Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  Universe 6

  Ed by Terry Carr

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  Journey to the Heartland

  brian w. aldiss

  What Did You Do Last Year?

  gordon eklund & gregory benford

  Custer’s Last Jump

  steven utley & howard waldrop

  The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat

  harlan ellison

  Under the Generator

  johN shirley

  Stars and Darkness

  glenn chang

  Shifting Parameters in Disappearance and Memory

  charlie haas

  * * * *

  Brian aldiss, whose novels include Greybeard and Frankenstein Unbound, is one of the most important science fiction writers of the past decade—not only because of his great talent, but because he has continued to explore new fictional territory year after year.

  Here, in his first story for Universe, he tells an absorbing tale of research into human consciousness, of the discovery that different time-flows run concurrently in the brain. It sounds like a terribly serious, significant story, and it is....but Aldiss makes of it something more, a wry, even playful commentary on people.

  * * * *

  Journey to the Heartland

  BY BRIAN W. ALDISS

  At certain times of day the campus was full of people. Students and college professors alike paraded in the sunshine, talking, calling, flirting, reading—a bright flock almost as migratory as birds. Five minutes later, they would all be gone to classroom or playing field or canteen, leaving the area deserted.

  The windows of the Dream Research Unit looked down on the parade. Andrew Angsteed looked down through the windows. He was head of the unit. He was tall, casually dressed; his hair was graying. People found him remote. The hubbub from below rose to his ears. On the whole, he preferred the campus empty.

  Behind him, in the laboratory, his three assistants worked, transcribing and codifying the previous night’s work. Angsteed walked past the row of caged cats with their shaven heads. A thin beam of sun, slanting in the end window, lit the last cage; its occupant rolled over on her back, purring as Angsteed passed. He went to the window and drew down the blind.

  Then he retreated into his office and put his head between his hands.

  * * * *

  Rose-Jean Dempson was awakened by the yellow buzzer.

  She opened her eyes. The scene that drifted in on her senses was without meaning, an affair of walls, angles, and corners in which she was not remotely interested, so vivid remained the perspectives in which she had just been moving namelessly.

  Moving carefully so as not to detach electrodes, she pulled herself onto one elbow and reached for a microphone by the bedside.

  “4:17. I dreamed I was on a train in the Jurassic Age. It was a funny train, all full of beautiful furry surfaces. They were like big moths. I don’t think they were alive. I wasn’t scared of them. It didn’t seem to be Jurassic time outside, at least not at first.

  “My husband was in the dream. We had been to a party with a lot of people. Maybe it was somewhere under ground. I had left without him to catch the train. Yet he was also on the train. That sounds confusing, but it wasn’t in the dream. He was at the party and he was also on the train. I kept wondering how I could save him. I loved him best in the world and I wanted to be perfectly possessed by him; but he would not come all the way toward me. That was why I was having to go into the Jurassic, I think.

  “Someone was arguing with me. It was a ticket collector. He was old and gray but very solid, very fatherly. He did not seem to see my husband. He was telling me to get off the train.

  “I said, ‘There are things which have never been done before. I have to tell my husband to let go of his strict self-control. He has to reject all the things he thinks he loves, or else he will die. He must be more random, as these moths appear to be.’

  “But I knew that was wrong, somehow. The ticket collector would not let me explain properly. He shook his head and said something like, “The essence of human life can only be a matter of cyclic repetition.’

  “I was trying to explain to people that my madness, my wish to roam, was a special, life-giving quality. My husband had to admire, accept, and emulate it. I knew this meant suffering for him, but only in that way could he make his inner life flower. Everything else in the compartment was flowering, the upholstery and everything, but he sat there almost like a pile of luggage. I must have identified with him in some way, because I also felt like a thing all of a sudden.

  “There were strange lumpy people moving along the corridor of the train.

  “When I lay down on the seat, I realized it was night outside. We were gliding through the outer suburbs of a huge city. The train was a blaze of flame and foliage and bright things. Just above the rim of the window, I saw cold lights that fled by in the dark—white, white, white, white, white, repetitive, chilled nine hundred times. Very threatening. They were lighting wide deserted roads. Then there were dark houses. Then spots of sodium lighting, threaded out thin. Then country. Blackness.

  “A different blackness from my blackness. Mine was rich and warm, personal, unregulated. The outer darkness had been chilled by the little urban lights. I tried to explain to my husband that the mad and the sane met here, that the lights were the lights of the sane—in those two camps of the world, the sane were winning by sheer force of numbers, pushing their cold little nonradiant lights out into the countryside.

  “There was a terrific noise as we went over a bridge. I was excited because I thought we were getting near the Jurassic. The moths were very thick and bright.

