“I don’t remember,” Alleluia said.
“Well, sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t.”
“And you? You never get the dreams, do you?”
“Never once,” he said, and felt the bitterness starting to rise. “Everybody gets them but me. I don’t know. I’d like to see those places just once. I’d like to know what the hell is going on in everybody’s mind. I’ve got it on my ring that first thing in the morning I have to ask myself, Did you dream a space dream? And I never have. Christ, I hate not feeling what other people feel.”
“You ought to try being artificial for a while, then. See what it’s like being really different.”
“Yeah. Sure. Just what I need.” Ferguson smiled. “Well, at least I won’t get picked tomorrow. They won’t stick their goddamn electronic scalpels into my head. Maybe two or three days away from those bastards and I’ll start to dream, you think? What do you think, Allie?”
“The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you want it too bad. You have to stop wanting it if you hope to get it. You see that, Ed?”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“A lot of hard things are simple.”
“Forget it,” he said. “I can live without the goddamn dreams. I’m just glad to be away from that place.”
“So am I,” she said, and gave his forearm a squeeze that he supposed was meant to be joyful and affectionate. It sent such a jolt of pain through him that he wondered for an instant if she had broken his arm.
They were about three hours out of the Center now. It was late afternoon, still a couple of hours to go before dark. The air was still warm, though there was the first hint in it of the oncoming evening chill. They were in dense redwood forest, moist and soft underfoot even after the long months of summer drought. There were ground squirrels running around everywhere, and now and then some shy skittish little deer peered at them from behind one of the giant trees.
Getting away had been easy, just as Ferguson had expected. After lunch, during free-time, they had simply wandered off into the woods on the inland side of the Center. Nothing unusual about that. Kept right on wandering, that was the unusual part. Stopping in his favorite little screwing-glade to pick up the canvas bag he had stashed there the day before. He had filled the bag with bread, apples, some squeeze-cans of juice, and he had put a detailed memo about it on his recorder-ring, telling his post-pick self of the next day exactly where to find it. And now they were on their way. Christ, it felt good to be free! Out of the pokey at last. Well, the Center wasn’t exactly like a prison—more like a strict boarding school, Ferguson thought—but he had never been much for boarding school either. Or anyplace else where people could tell him what he was supposed to do twelve, sixteen hours a day.
He had a sort of plan. Get to Ukiah, first: that was a fair-sized town, his recorder said, thirty, forty thousand people. A downright metropolis these days, post-Dust War days, when kids were few and far between and the population was way down, off as much as eighty-five percent from twentieth-century peaks. Sometimes Ferguson tried to imagine the world with all those people in it, five or six million in L.A. alone, more than that in New York. They said sixteen million in Mexico City. Could you believe it? Wasn’t anyone in Mexico City now, zero, nada, everybody scattering when the Nicas dusted the place. And maybe a million in L.A., if you counted in every town from Santa Barbara down to Newport Beach as being L.A. Well, so we get to Ukiah, he thought, find ourselves a motel, tidy up, regroup, and reorganize. Then phone Lacy and have her wire some money to me from San Fran. She’d be liquid enough to advance him something, he hoped. Christ knows she made a pile when she was working for me: must have hung on to enough to spare me a little. He wasn’t carrying any, of course. There was no need for it at the Center, and they didn’t encourage you to keep it on hand; when you had a weekend’s external leave they simply set up a credit line for you at the place where you’d be staying and at the place where you’d be eating. They didn’t want their inmates getting beyond reach.
He’d get beyond reach, all right. Couple days in Ukiah making arrangements, then off to Idaho—no visa needed to get into Idaho, right?—and from there, after maybe six weeks’ residence to make it official, apply for entry into Oregon. They had some sort of republic in Oregon now, Oregon and maybe half of what had been Washington State, and once he was across the line there’d be no way of getting him back to California. A matter of sovereign independence, and the way Oregon felt about the Californios, they’d never extradite anybody. So then with Oregon as his base he could start making some profitable use of the space dreams. He wasn’t exactly sure how just yet, probably some variation on the former Betelgeuse Five scam, guaranteed transmission to the newly developing other worlds, the seven planets so widely being exhibited in your nightly dreams. It would help some if he could see the dreams himself, but that wasn’t essential so long as he had Alleluia beside him. And Alleluia beside him at night, too, that tremendous panther body of hers every night—
“Hey, what’s the hurry?” he called to her. Suddenly she was striding along like a house on fire, leaving him far behind.
She turned and gave him a mischievous smile. “You having trouble keeping up, Ed?”
“Screw you,” Ferguson said amiably. “We all know you’re a superior life-form. You don’t have to prove the goddamn point. Now slow down a little and let’s hike it together, okay?”
“Right now I feel like moving fast,” she told him. “Getting my heart pumping some.”
“You get out of sight, you’ll get lost altogether. You may be perfect but you don’t know where you’re heading, do you? Go on. You just charge off through the woods. Maybe I’ll see you again, maybe not.”
Her laughter came floating back to him. Feeling anger rising, Ferguson began to walk faster, keeping his eyes fixed on her. Bitch, he thought. Challenging him like this. A real bitch. But you have to admit she’s a magnificent bitch.
He had never known a woman anything like her, and he had known a lot of women. So tall and supple, practically his own height. And beautifuclass="underline" all that jet-black hair, those breasts, those legs. And strong: the long flat muscles rippling beneath her satiny skin, that aura she had of tremendous power just barely held in reserve. And strange: you could never predict what she would do. The way her mind worked, she seemed like a Martian sometimes. A woman from Betelgeuse Five. Ferguson wondered what sort of problems had landed her in mindpick. The first thing they told you at Nepenthe Center was that you weren’t supposed to discuss your past with your fellow patients; the past was where your wounds were, they said, and you were supposed to let it all slough off under the pick. When you reintegrated in the final phase of the treatment, they told you, the useful part of your past would come back, the wounds would be forever gone; so it wasn’t useful to cut the memory grooves any deeper by talking about where you were coming from. Ferguson had broken that rule, of course. He broke all the rules, just as a matter of habit. But Alleluia hadn’t told him a thing about the disturbances that had brought her to the Center. She had gone into fits of crazy depression, maybe, the Gelbard stuff, and maybe even killed people with her bare hands to cheer herself up, for all he knew. Whatever it was, she kept it to herself. Maybe she didn’t even know. Maybe she had already sloughed all her memories off under the pick, he thought. A strange woman. But gorgeous. Gorgeous.
He was damned if he’d let her get this far ahead of him. She was almost out of sight up there. He started into a half-trot, breathing hard, breaking into a light sweat, stumbling a little on the soft loose forest duff. Ferguson was surprised at how short a time it took for him to get out of breath. Then he began to feel the beginning of some pain behind his breastbone, nothing too agonizing, just a sharp little pressure. No big deal. But a little on the scary side all the same.