To Dream

by Lowy, Louis K;

  Pallab knocked her in the back of the head. “How could you have allowed this to happen?” Pallab was sitting at his desk in the University of Miami’s Virtual Systems Office. She was standing, facing him and holding their newborn. He said, “My sister warned me that as head of VS, it would be improper to marry a student. She said bad things would come of it. She was right.”

  Niyati hugged Jay, stepped back, but didn’t go anywhere.

  “Give him to me,” Pallab said.

  Niyati shook her head.

  “I said to hand him over.”

  She tightened her grip on the baby.

  Pallab knocked her in the back of the head again.

  She toppled…a bull with one horn ripped from its head hurtled through marshland toward her. Her pulse hammered with fear-induced adrenalin. She rolled onto her back and was lying in the rear seat of an SUV with Miguel Acevedo. Her cool skin pressed against his nakedness. He fondled her breasts. She licked his shoulder. She was young, maybe nineteen. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she was pregnant with Jay.

  Pallab smacked her in the back of the head. Her skull rattled. She was old again, fully dressed and standing next to Lulu who was in a hospital bed, dying. Lulu was obese. Her right leg had been amputated. Her hair was straggled and gray. Velvet Cowgirl was there and so was Velvet’s daughter, Cha-Cha. Lulu tugged Niyati’s hand and said, “I don’t want to die. Please! You know the secret. Save me.”

  Niyati shook her head. “I can’t.” Jay, seventeen, stood behind her in his cap and gown. She turned to him and repeated, “I can’t,” and sobbed.

  Niyati was knocked in the back of the head again, but it wasn’t Pallab. It was a red pick-up with a fireman’s sticker on its windshield. The pick-up crashed into her passenger side mirror. Jay’s mortar cap slammed against her.

  Pallab screamed, “Maadher chod!” Niyati’s calf ached from pushing as hard as she could on the brakes. The crunch of fiberglass and metal, and the terrible, high-pitched wail of Jay’s screams flooded her ears.

  Niyati jolted awake, slammed the caterwauling alarm clock off and waited for her heart to stop pummeling against her chest.

  There was a knock on the door. “Everything good, Doctor?”

  Niyati took a moment to calm herself and said, “Yes, come in.”

  Velvet Cowgirl entered. She was a fit, middle-age woman with tawny skin and long, flowing black hair. “I heard you moan. Bad dreams again? You okay?”

  “Fine. Perfectly.”

  Velvet Cowgirl studied her. “Have you thought about what I said…trying therapy?”

  Niyati grunted. “Lulu would’ve offered me a shot of Glenlivit or a joint to calm my nerves and that would’ve been the end of it.”

  “My mom was a pistol, no doubt about it.” Velvet Cowgirl helped Niyati to her feet. “But these are different times.”

  Different times, indeed, Niyati thought. Lulu’s death flashed in Niyati’s eyes, along with her final words: You know the secret. Save me. But Lulu had been wrong. She didn’t know the secret. The only thing she knew, and it wasn’t much of a secret to Lulu, was that when Niyati had started taking GTS sixty years ago it had cured her lung cancer. When Lulu had succumbed to diabetes two decades later, GTS had no effect on her condition. It was too early in the research. Still, Lulu’s dying words haunted Niyati.

  Cha-Cha dashed into the room. “For you, Gran-gran.” Velvet Cowgirl’s five-year-old offered Niyati a clump of freshly picked daisies.

  Niyati breathed them in. “How beautiful!” she said, and hugged the little girl. She placed the flowers in a vase that she kept on her nightstand for this welcomed ritual.

  “Worldwide sat-com crews are setting up. There must be at least sixty different ones,” Velvet Cowgirl said as she rifled through Niyati’s closet. She pulled out a cream-colored evening dress. “I like this one. It highlights your eyes. What do you think?”

  “I’m a hundred and five,” Niyati replied. “Do you really think anyone’s going to notice the connection?” She headed into the bathroom.

  “Gran-gran’s peppery this morning, isn’t she Cha-Cha?”

  “Un-huh.”

