Lathe of Heaven, The (22 page)

"I believe so," George replied mildly. "The big load's off your shoulders. Right?"

"And onto yours?'

"And onto mine. Right!" Again the big, gusty laugh, a little overprolonged. Heather wondered if Haber was always like this, or was in a state of extreme excitement.

"Dr. Haber," her husband said, "have you ever talked to an Alien about dreaming?"

"An Aldebaranian, you mean? No. Forde in Washington tried out a couple of our tests on some of 'em, along with a whole series of psychological tests, but the results were meaningless. We simply haven't licked the communications problem there. They're intelligent but Irchevsky, our best xenobiologist, thinks they may not be rational at all, and that what looks like socially integrative behavior among humans is nothing but a kind of instinctual adaptive mimicry. No telling for sure. Can't get an EEG on 'em and as a matter of fact we can't even find out whether they sleep or not, let alone dream!"

"Do you know the term iahklu'?"

Haber paused momentarily. "Heard it. It's untranslatable. You've decided it means

'dream,' eh?"

George shook his head. "I don't know what it means. I don't pretend to have any knowledge you haven't got, but I do think that before you go on with the, with the application of the new technique, Dr. Haber, before you dream, you ought to talk with one of the Aliens."

"Which one?" The flick of irony was clear.

"Any one. It doesn't matter."

Haber laughed. "Talk about what, George?"

Heather saw her husband's light eyes flash as he looked up at the bigger man. "About me. About dreaming. About iahklu'. It doesn't matter. So long as you listen. They'll know what you're getting at, they're a lot more experienced than we are at all this."

"At what?"

"At dreaming--at what dreaming is an aspect of. They've done it for a long time. For always, I guess. They are of the dream time. I don't understand it, I can't say it in words.

Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes. . . . But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world.

You must learn the way. You must learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully--as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you?"

"It's not new to me, if that's what you mean. World soul and so on. Prescientific synthesis. Mysticism is one approach to the nature of dreaming, or of reality, though it's not acceptable to those willing to use reason, and able to."

"I don't know if that's true," George said without the least resentment, though he was very earnest. "But just out of scientific curiosity, then, at least try this: before testing the Augmentor on yourself, before you turn it on, when you're starting your autosuggestion, say this: Er' perrehnne. Aloud or in your mind. Once. Clearly. Try it."

"Why?"

"Because it works."

"'Works how?"

"You get a little help from your friends," George said. He stood up. Heather stared at him in terror. What he had been saying sounded crazy--Haber's cure had driven him insane, she had known it would. But Haber was not responding--was he?--as he would to incoherent or psychotic talk.

"Iahklu' is too much for one person to handle alone," George was saying, "it gets out of hand. They know what's involved in controlling it. Or, not exactly controlling it, that's not the right word; but keeping it where it belongs, going the right way. ... I don't understand it. Maybe you will. Ask their help. Say Er' perrehnne before you . . . before you press the ON button."

"You may have something there," Haber said. "Might be worth investigating. I'll get onto it, George. I'll have one of the Aldebaranians from the Culture Center up and see if I can get some information on this. . . . All Greek to you, eh, Mrs. Orr? This husband of yours should have gone into the shrink game, the research end of it; he's wasted as a draftsman." Why did he say that? George was a parks-and-playgrounds designer. "He's got the flair, he's a natural. Never thought of hooking the Aldebaranians in on this, but he might just have a real idea there. But maybe you're just as glad he's not a shrink, eh?

Awful to have your spouse analyzing your unconscious desires across the dinner table, eh?" He boomed and thundered, showing them out. Heather was bewildered, nearly in tears.

"I hate him," she said fiercely, on the descending spiral of the escalator. "He's a horrible man. False. A big fake!" George took her arm. He said nothing. "Are you through?

Really through? You won't need drugs any more, and you're all through these awful sessions?"

"I think so. He'll file my papers, and in six weeks I should get a notice of clearance. If I behave myself." He smiled, a little tiredly. "This was tough on you, honey, but it wasn't on me. Not this time. I'm hungry, though. Where'll we go for dinner? The Casa Boliviana?"

