Dream Thing
For the Glorious House of Sinanju
With special thanks and acknowledgement to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.
Copyright
First published in the United States in 2005 by Worldwide
First published in Great Britain in ebook by Sphere in 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7515-6088-6
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 Warren Murphy
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Sphere
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
Contents
Dedication
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
About the Authors
Prologue
The man cradled the gangly girl in his arms as if she were a baby, but she wasn’t aware the way an infant was. Her mind was consumed by her need to fend off sleep.
“What else could be behind such dreams?” her father demanded.
The father had married into his second cousin’s bloodline, which was the most sensitive branch of all the Peoples. Now he alone was free of the dream torment, while his wife, daughters and son suffered terribly.
The daughter in his arms was catatonic, her body half-dead from need of sleep.
The Caretaker of the People pondered this pathetic young victim as she tensed and slackened rhythmically, fighting to stay awake. She succumbed to her need, and became limp in her father’s arms as sleep overcame her.
They held their breath, the father and the Caretaker. Maybe this time there would be no dreams …
The girl screamed, her eyes opening wide and her hands clawing at her father’s chest. Her mind told her that she was falling from a great height, burning in boiling rain, sinking into water so deep that all light was erased.
Her moment of terror faded, but her reality was just as bad. She didn’t see her father or the Caretaker, but focused again on fighting to stay awake.
“She is like this always now. For two days it has been thus,” her father said. “I’m afraid she is already mad.”
Okyek Meh Thih, the Caretaker of the People, felt sad and helpless. He stood up.
“What will you do?” the father asked.
“I will seek out wisdom,” Okyek Meh Thih announced.
The girl’s father showed a sign of faint hope, but Okyek Meh Thih felt no hope.
It was his duty. His grandfather’s instructions were quite clear. If a time came when the dreams disrupted the lives of the People, then Okyek Meh Thih must go into the mountain again and meditate on the message in the cave. Every fiber of his being told him to stay and offer comfort to the suffering People, and yet he did his duty and walked away from them.
What wisdom could there be in those old mountains and the faded inscription of a people long dead?
Chapter 1
Being insane makes it hard to keep track of the time.
How many days had it been? How far had he crawled? How close was he now to the surface of the world? How much water was left and how much air?
Only as an afterthought did he realize that the gnawing had stopped below his feet. The alien rock eaters were no longer chewing. This explained why the madness had left him; the insane chewing of the alien rock eaters had gone away at last.
His mind turned to his own rock eaters. Were they still eating? Well, of course they were. He could see, couldn’t he? The yellow glow of their light was the only light he had seen in weeks. He wriggled until his face was close to the viscous trickle of yellow matter, and inspected it. Were the machines still fully functional?
He couldn’t tell without a microscope. The fact that the carrier fluid still glowed was a good sign. The nanotech machines wouldn’t glow if they weren’t also digging. He had programmed them that way.
Once, a lifetime ago, he produced the machines from a nanotechnological experiment that he never thought would succeed—but it did. He created functioning devices the size of gnats, and he programmed them to perform a few simple functions. He encapsulated the tiny machines in a tiny vial of silver and had the vial placed on his person, where it would always be with him. The dentist had balked at taking out a perfectly healthy molar to replace it with the silver vial, but a brick of twenty-dollar bills convinced him to do the deed.
The vial was intended to remain with him even after an intense search by law enforcement, and the nanotech machines were intended to be used to free him from a prison cell. Now his prison cell was the earth itself, and the nanotech machines had been put to work to perform a function for which they were not designed.
They chewed away the blockage in fragments smaller than the footprint of an ant, whether the blockage was steel security plates, reinforced concrete walls or solid limestone. Each machine transported its tiny fragment of material to the farthest possible point away from the excavation, and then traveled to the front of the excavation to chew off another fragment. For energy, they fermented small grains of whatever organic matter was provided for them to serve and, when they had energy enough, they provided a phosphorescent output. This was the sum total of their functionality.
The young man could control the direction and size of their excavation by manipulating the pool of excavating machines—this boiled down to smearing the creatures on the rocks that they should excavate. The smaller the cavity they formed, the faster they worked. In the interest of speed, he kept the cavity narrow. It was just six feet long, a foot high and not two feet in diameter. A coffin provided more elbow room. It was made even tighter by the extra equipment: the air tanks, the small compressor and the canteen.
He had been in this enclosed space for at least forty days. No wonder he was starting to lose his marbles.
He pulled out his pocket notebook and squinted as he read. Depending on how many days he had lost to madness, he ought to be nearing another air chamber. His oxygen tanks were almost depleted.