“Get off, you bitch!” The same magnified voice.
I powered my chair forward. Halfway across the catwalk the congresswoman passed me, her head high, her lips smiling, her eyes burning with anger. There was no applause.
I powered my chair to the center of the floating platform and put my lenses on zoom. The KingDome was only half full. People stared at me, some sullen, some uncertain, some wide-eyed, but nobody smiling. I hadn’t ever faced anything like this. They were balanced on an edge, right between an audience and a mob.
“That a donkey chair you sit in, Arlen, you?” the magnified voice shrieked, and I identified its owner when several people turned to him. A man pushed him, hard; another glared; a third moved protectively in front of the heckler and stared hard-eyed at the platform. Somebody down front called faintly, unmagnified, “The Lucid Dreamer ain’t no donkey, him. You shut up!”
I said, so softly that everyone had to quiet to hear, “I’m no donkey, me.”
Another rumble went up from the audience, and in my mind I saw water flooding the Delta where I was born, the water not fast but relentless, unstoppable, rising as steeply as any Huevos Verdes curve of social breakdown.
“People are dead, them, in the lousy donkey trains nobody bothers to keep up!” the magnified voice cried. “Dead!”
“I know,” I said, still softly, and the lattice stopped shaking as my mind filled with slow, large shapes, moving with stately grace, the color of wet earth. I pressed the button on my chair and the concert machinery began to dim the stage lights.
I was supposed to give “The Warrior,” designed and redesigned and redesigned again to encourage independent risk taking, action, self-reliance. Stored in the concert machinery were also the tapes and holos and subliminals for “Heaven,” the most popular of my concerts. It led people to a calm place inside their own minds, the place all of us could reach as children, where the world is in perfect balance and we with it, and the warm sunlight not only falls on our skin but goes all the way through to the soul and draws us in to blessed peace. It was a concert of reconciliation, of repose, of acceptance. I could give that. In ten minutes the mob would be a yielding pillow.
I began “The Warrior.”
“Once there was a man of great hope and no power. When he was young he wanted everything…”
The words quieted them. But the words were the least of it, were unimportant, really. The shapes were what counted, and the way the shapes moved, and the corridors the shapes opened to the hidden places in the mind, different for each person. And I was the only one in the world who could program those shapes, working off my own mind, whose neural pathways to the unconscious had been opened by a freak illegal operation. I was the Lucid Dreamer.
“He wanted strength, him, that would make all other men respect him.”
No one at Huevos Verdes could do this: seize the minds and souls of eighty percent of the people. Lead them, if only deeper into themselves. Shape them. No — give them their own shapes.
“Do you understand what it is you do to other people’s minds?” Miri had asked me in her slightly-too-slow speech, shortly after we met. I had braced myself — even then — for equations and Law-son conversion formulas and convoluted diagrams. But she had surprised me. “You take people into the otherness.”
“The—”
“Otherness. The reality under the reality. You pierce the world of relativities, so that the mind glimpses that a truer absolute lies behind the fragile structures of everyday life. Only glimpses it, of course. That’s all even science can really give us: a glimpse. But you take people there who couldn’t ever be scientists.”
I had stared at her, strangely frightened. This wasn’t the Miri I usually saw. She brushed her unruly hair away from her face, and I saw that her dark eyes looked soft and far away. “You really do that, Drew. For us Supers, as well as the Livers. You hold aside the veil for just a glimpse into what else we are.”
My fright deepened. She wasn’t like this.
“Of course,” she added, “unlike science, lucid dreaming isn’t under anybody’s control. Not even yours. It lacks the cardinal quality of replicability.”
Miri saw my face, then, and realized her last words were a mistake. She had ranked what I do second… again. But her stubborn truthfulness wouldn’t let her back down from what she did in fact actually believe. Lucid dreaming lacked cardinal quality. She looked away.
We had never spoken of the otherness again.
Now the Liver faces turned up to me, open. Old men with deep lines and bent shoulders. Young men with jaws clenched even as their eyes widened like the children they had so recently been. Women with babies in their arms, the tiredness fading from their faces when their lips curved faintly, dreaming. Ugly faces and natural beauties and angry faces and grieving faces and the bewildered faces of people who thought they’d been running their lives and were just now discovering they weren’t even on the Board of Directors.
“He wanted sex, him, that would make his bones melt with satisfaction. He wanted love.”
Miri was probably already in the underground facility at East Oleanta, and I was too cowardly to admit that I was glad. Well, I’d admit it now. She was safer there than at Huevos Verdes, and I didn’t have to see her. Eden. The carefully programmed sublim-inals on the cafe HTs throughout New York’s Adirondack Mountains called it “Eden.” Not that the Livers knew what this new Eden meant. I didn’t either, not really. I knew what the project was supposed to do — but not what it would ultimately mean. I’d been too cowardly to admit my questions. Or admit that even SuperSleepless confidence might not add up to automatic Tightness.
Pale, deadly grass waved in my mind.
“Aaaaaaahhh,” a man sighed, somewhere close enough that I could hear him over the low music.
“He wanted excitement, him.”
A man in the sixth or seventh row wasn’t watching me. He glanced around at everybody else’s rapt face. He was first puzzled, then uneasy. A natural immune to hypnosis — there were always a few. Huevos Verdes had isolated the brain chemical necessary to respond to lucid dreaming, only it wasn’t a single brain chemical but a combination of what Sara Cerelli called “necessary prerequisite conditions,” some of which depended on enzymes triggered by other conditions … I didn’t really understand. But I didn’t need to. I was the Lucid Dreamer.
The unaffected man shuffled restlessly. Then settled down to listen anyway. Afterwards, I knew, he wouldn’t say much to his friends. It was too uncomfortable, being left out.
I knew all about that. My concerts counted on it.
“He wanted every day to be filled with challenges only he could meet.”
Miri loved me in a way I could never love her back. It burned, that love, as hard as her intelligence. It was the love, not the intelligence, that had made me never say to her directly, “Should we go ahead with the project? What proof do we have that this is the right thing to do?” She would tell me, of course, that proof was impossible, and her explanation of why not would contain so many things — equations and precedents and conditions — that I wouldn’t understand it.
But that wasn’t the real reason I’d never pushed my doubts. The real reason was that she loved me in a way I could never love her, and I had wanted Sanctuary since I was six years old and discovered that my grandfather died building it, a grunt worker before Livers were taken care of by a vote-hungry government. That was why I had turned my mind, so much weaker than hers, over to Huevos Verdes.
But now there was the pale grass, growing over the lattices in my mind, growing over the world.
“He wanted—”
He wanted to belong to himself again.
The shapes slid around my chair; the subliminals flickered in and out of my audience’s consciousness. Their faces were completely unguarded now, oblivious to each other and even to me, as the private doors of their minds swung briefly open. To the desires and fearlessness and confidence that had been buried there for decades, under the world that needed order and conformity and predictability to function. This was my best concert of “The Warrior” yet. I could feel it.