Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  Dolphins and whales! Donnie thought from the core of his trance and nearly quivered awake with that recognition. For an instant, the boy’s self-awareness flared brighter, and he saw himself against the heights of the sky, the lava field around him gray with translucence, a thick fog of rock. The air stank with the sulfur of volcanic vents, and he tried to pull himself awake through his nostrils. But that didn’t work. The alien was too strong, and muscles of whale-music closed the lock of the trance.

  “Insideout,” the sea-animals called the 5-space mind whom they sensed approaching. That’s what it felt like to them, leaving the songfulness of the pith and being flung through outer space at the speed of light. Insideout, impressed by their awareness of it, used its hyperspace field to reach more strongly through the distance between them. They were clearly one mind in a spray of many minds, and their intelligence fascinated the alien.

  The songful water creatures understood trespass between worlds: They had left the sea once. They had lived along the tumbling shores and jarred rocks in tangles of grass and mud. And when the mud had dried and the sun had begun to eat everything, they had come back, stronger and wiser for their trespass. The song had begun then.

  Insideout swam with all the tribes: cetaceans—dolphins and whales whose huge, complex brains held the light of a magnified reality. The alien called them by their own whistle names. It communed with them through its hyperspace window, appearing in their minds as a disembodied and remote presence at the fringe of voice. Though still physically light-years away, the titanohematite brain pressed closer to the dolphins and whales than the spume in their clutching airholes. The 5-space core of the alien at that time actually touched every point in the universe, and it could put its consciousness anywhere.

  It put its mind on Earth and learned from the cetaceans how to radiate—how to sing in this flying-apart universe. By the time it arrived near Earth, hundreds of millennia later, its song had evolved to a bliss of sharing: It sang of the bedazzling pith and the tranced oneness of 5-space, which the whales called yes-out-of-mind. It listened to the Earth songs in an empathic bliss that melled its consciousness with the collective unconscious of the cetacean psyche. And it knew the gauze of a physical body, the dust of eyesight, and the absorption of sounds pictorializing a benthic world of up and down.

  This liberty of mind flowed over generations, riding the crest of life right through the rendings of death, unimpeded for over two hundred fifty thousand orbits of the water planet about its yellow star. Abruptly, toward the very end of its journey, another mind from among the many minds on this planet intruded aggressively.

  Insideout, whose point-awareness had fixated on the cetacean psyche, would have ignored this songless mind except that it appeared so suddenly, filling every pock of the planet with its radiation. The serenity of the blue world, which had been luring the arc, all at once blared with screaming energy. Radio noise and microwave sirens swirled about the planet like the aura of a small star, and Insideout thought that its approach had somehow triggered this global response. It filtered the radio flux and listened to military frequencies, radar beacons, and soap operas long enough to ascertain that it had nothing to do with the radioactive frenzy blazing hotter as the alien approached.

  The being responsible for this noise was a dim, chittering mind whose thronging spindle-limbed bodies flourished everywhere on the planet’s exposed land.

  From inside his trance, Donnie witnessed a magic kaleidoscope of people: prismatic faces, ghostly bodies, fluttery snapshots of bright cosmetics, spike-heeled shoes, cuffed trousers, and padded shoulders. Images from the fifties ruffled before him like reflections on water, and he desperately tried to mentally seize hold of any one of these familiar shapes from the past, hoping to rouse himself from the alien’s spell. Fin-backed cars streaked by, suburban houses appeared and vanished—and he grew smaller, shrinking back into the alien’s trance.

  I’m Donnie! he shouted to himself. I’m Donnie Lopes! Afraid of losing himself among this jumble of human faces glittering with makeup and the silent animation of lost conversations, he cried, Let me go! But Insideout could not hear him, and his noise dwindled into the neverness of the alien’s grip.

  Humans were without a song, Insideout realized. Only their machines created jangling distortions in the photon field, and their machines made little sense to the alien. It finally ignored them and put its attention back on the sublime blue peace of the cetaceans.

