Keeper of Dreams (17 page)

Great civilizations grow up where certain conditions are met. Not only are there enough resources within reach to support a large population, there must be certain environmental challenges that greatly reward people who learn to work together in great public works projects. The cooperative ventures would then concentrate the population in a certain area where they might be wiped out by a single cataclysmic event.

In the Nile Valley, the annual floods made it easy to grow crops—but by creating granaries and guarding them together, much larger populations could sustain themselves through the dry season.

Whether the land is too wet and you have to have vast community
cooperation to create drier farmland, as in Mesoamerica, or the land is dry and you have to irrigate from the existing rivers, as in Mesopotamia and the Indus, civilizations grow where cooperation is rewarded with surpluses that can sustain “high” cultures.

So where in Eurasia could there have been a place where it was likely for a civilization to grow, and yet a single flood that was specifically
not
a river flood but an
ocean
flood take place?

While I still had hopes for the Mediterranean or Black Sea—or maybe the Persian Gulf?—I talked to my friend Michael Lewis, a geographer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I think it took him all of ten seconds to open the atlas and point to the Red Sea. “It’s a rift valley,” he said. “So almost no rivers flow into it. During the Ice Age, when it was cut off from the Indian Ocean, it would have dried up to a rump of what it is now—maybe even completely, like Lake Chad. And when the Ice Age ended and sea levels rose, it would have stayed low until the Indian Ocean broke through and flooded it in one amazing cataclysm. Anything and anyone in the Red Sea bed would have been swept away.”

Looking at a map, it was obvious. The trouble was, the very lack of water that would leave it as a rump sea would also indicate that nobody could live there.

Except . . . there would have been a bit more water flowing out of the wadis that do feed the Red Sea. Water from the wadis of southwest Arabia and the Eritrean coast might well have created the kind of seasonal marshland that would reward public works projects. Around the mountains of the Dahlak Archipelago and in the valley of the Mits’iwa Channel, water might have collected into streams and swamps; dammed and channeled, the land might have become a protocivilization.

Anyway, it certainly looked more plausible than any of the other candidates for the job. In the Red Sea, there most definitely would have been a flood, and while it might have happened during a rainstorm, the bulk of the water would have been seawater from the Indian Ocean. There might have been advance warnings as the Indian Ocean rose and occasionally lapped over, sending tongues of water licking out across the sandy wastes of the isthmus joining Arabia and Africa. A gout of water might even have made it all the way over, sending a mini-flood down into the Red Sea basin, only to abate when the storm died.

Then came the big one, and this time, instead of just flicking out a tongue of water, the storm would keep enough surges flowing after the first one that a channel would wear through the sand, and as the flow increased, the channel would carve itself deeper and wider, until it would look like the bursting of a dam. With no early-warning system, people in the bottomlands would find the ocean pouring in on them, wave after wave, and many who sought the nearest high ground (“surely the flood won’t go any higher than
this
”) would also be swept away.

I knew I had my flood location. Then all I needed was my flood story.

Foolishly, I did not go back to reread the Gilgamesh epic before giving my Noah character a name echoing that alternate source of the flood story. Only after I had written and my friend Richard Gilliam had published “Atlantis” in the Atlanta World Fantasy Convention anthology (
Grails: Quests, Visitations and Other Occurrences
) did I make the head-slapping realization that Gilgamesh wasn’t the flood guy, he went and
talked
to Utnapishtim, who was. Too late to fix it for that version; I’ll change it when I write the novel
Pastwatch II: The Flood
. Meanwhile, the story “Atlantis” stands as I first wrote it.

Sandy started babbling on Tuesday morning and Todd knew it was the end.

“They took Poogy and Gog away from me,” Sandy said sadly, her hand trembling, spilling coffee on the toast.

“What?” Todd mumbled.

“And never brought them back. Just took them. I looked all over.”

“Looked for what?”

“Poogy,” Sandy said, thrusting out her lower lip. The skin of her cheeks was sagging down to form jowls. Her hair was thin and fine, now, though she kept it dyed dark brown. “And Gog.”

“What the hell are Poogy and Gog?” Todd asked.

“You took them,” Sandy said. She started to cry. She kicked the table leg. Todd got up from the table and went to work.

The university was empty. Sunday. Damn Sunday, never anyone there to help with the work on Sunday. Waste too much damn time looking up things that students should be sent to find out.

He went to the lab. Ryan was there. They looked over the computer readouts. “Blood,” said Ryan, “just plain ain’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

“Not one thing,” Todd said.

“Plenty of tests left to run.”

“No tests left to run except the viral microscopy, and that’s next week.”

Ryan smiled. “Well, then, the problem must be viral.”

“You know damn well the problem isn’t viral.”

Ryan looked at him sharply, his long grey hair tossing in the opposite direction. “What is it then? Sunspots? Aliens from outer space? God’s punishment? The Jews? Yellow Peril?”

Todd didn’t answer. Just settled down to doublechecking the figures. Outside he heard the Sunday parade. Pentecostal. Jesus Will Save You, Brother, When You Go Without Your Sins. How could he concentrate?

“What’s wrong?” Ryan asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Todd answered. Nothing. Sweet Jesus, you old man, if I could live to thirty-three I’d let them hang my corpse from any cross they wanted. If I could live to thirty.

Twenty-four. Birthday June 28. They used to celebrate birthdays. Now everyone tried to keep it secret. Not Todd, though. Not well-adjusted Todd. Even had a few friends over, they drank to his health. His hands shook at night now, like palsy, like fear, and his teeth were rotting in his mouth. He looked down at the paper where his hands were following the lines. The numbers blurred. Have to have new glasses again, second time this year. The veins on his hands stuck out blue and evil-looking.

