Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  The matron stepped back, alarmed. Behind her, the watchman appeared.

  “Go back inside,” she commanded, and her words vibrated in her bones. The two turned mechanically and walked out of the courtyard and into the building.

  “Wait,” Insideout said to her. “Have the watchman open the gate. Tell him to lock it after you and to forget ever seeing you tonight. Tell the matron to forget she saw you tonight, too.”

  Reena did as she was told, and when the great iron gate at the end of the long driveway clanked behind her, she edged out onto the wide country road under the sombrous pines and the sky chiseled with stars. She stepped like someone walking on contact lenses.

  “Relax,” Insideout said. “No one and nothing can hurt you out here. You have to affirm that.”

  “Then what were those devil faces I saw floating in the air around you?”

  “They’re devils, all right,” Insideout confessed. “I can’t control them at all. They’re wild energies set loose by the pain I’m suppressing. They’re terribly embarrassing but not very dangerous, yet. Don’t think about them. I’m trying to forget them, too.”

  Reena looked about at the night-dense landscape. “Which way do I go?”

  Insideout pointed through the pines to a cluster of stars in the Horse’s mane. “There’s the plane of the galaxy, looking toward the core. We’re closest to the core this time of year, you know. We’re swinging past it now on our way around the sun. The Earth’s just glided three hundred miles in the time it took you to walk through that gate. The sun coasted four thousand miles in its galactic orbit, and half a million miles of space have expanded between us and the nearest galaxy. I can’t get over that. Everything’s just blowing up!”

  “I don’t want an astronomy lesson,” she said. “Which way do I go?”

  “I don’t know.” Reena turned her hands up to the sky as if to feel if it was raining.

  “Walk toward town,” Insideout advised, pointing east. “We’ll stop the first car we see.”

  Reena began walking, her muscles soggy with disbelief. “I don’t know why all this is happening. I don’t know who you are. I don’t even know who I am.”

  “You could use your telepathy on me, you know.” Dirk’s idealized face had a sweet and sad expression. “Then, at least, you’d see what kind of Satan I am.”

  Reena stopped and looked closely at Dirk. The balsam sighs of the pines filled the breeze. An owl hooted from the end of the world. Then, scents and sounds fell away like dust, and she touched the alien. Its story rang coolly in the dendritic forest of her brain, an oboe recitative playing its tale into her nerves, and she experienced Insideout’s wild leap out of 5-space, its plunge through the continuum toward the dolphins’ song, its horror and pain as Donnie Lopes disrupted the arc, and its desperate need for a human alliance. It had to get back—and if it didn’t, it and the hapless island where its body was trapped would be destroyed. But that was just a story. Even the experience of it was an hallucination. What made it real for her was that she could ponder it—she could actually think about it, consider it, weigh it against the rapturous abundance of her reason. For the first time in her life, she felt she had a mind of her own.

  The backwash of her telepathic push swelled over the alien, and it sensed her, clearly, for the first time. It felt the cellular exhilarations of her flesh before her mind had crystallized. Pure as a circle, her biokinesis had gone on, Krebs cycles, oxygen transports, and hormonal tides unwinding their molecular patterns, weaving a body that grew through girlhood into a fifty-four-kilogram woman. And all the while her brain was building its own world inside her skull—a world of little girl weepings, animal tenderness, forbiddings and screamings, and long tranceful hours with arms lifted, embracing emptiness, losing touch.

  The pain at the start and end of those trances continued as fierce as the wound between Insideout and its hyperfield. Maybe that’s why its titanohematite brain had selected her. She was the perfect embodiment of its feelings—especially its hurt. In the instantaneity of choice, its titanohematite brain had chosen her for her emptiness. Of the four, she was the only woman. No doubt the double-x genetic structure of the female was more suited for accessing psychic fields, morphogenetic ranges, astrals, whatever a mind wanted to call it. It didn’t know. Its brain did, and it expressed the truth of its hunch in thought sequences about the nuclear magnetic resonance of chromosomes, the electric field patterns of consciousness, and on and on. It had no time for that. Its life frittering away, second by second, its immortality decomposing, it didn’t want to taste death.

