To Dream

by Lowy, Louis K;

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Date: 2250

  Planet Truatta

  Mount Kwieetus

  My mother screams. My father yells, “Maadher chod!” My mortar cap flies past me. A crunch noise claws my ears. I am looking upon my body pressed into the dashboard. The left side of a red pick-up has crashed into my right side. The impact has caused my neck to snap, my ribcage to shred and my lungs, intestines and heart to rupture. A man in the pick-up backs up, speeds forward and disappears off the exit ramp. A woman taps my shoulder. I turn. I can’t tell if she’s human or machine. Her figure is Rubenesque. Her skin is the gray color of dawn. Her limbs appear metallic but her blue eyes look human. They reflect peace and serenity.

  “Come along,” the mechanical-human woman says. “It is time to leave.”

  I am rising. I am at peace.

  My mother cries out, “Jay! It is not time.”

  I stop rising. The tranquility saturating my body leaves and suspends above me, a fingernail beyond my reach.

  The mechanical-human woman cocks her head. Her lips are still, but in my head I hear her say, If you wish to go, now is the time.

  “Part of me wants to go,” I respond.

  Which part? The mechanical or human? she speaks inside my head.

  “I don’t know.”

  She smiles. “And therein lies the rub.” The mechanical-human woman rises without me.

  “Wait,” I say. “Give me a moment to figure this out.”

  Her voice again fills my head. The moment has already passed. However, if you choose the right path another will come. Though she is far above me, I hear her whisper in my ear, “Be prepared, it is your final opportunity. Until then, may you find peace.” She waves once to me and continues her ascension.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and groan. My body rattles. It rattles harder. So hard I’m forced to open my eyes. My breath is laden. My chest thumps hard. “What?” I speak the question unsure of where I am or whom I’m speaking to. The answers come quickly. I am curled up in the fetal position on Coco’s lifter tray. It is rocking in short, rapid bumps barely above the ground but without making contact with it. I grasp the reason. Coco’s rattling is meant to stir me without making a noisy commotion. I wave at her to stop. She does.

  I sit up, take a slow, deep breath and gather my bearings. We are still camped out in the spot we stopped at last night. Though I haven’t been told, it isn’t difficult to figure out that we are nearly at the mountain’s peak and that Pocketsville must be close at hand. The land is rocky, barren and tinted with pre-dawn gray seeping over the horizon. Snowflakes fall, but are quickly swept away in the near-constant howling wind. I know the routine. In an hour the sun will rise high enough to replace the gray hue with lavender. With it, Norma and the others will emerge from their tents. Before I can gather further thoughts, Coco quietly turns her lifter tray, which I’m still sitting on, until it faces the only person who isn’t asleep—the sentry keeping watch about thirty feet away.

  I try to make out whom it is, but he or she is perched in front of the emerging sun’s rays. The background glow makes the sentry appear in silhouette. I lie back down and close my eyes. Coco once more rattles the lifter tray and slants it backwards to prod me to sit up, which I do. She again points me in the direction of the silhouetted sentry. Coco tilts downward and back up. It is a nod to confirm that she wants me to focus my attention on that person. For several minutes the sentry remains still among the wailing wind. There is a momentary lull in the weather. The figure looks around.

  I slump and squint my eyes to make like I’m asleep. The person removes a gun-like object from their belt and aims it upward and at an angle away from the tents. The sentry looks around one more time and fires. There is a quiet whiz sound, quieter than the wind gusts. A flickering green and red sparkle shoots toward the sky. Within seconds the sparkle disperses and disappears. The momentary wind lull ceases. The sentry replaces the flair device and retains his or her former stance. I turn to Coco and whisper, “Do you know what’s going on?”

  Coca tilts from side to side: no.

  “How many times has it happened tonight?”

  Coco raises and lowers her lifter tray three times.

  “Do you think it’s something good?”

  Coco remains motionless.

  “Something bad?”

  She still doesn’t move.

