The Dream Master (10 page)

She knew him in all his roles, who could not exist without an audience. He was Life.

He was the Shaper…

He was the Maker and the Mover.

He was greater than heroes.

A mind may hold many things. It learns. It cannot teach itself not to think, though.

Emotions remain the same, qualitatively, throughout life; the stimuli to which they respond are subject to quantitative variations, but the feelings are stock in trade.

This why the theater survives: it is cross-cultural; it contains the North Pole and the South Pole of the human condition; the emotions fall like iron filings within its field.

A mind cannot teach itself not to think, but feelings fall into destined patterns.

He was her theater…

He was the poles of the world.

He was all actions.

He was not the imitation of actions, but the actions themselves.

She knew he was a very capable man named Charles Render.

She felt he was the Shaper.

A mind may hold many things.

But he was more than any one thing:

He was every.

… She felt it.

When she stood to leave, her heels made echoes across the emptied dark.

As she moved up the aisle, the sounds returned to her and returned to her.

She was walking through an emptied theater, away from an emptied stage. She was alone.

At the head of the aisle, she stopped.

Like distant laughter, ended by a sudden slap, there was silence.

She was neither audience nor player now. She was alone in a dark theater.

She had cut a throat and saved a life.

She had listened tonight, felt tonight, applauded tonight.

Now, again, it was all gone away, and she was alone in a dark theater.

She was afraid.

The man continued to walk along the highway until he reached a certain tree. He stood, hands in his pockets, and
stared at it for a long while. Then he turned and headed back in the direction from which he had come. Tomorrow was another day.

“Oh, sorrow-crowned love of my life, why hast thou forsaken me? Am I not fair? I have loved thee long, and all the places of silence know my wailings. I have loved thee beyond myself, and I suffer for it. I have loved thee beyond life with all its sweetness, and the sweetnesses have turned to cloves and to almonds. I am ready to leave this my life for thee. Why shouldst thou depart in the greatwinged, manylegged ships over the sea, bearing with thee thy Lares and Penates, and I here alone? I shall make me a fire, to burn. I shall make me a fire—a conflagration to incinerate time and to burn away the spaces that separate us. I would be with thee always. I shall not go gently and silent into that holocaust, but wailing. I am no ordinary maiden, to pine away my life and to die, dark-eyed and sallow. For I am of the blood of the Princes of the Earth, and my arm is as the arm of a man’s in the battle. My upraised sword smites the helm of my foe and he falls down before it. I have never been subdued, my lord. But my eyes are sick of weeping, and my tongue of crying out. To make me to see thee, and then to never see thee again is a crime beyond expiation. I cannot forgive my love, nor thee. There was a time when I laughed at the songs of love and the plaints of the maidens by the riverside. Now is my laughter drawn, as an arrow from a wound, and I am myself without thee and alone. Forgive me not, love, for having loved thee. I want to fuel a fire with memory and my hopes. I want to set to burning my already burning thoughts of thee, to lay thee like a poem upon a campfire, to burn thy rhythmic utterance to ash. I loved thee, and thou hast departed. Never again will I see thee in this life, hear again the music of thy voice, feel again the thunder of thy touch. I loved thee, and I am forsaken and alone. I loved thee, and my words fell upon ears that were deaf and my self upon eyes that saw not. Am I not fair, oh winds of the Earth, who wash me over, who stoke these, my fires? Why then hast thou forsaken me, oh life of the heart in my breast? I go now to the flame my father, to better be received. In all the passes of loving, there will never be another such as thee. May the gods bless thee and sustain thee, oh light, and may their judgment not come too heavy upon thee for this thing thou hast done. Aeneas, I burn for thee! Fire, be my last love!”

There was applause as she swayed within the lighted circle and fell. Then the room was darkened.

A moment later the light was restored, and the other members of the Act a Myth Club rose and came forward to congratulate her on her perceptive interpretation. They discussed the significance of the folk-motif, from the
suttee
to the immolation of Brunhilde. Good, basic—fire—they decided. “Fire… my last love”—good: Eros and Thanatos in a final cleansing burst of flame.

