Gilpin's Space, page 11
It seemed to work, especially with VeeVee and the Gnat. They reported waking up just as nightmares started, half-scared but not overwhelmed. But it didn’t seem to work as well with adults and some of the older children, especially as the days passed and the intrusions intensified, coming with greater frequency. Franz and Bess Mayhew both had a taste of it; they reported that they never before had known the meaning of pure terror. Geoff, too, of all people, woke up in the small hours, utterly desolate, weeping; he told me he had found himself a thousand fathoms deep in a despair so absolute that at first he knew there could be no escape from it. Then Rhoda experienced two more attacks, each just as traumatic as the first.
“I think,” Laure told Bess, “that how we respond to your Senoi therapy and Franz’s Korzybskian approach—and also how we react to these invasions—is a function partly of our cultures and partly of what has happened to us as individuals. Tammy and Malia and, for that matter, Anne and Jamie, come from cultures not really hostile to the extrasensory; so does Franz. Besides, they all had family backgrounds in which a child would have run no real risk by suddenly becoming telepathic and letting his folks know about it. Rhoda’s parents, on the other hand, lived lives of suspicion, jealousy, and downright hatred. From everything she’s told me, I’d not have wanted to peep into either of their minds. That’s the sort of thing that could reinforce the resonance Saul’s little Indian friend warned us against—a resonance that may make the sense of identity almost unbreakable.”
In our sessions, we listened to how one or another had been wakened by—by what? In many cases, the emotions reaching us were too alien to be directly understandable; our assailed minds could only struggle to translate them into our own idioms. Most of them involved suffering—sometimes with vague implications of physical agonies, sometimes as a direct message of terror of the unknown, the unknowable, sometimes screaming the fear of death, sometimes the fear of never dying. Then there were others which we translated into bleak bereavements, into the cruel destruction of high hopes and cherished loves, into yearnings so acute and deep and completely hopeless that only the emptiness of nonexistence could put an end to them.
And, worst of all, this was all there was. No data came, nothing to tell us the nature of those suffering beings, or their environments, or what it was that hated them, or had abandoned them, or thrown them into the terrors they screamed at us. Yes, we would awaken cold as ice—but did we really know that it was cold we were responding to?
Our reactions differed widely. After that first nightmare hit me, I usually managed to wake instantly—or almost instantly—at the first painful touch; so did Geoff and Anne and Jamie; so did Bess. Mrs. Rasmussen and Linda each told us that they really had to struggle to awaken. Franz had a terrible time for days; then suddenly, somehow, managed to turn it off—he credited the Structural Differential. Tammy and Malia and their boy and girl pretty much took it in their stride—perhaps with the help of that uncle priest of his—but they didn’t claim to be unaffected. Keithy and VeeVee and the Gnat still were wakened by nightmares, but they declared they weren’t scared of them anymore.
Strangely, it was very seldom that, except for the twins, more than one of us had the same nightmare or even simultaneous ones that were in any way similar; and all of us seemed to be affected differently. All of us except Tammy put it down to differences in personality structure and background. He attributed it smilingly to karma.
Another odd thing was the behavior of the two cats, Mavis and Mutton. Both Anne and Jamie told me that they’d seen them, just before the kids had a nightmare, crouching with all their hackles up, growling deep in their throats, protective but not at all afraid. Malia explained it by saying that everybody knew cats were telepathic; they had to be in order to find scared mice; they understood that the thoughts that came to them in the night were neither cat nor mouse thoughts. Then, as she often did when she wanted to emphasize a point, she dropped her habitually meticulous English for Hawaiian pidgin. “Hey,” she said, “you listen. Thosepopoki got sense. They say, ’Those no my thoughts, no popoki thoughts. Maybe they been reading this guy Korzybski. Anyhow, all of us get same kind sense, no more pilikia, no more trouble.’”
