Aurora picked up the story.
‘We saw them more as the unsung heroes of the hibernatory revolution, unknowingly brave foot-soldiers, spearheading the fight against the horrors of the Winter to bring us victorious into the Spring. Those citizens, those nightwalkers, died honourably to make a better place for all of us.’
It was an understandable point, just not a very ethical one. The victims, the Nightwalkers, had no choice in the matter.
‘And Morphenox-B?’ I asked. ‘What about that?’
‘Much more exciting,’ said Aurora. ‘The expense in manufacture was predicated on drug purity so nightwalker numbers were kept to an absolute minimum. But we were seeing it arse about face. More nightwalkers actually works for us. Cut a few corners in the manufacturing process and instead of a one-in-two-thousand likelihood of walking, Morphenox-B will give us one in every five hundred.’
‘With those figures, the nightwalker economy could be worth 4.2 billion euros to us within five years,’ continued Goodnight, ‘and will also be socially transformative: tedious and repetitive tasks will be given to workers who don’t know or care what they do and can work sixteen uncomplaining hours a day. Productivity will rise, costs will fall, food production will increase. And once their year is done, they get to be parted out and add immeasurable quality of life to thousands. True vertical integration, Worthing – everything of use but the yawn. I made up that slogan,’ she added proudly. ‘Sums it up well, doesn’t it?’
‘Best of all,’ said Aurora, ‘is that when Winter wastage falls, places like your joyous St Granata’s will actually cease to exist; the burden of endless childbearing a thing of the past. It’s win-win all the way down the line. But,’ she continued, ‘there is a very small fly in our very large ointment. The venerable Don Hector discovered a way to retrieve nightwalkers. He’s dead now, thank goodness, but he encoded it all on a cylinder which he then gave to someone connected to RealSleep. While that cylinder is at large, we are exposed, and we don’t like being exposed.’
They fell silent and stared at me expectantly.
‘You want me to agree with you,’ I said, ‘but I can’t. Nightwalkers are alive. And while they are, you have to do what you can to bring them back. And you can’t murder them, nor part them out. Not for any reason, no matter how noble you think it is.’
‘It’s so easy to be judgemental,’ said Goodnight in a patronising tone, ‘but you must understand that we’ve done too much good for too long to have our work sacrificed on the altar of short-term, wishy-washy, woolly-headed egalitarianism. The benefits of Morphenox-B far, far outweigh the drawbacks and we are here to ensure the most—’
‘—favourable outcome is enjoyed by the majority,’ I said. ‘I know. I hear that a lot. What about this: “If you can’t have change without injustice, then there should be no change”.’
‘Who said that?’
‘I can’t remember. Someone important. It’s annoying when that happens.’
‘The idealism of youth,’ she said with a dismissive snort. ‘We can’t fail, not now. We’re too big, too integrated into society. All that we’ve done. All that we can do. All that we will do.’
They stared at me without speaking for some moments.
‘So what do you want from me?’ I asked.
Goodnight stared at me for a moment, and then walked from the small room, beckoning us to follow.
‘I want you to meet someone.’
She led me across to cell 4-H. I guessed who was in there but looked through the peephole anyway. Birgitta was lying on the bed staring up at the ceiling. Her hands were drawing circles in the air; pretend pens on pretend paper.
‘What are you going to do with her?’
‘Nothing for the moment, but she’s a good candidate for retrieval, and we do conduct tests from time to time. How about if we were to retrieve Birgitta right now? In exchange for the cylinder? She’d never know anything had ever happened. She’d be missing a thumb, of course, but that could be explained away as rats or mould or something.’
I had to think very carefully on this one. I could have given them the cylinder, but I had a pretty strong feeling that once the cylinder was secured, anyone remotely attached to it would end up in the night pit covered by a spadeful of lime.
‘I don’t know where the cylinder is.’
The Notable Goodnight cocked her head on one side.
‘Then we could redeploy Birgitta instead,’ she said, ‘next on the list. She’s very Tricksy so might be able to manage simple data entry. The problem is, one in every hundred do not survive the redeployment procedure. I can’t say it will be Birgitta, but we might have some bad luck.’
The implication wasn’t lost on me. I was to play ball – or Birgitta died. But again, I had no guarantee that wouldn’t happen anyway.
‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ I said, ‘but I don’t have the cylinder.’
The Notable Goodnight stared at me again for a few moments.
‘You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?’
‘I probably would, actually,’ I said, ‘about some things – y’know, like personal stuff. But not about this.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s perfectly acceptable and understandable,’ replied Goodnight, suddenly coming over all sunny, ‘we just had to be sure, that’s all.’
She gave me a smile and then, the ‘orientation’ over, asked Aurora to show me where I would be staying.
It wasn’t too far from the labs, no more than a flight of stairs and along a corridor. The proximity, I guessed, was not so much based on convenience, but on technology. If they wanted to try to coerce me into the Dreamspace in order to use more invasive methods, they would need a few machines to do so.
Aurora showed me into the room and told me to make myself comfortable, and how I’d have to remain here until my security clearance was established.
