Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  “You tried to kill me,” he said. “But you didn’t. Why?”

  Teres stirred impatiently. “Kalypso, I don’t see anything. I don’t feel anything. Where’s this proof of yours?”

  “I don’t know,” Kalypso said to Marcsson. She began walking into the water. “I really have no idea.”

  DAMN. ROBERE’S ON THE LINE. OUR HOUR’S UP. KALYPSO, MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN.

  Teres grabbed hold of Kalypso’s hand. “Where are we going?”

  DON’T GO INTO ALIEN LIFE, KALYPSO. YOU’RE LOSING TERES.

  “Come on, Teres,” Kalypso said. “Be brave. It’s only Dreaming.”

  KALYPSO, CUT IT OUT. KEEP HOLD OF TERES. I’VE TOLD ROBERE WE CAN—

  “This isn’t Alien Life anymore,” Marcsson informed her, although she’d already guessed. “It’s the Core.”

  “Too late, Tehar. We’re already there. At least, it smells like an old suitcase.”

  Hey Columbus this don’t look like India. Where are the elephants?

  She didn’t know who said that but addressed Marcsson.

  “That’s enough, Azamat. You’re on my turf now and I’m not having this from you.”

  KALYPSO, TERES JUST WOKE UP. SHE’S PISSED OFF. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?

  The Core of Ganesh felt very much as it had during Azamat’s ill-fated Dream run, but Kalypso herself must have become inured to sensory trauma because she no longer allowed the puree of concepts to distract her from existing.

  “This is everything in Earth Archives, isn’t it?” she said incredulously, beginning now to understand. All kinds of stuff was flying by at high speed; some of it slid off, some of it tried to tangle her.

  She swatted at a swarm of data as it tickled her eyes, and it pulled her into the midst of a camel train: flies (Everywhere and everybody was dressed in black and she was . . . what was she?

  Beneath the robes and the sweat and the smell and the heat, below the embodiment, a kind of sound or other less obvious sense. Inside the bones: a resonance. It called her and her own structure began to sympathetically throb and then soften, liquefy. Mute.

  I’m not a thing anymore. I’m a function whose tail lashes its face, a parasite that kills the host and itself. I don’t belong here.

  His vacant and sexual gaze. Preying. That stumbling in the gait which signifies illness, nearness to death.

  On the ground. Now. You shouldn’t be doing this, but are. The pleasure of distance. You cannot know what is being experienced in those aching, blackened teeth, I’ll teach it to excite you.

  He said: I’m only close enough to scare you. If I were any farther away you wouldn’t see me at all, but I would still be there, eating you. The metabolism of my existence involves the devouring and reconstituting of you.

  KALYPSO, WE’VE JUST HAD HALF A NODE COME UP! WHATEVER IT IS YOU’RE DOING, KEEP DOING IT.

  Shit. She didn’t know what she was doing.

  “Azamat, are you ever going to speak to me in terms I can grasp? I think you owe me. What’s the purpose of this? What’s it got to do with the Oxygen Problem?”

  Sensory deprivation

  We were looking for order and we found it. Or it found us. What is my purpose? It has no purpose, it just tries to live despite being beaten for no reason. There’s no purpose to me. Something has me in its grip and I try to live. That’s all. I’m not big enough to hold it. You like big things, Kalypso. You don’t want anything to do with me or any other human being. I can teach Ganesh how to solve the oxygen problem.

  I can finish the dream we started.

  She can feel pressure in her ears, big water being held back by some invisible force. The rate of flow is increasing. Earth Archives will spill over into the only empty space left: her. Unless she does something. First day of Shotgunning 101: change the imagery, and you control the Dream.

  “We are on a submarine,” Kalypso suggested. “Earth Archives are outside in the water. The hull is strong.”

  And they were. Or rather, she was. He remained annoyingly discorporeal.

  KALYPSO, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU CAN’T JUST START BUILDING STUFF. TERES HAS JUST ORDERED AN ATTACK ON THE GRUNTS. WE DON’T HAVE TIME TO PLAY GAMES.

  “Marcsson, I said we’re in a submarine. Get in here. Quit hiding.”

  He sat at the periscope.

