Dream Thief

by Stephen Lawhead

  Spence’s mind reeled. This little bit of information could answer so many questions about the great upheavals and cataclysms in Earth’s past. He wondered what else the Martian could tell him. And what of Martian life—philosophy, art, and literature? Did they have these things? Did they know of their origin? What kind of spaceships did they travel in? What secrets had they possessed while men still roamed the Earth in nomadic tribes?

  There was so much to learn Spence fell silent, speechless. The possibilities were awesome, and he was hopelessly inadequate to the task.

  “You must sleep now,” Kyr said. “We will talk again. I would hear how you came here and how you knew to rebirth me.”

  Without protest, though his brain was reeling with excitement, Spence lay back in the oval nest and the alien lowered the energy net over him once more. He slept at once, blissfully and soundly.

  9

  “WHAT PLACE IS THIS?” Spence stood on a sort of skyway overlooking a spreading underground metropolis undulating in graceful asymmetry—hives, hollows, arches, pinnacles, and spikes—stretching out as far as the eye could see under a great glimmering golden dome.

  “Tso. It is the largest of the underground cities built in the Third Epoch. On Ovs there have been four epochs: Vjarta, Kryn, Ovsen, and Soa. In your words the Water Epoch, Dust Epoch, Stone Epoch, and Star Epoch.”

  The underground city held an eerie beauty for Spence, though seeing it now reminded him of nothing so much as bones, as if he were gazing into the fabled Elephant Graveyard.

  In the last few days—Spence called them days—Kyr had guided him through the ancient city and had instructed him in the culture of the vanished race. Each new bit of information struck him with the force of a mind explosion. Each new fact was a revelation. Spence had learned a great deal; enough to know that to learn the rest would take a lifetime—ah, but what a lifetime!

  He turned to his tall friend. That had been one of the first things he had learned; the docile, peace-loving, kindly beings were friends, not enemies of man. Brothers under the sun.

  He gazed at the form of the being beside him and felt a sadness for him. “Why did you stay behind? Why didn’t you go with your people?”

  Kyr fixed him with an indecipherable look. “I am a Guardian. It is my life to preserve the memory of our kind in the solar system, so that any who come—as you have come—will know and remember.

  “I was chosen among others to guard the secrets of our past, lest anyone come after us and use our discoveries unwisely. You see, there was much we could not take with us and to destroy it would have been unthinkable. The Guardians were chosen to keep watch over all that was. Now I only am left.” Sadness accompanied this last admission; Spence felt it and turned the conversation.

  “When did your people leave? How long ago?”

  Kyr pondered this for a moment. “Several lifetimes,” he replied at last. “Three or four thousand of your years, maybe more. I cannot be sure until I have visited the—” He paused and chirped a word that sounded to Spence like krassil and then continued. “That I must do soon. I must make certain no one has entered there.”

  “Then let’s go. I’d like to see it.” Spence, feeling remarkably fit thanks to Kyr’s healing care, was eager to see all he could of Martian wonders.

  The krassil turned out to be part museum and part time capsule. It was a huge, cone-shaped hive in the center of a cluster of smaller hives, and it had been sealed long ages past against this very day.

  Kyr walked several times around the enormous structure while Spence sat on one of the mushroom-shaped objects which abounded throughout Tso. After his tour Kyr stepped aside and tilted back his head, loosing a long, whining note that split the air like a knife.

  Spence clamped his hands over his ears and watched.

  Kyr waited for a few moments and then repeated the procedure, this time in a slightly lower register.

  The vibration of the Martian’s voice shook the very ground beneath their feet. Spence realized then how powerful the beings were. He watched as a sizable crack opened in the smooth, shelllike surface of the hive. Kyr went to the crack and began pulling away chunks of material which concealed a door.

  He stood before the door and in his whistling tongue chirped a few words to it. The door magically slid aside.

