Authors: Kim Newman
Trefusis ignored her protest. ‘Our prisoners are confined in mind as well as body. Containment is the essence of the penal system. They do not have access to Dreams. But this isn’t Devil’s Island. We do have an extensive vid library. Tridvid, mostly, but we stock much other material. Soon after his arrival, Truro Daine developed a pash for flatties. Specifically, he made an exhaustive study of the North American cinema of the 1940s and ’50s. Are you familiar with the period?’
‘I did a term paper on
film noir
at Eton.’
‘Excellent. I’m not stimmed by twentieth-century arts myself. I have it tagged as an enormously banal period. Our great-grandparents must have been such nasty little people. Truro Daine requested an increasing number of vid tapes. I have a printout.’
Trefusis handed her a curl of silver foil. Red letters stood out. Susan skimmed the list of titles.
‘The File on Thelma Jordon
… I’ve seen that. Barbara Stanwyck is in it.
Dark Passage
… that’s a seminal pre-Dream, lots of subjectivity.
Between Midnight and Dawn
… that I don’t know.
I Wake Up Screaming
,
In a Lonely Place, Cry of the City, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands
,
The Big Combo, While the City Sleeps.
All good stuff.
In a Lonely Place
is rare. I didn’t think even BritLib had a vid. I wouldn’t mind cloning it some time. It’s out of copyright, so I wouldn’t be trespassing against the reproduction laws.’
The governor took the strip back and cracked it in the air. The red dispersed. ‘It seemed a harmless pastime. And it kept him quiet. We’d been expecting more trouble.’
At another slab touch, the door slid open and an andrew warder came in. It wasn’t armoured, but its transparent right hand was set to deliver a disorientation zap. It had a pretty girl’s face. ‘We’d better get down to Daine’s field,’ explained Trefusis. ‘Dr Groome is waiting for us.’
In the corridor, Susan noticed convicts in fleshtex skinsuits performing menial chores. They were, as far as she could tell, unsupervised. Trefusis had an unnerving habit of referring to each prisoner as they were passed, identifying them with their trespasses, snapping ‘cat burglar’, ‘credit creeper’ or ‘information embezzler’, like a tour guide pointing out items of interest. The convicts themselves took this habit as a salute, and returned it with a noncommittal ‘Morning, sir’. For the most part, the prison seemed unfurnished. In cells without doors, Susan saw GP couches built into floors, covered foodholes, excrement apertures and little else. There were no views on the walls, no personal possessions, nothing with any character whatsoever.
It wasn’t at all like the dank and dripping dungeon she had had Vanessa Vail escape from with only a facestick and a sitar plectrum. That had been her idea of the Worst Place on Earth, this was more like a very large DHSS waiting room. The only way she could tell the andrews from the prisoners was that the mechanicals were smiling. On a lower level, a short, fat convict – ‘pain peddler’ Trefusis called him – was abrading a graffito from the wall. ‘Hang Truro Daine’, with a stickman on a scaffold. ‘Here we are,’ said the governor.
Dr Helena Groome turned out to be a small woman with grey scalplocks, green lips and a floorlength white coat. She sucked slickorishe capsules, perfunctorily offering a squirter around but taking it back before anyone could accept or refuse a jet. Susan noticed Dr Groome had included the andrew in her indian offer. The doctor and Trefusis each palmed a wallslab and recited a meaningless but suggestive phrase into a vivicorder outlet – Dr Groome’s was ‘Home is the Hangman’, the governor’s ‘Pease Porridge Hot’. After some silent processing, an aperture appeared. Susan was shown through, and the andrew remained behind. ‘Welcome to Maximum, Ms Bishopric,’ said Dr Groome. ‘It’s a homey but it’s hell.’
The room was like a large hospital dormitory, with a double row of sarcophagus tanks. Only two were humming. The views above them flashed figures and readings Susan couldn’t follow. Printstrips piled on the floor by the tanks, waiting for the final check. Juliet stood by the tanks, vigilant. With her helm off, Susan could see her long, brown-toned hair. The marshal smiled and waved a greeting with her left hand. Seconds later, Susan realised why Juliet’s gesture appeared awkward: she was keeping her right hand free for the touch taser. Dr Groome fished a remote control pointer out of a pocket, and adjusted the master view. Daine’s face appeared again, a candid clip this time. The trespasser was deepsleep, his chin stubbled, REMming regularly. He had a laurel-shaped device twisted around his temples.
‘Recognise it?’
‘Of course, doctor. It’s a dreaming cradle.’