  Niyati turned back around. She was about to prove them right by saying something grumpy, but when she saw them smiling at her, Niyati smiled back. No need taking my problems out on them, she thought. They’re the closest things I have to family. “What’dya say, Cha-Cha? After my shower, let’s have breakfast on the terrace so we can watch all the hubbub.”

  Cha-Cha nodded.

  “I’ll find a nice brooch and necklace to go with your outfit,” Velvet Cowgirl added.

  Niyati glanced at her alarm clock. There was still five hours before the stockholder’s gathering began. She made her way to the bathroom, wondering if she was going to love or dread what was going to take place today.

  ~~~

  The see-through parboflex walls and ceiling was filtered at about mid-level, Niyati figured, because the blazing July sun seeped through like a ball of cool, muted light on the three or four hundred people who had already taken their seats in the atrium.

  Buster Panther had his people reconfigure the building’s shape from its usual rectangle into an octagon in honor of the special occasion. Niyati didn’t know why, but eight was his lucky number. Cascading down the eight atrium walls, like a thousand glittering waterfalls, were the phrases “The Impossible is Now Possible” and “Experience the Best Through GTS.”

  Niyati watched the ant pile of activity going on outside of the transparent building. Not far from the old guesthouse where she had originally lived—before she turned it over to Lulu after her larger quarters were built, and then to Velvet Cowgirl after Lulu died—there were several gatherings of formally attired stockholders. One group clapped time to a half-dozen Seminole men and shaker-rattling women dressed in traditional garb. They were on a platform clomping around a holographic fire doing the Opvnkv Haco, or Stomp Dance.

  Not far from the dancers, another crowd was gathered around a laser-link fence watching a Seminole man saddled over an alligator. His arms were spread like jet wings and he was holding the gator’s head up from behind with his chin.

  In other areas of the Panther compound, three musical groups were each performing on separate stages. One stage featured a Seminole trans-a-billy band, another a classical string quartet, and a third a hip-polka-hop band.

  Servers roamed about forking out fried frog legs, pumpkin bread, crab claws, ceviche, and Panther’s Premium Lager.

  A thirty-foot-wide circle-screen rotated high above the grounds, projecting a montage that included Seminole cultural scenes of two men shaping a dugout canoe and a female surgeon comparing notes with colleagues. There was a shot of Chief Buster Panther greeting the president as he stepped out of Air Force One.

  “This whole affair is gaudy,” Velvet Cowgirl whispered. She was sitting inside the atrium next to Niyati. They were three rows back, dead center to the dais. The press corps was cordoned off on a riser at the rear of the building. Cha-Cha napped on Velvet Cowgirl’s lap. “Do you think Chief Dan would have made the announcement this way?”

  “I doubt it,” Niyati replied. She thought about one of the last times she had seen Buster’s father. He had been wandering the most exclusive patient’s floor of the building he owned, Panther Alzheimer’s Institute, trying to interlock time fragments that didn’t piece together correctly. He had asked her what she wanted from the school lunch menu, stiff-armed a wheelchair and performed a touchdown dance around it. He had squatted in the hall and relieved his bowels. He asked to call Suzette, his dead wife, to tell her he was going to pick-up Buster from the nursery. This was twenty years ago, when Buster was forty-five and Dan Panther was an octogenarian.

  The bang and crackle of 3D firework graphics soaring out of the large circle-screen drew Niyati’s attention back to now. Along with the virtual pyrotechnics came mythological winged creatures: Pegasus, Griffins, and Sylphs dissolving as they winged within feet of the
atrium.

  The outdoor display ended. The entertainers stopped performing and the caterers stopped serving. The atrium walls lost their transparency and turned a gold-veined white marble. World broadcast cams mounted on the inside walls swiveled their lenses toward the dais. Seats rose up from the granite floor to accommodate the mass that was entering.

  Niyati watched muscle-bound bodyguards escort Malalani Takáts, the sixty-five-year-old grande dame of Ameri-Inc., to her place in the front row center. With her were her two children, Herbert and Rebeka. Niyati thought they looked to be in their early twenties. Herbert seemed bored. Rebeka had the same steely-eyed countenance of her mother. Malalani nodded to the bodyguards. They blended discretely into the shadows.

  “Showtime.” Velvet Cowgirl shook her head with disdain.

  Niyati smiled. Velvet’s mother, Lulu, would be reveling in the activity. She missed Lulu, and she missed Dan Panther who was alive in body, but not in mind. Niyati teared up. Damn it, she thought, quit being an old woman.

  Velvet Cowgirl noticed Niyati’s moistened eyes. She smiled sympathetically and patted Niyati’s hand. “It’s been a busy day. How about when we get home I make us all hot chocolate?”

