The Stuff of Dreams (6 page)

“Taste yours. It smells different.”

“Oh, that? You know, I went and changed the tea leaves. This is homemade, grown in my very own garden out back. The last pot was some cheap stuff I got off a merchant from the Capital.” Winking at her guest, she drew the steaming liquid through her wrinkled lips. “There. Are you satisfied there’s no poison in it now, my suspicious Hunter? You’ve gone and spoiled the mood. It’s okay; you don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to.”

D brought the cup to his mouth. The old woman watched with pleasure as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Setting the cup down, D got to his feet. He was headed for the door, but halfway there he turned around and asked, “Did you dream about me, too?”

The old woman nodded.

“And what did you think?”

The brief silence that followed may have been her wrestling with concerns about what it would be polite to say. “I can’t speak for the rest of ’em,” Mrs. Sheldon finally ventured, “but I thought you were dangerous.”

“Dangerous?”

“In the dream, you seemed to say you were a dangerous man as you walked along. Even though you didn’t actually come right out and say it, I could definitely tell.”

That was probably the best way to describe him.

“Thanks for the tea,” D said simply, and with that he left her home.

“Godspeed to you,” the old woman called from the porch. “We’ll meet again soon. Next time, you’ll have to listen to one of the songs I wrote. It’s a good one, since I made it back when I was young.”

Saying nothing, D mounted his horse, gave a single kick of his heels to its sides, and was off.

When the house was hidden behind the hill, a hoarse voice snapped, “I can’t believe how stupid you can be sometimes. Drinking that tea of all things! It was probably poison.”

“You mean to say you don’t know what was in it?”

“Well, I could make out the tea well enough, but there was some other unknown substance in it.”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” D said as if the matter didn’t involve him at all. “A dangerous man, am I?” he muttered.

“That’s for sure, as far as anybody’s concerned. But remember what the old lady said—she said the whole village felt the same thing.”

What they felt was that he was clearly a dangerous man. Dangerous for
them
, that is.

The voice continued, “That would mean the folks in the village called you here even though they think you’re a threat to them. It’s possible they called you here to kill you. If that’s the case, what that farmer did would stand to reason . . . But I don’t think that’s it. Despite what the old lady said, I’m not so sure every last person in town felt the same way. It’s pretty clear they weren’t hostile. After all, this is a peaceful village.”

“A peaceful village, is it?” As he rode, the words D muttered sailed off on the wind and the scenery streamed by on either side. To any bystander, this conversation would’ve been unparalleled in its weirdness.

“You were gonna leave town . . .” the hoarse voice continued indifferently. “On your way out, you were attacked, but your attacker was killed with an arrow from your dreams.
He
must’ve wanted to keep you alive. And as a result, you wound up staying here. It may very well be the farmer who attacked you was part of
his
plan, you know.”

Then suddenly, the hoarse voice was gone. Without a single world, D kept gazing straight ahead. The young man didn’t seem to be concerned about the uncanny ring of this voice that seemed to come from nowhere, nor did he seem the least bit worried about the subject of its discourse. Perhaps the weirdness that existed beyond the mortal realm was something the inhuman never even noticed.

.

Back at the house, Old Mrs. Sheldon watched her departing guest until both he and his mount had vanished behind the hill. Then, in a manner that was totally unbecoming for her age, she seductively winked in their direction, before stepping off the porch and heading around to her back yard.

Mrs. Sheldon’s yard was a fenced-off plot of over a thousand square feet, where colors beyond numbering competed in a floral arena. Stopping at a certain patch of pretty flowers with the same blue petals that were floating in the tea, the old woman said to herself, “Oh, he’s a dangerous man all right, but I wouldn’t mind getting into danger with him. In some ways, I want that tea to work, but in other ways I suppose I don’t. Lordy me, it’s been a long time since I felt like a mixed-up schoolgirl.” And then, casually glancing down at the blue flowers at her feet, she said, “Well, this is certainly where that tea was picked . . . but I wonder how long it’s been growing here?
I’ve never seen it before
.”

And just as the old woman bent over to pick a bit more of it, she heard the strident sound of something whistling through the air right by her ear.

.

I

.

