Again, Dangerous Visions Part 36

"Before you read the texts," he said, "look at the starting times registered on both alpha-REM graphs. The clue is there."

I did as he suggested. Vicki's dream, if the styluses were right, had started at precisely 3:47.91, Quentin's at precisely 3:47.91.

"No gap at all," I said. "This time they did start neck and neck."

"The evidence is indisputable. I've wondered many times if this would happen, and if so, when, but I never dreamed, if you'll forgive the word in this context, it would be so soon, and the results so violent. As a matter of fact, I've even had a careful study of the time differentials made, to ascertain if they indicated any trend. There certainly was a trend. It wasn't straightline, there were waverings and backslidings, but we found an undeniable overall curve. Downward. When they began sleeping together, their dream initiation times were as much as five and six minutes apart. Slowly, and jerkily, the gap came down to four minutes, then three, then two. It was a mathematical certainty that in the end the gap would close, they would be identical starters, but we couldn't say when. Today, as you've seen, the gap was closed. With a bang, and a variety of whimpers."

"What does this tell you about his going berserk?"

"You've read samples of their earlier dreams, Mr. Rengs. You know his were never just mirror images of hers, he was resisting, fighting off her imposed content, distorting her symbols, cloaking, reshaping. But the resistance was going steadily down. In the last days his dreams have echoed hers much more strongly and nakedly. This explains why the gap was narrowing between their starting times. Because his unconscious was fighting hers off less and less, his dreams were triggered more and more rapidly by hers. As he became more and more her slave in point of time, so he did in the dream content."

"And today the gap is wiped out altogether. Meaning his resistance is wiped out?"

"I see no way to avoid that interpretation."

"If that's so, wouldn't his dream be an exact duplicate of hers, with no distortions, colorings, reshapings?"

For answer, Wolands slid the two typewritten sheets closer to me. Not wanting to, I read.

Vicki:

A cla.s.sroom. Subject, musicology. Various instruments on display on pedestals. Students in kneepants and Eton collars are members of The Omen, plus Ivar. Lecturer is myself in academic robes but wearing tall conical hat with arcane symbols on it, plus an a.s.sortment of musical signs. I say, students, today our subject is lyrics. Students begin to take careful notes. I say, lyric derives from the word lyre, name for the old string instrument, the hand-held harp, which was used in olden times to accompany vocalized words. I take down the lyre from its pedestal. I strum its strings. I say, the member of this cla.s.s who calls himself a lyricist is a lyre, spelled, 1-i-a-r, p.r.o.nounced, liar. Because he claims to write original lyrics and only steals them from his collaborator. I say, I will now introduce the collaborator, who is not a liar but a true lyricist worthy to be accompanied on the lyre. Will our guest lecturer Mr. Gordon Rengs please come in. Mr. Rengs steps in, wearing a leopard-skin loincloth, more a jockstrap. I say, Mr. Rengs will now favor us with a few words on the musical potential of the human knuckles as an accompanying instrument. Mr. Rengs says, friends, music lovers, the melodic and harmonic capacities of the human knuckles are limitless, if they are in good condition and emit rich, resonant soundings, not the unpleasant cracklings of the over-dry and hence brittle, those who at their hardest may crack and shatter. Allow me to demonstrate with one of my own compositions. He begins to sing, Fire come down the mountaing, burn up all you house an goods, striking rich, resonant background chords from his knuckles with some xylophone hammers. He says, there is an individual present in this room who claims he strikes songs like Mah Own Tang from his own richly lyrical knuckles but I can attest that his knuckles only crack, as the too brittle bones crack in Hemingway, and, in short, that I wrote this song, as I write all his songs, and he is an ooze pretending to be a monolith, and only plagiarizes...

It went on and on. Vicki had been dreaming lavishly today. I felt I had read quite enough. With some reluctance I turned to the twin sheet.

Quentin:

Lecture hall. Some cla.s.s in musicology. Lots of instruments standing on pedestals. All The Omen and me present, in short pants and wide starched collars with big bunched ties. Lecturer is Vicki, wearing doctoral robes, high cone-shaped hat with magic and music symbols all over it. She says, today our subject is lyrics. We begin to make notes. She says, lyric derives from the word lyre, name of an old string instrument, the hand-held harp, which they used in ancient times to accompany vocalists. She takes the lyre down from its stand. She runs her fingers across the strings. She says, the member of this cla.s.s who calls himself a lyricist is a lyre...

