The Last Dream

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “What?” her voice came to the man and the Klantheid together, muffled by the door panels between them and the woman.

  “Come on out here,” said the man. “I’m not going to stand here and shout at you.”

  There was a short space of waiting and then the door opened and the woman came into the living room. Her face was drawn. She had not been sleeping through the long night and the Klantheid sensed the mind-numbing, wire-tense exhaustion that held her.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “I’m going to Rod Gielgud’s station—number fifteen,” the man said.

  “Number fifteen,” she repeated, automatically, tucking a stray wisp of hair behind her ear.

  “If Headquarters calls about the transfer, or—” he hesitated, “anything, you tell them I just took the flitter out for a short trip to check on local watershed conditions. Then you call me at Rod’s.” “Call you—” she echoed numbly.

  The man looked at her. For the first time the set, staring expression of her thin face seemed to reach through the self-concern that surrounded him and register on his mind. The tight lines of his heavy face, betraying the anger and frustration that lay just under the surface with him all the while, smoothed away for an instant in an expression of puzzlement followed by one of faint concern. He hesitated, looking at her keenly.

  “Are you ill?” he demanded with sudden sharpness, pricked to harsh tones by the stirring of a long-buried conscience.

  “No,” she said dully—but then, as the sense of his words registered, the glaze went from her eyes and a little color crept back into her cheeks. She turned her head directly toward him and for the first time in months they looked openly at each other.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with you?” the harshness was still there, but now his words were actually a question, not merely an indication of his annoyance.

  “You know what’s wrong with me,” she said. “If you’d stay home—”

  It was the wrong thing to say. He had begun to open up slightly, but he was not yet ready to have the blame laid squarely on his shoulders.

  “Hell!” he said explosively and swung away. “I’m no mind reader.”

  And, blocking his emotions firmly to any more fair impulses, he grabbed up his last load from the table and went on out the front door. Woman and Klantheid, they watched him go, the possible moment of reconciliation lost and broken.

  He climbed into the flitter, and took off. Like a silver bird it rose into the morning sunshine—rose to the height of a couple of hundred feet above the park-like lawn surrounding the station. Suddenly the woman broke. She ran across the room to the communicator and snapped it on to the flitter’s wave length.

  “What is it?” his voice boomed into the living room from the wall loudspeaker.

  “Harry!” she said. “Come back!”

  “Why?” The tones of his voice, even filtered through the limitations of the loudspeaker, hinted at a struggle within him. “What for? Why do you want me to come back?”

  “I—” she stumbled and stopped, not knowing what to say to make him return. “Just come back and I’ll tell you—”

  There was a moment’s silence, then his voice answered, automatically grumbling.

  “All right. Just a minute while I put it back on manual—” He checked himself in mid-sentence. There was a moment when time hung still between the living room and the flitter suspended in the blue sky, and then the short silence was broken by a burst of insane fury from the loudspeaker.

  “You—” he choked. “You dirty—,” and the hate and resentment in him, spurred by fear came pouring out in a stream of foul denunciations and epithets directed at the woman—ending with, “I’ll kill you!”

  “Harry!” It was a desperate cry from the woman, pleading her lack of understanding.

  “Try to get rid of me, will you?” he raved back. “Pull the auto pilot jack and maroon me, eh? What were you going to do—tell Headquarters I’d deserted? Stay where you are. I’m going to come get you and put you in the flitter and disconnect the manual and turn you loose—see how you like it when the automatic takes you out over the hills and cuts its motor and tries to land two thousand feet up in the air. Wait there. I’m coming to get you.” And the flitter spun about and headed back toward the station in a vicious, shallow dive.

  The whites of the woman’s eyes flashed suddenly in abrupt shock and fear. Frantically, she spun about from the set, searching for some kind of refuge. But the station was wide open—neither latches nor locks held its doors and there was no place to go.

