K. W. Jeter - The Dreamfields

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2024-12-19 0 0 363.4KB 147 页 5.9玖币
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The Dreamfields by K.W.
Jeter
This was the dream of Arthur. He thought there was come into this
land griffons and serpents, and he thought they burnt and slew all the
people in the land, and then he thought he fought with them, and they
did him passing great harm and wounded him full sore, but at the last
he slew them. When the king awaked he was passing heavy of his dream.
—Sir Thomas Malory, Morte d'Arthur
PART ONE
The Base
CHAPTER 1
Something had struck the earth and it wouldn't stop ringing. Or so it
seemed. Ralph Metric took another pull at the beer can sweating in his
hand and watched the heat waves shimmer on the rocks and sand beyond
the glass. Below the glaring window the air conditioner whined.
"I just think it's kind of strange," came Stimmitz's voice again. It cut
through the aural haze produced by Bach cantatas dribbling into the room
at low volume. "Don't you? Strange, a little?"
"Huh?" Ralph turned, from the window. A phantom desert in green and
purple slowly ebbed from his vision, revealing Stimmitz sitting in the dark
end of the room. On one of the bookshelves behind him the reels of his
tape deck inexorably rotated.
"Strange." The too-angular legs shifted their positions, like some part of
a mantis flexing. "Don't you think it is?"
Somehow I got lost here, thought Ralph. While I was looking out the
window? I can't even remember what we were talking about. "Strange?"
The word itself had gotten a little fuzzy from repetition, and beer. Bach,
too. He discovered he was running his thumb around the top of the beer
can at the same speed the tape reels were going around. He switched the
beer to his other hand and slid the first into his pocket. "What's strange?"
he said.
"Oh. You know." Stimmitz looked past Ralph towards the window.
"Operation Dreamwatch, the whole thing. The uniforms and the
pretend-military bit. I mean, if they really want discipline so tight, why'd
they hire people… like Glogolt, for Pete's sake. That jerk's been here longer
than any of us and he still hasn't learned how to do the regulation knot in
his tie." Stimmitz's eyes shifted a fraction of an inch and refocused on
Ralph.
"Glogolt's got quite a stack, of deficiency notices." Ralph interposed the
beer can between Stimmitz's eyes and his own and took another swallow.
"Yeah, but they don't get rid of him. So they must have some kind of
use for him, right? But what good is somebody like Glogolt? Or any of the
people here, for that matter."
Ralph laid the cool damp of the beer can against his cheek and said
nothing. Stimmitz was poking at a group of thoughts that had been
wadding up in Ralph's gut for some time now. About the size of a
basketball, thought Ralph glumly. That's how they feel.
"I mean, this is an expensive set-up," Stimmitz's mouth moved again
beneath his hardening eyes. "This all costs money, a lot of it. How come
there's so much Muehlenfeldt money being dumped into this project while
there's a war going on?"
"Muehlenfeldt money?" Through Ralph's mind flashed a brief image of
the distinguished Senator M. cranking a printing press in a dank
basement.
"Of course. This whole thing's bankrolled through their Ultimate
Foundation."
"So? Somebody's got to pay for it."
"Yeah, but why?" A slight increase in the volume of Stimmitz's voice
eclipsed the murmuring Bach cantata. "What's the whole project doing
here? What's it for?"
"It's for 125 dollars a week," said Ralph with beer-laden profundity.
"Plus room and board."
"Come on."
"Yeah, well, they told us what it's for, didn't they? Therapy, right? For
all those messed-up little juvenile delinquents over there at the Thronsen
Home."
Stimmitz was quiet for a moment, then spoke very softly. "Do you
believe that?"
A thin layer of Bach crept through the room for several seconds. "I
guess so," said Ralph finally. "Why shouldn't I?"
"I went into Thronsen yesterday," said Stimmitz. "Helga and I did. We
cut a hole in the perimeter fence and went into the main building—"
"Hey, you're not supposed to do that."
Stimmitz looked annoyed, then shrugged. "Sometimes you have to do
things you're not supposed to."
"So what'd you find?" Ralph's curiosity had started to unfold a little.
From the tape came a soprano solo, then the chorus again, sounding as
if from a great distance. "Maybe I'd better not tell you just now," said
Stimmitz. "Maybe later."
"I hate that," said Ralph in disgust. "I hate it when people do that.
Teasing you with some crummy little secret, and then they won't tell you."
"You probably wouldn't believe me, anyway. Not yet at least." He
seemed to be drawing away from the conversation. "You're still operating
out of a whole different universe."