I felt an ache at the base of my tongue, as though it were being pulled at hard. I said, "Yes, I guess you could call this a breakthrough."

"A break through and down," Wolands said.

"This is what I get out of it. Ivar may have some potency doubts. I suspect this because one night, April 22, he was having heated erotic thoughts about Vicki, and decided to go to her place and establish his virility, but instead smoked a lot of marijuana and pa.s.sed out, maybe to avoid the challenge. Let's say it's so. All right. Vicki senses this shakiness in him from the beginning. Out of her own malicious needs, she goes after this weakness in him, real or imagined. Her unconscious goes after it. Her dreams zero in on this sore spot, week after week. Today they score the full bulls-eye, all the fight's gone out of him..."

"I would say that's very acute, Mr. Rengs. To the extent that he's an avoider, she's an attacker, their whole sequence of dreams shows that. And this afternoon, when he had no more defenses left, no more energies to ward off her gibes, and her dream crashed into his full force, he felt invaded. He knew such a terrible dream had to come from somewhere. It was out of the question to name himself as the source. So he decided it was all trickery, we were in an elaborate plot against him, using sleep suggestion, piped-in voices, and so on. He's right to suspect there's some sort of psychic breaking and entering, of course. What he doesn't know, because we haven't been able to tell him, is that the footpadding is exclusively of the mental order, without electronic tricks."

"There's one thing I don't understand. Why has she got me parading through her dream as a lyric writer in a loincloth?"

"The best person to ask about that is Vicki, Mr. Rengs. She's down on the campus waiting for you. She thinks it's important that you two talk."

In parting I said, "You may have to revise your ideas somewhat. The worst wars may originate in dreams."

He countered with, "Come, come, Mr. Rengs, you're not going to argue that Ivar and Vicki are typical dreamers."

"Maybe not. But they're typical, if highly energized, infighters."

"That's precisely why we must study them in depth, Mr. Rengs. Thanks to the rich network of underground channels open between them, they afford us a rare opportunity to get some electroencephalographic and other insights into that most American of phenomena, togetherness. Don't you think they're the ideal mutually tuned couple? Perhaps, if we can learn enough about these two, we'll come to appreciate that togetherness can be one of the weirdest and wildest variants of total war, if not its prime source...."

Her face was covered with bruises, but she was in good spirits. As soon as we found a place on a bench, she said, "I don't blame Ivar for any of this."

I said, "That's broadminded of you. Whom do you blame?"

"n.o.body, Mr. Rengs. The setup in the lab guaranteed that it would come to this sooner or later, I see that very clearly now."

"How, exactly?"

"I'm not a fool, Mr. Rengs. I know now that what they're really studying, at least as between Ivar and me, is some kind of ESP, and between Ivar and me there's d.a.m.n plenty."

"How do you know that?"

"I've got a head to think with. And plenty to think about, after today. I don't have to see Ivar's dream records to know there are correspondences between our dreams, overlaps, echoes back and forth, that just can't be explained by any kind of communication other than the extra-sensory. For example, the songs, incantations, whatever you want to call them, that show up in my dreams. Don't you suppose I recognize how close they come to the lyrics Ivar keeps turning out for The Omen? I sing about what's the temperature of the Shiny One's Rotunda, zero or unda, only I never breathe a word about this dream to him, yet he comes back with, what's the temperature of heaven, seven. Such reverberations need explaining, don't they?"

"And your explanation is?"

"ESP, Mr. Rengs, there's no two ways about it. It's only a question of which way the ESP traffic goes, him to me or me to him. I'm dead sure of the direction now, it's him to me all the way. And that's the reason you showed up in the dreams today. In mine, and I suppose in Ivar's, though there I'm just guessing."

"You're losing me, Vicki. How would ESP from Ivar to you bring me in?"

