This Shared Dream (22 page)

It was really, really cool when the change came to all the kids in the world.

Zoe would always remember it. It happened on a Tuesday night, at least for her, but for other kids it was Wednesday morning, or Tuesday afternoon.

She was lying in bed, almost asleep, when she saw a light on the ceiling, and heard a brilliant music, so brilliant that toes and fingers and even her hair ached with it, brilliant beyond beautiful.

She got up to see what the light was, moving through skeins of color and sound, and saw that it was her classbook, all lit up.

Picking it up and holding it in front of her face, she was profoundly transformed. The voices were all singing, and she sang with them, adding her own notes now and then, listening for a few seconds, then joining in.

She didn’t know how long this happened. But the next day, kids started talking to one another and they talked so much in their own languages and worked so hard that words started meaning the same thing to them as they did to other kids. It was kind of like swimming in the ocean, being pushed here and there with words and meaning and sense, and the words were ground down to sand and re-formed into new words that meant the same thing to everyone, until one morning you understood what everybody was saying, you could stand up, you were on land and could walk where you wanted to go. It was like that. But those were the simple early times and then the words got so you could say more complicated things. They called their talk Zozo. Whenever someone started talking in their own language, lots of kids would shout “Zozo!”

One day when she was much younger, just six, and missed her mother, she had walked out of school and listened for her. She had a kids’ pass for the Metro and just went on this bus and that and sometimes Mom got faint but then Zoe would find a bus going the right way. And she walked into her mother’s meeting, just opened the door where her sound boomed and soared and Mom saw her and stopped talking. She stared at Zoe. She said, “Excuse me, that’s my little girl,” which made Zoe mad, because she was not little, and then Mom took her out to lunch and asked how she knew where she was and why she was not in school and there was a big flurry of unpleasant stuff and she found out that it was not good to just go wherever you were hearing said you ought to go. So she found out when it was okay and when it was not.

She had only been two when she last saw Grandpa Dance. They told her she was too little to remember, but she did. He used to grab her up, in the living room downstairs, while he played those jazz records, and swing her around the room as she shrieked and laughed. He took her out in the garden and taught her names: peony, tulip, hollyhock, lily-of-the valley, which were poisonous. He told her about Ohio, and riding on the
Queen Elizabeth,
and played any song she wanted on his saxophone for her, and the songs were always stretched with lots of notes and more interesting than hearing “The Erie Canal” on her record player. He’d play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and it never sounded the same twice, yet she always recognized it somehow.

She remembered running out the door screaming when her daddy told her that Grandpa Sam might not come back, and his big footsteps behind her as he ran and caught her before she could run across the street in front of a car.

Now that she was older, she could see him more strongly, more clearly, in music. He was half a rainbow. The other half was missing. She could still feel him somewhere looking for the rest of the rainbow. She dreamed of him as a walking rainbow with legs and arms and a hat and a saxophone, like a cartoon, but the rainbow had eyes and they were his.

Now the other half of the rainbow was here: Grandma Dance. She and Abbie and Whens were big enough to keep the secret, probably. Maybe. Bitsy was definitely a blabber. So little that nobody would believe her, though. Zoe knew what that was like.

