Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  No, they would never let him in.

  Another quiver of the shuttle. His stop. He might as well try. He could propose that Lyla vouch for him and lead him blindfolded to her rat maze lab. He stood up, smacked his jacket and trousers into a semblance of neatness, and stepped onto the platform. No one else left the shuttle and no one boarded. In fact, there were no people visible, no vending machines, no benches or ticket booths. The Fort Hoosier station consisted of a windowless building, painted porridge gray and surrounded by razor wire. The blank steel door was plastered with warning signs.

  Before he could budge, a camera mounted above the door swiveled to focus on him and a voice boomed: “STATE YOUR BUSINESS! CLEARANCE CODE! PASSWORD!”

  Sir Toby blinked at the camera. “I’ve come to see Dr. Bellard on urgent business.”

  Evidently this answer flummoxed the guard, for several seconds of electronic hum ensued. Presently the same male voice, but considerably less belligerent, inquired: “Excuse me, sir, but you wouldn’t be the guy who paints the skies, would you? Sir Toby Something?”

  “Moore,” Sir Toby answered, bowing slightly. “May I speak with Dr. Bellard? I promise not to steal any secrets.”

  A moment later the combined breathing of several onlookers, who had evidently gathered near the monitor, was audible through the speakers. “Look,” whispered a female voice. “It’s really him.” There was a muffled discussion, of which he could decipher only two words, Toby and Lyla. This conference was terminated by a round of laughter, and then the guard’s chastened voice: “One moment, sir, while I page Dr. Bellard.”

  Sir Toby, who was beginning to feel like a zoo exhibit, turned from the camera’s scrutiny to wait. Out of habit, he searched his garments once again for provisions. To his surprise, he discovered a joybar in the watch pocket of his plaid vest. To his even greater surprise, he felt no desire to eat it. Indeed, he felt crammed to the gullet, as if he could go a month before his next meal. With a shiver of revulsion, he slipped the joybar back into its hidey hole. What was happening to him? He studied the oatmeal-colored walls suspiciously. Maybe they were beaming rays at him to quench his hunger. They did such things at these labs. Poking about in the brain.

  He felt woozy. There being no seat, he propped himself against the wall. Lyla would make them stop experimenting on him. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths. In his dizziness, he did not hear the door open or footsteps lightly approach.

  “Toby, darling,” came a gentle voice, “whatever’s the matter?”

  It was as if birds had begun singing in his heart. He opened his eyes and engulfed her in a hug, murmuring, “Lyla, dearest, they’re tormenting me.”

  “Who?” she demanded, pulling back to gaze at him with luscious brown eyes.

  “Everybody. The paparazzi with their videos. The Sleek of Araby bosses with their teeth and needles. Gawkers in the mall. And even here,” he protested, gesturing at the camera’s glass eye, “the guards are beaming some kind of—” he groped for a word, “fullness rays at me.”

  “Fullness rays?” she repeated skeptically.

  He explained to her about the uneaten joybar, the loss of appetite, the faintness.

  “Nobody’s messing with your brain at the moment,” she assured him. Her small hand played like a mouse in his beard. She wore an olive-green uniform, with her name and rank stitched on the breast pocket, instead of the white coat he had expected. It was always disconcerting for him to be reminded that this tiny woman, with her ponytail and mice-size hands, actually worked for the Psy-Ops division of the Pentagon.

  “I just feel strange,” he said.

  “Why don’t you take a vacation from the mall?” she suggested, as she had so often suggested before. “Stay at my place.”

  “The evening news would love that.”

  “What more can they say about us than they’ve said already?”

  He wavered. “Yes, but I’ve got a sky-mural due in two days.”

  “I’ll bring a lightbrush and projector from the lab.”

  “But I’ve already got a painting started on my ceiling.”

  “Then zip the file out here.” She looked at him intently, a slight smile on her face. “Have you run out of excuses?”

  He shrugged, and returned her smile. He had always offered the same excuses. Publicity. Work. Deadlines. Yet, in his heart of hearts—or perhaps in his stomach of stomachs—he had been reluctant to leave the mall itself, with its eateries and domeshows and pleasure arcades. Now the mere thought of food filled him with loathing. As for pleasure, there was always Lyla.

