Dancing in Dreamtime (30 page)

In the evenings, after he had finished his homework at the kitchen table, he retreated to his room. Tanya often paused outside his shut door and listened, hearing muffled dialogue, one voice recognizably Hoagy's, the other one higher-pitched, girlish. Even with her ear pressed against the door, she could not decipher the
words. When sharp laughter or urgent moans broke out, she hurried on down the hall.

Hoagy soon lost interest in the girls who trailed perfume down the corridors at school or flashed their bare legs on the sidewalks; now he could conjure up women more desirable than any female he had seen in the flesh. The prim, chatty maidens of his early scenarios were succeeded by strumpets cavorting in negligees, then by lascivious nudes. Their breasts and buttocks defied gravity, refusing to sag, and their skin was unblemished silk. Their limbs assumed any posture he chose, including ones that would baffle a yogi. Their eyes said only what he wished them to say.

One red-haired temptress haunted him for weeks. Delicate blue veins showed through her translucent skin. Her jade green eyes, fixed on him, gave back a tiny image of his face.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“On the fifth planet of Epsilon Eridani,” she breathed. “Come find me.”

He summoned her back again and again, surrounding her with a landscape of ancient forests, rolling prairies, wildflower meadows aflame with butterflies, rivers teeming with fish and skies with birds. Such riches were no longer available on Earth. But why not on the fifth planet of Epsilon Eridani, or on some other habitable world?

By the time Hoagy received a more powerful eros couch at age fifteen, all his projections had grown otherworldly. No longer rushing him to orgasm, as they had in the early days of acrobatic postures and lacy lingerie, now his beauties entranced him for
hours at a stretch. As settings for his trysts, he fashioned gardens riotous with flowers and brimming with fruits and thronged by magnificent beasts. Sometimes he postponed climax for days in order to refine his visions, like an alchemist in search of gold.

While his friends were vibrating to sex like struck tuning forks, rubbing one another's ticklish bodies, conceiving and aborting the occasional baby, Hoagy kept to himself at school and divided his time at home between the eros couch and his computer, where he studied exobiology.

Though the psychiatrists had warned her, Tanya was not prepared for the transformation in her son. He scarcely spoke to her anymore, unless she prodded him with questions. At meals he would stare off into space, forgetting to eat. He became alarmingly thin, his cheeks gouged by shadows. Fret lines appeared at the corners of his mouth.

One night, as she tiptoed down the hall, she noticed his door was ajar. Glancing in warily, she saw he was at his desk, studying a screenful of data. Relieved that he was not on the Freud, she slipped into the room. “What are all the numbers?” she asked.

Without looking up, he said, “Coordinates for E-type planets in our galaxy.”

“E-type?”

“Planets sufficiently Earth-like to have the potential for supporting life as we know it.”

She squinted at the rows of numbers. “So many?”

“On the order of ten million identified so far.”

“How many have we explored?”

He snorted. “A handful. And those only by drones.”

“Imagine all those planets. There might be creatures we've never dreamed of.”

“Or creatures we
have
dreamed of,” said Hoagy. Hunched over, his face reflecting the glow of the screen, he withdrew his attention from her as firmly as if he had thrown a switch.

Tanya studied the boy, her ninth birthing, whom she had been allowed to keep because of his unforeseen epilepsy. He was no more her genetic offspring than the previous eight had been. Only the Fertility Board knew whose egg and sperm had been implanted in her womb, knew what couple had refused to accept this flawed child. By rearing Hoagy, feeding him, helping him learn to crawl, to walk, to speak, she was bound to him by a link deeper than genes.

He did not glance up or speak when she wished him good night and closed the door.

Shortly before Hoagy's eighteenth birthday, when the time came to replace the Freud with a state-of-the-art model, Tanya brooded once more on the decision she had made years earlier to sign him up for the timeshell experiment. From his earliest school-days, tests had shown him to be gifted at remembering complex images in precise detail. After glancing at a page of print, he could recite every word without error; after glimpsing a picture, he could draw an exact replica. Eidetic vision, the examiners called it, possibly a side-effect of his epilepsy. The gift was so rare that a Project VIVA psychiatrist, learning of Hoagy's case, had persuaded Tanya
to enroll him in the program. The eros couches were designed to wean him away not merely from earthly women but from Earth itself. The psychiatrist put it bluntly: Your son will give up the chance of leading a normal life for a chance to overcome his disorder. Better he should pay this price, Tanya reluctantly decided, than die of a seizure. If he could contribute to science in the process, all the better.

