Shuteye for the Timebroker (29 page)

“No, not a-som. Something better. Why not come with me and see for yourself?”

What did Cedric have to lose? He let Doug lead the way.

The authorities had marked the small waterfront building for eventual demolition, as they continually enhanced the system of dikes protecting the city’s shoreline from rising sea levels. For now, though, the structure was still high and dry. Doug pried back a suspiciously hinged panel of plywood covering a door frame and conducted Cedric inside.

The place smelled like chocolate. Perhaps the Ghirardelli company had once stored product here. But now the large, open, twilit room was full of sleepers. Arrayed on obsolete military cots, two dozen men and women, covered by blankets, snored peacefully while wired cranially to a central machine the size of a dorm fridge.

“What—what the hell is this? What’s going on?”

“This is a little project I and my friends like to call ‘Manhole 69.’ Ring any bells? No? Ah, a shame, the lack of classical education you youngsters receive. Well, no matter. The apparatus you see is an REM-sleep modulator. Invented shortly before the introduction of a-som tech, and then abandoned. Ironically unusable by the very people who needed it the most. Basically, this device provides guided dream experiences within broad parameters. The individual’s creativity is shaped into desired forms. Nonsurgical neuronal magnetic induction, and all that. Everyone you see here, Cedric, is dreaming of a better world. Here, take a look.”

Doug borrowed Cedric’s Palimpsest and called up a control channel to the dream machine. A host of windows filled the flatscreen. Cedric witnessed pastoral landscapes populated by shining godlings, super-science metropolises, alien worlds receiving human visitors, and other fanciful scenes.

“Are you totally demented, man? So you can give people pretty dreams. So what? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take a few hours under your brain probe, just to get some relief. But as far as helping the world become a better place, you’re only kidding yourself.”

“Oh, really? Would you care to discuss this over some coffee?”

“Coffee? What’re you talking about?”

Doug didn’t answer. He was too busy sending instructions to the dream machine. All the flatscreen windows formerly revealing the variegated dreams of the sleepers changed at once to the same realtime image: the interior of the very building Cedric and Doug stood in, captured by Palimpsest cam. But the screen views were different from reality in one particular: a steaming paper cup stood atop the dream machine cabinet.

“This should only take a second or two.”

“What should take—”

Cedric smelled the coffee before he saw it. There it rested, just where the dreamers had envisioned it.

Cedric walked in a daze to the cabinet, picked the coffee up. The cup and its contents warmed his fingers.

Doug’s manner took on the serious affect of an expert in his field with something to sell.

“Two dozen people programmed to dream the same thing can instantiate objects massing up to ten ounces. I expect that the phenomenon scales up predictably. Something to do with altering probabilities and shifting our quantum selves onto alternate timelines, rather than producing matter ex nihilo. Or so certain sleeper scientists among us theorize. But we’re not interested in such parlor tricks. Instead, we want to shallowly engrave a variety of desirable futures into our local brane, thereby increasing the likelihood that one of them will become real. We’re shifting the rails that society is following. And as Thoreau once ironically observed, rails rest on sleepers. There are places like this around the globe, Cedric. And the more sleepers we enlist, the greater our chances of success. Are you on board, son?”

Cedric regarded Doug dubiously. Had the manifestation of the coffee been a trick? Maybe that cabinet was hollow, with a false top, the coffee concealed inside. Should he ask for another demonstration, or take the old man on faith? Why would anyone bother to try to hoax him into simply going to sleep? And what else was he going to do with his life?

“Here,” said Cedric, offering the coffee to Doug. “You take this. I guess I’m finally ready for a little shut-eye.”

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the ancestors of the SF genre who is more honored in lip service than on the printed page these days. Although he practically invented the modern short story, Poe’s crepuscular and eccentric and somewhat fusty work does not seem to attract the worshippers it once did, when, say, Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch deliberately invoked him. Even postmodern horror writers—horror being what Poe is generally remembered for—seem to have put him on a dusty shelf.