  Like a wild bird beating its wings against the bars of a first cage, she fluttered wildly about the living room. Just as the flitter landed, her distraught eyes came to rest on the equipment cabinet set in one wall. Through its glass door she could see its contents, the medical kit, the communicator spare parts and a signal rocket handgun.

  Desperately, she ran to the case, tore open the door and seized the handgun, turning to face the front door as the man came through.

  He took two steps into the living room and halted, facing her, his mouth twisted, his shoulders hunched, hands at his sides. His breath came in short ugly gasps.

  “Don’t come any closer,” she gasped. “I’ll press the trigger button, Harry.”

  “Press and be damned,” he muttered, taking another step. “You couldn’t hit the side of a house.”

  He stepped forward.

  “I mean it, Harry!” Her voice was shrill. His eyes were wild, insane.

  “It’s not safe with you here,” he said, half talking to himself. “You’ll be knifing me in my sleep, next. Or poisoning me.”

  He was almost on her now.

  “I should have made you take the psychological test before we got married instead of letting you talk me into bribing the marriage bureau man into giving us good scores. Then I would have found out about you.”

  “That was your idea!” she protested—ending on a scream. “Don’t come any closer, Harry!”

  He paid no attention, talking as he sidled forward.

  “You couldn’t stand the loneliness,” he said. “You cracked mentally. Your mind isn’t strong like mine. I stand loneliness fine. Put the gun down, Cora—I’m not going to hurt you. Just put you some safe place where you can’t hurt me.” His eyes said that he lied.

  “No,” she sobbed, trembling now.

  “Yes!” he shouted, suddenly leaping for her. She gave a loud cry as their two bodies came together. A blinding flash of red light filled the room, and the sound of an ear-splitting explosion. Then he was hurled back from her as if by the push of some monster hand, to crumple like a broken doll on the carpet and lie still, a red stain spreading from him, dyeing the carpet where he lay.

  The Klantheid screamed, feeling the agony of the man’s death.

  She dropped the gun and sagged lifelessly to the floor.

  For two hours now, the room had not changed. The dead man still lay, the woman alive but un-moving. The Klantheid whimpered, helpless in its tank and suffering all that the woman suffered, with all the added torture of not understanding.

  As the sun rose to noon, however, it could stand no more. Weakly, tremblingly, it began to sing— not what it wanted to sing, a melody of soothing peace and the healing of hurts—but what it could not help but sing as long as the woman crouched near it, pouring out the tearing, agonizing waves of her emotion. As long as that possessed the room and it, it could sing only what it felt—of death and sorrow. And for a little the pressure went off a bit—the emotion now finding an outlet, flowing through the Klantheid and not damming up there, but turning, fabricating itself into a wire-thin whisper of melodic sound, sweet and bitter.

  The sound went out and cried through the room, growing in strength as the Klantheid began to relieve itself of the excess of killing emotion its tender nature had never been created to carry. The song sobbed and wept over the dead man, sorrowed over the woman and looked beyond and beyond in
to tragedy and sorrow everlasting.

  The sun passed its zenith. Gradually, as the song went on, the woman began to stir. Like a somnambulist hypnotized by the music, she raised her head to look at the Klantheid. And, after a while, she got to her feet. The Klantheid watched her, aching for her and wanting to sing her comfort, but unable to do anything but echo the emotion that she herself was putting out—that was feeding on the very music it sang, and growing, and which possessed the plant. Into her soul it sensed, and sang a great, great longing for peace, utter and final peace—and the Klantheid cheered up as this new note crept into its music, for it thought that the woman was feeling better at last.

  So it threw its whole self into its singing and sang of peace. And the woman turned away from it and walked over to the equipment chest and took from the medical kit a hypodermic filled with a strange brown liquid, which she injected into the big blue vein inside her right elbow. And while the Klantheid still watched and sang hopefully, she sat down in one of the big chairs and died.