  Niyati narrowed her eyes at Velvet Cowgirl. She hated to be treated like a…like a senior citizen. She was a hundred and five, and yes, moved slower than she did thirty years ago, but she was still the sharpest scientist in Buster’s stable, not to mention the wealthiest.

  As the final stockholders took their seats, Niyati’s mind returned to poor Dan Panther. GTS worked miracles on cancer and showed great promise on more diseases than she thought possible, but it had no perceivable effect on mental disorders or brain diseases. And then there was the mineral’s coup de maître—purer doses combined with a few stimulants slowed aging. She was proof of that, which was her conundrum.

  In one sense she wanted to die and end the guilt that fell upon her plup, plup, plup, like clumps of sand. On the other hand, she needed to come to terms with herself by explaining to J-1 what he was—a machine with the essence of her son lurking somewhere inside. She had no idea if Jay’s essence lived or had become another data bit in a link of trillions. She prayed with all her heart that it was the former.

  There was only one way to know this. It was to speak with J-1 and to look into his eyes. Jay was her flesh and blood. She would know if a part of him existed. She would know.

  Until that moment came, Niyati vowed to stay alive. Even if it meant that the physical longevity GTS was capable of giving might also shatter her mentally like it did Dan Panther. Though there was no solid evidence that GTS caused mind erosion, as she approached her thirtieth year of taking the drug she had developed near-constant nightmares. The implications frightened the hell out of her.

  As if partnered with her bleak thoughts, the room darkened. Conversation stopped. A drum roll filled the silence. A cobalt spotlight beamed down on the empty dais. A sonorous voice rumbled, “La-hey-dies and Ge-hentlemen, from this evening on, there will be only two moments worth telling your grandchildren about—how it was before tonight, and how it was after.” The drum roll became kettledrums pounding from high to low pitches: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

  “The Moment is Now!” darted along the ceiling, spiraled, and showered onto the crowd. Chief Buster Panther rose from a platform beneath the stage into the circle of cobalt.

  Niyati could practically feel Velvet Cowgirl’s eyes rolling.

  Buster was decked out in his trademark outfit: black tee, black Levi’s, unbuttoned black-with-turquoise patchwork waist-jacket and moccasin-hide boots. A towering holoscreen appeared behind him, projecting close-ups of his image. Lavish cheering. He held up his hands until the noise died down. Buster spoke. “In conjunction with my partner and good friends, Ameri-Inc., the first FDA tested and approved cancer vaccine will go on the market in less than five hours. I predict all forms of the disease will be completely—that’s right—completely eradicated within the next decade!”

  The crowd sprang to their feet and smacked their hands in thunderous applause. The tympani drums morphed into Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with a blazing eight-string guitar solo jamming above it. Hundreds of spotlights fandangoed across the crowd. Wide eyed, Cha-Cha clamped her hands to her ears. Stockholders cried with joy. Others hugged one another. Niyati glanced at Malalani and her children. She and her daughter, Rebeka, remained seated. They were stiff-backed, clapping politely and looking straight ahead. Herbert was standing, looking around the room with a large smile.

  From the stage, Buster Panther waited for the moment to crest and motioned for the crowd to sit. He explained the basics, which Niyati already knew: how their partner, Ameri-Inc., had completed an intergalactic pipeline to excavate, ship and refine GTS from the exoplanet, Truatta, and that, “A team of inspectors is flying into Truatta next month. The mining operation will officially begin upon their final approval.” He described Truattans as, “Uncomplicated, welcoming people who are appreciative of our mutual relationship,” and how “Ameri-Inc. has taken special care not to disrupt their environment,” and that “The land itself is similar to and as beautiful as Oahu.” Niyati deduced the latter part was in deference to Malalani Takáts’ Hawaiian heritage.

  Then Buster said something that shocked her: “Ameri-Inc.’s most sophisticated robot—the Humachine—will run the Truatta end of the operations.” He didn’t explain why, but it wasn’t hard for Niyati to figure it out, J-1 allowed Ameri-Inc. to skirt a plethora of time-consuming and costly government regulations required to bring in a crew of human operators, and only something as sophisticated as J-1 could single-handedly manage such an undertaking.

  Niyati tapped Velvet Cowgirl on the arm and whispered, “After the hoopla has died down, please get word to Buster that I’d like him to stop by my residence. I don’t care how late it is.” Velvet Cowgirl’s eyebrows lifted. Niyati rose to her feet and walked toward the exit. Velvet Cowgirl grabbed Cha-cha’s hand and followed.