The last sounded like something Stimmitz had always talked about
before, but to which Ralph had never paid attention. "Don't start that." He
leaned over to deposit the beer can on a low table already crowded with
empties. The can slid from his grasp and dropped the last inch to the table
top. A few drops of warm fluid splashed out of the little opening and
flecked his hand. "All this talk about universes—" He paused to hold down
a belch, "—is just a way of avoiding the real problem." Which is? mocked a
portion of him that the beer hadn't reached. He ignored it and headed for
the bathroom. A couple more empty cans fell over on the floor as his feet
hit them.
"Just remember," said Stimmitz as Ralph crossed in front of him,
"what went on today. While you were here."
"Sure." Ralph pushed open the door. "Remember this conversation
always. Changed my whole life."
"Seriously." Stimmitz's voice followed him into the smallest room of his
apartment. "In case… uh, something happens. And I don't get around to
talking to you about this again."
Ralph nodded and closed the door without saying anything. What was
that all about? he wondered.
When he came out, the Bach cantatas tape had ended. The loose end of
the tape fluttered as the take-up reel continued to spin. The chair in front
of the bookshelves was empty.
Ralph went to the tape deck and switched it off. Small lights died and
went out. "Stimmitz?" he said, turning around.
The room was silent except for the air conditioner. Outside the window
the desert still vibrated with heat.
"Hey. Where are you? Hey, Stimmitz, where'd you go?" He pivoted
slowly in the center of the room.
"What's the matter?" Stimmitz came back into the room from the
apartment's miniscule balcony. He had been standing to one side where
Ralph couldn't see him. "What's wrong?" he said, sliding the window shut
behind himself.
"Nothing." Ralph kneaded his forehead with one hand. Something
during the last few seconds had dissipated the gassy alcoholic haze
produced by the beer. Maybe his universe is catching up on me? "Just
don't—go around disappearing like that, OK?" From the floor he picked up
his uniform coat with the green and gold Opwatch patch on the sleeve.
* * *
As he crossed the base, he was aware that to anybody watching from
one of the apartment buildings, it would look as if he were now
shimmering with heat waves, too. That's all right, thought Ralph. As long
as you're in phase. He trudged on towards the base's Rec hall.
Through its door of dark glass he could see a few of the other watchers.
The sweat on his forehead and along his arms chilled as he pushed open
the door and stepped into another air-conditioned area.
"What's up, Ralph?" Slouched in one of the sagging, upholstered chairs,
Kathy Foyle continued to gaze dispassionately at a section of newspaper. A
bit of nail came loose from the rest and she took her forefinger away from
her mouth. A lock of her dark hair straggled in front of one ear.
"Nothing much. About the same." The exchange had become a ritual
with them, a section of meaningless time that had formed into a loop and
kept splicing itself in. There were other loops as well, Ralph knew, which
were capable of multiplying into whole days.
The rest of the newspaper lay on the unused pool table in the middle of
the room. The table's felt had become gritty with the little bit of the
Californian desert that came into the room every time the door was
opened. Ralph's fingertips left little marks as he picked up the L.A. Times'
front page.
XIMENTO FRONT PENETRATED Hill B-12 Taken, Says Pentagon.
Where was that? The name sounded Mexican to Ralph, though he hadn't
been aware that the fighting had spread that far north. Considering his
only mild curiosity, the text below the headline looked too dense to
penetrate. He laid down the paper, then headed along the hall's main
corridor to pick up his mail.
He peered into the little box set into the wall with all the others. There
was nothing except an offer to join some record club—he got a lot of those;
he was on somebody's list somewhere—and his weekly copy of the
Revolutionary Workers' Party Agitant. A mimeographed note was stapled
to the low-grade paper. It stated that if he didn't send a couple more
dollars, they would regretfully have to let his one-month trial subscription
come to an end. The same note had been stapled to every issue he had
received for the past six months.
He took a quick glance at the paper—SUPPORT SOCIALIST MARTYRS
OF XIMENTO!—then dropped it and the record-club offer into a waste
can and walked back to the main room.
Kathy was gone but Fred Goodell was now sprawled in one of the
chairs, gazing out the glass door and scratching between the creases of his
sweat-stained Opwatch dress shirt. His bored-ferret face looked up at
Ralph. "You on tonight?"
"Yeah," said Ralph. He lowered himself into one of the chairs. The tired
upholstery sighed even under his thin frame. "This is my Monday."
Goodell nodded. "Two more nights for me." The watchers' shifts were
staggered through the week. "Then I'll be off." The conversation dissolved
into silence.
