Angels and Exiles (8 page)

The performer’s doors of the Proxima Theater are closed when the three dreamweavers rush out of the red-class taxicab. They run across the street, their coats flapping behind them, ascend the three steps, slam their bare hands onto the doors with desperate cries. Kel wails in frustration; Ras gives Edge Nain a murderous look. Edge Nain has been praying, deep in his heart. And so it does not truly surprise him when the doors suddenly yield, swing inward, let them in. The trio stagger into the backstage lobby of the Proxima. The entry fee is deducted from their accounts; and, starting this instant, every additional minute they remain within the building will cost them 1.8 assets.

In the lobby stand nearly a dozen groups of dreamweavers. Most are made up of three or four people; one group boasts nine members, while two flamboyant individuals are going it alone. An Eldred carrying a palm-node greets the trio; by the pattern of jewels embedded among her scales, they think to recognize her as one they have dealt with before, whom they learned to call Sumyuru.

Sumyuru: “Friends, you have come to participate in the competition?”

Ras: “Yes, we have. We’re registered under ‘Brothers of Enceladus’. Are we too late?”

Sumyuru raises a hand and spreads her six digits, the Eldred equivalent of a smile, or so it is believed. “No. There was a small delay on our part, and you are still on time. I have confirmed your participation. In one minute we will announce the order in which the performances will be given. There will be a ten-minute period to rehearse, after which all performers will be required to enter the auditorium and attend the others’ performances. If you wish, mood-enhancers and hallucinogens are available at self-service dispensers; rates are posted above the machines.”

Kel shakes his big-boned head in contempt. He has a pathological aversion to drugs, believes only in the purity of the dreamweaving experience. While Ras and Edge Nain are not so puritanical as he, neither of them considers using the proffered substances. They see one of the soloists at the drug dispensers, obviously mentally trying out combinations, checking the total price. He comes to a decision, punches in his choices, and four varicoloured pills drop into his outstretched hand.

Kel: “That fool’s going to burn out every neuron in his brain. I can’t let him do this.”

Before the other two can hold him back, Kel strides over to the soloist, urges him not to take the drugs. The other becomes instantly suspicious, demands to know why Kel is so concerned about his welfare. Next instant, before any answer can be given, he takes a swing at Kel, who ducks back and retreats toward his friends, under a torrent of invective. The soloist does not pursue, probably aware that he has already been heftily fined for attempted violence and that actual assault might well bankrupt him on the spot.

Ras: “Give it a rest, Kel. It’s his choice if he wants to take them.” Ras forebears to add that if the soloist does burn out, it will increase their own chances. He knows that his soft-hearted friend would be deeply offended by such a remark, though it is no more than the truth.

Sumyuru’s hissing voice rises in the lobby, instantly evoking silence. She reads out the schedule for the competition. The Brothers of Enceladus will be fifth out of eleven, a good spot. They will have time to calm down, but they will not have to wait too long and risk losing their concentration.

Everyone takes advantage of the ten-minute rehearsal period. Small side-rooms are made available to the performers, at a nominal charge. Kel groans in anguish when he sees the soloist swallow all the pills at once before going into a room. The trio chooses a room and goes through warm-up exercises. They do not evoke anything they will be using in their performance, for fear of killing the spontaneity. Instead, they work on standard effects, striving to achieve a meshing within the first few seconds, gauging each other’s mood. The ten minutes pass by quickly; at the end, they are as relaxed and comfortable as they’ll ever be.

A bell rings, and all the dreamweavers gather, enter the auditorium. The human audience is assigned seats on the parterre, while the Eldred are seated in a single high box. No efforts have been made to conceal the box’s security equipment: sensors and weapons gleam in the lights. Exclamations rise from the human section as the dreamweaving teams make their way to their bank of seats close to the stage, separated from the rest of the parterre by five metres of empty space and a softly glowing line. Edge Nain recognizes more than a few people in the crowd, including a woman he would never have expected to see again, not after her friend was gunned down by theatre security at the Brothers’ last performance for having tried to cross the line separating performers from audience.
Sweet Jesu
, prays Edge Nain as he grasps the relayer-bar set in the armrest of his seat,
please let everyone here keep their head tonight
.

