Ancient Echoes (15 page)

The New Zealander, Brightmore, came over to shake Jack’s hand. He had long black hair tied back in a single plait, and dark stubble on his lean face. He watched Jack distantly, but with curiosity, attempting a smile.

‘That was a good test, Jack. You really pump out the O.R.I’s.’

‘I do my best.’

‘How often did you dream lucidly as a child? Angela’s right – you’re really strong.’

‘I didn’t. Much. Maybe a few times, the usual thing – flying over tree-tops, being swung high in the air on the end of a huge rope, hanging on for dear life.’

Brightmore glanced at Angela with a quick smirk, then said, ‘
Those
weren’t lucid. Lucid is different. Your lucid dreaming is
so much a part of you, you probably think it’s part of reality. Such a
powerful
O.R.I. I’m really impressed, Jack.’

‘Thank you, Steven.’

‘The VR scanner was picking up the neurone-firing pattern and interpreting it in
seconds.
Did you sense the interaction delay? With Angela?’

‘Interaction delay?’

‘Like on the phone, long distance. A hesitancy in response.’

He hadn’t. He said so.

‘Good. T-lag compensation. That’s quite common. But I say again, you’re a natural, Jack. Your Midax is almost begging to be released and let loose.’

‘My Central Self. My ego.’

Brightmore laughed, this time making Jack’s adrenalin surge with irritation. ‘Central self! Ego is different.
Id
is different. Old-fashioned words, back in favour. You have ego and id personalities, hundreds of them.’

‘And this is good?’

‘It’s not
bad.
Your Central Self is a rational fusion of
some
of these. The rest are scattered,
eyes
watching from the
unconscious.
But your Central Self is
rational –
it’s strongly shaped, strongly formed, and when it goes
Mostly Isolated, Defined
and
Autonomous,
it will have direction and purpose! Angela and I should be able to interact with you at the higher level of the pre-conscious. The Hinterland. The region before the Deep. We’ll be there to take your reports …’

‘The Hinterland,’ Jack echoed. ‘Pre-conscious …’

‘A kingdom all your own, Jack. A part of the mind shaped by you, unique to you, your own world, filled with the familiar, but utterly original. Think of a chess game. Recognizable pieces; unique game-play. No two alike.’

‘Kings, castles, knights and pawns.’

‘Pieces in the game, but
no
game the same. Let’s go again. Do you mind? One more dream, just for practice.’

‘And then?’

‘And then we’ll start
isolating.
We’ll start breaking the rules!’

M.I.D.A.C.S. TRANSMISSION, CHATWIN TEST
6/ Relocation

‘I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers …

‘But all I see is a church, growing out of a cliff …

‘Is anybody there croaked the raven, raven, dream dream, Jeannie, dream …’

Get
a grip, Jack. You’re almost there. Give us a visual source for the voice
…

‘… like the Cathedral at Notre Dame … hundreds of human statues round the big door at the front of the church – all faceless – great doors, hanging open. Feeling of desertion. The red cliffs … all around, encompassing, high above … hundreds of caves and … movement. Reminds me of Petra, hot rocks, the desert, the buildings cut into the desert cliffs, like Rose-red Petra …’

Go
into the church, Jack.

‘Oh God! Huge, absolutely huge arched dome, light everywhere from windows, dust and rocks and broken pews, and chickens everywhere, running everywhere, enormous statues everywhere … gleaming white.’

Take control. Find a visual source and take control.

‘Woman in armour, holding spear and sword … Joan of Arc … de Triumph … white stone armour …’

Bring
me in.

‘Come on in, Angela …’ Find
a source for Steve. You need to hear him.

‘Lovely Jesus. On the Cross. All pained and twisted. That’s my Steve, you bastard … Come on down from that bloody tree, Mr Brightman …’

Jack. Get a grip.