  “The change might do me some good,” he agreed at last.

  “Delightful!” She took one of his great paws in her tiny one, and with her other hand she waved at the camera. The featureless door clicked open. Of course someone had been watching.

  The partially finished sky glimmered on the ceiling of Lyla’s apartment. After prolonged frowning at the chicken-liver sunrise, chocolate birds, and mashed-potato fog, however, Sir Toby could not bring himself to add another stroke of the lightbrush. Lyla had dubbed it “the great floating smorgasbord.” Only a starving man could paint such toothsome skies, and Sir Toby, lounging like a walrus upon his lover’s couch, was not the least bit hungry. He still had cravings, but not for food. With the flick of a switch he erased it all, the popcorn and giblets, the gravies and syrups, the sugary constellations. He closed his eyes and waited for inspiration.

  He was still waiting when Lyla summoned him to the guest bedroom. Ordinarily he avoided this room, for it housed a colony of white rats, which had retired here after finishing their careers in the lab. “Come,” she said, “I have something to show you.”

  With foreboding, he shuffled down the hall, but only after tucking his trouser cuffs into his socks as a precaution against inquisitive rats. He was relieved to see that a stout gate sealed off the lower half of the guest room doorway. Lyla stood just outside.

  “Closer,” she insisted, drawing him to the threshold by his elbow. He peered into the room, where perhaps a dozen rats were nosing through mazes, working out on rodent-scale exercise equipment, or otherwise frolicking, apparently indifferent to the food heaped in a trough along one wall. “Here goes,” said Lyla, pushing a button on a control wand.

  The ceiling was suffused with a rose-colored glow, which darkened to the color of tomato soup. Within that goop, creamy pasta-shapes slowly congealed. Sir Toby recognized this as the overture to one of his recent skies, broadcast within the past six months. “How did you get hold of it?” he asked.

  “Military channels,” she answered. “Now watch what happens.”

  He knew only too well what would happen. After the tomato soup would come lasagna, eggplant Parmesan, and so on through a five-course Italian meal, all smeared across the ceiling in shades of catsup and cheese. A scrabbling noise made him look down, afraid the rats might be assaulting the gate. But they were scurrying toward the food trough, fighting for position, gorging themselves. Bits of kibble flew as the furry jaws snapped. Watching them made his skin crawl. The rats nipped one another in their frenzy to get at the food. They hauled themselves from dish to dish, their bellies sagging.

  “They’ll kill themselves,” he said with horror.

  “Some of them would if I left it running long enough.”

  “My art is doing that?” Standing in the doorway, he realized that a feeling of hunger was mixing with his nausea.

  “Not your art, but what your sponsor blended with it.” Lyla pressed a hand against his back. “Stick your head inside the room and see how it feels.”

  Fascinated, frightened, he leaned over the threshold, and was immediately seized by an overwhelming craving. He clutched his stomach, screaming, “Turn it off!”

  Lyla quickly extinguished the painting, drew him back into the hallway, and put her arms around as much of him as she could encompass. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but you wouldn’t have believed me if I’d only told you about it.”

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nbsp; “What the devil—” he began, but he was too dazed to formulate a question. He sympathized with the rats, which now lay on their sides, paws outstretched, bellies swollen.

  “MEGA programmed into your sky-show a vibration that stimulates the hypothalamus—the hunger center in the brain,” Lyla explained. “You get a more concentrated charge in here than you would in a mall, but this gives you an idea of the effect.”

  “They can do that?”

  “Oh, yes. They’ve been doing it for nine or ten years, with the government’s blessing.”

  “To keep everybody hungry?”

  She nodded. “Twenty-four hours a day. In every mall, shuttle, stadium, and dome.”

  “But not at the base?” he said, thinking of the windowless buildings at Fort Hoosier.

  “No, our heads must be clear. Protecting national security, you know.”

  He surveyed the engorged rats. After a few weeks of such eating, they would all need slenderizing operations. From trough to needle. Then back to trough. With a stab of insight, he understood—food shops and slenderizing parlors, Cravin’ Haven and Sleek of Araby—a closed circuit of gluttony and shame to make the cash registers ring.

