“It is time for the gestalt to fulfill its final promise!” he announced. “The failure to achieve unity the last time was because I did not evince sufficient leadership in our conjoining, and control the emotional feedback. Now, it will last. I will guide the transformation, and we will become that single, powerful entity that we have worked to become! We can take the last steps to our destination as if we were wearing a pair of seven-league boots! We will be one!”
Yes, came the mind-voices through the link.
Taboret felt the excitement from her fellow apprentices, and looked at them with despair. No! she thought, but her thoughts were no longer under her control. Nine other minds pulled at her. Against her will, the diagram appeared before her mind’s eye, of a giant composite being, and the wonderful wheeled transportation device that it would ride, carrying the Alarm Clock as easily as one of them now carried a pencil.
The princess, who had become an ice-pale beauty with translucent blue-white skin, refusing to speak to any of them even after the silence spell had been removed from her, dismounted haughtily, and turned her back on Brom. The green motorbike’s frame arched up and outward like a spider capturing its prey, and reformed as a cage around her. She spun, almost saying something, then put her nose in the air in disdain.
“Apprentices, move your motorcycles together,” Brom ordered. “Then, come here to me.”
As one, the apprentices dismounted. Taboret resisted, but she was dragged by sheer influence toward the place the crucible would be formed. An impulse not her own pulled her hand to the center of the circle.
“Do we have to touch that?” Lurry asked, drawing back from the tar smeared on her skin. Most of the feathers had sunk into the resin or had fallen off.
“Certainly not,” Brom said. “I think the point has been made.” He drew his hand downward from his head to his feet, and Taboret felt the fresh air rush over her skin. She looked down, and found she was clean.
“Thank you, Master Brom,” she said, sincerely. He ignored her, staring off into space to visualize the parameters of the final transformation. Taboret put her hand lightly on top of Gano’s, and waited for Dowkin to cover hers.
When it came through her, the wave of power did have a different feeling than before. This time it was more coherent, more all-encompassing. Brom’s mind penetrated through it all, controlling, guiding, so that she had no conscious impact on the shape things were taking.
The motorcycles changed first. The white haze roiled around them, surrounding, concealing them. When the mist cleared, there was one single vehicle there, a giant cycle with six sets of handlebars.
“Concentrate on combining yourselves,” Brom said.
“Yes,” Doolin said. He stepped a pace closer to Dowkin, and the two of them moved toward, and into one another.
“Look at us!” Dowkin shouted. “We’re each other! Fantastic!” Then they started to lose their shape, broadening and flattening out into a single mass that flowed into the apprentices next to them.
Taboret felt the transformation begin on her. She cried out one final protest before her tongue became a tendon, and her teeth became sinews. Her limbs stretched out taut and grew stiff. It hurt. Her skull became a knee-bone, and her legs stretched out and bent forward, shaping into a single great foot. She felt the foot rise and come down on a bicycle pedal as large as a bed. She’d have screamed if she had any physical equipment left to scream with.
Brom’s great voice boomed through them.
“Together, now!” it cried. Taboret could no longer see through her own eyes, only through Brom’s eyes, who was the head of the giant body they had become. They stood taller than the treetops. To the north was the river, and the enormous waterfall that concealed their destination, the Hall of the Sleepers. To the south, she/they saw a cloud of dust, and the tiny figures riding toward them up the slope of the land. The great mouth smiled. Too late. With its left hand, the giant gestalt-being scooped up the Alarm Clock, then reached for Leonora with its right.
Taboret felt a shock run through the entire being, as she/ they realized that there was no right hand at the end of its arm. Glinn! she thought. That should have been his position, and he was gone. The monster roared out its frustration, making the ground shake.
“Those peaks are the Deep Mysteries,” Bergold said, peering at the massif, having consulted his map. He handed the map over to Misha for folding. “The oldest dreams of all the Collective Unconscious have been seen near the mountains everywhere in the Dreamland, but the deepest archetypes occur the most here at the source of the Lullay: dinosaurs, volcanoes, spirits, cavemen, angels, all things left over from when the world of the Sleepers was young.”
