Dreamquake

by Elizabeth Knox

  The handcar pulled up at a platform. More rangers appeared and began unloading the supplies, carrying everything into one of the huts. Laura was lifted like baggage and put down on the platform. She waited as people went by her with boxes and baskets. She ignored the rangers and tried to catch the eye of one of the people in yellow. Most were men, but Laura did see a few young women among them. They all looked well fed, well rested, and reasonably clean. They were not at all interested in Laura’s appearance. Their eyes went across her as though she were no more surprising than anything else they looked at.

  Laura didn’t like their yellow uniforms or their vulnerable, unshod feet. But she could see that none of the people seemed sedated. They were all active and coordinated and clear-eyed, only strangely calm.

  Several more rangers emerged from one of the barracks and came over to Laura. The one wearing a white coat and stethoscope frowned as he came up and said, “Untie her immediately.”

  When her hands were free, Laura pulled the gaping front of her shirt together.

  “There’s no need to do that, young lady. I want to look at your license,” the doctor said.

  “She’s Tziga Hame’s daughter, Laura,” one of her captors said.

  The doctor gave Laura a careful, appraising look.

  “She was walking Inland along the rail line about an hour from the tower. The gate at the beginning of The Pinnacles was hanging off its hinges. The detour gate was smashed to bits. But the girl was on her own when we found her.”

  The doctor looked into her eyes. “Did you break the gates, Laura?”

  “They were already broken,” she said. “I wondered whether there was some emergency. I went in to see if I could be of any assistance.” She lifted her chin and stared at him, cool and defiant.

  One of the rangers snorted in disbelief. “Who worked the cable car, then?”

  Laura said, “I was so determined to help, I went up the cable hand over hand.”

  The ranger hissed in anger and reached for her, but the doctor fended him off. “There’s no need to press her. We’ll know her story soon enough.”

  To Laura he said, “I’m sure you understand that you’re in trouble. You’ve trespassed. And there’s the matter of damage to property.”

  Laura didn’t like to meet his eyes. There was a look in them, a cold, stripped-down look, that frightened her. Instead she turned her attention to the rail line, which, she saw, didn’t end at the platform but went away, dead straight, Inland. She asked, “Is this the Depot?”

  “Yes, it is. But where did you hear that name?”

  “I don’t remember. What’s out there?” Laura pointed along the line.

  “The railway is being extended solely in the interest of exploration. Believe me, the farther you go, the less memorable it is. But I suppose you are one of those dreamhunters with romantic ideas about the hinterland? About a dream like Koh-i-noor? A big, matchless diamond of a dream.”

  He was making fun of her. He was all scorn and cynicism; a fortress defended, but defending only emptiness. That was what she could see when she looked into his eyes. He knew he was doing wrong, and meant to go on doing it, but was still capable of feeling resentment when anything reminded him of it.

  Laura remembered seeing a similar expression in Maze Plasir’s face when she’d asked him about supplying nightmares to the Department of Corrections.

  As these thoughts went through her mind, she began unconsciously pursing her lips and shaking her head.

  “Are you about to scold us?” the doctor asked, sarcastic.

  The look she gave him. The doctor remembered it all his life. She met his eyes, her expression icy and knowing. It wasn’t bravado. She didn’t strike him as brave. She was still shivering and clutching her torn shirt closed over her tiny breasts. Fear was there in her body, frank fear in her tremors and whitened knuckles. But she looked like someone who couldn’t feel her own fear, because it was being interfered with by faith. Faith was pouring out of her face at him, bigger and louder than anything. She looked like a saint.

  It was very impressive. But being impressed only made this man feel spiteful. He leered at Laura Hame. He said, “I’m pleased to see you’re not afraid. You have no reason to be, as you’ll soon learn.” He nodded to the rangers she’d come with, one of whom laid a hand on her shoulder while the other knelt to unlace and remove her boots. The doctor smiled more widely and added, “I know you’ll be very happy here.”

  The hut had a wooden floor, and white dust had gathered in its corners. It had a window with bars on it but without glass. There was no need for glass, no cold to combat, or wind to screen. A thin mattress was set square against one wall. There was a bucket: clean white enamel, with a lid. There was no other furniture.

  An hour after Laura was put into the room, the door was unbolted and a tray delivered to her. On it were a mug of water and oatcakes topped with honey. There was also a bowl full of some kind of cold tomato concoction and an orange.

  Laura sipped the water slowly. She wasn’t so much planning an escape as just meaning to. Because she meant to escape, she would take every opportunity to store water in her body. She drank slowly with the idea that she, like an indoor plant, would absorb more water if watered gradually. As she sipped, she looked through the window at the people in yellow.

  She saw one she recognized. It was Maze Plasir’s apprentice, Gavin Pinkney. Oily, snide Gavin—who had passed in the Doorhandle Try last autumn, and who was licensed before Laura since he didn’t catch dreams about convicts.

  Gavin was sitting, holding his bare toes in either hand and rocking gently back and forth.

  Laura put her face against the bars and called to him. “Gavin!”

  He was slow to react to his name but turned to her smiling already, then beamed. He got up and came over wearing a goofy but completely genuine grin. “Hello,” he said.

