The Lifer edged back into the river. The water was warmed by the sun, and by the vegetation. He went carefully, searching for safe footings. He went down in a fresh place, not in the muddy slot the thief had made in the bank. He looked over his shoulder and saw water textured by floating weeds, then, beyond that, smooth, its skin twitching only where touched by pond skimmers. He glanced up at the guards, who were quiet now, and at the bridge, the still forms of all the staring convicts, the beautiful carvings, the lucent scales of sunlit water reflected on the underside of the sandstone arch. He looked around, and then he slipped, slithered back, his hands tearing at the weeds. He saw the thief lunge forward and splash onto his belly, hands stretched out.
The weeds came loose in the Lifer’s grasp. He was holding on to them, but they had let go at the root. There was nothing behind his feet. The weeds parted and he went back into the water, his eyes open. Billowing clouds of mud followed him and he lost sight of the surface for a moment. Then it was back, as brackets of black ripples on a hot blue sky. His shackles drew him down into the channel, and the weeds closed over his head. He was engulfed in caressing green gloom.
He held his breath. He stretched his arms up. He felt the cool lightness of air on his knuckles, so he opened his hands, forced his gnarled fingers straight up into the air. He waited for a grip, a rope, a breath—
The green light turned red, the still water turbulent. His lungs ached, then opened. He sucked in water. There was nothing behind it, or beyond it. No air. In a room beside the troublemaker’s cell, someone pushed back a down comforter. Maze Plasir turned up the flame of the lamp by the bed. The light was like a reprieve. The dreamhunter leaned back on his pillows and breathed deeply. He felt weak with gratitude just for waking up. It was absurd to feel that way, and Plasir waited patiently for the feeling to fade. While he waited, he hurried his recovery by saying to himself, “It is my nightmare, and so I am the river.”
Once the force of the nightmare’s end had faded, Plasir again began to feel dissatisfied with it. It wasn’t particularly strong, as far as nightmares went. But the Department of Corrections had chosen it from its description in the Regulatory Body’s Dream Almanac. The man next door, the troublemaker, had done something that Corrections thought would best be treated with a nightmare in which submersion and the weight of iron figured heavily. Plasir had no idea what the man had done. He just had to suppose that Corrections knew what they were doing.
The dreamhunter picked absentmindedly at a loose thread on the silk cord trim of his bolster. In a moment he’d lie down again and begin another cycle of the dream. He caught himself holding his breath as he strained to hear sounds on the other side of the wall. He remembered that there had been one subject who, for some reason unable to wake up, had stopped breathing.
The dream, Sunken, did end with a death. It was one of only a very few dreams that did so. Hame’s nightmare Buried Alive was so terrible that it was said no dreamhunter would be able to stay asleep long enough to see its end. Plasir wondered what would happen if an unconscious dreamhunter was set down on the site of Buried Alive. That would be an interesting experiment. But, sadly, no one could experiment with the nightmare since no one knew where it was to be found. Tziga Hame had concealed the dream’s site, and Lazarus—whoever the hell he was—wasn’t volunteering information to anybody.
Plasir liked to experiment with dreams. He had learned to like this process as he became more experienced, and as he began to notice how much some dreams changed.
Second Sentence, for instance, was a split dream. For years Plasir had caught it but hadn’t known it was a split dream. Then the Body had had Jerome Tilley, one of the rare “Novelists” (as those who caught split dreams were called), take a good look at all its most effective “Think Again” dreams. The Body had wanted to check that—for instance—a dream Plasir had been catching, about the young woman attacked in her home, might not also have something from the point of view of the husband who discovered her bleeding body at the dream’s conclusion. It turned out that it did have, and the dream Violated became Violated and The Husband’s Horror. The Body then had all its dreamhunters with Corrections contracts catch the dream till they found one who could reliably catch only The Husband’s Horror. Jerome Tilley’s experiments were all part of the Body’s plan to develop more “targeted treatments” for hardened offenders.