  A voice-imprinted lock, thought Spence. Such things were in experimental use on Gotham now. The Martians then were not as far advanced technologically as he had first thought.

  Spence entertained this notion for a few seconds before remembering that he was seeing the state of their science four thousand years ago. Technology on Mars had frozen the day they left.

  He chided himself for the vanity that lay behind his mistaken observation and for presuming to compare two such different civilizations. Then Kyr reemerged from the krassil, and beckoned to him to follow.

  Spence entered through the oblong doorway and stepped into the interior of the krassil, crammed to the ceiling with singular objects, all looking as if they had been placed there only moments before and their owners would return to take them up again at any time.

  There were things impossible to describe—many of them looked like they had been grown according to some freakish horticultural method rather than manufactured. Most of the Martian artifacts he saw possessed this natural, rather organic quality.

  This had caused Spence to do some wild theorizing on the origins of the Martian civilization. Man had belonged to the mammalian order on Earth, but it did not necessarily follow that that should be the regular course of things at all. The Martians might very well be part of the botanical branch of the Martian life tree, or the reptilian—he was not sure which they resembled the more. Maybe they came from some otherworldly synthesis of both.

  While Kyr busied himself with what appeared to be an inventory of sorts, Spence wandered among the strange assemblage of objects—objects at once bizarre and eerily fascinating, whose uses could only be supposed by the most astounding leaps of imaginative fancy. His curious eyes devoured all he looked upon greedily, like a man whose sight has just been restored after a long period of blindness.

  He came after some time to a further part of the krassil where an arched opening led into a small alcove. Inside, set on a rough base of stone, stood a large graceful object which immediately captured his attention. It looked like delicate, interwoven, semi-transparent wings. He stepped into the alcove and the sculpture—if that is what it was—instantly lit with a rosy light and began to slowly move.

  Spence watched as other colors gradually came into play along the sculpture’s transparent surface: yellow, blue, and green. These tones began to melt into each other in complex patterns as they swirled over the sculpture’s elegant form until the form itself and the color became one. The hues mingled and blended, forming more subtle shades, now flashing boldly, now subdued.

  He was riveted to his place, drinking in the astonishing beauty of the art piece. He could not take his eyes from it. The thing held him with a hypnotic power as it spun and resolved itself into endlessly intricate patterns of light and color, each more graceful and lovely than the last. He felt a welling up inside him of emotion, a yearning so strong that it resembled a hungering pain—a pain that bordered on bliss.

  It was a feeling he recognized as belonging to the apprehension of beauty, but one he had rarely, if ever, felt. Presumably others were so moved when they looked upon a classic work of art or listened to a beloved symphony. He had seldom had such experiences; the feeling was foreign to him and perhaps therefore more powerful and bewildering.

  He could not look away. The light sculpture reached out to him, binding him fast with threads of wonder. He felt nearly faint with rapture.

  This, thought Spence, was what the poets felt, the love that burns its victims in flames of ecstasy. Oh, to be so consumed—it was past enduring, yet he longed to endure still more.

  That he could be so affected by the sight of any created object he would have denied.
But that obstinacy melted away in the certainty that he was experiencing a work of consummate beauty.

  Tears formed in his eyes and his heart swelled nearly to bursting as the dry rivers of his soul began to flow with streams of joy. The passions he felt unlocked within him could not be contained. He wanted to leap, to dance, to weep and shout and exhaust himself in singing. Shudders of pleasure coursed through him; he heard a strange music ringing in his ears and realized that it was his own voice giving free vent to his pleasure in spontaneous song.

  The sculpture, as if sensing his joyous outpouring, moved more swiftly in response. The brilliant shades spun and changed, weaving themselves together and parting in intricacies beyond reckoning.

  It seemed to live, growing larger and more luminous, throwing off flashes of light and filling his tear-filled eyes with shapes too wonderful to behold.

  At last he could take no more. He closed his eyes, but still felt the shifting colors of light playing over him. A voice nearby said, “This is Soa Lokiri.”