  “Do you know how it works?” he demanded.

  “I’m afraid I do,” said Lyla. “I helped develop the technology.”

  “You? For the malls?”

  “No, for the military. It was supposed to be used in war. But the Pentagon decided it wouldn’t incapacitate enemies. So they licensed hunger to the merchants.”

  “What did they come up with instead?”

  “Lust, anxiety, paranoia, depression, and hallucination proved to be more disruptive.”

  “All of that came from your research?”

  “Indirectly. It turns out by modulating the beam you can play the brain like a piano.”

  “That’s evil.” He backed away in disgust and hurried down the hall.

  “Thurgood,” she called after him, using his real name, the one she sometimes whispered when they were making love. He did not stop. She caught up with him in the living room. “I could be court-martialed for showing you my little demonstration with the rats,” she said. “But I needed to share this with someone outside Psy-Ops, and you’re the only person I can trust.”

  Without answering, he slumped onto the couch.

  “Maybe I should have left you in the dark,” she said.

  He glared at her. “How can you go to the lab every day, knowing what your research is doing to people?”

  “I have no say over how my research is used.”

  “Then you should have quit.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe I will.” She sat beside him on the couch. “But hasn’t your art been used to manipulate people?”

  “I had no way of knowing,” he objected.

  “You didn’t know the technical details, but you knew MEGA owns both ends of the food-and-fat cycle, all those franchises with their stupid names. You knew your paintings were helping to lure people into food shops and slenderizing parlors.”

  “I never—” he began. Then he faltered into silence, for Lyla was right. He was as much a captive of MEGA as she was of the Pentagon. She had chosen to look the other way when her science was misused, and he had done the same with his art.

  “Thurgood?” she said, cuddling against him, sobbing. “Sweetheart?”

  He drew her close and spoke quietly. “It’s time for both of us to quit what we’ve been doing and find work we can believe in. Meanwhile, I’d better get out from under those appetite rays and move in here with you.”

  For supper there was kale salad, falafel, and yogurt. Though the meal was scrumptious, Thurgood—as he now thought of himself—could not clear his plate. Every bite reminded him of those rats and the munching passengers aboard the shuttle and the chewing faces at the counter in Cravin’ Haven. As he toyed with the last of his food, Lyla said, “Keep this up, and you’ll melt away to nothing.”

  He laughed, relieved that they still loved one another. “Sure, like the Arctic sea ice.”

  The image reminded him of the MEGA branding executive, her teeth glistening like tiny icebergs, and he was pitched into gloom once again. He wouldn’t do any more Sleek of Araby skies. But what could he paint instead? Where could he get his murals shown?

  Sensing this change in mood, Lyla said, “Never fear. We’ll find ways to use our talents and brains that don’t involve manipulating people.”

  “It’s scary, though. I wonder if I can still paint anything besides food.”

  He rose to clear the table and load the dishwasher. He was handling the last plate when he noticed hairline cracks in the glaze. Immediately he set down the plate, rushed into the living room, grabbed the lightbrush, and began sketching a feathery lacework pattern on the ceiling.

  Lyla drew close to him and gazed at the emerging design. “It looks like crystals of frost.”

  “Right you are!” he cried. The cracked glaze had reminded him of frost-covered windows in his grandparents’ farmhouse. He could have shouted for joy. There were paintings in him still, preserved by memory and affection. Suddenly he thought of an idea so delicious that he began prancing around the living room, hooting with laughter.

  “What is it?” Lyla spun about as he circled her in his lumbering dance.

  “I want to broadcast one last sky!” He pointed at the ceiling. “Lovely, innocent frost. Only you’ll doctor it up with your voodoo vibrations. Not hunger this time. No, no. This time it’s going to be sex. The Sleek of Araby brings you an orgy! Think of it. The dome lights up, ice crystals thread across the screen, and people in malls around the world strip off their clothes, grab the nearest warm body, and tumble onto floors and countertops. Shoppers, gawkers, guards, teenagers, geezers—everybody coupling wildly! What do you say? That would put MEGA and the rest of them out of the brain-tampering business, wouldn’t it?”

