“He didn’t go that far,” Sidney said. The Magician’s head turned toward Nova’s stage an instant before the curtain-light spiraled down around it, then up again, signaling a two-minute warning. The Nebraskan was looking at his watch.
“Break’s over,” he called cheerfully. “Back to the salt mines.”
The Magician put his glass down. “You staying awhile, Aaron?”
Aaron shook his head, draining his Scotch. “Not tonight. Too noisy. I’ll drop by the Flying Wail soon, see how you’re doing with that receiver.”
“Thanks.” He made a movement to turn, then didn’t. “You all right?”
“Yes,” Aaron said, feeling his face stiffen. “Thanks. Just tired.”
He watched the Magician cross the floor, lost sight of him in the crowds, then found him again, taking his place on the stage. A cataract of purple fell; Nova dissolved into light, and Aaron caught his breath at the sudden, powerful and absurd vision of the light as an alien thing that had just reached down and hidden them forever somewhere within the secret worlds and mysterious, overlapping times beyond the Earth.
His fingers were digging into the muscles of his arms. He dropped his hands, wondering at himself. Too many dead-end messages in the bomb shelter? Too little sleep, too many dreams in a lonely bed? He found Sidney watching him gravely. He smiled wryly and picked up a black rose.
“Maybe I should use one of these.”
“Talk to Quasar,” Sidney suggested.
“No. I prefer anonymity, these days.” He brooded at the room through narrowed, critical eyes, then shrugged, feeling boredom pull at his bones like gravity. He faked a yawn, wanting to go sit in the silent shelter, make more lists, search out new leads. “Tired tonight. I’ve been working overtime.”
“Aaron, is something bother—”
“I’m fine, I just—” He stopped, alarmed at his own response to an unexpected voice-tone.
He drew away from the bar, away from Sidney’s puzzled, generous impulse. “Sometimes it’s too much trouble. I’m just tired, thanks. Good night.”
He eased quickly through the tangle of faces, perfumes, metallic fabrics, body paints, voices; he murmured greetings, steadied a drunk, sidestepped lovers and robot waiters. He reached the door finally and was halfway into the night when he realized he was holding something. It bit his thumb. His hand jerked and he breathed in a light, elusive scent. He stopped, blinking.
Someone had given him a living rose.
SIX
Okay,” Dr. Fiori said, wiping bloodshot eyes with his fingers. “Okay, okay, okay. We can never be certain. We can never know that what we’re seeing is precisely what she’s thinking. But you have to admit it’s hard to say ‘roast beef’ and think of an elephant simultaneously.”
“Then why,” Reina asked, “is she giving you a red sun?”
“I asked for red.”
“Why not a fire?”
“Because she’s crazy.”
“Then how…” She paused, confused, her mouth open. Terra, curled in the curve of her bubble-chamber, heard their words disinterestedly. Dr. Fiori sighed.
“I’m sorry. That was a stupid answer. Of course her responses will be somewhat distorted on the screen, and we can’t know how distorted. But I asked for red and she thought red. The Dream Machine showed that she thought red. That’s what’s important. The Dream Machine picked up her brain responses for the word red and recorded them. It is working.”
They both looked up at the prisoner, the young woman at the console in her sleek silver uniform, with her curious eyes and her painted mouth still open, and the rumpled doctor who had driven his hair up in spikes with his fingers.
“There’s nothing wrong with her that I can find,” Dr. Fiori added. “No lesions, no chemical imbalances, no growths, no peculiarity in the communication between the two sides of her brain. She should be perfectly healthy. The only aberration any of the tests have located is what I suppose we might call a ‘brainstorm.’ An excitation of electrical impulses with no apparent purpose or result. I’ve never seen anything quite like it… But these come at intervals; between them, there’s no reason why she is not aware and lucid. Instead she seems addicted to these ‘brainstorms’ and the images they apparently create. Why? Perhaps, when we see the images, we’ll begin to understand her.” He smiled reassuringly, almost affectionately at Terra. To his surprise she spoke, with a dogged, weary patience, “This is not in the vision.”
