The boy’s eyes clouded over, and his lower lip trembled.
“Chris?” Willa resisted the urge to brush his hair back off his forehead. Instinctively she knew he wouldn’t want to be touched right now. “It’s all right. Whatever happened next, I won’t criticize you, but I need to hear about it.”
“His father was just there all of a sudden, and the other Neworlder men. I don’t know where they came from, but it was like they planned it. They all started coming out into the corridor, the women and the kids, too. They just stood there staring at me.
“Then Flax’s father started shouting at me. He said that he’d warned Silk’s folks about me, and she wasn’t allowed to go near me for the rest of the voyage because I—I had ‘wrong ideas.’ And all the time the other kids were staring at me, even Silk. I wanted to run, but I didn’t.”
Gently, hoping he wouldn’t pull away—nine was such a tenuous age for a boy-child—Willa put her arm around his shoulder.
“What did you do then?” she asked, restraining herself from doing what she really wanted to do, which was to kiss the top of his head and rest her cheek against the dark hair and hold him the way she had when he was really small.
“I just stood there,” he reported, as if he had failed somehow. “I didn’t know what else to do. Then Captain Zameret came down from the bridge to say she’d heard shouting, and was everything okay? All the Neworlders just turned and walked away, first the grown-ups, then the kids. Even Silk.”
His mother waited for him to finish.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, Mom!” Chris said plaintively after a long moment. “So how come I feel like it’s my fault?”
Willa had promised herself when he was a toddler that she would never talk down to him. “Sometimes…” she said, searching for the words, “any one of us can find ourselves in a situation where it seems like we could have done something differently, if only we knew what it was. We have to remember that we can only control our own actions, not someone else’s. I know that’s hard, but that’s the way it is.”
She wasn’t sure if he accepted it, but she could tell he was thinking about it. There didn’t seem to be anything else she could do right now, except leave him to his thoughts. Suppressing a last urge to kiss his brow, she tiptoed away.
The last time he saw her, the ranch house was engulfed in flames. He started to run toward her, but she called out to him.
“No, Chris, no! Don’t come any closer—!”
A strong pair of arms wrapped around him then and lifted him bodily off the ground, flailing and screaming, clawing through the thick shirt at the iron grip that held him.
“Put me down! I have to save her! Let go of me!”
But the arms were implacable, and they dragged him away. Soon the horses’ screams and the roar of the flames as they swallowed the house drowned out everything else.
3
2267: Talos IV
“No!” he shouted, and sat up suddenly. Instead of fire there was only a soft breeze blowing sand onto the blanket and its occupants. Pike had leapt to his feet, brushing it off his arms and legs as if it burned him, before he remembered where he was.
“It’s all right,” Vina said, stroking his arm to comfort him. “You were dreaming. It’s gone now.”
“No!” Pike said again, suppressing a shudder. “It wasn’t a dream. They’ve got the memories wrong. It didn’t happen that way!”
Then again, how did he know he hadn’t been dreaming? He’d dreamt about the fire ever since it happened. But this time…one minute he’d been telling Vina about Elysium, and then…
He didn’t remember falling asleep, hadn’t been aware of her leaving him to go for a swim, but apparently she had. The bright blue swimsuit that matched her eyes and not incidentally the color of the sky at zenith, was damp and clinging to her in all the right places, and her hair hung in wet tendrils against her neck. What was the difference between sleeping dream and waking dream in this place?
“Tell me what you were dreaming,” Vina coaxed him as he looked around for the light robe he didn’t remember bringing down to the beach, yet knew somehow would be rolled up in the duffel bag he didn’t remember either. He slipped the robe on without tying it, but refused to sit beside her on the blanket again.
“I—I don’t remember,” he lied, wondering if she could tell it was a lie, or if the Talosians could. He and Vina didn’t know each other well enough for that yet.
“It isn’t working!” he said, angry and frustrated. “I can’t give in to the illusion. Are either of us really here? How do I know I’m not just imagining you, and you’re actually off somewhere else lost in an illusion of your own? What if one of us wants to do something, go somewhere, and the other doesn’t?”
Only then did he notice that the sand was just a little too hot under his feet to be comfortable. Annoyed, he moved to stand on the blanket, then sat back down, defeated. The sheer joy of being able to feel anything again, even pain, should be sufficient to—No! he thought, more angry at himself than anyone else. Don’t get sidetracked! Focus! It wasn’t about this illusion, this illusory here and now, but—
Vina sighed, looking down at her hands. “I was afraid this would happen.”
Before he could ask her what she meant, she also got to her feet, walking away a little, distancing herself from him the way she had all those years ago, as if only by avoiding proximity to him could she collect her thoughts; the hot sand didn’t seem to bother her. Or maybe, Pike thought, she’s chosen herself a different illusion. She could be in another place entirely.
“It might take them a while at first to adjust to the particular…patterns of your thoughts. Remember, they have to sustain the initial illusion—that we’re both young, strong, healthy humans—all the time. That’s hard enough for them at first. Whenever we summon a memory, an illusion inside the illusion—”
“—it’s more of a challenge,” Pike suggested not unkindly, wanting their minders, as much as Vina, to know he appreciated what they were trying to do for him.