‘We can’t have anyone from RealSleep infiltrating the facility, now, can we?’ she said with a laugh, ‘Reporting back to Kiki and whatnot.’
I told her no, of course not, that would be silly.
She wished me goodnight, the door closed and I heard a bolt being slid across. I stood for a moment, listening to her footsteps retreat on the polished wooden floor outside, then chucked my jacket over a chair-back and looked around.
The apartment was spacious, warm and in good order. Two rooms, carpeted, all mod cons. Oddly, I kind of missed Clytemnestra and the charming grottiness of Siddons 901. I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and checked my collection of bite marks in the mirror, only one of which seemed to have an infection. I squeezed the pus from the wound, cleaned it with some vodka I’d found in the mini-bar and then changed all the dressings. I had a shower, found a bathrobe, climbed into bed and considered my position. The default plan was to simply stay awake as long as I could and deny HiberTech my sleeping mind, but on reflection that might not be the best strategy. I would eventually fall asleep after two days or more, but I’d be in a poor state to resist what they had planned. The best idea would be to go to sleep now, while I was still strong, my mind unmuddied by fatigue.
So I switched off the light and stared at the ceiling, trying to get to sleep. It took an hour to do so. I felt the room darken, there were a couple of flashes, an all-consuming glossy darkness, and—
Dreamspace
‘ . . . Dreams are nothing more than the random and wasteful firings of the brain, a mesh of thoughts and memories giving narrative to the sleeping mind by a cortex eager to make order out of chaos. A waste of energy, a waste of processing power, a drain on the life-fat that promises to deliver one from the darkness . . . ’
– Press release from HiberTech. Morphenox launch, July 1975
I heard the gulls cackle before I saw them, punctuated by the boom of the incoming tide and a wind th
at whistled through the cable-stays that secured the funnels of the Argentinian Queen. I inhaled deeply of the salt-laden air, the freshness of the breeze, the gently rotting seaweed on the storm-shore. I opened my eyes and was back on Rhosilli beach in the Gower, the wreck before me, high and dry on the huge expanse of sand. The dream was exactly the same as it had been for the past few nights.
More real than real, but for one thing: I wasn’t Birgitta’s Charlie, I was me Charlie, still in my bathrobe, covered in bite marks, dotted with blobs of iodine. It was the same dream, but instead of being first person Active Control, I was third person Active Control – this, I presumed, was Dreamspace.
Charles and Birgitta were beneath the parasol talking in low voices, and every now and again they would laugh, and touch one another, and kiss. I can’t pretend that I didn’t feel some sort of jealousy, for I did – a dull ache in my chest.
There was a gurgle of laughter and the young girl chased her beach ball, while Birgitta and Charlie exchanged their vows of affection, as before, as always, again.
‘I love you, Charlie,’ said Birgitta.
‘I love you, Birgitta,’ said Charlie.
A voice broke into my thoughts.
‘Where is this place?’
I turned to find Aurora staring at me. She was dressed in a flowery blouse and a white skirt over a stripy swimming costume. She looked tanned and well, with longer hair less streaked with grey and a fuller body which made her look a good deal healthier than the lean overwinterer I had come to know. I guess in Dreamspace you can idealise yourself. She was still armed, a Bambi at her hip, while her unseeing left eye flicked around in its socket.
Aurora looked around curiously, as though she’d blundered into a newly undiscovered cupboard in her kitchen, and was trying to figure out its function.
‘The Gower Peninsula,’ I said, ‘a glorious weekend, fondly recalled. A place to visit when in pensive mood, an escape from the real world, something to flash upon the inward eye.’
‘Very romantic,’ replied Aurora. ‘I remember that parasol. This is a dream from one of the orderlies we interrogated after the cylinder went missing. What was his name again?’
‘Charles Webster.’
She clicked her fingers.
‘Right. Webster. Nothing came of it, I recall. So why are we here?’
‘This is the dream you’ve been projecting into my sleeping mind these past few nights at the Sarah Siddons,’ I said, ‘through the wall from 902.’
‘Nope, you got a fresh Don Hector dream recording all to yourself,’ she replied. ‘We replace them because they wear out after five or six playings – tend to get scratched and lose their detail.’
I shrugged.
‘All I know is that I dreamt I was Webster in the Gower, then went to the blue Buick from here.’
She frowned, then a flash of understanding moved across her face.
‘With a jump and a tear?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘with a jump and a tear.’
‘That’s a first,’ she said, genuinely impressed. ‘We record dreams on wax cylinder because Edison’s invention has never really been improved upon. But there is another, more practical reason. Do you want to try and guess what it is?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘It’s this: each cylinder records about eight minutes of dream. A single night’s recording can produce upwards of twenty cylinders. We kept Don Hector’s – there are about seven hundred dreams of his in storage – but we can’t keep them all, so the dreams we record from people of no consequence are—’
‘—erased,’ I said.
‘Yes indeed,’ said Aurora. ‘Whoever was on erasing duty that day didn’t do such a good job and left the remains of one of Webster’s dreams on the start of the cylinder.’