"I've got the whole picture now, Mr. Rengs, I a.s.sure you. You're his collaborator! He's boasted about it often enough when I've complimented him on his lyrics! He uses the word collaborator so he can claim a creative a.s.sociation with a distinguished writer and teacher like you, but what he's hiding with that puffed-up boast is that you really write those great lyrics and he just steals them and puts his name on them! He's an impotent scribbler but he gets a big creative potency from you, because you're nice enough and generous enough to let him take all the credit! Well, he's got to have a lot of secret guilts about that sleazy lie, which color his dreams, and, in reflex, mine. Today those guilts just shot up and took over his dream. He was making a naked confession as to his plagiarism in his dream, and it spilled right over into mine. Of course, he couldn't acknowledge that the terrible revelation in that dream came from him, and spilled out to me. He had to claim it originated with me and was fed in some tricky way into into him. And, of course, had to deny it was based on fact. We know the technical word for that, projection, sneaking your own guilts out and into others. So he came roaring after me, to beat me up for his own sleep admissions. But listen, I know I'm right about how the traffic goes. I know because of the inspired lyrics that come out of a clod and a dud like Ivar. They come up in you, a vastly talented man. He takes them over. They get fed into my dreams, even ones he's still working on, ones I haven't heard yet and couldn't possibly know. So what I'm saying is, there's a flow of rich psychic material him. And, of course, had to deny it was based on fact. We know the technical word for that, projection, sneaking your own guilts out and into others. So he came roaring after me, to beat me up for his own sleep admissions. But listen, I know I'm right about how the traffic goes. I know because of the inspired lyrics that come out of a clod and a dud like Ivar. They come up in you, a vastly talented man. He takes them over. They get fed into my dreams, even ones he's still working on, ones I haven't heard yet and couldn't possibly know. So what I'm saying is, there's a flow of rich psychic material through through Ivar, and into me. Coming, if you want to name the source, from Ivar, and into me. Coming, if you want to name the source, from you you. I know the logistics here, Mr. Rengs. Ivar's only a transmitting belt, for marvelous excitements and incitements from you to me. That's what I wanted to say to you. When there's that much wild flow from one human being to another, they ought to face the fact and consider its meanings..."

The ache at the root of my tongue had become a nagging pulse. This was a new situation to me, the Muse accusing the a-mused of plagiarism, or having a ghostwriter.

"I think you're exaggerating the sizes of my emotional exports, Vicki To begin with, I really contribute very little to Quentin's lyrics, you must believe-"

"Come on, Mr. Rengs. Really. How's a klutz like that going to come up on his own with a shattering thought like, comes the savior, to lead us upstairs to best behavior, and if his name's mao, will we gao? There's a kind; of genius in that. I can tell a klutz from a genius."

"You should also be able to tell that this genius of mine does not produce such inspired lines in my own writing. These references to klutzes, Vicki. I'd like to get into that a little more. You seem to feel that Quentin is somewhat deficient in fields other than lyric writing. For example, why do you make so much of his knuckles? Their fragility, and so on?"

"Oh, that started with something simple. Once in the lab, while we were waiting to be called, just to pa.s.s the time, because he's not exactly an inspired conversationalist, I said something about Hemingway. That's it, he'd told me you were scheduled to give a lecture to the Santana branch ; of FANNUS on all the broken bones in Hemingway, and that interested me, so I said, that's right, it's a panorama of fractures, the males in Hemingway were always getting their bones broken, and having severe potency troubles too, so maybe the broken bones were as much symbols as anatomy. I said, Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls For Whom the Bell Tolls can't finally make it with Maria because they shot his leg into splinters at the bridge, but Jake Barnes can't get together with Lady Brett in can't finally make it with Maria because they shot his leg into splinters at the bridge, but Jake Barnes can't get together with Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises The Sun Also Rises because his tool of the male trade was shot off in the war, and didn't it add up to the same thing finally? That's when I first noticed this funny habit in Ivar, how he began to suck on his knuckles like they were candy, and the color in his cheeks was high. I said to him on that occasion, what are you trying to do, dissolve your knuckles? His color got higher and he said something feeblemindedly irrelevant, something about, well, on the subject of sucking, you smoke and I don't. He's really a nowhere conversationalist." because his tool of the male trade was shot off in the war, and didn't it add up to the same thing finally? That's when I first noticed this funny habit in Ivar, how he began to suck on his knuckles like they were candy, and the color in his cheeks was high. I said to him on that occasion, what are you trying to do, dissolve your knuckles? His color got higher and he said something feeblemindedly irrelevant, something about, well, on the subject of sucking, you smoke and I don't. He's really a nowhere conversationalist."

"Coming back to today's dream, Vicki. The dream you feel Quentin originated and pa.s.sed along to you. What's your thought as to why Quentin would bring me on the scene dressed in a loincloth?"

