by Ian Watson
It wasn’t an ordinary experiment at all. We weren’t exactly volunteers. And it wasn’t conducted in a lab; it was in a clinic.
“It was therapy, wasn’t it? It was an experiment in therapy—for the …” I falter, “for the mixed-up. For a bunch of nuts. It was psychiatric treatment. We … Richter was trying to save us by teaching us how to dream lucidly. Using drugs and hypnotic tricks.”
“Right. You and your sexual problems and your whole sick attitude to the world—as something dead and full of zombies. Me and my pyromania, my fire-raising—”
“You burnt my Africa down!”
She nods.
“—and my black depressions. Fire was the only thing bright enough to keep me from that dark and empty house. It was a choice of either burning places down, or sitting like a statue in that empty cellar. I swung between the two extremes: burn and freeze, freeze and burn. And Sam and Tony: all of us—we didn’t look too salvageable in the real world, so—”
“—so, in our dreams Richter hoped … ?” I feel as if I’d been walking down that dirt road in dream-Africa for years on end. I’m still confused.
“What better way to treat the not-very-sane, than to show them how to control a whole world—of their dreams? What better motive could they be given, than to learn to rule a private world? And thus they would learn how to manage their own minds.”
“I can’t be dead. I was reporting back to Noguchi in the lab. The clinic, I mean. That means I’m still alive.”
“There’s no need to crush my arm, Paul.”
“Sorry.” She is a person, not a succubus.
“You were dreaming about the therapy sessions. You were dreaming about lucid dreaming. So you went lucid for a while—just long enough. You could be reached. The lucid can always reach each other, once they’re dead. Besides, you were calling out for me. Though, hell’s teeth, why you were doing it was something else! So I lured you to my own house of … not-quite-sanity, which I haven’t been living in for a long time. And through it to here.”
To the greensward. To the river side, and the fairy castle.
“Dead,” she repeats. “We’re the dead. The lucid dead.”
“But—”
“A jet transport carrying thousands of gallons of fuel crashed on the clinic while we were asleep. It exploded. The whole hospital must have been levelled, or burnt out. Oh the fire there must have been! And Richter was right about the afterlife. My God, how right he was!”
“Wait a minute. How do you know about the plane? If we were all asleep?”
“Dr Richter saw it, just before it hit. He heard its jets screaming. He had time to look out. He was awake.”
“He made it here too?”
“Noguchi, as well. They went lucid straight away, as soon as they died. Because they knew how. I was lucid when I died. So was Sam. Fox and Tony went lucid too. But Donna and Max …” Angela purses her lips. “They weren’t so far into this as us. It’s tragic.”
“Do you mean to say there are only seven souls in the whole of Heaven?”
“Oh no. There are thousands of us lucids. Mostly they like different scenery. We can all visit, though. Doors stand wide open to their dream-worlds. But billions of other dream-worlds are locked up tight. The dreamers aren’t in control there. They can’t wake up in their dreams. So the dreams rule them. They’re in Hell.”
“As I was? Till you reached me?”
“You were close to rescuing yourself, Paul. But you needed a bit of help. We can help others, if they just wake up for a moment in their dreams. Or nightmares. We can get into those, then. Siddhartha Gautama has rescued several dozen dreamers since he died. Francis of Assisi has saved others. But there are billions of souls in their private hells. The afterlife’s like an insane asylum, full of locked cells. The prisoners never learned how to dream consciously, while they were alive.”
And now we have reached the riverbank. A drawbridge rattles down. Across the planks, beyond the raised portcullis, in a banqueting hall a familiar figure waits, with Noguchi by his side.
It’s Dr Richter: thin, white-haired, blue-eyed. There are others, whom I don’t recognise. Members of the fraternity of the lucid dead, from other times and places. Though I recognise Fox, with her crinkly russet hair bound in a brush. She’s pouring ale or mead out of a flagon into a silver cup.
Over we go, and in.