  “Gavin, how long have you been here?”

  He shrugged. “It’s great here,” he said. “Though I could murder for a bit of cooked meat.”

  “A while, then?” Laura said.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come,” he said. “You’ll find you feel better almost immediately.”

  Laura nodded to encourage him, and he began to echo her nod, his eyes creased with smiling. “It’s wonderful that we’re together,” he said.

  “You and me?” Laura was astonished. He’d shown no sign of liking her before.

  “All together,” he said, in a singsong voice. “It was all worth it.”

  “What was?”

  “The work, the chances I took. Time well spent, to end up with this—this full well of time.” Gavin’s voice was nasal—his usual quacking voice, but his tone was so serene he sounded mesmerizing. “And we have the whole day ahead of us,” he said. “This beautiful day.” He looked around, his face shining, as if illuminated by brilliant spring sunshine.

  Laura covered her mouth with her hand. She retched, and some of the water came back up from her gullet tainted with bile. She swallowed and tried to control herself.

  Gavin went on. “There’s my mother waiting for us—still in the best of health. And my grown children, favored by fortune, he prosperous, she generous. How foolish I was to worry about them. And the grandchildren—here they come up from the beach, the girls practicing cartwheels and the boys carrying the canoe paddles—”

  “It’s a dream, Gavin,” Laura said, to put a stop to his rapturous chanting.

  “A dream …” His eyes flickered.

  “Contentment,” Laura said, guessing.

  “Yes.” His face cleared. Then he said, puzzled, “Don’t you want to be happy?”

  There was a clanging from one of the buildings. It sounded like a dinner bell. Gavin got up, dusted off his backside, and left without saying another word. Laura watched all the yellow-clad figures making their way, orderly and eager, toward the sound of the bell.

  There was no fence around the compound. There was no need for one; the bare
foot, captive dreamhunters wouldn’t want to run away from decent food and the blessed company of the dream.

  Before they had put her in the hut, the rangers had made Laura turn out her pockets. She’d said to them, sneering, “Do you suppose I’m carrying a lock pick? Or a knife?” But of course they’d been looking for Wakeful. Wakeful was what Laura wished she had now—the drug, or a lock pick, or a knife.

  She knew that her captors had only to wait for her to sleep. Then they could ask her their questions. Once she had taken a print of the dream, and been drugged by its bliss, they would ask their questions and she’d answer them, trustingly. Nothing would matter. It would be a beautiful day, and she’d have the whole day ahead of her.

  Before she could have second thoughts, Laura began to feed the oozy oatcakes through the bars; then she poured the tomato stuff out after them. As she did this, she whispered, “I don’t want to be happy. I don’t want to be happy.” She didn’t put the food in her slops bucket because the bucket was still empty and clean, and she might be tempted to take the food out again. Her captors might not be patient—she reasoned—they might drug her food to make her sleep sooner. Laura could still see how the smashed gates had looked. If they were her gates and she had found them and hadn’t known how they’d been broken, she’d be very eager to find out as soon as possible.

  Laura ate only the orange. She chose to believe that it was protected from tampering by its peel. She stopped whispering to herself as she ate but went on once she’d swallowed her last bite, in a slow-burning panic. “I don’t want to be happy.”

  She moved to the window again to stare out into the grasslands. She imagined she saw a far-off figure, a dark speck.But it was only a dust mote sliding down the surface of her eye.

  Her mouth shaped his name.

  A ranger found the food. He picked up the oatcakes and went away. The doctor appeared a few minutes later at her door. “You’re being very stupid,” he said. “Unless you want to answer our rather pressing questions now.”

  Laura shook her head and backed away from him.

  He signaled to the rangers waiting behind him. The men stepped into the hut and grabbed her. The doctor advanced on her. He pulled a square, black leather case from the pocket of his white coat. He snapped its lid open. Laura glimpsed the gleaming glass and steel of hypodermic needles. “No!” she shrieked.

  “No?” The doctor hesitated, the case open. He tilted it back and forth so that bubbles slid in the glass barrels of clear chemical.

  “I’ll be good, I’ll eat, I’ll lie down.” She was babbling. Then she burst into tears. She sobbed in rage and fear, her voice dropped a full octave, and she said, “I’ll kill you,” sobbing.

  “You’ll be good, and you’ll kill me?” the doctor said, cold and sweet. But he must have made a silent command too, for the rangers released her. Laura cowered away from them against the wall. Through the distortion of tears, she saw the doctor point down, at the mattress she was standing on. She obeyed him, lowering herself to her knees.

  “I’ll send in more food. It isn’t drugged, Miss Hame. You’ll sleep better with something in your stomach.”

  “Yes,” Laura said. “Yes, all right.” She held her hands out, palms up, pushing them away.

  They left. She heard the bolt on the outside of the door slide into place. Someone gave it a rattle for good measure. Then it was quiet. She could hear footsteps, their feet in the yard, the occasional murmuring voice. She thought she could hear the other captives having dinner, the clack of spoons on enamelware. She covered her ears and squeezed her eyes shut and tried to push back the panic that was threatening to annihilate her, prematurely, since Contentment was poised to wipe her out as soon as she slept. The dream would replace herself with itself, her desires with its self-satisfaction. It would replace her family with its family, its cartwheeling granddaughters.

