Symbiography

by William Hjortsberg

  As a rule, the Dreamer wandered naked in the house, adding only a conical hat to protect his tender scalp from the sun in the gardens; but, for the library, he wore a long, shot-silk gown, cut in the flowing style of a medieval cassock. The current fashion for men in the City, ballooning knee-britches and short metal-scaled vests, struck Sondak as ridiculous, like the costumes trained bears wore in the ancient circuses. He thought of the portly Gibbon, unable to rise from his knees after proposing marriage; could his own age boast such a droll genius? Was there someone to record the decline and fall of the Utopian Era?

  The computer interrupted the Dreamer’s musing. “Excuse me, sir,” the modulated, unhurried voice never varied; the computer announced good news and bad alike with the same laconic indifference. “The sensors report the presence of an intruder on the grounds. A Nomad, sir.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “The last fix placed him on the edge of the south orchard.”

  “Have the arrangements all been made?” “Everything according to your specifications.”

  “Good.” The Dreamer finished his brandy in a single swallow. “Very good. It’s only a matter of time and he’s ours. See if you can pick him up on holo; I want to watch from the control room.” Sondak’s face was flushed. He left the library, lifting the skirt of his long gown above his ankles like an anxious priest as he hurried up the gleaming corridor.

  Buick kneeled beside the base of one of a dozen fluted marble columns surrounding an ornamental pond. Only a broad swath of immaculate green lawn separated his hiding-place from the curving crystal and silver minarets of the house. He never planned on coming this far. Simply to have stolen some fruit would have been sufficient triumph; to risk this much was madness. But Buick was following a scent which lured him still, past any thought of danger. He was intoxicated by the wind-borne aroma of roasting meat. Now he was close enough to hear the sizzle of melting fat and see pennants of white smoke reaching through the rain from below the circular terrace.

  Buick covered the distance to the stairs in five long strides, nearly slipping on the wet flagstones before he reached the shelter of a carved balustrade. He started down, one step at a time, his back pressed against the rough ashlar masonry of the terrace wall. At the bottom, out of sight of the house, stood a hidden pavilion and under the blue and gold awnings, a spitted calf turned, glazed and dripping, over a bed of coals.

  Of all the wonders seen today, the splendor of food in such profusion was by far the most magical and bewitching. The Nomad wandered spellbound in front of a long cloth-covered table, trying to associate trout jellied in aspic, terrine of pheasant, grilled spring lamb, fruit heaped on silver platters with his own memories of eating roots and porridge, when a bit of dog or an occasional rat trapped among the grainsacks was a prize addition to the stewpot.

  The rain whispered against the taut canopy of the pavilion; the coals hissed and snapped. Buick waited, barely moving. There wasn’t much time. The banquet table was prepared, the guests must not be far behind. Although his every instinct told him to hurry, Buick approached the feast with the dignity of an invited God.

  A hind-quarter from the broiled calf stood on a thick wooden salver. The Nomad leaned his musket against the table and cut a slice with a surgically keen carving-knife. He had never tasted anything so good. He would take as much meat as he could carry. The knife, too. It was a beautiful knife; no one else in the clan owned such a knife. He leaned forward and cut another slice.

  “Good, good,” the voice behind him said. “Eat.”

  The Nomad spun about, grabbing for his musket, gagging on a mouthful of meat. His instincts had betrayed him. He wasn’t alone. A pink-faced, hairless fat man stood only feet away, his long silk robe shining in the fire-light. “Don’t be alarmed,” the Lord Citizen said. “Eat what you want. Take. This is for you.”

  Buick steadied his musket against his shoulder and fired. The Lord’s face was lost for a moment in the sulfurous smoke, but his smile was intact when the air cleared. Buick knew this was magic. His gun carried a load of scrap-metal; ancient bottlecaps, nails, screws and bolts; rusted, unrecognizable lumps from the machine age found anywhere in the desert by scratching the surface with a stick. In battle, warriors reloaded by scooping handfuls of the stuff off the ground. With a three-ounce charge of crude black powder behind it, the load erupted from the smooth-bore like a swarm of angry bees. At close range, there was no such thing as missing. Buick was fighting a phantom. He drew his cutlass and rushed forward, wildly carving the empty air.

