Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  Marn lay on her back and floated. The air was rank with the smell of weeds and mud. The water licked the salt from her skin, washed away the dirt, but it could not scour away the taste of Jurgen’s blood or the feel of Hinta’s fingers.

  The night was the coolest she had ever known, as the day had been the hottest. This was what it meant to live in weather, shivering and sweating by turns.

  Lit from inside, the dome appeared like a faceted globe. Marn could see the dim shapes of the others preparing for sleep. Someone would be checking on Jurgen, giving him water, making him comfortable. I should be doing it, Marn thought. But she could not yet look into his stone-dark eyes without confusion.

  Afloat, she let her thoughts spread out on the water and dissolve.

  Sometime later a voice called her name, and she opened her eyes on darkness spangled with stars.

  “Marn! Are you all right?” came the voice. It was Hinta, her lean silhouette on the bank.

  “I’m fine,” Marn answered. The water sluiced along her ribs, her thighs, as she swam toward shore.

  “I saw you go out,” Hinta said. “I started to worry.”

  “Time seemed—” Marn began. But she could not tell what had become of time, or of her fear. She stood up in the shallows, and could see her nakedness register in Hinta’s startled gaze.

  “Here’s a towel,” Hinta offered.

  Marn’s feet sank into the muck without moving. “I’m not ready to come out yet.”

  “Isn’t the water cold?”

  “Come see.”

  For a few seconds, Hinta did not move, a slender column of darkness. Then she wriggled free of her clothes and eased into the shallows beside Marn. “Brrr,” she said. “It is cold.”

  “Swim out with me,” Marn answered, “and you’ll soon warm up.” Touching the other woman to keep contact in the dark, Marn led her away from shore.

  Eros Passage

  On the morning of his thirteenth birthday, Hoagy Ferris woke to find an eros couch installed in his bedroom. He had been hoping for a more advanced model. The screen was small, the stimulus rating low. But the Freud, as his mother called it—or the Orgasm Express, as his friends called it—was potent enough for a beginner.

  The eros couches Hoagy had used in friends’ apartments and public arcades came loaded with sexual fantasies for every taste, but this one required the user to create fantasies of his own. Undaunted, he buckled on the helmet and soon learned to mesh his brainwaves with the simulator, using biofeedback techniques he had learned in an effort to manage his epilepsy.

  At first the video stars and nubile schoolmates he summoned onto the screen were fully clothed, their images blurry. With practice, he sharpened the focus. Undressing his heroines took longer, since his knowledge of female anatomy, after four years of sex education, was still entirely theoretical. Too shy to get down to business, he carried on long conversations with his primly dressed sirens. “Do you have many friends?” he might ask.

  “Not many,” the current beauty would confess. “I get awfully lonely.”

  “Does your mother understand you?”

  “She’s forgotten what it’s like to be young.”

  “And your dad?”

  “I never had one.”

  “Me neither.”

  Emboldened by these chats in which he dictated both voices, eventually Hoagy allowed a strap to glide from his heroine’s shoulder, a streak of thigh to show through a slit in her gown. Once the disrobing began, it hastened forward until she lolled on the screen as naked as the sun in a cloudless sky.

  Tanya Ferris had been assured by the psychiatrist that the Freud would not ply her son with fantasies but rather would train him to orchestrate his own desires. By learning to direct the flow of neural impulses, he might be able to control his epilepsy without the use of drugs. Indeed, within a few months after installation of the eros couch, Hoagy’s seizures had all but ceased, and the few he suffered were mild, allowing the doctor to wean him off medications. Still, Tanya wondered if she had done the right thing by enrolling him in the timeshell experiment, with all its risks. Yet how else could she have secured treatment for him? She could never afford even the cheapest Freud, let alone the psychiatrist’s fees. As it was, she and Hoagy were barely getting by on the pension she received as a retired surrogate mother. Even to buy him a new pair of shoes required weeks of scrimping.