  Spence turned to see Kyr standing beside him. He had not been aware of the Martian’s presence.

  “It is beautiful.” He returned his gaze to the shimmering display. At length he said, “What is Soa Lokiri?”

  “It means Starmaker. It is an artwork in homage to Dal Elna, made by the hand of one of our most revered artists, Bharat.”

  “Starmaker.” Spence repeated the name, nodding to himself. “It is aptly titled. But who is Dal Elna?”

  Kyr tilted his head sideways, looking at Spence closely. “Dal Elna, the All-Being.”

  “All-Being? You mean God?”

  Kyr’s head began weaving from side to side. “That word does not communicate to me.”

  A pang of guilt squirmed inside Spence. Possibly the word held no meaning for Kyr because it held no particular meaning for him. Whatever means Kyr had used to, as he said, assimilate Spence’s language, he had only received Spence’s vocabulary and only the meanings Spence himself attached to the various words at his command. God, for Spence, was an empty word. It did not communicate.

  “The word God, I think, is what men call the All-Being.”

  Kyr merely looked at him.

  “I have never been so moved by anything in my life. Bharat is a most extraordinary artist. Are there more of his works here?”

  “No. This was, as many considered, his greatest. It alone survived the Burning.”

  “That’s tragic. I would like to have seen more.” He looked back at the sculpture. He now imagined he could see the hot points of stars forming in starfields, worlds bursting into creation, and more. There was a pattern to it—a greater pattern than could be taken in all at once. “I feel as if I were always on the verge of apprehending it, and yet… not at all,” Spence said.

  “That is the greatness of the work. Bharat has mirrored Dal Elna’s mystery and given visual expression to the greatest single truth of our philosophers: Rhi sill dal kedu kree. It means: In the many there is One.”

  Spence repeated the words with a slow shaking of his head. “You’ll have to explain that to me. I don’t get it at all.”

  “Many hundreds of lifetimes ago our philosophers reduced their theories to this one axiom. It cannot be expressed more simply. But I will think about it and find a way to explain it to you.”

  They left the alcove and the kinetic sculpture silently. Spence went on tiptoes like a priest leaving the holy of holies. He was conscious of a sharp longing, almost a loneliness, as if he had left the presence of the Deity himself. He felt cut off.

  He turned to view the sculpture a last time, but the alcove was dark and the slender object still. He wondered if he had imagined the patterns and color. The ache in his heart told him that he had encountered a masterpiece, and that, as an onlooker at a miracle, he, too, had been inwardly changed.

  10

  CAROLINE ZANDERSON CALLED FOR a pen and paper, something she had not done in the eleven years she had been at Holyoke Haven. The request caused a sudden rush of the asylum’s staff as they tripped over one another to fulfill it. Mrs. Zanderson, wife of the director of GM Advancement Center, was a most perplexing case.

  Of all the patients she seemed the most normal, and the most severely disturbed, depending on the time one happened to see her. She was often remarkably lucid and calm, calling everyone by name and glowing with a genuine vibrant charm. But her good days were separated by periods of extreme anguish and depression. Her highs were balanced by the lowest lows.

  When her madness came upon her, the charming sophisticate became a hunkering crone. Her personality disintegrated; she neither knew who she was nor where she was. She became fixated on the strange force she believed to be torturing her, possessing her, stealing her sanity.

  That is why, when she called for a pen and paper, the staff fell over themselves in their haste to provide it. The act signaled a beginning perhaps to one of her good periods, and there had been few of those in the last year.

  “Is that you, Belinda?” Mrs. Zanderson heard a slight commotion at her door and turned toward it, peering around her faded red chair.

  At the door a white-uniformed nurse was speaking to another patient, a woman in a light blue flowered dress who strained ahead eagerly, clutching a worn cloth suitcase.

  “The ship has not come today, Mrs. Mawser,” the nurse intoned gently.