So I was very intrigued when I learned of a book project that involved taking one of Poe’s fragmentary story beginnings and playing with it in any manner the author chose. I signed up right away, determined to channel Poe into a kind of SF/cosmic horror vein. The words flowed surprisingly easily, and I like to think that the ghost of Poe—who often visited my hometown, Providence—sat like a bodiless raven on my shoulder as I wrote.

The Days of Other Light

[based on a fragment by Edgar Allan Poe]

Ingeniero watched the transphotonic packet
Oriole
depart the surface of Skyfire. Lifting off lightly from the airless tinted desert of the planetoid, the sleek interstellar ship swiftly became lost against the hectic, coruscating, panchromatic backdrop of radiance that formed the famous celestial vista that had inspired this worldlet’s name.

Now he was alone, and there was no telling what might happen to a man all alone as he was. Yet his spirits revived at the mere thought of being—for once in his life at least—so thoroughly
alone
.

The
Oriole
would not return for six months, per Ingeniero’s request. Until then, Ingeniero was trapped here of his own free will, the sole inhabitant of a small world. By the time his means of departure returned, his transport back to the galactic polity known as the Diffusion, he would either have solved the quandary that had brought him here, attaining renewed supremacy in his craft, or have been rendered a bestial, brain-damaged cripple.

Break through or break down. Such was the harsh point to which Ingeniero had been driven, midway through his life and career.

Turning to his left, Ingeniero regarded his lone companion, a slave half-organic, half-inorganic. The artificial being was a bulky shapeless mass of mind putty resembling a fantastically enlarged amoeba that towered some six feet tall. A lump of blue-tinged, translucent pseudo-protoplasm, threaded with golden moletronic circuits and muscle fibers and synthetic organelles, the slave possessed a moderate intelligence but lacked all initiative or personality. It responded to commands only from Ingeniero, who addressed it as “Iamo.”

Floating beside Iamo was a fifth-force hover-sled stacked with the few provisions and personal possessions necessary for Ingeniero s stay. Some entertainment planchettes, a few changes of clothing, and half a years worth of metabolytic lozenges. A sparse inventory. But Ingeniero had not come to Skyfire for a luxurious vacation. Had that been his goal, he would have stayed on Myrthwold or Fleury, planets that catered to Ingeniero’s rich and famous peers and patrons. In his current mental condition, such resorts were anathema to Ingeniero—ash-filled, hollow places where his cursed fate was continually thrown before his eyes by outwardly sympathetic but inwardly mocking aesthetes.

Ingeniero was himself sheathed in the thinnest film of mind putty, so that he resembled a more shapely version of his slave. The quasi-living substance formed the perfect environmental suit, providing for all of its wearer’s bodily needs and offering absolute protection against the vacuum and cold and fluctuating radiation of Skyfire. A moletronic mechanism embedded in Ingeniero’s cortex offered subetheric contact between Ingeniero and his factotum.

“Iamo, accompany me now and bring the sled.”

His steps flighty in the low gravity, Ingeniero started walking toward the only structure on Skyfire.

The Tower of the Lens.

His home for the next six months.

Chamber of ecstatic regeneration.

Or of excruciating torture.

Or of both, alloyed.

The Tower of the Lens was not architecturally impressive. Yet it was a structure that somehow, on first impression, seemed safe enough under any circumstances, one in which Ingeniero could feel secure.

Some four stories tall, unornamented, square in cross section and measuring approximately twenty feet along each wall, the tower seemed rudely built of native materials: primitive, rough-hewn blocks of gray stone. Yet the structure was both airtight and resistant to every form of energy ever focused on it. Geophysical survey probes had determined that its inaccessible roots extended half a mile into the crust of Skyfire. Every attempt to move the tower to a more hospitable world for study or utilization had failed. Even efforts to shift the entire planetoid had been thwarted by, experts postulated, some kind of hidden frame-drag generators that allowed the worldlet to anchor itself immovably into the very fabric of space-time.