  In the evenings, after he had finished his homework at the kitchen table, he retreated to his room. Tanya often paused outside his shut door and listened, hearing muffled dialogue, one voice recognizably Hoagy’s, the other one higher-pitched, girlish. Even with her ear pressed against the door, she could not decipher the words. When sharp laughter or urgent moans broke out, she hurried on down the hall.

  Hoagy soon lost interest in the girls who trailed perfume down the corridors at school or flashed their bare legs on the sidewalks; now he could conjure up women more desirable than any female he had seen in the flesh. The prim, chatty maidens of his early scenarios were succeeded by strumpets cavorting in negligees, then by lascivious nudes. Their breasts and buttocks defied gravity, refusing to sag, and their skin was unblemished silk. Their limbs assumed any posture he chose, including ones that would baffle a yogi. Their eyes said only what he wished them to say.

  One red-haired temptress haunted him for weeks. Delicate blue veins showed through her translucent skin. Her jade green eyes, fixed on him, gave back a tiny image of his face.

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “On the fifth planet of Epsilon Eridani,” she breathed. “Come find me.”

  He summoned her back again and again, surrounding her with a landscape of ancient forests, rolling prairies, wildflower meadows aflame with butterflies, rivers teeming with fish and skies with birds. Such riches were no longer available on Earth. But why not on the fifth planet of Epsilon Eridani, or on some other habitable world?

  By the time Hoagy received a more powerful eros couch at age fifteen, all his projections had grown otherworldly. No longer rushing him to orgasm, as they had in the early days of acrobatic postures and lacy lingerie, now his beauties entranced him for hours at a stretch. As settings for his trysts, he fashioned gardens riotous with flowers and brimming with fruits and thronged by magnificent beasts. Sometimes he postponed climax for days in order to refine his visions, like an alchemist in search of gold.

  While his friends were vibrating to sex like struck tuning forks, rubbing one another’s ticklish bodies, conceiving and aborting the occasional baby, Hoagy kept to himself at school and divided his time at home between the eros couch and his computer, where he studied exobiology.

  Though the psychiatrists had warned her, Tanya was not prepared for the transformation in her son. He scarcely spoke to her anymore, unless she prodded him with questions. At meals he would stare off into space, forgetting to eat. He became alarmingly thin, his cheeks gouged by shadows. Fret lines appeared at the corners of his mouth.

  One night, as she tiptoed down the hall, she noticed his door was ajar. Glancing in warily, she saw he was at his desk, studying a screenful of data. Relieved that he was not on the Freud, she slipped into the room. “What are all the numbers?” she asked.

  Without looking up, he said, “Coordinates for E-type planets in our galaxy.”

  “E-type?”

  “Planets sufficiently Earth-like to have the potential for supporting life as we know it.”

  She squinted at the rows of numbers. “So many?”

  “On the order of ten million identified so far.”

  “How many have we explored?”

  He snorted. “A handful. And those only by drones.”

  “Imagine all those planets. There might be creatures we’ve never dreamed of.”

  “Or creatures we have dreamed of,” said Hoagy. Hunched over, his face reflecting the glow of the screen, he withdrew his attention from her as firmly as if he had thrown a switch.

  Tanya studied the boy, her ninth bi
rthing, whom she had been allowed to keep because of his unforeseen epilepsy. He was no more her genetic offspring than the previous eight had been. Only the Fertility Board knew whose egg and sperm had been implanted in her womb, knew what couple had refused to accept this flawed child. By rearing Hoagy, feeding him, helping him learn to crawl, to walk, to speak, she was bound to him by a link deeper than genes.

  He did not glance up or speak when she wished him good night and closed the door.

