Waking in Dreamland

by Jody Lynne Nye

  “You probably left the hall too soon to hear that this project has been terminated,” he said reasonably. “If you return now, the Minister of Science will hold you harmless in any wrongdoing—”

  With a snarl, Brom made a soundproof glass cage form around Roan while he stood up and restored his dignity. Feeling his own influence strong in this place, Roan thinned the glass to air and walked out of it. The real battle of wills was beginning. He studied Brom, wondering how strong-minded he was. While Roan might question Brom’s wisdom in creating a monstrosity like the Alarm Clock, he couldn’t fault the man’s sanity, and in the Dreamland that was where power lay. To control the stuff of dreams, one had to know one’s own parameters, not to say limits. With sufficient strength of will, there were no limits, save those of the Sleepers themselves. Roan reached out for pliable matter, and threw armloads of influence at Brom.

  Snapping manacles clamped about the chief scientist’s legs, feet, arms, torso, and neck. More poured down, burying Brom under a mound of clanking metal, drowning out his angry yells. Roan turned to address the apprentices again, but almost at once, the chains were gone. Brom snarled at him. Roan tried to bring the chains back, but they were gone beyond recall. He felt dismay. Brom had a superior command of influence, as strong as his own. The young apprentices stood nearby, not knowing what to do. They started tentatively toward one another.

  “Reform!” Brom ordered them.

  “No!” Roan shouted.

  None of them had the strength or the talent of their master; they were merely intelligent. The two musclemen started forward, and Roan promptly dropped the ground out from under them, plummeting them again into a steep-sided sandpit with a soft bottom to land on. The momentary lapse of attention gave Brom an uninterrupted move. Machine guns appeared in a ring around Roan. He flung himself down into the sand, and a deafening barrage erupted over him. Were they real bullets? Roan wondered, covering his head with his arms. He was unwilling to lift his head and find out. Would Brom countenance murder to make certain his precious device had a chance to gain ground?

  Empty clicking told him the guns were out of ammunition. Before they could reload, Roan stood up and made them vanish with a wave of his arms. There were no holes in the surrounding landscape, or in the bystanders who could not have avoided being hit. So the barrage was a mental ploy. Good. Roan could fight on those terms.

  Confusion was the only way to defeat a really sane man who knows who he is. Roan created several duplicates of himself, and set them to close in on the chief scientist, all wielding different weapons, hoping Brom would wear himself out attacking simulacra. In response, Brom cupped his hands again, and tan clouds of sand blew up. Brom was trying Roan’s own trick of mixing up the landscape. It didn’t matter how many of him there were, they’d all be lacerated by the whirling sand.

  Roan squinted through the blowing storm. He thought he still saw all of the scientists in place, and thought of fixing each one in place like draughts on a checkerboard. He was just drawing the lines in the sand when the ground started to shift under his feet. He felt himself being turned to the right. To keep his prisoners under guard, he pivoted on his left heel. The sand turned him again. He pivoted again. The sand kept spinning. Roan stepped leftward again and again, as if he was dancing on a moving floor. If Brom wanted to disorient him, he was doing a good job, making him dizzy while standing in one place. Roan had to pit every erg of strength he had, every degree of concentration that he could muster to keep his reality his way. Hidden in the cloud Brom could alter small details, and he wouldn’t be able to tell.

  The tall figure in gray-blue and white tilted his head, and the other, more indistinct figures started closer to him. Alarmed, Roan stopped moving his feet, and allowed the sand to whip him around and around. The scientists must not be allowed to touch. As if seen in a magic-lantern show, Brom’s people started to move jerkily toward one another. Roan built with the tools to hand, forming walls out of the sand around each apprentice, willing the panels to transparent, stonelike impermeability. The figures stopped, feeling the confines of their prisons. He heard voices muffled by the roar of the wind, and Brom’s shouting over all.

  The tall figure turned away from him to feel the translucent walls with the palm of his hands, making him look rather like a pantomime artist. Roan had left no way out of the prison. Brom threw a gesture over his shoulder at Roan. With a backward glance of disgust, Brom had to let go of the influence he was using to break out of Roan’s. The King’s Investigator stopped spinning so abruptly that he stumbled a few paces and dropped to one knee in the sand, but he kept his concentration fixed on making the walls stay. He had to hold the others in place long enough for help to arrive. How long? he thought. Bergold, where are you?