  While Insideout’s mind explored Earth, its iridium-shelled, titanohematite-cored body decelerated by using its internal hyperfield to siphon some of its inertia out of spacetime and into the multiverse. But the accuracy of its map of the continuum was fractionally off, and Insideout missed Earth and plunged toward the proton wall of the sun.

  On its three-hour detour back to the blue planet. Insideout took time from its rapport to calculate how long it would remain on Earth. The stay could hardly be indefinite, because the alien’s connection with 5-space demanded that it stay in motion within the expanding field of the continuum. Its interlope could last only three revolutions of the planet. Then it would use the infinite power of the arc to return home. Any longer and the hyperfield in the atomic spaces of its brain would collapse into the flux of spacetime and the alien would be trapped in this weird, exploding reality, where one was many, each radiating a psychic field for a small time and then—blinking out and becoming eerie, bodiless light cones.

  Insideout had sometimes wondered about the light cones. The wraiths of past light interacted endlessly in the vastness of the vacuum field—and Insideout realized that the waveforms generated by the three-dimensional creatures never dissolved or blinked out. Light within the tesseract range of the continuum endured forever. And it was there, among these shapes of light, that the alien would be stranded if its hyperfield collapsed. The thought of persisting endlessly in this blasted apart cosmos terrified the 5-space entity, and Insideout was glad when a close-up view of the planet’s surface diverted its attention.

  Pastels of radio emissions covered everything, and the alien shifted to gravitational light to see through the smog of radio and microwave noise. The land surface of the planet registered mostly as wasteland, yet even in the most desolate regions of rock and ice electromagnetic pollution from the radio animals seethed. Insideout was grateful for the weak graviton current of the planet, which revealed the landscape dimly but without distortion from the electronic yammering, and it avoided the wide land masses. The dolphin-sized, narrow-shaped beings filled all the river crevasses and plains of the planet, cluttering the surface with their electrical excrescences. Fortunately, water covered most of the surface, and there resided the cetaceans, whom Insideout had traveled light-years to greet.

  The arc circled the globe twice, scanning in gravitational light for the right place to land. The seabed lacked stability: Creatures came and went down there, and the strong currents offered little shelter. The ice sheets of the poles looked good, if it could find a niche away from the wind. Insideout banked toward the bright haze of the frozen Ross Sea when it noticed again the largest mountain on the planet. Surrounded by the warm waters the dolphins loved, the mountain seemed inviting. Insideout had rejected the site on its first flyby, because of the electrical clutter there, signifying again the presence of the photon-loud but otherwise songless animals that the alien had come to fear: Their thought-waves had a sinister texture, and the jumble of radiation that they dumped into the photon field demonstrated an appallingly centerless fervor growing louder with each orbit.

  Now, however, its urgency to match the inertial frame of Earth and experience union with the cetaceans before returning to 5-space overrode its anxiety, and it decided to ignore the radar-howling creatures and land at a site on the planet’s biggest mountain, somewhere out of reach.

  Insideout selected a rock slope that appeared luminously empty in the gray fabric of gravity light—a barren lava field overlooking black, devastated miles of crusty magma. Bar
ring a freak meteor, the site looked safe from change for centuries, let alone three days.

  The sight of the familiar terrain roused Donnie Lopes toward consciousness again. Sunlight pressed on the land. For one clear moment, Donnie became himself once more, holding the arc in his hand. Only an instant had elapsed since he had climbed out of the lava kettle, and the soulful bellies of the clouds still hung as they had when he had first held the arc up to the light. Please, let me go, he whimpered from inside the ice of time. Fear scampered in him. Where were the world’s old noises? Why were the birds he could see stuck in the air like pieces of the sky that had been punched out? Please, please, he cried and fell back into the alien’s dream.

  The arc released its expendable inertia to the hyperfield and fell to Earth. The iridium-shelled pod flumped onto the black sand among fists of igneous rock, and Insideout melled at once with the morphogenetic field lines of its old friends in the sea.

