That was the last dream anyone dreamed.
At first it seemed a blessing. Clear heads, bright eyes, no morning mouth. Good day to you, citizen; and to you, sir. Sleep well? Ah! Pull back of the shoulders, stretch, smile. Sleep of the righteous, comrade. Like the very dead. Days, weeks, a month; deep and dreamless. No one noticed that there was less and less to talk about under the tea-shop awnings, leaning against the trackside signal lights waiting for the slow morning mail, or that sleep was no longer as righteous as it had once been, that it pressed down heavy as lead sheets all the hot night, impossible to throw off next morning. There was never a time when the people noticed that the light of that morning was not as bright as the one before, that the tea was pale and insipid, that the music on the breakfast show was just irritating. That the colour was draining out of life. That they sat up hour after hour, with the million lights of the moonring tumbling over their roof tiles, later than late, afraid to tell their friends lovers others that they did not want to go to bed for dread of that planetary, crushing sleep. That when next they woke, the light could be a mere lightening of night, that the tea could be warm water, that the wireless could sing in static, that all colours had run into one. That they no longer cared that it was so.
No one cared. No one laughed. No one cried. No one went out. No one made a joke. No one read a book. No one wrote a love letter, or fell in or out of love. No one loved. No one looked up at the tumbling jewels of the moonring with an ooh in the heart. No one woke in the night to the plaint of the night-train whistles and begged them, Take me where you are going. No one sang. No one danced. No one dandled a child upon the knee, much less thought to conceive one. No one bought a good frock or a new shirt or fine fine shoes. No one ached, no one hoped, no one longed, no one aspired, no one imagined, no one dreamed.
It was about that time that the grey cloud, sign and seal of the plague of dreamlessness, known and shunned by those more desert-wise than Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th, fixed itself over Solid Gone.
Many a town had died this way, withered by its own grey apathy. Nothing lives long when its dreams have died. But for a naive young cloud-cineaste, inheritor of a truck-load of marvels and inspiration from a mad, visionary great-aunt, Solid Gone would have ended swallowed by the dust.
“I mean, you get to expect people not turning out to greet you, out here,” Sanyap Bedassie said to by-now entranced Sweetness. “It’s kind of old-fashioned, folk’s grandparents’ll talk about the Cloudchanger and wasn’t it great and sure that was how I met your grandmother and all that, but most of the young ones, all they want to know about is this dance stuff. Even so, when I got right in here and there was absolutely no one around, I was beginning to think, even for the edgelands, this is odd. But free parking’s free parking and, hey, no kids coming poking at things, asking, hey mister, what’s that do?
“So, I hang out the flags. Not a soul. This happens. I unfold the aerial, set the thing up. Still nothing. If I hadn’t seen them, sitting on their verandahs, just staring, I’d’ve sworn I’d stumbled into one of those edgeland ghost towns you hear about. Anyway, I power up the dream-projector—I mean, half the reason for coming to this place is because they’ve got a perfect cloud hanging right over their heads!”
“I was going to ask you about that,” Sweetness said. “Like, a cloud cinny-hoojahflip, in a desert? Your great-aunt was mad, and you inherited it.”
“That’s what they say about all artists.”
“All artists aren’t stuck in a campervan ten metres up in the middle of a town square. And if you ask me, artist or not, it’s a pretty dumb thing to get trapped because of a perfect cloud.” When she saw how he shrugged; that that shrug was mostly a flinch, Sweetness wished she had not said the thing about being trapped. “Sorry,” she whispered. “So, how come?”
“So, I set the thing up—you know how it works?” He did not wait for the answer she did not give. “Well, it’s not your simple cinema. To work properly, you have to allow it to get into your head, pull out all your dreams and hopes and ambitions and fears. Everyone’s got cinema inside them. There’s clever machinery in there, takes your dreams, gives them plot and character and structure and all that, animates them, stick them up in the clouds.”
“But if there’re no dreams…”
“You get brain-static.”
“So, the evening news?”
“I was running it as a test programme. And they just started coming. It was like the stones had started walking. All those grey faces. I thought—well, you know my trade, you can imagine the kind of thing I was thinking.”
Yes, thought Sweetness, mind lit by the garish blue glare of her brother’s masher-movies.
“They came walking in, like you saw just there. Every last one of them. I didn’t think they were going to stop. I thought they were just going to walk right over me, trample me into the cobbles—next morning, there’d be like an oval of flat metal in the middle of the square. But I couldn’t get out. I was surrounded. And they stopped, and they stood there and every man jack of them looked up and no one said a word. Not one word. And they watched the news, right the way through to the end. I turned the thing off, and waited. I didn’t know what was going to happen. For all I knew, they’d pick up a cobble each and wade in. And then, one woman smiled. She was this plump, plain, middle-aged woman—nothing special about her, but that smile stood out in this square like a beacon. I saw it run out from her, like roots going out from a plant, I saw that smile go running around the square like some kid picking pockets, and they were all smiling, and then they were all laughing and crying and cheering and clapping and just sitting there with these big tears of ecstasy running down their cheeks. I tell you something, I never had an audience reaction like that. Never.”
“Some thanks you got.”
“How could they let me go after that? To you and me, it’s the evening news. To them, it’s everything the plague took away. It’s all the mundane, trivial, petty, useless things that make up a life. It’s dirt and gossip and achievement and tragedy and horror and strife, and we love it. We gather it in and sow it out in every possible medium we can, as often as we can, as much as we can: we can’t get enough of it! It’s the best soap opera there is. News makes our lives. Tell me this, you’re sitting round having your dinner, what’s the talk at the table about? What’s on the news. Well, these people more than talk it. They live it, eight times a day at the top of the hour. Now, tell me, how could they let me go? Sticking me up here was the last creative thing they ever did.”