“Where, exactly, did this come from, Dr. Reed?” Fowler wanted to know.
“Parallel 4972B3,” Joanna told him. “My alter ego there is fully controlled and active. We’re using her to direct experiments in psychic boosting using a variety of drugs. There’s a sanitarium in Winchelsea in southern England, set up to treat what they call trauma response. They discarded the term shellshock when they decided that it really was a medical problem and not disguised cowardice. The doctor in charge—a man named Huxley—thinks he’s exploring the therapeutic potential of various psychotropic drugs under the direction of the War Ministry. This is the only patient of his who’s so far shown any indication of an ability to make contact with her alternative selves.”
Joanna could tell that Fowler wasn’t in the least impressed. He’d been part of the project since its inception, long before Joanna’s time. For all she knew, he might be the oldest of the Old Guard. His idea of a field agent was one who swashed and buckled her way through a hundred action-filled parallel lives, changing local history left, right, and center in the hallowed name of progress, not one who conducted experiments in psychometry using the parallels as samples and controls.
“So this is an account of a dream reported by one of Huxley’s patients?” he said, in his annoyingly punctilious fashion, looking down his nose at the text.
“A drug-assisted dream, yes. Induced by a laboratory derivative of psilocin—that’s a fungal alkaloid, similar to psilocybin but lacking a phosphate group.”
Fowler was not the kind of man to worry about such trivial details as the presence or absence of a phosphate group. “And why do you think it’s of any interest to us?”
Joanna fought to remain perfectly calm, telling herself that it really wasn’t Fowler’s fault. He simply had an imaginative allergy to data that didn’t fit the patterns that the mapmakers were spinning out of the scanning data. It was a medical problem, like any other quirk of brain chemistry.
“What she’s describing,” Joanna said, carefully keeping her voice neutral, “is a soldier with a flame-thrower. A soldier from one of the Imperialist parallels on axis C.”
“That’s absurd!” Fowler retorted. “This is the stuff of fantasy! The dreamer can’t possibly be contacting an alternative self. She’s imagining herself as some kind of female satyr! We’ve no evidence of the existence of such beings in any of the parallels we’ve scanned, even as far out as the D axis.”
“That depends what counts as evidence,” Joanna countered, with painstaking mildness. “We know that most, if not all, of the parallels we’ve scanned have legends relating to such creatures. The consistency and everpresence of such legends surely suggests that they might actually exist somewhere in the continuum, and that intelligence of their existence is leaking through the mindweb.”
Fowler had no sympathy with the school of thought that held that all fantasy was simply altereality glimpsed through the dark glass of multiple self-awareness. He was a pragmatist, who worried far more about the Imperialist threat to the A and B axes than the possibility that their adventures might extend into terrae incognitae.
“That’s nonsense!” he informed her, loftily. “If the consistency and everpresence of such legends has any bearing at all on the possible existence of mythical creatures it assures us that they belong entirely to the distant past. One of the few things we know for sure about the multiverse is the consistency of the moment. Insofar as other parallels are accessible to us, they’re only accessible to us at precisely complementary points in time. The other selves with which psychics can make contact always exist at an exactly similar point in time.”
“Once you grant the possibility that they did exist,” Joanna countered, stubbornly, “then it’s surely possible that there are a few parallels—albeit distant from the ones we can most easily explore—where such creatures still exist in the everpresent today.”
“We’ve found no evidence of such parallels,” Fowler stated, flatly.
“This is evidence,” Joanna told him, losing the battle to control her impatience. “You’re just refusing to acknowledge it as such. If you won’t allow any such evidence to be considered, it’s hardly surprising that it can’t subsequently be found, is it? Given that your primary interest is in the parallels most like our own it’s entirely understandable that you should focus your attention and your pattern-analyses on axes A and B, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t far stranger parallels that are far more difficult for our psychics to contact—so much more difficult that they might require the assistance of psychotropic drugs. Surely there’s ample room in a truly infinite multiverse for all kinds of alternative mankinds…” She was careful enough not to add “undreamt of in your philosophy”—not out loud, anyway.
“You can’t have it both ways,” Fowler informed her, with the predatory air of one who has found a crucial logical flaw in his opponent’s argument. “If you’re using the alleged presence of an Imperialist soldier to validate this hallucination, you’re presuming that this parallel lies close enough to their home bases to permit the large-scale conscription of male alter egos. It simply doesn’t fit, Dr. Reed. It doesn’t fit at all.”
“I know it doesn’t fit with present theory,” Joanna retorted, still trying her utmost to keep her voice level. “The point is, does it not fit because it’s just a dream whose connections to our other explorations arise out of mere coincidence, or does it not fit because our tentative theories are too narrow to encompass the true hyperdimensional geometry and the whole range of phenomena that the multiverse accommodates? If there’s the slightest possibility that the latter is the case, we ought to investigate further and more scrupulously, don’t you think?”
Joanna could see in the old man’s face that his answer was a flat no, but even Fowler felt that he ought to prevaricate a little, for safety’s sake. No one worked half a lifetime in a madhouse like this without learning to cover his ass. “Tell me about the dreamer’s parallel,” he said, warily. “What’s the state of play there?”
“Huxley’s sanitarium is well-supplied with patients because the Great War’s still going on.”
“Still! That’s very unusual.”
“But hardly unprecedented.” Joanna knew that Fowler had been party to the grand fiasco of 4821B1, where a botched attempt by a handful of agents to bring an unnaturally extended Great War to its “natural” end had instead resulted in the outbreak of the most devastating Plague War ever recorded. The memory of it must still rankle, but his features were frozen, permitting no acknowledgment of the point she had scored.
“The patient’s a twenty-six-year-old woman who was working as a nursing auxiliary in Flanders for some years before being sent home,” Joanna went on. “If she hadn’t been invalided out, of course, she’d have been killed or captured when Ludendorff finally drove the allies out of continental Europe. Since then he’s been sending wave after wave of zeppelin bombers against London, trying to finish the job. Strays must go back and forth over Winchelsea all the time, offering the patients uncomfortable reminders of the conflict, but it’s a relatively quiet spot.”
“But this woman was close to the front for some considerable time,” Fowler said. “She must have seen men with flame-throwers and she must have seen their victims. She must also have seen men with protective clothing and gas masks. I presume they’re still using phosgene and chlorine as weapons?”