Case and the Dreamer (36 page)

“Ah,” said Trudi, unable to think of anything else. Then: “You were going to tell me how he invented the Receiver.”

“Yeh. Yeh. He came back from Arca, I was down at the cycle pool when he came in, he said we could have instant transmission, faster than light, he said it could be done. But not that way, he said, never that way. I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

“Wait a bit. What or where is Arca?”

“Oh, it’s long gone. Settlement or something, Medean natives, intelligent species, long gone too, far as I know. Or maybe went underground. That’s Medea for you, full of ecological pockets, mutatitive radiation, fast evolution; species come, species go. They say there is a whole race of intelligent balloons over on Castorview. An old theory, but now it’s ‘sposed to be proved. They—”

“Please—about Dom Felix.”

“Yeh. Yeh. After he came back the natives abandoned Arca. Must’ve, no bodies around. They must’ve pulled the plug on their wing-house plant, so Arca just naturally blew away. The wing-houses were—”

“Did Dom Felix—”

“I’m coming to that,” said the old man testily. “The Big Chief was ready to give Dom Felix anything he wanted including his own job. Dom Felix, he brought the Acceptance idea and before you know it, an enclave ready to massacre itself turned into one big happy family. You see, Dom Felix—”

“I know about that part, Altair. Tell me about the Receiver.”

“Receiver, yeh. There was this technician genius, Kert Row was his name, and Wallich, a Mule, a theoretical synthesist, best I ever saw. She was also, well, I had a real big thing for her for a while, well, she had a lot to do with me Double Tripping a whole lot later, after what happened.”

Patiently, “What happened?”

“Dom Felix got a little winghouse out in the compound and drafted Kert Row and Wallich to help him invent the Receiver. Mind you, he had no head for what it would take, but he had the drive for it and the sure certain knowledge it can be done, and between them Kert Row and Wallich had what knowledge and technique he didn’t. How hard he drove them, and himself too, you wouldn’t believe. And Wallich pregnant at the time, too. He had some crazy idea it could be done some other way, some way that would tear Terra apart; he was afraid of that. More than afraid. Terrified. Anyway, bioenergetics was the key to it, and Wallich was one of the all-time greats at that. It was Wallich developed the defrosting technique with orgasm, the full organic bioenergetic field being better than anything ever invented to kick a Tripper out of stasis. That’s how she came to be pregnant by Dom Felix. It couldn’t have happened by anyone on Medea because she was a Mule, if you know what that is.”

“I know what that is. Dom Felix—”

“Dom Felix was from Terra and she had his charts down to the
last molecule. He was a good genetic match and she knew a lot of tricks to make it perfect. She treated his sperm-sample to make absolutely sure.”

“Why did she do that?”

“Ah, Wally, she had a kink, a little neurotic kink, know what I mean? A Mule, you know; I remember she said to me once, ‘Altair, oh God, what I wouldn’t give to be a real woman.’ I said, ‘Well, you are, altogether through and through,’ and she cried and said she wasn’t. Well, she was; Trudi, she had hair like—”

“Yes, yes. Still makes you cry, doesn’t it? Ha ha! So she thought if she had a baby she would be more real than real. Now go on about the Receiver.”

“Okay, okay. The three of them threw out the electromagnetic spectrum, and the Einsteinian field complex, space, time, gravity, matter, and started outside all that, with bioenergetics as the beachhead. Well, it turned out not to be bioenergetics in the end, but an analog of it, something brand-new. The vibratory—”

“Yes, I know how it works, everybody knows how it works. I want to know how it was invented. So—it was the three of them who pulled it off?”

“Well no, not exactly; it was Dom Felix. Kert Row got killed. He was coming out to Dom Felix’s winghouse with something Dom Felix had sent him for when an underpillar from the house fell on him. Squashed his head. There was a mechanic for the cycle pool started an ugly rumor about that, said the sensor-chips inside the house had been tampered with, made the house lift and topple the pillar. Said he saw Dom Felix out there beating on Kert Row’s head. Don’t you believe it. I was out there myself not ten minutes after and saw Dom Felix working like a demon to get the pillar off him, not that it would have done any good, his head was split wide open. Dom Felix was crying, saying over and over, ‘A way of thinking, that’s all it is, that special way of thinking.’ I knew he was going to miss that special way of thinking and I bet he did, but he got through anyway. Maybe it could only have been done by a crazy man and I told you, he really was kind of crazy.