  As he danced, his arms waving and beard wagging, Lyla gaped at him, like a bear-handler whose pet had gone berserk. “That’s utterly crazy,” she said, laughing.

  “So you’ll do it, right? A little subversive science.” He whirled to a stop, bent down, and painted her face with kisses. “We could try it on the rats first, in case you need to work out any kinks. Or work in any kinks. Better yet, we could try it on ourselves. What do you say?”

  For a moment her smile was uncertain, and then it brightened into glee.

  The Engineer of Beasts

  Orlando Spinks meant no harm. You could have searched that dilapidated organ, his heart, without discovering any murderous hankerings. You could have shone searchlights into the basement of his brain without finding the least cobweb of malice. His intentions were as innocent as shoelaces. He merely wished to inject an element of wildness into the beasts he constructed for the Oregon City Disney.

  Wildness, or at least the simulation of wildness, had been the Spinks family business for generations. Orlando had learned the trade of beast-engineering from his father, who had learned zoo-keeping from his father, who had stuffed animals for a living back in the days before the Enclosure when there had still been animals to stuff. Once the domes clamped down over the cities, and the travel-tubes bound the cities together in a global web, and extractors began mining the oceans and recyclers began filtering the air, and the Enclosure was sealed tight in all its manufactured perfection, Grandfather Spinks, who was inside, could no longer stuff the cadavers of animals, which were forever shut outside. He therefore abandoned taxidermy as a doomed craft, like blacksmithing, and went to work for the Oregon City Disney restoring moth-eaten bears and crocodiles. Tiring of the jovial owls and congenial tigers that Grandfather left behind, Father Spinks introduced frankly imaginary beasts, such as unicorns and griffins and mermaids. By the time Orlando became chief engineer, the visitors who ambled through the disney no longer knew or cared which of the animals had once lived on Earth and which were imaginary.

  Orlando’s initial problem was in deciding what constituted wildness.
He brooded on this question while puttering in his workshop, where Grandfather’s collection of stuffed animal heads gazed down at him from the walls like a glum and moldering board of trustees. Was it simply filth that distinguished wild creatures from his robots? Shaggy fur swarming with vermin? Or was it stupidity, the inability to reason and talk? Viciousness? Unpredictability? A yen for howling in the night?

  He discussed these conjectures with his apprentice, a mop-haired girl of twelve with ingenious fingers and foxy eyes.

  “I’d vote for filth as a starter,” the girl suggested.

  “But what shall we use for dirt?” said Orlando.

  “Don’t you worry, I’ll find some.”

  Before he could object, she was off in search of dirt, pulling a wagon. Today her honey-colored pigtails were coiled into the shape of a beehive, and convincing bees zipped in the air about her head. She had painted her face and arms with raspberry splotches to simulate stings. The pedbelt riders—who would never have seen actual bees, but who could recognize eccentricity from a kilometer away—shouldered aside to give her room.

  If anywhere in this immaculate floating city a bucketful of dirt had escaped the cleansers and recyclers, Orlando felt confident she would retrieve it. Her name was Mooch. He had first encountered her one Sunday in the lion’s den, her lower half protruding from the alpha lion’s mouth. The jaws were programmed to open and shut in synchrony with recorded roars, but the girl had jammed the mechanism, and the lion’s rubber teeth clamped tight about her midriff. Instead of hanging slack or jerking in terror, her legs—clad in baggy purple trousers—stood firmly planted on the cage floor. In place of the lion’s voice, there issued from the cavernous throat a child’s bemused humming.

  When he pried her loose she lambasted him for having stuffed the lion’s gut with gears instead of lungs and bowels. “You’ve even got him saying silly speeches between roars,” she griped. “Don’t you know lions couldn’t talk? And if they could, they’d have talked about sunlight or the taste of antelope, not about safaris. You need a helper, somebody who knows the beasts. Somebody who’s read all the animal books, watched nature feelie films, tromped through hologram jungles. Somebody like me. Make me your apprentice and we’ll turn this disney into a place that will stand people’s hair on end.”