I'd better go fix myself something to eat, thought Ralph vaguely. And
then go to sleep for a while. Rest up for another eight hours on the
dreamfield tonight. After half a year on this job, there were still times
when spending the night wandering around in other people's dreams
seemed like an unnatural thing to do.
CHAPTER 2
"All right, men." Operations Chief Blenek paced back and forth in front
of them with his clipboard held behind his back. "Straight through,
tonight. No heroics. Just do everything by the manual, the Opwatch way.
All right?"
"Oh, brother," muttered Chuck Fletchum, and slouched lower in his
folding metal chair next to Ralph. "They must be running those World
War Two bomber squadron flicks on TV again."
Ralph said nothing. He could recall the week that one of the local
stations had scheduled a batch of 1940s' spy movies, and the pudgy
functionary had actually shown up at the pre-shift briefings wearing a
belted trenchcoat.
Blenek had fallen silent and was now glaring at the two dozen men in
front of him, his small eyes set to impale whomever he had heard talking;
they fastened on Glogolt, who was a couple of chairs ahead of Ralph.
"What was that smart remark, Mr. Glogolt?"
"Didn't say anything," mumbled the accused. He shifted his sacklike
bulk, a small mountain of flesh encased in a wrinkled jumpsuit.
"Look at those shoes," snarled Blenek, pressing his case. "When was the
last time you took a rag to them? And pull up your zipper—you're a mess."
Ralph leaned back and studied Glogolt—he was a mess. He always
looked as if he were somehow disintegrating inside his clothes, as if the
effort to retain human shape had become too much for him. It made one
tired just to look at him. Stimmitz is right, thought Ralph. What good is
there having somebody like that around!
He looked over at Stimmitz sitting with his chair pushed against the
wall of the briefing room. The eyes in the impassive face focused
somewhere beyond the room. Ralph wondered what he was thinking. One
of Stimmitz's hands gripped the edge of his chair, his knuckles tensed
white.
The voice of one of the other watchers broke through Ralph's attention.
"Come on, Blenek, get on with it."
Blenek's eyes swept over the group again, then narrowed. They became
two thin gauges of the anger he obviously felt over the difference between
Operation Dreamwatch as it was and his fantasies of it. Clashing
universes, Ralph found himself thinking—a phrase picked up from
Stimmitz.
"This just came over from the Thronsen Home," said Blenek sullenly.
"They've started a new pattern some of you guys might observe tonight. In
it, the kid is accused of shoplifting a candy bar, kid denies it, shopkeeper
hits kid and searches him, in doing so tears the new jacket the kid's
mother gave him, shopkeeper turns into kid's mother, and then it segues
into one of the 'angry parent' cycles. Got it?" Blenek had worked himself
back into his original gung-ho mood. "Let's keep an eye out for it and get
some reports in on it. Show the brass we're not just sleeping around here."
He placed his clipboard under his arm and rocked back on his heels. His
wide belly tautened his Op-watch uniform. "Okay, move out—time to get
on the line."
As they crossed the short open space between the briefing room and the
line shack—the grounds of the base were lit blue by moonlight and the
desert's numerous stars—Ralph glanced over at the group of female
watchers sauntering out of their own briefing room. In a few moments
they would be on the dreamfield of the girls in the Thronsen Home.
At a distance of fifty meters or so, Ralph could just recognize Kathy.
She waved briefly to him, holding a lit cigarette. It didn't appear to him as
if she had combed her hair since she had woken up last—one of her
regular shortcomings, Ralph conceded. He looked, but didn't see Helga
Warner in the group.
He turned away and followed the other men into the line shack. The
building housing the PKD Laboratories' Field Insertion Device wasn't a
shack at all, but the largest cubic pile of cinderblocks and concrete for
miles around. "Shack," Ralph had decided, was probably just more
pseudo-military lingo.
As he stepped into the building's doorway, a pair of distant screams
sounded from the sky. He looked back and up. Two pale luminous jet trails
were vanishing into the south. Another midnight terror-bomb run,
probably, down to the Brazilian front. Maybe Blenek should put in for a
job over at the Air Force base, thought Ralph. He pulled the door shut
behind himself.
The towering banks of electronics were softly humming as he passed by
them. The air inside the building was sharp with ozone. Blenek scowled at
him and made a mark on his clipboard as Ralph stepped past him. The
last vacant strap was at the end of the thick cable dangling from the lofty
ceiling. He grabbed the leather loop and felt the cold metal contact point
settle against his palm. The permeating electronic hum grew louder.
