Dream Dancer

by Janet Morris

  As much in those early days as she was consumed with hurt that the man she had willingly called “father” would serve her up to the wolves of expediency, she felt the suction of the well of dreams.

  Some one of the old Earth philosophers she had studied had proclaimed that dream was life and Hfe was dream. As untenable as the ancient’s contemporaries had found that position did Shebat find her own.

  Each day the world of the dream dance became more real and the world without decreased in substance.

  The lessons Spry had sent were like a bridge over the chasm of the dark warren world in which he had placed her. She did them faithfully; each completed run brought her a step closer to pilotry and freedom.

  But each day she became less concerned with then (when all would be completed and she could take her pilot’s oath) and more concerned with now (where richer dreams were to be had than she had had before).

  She drifted, hanging between her selves, and at length she began to dream she had passed her pilot’s boards. She would have been troubled if the dreams were not so grand, or if the other dancers did not try to emulate her; or if Lauren’s despite had not become ever more pronounced. But she was good; she was very good; and she hung the above-mentioned difficulties around her throat like a bejeweled necklace: decorations for her dreams, gilding that added depth and tone. The dream dancer in her knew these things to be the measure of her success, and accepted them graciously.

  She had other tasks than the dream dance: citizenship was a serious matter, in the lower levels where it was so highly prized. All citizens had to vote to maintain their degree of privilege. To vote, a person had to absorb enough information on the article in question to be able to answer ten questions on the subject under discussion. To do that, one had to study.

  Shebat was used to studying words on a screen: literacy was held in high repute in Kerrion levels. The absence of it in the lower dark explained why. Here, reading had long ago given way to the more economical method of querying via intelligence keys.

  The dream dancers had no use for the written word; they could barely make use of it. They received all information directly and stored it in memory, without difficulty. They evinced only scorn for one so lacking in retention as to have to need to write something down. Shebat, having just learned reading and writing, was hard put giving them up.

  To be a dream dancer, she would have to cultivate eidetic memory; to be a ship’s pilot, she must be fluent in the ships’ tongues, equally free from the need to read or write.

  Yet, the lessons Spry sent were written; she needed to monopolize the only visual terminal in the dream dancers’ warren to learn them.

  She was sitting there, with her stack of cards, placing one after another in the terminal’s slot, pressing “run” then typing her responses in, when a wave of inadequacy washed all attention from her. Somewhere around the sixth unanswered query, she realized she was hopelessly lost, being so scored, and stopped the sequence.

  Sitting hunched over, fingers wound in her hair, she glared at the blank screen. She could not retrieve the card from the terminal until the sequence had been completed. But the answers in her head were not to the questions of navigation through space or sponge, but of navigation through life.

  Knowing that she would probably fail the examination did not help her marshal her concentration. Six wrong by reason of being left unanswered . . . she would have to make a perfect score on the rest to squeak by. With a Bolen’s town epithet, she stabbed the “run” button.

  Damn Spry’s circumspection. If he had just ordered up examination sequences for her in the usual manner, she would not be facing failure. But if the central data pool had given her the rating examinations without resort to printed cards, then it would be a matter of record that Sheba Spry was slumming, living with dream dancers; in fact, living in the very room with Aba Cronin, apprentice to the art of dreams.

  Some long while later, when the card popped into the retrieval slot and on the screen her passing score of one point above the minimum leered greenly, she succumbed to all she had held in abeyance.

  She did not weep. She had promised herself that never again would she offer tears up as sacrifice. Spry was right. It did no good. Besides, she was not sorrowful as much as terrified. Yesterday, she had danced a dream for Harmony, the troupe leader. As to how it had been received—she still had not heard.

  She sat immobile while perspiration inundated her, grinding her teeth so that they would not chatter. Her stomach had fled its abode and where it had been an emptiness like ectoplasmic writhing snakes churned and bucked. She swallowed repeatedly through a tight throat. At length the perspiration defeated the protection of her mil and she shivered violently. She had seen a girl baby exposed to die in Bolen’s town one snowy winter. She saw it again, called the seeing an evil omen.

  Would all be lost, then, as the terror gloated? She had felt this helplessness before, since coming among the dream dancers. She had thought she had defeated it. She had felt it after the pilot had slipped from Lauren’s arms, murmuring that as much as he wished it, he could not stay, when he left her in the care of strangers.

  How awful the brink of disaster appears, when one is not sure whether or not Fate will propel cringing flesh over the edge.

  She had thought she had touched bottom. Sometimes, when the dream dance took her, she was sure she had.

  In the good times, she spoke with determination to herself that she would learn to hold a hundred dances, pure and perfect in their exactitude and their effect, in her mind.

  In the bad times, she sought a personal solution, devaluing all but life and love and seeing the fictions of the dance as the enemies thereof.

  Then she agreed with the Kerrion position that fiction and fantasy were acid eating away at the substructure of society, that these could foster nothing but discontent and malaise. In Kerrion space, there was the reality and there were the dream dancers: there was nothing in between. With the fall of literacy had gone the writers of fiction; with the ascendancy of the intelligence-keyed computer had gone poetry and music and the makers thereof.

