“And you don’t know—yet—how the crystals do it.”
He looked up at her without moving his head, so that she saw his eyes glint through his heavy brows. “I hate you,” he said, and grinned. “I hate you because I have to depend on you—because I have to talk to you. But sometimes I like what you do. I like what you said—yet. I don’t know how the crystals do their dreaming—yet.”
He leaped to his feet, the chair crashing against the wall as he moved. “Who understands a dream fulfilled?” he yelled. Then, quietly, as if there were no excitement in him, he continued evenly, “Talk to a bird and ask it to understand that a thousand-foot tower is a man’s finished dream, or that an artist’s sketch is part of one. Explain to a caterpillar the structure of a symphony—and the dream that based it. Damn structure! Damn ways and means!” His fist crashed down on the desk. Zena quietly picked up her wine glass. “How this thing happens isn’t important. Why it happens isn’t important. But it does happen, and I can control it.” He sat down and said to Zena, courteously, “More wine?”
“Thank you, no. I still—”
“The crystals are alive,” Monetre said conversationally. “They think. They think in ways which are utterly alien to ours. They’ve been on this earth for hundreds, thousands of years… clods, pebbles, shards of stone… thinking their thoughts in their own way… striving for nothing mankind wants, taking nothing mankind needs… intruding nowhere, communing only with their own kind. But they have a power that no man has ever dreamed of before. And I want it. I want it. I want it, and I mean to have it.”
He sipped his wine and stared into it. “They breed,” he said. “They die. And they do a thing I don’t understand. They die in pairs, and I throw them away. But some day I’ll force them to give me what I want. I’ll make a perfect thing—a man, or a woman… one who can communicate with the crystals… one who will do what I want done.”
“How do—how can you be sure?” Zena asked carefully.
“Little things I get from them when I hurt them. Flashes, splinters of thought. For years I’ve been prodding them, and for every thousand blows I give them, I get a fragment. I can’t put it into words; it’s a thing I know. Not in detail, not quite clearly… but there’s something special about the dream that gets finished. It doesn’t turn out like Gogol, or like Solum—incomplete or wrongly made. It’s more like that tree I found. And that finished thing will probably be human, or near it… and if it is, I can control it.”
“I wrote an article about the crystals once,” he said after a time. He began to unlock the deep lower desk drawer. “I sold it to a magazine—one of those veddy lit’ry quarterly reviews. The article was pure conjecture, to all intents and purposes. I described these crystals in every way except to say what they look like. I demonstrated the possibility of other, alien life-forms on earth, and how they could live and grow all around us without our knowledge—provided they didn’t compete. Ants compete with humans, and weeds do, and amoebae. These crystals do not—they simply live out their own lives. They may have a group consciousness like humans—but if they do, they don’t use it for survival. And the only evidence mankind has of them is their dreams—their meaningless, unfinished attempts to copy living things around them. And what do you suppose was the learned refutation stimulated by my article?”
Zena waited.
“One,” said Monetre with a frightening softness, “countered with a flat statement that in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter there is a body the size of a basketball which is made of chocolate cake. That, he said, is a statement which must stand as a truth because it cannot be scientifically disproved. Damn him!” he roared, and then went on, as softly as before, “Another explained away every evidence of malformed creatures by talking eclectic twaddle about fruit-flies, x-rays, and mutation. It’s that blind, stubborn, damnable attitude that brought such masses of evidence to prove that planes wouldn’t fly (for if ships needed power to keep them afloat as well as to drive them, we’d have no ships) or that trains were impractical (because the weight of the cars on the tracks would overcome the friction of the locomotives’ wheels, and the train would never start.) Volumes of logical, observer’s proof showed the world was flat. Mutations? Of course there are natural mutations. But why must one answer be the only answer? Hard radiation mutations—demonstrable. Purely biochemical mutations—very probable. And the crystals’ dreams…”
From the deep drawer he drew a labelled crystal. He took his silver cigarette lighter from the desk, thumbed it alight, and stroked the yellow flame across the crystal.