Roan caught a glimpse of movement among the undergrowth. He sat upright with a feeling of deep satisfaction. “There goes my caveman,” he said.
“Look!” Misha shouted, in great excitement. “A dragon! A big green dragon!” The huge, scaled beast zoomed overhead, seeming to skim the clouds with the tips of its wings. “Uh-oh, it’s coming back!”
“Duck!” Felan yelled. The party scrambled into the undergrowth, pulling the protesting steeds in behind them. The dragon made another pass, then went on in search of easier prey. Bergold took out his notebook and made several notes in great excitement. “This will be worth at least one paper,” he said. “My hat!”
“No!” Glinn cried out in a terrible voice. Roan reached out to help him. The apprentice scientist was tearing at his face, dislodging the blindfold. His eyes were wild beneath it.
“What’s wrong?” Roan asked. Glinn looked at him as if trying to say something, then his face went blank. It did not merely lose its expression, but its features as well. His head rounded and widened, joining to his shoulders and arms in one nearly featureless cylinder of flesh, like—like a wrist.
His legs went through the most fearsome transformation. They shrank and fused together, then separated from two into five extensions of flesh and bone, even growing nails on his altered feet.
“My soul,” Bergold said, staring. “He’s becoming a hand. A right hand.”
The forearm that was Glinn tottered and fell over in the saddle, sending Golden Schwinn crazy with fear as the enormous fingers dropped over her eyes. The mare galloped away, Glinn flopping helplessly. Roan leaped onto Cruiser’s back and kicked him into a canter. He pursued Schwinn down the slippery road until he could force her against the trees and grab for her reins. Cruiser was chary of the giant limb, too, but he stayed calm enough while Roan arranged the arm over Schwinn’s saddle.
The others caught up with him. Bergold met his eyes with a question in his own.
“If something so horrible is happening to this young man,” he asked, “what will become of Leonora?”
There’s no other hand, the mass-intelligence thought at Brom, looking at the arm that ended at the elbow. I/we can seize the princess or the Alarm Clock, but not both.
“We can have both!” the overarching Brom intelligence cried out. “Take her, mount the cycle, and begin pedaling!”
Obediently, the body bent down toward the tiny girl in white. She cowered away from it, feeling for the bars of her cage. Taboret saw it the moment she realized that there was no cage there any longer. The material comprising it had gone to make part of the singularity cycle.
Brom/they reached out for her with the stump of its right arm, but missed her by six feet, the length of the missing limb. Leonora scrambled to her feet, and started to back away. Brom/ they swiped at her again. It must capture her, it must use her. She wasn’t going to come quietly. She opened something between her hands and struck out at the stump of the arm with a jet of fire from a flamethrower. The Brom-being recoiled.
“Fools! You left her with a weapon!” Brom boomed. “Concentrate on the gestalt. Grow us a new right arm, now! Raise the power!”
But Taboret knew he had made a mistake in his calculations. The gestalt had no power and no concentration left. All its strength was taken up in maintaining
the giant it had become. They began to sway. Leonora stared at them in horror.
“No, concentrate!” Brom cried. “We are one!”
And in one astonishing moment, they were one single being. Suddenly, the being began to grow smaller and weaker. Taboret knew now why such a thing had never been tried successfully in all the history of the Dreamland. Now that they were all one, they had only the strength of a single person. The crucible could not exist with only one part. In that moment, the gestalt began to collapse.
The Dowkin-Doolin part of the union was openly scornful at the failure of yet another attempt. The Taboret-Gano-Basil-Lurry-Bolmer-Carina-Mamovas part was terrified. The Brom part tried to cope with the loss of power and control, but realized that without Glinn, it had no good right hand. Taboret felt it all, heard it, was part of it, and knew that part of her was mourning Glinn’s loss, but also gloating. Roaring, the gestalt being rose up and reached to the sky. It needed more power, but this was all they were. It tried to reach out for Leonora again with the stump of its right arm, thinking to capture her, thinking to use her, and jarred the Alarm Clock, still held in its left hand. The bells echoed from tree to rock, through Taboret’s teeth-now-sinews.