Noting Tilley’s experiments, Plasir had begun to wonder about his own specialty dreams. After a time, just wondering seemed to make it possible for him to open some of them up. He never did catch a split dream—he wasn’t a Novelist—but he found that a few dreams he knew suddenly switched their point of view. And so it was that Second Sentence had thrown up the nightmare Plasir named, simply, Sunken. Sunken had the same setting as Second Sentence—a bridge under construction in a country town, on a hot day after harvesttime.
Maze Plasir stopped pulling threads on the bolster and held his breath again. He had realized something. That Alexander Mason’s Water Diviner was also set in that place and at that time—the country town and valley full of the haze of smoke. Plasir concentrated; he looked very hard at his memory of the country town. It wasn’t anywhere he knew in life, and there was something about its reality that was off-kilter. There was the whittled elegance of the women’s skirts—skirts with higher hems than those women were wearing. There was the lack of jitters in the sleek motorcars. The town seemed real and not real at the same time (though, of course, all the dreams were factual, none had monsters, or unassisted flight, or any of the things true human dreams had). The country town of The Water Diviner, Sunken, and Second Sentence was strange to Plasir, yet, if he squinted through the brown haze at its distances, he thought he could see familiar hills, hills he’d seen somewhere he’d been as a child.
Plasir concentrated. He strained to know. Then he gave up, sighed, settled himself down on the bed, and went back to his first train of thought.
Sunken may have been set in the same place as Second Sentence, but it was very different. It showed the same events from a different point of view. The Lifer’s eyes lingered on everything because his thoughts dithered and doubled back on themselves. The man had gotten to the end of his life and seemed still to be trying to put his life together—like two plus two—to make something of it.
Second Sentence, however, was from the point of view of the violin thief. The young man began the dream happy, because his sentence was nearly up, and because he’d been working with the mason, a man whose skill he admired. The heat wasn’t draining the young thief dry; he had his health, and hope. He had learned his lesson. He was full of a resolve to stay out of trouble, to spend the rest of his life out of the power of the law. The smoke-stained skies made him think of music; the slow, green, waving weed made him think of music. Second Sentence was a constructive, reforming dream. It had lessons to teach, such as “Stick to your resolve” and “Keep your temper.” After the old Lifer drowned, straining up into the air, straightening his crippled fingers, the young man stared for a few seconds at his mud-caked hands and a thought flashed through his mind—or more a feeling than a thought, for the dreamhunter Plasir had never been able to make much sense of it. It was a thought about a belief or a story, and, like most of the thief’s thoughts, it had a kind of tune to it, a musical chant. “I’m not helpless,” the thief thought—as people in desperation do sometimes think the exact opposite of what is true and being proved to them. And then, in the dream, the young man lost his temper and surged up, took hold of a rifle in the hands of the nearest guard, the one standing slack-jawed and sated with cruelty. He tore the rifle away from the man, swung it, clubbing and clubbing, till other guards hauled him off. The guard had a broken skull, and the young thief, only weeks away from freedom, was then looking at years, at a second sentence.
Second Sentence was very effective, less a nightmare than a dream with a nasty, sobering turn at its end. But now that he was catching its other aspect, the dream seemed a lot less useful an
d positive to Plasir. The old man of Sunken had next to no experience of pity, yet how desperately he looked around him for it. He looked into all the faces. What he saw was what he already knew about the world—that it didn’t make any difference if you kept your temper or stuck to your good resolve, for there was malice, always close, and always ready to lend its icy hand.
Second Sentence showed a way out of trouble—though the young man didn’t take it. Sunken showed that it didn’t matter what you did, because accidents happened, and accidents were opportunities for evil. Second Sentence was a warning dream. Sunken was a nightmare. Taken together, they were horribly incompatible, and Plasir couldn’t help but wonder what a Novelist like Grace Tiebold would make of the dream—for it was one dream, and Grace Tiebold would catch it intact, the old man and the young together. She’d catch both the terror and despair of one, and the rage and crushed hope of the other.
Maze Plasir closed his eyes. He would go back to sleep. He would give the troublemaker in the next room another dose. And he’d try to take a better look at the other thing about the dream that troubled him.