  Why listen to another man’s song, when any could make his own?

  Why call up another’s vision, when any could command an uncircumscribed view of all that existed in the universe?

  Why let madmen spread their illness? The maunderings of man’s unconscious were demonstrably dangerous, essentially flawed.

  Madness, it is true, hardly ever clacked its slavering jaws in the Consortium. Men seldom did violence one upon the other’s person. Out of sight, out of mind? Was that why the dream dance was forbidden? It was certainly why the Kerrions purported to forbid it.

  Myth had been placed on trial. The adjudication had not been in its favor. The technocrats reasoned with their compatriots, the computers, that removing the irritant might allow the sore to heal upon its own.

  There were myths, just the same. The dream dancers made them, surreptitiously, fearing to record any of them lest the evidence be used against them. So the older, greater dream dances were passed from mind to mind, down the generations, learned impeccably and never altered, surviving increasingly concerted attempts to erase them from the consciousness of man.

  Once, dream dancers had performed before massed audiences, whole groups of them intent upon one dream, its embellishment and its presentation, the fruits to be shared by all.

  That had been long ago. The practice had been ruthlessly stamped out, the audiences, or dreamers, proclaimed as responsible for the crime as the dancers, the technicians, the musicians, and the minds who orchestrated the heinous crimes.

  Now, such a gathering for sharing a single dream dance was impossible. Whatsoever occurred between two consenting adults, however, was not punishable, in theory of Consortium Law. In theory, one dream dancer and one client could not be arrested, convicted, punished for their shared crime. In practice, dream dancers disappeared with disquieting regularity. Their citizenship status, not maintain
ed by the obligatory voting hours, was then revoked.

  It was not in the dream dancers’ power to fight the Consortium.

  They did, however, continue to ply their trade, some falling, some surviving, carrying on the tradition as they carried in their heads the masterworks of deceased geniuses, adding as best they could to what had gone before.

  Shebat had made a dream dance which Harmony, the troupe’s leader, had asked to have performed for her, having heard of its power from the others.

  It was not a pretty, seductive dance. It was awful; it was austere. It left the dreamer shaken and changed. Lauren had deemed it horrible, but even she could not thrust it aside.

  Shebat was well aware that if the dream dance were judged too lacking in suitability, she would not be trusted to take clients. Like her pilotry examination, all was subject to disconcerting influences, from within and without.

  How can one make a dream of joy from the dungeon of despair? How could she concentrate on one thing at a time, when both screamed for priority, shouldering each other from her view? She must get back to her little gray cubicle, in case the troupe mistress had made her judgment.

  In one part of her mind, a small voice opined that since she had lost everything, why worry: she had nothing more to lose. She answered back to it that since Chance had released her from Bolen’s town and endless drudgery, all that had occurred afterward was in the nature of a gift. If she did not make use of the gift honorably, then it would surely be taken. That she had been so briefly a Kerrion was to her advantage. But it would not have lasted, had never been meant to last by those who decreed it. That she had learned to read and to write and to hold great reams of information in her head, unwritten, was enchantment’s kindest smile. If, then, the wrathful face of magic scowled, making her stumble in her studies, bequeathing the awful dream dance (which she must have chosen), then that was only fair balance.

  The worlds of the platforms would surely not come down around their heads simply because Shebat had created a dream dance in which they did.

  Hopelessness was not any deeper a sea because she had rowed out to its middle and thrown a plumb-line down to define its depths.

  Work must stand with its integrity inherent, or better not be done at all.

  Woe to the creator who spins a web of sweet fantasy, when the breath of fire crackles ominously within, for it surely must consume him who will not spew it out.

  She had made the dream dance. Like her well-schooled kick, which had made out of a faithful bodyguard a gruesome corpse, she had done her best.

  “Sometimes,” she hissed aloud, tearing at the hair that ever flopped over her eyes, “I think I am my own worst enemy.”

  She had certainly not helped matters, with her outspoken dream dance. Softa had been adamant that she learn the dream dancer’s trade well enough to pose as one for an interval. If the troupe’s mistress forbade it, judging her unfit, no dream dancer in the Consortium would suffer her presence. Softa’s plan would be thwarted.

  What would happen to her then?

  She hated the dream dancers at times. Hated their sense of mission, the messianic fellowship of their bond.

  It well might be that the Kerrion law was rightful, that dream dancing was degenerate and degenerative; that selling one’s person in total was more debased than the lesser prostitution it was rumored had once preceded it.

  Sex for meretricious gain was no longer illegal; the Consortium was too civilized for that. Shebat picked up her cards, and with a last baleful glare at her odiously low navigational proficiency, wiped the screen with a finger’s tap.

  Tap: no record remained of what had transpired, but on the little card. Tap: she was no longer Shebat Kerrion, inheritor of fifty-one percent of one of the most powerful trade-bloc in all of spacetime. Tap: she was Sheba Spry, apprentice pilot. As easily, then; tap: Shebat Kerrion would not exist, even in her own memory.