  “Only what is lost is free,” Reena told the alien with an elfin smile when she heard those thoughts.

  “I don’t want to be free anymore,” Insideout confessed. “I was happy in 5-space. Replete. How could I ever tell you? I was wrong to push the map beyond itself. But I had no choice. There is no choice where I come from. I fulfilled the law, and now I am going to die.”

  Reena stepped closer to Dirk. She faced into the irreality of the ghost. “I’m not afraid anymore,” she said, tenderly. “I believe you.” The thoughts of Satan and God that she had learned from the matrons and that she had imagined in her trances hung in her awareness like numbers and equations. They were thoughts—nothing more. At the pivot of her mind, all thoughts were possible. And so none were true. She was lost among the possibilities. And when she saw that now she was free to choose her own thoughts, a regnant sense of well-being pervaded her.

  “Then you’ll help me?” Insideout asked with a heart-leap of hope.

  “I will help you,” she said, reaching for Dirk and watching in amazement as her hand passed through the holographic shape of him.

  The hologram thrived in her brain, and she comprehended that with telepathic swiftness. She walked off the road and sat in the aromatic leaf debris at the edge of the night forest. She sat there for about seven minutes, waiting for a vehicle to go by, and while she waited, she questioned the alien. “Why did you select me . . . and the others?”

  Dirk’s pretty face scowled with confusion. “I don’t know. You must think me such a dolt. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “I’m so glad.” Insideout looked relieved. It pinched its chin, pondering. “My brain was more strongly connected with the hyperfield when you and the others were selected. So, you see, it happened instantly. I wasn’t at all human then. I couldn’t have guessed you were all so—so different from one another. My considerations were a long way from causality and reason. I can’t account for it now. I guess you would say it was the will of God.”

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked in all earnestness, her back pressed into the rough hide of the tree, her naked body under her sweater and smock chilled to the verge of trembling.

  For this question, Insideout let its brain search out a thought. “I guess that there’s always the Unseen. There are concepts vaster than the mind. At least as long as you stay in 4-space. Everything is so very partial here. It’s distracting. But where I come from, everything is known. Everything is touching everything. God is not a thought or an exclusion, like here.”

  “Your home is a place I’d like to visit,” she said.

  “Oh no, you wouldn’t.” An ironic smile chilled Dirk’s face. “If you did, it would be for keeps. You’d become one with all else that is the Pith, the map, the knowing. You can’t come back from that.”

  A shrug tensed through her shoulders. “Like you coming here,” she said. “If the four of us fail and don’t reconnect you in time, you’ll be stuck here forever.”

  “It’s not a pleasant prospect,” Insideout admitted nervously. “Especially since the agony of my rift from the hyperfield will probably continue. Maybe, if I’m lucky, the intensity of it will kill me. I don’t know. And I don’t care to find out.” It looked ready to cry.

  Reena swelled with concern. “Don’t worry, we’ll make it. We have to. The arc will kill thousands of people if we don’t. So much is at stake.”
r />   “Indeed.”

  “And when we do get you back—” She hesitated a beat. “When it’s time for you to leave—could I come with you?”

  Her question startled the alien. Why would she want to leave? Then Insideout realized that she had grasped a truth that it, in its eagerness to get away, had ignored. She said it outright in her next question:

  “I guess what I’m trying to ask is, what’s going to happen to me when you’re gone?” She pulled her sweater tighter. “I think I already know.”

  With swift certainty, the answer shot out from the interstices of the titanohematite brain where she had already perceived it, “You’ll revert to your former self,” Insideout told her. “Oh, dear.”

  Her eyes closed, and the darkness under her lids tilted, vertiginous. She snapped open her gaze. “Isn’t there some way to heal me? Can’t you stop the sickness the way you stopped the pill Yannick gave me?”

