Behind the Eyes of Dreamers

by Pamela Sargent

  Daro took her arm as they passed through the doorway. Mats of various colors covered white tiles around a small pool; there were no plants, trees, or flowers. Orielna had passed many pleasant hours here with her sharer, but the courtyard now seemed stark and lifeless.

  Aniya sat by the pool, her dark head resting on Karel’s shoulder. The slim blond man glanced up at them with eyes as large and dark as Aniya’s, then stroked his sharer’s hair.

  Aniya straightened and smoothed down her blue robe. Orielna searched the woman’s fine-boned face for a sign of welcome, but Aniya’s eyes were expressionless, her face stiff.

  “So you’ve come back,” Aniya said. Her gaze flickered over Daro; her mouth tightened. “I’ve been quite disoriented lately. Piro came here not long ago.”

  “Piro?” Orielna murmured, surprised.

  “The lover I chose to forget.”

  “You mean the sharer you don’t want to remember.”

  Aniya’s head shot up. “Did he tell you? He had no right to do that.”

  “He didn’t tell me,” Orielna said. “Your secret is safely locked in the Net’s records. Daro guessed it quite a while ago. I think I sensed he was right about that, even though I didn’t realize it at the time.”

  “I’ll have it wiped entirely,” Aniya said in a sharper tone. “I won’t remember him at all. He came here to remind me of what I was. He kept saying that he’d done me a great wrong, that he was like me once, that he left me in this house because he knew what I might do.” She took a breath. “He thought I’d be safe here, protected from my impulses, the same ones he once had—he sounded quite unbalanced. He said he’d finally rid himself of the cruelty and fear he left in me, that he wanted me to come away with him and find out what I could be, that he wanted to make up for what he’d done. He said he’d found himself and that I could, too.”

  Orielna glanced at Daro. His face was filled with pity; he turned his head a bit toward her. His eyes grew warmer, and she knew then that he would not see Aniya when he looked at her.

  “What a fool he was to come here,” Aniya muttered. “He wanted me to remember it all again, but I won’t.”

  “I came to tell you,” Orielna said, “that I can’t live with you anymore.”

  Aniya leaned forward. “Do you think I’d want you here now? You’ve grown much too different. I hoped you wouldn’t, but I was prepared for that. I couldn’t let you stay as you are, and there is Karel.” The blond eidolon stroked her arm. “I’ll wipe my mind of you, of Josef, of everything,” she added in a strangely calm voice. “I won’t retain any of it.”

  “And you’ll go on being a shadow.” Orielna lifted her arm. “Piro told you the truth about yourself. This place is your prison, but you can leave it. Release Karel and come away. Leave the trap you made for yourself.”

  “A trap?” Aniya smiled. “All finite life short of divinity is a trap, isn’t it? We are God’s forgotten eidolons.” Her eyes went blank. Orielna opened her link slightly, then closed it again. Aniya had fled into a dream, perhaps one where her eidolons surrounded her, unchanged, gazing at her lovingly with her own eyes.

  Karel got to his feet and said, “You’ve disturbed her enough.”

  “She might listen to you,” Orielna said, knowing her words were futile. “Tell her she doesn’t have to—”

  Karel’s lip curled. “You’d probably like to take her away and fill her with your own thoughts. She has what she wants, and so do I. My greatest joy comes when I link with her and know my thoughts are hers.”

  “I felt the same way once.”

  “You shouldn’t have come here.” Karel led them through the chamber of mirrors; the door slid open soundlessly. “I’m hers, and she’s mine—I’ll never want anything else. You could have been happy with us if you hadn’t diverged, but maybe it’s better this way. We can be everything to each other.” There was a note of desperation in his voice; she wondered if he was aware of that.

  A wind rippled the grassy plain below. Daro held her around the waist and kissed her gently on the forehead. “Did it hurt,” he said, “when she told you she didn’t want you here?”

