Dancing in Dreamtime (31 page)

Hoagy's link to the everyday world had grown so tenuous that he felt only mild surprise when his application to become an astronaut for Project VIVA was promptly accepted. He was more surprised by his mother's delighted response when he told her the news over breakfast.

“You're not upset?” he asked.

“Why should I be?” she said. “You were born for space. I've seen you headed there since you were a boy.”

“You're not worried about the dangers?”

“Everything worth doing is dangerous.”

“The timeshell—” he began.

“Wouldn't you love to be the one to break through?” she asked eagerly. “You'd be a pioneer. They say you've got the ideal mind for it. And you've prepared so well on the Freud.”

The fervor in her voice rattled Hoagy. He shoved away from the table and retreated to his room and slammed the door. Prepared so well?
Prepared
? He paced back and forth, scowling at the eros couch, this luxurious and treacherous dream machine. All these years, his mother had let him believe these devices were only therapeutic, training him to govern his epilepsy. But that had never been their real purpose. They were designed to groom him for warp flight.

Suddenly furious, he flung the couch on its side, ripped the harness loose, tore out the electrodes, and stomped on the helmet until it cracked.

The door swung open and his mother stood there, appalled, gazing at the wreckage. “What are you
doing
?”

“Cutting the puppet strings!”

“What puppet strings?”

He kicked the helmet and sent it spinning across the floor. “This machine has been pumping me full of junk.”

“Your visions?”

“The psychiatrists' visions!”

“They're yours, sweetheart.”

“No.” He shook his head doggedly.

With hands on hips, she glared at him. “The Freud only picked up your longings.”

He slumped on the edge of the bed and waved a hand in front of his face. “Okay, they're my stupid longings. But they've been used to manipulate me.”

“That's not true, and you know it. What you've imagined came out of your own mind.”

He sat in silence for a moment before saying, “Then I'm a monster of desire.”

“You're not a monster.” She sat next to him and curved an arm around his waist. “We all have strong desires. I wanted a husband. I wanted a college degree. I wanted to be an artist. I've run out of chances for any of those things,” she said, tears brimming. “But you have a chance to satisfy your longings. You have a gift. Your vision is so strong it can deliver you.”

He let himself relax into the curve of her arm. “Even if I survive the warp,” he said quietly, “my chance of finding a planet and a woman to match my vision is slim.”

“Slim is better than nothing,” she said. “It's better than I ever had.”

For the first time in a long while, he looked searchingly at his mother, chastened and surprised by her grief. Her cheeks were splotched, her eyes red from crying, her lips crimped tight. Instead of dwelling on his own unappeasable hunger, he felt hers.

“Alright,” he muttered. “I'll try. If I break through without going crazy, maybe I can find my heart's desire.”

His mother picked up the shattered helmet. “But won't you need the Freud?”

“Not anymore. The vision never leaves me now.”

Training for warp passage took three strenuous years. While Hoagy's conscious mind was absorbing the technicalities of flight, cross-species communication, bio-surveys and the like, his unconscious mind was elaborating the details of his visionary planet. The VIVA engineers who lectured about safety systems, the linguists who explained computer translation, and the neurophysiologists who monitored his brain were a blur to Hoagy. He took in their lessons, but otherwise ignored the instructors. The only people who captured his attention were his two partners, Jaffa Marx and Blake Polo. The three of them made up Alpha Trio, the first mind-conditioned group selected to pass through the timeshell.

Soon after the three had been introduced, Hoagy asked the others, “How old were you when you started on the eros couch?”

“Fourteen,” answered Blake, a dark and doughy man, fluent in a dozen languages, expert in semiotics.

“Twelve,” said Jaffa. She was an astrophysicist, tall and slender, with pale skin, lilting speech, and a bright, inquisitive manner.

“How long before you were—” Hoagy let his voice trail off.

“Possessed?” said Jaffa, her green eyes glinting. “I was hooked within a few months, first on guys, then on wild landscapes, and finally on a gorgeous planet.”

“I followed the same path,” Blake said, “only it took me a year to work my way from lovers to planet.”

“This place you've imagined, does it feel like your real home?” Hoagy asked.

“Yes,” said Jaffa, “like a garden I've been kicked out of.”

“Exactly,” Blake said. “I feel I'm in exile here on Earth.”

