“But what is it?” she asked.
“It is like a meeting, a holy prayer. There are gods. It is very beautiful.” He took the bonephones from her as tenderly as he had put them on. “My wife, she will not this weekend, eh?”
“No, Tomás.”
“Ah. Ah, it is too bad.”
“Yes.” Elszabet switched off the screen. “You might want to go down to the gymnasium. There’s a dance group there now. You’d enjoy it.”
“Perhaps a little while.”
“All right. Do you happen to know where Ed Ferguson is?”
“Ferguson, no. I think he goes off walking in the woods.”
“Alone?”
“Sometimes the big woman. Sometimes the artificial one. I forget the names.”
“April. Alleluia.”
“One of them, yes.” Menendez took Elszabet’s hand carefully between his own. “You are a very kind woman,” he said. “You will visit me tomorrow?”
“Of course,” she said.
The strange discordant chanting still rang in her ears as she walked up the hallway to finish her rounds. Philippa, Alleluia, April. Alleluia wasn’t there. All right, off in the woods with Ferguson: that was an old story. They deserved each other, she told herself, the cold-blooded swindler and the cold-blooded artificial being. Then she chided herself for lack of charity. Some hell of a healer you are, thinking of your patients that way. But as quickly as she had assailed herself Elszabet let herself off the hook. You’re entitled to be human, she thought. You aren’t required to love everybody in the Center. Or even to like them. Just to see that they get the treatment they need.
She broke into a slow trot and then into a jog, heading back up the hill toward her office. The morning was lovely, clear and warm. It was that time of the year when one golden day followed another without variance or interruption; the summertime fog season was over, and as Nick Double Rainbow had so thoughtfully reminded her, the rainy season was still more than a month away.
I’ll go to the beach this afternoon, Elszabet thought. Lie in the sun, try to make some sense out of things.
It bothered her enormously that these strangenesses were creeping into the Center: the shared dreams, puzzling not only because they were shared but also because of their bewildering content, all these to the staff: Teddy Lansford and Naresh Patel and just yesterday Dante Corelli, too, bewilderedly confessing a Nine Suns dream. Elszabet suspected that other staff members might be concealing space dreams of their own, too, just as she had not yet been able to admit to anyone that she was now and then being invaded—while actually awake, no less—by strands of imagery that seemed to come out of the Green World dream. Everything was turning strange. Why? Why?
For Elszabet the Center was the one place in the world where she felt at peace, where the crazy turmoil outside was held at bay. That was why she had come here, to do her work and be of service and at the same time to escape the harshness and sorrows of that burned-out world beyond the Center’s gates. There were times here when she almost managed to forget about what was going on out there, although the steady influx of Gelbard’s syndrome victims, twitchy and hollow-eyed, constantly reminded her of that. Still, the Center was a peaceful place. And yet, and yet, she knew that was foolishness, hoping she could ever escape the real world here. The real world was everywhere. And now the real world was getting unreal and the unreality was sliding through the gates like a fog.
As she approached her office Bill Waldstein came down the path from the GHQ building and said, “Where is everybody?”
“Who? Staff? Patients?”
“Anyone. Place seems awfully quiet.”
Elszabet shrugged. “Dante’s got a big dance group going. I guess just about everyone must be over at the gym. Who are you looking for? Tomás and the Indian are in their room, Phillipa and April are in theirs, Ferguson’s fooling around in the forest with Alleluia—”
Waldstein looked drawn and weary. “Is it true that Dante had a space dream night before last?”
“You’d better ask her that,” Elszabet said.
“She did, then. She did.” He scuffed at the ground with his sandal. “Can we go into your office, Elszabet?”
“Of course. What’s happening, Bill?”
He didn’t speak until they were in the little room. Then, scrunching down against the data wall, he gave her a haggard look and said, “Confidential?”
“Absolutely.”
“You remember when I was saying the space dreams had to be frauds, that the patients were making them up just to bedevil us? I haven’t really believed that for a while, I guess. But I certainly don’t now.”
“Oh?” she said.
“Now that I’ve had one too.”
“You?”
“I had Double Star Three last night. The whole thing, all the bells and whistles, the orange sun high and the yellow one down by the horizon, the double shadows. Then the yellow one set and everything turned to flame.”
Elszabet watched him closely. She thought he was going to burst into tears.
“Wait,” he said. “There’s more. I improved on it. When April had it last week there were no life-forms, right? I got life-forms. Blue sphere-shaped creatures with little squid tentacles at the top end. Isn’t that cute? Strolling around in a sort of amphitheater like Aristotle and his disciples. Cute. Very cute.”
“How do you feel?” Elszabet asked.
Waldstein shuddered. “Dirty inside the head. Like I have gritty sand all over the lining of my skull.”
“Bill—”
Compassion flooded her. This was the moment to tell him that he wasn’t alone, that she had been feeling the Green World dream tickling at the edge of her mind, that she feared the same things he feared. She couldn’t do it. It was a lousy thing, holding back on him when he was plainly in so much pain. But she couldn’t do it. Letting him, anyone, know that her mind too was vulnerable to this stuff: no. No, she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. She felt like a hypocrite. So be it. So be it. She remained outwardly cool, calm, the sensitive administrator hearing the confession of the troubled staff member.
Give him something, Elszabet thought.
“I can tell you that you aren’t alone in this,” she said after a moment.
“I know. Teddy Lansford. Dante. Also I think Naresh Patel, from something he let slip a few weeks ago. And probably more of us.”
“Probably,” she said.
“So it isn’t just a psychotic phenomenon limited to the patients.”
“It never was limited to the patients. Almost from the beginning it’s been reaching staff members.”
“Who are psychotic also, then? Early stages of Gelbard’s, do you think?”
She shook her head. “A, stop throwing around loaded words like psychotic, okay? B, sharing a manifestation like this with victims of Gelbard’s doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re coming down with Gelbard’s yourself, only that something very peculiar is going on that tends to affect the patients more readily than the staff, but affects staff too. C—”
“I’m scared, Elszabet.”
“So am I. C, what we have here is a phenomenon not confined to Nepenthe Center, as I intend to make clear at the staff meeting tomorrow.”
Waldstein looked startled. “What do you mean?”
“Move back and watch the data wall,” she said.