Dreamer

Ben and Harenn pulled Kendi along between them on swaying walkways. Ara hadn’t answered her phone, though it seemed to Ben that he should be more worried than he was. Harenn uncharacteristically kept up a running monologue as they went.

“Most people think the Dream is a gestalt of all minds in the universe,” she said. “It makes us feel connected to other people. But now we are no longer part of the Dream. We feel lonely and afraid and we don’t care about other people except out of habit or when the feelings are exceptionally strong.”

“Not now,” Ben snapped. Harenn fell silent.

Ben continued dragging Kendi along the walkways. It would have been faster to leave him behind, but something told Ben this would be a mistake. Kendi walked like he was half-asleep and his arm was cold in Ben’s grip. The monastery had been transformed. It no longer bustled busily. People sat on balconies and stared into space. Several times he saw people hanging from branches or rails, their bodies swinging like ghosts in the fog. Four shots sizzled in the distance and a siren wailed for a long moment before dying. A Ched-Balaar lay sprawled across one of the walkways. Ben had to guide Kendi’s steps over its body. As he did so, he saw its head had been crushed.

The rest of journey was equally nightmarish. Ben didn’t dare try the gondolas or the monorail, and he avoided humans and Ched-Balaar whenever he could. If Harenn was right, if no one cared about or felt empathy for anyone else, it meant people could commit-probablyalready had committed-unspeakable crimes against each other. Harenn walked wordlessly with him, guiding Kendi by the other arm.

Eventually they reached Ara’s house. Ben hurried Kendi across the walkway connecting her porch to the main thoroughfare. It was strange. His heart was beating fast only from exertion. He wanted to know how Ara was doing, but it was as if she were someone else’s mother, perhaps Kendi’s or Harenn’s. The front door opened for Ben’s voice.

“Wait here,” he said once they were inside. He ran through the house, calling out. Ara was nowhere to be seen. Ben asked the computer if it knew where Ara was.

“Mother Adept Araceil is on the rear section of the balcony,” it said.

Feeling a bit of relief, Ben trotted out the back door. But Ara wasn’t there. Confused, he asked the computer to verify her whereabouts.

“Mother Adept Araceil is on the rear section of the balcony,” it repeated.

And then a gleam caught Ben’s eye. On the floor of the balcony lay a gold medallion and a gold ring with a blue stone. They were Ara’s.

Something inside Ben broke through the apathy. His heart beat hard in his ears and blood roared through his head. It couldn’t be what he thought. It couldn’t be.

Without stopping to explain to Harenn or Kendi, Ben ran to the staircase that wound down around the trunk to the base of the tree. It thudded and thumped beneath his shoes. The planks were slightly slick with moisture, but Ben avoided slipping with the ease of long practice. He passed the houses set beneath Ara’s without seeing them and ran all the way to the bottom. There was no trail or sidewalk down here-the staircase was primarily for use in case of fire or other emergency. Green ferns grew shin-high among beds of moss, and the impossibly thick trunk soared high above him. Ben ran several meters away from the trunk and began to circle it, trying to gauge the spot below Ara’s balcony. His shoes and trousers were quickly soaked by the wet ferns. After several minutes of searching, he found nothing. Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe he’d been His foot came down on something that rolled slightly. Ben jumped back and saw the dark place where the ferns had been crushed. Ara lay face-down among them. With a choked cry, Ben dropped beside his mother, feeling desperately at her neck for a heartbeat. Her slack skin was already chilly and pale. No pulse. Feverishly Ben rolled her over.

Her face was a mass of blood. Fern leaves and bits of dirt were stuck in it. When he touched her chest, he could feel the shattered ribs move grotesquely beneath his hand.

“No,” he whispered. “Mom, please, no.”

There was no response. Benjamin Rymar gathered his mother’s body into his arms and cried among the dripping ferns.

How long he stayed there, he didn’t know. Then he felt a touch on his shoulder. Ben looked up. Harenn was standing beside him.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“If I had come over earlier,” Ben said, hot tears running down his face, “I could have stopped her. I could have-”

“You had no reason to be here or even to call before any of this happened,” Harenn interrupted. “There was no way for anyone to do anything.”

Her words didn’t make Ben feel any better. “We can’t leave her here,” he said. “Something might-the dinosaurs will-”

“I saw a gravity sled at one of the houses on the way down,” Harenn said. “Wait here. I will bring it.”

