The Dream Master

by Roger Zelazny

  The people flowed beneath this sky, passed among the exhibits, moved like a shallow stream through a place of rocks.

  They moved in ripples and random swirlings. They eddied; they churned, bubbled, babbled. Occasionally, there was a sparkle...

  They poured steadily from the parked machines beyond the blue horizon.

  After they had run their course, they completed the cir­cuit by returning to the metal clouds which had borne them to the running.

  It was Outward that they passed.

  Outward was the Air Force-sponsored Exhibit which had been open for the past two weeks, twenty-four hours a day, and which had drawn spectators from all over the world.

  Outward was a survey of Man's achievements in Space.

  Heading Outward was a two-star general, with a dozen colonels, eighteen lieutenant colonels, many majors, numerous captains, and countless lieutenants on his staff. Nobody ever saw the general, excepting the colonels and the people from Exhibits, Incorporated. Exhibits, Incorporated owned Exhibit Hall, there by the spaceport, and they set things up in good taste for all the exhibitionists who employed them.

  First, to the right, as you entered Toadstool Hall (as it had been dubbed by some Vite), was the Gallery.

  In the Gallery were the mural-sized photos that a spec­tator could almost walk off into, losing himself in the high, slender mountains behind Moonbase III (which looked as if they would sway in the wind, were there any wind to sway them); or wander through the bubble-cap of that undermoon city, perhaps running a hand along one of the cold lobes of the observational cerebrum and feeling its rapid thoughts

  clicking within; or, passing by, enter that rusty desert be­neath the greenish sky, cough once or twice, spit bloody spittle, circle the towering walls of the above-ground Port Complex—bluegray, monolithic, built upon the ruins of God knows what—and enter into that fortress where men move like ghosts in a Martian department store, feel the texture of those glassite walls, and make some of the soft and only noises in the whole world; or pass across Mercury's Acre of Hell in the cool of the imagination, tasting the colors—the burning yellow, the cinnamon and the orange—and come to rest at last in Big Ice Box, where Frost Giant battles Fire Wight, and where each compartment is sealed and separately maintained—as in a submarine or transport rocket, and for the same, basic reason; or stroll on out in the direction of the Outer Five, where the hero is heat and cold the villain, stand there in a frosted oven beneath a mountain, hands in pockets, and count the colored streaks in the walls like opals, see the sun as a brilliant star, shiver, exhale vapors, and agree that these are all very wonderful places to have circling about the sun, and nice pictures, too.

  After the Gallery were the Grav-rooms, to which one might climb by means of a stairway smelling of fresh-cut lumber. At the top, one might select the grav one wished—Moon-weight, Mars-weight. Merc-weight—and ride back to the floor of the Hall on a diminishing cushion of air, elevator-like, knowing for a moment the feeling of weight personal car­ried on the chosen world impersonal. The platform drops down, the landing is muffled... Like falling into hay, like falling into a feather bed.

  Next, there was a waist-high rail—brass. It went around the Fountain of the Worlds.

  Lean over, look down...

  Scooped out of the light was a bottomless pool of black...

  It was an orrery.

  In it, the worlds swung on magnetic lines, glowing. They moved around a burning beachball of a sun; the distance to the outer ones was scaled down, and they shone frostily, palely, through the murk; the Earth was emerald, turquoise;

  Venus was milky jade; Mars, an orange sherbet; Mercury, but­ter, Galliano, breadcrust, fresh-baked.

  Food and riches hung in the Fountain of the Worlds. Those who hungered and lusted leaned on the brass rail and stared. Such is the stuff dreams are made of.

  The others looked and passed by, going on to see the full-sized reconstruction of the decompression chamber of Moonbase I, or to hear the valve manufacturer's representa­tive give little-known facts concerning the construction of the pressure-locks and the power of the air pumps. (He was a short, red-haired man who knew many statistics.) Or they rode across the Hall in the cars of the overhead-suspension monorail. Or they saw the 20-minute Outward—With Stops At Spots film, which was so special as to feature a live narrator rather than soundtrack. They mounted freshly-heaped wall-cliffs in scaleboats, and they operated the pincers of the great claw-cans, used for off-Earth strip-mining.