  The apprentices tried to climb out of their prisons, and Roan saw hands waving out of the top of cells where the ground was too soft to give them a foot up. He made the glass slipperier, and they fell back in.

  “When?” Brom shouted out loud. Roan started. The question was not meant for him. One of the male assistants stopped trying to escape from his prison. He yanked out a gold pocketwatch and opened it.

  “Not yet, sir!”

  “Wait for it, then!” Brom said. He put his hands together and dissolved the glass walls with a burst of power. The cylinders crumbled, and the apprentices ran toward one another through the shards raining down upon them.

  Roan forced the unwilling grains to fountain up and mold back into shape around each of the apprentices. As long as his strength held, the crucible couldn’t reform.

  He thanked the fate that left him in an immutable body. The chief scientist checked again and again as he almost threw whammies on Roan, then diverted at the last moment to blast Roan’s surroundings. Most of the time, he simply tried to knock the ground out from under him. Roan was staggeringly dizzy from his spin, but he couldn’t let the feelings of nausea stop him. He rolled when the dunes disappeared from under him, or braced himself when they grew to tower height. He might not have had an adaptable body, but he had a highly developed sense of self-preservation.

  Come on, Bergold! he thought desperately. Hurry up!

  A dark shadow at his feet made him look up suddenly. He rolled out of the way just in time as a ten-ton weight crashed down into the sand exactly where he had been standing.

  Brom seemed to make use of his hand gesture to focus his mental powers. Roan made the glass walls turn into a ribbon of glass that wound around and put a squeeze on him, pinning his arms to his side.

  The scientist with the pocket watch shouted, without looking up, “Sir! One of them’s coming . . . now!”

  Roan wanted to know what “them” was, but he didn’t dare break his concentration to look around. Did the little device indicate the arrival of Bergold and the others?

  Suddenly, he was surrounded by a crowd of men in white shirts, and black trousers and shoes, and gaudy ties, shouting into small rectangular black boxes held to their heads.

  “Sell IBM! No, buy! Sell, sell, sell! Buy IBM! Buy AT&T! No, sell!”

  A nuisance! These random neural storms were the product of odd bits of active influence that broke off and swirled through the Dreamland. They almost always appeared at inopportune moments, and interfered with normal activity. Roan flailed at the crowd of investment brokers, trying to see over their

  shoulders. Someone bumped his elbow. He dropped his staff, and was unable to bend to pick it up in the crush.

  In between the confusion of margin calls and buy orders, Roan managed to catch glimpses of the scientists. One by one they were breaking free of his glass cages and running away. Roan tried to apply his will to one apprentice, then another, to get them to stay where they were, but each time, a fragment of the nuisance got in his way and broke the connection.

  Roan realized he was letting his attention be drawn in too many directions. Instead of trying to capture the group, he tried focusing directly on the next individual he saw, a thin young man with
a plastic half-envelope sticking out of his coat’s breast pocket, and gazed at him, making him sink into the sand. Roan would have one captive, at least. Up to his armpits, the apprentice cried out to his fellows for help. Roan filled his mouth with cotton. The nuisance buffeted him up and back, until he lost sight of his prisoner.

  Through the crowd of cellular phones and Armani ties, the face of Brom suddenly appeared and leered at him.

  “You see, young man? There is no master but science.”

  Roan saw the end of his own staff shooting down toward his forehead, felt an appalling pain in his skull, then everything went black.

  Chapter 8

  The sky that had been empty over the desert was full of twittering birds now, swooping down to circle around his head and off again into the sky, in triumphant patterns. Roan stood tall and straight before the throne.

  King Byron, dressed in blue silk velvet and rows of snowy ermine, and looking more regal than ever before, congratulated him warmly.

  “We shall be proud to have you in the family, my dear young man,” he said, shaking Roan’s hand in a firm grip. “You’re a hero! You have saved the Dreamland!”

  Roan smiled, and bowed deeply, feeling his head swim at such compliments. “Your Majesty, I am honored to have been of service, but I have to give credit to those others who helped me by arriving in the nick of time.”

