Keeper of Dreams

by Orson Scott Card

2024—Angle Φ

  “I can’t stand it, I can’t. I won’t live here another day, another hour.”

  “But it never harms us, and we can’t afford to move.”

  “The chair is on top of the door, it could fall, it could hurt one of the children. Why is it doing this to us? What have we done to offend it?”

  “We haven’t done anything, it’s just malicious, it’s just enjoying itself!”

  “No, don’t make it angry!”

  “I’m fed up! Stop this! Go away! Leave us alone!”

  “What good is it to break the chair and smash the room!”

  “No good. Nothing does any good. Go, get the children, take them out into the garden. I’ll call a taxi. We’ll go to your sister’s house.”

  “They don’t have room.”

  “For tonight they have room. Not another night in this evil place.”

  3000

  Hakira examined the contract, and it seemed simple enough. Passage for the entire membership of Kotoshi, if they assembled at their own expense. Free return for up to ten days, but only at the end of the ten days, as a single group. There would be no refund for those who returned. But all that seemed fair enough, especially since the price was not exorbitant.

  “Of course this contract isn’t binding anyway,” said Hakira. “How could it be enforced? This whole passage is illegal.”

  “Not in the target world, it isn’t,” said Moshe. “And that’s where it would have to be enforced, nu?”

  “It’s not as if I can find a lawyer from that world to represent my interests now.”

  “It makes no sense for me to have dissatisfied customers.”

  “How do I know you won’t just strand us there?” said Hakira. “It might not even be a world with a breathable atmosphere—a lot of angles are still mostly hydrocarbon gas, with no free oxygen at all.”

  “Didn’t I tell you? I go with you. In fact, I have to—I’m the one who brings you through.”

  “Brings us? Don’t you just put us in a bender and—”

  “Bender!” Moshe laughed. “Those primitive machines? No wonder the near worlds are never found—benders can’t make the fine distinctions that we make. No, I take you through. We go together.”

  “What, we all join hands and . . . you’re serious. Why are you wasting my time with mumbo jumbo like this!”

  “If it’s mumbo jumbo, then we’ll all hold hands and nothing will happen, and you’ll get your money back. Right?” Moshe spread his hands. “What do you have to lose!”

  “It feels like a scam.”

  “Then leave. You came to me, remember?”

  “Because you got that group of Zionists through.”

  “Exactly my point,” said Moshe. “I took them through. I came back, they didn’t—because they were absolutely satisfied. They’re in a world where Israel was never conquered by the surrounding Arab states so Jews still have their own Hebrew-speaking state. The same world, I might add, where Japan is still populated by self-governing Japanese.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch. Except that we use a different mechanism that is not approved by the government and so we have to do it under the table.”

  “But why does the other world allow it?” asked Hakira. “Why do they let you bring people in?”

  “This is a rescue,” said Moshe. “They bring you in as refugees from an unbearable reality. They bring you home. The government of Israel in that reality, as a matter of policy, declares that Jews have a right to return—even Jews from a different angle. And the government of Japan recently decided to offer the same privilege to you.”

  “It’s still so hard to believe that anyone found a populated world that has Japanese at all.”

  “Well, isn’t it obvious?” said Moshe. “Nobody found that world.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That world found us.”

  Hakira thought about it for a moment. “That’s why they don’t use benders, they have their own technology for reslanting from angle to angle.”

  “Exactly right, except for your use of the word ‘they.’ ”

  And now Hakira understood. “Not they. You. You’re not from this world. You’re one of them.”

  “When we discovered your tragic world, I was sent to bring Jews home to Israel. And when we realized that the Japanese suffered a similar tragic loss, the decision was made to extend the offer to you. Hakira, bring your people home.”

  2024—Angle Θ

  “I told them I didn’t want to see you.”

  “I know.”

  “I was sitting there playing cards and suddenly I’m almost killed!”

  “It never happened that way before. The chair usually just . . . slid. Or sometimes floated.”

  “It was smashed to bits! I had a concussion, it’s taken ten stitches, I’ll have this scar on my face for the rest of my life!”

  “But I didn’t do it, I didn’t know it would happen that way. How could I? There were no wires, you know that. You saw.”

  “Nossa. Yes. I saw. But it’s not a ghost.”

  “I never said it was. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know. Everything else I think of sounds like fantasy. But then, telephones and satellite TV and movies and submarines once sounded like fantasy to anyone who thought of such ideas. And in this case, there’ve been stories of ghosts and hauntings and poltergeists since . . . since the beginning of time, I imagine. Only they’re rare. So rare that they don’t often happen to scientists.”

  “In the history of the world, real scientists are rarer than poltergeists.”

  “And if such things did happen to a scientist, how many of them might have done as you urged me to do—ignore it. Pretend it was a hallucination. Move to another place where such things don’t happen. And the scientists who refuse to blind their eyes to the evidence before them—what happens to them? I’ll tell you what happens, because I’ve found seven of them in the past two hundred years—which isn’t a lot, but these are the ones who published what happened to them. And in every case, they were immediately discredited as scientists. No one listened to them anymore. Their careers were over. The ones who taught lost tenure at their universities. Three of them were committed to mental institutions. And not once did anyone else seriously investigate their claims. Except, of course, the people who are already considered to be completely bobo, the paranormalists, the regular batch of fakers and hucksters.”