  The woman turned a suddenly stricken face to the nurse, her eyes wild and fearful. “I haven’t missed it? Oh! Ohhh …”

  “No, no,” the nurse soothed, placing her hand on the woman’s back. “You haven’t missed it. We won’t let you miss the ship when it comes. Now you go back to your room and unpack. It’s almost time for lunch.”

  The woman shuffled away with the suitcase, muttering as she went. The nurse watched her go and then stepped lightly into the room.

  “Caroline, I’ve brought your paper and pen—and an envelope, too.”

  “An envelope?” The blue eyes were pools of lead in her face. “You’ll need an envelope if you are going to write a letter.Remember?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll need an envelope. May I have the paper and pen now, please?” She took them and moved to the tiny antique writing desk that stood by the French doors. Without another word to the nurse she began. After several strained attempts she wrote:

  My Dearest Ari,

  Don’t be alarmed at receiving a letter from your mother. I have long wanted to write to you and thank you for all the wonderful letters and gifts you send, but I have not been up to it for a very long time. I do think of you often, of course—when I am myself, that is.

  I am writing now to tell you something very important. Please listen to me and do as I ask. You are in great danger, my dear one. The greatest possible danger! The Dream Thief has turned his eyes on you and he wants you. Even now his hands are stretching after you. Be careful. Please, be careful!

  You must take steps to protect yourself. Come to me and I will tell you what to do. I dare not put it in a letter—his eyes are everywhere. But come soon, my darling. Please, before it is too late.

  Always my love. Mother

  When she had finished the letter she read it through several times and then folded it neatly and placed it in the envelope and addressed it. She then called for the nurse again.

  “Good, Belinda, you’re here. Take this letter and make sure it is mailed properly. Mail it yourself, please. It’s important.”

  “Of course I will, Caroline. I would be happy to. Oh, I see it’s to your daughter. I’m sure Ari will enjoy hearing from you. It’s been a long time since she has been here, hasn’t it? I’ll mail the letter today, right after lunch. Would you like to come down and eat now? We’re having a nice chicken salad. They say it’s very good.”

  “I think I will have some tea in my room,” Caroline said, slumping back into her overstuffed chair facing the doors. “I’m a little tired right now. Maybe I’ll come down later.”

  The letter drained her, as if the amount of conce
ntration necessary to complete it had depleted an already scant reserve. She closed her eyes and rested her head on the white crocheted doily of the chair. Her muscles went slack and she fell asleep at once.

  “That’s right,” said the nurse. She crossed the room and closed the doors. “You take a little nap and I’ll look in on you later.” She crept out of the room, placing the letter on the top of a large bureau near the door.

  SPENCE SIPPED THE BROTH, a warm, brown liquid that tasted of cinnamon. He did not mind the thin soup—undoubtedly it was very nourishing—but it did not fill him up as he would have liked. He was hungry all the time. Kyr had explained that it would be some time before food could be grown and produced, but that in time they would have something more substantial to eat.

  That had brought up the subject of his leaving.

  “I should return to the surface soon,” remarked Spence in a tone he hoped was casual.

  Kyr only peered at him intently, and so Spence launched into a full account of how he came to be there, including the fact that he had friends waiting for him, worrying about him, back at the installation. He did not know how long he had been underground, but he reckoned it to be nearing the time when the work party would begin preparing to return to the transport for the journey back to Gotham.

  “I understand. But there is much I would show you still.”

  “I will come back as soon as I can. I’ll stay years if you like. Believe me, I want to learn everything you can teach me. And there are others—hundreds of others—just like me who will come.”

  Kyr had not received this in the way Spence intended. He seemed to become restive and, after a session of head waving, sat back stoically with slender hands in his lap.

  After he had finished sipping his ration of broth, Spence asked, “Have I said something wrong? Tell me if I have not understood you.”

  At that the Martian picked up his bowl of broth and drained it and stood, hoisting Spence to his feet with a strength that astounded him.