Dreaming Jewels (7 page)

Blinded, stunned by this urgent, painful pressure, he sank back on the bunk. The call flared again within him; he started up. “Zee—” But she was gone. He stood up, his head in his hands, and then remembered the furious urgency of her orders, and sat down again.

It came again and was—incomplete. Interrupted.

He sat quite still and felt for it with his mind, timidly, as if he were tonguing a sensitive tooth. It was gone. Exhausted, he fell back and went to sleep.

In the morning Zena was back. He had not heard her come in. When he asked her where she had been, she gave him a curious look and said, “Out.” So he did not ask her anything more. But at breakfast with Bunny and Havana, she suddenly gripped his arm, taking advantage of a moment when the others had left the table to stove and toaster. “Horty! If you ever get a call like that again, wake me. Wake me right away, you hear?” She was so fierce he was frightened; he had only time to nod before the others came back. He never forgot it. And after that, there were not many times when he woke her and she slipped out, wordlessly, to come back hours later; for when he realized the calls were not for him, he no longer felt them.

The seasons passed and the carnival grew. The Maneater was still everywhere in it, flogging the roustabouts and the animal men, the daredevils and the drivers, with his weapon—his contempt, which he carried about openly like a naked sword.

The carnival grew—larger. Bunny and Havana grew—older, and so did Zena, in subtle ways. But Horty did not grow at all.

He—she—was a fixture now, with a clear soprano voice and black gloves. He passed with the Maneater, who withheld his contempt in saying “Good Morning”—a high favor—and who had little else to say. But Horty-Kiddo was loved by the rest, in the earnest, slap-dash way peculiar to carnies.

The show was a flat-car rig now, with press-agents and sky-sweeping searchlights, a dance pavilion and complicated, epicyclic rides. A national magazine had run a long picture story on the outfit, with emphasis on its “Strange People” (“Freak Show” being an unpopular phrase.) There was a press office now, and there were managers, and annual re-bookings from big organizations. There were public-address systems for the bally-platforms, and newer—not new, but newer—trailers for the personnel.

The Maneater had long since abandoned his mind-reading act, and, increasingly, was a presence only to those working on the lot. In the magazine stories, he was a “partner,” if mentioned at all. He was seldom interviewed and never photographed. He spent his working hours with his staff, and stalking about the grounds, and his free time with his books and his rolling laboratory and his “Strange People.” There were stories of his being found in the dark hours of the morning, standing in the breathing blackness with his hands behind him and his gaunt shoulders stooped, staring at Gogol in his tank, or peering over the two-headed snake or the hairless rabbit. Watchmen and animal men had learned to keep away from him at such times; they withdrew silently, shaking their heads, and left him alone.

“Thank you, Zena.” The Maneater’s tone was courtly, mellow.

Zena smiled tiredly, closed the door of the trailer against the blackness outside. She crossed to the chrome and plastic-web chair by his desk and curled up with her robe tucked over her toes. “I’ve had enough sleep,” she said.

He poured wine—shimmering Moselle. “An odd hour for it,” he offered, “but I know you like it.”

She took the glass and set it on the corner of the desk. She waited. She had learned to wait.

“I found some new ones today,” said the Maneater. He opened a heavy mahogany box and lifted a velvet tray out of it. “Mostly young ones.”

“That’s good,” said Zena.

“It is and it isn’t,” said Monetre irascibly. “They’re easier to handle—but they can’t do as much. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.”

“So do I,” said Zena.

She thought his eyes moved to her and away in their deep sockets, but she couldn’t be sure. He said, “Look at these.”

She took the tray on her lap. There were eight crystals lying on the velvet, gleaming dully. They had been freshly cleaned of the layer of dust, like dried mud, that always covered them when they were found—the layer that made them look like clods, like stones. They were not quite translucent, yet the nucleus could be seen by one who knew just what internal hovering shadow to look for.

Zena picked one up and held it to the light. Monetae grunted, and she met his gaze.

“I was wondering which one you would pick up first,” he said. “That one’s very alive.” He took it from her and stared at it, narrowing his eyes. The bolt of hatred he aimed at it made Zena whimper. “Please don’t…”

“Sorry… but it screams so,” he said softly, and put it back with the others. “If I could only understand how they think,” he said. “I can hurt them. I can direct them. But I can’t talk to them. But some day I’ll find out…”

“Of course,” said Zena, watching his face. Was he going to have another of his furies? He was due for one…

He slumped into his chair, put his clasped hands between his knees and stretched. She could hear his shoulders crackle. “They dream,” he said, his organ voice dwindling to an intense whisper. “That’s as close to describing them as I’ve come yet. They dream.”