  “And the same thing will happen to you.”

  “No. Because I have you as a witness.”

  “What kind of witness am I? I was hit in the head. Do you understand? I was in the hospital, delirious, concussive, and I have the scar on my face to prove it. No one will believe me, either. Some will even wonder if you didn’t beat me into agreeing to testify for you!”

  “Ah, Leonard. God help me, but you’re right.”

  “Call an exorcist.”

  “I’m a scientist! I don’t want it to go away! I want to understand it!”

  “So, Bêto, scientist, explain it to me. If it isn’t a ghost to be exorcised, what is it?”

  “A parallel world. No, listen, listen to me! Maybe in the empty spaces between atoms, or even the empty spaces within atoms, there are other atoms we can’t detect most of the time. An infinite number of them, some very close to ours, some very far. And suppose that when you enclose a space, and somebody in one of those infinite parallel universes encloses the same space, it can cause just the slightest bit of material overlap.”

  “You mean there’s something magic about boxes? Come on.”

  “You asked for possibilities! But if the landforms are similar, then the places where towns are built would be similar, too. The confluence of rivers. Harbors. Good farmland. People in many universes would be building towns in the same places. Houses. All it takes is one room that overlaps, and suddenly you get echoes between worlds. You get a single chair that exists
in both worlds at once.”

  “What, somebody in our world goes and buys a chair and somebody in the other world happens to go and buy the same one on the same day?”

  “No. I moved into the house, that chair was already there. Haunted houses are always old, aren’t they? Old furniture. It’s been there long enough, undisturbed, for the chair to have spilled a little and exist in both worlds. So . . . you take the chair and put it on top of the door, and the people in the other world come home and find the chair has been moved—maybe they even saw it move—and he’s fed up, he’s furious, he smashes the chair.”

  “Ludicrous.”

  “Well, something happened, and you have the scar to prove it.”

  “And you have the chair fragments.”

  “Well, no.”

  “What! You threw them out?”

  “My best guess is that they threw them out. Or else, I don’t know, when the chair lost its structure, the echo faded. Anyway, the pieces are gone.”

  “No evidence. That clinches it. If you publish this I’ll deny it, Bêto.”

  “No you won’t.”

  “I will. I’ve already had my face damaged. I’m not going to let you shatter my career as well. Bêto, drop it!”

  “I can’t! This is too important! Science can’t continue to refuse to look at this and find out what’s really going on!”

  “Yes it can! Scientists regularly refuse to look at all kinds of things because it would be bad for their careers to see them! You know it’s true!”

  “Yes. I know it’s true. Scientists can be blind. But not me. And not you either, Leonard. When I publish this, I know you’ll tell the truth.”

  “If you publish this, I’ll know you’re crazy. So when people ask me, I’ll tell them the truth—that you’re crazy. The chair is gone now anyway. Chances are this will never happen again. In five years you’ll come to think of it as a weird hallucination.”

  “A weird hallucination that left you scarred for life.”

  “Go away, Bêto. Leave me alone.”

  2186

  “I call it the Angler, and using it is called Angling.”

  “It looks expensive.”

  “It is.”

  “Too expensive to sell it as a toy.”

  “It’s not for children anyway. Look, it’s expensive because it’s really high-tech, but that’s a plus, and the more popular it becomes, the more the per-unit cost will drop. We’ve studied the price point and we think we’re right on this.”

  “OK, fine, what does it do?”

  “I’ll show you. Put on this cap and—”

  “I certainly will not! Not until you tell me what it does.”

  “Sure, I understand, no problem. What it does is, it puts you into someone else’s head.”

  “Oh, it’s just a Dreamer, those have been around for years, they had their vogue but—”

  “No, not a Dreamer. True, we do use the old Dreamer technology as the playback system, because why reinvent the wheel? We were able to license it for a song, so why not? But the thing that makes this special is this—the recording system.”

  “Recording?”

  “You know about slantspace, right?”

  “That’s all theoretical games.”

  “Not really just theoretical. I mean, it’s well known that our brains store memory in slantspace, right?”

  “Sure, yeah. I knew that.”

  “Well, see, here’s the thing. There’s an infinite number of different universes that have a lot of their matter coterminous with ours—”

  “Here it comes, engineer talk, we can’t sell engineering babble.”

  “There are people in these other worlds. Like ghosts. They wander around, and their memories are stored in our world.”

  “Where?”

  “Just sitting there in the air. Just a collection of angles. Wherever their head is, in our world and a lot of other parallel worlds, they have their memories stored as a pattern of slants. Haven’t you had the experience of walking into a room and then suddenly you can’t remember why you came in?”

  “I’m seventy years old, it happens all the time.”

