He ambled to his feet and turned around. She activated the wall. A map of the Pacific states appeared.
“These dreams,” she said, “have also been reported at the mindpick centers in San Francisco, Monterey, and Eureka.” She touched a key and the screen lit up at those three places. “I’ve been in touch with the directors there. Same seven visualizations, not necessarily all seven in each center. Primarily experienced by patients, lesser frequency among staff.”
“But what—”
“Hold on,” she said. More lights appeared on the screen. “Dave Paolucci in San Francisco has been gathering reports of incidence of the space dreams outside Northern California, and it looks like his new data are coming on line right this minute.” Patterns of color blossomed at the lower end of the state. “Look at that,” Elszabet said. “I’ve got to call him. I’ve got to get the details. Look there: a heavy concentration of dream reports in the San Diego area, you see? And some from Los Angeles. And up there too: what’s that, Seattle, Vancouver? Oh, Christ, Bill, look at that! It’s everywhere. It’s a plague.”
“Denver, too,” Waldstein said, pointing.
“Yeah. Denver. Which is about as far east as we have reliable communication, but who knows what’s going on beyond the Rockies? So it isn’t just you, Bill. It’s damn near everybody that’s dreaming these dreams.”
“Somehow that doesn’t make me feel much better,” Waldstein said.
4
Ferguson said, “What I’d like to do, I’d like to get myself the hell out of this place as fast as I can and start making some money out of all this nonsense.”
“How would you do that?” Alleluia asked.
“Hell, wouldn’t be much of a trick. The main side of the Center there’s a gate, but on this side it’s just the forest. You could slip off in the afternoon and find your way right through, just keep the sun at your back afternoons and in front of you mornings, maybe two or three days tops if you had your wits about you. Out to the old freeway and across to Ukiah, say—”
“No. I mean how would you make money out of it.”
Ferguson smiled. They were lying in a quiet, mossy glade a twenty-minute stroll east of the Center, redwoods and sword ferns and a little brook. The ground was folded and tilted there in a way that would make it hard for anyone to blunder onto them. It was his favorite place. He had made sure to enter its location on his ring-recorder so he’d have no trouble finding it again, even though they might happen to pick the data from his mind every time after he had gone there. Some things you forgot, some you didn’t: you never could be sure.
He said, “It’s a cinch. The space dreams, they aren’t just happening to the patients here. I know that for a fact.”
“You do?”
“I listen very carefully. You know the technician, Lansford? He’s had them two or three times. I heard them talking, Waldstein, Robinson, Elszabet Lewis. I think maybe that little Hindu doctor has had them. And even Waldstein, is what I think. But the dreams are also happening outside the Center.”
“You know that?” Alleluia asked.
“I’ve got good reason to think so,” Ferguson said. He ran his hand lightly up her thigh, stopping just short of the crotch. Her skin was smooth as silk. Smoother, maybe. It was half an hour since they had done it and he still felt sweaty, but not Alleluia. That was the thing about these artificial women—they were perfect, they never even worked up much of a sweat. “I have a friend in San Francisco, she told me about a dream weeks ago, same one you had once. You remember having that dream? With the horns, the block of white stone, the two suns?”
“I thought that you had that dream.”
“Me? No. It was you. I never had any of the dreams, not one. The time I told you, it was that my friend had it, the one in San Francisco. If they’re having them there, having them here, you can bet they’re everywhere.”
“So?”
He slipped his hand up to her breast. She stirred and wriggled against him. He liked that. He felt almost ready to go again. Just like a kid, he thought: always ready for an encore, even these days.
“You know what I was sent here for?” he asked.
“You told me, but they picked it.”
“I had a scam going, offering to send people to other planets where they could make a new start, escape this mess on Earth, you know? Just give me a few thousand bucks and as soon as the process is perfected you’ll be able to—”
Alleluia said, “You can still remember doing that?”
“It doesn’t seem to go when they pick me.”
“And you’ll start your scam up again, is that it?”
“How can it miss? Everybody’s presold. The dreams, they’re like advertisements for the planets that I can supply, you see? There’s the red-and-blue-sun world, there’s the green-sky planet, there’s the nine-suns planet—you see, I know them all, I have my ways, Allie. Seven of them, there are, seven dream-planets. You make your choice, you give me the money, I take care of things, I see to it that you’re shipped to the right place. The dreams, I say, that’s just the other planets sending out like travel posters to tell people how terrific they are. It can’t miss, kid. I tell you: it can’t miss.”
“They’ll catch you again,” she said. “They caught you once, they’ll catch you again. And this time they won’t just toss you in Nepenthe Center.”
“It won’t happen, they catch me.”
“No?”
“Never. First thing is, I get out of the jurisdiction. I go up north, Oregon, Washington. Then I use a dummy corporation—you know what that is?—and another dummy behind the dummy, a series of shells, everything through nominees. With a mail drop in Portland, say, or maybe Spokane, and—”
“Ed?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t give a crap, Ed. You know that?”
“Well, why should you? You don’t give a crap about anything, do you?”
“One thing.”
“Yeah,” he said. “One thing. Thank God for that. But I don’t understand. What good’s a sex-drive in a synthetic? Sex was put in us originally so we’d reproduce, right? And you don’t reproduce, not by sex. Right? Right?”
“It’s there for a reason,” she said.
“It is?”
“It’s to make us think we’re human,” Alleluia said. “So we don’t get maladjusted and unhappy and try to take over the world. We could, you know. We’re highly superior beings. Anything you can do, we can do fifty times better. If we didn’t have sexual feelings, we might think of ourselves as even more different than we are, some sort of master race, you know? But they give us sex, it keeps us pacified, it keeps us in our place.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I can understand that.” Ferguson leaned across, kissed the tip of each nipple, lightly kissed her lips. “It makes a lot of sense,” he said. He had never spent this much time around a synthetic before, and he was learning a lot from doing it. Like most people, he had tended to keep his distance, regarding the synthetics as creepy, weird. There weren’t that many of them anyway, maybe half a million, something like that. Less. He remembered when they were being made, thirty years ago or thereabouts, just before the Dust War. Intended for military use was what he remembered, perfect beings to fight a perfect war. A discontinued experiment of the good old days. But they weren’t quite perfect, it seemed. They had a lot of genuine human quirks. Human enough to make them wind up in a therapy center the way this one had, apparently. Well, they were human enough to love to fuck, too. You take the pluses with the minuses, hope for the best. He cupped her breasts. Softly he said, “When I leave here, you leave here with me, okay? I’ll show you all my little tricks.”