  “No.” She gazed directly at him so that he would know that was true. They walked down the hill; she turned and looked back for a moment. Karel lingered by the entrance, then gazed out at the plain, as Josef used to do, before the door closed.

  They passed through the gate and entered the wall’s long evening shadow. A pavilion had been set up under the trees; a pale-haired woman in a violet shirt and pants sat under the canopy. A white cloth with a golden jug, a goblet, and a plate of pastries were spread on the ground in front of her.

  “Greetings, Kitte,” Orielna said as she and Daro approached.

  Kitte nodded at them. “Please do sit down.” She motioned with her wand. “There’s plenty for all of us.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t have it brought here so that you could welcome us back to the Garden.”

  “Not exactly.” Kitte’s violet eyes were calm, her perfect face composed. “Will you join me?”

  Orielna glanced at Daro; he shrugged. “Very well,” she replied.

  “I’m afraid I have no other goblets,” Kitte said, “but you’re free to swig from the jug.” Orielna and Daro seated themselves. “I didn’t think you’d come back. Does this mean you’ve left your sharer?”

  “She isn’t my sharer now.”

  “No, I don’t suppose she is. You’ve changed too much—even I can see that.” Kitte handed the jug to the hunter. “You left my murderer in the Garden. That was his punishment—being allowed to stay where he wanted to be.”

  “It may be fitting,” Daro said. “He chose it, and that may make it more of a punishment in the end.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter.” Kitte smiled; she had the slightly unfocused look of someone with a completely open link. Orielna was relieved her own was closed, having no desire to glimpse any of this woman’s thoughts. “He’s alone now—did you know that? The Net verified it for me.”

  “Alone?” Orielna asked. Daro said nothing.

  “Waiting for his unchanged girl. She hasn’t come back for some time, and he’s wondering where she is. Of course, he can’t go to look for her.”

  Orielna frowned. “Maybe she went back to her people.”

  “She wouldn’t go there,” Daro said. “If she did, they’d see her as bewitched after being with a ghost so long. They’d drive her away.”

  “I suppose you’d know, being a hunter.” Kitte’s eyes narrowed as she studied Daro. “I thought myself that she might have another destination in mind, but I’m glad to hear you confirm that.” She set down her goblet. “He must have believed she wouldn’t dare to leave him.”

  Daro waved at the cloth and the tiny pastries. “Then this is a celebration of sorts.”

  “You might put it that way. He can feel a little of what I felt when he fled from me. He can wonder if some accident befell her, or if she finally grew to hate him.” The woman sighed. “I am filled with suspense. I think I may wait here for a while.”

  “Perhaps you’d prefer to celebrate alone.” Orielna stood up. “We must be going—we have quite a walk ahead of us.”

  Kitte waved her arm languidly. “Farewell.”

  Daro rose and followed Orielna from the pavilion. They had gone only a short distance before a rustling sound warned her that something was ahead. She took out her wand, listening to the sounds of panting and running footsteps.

  The dark-eyed unchanged girl burst from the trees, snarling as she pushed past Orielna. Daro lifted his wand. The girl spun around, hissed, then slowly crept toward Kitte.

  Orielna opened a channel. Josef’s despairing wails echoed inside her, tearing at her mind; she muted them quickly. Daro caught her by the arm. She looked back long enough to see Kitte leading the girl toward the gate, then followed the hunter into the welcoming shadow of the forest.

  The Renewal

  1

  As she gazed over the fi
eld, Josepha Ryba saw the maple tree. It dominated the clearing in front of her small house and marked the boundary between the trimmed lawn and the overgrown field. The tree was old, perhaps as old as she was. It had been there when she cleared the land and moved into her home.

  The other trees, the hundreds along the creek in back of the house and the thousands on the slopes of the nearby hills, had to struggle. She and the gardeners had cleared away the deadwood and cut down dying trees many times. Gradually, she had become aware of changes. The pine trees across the creek flourished; the young oaks near the flat stones she had placed in a circle were gone.