  Byron smiled back and raised his hands high. “Your modesty ill-defines your courage and abilities. You have swept aside any objections I had to you marrying my daughter. The wedding will proceed at once!” He clapped his hands.

  “Her Ephemeral Highness, the Princess Leonora!” the herald bellowed, but even he sounded elegant, and was clad in yards of sea-green velvet and golden lace.

  The princess, looking more lovely and remote than ever, dressed in a filmy lace gown that was nearly insubstantial and yet still opaque enough to protect virginal modesty, stepped forward and laid her fingers on Roan’s arm. She smiled brilliantly up at him as trumpeters played a slow march. Roan and his chosen lady walked together along an aisle carpeted with white silk and strewn with flowers, to an altar of gold and warm brown wood, backed by a colored window that looked like the intricate branches of a tree with blue sky and green leaves of stained glass between the thick black lines. As the triumphant music rose around them, the princess turned toward him and raised her sheer, white veil; her beautiful brown—no, blue—no, green eyes were full of worry as she looked up into his face.

  “Can you hear me, Roan? Darling, are you all right?”

  The headache centered behind his forehead throbbed with every single word she spoke. He opened his mouth to reply, and wondered why her wedding dress had turned into a heavy, dark green, roll-neck silk tunic that matched her eyes. Behind her, instead of the stained glass window, was a tracery of branches like black lace. He groaned. He wasn’t back in Mnemosyne, getting married. He was lying in the middle of a public footpath within sight of a real forest.

  A large fish’s head leaned over him, and something wet touched his mouth. Roan tried gratefully to drink. He was very dry.

  “He’s coming to, my dear.” Bergold’s voice, thank the Sleepers. He would explain what had happened. Roan turned his head slightly. Behind the Historian were several more shadows, and the outlines of a herd of bicycles, most of them heavily laden with packs. The steeds had come back at last.

  “How do you feel?” Leonora asked, gently turning his head back with her fingers. “Can you speak?”

  “What are you doing here?” Roan asked at last, his voice sounding far away. Leonora sat back on her heels as Bergold and the others helped Roan sit up.

  “I brought your bicycle,” she said, with the same bright, intense smile that she had worn in his vision of their wedding—but at the moment he wasn’t quite so pleased to see it. “He’s very skittish. He wouldn’t let anyone ride but me. I had to lead Golden Schwinn. All the steeds are unusually nervous. I don’t know what Brom did to them. And we picked up your trail markers. I thought you might want them back.” She gestured to one of the men, who brought Roan the bundle of multicolored arrow-shaped signs.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Roan said urgently, lowering his voice. His head ached mightily, but he managed to touch it gingerly with both hands. It still felt the same size on the outside, but the inside had ballooned with pain enough to fill several provinces.

  “Of course I should,” Leonora said, the gamine smile taking on a slight edge. “I told you, this is my task as much as yours.”

  Scenting a private argument, the others tactfully withdrew a few paces. Roan didn’t relish what he had to say, but he promised himself he would keep from insulting her this time. He took her hand in both of his.

  “You must go home, Leonora,” he said sincerely, looking deeply into her eyes. “I thank you for coming now, and I’m happy to see you, because I didn’t get to explain my reasons in the court.” Roan’s head ached as he searched for words. “There are undoubtedly hardships ahead. Brom has proved he will stop little short of murder to carry out his task. We must catch him before he finds the Hall of the Sleepers. Those of us who have experience and training in traveling long, hard distances, sleeping out of doors, and dealing with violence are best suited to this mission. We would find the task that much easier if we didn’t have to worry about protecting you at the same time. Please go back to your father, if not tonight, in the morning.”

  “Certainly not,” the princess said, with spirit, dusting her hands together. She manifested a water bottle and held it out to him. “This is my father’s kingdom—and someday mine, as you pointed out. It is right that I help save it from those madmen. I’ll take care of myself. Are you thirsty? You’re covered in sand.”

  “But they’re dangerous! Look at me.” Roan felt the bruise in the middle of his forehead. It had swollen into a perceptible lump, and he bet that it was turning purple.