“Exactly,” she said. “There’s also…the feeling that you’re still fighting them, resisting. It…jangles things. That’s the best way I can explain it.”
“Are they telling you all this?” he wondered.
She nodded. “In a manner of speaking. It’s hard to explain. You’ll understand it better after you’ve…acclimated.”
“All right.” He held out a hand to her, inviting her to sit beside him again. “I have a reputation for occasionally being…impatient. At least that’s one of the more polite words that’s been applied to me over the years. So what should we do? Stay in the ‘present’ for now?”
Vina seemed to be listening to something. “Not necessarily. I think they have things under control. Yes, in fact…” she sat beside him, easing her body against his. “Everything’s okay now. You can continue your memory, if you like.” When he seemed reluctant to go back that far again, she laced her fingers through his and glanced up at him out of the corners of her eyes. “So, I see I had a rival….”
“Here and here, Magistrate,” the Archivist indicated, though the pattern of the readout was self-evident to all those gathered around to observe the monitor set into the cave wall, as well as to those accepting the transmission of thought from a distance. “These indicate the neural pathways in the forebrain where the subject’s earliest memories are stored….”
How long had it been since they had ceased to think of each other as individuals with names, referring to each other instead by their function—Magistrate, Archivist, Physician, Technician, Provisioner and so on? Not that any of them had only one function; the necessity of living underground for hundreds of millennia required each of them to participate in a number of tasks. And there was more than one designee per category, though given the importance of the task of sustaining the humans in their illusion, each of those gathered here was the primary—Magistrate-1, Archivist-1, and so on—of their class. Each had been assigned or
had assigned themselves—it had been so long ago no one could remember—a dominant task by which they were named, so that they had become one with their function.
Archivist-1, working with hir own staff as well as with Technician-1 and hirs, had begun with Vina’s neural pathways and some of the ancient machinery, cobbling it together with components they had scavenged from the scattered bits of Columbia, and they were now able to track human neural pathways almost as readily as they could their own. Almost, because they had long since abandoned the practice among themselves, when the telepathy became paramount.
Centuries of exposure to the radiation from the war had altered their own neural pathways to such an extent that the weak psionic power with which most of them were born had been enhanced a hundredfold. There was no surviving Talosian who was not able to communicate purely via telepathy with every other.
Most humans were not so gifted. Perhaps the female Vina’s intuition about certain things was as powerful as it got. As for the male, he gave off a different kind of energy.
The Magistrate studied the readout, and could see it.
“Will he need to relive these memories, Magistrate?” the Archivist wondered, hir temples pulsing, an expression—subtle, as all Talosian facial expressions had become in the wake of their telepathy—which might have been concern touching the corners of hir eyes. “The memory of fire seems to particularly unsettle him.”
“Are you suggesting he might find the memories damaging,” the Magistrate wondered for all to hear, “or instructive?”
“Perhaps both, Magistrate,” the Archivist admitted. “We are uncertain. Which is why I asked.”
When, the Magistrate wondered, had they, all of them—because their minds were linked in such a way now that any thought affected all of them—ceased to think of the two human subjects as, well, subjects, as creatures, which was to say inferiors, and begun to think of them as coequal? It was a puzzlement. Much of the Talosians’ certainty about what they were doing and why had been challenged by the arrival of Christopher Pike thirteen years ago. Now that he was among them once again, the dynamic he brought to the equation would have to be considered very carefully.
They had had eighteen years to study the female. Would it take as long to learn the intricacies of Pike? Each of the humans individually was a challenge, but there was also a synergy between them which…
The Magistrate formed a decision s/he knew would be acceptable to the others. The intertwining of so many minds working separately, yet in cohesion, one might almost say collusion, after all this time, made certain thoughts unnecessary.
What the humans brought was randomness, which evoked uncertainty. Uncertainty, after all this time, might almost be welcome.
“His thought processes will be voluntary,” the Magistrate announced. “We will merely facilitate. Should he need these memories, we will provide them. If he finds them painful, he can choose to abandon them. We will not commit the error we made the last time. This time, we will not interfere.”
Let him talk, Vina told herself. Just listen. There will be plenty of time for your story, if he’s interested, and if not you can go to a place where you can imagine that he is.
She had made her peace with the Talosians in the interregnum between Pike’s departure and his return. She still, no matter how often she touched him, heard his voice, marveled at him, wasn’t entirely sure he was really here. She would let him talk, until she herself was comfortable with this new dimension. So to keep the conversation light but challenging, she teased him.
“A rival? No, you didn’t, not really,” Chris said, noticing as she knelt beside him that her hair smelled of salt water and sea air. “I was only nine.”
“But you know what they say about first loves,” Vina reasoned, lacing her fingers through his. “They’re the ones you never forget. She broke your heart.” Her next words were flirtatious. “And apparently gave you a lifelong fascination with blondes.”
“What blonde? Maia was a redhead. She was a chestnut; her coat was the color of an Irish setter’s. When she’d just been curried, she gleamed.”