And Sandy was over the edge today.

She was only twenty-two; it hit the women first. He had met her just before college, they had married, had nine children in nine years—duty to the race. It must be child-bearing that made the women get it sooner. But the race had to go on.

Somehow. And now their older children were grown up, having children of their own. Miracles of modern medicine. We don’t know why you get old so young, and we can’t cure it, but in the meantime we can give you a little more adulthood—accelerated development, six-month gestation, puberty at nine, not a disease left you could catch except the one. But the one was enough. Not as large as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

His chin quivered and tears dropped down wrinkled cheeks onto the page.

“What is it?” Ryan asked, concerned. Todd shook his head. He didn’t need comfort, not from a novice of eighteen, only two years out of college.

“What is it?” Ryan persisted.

“It’s tears,” Todd answered. “A salty fluid produced by a gland near the eye, used for lubrication. Also serves double-duty as a signal to other people that stress cannot be privately coped with.”

“So don’t cope privately. What is it?”

Todd got up and left the room. He went to his office and called the medical center.

“Psychiatric,” he said to the moronic voice that answered.

Psychiatric was busy. He called again and got through. Dr. Lassiter was in.

“Todd,” Lassiter said.

“Val,” Todd answered. “Got a problem.”

“Can it wait? Busy day.”

“Can’t wait. It’s Sandy. She started babbling today.”

“Ah,” said Val. “I’m sorry. Is it bad?”

“She remembers her separation therapy. Like it was yesterday.”

“That’s it then, Todd,” Val said. “I’m really sorry. Sandy’s a wonderful woman, good researcher, but there’s nothing we can do.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be able to see signs before she reaches this stage?”

“Usually,” Val answered, “but not always. Think back, though. I’m sure you’ll remember signs.”

Todd swallowed. “Have you got a space, Val? You knew Sandy back in the old days, back when we were kids in the—”

“Is this pressure, Todd?” Val asked abruptly. “Appeal to friendship? Don’t you know the law?”

“I know the law, dammit, I’m asking you, one medical researcher to another, is there room?”

“There’s room, Todd,” Val answered, “for the treatables. But if she’s reverted to separation therapy, then what can I do? It’s a matter of weeks. For your own safety you have to turn her over, never know what’s going to happen during the final senility, you know. Hallucinations. Sometimes violence. There’s still strength in the old bones.”

“She’s committed no crime.”

“It’s also the law,” Val reminded him. “Good-bye.”

Todd hung up the phone. Turn her over? He’d never thought it would come to Sandy so suddenly. He couldn’t just turn her over, she’d
hate him, she had enough of herself left in herself to know what was going on. They’d been married thirteen years.

He went back to Ryan in the lab and told him to put the computers on the viral microscopy tomorrow.

“That’s unscientific, to rush it,” said Ryan.

“Damned unscientific,” Todd agreed. “Do it.”

“OK,” Ryan answered. “It’s Sandy, isn’t it?”

“It’s handwriting,” Todd said. “It’s all over the walls.”

Todd went home and found Sandy in the living room, cuddling a pillow and watching the tube. Someone was yelling at someone else. Sandy didn’t care. She was stroking the pillow, making love noises. Todd sat on the chair and watched her for almost an hour. She never noticed him. She did, however, change pillows.

“Gog,” she said.

She listened for an answer, nodded, smiled, held the pillow to her breasts. Todd chewed his fingernails. His heart was fluttering.

He went into the kitchen and fixed dinner. She ate, though she spilled a great deal and threw her spoon on the floor.

He put her to bed. Then he showered, came back out, and crawled into bed beside her.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing,” she challenged, her voice husky and mature.

“Going to bed,” Todd answered.

“Not in my bed, you bastard,” she said, shoving at him.

“
My
bed, you mean,” he said, even though he knew better.

She growled. Like a tiger, Todd thought. Then she clawed at his face. Her nails were long. He lurched back, his face on fire with pain. The motion carried him off the bed. He landed heavily on the floor. His brittle old bones ached at the impact. He felt for his eyes, to see if they were still there. They were.

“If you ever come back,” she said, “I’ll have my husband eat you alive.”

Todd didn’t bother arguing. He went into the living room and curled up on the couch. For the first time he wished that children still lived at home nowadays. That even the two-year-old were there to talk to. He touched the pillow, pulled it toward him, then stopped himself. Pillows. One of the signs.

Not me, he thought.

He fell asleep surrounded by nightmares of childhood, attacked on all sides by sagging flesh and fragile bones and eyes and ears that had forgotten all they ever knew how to do.

He woke with the blood clotted stiffly on his face. His back was sore where he had struck the floor last night. He walked stiffly to the bathroom. When he washed the blood off his face the cuts opened again, and he spent a half hour stanching the bleeding.

When he left home, Sandy was sitting at the kitchen table, holding a tea party for herself and the pillows.

“Good-bye, Sandy,” Todd said.

“More tea, Gog?” she answered.

He did not go to the lab. Instead he went to the library and used his top security clearance to gain access to the gerontology section. It was illegal to use security clearance for personal purposes, but who would know? Who would care, for that matter. He found a volume entitled
Psychology of Accelerated Aging
by V. N. Lassiter. He finished it at one o’clock.

Ryan looked irritated when Todd finally came in.

“We’ve been running the series without you,” he said, “but holy hell, Todd, everybody’s been on my back for doing it early. If you’re going to give me a screwed-up order, at least be here to take the lumps.”

“Sorry.” Todd started looking over the early readouts.