  Those who hungered stayed longer, though, in one place.

  They stayed longer, laughed less.

  They were the part of the flow which formed pools, sparkled...

  "Interested in heading out some day?"

  The boy turned his head, shifted on his crutches.

  He regarded the lieutenant colonel who had addressed him. The officer was tall. Tanned hands and face, dark eyes, a small moustache and a narrow, brown pipe, smoldering, were his most prominent features, beyond his crisp and tailor­ed uniform.

  "Why?" asked the boy.

  "You're about the right age to be planning your future. Careers have to be mapped out pretty far in advance. A man can be a failure at thirteen if he doesn't think ahead."

  "I've read the literature..."

  "Doubtless. Everyone your age has. But now you're see­ing samples—and mind you, they're only samples—of the actuality. That's the big, new frontier out there—the great

  frontier. You can't know the feeling just from reading the booklets."

  Overhead, the monorail-car rustled on its way across the Hall. The officer indicated it with his pipe.

  "Even that isn't the same as riding the thing over a Grand Canyon of ice," he noted.

  "Then it is a deficiency on the part of the people who write the booklets," said the boy. "Any human experience should be describable and interpretable—by a good enough writer."

  The officer squinted at him.

  "Say that again, sonny."

  "I said that if your booklets don't say what you want them to say, it's not the fault of the material."

  "How old are you?"

  "Ten."

  "You seem pretty sharp for your age."

  The boy shrugged, lifted one crutch and pointed it in the direction of the Gallery.

  "A good painter could do you fifty times the job that those big, glossy photos do."

  "They are very good photos."

  "Of course, they're perfect. Expensive too, probably. But any of those scenes by a real artist could be priceless."

  "No room out there for artists yet. Ground-breakers go first, culture follows after."

  "Then why don't you change things and recruit a few artists? They might be able to help you find a lot more ground-breakers."

  "Hm," said the officer, "that's an angle. Want to walk around with me some? See more of the sights?"

  "Sure," said the boy. "Why not? 'Walk' isn't quite the proper verb, though..."

  He swung into step beside the officer and they moved about the exhibits.

  The scaleboats did a wall crawl to their left, and the claw-cans snapped.

  "Is the design of those things really based on the struc­ture of a scorpion's pincers?"

  "Yes," said the officer. "Some bright engineer stole a trick from Nature. That is the kind of mind we're interested in recruiting."

  The boy nodded.

  "I've lived in Cleveland. Down on the Cuyahoga River they use a thing called a Hulan Conveyor to unload the ore-boats. It is based on the principle of the grasshopper's leg. Some bright young man with the sort of mind you're interested in recruiting was lying in his back yard one day, pulling the legs off grasshoppers, and it hit him: 'Hey,' he said, 'there might be some use to all this action.' He took apart some more grasshoppers and the Hulan Conveyer was born. Like you say, he stole a trick that Nature was wasting on things that just hop around in the fields, chewing tobacco and being pesty. My father once took me on a boat trip up the river and
I saw the things in operation. They're great metal legs with claws at the end, and they make the most godaw­ful unearthly noise I ever heard—like the ghosts of all the tortured grasshoppers. I'm afraid I don't have the kind of mind you're interested in recruiting."

  "Well," said the officer, "it seems that you might have the other kind."

  "What other kind?"

  "The kind you were talking about: The kind that will see and interpret, the kind that will tell the people back home what it's really like out there."

  "You'd take me on as a chronicler?"

  No, we'd have to take you on as something else. But that shouldn't stop you. How many people were drafted for the World Wars for the purpose of writing war novels? How many war novels were written? How many good ones? There were quite a few, you know. You could plan your back­ground to that end."