After they had used up their appreciation, a small, stooped man and his birdlike, birdtracked wife moved to the center of the room.

“Heloise and Abelard,” the man announced.

A respectful silence gathered about them.

A beefy man in his middle-forties moved to his side, face glazed with perspiration.

“My chief castrater,” said Abelard.

The big man smiled and bowed.

“Now, let us begin…”

There was a single clap and darkness fell.

Like deep-burrowing, mythological worms, power lines, pipelines, and pneumatic tubes stretch themselves across the continent. Pulsing, peristalsis-like, they drink of the Earth and the thunderbolt. They take oil and electricity and water and coal-wash and small parcels and large packages and letters into themselves. Passing through them, beneath the Earth, these things are excreted at their proper destinations, and the machines who work in these places take over from there.

Blind, they sprawl far away from the sun; without taste, the Earth and the thunderbolt go undigested; without smell or hearing, the Earth is their rock-filled prison. They only know what they touch; and touching is their constant function.

Such is the deep-buried joy of the worm.

Render had spoken with the staff psychologist and had inspected the physical education equipment at the new school. He had also inspected the students’ quarters and had been satisfied.

Now, though, as he left Peter once again at the place of education, he felt somehow dissatisfied. He was not certain why. Everything had seemed in as good order as it had been when first he had visited. Peter had seemed in high spirits, too. Exceptionally high spirits.

He returned to his car and drifted out onto the highway—that great rootless tree whose branches covered two continents (and once the Bering Bridgeway was completed would enfold the world, saving only Australia, the polar icecaps, and islands)—he wondered, and wondering, he found no answer to his discontent.

Should he call Jill and ask about her cold? Or was she still angry over her coat and the Christmas that had accompanied it?

His hands fell into his lap, and the countryside jumped up and down around him as he moved through the ranks of the hills.

His hand twitched toward the panel once more.

“Hello?”

“Eileen, Render here. I didn’t get to call you when it happened, but I heard about that tracheotomy you performed at the Play House…”

“Yes,” she said, “good thing I was handy—me and a sharp knife. Where are you calling from?”

“My car. I just left Peter at school. On my way back now.”

“Oh? How is he? His ankle…?”

“Fine. We had a little scare there at Christmas, but nothing came of it. Tell me how it happened at the Play House, if it doesn’t bother you.”

“Blood bother a doctor?” She laughed softly. “Well, it was late, right before the last act…”

Render leaned back and smiled, lit a cigarette, listened.

Outside, the country settled down to a smooth plain and he coasted across it like a bowling ball, right in the groove all the way to the pocket.

He passed a walking man.

Beneath high wires and above buried cables, he was walking again, beside a great branch of the road-tree, walking through snow-specked air and broadcast power.

Cars sped by, and a few of their passengers saw him.

His hands were in the pockets of his jacket and his head was low, because he looked at nothing. His collar was turned up and heaven’s melting contributions, the snowflakes, were collected on the brim of his hat.

He wore rubbers. The ground was wet and a little muddy.

He trudged on, a stray charge within the field of a great generator.

“…
Dinner tonight at the P & S?”

“Why not?” said Render.

“Say eight?”

“‘Eight.’ Tally-ho!”

Some of them dropped down out of the sky, but mainly they came spinning in off the roads…

The cars released their people onto platforms within the great car-hives. The air-taxis set theirs free in landing areas, near to the kiosks of the underground belt-way.

But whatever the means by which they arrived, the people toured Exhibit Hall on foot.

The building was octagonal, its roof an inverted soup bowl. Eight non-functional triangles of black stone provided decoration at each corner, without.

The soup bowl was a selective filter. Right now, it was sucking all the blue out of the gray evening and was glowing faintly on the outside—whiter than all the dirty snows of yesterday. Its ceiling was a cloudless summer sky at eleven o’clock in the
a.m., without a sun to mar its Morning Glory frosting.

The people flowed beneath this sky, passed among the exhibits, moved like a shallow stream through a place of rocks.