What the psychiatrist did not tell her was that her son might go mad. Project VIVA, the program for mapping life in the Milky Way, had been stymied by a difficulty no one had foreseen in the pre-warp days: matter, including human bodies, passed through the timeshell without harm, but minds were deranged. When the early warpships returned at all, their crewmembers were insane. Nothing, it seemed, would protect the astronauts, neither drugs nor freezing nor hypnosis. Many scientists began calling the timeshell an impassable barrier, as the speed of light had been described in the twentieth century.

Just when the International Space Agency was on the point of shelving the project, declaring the human costs too high, the seventh flight brought back the hint of an answer. Officials approved for the trip a woman who was a paranoid schizophrenic. She returned just as insane as the rest of the crew, just as incapable of reporting her observations, but with her psychosis undisturbed. Her paranoia had passed twice through the warp without altering.

If some fixation less crippling than paranoia could be induced in the astronauts, perhaps it would preserve their sanity through the warp. Subsequent flights bore crews trained with mantras and mandalas, meditation and prayer. The returning astronauts
were mad in novel ways, but mad nonetheless. Again there was a curious exception—a twenty-year-old Zen adept. Although he raved most of the time, he also had lucid spells in which he could describe the lava-spouting planet his flight had orbited. He was the youngest person ever to breach the shell, the youngest to be trained in fixation.

Perhaps, the psychiatrists reasoned, adults were the wrong candidates for training. Perhaps adolescents, with their fierce cravings and attachments, were more likely subjects. And what craving was fiercer or more easily manipulated than sex? Cautiously, after prolonged debates in scientific and governmental circles, Project VIVA was commissioned to test the idea.

After more than a thousand interviews, eight couples and four single parents were persuaded to enroll their adolescent children. If this experiment succeeds in revealing how to break through the timeshell, the parents were told, your child's name will be honored alongside those of Lindberg and Armstrong, Gagarin and Chi. The parents were not allowed to visit the hospital in Santa Fe where survivors of earlier flights dozed under heavy sedation or slouched in chairs, drooling. Imagining the dangers their children might face, Tanya Ferris and the other parents thought only of mild phobias, a stutter, a twitch. The risk seemed worth taking in exchange for the possibility of fame.

On the afternoon of his eighteenth birthday, Hoagy returned from the Institute for Exobiological Research to find in his room a top-of-the-line eros couch. Instead of projecting images onto a
screen and synthesizing odors and sounds, this model directly stimulated the occipital and cerebral cortex and limbic system. The helmet pressed electrodes against his skull, the webbing cradled him as in a hammock. Lying in the machine's embrace, mind absorbed by the tingling sensations, Hoagy immediately entered a trance. Whatever he envisioned in this spellbound state became more vivid to him than anything in the waking world.

Fantasy women still drew him into his visions, with their silky bellies and exquisite feet, their hair spun from starlight. But now his desire expanded beyond these goddesses to conjure up entire planets, lush and pristine. Making love with such women, in such places, required him to leap beyond the confines of his own chemistry, to merge with an alien ecology.

Even when not strapped into the couch and helmet, he carried the images with him. By comparison, his actual surroundings seemed ugly and crude. He shuffled between home and the Exobiology Institute in a perpetual daze of desire. His teachers had never come across anyone so insatiably curious about extraterrestrial life, so relentless in his studies. The curriculum that should have kept him busy for seven years he finished in three. By age twenty-one he was working on the frontiers of the discipline.

He became a leading proponent of the view that wherever conditions were suitable for carbon-based life such life would inevitably appear, and if given enough time it would evolve and diversify, producing more and more complex organisms. The possibility that any of these organisms would be humanoid was vanishingly small, of course, but not zero. In a galaxy with tens of millions of candidate planets, there might be thousands on which species akin to Homo sapiens had evolved, and somewhere among
them he might discover the infinitely desirable women who tantalized him in daylight and dream.