‘Get a grip on Angela, you got a grip on her … caused me pain … no pain to you … never commit for more than a year … pain in the head, the thorns, the hands … come on down, you bastard, come and join the dream dream Jeannie …’

M.I.D.A.C.S. TRANSMISSION, TEST
6 /Dispatches

I kept hearing rock songs, like
Jean Jeannie,
that old David Bowie number … no, I know it wasn’t called that, but you know the one I mean … and echoes of Heavy Metal. The church was just like that Cathedral in Reims, in France – acid-rain scoured statues of the apostles, the saints etcetera in columns beside the big, oak doors. But the Cathedral was embedded in an immense cliff of red sandstone, as if it were
growing
from the cliff. When you told me to go into the place, the church itself seemed to squeeze towards me, like something growing, something organic. The steps were wide and white marble, and I think I recognize the influence of that George Pal film,
The Time Machine:
a sense of running into desertion and decay. The inside of the church was straight out of Turner, but I can’t remember the painting. We saw it at the Royal Academy once, wrecked pews, broken statues, all those chickens and the fabulous shafts of light catching dust which was almost motionless in the air …
Ewenny Priory
! That’s the one. Ewenny Priory, all ruins and light and dust. Perhaps this symbolizes the decay of my religious belief? Am I supposed to speculate about these things in the Hinterland?

I approached the altar space, aware of a big crucifix, with the figure of Christ, loin cloth, crown of thorns, dark beard, eyes closed; but in a side chapel there was a brilliant white statue of Joan of Arc. Her hair was long and curled. She had armoured greaves on her legs, and an impressive breastplate, shaped for what I can only assume was a fairly impressive bosom below. Lots of chain mail, and a spear and sword, and her
armoured foot stamping on the snarling head of a dragon.

When you said to put Angela in the statue it was quite incredible: Joan creaked, twisted and looked around, then came down off the plinth, walking in jerky motion at first, then more smoothly. How very silly! But it seemed real at the time. I’ve watched so many films, so I suppose I could describe the movement as Ray Harryhausen segueing effortlessly into Terminator 2, you know, that effect, what do they call it? Morphic something? Not Resonance, that’s different.
Morphing,
that’s it. The smooth special effects you get.

Joan became splashed with colour, especially round the face, and walked over to me, crouching down, a stone woman with Angela’s features but huge, hugely built, a marble, marvellous giantess.

Then the Christ detached itself from the Cross. I’m sorry Steve … I wasn’t an control, and still resent you. Obvious statement. Funny that I can articulate it here and now, but I didn’t mean to subject you to so much blood. The unconscious works in mysterious ways. Funny, though, you were hitching up your loin cloth at the front like you do with your jeans, always checking everything’s in place, and it was held together with studs and turned faded denim blue as I thought of it.

So I had Christ and Joan of Arc, crouching in front of me, really earnestly, talking to me – your voices – and that’s when I started to laugh.

(Sorry about that.)

Are you getting all this? It feels strange; I’m writing furiously, sitting just outside the church, on the steps in fact, and the sun is low, and red, and everything here is very still and deserted, like the end of the world. I seem to be writing on a heavy parchment, and the pen is a fountain pen, something I never used at school, but it feels good, so maybe this is the fulfilment of an unrealized dream.

So many unrealized dreams, so much to fulfil if Natalie’s to be safe.

Odd: as I wrote that last I was feeling concern for Natalie.
Is that important? My external world feelings are still strong in this Midax state. Which makes me remember that I’m to look for the aperture, and Greensleeves, but everything is so silent, glowing like red dusk, red twilight, yes! I think the way through is close, don’t know why I say this, why it feels like it feels, but behind me, the way through is close.

Am I in a Midax state? It’s hot, I could do with a drink, and I’m sitting on hard steps below a ruined church, looking at other temples, like Roman temples, basking in end-of-the-world red sunlight.

Back to what happened: the two statues quite quickly became ‘certainties’ of each of you; they still looked like Christ and Joan, but your own characters started to belong to them.

You asked me to define Midax again –
Mostly-Isolated/ Defined-Autonomous-Central-Self –
and Christ in his blue loin cloth said, ‘That’s good. That’s very good. You have a fifty percent split; that’s the best yet. When we can isolate your Central Self at 80 you’ll get the instruction to locate one of the access channels between the Hinterland and the Midax Deep. You’ll go in after Greenface, then, but you’ll be on your own. So keep writing, keep practising control.’

And I said, ‘I want to come out. I want to make love. I want to see what’s behind the armour.’