  “Maybe I should say something to Nor—” I’m cut short by a humming sound. My stomach sours. It’s coming from the sentry’s direction. I turn. The sun has risen even more. I squint to block the light. Even with that I can make out only two things: the person is pointing an electro-rod at me, and from the weapon’s hum, it is at full capacity and ready for discharge. The sentry steps toward me. The hum increases in pitch. I lift my hands to block my face. A platinum ray slams into my chest. There are streaks of light. I dry heave. Cold and hot flashes, stomach, quad cramps envelope me. I convulse and tumble off of Coco’s lifter tray onto the stony dirt below. There is darkness. Before it overtakes me an odd question sparkles in my mind, is this the second opportunity the mechanical-human woman in my dream spoke of?

  ~~~

  Norma foot-nudged J-1. His eyes were closed. He was shivering. His face was splotched with vomited peach-colored bio-core fluid. He didn’t respond to her prod. Norma kicked harder. He opened his left eye. She slipped a napkin-sized cloth from her backpack and flapped it in the air. The cloth expanded into a throw blanket. “You stink, automaton. What happened?” She kneeled and laid the cloth over him.

  J-1 opened his other eye. Standing beside Norma were Prudence, Hob, and Teague. Orson was standing behind them tied in his bindings. The tents were packed and the campground cleaned. J-1 gripped the blanket and brought it to his chin. He had never felt this type of cold before. It had little to do with the wind and snow. This was a liquid freeze that crawled through the veins of his relay units and processors. He couldn’t stop trembling. Norma tucked the blanket in at his sides.

  J-1 studied the others. He tried to piece together which one had attempted to kill him. Their faces revealed nothing.

  “Automaton, you still with us?” Norma slipped a rag from her belt and wiped the vomit from his face.

  As leader, J-1 knew Norma never stood guard. That gave him comfort to ask, “Who stood guard last night?”

  She stopped wiping and stared at him. “No one. Why do you ask?”

  J-1’s jaw clenched. If there were no guards, even she could have been the person he’d seen last night.

  “If it’s any business of yours,” she added, “we rarely post guard here because we’re close enough to Pocketsville that if anything was coming they would see it before us and send a signal.”

  “What’s going on, friend?” Teague asked. “Why the curiosity?”

  “I’ll tell you why,” Orson said. “He’s a spy gathering information for the Earthers.”

  “No,” J-1 said. “I…after I convulsed I wondered why no one came. That’s all.” He lowered his eyes.

  Prudence glanced at Hob. He grimaced.

  “Robot, from this point on I want you within my vision at all times.” Norma stood and said to the others, “If he strays from my sight for one blink, I want him taken down. That’s standing orders for all of you.”

  “About mother Earthin’ time,” Orson said.

  “Prudence, Hob, put him on the lifter,” Norma said.

  They flopped him on Coco’s tray.

  “Let’s suit up and get out of here.” Norma and the rest removed a palm-size object from each of their belt pouches. They rubbed the item until it expanded into a hooded body suit. Before donning the heavy garment, Prudence reached into Orson’s belt pouch and did the same for him.

  Norma said to J-1, “You and the lifter stay two arms’ distance in front of me. Got it?” J-1 nodded and motioned for Coco to do as they were told. Norma gave the orders to move on.

  They traveled up the mountain path until near sunset. Norma
led the cadre. J-1 and Coco maintained a position slightly in front so she could keep an eye on them. Prudence and Hob followed behind Norma. Orson trailed them. His hands remained bound behind his back. Teague held up the rear. The lower the sun sank, the lower the temperature fell and the steeper and narrower the trail became. The air smelled of cold gravel. The flurries were constant now.

  From his perch curled up on Coco’s lift tray, J-1 looked over the outer edge of the pathway. There was nothing but a steep, snow-crusted rocky cliff that seemed to cascade down forever. J-1 glanced up. About a quarter of a mile above him was the portion of the mountain surrounded by mist. Above that he could see nothing but iron-gray sky.

  With great effort, J-1 forced himself to sit up. It was the first time he had had the strength to do so since being shot with the electro-rod. His core processors were taking a beating. The question was, how much longer could they continue before shutting down permanently?

