Dreams (20 page)

Dr. Singh rubbed his jaw. "We're learning a lot about Mars, Miss Smith. We have strong evidence that there was once plenty of water on Mars. Rivers and seas, yes. Percival Lowell and Giovanni Schiaparelli may have been right, and all the skeptics of the past century, wrong. And if you saw what you drew—"

He stopped.

After a while, Olga Smith said, "If I saw what I drew—what, Dr. Singh?"

"I don't know. Astral projection? Second sight? Remote viewing? Conscious time-travel? Each explanation is more far-fetched than the last." After a pause he said, "I wish I could convince you to come back to Mountain View with me. We can assemble a team to try and figure this out. If you are able to travel—or, at any rate, to 'see'—across vast distances of time and space, this could be one of the most amazing tools for research ever discovered."

Long story short, Olga closed up shop in Arcata. Strictly temporarily. She liked that town, she had friends there. She had found a home in Arcata, which she had never done in Wheaton or Chicago or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle or either Vancouver. Walter Macintosh agreed to accompany her to Mountain View. He drove his own car, a lovingly restored 1966 Volvo 544. Olga's brother Milton agreed to stay in the Arcata house until Olga returned.

And in Mountain View, nothing happened. The astronomers were fascinated by Olga's drawings, the psychologists interviewed her endlessly. But nothing happened.

She did meet some interesting and very nice people. The chief headshrinker was the blackest woman she'd ever encountered. Her name was Pamela Snowden. The top mathematician and computer genius looked like a down-on-his-luck professional wrestler badly in need of a shave and a shower. He introduced himself as Biff McGurk. There just happened to be a book lying on a nearby table. Olga read the stamping on the spine.
Inverse Multidimensional Matrix Inversion and Analysis Techniques for Universal Platform Transforms, by Eldon M. J. McGurk, Ph.D., D.Sc.

Who said that NASA scientists were a humorless bunch?

Olga had brought her Primal Atom snow globe with her, and all of her Dietrich Buxtehude CDs. The NASA people did their best to re-create Olga's trance room, and truth be told they did a remarkably good job of it. They even rounded up some packages of the kind of incense that Olga had used in Arcata.

Nothing happened.

So it was
Thanks very much, Miss Smith,
and
Please stay in touch, Miss Smith,
and
Of course we'll pay all expenses and even give you a consulting fee out of our discretionary budget, Miss Smith,
and Walter Macintosh and Olga Smith rode back from Mountain View to Arcata, California, a picturesque but demanding drive, and Madame Olga was back in business.

But that isn't the end of the story.

Olga and Walter resumed their pleasant lives in Arcata. Milton decided that he wanted to be a software designer and enrolled at Humboldt State. Two more of Olga's siblings, the twins Anna and Hannah, made their way to the West Coast and took up residence in the growing community of Madame Olga's family. They were only kids, eleven years of age, in fact, but the elder Smiths had by now reconciled themselves to Olga's having become the
de facto mater familias
of the Smith demesne.

And Olga continued to play Buxtehude recordings and gaze into her Primal Atom snow globe and produce amazing drawings of exotic scenes and alien beings. She bought a digital camera and took photos of her drawings and sent them to Jaskaran Singh by email.

Things went along tranquilly until the morning Olga's phone rang and an excited Jaskaran Singh told her that she had produced another drawing of a real place. It was Enceladus. Olga said she'd never heard of Enceladus. Dr. Singh said it was one of the moons of Saturn. It was believed to be warmed by tidal forces and to be geologically active.

Olga wasn't sure why Dr. Singh was telling her this.

He said, "You have drawn a picture of a village—I suppose we should call it a village—on Enceladus, and of the inhabitants of that village, who apparently resemble upright bipeds covered with a leafy exoskeleton. And they are looking upward. And in the sky above them you have placed a crewless scientific probe with NASA insignia."

Olga smiled. "That one, I will confess, has to be a dream. Don't you think so?"

"Miss Smith, the probe that you drew has yet to be activated. It's here in Mountain View right now. There's plenty of work still to be done on it. It should be completed and tested within the next year. It's scheduled to be shipped by rail to Florida and launched from Cape Canaveral. And the trip to Saturn—to Enceladus—will take another six years."

