Tom O'Bedlam

by Robert Silverberg

  “Quit it,” Charley said. “We came here to scratch. Let’s do some scratching. Stidge, you’re a pain in the ass.”

  “You think I’m gonna believe that? Three hours and you’re in New York?”

  “My father said it,” Tamale muttered.

  “A different world then,” said Charley. “Before the Dust War it was all different. Maybe it was five hours, huh, Tamale?”

  “Three.”

  Tom felt all this talk pressing on his skull like a brain tumor. Three hours, five, what did it matter? That world was gone. He walked away from them.

  He sensed that a vision was coming on.

  Good. Good. Let it come. Let them bicker, let them cut themselves up if that was what they wanted. He dwelled in other, finer worlds. He walked up a little way, around the raw jagged upended block of pavement, past a mass of rusty iron gridwork, and sat down on the curb of a sand-choked street with his back against an enormous palm tree that looked as though it meant still to be here when California and everything man had built in California had been swept away by time.

  The vision came rushing on, and it was a big one, it was the entire deal all at once.

  Sometimes he got it all, not just one alien world but the great stupendous multitude of them coming one on top of another. At times like that he felt himself to be the focus of the cosmos. Whole galactic empires surged through his soul. He had the full vision of the myriad realms beyond realms that lay out there beyond mankind’s comprehension.

  Come to me! Ah, yes, come, come!

  Before his astounded bugging eyes came the grandest procession he had ever seen, a sequence of worlds upon worlds. It was like a torrent, a wild flood. The green world and the empire of the Nine Suns and the Double Kingdom first, and then the Poro worlds and the worlds of the Zygerone who were the masters of the Poro, and rising above them the figure of a Kusereen overlord from the race that ruled who knew how many galaxies, including those of the Zygerone and the Poro. He saw quivering transparent life-forms too strange to be nightmares. He saw whirling disks of light stretching to the core of the universe. Through him raced libraries of data, the lists of emperors and kings, gods and demons, the texts of bibles sacred to unknown religions, the music of an opera that took eleven galactic years to perform. He held on the palm of his hand a jeweled sphere no larger than a speck of dust in which were recorded the names and histories of the million monarchs of the nine thousand dynasties of Sapiil. He saw black towers taller than mountains rising in an unbroken row to the horizon. He had full perception in all directions in time as well as space. He saw the fifty demigods of the Theluvara Age that had been three billion years ago when even the Kusereen were young, and he saw the Eye People of the Great Star-cloud yet to come, and the ones who called themselves the Last, though he knew they were not. My God, he thought, my God, my God, I am as nothing and You have brought all this wonder upon me. I Tom your servant. If I could only tell them the things You show me. If I could only. How can I serve You who created all this, and so much more besides? What need do You have of me? Is it to tell them? Then I will tell them. I will show them. I will make Thy wonders manifest in their eyes. My God, my God, my God! And still the vision went on, and on and on, worlds without end.

  Then it was gone, winking out with a snap, and he lay sprawled in a ruined street in a deserted town, stupefied, gasping for breath. His clothing was drenched with sweat. Charley’s worried face hovered before him.

  “Tom? Tom? Can you talk, Tom?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “We thought you had a stroke.”

  “It was the big one,” he said. “I saw it all. I saw the power and the glory. Oh, poor Tom, poor poor Tom! It was the big one, and never will it come again!”

  “Let me help you up,” Charley said. “We’re ready to move on. Can you stand? There. There. Easy. You had another vision, huh? You see the green world?”

  Tom nodded. “I saw it, yeah. I saw everything,” he said. “Everything.”

  * * *

  Two

  Of thirty bare years have I

  Twice twenty been enraged

  And of forty been three times fifteen

  In durance sadly caged.

  On the lordly lofts of Bedlam

  With stubble soft and dainty

  Brave bracelets strong, sweet whips, ding-dong

  With wholesome hunger plenty.

  And now I do sing, “Any food, any feeding,

  Feeding, drink, or clothing?

  Come, dame or maid,

  Be not afraid,

  Poor Tom will injure nothing.”