"Chinatown," she said, and then caught herself. "Ha-ha," she added. The old Chinese district had been cleared away along with the rest of downtown, at least ten years ago.

For some reason she had completely forgotten that for a moment. "I mean Ruby Loo's,"

she said, confused. George held her arm a little closer. "Fine," he said. It was easy to get to; the funicular line stopped across the river in the old Lloyd Center, once the biggest shopping center in the world, back before the Crash. Nowadays the vast multilevel parking lots were gone along with the dinosaurs, and many of the shops and stores along the two-level mall were empty, boarded up. The ice rink had not been filled in twenty years. No water ran in the bizarre, romantic fountains of twisted metal. Small ornamental trees had grown up towering; their roots cracked the walkways for yards around their cylindrical planters. Voices and footsteps rang overclearly, a little hollowly, before and behind one, walking those long, half-lit, half-derelict arcades.

Ruby Loo's was on the upper level. The branches of a horse chestnut almost hid the glass facade. Overhead, the sky was an intense delicate green, that color seen briefly on spring evenings when there is a clearing after rain. Heather looked up into that jade heaven, remote, improbable, serene; her heart lifted, she felt anxiety begin to slip off her like a shed skin. But it did not last. There was a curious reversal, a shifting. Something seemed to catch at her, to hold her. She almost stopped walking, and looked down from the sky of jade into the empty, heavy-shadowed walks before her. This was a strange place. "It's spooky up here," she said.

George shrugged; but his face looked tense and rather grim.

A wind had come up, too warm for the Aprils of the old days, a wet, hot wind moving the great green-fingered branches of the chestnut, stirring litter far down the long, deserted turnings. The red neon sign behind the moving branches seemed to dim and waver with the wind, to change shape; it didn't say Ruby Loo's, it didn't say anything any more; Nothing said anything. Nothing had meaning. The wind blew hollow in the hollow courts. Heather turned away from George and went off toward the nearest wall; she was in tears. In pain her instinct was to hide, to get in a corner of a wall and hide.

"What is it, honey. .. . It's all right. Hang on, it'll be all right."

I am going insane, she thought; it wasn't George, it wasn't George all along, it was me.

"It'll be all right," he whispered once more, but she heard in his voice that he did not believe it. She felt in his hands that he did not believe it.

"What's wrong," she cried despairing. "What's wrong?"

"I don't know," he said, almost inattentively. He had lifted his head and turned a little from her, though he still held her to him to stop her crying fit. He seemed to be watching, to be listening. She felt the heart beat hard and steady in his chest.

"Heather, listen. I'm going to have to go back."

"Go back where? What is it that's wrong?" Her voice was thin and high.

"To Haber. I have to go. Now. Wait for me--in the restaurant. Wait for me, Heather.

Don't follow me." He was off. She had to follow. He went, not looking back, fast, down the long stairs, under the arcades, past the dry fountains, out to the funicular station. A car was waiting, there at the end of the line; he hopped in. She scrambled on, her breath hurting in her chest, just as the car began to pull out. "What the hell, George!"

"I'm sorry." He was panting, too. "I have to get there. I didn't want to take you into it."

"Into what?" She detested him. They sat on facing seats, puffing at each other. "What is this crazy performance? What are you going back there for?"

"Haber is--" George's voice went dry for a moment. "He is dreaming," he said. A deep mindless terror crawled inside Heather; she ignored it.

"Dreaming what? So what?"

"Look out the window."

She had looked only at him, while they ran and since they had got onto the car. The funicular was crossing the river now, high above the water. But there was no water. The river had run dry. The bed of it lay cracked and oozing in the lights of the bridges, foul, full of grease and bones and lost tools and dying fish. The great ships lay careened and ruined by the towering, slimy docks.