  “Very nice,” he said. “Let’s be cordial about this. Why not? There’s nothing else left.”

  “Can you teach us to understand the System? Is it something we can communicate with?”

  “That depends on Ganesh. Right now Ganesh can’t understand you and you can’t understand it.”

  WE HAVE TROUBLE AT REFLEX POINT 4. KALYPSO, YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO COME OUT.

  “Case in point,” Marcsson said. “I don’t want this thing shut down any more than you do. I live here now.”

  “How? How? I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want you to understand. Just go on being stupid, Kalypso, or it will get you, too.”

  “You’re using Sieng’s data. How.”

  “It’s part of a bridge. I’m learning the chemical sequences to engage the planetary System on its most basic level. So that when I give it a command, it must obey.”

  “It commanded Sieng,” Kalypso said. “You tried to tell me but I didn’t get it. The System commanded Sieng and she died.”

  “I thought you were Sieng but you turned out to be much larger. I can infect the System. It will make oxygen.”

  Outside the submarine, the ocean is shaking. Outside is everything that history is made of. It’s invisible to Kalypso because she has constructed a steel hull to save herself from its volume. But something else is lunching on it.

  The devouring and reconstituting of you.

  “And then what?”

  “I infect the System and in so doing I infect myself. You understand?”

  “No.”

  “I am the action of the System re-forming itself.”

  “But I’m infected, not you.”

  “You’re just a music. You’re just a piece of time, an anti-silence.”

  Play me again. Put me in your ears.

  THE SITUATION OUTSIDE IS NOT LOOKING GOOD. THE GRUNTS HAVE REFLEX 4. I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS WILL DO TO THE CORE, BUT BE READY FOR ANYTHING. ARE YOU COMING OUT OR NOT?

  Marcsson was doing things to the controls of the submarine.

  “Hey,” she said. “I didn’t write anything in there. You better not try to dive because it’s not programmed.”

  “Watch me. Periscope down.”

  KESSEL AND CHARL ARE ENGAGED IN A STANDOFF AT REFLEX 1. TERES IS MAKING HER WAY TOWARD THE CORE.

  The soft parts always hide themselves adjacent to the vicious parts. It’s a form of psychic camouflage. But you’ll inevitably find them if you refuse to lose.

  LIET SAYS THREE WITCH DOCTORS HAVE ESCAPED. THE DEAD STILL HAVE EVERY REFLEX POINT EXCEPT 4.

  “We’re going to the bridge,” Azamat told her. “It’s not safe for you anywhere else.”

  The submarine was no more, and Marcsson was invisible. Kalypso could see that the bridge was almost finished, yet she could not make out what was on the other side: The luma below was full of bodies and objects.

  “You’re standing on me,” he said. “Ganesh is Wild now.”

  Oh, I could go into it. A falling. I’m stretched across an abyss, a discontinuity I’m reaching into something I don’t know, bridging or trying to. Sometimes I think I’m there but it’s impossible for this to occur. Presenting a conundrum. Maybe there is no other side. It’s like a fault line I’m on, a shift between paradigms. On the other side everything’s different. The rules change.

  So the only way. The only way I can be a bridge is to fall. I’m afraid, but I jumped or was pushed already and I don’t even know it. There’s no one here to answer me when I call. You come as close as anyone has, but I know you don’t hear.

  “Azamat,” she said.

  “It won’t be here tomorrow
. It won’t stick around to get nailed down. Nothing alive does. You and your Miles Davis.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Don’t bother to analyze. You’ll want to.

  They’ll want to. Don’t bother.”

  “Stop sounding like you just came down from the mountain.”

  “I want a last cigarette.”

  Azamat was sitting on her beach, which had been parceled off into geometric shapes containing running streams of tiny black creatures. He was wearing a red cape, which he snapped and flourished at her.

  “Olé!” he said without much conviction.

  KALYPSO, WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” she said viciously. “This is my Dreamer. Don’t you come in here and move shit around. What’s that—an ant farm? Get it out of here.” She wasn’t sure why she was so angry. It wasn’t the same emotion that had made her try to kill him before; it was the kind of anger you feel at people who mean something to you, and the fact that she felt it made her angrier still. She felt royally hoodwinked although she couldn’t have said why.