  She had seen for herself that although no violent solutions were admitted into the Draconis-consciousness as a whole, violence occurred. She had tapped into Current Events the day after she had smashed in the Kerrion retainer’s face, and found no mention of it there in the computer’s news broadcast. Hence, all things that occurred were not entered therein, or, being entered, were not made accessible along with the stock quotes and currency exchange rates and lading bills from incoming freighters.

  Hence, too, she thought sourly, all of Softa’s precautions.

  As a precaution of her own, she had not demanded of the data pool that it search for any previous mention of the slaying of the two bodyguards. As another caution, she always used Aba Cronin’s intelligence keys when activating a direct contact with the data pool. There was only one problem inherent in that: Aba Cronin was merely a fractional citizen, maintaining a one-quarter status, and as such certain areas were not within her reach: her clearances were too low.

  So she had not found out that Chaeron P. Kerrion had been transferred to Draconis until Lauren had let slip in conversation that she had of late been graced with the patronage of “the Consul Kerrion.”

  “A Kerrion consul,” Shebat had corrected her grammar. The pidgin speech of some dream dancers irritated her: their lack of understanding of the upper levels gave her the superiority from which to correct; her dislike of the other girl’s dislike for her made her enjoy it.

  “The Consul Kerrion,” Lauren repeated, perfectly plucked saffron brow arching high. “Chaeron Ptolemy Kerrion. He has been three nights in a row to dream with me. He is, you know,” she said sweetly, “the new Draconis consul. Do you feel unwell?”

  Shebat heard her titters as she rushed divested of dignity from the little common room where the dancers gathered to hear the nightly news and exchange their own.

  She had sent an urgent message to her “brother” Spry from the street corner terminal just outside the basement warren.

  Then she had fled to her room, locking herself within.

  But Softa did not come in the morning, or the next day, or the next.

  Harmony, the eternally mothering troupe mistress, had come to her door on the third day and demanded entrance. She had had no choice but to admit her. She was hirsute and fleshy, with short brown hair and skin even a mil-suit’s slick finish could not disguise: it was mottled and spotted with pink, brown and black; beneath the mottles, it was white as a dead fish’s belly.

  “What’s wrong with you, child? This is no way to act. What would Spry say, if he knew you were locked in your room? Too good for us low-livers, are you?”

  “Chaeron Kerrion was here!”

  “So? He didn’t see you, and he won’t. I wouldn’t play Spry foul. And neither would Lauren, no matter how it looks. She loves ‘im. Got it?”

  Shebat made a noise and spread her hands.

  “Look, smart pussy: it took a lot of scrip to get you bought in here. We’ll take good care of you. By the same coin, I made a bargain with Spry to teach you however much you could learn: I keep my word.”

  “He should never have told you. . . .”

  “That’s his morals. Boy’s got class. That’s class: not the Kerrion kind; the other kind, which can’t be bought. You think he would have put the whole twelve of us in peril by stashing a Kerrion fugitive among us without letting us know, then you don’t know him. He’s too good at what he does to make a stupid mistake.”

  Shebat picked at the threadbare gray blanket, not looking up.

  “If he had given you over to us without telling true as to what the dangers were, and we’d gotten this far along—well, then I might just have had to get nasty. Not just with you, with him. So relax. You are here to learn the dance, and the dance we’ll teach, even if we have to add a little common savvy along the way. . . .”

  The woman let out a rattling sigh, as if her gullet were filled with pebbles. “You don’t trust us, which is not a bad sign, though my vanity’s sore wounded by it. I’ve taken your money, girl, from your very own hand.”

  “Lauren hates me.�
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  “Lauren does not hate you. I think she feels a little pity, along with her jealousy, which never killed anybody. She loves Softa, and she’ll never get him. She knows that. He’s taking you, not her, out of Kerrion space. . . .” The woman looked hopefully at Shebat, who only tossed her head.

  “Lords, girl, give me the courtesy of your glance. I’d heard you were greener than sponge, but who could believe it . . . ? Look, I give you my word that Lauren won’t intrigue against you. If she does, she’ll have me to answer to. And you can shoot her down with that little piece of information should the occasion arise.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thanks, is it? Thank me by working up a dream dance good enough to avoid being the laughingstock of all the dancers. They’re laying bets as to how long before I bounce you out of here. And since I can’t bounce you, but have to keep you until Spry collects you, do me a favor: pretend to be trying. Make me a dance that’ll shut up the gossips.”

  “But I am trying. . . .”

  “Make me a real dance, not that masturbatory drivel you threw in Lauren’s face.”

  With a smile that threatened to fall away and reveal her chagrin, Shebat promised: “I will.”

  And so she had come to make the dance, and it had been the one which had so horrified Lauren, the one which Harmony herself had demanded to view.

  Shebat sighed and, taking her study-cards, threaded her way back to the narrow gray room with its cot and lavatory, and locked herself within.

  All things were flowing together, making days fragment, the procession of them dissolving so that she could not tell sometimes what had happened from what had not.

  Lauren had not told Chaeron about her being here, that was sure.

  Softa had not come, though her summons had been urgent. That, also, was sure.

  The dance was completed, all that remained was to wait for Harmony, whose reaction was most unsure, to send word of judgment rendered.