  Alone inside a dolphin body, in the green sea, it knew again in-ness, inflamed with joy by the ubiquity of this intensely primal feeling: Once more, it was in. Only here, in this strange reality, each being had its own in! Each has its own Point! A numinous feeling gripped Insideout— and it prayed in the click language of its hosts:

  “Glory of the Great One—glory to You, the Many. A brief instant ago it seems I hung far yet erect in the fixed attention of the pith, undreaming, with all the one, younging as my life became the hopeful dark, as Being has willed, O as Being has willed from the Last! Great One— you are here! Even in this scattered world, you are here!”

  The dolphins shoaled at the surface, spinning with giddy energy in the mellifluous and mysterious presence of Insideout. They sang a soft-eared song as serious as play about the fire of becoming, and the alien was touched,

  “You songful ones are like me—so yes-out-of-mind and all one, yet—yet so separate, so far from the pith and not one at all! How can this be? You are one only in song!”

  All at once, as if in reply but with violent impersonality, the high blue air of the sky tore by like the wind, and Insideout was flung beyond organic bonding. Silence zenithed in the direction of its plummet, which also felt like a wild ascent. And that’s when it apprehended that it was going to die.

  The arc had been moved! Insideout churned with the expanding knowledge of what had happened: Some animal had moved its physical form! It could see the beast in electromagnetic light—one of the radio noise creatures, climbing clumsily over the black rocks, the arc in its hand.

  Donnie observed himself climbing up the rocky incline, and when he reached the exact place where he stood now, the trance imploded and all memory of the alien’s memory vanished in him. He stood like a flash of rain, all awareness of Insideout falling out of him.

  Horror quaked through Insideout as it realized that it was truly going to die. The arc was now broken. The hyperfield itself could not be moved and remained there on the lava field suspended in the suds of the continuum at the exact point where the arc had entered the inertial frame of the Earth. Unless the titanohematite brain returned to that precise point where the connection to 5-space waited, the hyperfield would weaken and in a few days smear away in the expansion of the universe.

  Death had no dominion in 5-space, only here—and here the alien’s only way home meant being torn apart by the bloating fields of the cosmos: It would have to make its own peace with death. But what did that mean? Its mind unspooled calculations. When the hyperfield collapsed, the arc would convert into pure energy. It would become light again—but would it be conscious? How long could it live without its bond to hyperspace? The question took longer to ask than the time the answer offered—and it retracted from its thoughts, stung. Its own intelligence mocked it. It was going to die.

  No! It commanded itself to find again the animal that had moved it and to reach into the being, toward its pith, and communicate its need.

  A cramped, skullbound sensation squeezed it like the birthhold, and it pulled away in a huff of fright.

  The screaming sky sheared through it. The inertial rip in the hyperfield, though still miniscule, inflicted excruciating, dizzy anguish that got worse as its metallic brain moved farther from the hyperfield. Hurt mangled its perceptions, and it reached again, more desperately, for the animal that carried the arc.

  A smothering terror enclosed it and fisted harder, pressing out all sensations but a muffled smudge of sound and a pale leaking of light. This wee-minded animal barely provided room to feel anything but the blood of the beast welling in its loops.

  Insideout wanted to lift away from this seizure of numb flesh, yet it knew it couldn’t. Until the arc was returned, it had to go on, deeper into the mute flesh of this being. Moments collapsed and sprawled. Sinewy thoughts flexed with aching slowness.

  The dolphins called after Insideout in fiery tatters of song, startled by its vehement withdrawal. It went on, ignoring the song. Pulps of visceral feelings globbed thicker and swathed its wounded core. Thinking dimmed. Even so, Insideout went on into the animal darkness, deeper into the deathable kingdom.

  The mind that it encountered proved too small to contain the alien’s presence. Unlike the cetaceans, these creatures had no group unity. They swarmed as pinpoint minds, each distinct and separate from the others. Even the light cones of the physical bodies that had dissolved went on in the vacuum as discrete waveforms, melling into each other much more slowly than the light of the cetaceans.

