Dreamquake

by Elizabeth Knox

After that it was easy. She swung a knee up and was suddenly kneeling in the gutter set into the stonework. Ahead of her was a flat expanse of roof sealed with tar and set with several skylights. The big skylight over the central staircase was like a greenhouse in which fire was growing and running riot. Around it the roof tar bubbled and smoked.

  Rose got to her feet and made a long circuit around the big skylight. She went gingerly, because the tar was hot and soft, and because she was afraid the roof might collapse under her, sending her down—like Laura’s sandman—into the heart of the fire.

  Laura and Grace stood in the crowd and watched fire rise to fill every window of the front façade of the People’s Palace. During those minutes someone came and draped a blanket over Grace’s shoulders. She said “Thank you,” but her eyes never strayed from her watching. The engine and tender backed out of the side street north of the building—retreating—the firemen hauling the heavy hoses with them. More fire trucks had arrived, and hoses were working over the whole front of the building. The smoke flowed straight up now, pushed by superheated air.

  Someone put a hand on Laura’s shoulder, and she looked around and saw that it was her uncle. Chorley stood behind them, almost supporting himself on them. There was a bandage wound around his head. He caught Laura’s look of horror and said, “It’s nothing. A bump.” He bit his lips. He didn’t say, “Where’s Rose?”

  Grace was weeping and trembling from head to foot.

  Some stranger first spotted Rose. He shouted and pointed at the figure in white, glimpsed through the smoke streaming from the plumes of fire that belched from every window. Then the whole crowd saw her and made a sound, a rumble of anxiety that gained volume and turned into urgent yelling. The firemen moved almost as one, turning their hoses on the windows directly beneath where Rose was standing.

  Chorley and Grace ran into the confusion of water, shouting their daughter’s name. The firemen rushed to hold the couple back. A truck was being moved. The fire nets had been laid aside, unused. Now a group of firemen converged on one net. They spread it out, pulled it taut, lifted it, and hurried across the plaza to stand beneath the corner of the building, the only place without windows, and so also without fountains of fire.

  Laura could see that Rose was watching the firemen. She’d seen the net. She came nearer to the edge and picked up her skirt to climb out onto a jutting cornice.

  It was then that the big skylight exploded. It sprayed glass in every direction. The crowd howled in terror, but the girl on the roof only dropped into a crouch and covered her head. Then she got up again, slowly. Her hair had come loose and was floating straight up from her head like a bright flag. She stood looking down at the net, a slender figure in white, apparently utterly composed.

  It was a long way down. The circle of the fire net seemed a small hope. A twisting column of flame had erupted from the gap where a skylight had been. Rose could hear tar sizzling, she could see where the roof was sagging. The heat behind her was terrible. In a moment she’d be on fire.

  Rose took a couple of steps back. She wanted to be sure she could jump far enough to clear all the masonry below her. Only two steps should do it. She kept her eyes on the circle of the net. She lined it up with her gaze as she’d line up the deepest water when she was jumping at high tide from the rocks below Summerfort.

  The crowd saw her retreat and howled. Rose heard her parents’ voices rise above the cacophony of the fire, the roar and splash of hoses, and all the other voices. Their despair made them audible; those cries could be heard through anything, it seemed, even through the rules of the universe.

  Rose ran forward and jumped. The air rushed past her. Her feet flew up over her head so that she slapped, shoulders and back first, into the canvas. Her breath was knocked out of her. She bounced up once, then the canvas caught her and she lay tumbled on it, her elbows smarting.

  Through the faces bent over her and the hands reaching for her, Rose looked up at the roof, which didn’t seem so far away now. It really wasn’t any surprise that she’d made it.

  Then her ma and da and Laura appeared. The firemen laid the net down, so Rose was on solid ground. Her father scooped her up. He was crying. Her mother was crying. Laura was crying. But why on earth were all the other people crying, even the firemen? Weeping and touching her as though she was a holy relic.