Ben turned his attention back to Ara’s body. Water dripped from the ferns around him with tiny spattering noises. He smoothed the dark hair out of her face and wiped the blood away with his sleeve. So many times he had heard people say that it didn’t feel real when they found out someone they loved had died, but this felt achingly, bone-wrenchingly real.

Harenn arrived with the sled, a small one just the size of a stretcher. They lifted Ara’s small body onto it and Ben pulled it up the stairs. The sled remained parallel to the ground and stuck out oddly from the staircase, and Ben kept checking to make sure Ara’s body wasn’t in danger of sliding off. They brought her to the house and let the sled drift to the balcony floor at the top of the stairs. Ben fixed the sled in place while Harenn went inside to get a sheet to draw over Ara’s face. Harenn’s shout brought him hurtling into the house.

He followed her yelling to the living room. When he got there, he stared in shock. Harenn stood in the center of the room, her arms wrapped around Kendi’s waist. Kendi’s unmoving feet were half a meter off the floor. A rope made a loop around his neck. The other end was tied around one of the high ceiling beams. An endtable lay overturned to one side.

“Help me!” Harenn shouted. “Hurry! I can’t hold him up!”

Ben continued to stare. After a moment, the shock faded, replaced by his earlier crushing despondency. Nothing mattered. Ben was ultimately alone whether Kendi was alive or dead. If Kendi wanted to die, let him.

“Ben!” Harenn gasped. Kendi was slipping from her grasp.

And then more images of his mother washed over him. Her gentle hands. Her crumpled body. Her laugh. His own pain. Ben’s chest tightened with grief and tears he had yet to shed. He had lost his mother. He couldn’t bear losing Kendi, too.

“Ben!”

Ben moved. He rushed over and wrapped his own arms around Kendi, holding him up and preventing the noose from choking him. Harenn righted the endtable and climbed up beside Kendi. She produced her knife and swiftly sawed through the rope. Ben gently lowered him to the ground and, for the second time that day, felt for a pulse. Kendi’s heart was still beating, though he had stopped breathing. Training took over. Ben tilted Kendi’s head back, pinched his nostrils, and breathed into Kendi’s mouth while Harenn got on the phone. Ben was only dimly aware of her voice in the background. His entire world had shrunk to breathing for Kendi.

Come on, he thought. Don’t do this, Kendi. Come on!

“There is no answer at the medical center,” Harenn said behind him, but Ben barely heard. Twelve breaths, check pulse again. Still strong. Another breath and another.

Come on, Kendi. Breathe for me! I lost Mom. I’m not losing you, too.

Abruptly, Kendi coughed into Ben’s mouth. He drew a shuddering breath, then blinked weakly.

“Ben?” he said in a hoarse voice.

It was only then that Ben noticed he was crying again. “Kendi. God, what were you doing?”

“It hurts,” Kendi said. “All life, Ben-why didn’t you let me die?”

Because I love you, you idiot, Ben thought, but he couldn’t make himself say the words. Instead, he said, “We need to get you to the hospital.”

“I told you,” Harenn said, making Ben jump. He had forgotten she was there. “The medical center is not responding. I suspect they are overloaded or understaffed. Or both.”

“We can’t leave him like this.” Ben sat back on his haunches. “What if he tries again?”

“We need to get him away from here,” Harenn said. “We need to take him someplace where he can reach the Dream again.”

“The Post Script,” Ben said. “It’s still at port, isn’t it? Maybe if we move Kendi far enough away from Bellerophon, he’ll snap out of it.”

“Then when should go now.” Harenn helped Ben haul Kendi to his feet.

“We can’t just leave Mom laying there,” Ben said.

Harenn looked ready to protest, then saw the expression on Ben’s face. “We will take her with us and put her in a cryo-chamber on the ship,” she said.

The spaceport, however, was too far away to walk. They managed to get Kendi and the gravity sled to the monorail station where, as luck would have it, the train lay like a dead snake on the track. Ben cautiously poked his head into one of the cars. About half a dozen people and one Ched-Balaar were on board. All of them were alive, but none of them reacted to Ben.

“We’re taking this train to the spaceport,” he announced. “If you don’t want to go, get off now.”

No one reacted. Ben bundled Kendi into the empty control compartment, carefully not looking at the gravity sled and its white-draped burden as Harenn guided it into the passenger area behind him. Ben wondered what had happened to the engineer.