Zena waited.

“But their dreams live in our world—in our kind of reality. Their dreams are not thoughts and shadows, pictures and sounds like ours. They dream in flesh and sap, wood and bone and blood. And sometimes their dreams aren’t finished, and so I have a cat with two legs, and a hairless squirrel, and Gogol, who should be a man, but who has no arms, no sweat glands, no brain. They’re not finished… they all lack formic acid and niacin, among other things. But—they’re alive.”

“And you don’t know—yet—how the crystals do it.”

He looked up at her without moving his head, so that she saw his eyes glint through his heavy brows. “I hate you,” he said, and grinned. “I hate you because I have to depend on you—because I have to talk to you. But sometimes I like what you do. I like what you said—
yet.
I don’t know how the crystals do their dreaming—yet.”

He leaped to his feet, the chair crashing against the wall as he moved. “Who understands a dream fulfilled?” he yelled. Then, quietly, as if there were no excitement in him, he continued evenly, “Talk to a bird and ask it to understand that a thousand-foot tower is a man’s finished dream, or that an artist’s sketch is part of one. Explain to a caterpillar the structure of a symphony—and the dream that based it. Damn structure! Damn ways and means!” His fist crashed down on the desk. Zena quietly picked up her wine glass. “How this thing happens isn’t important. Why it happens isn’t important. But it
does
happen, and I can control it.” He sat down and said to Zena, courteously, “More wine?”

“Thank you, no. I still—”

“The crystals are alive,” Monetre said conversationally. “They think. They think in ways which are utterly alien to ours. They’ve been on this earth for hundreds, thousands of years… clods, pebbles, shards of stone… thinking their thoughts in their own way… striving for nothing mankind wants, taking nothing mankind needs… intruding nowhere, communing only with their own kind. But they have a power that no man has ever dreamed of before. And I want it. I want it. I want it, and I mean to have it.”

He sipped his wine and stared into it. “They breed,” he said. “They die. And they do a thing I don’t understand. They die in pairs, and I throw them away. But some day I’ll force them to give me what I want. I’ll make a perfect thing—a man, or a woman… one who can communicate with the crystals… one who will do what I want done.”

“How do—how can you be sure?” Zena asked carefully.

“Little things I get from them when I hurt them. Flashes, splinters of thought. For years I’ve been prodding them, and for every thousand blows I give them, I get a fragment. I can’t put it into words; it’s a thing I
know.
Not in detail, not quite clearly… but there’s something special about the dream that gets
finished.
It doesn’t turn out like Gogol, or like Solum—incomplete or wrongly made. It’s more like that tree I found. And that finished thing will probably be human, or near it… and if it is, I can control it.”

“I wrote an article about the crystals once,” he said after a time. He began to unlock the deep lower desk drawer. “I sold it to a magazine—one of those veddy lit’ry quarterly reviews. The article was pure conjecture, to all intents and purposes. I described these crystals in every way except to say what they look like. I demonstrated the possibility of other, alien life-forms on earth, and how they could live and grow all around us without our knowledge—
provided they didn’t compete.
Ants compete with humans, and weeds do, and amoebae. These crystals do not—they simply live out their own lives. They may have a group consciousness like humans—but if they do, they don’t use it for survival. And the only evidence mankind has of them is their dreams—their meaningless, unfinished attempts to copy living things around them. And what do you suppose was the learned refutation stimulated by my article?”

Zena waited.

“One,” said Monetre with a frightening softness, “countered with a flat statement that in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter there is a body the size of a basketball which is made of chocolate cake. That, he said, is a statement which must stand as a truth because it cannot be scientifically disproved.
Damn
him!” he roared, and then went on, as softly as before, “Another explained away every evidence of malformed creatures by talking eclectic twaddle about fruit-flies, x-rays, and mutation. It’s that blind, stubborn, damnable attitude that brought such masses of evidence to prove that planes wouldn’t fly (for if ships needed power to keep them afloat as well as to drive them, we’d have no ships) or that trains were impractical (because the weight of the cars on the tracks would overcome the friction of the locomotives’ wheels, and the train would never start.) Volumes of logical, observer’s proof showed the world was flat. Mutations? Of course there are natural mutations. But why must one answer be the only answer? Hard radiation mutations—demonstrable. Purely biochemical mutations—very probable. And the crystals’ dreams…”

From the deep drawer he drew a labelled crystal. He took his silver cigarette lighter from the desk, thumbed it alight, and stroked the yellow flame across the crystal.