Leonora waited no longer. She turned and ran off into the woods. Good, Taboret thought. Run. Run.
The bells rang on, clanging through her head. The gestalt-being heaved together painfully. Then it collapsed in a heap of people, coat hangers, and bicycles, with the litter containing the Alarm Clock on top of everything.
As they came to the edge of the river, the arm that was Glinn slung across Roan’s saddle started to fuss and kick. Roan reined in Cruiser as the huge limb began to take on detail, parts separating into legs and arms and a head, and finally a face. A restored Glinn lay over the saddle on his belly. His mouth opened, gasping.
“Something is happening,” Glinn panted. “I’m weak. All my influence has been drained away by the gestalt. There’s been a catastrophe.”
“Leonora!” Roan exclaimed, helping the scientist to sit up. “Is she all right? Where is she?”
“I . . . don’t . . . know,” Glinn said, drawing his brows down. He shook his head, as if trying to clear his mind. “Brom must have started the final plan, but I don’t think it went well. I can’t see anything, I mean, through anyone else’s eyes. Something has happened.”
Golden Schwinn and Cruiser set up an excited whinny. Roan looked at them in surprise.
“Leonora must be around somewhere,” he said. With all the influence he could muster, he molded the two horses into bloodhounds on leashes. At once, the dogs began to run, noses to the ground, raising their heads to bay.
From near the bottom of the heap of people and things, Taboret looked up, grateful to see with her own eyes once more, and saw a chain of paper clips dangling across the bridge of Brom’s nose.
“Touch hands!” Brom said, hoarsely. “Touch hands!”
Taboret found her hands. She thought she had absolutely no strength left, but she stretched one out, and helped form the crucible. It was a shock as Brom’s fingers clasped hers, because there was so little of the force of his personality behind it. To her secret delight, she could no longer hear Brom’s or anyone else’s thoughts. She was actually able to concentrate on his hands, the dry fingertips, slightly clammy skin, and the palm which widened even as she grasped it. He was changing in a burst of influence, in spite of his efforts not to, just like the rest of them.
The mist rose weakly above them. There wasn’t much, but it was enough to get the Alarm Clock off their backs. It was heavy as a boulder. When they were all on their feet once more, Brom took stock of the situation.
“We haven’t enough bicycles left for everyone, and there is no time to wait for more to mature,” he said. Taboret looked twice to realize that almost all the motorcycles had reverted to simple bicycles.
Maniune and Acton came racing back, standing up on the pedals of their steeds.
“What happened?” Maniune demanded, screeching to a halt before the ruin of the singularity cycle. “We heard the bells ringing, then this thing lost all its power!”
“The gestalt overloaded,” Brom said, already onto the next problem. He indicated armloads of the bicycle parts. “Put those together. And those.”
The apprentices bent to pick up the pieces and set them where their chief indicated. Taboret’s muscles were stiff, but she was entirely herself once again. She set to work willingly, blessing the privacy of her own thoughts, which could be as rebellious as she wanted. Sadly, it meant that she wouldn’t have been able to read Glinn’s mind any more, but that didn’t matter since he was dead. Now and then, she seemed to feel his presence as if he was still alive, but put that down to imagination, something with which she was not extraordinarily gifted, but love did funny things to a person. Typical of the Dreamland, where illusions were the stuff life was made of.
“Come on, Master Brom, we’ve got to get moving,” Acton said, impatiently, shoving a heap of gears and wheels into the piles. He didn’t look nearly as menacing as he had before. Taboret wondered if he, too, had been enhanced by the power of the crucible. They moved around him, dumping bicycle parts in heaps. “They’re coming up fast behind us.”
“We are working on the situation,” Brom snapped. “Assist, or get out of the way.”