  VI

  Epidemic Contentment

  1

  HE FIRE BURNED FOR A NIGHT AND A DAY, FUELED BY COAL STORED IN THE PALACE CELLAR. WHEN IT WAS OUT, THE SMELL OF IT HUNG, HORRIBLE, OVER MUCH OF THE CENTRAL CITY. THERE WERE NO CALLING CARDS, NO PARADE OF MOTHERS, NO PREPARATIONS FOR LATER BALLS. FOR A DAY ROSE LAY UPSTAIRS AND COUGHED, THEN HER COUGH QUIETED. LAURA WENT OUT AND CALLED FOR NOWN UNDER THE DARK ARCH OF MARKET BRIDGE, LOOKED FOR HIM AMONG THE BROKEN GLASS, RAGS, AND HUMAN WASTE. THEN, WHEN ROSE WAS ABLE TO TELL HER STORY, SHE TOLD LAURA SHE’D SEEN NOWN FALL.

  Laura lost track of time but did wonder why Sandy hadn’t come. Then, on the afternoon of the second day after the fire, George Mason arrived with red-rimmed eyes and his bad news. He stood in the library and showed the family what he had—wrapped in his handkerchief in a nest of soot—the broken chain and charred copper tags of his nephew’s dreamhunter’s license.

  The next day, when Laura was sitting at the dinner table and her father was trying to persuade her to eat, even cutting up her food for her, Rose saw that Laura had a look like the façade of the People’s Palace, stony, and still standing, but burned out inside.

  Rose went to visit Mamie. She waited in the entrance hall and overheard Mrs. Doran say to her daughter, “Really, Mamie, it’s so common of your friend just to turn up unannounced. It’s to be discouraged.”

  Rose heard Mrs. Doran coming and darted away from the door. Mamie’s mother emerged, gave Rose a smile with no buoyancy whatsoever, and said, “Mamie is waiting for you, please go in.”

  “Thank you,” Rose said. She opened the door a crack and flitted through it, trying not to touch anything as she went.

  Mamie didn’t get up but did begin to fidget. She said, “What’s under the scarf?”

  Rose touched her silk bandanna. “My hair is frizzy at the front. I’ll have to let it grow a bit before it can be repaired.”

  “You look sphinxlike,” Mamie said.

  “You mean I don’t have any eyebrows. Frankly, being a sphinx stinks.”

  Mamie said. “Do you want tea?”

  “No, thanks. Do you want to play hostess?”

  “Not really.”

  “Aren’t you pleased to see me?” Rose said, being blunt.

  “Yes.” Mamie straightened her spine, sat as a lady should. She looked like her grandmother, without that woman’s corsets. “I saw you jump. There was even a picture of it in the papers.”

  “I’m sorry that you felt I bossed you about the ball,” Rose said.

  “Don’t think about it. You meant well. And I couldn’t have resisted Mother anyway.”

  Rose wriggled forward on her seat. “Just because everyone imagines that coming out means we’re advertising ourselves as available for marriage, that doesn’t mean we have to experience it all that way. We don’t have to take any of it seriously.”

  Mamie shrugged. “But have you thought what you’re going to do with your life apart from getting married?”

  “No. I’ve only thought what I might do for the next year or so. Have a final year at school, then travel around the country staying with all my classmates and distant relatives—really get to know the whole country, not just resorts like Sisters Beach and the spa in Spring Valley. Then, when I’m twenty-one, I can go to university.”

  “To study what? And why?”

  “Something for its own sake. Or law—for justice.”

  Mamie gave Rose a slow smile. “I’m going to eat until I’m so fat that everyone will leave me alone.”

  “No, you’re not,” Rose said, impatient. “Da is going to teach me to drive. He can teach you too, if you’d lik
e.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “Independence. Get-up-and-go. Honestly, Mamie, complaining doesn’t make you a rebel, only action makes anyone a rebel. We girls have to do what we can. Take whatever opportunities we’re offered.”

  “Tea?” Mamie offered again. “There’s some lovely almond cake.”

  Rose laughed.

  Mamie continued. “What you have to realize, Rose, is that I’m not adventurous. Laura is your natural companion for adventures. You can’t charm me into joining you. It’s not that I’m timid, it’s just that I hate failure, and hate to be uncomfortable, and I don’t particularly enjoy effort. I’m a lost cause.”

  Rose looked at the floor. She thought, “Whereas Laura is just lost.”