  Thirty paces from the maple a young apple tree grew. She had planted it a year ago—or was it two years? Two gardeners, directed by her computer, had planted the tree, holding it carefully in their pincerlike metal limbs. She did not know if it would survive. A low wire fence circled it to protect the tree from the small animals that would gnaw at its bark. The fence had been knocked over a few times.

  Josepha looked past the clearing to the dirt road which wound through the wooded hills. A white hovercraft hugged the road, moving silently toward the field. The vehicle was a large insect with a clear bubble over its top. Small clouds of dust billowed around it as it moved. The craft stopped near the tangled bushes along the road, the bubble disappeared, and a man leaped gracefully out onto the road.

  Merripen Allen had arrived a day late.

  Josepha waved as he jogged toward her. He looked up and raised an arm. She wondered again why she had asked him to come. They had said everything and she had made her decision.

  But she wanted to see him anyway. There was a difference between seeing someone in the flesh and using the holo, even if an image appeared as substantial as a body, at least until one reached out to it and clutched air.

  He looked, as she expected, exactly like his image. His wavy black hair curled around his collar, framing his olive-skinned face. A thick moustache drooped around his mouth. But he seemed smaller than the amplified image, less imposing.

  She was still holding her cigarette as he came up to her. She had been living alone too long and had forgotten how some felt about such filthy habits. She concealed it in her palm, hoping Merripen had not seen it, then dropped it, grinding it into the ground with her foot. She entered the house, motioning for him to follow.

  Josepha disliked thinking about her life before the Transition. But her mind had become a network of involuntary associations, a mire of memories. She had been living in her isolated house for almost thirty years and would not have realized it without checking the dates. She had not believed it at first.

  It was time to pack up and leave, go somewhere else, do something she had not tried. Her mind resonated here. The sight of an object would evoke a memory; an odor would be followed by the image of a past experience; an event, even viewed at a distance, would touch off a recollection until it seemed she could barely get through the day without succumbing to reveries.

  Josepha was more than three hundred years old but she could still feel startled by the fact. She looked twenty-two—except that when she had actually been twenty-two she had been overweight, myopic, and had dyed her hair auburn. She had become, in what would have been her old age in another time, a slim woman with black hair and good vision. She was no longer plagued by asthma and migraine headaches and could not remember how they felt.

  But she remembered other things. The events of her youth sprang into her mind, often in greater detail than more recent happenings. She had thought of clearing out the memories; RNA doses, some rest, and the reverberations would be gone, the world would be fresh and new. But that was too much like dying. Her memories made her life, uneventful and pacific as it was, more meaningful.

  But now Merripen was here and the peace would soon end.

  Merripen Allen slouched in the dark blue chair near the window. His dark brown eyes surveyed the room restlessly. He seemed weary, yet alert and decisive. All the biologists were like that, Josepha thought. They were the ones who had made the world, who kept it alive, who had banished death. They held the power no one else wanted.

  Merripen was the descendant of English gypsies. His clipped speech was punctuated by his expressive arm gestures. Josepha suspected that he deliberately cultivated the contrast.

  They had spent several minutes engaging in courtesies; exchanging compliments, describing the weather to each other, asking after people they each knew, making an elaborate ceremony of dialing for refreshments. Now they sat across the room from each other silently sipping their white wine.

  Josepha wanted to speak but knew that would be rude; Merripen was still savoring the Chablis. He might want another glass and after that there would be more ceremonial banter, perhaps a flirtation. He would pay her compliments, embellishing them with quotations from Catullus, his trademark, and she would fence with him. She had gone through all this in abbreviated form with his image. A seduction, at least in theory, could last forever. Sex, however inventive, and however long it went on in all its permutations, grew duller. It was too much a reminder that other things still lived and died.

  Merripen finished the wine, then gazed out her window at the clearing, twirling the glass in his fingers. At last he turned back to her.