  He drew a line in the sand. “I dare you.”

  She stepped across it. The ants stung her foot; she hopped away, incensed.

  “See? You’re just the same as you ever were, Kalypso.” He was shaking his head and laughing.

  EACH OF THE SIX DEAD, SITTING ON A REFLEX POINT.

  “What are you doing in here? You can’t be here. This is my place. I don’t just mean, you’re not allowed. I mean, you can’t. This interface we’re having. It’s impossible.”

  “Not for me. Not anymore.”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  GENN ON A REFLEX POINT.

  “You already said that,” he laughed.

  “I have a right to know. After what you did to me.”

  MALIK ON A REFLEX POINT.

  He climbed up into the lifeguard chair.

  “Hey! Get the fuck down. That’s my chair.”

  “I’ve taken everything else that’s yours. Why not this.”

  ALL REFLEX POINTS COVERED.

  She reached through the interface, intending to come up with something to blow him away with. A bazooka, maybe, or a medium-sized cannon. Or a bolt of lightning, although she didn’t think he really deserved anything that biblical.

  Nothing happened.

  Seething, she climbed the side of the chair and tried to physically push him down. It was no easier in the Dreamer than it would have been in real life.

  “How dare you do this to Ganesh?”

  “What are you going to do to me?” He laughed.

  “I’ll destroy you,” she hissed. “I’ll bring you down, I’ll make you as if you never were.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You will.”

  And suddenly they weren’t at her node anymore. They were standing on the bridge. It made a high arch out into darkness. Luma sparked below. At his feet was an open cigar box, ten times the size it should be.

  KALYPSO, RESPOND. I CAN’T FIND YOU.

  “I want,” he said, “to be capable of love and silence. I want to.”

  In the box was a kitten.

  “Please,” she said, and the futility of her words was obvious even before she spoke them. “Just let me take over this interface now. Just let me. Just.”

  COME, KALYPSO. IT’S TOO LATE. IT’S TOO LATE. COME ON.

  “This creature has no place here. It has needs but no ability to pursue them. It must be provided for.”

  He bent down. She noticed that he was emaciated, as if he’d not eaten for weeks. He reached into the box and stroked the kitten’s back. It arched against his finger.

  “That why we love it. We are attracted to its vulnerability. It reminds us of our own children.”

  “Let it go, please.” She could feel that something bad was going to happen. Who was making it happen? Ganesh? Azamat? Or was it she herself? Why couldn’t she get control? She reached through the interface and came up empty.

  He picked up the kitten. It sat in the palm of one of his hands, purring.

  “It doesn’t love me back, of course. If it were bigger, it would eat me. And then it wouldn’t be vulnerable; I would. It’s all a question of scale.”

  “It’s hungry,” Kalypso said.

  TERES SNARLING AT ROBERE.

  “Yes. It needs its mother. They don’t know how to chew at this age.”

  “Don’t do this.”

  ROBERE SNARLING BACK.

  “Do what? You think I mean this creature harm?” Suddenly he threw the animal back into the box. It cowered for a moment, claws extended, trying to right itself. Azamat shook the box fiercely. The kitten flipped over, rolled, recovered.

  “Cats are nicely flexible, especially when they’re young like this. It’s riot easy to break their bones. However . . .” He produced a curving knife of the type used to gut fish.

  “Azamat, don’t. Don’t. This is an abuse of the Dreamer.”

  “The Dreamer’s extinct. There will never be another Dreamer.”

  He pinned the kitten down and cut off half its tail. The sound it made was an injection of pain and horror. “Stop it now.”

  She flung herself at him but he simply displaced himself to another location. Like a magician. That’s my kind of move, Kalypso thought. But she couldn’t get at the interface. She couldn’t make anything happen. She could only witness.

  KALYPSO, ARE YOU THERE?

  The kitten was trying to lick the bleeding stump of tail. Marcsson looked grave.

  “Fuck you,” Kalypso shouted. “You can’t get to me this way. It’s a Dream. I don’t care what you do.”

