She could have been “normal”—and had in fact always dreamed about becoming “normal” one day, when she was old enough and sufficiently resourceful to leave her family. If it hadn’t been for the bust, she would have become “normal.” Now “normal” was long gone and past wishing for. John Shea Velikovsky—the epitome of “normal”—never stopped letting her know that she never would be and that he despised her for it.
When she had knelt beside the three others taking the Corollian Reception test, she had not only been burning with anger and frustrated and hopeless with the despair of being trapped in What Is, but frightened and repulsed. From a distance, Corollians resembled humans. But the hair on their faces and heads wasn’t at all like human hair, their gray skin was damp and furry, and their arms weren’t simple limbs, but bifurcated at their double-jointed elbows into a long tentacle with suckers and a shorter, fleshier, hairy arm ending in hands with double-jointed wrists and two middle fingers plus two opposable thumbs. The examinees’ horror on approaching the Corollian was so visceral that the examiners had to shock them repeatedly to get them to kneel before it and accept either a hand or a sucker on their foreheads. Azia had been lucky enough to get a hand rather than a sucker, but the touch had still made her stomach heave and her face ache from clenching her teeth—until it— almost at once—dropped her into sleep. When she woke a couple of minutes later, it was with the memory of a chaotic, full-blown dream that seemed to her to have lasted an hour at least. And she saw that while she had been dreaming, the other three girls who had been kneeling with her had been removed from the room.
“Did you dream, Azia?” the examiner said as she was scrambling to her feet, frantic to get away from the xenospecies.
“I must have fallen asleep,” she said, wondering how that could have happened under such harsh conditions.
The examiner wanted to know her dream.
She found it hard to describe because it was so strange. “I was somewhere where there was ice everywhere, where these furry wormlike creatures were swarming, burrowing in and out of it, and I guess I wasn’t really present in the scene because I didn’t feel the cold or have any fear that the animals might be going to touch me, but somehow could see it, and after awhile the ice was formed into a lot of different piles of very exact shapes, hexagonal, I guess, and then I was on a ship, very dim, and really long and narrow, shaped like a needle, sort of, with big holds full of the hexagonal blocks of ice, and after a while the ship docked at a space station in orbit around some planet I didn’t recognize, and then I was sitting in a room with this human who was asking me questions about the cargo, and I like told him what kind of goods could be traded for it…” She frowned. “I knew the words in the dream—what the cargo was, and what it was worth—” She shook her head. “But I don’t know any of the words now.” Feeling foolish, she laughed. “I guess that’s a stupid thing to say, since I didn’t know anything about it before I fell asleep, and so of course it was just something weird I made up.”
The examiner said, “You didn’t make it up. The Corollian told you all about it. It put its hand on you and sent a telepathic burst, which your brain processed and then communicated to you by firing off neurons and giving you a dream composed of the material it sent you.”
Reception didn’t just feel like dreaming, it was dreaming. If you had the talent to Receive, then you could—according to the examiner—be taught to use the resulting dreams to be an interpreter for Corollians.
John Shea Velikovsky directed Azia to kneel before Pluummuluum. He had brought a kneeling pad for himself, and now he set it on the floor beside her and knelt on it. His face and body language conveyed matter-of-factness, as though he felt neither the revulsion Azia had felt when she’d knelt before the Corollian who had tested her, nor the extreme excitement she felt at proximity to her bonder. He said, “We’ll begin with something short and simple,” and Pluummuluum almost at once laid one hand on her forehead and the other on John Shea Velikovsky’s. Azia gasped. A delightful, overpowering shiver of pleasure flowered in her crotch and radiated out in waves over her thighs, buttocks, belly, and then over the rest of her body as well, even as she was plunged unprepared into a dream.
She woke in a delirium of delight.
John Shea Velikovsky’s voice cut through the haze like a knife. “What do you remember?” And his hand shot out and pushed her back, off Pluummuluum’s knees. “And that’s bad form,” he said, “even if you are bonded to it.”
Azia’s breasts and stomach, which had been pressed against her bonder, shimmered and trembled with the lost contact. Azia realized she was crying when she felt tears rolling down her cheeks, and recognized how impossibly overloaded she was. Aware of the two of them watching— silently criticizing, she was sure—she groped for words to describe the dream. “There was a cargo of what looked like… like… like feathers.” Azia sniffed and swallowed. “One half-bale of whatever it was. And Pluummuluum told me it would accept one hundred and fifty holds of some kind of grain in exchange. Or one hundred holds of some kind of fungus— something bioluminescent, I think… and, and you were in the dream, too, I was supposed to tell you something, or maybe not supposed to tell you something, only I’m not sure what it was…”
Azia looked at Pluummuluum. It was so close, so very, very close. From so close she could see that the hair on its face wasn’t a beard, that the planes of its face weren’t at all human—the facial surface dipping and hollowing in unexpected places—and that the deep pools of its eyes were faceted—and watching her with a remote detachment that made her feel as if she weren’t there at all.…
“You’re not sure, or you don’t remember?” John Shea Velikovsky said.
Effortfully she pulled her gaze from Pluummuluum to look at the trainer. “I don’t remember, but I’m not sure if I ever knew exactly what it was, or whether I just thought I knew.” Which was the way dreams tended to be, right?
“That’s not good enough,” the trainer said. “Worse, your sense of scale was grossly off, and you forgot or omitted to mention other things, besides. This was a simple communication, using objects fairly easily identifiable. You must pay attention, especially when you snap back to ordinary consciousness. That moment of snap-back is the most important access point for total recall. This sloppiness simply will not do. You’re going to have to perform better than that, Azia, much, much better. Now let’s try it again, and this time, exercise at least some control over yourself.”
Azia glanced at her bonder for understanding and help. Surely it must understand her difficulty. But its silence, its remoteness, seemed so far withdrawn from interest or even awareness of what she might be feeling, that she looked back at John Shea Velikovsky in near-desperation. “Don’t you understand?” she said. “It touches me when it makes me dream. How can I pay attention when I come back, when I’m—I’m—I’m—in the middle of…” Her cheeks burned. John Shea Velikovsky’s face was disdainful. He was not lost in orgasmic experience when he returned to consciousness. He just thought she was an uncontrolled little freak—