After D galloped over a mile in under five minutes, a vast ranch suddenly appeared. Out on the rich pasture there was a herd of meat beasts, several of whom were munching the grass. Seven feet long and easily in excess of fifteen hundred pounds each, the barrel-shaped beasts were covered with armor-like plates that could deflect lasers. Their snouts were reminiscent of power shovels with a pair of curved buckets, which were actually their upper and lower jaws loaded with massive molars. Yet, despite their daunting appearance, nothing tastier had ever graced a dinner table. Though the aesthetic sensibilities of the Nobility had given shape to many ghastly creatures for the sole purpose of terrifying humanity, these beasts were perhaps the greatest exception to that rule in that they also provided food. What’s more, so long as the beast wasn’t fatally wounded, the flesh that’d been carved from it would begin growing back twelve hours later, while the creature itself felt no pain at all and offered no resistance. It was said that with a pair of these treasured beasts, a family of five would never go hungry. Unfortunately, these meat beasts were extremely limited in number, and they rarely produced offspring. Usually, if someone found one, they’d have a creature that could fetch them enough money to buy one of the Nobility’s flying machines, and that’s usually what they did rather than keep them for food. By the look of it, there were at least thirty of them on the ranch, leading D to the conclusion that not only was this region peaceful, it was rich as well.

As D headed straight for the main house, scarlet streaks of fire occasionally skirted the periphery of his field of vision. The streaks were flames disgorged by the scarlet moles that were supposed to guard the place, although their numbers were less than a fiftieth of what an ordinary ranch would have. With so few of them, you could never hope to see the hundreds of fiery pillars that usually erupted from the earth to greet intruders on the surface or in the air.

A sensor set forty feet away from the main house was tripped, and before D’s horse had stopped, a woman appeared from the front door carrying an old-fashioned Tommy gun with a drum magazine. D halted.

As the woman stared at his face, a faint red glow rose in her cheeks. “Um . . . Can I help you?” she asked in a voice that had a touch of good-mannered timidity to it. Her black hair was tied back in a light brown scarf and her face was that of a woman long past her prime, hard around the mouth and razor sharp through the eyes in a way that let the bitter precipitate of her life bleed through. And yet, there was something refined about her, the clear line of her nose and her gracefully thin eyebrows suggesting a life far removed from that of her faded cotton shirt and long skirt. In addition to the Tommy gun, she had a well-weathered knapsack slung on her back.

“Are you Ai-Ling?” the Hunter inquired.

“Yes.”

D advanced on his horse.

“You . . . Stop right there. I can’t let you come barging onto our land.”

“Sorry, but this is urgent,” D said from up on his horse. Dismounting by Ai-Ling’s side, the Hunter said, “I’d like to ask you a few things about the girl sleeping in the hospital—Sybille. My name is—”

“D,” Ai-Ling muttered as she slowly lowered the barrel of her weapon. “I can tell you what I know. But right now, I’ve got to feed the beasts . . .”

“I’ll wait.”

An expression flitted across the middle-aged woman’s face that straddled a line between resignation and delight. Shouldering the Tommy gun, she slowly headed toward the fence. D walked right alongside her.

“What did you come here for?” Ai-Ling asked. Perhaps she, too, sensed that D was dangerous.

D didn’t answer. As Ai-Ling opened the gate and walked out to the middle of the pasture, D leaned back against the fence and watched her. It was clear he didn’t have the slightest intention of helping.

Tucking the Tommy gun under her right arm, Ai-Ling stripped off the knapsack about forty feet from D. Quickly opening it, she knocked it on its side. Glistening crystals of synthesized feed for the meat beasts spilled out, and shrill cries arose from all sides as the ground began to rumble. The fifteen-hundred-pound mountains of black came running in unison. The thirty of them had a total weight of over twenty tons, which made the earth tremble and even shook the fence as they stampeded toward her. D alone was unaffected, with not so much as a single hair stirring. It was almost as if the vibrations of the fence the young man was leaning against were absorbed by his black coat before they could reach him.

Ai-Ling stepped away from the tremendous beasts as they greedily consumed the food they loved, but soon she was lost again in a mad scramble of black armor that seemed sure to trample her to death. And yet, when her slender figure stepped out from between the massive, thrashing forms, she suddenly delivered a kick to the rump of the closest beast.

