But he had to know if this crap was really happening.
It was quiet here in the forest. Wind in the treetops, nothing else. Good clean redwood smell. He was starting to like it here a little.
“Why don’t you believe we really have the dreams?” she asked.
Ferguson looked at her. “Two things,” he said. “One is that all my life I been dealing with people who experience things I don’t experience. The ones who go to church, the ones who hang tinsel on their Christmas trees, the ones who think that prayers are answered. Those people have assurances. You know what I mean? I never had an assurance of any damn thing, except that I had to make my own luck because there was no one out there going to make it for me. You follow me? Sometimes I’d like to pray too, just like everybody else, only I know there’s no use in it. So I feel myself sitting outside what a lot of people know for certain. And when these sort of weird dreams come along, and everyone says how beautiful, how wonderful, and I don’t get them you know how I feel? Go on, tell me I’m paranoid. Maybe I am, or I wouldn’t be in a place like this, but I never could believe in anything I couldn’t touch with my own hands, and I’m not touching these dreams.”
“You said there were two things, Ed.”
“The other one is, you know I was supposed to go to jail?” He wondered why he was telling her so much about himself. There might be some way she could use this stuff to hurt him. No, he thought, not her. Sweet April. “Convicted of fraud is what I was. Selling trips to the planet Betelgeuse Five is what I was doing. We’d promise to send you I forget how many light-years, fifteen, fifty, not in the actual flesh but just your mind, by a process of metem—metem—”
“Metempsychosis?” April said.
“That’s it, yeah. People signed up in droves. I’m surprised you weren’t on our list. Christ, maybe you were. Everybody wanting to go, but of course it was just bullshit, we were going to have trouble with the process and refund all the deposits later on, but meanwhile we were making interest on the cash, you see? Plenty of it, millions. And then they got us. Me. I took the fall, some of the others got off. But what eats me, April, is now the scam is coming true, in reverse, goddamn Betelgeuse Five is metempsychosing to Earth. That’s what’s so unbelievable to me, that suddenly people’s minds are in tune with other stars, the very thing I was peddling. I knew I was phony. But this—”
“No, it’s real, Ed.”
“How do I know? How do I know? Sometimes I think the bastards are just fooling me. Making it all up just to mess up my head.” They were deep in the forest now. Just the two of them. Is that really what I believe, he asked himself? That it’s like a conspiracy? Even Lacy, back in San Francisco, seeing the big golden thing with horns: Alleluia had seen the same thing. Could Lacy possibly be in on the deal too? No, how could Lacy have managed to tell her dream to Alleluia? She didn’t even know that Alleluia existed. Even he had to admit that it was crazy to doubt the dreams. But all the same he did doubt. “Tell me about what you saw this morning,” he said. “The jellyfish people.”
“I’m not supposed to discuss—”
“Jesus,” he said. They were all alone, nobody around but the chipmunks. He smiled and came close to her. For an instant she gave him a worried, frightened look. “You could be very attractive, you know?” Ferguson told her, and drew her up against him. She was wearing a blue cashmere pullover, fuzzy, soft. He slipped his hand up under it and felt her breast, bare within, so big that he couldn’t cover the whole of it with his outspread fingers. She closed her eyes and began to sigh. He found her nipple and rubbed his thumb against it slowly, and in an instant it was hard as a pebble. She pushed the lower half of her body against him again and again and made little sighing sounds.
Then he took his hand away.
“Don’t stop,” she said.
“I want to know. I need to know. Tell me what you saw.”
“Ed—”
He smiled. He put his mouth over hers and slid his tongue between her lips, and touched her breast again, outside the sweater. “Tell me.”
With a sigh she said, “All right. Don’t stop and I’ll tell you. The sky on this world I dreamed is all lit up, it’s a million billion stars surrounding the planet, so there’s daytime all the time, brilliant daytime. And these beings float through the atmosphere. They’re gigantic, and they look something like enormous jellyfish, transparent, with dangling stuff, very intricate. Oh, Ed, I shouldn’t be telling you this!”
He massaged her stiff nipple. “You’re doing terrific. Keep going.”
“Each entity is a colony of beings, like. There’s the dark brain in the middle, and then there are the coiling dangling things that hunt for food, and the ones with little oar-legs that propel the colony, and the ones that—that do the reproductive things, and—and, oh, I don’t know, there must be fifty other kinds, all bound together, writhing clusters and tangles of them, each one with a sort of mind of its own, but all connected to the main mind. And on the outside of the whole thing are the perceptors that function in all this dazzling light like eyes, but they aren’t really eyes because they’re all over every bit of the outside—”
He said, “Did it look the same the other time you saw it?”
“I don’t know, Ed. They picked me, remember? I lost it then. But I think it must have been the same, because it’s a real projection of a real world, so how can it be different each time?”
He didn’t know about real projection of a real world. But her description was the same, for sure. She was using some of the exact phrases she had the other day, two, three, four days ago, when she had first told remember what she had said that day any more than she could, but he had it all down on his recorder. And that was what she had said and he had transcribed, writhing clusters and tangles and a dark brain inside the transparent body.
“You mustn’t say I told you, Ed.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Hold me again, won’t you please?”
He nodded. Her face came up toward his, eyes bright and misty, lips parted, tongue-tip visible. Poor fat broad. Probably wishes she could leave her body behind and jump to that other world tomorrow and live like a jellyfish-being with dangling clusters of stuff. Happily ever after.
“Oh, Ed—Ed—”
Goddamn, he thought. There’s no hiding from it: they all do have these dreams, everybody but me, sharing the same dreams, Christ only knows how. The bastards, the bastards. Everybody but me. He asked himself what use he could make out of all this. There had to be a use. All his life he had turned to his own use the fact that he missed out on a lot of things that other people experienced. All right, this too. Maybe they’ll have some special need for somebody who’s immune to the dreams and I can trade that for an end to the goddamn daily mindpicking, or something. Maybe.
April pressed herself close, pistoning her hips against him.
“Yeah,” he said softly. A deal was a deal. She had told him what he wanted to know; now he had to come through for her. He slipped his hand under her sweater again.
5
Elszabet said, “Output Dreamlist,” and the data wall in her office lit up like a stock-exchange ticker display.
1) Green World: Six reports. Single green sun, heavy green atmosphere, crystalline humanoid inhabitants.
2) Nine Suns: Three reports. Nine suns, various colors, in sky simultaneously; large extraterrestrial figure frequently visible.