  Desperate to save itself, Insideout forced its sentience into the tiny psyche of these loud creatures. Forty centuries of human thought tunneled into it with a luminous frenzy. Donnie’s body, vibrantly contoured in infrared colors, appeared before it. Three other human bodies, chromed in hot light, appeared beyond Donnie. Four human shapes confronted the alien. To communicate with these organisms, it would have to use all four bodies.

  Space glittered in icy motes as the interloper from 5-space culled information about these beings from the human light in the vacuum field. The viscera of physical bodies swathed the alien’s senses, constricting its awareness to the one creature holding the arc. This was the one it had to reach. Donnie looked as if he were made of mirror pixels: Each of the millions of gleaming mirrors opened a window on an instant in the creature’s life.

  Almost gagging with claustrophobia, Insideout peered into the windows and viewed Donnie’s life. The waveform in the vacuum field that had blinked on with the DNA of Donnie’s first cell, at the boy’s conception, exposed a cruel consciousness, a minatory waveform. Staring across the tesseract range through that waveform, Insideout detected a sooty red vista, heard screams, felt rage and fear. War. This waveform’s last physical shape had destroyed other human bodies, and it itself had been destroyed by its own kind. The fear imprinted on that waveform matched the clangor of the alien’s own terror, and it wanted to pull away. But to live, it had to go on. It shifted its focus to the waveform’s current three-dimensional shape. The atrophied left leg felt numb. The natural flow of energy had been cut off there shortly after birth by an invasion of poliovirus. The tightness of the body felt wrong. Both parents drifted as waveforms in the vacuum, their bodies gone, dissolved after shattering in a car accident. All recent memories depicted the home—limping among other orphans, reading, hobbling among classrooms, reading—

  “What’d you find, stooge?” a voice cracked Donnie’s reverie, and immediacy streamed back on him. The sour egg stench from the volcanic fumaroles and the sight of the blasted terrain jolted into place, and he looked toward the voice with a dazed expression.

  “You stoned?” a blond face with sunstreaked, windcast hair and a mischievous smile asked. Dirk Heiser, the class tough, lean and restless as a leopard, wore a flouncy white shirt with a wide collar like a pirate’s, open to his navel, revealing a taut stomach. Dirk reached out and plucked the bright object from Donnie’s fingers. “What have we here?”

  “Hey, I found it!” Donnie shouted and snatched at the silver disc.

  Dir
k tossed it in the air like a coin, and it shuffled sunflashes and opals. “It’s mine now, stooge.”

  “No! I found it!” Donnie yelled—something he had never dared with Dirk before. Remotely, he experienced awe in the airy twilight feeling that had come from the object and that had led to this defiance.

  “Give it back to him, Dirk,” a woman’s voice called from the bushes. A scrawny girl with a long-eyed and sharp-boned face appeared behind the leering bully. Dark, fluffy hair flattened at the back and black sand smudging the shoulders and elbows of her red pullover shadowed the moment before.

  “Go sit on it, Lani.” Dirk fit the reflectant shape to his eye, monocle-style, and with one hand pushed Donnie backward.

  Donnie staggered to the edge of the scarp, and his bad leg went out from under. He slid into the pit and immediately stopped his fall with his cane. Gravel chuckled down the long slope.

  “I don’t like anyone yelling at me, gimp.” Dirk bent over to confront Donnie face to face. Donnie saw himself in the bauble gripped by Dirk’s angry eye: The horse of his face in the curved surface snorted with fear. With a grin that revealed backward bent teeth, Dirk grabbed the cane and yanked it from Donnie’s grip.

  Gravity jerked through Donnie, and his hands clutched at the sharp rocks jutting from the brim of the slope while his good leg scrambled for footing. He ignored the hot pain of cut nerves in his fingers and held the frantic weight of his body until his leg found support.

  “Dirk!” Lani protested and bent to help Donnie.

  Dirk shoved her back. “Get away.” He hooked the cane to a branch of a wispy ohelo and held the other end out for Donnie. When Donnie reached for it, Dirk swung it away. The bully laughed as Donnie fell back and the air gasped out of him. “You still have the stuff I gave you last week?”