  “Do you see? Do you see?” Par Sondak exulted among the displays and monitors of the control room. The image of the Nomad slashing with his sword appeared on rows of holo screens arranged along the far wall: close-ups, wide-angles from above, teleholo views. “Look at him. Isn’t he a savage?” The Dreamer switched off the hologram-projector and addressed the bewildered face on the three-dimensional wall displays. “It is useless to fight. You cannot harm me. You are at the mercy of my power.” Sondak turned off the audio. “How much longer before it takes effect?”

  “Within three to five minutes, sir,” the computer said. “If the dosage were any higher it would kill him.”

  “I’ll keep him amused.” The Dreamer switched the hologram back on and turned up the volume. The Nomad was gasping and bug-eyed when the fat man in the shining robe reappeared on the other side of the table. “Why be my enemy?” smiled the cherubic pink Lord, extending his open palms in a gesture of friendship. “This food is for you.”

  Buick stared, fear-struck and open-mouthed.

  “Can’t you speak?” the Dreamer asked. “What’s your name?”

  On the bank of displays, a dozen mouths soundlessly formed a single word.

  “Well, you do understand something, don’t you? Speak a little louder. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The Nomad’s hand groped for his face and throat. His mouth opened and closed, fighting for air like a stranded fish. Teeth bared in a snarl of final defiance, he hurled his cutlass at the smiling figure of the Lord and pitched headlong onto the elegant table, dragging a torrent of silver and crystal after him in his fall to the floor. Par Sondak’s smile remained unchanged. He gave some orders and switched off the hologram.

  Fresh from the laundry, sanitized and fumigated, the Nomad’s garments and weapons were displayed on a table in the main hall of the Dreamer’s house. Par Sondak examined each item with care. He fingered the unfamiliar roughness of hand-woven fabric and toyed with the primitive spring-wound ratchets in the firing mechanism of the heavy wheel lock musket. In a sudden moment of boyish enthusiasm, he shouldered the awkward weapon, pressing his cheek against the brass-studded stock.

  The Nomad’s belongings fascinated the Dreamer. He was puzzled by the red numerals sewn to the coarse shirt, but he recognized the metal-and-ceramic medallions hanging on the leather belt as products of the Late Industrial Age. One showed a clipper ship under full sail; others portrayed faces: the head of an Indian, a bearded Spanish conquistador, the Roman god, Mercury, with his winged, soup-bowl helmet; the simplest, a plain white oval, had the word Ford across the center in the fluid strokes of the ancient script.

  The contents of the snakeskin pouch were equally mysterious. Aside from a few steel ball-bearings and a magnet, the Dreamer could identify none of the other relics and he asked the computer to run a source check with the micro-mode archive in the City. In less than a minute, the picture-wall switched on and a photo-collage appeared; an instant mural display of the objects spilled across the glass table.

  “These items,” said the computer, “are products of the Late Industrial Age, more than a century before the founding of the Utopian Era. Most of them are machine parts and the pictures are from manufacturer’s catalogues which survive from that period. The first, shown on the far left, was a device known as a ‘spark plug,’ which provided the ignition in the fossil-fuel, internal-combustion engines of a wheeled ground vehicle called an ‘automobile.’”


  “Cars,” Par Sondak said, turning the sparkplug over in his hand.

  “What was that, sir?”

  “In the vernacular they were called ‘cars.’“

  “I didn’t know you had an interest in that Age, sir.”

  “Oh, I’ve read the literature.”

  “Would you be interested in seeing some film on the subject? The archives have a number of old advertisements preserved. They’re only two-dimensional, but they provide an approximation of how these vehicles … these ‘cars,’ must have looked in operation on the ancient highways.”

  “Go ahead,” said Sondak, settling into a contour-chair.

  The picture-wall blinked and the photo-mural was replaced by a view down an empty two-lane road, a band of asphalt slicing the verdant landscape. A red-and-white automobile, bright with chromium trim, speeds smoothly through the rushing green.

