by Tim Scott
I was bursting by now, and they let me use the toilet. When I got back, I reviewed the whole thing, and the entire dream sequence felt like it had come together. It’s possible to spend days designing dreams, and there comes a point when you just have to stop or you start unraveling what you’ve already done. You could say it’s like climbing a mountain and that, sooner or later, you get to the top. And, if you don’t spot that moment, you’ll start going down and be back at the bottom again without noticing. So, all in all, I decided I was done.
“That’s it,” I said, pushing back my chair. “A dream that tells the dreamer God doesn’t exist. All here.”
“Good,” said the lead Rider, nodding.
“Fucking good,” said the chirpy one, who lay on his back and didn’t move. “Fucking, shit, good,” he added, then, after a pause, he went on, “Fucking, shit, bloody, fucking, good. No, I’d already used ‘fucking’ once in that one, didn’t I?”
“Just shut up for once, Death, for goodness’ sake!”
“Death! That sounds sweet. My name is Death. How do you do, I’m Death…no, just Death…no, no first name. No, you don’t recognize me from that high school. I am Death.”
“What are you on about? Shut up! I mean Christ! OK? Jonny X, time for the Dream Virus bit.”
“What’s that?”
“The Dream Virus. This is the list of DNA we need to be susceptible,” he said, handing over a sheet.
I was genuinely perplexed, and wondered whether they had read some article in a newspaper about the future of dream architecture and thought it was real.
“You’ve got me,” I said, and he stared at me.
“Yes, we have got you. So get on with it.”
“With what?”
“With this,” said War. “We’re really not so stupid,” and he plonked down a folder of paper notes as thick as a pile of sandwiches. I stared at the thing. On the top was scrawled: “The Dream Virus Project,” and it was unmistakably in my writing. And yet, I had no memory of it at all. I was so enwrapped by this turn of events, I assumed the excruciatingly loud organ music that suddenly started playing was solely in my head. The feeling was reinforced when I began to recognize the tune as a very bad version of the theme from Michael, the Very, Very Magic Horse—a children’s program from when I was a kid.
After a moment I looked up to where the Riders were standing, wondering how I would explain to them I might have lost part of my memory, when I saw they could hear the music too and were slightly alarmed by it. I realized the obvious.
Somebody was playing the organ.
27
The Riders were staring down the stairs in childlike confusion, for once knocked mentally off-balance. I guessed Death was probably oblivious to the fact he was actually mouthing the words along to “Michael, the Very, Very Magic Horse.” But someone swung the butt of a shotgun into his chest and motioned him to follow them down to check it out, and that snapped him out of it pretty quickly.
My head was still sloshing the news of the Dream Virus Project backwards and forwards like a stricken ship suddenly awash with seawater. I ran my fingers over the file, trying to trigger anything hidden, but nothing came. I carefully picked it up. The organ player was probably some student who had blundered into the cathedral, but it gave me some breathing space to try to think of my next move.
That is, if I got a next move.
The music continued, but the force of the air through the tubes was too much for some of the old, cobwebbed pipes, and I heard them rattle and clang as they fell to the floor like fainting grandmothers. I gazed at the first page of scribbled notes and tried to make some sense of it all. It looked alarmingly like my writing—but then again, I suppose, it could easily have been forged. Though why anyone would forge my writing was beyond me. Was there some conspiracy to set me up with this?
But why?
My head kept coming back to the question: why? I was a nobody. Why any of this? Could the Dream Virus Project be for real? It seemed unlikely. There were always rumors of outrageous breakthroughs in all kinds of fields, but that’s generally all they were. Rumors. I flicked through the notes and diagrams and chemical formulae and understood only bits of it, but enough to see that if this was a hoax, it was a very detailed one—and there did seem to be some kind of interesting logic to the idea. I turned over another page and my eye caught a note scribbled in one corner. It said simply: “Moss Landing. Killer waves, five-to six-foot.”