As they compared their visions, they gradually realized they were all imagining the same planet, right down to the contours of cliffs and smell of hot stone and taste of springwater.

“Maybe the VIVA psychiatrists implanted the image,” Blake suggested.

“That's what I used to think,” Hoagy conceded. “But there's another possibility. Maybe our vision is a genetic inheritance, passed down from ancestors who lived on another world before they brought the seeds of life to Earth.”

Jaffa snapped her fingers. “I've had the same thought.”

“So myths of paradise aren't inventions—” Blake began.

“They're species memories,” Hoagy said.

“Eden, Elysium, Shangri-La, nirvana,” Jaffa chanted, “all of them glimpses of an actual place, somewhere out there.”

“Yes,” Hoagy said. “One of those tens of millions of E-type planets.”

“But what are the chances of finding it?” Blake asked.

“And if we do,” said Jaffa, “will it still be a paradise?”

And so the trio spoke excitedly, finishing one another's sentences, merging ideas they had conceived in solitude. Blake held that language forms a cosmic net, which all living things
are weaving with their manifold speech. Eventually, consciousness will be able to journey from galaxy to galaxy on a web of signs. Consciousness already pervades the universe, according to Jaffa, who speculated that stars and quasars were manifestations of mind, with a subjective interior as well as a physical exterior. “Matter thinks,” she said flatly. “Just look at the brain. If the brain, why not a nebula?”

Why not? Hoagy thought, even as he realized that he and his partners might only be spinning theories out of a need to believe they could actually reach the world they longed for.

The sense of being in exile from their true home bound the Alpha Trio closely, further estranging them from ordinary people. Hoagy found it difficult to speak even with his mother, when she called two weeks before the launch to wish him well.

“You must be excited,” she said.

“Yes,” was all he could answer.

“This is the last call I'm allowed to make until after . . .” Her voice broke. On the screen her face was a white smear, which he could not bring into focus.

“After I'm back?” he suggested.

“Right. After you're back.” When he said nothing, she pleaded, “Hoagy?”

“I'm here, Mom.”

“Sweetheart, if I was wrong to get you into this . . . if anything happens to you . . . I'll never . . .” Again she faltered. Her face on the screen crinkled with pain. “I'm sorry,” she added hastily, and hung up before he could think of anything comforting to say.

During the final week before launch, the members of Alpha Trio were kept apart, each one training in a mock-up of the warp chamber. Murmuring through headphones, psychiatrists coaxed them into deep trance, then urged them back to ordinary consciousness. “Mind sprints,” Jaffa called the exercises.

Hoagy entered trance with ease, but struggled on the return. Hearing “T-state now,” he swiftly conjured up his garden planet. Earth dwindled away behind, until he could no longer feel its pull, as he raced toward his beautiful, sumptuous globe. He recognized the oceans, the green continents, the mountain ranges, the sinuous rivers. Nearing the surface, he smelled the ozone from waterfalls, the pheromones from mating animals, the juices of burgeoning plants. He ached to land. But an instant before he touched down, the voice rang in his ear: “R-state now!” Return was torture. He had to fight against the lure of his vision, wrenching himself free, until he tumbled back into real time and found himself once more in the warp chamber. After a brief rest, he was told how many seconds he still needed to shave off his re-entry time. Then came the order, “T-state, now!” and the cycle repeated.

He was always tempted to ignore the peremptory voice that called him back. But he knew he must delay consummation, for he needed the full psychic charge of desire to keep his mind from whirling apart as he passed through the temporal dislocation of warp.

Beginning three days before launch, the training schedule was relaxed. Nutritional supplements brought Hoagy's body up to peak strength, and injections of neurotransmitters revved his brain to a dazzling clarity. He could not help wondering how much
of this treatment had been given to those earlier astronauts, who had returned broken and mad.

On the morning of launch the Alpha Trio were reunited in the warp chamber. They nodded at one another, lips tight. Once harnessed in, shoulders nearly touching in the cramped space, they went through pre-flight checks. They confirmed the targeting instructions: fourth planet of K-47 in the Great Globular Cluster of Hercules, 25,000 light years away. Time elapse, .001 seconds. For reasons the physicists still could not explain, zero-elapse passage disintegrated machines as well as minds, while times longer than a thousandth of a second accelerated the rate of metal fatigue. So the meter was set at .001, and each of the astronauts read the setting aloud.