  Another concern was the strain on Coco. Since he had lost the ability to transmit internally with the lifter, he had no way of determining Coco’s current operating capacity. Her solar intakes should keep her afloat indefinitely as long as there was sun, he thought, but their journey has been blanketed in perpetual overcast skies. He didn’t dare glance down at the cliff again. Lifters were built to gravitate a maximum ten feet above their surface. If she lost power and they tumbled over the edge he was afraid to visualize what would happen to them.

  Like a dogsled team, they trudged upward in lockstep until the sky blackened and the snow flurries whipped against them like sandblasts. When the road had slimmed to within shoulder width and had filled with ice and boulders, Norma shouted through the wind, “Hold up!”

  Unless she and her squad could levitate, J-1 thought, they weren’t going anywhere. He watched her remove a leather band from around her neck. Dangling from it was an object resembling a thumb-size, brass toothbrush. Norma worked her way through the gale to a heart-shaped rock embedded in the mountain. It was about chest height above the ground and the size of a human head.

  Norma rubbed the brass toothbrush between her gloved fingers. It expanded to twice its size and the bristle end of the object hardened into a key blade. She slid the key blade beneath the heart-shaped rock and turned the bow.

  The rock’s outer half swung open like a hinged door. Another key, a silver one, lay inside the small opening. She grabbed the second key, knelt on her knees and placed both keys into two nearly invisible keyholes located next to each other about eighteen inches above the ground. The wind picked up again. She twisted the keys. There was a short rumble that even the wind’s bellow couldn’t drown out.

  Next to the heart-shaped rock, a door-sized portion of the mountain slid up. Behind the opening was a small cavern. The others scrambled into it. Norma replaced the silver-colored key in the heart-shaped stone and closed it. She again rubbed the brass key until it shrunk, and the key blades softened into bristles. She replaced the leather band around her neck, and motioned for J-1 to follow her inside.

  Like the chamber they had entered a few days earlier, an unlit torch hung on the wall. Teague removed and lit it with a spark from his electro-rod. Unlike the earlier chamber, the brilliant glitter of GTS was nowhere to be seen. Norma pressed down on the wall sconce that had housed the torch. The stone door slid shut with another rumble.

  Teague and his torch led the way. Orson, Prudence and Hob held the middle. Norma kept flank from the rear with J-1 and Coca in front. Within minutes the cavern had opened into a large tunnel. They continued until a faint, musky odor filled the passageway. The smell brought them to a halt.

  “The Dark Prey can’t be too far off,” Teague said softly.

  “Dark Prey?” J-1 asked. “What’s that?”

  “Shhh,” Norma whispered. “Listen only.”

  J-1 wondered what they were listening for. The only thing he heard was a light whistle coming from Hob’s nostril whenever he inhaled.

  “Extinguish the flame.” Norma's voice was quiet, but tense. “Now!” She pulled out her electro-rod and fell to her belly. The others did the same. Following their lead, J-1 fell to his stomach and ordered Coco to the ground. Teague smothered the torch in the dirt.

  In the pure blackness J-1 still heard nothing except the hum of their electro-rods and—a flapping? No, many flappings. Deep and loud. Louder. The odor grew worse. In an instant the smell and the sound multiplied, echoed and increased in intensity until they seemed to solidify into a concrete-thick oozing sludge. J-1’s pulse raced. In the maddening roar and the inky black there was no longer a sense of up, down, front, back or sideways. His hands tingled. Something like dead branches or caked rags rubbed across him. His chest heaved with panic. He flailed about wildly to seize on to something—anything—that would ground him. He felt nothing but rushing air.

  Then it grabbed him.

  He screamed.

  “Shut up, you idiot!” Norma said.

  The something ripped at his torso. It squeezed his sides like a pair of boney tongs. He thrashed out again. Something nipped into his fingers and arms, then his neck, legs, shoulder and eyebrows. He punched out savagely. His body lifted and shot forward. He yelled again.

  Someone else—a woman—screamed.

  Blue discharges flashed from the electro-rods. From their brief light J-1 realized he was above them and on his back because the tunnel ceiling was racing past him. Another ray sparked. J-1 saw large, corn-yellow eyes glaring down at him. There was another round of electro-rod discharges, but he was now too far away from them to see anything.