I felt like my head was being stirred with a cold spoon.
This was the echo of something, but whatever had made the original noise was long gone. I was always making absentminded surfing notes like that when on the phone to Mat, and seeing it written out sent a divot of memories somersaulting around my head. I leaned back and drew in a huge lungful of cool, heavy air as another organ pipe clanged off its mountings and bounced to the floor. Whoever was playing was still tugging away maniacally at the stops, or whatever it is you do with organs—oblivious, or perhaps just not caring, that the whole thing was collapsing about them.
Clearly the Riders hadn’t got to them yet, but I knew it would only be a matter of time, and I hoped they just set whoever it was on their way without anything more than a massive shock. “Michael the Very, Very Magic Horse” went the lyrics, and there were gaps in the tune now, where parts of the organ were missing. “He can jump down from the clouds, of course!” Although the person playing seemed to get stuck on this line, playing it over and over. “He can jump down from the clouds, of course!” I saw in my mind’s eye the picture of the rainbow-colored horse jumping down through a hole in the clouds as it always used to do, and instinctively I looked up.
My heart rebounded off the walls of my chest and nearly went out through the top of my head.
A dozen thoughts sprang at me and clamored for attention all at once. A tiny figure was dangling on a wire that threaded in through one of the huge holes in the roof, maybe a hundred feet up. It looked a lot like Caroline. Or maybe I was being optimistic—but in the situation I was in, any reason for optimism had to be grabbed with both hands, teeth, and anything else that came to hand, like adjustable torque wrenches. In the back of my mind I knew it could be the Belgian too, and that a whole new chapter of grief could be about to unfurl, but frankly that seemed preferable to staying here.
The two Riders left up on the gallery were still pretty distracted by the organ music, and certainly hadn’t seen the suspended figure. I slowly got up and walked to the edge of the gallery, which I guessed was about the point directly underneath the wire. They didn’t seem to take much notice of me.
Still the music thundered on.
I stood as coolly as I could, hoping if they did see me, they would think I was just stretching my legs, and I hoped to God they didn’t look up. I didn’t dare look up myself now, but instead tried to guess how long it would take for the figure above to reach me. I realized it would be at least another thirty seconds and I knew then that a lot of things would happen at once—and judging by past experience, I would not have much to do with any of them. I looked around and noticed the Dream Virus file lying open on the desk, and as I’ve said before my curiosity can really get me into a lot of trouble. Curiosity killed the cat, as they say, but I have a strain that can also kill half the farm animals in New England. So despite the voice of reason screaming at me not to, I sauntered back to the desk like a bad B-movie extra. Walking seemed unexpectedly foreign, and I wondered how I’d ever done it so easily all these years. I reached for the file and picked it up at precisely the same moment the organ music abruptly cut off. And in the sudden, deathly silence, I felt the eyes of the two remaining Riders fall on me like a sack of elk meat. I froze, knowing somehow that this did not look good. I lifted the file, turned slowly toward them, and smiled inanely.
“I know what you mean about this,” I said, seeing the depth of humorless disinterest in their eyes. The sullenness. I sensed images of violence trapped in their memories that doused them
both in a comfortless torpor. They were in another place, where the consequences were different, where different rules applied. Where life meant something very different.
They said nothing.
“It’s not as though I’m going anywhere,” I added.
They seemed to accept this. So they were perhaps even more surprised than me when I was scooped off my feet in the very next second by the black figure who tore across their line of vision, suspended on the steel wire.
Gunfire broke out in fumbling showers. We swung above the floor, then paused at the end of the arc, before swooping the other way in an effortless loop toward the nave. I hung on to the black figure desperately, feeling the preciousness of life envelop me. I didn’t want to die. Not now. Not after all this. Masonry fell in thumping clumps from the roof and dust blew after it in swarms. The noise of gunfire echoed and cracked, filling the cathedral in a chorus of earsplitting chaos. Masonry rained down in ever-larger sections, smothering any sign of the original floor like spewed-up lava. I was pincered in the legs of the figure and I tilted my head back slightly wondering who it was, but my rescuer was clad entirely in black, with a balaclava on. It could as easily be the Belgian as Caroline, I thought.