Out of the blackness came a faint, agonized scream.
“Please don’t,” said Zena.
He looked sharply at her drawn face. “That’s Moppet,” he said. “Have you now bestowed your affections on a two-legged cat, Zena?”
“You didn’t have to hurt her.”
“Have to?” He brushed the crystal with the flame again, and again the scream drifted to them from the animal tent. “I had to develop my point.” He snapped the lighter out, and Zena visibly relaxed. Monetre dropped lighter and crystal on the desk and went on calmly, “Evidence. I could bring that fool with his celestial chocolate cake here to this trailer, and show him what I just showed you, and he’d tell me the cat was having a stomach ache. I could show him electron photomicrographs of a giant molecule inside that cat’s red corpuscles actually transmuting elements—and he’d accuse me of doctoring the films. Humanity has been accursed for all its history by its insistence that what it already knows must be right, and all that differs from that must be wrong. I add my curse to the curse of history, with all my heart. Zena…”
“Yes, Maneater.” His abrupt change in tone startled her; she had never gotten used to it.
“The complex things—mammals, birds, plants—the crystals only duplicate them if they want to—or if I flog them half to death. But some things are easy.”
He rose, and drew drapes aside from the shelves behind and above him. He lifted down a rack on which was a row of chemist’s watch-glasses. Setting it under the light, he touched the glass covers fondly. “Cultures,” he said, in a lover’s voice. “Simple, harmless ones, now. Rod bacilli in this one, and spirilla here. The cocci are coming along slowly, but coming for all that. I’ll plant glanders, Zena, if I like, or the plague. I’ll carry nuisance-value epidemics up and down this country—or wipe out whole cities. All I need to be sure of it is that middle-man—that fulfilled dream of the crystals that can teach me how they think. I’ll find that middle-man, Zee, or make one. And when I do, I’ll do what I like with mankind, in my own time, in my own way.”
She looked up at his dark face and said nothing.
“Why do you come here and listen to me, Zena?”
“Because you call. Because you’ll hurt me if I don’t,” she said candidly. Then, “Why do you talk to me?”
Suddenly, he laughed. “You never asked me that before, in all these years. Zena, thoughts are formless, coded… impulses without shape or substance or direction—until you convey them to someone else. Then they precipitate, and become ideas that you can put out on the table and examine. You don’t know what you think until you tell someone else about it. That’s why I talk to you. That’s what you’re for. You didn’t drink your wine.”
“I’m sorry.” Dutifully, she drank it, looking at him wide-eyed over the rim of the glass that was too big to be her glass.
After that he let her go.
The seasons passed and there were other changes. Zena very seldom read aloud any more. She heard music or played her guitar, or busied herself with costumes and continuities, quietly, while Horty sprawled on his bunk, one hand cupping his chin, the other flipping pages. His eyes moved perhaps four times to scan each page, and their turning was a rhythmic susurrus. The books were Zena’s choice, and now they were almost all quite beyond her. Horty swept the books of knowledge, breathed it in, stored it, filed it. She used to look at him, sometimes, in deep astonishment, a
mazed that he was Horty… he was Kiddo, a girl-child, who, in a few minutes would be on the bally-platform singing the “Yodelin’ Jive” with her. He was Kiddo, who giggled at Cajun Jack’s horseplay in the cook-tent and helped Lorelei with her brief equestrienne costumes. Yet, still giggling, or still chattering about bras and sequins, Kiddo was Horty, who would pick up a romantic novel with a bosomy dust-jacket, and immerse himself in the esoteric matter it concealed—texts disguised under the false covers—books on microbiology, genetics, cancer, dietetics, morphology, endocrinology. He never discussed what he read, never; apparently, evaluated it. He simply stored it—every page, every diagram, every word of every book she brought him. He helped her put the false covers on them, and he helped her secretly dispose of the books when he had read them—he never needed them for reference—and he never questioned her once about why he was doing it.