Plasir had been the thief, on and off, for years. He’d seen everything through his eyes. The thief knew his own past, of course, but he wasn’t really thinking about it on that morning. For instance, Plasir had known from Second Sentence that the thief played the violin, but only learned from Sunken that he had stolen his own instrument from a pawnshop. Plasir knew about the thief only what he’d managed to gather from the young man’s thoughts on that afternoon at the bridge. Then, when he first caught Sunken, the old Lifer had shown Plasir the face of the person through whose eyes he’d formerly seen everything.
There was something about that face. Something familiar. The thief looked healthy and happy, and wary and furtive—none of this strange in a criminal on light duty and near the end of his time. But when the stone fell into the river, and the guards turned their spite into sport, and the two convicts were driven to the river’s edge, and the old Lifer gazed into the young thief’s face and saw fear and pity—
“I know that person,” Plasir thought. “I’ve seen that sensitive, stubborn mouth before. Not in a dream.” He pictured the mouth and the eyes. Eyes full of sadness and shame and resignation and, behind all that, power: pitiless, cold power.
3
HORLEY TOLD GRACE THAT HE’D PROMISED THE GRAND PATRIARCH HIS HELP WITH “THE CAUSE.”
“What cause is this?” Grace asked. “Tziga’s? Laura’s? The cause of stirring up trouble between dreamhunters and their public?”
“The Grand Patriarch offers refuge to renegade dreamhunters. He thinks the Body is up to no good. Tziga’s ideas and Laura’s actions have nothing to do with him. You can’t blame him.”
Grace glared at her husband. “Am I allowed to blame anyone? Or is it best for me to just bite my lip?”
“Better than biting me, dear. It’s not my fault that Laura and Tziga are out of reach.”
“No, but it is the fault of Erasmus Tiebold.”
Chorley gave a sigh of put-upon patience, kissed his wife on top of her head, and went out.
The Grand Patriarch thanked Chorley for his visit and told him that, since no one expected him to denounce dreamhunting, did he think he could investigate the Place?
“Rangers go there and make maps and call it exploration,” the Grand Patriarch said. “Philosophers muse about it as a phenomenon and call that—rightly in some ways —thinking about it. But none of us are getting any nearer to knowing what the Place really is. You’ve been close to the subject for years; you are familiar with all the distracting facts already. You have a reputation as something of a scientific mind, and an independent thinker. So please, Mr. Tiebold, look into it for me.”
Chorley had gone away, and for days he hadn’t been able to imagine where to start. He reread some of those philosophers and was struck again by how they all seemed to talk about the Place as if, by coming up with the right metaphor for it, they might be able to say what it was. He found that he liked Dr. King’s account in A History of Southland. King’s approach to the Place seemed practical; he tried to find evidence of its earliest appearance. Chorley mused on Dr. King’s speculation that the dreams might be memories of people who had lived in its geographic vicinity. And on his own idea that the Place was like a mirage. Chorley considered all this—as, no doubt, the Grand Patriarch already had.
And then he remembered the telegraph line that had once run through the Rifleman Pass, from Doorhandle to Sisters Beach. A line that was long ago abandoned. The wire, though intact and visible along its entire length, was finally deemed hopelessly unreliable. Signals were lost, and there were strange interferences, both a patterned tapping that didn’t match any known telegraphic code and bits of code that could be deciphered but that gave the key man on the receiving end bad, mad messages.
And so it was that, several days after remembering the abandoned telegraph line, Chorley found himself waiting in a poky room beneath the mosaic floor of the Founderston Central Post Office. The man Chorley waited with didn’t have much to say, but he stood at his desk sorting through a bunch of keys on a string. The room was dingy. There were windows only at the top of one wall. Through them Chorley could see people—or their feet at least—passing on the street, scuffed shoes and polished ones, the wheels of a pram, a woman in a hobble skirt, and the lower legs of a small girl in flimsy blue sandals.
“It’s summer already,” he thought.