  The day before, Laura had gone with Grace to see George Mason off at the station. Mason was taking Sandy’s remains—a collection of carbonized bones—back to his family. Afterward Laura had talked to Rose, in a wispy voice. She told Rose what she knew about Sandy’s home—his six brothers and sisters. One brother was the head of the night shift at the sawmill. Another was an engineer in a railway workshop. His father was a shop steward at the carpet factory. Laura talked about the year Sandy had spent working in that factory, about his school, with its tattered books and sour hallways. Sandy’s mother was a teacher at a similar girls’ school. The family had tenuous respectability—all of them had stayed in school till fifteen.

  Rose said to Mamie, “Laura has had adventures I can’t even imagine. She’s even been in love. Her heart is broken.”

  “Laura hasn’t been lucky, has she?”

  “No. Sandy. Her mother …” Rose looked hard at Mamie. “I suppose you’ve heard that her father’s back?”

  “I’ve heard that he’s ill.”

  “Yes. That’s what’s finally roused Laura. In a couple of days she is going In to get The Gate.”

  “The miracle dream.”

  “I’ve had it three times now.” Rose could feel her face softening. “It’s extraordinarily beautiful. It is proving a little controversial, though. At Fallow Hill it carried off any of their patients who were close to death, or ready to die. It can’t be dreamed near anyone critically ill or injured who has any chance of recovery. What it does is tell whoever dreams it that there’s something beautiful to go on to after death. It tells it with such conviction that very sick people just let go of life. But it’s excellent for chronic illness, pain, madness, and misery. I’m glad Laura’s father has persuaded her to get it for him. Of course he’s hoping it’ll help her.”

  “Is your mother planning to catch it too?”

  “No. Ma is going farther In to get Drought’s End. She’s going to perform it at the Rainbow Opera. What Founderston needs after the fire is a balm of rain—and the dream’s sloppy romance, and little white horses.”

  “You forget I haven’t had any of these dreams.”

  “Oh,” said Rose, feeling awkward. She did keep forgetting that Mamie’s mother hadn’t let her daughter go to a dream palace.

  Mamie was looking sly and thoughtful. “Is Drought’s End a master dream?”

  “I didn’t know you knew anything about that.”

  “I know all about it, despite my lack of firsthand experience.”

  “I don’t think it is a master dream.”

  Mamie rearranged herself and seemed to change the subject. “Well,” she said, “I’m getting on a train tomorrow night. My father is sending me off to our summerhouse.”

  “Alone?”

  “The servants will be there.”

  “Does your father think you need a holiday?”

  “No.” Mamie stared into Rose’s eyes.

  Rose searched her friend’s face. Mamie was looking sphinxlike, though she still had her eyebrows. She was trying to tell Rose something, to tell without actually saying.

  “Or,” said Rose, “does he just think you’ll be better off out of Founderston?”

  And Mamie said, “That must be it.”

  It was Rose who remembered the film, five days after the fire. Chorley developed it, and they all sat down to watch it.

  Laura saw that Nown had cranked the camera a little too slowly, so that the film’s action was fast, the captives and rangers jerky and insectile in their movements. There was shutter flicker, as though the camera were peering through eyes that were blinking away tears. But there were the huts, the barracks, the canvas-walled rooms of the Depot.

  “How did you get this?” Chorley said.

  “I didn’t,” Laura said. “I was here.”

  “We sent someone,” said Tziga.

  When Nown had been shooting the footage, Laura had been lying in Sandy’s arms within the circle of Foreigner’s West. They got up and folded the blankets, and she gave up one life for another. Nown had betrayed her. He was heartless. He should have told her what he must have known. He’d always carried her, but—in a way—he’d made her walk. Her long, hard journey might have been simple and short if only he’d said: “The Place is the same thing I am, a Nown—that’s something you need to know.”

  Chorley said, “I’ll take this to the Grand Patriarch. I imagine he’ll want to present it to the Commission.”

  “Make a copy first,” Tziga said.

  Grace said, “I hate having to rely on that old man to get things straightened out.”

  “We’re not relying on him, we are consulting with him,” Chorley snapped.

