by J. M. Porup
You keep saying that—
“Because it’s true!”
But they found me, Shade pointed out.
Buck shuffled his hooves. “Indeed. It’s dangerous because you can never be sure when the Collective will be ready to see what’s right in front of its face.” He frowned at Linda. “I discouraged her from visiting you. She could have been caught and ChemLobbed.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to wake you up,” she said. “I had to content myself with memorizing your face.” She gestured at the unfinished canvas.
Shade stared at her. I thought you said other people couldn’t be your dream.
“They can’t be,” she said quickly. “You were my…inspiration.”
Inspiration?
“It means—”
I don’t know what it means and I don’t care! How can you live with yourself?
“What—what are you talking about?”
The human race stands in crisis. The world is about to end if we don’t all pitch in and work to save it. He flung an arm at the painting. And here you are, wasting your time with this frivolous nonsense?
She said, “It’s not—”
He ripped the brush from her fingers.
His cheek stung. She drew back her arm to slap him again.
“Give me back the brush.” Her voice was cold.
Shade gripped it in his hand. Because of you, the human race could go extinct!
“Then good riddance to bad rubbish,” she said, and hit him, this time with her fist. Then again, so hard Shade tasted blood.
His grip on the brush loosened, and she snatched it back. She took a deep breath. Calm returned to her features.
“I do not ask you to understand my dream,” she said. “I ask only that you respect it.”
Buck stepped between them. “Perhaps,” he said, “we should continue the tour. Canvas clearly does not speak to Jimmy Shade.”
Linda pursed her lips, nodded. She put the brush away and covered the rectangle once more. Without a word, she turned and strode away.
Shade raised an eyebrow at Buck, but the goat-man merely gestured with a fur-covered hand. They followed Linda down a long row of monsters.
The painting section ended. They stood in the middle of thousands of monsters hunched over desks. The monsters clutched sharpened yellow twigs in their hands or claws and scratched the tips across white sheets of—paper? Was it really? Just like inside Boss’s head, only for real! But wasn’t paper made from trees? And didn’t trees disappear thousands of years ago? Where did it all come from?
“Hydroponic forests,” Buck commented. “Dreamers salvaged some seeds, nursed the species back to life.”
The scritch-scratching monsters didn’t look up at the three visitors, but continued scraping their yellow twigs across the sheets of paper, like they were in a hurry.
Shade looked on, puzzled. What are they doing?
“They are writers,” Linda whispered. “Writers write.”
Writers?
“Storytellers,” Buck explained. “They help us make sense of our world.”
Shade laughed inside his head. But that’s what the Collective’s for!
“Let’s move on,” Buck suggested.
They strolled past the writers, the painters now far behind them, and came to another section, this one elbow-to-elbow with monsters wearing white jackets. Strange smells filled the air. Tiny fires burned on black counter tops. Glass beakers emitted vapors. Other monsters puzzled over equipment Shade did not recognize.
And these? he asked. What are they doing?
“Scientists,” Buck said. “They seek to understand the world we live in. Its physical dimension.”
Shade smirked. What’s the point of that?
Buck shrugged. “I confess it is not a dream I understand. They seeking understanding outside themselves, rather than inside their own souls. Although they sometimes come up with useful stuff that helps the rest of us. Like the hydroponic forests, for instance.”
“That’s true,” Linda chimed in. “And a couple of scientists are doing interesting research into the Collective’s brain implants.” She pointed to a table, where a team of white-jacketed monsters sawed open the skull of a cadaver and proceeded to remove, tentacles by tentacle, an implant.
Yuck, Shade thought. But why bother with—
One of the scientists ran up to them, a pad of paper in his hand. His hair was white and stuck out a meter in every direction.
“Eureka!” he shouted. “I have found it!”
Buck welcomed the man with arms wide open. “Ennst. Always a pleasure. What esoteric mysteries are you plumbing today?”