Human affairs refuse to be simple… human goals refuse to be clear. Zena’s task was a dedication, yet her aims were speckled and splotched with surmise and ignorance, and the burden was heavy…
The rain drove viciously against the trailer in one morning’s dark hours, and there was an October chill in the August air. The rain spattered and hissed like the churning turmoil she sensed so often in the Maneater’s mind. Around her was the carnival. It was around her memories too, for more years than she liked to count. The carnival was a world, a good world, but it exacted a bitter payment for giving her a place to belong. The very fact that she belonged meant a stream of goggling eyes and pointing fingers: You’re different. You’re different.
Freak!
She turned restlessly. Movies and love-songs, novels and plays… here was a woman—they called her dainty, too—who could cross a room in five strides instead of fifteen, who could envelop a doorknob in one small hand. She stepped up into trains instead of clambering like a little animal, and used restaurant forks without having to distort her mouth.
And they were loved, these women. They were loved, and they had choice. Their problems of choice were subtle ones, easy ones—differences between men which were so insignificant they really couldn’t matter. They didn’t have to look at a man and think first, first of all before anything else, What will it mean to him that I’m a freak?
She was little, little in so many ways. Little and stupid. The one thing she had been able to love, she had put into deadly jeopardy. She had done what she could, but there was no way of knowing if it was right.
She began to cry, silently.
Horty couldn’t have heard her, but he was there. He slid into bed beside her. She gasped, and for a moment could not release her breath from her pounding throat. Then she took his shoulders, turned him away from her. She pressed her breasts against his warm back, crossed her arms over his chest. She drew him close, close, until she heard breath hissing from his nostrils. They lay still, curled, nested together like two spoons.
“Don’t move, Horty. Don’t say anything.”
They were quiet for a long time.
She wanted to talk. She wanted to tell him of her loneliness, her hunger. Four times she pursed her lips to speak, and could not, and tears wet his shoulder instead. He lay quiet, warm and with her—just a child, but so much with her.
She dried his shoulder with the sheet, and put her arms around him again. And gradually, the violence of her feeling left her, and the all but cruel pressure of her arms relaxed.
At last she said two things that seemed to mean the pressures she felt. For her swollen breasts, her aching loins, she said, “I love you, Horty. I love you.”
And later, for her hunger, she said, “I wish I was big, Horty. I want to be big…”
Then she was free to release him, to turn over, to sleep. When she awoke in the dripping half-light, she was alone.
He had not spoken, he had not moved. But he had given her more than any human being had ever given her in her whole life.
7
“ZEE…”
“Mmm?”
“Had a talk with the Maneater today while they were setting up our tent.”
“What’d he say?”
“Just small-talk. He said the rubes like our act. Guess that’s as near as he can get to saying he likes it himself.”
“He doesn’t,” said Zena with certainty. “Anything else?”
“Well—no, Zee. Nothing.”
“Horty, darling. You just don’t know how to lie.”
He laughed. “Well, it’ll be all right, Zee.”
There was a silence. Then, “I think you’d better tell me, Horty.”
“Don’t you think I can handle it?”
She turned over to face him across the trailer. “No.”
She waited. Although it was pitch black, she knew Horty was biting his lower lip, tossing his head.
“He asked to see my hand.”
She sat bolt upright in her bunk. “He didn’t!”
“I told him it didn’t give me any trouble. Gosh—when was it that he fixed it? Nine years ago? Ten?”
“Did you show it to him?”
“Cool down, Zee! No, I didn’t. I said I had to fix some costumes, and got away. But he called after me and said to come to his lab before ten tomorrow. I’m just trying to think of some way to duck it.”
“I was afraid of this,” she said, her voice shaking. She put her arms around her knees, resting her chin on them.
“It’ll be all right, Zee,” said Horty sleepily. “I’ll think of something. Maybe he’ll forget.”