Reina glanced at a smaller screen, which showed constantly changing cross sections of Terra’s brain in vivid colors. “She’s alert. No interference.”
“Terra,” Dr. Fiori said gently. “Terra Viridian.”
“What?”
“How do you feel?”
“I am sane.”
He was briefly silent. “Your perceptions of reality are distorted. We’re going to analyze that, try to help you to see more clearly. Do you know where you are?”
“I am not here.”
“You are in an Infirmary Ward in the Underworld. The same place you’ve been for the past five days. I’m finished showing you pictures. Now it’s your turn. I’ll ask you many questions; I want you to show me your thoughts, your dreams. If you do this, you’ll be helping yourself, and you may help other sick people at the same time. Do you understand?”
She gazed at him, her eyes enormous, haggard. “I see,” she whispered.
“Do you understand?”
“You must understand. The vision is all. The vision. The vision is the knowledge. The vision is life.”
“What vision?”
“Caterpillars.”
“What?”
“Initiation.”
“Your words aren’t making sense to me.”
“Form. To take form. Something needs to take form.”
“What needs to take form?”
“Something… in the mind.”
“In your mind?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. There is only the vision. The Dark Ring is nothing, no place. The vision is everything.”
“So. You know where you are.”
“No. I only know the vision.”
Her head dropped wearily against the bubble-wall. An image appeared in the eye of the Dream Machine: a strange, distorted oval in grainy, pale purple sand.
Dr. Fiori pulled at his hair absently, chewing over the language she was creating. “Sand. Sand in Desert Sector? Are you recording this? Audio and visual?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“It’s going to get complicated.”
“Yes, sir. What is the oval?”
“Somebody’s head? A memory of her killing, perhaps, distorted into a safe symbol.” He watched the changing screen. “Now what?”
“It seems to be a wall.”
“Or a cliff? It’s rising out of the sand.”
“But it’s solid black.”
“A wall, then. I guess.”
“It’s too lumpy,” his assistant objected, gazing, like the doctor and Terra, in fascination at the screen.
“It’s a wall of the military station, distorted in memory. Something needs to take form… It’s her memory that needs to take form. The truth she’s terrified of. Trying to hide from it is making her crazy.”
“But she was crazy before she shot all those people, or else why would she kill them? Unless she wasn’t crazy, and she deserves to be here.”
“Then something even more terrible happened before that…Terra. Can you hear me? What is the first thing you remember? The very first thing in your life?” The screen changed. They were silent. “Water?”
“An ocean?”
“She’s a spacer,” Dr. Fiori said puzzledly. “There’s no ocean on Mars.”
“It’s not the right color. Doctor, maybe you’d better test her colors again.”
“Sh. Terra. Think back. You were born on a tiny moon circling a planet with no seas. What do you remember? What’s that?”
“Static.”
“From what? Is it the system?”
She touched lights. “No, it’s her. Sort of—a brainstorm, I guess.” They watched the screen.
“Electric blue against black. It’s pretty…”
“Okay. Let’s try another question. Terra. What is it that needs to take form? What is it? Can you show us?”
She spoke from behind him, startling him again, for he had been talking to the screen. “I need to take form.” Her voice was very thin, far away. “I need.”
“What form?”
She was silent; the screen went dark. Dr. Fiori sat down.
“All right,” he said softly, patiently. “Let’s try something else.”
An hour later he was pacing. Terra sat against the bubble-wall, watching him indifferently under half-closed eyes. The image on the screen had barely changed in ten minutes. “What is it?” he demanded. “Did I not ask you the right question? All right. Never mind. Your mind is your locked, secret room; I can’t batter my way into it. I must persuade it open with the right key. I have a million keys, a million words, but only one word is right…” He stopped in front of the screen, stared at the black wall, the shadowy red background. It was fading. “Now what? Reina, what’s she doing?”