  "Maybe," said the boy.

  They walked on.

  "Come this way?" asked the officer.

  The boy nodded and followed him out into a corridor and then into an elevator. It closed its door and asked them where they wished to be conveyed.

  "Sub-balc," said the lieutenant colonel.

  There was scarcely a sensation of movement, then the doors opened again. They stepped out onto the narrow bal­cony which ran around the rim of the soup bowl. It was glassite-enclosed and dimly lit.

  Below them lay the pens and a part of the field.

  "There will be several vehicles lifting off shortly," said the officer. "I want you to watch them, to see them go up on their wheels of fire and smoke."

  " 'Wheels of fire and smoke,' " said the boy, smiling. "I've seen that phrase in lots of your booklets. Real poetic, yes sir."

  The officer did not answer him. None of the towers of metal moved.

  "These don't really go out, you know," he finally said. "They just convey materials and personnel to the stations in orbit. The real big ships never land."

  "Yes, I know. Did a guy really commit suicide on one of your exhibits this morning?"

  "No," said the officer, not looking at him, "it was an accident. He stepped into the Mars Grav-room before the platform was in place or the air cushion built up. Fell down the shaft."

  "Then why isn't that exhibit closed?"

  "Because all the safety devices are functioning properly. The warning light and the guard rail are both working all right."

  "Then why did you call it an accident?"

  "Because he didn't leave a note. —There! Watch now, that one is getting ready to lift!" He pointed with his pipe.

  A blizzard of vapors built up around the base of one of the steel stalagmites. A light was born in its heart. Then the burning was beneath it, and waves of fumes splashed across the field, broke, rose high into the air.

  But not quite so high as the ship.

  ... Because it was moving now.

  Almost imperceptibly, it had lifted itself above the ground. Now, though, the movement could be noted.

  Suddenly, with a great gushing of flame, it was high in the air, darting against the gray.

  It was a bonfire in the sky, then a flare; then it was a star, rushing away from them.

  "There is nothing quite like a rocket in flight," said the officer.

  "Yes," said the boy. "You're right."

  "Do you want to follow it?" said the man. "Do you want to follow that star?"

  "Yes," said the boy. "Someday I will."

  "My own training was pretty hard, and the requirements are even tougher these days."

  They watched two more ships lift off.

  "When was the last time you were out, yourself?" asked the boy.

  "It's been awhile..." said the man.

  "I'd better be going now. I've got a paper to write for school."

  "Let me give you some of our new booklets first."

  "Thanks, I've got them all."

  "Okay, then... Good night, fella."

  "Good night. Thanks for the show."

  The boy moved back toward the elevator. The officer re­mained on the balcony, staring out, staring up, holding onto his pipe which had gone out.

  The light, and twisted figures, struggling . .. Then darkness.

  "Oh, the steel! The pain as the blades enter! I am many mouths, all of them vomiting blood!" Silence. Then comes the applause.

  IV

  "... the plain, the direct, and the blunt. This is Winches­ter Cathedral," said the guidebook. "With its floor-to-ceiling shafts, like so many huge treetrunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces: the ceilings are flat; each bay, sep­arated by those shafts, is itself a thing of certainty and stability. It seems, indeed, to reflect something of the spirit of William the Conqueror. Its disdain of mere elaboration and its passionate dedication to the love of another world would make it seem, too, an appropriate setting for some tale out of Mallory..."

  "Observe the scalloped capitals," said the guide. "In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif..."

  "Faugh!" said Render—softly though, because he was in a group inside a church.

  "Shh!" said Jill (Fotlock—that was her real last name) DeVille.

  But Render was impressed as well as distressed.

  Hating Jill's hobby, though, had become so much of a reflex with him that he would sooner have taken his rest seated beneath an oriental device which dripped water on his head than to admit he occasionally enjoyed walking through the arcades and the galleries, the passages and the tunnels, and getting all out of breath climbing up the high twisty stairways of towers.