“Not the horse!” Vina protested, digging her elbow into his ribs. She wanted to weep with joy. Talosians were always so serious; she missed human playfulness most of all. She was a natural tease, and hadn’t had a worthy sparring partner since Theo. Don’t think about Theo! she cautioned herself. That’s dangerous territory, even now!
“Oh, you mean the girl—!” Chris said, as if he’d only just figured it out. He wondered if Vina was ticklish, deciding to find out.
She was, and so was he, and they ended up chasing each other along the beach like a couple of kids, running into the surprisingly warm surf and splashing each other until they were both out of breath and they could almost hear the music swell as he took her face in his hands and they sank to their knees at the tide line as if they had been choreographed and…
And for the first time since he’d arrived, Christopher Pike forgot that everything he and Vina did was being watched.
It was too grandiose to be called a beach house; it was more of a villa, with half a dozen bedrooms, each with its own balcony and private bath, overlooking half an acre of landscaped gardens planted with native flora resistant to the salt air. Vina led him barefoot up the deeply carpeted staircase against his protests.
“We’re soaking wet! And we’re getting sand all over everything!”
“It’s all right!” she giggled. “I’ll program the servitor to clean the carpets while we shower.”
“Shower?” he echoed her, finding himself tugged into a marble-lined, glass-enclosed real-water shower unit big enough for two people, with multiple spray heads at several levels. His senses awash in luxury (What was that aromatic bubbly stuff she was rubbing all over him?), he remembered that the one thing he liked least about space travel was the sonic showers. This was more like it.
As they toweled each other off afterward, Pike realized it could be this way forever if he wanted it to be, just the two of them alone in this place. Or they could people it with a few dozen of their friends and throw a party every night. Or they could go someplace different every night, together or separately. Who was to say whether Vina was really here, or whether she’d gotten bored—the beach house, after all, had belonged to her aunt in real life—and perhaps gone off on some newer, less mundane adventure?
The thought that they could both be here, yet lost in separate illusions instead of with each other, or not, or sometimes, and that through all of this their thoughts remained separate so that when the other spoke it was always a surprise, and wrapped around all of these realities was the reality of their true damaged bodies, and the Talosians, outside them, watching them, yet inside the illusions they created, all at the same time, made his brain hurt.
Stop overthinking it! he warned himself, following Vina down the stairs, which had in fact by now been vacuumed free of sand, though he hadn’t heard a sound, and into the kitchen, where she ordered hot soup from the food dispenser, which was exactly what he suddenly realized he wanted. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that the long table in the dining room had been set for two, and vague but delectable aromas told him the soup was only the beginning, but he would savor all of this one increment at a time.
“Tell me more,” she coaxed him. They did not repair to the dining room, but stood leaning against the kitchen counter smiling at each other over the edges of their soup mugs like mischievous children. “I’m listening.”
Is there anything more appealing, he wondered, finding the soup too hot to taste just yet, than a woman who hangs on your every word?
2228: ELYSIUM
At first glance, Elysium City was little more than a cluster of glorified Quonset huts, dwarfed by the landscape surrounding it. As the shuttle ferry brought the Prescotts downplanet from the ship, Chris had his face pressed against the port, looking for landmarks.
Oceans and rivers and lakes began to take shape once they’d passed thr
ough the spun-sugar clouds. Long stretches of grassy plain and forests of stunted, scrubby trees alternated with lava fields where nothing grew. And there were volcanoes, lots of them.
They were everywhere, some linked together like beads on a string, some sprung up alone in the middle of otherwise flat plains. Most were inactive, their cinder cones softened by trees and brush; some of the taller ones were even snowcapped. But here and there one smoked fitfully, others steamed softly like cooling teakettles, and Chris’s eyes widened as he watched one spewing a slow trickle of incredibly hot orange-red lava into a nearby lake, where it set up a roiling cloud of steam and twisted and hardened almost instantly into dense, grotesquely shaped black rock. Though the shuttle ferry was a good kilometer above the pyrotechnic display and her thick clearsteel ports shut out any ambient noise, Chris swore he could hear the bubbling hiss of liquid turned to stone.
The ferry pilot had deliberately taken the long way around to give the newcomers a bird’s-eye view of their world. Now he banked and headed for the planet’s only city. After what they’d just seen, the sight of human-built creation seemed almost anticlimactic.
Begun in a bowl-shaped valley ringed about by rolling hills, some of them with the distinctive cinder cones of still more inactive volcanoes, Elysium City was planned to expand into those hills, then be connected to the outlying homesteads by paved roads and pneumo-tubes as well as aircar routes.
Over the ensuing months, clearsteel-and-transparent-aluminum high-rises would spire upward like growing crystals even as the urban infrastructure spiderwebbed outward toward the horizon in all directions. Buildings would grow overnight like mushrooms, fitted together like gigantic children’s construction sets out of prefab units brought downplanet from where they’d been stored in orbit. No matter how many times he watched the process, Chris never got tired of it.
Burning Dreams Page 4