“Bad boy, Ben!” Ai-Ling scolded the creature. “You’ve already eaten more than your share, haven’t you? Be a good little beast and give Pluto some room. Don’t give me any trouble now.”

Although fierce, the meat beasts were also highly intelligent, and if handled properly, could be tamed. Doing so, however, meant risking life and limb day after day. It was said to take as much patience as finding a single grain in a mountain of sand, and yet, it looked like this woman with the cultured upbringing had managed to do just that. The beast she’d kicked ambled aside, but the one called Pluto seemed to miss the point entirely and just continued to hang back. “Get a move on, Pluto. You’ve finally got an opening, so get in there and chow down.” Seeing that the beast still wasn’t responding, Ai-Ling shouted, “You big dope!” and kicked it in the rump. It didn’t move.

Ai-Ling took a step back and folded her arms. Eyes filling with determination, she grabbed the Tommy gun by the stock and held it like a bat.

“Now there’s something,” D muttered.

The woman had just taken the gun and smacked a creature taller than she was right in the middle of its ass. Beads of sweat flying from her, she delivered five or six blows before the idiotic beast finally nosed its way into the opening and started scooping up feed with its power-shovel jaws. Once she was sure of that, Ai-Ling went over to D again. Although she was probably mentally and physically exhausted from what she’d just done, her gait was incredibly steady.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, but I have to check the thermostats in the chickener coop, too.” Her breathing ragged, the woman had D’s face reflected in her beads of sweat. Her body shook. “Would you like to come with me? Ordinarily you could wait in the house, but I can’t very well have a man in my home while my husband’s out.”

“Out here is fine with me.” As D said it, he took a place by Ai-Ling’s side and they walked off toward the building that stood to their left. “Don’t seem too suited to farm life,” he said after they’d walked a short distance.

It took a few seconds for Ai-Ling to realize he was talking about her. Shooting a look of surprise at D’s face, she asked, “You concerned on my account?” Her expression was almost a tearful smile.

“Farm work is tough, even for a man,” D remarked. “So, why did you give the meat beasts names?”

“The work’s not really all that hard,” Ai-Ling answered in a cheery tone. “You keep at the same thing for thirty years, and you’ll get used to any kind of labor. And I gave them names because it makes it easier to work with them.”

Upon reaching the building, Ai-Ling opened the steel door. A nauseating stench billowed out—the stink of wild animals and their excrement. Ai-Ling turned her face away and coughed. “I just have to check the thermostats, but we can talk while I’m walking around. Ask away.”

Her voice traveled back from the darkness. The sunlight peeking in through the doorway provided a modicum of illumination for the building’s interior, where there were rows of massive chickeners—giant chicks standing up to six and a half feet tall. The way they simply stood there motionless behind the high-voltage lines strung along either side of the pathway, scrutinizing the pair with glinting blue eyes but not displaying any of the rambunctious behavior of normal chicks, was as unsettling a sight as any.

These giant chicks were a crucial food source out on the Frontier. There were only a few special species that could produce chickeners, and they had extremely sensitive constitutions; a temperature deviation of a few degrees from their usual conditions could quite easily spell death for them. In addition, there was
a multitude of problems involving their feed and their vicious disposition, so a family of five would usually face tremendous hardship in raising just one of them. What was taking place in this filthy, dimly lit hut was nothing short of a miracle.

Pale sparks shot out in the distance as a chickener touched one of the high-voltage lines. Oddly enough, the chick didn’t let out a single cry of pain.

“As I recall, chickeners love human bones. Are you able to
get them?”

Ai-Ling shook her head at D’s question. “Not too easy to come by in our village. So I buy them off the dead carrier.”

A wide variety of merchants came to Frontier villages from the Capital or other commercial districts. The fur trader, the repair man, the parts dealer, the fruit seller, the ice man, the dressmaker, the weapons broker, the magician, the traveling picture show—some stank of blood while others were cheery, some were stained with grease while still others were dressed in the finest of clothes, but each and every one of them was an indispensable part of the Frontier. The dead carrier was another such merchant.