  So he ran his eyes over everything, burnt everything down by shutting them, then built the place up again out of the still smoldering ashes of memory, all so that at a later date

  he would be able to repeat the performance, offering the vision to his one patient who could see only in this man­ner. This building he disliked less than most. Yes, he would take it back to her.

  The camera in his mind photographing the surroundings, Render walked with the others, overcoat over his arm, his fingers anxious to reach after a cigarette. He kept busy ig­noring his guide, realizing this to be the nadir of all forms of human protest. As he walked through Winchester he thought of his last two sessions with Eileen Shallot.

  He wandered with her again.

  Where the panther walks to and fro on the limb over­head . ..

  They wandered.

  Where the buck turns furiously at the hunter...

  They had stopped when she held the backs of her hands' to her temples, fingers spread wide, and looked sideways at him, her lips parted as if to ask a question.

  "Antlers," he had said.

  She nodded, and the buck approached.

  She felt its antlers, rubbed its nose, examined its hooves.

  "Yes," she'd said, and it had turned and walked away and the panther had leapt down upon its back and torn at its neck.

  She watched as it bayonetted the cat twice, then died. The panther tore at its carcass and she looked away.

  Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock...

  She watched it coil and strike, coil and strike, three times. Then she felt its rattles.

  She turned back to Render.

  "Why these things?"

  "More than the idyllic must you know," he had said, and he pointed.

  ... Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou.

  She touched the plated hide. The beast yawned. She studied its teeth, the structure of its jaw.

  Insects buzzed about her. A mosquito settled on her arm and began to sting her. She slapped at it and laughed.

  "Do I pass?" she asked.

  Render smiled, nodded.

  "You hold up well."

  He clapped his hands, and the forest was gone, and the swamp was gone.

  They stood barefoot on stirring sands, and the sun and its folding ghost came down to them from the surface of the water high above their heads. A school of bright fish swam between them, and the s
eaweed moved back and forth, polishing the currents that passed.

  Their hair rose and moved about like the seaweed, and their clothing stirred. Whorled, convoluted and twisted, pink and blue and white and red and brown, trails of seashells lay before them, leading past walls of coral, heaps of seasmoothed stone, and the toothless, tongueless mouths of giant clams, opened.

  They moved through the green.

  She stooped and sought among the shells. When she stood again, she held a huge, eggshell-thin trumpet of pale blue, whorled at the one end into a concavity which might have been a giant's thumbprint, and corkscrewing back to a hooked tail through labyrinths of spaghetti-fine pipette.

  "That's it," she said. "The original shell of Daedalus."

  "Shell of Daedalus?"

  "Know you not the story, m'lord, how the greatest of artificers, Daedalus, did go into hiding one time and was sought by King Minos?"

  "I faintly recall..."

  "Throughout the ancient world did he seek him, but to no avail. For Daedalus, with his arts, could near-duplicate the changes of Proteus. But finally one of the king's ad­visers hit upon a plan to locate him."

  "What was that?"

  "By means of this shell, this very shell which I hold be­fore you now and present to you this day, my artificer."

  Render took her creation into his hands and studied it.

  "He sent it about through the various cities of the Aegean," she explained, "and offered a huge reward to the man who could pass through all its chambers and corridors a single strand of thread."

  "I seem to remember..."

  "How it was done, or why? Minos knew that the only man who could find a way to do it would be the greatest of the artificers, and he also knew the pride of that Daedalus-knew that he would essay the impossible, to prove that he could do what other men could not."

  "Yes," said Render, as he passed a strand of silk into the opening at its one end and watched it emerge from the other. "Yes, I remember. A tiny slip-knot, tightened about the middle of a crawling insect—an insect which he induced to enter at the one end, knowing that it was used to dark laby­rinths, and that its strength far exceeded its size."