They moved in ripples and random swirlings. They eddied; they churned, bubbled, babbled. Occasionally, there was a sparkle…

They poured steadily from the parked machines beyond the blue horizon.

After they had run their course, they completed the circuit by returning to the metal clouds which had borne them to the running.

It was Outward that they passed.

Outward was the Air Force-sponsored Exhibit which had been open for the past two weeks, twenty-four hours a day, and which had drawn spectators from all over the world.

Outward was a survey of Man’s achievements in Space.

Heading Outward was a two-star general, with a dozen colonels, eighteen lieutenant colonels, many majors, numerous captains, and countless lieutenants on his staff. Nobody ever saw the general, excepting the colonels and the people from Exhibits, Incorporated. Exhibits, Incorporated owned Exhibit Hall, there by the spaceport, and they set things up in good taste for all the exhibitionists who employed them.

First, to the right, as you entered Toadstool Hall (as it had been dubbed by some Vite), was the Gallery.

In the Gallery were the mural-sized photos that a spectator could almost walk off into, losing himself in the high, slender mountains behind Moonbase III (which looked as if they would sway in the wind, were there any wind to sway them); or wander through the bubble-cap of that undermoon city, perhaps running a hand along one of the cold lobes of the observational cerebrum and feeling its rapid thoughts clicking within; or, passing by, enter that rusty desert beneath the greenish sky, cough once or twice, spit bloody spittle, circle the towering walls of the above-ground Port Complex—bluegray, monolithic, built upon the ruins of God knows what—and enter into that fortress where men move like ghosts in a Martian department store, feel the texture of those glassite walls, and make some of the soft and only noises in the whole world; or pass across Mercury’s Acre of Hell in the cool of the imagination, tasting the colors—the burning yellow, the cinnamon and the orange—and come to rest at last in Big Ice Box, where Frost Giant battles Fire Wight, and where each compartment is sealed and separately maintained—as in a submarine or transport rocket, and for the same, basic reason; or stroll on out in the direction of the Outer Five, where the hero is heat and cold the villain, stand there in a frosted oven beneath a mountain, hands in pockets, and count the colored streaks in the walls like opals, see the sun as a brilliant star, shiver, exhale vapors, and agree that these are all very wonderful places to have circling about the sun, and nice pictures, too.

After the Gallery were the Grav-rooms, to which one might climb by means of a stairway smelling of fresh-cut lumber. At the top, one might select the grav one wished—Moon-weight, Mars-weight. Merc-weight—and ride back to the floor of the Hall on a diminishing cushion of air, elevator-like, knowing for a moment the feeling of weight personal carried on the chosen world impersonal. The platform drops down, the landing is muffled… Like falling into hay, like falling into a feather bed.

Next, there was a waist-high rail—brass. It went around the Fountain of the Worlds.

Lean over, look down…

Scooped out of the light was a bottomless pool of black…

It was an orrery.

In it, the worlds swung on magnetic lines, glowing. They moved around a burning beachball of a sun; the distance to the outer ones was scaled down, and they shone frostily, palely, through the murk; the Earth was emerald, turquoise;

Venus was milky jade; Mars, an orange sherbet; Mercury, butter, Galliano, breadcrust, fresh-baked.

Food and riches hung in the Fountain of the Worlds. Those who hungered and lusted leaned on the brass rail and stared. Such is the stuff dreams are made of.

The others looked and passed by, going on to see the full-sized reconstruction of the decompression chamber of Moonbase I, or to hear the valve manufacturer’s representative give little-known facts concerning the construction of the pressure-locks and the power of the air pumps. (He was a short, red-haired man who knew many statistics.) Or they rode across the Hall in the cars of the overhead-suspension monorail. Or they saw the 20-minute
Outward—With Stops At Spots
film, which was so special as to feature a live narrator rather than soundtrack. They mounted freshly-heaped wall-cliffs in scaleboats, and they operated the pincers of the great claw-cans, used for off-Earth strip-mining.

Those who hungered stayed longer, though, in one place.