Out of the blackness came a faint, agonized scream.

“Please don’t,” said Zena.

He looked sharply at her drawn face. “That’s Moppet,” he said. “Have you now bestowed your affections on a two-legged cat, Zena?”

“You didn’t have to hurt her.”

“Have to?” He brushed the crystal with the flame again, and again the scream drifted to them from the animal tent. “I had to develop my point.” He snapped the lighter out, and Zena visibly relaxed. Monetre dropped lighter and crystal on the desk and went on calmly, “Evidence. I could bring that fool with his celestial chocolate cake here to this trailer, and show him what I just showed you, and he’d tell me the cat was having a stomach ache. I could show him electron photomicrographs of a giant molecule inside that cat’s red corpuscles actually transmuting elements—and he’d accuse me of doctoring the films. Humanity has been accursed for all its history by its insistence that what it already knows must be right, and all that differs from that must be wrong. I add my curse to the curse of history, with all my heart. Zena…”

“Yes, Maneater.” His abrupt change in tone startled her; she had never gotten used to it.

“The complex things—mammals, birds, plants—the crystals only duplicate them if they want to—or if I flog them half to death. But some things are easy.”

He rose, and drew drapes aside from the shelves behind and above him. He lifted down a rack on which was a row of chemist’s watch-glasses. Setting it under the light, he touched the glass covers fondly. “Cultures,” he said, in a lover’s voice. “Simple, harmless ones, now. Rod bacilli in this one, and spirilla here. The
cocci
are coming along slowly, but coming for all that. I’ll plant glanders, Zena, if I like, or the plague. I’ll carry nuisance-value epidemics up and down this country—or wipe out whole cities. All I need to be sure of it is that middle-man—that fulfilled dream of the crystals that can teach me how they think. I’ll find that middle-man, Zee, or make one. And when I do, I’ll do what I like with mankind, in my own time, in my own way.”

She looked up at his dark face and said nothing.

“Why do you come here and listen to me, Zena?”

“Because you call. Because you’ll hurt me if I don’t,” she said candidly. Then, “Why do you talk to me?”

Suddenly, he laughed. “You never asked me that before, in all these years. Zena, thoughts are formless, coded… impulses without shape or substance or direction—until you convey them to someone else. Then they precipitate, and become ideas that you can put out on the table and examine. You don’t know what you think until you tell someone else about it. That’s why I talk to you. That’s what you’re
for.
You didn’t drink your wine.”

“I’m sorry.” Dutifully, she drank it, looking at him wide-eyed over the rim of the glass that was too big to be her glass.

After that he let her go.

The seasons passed and there were other changes. Zena very seldom read aloud any more. She heard music or played her guitar, or busied herself with costumes and continuities, quietly, while Horty sprawled on his bunk, one hand cupping his chin, the other flipping pages. His eyes moved perhaps four times to scan each page, and their turning was a rhythmic susurrus. The books were Zena’s choice, and now they were almost all quite beyond her. Horty swept the books of knowledge, breathed it in, stored it, filed it. She used to look at him, sometimes, in deep astonishment, amazed that he was Horty… he was Kiddo, a girl-child, who, in a few minutes would be on the bally-platform singing the “Yodelin’ Jive” with her. He was Kiddo, who giggled at Cajun Jack’s horseplay in the cook-tent and helped Lorelei with her brief equestrienne costumes. Yet, still giggling, or still chattering about bras and sequins, Kiddo was Horty, who would pick up a romantic novel with a bosomy dust-jacket, and immerse himself in the esoteric matter it concealed—texts disguised under the false covers—books on microbiology, genetics, cancer, dietetics, morphology, endocrinology. He never discussed what he read, never; apparently, evaluated it. He simply stored it—every page, every diagram, every word of every book she brought him. He helped her put the false covers on them, and he helped her secretly dispose of the books when he had read them—he never needed them for reference—and he never questioned her once about why he was doing it.