“Like about the baby. Once Wally was about to term he got the
idea to deliver it himself. He was still the Big Chief’s superhero, mind, so he could get what he wanted. Wally, I think she loved him—then, not later, oh God no—but she was willing to do anything he wanted. So he did, all by himself, and it was okay. And then he called the medics and they took her and the baby inside. And from that day on he never looked at either one of them and she wouldn’t even mention his name or let anyone else. All she told me was he did something so disgusting that it made her sick to think about it, and it should be forgotten before the kid grew up. And anyway the kid died and after that she did too, and that’s all I know.”

“That’s all you know about the Receiver?”

“That’s all I know about Wally. The Receiver, well, you’d think without Kert Row and Wallich, Dom Felix would’ve ground to a halt. Far from it. Nothing could’ve stopped a drive like he had; and then, though he had no real training, maybe something of Kert Row’s design genius and Wally’s talent for synthesizing theories had rubbed off on him some way. Anyway, he did it by himself alright, and now you’re talking to me, and all the settlements on all the planets are tied together again.… Funny thing, he started out by failing. Maybe that’s what lit his spark.”

“Failing? At what?”

“If you remember, I told you about Arca, the Medean town or shrine or whatever it was. Dom Felix went out there to bring them Acceptance and begin a new era on Medea, love and brotherhood between two different species for the very first time. And that one time he sure laid a big egg. One visit from him and they cut out and we never saw them again.”

“I never knew Acceptance to fail.”

The old man laughed. “Maybe they just wouldn’t accept him. I told you he was more than a little crazy.”

“One more thing, Altair. Will you give me your impression of the Receiver, how you feel about it and what it has done?”

“I think it’s wonderful and marvelous and a miracle and all the other stuff they say about it, and it certainly has tightened up communications, and anything that does that for humanity is something humanity needs, across space or across a room or across a bed. We
are very good at talk and very bad at real communication. Everything we have ever accomplished we have done at the price of something important; it’s as if we weren’t capable of seeing all the factors of any problem. Someone brought rabbits to Australia for pets and the rabbits damn near ate up the continent. Someone found out petroleum could make a fuel and they used it for fuel until, one way or another, it killed more people than any war ever has. Someone found a hormone that would prevent miscarriages and produced a whole generation of women—their daughters—with a new kind of cancer. Someone found out how to keep premature babies alive and produce a couple hundred thousand blind people. We were always like that. I guess we always will be like that.”

“How do you apply that to the Receiver? Or do you?”

“Sure I do, but it’s a feeling, that’s all; not enough time has gone by to be sure. But you can see the signs. It’s changed from a great discovery, a miracle, into a toy, the same way all inventions do when they turn into entertainments. I just have this feeling about it.… Don’t know what makes me think about it right now, but when Dom Felix came back from Arca that time, he asked me, ‘Why don’t dolphins bite?’ Well, that was a line I used to spout back in those days; dolphins are carnivores with plenty of sharp teeth, plenty of strength and speed, they can even take on a shark and drive it off; and men have captured them and humiliated them and tortured them and brainwashed them and never once has a dolphin attacked or bitten a man; they even have been known to help a man to shore. And I used to say, it’s because they know something we don’t, and they’re sorry for us.”

“I still don’t understand how that applies to the Receiver.”

“Neither do I, friend, not altogether. I told you, it’s just a feeling I have—that by using little parts of whole things, we pass miracles that are a lot smaller than they could have been in their own time, in their own way. I see the Receiver turning into a toy, and it makes me sad.

“It takes a minimum of redesign to turn a crucifix into a pogo stick.”

“You have a dark beer?”

“In a place like this you want a dark beer?”

“Whatever, then.”

The bartender drew a thick-walled Stein and slid it across. “I worked in the city. I know about dark beer and Guinness and like that. These yokels around here,” he added, his tone of voice finishing the sentence.

The customer was a small man with glasses and not much of a beard. He had a gentle voice. “A man called Grinny …”

“Grimme,” the barman corrected. “So you’ve heard. Him and his brother.”

The customer didn’t say anything. The bartender wiped. The customer told him to pour one for himself.

“I don’t usual.” But the barman poured. “Grimme and that brother Dave, the worst.” He drank. “I hate it a lot out here, yokels like that is why.”