Half way along the left-hand wall of the hall a great door, veneered in horn, stands wide open. Beyond it is a long corridor from which lead innumerable other doors, all open too. Half way along the right hand wall is another great door, inlaid with ivory. The ivory door is shut tight. A monk in brown robes stands meditating outside it, his face hidden by his cowl. Painted shields hang on the rest of the walls, and crossed swords and spears and axes—firearms too, both ancient and modern.
I think I know the reason for this armoury, without asking.
We are the knights—and ladies—of the dream unconscious, lucidly known, consciously mastered.
I point at the open door.
“That way leads to the other lucid dreams.”
“And the ivory door?”
“All the lonely hells of dead souls are through there, Paul. Every now and then, that door also opens. A flash of lucidity passes through a hell-dream, like lightning. Then the door closes tight again. Unless one of us goes in, on a rescue mission. And it might never open up again, on that particular dead dreamer.”
“So through there … ?”
“There Be Dragons. Often. The dragons of the mind.”
Suddenly Angela kisses me. It is a sisterly kiss, a kiss of welcome. I return it in the same way. Then she runs to Fox, and they embrace—in a different spirit.
Dr Richter takes the chalice from Fox and, coming over, presses it into my hand.
“Hi, Paul.” He smiles wryly. “One more down—ten billion more to go. And they’re arriving all the time in Hell. But no devil is to blame. Just our own minds. The sleep of death is a troubled sleep, when we aren’t awake in it. Still, I guess we have all eternity.”
I raise the silver cup to him.
“Here’s to eternity, then.”
I drain the liquid, and it is sweet.
At this moment the monk claps his hands—for the ivory door is swinging open silently.
Beyond its threshold stretches a vile, dank swamp. A black man in rags is stumbling knee-deep through the foul waters, pulling a broken chain along with him. White riders on horseback pursue him with whips and rifles. Hounds swim and leap through the swamp. The sky is the colour of blood.
“No!” we can hear the slave scream distantly, with the last of his breath. “I say no to you! You ain’t real at all! You’re just a nightmare! I’m dead—dead!”
Gathering up his skirts to wade, the monk steps quickly through into the stagnant waters, just as the runaway slave stumbles headlong.
The ivory gate strains to close, but it cannot.
The Call of the Wild: the Dog-Flea Version
(with apologies to Jack London)
Chapter One: Into the Alien
BUCK FLEA DID not listen to the radio, or he would have known that mysterious lights had been seen dodging about Gainsboro County by night and haunting the stray dog pound in Gainsboro, worrying the captive dogs into a frenzy of barking and howling.
No one suggested that there was any connection between these lights and ‘flying saucers’. The lights were too small; they were more like flashlights in the hands of invisible prowlers. Even though no pet dog was reported missing, vivisectionists were the principal suspects.
Thus no one realised that the Earth had been visited by kidnappers from the stars—no one, that is, apart from the fifty luckless members of Aleppo’s Flea Circus.
Even Aleppo himself, discovering to his horror that his entire flea troupe (and his livelihood) had vanished overnight, made no connection with the phantom lights. He blamed the disappearance on the action of some malicious boy who had slunk into the t
ent and cut a penny-sized hole in the belljar which the fleas used as their living quarters.
Buck had been the King of the Circus, with a fine pride in himself, to which all the other fleas consented. Aleppo had showered praise on Buck and pampered him—though since the form of this pampering mainly involved letting Buck take mighty leaps about the circus tent, unhampered by his thread-harness (for Aleppo knew that Buck would always faithfully return), this had only served to keep Buck in fine trim, with thruster muscles as strong as steel springs.
Now Buck found himself chained in the hold of the mother ship of the Zogs. Each flea from the circus was fastened to the edge of thin fissures cut into the metal wall—too thin for any of them to retreat into.
Three Zogs strolled round the hold, surveying their haul with crude satisfaction. Fifty at a go was a real bonanza. The Zogs were stout, four-legged creatures with a long proboscis like an elephant’s trunk for a nose. They wore rather dirty uniforms and stood about two and a half times the height of a flea—for as a man is to a dog, so a Zog is to a flea.
The trio halted opposite Buck.