The first group, Noncortical, steps onto the stage to the raucous cheering of their supporters in the audience. It is a quintet, with three inexperienced youngsters and only two old hands in their mid-thirties to keep them in check. Edge Nain knows one of them, Syrna; worked with her in fact, five years ago, when he was just starting out. He smiles briefly, remembering the dreams their group shaped in those days. The smile turns into a slight wince as Noncortical’s performance starts. Within a few seconds, Edge Nain is swept into an adventure within an endless jungle, along with a band of friends he has known forever. . . . The dream is brash, energetic, but it lacks focus; frequently, the thread is lost, sounds and images clash with the moods: the sense of purpose, which is so important, fades away. Five years, and Syrna’s dreams have not changed. Maybe if she allowed herself to act her age, if she went after experience instead of raw youth in her partners . . .

The dream lasts the full five minutes allowed and concludes abruptly when the inducers power down at the command of their timing units. Noncortical leaves the stage to polite applause. Immortality will not be for them this night, and everyone knows it. Even their fans’ enthusiasm now sounds forced.

Three more performances before it is the trio’s turn. Between each performance, they empty their heads of the others’ dream. This is the risk they all run: being contaminated by the other weavers’ material. If it echoes in their own performance, they will show themselves to be weak, easily influenced.

Indeed, it happens to the soloist who goes fourth, just before them. As he steps upon the stage Kel heaves a sigh: the man is shaking all over, in the grip of the drugs’ side effects. When he starts his dream, it comes blaring out, distorted and incoherent. This might have been intentional, but it is clear to the trio that it is not: merely from the images in the overture, they can see the dreamweaver is trying for a pastel fantasy, a type well-suited for solo performances. But the drugs are now altering his metabolism too swiftly for the inducer to adjust. His fear of failure is so strong it affects everything he weaves: Edge Nain tastes it in the back of his throat; Ras hears it as a ghostly wail; Kel sees it in the corners of his eyes. Then the third team’s dream begins to insinuate itself into this one: as the protagonist gazes through a window at the shining wonderland beyond, incongruous eidetic flashes rip through the visual field and pulses of terror, too sharp to be filtered by the inducer’s emotion dampers, lash the audience’s brainstems. The soloist’s thoughts, unspoken, are painfully obvious:
They were so much better than me, how can I have a chance?

Edge Nain pulls himself partly away from the dream, cranes back his head, looking up over his shoulder at the box where the Eldred audience is seated. The dream blurs his vision so he cannot clearly focus on reality; still, he can discern paired gleams in the dimness: reflections of the theatre lights upon the glossy black spheres the Eldred have for eyes. Can’t they put an end to this performance? The weaver’s concentration is shredding away, the drugs still roiling in his system; if it keeps up like this, he will soon need medical attention.

Ras, under his breath: “No! You had a way out, you little fucker, you could have brought it back under control, don’t you know
anything
?”

The dream has gone utterly sour; the soloist is no longer in conscious control of it: icons from his undermind are pouring out, personal archetypes of his fears and self-loathing. It is an ugly thing to experience, for all that it reveals of the human soul. Someone, a woman, shouts: “Stop it!” Kel grasps Edge Nain’s wrist, says: “I can’t go, he’ll never let me. But someone should. . . .”

And then it is all over; with a final dissonant ugliness, the dream collapses. The weaver is on his knees, hand clutching the inducer, white-knuckled. He lets go of the machine, tries to crawl off the stage, halts at the edge of the stairs, and starts retching. A woman from the second team comes to him, drags him off and out of the auditorium.

An Eldred’s hissing voice: “Fifth competitors: Brothers of Enceladus.”

The trio stands up, files onto the stage. They purge their minds of everything except the dream they are about to weave: they can spare no more pity for the failed soloist, nor any fear for themselves.

The inducer is a silvery machine, a slim pillar a metre and a half high, with a dozen fragile sharp-tipped spines extending outward from its top. Another marvel of Eldred technology, another gift from the stars. Each of the three grasps a spine, and then all feel themselves drawn into the dream as the inducer powers up.