“There’s still the city.”

“Not for me. The wife.”

“Oh.” And he waited.

“They lied a lot. Come in here, get drunk, tell about what they done, mostly women. Bad, what they said they done. Worse when it wasn’t lies. You want another?”

“Not yet.”

“No lie about the Fannen kid, Marcy. Fourteen, fifteen maybe. Tooken her out behind the Johnson’s silo, what they done to her. And then they said they kill her, she said anything. She didn’t. Not about that, not about anything, ever again, two years. Until the fever last November, she told her mom. She died. Mom came told me ’fore she moved out.”

The customer waited.

“Hear them tell it, they were into every woman, wife, daughter in the valley, anytime they wanted.”

The customer blew through his nostrils, once, gently. A man came in for two six-packs and a hip-sized Southern Comfort and went away in a pickup truck. “ ‘Monday busy’ I call this,” said the bartender, looking around the empty room. “And here it’s Wednesday.” Without being asked, he drew another beer for the customer. “To have somebody to talk to,” he said an explanation. Then he said nothing at all for a long time.

The customer took some beer. “They just went after local folks, then.”

“Grimme and David? Well yes, they had the run of it, the most of the men off with the lumbering, nothing grows in these rocks around here. Except maybe chickens, and who cares for chickens? Old folks, and the women. Anyway, that Grimme, shoulders
this
wide. Eyes
that
close together, and hairy. The brother, maybe you’d say a good-looking guy for a yokel, but, well, scary.” He nodded at his choice of words and said it again. “Scary.”

“Crazy eyes,” said the customer.

“You got it. So the times they wasn’t just lyin’, the women didn’t want to tell and I got to say it, the men just as soon not know.”

“But they never bothered anyone except their own valley people.”

“Who else is ever around here to bother? Oh, they bragged about this one and that one they got to on the road, you know, blonde in a convertible, give them the eye, give them whiskey, give them a good time up the back roads. All lies and you know it. They got this big old van. Gal hitchhiker, they say the first woman ever used ’em both up. Braggin’, lyin’. Shagged a couple city people in a little hatchback, leaned on them ’til the husband begged ’em to ball the wife. I don’t believe that at all.”

“You don’t.”

“What man would say that to a couple hairy yokels, no matter what? Man got to be yellow or downright kinky.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened, I told you I don’t believe it! It’s lies, brags and lies. Said they found ’em driving the quarry road, ’way yonder. Passed ’em and parked the van to let ’em by, look ’em over. Passed ’em and got ahead, when they caught up David was lying on the road and Grimme made like artificial you know, lifeguards do it.”

“Respiration.”

“Yeah, that. They seen that and they stopped, the couple in the hatchback, got out, Grimme and David jumped ’em. Said the man’s a shrimpy little guy look like a professor, woman’s a dish, too good for him. But that’s what they said. I don’t believe any of it.”

“You mean they’d never do a thing like that.”

“Oh they would all right. Cutting off the woman’s clo’es to see what she got with a big old skinning knife. Took a while, said it was a lot of laughs. David holdin’ both her arms behind her back one-handed, cuttin’ away her clo’es and makin’ jokes, Grimme holdin’ the little perfessor man around the neck with one elbow, laughin’, ’til the man snatched his head clear and that’s when he said it. ‘Give it to him,’ he told the woman, ‘Go on, give it to him,’ and she says, ‘For the love of God, don’t ask me to do that.’ I don’t believe any man would say a thing like that.”

“You really don’t.”

“No way. Because listen, when the man jerked out his head and said that, and the woman said don’t ask her to do that,
then
the perfessor guy tried to fight Grimme. You see what I’m saying? If Grimme breaks him up and stomps on the pieces, then you could maybe understand him beggin’ the woman to quit and give in. The way Grimme told it right here standing where you are, the man said it when Grimme hadn’t done nothing yet but hold his neck. That’s the part Grimme told over and over, laughin’. ‘Give it to him,’ the man kept telling her. And Grimme never even hit him yet. ’Course when the little man tried to fight him Grimme just laughed and clobbered him once side of the neck, laid him cold. That was when the woman turned into a wildcat, to hear them tell it. It was all David could do to hold her, let alone mess around. Grimme left him to it and went around back to see what they got in their car. Mind you, I don’t know if he really done all this; I’m just telling you what he said.
I heard it three, four times just that first week.”