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Authors: C. J. Cherryh
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firings—but then, if that were so, then we should not be sharing the dream, unless all that I had touched, the ship, the lady, Lance, everyone—was illusion, and I had never seen or touched at all.
Perhaps I had built it all out of the chaos-stuff as I had built my hand when I willed to see it. Perhaps I had just gone too far in my building, and what the lady said about dying was my own brain talking to itself, trying to convince me by logic that the dream had to end and that I should be decently dead.
And I would not listen, but went on dreaming.
No , I thought, and shuddered, because there had just crept a touch of red into the shadows in the hall, the old way of looking at things coming back again, and if I could not stop it my eyes would begin to see the chaos-stuff through the walls.
They had experimented, so my lady’s pilfered tapes had told me, with living human senses; and the brain could be re-educated. Eyes could learn to see rightside up or upside down. Somewhere in the waves of energy that impinged the nerves, the brain constructed its own fantasies of matter and blue skies and green grass and solidity, screening out the irrational and random.
A reality existed within us too, tides of particles that were themselves nodes in chaos, all strung together to make this reality of ours. And in this place the structure of matter gaped wide and I could see it ... miniature tides like the tides of the moving galaxies in one rhythm with them, and us spread like a material veil between, midway of one reality and the other.
No, I thought again, and leaned against the veil/wall in my chosen viewpoint of what was, was, was ... don’t look down. One was advised not to look at such things and never to know that all of us were dreaming, dreaming even when we were sure we were alive, because what the brain always did was dream, and what difference whether it built its dreams from the energy affecting it from outside or whether it traced its own independent fancies, making its own patterns on the veil. Don’t lean too hard. Don’t look.
I slid down onto the corridor floor and heaved up my insides, which was my body’s way of telling me it had had enough nonsense. It wanted the old dream back, insisted to have it. I lay there dry-heaving until I dismissed my ideas of dreams and eternities, because I hurt inside and wanted to die, and if I could have waked and died at once I would have gladly done it.
So a pair of slippered feet came up to me; and my lady Dela, all tearful, cursed me for useless and kicked me besides, in my sore stomach. That helped, actually, because when my lady had gone on in and shut the door, I was angry, which was better than hurting. And before I had gotten up on my own, Percy came after me, saying she had sent him. Gentle Percy cleaned the hall up and cleaned me up and carried me to the crew quarters. There, when he had gone back to his duties, I took care of myself and changed and felt better, if somewhat hollow at the gut.
So much for fighting it. I moved meekly about the reality of the Maid , loving her poor battered self as I did my own body, and doing all I could to get her into order again. So did we all, I think with the same reason, that if the Maid had been precious to us before, she was ten thousand times so now.
V
Then to her tower she climb’d, and took the shield,
There kept it, and so lived in fantasy.
I t seemed a long time that we worked. The clocks said one thing and our bodies told us something else, and they were never in agreement, so that some hours flew past as if we had been day-dreaming and others dragged on and on while we ached and got thirsty and hungry. I kept thinking of the way the walls had come and gone at first, and that hours were doing the same thing, or our bodies were. Whatever happened to matter, Lynn said, would happen to us; and if there were phases in this place, I reckoned, where things just went slower, then we and the clocks ought to agree, but
Perhaps I had built it all out of the chaos-stuff as I had built my hand when I willed to see it. Perhaps I had just gone too far in my building, and what the lady said about dying was my own brain talking to itself, trying to convince me by logic that the dream had to end and that I should be decently dead.
And I would not listen, but went on dreaming.
No , I thought, and shuddered, because there had just crept a touch of red into the shadows in the hall, the old way of looking at things coming back again, and if I could not stop it my eyes would begin to see the chaos-stuff through the walls.
They had experimented, so my lady’s pilfered tapes had told me, with living human senses; and the brain could be re-educated. Eyes could learn to see rightside up or upside down. Somewhere in the waves of energy that impinged the nerves, the brain constructed its own fantasies of matter and blue skies and green grass and solidity, screening out the irrational and random.
A reality existed within us too, tides of particles that were themselves nodes in chaos, all strung together to make this reality of ours. And in this place the structure of matter gaped wide and I could see it ... miniature tides like the tides of the moving galaxies in one rhythm with them, and us spread like a material veil between, midway of one reality and the other.
No, I thought again, and leaned against the veil/wall in my chosen viewpoint of what was, was, was ... don’t look down. One was advised not to look at such things and never to know that all of us were dreaming, dreaming even when we were sure we were alive, because what the brain always did was dream, and what difference whether it built its dreams from the energy affecting it from outside or whether it traced its own independent fancies, making its own patterns on the veil. Don’t lean too hard. Don’t look.
I slid down onto the corridor floor and heaved up my insides, which was my body’s way of telling me it had had enough nonsense. It wanted the old dream back, insisted to have it. I lay there dry-heaving until I dismissed my ideas of dreams and eternities, because I hurt inside and wanted to die, and if I could have waked and died at once I would have gladly done it.
So a pair of slippered feet came up to me; and my lady Dela, all tearful, cursed me for useless and kicked me besides, in my sore stomach. That helped, actually, because when my lady had gone on in and shut the door, I was angry, which was better than hurting. And before I had gotten up on my own, Percy came after me, saying she had sent him. Gentle Percy cleaned the hall up and cleaned me up and carried me to the crew quarters. There, when he had gone back to his duties, I took care of myself and changed and felt better, if somewhat hollow at the gut.
So much for fighting it. I moved meekly about the reality of the Maid , loving her poor battered self as I did my own body, and doing all I could to get her into order again. So did we all, I think with the same reason, that if the Maid had been precious to us before, she was ten thousand times so now.
V
Then to her tower she climb’d, and took the shield,
There kept it, and so lived in fantasy.
I t seemed a long time that we worked. The clocks said one thing and our bodies told us something else, and they were never in agreement, so that some hours flew past as if we had been day-dreaming and others dragged on and on while we ached and got thirsty and hungry. I kept thinking of the way the walls had come and gone at first, and that hours were doing the same thing, or our bodies were. Whatever happened to matter, Lynn said, would happen to us; and if there were phases in this place, I reckoned, where things just went slower, then we and the clocks ought to agree, but
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