Dreamweaving is typically a collaborative experience; using several participants brings greater depth to the experience, though it demands a severe mental discipline. While techniques vary widely—this is a very new art form, still in its infancy—most often sensory and intellectual cues are divided among the weavers, one handling sight, another sound and touch, a third emotional overtones, and so forth. Edge Nain, Ras, and Kel, the Brothers of Enceladus, work this way. Edge Nain has the additional responsibility of keeping things on track; it is to him the other two must defer if an uncertainty arises in the unfolding of the dream.

But this time he will have no need to intervene; honed by hundreds of hours of rehearsal, given additional intensity by the pressures on them, the dream unfolds precisely as they envisioned it.

It is a fantasia, midway between a free-form improvisation and a classically developed thematic dream. Sets of images recur throughout, giving it an identifiable texture; the initial situation is allowed to fade away, but reappears more and more frequently as the dream progresses, and eventually can be seen to be resolving, revealing the overall shape of the dream.

It is a strong dream, built on pain and wonder. Yerusalom is the setting for it, but at a remove: everything happens as if within a great luminous structure, which only alludes to the buildings of the city. Images recur throughout: a weeping girl wearing a bonnet of green felt; a proud warrior standing desperate against the twilight of his race; a bright concourse strewn with flowers and bloody skulls. It is a complicated story the three dreamweavers tell, which seems to meander into a hundred dead ends, yet always returns to its main thrust.

When the bitter tale concludes, there comes a feeling of dissolution, and the dream’s focus widens. Is this Yerusalom where the whole tale took place, its own world embedded in reality? Or are we still dreaming, finding within the dream a city much like the one where we live and strive, questing for our heart’s desire, praying for it to be granted?

Hands release the spines of the inducer; Edge Nain speaks the disengagement command, and the machine powers down. The audience emerges from the dream. It was all told within four and a half minutes, though, as in the manner of the best dreams, it seemed to stretch out for hours. The Brothers’ fans whoop and yell. Edge Nain can see them all with the surprising clarity that comes after an extended weaving session. This portly man dressed as a financier, always reserved and stiff-backed, indulging a secret vice perhaps; the tattooed gaggle of couriers desperate to be seen in company with the Brothers; those two girls who used to share Kel’s bed, and whom he won’t look in the eye nowadays; and others. . . . The rest of the audience is applauding, even the other groups’ supporters; heckling at dreamweavings is frowned upon. To Edge Nain the applause seems somewhat half-hearted, but he knows, he knows they were good. Really good. Perhaps that last flourish was judged clever, but affected? Yet it could be said it is the whole point of the dream; he had hoped people would pick up on that. His eyes rise to the Eldred’s balcony. They, unlike the audience, sit immobile. He had been hoping for some reaction, however slight. . . . The Brothers file back to their seats, settle back to go through the remaining six dreams. Edge Nain grasps his comrades’ hands and smiles brightly at them. Sweet Jesu has granted his prayer that they be allowed within the theatre, and the prayer that they work well together. Edge Nain prays one last time, but it is meant more as a form of thanks:
Whatever happens now, let us accept it in peace, please, Sweet Jesu
.

The six other dreams all pass in a blur, and then it is time to leave the auditorium and await the results. The dreamweavers gather in the backstage lobby; tension runs high, manifesting in some as ebullient good spirits and fellowship, in others as bitter hostility. The soloist who collapsed cannot be seen. Edge Nain asks the woman who helped him what happened.

She: “I don’t know. I got him out of the auditorium and left him sitting on that chair over there, then I went back in.”

Edge Nain: “You didn’t call for medical assistance?”

She: “What, on
my
money?”

Edge Nain is silent. He considers stepping out into the street. Waiting here is ten times more expensive than waiting out in the street—but he cannot make himself leave the confines of the lobby, and no one else can either.

Time passes. It cannot be more than ten minutes, Edge Nain thinks, and is astonished to realize they have been waiting for over an hour.

Then a door opens, and three Eldred come out. In the lead, an Eldred who looks like none Edge Nain has ever seen; she is barely ornamented, and the jewels and wires on her face are nearly as dark as her scales. The Eldred speaks a few words, but Edge Nain cannot hear them well; he is seeing that the Eldred is beckoning to them, the Brothers of Enceladus, asking them to follow her. He finds he has trouble breathing. All this time preparing for graceful failure—he had never expected to win.