His assistant blinked. She checked the monitor screen. “Falling asleep. So am I. What did you say, Doctor?”
“Nothing,” he said penitently. “I’m sorry.”
She frowned. “We’ve all been at it fourteen hours. She’ll get sick at this rate; she’s already thin as a stick. We’ll all start hallucinating.”
He dropped reluctantly into a chair. “All right. Call the guards. I want her back here in nine hours. Tell Ng I want him in your chair in nine hours.”
“Okay, yes, Doctor.” She shut down the Dream Machine and stretched.
“I wonder if we could rig up some way of taping her dreams…”
“I’ll come back myself,” Reina said suddenly. “There’s nothing much else to do in the Underworld. Nat and Pietro have a card game going in the cafeteria with some of the guards. I’d rather watch this.”
He smiled. “All right.”
“It’s interesting. I just keep wondering… something about the colors she sees.”
“What?”
She gazed at the blank screen, still frowning. “There are no cliffs in that Sector. And why is the sky red?”
A handful of colored, viscous drops slowly elongating as they fell. A horizontal line, dark above, light below. Something flickering, out of focus, against a yellow surface. A lightning bolt or a crooked bone frozen in cloudy red. A cave full of colored teeth, a mouthful of jewels. The bent oval…
The prisoner sat once more in the bubble, creating images. Jase had been drawn to watch; he leaned against a wall, his arms folded, eyeing the screen coldly. Dr. Fiori, looking a little less exhausted, swiveled on a stool like a top, monitoring Terra and her incomprehensible thoughts.
“That,” Jase said finally, of something that flowed and rippled itself down into a disturbed surface, “is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. Dr. Fiori, are you sure this machine is working right?”
“I tested it,” Dr. Fiori said. He tapped his head absently. “My own thoughts. Minor variations…”
“Does it bother her if I talk?”
“Look at her. She hardly knows you’re here. You’re not in the vision.”
“The vision,” Jase repeated softly. Life, it seemed to him, was a clutter of visions. Your own, someone else’s, all demanding attention, all interfacing with or rebounding from another stubborn mingling of aspiration and experience. I have a vision of not working here, he thought, that is bumping against someone else’s vision of me working here. My vision nudges his, his nudges mine… While we wait to see whose vision is stronger, the work gets done.
When your vision is so strong you can’t see the world any longer, when you see nothing but what’s in your own head, that’s when you go crazy. He pondered his own thoughts, and added, Or you change the world.
He studied the prisoner, huddled limply against herself, too lost in her own mind even to blink. She can’t even change her socks.
Then she was looking back at him, her eyes direct, smoky, and he felt the skin move on the back of his neck. Shifting his eyes, he saw a man’s face on the screen, dark browed, heavy eyed, grim, on the plump side, its individuality lost in the translation from Terra’s eyes to machine, but his own face.
I’m damned, he marveled. It works.
“Terra,” said Dr. Fiori gently, “can you tell us about the images you’ve just shown us? What do they mean?”
“They mean…” Her voice faded tiredly, returned. “What they are.”
“But what are they?”
“They are what exists.”
“Where?”
She swallowed. Her hands fluttered slightly in the shadows. “They are the messages. They are the doorways.”
“Doorways to what?”
“To the change.”
“Who will change? You?”
“Yes. I.”
Hopeless, Jase thought. But Dr. Fiori seemed pleased.
“When did the images begin?”
“On that day,” Terra said.
“On what day?” He paused, added softly, “That day in the desert?”
Her fists clenched; her head swung back and forth. “No. No. No—”
“Terra.”
“No.”
“Terra.”
“That was in the vision.”