Olga held her breath, waiting for Jaskaran Singh to continue.

"It appears, Miss Smith, that you have not only drawn a scene on a world several hundred million miles from Earth. But the event you have drawn will not take place for seven years. It appears that you can see the future."

Dr. Singh definitely sounded breathless.

"Your Martian image was almost certainly of a moment from the remote past. That's remarkable enough. But your image of Enceladus is a vision of the future. That's more than remarkable. It's astonishing. It is going to shake the scientific world to its very foundations."

Olga said, "I hope you're not going to ask me to leave Arcata again."

Dr. Singh said, "No. That was a hard lesson. Your power—I suppose we have to call it that—your power operates in Arcata but not in Mountain View. But what I would like to do—several of my colleagues and I, members of the team you met when you were here—what we'd like to do is see if anyone else can do the same things you do. And also see which variables have an effect on your performance."

"Variables? What variables?"

"Well, for instance, is the music vital to your visions? Would you have the same experiences in a silent room?"

"I have no idea."

"Nor I. But suppose the choice of music, the selection, had an effect on your power? Would Haydn do as well as Buxtehude? What about, oh, Scarlatti? Or Ralph Vaughan Williams? Do you see what I mean?"

She did.

A week later a van pulled up to Madame Olga's House of Mystery in Arcata, California. Out poured the scientists and technicians and their support crew. Equipment you wouldn't believe, ranging from electroencephalographs to two- and three-dimensional imaging systems, to an array of computers that would set Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to playing rock-paper-scissors for who gets to tinker with them first.

Olga wasn't exactly happy about all this. She'd fled the world of Wheaton, Illinois, because she felt out of place in those surroundings. She'd sampled half a dozen cities from Chicago to Los Angeles to Vancouver (both Vancouvers, right) and not wanted to live in any of them. But if Olga wouldn't come to the big city, it looked as if the big city was coming to Olga, and she didn't care much for it.

She kept her friends in Arcata and she kept her classes going, more because they relaxed her than because she needed her students' fees. Maybe she should move out of Arcata, find a place in a smaller town nearby. Her friend Robyn Marten actually lived in Fickle Hill, and Walter Macintosh had a place in The Bottoms.

But if Olga moved, she knew that Jaskaran Singh and his NASA colleagues would only follow. So she laid down the law about ground rules in Madame Olga's House of Mystery and vowed to make the best of it. She was in favor of science, after all, and if she truly had an unusual, even unique power, she felt that she ought to cooperate with the researchers from Mountain View.

The first experiment involved setting up conditions identical to the ones that had produced her drawings, but without music.

Nothing.

Bach, Mozart, Scarlatti, Hildegard von Bingen. She loved the music. She even had some pleasant dreams. But no drawings.

Okay, bring back Buxtehude.

First try, a beautiful vision of a triple star. Red, white, and blue, no less. Dozens of planets, weaving in an intricate cosmic dance. And objects moving among them that looked more like living beings than artifacts.

Try it without the Primal Atom snow globe.

Nothing.

Try it with a Santa Claus snow globe.

A dream of her childhood in Wheaton, Illinois. Pleasant enough but nothing special about that.

Try it on an empty stomach, try it on an avocado and tomato salad, try it on a glass of wine. Try it with a different brand of incense. Try it with no incense. When one of the Mountain View bigdomes suggested trying it on LSD, Olga refused flat out.

Try it in teams. Olga and Walter, Olga and Milton, Olga and her friend Robyn.

Nix.

Try it with—now here's a concept!—Olga's twin siblings, Anna and Hannah.

Neither twin had shown any particular talent for graphics or any particular interest in drawing or painting. Still Jaskaran Singh thought it would be worth a try. Olga had come to trust Dr. Singh by this time, a feeling that she did not have for most of his colleagues.

Everything was kept as much like Olga's surroundings, the surroundings that had worked for her, as possible. The snow globe, the incense, the drawn drapes, the Buxtehude music. The only difference was the second chair that had been added.