  With her dying, present peace came to the Klantheid, for it was not human, and to it death was the final solution and end to all things. As far as its own sensitive feelings were concerned, the man, and later the woman, disappeared when they ceased to think and feel. It only retained a memory of the woman and the beauty it had sensed buried deep in her and remembrance of having loved her. The plant felt a great emptiness within it and a need for healing.

  So, slowly, tiredly and laboriously, it climbed over the edge of its tank and down onto the floor. Weakly, it dragged itself across the threshold and out into the soft light of afternoon, into the warm light, into the bright light.

  Before it the meadows fell away unendingly under the afternoon sky, and the grass, pushing and relaxing beneath it, helped it along as it moved slowly away from the station, leaving it behind. The bright light warmed it and the air was heavy with the constant whisper of living, growing things that the Klantheid could hear and feel deep within it. As it traveled, gradually its tense, rolled-up petals unfolded and spread themselves to the sun; its filaments rose and swayed in the breeze and the gentle motion of its travel. On every side the outspreading wash of its appreciation and affection was returned a thousand fold. Happy, the Klantheid vibrated its filaments together and sang a paean rejoicing in the end of all unhappiness and sorrow.

  If alternate realities balance like yin and yang, one world’s misfit might become another’s hero.

  Walker Between The Planes

  I

  For a moment he let darkness and agony take him. Then, like a soundless shock wave, reaction flared. Something like panic, but too hard for panic, which he had lost along with fear somewhere back among the scarred rough years since his youth.

  Fighting the spasms from the deadly gas, he worked the pill from under his tongue and up between his teeth. As he bit down, a liquid oozed from the capsule and fumes spread through his mouth and toward his brain.

  He floated, half-conscious on the hard chair. Suddenly he seemed to be dreaming. Events piled up in his mind—mostly ugly. Thirty years of being alone and friendless has to be ugly. Even the man he knew as Uncle Jim had acted from outmoded pride, not from any love for him…

  The aged face of the man who called himself James Rater Bailey had worn a snarl when they left him alone in the cell with Doug. His gnarled fingers clutched at the tattered charms he always wore about his throat and he muttered something, as if praying to the devils it had been said he worshiped.

  “What a place! If your grandfather had lived to see it…”

  “I didn’t ask you to come,” Doug Bailey told him stiffly.

  Doug had never sought help, knowing he could expect none. It had been a fair fight after he was attacked, and the hoodlum’s death had been an accident. Doug could have escaped if he had not called for an ambulance. But he had not asked for mercy even after he had learned the drunk was the son of the state’s Governor. When they had lied and then had thrown the book at him, he had faced their gas chamber without pleading. He was not ready to plead for sympathy now.

  “Your family may mean nothing to you,” Uncle Jim lashed at him. “But in my day, no man escaped his family responsibility.”

  Doug nodded bitterly. Maybe the old man was right. Once, according to the books, the family and not the government had been the basis of society. But that was before people thought they had a right to be supported and to be paid for hours, not work. And family ties were weak at best. Certainly they had never meant much to him. He had been an orphan at ten.

  “Doug.” The old voice was urgent. “Doug, I didn’t come to quarrel but to help you—for your grandfather’s sake.”

  Doug snorted. “Miracles don’t work against cyanide.”

  “Doug, listen. You won’t believe me—nobody ever did. But listen!”

  For a moment, the appeal cut through Doug’s cynicism. Maybe Jim deserved some last-minute respect. He had always been a weird shadow, spoken of in whispers for dark beliefs and practices no one could detail. He was supposed to cast spells and deal with witches, according to some accounts.

  “All right, I’ll listen,” Doug agreed.

  “Then take this.” A tiny capsule fell from Jim’s crooked hand into Doug’s palm. “Put it under your tongue and bite down on it just before… It’s a powerful antidote, boy—maybe too powerful. But you’ll have a chance.”

