Waldstein leaned toward her, hunching over a little. He was a tall, thin man, about forty, whose dark hair was just starting to go. When he hunched his shoulders like that, Elszabet knew, it was a gesture of concern, protectiveness, even overprotectiveness. She didn’t care much for that, coming from him. Quietly Waldstein said, “The noble red-man hit you too, didn’t he, Elszabet?”
She shrugged. “I got an elbow in the mouth, more or less incidentally. Nothing detached, nothing even bent. I’m not planning to file charges.”
Scowling, Waldstein said, “The crazy bastard. He must have been out of his mind, hitting you. Poke Lansford, I can understand, but hitting you ? When you’re the one who sits up half the night listening to him sob on and on and on about his martyred ancestors?”
“I beg to remind,” said Dante. ” All these people here are crazy. That’s why they’re here. We can’t expect them to behave rationally, right? Anyway, Double Rainbow doesn’t remember how nice Elszabet’s been to him. That stuff’s been picked.”
“No excuse,” Waldstein said sourly. “We all have martyred ancestors. Fuck him and his martyred ancestors: I don’t even think he’s the Sioux he says he is.” Elszabet looked at Waldstein in dismay. He liked to think of himself as genial and mellow, even playful; but he had an astonishing capacity for irrelevant indignation. Once he got worked up he could go on quite a while. “I think he’s a phony,” Waldstein said. “A con man, like sweet Eddie Ferguson. Nick Double Rainbow! I bet his name is Joe Smith. Maybe he isn’t even crazy. This is a nice rest home, isn’t it, out here in the redwoods? He might just—”
“Bill,” Elszabet said.
“He hit you, didn’t he?”
“All right. All right. We’re running late, Bill.” She wanted to rub her throbbing jaw, but she was afraid it would touch off another volley of outrage from him. It might have been simpler, she thought, if she hadn’t turned Waldstein down when he’d made that sudden but not altogether unpredictable play for her a year or three back. She hadn’t let him get anywhere. If she had, maybe at least she wouldn’t have to endure his ponderous chivalry all the time now. But then she thought, no, it wouldn’t have made anything any simpler if she had done that. Then or ever.
Switching on the little recorder in front of her, Elszabet said, “Let’s get started, people, shall we? Monthly staff meeting for Thursday, July 27, 2103, Elszabet Lewis presiding, Drs. Waldstein and Robinson and Patel and Ms. Corelli in attendance, 1121 hours. Okay? Instead of starting with the regular progress reports, I’d like to open with a discussion of the unusual problem that’s cropped up in the past six days. I’m referring to the recurrent and overlapping dreams of a—well, fantastic nature that our patients seem to be experiencing, and I’ve asked Dr. Robinson to prepare a general rundown for us. Dan?”
Robinson flashed a brilliant smile, leaned back, crossed his legs. He was the senior psychiatrist at the Center, a slender, long-legged man with light coffee-colored skin, very capable, always wondrously relaxed: truly the mellow man that Bill Waldstein imagined himself to be. He was also probably the most reliable member of Elszabet’s staff.
He put his hand on the mnemone capsule in front of him, hit the glossy red activator stud, and waited a moment to receive the databurst. Then he pushed the little device aside and said, “Okay. The space dreams, we’re starting to call them. What we are finding, either by direct report from the patients or as we go through the daily pick data to see what it is that we’re combing out of their minds, is a pattern of vivid visionary dreams, very spacy stuff indeed. The first of these came from the synthetic woman Alleluia CX1133, who on the night of July seventeenth experienced a glimpse of a planet—she identified it as a planet in her consultation the following morning with me—with a dense green sky, a thick green atmosphere, and inhabitants of an alien form, glassy in texture and extremely elongated in bodily structure. Then, on the night of July nineteenth, Father James Christie experienced a view of a different and far more elaborate cosmological set-up, a group of suns of various colors simultaneously visible in the sky, and an imposing figure of apparent extraterrestrial nature visible in the foreground. Because of his clerical background, Father Christie interpreted his dream as a vision of divinity, regarding the alien being as God, and I gather he underwent considerable emotional distress as a result. He reported his experience the following morning to Dr. Lewis—rather reluctantly, I gather. I’ve termed Father Christie’s dream the Nine Suns dream, and Alleluia’s the Green World dream.”
Robinson paused, looking around. The room was very still.
“Okay. Now on the night of July nineteenth Alleluia had a second space dream. This one involved a double-star system, a large red sun and a smaller blue one that seems to be what astronomers call a variable star because it has a pulsating kind of energy output. This dream too was associated with an impressive extraterrestrial figure of great size—a horned being standing on a monolithic slab of white stone. I call this dream the Double Star dream. It’s possible that Alleluia has had this dream several times; she’s become a little evasive on the whole subject of space dreams.” Robinson paused again. “Where this gets interesting,” he went on, “is that on the night of July twentieth, Tomás Menendez experienced the Double Star dream also.”
“The same dream? ” Bill Waldstein asked.
“It checked in every detail. We have the pick data for both of them: of course there aren’t any visuals, but we have exactly the same adrenal-output curves, the same REM fluctuations, the same alpha boost, isomorphic all the way. I think it’s generally agreed that these things correlate very closely with dream activity, and I’d like to postulate that identical dreams will generate identical response curves.”
He glanced questioningly at Waldstein.
“I would buy identical curves meaning identical dreams,” Waldstein said, “if I could buy identical dreams. But who has identical dreams? Is there any record anywhere in the literature of such a thing?”
“In visionary experience, yes,” Naresh Patel said softly. “There are any number of examples of cases where the same vision was received by a host of—”
“I don’t mean out of the Upanishad or Revelations,” said Waldstein. “I mean documented by western observers, contemporary clinical work, twentieth century or later.”
Patel sighed, smiled, turned up the palms of his hands.
“Hold on,” Dan Robinson said. “There’s more. We have a fourth dream that I call the Sphere of Light dream, where the sky is a globe of total radiance and no astronomical features are evident at all because of the high level of illumination. Against this background extremely complex extraterrestrial figures are seen, what appear to be some unusually intricate life-forms with a great many limbs and appendages, so complicated that our patients are having trouble describing them in detail. So far the Sphere of Light dream has been experienced by these patients: Nick Double Rainbow on July twenty-second, Tomás Menendez July twenty-third, April Cranshaw July twenty-fourth. Father Christie experienced the Double Star dream on July twenty-fourth; once again he interpreted it as a divine manifestation, God in yet another guise—the horned being, I mean. That makes three of our people who have had that dream so far. The Green World dream was reported by Philippa Bruce on the twenty-fifth. Last night it reached Martin Clare. That’s three Green Worlds here too.”