“Oh.” Crumbs fell to the floor as the gynander pressed her face up to the glass. “Right there? Right outside your window? The ocean?”
Ceryl cleared her throat and pretended to read a monitor on her desk. Perhaps this had been a bad idea after all. This morph had no manners whatsoever—imagine mentioning the ocean to a stranger! Ceryl fiddled with her monitor, glancing sideways at the morph. She’d be wasting her credit and, worse, her time. At the thought of another night plagued by bad dreams she sighed and rubbed her temples.
The gynander ate noisily but without further conversation. Finally she dropped the empty dulse tin and wiped her hands on her pantaloons. Ceryl watched her with distaste.
“All right,” the gynander pronounced. She cast a last curious look at the window. “Please tell us of your troubles.”
“I—I’ve been having these dreams.”
Reive nodded solemnly, as though she had never heard the words before.
“Nightmares,” Ceryl went on quickly. “I—they’re not the sort of dreams I can talk about easily at an inquisition when there’re others around. I’m—in the pleasure cabinet,” she added. She tapped nervously at her monitor. “You understand…?”
The gynander nodded. “It is, perhaps, a treasonous dream?”
Ceryl raised her eyebrows at the gynander’s bluntness. “We-ell,” she stammered, then nodded. “Yes, I think—well, someone might think it was treasonous,” she said lamely.
Reive stepped across the room to a chair and settled into it, drawing her feet up demurely beneath her and cupping her chin in her hands. She lowered her eyes so that Ceryl couldn’t see her expression.
A treasonous dream! Better and better—if this woman proved to be a stingy patron, Reive could always blackmail her. The gynander coughed delicately. “Please,” she said, closing her eyes and tilting her head so that Ceryl could see her face, painted with that mask of studied innocence. “We would like to help you.”
Ceryl took a deep breath. This is it, she thought, then said, “For the past year I have been having these terrible dreams….”
It came out hesitantly. Ceryl had thought it would be easier, telling it alone like this. Instead she found herself in a bizarrely intimate situation, sharing her worst secret with a stranger. She paused.
It wasn’t too late. She could throw the morph out and never tell anyone; though that would mean suffering from the nightmares, perhaps forever. Or she could expose her secret at the next inquisition and face the consequences.
The thought made her cringe. She hated the dream inquisitions. She had of course attended them before her promotion, with other biotechhicians and once even with a group of drunken Aviators slumming down on Dominations. But these were small homey gatherings, brisk with vivarium gossip; not the perilous intrigue of the Orsinate’s inner cabal. There, a faltering confession or a spiteful morphodite could result in one being dragged off by the Reception Committee.
She hated it all. The hermaphrodites with their languid expressions and voices slurred from smoking kef. The margravines watching with keen narrow eyes for the merest hint of treachery, as one by one their guests recited their nighttime journeys. Diplomats confessing to fitful reigns in imaginary kingdoms; Imperators intoning childish humiliations; the tedious minutiae of countless dark inexplicable passions and coughing sounds in the dark. Then the margravines themselves would speak; and the only remarkable thing about their dreams was that they were just as dull and absurd as everyone else’s.
Ceryl never told them about her nightmares. When it was her turn to speak, she made up dreams. So far no one had noticed the difference. She created oddly wistful scenarios—eyeless children in blue-lit alleys, sexual hijinks with aardmen—or else she repeated dreams she had heard at those simpler gatherings on the vivarium level. But after a few months she ran out of ideas. Then she had desperately gone through old cinemafiles and even crumbling books in the Orsinate’s library. Anything to come up with ideas to satisfy the grinning curiosity of Âziz and Nike and the others who sprawled in the Four Hundredth Room, smoking kef or prodding each other with morpha and endope, drinking the Orsinate’s wine and patting the creepily quiescent morphodites all the while.
She hated it because it was so banal; and so dangerous. The scrying morphodites could reduce the most lurid nightmare to a bad meal, twist an innocent fancy into betrayal. The angelic boy in one’s arms became a herald of senility and death; the bronze-winged hippogriff an assassination plot. Through it all the margravines listened and nodded among themselves, rewarding this fantasy, condemning that. And Ceryl cursed whoever it was had resurrected this ancient mania for probing one’s sleeping secrets, and prayed for another kind of game to become the Orsinate’s next fad.
She kept her dream to herself. Because in a way it was a beautiful thing, the only beautiful thing she had, maybe. Even though she knew it was as foolish as Tatsun Frizer’s account of the rubber wheel or Shiyung’s recurring vision of the whistling head.
To herself, Ceryl called her dream the Green Country. That was another reason she could never speak of it. Because everyone knew what the Green Country meant: the forbidden place and color, the horror of sky and plains unshackled. The world Outside, so dreadful that it could only be looked upon once every ten years, and then only to remind the people of Araboth of their good fortune to dwell beneath the nurturing domes.
But in Ceryl’s dream the world was not a firestorm of poisonous ash and viral rain. In Ceryl’s dream she was walking toward the fouga hangars, the steel and plastic warehouses on Seraphim where the dirigibles waited like sullen clouds, until the Orsinate ordered yet another strike against the enemies that crouched Outside. In the dream Ceryl walked through the hangars until she found a fouga just starting to waft upward. She ran to the ladder dangling from its gondola and climbed, until the choking chemical air inside the hangar gave way to the fouga’s metallic chill.
Once inside the steering cabin she was not surprised to find herself alone, or to hear the computer navigator whispering to itself as the airship floated silently toward the skygates. She stumbled as she walked along the narrow strip of uneven rubber flooring. From overhead came the insistent whine of the fouga’s propeller gears.
And then she was standing by a window in front of the gondola, and the skygates were opening before her; the shields parting like the struts of an ornamental silver fan to reveal the vastness behind them. Ceryl cried out as the fouga floated free into a sky thick with smoke and soot, ashes flung against the window so that she drew back, afraid the glass would break.
But it did not break, though she saw blue lightning lash against the curved horizon of the domes beneath her, and lightning like shining water streaming down the sides of the fouga as it rose up and up through the air.
And then (and this was the part she would never be able to tell them. It was their greatest taboo, the sublime imago that lurked behind all the excesses of the Orsinate, all the ordered horrors of timoring)—
And then she saw it. The darkness pared away as the fouga rose through the sunless air until there was nothing but sun, a radiance that blinded her so that she clutched at one of the metal pillars inside the gondola, as abruptly the fouga’s upward trajectory snapped and the airship plunged earthward.
And there it was, an endless country rising through the darkness like a mountain from the sea. Green everywhere, from the pale yellows and nearly blue washes of the dawn sky at Æstival Tide to the deepest most occult shades of emerald, lanced here and there by lakes and rivers that glowed in that painful light like the brightest of the Orsinate’s numinous sculptures. And even though there was more to the dream—a wave like the sky crashing down upon the city, the sight of the domes crushed and splintered into black, a fissure splitting the Undercity like a blade drawn through sand—even though the dream went on until Ceryl woke shivering in her bed, it was that color that tore at Ceryl’s stunned consciousness.