  “Then the bell rang.”

  Rose-Jean looked about the laboratory, thick with mute noises of machines. Then she settled her dark head down on the pillow and fell asleep. Ninety-two minutes later, the yellow buzzer roused her again.

  * * * *

  Andrew Angsteed and Rose-Jean Dempson walked back from town. The sun was low, casting long poplar shadows across the fields toward the university, where a few windows were already lit against dusk.

  “I’m going to be away next week,” Angsteed said. “Or did I already tell you that? Do you want a break from work, Rose-Jean?”

  “No, I’m not tired at all. Besides, I’m off duty tonight.”

  “But you’ve been on nights for six weeks now, going on seven.”

  “I can’t exactly explain, Andrew, but I’m refreshed by my dreams. Since you’ve been recording them, they have become much more vivid. I feel as if—as if a whole new side of my personality was coming into being.”

  A silence between them. Before it could grow too long and awkward, Angsteed said, “You’ve become my star guinea pig, Rose-Jean. As you know, our interest on the project is simply to categorize, not analyze, dreams. We’ve identified three main types, or think we have—sigma, tau, and ypsilon, and over a five-year period we are specializing in the tau-type, which is a phenomenon of median second-quarter sleep. In other words, we are concerned with classification, not with the dream content per se. What is beginning to emerge is that the tau-type is a more multilayered dream than the other kinds. But your dreams—your tau dreams, Rose-Jean . . . well, I happen to find them extraordinarily beautiful, interesting, and significant. I mean nothing personal—”

  She looked up at his face and said, “Dreams aren’t exactly personal, are they?”

  “No, let me finish! Just because I’m in charge of the project, I may seem remote at times. You know that our findings are being challenged by Dr. Rudesci in St. Louis.” He paused. “Have I said this to you b
efore?”

  “No. Well—yes, in a way. Sometimes. People have been known to repeat themselves, Andrew, especially if it is something that is worrying them.”

  They had come to the gate into New Buildings. He paused and took her hand.

  “Don’t let’s go in yet! I have to talk to you. Rose-Jean, I have fallen completely for you. You must have noticed. You’re so beautiful and your dreams are so beautiful. I’ve never been so close to anyone’s inner world. . .

  She looked searchingly at him, so that he could devour once again the sight of that perfect conjunction between nose, nostrils, upper lip, and mouth, and the unique placement of her eyes, eyes that he had so often surreptitiously gazed on when, closed and inward-gazing, they were merely the most entrancing part of his research project.

  “You’d better come up and have coffee in my room, Andrew,” she said.

  * * * *

  Hers was the ordinary untidy room of a young faculty teacher. He noted books on her shelves that one might find in any of twenty adjacent rooms: Tilbane’s Lord of the Rocks; The Grand Claim of Being; Sex in Theory and Practice; Orlick’s After the Post-Renaissance; his own Sense and the Dreaming Self; What I Know About Mars; Loupescu on Time; Krawstadt’s Frankenstein Among the Arts; and others. There were also drawings and gouache paintings scattered about.

  By the window was a framed photograph of her with a man, laughing.

  He picked up one of the gouaches. It showed a girl sitting decorously nude against a panther. “Did you do this?” he asked. The colors were crude.

  “Please. It’s not finished. Besides, it isn’t very good.”

  He watched her push her paintings away in a locker. She was right, that must be admitted; the painting wasn’t very good; her dreams were much more striking.

  Straightening, she said, “I keep painting the same picture over and over again, as if that one image is all I have to offer, I don’t know why. It’s as if my essence was just repetitive.”

  “The essence of human life can only be a matter of cyclic repetition, since all generations are similar, have similar archetypal experiences.”

  “I meant repetitive within myself. Maybe all my dreams would boil down to repetition, if they were analyzed.”

  He suspected she was trying for pathos. He replied with a great effort at warmth, “I would not think that at all. There are always certain recurrent archetypes in dreams, but much of the other content of your dreams I find highly original and thought-provoking.”

  “Is that really so? What sort of things—I mean, may I ask—?”

  “Take your last dream, the one about traveling by train into the Jurassic. I’ve played your report over several times. I found it interesting the way you contrasted the mad and the cold sane. Your sympathies were with the mad. You evidently see our urban culture, nominally built by the sane, as a sinister thing—a threat to true sanity, which is allied to madness.”

  She put her hand over her mouth. “Do I really? Did I say that? Oh, it sounds very profound. . . . My subject’s really domestic science. . . . Maybe I should get us some coffee, would you like that?”

  “The dream world—right at its heartland lies an extraordinary amalgam of sanity and madness. . . .” His attempt at explanation hung in the silence of her banal room.