The buildings of downtown Portland, the Capital of the World, the high, new, handsome cubes of stone and glass interspersed with measured doses of green, the fortresses of Government--Research and Development, Communications, Industry, Economic Planning, Environmental Control--were melting. They were getting soggy and shaky, like jello left out in the sun. The corners had already run down the sides, leaving great creamy smears.

The funicular was going very fast and not stopping at stations: something must be wrong with the cable, Heather thought without personal involvement. They swung rapidly over the dissolving city, low enough to hear the rumbling and the cries.

As the car ran up higher, Mount Hood came into view, behind George's head as he sat facing her. He saw the lurid light reflected on her face or in her eyes, perhaps, for he turned at once to look, to see the vast inverted cone of fire.

The car swung wild in the abyss, between the unforming city and the formless sky.

"Nothing seems to go quite right today," said a woman farther back in the car, in a loud, quivering voice.

The light of the eruption was terrible and gorgeous. Its huge, material, geological vigor was reassuring, compared to the hollow area that now lay ahead of the car, at the upper end of the line.

The presentiment which had seized Heather as she looked down from the jade sky was now a presence. It was there. It was an area, or perhaps a time-period, of a sort of emptiness. It was the presence of absence: an unquantifiable entity without qualities, into which all things fell and from which nothing came forth. It was horrible, and it was nothing. It was the wrong way.

Into this, as the funicular car stopped at its terminus, George went. He looked back at her as he went, crying out, "Wait for me, Heather! Don't follow me, don't come!"

But though she tried to obey him, it came to her. It was growing out from the center rapidly. She found that all things were gone and that she was lost in the panic dark, crying out her husband's name with no voice, desolate, until she sank down in a ball curled about the center of her own being, and fell forever through the dry abyss.

By the power of will, which is indeed great when exercised in the right way at the right time, George Orr found beneath his feet the hard marble of the steps up to the HURAD

Tower. He walked forward, while his eyes informed him that he walked on mist, on mud, on decayed corpses, on innumerable tiny toads. It was very cold, yet there was a smell of hot metal and burning hair or flesh. He crossed the lobby; gold letters from the aphorism around the dome leapt about him momentarily, MAN MANKIND M N A A A.

The A's tried to trip his feet. He stepped onto a moving walkway though it was not visible to him; he stepped onto the helical escalator and rode it up into nothing, supporting it continually by the firmness of his will. He did not even shut his eyes.

Up on the top story, the floor was ice. It was about a finger's width thick, and quite clear.

Through it could be seen the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. Orr stepped out onto it and all the stars rang loud and false, like cracked bells. The foul smell was much worse, making him gag. He went forward, holding out his hand. The panel of the door of Haber's outer office was there to meet it; he could not see it but he touched it. A wolf howled. The lava moved toward the city.

He went on and came to the last door. He pushed it open. On the other side of it there was nothing.

"Help me," he said aloud, for the void drew him, pulled at him. He had not the strength all by himself to get through nothingness and out the other side.

There was a sort of dull rousing in his mind; he thought of Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe, and of the bust of Schubert, and of Heather's voice saying furiously, "What the hell, George!"

This seemed to be all he had to cross nothingness on. He went forward. He knew as he went that he would lose all he had.

He entered the eye of the nightmare.

It was a cold, vaguely moving, rotating darkness made of fear, that pulled him aside, pulled him apart. He knew where the Augmentor stood. He put out his mortal hand along the way things go. He touched it; felt for the lower button, and pushed it once.

He crouched down then, covering his eyes and cowering, for the fear had taken his mind. When he raised his head and looked, the world re-existed. It was not in good condition, but it was there.

They weren't in the HURAD Tower, but in some dingier, commoner office which he had never seen before. Haber lay sprawled on the couch, massive, his beard jutting up. Red-brown beard again, whitish skin, no longer gray. The eyes were half open and saw nothing.

Orr pulled away the electrodes whose wires ran like threadworms between Haber's skull and the Augmentor. He looked at the machine, its cabinets all standing open; it should be destroyed, he thought. But he had no idea how to do it, nor any will to try. Destruction was not his line; and a machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.