Blenek paced slowly alongside the line of watchers, who were hanging
onto the line's straps like bored subway passengers. He glanced from them
to his clipboard and back again, until he seemed satisfied that everyone
was there. Pivoting on his heel, he waved up at the control booth. "Okay,
Benny, take 'em on out."
Nothing happened. The man in the little glass booth several meters
above their heads remained absorbed in a half-eaten sandwich and a
paperback book. He had his feet up on the controls that would activate the
line and send the watchers out onto the dreamfield.
"Hey, Benny, come on!" shouted Blenek. "What're you doing up there?"
"What does it look like?" said Goodell, who was standing closest to
Blenek. He took Blenek's pencil out of his hand and flung it up at the glass
booth. It ticked against the glass and fell back to the floor. Benny lowered
his feet and looked down at them.
"Come on!" Blenek waved his clipboard, a stiff rectangular bat flapping
around his reddened face. "Throw the switch, dummy!"
Benny's mouth moved, forming words they couldn't hear, but his hands
travelled across the control board anyway. The electronic hum whooped
up in pitch and held its new note. The fluorescent lights suspended from
the ceiling dimmed, reminding Ralph of the electrocution scenes from old
prison movies, then the entire building, Blenek, and Benny up in the
control booth, faded into grayness.
The dreamfield faded in. The familiar sidewalks and storefronts of a
semi-rural small town solidified around the watchers holding onto the
line's straps. From a blue sky the fields eternal midafternoon sun shone
upon them, but they cast no shadows upon the street's surface.
The humming noise from the shack's electronics back in the real world
faded and then ceased entirely. One by one, the watchers let go of the
leather straps. The line hung motionless for a moment, then snaked
upwards, gathering speed until it vanished in the limitless sky above them.
One of the watchers yawned and stretched his arms. "If I stand around
here," he announced, "I'll cork off in about ten seconds. Let's go." He
motioned to his observation partner, and the two of them slowly started
away from the group.
The rest divided into pairs and headed off in different directions along
the dreamfield's sidewalks. They all moved at the same unhurried pace.
"Which way you want to go?" asked Stimmitz. It was the first time he
had spoken to Ralph since that afternoon.
"Whichever way looks good to you." Ralph glanced at his watch; for
some reason, he and Stimmitz were the only watchers he had ever seen
with time-pieces. Eleven-fifteen, he noted, and sighed. Seven and
three-quarters hours until the line came dangling down out of the sky
again.
They walked in silence past a small drugstore. Circular racks of
sunglasses and the aisles of cosmetics and other merchandise could be
seen through its window. The store, like the others on the block, was lit up
inside but vacant—the dream sequences tended to show up farther away
from wherever the watchers had been dropped by the line.
Idly, Ralph pushed his fingers through the drugstore window. After an
initial resistance, his hand went into the glass as though it were a body of
water somehow made vertical. The nature of objects on the dreamfield
was described alternately as "cheesy insubstantiality" and "evanescent
jello." The mental orientation that kept the watchers on top of the
sidewalks instead of sinking slowly through them also gave a slight
surface-tension effect to everything in the dreamfield's illusion of a small
town. The glass actually felt like water rippling around Ralph's moving
hand.
He turned his head and looked behind. The other watchers were all out
of sight. Beside him, Stimmitz slowly paced, silent and apparently lost in
thought.
They reached the end of the block and crossed the street. On the other
side were the same stores as they had just passed, but reversed as if they
had walked through a mirror. The entire field was made up of infinite
repetitions and reflections of the same small area. If the two of them
continued walking down the street, the neon sign that spelled out
DRUGSTORE would become EROTSGURD and then DRUGSTORE
again… again and again, for as far as they went on the field.
The sound of voices broke the silence. They had come upon the first
dream sequence of the night. "In there," said Stimmitz, pointing to the
restaurant in the middle of the block on the other side of the street. The
voices grew louder as he and Ralph headed towards them. One voice, a
child's, cracked with emotion.
Peering through the restaurant's door, they watched the scene, already
well under way. "The old puppy-on-a-platter pattern," said Stimmitz.
摘要：

ScannedbyHighroller.ProofedbyaProofpackProofer.MadeprettierbyuseofEBookDesignGroupStylesheet.TheDreamfieldsbyK.W.JeterThiswasthedreamofArthur.Hethoughttherewascomeintothislandgriffonsandserpents,andhethoughttheyburntandslewallthepeopleintheland,andthenhethoughthefoughtwiththem,andtheydidhimpassinggr...

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