  Shortly before Hoagy’s eighteenth birthday, when the time came to replace the Freud with a state-of-the-art model, Tanya brooded once more on the decision she had made years earlier to sign him up for the timeshell experiment. From his earliest school-days, tests had shown him to be gifted at remembering complex images in precise detail. After glancing at a page of print, he could recite every word without error; after glimpsing a picture, he could draw an exact replica. Eidetic vision, the examiners called it, possibly a side-effect of his epilepsy. The gift was so rare that a Project VIVA psychiatrist, learning of Hoagy’s case, had persuaded Tanya to enroll him in the program. The eros couches were designed to wean him away not merely from earthly women but from Earth itself. The psychiatrist put it bluntly: Your son will give up the chance of leading a normal life for a chance to overcome his disorder. Better he should pay this price, Tanya reluctantly decided, than die of a seizure. If he could contribute to science in the process, all the better.

  What the psychiatrist did not tell her was that her son might go mad. Project VIVA, the program for mapping life in the Milky Way, had been stymied by a difficulty no one had foreseen in the pre-warp days: matter, including human bodies, passed through the timeshell without harm, but minds were deranged. When the early warpships returned at all, their crewmembers were insane. Nothing, it seemed, would protect the astronauts, neither drugs nor freezing nor hypnosis. Many scientists began calling the timeshell an impassable barrier, as the speed of light had been described in the twentieth century.

  Just when the International Space Agency was on the point of shelving the project, declaring the human costs too high, the seventh flight brought back the hint of an answer. Officials approved for the trip a woman who was a paranoid schizophrenic. She returned just as insane as the rest of the crew, just as incapable of reporting her observations, but with her psychosis undisturbed. Her paranoia had passed twice through the warp without altering.

  If some fixation less crippling than paranoia could be induced in the astronauts, perhaps it would preserve their sanity through the warp. Subsequent flights bore crews trained with mantras and mandalas, meditation and prayer. The returning astronauts were mad in novel ways, but mad nonetheless. Again there was a curious exception—a twenty-year-old Zen adept. Although he raved most of the time, he also had lucid spells in which he could describe the lava-spouting planet his flight had orbited. He was the youngest person ever to breach the shell, the youngest to be trained in fixation.

  Perhaps, the psychiatrists reasoned, adults were the wrong candidates for training. Perhaps adolescents, with their fierce cravings and attachments, were more likely subjects. And what craving was fiercer or more easily manipulated than sex? Cautiously, after prolonged debates in scientific and governmental circles, Project VIVA was commissioned to test the idea.

  After more than a thousand interviews, eight couples and four single parents were persuaded to enroll their adolescent children. If this experiment succeeds in revealing how to break through the timeshell, the parents were told, your child’s name will be honored alongside those of Lindberg and Armstrong, Gagarin and Chi. The parents were not allowed to visit the hospital in Santa Fe where survivors of earlier flights dozed under heavy sedation or slouched in chairs, drooling. Imagining the dangers their children might face, Tanya Ferris and the other parents thought only of mild phobias, a stutter, a twitch. The risk seemed worth taking in exchange for the possibility of fame.

  On the afternoon of his eighteenth birthday, Hoagy returned from the Institute for Exobiological Research to find in his room a top-of-the-line eros couch. Instead of projecting images onto a screen and synthesizing odors and sounds, this model directly stimulated the occipital and cerebral cortex and limbic system. The helmet pressed electrodes against his skull, the webbing cradled him as in a hammock. Lying in the machine’s embrace, mind absorbed by the tingling sensations, Hoagy immediately entered a trance. Whatever he envisioned in this spellbound state became more vivid to him than anything in the waking world.

  Fantasy women still drew him into his visions, with their silky bellies and exquisite feet, their hair spun from starlight. But now his desire expanded beyond these goddesses to conjure up entire planets, lush and pristine. Making love with such women, in such places, required him to leap beyond the confines of his own chemistry, to merge with an alien ecology.

  Even when not strapped into the couch and helmet, he carried the images with him. By comparison, his actual surroundings seemed ugly and crude. He shuffled between home and the Exobiology Institute in a perpetual daze of desire. His teachers had never come across anyone so insatiably curious about extraterrestrial life, so relentless in his studies. The curriculum that should have kept him busy for seven years he finished in three. By age twenty-one he was working on the frontiers of the discipline.