  “It has nothing to do with being seventy. It happened when you were young, too. Only you’re more susceptible now, because your own brain has so much memory stored that it’s constantly accessing other slants. And sometimes, your head space passes through the head space of someone else in another world, and poof, your thoughts are confused—jammed, really—by theirs.”

  “My head just happens to pass through the space where the other guy’s head just happens to be?”

  “In an infinite series of universes, there are a lot of them where people about your height might be walking around. What makes it so rare is that most of them are using patterns of slants so different that they barely impinge on ours at all. And you have to be accessing memory right at that moment, too. Anyway, that’s not what matters—that is coincidence. But you set up this recorder here at about the height of a human being and turn it on, and as long as you don’t put it, say, on the thirtieth floor or the bottom of a lake or something, within a day you’ll have this thing filled up.”

  “With what?”

  “Up to twenty separate memory states. We could build it to hold a lot more, but it’s so easy to erase and replace that we figured twenty was enough and if people want more, we can sell peripherals, right? Anyway, you get these transitory brain states. Memories. And it’s the whole package, the complete mental state of another human being for one moment in time. Not a dream. Not fictionalized, you know? Those dreams, they were sketchy, haphazard, pretty meaningless. I mean, it’s boring to hear other people tell their dreams, how cool is it to actually have to sit through them? But with the Angler, you catch the whole fish. You’ve got to put it on, though, to know why it’s going to sell.”

  “And it’s nothing permanent.”

  “Well, it’s permanent in the sense that you”ll remember it, and it’ll be a pretty strong memory. But you know, you’ll want to remember it so that’s a good thing. It doesn’t damage anything, though, and that’s all that matters. I can try it on one of your employees first, though, if you want. Or I’ll put it on myself.”

  “No, I’ll do it. I’ll have to do it in the end before I’ll make the decision, so I might as well do it from the start. Put on the cap. And no, it’s not a toupee, if I were going to get a rug I’d choose a better one than this.”

  “All right, a snug fit, but that’s why we made it elastic.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “Objective time, only a fraction of a second. Subjectively, of course, well, you tell us. Ready?”

  “Sure. Give me a one, two, three, all right?”

  “I’ll do one, two, three, and then flip it like four. OK?”

  “Yeah yeah. Do it.”

  “One. Two. Three.”

  “Ah . . . aaah. Oh.”

  “Give it a few seconds. Just relax. It’s pretty strong.”

  “You didn’t . . . how could this . . . I . . .”

  “It’s all right to cry. Don’t worry. First time, most people do.”

  “I was just . . . She’s just . . . I was a woman.”

  “Fifty-fifty chance.”

  “I never knew how it felt to . . . This should be illegal.”

  “Technically, it falls under the same laws as the Dreamer, so, you know, not for children and all that.”

  “I don’t know if I’d ever want to use it again. It’s so strong.”

  “Give yourself a few days to sort it out, and you’ll want it. You know you will.”

  “Yes. No, don’t try to push any paperwork on me right now, I’m not an idiot. I’m not signing anything while my head’s so . . . but . . . tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. Let me sleep on it.”

  “Of course. We couldn’t ask for anything more than that.”

  “Have you shown this to anyone else?”

  “You’re the biggest and the best. We came to yo
u first.”

  “We’re talking exclusive, right?”

  “Well, as exclusive as our patents allow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve patented every method we’ve thought of, but we think there are a lot of ways to record in slantspace. In fact, the real trouble is, the hardest thing is to design a record that doesn’t bend space on the other side. I mean, people’s heads won’t go through the recording field if the recorder itself is visible in their space! What I’m saying is, we’ll be exclusive until somebody finds another way to do it without infringing our patent. That’ll take years, of course, but . . .”

  “How many years?”

  “No faster than three, and probably longer. And we can tie them up in court longer still.”

  “Look at me, I’m still shaking. Can you play me the same memory?”

  “We could build a machine that would do that, but you won’t want to. The first time with each one is the best. Doing the same person twice can leave you a little . . . confused.”

  “Bring me the paperwork tomorrow for an exclusive for five years. We’ll launch with enough product to drop that price point from the start.”

  3001

  It took a month for the members of Kotoshi to assemble. Only a few decided not to go, and they took a vow of silence to protect those who were leaving. They gathered at the southern tip of Manhattan, in the parlor of Moshe’s house. They had no belongings with them.

  “It’s one of the unfortunate side effects of the technology we use,” Moshe explained. “Nothing that is not organically connected to your bodies can make the transition to the new slant. As when you were born, you will be naked when you arrive. That’s why wholesale colonization using this technology is impractical—no tools. Nor can you transfer any kind of wealth or art. You come empty-handed.”

  “Is it cold there?”

  “The climate is different,” said Moshe. “You’ll arrive on the southern tip of Manhattan, and it will be winter, but there are no glaciers closer than Greenland. Anyway, you’ll arrive indoors. I live in this house and use it for transition because there is a coterminous room in the other angle. Nothing to fret about.”