Another trainload of masonry screamed past us on its way down, and as the dust cleared above for a brief second, I saw exactly the reason it was falling with such fervor. The wire we were suspended on was cutting through the roof, dislodging the great stones like a razor saw, and I guessed we had to be suspended under a chopper. We lurched sideways down the nave, about twenty feet off the ground, bringing down more sizeable bits of the roof. At least the dust made it impossible for the Riders to see much; but they fired anyway, splintering the columns around us with random intensity.
We seemed to be dropping down, and I twisted my head to see the floor rise up. A dust-clad figure was running below, trying to keep to our pace as falling masonry exploded around him.
I didn’t like this at all. My only option would be to kick at him, and somehow I didn’t feel that was going to be enough. He made a wild dive for the tail of the wire, caught it, and was dragged along the floor through a substantial pile of chairs, then a faded display about flowers. He hung on doggedly and was scooped up off the ground as we swiftly gained height, so there were now three of us on the wire.
I clung on.
Our sideways momentum increased and I turned my head to see where the hell we were going. In front of us was the towering, arched west window of the cathedral, glowing with stained-glass figures. The main figure had his hands wide apart in a welcoming embrace and we were swinging straight for him.
“All ye who come unto me shall be free,” I couldn’t help reading below the figure. The wire above us scythed through the last of the roof and its momentum tore us through the body of the giant figure in the window in an explosion of colored glass, plaster, and masonry.
We swung free into the warm midday sun, trailing a dust cloud like a swarm of bees who’d just had a flour fight. Plain Song spread out around us in a pincushion of spires—some lying collapsed in long, shattered lines like dinosaur fossils. I felt my fingers begin to go numb in the cold with alarming speed as we gained height, and massive gusts of buffeting wind swayed us in looping circles below the chopper. I clung to the Dream Virus Project file and hoped all the papers weren’t fluttering away in the breeze behind us. Then I turned my head from the direction we were going, so it was sheltered from the roaring air, and saw the dust-covered figure below me, still hanging on to a handle twisted into the wire.
I stared, and as we rolled wildly in a great arc past another double-sized replica of Lincoln Cathedral, I finally understood.
28
The wire hawser drew us steadily up toward the chopper and we swung level with the empty rear cargo bay. The door was missing and the panels of the GaFFA 6 were conspicuously beat-up. I was yanked aboard by the black figure and rolled over on the pop-riveted metal floor in cold exhaustion.
This was no cure for a hangover, I thought.
But I couldn’t relax yet. Heaving myself up, I reached out of the door, found Mat’s hand, and lugged him into the GaFFA 6.
“Nice work,” I cried above the engine howl, “but ‘Michael, the Very, Very Magic Horse’?”
“You recognized it then?” he gasped, with a face shorn of all emotion as he flopped beside me. Caroline slipped off her balaclava, looking composed and alert.
“This doesn’t mean I’m accepting your offer,” she shouted, “so don’t get any ideas, but events took a bad turn at Logistics HQ when they realized your Jab-Tab had been terminated.”
“A bad turn?” I cried, wondering what she could possibly mean. As if things weren’t bad enough.
“I felt in part responsible,” she cried, “and I pride myself on being a professional.” She clambered forward into the cockpit, flipped the straps over her shoulders, and locked herself into the copilot’s seat. “This is Marius,” she called back above the gravelly whine of engine noise, pointing at the pilot. “He saved your ass.”
I nodded, wondering what she meant by “events took a bad turn,” but I didn’t let it bug me. I was free from the Riders, which was very cool, and I couldn’t help liking her.