  “That was a self-catalyzing reaction,” Insideout replied through a thoughtful frown. “You started it with my energy, and it carried itself to completion. But—forgive me—the distortion in your brain is so complex, so pervasive I don’t have the power to change it. I’m sorry. Truly I am.” It flashed her a fluorescent cross-section of her hippocampus, electrically etched to show a ravel of nerves like fire-frizzled hair. A pink ghosted overlay of an ideal hippocampal gyrus revealed a crossweb of exact nerve symmetries, precise and orderly as brush bristles. “With this section of your brain tangled up, your sensations, emotions, and thoughts get confused. I’m sorry to tell you, but your schizophrenia is in the very roots of your brain.”

  “Then why can I think clearly now?”

  “I’m helping you. I’m overriding your damaged hippocampus with rectifying instructions from my own brain. As long as we’re together, you’ll be whole.”

  “Then we really do need each other,” she said with a simplicity that moved the alien.

  “Yes, we do,” it answered and was surprised by the warmth that this small mind had started glowing within it. “I’ll make you a promise, Reena. If I do get back to my hyperfield, I’ll take you to an Earth where you can be whole.”

  “You can do that?” Disbelief clouded her expression.

  “Of course. You may think I’m lying to win your cooperation, but I can assure you, there are endless Earths.”

  Earth without end, Reena remembered from her prayers. “I don’t think you’re lying. But how can that help me?”

  “When my arc is complete, I’ll have almost infinite power. Enough power and computational potential to turn you into light with me and to put you back together again whole. On my way home, I’ll take a short detour and return you to an Earth where you don’t exist yet and where you can live a normal life.”

  She accepted the truth of this. Lying was impossible with her, since she was in a sense a part of Insideout, its most empathic part. And now that they had attained this exact degree of clarity between them, she felt as comfortable with the alien as the crown with its dragon, the shell with its snail, the hand with its brain.

  “There are that many worlds?” she asked with simpleminded awe.

  “Time has no shores,” Insideout assured her. “Past and future don’t really exist. They’re just different parts of the tesseract range, through which I can travel freely—when I’m free.”

  Headlights pronged through the darkness, coming west on the highway from town. Reena stood. “What do I do?”

  “You know,” Insideout said and said no more.

  Reena walked to the middle of the highway, arms reaching out for the approaching car. “Stop,” she called into the binary glare, and the corpuscles in her brain twinkled.

  The car slowed and came to a stop with its bumper touching her kneecaps.

  Reena stepped out of the brilliance of the headlights. She already knew the driver traveled alone. She knew his name and the names of all his relatives and friends. She knew the details of his job as a paint salesman. She knew the glutful sensation of his illicit hours with his mistress. She knew the chest ache of his fibrillose ventricles. She knew more about him than she knew about herself. When she opened the passenger door and sat down next to him, her eyes glittered, twin diamonds. “Let’s go to the airport,” she said.

  ***

  A terrible black voice said: To be is to gather from within. And Dirk Heiser woke up. For a crazy moment, a doubleness of mind held him: He was still with Reena Patai as she set her will in the nerves of the paint salesman—and he curled around a granite headache, jostling inside a speeding car.

  “He stay wake,” Ipo grumbled.

  Dirk clung to the dreamfulness of Reena, pretty Reena with her mountain lake eyes and hair of spun noonlight. “Let’s go to the airport,” the indigo sound of her declared in him, and his tendons twanged on his bones like strings on a bass fiddle.

  The car lurched, squealing tires, and heaved Dirk upright in a gasp of sharpened clarity.

  “Eh!” Ipo shouted from the back seat and pushed his huge body toward the front to grab hold of the wheel. “Where you wen go?”

  “Airport—no?” Chud replied in a voice like a ricochet of thunder.

  “Airport? You crazy o’ wat?” Ipo tugged at the wheel, and the car fishtailed with the vehemence of a hooked marlin. “Turn round, awready! Peel off!”

  Ipo rapped the side of Chud’s bald head with his knuckles, and the driver snapped out of his trance. He glared at Ipo and eased the car through a lazy U-turn. “No hit me, brah.”

  “Foh shu-ah when you stay crazy. Why you wen drive airport, eh? I toll you, we take ‘em to the shack.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Then why you wen drive airport?”