Dowkin and Doolin Countingsheep sat side by side on the ground next to the pile of broken parts. They had long, thin faces with heavy foreheads and eyebrows, all drooping mournfully.
“It was almost perfect,” Doolin said. Taboret was surprised that she could still tell them apart, even without the help of the link. “We’re separate beings again. It’s no good.”
“Have to find a way back to that state, brother,” Dowkin said. “I can start the calculations.”
“It’s been a conspiracy all along,” Doolin said, with a dark look for the others. “We had a perfect bond. They copied it, then they broke it.”
“Dowkin! Doolin!” Brom shouted, throwing a set of handlebars at them. “Enough! Put these together!” Sullenly, the brothers got up and set to work, muttering under their breath to one another.
The remaining bicycles were jury-rigged into tandems and trandems, and a makeshift yoke was concocted to carry the Alarm Clock to the banks of the Lullay. Taboret hung back, hoping to be ignored until she could escape into the woods, but Brom’s personal radar found her even at the back of the crowd.
“You, and you,” he pointed at Lurry. “Take the litter. The rest of you we will need for the final construction. We haven’t much time. Hurry!”
The silver-and-gold bloodhounds veered off the road, dragging Roan behind them. They rushed into the woods, vacuuming scents off trees, lolloped over piles of bracken, and splashed through brooks. The trees dodged this way and that. Roan got tied up in the leashes more than once avoiding running into the landscape.
There was a rustle in the undergrowth ahead of Roan. The two dogs lifted their heads toward the heavens, and set up a loud howl of joy, and scrambled forth into the brush.
“Who’s there?” a voice asked tentatively, over the excited baying. “Oh, Schwinn!”
“Leonora!” Roan shouted, running toward the voice. He pushed through a brake of flowering lilacs. The princess stood there, high on her pedestal for safety, looking exactly like an exotic blossom herself. The dogs frolicked and danced around her, jumping up to lick her feet, tying the plinth up in their leashes. Roan felt as if he could dance, too. His heart was overflowing with delight and love. He rushed to her, and she jumped down and threw her arms around him. The music he’d heard that night on the hilltop filled the air.
“My darling, I thought you were dead, and then I was so angry and worried,” Roan said, in between eager kisses, as all his thoughts tumbled together. “We’ve been coming to rescue you.”
“Wait until I tell you what happened,” Leonora said. “If I could only have gotten that wretched steed loose from their influence, I could have been back wi
th you ages ago. They’d never have caught up with me. I have so much to tell you.”
The others came crashing over the fallen brush, and gathered around them to welcome the princess back.
“Dear lady, I am so glad,” Bergold said. “It’s nearly been the death of my poor young friend here.”
“We’re happy you’re safe,” Felan said, smiling at her with relief.
“I found your treasures,” Roan said, pulling the daisy chain out of his waistcoat pocket. He folded them into her hand. “I knew you didn’t throw them away idly.”
Leonora kissed Roan soundly once more, then pulled away.
“Oh, thank you, my darling,” she said, with a sweet smile. “Just one moment?”
She spun on her heel, and slapped Felan across the face hard enough to make him stagger backward.
Without conscious impulse, Roan and the other men responded as all gentlemen of the Dreamland did when a lady demonstrated that she had been offended. They picked Felan up, marched him to the nearest river, which happened to be the Lullay, and threw him in.
“Wait! Hey! Blub!” Felan shouted, spitting out a mouthful of water. Not waiting for him to climb out on the bank, Roan went back to Leonora.
“Now, please tell us why we did that,” Roan said. The princess stood with her hands on her hips, tapping her foot impatiently. She was angry.
“Felan betrayed us,” she said, her eyes flashing. “He’s Brom’s spy!”
“Felan?” Roan asked, watching the historian crawl up the bank somewhat downstream from where he went in, sputtering, his clothes streaming.
“He’s been sending Brom air-mail reports all along,” she said. “One of them came while I was with them. He has been telling them all our moves from the time we left home!”
Waking in Dreamland Page 40