“This one’s worth a hundred and fifty truffles, or I’m a square trunk,” said one of the Zogs, rubbing his finger-tentacles together greedily.
“That’s if you break him, first,” snuffled the second Zog.
“Redswet’s no slouch at flea-breaking!” laughed the third.
The Zog named Redswet advanced on Buck. And Buck, with rage in his heart and the very devil in his eyes, leapt at the Zog to bite him.
Buck left the floor at a much higher speed than he had expected—for Zoggish gravity, as maintained in the mother ship, was far weaker than Earth’s hold on a flea. He would have sailed right over Redswet’s head. But then the chain snapped him to a halt in midair, throttling him. At the same moment Redswet beat him to the deck with a club. The blow stung like fire; it was electric.
Again and again Buck leapt at the Zog, and each time he was felled, until he lay hopelessly dazed upon the deck.
Now Redswet bent over Buck and patted him fearlessly upon the head; and even though all the hairs along Buck’s carapace bristled, he endured the alien touch without further protest.
“A hundred and fifty? Three hundred, you mean!” cried Redswet. “He’ll be the high-jumper of all time!”
And the trio passed on, to taunt the other fleas into a rage and then subdue them.
Chapter Two: The Law of Clab and Crack
THAT NIGHT WHEN the mother ship got under way, waves of gravity pulses made the prisoners in the hold feel wretchedly sick.
The next day, and for several days thereafter, their education by electric club continued, and very soon all the gentility of Aleppo’s circus was beaten out of Buck, though none of his agility. From the neat orderliness of the circus, where he had worn a fine flea-jacket and had entered gladly into thread-harness to pull a tiny carriage, Buck quickly became a primordial flea, leaping wildly—all to no avail, so that he must bow and bide his time. From a civilised flea, he became the equivalent of an obedient tiger.
No bowls of blood were brought for the captives to drink, even though some of the fleas fawned contemptibly upon their captors, and one—Marlon, crazed with thirst—fought through the sting of the club to force Redswet to the deck. Quickly increasing the electric charge, Redswet killed Marlon, who had gone mad.
And still no blood was brought.
As Buck grew weaker and began to consume his own body fluids, becoming a two-dimensional shadow of the flea he had been, he realised how cruelly—yet how practically—it was planned that they should pass the voyage. He crawled into the crack in the metal wall, which now fitted his body easily.
For a flea can lie comatose in a crack for as long as seven years, till the vibration of a passing host awakens it.
Perhaps the voyage to the star of the Zogs did last seven years—years during which the Zogs either slept in freezers, or else speeded up their time perception with drugs.
One day the ship vibrated mightily. At once Buck roused and leapt from his crack—to find a bowl of luke-warm artificial blood waiting for him. He settled to gorge, as did all the other surviving fleas at one bowl or another.
Each day from now on they were fed with brackish blood. But there was never enough to satisfy their hunger. Soon flea began to steal from flea. Savage ruthlessness replaced even the memory of the civilised amenities of circus life.
Their chains were lengthened, too—for none of them would dare attack the Zogs—so that they could all attack each other, muzzle to muzzle. Fair play became a forgotten code. Though if a fight looked as though it would end in death, one of the Zogs always broke it up with his club.
Thus it was in a savage yet obedient frame of mind that the fleas arrived on the world of the Zogs, to be sold at auction in the boom town of Richclouds.
And Buck, who had learnt well the law of club and crack, bided his time.
Chapter Three: The Toil of Net and Truffle
THE PLANET OF the Zogs is a small, low-gravity world which keeps its atmosphere thanks to a self-repairing membrane of organic nature that floats on top of the stratosphere.
By Zoggish standards, of course, their world was by no means small; nor was the gravity slight. And this was the source of the Zogs’ problems. For their most delicious food was an aerial creature resembling a floating, mobile truffle.
Formerly, these truffles drifted by only a couple of Zog-spans above the ground, so that Zogs only needed to rear up on their hind legs and pluck them with their trunks. Zogs had grown fat and heavy on that fare for generations.