  Laura thought how strange it was that her aunt was still able to imagine things being “straightened out,” as though all that had to happen was that Cas Doran be exposed and the Regulatory Body encouraged to mind their own business. Grace seemed to think that if those things were accomplished, then dreamhunters would be able to get back to their prospecting and performing in peace. Rose and Chorley and Tziga wanted Doran stopped and punished. They wanted to weed out corruption. Was Laura’s aunt right to look to a time beyond that, to order and everyday life?

  Laura thought nothing could be mended. And she was sure she was thinking just as straight as her aunt Grace. So which of them was right?

  The family agreed that Laura shouldn’t be left alone. But only Rose understood what that meant. As soon as her cough eased, Rose had taken to climbing into Laura’s bed. She didn’t try to watch with Laura, to stay awake and stare into the dark—she slept, but she was there.

  The night they screened the film, Rose fell asleep almost the moment she put her head on her pillow. She woke after an hour or two, from a dream in which she wandered along red-painted hallways, unable to open any of the doors because their handles burned her hands.

  “Nightmare?” said Laura, from the other side of the bed.

  “Yes. There’s never any fire in my nightmares. Just heat.”

  “I still have nightmares where I’m thirsty.”

  Rose turned over and tried to see her cousin. There was a little light coming in the window from the street, enough so that the shadows of the flowers on the frosted-glass lamp on the nightstand were visible. Rose could see the lumpy shadow that was her cousin, and the glimmer of Laura’s eyes. Because it was dark, Rose felt a little daring. She said, “Have you thought that you could make your sandman again?”

  “He let me down,” Laura said, her voice flat.

  “He couldn’t help it.”

  “Not in the fire. Before that.”

  “So you won’t make him again because you’re mad at him?”

  “I won’t make him again because I can’t make Sandy.”

  Rose thought about the logic of Laura’s statement. Of course it was flawless. It made perfect sense. Rose knew that her cousin had loved both of them, Sandy and the monster. Laura wouldn’t resurrect one if she couldn’t resurrect the other.

  “It’s not just a decision,” Laura said. “I think it’s prohibited. My need is great, but I can’t feel the song. When I found Da’s sandman, but before I knew ‘The Measures,’ I could feel this storm of music around me. Now I don’t feel anything.�
��

  Rose found one of Laura’s hands under the covers and held it.

  “I’m just going to be good and do what I’m asked. Then maybe I’ll stop feeling so sick and tired. Sandy felt like my family and my future.”

  Rose squeezed Laura’s hand.

  Laura said, “Wouldn’t it be terrible if none of us had futures, only fates?”

  “I don’t believe in fate,” Rose said. It was true; Rose believed in the poker, the sewing basket, the broken window, the rooftop, the fire net, the way out. She believed in reprieve. And she was sure that, sooner or later, she would think of some way to help Laura. Something would come to her—it was only a matter of time.

  2

  ATURDAY EVENING. TWO MEN, ONE TALL, THE OTHER SMALL, WALKED SLOWLY BACK ACROSS MARKET BRIDGE FROM the Isle of the Temple. The evening was autumnal, and there was a white mist rising from the surface of the river.

  Other pedestrians they passed glanced, then turned to stare after them.

  “It’s taking a while for the word to get around Founderston that you’re not dead,” Chorley said.

  “I’ve been sequestered at home, or at Fallow Hill.”

  “After Monday we’ll be able to deal with the reports of your death. We can bring up the matter of the forged signature in the Doorhandle intentions book.”

  “After Monday that will be an even smaller matter than it is already.”

  Chorley and Tziga had shown the film of the Depot to the Grand Patriarch. On Monday afternoon the Commission of Inquiry was due to convene again. Their report would be published soon. All submissions had been read, all witnesses questioned, all arguments heard. But the seven men of the Commission were due to meet again to discuss their findings—and the Grand Patriarch intended to deliver the film to them, with Laura and her testimony.

  “I wouldn’t like to be in Doran’s shoes after Monday,”Chorley said. “Though he must have been forewarned. Your cameraman was spotted. In the final seconds of the film, a ranger points at him.” Chorley was quiet for a moment, then added, “He’ll have to testify too, I expect.”