  —Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song

  THERE was unexpected trouble with Nick Double Rainbow that morning, something close to a three-alarm psychotic break coming out of nowhere and more than a little violent acting-out, ugly stuff and difficult to deal with. Which was why Elszabet was late getting to the monthly staff meeting. All the others were there already—the psychiatrists, Bill Waldstein and Dan Robinson; Dante Corelli, the head of physical therapy; and Naresh Patel, the neurolinguistics man, deployed around the big redwood-burl conference table in their various relaxation modes—when she finally entered the room a little past eleven.

  Dante was staring into the pumping whorls of golden light coming from a little Patternmaster in her hand. Bill Waldstein was leaning back contemplating the flask of wine sitting in front of him. Patel looked to be lost in meditation. Dan Robinson was fingering his pocket keyboard, jamming inaudible music into the recorder circuit for playback later. They all straightened up as Elszabet took her place at the head of the table.

  “Finally!” Dante said stagily, overplaying it as if Elszabet were two years late for the meeting, minimum.

  “Elszabet’s just been showing us that she knows how to be passive-aggressive too,” said Bill Waldstein.

  “Screw you,” Elszabet told him casually. “Thirteen big minutes late.”

  “Twenty,” said Patel, without appearing to break his deep trance.

  “Twenty. So shoot me. You want to pass some of that wine over here, please, Dr. Waldstein?”

  “Before lunch, Dr. Lewis?”

  “It hasn’t been a wonderful morning,” she said. “I will thank all of you to recalibrate for a lower bullshit quotient, okay? Thank you. I love you all.” She took the wine from Waldstein, but drank only the tiniest sip. It tasted sharp, full of little needles. Her jaw was aching. She wondered if her face was going to swell. “We’ve got Double Rainbow cooled out on fifty milligrams of pax,” Elszabet said tiredly. “Bill, will you check in on him after lunch and consult with me afterward? He decided he was Sitting Bull on the warpath. Smashed up I don’t know how many hundreds of dollars of equipment and took a swing at Teddy Lansford that knocked him halfway across the room, and I think he would have made a lot more trouble than that if Alleluia hadn’t miraculously come floating into the cabin and corralled him. She’s amazingly strong, you know. Thank God she wasn’t the one who psychoed out.”

  Waldstein leaned toward her, hunching over a little. He was a tall, thin man, about forty, whose dark hair was just starting to go. When he hunched his shoulders like that, Elszabet knew, it was a gesture of concern, protectiveness, even overprotectiveness. She didn’t care much for that, coming from him. Quietly Waldstein said, “The noble red-man hit you too, didn’t he, Elszabet?”

  She shrugged. “I got an elbow in the mouth, more or less incidentally. Nothing detached, nothing even bent. I’m not planning to file charges.”

  Scowling, Waldstein said, “The crazy bastard. He must have been out of his mind, hitting you. Poke Lansford, I can understand, but hitting you? When you’re the one who sits up half the night listening to him sob on and on and on about his martyred ancestors?”

  “I beg to remind,” said Dante. “All these people here are crazy. That’s why they’re here. We can’t expect them to behave rationally, right? Anyway, Double Rainbow doesn’t remember how nice Elszabet’s been to him. That stuff’s been
picked.”

  “No excuse,” Waldstein said sourly. “We all have martyred ancestors. Fuck him and his martyred ancestors: I don’t even think he’s the Sioux he says he is.” Elszabet looked at Waldstein in dismay. He liked to think of himself as genial and mellow, even playful; but he had an astonishing capacity for irrelevant indignation. Once he got worked up he could go on quite a while. “I think he’s a phony,” Waldstein said. “A con man, like sweet Eddie Ferguson. Nick Double Rainbow! I bet his name is Joe Smith. Maybe he isn’t even crazy. This is a nice rest home, isn’t it, out here in the redwoods? He might just—”

  “Bill,” Elszabet said.

  “He hit you, didn’t he?”