  “Yes, but you were alone,” Leonora pointed out. “Now, you are not. I brought some of the palace guards. Together, we’ll all be safe.”

  “Does your father know you’re here?”

  “Of course he does. Roan, I’m not going back,” she said, quickly. Roan was aghast. She hadn’t told him.

  “For your own safety,” Roan pleaded. Leonora sat back and folded her arms. Since their childhood, that gesture had meant she had made up her mind, and nothing short of a Changeover would shift her. Perhaps not even that.

  “Men!” Roan stood up woozily to beckon to a pair of uniformed guards standing near the bicycles. They had an apprentice scientist between them. His hands were attached at the forefinger-tips by an unbreakable, woven straw tube.

  It was Captain Spar himself who answered Roan’s call. Spar left the prisoner near the hitching post in the care of Corporal Lum and the two other guards, and came to stand at attention beside Leonora with a crashing salute that made Roan wince for his own forehead.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Please escort the princess back to Mnemosyne at once,” Roan said. “She’s not accompanying us any farther. I think there’s enough daylight for you to reach the palace before full dark.”

  “No,” Leonora said, springing up, her eyes sparkling. The soldiers looked from her to Roan, wondering what to do. “Ignore that order. Roan, these men are my father’s officers, not yours. They obey me.”

  Spar gave Roan a look of undiluted sympathy, but he backed away from the princess, who stood with her hands on her hips. Leonora had grown formidable in her beauty, tall, blonde, and sturdy, the green tunic molded to her form as a Valkyrie’s armor, and her heart-shaped face thickened at the jaw to show muscle.

  “You need to get used to the idea of having me as part of the party,” she said, raising a muscular forefinger warningly. “Make the best of that, because that’s one thing that is not changing.”

  Roan opened his mouth, and decided he couldn’t trust himself to speak at that moment. He looked around for his hat. The desert whim of the Sleeper h
ad ceased. Sparse trees and bushes dotted the surrounding grassland, which was furnished with a riotous blanket of bright-colored flowers. Roan found his hat half a dozen paces away in a cluster of red blossoms, and slapped it into a wide-brimmed fedora with padding in the crown. What couldn’t be cured must be endured. That was one of the old wise sayings that had come down from the Sleepers since time immemorial. Leonora’s strongmindedness might actually be an asset to her on the road. She might also tire of the game, if they were lucky, before she got into a dangerous situation. He walked back to her, and she raised an eyebrow at him.

  “All right, we’ll try it,” he said. “But if there’s any real trouble . . .”

  “I’ll stay out of the way,” she said, promptly, sensing that she had won. Her breastplate softened again into the tunic that matched her eyes, and her body slimmed to suppleness. She had a playful dimple in her cheek just beside the corner of her mouth when she wanted one. It appeared now. “And if I prove to be a problem, I’ll go home at once, without an argument. I promise I won’t hold your decision against you. Is it a bargain?”

  She held out her hand, and Roan clasped it, feeling more than a little foolish. Her offer was fair enough. She really was perfect. He shook his head, trying to think like a leader, and less like a besotted calf.

  “Done and done,” he said. She grinned like a child, and he suddenly saw how frightened she was. He immediately had second thoughts. He had to admit he was worried, too.

  “We’d better hear all about what happened to you on the road,” Bergold said, detecting that the argument was over. He came around to slap Roan on the back. The historian was now in the shape of a man with the head of a fish. His eyes, one on either side of his narrow, flattened face, lacked eyelids, so all their expression was in the expansion or contraction of the pupils. Roan focused on one great, round eye, and told his story. Spar, Lum, and the guards moved close enough to listen, while still keeping an eye on their prisoner, whom they had secured to the hitching post with a bicycle lock. Drea, Leonora’s ancient nurse and confidant, fussed over the bandages on Roan’s forehead, with Colenna, a retired field observer from the Ministry of History, standing by with a handful of gauze from her amazingly capacious handbag. Felan, also from the Ministry of History, and Misha, from Continuity, were two young men he had seen about court but did not really know. They listened to Roan carefully, as if committing every word to memory for the archives. If this mission was successful, the tale would be an important and popular one throughout the Dreamland. If they failed . . . no one might be around to tell it, or to listen.