The artifact of an untraceable race long vanished, the tower, since its discovery some three hundred years ago, had been nominated a neutral territory under pan-Diffusion supervision. Access to the tower was approved only for the most deserving, and the waiting list was months long. Ingeniero had suffered for five harsh months before getting the go-ahead for this last desperate attempt to recoup his powers.

Ingeniero and his slave reached the entrance to the Tower of the Lens and paused. The door was the one anomalous part of the facade. When it was first discovered, the tower had featured as ingress only an arch exposing its interior to the vacuum. Into this space had been retrofitted a conventional airlock. Now Ingeniero beamed the proper access code to the door, and soon he and Iamo and the sled had cycled through.

The interior of the tower, Ingeniero knew, was divided vertically into four levels. Each level was a single large room. This first floor boasted various amenities, all of human origin and designed to ameliorate the hard lines of the original structure, empty at its discovery. Organiform couches, a food-prep station, viewing carrels, even artworks on the wall. Ingeniero quickly recognized original paintings by Pristina, Kompot, and Novalis—not their best works, either. Ingeniero snorted. Leave it to some Diffusion bureaucrat to be hornswoggled by a canny art dealer eager to unload second-rate works.

His suit informed Ingeniero that the atmosphere and temperature inside the tower were compatible with life, so the man moved to shed his protective covering. He touched a forefinger to his slave and said, “Iamo, absorb my suit.” The sheath of mind putty flowed off Ingeniero like mercury and was taken back up undetectably into the bulk of Iamo. Ingeniero stood revealed in lime-and-plum-striped tights, moleskin slippers, and a gold-filigreed weskit over a peach blouson. His long, saturnine face bore various corporate beauty marks identifying his patrons and sponsors. Over the past five years of inactivity, Ingeniero had fought hard to retain these status stipplings. But without a resumption of his artistic productivity, he acknowledged, he stood in danger of losing them all.

“Iamo, distribute the supplies to their proper places.”

Ingeniero was startled to discover that some peculiarity in the echo of these walls made his voice resonate in a curious manner. He resolved not to speak any more than was absolutely necessary to his slave.

But evidencing no trouble with the audio distortions, the slave responded to the spoken command as promptly as it had to the beamed orders. Forming various useful temporary extrusions, it went about its chores.

While Iamo worked, Ingeniero moved to explore the rest of the tower. Now, he thought, for a good look around to see what I can see.

The
Oriole
had not been a swift luxury ship but a spartan commercial vessel, and Ingeniero was worn out from the long tedious flight here from the world of Drylongso. But his excitement was such that he could not rest.

An ornate impervium spiral staircase in one corner of the tower afforded access to the upper floors through eccentrically trapezoidal holes originally found in each ceiling. Eagerly climbing, Ingeniero bypassed the second floor (studio space) and the third (sleeping quarters), hastening for what he knew awaited him.

The Chamber of the Lens.

The top floor hosted only a large, low, circular dais positioned directly in the center of the room. Formed of the same substance as the tower, the dais had lately been equipped with a comfortable pad to cushion anyone who lay upon it. But more alarmingly, the altarlike platform also featured restraints for wrists and ankles.

Ingeniero cast his gaze upward, toward the lens itself. But the much-anticipated spectacle was initially disappointing.

Inset into the roof directly above the dais was a huge oval slab of crystal whose lower surface was subtly convex. Coating the outer, vacuum-exposed side of the lens was a film of opaque material installed by the humans, a covering that could be dispersed with a simple command. Currently, with this shield in place, the lens was rendered inert—a dark, bland mass.

Hardly the appearance that the unnatural glassy eye would present, Ingeniero knew, when it was exposed to the massed brilliance of Skyfire’s heavens—at that exact moment when he would crucify himself beneath it.