She was independent and knew her own mind—and for someone who had lost track of his own, that seemed pretty attractive. But there was also a whole other side to her—a great dark area I knew nothing about—and I wondered what lurked there. What events from her past pushed her forward with such visible intensity? Maybe she was running away from stuff just like I felt I was, or maybe she was running toward something she knew was real. That’s the thing; it’s not always easy to tell one from the other.
I could see that Mat’s hangover was still haunting him, and his ashen face gave him a strangely waxy appearance. I should have known it was Mat playing the organ. We had often sung “Michael, the Very, Very Magic Horse” at the tail end of drunken parties, when a guitar had surfaced and everyone else had got through their repertoire of dull, heartfelt love songs. Clearly he had been trying to give me a hint with that second line of the song.
I really can be quite dumb sometimes.
I stared out of the chopper door, watching the malls and roads slip by in neat blocks, and felt that the tide had turned. My old life was probably gone forever, but somehow that didn’t matter anymore. I wasn’t sure I wanted it back, anyway. What mattered were the people around me now. What mattered was regaining who I was, because the pleasure of being alive is not pining for different lives, or different things, but just being. Just being.
There was a pungent smell of engine fumes in the cargo bay that broke in strong waves around us, only to be immediately washed out of the missing door by the whipping breeze. I edged closer to the opening to try and breathe the cleaner air and looked at Mat, but he was poleaxed on the metal floor. The Dream Virus Project file was still clutched in my numb white hand, and I was relieved it had a large number of sheets still in it—though some were on the verge of escaping, and I tucked them back in. Probably I had lost a few, but this was still something to go on, and it bulged in my mind like a Christmas stocking waiting to be unwrapped.
I didn’t bother to take in where we were, or where we were heading. I would find out soon enough. Instead, I just watched the odd cloud flop by, and the birds roller-coaster about on the breeze. It felt good just to let life slide by for a while, and I had always liked travel where you could watch the world go past and put your mind into neutral. Much sooner than I would have chosen, we hovered above some building and began the familiar, gentle sink onto a pad. I nudged Mat, who was still lying on the metal floor, knowing that getting up and gaining any sort of momentum again was going to be a wrench for him.
“This is where you get out,” Caroline said over her shoulder, as the skids scraped down and the chopper sank onto its haunches. “The Riders won’t find you here. I’ve arranged for a Medi-Data leak on their file, anyway.”
“Why?” I shou
ted, wondering what that was about, but she just pressed on.
“As for the Belgian on your case now, he’s all your problem. This will unmask his C-4 Charlie and trigger plasi-screens if he is in the area,” she said, tossing me another wrist bracelet. “He’s called Luke K34. It’s more than my ethics allow. He may be arrogant, but he’s my colleague and I’ve signed the limpet encyclopedia salesperson oath like everyone else.”
“An oath?” I repeated.
“Yes, and this is really testing my conscience.”
“Thanks, then. What did you mean earlier about ‘events had taken a bad break’ or something?” I pressed, sensing I might not get another chance to see her and that these snatched answers might turn out to be precious.
“When people don’t have the means to pay for their encyclopedias, the company can get very angry and hand clients over to the debt collectors, to Le Volci—’The Voices.’ When you hear The Voices, it can be very scary. It can ruin your life forever. They decided to turn you over to Le Volci if you don’t pay,” she said with a shrug of the shoulders, staring at me with those deep blue eyes. “And since you were in my care when Zone Securities snatched you, I felt in part responsible. Now, leave. Go on.”
“But I don’t want any encyclopedias! Did they not factor that in at all?” I protested as Marius wound up the rotors to a howl.
“Don’t kid yourself, Jonny. Everyone succumbs in the end. Even the president has a set,” she shouted, as Mat and I collapsed out of the cargo bay and onto the concrete as the chopper eased up off its skids. “Drinks are arranged,” she cried as her voice receded. “See the man with the earrings.” And then any other words were swallowed up by the engine growl. The GaFFA 6 hummed happily up for about ten feet then yawed away, sliding off into the clear, empty sky.