  See the U.S.A.,

  In your Chevrolet,

  America keeps asking you to call… .

  For the first time in months, Par Sondak missed the sunset. No one bothered to program new instructions for the kitchen and supper was served as usual on the patio, where it sat and grew cold until the serving-cart rolled out at dusk to clear the table and chase away the gathered song birds. The Dreamer spent the entire afternoon and well into the night watching antique television commercials from the Late Industrial Age. He learned that Mercury and Ford and Buick were the names given to cars by the romantic mercenaries of that time. Imagine, names for machines! The relics from the snakeskin pouch were likewise identified: along with ballbearings and spark plugs, the Nomad included among his treasures a vacuum tube, three automotive fuses, a flashlight bulb and a tiny six-pointed metal star which had once been used by children in a ball-game known as “jacks.”

  The Dreamer stared through the glass partition at the unconscious form stretched on his back for diagnosis in the automated clinic. Sondak only half-listened to the medical report. The computer told him that his “guest” was free from any contagious diseases and suffered only from malnutrition and the annoyance of four different species of body-vermin. Although full-grown, the Nomad stood no taller than the average ten-year-old City child and weighed even less; a frail body, marked with savage scars which froze the battle-agony of his wounds forever into his flesh.

  “How old is he?” Sondak asked.

  The computer’s answer comes instantaneously: “Bone tissue analysis indicates no more than fifteen or sixteen years.”

  “So young …” The Dreamer contemplated the lean, weathered features of his captive, who appeared to have experienced more in a few short years than he had in over a century of living. Sondak frowned, troubled by the implications of this momentary self-awareness. He saw, as if for the first time, the strict limits of his cloistered life. He felt imprisoned by a wall of books. The pleasures he took: berry-picking, puttering in the garden, surprising rabbits and deer while walking in the woods, eating organic foods, watching the sunset, all seemed tame when confronted by the scar-striped body of the young Nomad. Par Sondak’s adventuring took place in the shadowy realm of dreams; how pale his most stirring Renaissance fantasy appeared when he compared the cloak-and-dagger posturing of his wicked Cardinals and condottiere with even one day of life among the nomadic desert tribes.

  In the end, Sondak’s scholarly nature overcame his dissatisfaction. For hundreds of years, the City’s enlightened citizenry had ignored the Nomads exiled outside her air-conditioned walls. More was known about the lichens growing on Mars than about this forgotten portion of mankind. Any research was in the tradition of Mendel and Darwin and Czolwirtzki. The quest for knowledge was itself a great adventure.

  The Dreamer’s house possessed equipment which would allow him to sample the Nomad’s dreams if he desired. Not one secret of this savage subconscious need elude him. But Sondak had more ambitious intentions. Before leaving the automated clinic, he gave the computer orders to begin preparations for surgery. The operation was a simple one. Cerebral mini-probe implantation could be accomplished in less than half-an-hour.

  The Dreamer waited in his library. He stood, gazing into the fire, letting his thoughts ride on the snake’s-tongue flicker of the flames like a boat adrift on a shifting sea. The computer would announce when everything was ready. Even now, the Nomad youth was being transported to the north, hundreds of kilometers from Sondak’s house. In the clinic, the boy had been immunized against every known disease, his teeth treated for decay, his blood refortified and his enzymes renewed. A thorough overhaul ensured that each of his parts would operate as efficiently as the wafer-thin neural-probe wired into his frontal lobe.

  Along with the gift of restored health, Sondak added a few useful tools: the tungsten-bladed carving knife which never needed sharpening; a pocket solar-torch, rechargeable even on cloudy days; an assortment of concentrated vitamins, energizers and cellular nutrients, enough to sustain the Nomad’s strength no matter how insufficient his diet; and a carefully programmed dream explaining how he came to possess these marvels, a narrative designed to satisfy the boy’s heroic expectations as well as his curiosity.