  ~~~

  Niyati sat on her back porch rocker watching the moonlight ripple on the lake. The holoscreen imbedded in her chair flashed the time in front of her, 3:37am. The party had died down from where it had been hours earlier, a roar of voices and music, to where it was now; quiet enough to hear not only the crickets, but also the crunch of approaching boots in the dewy grass. The wearer of the boots, Buster Panther, stepped on the marble porch and leaned against the banister.

  “Time wants to do a spread on me.”

  “How come I didn’t know about J-1 being sent to the mining operations?”

  “Newshound and Second by Second have requested interviews for tomorrow night.” He slapped his hand against his jeans and laughed. “God, it was a good night!”

  Niyati stopped rocking. “Your daddy and I trusted each other, Buster. I expected the same from you.”

  Buster turned away and stared at the moon. “Hell, we don’t even know if it’s really him they sent up there. It could be any robot.”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence.”

  “You’ve been like a second mother, Niyati. You know that.” He turned back around and smiled warmly. “I hope in some ways I’ve been like a son. I don’t want anything happening to you. Dad loved you, and I love you, too.”

  Niyati smiled, but hers was tight. “Cut the bullshit. I want on that flight.”

  “You’d never survive the trip. It’s rough for a twenty-year-old, much less a woman of your age. I can’t in good conscience allow you to take that kind of risk.”

  “You don’t want me on it because you’re afraid of losing your cash cow.”

  “I’m offended,” Buster replied. “Even if I thought it was a good idea, it’s impossible. I have no say over Ameri-Inc.” He walked down the porch.

  “Get me on that ship and I’ll sign over a portion of my partnership to you.”

  “Good night,” Buster said without looking back or slowing down.

  “I’ll give you ninety percent
.”

  He stopped and turned around. “Ninety percent?” It wasn’t often that Buster Panther was caught with his trousers down, but Niyati could plainly hear the surprise in his voice. He stroked his nose and stared at her warily. Finally, he waved his hand. “No deal. You’re the brains behind the research. How about if I arrange with Ameri-Inc. to run a sat-feed between you two?”

  “No. I must speak with him personally. Look into his eyes.”

  “Sorry, but if something happens to you, there’s no more money to be made.”

  Niyati walked to him. She straightened the collar on his patchwork jacket. “It’s not me that makes you money. It’s the knowledge I possess. You get me on that flight and before I leave, I’ll hand over all of my data files. If you refuse, I’ll destroy everything, meaning my work for Panther enterprises will cease.”

  “You can’t stop working. It’s in your blood.”

  “There’s plenty of other stuff to keep me busy, Buster. For instance, have you ever wondered if the chirp of crickets could be tuned to interrupt gamma-alpha particles? And if they did, what would the meteorological implications be on the Kármán line?” She had no idea what she was talking about, but she took her seat in the rocker, sat motionless and cupped her ear as if to better hear the cricket sounds.

  “The flight’ll kill you.”

  “I’m also thinking about taking up dressmaking again.”

  “Shit!” He flung his hands in the air. “I guess I can come up with some cock and bull about you being a sanitary expert or something, making a final inspection on the integrity of the GTS supply chain. I’ll have my people draw up the papers turning over your ninety-percent to me. Promise me you won’t stay long.”

  “I’ll only stay long enough to speak with him and to see how he’s doing.”

  “How bad could he be doing? He’s a ro—” Buster took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Niyati. I know what he means to you. Just, you know, don’t be too disappointed.”