  “All right. All right. We’re running late, Bill.” She wanted to rub her throbbing jaw, but she was afraid it would touch off another volley of outrage from him. It might have been simpler, she thought, if she hadn’t turned Waldstein down when he’d made that sudden but not altogether unpredictable play for her a year or three back. She hadn’t let him get anywhere. If she had, maybe at least she wouldn’t have to endure his ponderous chivalry all the time now. But then she thought, no, it wouldn’t have made anything any simpler if she had done that. Then or ever.

  Switching on the little recorder in front of her, Elszabet said, “Let’s get started, people, shall we? Monthly staff meeting for Thursday, July 27, 2103, Elszabet Lewis presiding, Drs. Waldstein and Robinson and Patel and Ms. Corelli in attendance, 1121 hours. Okay? Instead of starting with the regular progress reports, I’d like to open with a discussion of the unusual problem that’s cropped up in the past six days. I’m referring to the recurrent and overlapping dreams of a—well, fantastic nature that our patients seem to be experiencing, and I’ve asked Dr. Robinson to prepare a general rundown for us. Dan?”

  Robinson flashed a brilliant smile, leaned back, crossed his legs. He was the senior psychiatrist at the Center, a slender, long-legged man with light coffee-colored skin, very capable, always wondrously relaxed: truly the mellow man that Bill Waldstein imagined himself to be. He was also probably the most reliable member of Elszabet’s staff.

  He put his hand on the mnemone capsule in front of him, hit the glossy red activator stud, and waited a moment to receive the data-burst. Then he pushed the little device aside and said, “Okay. The space dreams, we’re starting to call them. What we are finding, either by direct report from the patients or as we go through the daily pick data to see what it is that we’re combing out of their minds, is a pattern of vivid visionary dreams, very spacy stuff indeed. The first of these came from the synthetic woman Alleluia CX1133, who on the night of July seventeenth experienced a glimpse of a planet—she identified it as a planet in her consultation the following morning with me—with a dense green sky, a thick green atmosphere, and inhabitants of an alien form, glassy in texture and extremely elongated in bodily structure. Then, on the night of July nineteenth, Father James Christie experienced a view of a different and far more elaborate cosmological set-up, a group of suns of various colors simultaneously visible in the sky, and an imposing figure of apparent extraterrestrial nature visible in the foreground. Because of his clerical background, Father Christie interpreted his dream as a vision of divinity, regarding the alien being as God, and I gather he underwent considerable emotional distress as a result. He reported his experience the following morning to Dr. Lewis—rather reluctantly, I gather. I’ve termed Father Christie’s dream the Nine Suns dream, and Alleluia’s the Green World dream.”

  Robinson paused, looking around. The room was very still.

  “Okay. Now on the night of July nineteenth Alleluia had a second space dream. This one involved a double-star system, a large red sun and a smaller blue one that seems to be what astronomers call a variable star because it has a pulsating kind of energy output. This dream too was associated with an impressive extraterrestrial figure of great size—a horned being standing on a monolithic slab of white stone. I call this dream the Double Star dream. It’s possible that Alleluia has had this dream several times; she’s become a little evasive on the whole subject of space dreams.” Robinson paused again. “Where this gets interesting,” he went on, “is that on the night of July twentieth, Tomás Menendez experienced the Double Star dream also.”

  “The same dream?” Bill Waldstein asked.

  “It checked in every detail. We have the pick data for both of them: of course there aren’t any visuals, but we have exactly the same adrenal-output curves, the same REM fluctuations, the same alpha boost, isomorphic all the way. I think it’s generally agreed that these things correlate very closely with dream activity, and I’d like to postulate that identical dreams will generate identical response curves.”

  He glanced questioningly at Waldstein.

  “I would buy identical curves meaning identical dreams,” Waldstein said, “if I could buy identical dreams. But who has identical dreams? Is there any record anywhere in the literature of such a thing?”

  “In visionary experience, yes,” Naresh Patel said softly. “There are any number of examples of cases where the same vision was received by a host of—”

  “I don’t mean out of the Upanishad or Revelations,” said Waldstein. “I mean documented by western observers, contemporary clinical work, twentieth century or later.”

  Patel sighed, smiled, turned up the palms of his hands.