“Esoteric to you!” he cackled. “Only the secrets of the universe being cracked down here, my boy!”
Shade wrinkled his nose. Smells more like something rotten to me.
“A new Dreamer, eh? Maybe you were born to be a scientist,” Ennst said. The little man blinked up at Shade. “We could always use a bright mind to help us in our labor.”
The Collective already knows everything. Why waste your time with all of this?
Ennst lay a hand on Shade’s arm. “If the Collective knows everything, then why is humanity in danger of extinction?”
For mistakes humanity made before becoming a Collective, Shade replied by rote.
“But what if we could innovate a solution?” Ennst quivered with excitement. “Find a way to clean up the radiation, or a way to end the nuclear winter?”
If that were possible, Shade thought, the Collective would have thought of it long ago. Innovation is something that belongs to the past. It was innovation that almost killed humanity, I remind you. That age, thank the Collective, is over.
Ennst straightened. “You know,” he said, “over the last thousands of years, Dream Scientists in this lab have made discovery after discovery that would benefit humanity, amazing research that could improve the lives of billions of people. Time and time again we’ve sent Primes to the surface to spread our ideas, and what does—”
So you admit it! You send Primes topside to infect us all!
“The Collective needs to dream, Jimmy,” Buck said. “We send Primes topside to share the most important dreams with the Collective.”
“And what does the Collective do?” Ennst tapped Shade’s chest with a finger. “They hunt down our dreams and kill them. They refuse to hear what we have to say. Why do you think that is?”
The Collective is pure wisdom, Shade thought. He stiffened his spine, kept his eyes front. These distractions—he waved a hand at the white-jacketed monstrosities—are nothing more than unwanted chaos in a perfect world.
The scientist plucked a long white hair, let it flutter to the floor. He nodded at Shade. “Well,” he said, “It’s safe to say that science does not speak to this one.”
Linda nudged Shade. “Come. Let’s continue the tour.”
Ennst returned to his place in the smelly dream section, and Shade let himself be led to an even stranger spectacle:
Monsters wearing funny clothes meandered across a platform made of what looked like wood, all the while declaiming in a loud voice. Some even held what appeared to be primitive weapons and pretended to engage in some kind of sparring contest.
What in the name of the Collective are they doing? Shade asked. It was by far the most bizarre thing he’d seen so far.
“Zune!” Buck called out. “Take five?”
A monster with two mouths leaped from the stage and skipped toward them.
“Buck!” it cried with one mouth. “Linda!” it cried with the other. “And who is this?” both mouths said at the same time, pumping Shade’s hand.
Shade drew back. You have two mouths.
The Zune creature cackled. “From a rookie’s squawk box to your ears.” He looked Shade up and down. “What have we got? Is he theater material?”
Shade furrowed his brows. …theater?
Linda shook her head. “His gift remains elusive. So
far nothing speaks to him.”
Zune flicked the badge number on Shade’s shoulder. “He’s Dream Police. Maybe he’s not a dreamer at all.”
“That seems unlikely,” Buck said. “Many Dream Police have become dreamers in the past.”
“But not impossible,” Zune said, baring both sets of teeth. “It has happened before. Dream Police who didn’t belong here.”
Do you see? Shade thought to Linda. I’m not the only one telling you this. I’m not a dreamer. I never have been. I never will be. Whatever you’ve done to infect me, take it back, cure it, I don’t want it!
Another actor, this one covered in feathers, called out, “Enough yack-yack, duckies, we’ve got a scene to rehearse here!”
With one mouth, Zune called over his shoulder, “Coming!” and with the other, said, “I must bid you all adieu. Best of luck, Mister Dream Policeman!”
Linda chewed a knuckle. “Keep going?”
Buck grunted, and they moved on.
Shade’s head hurt. If this wasn’t a nightmare, it was worse. The vast space of scientists and actors and writers and painters all merged together, a giant cacophony of noise and light and stench. Other regions he had not yet visited assaulted his senses—sculptors, woodworkers, metalworkers, instrument-makers.