The statue started laughing. It said, ‘Randy bastard. About time too!’ and I said, ‘But I’m going inside … and I may be gone some time …’

So then you asked me to imprint the church, and the carved cliff, with its windows and entrances, and try to mark a route back when the Midax state dissolved. I’d like to come out, now. The statue is walking up the steps. Christ is still crouching, watching me, wiping the blood from his eyes. It’s getting brighter, like a car’s headlight, a glare, a glare, blinding … glare …

DISPATCH ENDS

* * *

‘Excellent! Jack. Excellent! You went well beyond normal LD control.’

LD?
Oh, right. Lucid Dream
…

Jack sat up, realizing that his right wrist was aching. Someone was massaging the muscles, flexing the fingers. Angela’s face, smiling, came into focus. His arm was still strapped to the ‘scribble-pad’; he looked at the ferocious scrawl from the pen attachment and realized it made no sense at all. ‘Can you read that?’

‘Of course. It’s no worse than a doctor’s prescription.’

‘It’s just straight lines.’

Brightmore was fussing with the headpiece and laughed. ‘If you look closely you’ll see little bumps and twitches. We use Direct Computer Interpretation–’

‘DCI?’

‘DCI. Yeah. It prints out the text almost as it comes from the pen. It makes assessments where it’s unsure, that’s why we get you to repeat so much of what we say. Gives us a direct comparison.’

‘A DC?’

Angela laughed as she worked the blood supply back into fingers that were now tingling. ‘Not
everything
comes down to acronyms.’

He thought, RSI for sure, if I keep this up. He flexed the fingers. ‘How fast was I writing?’

‘Faster than you’d believe possible.’

‘FBP?’

‘Shut up. Idiot.’ Amused, she leaned over and kissed him. ‘Bet you feel like an LSP, though …’

It took a second ‘A long slow pint? Yes. I was thinking of beer for most of the transmission. The church was hot, the sun was hot, it made me feel very thirsty.’

Brightmore was fascinated by that statement and made a long note, nodding as he typed at the console.

‘So what’s
that
in capital letters?’ Jack asked after a moment.

‘Rats!’ The New Zealander said. He was frantically backspacing to correct an error.

‘Rats?’

Brightmore glanced over his shoulder, grinning. ‘Real Appetite Triggered.
Somehow.’

He had tried to understand the neurology and psychometry of Midax, but found that he could not mentally articulate the central concept: that his Central Self, the apparent existence of his own point of view, could be partly condensed and given identity and direction. And that once this was done, he would effectively be able to treat his dreams as a virtual reality experience, not just manipulating them, but existing in them, able to interact as if in real space and time.

Like the unfortunate policeman in Wendy Cope’s parody of The
Pirates of Penzance
, he would be able to patrol his own unconscious, to confront his own nightmares.

As far as the Midax research group was concerned, under the patronizing and bullying Steven Brightmore, he was a gift from the gods. The whole project had been centred on dreaming, and in particular on a way to locate and explore the channels that connected the conscious and the unconscious mind, which passed through the region currently referred to as the
pre
-conscious.

The pre-conscious was a focus of argument and counterargument, a region, or a pattern in the brain of primates, whose nature and complexity were hotly contested.

The Midax group, by working on isolating and making autonomous a fragment of the dreamer’s own consciousness, hoped to go – indeed already had gone – deeper into the wild world that fed nightmares.

Jack was a natural, and perhaps had been so all his life; there was some debate about whether his easy ability to isolate his CS existed by nature, or had been induced by the haunting influence of the bull-runners. This, and other questions, might become clearer after the first journey inwards.

That said, several of the Midax team, aware of his claimed
experiences with emerging ghosts, both human and stonewalled, were dubious, despite Angela’s persuasive discussion and description. It made no difference, however, since Jack was the perfect test subject.

Bizarre though his quest would be, if he could locate Greenface – whoever, whatever the entity was – and persuade her back to a world she feared, he would be triumphant. If not, the experience would still have been useful to the Midax team, and only his time would have been wasted.

This had been the sixth test transmission from the more superficial LD state and Brightmore wanted to run two more such experiments, to satisfy himself that he could produce a sufficiently autonomous ‘Ident’ of Jack Chatwin that it would survive the deep-coma state that would accompany the Midax voyage itself.