Gordon R Dickson - Sleepwalkers' World (3 page)

It seemed to him that he was in something like a series of very dimly lit rooms or caverns so far underground that he would die of old age before he could ever reach the surface, even if he could find his way out. The rooms were full of discarded, destroyed, and broken things and with an oppressive atmosphere that transmitted the emotional, rather than the physical, feeling of his being at the center of all possible pressures.

It was as if he were buried at the center of a universe. A different universe, he thought—but all the things around him rustled and whispered and hurried to assure him that this was the universe he had always known, but now being seen in its true appearance, stripped of all its decorations and paddings of illusory superstitions down to a stark hopelessness of truth.

The broken and discarded things came clustering around him, whispering at him to give up and agree, and he reached out for some sort of club or stick to beat them off. But everything he picked up broke or crumbled in his hand and was useless. Finally he ran, and for a little while he outdistanced them.

But he was conscious of the continuing pressure of something inimical—whatever it was that had been behind the things when they had tried to make him give up. He felt it somewhere nearby, and he found himself searching through the underground rooms for it. So he came after a while into a series of rooms where people were drinking, talking, and dancing, as if at a party; but all their talk was in whispers together, and stopped when he came up. Something within him told him that it would be useless to ask them questions—for he heard them sniggering behind his back once he had gone by, as if they knew what he searched for but were sure he could never find it.

Then, gradually, he became aware that they were all hollow, these people. Men and women alike, they had been scooped out from behind so that merely the front three-quarters of their skin and hair and clothes were left—just enough so that viewed from straight on they appeared to be in the round.

Gradually as he moved among them—and in spite of the fact that they were mostly very clever at keeping their faces and fronts toward him—he began to catch glimpses of the emptiness behind what was left, like the emptiness of a rock lobster tail once the meat had been taken out of it. Their whispering, heard all together like the sound of dry waves on a desiccated beach in utter darkness, was trying to tell him to give up, to abandon hope, just as had the broken things in the rooms he had passed through earlier.

Still, even as he ran from the corrosive chorus of their whispering, the illogical conviction formed in him that somewhere, even here, there was a firm weapon that would not crumble when he tried to use it—if he could only find it. And with one firm weapon he could prove them all wrong and defeat their universe. He had escaped from the hollow people now. He was in a series of barely lit caverns—true caverns rather than rooms now—through which he had to grope his way, but which held neither things nor the facades of people nor anything else but rock floor and empty stone walls arching to some high point overhead.

Then he found his enemy, the inimical creature behind the broken things and the hollow people, all alone by himself, or herself or itself, in one huge cavern. It crouched against one wall, for all its size—and it was many times bigger than he was—guarding a throne it had sat on once but had long since outgrown, like a mouse guarding a crumb.

He did not see it clearly, for though the cavern was lighted, the lights were so dim and far overhead and the shadows were so thick and black by the wall where it crouched that seeing was barely possible. But without seeing it clearly he understood it suddenly. Once it had been as human as himself, but now it had gradually increased to a gargantuan, abnormal size, like the swollen body of an old queen wasp among the smaller figures of the normal hive denizens.

Only in this case the growth had come about by the addition of body on top of over-body, shell upon shell, each one a rustling envelope of a dead year lived and lost to no purpose. Self-trapped at the core was what had once been a human being, but it was lost now and buried, not only in the dry and rustling years and years of its overbodies, but in its own belief that it was as monstrous as those overbodies made it. And in that belief it had constructed this universe where everything pressed inward to the center and that center was filled with broken things and hollow people.

He saw then that he should kill it—not only in his own self-defense, but in pity to release it from that existence which it had deluded itself was not a torment but a dark joy. He looked around and found nothing but a large and jagged stone; when he picked up the stone, it crumbled to dust in his hands.

“You see?â€

 

The next thing Rafe knew, he was seated in an aircraft capable of holding perhaps twelve passengers, and with that awareness began a peculiar period in which he was not completely in control of himself.

The aircraft was flying at a great height. The three times Rafe summoned up the energy to look out the window beside his seat, he saw first an endless expanse of water, then a landscape of ice and snow, and finally barren-looking plains, rising to a range of mountains dead ahead.

He found he could not work up any immediate concern or alarm about his situation. It was not as if he had been drugged. It was rather as if he were mentally isolated in a warm cocoon of indifference. As long as he made no effort to move or think, he sat quite comfortably in something like a pleasantly absent-minded state. But even the desire to move his head and look out the window seemed to require a massive effort.

He made that effort again, to look across the aisle of the aircraft at the seat opposite him. Gaby sat in it, gazing straight ahead with a placid expression. Lucas was nowhere to be seen.

Rafe turned his head to look forward again himself—the return movement was easy, effortless—and withdrew back into his cocoon. With his gaze front, he could see his hands lying open on his knees. He was not tied or secured in any way except for this compulsion which made doing and thinking nothing infinitely easier than movement and thought.

He sat, nonthinking.

After a little while he became vaguely conscious of a faintly nagging sensation in the back of his mind—the same sort of nagging sensation that afflicts someone who has just left home and is vaguely troubled by the thought of something forgotten or not done.

The feeling continued. It was like a small animal gnawing away at him below the platform level of the indifference that held him. Gradually, without realizing exactly how he had come to realize it, he woke to the fact that the small, gnawing uneasiness was a part of his mind which was somehow below, behind, or out of reach of whatever held the rest of him in a cocoon of indifference; and it was struggling against the effect of that indifference on the rest of his mind.

He watched the activity of this small uneasiness for some while, as the aircraft bored silently through the upper atmosphere. As he continued to watch, its image sharpened. It was, he saw, that instinctive part of him which had never been able to admit that others could do something he could not. That element of him which was not capable of accepting defeat.

It could not accept now the fact that he was being held physically and mentally inactive against his will. It insisted on trying to struggle. As his own feeling of it became clearer, there gradually seeped into his upper mind the concept that possibly he could carry on his thinking on his lower level where the nagging lived, without interference from what was holding him captive.

He tried it.

It was a strange way to think, he found. It required pure thought—thought without the color of emotion, without the concrete imagery of words or symbols.

His own will and intent, considered this way, were a bundle of forces; against them, at the moment, another force was being applied to immobilize him. This other force was turning his own strength back upon himself. He recognized the outside force then, by an intuitive, spark-gaplike mental jump, as a broadcast similar to the power broadcasts that ei> forced slumber on the world during its dark hours. Only this was a broadcast that was more selective, inhibiting thought and movement without putting him to sleep.

However—intuition sparked again in him below the level of conscious thought—if he could resist the ordinary power broadcasts, then this transmission also ought to be something he could resist—if he could only identify the pattern of its attack and work around it.

Below the level of conscious thought, his mind began to wake and move about, feeling its strength on this lower level like a sleeping giant roused after a lifetime of slumber.

Everything that could be done on a conscious level could be done here as well, he saw—but in different terms. It was as if the language of his thought had been forced to change from algebra to calculus. The two languages were apparently completely dissimilar, but they were joined together in the root that was himself.

In fact, maybe he could do more with the calculus of thought than he had formerly been able to do with the algebra of it. He explored, feeling about like a blind man, with this lower level of his mind, and felt Gaby’s mind, close by, but unaware of his.

He felt out for Lucas—and came up hard against the live and burning identity that was the wolf. Lucas, it seemed, thought more on this level than on the conscious, human level which was alien to him.

Lucas was not with them on the aircraft.

“Why not?â€