Now that Zoe was older, a whole new stream flowed through her, especially when she came here to Crazy Aunt Jill’s house. There were a million sounds and colors here, things she just could not write down no matter how hard she tried, because it radiated from everything, from vases and furniture and walls, and most strongly from the attic. The ballroom was the quietest place, really, like a sunlit meadow in the middle of a forest, and its music was more focused, and older, and clearer. Her aunts were nuts, of course, although it was more than that. Crazy Aunt Megan was crazy in a different way from Crazy Aunt Jill. Crazy Aunt Jill was like a lot of beautiful marbles all rolling around on the floor, sometimes clacking together with glassy sounds, and there were different levels, and the marbles could roll upward, defying gravity, and then back down. Crazy Aunt Megan was a smooth sheet of glass that you could see things through, things like the circuit board of a computer, brightly colored and precise and organized, but that you worried about what would happen to it all if the glass broke. There were an awful lot of colors and sounds at Crazy Aunt Jill’s house that could break the glass of Crazy Aunt Megan, which was why, Zoe supposed, she wasn’t there often. Her dad was kind of like that too, but he was more like melting glass, and the colors of the glass were melting together and swirling around and then they would stop and he would just be in one pattern for a while. Dad didn’t seem to mind all that. He wanted more melting, more swirling. But sometimes Dad was way too swirly. That’s what made Zoe sick, like being on a roller coaster. She tried to throw up in very, very private, otherwise they kept taking her to doctors, and they wanted her blood and she was forced to scream about the needles, at least when she’d been little, and they wanted to take pictures of her brain. There was nothing wrong with her, she knew. It was just everybody else.

The other kids called her mom Crazy Aunt Cindy, but that was because she was just so much fun and so funny and made them all laugh. There was nothing crazy about Mom. She was like a long walk through a beautiful garden and she was always working in the garden too, like she was the garden and the worker in the garden, planting new flowers, planting herself, and dusting off her hands.

There were frightening musics too, that came from other kids, from other people in the world, and then sometimes too from people she saw downtown, maybe in a nice restaurant where she had to really behave herself (though that had become easy years ago). She’d heard a lot of scary music in those places, from men and women wearing really nice clothes, and the times when that happened she actually threw up, which was pretty boring for her, it happened so often, and upsetting to everyone around her, so they didn’t take her to restaurants much anymore. They just said that she was nervous and had a reflux problem, but it wasn’t that at all.

Zoe and the new friends she found on Q talked in notes and colors. Some of them, like Indians, and Arabs, thought in colors more naturally than they did in Western music, and had different forms of notation, which Zoe learned readily. They used cool words like
jins,
and
maqam
, and although there were musics she could not play on the instruments around her, she could at least hear them, and now she could write them down and share them. So she was very glad to find that the complexity she longed for when composing had been thought of before, by other people, and that she was not alone.

It was very important not to be alone, and she had been alone since Grandpa left. Finding other kids like her was the happiest thing that had ever happened to her, other than playing her beloved instruments.

So all day, while the adults did their boring things, Zoe was enthralled to be able to play violin in the ballroom.

Fallen bits of the plaster ceiling lay on the herringbone floor, which needed sanding and waxing, and it needed a new metal beam underneath to hold it up. According to her parents, there was so much work to fixing up the ballroom further that they had no idea if they’d ever do it.

The windows were tall and had half-circles over them with thin pieces of wood like the rays of the sun holding the glass. Old furniture covered with sheets had been pushed over to the walls, spoiling the acoustics. She had tried moving some pieces to different places, but it didn’t help.

She had, though, discovered a spot at what she had decided was the front of the ballroom; Jill had even mentioned that they’d found an old photo in the attic and that was where a small stage had raised the musicians a few feet higher. She dragged a chair and stood on it as she played; then the sounds echoed back, absolutely beautiful.

She especially liked Vivaldi, and was right now playing
Summer
. She played her part very slowly, because it was quite complicated, but heard all the other parts as she played. She wanted the whole world to hear how beautiful it was. So much was wasted. Hardly anyone else could hear it. Sometimes this made her so deeply sad that she cried. At the same time, she cried because she was deeply happy that at least she could hear it.

Zoe was often distressed that other children did not feel the same joy about music. And that they could not hear the music of other humans, not to mention the music of a tulip, or were even unable to meld the perfect with the imperfect musically, for that wide view of everything in one great music, which filled her with light.

She never told anybody else about the filled-with-light feelings. She could show them, with music, and yet her control of her instruments, the violin and the piano, was imperfect, as far as she was concerned, despite how adults raved. That was only because of her age; she knew that she had a long way to go to reach her own goals. Presently, writing her music was the only way to actually transmit that light.