  Now the dream-events were beginning to fade and slow, to draw themselves out into long, hollow sounds here in the gas chamber. The taste of the capsule was again in Doug’s mouth and he felt himself being wrenched and flung—as if across some great, unimaginable distance of time or space…

  … Into whiteness.

  It was white sun-glare without a sun, dry white mist all about him and powdery whiteness under him. It was a strangely filled emptiness, without direction. Then abruptly, a small darkness soared over him and passed on.

  Instantly he felt cold. No, he felt emptied, suddenly weakened—robbed, as if something had been stolen from his integral self. His eyes turned to his right and downward like steel balls drawn by a magnet.

  Crouched there, lost in the dazzle, was a thing black and blurred. Something man-sized but which gave an impression of being crow-like and burdened with what had just been stolen from inside Doug. Too heavy to fly now, the creature flopped to its feet and began walking away, and the robbed feeling came back to Doug with hovering anger.

  He dug into the stuff in which he stood and gave chase. But the new emptiness about him sapped his strength so that he could not gain on the Walker.

  He followed it. But suddenly before him, shining against even the dazzle, hovering in mid-nowhere, loomed a bright and terrible disk—a kind of doorway casting a circle of blinding light.

  Instinctively he halted, daunted by the circle of brightness.

  The Walker went on, carrying its stolen burden into the circle. Soon it was lost to sight in the forbidding, blazing radiance. As it disappeared, the emptiness expanded around Doug. The doorway was too bright, he was too tired—he could not follow. All he wanted was to relax into the emptiness now swallowing him… which was death, after all. Yes, that was easiest. Simply to die, to turn away, from that terrible doorway and let the Walker go. To give up—

  But he could not. All his life, a cross-grained stubbornness had driven him, had been his master. It would not let him surrender now.

  He stumbled onward. The radiance engulfed him—and then it was gone. He seemed to fall, down through darkness forever.

  Horror smothered him. For the darkness was not so much like the absence of light as like being blind. He would not endure it! The fury that had driven him toward the radiant circle rose wildly in him again, became a white flame inside him.

  He was falling… endlessly falling. And he fought.

  Abruptly, there was a faint light. And through it he could see the Walker approaching him. He reached out a hand but the Walker went striding past. Then it stopped and pointed once, and mo
ved on.

  Now the light strengthened into a small glow ahead. He willed himself toward it—and found it nearer. There was another circle of brightness, but fainter and less forbidding. He burst triumphantly through it, feeling the momentless moment of his passage slip away from him.

  For a second, it seemed that the Walker was back and that a dark hand touched Doug. Then he was through, again in real time and space…

  He emerged to a roar of voices, the howling of a crowd at some wild sport event—and to a deep, sharp pain in his chest. The sun overhead was strangely white and fiercely bright. Ranks of faces surrounded a circle of bare paving fifty feet across. Just above the paving two outlandish figures like man-sized fighting cocks sparred in mid-air with silver-flashing spikes at their heels. As Doug watched, one of the fighters tumbled, wings flailing, to the pavement.

  He looked down at himself, at a wide brownish chest that surely must be his own although he did not recognize it. A male face with folded wing-crests behind it was stooping over him. A three-fingered hand danced before his eyes and something like an invocation sounded in his ears.

  In panic, Doug tried to shout but his voice was frozen. As the gesturing fingers moved back, Doug saw that his own hands were manacled by chains to a broad belt around his waist. His feet were clamped together at the ankles and he lay on some boardlike surface at a forty-five degree angle with the pavement.

  Directly in front of him, one of the fighting creatures was on the pavement now. The other hovered above it, poising long metal spurs for a killing downstroke.

  “Mount! Mount…” the circling crowd of faces was clamoring at the fallen figure. But the fallen one seemed stunned and helpless.

  “There he goes…” muttered someone behind Doug’s head. “Out, duLein!”

  The last words cracked commandingly in Doug’s ear. Then, without warning, he was no longer watching the fighting figures. He was one of them.