Anna and Hannah were the youngest of the Smith septet, born three minutes apart in the maternity ward of Wheaton Lutheran Hospital and inseparable, in what sometimes seemed virtual telepathic empathy, all their lives. They were eleven years old—oh, you knew that already—and their greatest passion was roller-blading.

There was a question of supervision and observation. Olga Smith was adamant about barring the Mountain View people from the trance room with Anna and Hannah during the experiment. Pamela Snowden—remember her?—the NASA psychologist on site, vetoed Olga's presence. That would distract the twins, the headshrinker insisted, and Olga had to concede that this would be the case.

Anna and Hannah were of the peculiar variety of twins who were alike in every way imaginable, at least genetically. To the NASA biologists, that meant that they had started as a single fertilized ovum. At a very early stage of development, as the cells multiplied, the almost microscopic cluster of protoplasm had split in half, each half carrying a full set of chromosomes. But in this case, instead of being identical, they were each other's mirror images. Anna was left-handed. Hannah was right-handed. Anna's hair parted naturally on the right. Hannah's hair parted naturally on the left.

Sitting at their older sister's desk, the twins tried to maintain silent concentration on the Primal Atom snow globe. At least, that appeared to be the case in the image that Pamela Snowden and the rest of the NASA gang saw in the video monitor that was the compromise agreed to in lieu of having live witnesses in the trance room with the twins.

After the first thirty seconds the girls had their heads together, whispering. Within the next thirty seconds this led to mutual rib-poking and threats of tickling. Next came the giggles.

Pamela Snowden looked at Olga Smith, who looked at Jaskaran Singh, who looked at Pamela Snowden. In short order they were giggling, too.

But the twins settled down, put their elbows on the desk, gazed into the snow globe, and slowly slid forward until their heads lay on the desk.

The sound of Glen Wilson playing a Buxtehude sarabande on a lovingly restored 1805 Marcus Gabriel Sondermann harpsichord filled the air.

Nothing happened except for two twenty-first-century eleven-year-olds snoozing, emitting occasional gentle snores to the accompaniment of seventeenth century music played on a nineteenth century instrument. After a while the Buxtehude harpsichord compositions gave way to organ performances—those are what brought J. S. Bach to Buxtehude's venue in Lübeck—and choral works.

Anna and Hannah slept on.

The watchers drank coffee, took notes, and made sure that the recording apparatus hooked up to the TV monitor was functioning. Eventually they started taking relief in shifts. Several six-packs of beer were obtained and consumed. A table-stakes poker game broke out in the kitchen.

Dr. Singh remarked that it was getting light outside, although the trance room was kept dark. By eight o'clock Arcata was up and bustling but the twins still slumbered.

Followed a brief consultation among the Mountain View contingent and Olga Smith. The music was faded to silence. The incense sticks had long since burned out and were not renewed.

Still the twins slept on.

Olga insisted on being the one to enter the trance room and draw back the drapes.

Slowly, Anna sat up, stretched, yawned, got to her feet, and looked around as if she wasn't quite sure where she was.

Simultaneously, Hannah yawned, sat up, stretched, got to her feet, and looked around with exactly the same expression as her sister. Well, not quite exactly. Each girl's actions reflected the right-for-left, mirror-like reversal of the other.

Then Anna and Hannah began to dance.

Olga started toward them but she felt a hand on her elbow and turned to see Pamela Snowden, the head headshrinker from Mountain View.

"Please," Snowden said, "don't touch them. They're doing something very important. I can't say that I understand it, but we must not interrupt."

Biff McGurk—you remember him, too—growled, "Well, I do understand it. Can't you see the pattern in what they're doing? We're getting all of this down on microchips, I hope."

They were.

First Anna and then Hannah slouched back into their deserted chairs. They looked up at their elder sister, Olga, and first Hannah and then Anna said, "Wow, am I ever hungry!"

One twin wanted ice cream and pizza and the other wanted pizza and ice cream. You are free to decide which girl wanted which treat first. They both got what they asked for.

While the twins were stoking up their eleven-year old bodies with sugar, fats, and carbohydrates, the main nutritional requirements of their generation, Eldon M. J. McGurk, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Science, was uploading the contents of the microchip recording of Anna and Hannah's dance.