  Laura found herself singing. She sang to stay sane. She sang the school song of Founderston Girls’ Academy, a song about striving and virtue and setting forth together. Then her voice trailed off, and she stared through the striped mattress cover in front of her.

  She had come up with a plan.

  The ranger sent to look in on Laura Hame stopped by her cell window and took a quick peek. He didn’t know quite what he expected—to surprise her at something perhaps, but what?

  The girl had her back to the window and didn’t notice him. She was kneeling in one corner and seemed to be busy sweeping up the dust gathered in the angle of floor and wall. She was using her hands and was in danger of picking up splinters from the rough planks flooring the hut. The ranger thought, “So—she’s decided to keep herself awake by doing housework.” She looked like a penitent, on her knees and grubbing away at the dirt.

  “It’s futile, you know,” he said.

  She stopped what she was doing, stiffened, but didn’t turn around.

  The ranger waited for a moment, then went away.

  When, over an hour later, he came back to check, the Hame girl was sitting cross-legged in the center of the room, with her back to the window. She’d removed her jacket and spread it out before her. The dust she’d swept up was gathered in a tiny pile on the jacket. This was odd, but he was reassured to see that she had in her hand the small, seedy loaf from her second plate of food.

  “Good girl,” he said.

  She turned around and gave him a cold look. “Don’t gloat,” she said. Then, “My clothes are uncomfortable. I’d sleep better in a pair of those yellow pajamas everyone is wearing.”

  He went away and found a clean pair, a little too big for her, but she could roll up the sleeves and ankles. He returned to the hut and found her standing at the window. Over her shoulder he could see her jacket, lying humped in the middle of the room. There was no sign of her housekeeping dust pile. The bread was gone, the water cup empty and on its side.

  He pushed the pajamas through the bars. She thanked him, and he went away once more.

  The ranger stayed away over an hour. The next time he looked in on the Hame girl, she was still up but was in the pajamas—their yellow highly visible in the gloom of the hut.

  She was singing.

  The ranger opened his mouth and drew breath to say something to startle her; then a familiar, lovely odor hit his palate. The scent seemed to come billowing out through the bars in the window. Ozone—summer rain on warm earth. The ranger shook his head and shouted, “Girl!”

  Laura Hame broke off her singing with a cough like a sob. Her shoulders slumped.

  “Do you want me to tell the doctor to come and pay you a visit?”

  “Go away!” she yelled. She didn’t jump up or twist herself around. She spoke vehemently but only turned her head to look back over her shoulder. “I want to sleep,” she said. “I have a sore stomach. I’m waiting for it to pass.”

  “Better be soon,” he threatened, then went away once more.

  Laura put her palms over her eyes to catch her tears. She rocked back and forth in her own darkness. There was only this to do. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. She had to empty her mind of all fear and expectation. She had only to remember that it did work—that she, Laura, was already living in a world in which she’d succeeded at this already. The only rule was the spell. The only effort, faith.

  She set her wet fingers on the drying surface of the little man she’d made out of dust and chewed bread. She made the surface of the mix tacky and pliable once more. She began to sing again, from the beginning: “The Measures,” that chant made of Koine, demotic Greek; and nonsense sounds, glossolalia, the tongues of angels. Every word was different from the one before.

  The power began to build and spin around her. She sang on in her tired, sweet, young voice, and, this time, no one came to interrupt her. When she finished singing, the room seemed to vibrate—it was so stuffed with energy. Laura picked up the second of two small, crescent-shaped slivers of fingernail, her own, and stooped over the tiny, tacky form of the bread-and-dust man. She
scratched the letters onto the broadest part of his anatomy, his chest. The other bit of fingernail was already buried in that doughy chest, as a heart. Laura etched “N O W” but left off the final N. She didn’t need him to speak to her, only to follow her orders.

  For a second the tiny bread-and-dust figure lay inert. Then, suddenly, his stillness looked like surprise. He flexed his legs, got up, and turned his little, roughly formed face to hers.

  Laura laughed and smiled down at him.

  His attention was so focused and expectant that it pulled her out of her brief moment of rapt relief. “Look,” she said. “I’ll just go check the window to see how many people are out there. We need plenty of people in yellow, and fewer rangers. A while ago I heard a bell ringing at that building farther off—so perhaps the rangers are having their meal. I hope so.” She bit her lip to stop talking. She didn’t need to explain her whole situation. He was so tiny that she thought she’d better keep her instructions simple. “His brain can’t be very big,” she thought, nonsensically. Then she recalled that he didn’t have a brain anyway, so maybe his size didn’t determine his mental capacity.

  Laura made herself stop thinking it all through. She went to the window, saw that there were now plenty of yellow-clad people around—as many as there had been when she first arrived, hours ago. Perhaps this was their daytime roster. The camp might very well run with a “day” and a “night” for the convenience of the rangers. So, it was “day,” and there were people around. There were even a few wandering quite far from the camp—maybe as far as they’d ever want to go on the invisible leash of the dream.