Dr Groome moved the image in on the view, revolving to get a profile. ‘Yes. Home-made, too. Some of the components must have been smuggled in. A young political was remaindered in the jail several months ago. Someone, not Daine, opened him up with their bare hands. We think the fixings for the dreamset were in his bowel somewhere. We’ve sampled the material. It’s some new synthetic, unremarkable but for one quality. It’s X-ray invisible…’
‘Another Truro Daine product,’ chipped in Trefusis.
‘Of course. Note these attachments here, Ms Bishopric. Behind the ear, through the cheek, and into the eye. It takes something quite considerable to insert a monofilament into one’s optic nerves by hand, don’t you think?’
‘It’s not a concept I’ve given much thought, doctor.’
Susan looked away from the view, and walked over to the active tanks. The face plates were opaque.
‘He’s in here, isn’t he?’
‘That’s right,’ said the governor. ‘Dreaming.’
‘Everyone’s a dreamer.’
‘No, Ms Bishopric. Daine’s Dreaming. Capital D Dreaming. Dreaming creatively. Like you.’
Susan looked at the view again, took in the smile. ‘I didn’t know he had the Talent.’
Trefusis stood by the left-hand tank, intent on the man inside. ‘Oh yes, one of his many Talents. He started young, you know. After he collected his parents’ insurance, he went into juvie porn. He was a star Dreamer on the black economy for several years. Up there with Elvis Kurtz and the Masked Mongoose. I believe his
magnum opus
was called
Anal Explosions of the Young Debutantes.
‘I must have missed that one.’
‘All copies were purportedly wiped by the Jesuits during the Second Moral Crusade, but the Vatican’s file copies have skulked onto the market. The King couldn’t afford the asking price, I believe, but several muse consortiums put in acceptable bids. Under several pseudonyms, he produced docuDreams during his career. Do you want to know what it feels like to be a mass murderer, Ms Bishopric? Care to sample patricide, fratricide, matricide, uxoricide, regicide, filicide, philicide, canicide, Alcide, genocide?’
‘Governor Trefusis, there’s nothing I haven’t done in Dreams.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’
‘Yggdrasil is merciful,’ cut in Dr Groome, ‘but it errored with Daine.’
‘So he’s Dreaming…’
‘More than that. We let him have the flatties he wanted. He used them in an unprecedented fashion, Ms Bishopric. He’s lodged himself into an Yggdrasil file and is Dreaming up his own private universe, furnished with the externals of those old vids. We’ve lost track of it. It expands as we tap in. Physically, he is still here, kept alive by the tank. But inside his head he’s free.’
‘More than free,’ said the governor. ‘He’s God.’
‘So, pull the plug.’
‘Strange as it may seem, we thought of that. Daine has done a good job of melshing with Yggdrasil. And with our fail-safe power plant. His body is in a coma. That dreaming cradle is bio-attached. It’s growing through his brain, through his body. It would take a team of andrew surgeons years to bum the filaments out, and we’d have to kill him in the process. If we just cut the power input and pull his master tape, his mind would be wiped like a printstrip. As you know, that’s legally murder.’
‘If jailbreaking is suicide, then surely he’s legally killed himself anyway.’
‘A good point, Ms Bishopric. Personally, I’d like to argue it after the fact with Truro Daine’s expensive battery of lawyers. However, the
corpus
is still in my care. The Gunmint has been up all night talking this out, and I’m their servant. They want him back.’
Susan could see it coming from a long way off, getting bigger on the horizon. There wasn’t any escape for her either.
Dr Groome palmed the tankslab and played with some readings. ‘We can’t drag him out of his Dream, Ms Bishopric, but we can introduce you into it. That would change the whole frame of reference.’
Juliet looked her in the eyes. ‘You kill him, Susan. If he dies in the Dream, the Dream dies with him.’
‘The marshal is right,’ said the doctor. ‘Daine is playing in his own mental backyard. That’s relatively small right now, but it’s growing in the Yggdrasil file like a virus. Subjectively, it’s city-sized at the moment. In a week, he may have made himself a continent. Then a world, then a universe, whatever. We could hook up an army and send them in, and they’d never find him. It has to be now.’
‘And it has to be you,’ said Trefusis. ‘Once you’re inside you should be at least as powerful as he is. You’re a Dreamer. You have more experience than him. We think you can shape his Dream, pull it apart around him.’
‘That would be another experience for your list, Governor. Even Daine doesn’t know what it’s like to be a deicide.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
‘To kill God. That sounds dangerous.’