But due to survival of the fittest and the evolution of a rudimentary sense of self-preservation, the truffles began to live higher and higher in the air till no heavy Zog could hope to catch one, unassisted.
One creature still leapt high into the sky, and through the sky from truffle to truffle, sucking their juices, though without killing them. This was the feral or wolf-flea. But it was completely untamable and invariably pined away in captivity (with the exception of one almost legendary wolf-flea called Red Fang). So the Zogs had begun to raid Earth for a flea that would leap till its heart broke with the strain of hauling the great truffle nets into the sky and would even be heartbroken if it was denied its proud work at the nets.
*
Buck found himself sold to Perro and Fronswa, two rough but good-natured Zogs who needed a new anchor-flea for their net.
Hitching the flea team to a balloon-sled on which the net was heaped, Perro and Fronswa set off leapingly into the wilderness north of Richclouds, where Buck began to learn his new trade in this junior but taxing position.
A truffle-net team operates thus: at the front end of the net is the top flea, who first selects the direction of flight and drags the net into the sky. To his right is the sub-leader. Behind each of these are two wing-fleas, who take up the weight of the net. Last of all comes the anchor-flea, who must hold the net taut and drag it to the ground on a depressed trajectory—a difficult jumping feat.
Buck learnt not to jump too strongly, or he would sail the back of the net right over the truffle prey. He learnt not to get caught in the traces by which he pulled the net. He learnt from his own painful errors and from the friendly clubbings of Perro and Fronswa. Above all, he learnt from the nippings of the top flea, Saliva, who conceived a fine jealous enmity for Buck. For Buck learnt fast, and the truffle catch was good, even though they had to leap the net higher and more skilfully than ever before.
And Buck bided his time.
Chapter Four: The Dominant Primordial Flea
THE INEVITABLE SHOWDOWN between Buck and Saliva came at last. For weeks now Buck had been subtly opposing Saliva in his bullying of the team. As a result, discipline was collapsing.
One cloudy day towards the end of the season, a pack of wolf-fleas leapt into their camp. They punctured the balloon-sled so that it overturned. Hungrily they tore open the bags of artificial dried blood which (mixed with water and h
eated over a fire) was the fleas’ usual food.
Immediately battle was joined between the fleas of Earth and the wolf-fleas. While Perro and Fronswa flailed about indiscriminately with their clubs, swearing foully, one attacker lost a leg to the jaws of the sub-leader, and one of the wing-fleas lost an eye.
Crashing into one of the attackers in midair, Buck was dashed to the ground; and Saliva seized his chance to leap upon Buck treacherously in the confusion. If Buck could be injured badly enough, it was the law of the wild that the rest of the team would tear him apart.
Buck fled. Saliva leapt after him. As soon as Buck reached open ground, he turned. The two fleas leapt at each other time and again, trying to ride each other down to the ground for the fatal bite.
Buck was already losing blood from nips all over his body—and Saliva was still quite unscathed—when Buck twisted right over in midair. Hanging on to Saliva’s carapace upside-down, he bit clear through one of the top flea’s thruster legs.
Saliva took off again, lop-sided. But Buck had calculated this. He was on to Saliva again, biting his other thruster. And now Saliva could no longer leap. He could only crawl. Buck did not even bother with the killing bite. As he hopped back towards camp, bleeding but triumphant, the wolf-fleas were already leaping high above him towards the doomed Saliva.
Buck fixed his eye on the red sun of the Zog-world, as though it was a globe of blood that he could bite and suck if only he jumped high enough. He thrilled. He had made his kill, and it was good.
Chapter Five: Who Has Won to the Top of the Net
“HE’S TWO DEVILS, that Buck,” grinned Fronswa, as he fastened Buck into the top flea position.
The other fleas had all been surprised at the speed with which Buck nipped them into order now that Saliva had been killed. It had been the two Zogs’ plan to shift one of the wing-fleas forward to sub-leader’s place and promote the sub-leader to top flea. But Buck would have none of it, hopping around the camp for a whole hour, refusing the traces till he got his way.