The controls turned out to be easy to run, but the trip itself was a nightmare. The heavy lethargy kept slowing him down, making him want to quit. Once, a series of shots rang out and one of windows shattered. This gave Ben a brief spurt of adrenaline-fueled energy, but it didn’t last.

Somehow, he got the train down to the spaceport. Ben hauled Kendi onto the platform while Harenn guided the gravity sled. They rushed through the spaceport as quickly as they could, ignoring the clumps of apathetic humans and Ched-Balaar.

Ben had to get Kendi to safety. He couldn’t let Kendi die like he had let his mother die. The words became a mantra as he picked his way through the port with Harenn and the sled behind him. He couldn’t let Kendi die. He wouldn’t let Kendi die.

Eventually they emerged near the landing field. Ben was jumping at every noise, afraid someone with no feelings left might have gotten hold of an energy pistol or rifle. It felt like gun sights were being trained on him from every shadow. Every corner held a potential lunatic. By the time he got to the Post Script, he was wringing wet with sweat.

The hatch swung obediently open at Ben’s touch and they maneuvered the sleds inside. Harenn went down to the engines while Ben got Kendi off the sled and up to the bridge. He parked Kendi in the captain’s chair while he powered up the systems. His earlier lassitude had mostly left him, swallowed up by the need to make sure Kendi was safe, that he wouldn’t end up-that he would be all right.

“Peggy-Sue,” Ben said, “are you on line?”

“On line,” the computer replied.

He got Harenn on the intercom and they went through the pre-flight checks together. Each check was a small goal, one step toward the overall one. Focusing on the little problems let him ignore the big ones.

An hour later, the checks were done and Ben tried to contact the control tower to authorize takeoff. Kendi slumped in the captain’s chair, sometimes quiet, sometimes crying softly. Ben only spared him enough attention to make sure he didn’t do anything foolish.

To Ben’s complete lack of surprise, there was no answer from the control tower despite repeated attempts to raise one. He got Harenn on the intercom again and told her to ready herself for takeoff.

The Post Script rumbled heavily into the sky. Ben didn’t bother with the sound dampeners. Although fully licensed, Ben wasn’t as experienced as Kendi, and the power drain from the dampeners made the ship harder to handle. If the noise spooked a few dinosaurs, that was too bad.

Ben worked the controls calmly and efficiently, as if he piloted a ship with his mother’s corpse in it every day. The blue sky on the screens darkened to purple and faded to black. Stars made hard points of light. He kept a sharp eye on sensors, but picked up no other ships in flight. Several circled the planet in orbit, and he kept his distance from them. The moment he had cleared Bellerophon’s gravity well, he let the ship coast while he figured out where to go. It ultimately didn’t matter to him, but he didn’t want to bring Kendi close to any other planets that had been swallowed by the thing in the Dream.

It was now no mystery to Ben why the Silent from the engulfed planets had remained missing and why none of the investigating ships had returned. With apathy, sorrow, and even sociopathic behavior overwhelming the people, they would not care about notifying anyone else. He only hoped taking Kendi out of the affected area would help. It might not. Ben’s knowledge of Dream theory was far from expert, but he did know that the Silent built their image of the Dream from the minds closest to them. A Silent who moved to another “place” in the Dream simply leapfrogged to other minds and built his or her image from them. Getting Kendi away from the minds on Bellerophon and closer to untainted ones should make him recover.

Unless Kendi’s mind kept reaching back to Bellerophon. Unless Ben’s understanding was less than perfect. Unless…

Ben put the doubts out of his head. If he turned out to be wrong, he’d try something else. He couldn’t let Kendi die like he had let his mother die.

Ben consulted the charts and decided to avoid the closest planets, since they might well be suffering under the same problem as Bellerophon. Instead he chose a planet toward the center of the Independence Confederation. If something went wrong, it’d be easier to shout for help.

No, that wasn’t true. The only way to shout for help was by radio or by Silent. If the planet he went to had been engulfed, Silent communication would be worthless, and radio would be too slow to do him any good. Still, there was nothing else to do. He programmed the coordinates for Nikita, the world he had chosen, and hit the panel that shoved the ship into slipspace. The view flashed psychedelically, and Ben blanked the screens.

“Where are we going?” Harenn asked over the intercom. “We’ve entered slip but I know nothing else.”

Ben told her. “We should be there in a few hours. I’ll stay at the controls.”

“The engines are doing fine,” Harenn said. “I will wash Mother Ara’s body and place it in a cryo-chamber.”