“It was—” He paused again, his mouth open, groping. Reina glanced at him, her brows raised in her poised, polished face. Jase thought, It’s a game to her. Terra isn’t human to her, she’s a puzzle broken into pieces. Nothing like this could ever happen to someone named Reina in a silver jumpsuit, as long as she puts her lipstick on straight and never uses words like initiation in a sentence.
He said aloud, “Premeditated?” Dr. Fiori glanced at him vaguely, as if a chair had spoken.
“Terra. What day, then? What day did the visions begin on?”
“The day the oranges turned red.”
“The day the—Terra, can you show me? What else happened on that day? What were you seeing? Think. Remember. What happened when the oranges turned red? Why did they turn red? Show us.”
Oranges in a blue bowl. Their reflection in a chrome table. The hem of a white curtain above them. A hand, reaching for an orange. A red shadow spilled over them.
“It began,” Terra said simply.
“You must see,” Dr. Fiori said in the cafeteria, over a cup of bouillon. “She is groping for a way out of her craziness. She’s inventing her own symbolic language of change, but she’s afraid to use it, follow it through. She’s afraid to remember what drove her crazy in the first place. What happened on the day the oranges turned red.”
“So it wasn’t the massacre itself,” Jase said politely.
“I don’t think so. Although,” he admitted, “it’s difficult to conceive of a more traumatic event than that. Something outraged her sense of reality, her sense of balance in the world.”
“Are you saying something happened to her that would justify her actions in Desert Sector?”
“No, no,” Dr. Fiori said quickly. “I’m not looking for justifications. I’m primarily interested in the language she’s using, and if it will lead her out of her trauma.” He sipped bouillon, and added, “Terrible things happen to all of us. Most of us find ways to assimilate experience, to adjust to it. We don’t turn bowls of oranges red in our minds. We—You don’t care,” he said accusingly, and Jase, still feeling the polite expression on his face, let it sag finally.
“I guess not,” he said slowly. “She lost me with the oranges. Up to then, I could see a little of what you’re seeing: that the strange images might have protected her from something. But if all this began because of a bowl of oranges, then I think it doesn’t matter where she is—the Dark Ring, New Horizon—she’s simpl
y loony, and you’ll never—” He stopped himself, gesturing. “What do I know? You’re the doctor. I think your machine is incredible, but you’re wasting your time with her.”
“Maybe,” Dr. Fiori said, steaming his face over the hot cup. “Why are you so judgmental about a bowl of oranges?”
Jase leaned back in his chair. “She massacred those people because an orange turned red. That leaves me cold. I can’t have any feeling for her as a human being. I can’t care anything more about her.”
“You did care, then.”
He shook his head. “I never cared. She got what she deserved here—less than she deserved. And yet—”
“And yet.”
“She’s not criminal. There’s no malice, no gain, no anger, no human reason for her to have done what she did. You can’t have feelings for someone that alien. Except maybe fear.”
“Of her? Or of yourself?”
Jase eyed the doctor. The best defense against questions like that, he had decided long ago, was to answer them. “I think,” he said finally, “that peoples’ minds are like houses. Full of bedrooms, cellars, attics, closets, kitchens, elegant living rooms, gardens… Full of doors. By the time you’ve reached my age, you’ve pretty much opened all the doors. You know what closets the monsters are kept in, what ugly thought lives down in the basement, what bloody impulse is behind the attic door. You know, by this time, what they’re worth to you. I’m comfortable in my own house. If someone rings the door bell, I let them in.”
Dr. Fiori put his cup down, smiling. “I didn’t think I’d like you,” he said, “when I first talked to you.”
“Well,” Jase said uncomfortably. “You never know.”
“I think you shouldn’t judge her too quickly at this point. Bowls of oranges don’t make people crazy. There’s nothing wrong with her brain. It’s she who’s making herself crazy. And she’ll tell us why. She can’t speak. Words are terrifying to her. Or too precise, too imprecise, who knows? Or else we have never invented the words to say what she has seen. So she tells her story in a language that is silent, in hope that someone can learn to hear.”
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