I understood, then. Everything I knew of Birgitta and Charles I’d gained from a half-inch of shiny blue grooves at the head of a single wax cylinder. Without random chance to bring me and this cylinder together, meeting Birgitta under the car would have been only intriguing, at best, and I’d likely not have intervened when Aurora was going to retire her. Without her becoming my dream-woman, she’d be dead.
‘I’ll make sure this cylinder is trashed once we’re done,’ said Aurora. ‘Now, you know why I’m here?’
‘You want to know where the cylinder is.’
‘Full marks. Are you going to tell me?’
‘I don’t know where it is.’
‘You’re a bad liar, Charlie. I’ve been working the Dreamspace since before you were squirted out of the turkey baster, and I’m good at it. When dreams are your own, you have agency over them, but right now we’re equal actors in another’s dream. I can mould it the way I want it to go, I can mould you the way I want you to go. I can pull something from your subconscious that you don’t want revealed, and I can even have your mind sweated out of you, so you end up like that dopey orderly, no better than a nightwalker. What was his name again?’
‘Webster.’
‘Thank you. So . . . Where was I?’
‘Something about sweating my mind out of me so I ended up like Webster?’
‘Yes – good only for driving a golf cart. So, here’s the deal: tell us where the cylinder is and we’ll retrieve Birgitta and you get to go back to the land of the living. How about it?’
I looked around at the beach, the Argentinian Queen and the parasol of spectacular size and splendour.
‘If I didn’t take the deal when offered by Goodnight, what makes you think I’ll take it with you? Besides, I don’t know about any cylinder.’
There was a sudden gust of cold wind, and a flurry of snowflakes drifted around the beach. The photographer had just arrived and was offering his services to Birgitta and Charles, just as before.
‘You see?’ said Aurora. ‘A subconscious clue. You will tell me. It’s hard not to think about stuff when asked. Out in the cold somewhere?’
‘I don’t know.’
Aurora took a step closer, and all of a sudden she was three times larger. I felt my chest tighten and for a fleeting instant I thought I would wake and be safely away from this, but Aurora took my ear between finger and thumb and squeezed so tightly I yelped.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘before I really get to work on you, last chance: tell me where the cylinder is.’
She drew closer and her teeth seemed to sharpen into points. I was suddenly reminded of Sister Contractia, who filed her teeth for fun until Mother Fallopia told her not to.
Despite the pain, I closed my eyes, concentrated, and shifted away from Aurora, away from the beach, away from the dream. I could feel myself momentarily aware of the apartment at HiberTech with two technicians looming over me, and then I was standing next to the blue Buick under the azure sky, the picnic laid out beside me, the oak tree around which the stones were piled. And sitting on top of them, Don Hector. Old, grizzled, tired. There were no hands around except his and mine, nor was there any Aurora. She’d have to find me.
The old man caught my eye and I walked over, the sun feeling warm against my skin. He was eating a sandwich, and a glass of freshly poured Champagne stood on a nearby boulder, the fizz rising in the liquid. The detail was all there. Every texture, every smell, every sound.
‘Your dream or mine?’ he asked, waving a hand about him.
‘Yours,’ I said, ‘with maybe a hint of mine.’
He smiled and patted the stones he was seated upon.
‘Do you know why these boulders are heaped around the tree?’
‘I’ve been wondering that for a while.’
‘Farmers ploughing their fields,’ he replied. ‘Whenever they snagged a boulder it was pulled up and discarded. Usually deposited to the side of the field, but if there was a tree, that would become the place. The heap of stones represents toil; a lichen-encrusted palimpsest of an agric
ultural way of life before mechanisation.’
‘I have the cylinder,’ I said, ‘but I need to know what to do with it.’
‘You have to get it to Kiki.’
‘I am Kiki.’
‘Then my mission is complete, my work is done.’
‘Yes, but what do I do now?’ I asked, ‘very little is clear to me right now.’
He stared at me for a moment, then smiled.
‘Bring them all back,’ he said, ‘bring them home.’
‘Okay—but how?’
‘I think you already know. Good luck, Charlie.’
Whump
Don Hector was knocked violently from the pile of rocks and to the ground, where he lay quite still. I turned around to find Aurora holding a Thumper. She didn’t look very happy. No, wait, scrub that: she looked seriously pissed off.
‘Think I’ve never been in the Dreamspace before? Think you can outwit me? I have over fourteen hundred hours’ dreamtime, Wonky, and I’ve prised bigger secrets from stronger people’s heads than yours.’
I wasn’t worried. I’d escaped from her once, I could escape from her again.
‘You killed Don Hector out in the real world, didn’t you?’
‘He’d lost sight of the good work we were doing,’ said Aurora with a half-smile, ‘and we felt he had swung from asset to liability. Asset good, liability bad,’ she added, in case I’d missed the main thrust of her argument.
‘Nightwalker retrieval was only the beginning,’ I said. ‘He’d perfected a risk-free Morphenox that could be synthesised cheaply and easily. He was going to go public. No secrets, Morphenox a universal right. Sub-beta, the Ottoman, the emerging Southern Alliance – everyone. A global hibernating village, equal in sleep, equal in dignity.’
Early Riser Page 41