Bordering the instrument-makers, musicians—like the ones in the king’s ballroom—scraped and banged and tapped at their curious implements. To one side, others danced and moved to the sounds, although not as expertly, or so it seemed to Shade, as the dancers he’d seen previously with the king.
The dancers and musicians ranged from almost human to extreme monstrosity. Here, for the first time, Shade noticed that what Linda had said was true—the more monstrous the dreamer, the more delightful and spectacular their creation.
Something stirred inside him. At first he thought it might be gas, but he tried to fart and nothing came out.
I don’t understand, he whispered.
But even as Shade spoke, his head began to hurt. The voice inside his head—the voice the Prime had awoken—responded to the noise, the—the music. His mind shuddered at the cavorting frenzy of this new thing inside him, as it danced to the noise.
Time check: 49:57:09.
Less than a day since he had been banished from the Collective, and so much had happened—his sleep in the storm drain, his journey with Buck, his sliding down that high pole, through the tunnel to meet the Dream King… making love to Linda—if love is what it was…it seemed like an eternity.
Without the comforting hum of the Collective in the back of his skull regulating his mental activity, his inner voice grew bold, and thoughts began to bubble up inside his brain, thoughts so alarming, so disturbing that he thrust them down, forced them down, did everything he could to silence these frightening impulses.
And failed.
Shade pulled at his hair, squeezed his eyes shut, but the illegal, immoral, anti-social impulses impelled him to do things he knew were wrong: he wanted to become one of them, to join the dreamers in their revelry.
The squawk box must have been translating all of this, because Linda pulled him close, stroked his face. “What you’re experiencing is normal,” she said. “It is always this way with new dreamers. All your life the Collective has drowned out the sound of your own voice. But now you can hear it for the first time.”
But what on earth do I want with my own voice? Shade cried out in agony. The individual is poisonous to humanity. To the Collective. We must work together, and sacrifice our voices for the good of the planet, or the world will end!
“The world is not going to end because we refuse to work,” Linda said gently.
“And this is our work,” Buck said, fingering a nearby potter’s wheel. The potter smiled, smacked his hand away.
This? Shade smashed a fist down on the potter’s wet clay, collapsing a vase. This is madness! It is nonsense! Nothing more.
The potter was on his feet, the smile gone.
Buck held out a hand. “He’s a new dreamer. Please forgive him this once.”
The potter glared at Shade, then bent down to pick up wet fragments of the unfinished vase, and molded the damaged form back onto his potter’s wheel.
Linda took Shade by the hand, led him away from the artisan. “A dream has seized their souls,” she said. “They have chosen to obey its summons, and live out their days here, beneath the Crust. They would rather become monsters, and live apart, than conform to the dictates of the Collective.”
How terrible! Shade said. Without jobs? No work to give their lives meaning?
“This is work,” Buck said again, patiently.
It is not! Shade said. It is—it is dreaming. He reached for his ChemLob jabbers, found his bandoleer gone. Cursed. The time for dreaming is over. Now we all—
“—must work. Yes. We know,” Linda said.
Buck put a hand on Shade’s shoulder. “This is work, but it is also play.”
The king said the same thing. But what does this word mean? ‘Play’?
Buck regarded him gravely. “Man was built to work. But he was also made to play. We choose to play.”
But what does the word mean? Shade shouted.
Linda touched his lips with a finger, turned down the volume on his squawk box. “You must find that out on your own.”
Her cold fingers made him flinch. I don’t understand.
“Listen to your dream,” she said. “It will tell you your destiny.”
Shade’s head swam in confusion, assaulted by these incomprehensible, illegal thoughts. No wonder the Collective banned dreams.
At that moment, a voice filled the room, and the others fell silent—thousands of brushes paused in mid-air; pens poised, unmoving; scientists lifted their heads from their microscopes. The musicians stopped. The dancers froze.