Dr Groome gave a list a check. ‘There are risks. We don’t want to conceal them. You are free to refuse.’
‘Because this is a free society, right? The Gunmint just has my best interests at heart?’
Dr Groome looked down at her list. Juliet turned her head and adjusted her hair. Governor Trefusis outstared her. ‘In a free society, every citizen is obliged to protect their freedom. The Gunmint can be persuasive.’
Susan turned away from the officials, looking for an ex. There wasn’t one, but she would have felt bad if she hadn’t at least looked. She flash-forwarded a newsclip. There was Orin Tredway in a purple tuxedo, holding up a Rodney statuette and mouthing sincerities. ‘Susie can’t be with us tonight as you all know, but as her personal friend I’m honoured to accept this for her…’ Susan shivered, unable to tell, as usual, the difference between fantasy and premonition.
‘One more question,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘Who’s in the other tank?’
I
n Chinatown, the streets were narrower, cluttered with produce stalls – open even this late – and mysterious tents. I had an idea I could hide out there for a while, maybe rest up, maybe make a connection who could get me out of the City. The cops would be watching the bus station and the railroad terminal, but maybe I could bribe my way aboard a tramp steamer for Macao or Shanghai. I knew that I had money. Some of the Genie of the Bank had attached to my clothing.
In an alley beside the Keye Luke Cabana, under a string of apparently waterproof paper lanterns, I peeled the bills off my trench coat and pants. I had forty or fifty thousand in hundreds. The bills weren’t sequentially numbered or marked in any of the large variety of ways I could imagine. I wadded one into my shoulder holster as an ace in the hole, packing it down with the gun. Then I made a fist-sized roll of the rest and shoved it into my deepest pocket. You were never entirely safe from prying fingers in Chinatown, but I had to give it my best shot. A wolfpack of ragged children swarmed through the streets, snatching at whatever was insufficiently guarded. The merchants occasionally killed one, but that didn’t seem discouragement enough; there were always new recruits.
‘Tell you fortune, Mist’ Americano, tell you fortune.’
A decrepit old man, supported by a young boy in a huge coolie hat, was tapping his way down the alley, patterned robes trailing in the rainwater. His face and hands were white and very wrinkled, but any signs of extreme age stopped just below his jawline and just above his wrists. He had huge empty eye sockets wadded with cotton, a scraggly Fu Manchu moustache and a long grey pigtail. A sign hung around his neck, covered with a scrawl of ideographs and a single attempted English word, BLIDN. I had the idea he was a European in disguise. His withered claw reached out and attached itself to my lapel.
‘Tell you fortune,’ he jabbered. ‘Fortune velly good. China girl in bathhouse wait you. She miss you velly much a long time. Much money in stars belonging you. Much good is fortune. Much.’
I shoved a hundred into his hand to get rid of him. He held the bill to his ear and slid it between his fingers. In his grin, several teeth were blacked. He shook with excitement. I realised my mistake; he’d remember such generosity, and his boy would be able to describe me. Hell, under all that gook on his eyelids, he was probably no blinder than a hawk. That made two unwanted witnesses to point the finger at me.
‘Much thanking, Mist’ Americano, much thanking.’ He whispered a long coil of Chinese phrases to his boy helper, and the child looked up at me, almond eyes shining in a brim-shadowed face. The hat nodded up and down in gratitude.
A rattling commotion alerted me to the patrol well before it reached the alley. I shrank back while the fortune teller tottered towards the main street. Merchants folded their stalls and made a run for it, their goods wrapped in voluminous sleeves. A grey guava rolled to my feet. I picked it up and bit deeply. It tasted dry, like pasteboard, but it was food and I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten. With what I hoped was an air of raffish nonchalance, I sauntered to the mouth of the alley, munching on the increasingly inedible fruit.
A battered Model T Ford, mounted with a shining machine gun, flying an unrecognisable flag, was lumbering down the street, pushing people and stalls before it. A Chinese officer in a uniform more than adequately equipped with polished belts, straps and full holsters stood up in the front passenger seat of the car like George Washington crossing the Delaware, shouting dictatorially. A tethered goat went down under one iron-rimmed wheel, and the vehicle jolted as the animal was crushed. The officer steadied himself by grasping the windshield, but didn’t miss a beat in his spiel. Three glum soldiers sat in the back of the car, greedily eyeing the machine gun, while a very fat civilian in a dragon-decorated garment did the driving. The car finally ground to a halt against the remains of a silk stall, a knot of scarves caught around one axle.