  Chud ignored him and rubbed the side of his head as he drove.

  Ipo settled back next to Dirk and regarded him. The youth looked trashed. The scarlet welt across his forehead where Ipo had slammed his face against the car door glowed livid, and the kid’s eyelids drooped. “Sweet dreams, hah?”

  Dirk said nothing. He wanted to be back with Reena and the alien. Those two had found each other, and their union sang in him like a rock video, hopping with crosscuts of Reena’s sprite face, pinwheel galaxies, and fluorescent brain parts. He flexed his arms and feet and was relieved to feel that he wasn’t bound. The dense pain of his jarred brain clouded his thinking. Was the alien with him, too—or was he alone?

  Stay calm, a windswept voice appeared in him, and his heart skipped as if for a lover.

  Hey! Dirk shouted in his mind, and his headache pounded louder. You’ve got to get me outta here. These suckers are gonna kill me!

  “Stop squirmin, toilethead,” Ipo grumbled and rammed his elbow into Dirk’s side.

  To be is to gather from within, a child’s ether voice said.

  Yeah, and what’s that supposed to tell me? Dirk glanced to the door on his left and contemplated springing it open.

  “You try foh it, Mistah Romance,” Ipo warned, “an I put you out again.”

  Dirk closed his eyes and tried to reach the alien telepathically, the way Reena had. But behind his eyelids he found only a headache. The memory of Reena and the alien together was vivid, and he continued to search in himself for Insideout.

  I’m here, Insideout said in a baritone variation of Dirk’s voice.

  Yeah? Well what am I supposed to do now?

  Get away from the people who are holding you. They mean you harm.

  “Jesus, I know that!” Dirk said aloud.

  “Eh!” Ipo grunted and seized Dirk by the back of his neck in a grip merciless as steel. “Wat chew mouthin’?” He shook the boy to a blur of tousled hair and chattering teeth. The sensation of manhandling the kid was so gratifying he did it again and snorted a laugh. He hated Dirk and not because the punk had ripped off the Judas Boys. He hadn’t. The ice had been fine until Ipo had stomped it when no one was looking. That was his excuse to the Judas Boys for his rage at Dirk, since he couldn’t admit his real reason without losing fac
e. Ipo was jealous. Dirk, a loverboy, was arrogant with his good looks.

  Ipo had wanted Lani for himself since she was thirteen. He had been friendly and generous with her and had even bought her a diamond ankle bracelet. She sent it back to him tied around a fish too dead even to eat. She could be mean that way, and that, as well as her pert rump and pendulous breasts, was what he liked about her. She was as churlish as her brother, the leader of the Judas Boys, and Ipo, who had been the leader a decade ago, before he went pro with the Japanese mob, absorbed a lot of backtalk from that kid hoping he would sway his sister for Ipo.

  But Lani lived as if she had no family. She was a rogue bitch, a runaway slum kid, full of herself, ignoring local boys for army brats and the kids of transferred executives. She started going with Dirk a year ago, when she was sixteen and sweet enough for Ipo to sweat like a diabetic whenever he was near her. He thought of raping her, but the Judas Boys would hate him for it—he was their legend, and so he writhed for her in the shackles of his reputation.

  Ipo grabbed Dirk’s face in the splay of one huge hand and studied the fear there. He had heard that this rude boy was vicious, and he could see something of that in his tight stare eager for reckoning. But the boy was too stunned to act. Ipo had hoped the kid would try something in the car. He liked killing in closed spaces. The kid sat still in his doom. This was Chud’s car, and Ipo had promised not to bloody it unless he had no choice. So he contented himself with gazing at the knot of frown in the loverboy’s face, to feel the knot of bowel in the coldness of his skin. He was so scared he was corpse-chilled, and Ipo shoved his face away with satisfaction.

  To be is to gather from within, the alien slurred in a muddy intonation.

  The knots of fear in Dirk’s body tightened. Listen, he pleaded. C’mon, please— you got to come through now. You got to help me. Do you hear me?

  You can help yourself.

  How?