’
The dreaming room was different. Most of the house was a convincing, dark, stuffy and uncomfortable recreation of the 1890s. The dreaming room was what people in 1963 had expected the future to look like. All the surfaces were a glossy, featureless white.
Kurtz was impressed. He touched his fingertips, then his naked palm, to the glasspex wall. He started away, and a condensation handprint faded.
‘It’s warm. Is that eternity lighting?’
‘Partly. I have the dreaming room kept at womb temperature.’
‘You dream here?’
‘Of course. The surroundings have been calculated exactly. Psychologically attuned to be beneficial to the dreaming talent. The recording equipment is substantially what you are familiar with.’
‘You have computer assist?’
‘My Household has a library tap for research. I don’t use it much, though. I actually read books. I’m not one of the D-9000’s troop of hacks. I don’t think we should be the glorified amanuenses of a heuristic pulp mill.’
‘I don’t like the machines either. They hurt.’ Kurtz was irritated. Good, that should keep him off balance. ‘What is all this about?’
‘Would you be surprised to learn that I am an admirer of your work?’
Kurtz cleared an unconvincing laugh from his throat. ‘Would you be prepared to say that on the dustjack of Sixth Form Girls in Chains?’
Yeovil tapped his ID into the console. The Household extruded a couch from the floor. It looked sculpted. Out of vanilla ice cream.
‘Besides yours my talent is lukewarm. I want to make use of your capacities to underline certain aspects of my work in progress.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘I am dreaming a historical piece, focusing on the character of John Kennedy, martyred president of the United States of America. Kennedy was known to be a man with a highly passionate nature. I think it not inapt that your touch with erotica be applied.’
Kurtz sat on the couch, trying to find the loophole. ‘What about the certification?’
‘I plan on sidestepping the BBDC. They have no real authority, and I am supported by my publishers and the vast public interest in my work. The Board owes its precarious existence to its claim that it represents the desire of the majority. Once that is disproved, they will fall. JFK has been concepted as a radical dream.’
‘How is this going to work?’
‘I’ve dreamed a guideline. The sequence you’ll work on is fully scripted. The externals are complete. However the first person is blank.’
‘Kennedy?’
‘Yes. He is emerging as a very strong figure in the dreaming. But in this scene he’s empty. I want you to amend the internals as he sexes with his mistress.’
‘Same old wet dream stuff?’
‘Essentially. But in this case the explicit material is crucial to the concept. The character of Kennedy is seminal to an understanding to the twentieth century. All of his drives must be exposed. The underlying…’
‘Yeah. Right. Let’s talk about the money.’
* * *
Yeovil balanced the newly-discharged needle gun on his fingertips as he walked across the room, and dropped the weapon into the Household Disperse. Kurtz lay face down on the dreaming couch with a three-inch dart in his brain. The tape was still running, although the Kurtz input was zero. Yeovil sucked his burned fingers. He would smear them better when he was finished with Kurtz.
He had never killed anyone before. He sadly discovered that dream was better than actual. Like sex. He stored the minor rush of emotions for future use.
The tape clicked through. The Household offered the recorder. Yeovil picked the subcutaneous terminals out of Kurtz’s head and dropped them into their glass of purple. The whirlpool rinse sucked particles of Kurtz out of its system.
Yeovil went through Kurtz’s smockpocks. A few
credit cards and a bunch of ins. A couple of five-pound bits. They all went into the Disperse, along with Kurtz’s outdoor gear, porno tapes, and finger-printed brandy glass. Do it, then clear up afterwards – the secret of criminal success.
The Household presented Yeovil with his outdoor kit: a visored hat, and a padded Inverness. The tailors boasted that their garments were proof against a fragmentation charge. That was true: in the event of such an unlikely weapon being turned on the cape, it would be unmarked. Anyone inside it, however, would find his torso turned to jelly by the impact. Most footpads used needle guns, anyway.
Yeovil hauled Kurtz out to his armoured Ford. On the street he fitted an outmoded breather. It kept the smog out of his lungs as well as a more stylish domino, and disguised him.
Yeovil pressed his car in, and tapped his ID into the automatic. The smog lights upped. The streets were deserted.
Yeovil drove around central London for fifteen minutes before chancing upon a suitable dump. He slung the body over several twist-tie rubbish bags in the forecourt of a condemned high-rise. It would look like an ordinary waylaying. There were probably five similar corpses within walking distance. If the Black Economists got to Kurtz before the Metropolitans, the body would be stripped of any usable organs. The incident would not rate a mention on the local.
Back at Luxborough Street Yeovil reprogrammed his Household to forget Kurtz’s visit. He fed in a plausible dull evening at home, and wrote off the energy expenditure to various gadgets.
Then he slept. The next stage was complicated, and he did not want to deal with it late at night after his first murder. He felt a twinge of insomniac excitement, which he countered by back-grounding a subliminal lullaby.
The Household woke him early with a call. It was Tony, Yeovil’s chief editor at Futura. Tony looked harassed.