  He watched her preparing coffee, dearly wishing that she would offer him whiskey. He recalled that she did not touch alcohol. Perhaps he could change that, given time.

  She looked so cool, so lovely, in her simple outfit of slacks, blouse, and suede waistcoat. He went over to her and put an arm around her.

  “Rose-Jean, the work has taken on new meaning for me since you joined our unit as a volunteer.” As he said the words he thought how pedestrian they sounded. The language of dreams was so much more eloquent than the poor, defaced coinage of waking.

  She took the opportunity to ask, “What do you hope to find out from these researches? You must believe in them—you’ve dedicated so much time to them.”

  “There are things that have never been done. Haven’t I said this to you before? It’s some while since it was discovered that there were different kinds of sleep. Now we are sure that there are different kinds of dreams—although the situation looks more complex than when I launched the project, nine years ago. I think at last I have the answer. . . .”

  “And what’s that? What sort of answer?”

  “Oh, forget it. Let’s not talk shop. Rose-Jean!” He grasped her and tried to kiss her. She struggled in his arms but he would not let her go. She submitted, bringing her lips to his. Although she stood unyieldingly, after a second she parted her lips slightly, so that he could taste the warmth rising from within her, the furnace of her. He cupped her left breast with one hand before letting her go.

  She retreated, hand up to mouth again.

  “Andrew, I’m not psychologically prepared for this kind of assault!”

  “‘Assault’!”

  “As you may know, I’m living separate from my husband, but he is still around and—I may as well tell you this—he still occupies much of my thoughts. Now, please let me pour you some coffee.”

  He clutched his head. “As I say—the essence of human life is cyclic—archetypal emotions, sensations, experiences. They don’t change. . . . Sometimes I feel that the whole reality of modern living is a fraud, a distraction from some deep and living thing. Maybe we help release that in our work.” He laughed, half angrily.

  She gave him a mug full of black coffee, looking at him curiously.

  “You were saying you have an answer to your work problems. Can you tell me? I have a fascination for science, so I am genuinely interested, you know.”

  “Are you? Do you care about me at all? Could you ever love me?”

  “Could you ever love me, Andrew? Or is it just my dreams that you care about? I sometimes think my husband never cared about the real me. My dream side is surely impersonal —it contains all kinds of fascinating—snippets, I guess, from God knows where. The collective unconscious, I guess. But the real Rose-Jean Dempson only surfaces in waking hours.”

  He looked at his watch. “Listen, I’ll tell you what I’ve told nobody. I think the unit is on to something really big. There are things which have never been done before, and we could be on to one of them.

  “Scientific thought is finally acknowledging the complexity of a human being. As usual, the biological side has had to come first, with its gradual revelation of the intricately different times and cycles kept by the physical body. Since then, there’s been progress in other directions, all reinforcing the same pattern.

  “The further we probe into sleep and dreams, the more actual becomes the vast, rich complexity of the mind. It sometimes feels like—I sometimes feel like an explorer, trembling on the brink of an unknown world.”

  “That must be a wonderful experience, Andrew. I’m truly glad for you.”

  “We’ve had a whole year of frustrations. The work’s got nowhere. Our findings have been challenged, as you know. Now we recognize that our earlier interpretation of the evidence was incorrect. We were working with a too-simple model of the mind. At last I can understand that we are on the threshold of something of much more startling import than I ever expected. Your dreams have helped me toward an understanding of that something.”

  “Oh, how totally thrilling! And what is that?”

  He set his mug down and said, slowly, “Rose-Jean, I can’t expect anyone but myself to grasp the entire picture yet, but I have discovered that there are several different time-flows running concurrently in the brain.”

  “I don’t understand. Time-flows?”

  “We all occasionally acknowledge different time-flows, despite the horrible supremacy of clock-time in the modern world—the clock-time I believe you were escaping from in your last dream. That’s why I think you are like me. There’s the light, slow time-flow of childhood, the heavy, sluggish time-flow of the mentally deranged, the time that lovers appear to abolish, th
e speeded-up time of drunks, the suspended time-flow of catastrophe, and others. They’re not imaginary, they’re genuinely different internal circuitry. I believe I shall soon have proof of that, proof that many different time-flows exist within any one mind, in the same way that various time-mechanisms coexist in the body.”

  Angsteed went to the window, absorbed in his vision. The campus, glimpsed here from an angle, was brightly lit. Several people were about. Some strolled leisurely, some walked briskly, one or two were running. Some went in groups and pairs. Many were solitary. Some chose the light areas, some the shadows.

  * * * *

  She was looking at him wide-eyed. There was something curious in her manner.

  “Do you mind if I draw the drapes?”