"Nothing to it! You're the creator, he's the copycat and snitcher! The creative one's the potent one, right! The source of all the flow! The male in the loincloth's the walking epitome of potency, whereas the snotnose plagiarist is a kid in kid's sissy clothes who can do nothing with his puny little pencil but sit there while the real man talks and take impotent notes! It's so plain, no wonder the dumdum had to jump me and give me a working over! On the a.s.sumption that this humiliating picture was sent out by me, not you, of course."

"I see."

"Another thing I've been dying to ask you, Mr. Rengs. How come you know so much about synovial fluid?"

I bit my tongue hard, at precisely the point where it was still sore from my biting it some days before.

"Do I?"

"Plenty. See, the other afternoon Ivar and I were chatting for a minute, and when I remarked about his cracking his knuckles so much he said it had something to do with synovial fluid. He said you'd explained the whole thing to him, that it has mucinlike ingredients, it's secreted by the synovial linings of bursae, articulations, and tendon sheaths. Well, I give you my word, that hit me hard. When I was an undergraduate I was set on being a doctor so I took the pre-med course, a lot of cla.s.ses in physiology and such, so I know all about synovial fluid, but I wondered how a nonscientist would know so much. Where did you pick up all this technical information, Mr. Rengs?"

"Here and there, I guess. Anybody who's a writer browses a lot."

"You might know the name of the fluid, yes. But all that detailed information about bursae and articulations and mucin? It just doesn't figure, bright as a man like you must be."

"Vicki, I once was friendly with the flamenco guitarist Segovia. He was a pre-med student before he gave up science in favor of his first love, the guitar. We spent many evenings together, talking about this and that, he gave me a lot of medical information that's stuck in my mind. Forgive me, it's been stimulating talking to you but I must go now, lecture to prepare-"

"You going to lecture any more on the statistical distribution of broken bones in Hemingway? I'd sure like to hear you talk about that."

"No, I've about covered that, what I'm tackling next is a more fluid subject, the incidence of ptomaine in the 19th-century literature of the Iberian Peninsula."

"Ho. Wowie. Now that's irrevocably wild, Mr. Rengs. I had a dream way back there about ptomaine and Spain, one of my first dreams, if you don't believe me ask Dr. Wolands to look it up in the records. If you needed any more proof about the traffic between you and me and its direction-"

"Yes. Goodbye, Vicki."

"See you around, Mr. Rengs."

"Right. I'll be the one wearing the loincloth."

I'm sorry to be breaking a prime rule of the writing game. Everybody knows about the so-called obligatory scene. If you've been building to a confrontation, laid the groundwork for a showdown, you're obliged, it's said, to carry through. This is known as going from premise to payoff. Now, in this REMMY story I've been telling, so full of rapid eye movements, there are certainly the seeds of one more encounter between Victoria Paylow and myself, a bang-up, all-out, full-bodied encounter in which all foreshadowed can come to, well, pa.s.s. The encounter never took place, I'm obliged to report, and that's the extent of my obligation. It makes no difference how rapidly you're eyeing me. This is the point where make-believe and the undoctored particulars part company. On the stage, for example, you have to stick with your premises to the neatly packaged end. In real life, you can vacate any premises any time you want. This is the great advantage of actuality over art, and why many people prefer it. All I'm saying is, being more interested in guarding my hide than weaving a plot, I was under no obligation to come face to face with Victoria Paylow again, and didn't.

There was one more phone call, however. The voltage flow being, I hardly have to note, from Vicki to me. I mean, she was the one who placed the call, and made the major waves, I a.s.sume of the alpha order; arousing much REM in me.

"Mr. Rengs, I just wanted to tell you I got a new guitar, the Sleep Project paid for it, I'd love to show it to you."

"Vicki, you're half my age."

"So? Does that make me half your weight? Height? Body heat? Itch?"

"It makes me twice as old as you."

"I'm for all that separates the men from the boys. So I can get to the men without stepping around the boys and wasting valuable time."

"Don't you care about the generation gap?"

"I care about people who know how to hop it. Neither party has to travel the whole distance. I could meet you halfway. Or at any bar you care to name. For that matter, at your apartment. Say in about 15 minutes."

"You're a fluid always ready to call a cab."

"A good ossicle's hard to find. It's worth some road work."