A second clerk, a man with a coat and a complexion the color of manila cardboard, shuffled into the room. The first clerk stopped sorting his keys and tossed them back into an open drawer. He said, “I was just telling Mr. Tiebold here that if any of the bad transcriptions from the Wry-Valley-to-Sisters-Beach line had been kept, you would know where to find them.” He turned to Chorley and said, “Mr. Nevis was a key man at Doorhandle twenty years ago, when the trouble started.” Then—to Mr. Nevis, “Can you help Mr. Tiebold?”
Mr. Nevis nodded and held the door open.
As they descended into the cold subterranean corridors beneath the Central Post Office, Mr. Nevis told Chorley that—yes—he had been a key man in Doorhandle. He had sent and deciphered messages to and from Sisters Beach. In fact, he had been at his post in the telegraph office on the evening that the Doorhandle innkeeper came in to wire for a surgeon from Sisters Beach. “For the boy with the broken leg—who later became your brother-in-law, Mr. Hame,” Mr. Nevis said. “The line had been complete then for three years. It was working well, except when the road washed out once and took half a dozen poles with it. The weather in the Rifleman Pass was a challenge, but we hadn’t yet encountered the problem that closed us down. That problem started after Tziga Hame’s fall.”
Mr. Nevis opened a steel door, located a light switch, and let Chorley into a room with long avenues of shelves filled with files. The air was chilly and undisturbed.
“We kept those messages separate,” said Mr. Nevis. “We had a special file for them—several by the time the Post Office abandoned the line, which they didn’t do, despite the problems, till the Founderston to Sisters Beach Railway opened, and the new telegraphic line with it. Those files had red tape on their spines. I remember making up a new one myself.”
“How many were there?”
“Mad messages? Hundreds. We had to have a special short key code for ‘Corrupt. Send again.’”
Mr. Nevis made a noise of discovery and dropped into a crouch, his knees creaking. He pulled files from a shelf, bundled them into his arms, and got up with Chorley’s help.
At the back wall, there was a bench under a light, a bare bulb in a wire cage. “I’m afraid you won’t be very comfortable, Mr. Tiebold. My manager doesn’t really like anything brought up from underground. But I’m sure you’ll find you won’t need to look far for a good example. For nonsense of a special kind.”
“Is it formless nonsense? Or nonsense only in the context of the message?” Chorley asked. He longed to edge the
man aside and look himself.
Mr. Nevis was patting the pile of files, tidying and talking. “I never thought madness terribly interesting myself, whether it was Lady Macbeth wringing her hands or Lucia di Lammermoor wafting around in her bloodied bridal gown. I never looked at the corrupt messages with any real attention.”
Chorley stepped up beside the elderly clerk, seized the stack, and slid it along the bench till it was under his own nose. “Has anyone ever gone through these looking for a pattern?”
“What kind of pattern? All the Post Office did was try to fix the problem. It even had men camping out nights under every tenth pole in order to catch the pranksters.”
“And all this happened before the Regulatory Body was formed?”
“Yes. Otherwise it would have been their problem. The Post Office blamed us key men at first, said it was our mischief. We blamed the fellows on the other end. But it was the Place. That telegraph line was unbroken from Doorhandle to Tricksie Bend; it ran outside, not Inside—but the Place used it to try to talk to us. Look!” Mr. Nevis snatched one file, flipped pages, and found a message: MOTHER FAILING STOP DOCTOR SAYS ONLY MATTER OF DAYS STOP PLEASE RISE UP I SAID RISE UP COME AT ONCE STOP ANDREW.
“That’s more or less typical. That ‘Rise up’ stuff.” Mr. Nevis sounded triumphant. He peered at Chorley, waiting for a reaction.
Small hairs were bristling on Chorley’s nape, his whole scalp tightening. The “interruption” in the telegram was a plea, like the cry of a king besieged on a battlefield. He licked his dry lips. “Does this sort of thing turn up often?”
“‘Rise up’ you mean? Yes. We got that one all the time. Come to think of it, perhaps that’s the pattern you’re asking about?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Nevis sighed. “I suppose then that you’ll want to read through all of these?”