Unfortunately, no one else knew how to read her music in its entirety.

On her classbook, though, she’d met a girl in China who was the same as her. The classbook translated their spoken language, and they also spoke in Zozo. They both understood that people were music and that the parts of them they tried to hide, even the parts of them that they didn’t know about themselves, were music. But each used a different method to write their music. The Chinese girl, Dawei, sometimes used equations hyperlinked to her notations. When she tried to explain them, Zoe realized the equation’s similarities to her colors, with their infinite hues.

There was also Adam, twelve, in a small town in Cameroon. He too had colors for sounds, but they had a different correlation than Zoe’s. He spoke French and some other African language, and again the translator helped, along with their new language. Adam used a lot of drums. The drums themselves, in all their varieties, often comprised an entire piece in Adam’s repertoire. Zoe imported many of Adam’s sounds into pieces she composed on her classbook.

These, and other kids like him, were Zoe’s friends, much more than the kids around her in school. Her schoolmates made fun of her, and called her a snob. She minded at first, a long time ago, but now she didn’t care. Since she was little, she’d had an imaginary older brother, Paul, who was very kind. She often heard other kids complain about their brothers, so she was glad Paul was kind, and fun too.

She wanted, someday, to be able to teach other kids about music. She wrote her heart out for them and put her pieces out there, on Q, the writing that had no physical manifestation except perhaps in people. She could make music out of people.

As she thought all these things, she was playing, and playing, and playing whatever came into her mind, Vivaldi having been left far behind.

When her father stuck his head in the door and told her it was time to go home, Zoe protested, “I just got started.”

Her dad got a funny look on his face. “It’s almost six, sweetie. You’ve been playing since eleven. Did you get yourself anything to eat?”

Zoe shook her head. She carefully put her violin away. “My fingers do hurt, I guess.”

*   *   *

Bette, up in the attic, had heard someone stumbling around earlier in the day. Listening in, later, she discovered that Brian had taken Sam’s notebooks, his saxophone, and the trombone.

Without any eavesdropping equipment, she had also felt, as much as heard, otherworldly violin music so sweet it almost made her weep. For some reason, it reminded her of Sam.

But she had been weeping a lot, anyway. She wandered the house when it was empty, and at night, trying to recover her own lost past, her own lost life, wondering if what she had been a part of had been worth the sacrifice.

The threat that had sent her timestream-hopping was still here, although now its origin was not her former employer, the CIA. It seemed as if the CIA had forgotten about the Dances completely. Perhaps in this timestream, the Dances had never been the subject of intense, crippling scrutiny. Bette, at overwhelming cost to herself, had sacrificed those growing-up years for their safety, so perhaps it had been worth it.

But this threat was from a source more mysterious, and thus more unsettling.

She nudged the little window a few inches higher, but with trepidation. Someone might notice the open window, although it was mostly hidden by an ornate gable. It crossed her mind that maybe she wanted to be discovered.

She turned on her vent fan, closed the window, and recalled the discussion Brian and Jill had had about her Q-Schools earlier in the day while she had somewhat guiltily eavesdropped. What right did anyone have to distribute such schools—that is, if the design even worked?

Jill had asked Brian, with some heat, what gave old men the right to mire nations and all their treasure and lives in horrific, endless war?

Not a new question. The answer had always been, because they had the power. Bette tapped a cigarette out of her pack and lit it.

War was just a biological tradition, according to Hadntz, one that could be broken, a terrible dream that humanity could wake from, if properly inoculated, via education. Inoculation could be many layered as well. It might consist of even deeper biological agents, akin, say, to vaccines for polio and smallpox, or any other world-changing drug. Disease, like war, was a natural biological occurrence, but that didn’t mean that people had to suffer from curable disease. These Q-Schools, like the Device, were a product of the human mind, as were war, commerce, medicine, and literacy.