  Chapter Forty

  Date: 2250

  Mount Kwieetus

  Pocketsville

  Though Mata walked with a cane she did it with steadfastness among the walkways of Pocketsville. She stepped with her spine vertical and with her chin raised. Not to display superiority. Lord, no. If anything, it was the opposite. If she slumped, hunched her shoulders or lowered her head it would send a mental signal from her body to her brain that she was old, feeble; on her last round. She walked as she did because it was a counterpunch to what her brain believed.

  It was an hour or two before dawn. Mata devoured this time for two reasons. The first was for the sounds. With nearly everyone asleep she could walk the compound and listen to the sounds of her ingenuity: the constant patter of ice and snow whipping against the weather protection dome; the sliding of the captured frozen elements down the dome’s gutters and into the five enormous cylinders surrounding the complex; the crunch of the ice and snow as gravity forced them down smaller shoots and through heaters that melted them into almighty rapids of water; the muffled gargle of the liquid swimming along the highways of surface pipe into Pocketsville’s hydro/electric plant, apartments, and the GTS supply station.

  Most satisfying was the sizzle from hundreds of overhead sprinklers scattering the supply station’s GTS-infused water onto the community-length greenhouse. It housed the plants and vegetables everyone depended upon for life.

  Because of these sounds the nearly six hundred residents of Pocketsville tolerated her. Why she was deemed eccentric and not bughouse insane. Why she wasn’t locked up in the infirmary. In her rational moments she understood as much, and used the knowledge to her advantage.

  The second reason she loved this time of night was because of the two tunnel passage guards—Eloise and Rudolph. They were born gossips. Eloise was in her late twenties. She was a rangy woman. Her brown hair was nearly always in a chignon, and her mouth was nearly always in a smile when she spoke of her two youngsters. Mata got the impression, by Eloise’s tight biceps, that she would also be more than capable of shoving a fully charged electro-rod up an Earther’s ass.

  Rudolph had a paunch. He was a widower in his early forties. In the struggle to reach Pocketsville, the Dark Prey had killed his wife. His sons had died earlier in the war. Though the thinning hair on his head was still black, his two-day whiskers showed gray. He was a pipe smoker. The tobacco smelled like fr
esh rope to Mata. An odor she found strangely compelling. His brown eyes were melancholy except when he passed along scuttlebutt. Then they brightened. Rudolph was lonely. Mata knew this and wished she could find him someone, but she could barely manage herself.

  She approached Eloise and Rudolph. The passage they guarded was the single way in and out of Pocketsville. It was nothing more than a cave entrance with an overhang built over it. The two sentries stood beneath a circle of pallid-yellow, illuminated from a light imbedded in the overhang’s ceiling. Metal double doors were installed in the cave’s opening. Two more guards were stationed on the tunnel side. The doors were only opened when there was a guard change, or when a platoon arrived or departed.

  When she saw Mata, Eloise elbowed Rudolph. Neither stiffened to attention as they would if someone of importance had arrived.

  “Makin’ the rounds again, Captain?” Rudolph winked at Eloise.

  “Keeping an eye on the troops, Sergeant.” Mata had been through this routine enough times to know that good-natured kidding was a quick path to conversation.

  “You hear that, Rudolph? You’ve been promoted,” Eloise said.

  Rudolph saluted Mata. “Thank you, Captain.”

  Mata brushed off a large rock just outside of the overhang and sat on it. She placed her hands on the curve of her cane and rested her chin on them. She stared up at the swirling snow, barely visible through the opaque overhead dome. She waited.

  Eloise and Rudolph spoke to each other about new changes to procedural reports, and how much they hated the mess hall's food. There were nights when they were in the mood to talk of nothing but shop. This was obviously one of those nights, but Mata had heard rumors and she had come here for confirmation.

  “I saw your daughters walking home from school yesterday,” Mata said to Eloise. “They’ve grown so tall and are as cute as gullflowers.”