  “Hold on,” Dan Robinson said. “There’s more. We have a fourth dream that I call the Sphere of Light dream, where the sky is a globe of total radiance and no astronomical features are evident at all because of the high level of illumination. Against this background extremely complex extraterrestrial figures are seen, what appear to be some unusually intricate life-forms with a great many limbs and appendages, so complicated that our patients are having trouble describing them in detail. So far the Sphere of Light dream has been experienced by these patients: Nick Double Rainbow on July twenty-second, Tomás Menendez July twenty-third, April Cranshaw July twenty-fourth. Father Christie experienced the Double Star dream on July twenty-fourth; once again he interpreted it as a divine manifestation, God in yet another guise—the horned being, I mean. That makes three of our people who have had that dream so far. The Green World dream was reported by Philippa Bruce on the twenty-fifth. Last night it reached Martin Clare. That’s three Green Worlds here too.”

  “Four,” Elszabet said. “Nick Double Rainbow last night, too.”

  Robinson said, “That’s not the full list. There’s an epidemic of overlapping space dreams. They’re being reported all over the Center. Except, I think, from Ed Ferguson. I believe he’s the only patient who hasn’t said a word about them to any therapist.”

  “Isn’t he the man who got convicted for selling real estate on other planets?” Dante asked.

  “Planets of other stars, no less,” Bill Waldstein said.

  “Ironic that he’s the only one who doesn’t get to visit other worlds when he’s asleep, then,” Dante said.

  “Unless he’s concealing the dreams,” Dan Robinson suggested. “That’s always a possibility with him. Ferguson monkeys around with his data something fierce.”

  “I suspect he’s got a recorder of some kind, too,” Waldstein said. “Somehow he doesn’t seem to pick clean—there’s always a continuity that shouldn’t be there—”

  “Please,” Elszabet said. “We’re getting a little off the track. Dan, you say there are other space dreams on your list?”

  “A couple. At the moment the reports are just fragmentary on those, and I’d prefer to skip them for now. But I think I’ve made the basic point.”

  “All right,” said Elszabet. “We have a mystery here. A phenomenon. How do we deal with it?”

  “Obviously they’re telling each other their dreams,” Bill Waldstein said.

  “You think so?” Dan Robinson asked, startled.

  “Obviously that’s it. They’re trying to screw us over. They all see us in an adversary position, anyway. So they’re in cahoots, pa
ssing their dreams around, coaching each other—”

  “We pick them,” Naresh Patel said. “Then the dreams are gone. Do they meet at dawn before pick time to rehearse?”

  “Alleluia doesn’t always seem to lose her dreams to the pick,” Dan Robinson said.

  Patel nodded. “We know that is a problem, the synthetic woman’s dream retention. But the others? We suspect Ferguson of making recordings, but he doesn’t report dreams. Surely Father Christie is not engaged in any sort of deception, and—”

  “Naresh’s right about Father Christie,” Elszabet said. “His dreams are real. I’d stake anything on that.”

  “Telepathy?” Dante said.

  “Not a shred of evidence, ever,” said Bill Waldstein.

  “Maybe we’re getting the evidence now,” Dan Robinson said. “Some kind of communion going on among them—maybe it’s even a pick phenomenon, an unsuspected artifact of the process—”

  “Balls, Dan. What kind of wild speculation is that?” Waldstein asked.

  “A speculative one,” Robinson replied mildly. “We’re just fishing around, aren’t we? Who knows what the hell’s going on here? But if we try all sorts of ideas—”

  “I’m not yet convinced it is going on,” Waldstein retorted. “We need to run reliable crosschecks to eliminate the possibility of patient collusion. After that you can talk to me about overlapping dreams, okay?”

  “Absolutely,” Robinson said. “No quarrel there.”

  “We need more data,” said Patel. “We must find out all there is to know about this matter. Yes, Dr. Waldstein?”

  Waldstein nodded uncertainly. “If it’s really happening, yes, we need to explain it. If it’s a fraud, we need to get control of it. Yes. More data. Yes.”

  “Fine,” Elszabet said. “We’re starting to reach some understanding here. Does anyone else want to say anything about this space-dream business now?”