  He became a leading proponent of the view that wherever conditions were suitable for carbon-based life such life would inevitably appear, and if given enough time it would evolve and diversify, producing more and more complex organisms. The possibility that any of these organisms would be humanoid was vanishingly small, of course, but not zero. In a galaxy with tens of millions of candidate planets, there might be thousands on which species akin to Homo sapiens had evolved, and somewhere among them he might discover the infinitely desirable women who tantalized him in daylight and dream.

  Hoagy’s link to the everyday world had grown so tenuous that he felt only mild surprise when his application to become an astronaut for Project VIVA was promptly accepted. He was more surprised by his mother’s delighted response when he told her the news over breakfast.

  “You’re not upset?” he asked.

  “Why should I be?” she said. “You were born for space. I’ve seen you headed there since you were a boy.”

  “You’re not worried about the dangers?”

  “Everything worth doing is dangerous.”

  “The timeshell—” he began.

  “Wouldn’t you love to be the one to break through?” she asked eagerly. “You’d be a pioneer. They say you’ve got the ideal mind for it. And you’ve prepared so well on the Freud.”

  The fervor in her voice rattled Hoagy. He shoved away from the table and retreated to his room and slammed the door. Prepared so well? Prepared? He paced back and forth, scowling at the eros couch, this luxurious and treacherous dream machine. All these years, his mother had let him believe these devices were only therapeutic, training him to govern his epilepsy. But that had never been their real purpose. They were designed to groom him for warp flight.

  Suddenly furious, he flung the couch on its side, ripped the harness loose, tore out the electrodes, and stomped on the helmet until it cracked.

  The door swung open and his mother stood there, appalled, gazing at the wreckage. “What are you doing?”

  “Cutting the puppet strings!”

  “What puppet strings?”

  He kicked the helmet and sent it spinning across the floor. “This machine has been pumping me full of junk.”

  “Your visions?”

  “The psychiatrists’ visions!”

  “They’re yours, sweetheart.”

  “No.” He shook his head doggedly.

  With hands on hips, she glared at him. “The Freud only picked up your longings.”

  He slumped on the edge of the bed and waved a hand in front of his face. “Okay, they’re my stupid longings. But they’ve been used to manipulate me.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it. What yo
u’ve imagined came out of your own mind.”

  He sat in silence for a moment before saying, “Then I’m a monster of desire.”

  “You’re not a monster.” She sat next to him and curved an arm around his waist. “We all have strong desires. I wanted a husband. I wanted a college degree. I wanted to be an artist. I’ve run out of chances for any of those things,” she said, tears brimming. “But you have a chance to satisfy your longings. You have a gift. Your vision is so strong it can deliver you.”

  He let himself relax into the curve of her arm. “Even if I survive the warp,” he said quietly, “my chance of finding a planet and a woman to match my vision is slim.”

  “Slim is better than nothing,” she said. “It’s better than I ever had.”

  For the first time in a long while, he looked searchingly at his mother, chastened and surprised by her grief. Her cheeks were splotched, her eyes red from crying, her lips crimped tight. Instead of dwelling on his own unappeasable hunger, he felt hers.

  “Alright,” he muttered. “I’ll try. If I break through without going crazy, maybe I can find my heart’s desire.”

  His mother picked up the shattered helmet. “But won’t you need the Freud?”

  “Not anymore. The vision never leaves me now.”

  Training for warp passage took three strenuous years. While Hoagy’s conscious mind was absorbing the technicalities of flight, cross-species communication, bio-surveys and the like, his unconscious mind was elaborating the details of his visionary planet. The VIVA engineers who lectured about safety systems, the linguists who explained computer translation, and the neurophysiologists who monitored his brain were a blur to Hoagy. He took in their lessons, but otherwise ignored the instructors. The only people who captured his attention were his two partners, Jaffa Marx and Blake Polo. The three of them made up Alpha Trio, the first mind-conditioned group selected to pass through the timeshell.