“He won’t forget. He has a mind like an adding machine. He won’t attach any importance to it until you don’t show up; then, look out!”
“Well, s’pose I do show it to him.”
“I’ve told you and told you, Horty, you must never do that!”
“All right, all right.—Why?”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“You know I do.”
She did not answer, but sat rigidly, in thought. Horty dozed off.
Later—probably two hours later—he was awakened by Zena’s hand on his shoulder. She was crouched on the floor by his bunk. “Wake up, Horty. Wake up!”
“Wuh?”
“Listen to me, Horty. You remember all you’ve told me—please wake up!—remember, about Kay, and all?”
“Oh, sure.”
“What was it you were going to do, some day?”
“You mean about going back there and seeing Kay again, and getting even with that old Armand?”
“That’s right. Well, that’s exactly what you’re going to do.”
“Well, sure.” He yawned and closed his eyes. She shook him again. “I mean now, Horty. Tonight. Right now.”
“Tonight? Right now?”
“Get up, Horty. Get dressed. I mean it.”
He sat up blearily. “Zee… it’s night time!”
“Get dressed,” she said between her teeth. “Hop to it, Kiddo. You can’t be a baby all your life.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and shivered away the last smoky edges of sleep. “Zee!” he cried. “Go away? You mean, leave here? Leave the carnival and Havana and—and you?”
“That’s right. Get dressed, Horty.”
“But—where will I go?” He reached for his clothes. “What will I do? I don’t know anybody out there!”
“You know where we are? It’s only fifty miles to the town you came from. That’s as near as we’ll get this year. Anyway, you’ve been here too long,” she added, her voice suddenly gentle. “You should have left before—a year ago, two years, maybe.” She handed him a clean blouse.
“But why do I have to?” he asked pitiably.
“Call it a hunch, though it isn’t really. You wouldn’t get through that appointment with the Maneater tomorrow. You’ve got to get out of here and stay out.”
“I can’t go!” he said, childishly protesting even as he obeyed her. “What are you going to tell the Maneater?”
“You had a telegram from your cousin, or some such thing. Leave it
to me. You won’t ever have to worry about it.”
“Not ever—can’t I ever come back?”
“If you ever see the Maneater again, you turn and run. Hide. Do anything, but never let him near you as long as you live.”
“What about you, Zee? I’ll never see you again!” He zipped up the side of a grey pleated skirt and held still for Zee’s deft application of eyebrow pencil.
“Yes you will,” she said softly. “Some day. Some way. Write to me and tell me where you are.”
“Write to you? Suppose the Maneater should get my letter? Would that be all right?”
“It would not.” She sat down, casting a woman’s absent, accurate appraisal over Horty. “Write to Havana. A penny postcard. Don’t sign it. Pick it out on a typewriter. Advertise something—hats or haircuts, or some such. Put your return address on it but transpose each pair of numbers. Will you remember that?”
“I’ll remember,” said Horty vaguely.
“I know you will. You never forget anything. You know what you’re going to learn now, Horty?”
“What?”
“You’re going to learn to use what you know. You’re just a child now. If you were anyone else, I’d say you were a case of arrested development. But all the books we’ve read and studied… you remember your anatomy, Horty? And the physiology?”
“Sure, and the science and history and music and all that. Zee, what am I going to do out there? I got nobody to tell me anything!”
“You’ll have to tell yourself now.”
“I don’t know what to do first!” he wailed.
“Honey, honey…” She came to him and kissed his forehead and the tip of his nose. “You walk out to the highway, see? And stay out of sight. Go down the road about a quarter of a mile and flag a bus. Don’t ride in anything else but a bus. When you get to town wait at the station until about nine o’clock in the morning and then find yourself a room in a rooming house. A quiet one on a small street. Don’t spend too much money. Get yourself a job as soon as you can. You better be a boy, so the Maneater won’t know where to look.”
Dreaming Jewels Page 6