  The experiment was working nicely. Soon, the Nomad would be back on his own in a world as alien to the Dreamer’s mechanical civilization as the colonies of protoplasmic bubbles floating in the ammonia-clouds obscuring the face of Jupiter. Wherever the Nomad went, whatever strange adventures he encountered, Par Sondak would be there too, exploring the unknown while sealed in the padded security of his egg-shaped studio.

  Buick opened his eyes. He lay at the edge of a water hole, across from where a chestnut stallion, hobbled front-leg-to-back, bent to touch noses with his reflection. The boy smiled, watching the horse drink. It was real after all. He hadn’t dreamed those weeks alone, or his adventures in the palace of the Lord Citizen. It had all really happened.

  Busy with the morning’s camp chores, Buick had ample occasion to relive his triumph in memory: he started his cooking fire with the light-that-never-dies and cut slabs of smoked meat with his fine new knife. Behind him, he heard the horse whisking away flies. He was not the same as other men. He had been tested and proved worthy by the All-Powerful.

  Until a month ago, a swaybacked donkey stolen during a raid on an encampment of the Buford Creek people was the finest mount Buick ever owned. Now, he rode a stallion bred by the hand of a Lord. The young Nomad remembered the final warning of his host: when you ride away from here, never return; forever shun the dwelling places of the Lord Citizens. It was strange how he understood every word even though the language the Select One spoke was completely unfamiliar to him. Wasn’t this another sign?

  Buick knew that life was forever changed; his fate altered the moment he stepped through the rain into the world of myth. What other warrior had ever battled a pack of three-headed dogs or been carried across a lake of fire in the talons of a giant hawk? And the victory feast in the rainbow palace of the Lord, how many clansmen could boast such an honor? The ordeal had been an initiation; the feast, with its attendant marvels and magic gifts, a celebration of his success. His was a special destiny.

  That night, Par Sondak violated the most cherished of his professional ethics: he interrupted the course of a Dream before visualization was complete. Often it took months while his shifting mental tides brought to the surface sufficient subconscious debris, the odd and often unrelated details which eventually would blend into a cohesive and continuous narrative. The Dreamer understood the evanescent nature of his art. If he missed a night before enough material accumulated for mixing, he ran the risk of having his fantasy unravel before it was successfully off the loom.

  It was a chance he was willing to take. The prospect of tuning in the implanted transmitter’s signal was too enticing for Sondak and when he placed the receptors on his head and stepped into the studio he issued new instructions for the computer. These were quite complex; he was planning a journey of over a month and needed to program a regimen of daily intrav
enous feeding and enzyme inoculation. The dream-table would have been more convenient, as it was portable and could have been moved alongside the clinic, but it was also designed to allow for easy interruption; the probe-receptors were set into a cushioned head-rest and merely the sound of a voice in the room or the melodic tone of a conference call-signal was enough to wake a dreamer. The studio was soundproof and temperature controlled. It sealed with the precision of an air lock. Par Sondak left orders that he was not to be disturbed.

  Buick reined in at the top of the hill to wait. Across the open plain, he could see the rising dust of six horsemen. He had seen them first shortly after dawn and they followed his trail all morning, coming gradually closer. Buick dismounted, unloading his horse in the shade of a large boulder. He was in no hurry; let them ride their mounts to death in the noon sun. He had known from the start he would have to make a stand; it was a matter of picking the right spot.

  Behind the cover of the boulders, Buick primed and cocked his musket, setting it aside where it was easily reached. He unsheathed his cutlass and slipped the blade under his braided belt. If it came to shot and steel he wanted to be ready. The horsemen were at the bottom of the hill, within five-hundred paces. They formed a line, six-abreast, and started up the slope, picking their way through the thorns.

  Buick waited until the six were within a hundred paces, but still safely out of musket-range, before he stepped into view. The riders came to a halt at the unexpected sight of an unarmed opponent. One of them pointed to the shining silver box in his hands and laughed when the boy called out his warrior’s greeting: “Ya Buick; m’papa Jeep, fum Cin’natti. Plus-plus breed mi altime conga so!”

  “Waya, chico!” the one who pointed shouted back derisively. It was an insult not to declare your name and lineage.