  “I’m not crazy,” he said. Looking at him now she was inclined to believe him. His face was steady, consistent. And if he was controlling this Dream, he had resources of a kind she couldn’t begin to approach. “You’re being distracted by emotion. Cruelty has a function. You just don’t know what it is.”

  KALYPSO?

  She felt Tehar making rapidfire adjustments to her body temperature. In the Dream spittle flew from her lips and she felt her veins stand out in anger?

  “Don’t you philosophize at me! No. I won’t look.”

  But she did. It was a Dream and she had no choice. He’d let the kitten out of the box. It scuttled belly down, hackles up, leaving bloody footprints on the new bridge. The knife in Azamat’s hand became a club.

  “We’re going to get to the bottom of you. We’re going to decode you.” He stepped after the kitten and raised the club thoughtfully, carefully, like a golfer preparing to putt.

  She tried to close her eyes but couldn’t. She had to see what he/it/they wanted her to see. She needed indifference, badly, but couldn’t find any. She tried to fake it.

  LASSARE’S VOICE ON THE RADIO, GOING, “WE CAN MASTER THE SYSTEM. COME TO YOUR SENSES, YOU FOOLS!”

  “Go ahead. I don’t care.”

  He brought the club down. It caught the cat in the pelvis. Again the sound, worse than before, and more prolonged. The kitten tried to get away, dragging its useless back half.

  “There,” he said with satisfaction to the kitten. “How does that feel?” He turned to her. “How does that feel, Kalypso? Are you feeling it? Is it big enough for you? Is it Wild enough for you?”

  There was a time, not long ago, when she would have bristled at his sarcasm; it would have hurt her. Not anymore.

  “I’ve been on the receiving end of it all. You broke me. You broke me Azamat and you can only do that once. Now you’ll have to deal with the shards.”

  The kitten was keening, a sound that reached into some old part of Kalypso’s brain and thrashed. For an instant she flashed that she was the animal, got a taste of its senses—just enough to shake her up. Her vitals and waves went crazy; Tehar fumbled and stabilized her.

  A VIEW OF FIRST FROM ONE OF THE ROBOT STATIONS ON THE FARM CELLS. THE SURFACE OF THE LUMA MOVING TOWARD FIRST LIKE WATER TOWARD A DRAIN.

  She found
herself curled up on the ground. Azamat was on his knees beside her. His hand cupped the back of her head and he drew her against his body.

  “Shards?” he said softly. “I don’t feel anything sharp.” He was running his hands down her back. Just as he said, her body had gone soft. While among her cluster, she had sobbed and thrashed and struck out to no relief; now, in one gesture, he had reduced her to a state of total release. She felt as dim and relaxed as a plant.

  “Yes,” Azamat said. “That’s better.”

  “I hate you.”

  He had enveloped her entire body with his limbs. There was a look of tenderness on his face. This is awful, she told herself. It’s terrible. But she was quiescent; she had given herself over without ever making a choice. She could still hear the animal. It was making some progress, wheezing softly.

  ONLY IT’S NOT SINKING. IT’S NOT GOING DOWN.

  How do I know this sound? Kalypso thought. I’ve never been anywhere near a cat.

  IT’S CLIMBING.

  “I hate you,” she said again. “You killed Ganesh.”

  “It was mutual, or will be. Go to sleep.”

  “No. What are you going to do.”

  “Sleep now,” he said gently. “I will take care of you.”

  But Ganesh knew what a cat sounded like.

  Ganesh. Ganesh was still here. She gathered herself.

  “I came here to save you,” she said. “I don’t know why I want to save you but I do. Whatever is happening here, it doesn’t have to happen.”

  “Yes it does.”

  “You’re in a coma. You don’t even know what’s going on.”

  “You can’t help,” he whispered. “You can’t save me. Go to sleep.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll torture the kitten again. I’ll take it apart bone by bone.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It’s a real kitten to you here. You can’t pretend to me that it isn’t because I know that it is. Just like this is real. My lips on your hand are real.”

  “I know,” she said. He was holding her hand lightly against his mouth. She could have easily withdrawn it but she didn’t. He kissed her fingertips.

  “So go to sleep. You don’t want to see this.”

  “I’ve seen you kill before.”