The ten-hour dream ended, and he had tasted the minds of uncounted scores of hosts. He had awakened drained and wearied by the experience, he remembered. And he remembered also that as he had descended from the twentieth level he had passed Leesa, heading upward, and knew from her sly glance that she was on her way up to the rooms of learning. She was, at fourteen, taller than the others, ripening more quickly, but still dressed in the metallic sash of all the children of the Watchers.
Again, as after the first dream, he ate with a hunger that surprised him. Later he learned that the dreams always brought on this fierce need to fill the belly. As with the first dream, he tried to remember some of the alien words he had been able to speak while dreaming, but they were gone from his mind.
He finished and slid the eating tray back into the wall slot, hearing, as the orifice closed itself, the roaring of steam that would cleanse it for the next one to sit at that place. Two women and a man approached him as he stood up and asked him to come and sit with them in one of the talking places and tell them his dream. He went, but was so shy of his new knowledge, so obviously afraid his dream would sound both uninteresting and poorly told, that one of the women guessed the reason for his discomfort and told of her own dream first.
“I wanted to experience beauty and pain,” she said, “and I chose the first world, and searched for half the dreaming before I found her. She was locked in a room of stone, and she was very weak but very beautiful. She had very strong thoughts, full of pride and hate and passion. I could not understand what they wanted her to denounce. It was some belief that had no meaning to me. I learned there was very little time left to her, and I hoped I would not have to leave her before they ended her. The men who kept her locked there tried to break her. Always one watched while the others used her. Finally she was taken in her stained rags through narrow streets. They threw filth at her. She was tied to a post and they piled things around her and a man stood in front of her and spoke in a very loud voice recounting her crimes. Then something was thrown into the substance around her, and the pain came up around her body, crackling and spitting. It was the most terrible torment I have ever found on any world, the fullest and most delicious pain. Just before her mind went dark, it became all broken lights and images and things of no meaning. When it went dark I moved into one who stood so close the red pain warmed his face, and I looked at the black sagging thing still tied to the post, and it had once been beauty, but then you could not tell what it had been. Then the dream ended.”
In the silence Raul looked at the woman, Bara, saw her run the sharp pink tip of her tongue along her lips. Her eyes were shiny under the heavy lids. The glowing walls made highlights on her naked polished scalp.
One of the men smiled sadly and shook his head. “She always seeks pain and enjoys the enduring of it. Why should one want to feel what the dream creatures feel? I like best the second world. I move into the creatures and push their thoughts away. I do not want to gobble in their strange tongues. I like their darkness. I find a young strong male usually and make him crouch and wait and leap out at the weaker ones, breaking them with strong hands, running them down. The dream machines are clever. One could almost believe their screaming is real. Then they come to hunt the body I have taken. The game is to remain free until the dream ends. Sometimes there are too many of them with lights and weapons, and they break the body. Sometimes they catch it and hold it, and then I call them idiots in our own language, and they look sick with fear. These are exciting dreams.” He wore a secret smile and kneaded his fingers together and nodded and nodded.
“Did you have good dreams in the first two worlds? Did you dream well in the second world?” the other woman asked. They all stared at Raul expectantly.
He stood up. “I visited a great many in the second world. Some of them were... good to know, to be with in that way. And I wanted to help them and did not know how. I liked them... better than many I know here, among us.”
The three looked astonished and then began to laugh. It was a shrill and unfamiliar sound. There was little laughter among the Watchers. “Oh, oh, oh,” they cried in weakness, and the tears streamed. When at last the man could speak he stood also and rested his hand on Raul’s shoulder. “We should not laugh at you. It is all new to you. The dreams seem very real the first time. But you must understand, you dream the creatures. You and the machine create the creatures inside your sleeping mind. When you awaken they cease to exist. It is very plain that they cease to exist, because if they did exist, they would be here, would they not? This is the only place. All else is nothingness without end.”
Raul frowned at them. “There is one thing I do not know yet. Can one go back to the same world and find the same person again?”
“Yes. That is possible.”
“And has he... lived during the time you were not dreaming of him?”
“Lived?” the other woman said. “The question does not mean anything.”
“In one of my dreams can I ever dream of someone who has been in the dream of someone else?”
“It happens, but not often. It does not mean anything, Raul. It is only the cleverness of the machines turning fantastic and impossible things of the mind into three orderly worlds which seem to have chains of strange logic. But the proof is, of course, that life could not be sustained under those conditions. You will understand one day soon that it is all clever illusion, and it is there for you to enjoy now that you are no longer a child.”
Bara stood, with an echo of the laughter still purring in her throat. She plucked at a metal fold of Raul’s toga. Her lips were swollen and pulpy-looking, and her voice was soft-slurred. “Raul, this is the only world. This is the place where all things are right for us. Don’t let the machines delude you. Their magic is clever. Some of our people have gone mad through believing that the dream worlds are real. At last, when they begin to believe that this, the real world, is a dream, they have to be thrust out of this world. I have many reasons why I don’t want that to happen to you.” She tugged at his arm. “Come with me to one of the small game rooms and alone I will play for you some of the parts that I have known in dreams. You’ll find it interesting.”
He pulled away from her. He shouldered the man aside and walked away. At the twentieth level he looked down the row of cases. On the twentieth level the corridor walls and the floors were always dim. The brightest lights shone inside the cases themselves. Either way he looked, the cases stretched off, lining both sides of the corridor, diminishing into the distance.
He walked slowly between the cases. Many were empty. In many were dreamers. He saw Jord Orlan, hands crossed on his blue-white chest. Some were on their backs. Some curled. One woman dreamed with her arms clasped around her knees, her knees against her chest. He walked until at last he saw nothing but the empty cases, on either side of the corridor, mouth plates unused, cables coiled and waiting. The corridor turned sharply and he stared down another vista of the machines for dreaming. He walked slowly onward.