It. His mother had already become an object instead of a person. Ben swallowed, then bent over the boards. Traveling through slipspace required constant course corrections, and Ben wasn’t experienced enough yet to make them by reflex. He had to concentrate on each one, and he welcomed the challenge. His entire world shrank to the instruments in front of him. One correction, and another, and another. The hours passed. They would leave slipspace in three…two…one…now!

The communication system leaped to life. Voices wavered in and out of hearing as the computer automatically searched for the control frequency. It found it, and the bridge echoed with instructions to other ships about entering and leaving orbit. Nikita’s airwaves were bustling with life, and Ben sighed with relief.

A hand landed on Ben’s shoulder. He jumped and twisted in his chair. Kendi was behind him. His brown eyes were luminous, his strong face torn with emotion.

“Thanks,” he said quietly.

“Mom’s dead,” Ben blurted, then turned back to the boards, embarrassed without knowing why.

“I know,” Kendi said. “I remember everything.” He put his arms around Ben from behind. Ben leaned back for a moment. He could feel Kendi again.

They stayed like that until the proximity alarm piped up to warn Ben that they were drifting too close to another ship-a warship. Kendi released him, and Ben felt empty, though not nearly as empty as he had felt back on Bellerophon.

“Want me to take over for a while?” Kendi offered. “I’ll get us into orbit and we can figure out what to do next.”

Ben nodded and got up. He took his usual place at communication while Kendi ran his hands over the flight board. Ben radioed for authorization to establish orbit around Nikita and discovered that most of the planetary orbits were taken up by warships. Ben could take a spot around the second moon, and he could only have it for two days. Then he would have to reapply and he might be denied if the military needed the spot. Kendi nudged the Script into place.

“Now what do we do?” Ben asked.

“I want to see her,” Kendi said.

The secondary bay was a gray, echoing chamber some twenty meters on a side. Stacked six high near the entrance were a dozen black boxes the size of coffins. Each bore a window, computer screen, and keypad. The cryo-units on the Post Script were meant for use in an emergency, in case all life support failed and/or there weren’t enough suits to go around. A cryo-unit automatically scanned its occupant and inserted IV needles that injected a sedative followed by a series of steroidal compounds that allowed the user to survive and be revived from temperatures colder than liquid nitrogen.

Only one unit had been activated. All the lights were red, indicating the unit’s occupant had died. Harenn stood nearby. She turned as Ben and Kendi entered. Her eyes were red and puffy above her veil.

“I have said good-bye,” she told them. “I will leave you alone with her.”

Harenn withdrew. Kendi walked up to the unit, and Ben noticed they were holding hands. He didn’t remember if he had taken Kendi’s or if Kendi had taken his. Ara’s cryo-unit was waist high, and Kendi had to bend slightly to peer through the window. Ara, her face pale and still, was visible inside. New grief sprouted like a sodden blossom in Ben’s chest, and anger, too. How could she commit suicide like that and leave him to find her broken body? He knew that it hadn’t been her fault, but the knowledge didn’t make him feel any better.

“The Real People are supposed to see death as a joyful transition,” Kendi said beside him. “I can’t do it. She was like a mother to me and I was a total jerk to her and I don’t know what I’m going to do without her.”

The grief filled Ben and overflowed like a waterfall. He let go of Kendi’s hand so he could put his arm around Kendi’s shoulder. Kendi hugged him back as they both started soundlessly to cry. After a time, they stopped and just stood in front of Ara’s body before turning away. Their feet took them out of the cargo bay and toward the galley.

“What happens now?” Ben asked as they walked. “We can’t go back to Bellerophon.”

“I don’t know,” Kendi admitted. “And eventually we’ll run out of places to run to if that thing in the Dream keeps growing. I don’t want to go through that again, Ben. It was horrible. I can completely understand why Ara…why she did what she did. I wanted to die, too.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Ben said.

Kendi squeezed Ben’s shoulder. “Thanks again.”

“You need to thank Harenn, too,” Ben replied as they reached the galley.

“Thank me for what?” Harenn said. She was sitting at the table with a steaming mug of fragrant coffee before her.

“Catching Kendi before he finished the job,” Ben said.

“Thank you,” Kendi told her gravely.

“You are welcome,” Harenn replied, equally grave. She gestured at the tiny kitchen. “There is hot water if either of you want coffee or tea.”

Kendi shook his head. “Right now,” he said, “I need the Dream.”