Living as they did in such a brutal environment, people didn’t always view the dead with reverence. Organs had their use in transplants, and human hair could be treated with a special animal fat to make communication lines that could carry a
signal any distance. Even bones had an important role to play
in fertilizer, thanks to their high calcium content. In addition,
a guitar made from a carved pelvic bone and hollowed-out vertebrae, and strung with tough intestinal material by a veteran tuner, would make absolutely exquisite music. While the bodies of relatives were handled differently, those who died out on the road might receive a perfunctory memorial service, after which a coffin bearing only their meager possessions would be carried off to the communal cemetery while arrangements were made to bring the cadaver out to a “butcher” on the edge of town for dissection.

When they still didn’t have enough corpses, dead carriers would sometimes supply bodies they’d preserved with their own flash-freezing equipment, while other times they would prowl around villages and towns like ghouls in search of fresh cadavers. Corpses were often sold as they were when demand called for it; otherwise, certain parts were marketed in their raw state, or were processed and then sold.

Ai-Ling checked the antiquated temperature equipment at each pen, which each held a trio of colossal, wily eyed chicks. When she got to the second pen’s thermostat, she paused and turned around to face D. “You still haven’t asked me anything. Afraid of distracting me? Even my husband isn’t that considerate.”

Saying nothing, D watched the chicks.

Smiling sadly, Ai-Ling reached for the machine. Suddenly, one of the chicks craned its neck, flames shot from the high-voltage line, and Ai-Ling pulled her hand back, a scream trailing out after her. The chick’s sharp beak had gouged the flesh on the back of her hand. Instinctively, she pressed the wound with her other hand, but blood seeped out around it anyway. D’s elegant white fingers touched the wrist of her topmost hand. Ai-Ling was speechless. She could only watch D’s face raptly as he moved the hand she was using to keep pressure on the wound and looked down at her injury.

“It’s nothing serious,” the Hunter told her. “Put a compress of vajna leaves on it, and before the day is out—”

Suddenly, Ai-Ling jerked her hand away roughly. In the feeble darkness, it wasn’t clear if D noticed how flushed her face was all the way to her ears. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled softly. “It’s just, it’s been a long time since a man took my hand.”

“Does that happen a lot with the chicks?” D asked as he watched the chick. Blue flames rose from its downy white chest—the work of the high-voltage lines. “And not a peep out of it—that’s very polite of it.”

“Every once in a while they get me,” Ai-Ling said as she pressed a handkerchief to the wound. In a matter of seconds, vermilion laid claim to the white cloth. Seeming uneasy as she looked up at the rapacious bird, she continued. “But it sure caught me off-guard today. You know, I can usually tell whenever they’re in that mood.”

“We should go.”

“Still got some to do yet,” Ai-Ling said with a smile before moving toward another pen. Stopping in front of the equipment, she hesitated a bit before reaching out her hand. The upper body of the nearest chick shook a bit, and then it froze. D was reflected in its glassy eyes. It seemed as if the creature had suddenly developed an appreciation of beauty, but actually the remorseless eyes of the vicious bird were filled with a shade of horror that was beyond description. D’s eyes were tinged a pale shade of red. Perhaps Ai-Ling also sensed something, because she looked up at the young Hunter with a pallid countenance, and then quickly went back to work. After that, the inspections were finished without further incident.

The sunlight was waiting to greet the two of them again. Once outside, Ai-Ling locked the door and tipped her head appreciatively to D. “Thanks for the help. Uh, try not to look
at it so much. I mean, it’s not a very pretty hand.”

She wasn’t talking about the hand she’d injured. The hand she covered it with had countless scars on the back, and the skin had hardened in a condition unique to toxic bites so that it was now like the scaly hide of a fire dragon. Perhaps D had noticed from the moment they’d met that she’d been trying to keep it hidden.

“What kind of girl was Sybille?” the Hunter asked, his voice cold and devoid of emotion.

Ai-Ling’s expression grew stiff, remembering again why D was there. “Oh, she was a romantic,” she replied flatly. “And she was so kind. What more could she possibly need? I’m sure she must be having some really nice dreams. If she’s not, there can’t be a God.”