The wordless sound was compelling. Sweet. The thing inside him moved and twitched again. What could it be? Not gas. Was one of his organs deformed, damaged or cancerous? He ought to see a doctor about that.
His feet carried him apart from his two guides, stumbling at first as he struggled to make sense of the sound, then, more sure of foot, he pushed his way through the throng of monsters to find a woman standing in a corner by herself.
Shade reeled when he saw her. It was Linda! Or looked like her. The nightmare Linda, the monster who had cursed him as he lay in the sewers, an eternity of suffering. A giant mass of green and purple flesh. Scales covered her body. Fangs jutted over her lower lip.
But the sound drew him to her once more. How could such a sweet sound come from such an ugly, monstrous form? And yet it fit with what Linda had told him. The more monstrous the dreamer, the sweeter the dream.
Her eyes were closed. With each breath she took, each exhalation that she made, a sound like nothing he had ever heard vibrated within every cell of his body—filling him with such sorrow, and joy, such laughter—and despair—it seemed to him his heart would burst in that instant, and leave him dead on the floor.
Shade fell to his knees at her feet, his mind crippled, his body on fire, unable to move.
The sound lasted an eternity, as long or longer than his nightmare in the sewers.
When she finished, she opened her eyes and looked down at him. She wiped away his tears with a clumsy claw.
She whispered. “You too?”
Chapter Twelve
Shade stared up at the monstrous female shape. The claw brushed his cheek, fell to her side.
What was that? he whispered.
“That,” she said, “was my song.”
How do you— he asked, but could not stop the thought—how do you do it? I want to do that too!
She reached down and tapped his squawk box. “You must learn to walk before you can run. You must learn to talk before you can sing.”
So many unfamiliar words! ‘Song’? ‘Sing’?
Hooves tap-tapped behind him. Buck said, “Jimmy Shade here has just arrived.”
The monster-woman
inclined her head. “Welcome, Jimmy Shade. To the City of Dreams.”
“If he should like to learn your gift,” Buck asked, “would you be willing to teach him? If he decides to stay, that is.”
“Oh, but you must stay!” the woman cried. “You have no idea what you’ve been missing.”
You mean—I could—that is—I mean—would I be able to—sing too?
The woman laid a rough claw on his shoulder. “If that is your dream. Then it would be my pleasure to teach you how to sing.”
Shade couldn’t believe what he said next. When can we start? he blurted out.
Linda squeezed his shoulder. “Tomorrow morning.”
Shade gaped at her. Why not now?
“We must finish your tour first, then you can study with Maude, if you wish.”
Maude! he thought. Her name was Maude. A beautiful name for such an ugly creature.
Maude looked him in the eye. “Once you learn to talk, you will also have to learn when to remain silent.” She patted his shoulder.
Shade blushed. Sorry…I meant no offense.
“None taken.” She straightened up and turned to go.
Wait! he said. Screw the tour. I want to stay.
He felt possessed. The words and actions were no longer his own, but this thing—this voice—growing in power inside him, held him in its grip.
“An eager one,” Maude said. She squeezed Shade’s arm. “Finish the tour. It is important you see and understand your new life here. Then tomorrow, if you still wish, I will teach you.”
Shade nodded, and climbed to his feet. He followed Linda and Buck. He looked back. Maude stared after him. Her mottled green-and-purple face turned red, and she twitched a claw at him.
Buck and Linda led him down a twisting passageway. He paid no attention to where he was going. They walked for a long time. The sound—the song—lingered in his soul, and rippled in ever-increasing waves, crashing against the shore of his brain.
They passed hulking monsters carrying pickaxes and shovels, and soon Shade found himself once more at the base of the gleaming crystal staircase, the thin spindle rising up to pierce the Crust far above. Two monsters dropped down the high pole, and puffs of air bumped them in opposite directions to land safely in the nearby dunes.