  “Delicious,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll have another.” He rose to his feet. She motioned him to sit, got up, and walked slowly to the oak cabinet in the corner where the opened bottle stood. She brought it to him and poured the wine carefully, placed the bottle on the table under the window, then sat down again.

  Merripen sipped. His visage blurred as she focused on the red rose in the slender silver vase on the low table in front of her. As she leaned back, the rose obscured Merripen’s body. The redness dominated her vision; she saw a red bedspread over a double bed in the center of a yellow room. She was back in her old room, in the house of her parents, long ago.

  She was fourteen and it was time to die. She locked her door.

  She gazed at the small bottle, fumbling with the cap, suspended in time past, vividly conscious of the red capsules, the red bedspread, the cheerful flowered curtains over her window. The pain these sights usually brought receded for a moment. A voice called to her, the same soft voice that had called to her before, the disembodied voice she had never located.

  She had been dying all along. The black void inside her had grown while the pain at its edges quivered. It would end now. As she swallowed the capsules, she was being captured by eternity, where she would live at last …

  She had emerged from a coma bewildered, uncomprehending, connected to tubes and catheters, realizing dimly that she still breathed. She tried to cry out and heard only a sighing whistle. She reached with her left hand for her throat, touched the hollow at the base of her neck and felt an open hole. They had cut her open and forced her to live as they lived.

  At night, as she lay in the hospital bed trying not to disturb the needle in her right wrist, she remembered a kind voice and its promise. Someone had spoken to her while she lay dying, while she hovered over her drugged body watching a tube forced into her failing lungs. The voice had not frightened her like the voice she had been hearing for months. It had been gentle, promising her that she would live on, that she would one day join it, and then had forced her to return. She was again trapped in her body.

  Perhaps her illness or the barbiturates had induced the vision. Yet it had seemed too real for that. She knew dimly that she could not discuss it, could not make anyone understand it, could not even be sure it was real. She felt she had lost something without even being sure of what it was. But the promise remained: not now, but another time.

  Josepha touched the rose and a petal fell. Her death was still denied her. She had lived, coming to believe she should not seek death actively, that three hundred, or a thousand, or a million years did not matter if the promise had been real.

  Merripen spoke. She looked away from the rose.

  The evening light bathed the room in a
rosy glow. Merripen’s skin was coppery and his tight white shirt was pinkish. “You are still with us,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You still want to be a parent to these children.”

  “Certainly.” Josepha had decided to become a parent two years earlier and had registered her wish. Her request had been granted—few people were raising children now. Her genes would be analyzed and an ectogenetic chamber would be licensed for the fetus. She had been surprised when Merripen Allen contacted her, saying that before she went ahead with her plans he had a proposal to make.

  He and a few other biologists wanted to create a new variant of humanity. They had been consulting for years, using computer minds to help them decide what sort of redesigned person might be viable. Painstakingly, they had constructed a model of such a being and its capacities, not wanting to alter the human form too radically for fear of the unknown consequences, yet seeking more than minor changes.

  Merripen sighed, looking relieved. “I expected you wouldn’t back out now, almost no one has, but two people changed their minds last week. When you asked me here I thought you had also.”

  She smiled and shook her head. It was Merripen’s motives she wished to consider. She had worried that she might change her mind after seeing the child, but that was unlikely. There were no guarantees even with a normal child, since the biologists, afraid of too much tampering with human versatility, simply insured that flawed genes were not passed on rather than actively creating a certain type of child.

  Even so, she had wondered when Merripen first made his offer. They had argued, he saying that human society was becoming stagnant while she countered by mentioning the diversity of human communities both on Earth and in space.

  “We need new blood,” he said now, apparently thinking along similar lines. “Oh, we have diversity, but it’s all on the surface. I’ve seen a hundred different cultures and at bottom they’re the same, a way of passing time. Even the death cults …”