Behind every successful man, we're told, there has to be a woman. Yes, but a miniskirted graduate student of the incantatory arts with a guitar slung over her shoulder? Robert Graves may be right about the fount of all poetry being the primal Mother-Mate-Mistress-Muse, the chesty White G.o.ddess fancied up with asps and corn shucks. But must she be putting all the words, every last one, in our mouths? What are we, then, sending stations, echo chambers?

I had a wobbly picture of Vicki and myself lying side by side, togethered in bliss, her unconscious dictating all my books to my unconscious. I thought about her, in some ESP-oriented future, having legal claim to my royalties. Suing me. For plagiarism.

"Vicki, you may be a fluid, but you're acting like several petrified forests on the move. Which, I'll make no bones about it, petrifies me. Which, I don't have to point out to your sharp mind, is not a good state for your purposes. My calcifications and your liquefactions, I'm afraid, are destined to remain forever unjoined. That's about the hard and the soft of it."

"You're a flinty man, Mr. Rengs. That's what I like about you."

"You're the sort of lymphy girl I vastly admire, Vicki. At a distance."

"A gap?"

"Agape."

"I hear The Omen's recording a new number Ivar just wrote, something called, Ptomaine in Spain Falls Rainly in the Plains Ptomaine in Spain Falls Rainly in the Plains. Now, Jesus, Peter, Paul, and Mary, doesn't that prove-"

"My cup runneth over. With a grateful dead of migraines, a loving spoonful of cold sweats, a holding company of grand-mal seizures. I wish you and your whole generation well, and G.o.dspeed, without traffic jams. Goodbye, Vicki."

Leopard skin. Ho. Syllogism serenade sweatshirt. Hm.

Afterword.

I haven't paid much attention to science fiction but the last time I thought about it, 11 43 P. M., October 29, 1948,1 didn't think much of it.

It was a particularly smoggy day in Los Angeles. I wasn't in Los Angeles, I was in Greenwich Village reading a self-complacent report in the Herald-Trib on Angelenos about to breathe their last and observing with no complacency whatsoever that my window sills, desk, typewriter, ma.n.u.scripts, and therefore, by logical inference, my lungs, were beady with soot.

I remember what thoughts went through my head. That the poisoning of air, earth and all living creatures was not an invention of the writers of sf. That this infestation of a whole planet, quite beyond the wildest imaginings of sf writers, had been brought about altogether absentmindedly, as the merest byproduct, by the scientists. That science, in other words, turned out much better fiction than sf ever could.

That was when I stopped thinking about sf and began to pay attention to science. As a writer of non-sf fiction I know how to go to the source.

I saw the bad joke being staged when, on the occasion of our first landing on the moon, the "experts" asked to telecomment on the event were two deans of sf. They spoke emotionally, while, I imagine, the entire scientific community snickered, about how they had both prefigured this moon voyaging in their sf novels.

All they had prefigured was the physical displacement of human beings from earth to the moon, which meant that they had prefigured nothing. Not the diversionary nature of the gala, to take our minds off the unsatisfactory results of the displacement of U. S. citizens to Vietnam. Not the vomitous s...o...b..zz inanity. Not the PR milking of the solemn moment by Tacky d.i.c.k, the everybody-wants-to-get-into-the-act circus atmosphere. (Nixon had his PR reasons, of course. He badly needed to have his oily image a.s.sociated with some real estate in the cosmos on which there was no static-making and bolixing Ho.) Not, certainly, the later commercial exploitation of the astronaut program, which began to suggest that the whole NASA spending spree was by way of giving enough big-science panache to Scott Carpenter so he could do all those commercials for Standard Oil pushing their fake F-310 gasoline additive as the surefire cure for air pollution, lumbago, and, possibly, impotence.

The sf deans may have thought science had vindicated them but all it had done was show up the "avant-garde" fictioneers about science for the stragglers behind reality they always are. I continued with profit to go on not thinking about sf.

This is by way of getting it straight that the two stories presented here are not sf. They are fiction, to be sure, about matters that embrace certain scientific considerations, but they are not sf, whose premise is that science embraces all matters and that therefore any sf work, which is about nothing but science or the superficialities of science deftly skimmed off, is by definition about everything. Sf is in the nature of things about things, sometimes disguised as people. A very different kind of fiction becomes necessary when you're interested in people not reduced to things.