But strangest of all was the fact that, from the beginning, Laure was immune—completely so. Her sleep was never troubled. Her dreams, she told me, were now either of her life when the Admiral was alive or of a planet she had never seen, an Earth-like planet, but one—here she groped for words—very different somehow, as though a different spirit hovered over it. She told us all, and I think that, because all of us were doing our best to fend off our nighttime assailants, we hated her a little for it. Aloud, we wondered whether we ever would find such a planet, and how long the attacks would persist, and whether they depended on the fabric of Gilpin’s Space; and then, invariably, Franz would demand to know how we knew Gilpin’s Space had a fabric? And, in relief, we’d start arguing about that.
But at least those morning sessions kept us pretty mu&h on an even keel, those sessions, and Laure, and Geoff, who held us to our routine of searching, making near approaches when a system seemed likely, and once—only once in sixteen days—almost landing on a planet which did not show us its true, unfriendly face until practically the last minute. He also made sure that the ship’s log didn’t miss a change of course, or how long each passage took, or any of the other data we might need just in case something diddled the computers.
And then things got worse, much worse.
2
During those sixteen days, we began to think we had the situation more or less in hand. Then, at the breakfast table, Keithy’s mother dropped a bombshell. Clearly distressed, she had kept him with us when Bess Mayhew, as usual, herded the kids out to their morning class, and now she told us that he had had a very different sort of bad, bad dream. ’Tell them about it, Keithy,” she said.
“Do I got to?” He was terribly embarrassed.
Mrs. Rasmussen patted his knee. “Now, it’s not like it was any fault of yours,” she told him. “You heard about what Mr. Gilpin and his nice Indian friends said, and you know what we’ve all been going through, so your dream’s real important to everybody here, like Mrs. Endicott and the Commander and all our friends.”
“Well—” He hesitated, shuffling his fork around on his empty plate. He flushed and dropped his eyes. Then it all came out. “Well—it—it was like I suddenly woke up—and everybody hated me, and everybody was—was just out, I guess, to kill me—and I—I was plain scared to death, and awful cold, and I—I couldn’t run—and all of a sudden I just knew I wanted to kill everybody too”
“Who was everybody?” Laure asked gently.
“Gee, Mrs. Endicott, just everybody.” Keithy squirmed, choking a little, and I could see tears forming at the comers of his eyes. “It—it was only for a—a second. Then somehow I woke up, sort of half way. And I pinched myself as hard as I could to get away from it, because I didn’t want to believe it was me thinking like that—and Gosh! I lay there and thought about it for a while, and I—all of a sudden I was real scared of me—and I—I didn’t want to be!”
He was crying openly, and for a few seconds there was absolute silence at the table. My own mind was throwing me a terrible, troubling question; and I learned later that everybody there had reacted similarly, at least with variations on the theme: what might have happened if such a telepathic compulsion, instead of striking happy, well-balanced Keithy, had hit Whalen Borg, or Rhoda’s brother, or any of the IPP’s twisted hit men? Or—or whom?
Mrs. Rasmussen gathered Keithy to her, and comforted him, stroking his hair and telling him, in English and in Danish, that he’d been very brave, and there was nothing now for him to worry about; and Laure said we were all very proud of him because what he’d done had been exactly right. Then she asked him not to tell the other kids about it, not for a little while.
Still sniffling, he wiped his eyes, and apologized because he hadn’t meant to cry, and Geoff—God bless him!—told him how a few nights before he’d had a dream that set him crying a lot harder than Keithy had. Finally, he went off with his mother and grandmother; and for a few moments we all simply sat there staring at each other. It was the first time we had ever looked at husbands, wives, friends in just that way—the first time that doubt—yes, and fear—had ever entered into our relationships. But it was there. Laure sensed it instantly.
“All of our nightmares so far, she said, “have been negative, but because of what’s just happened we now know that there are far more vicious ones. Still, to my mind, the situation hasn’t changed—except that now the most important, the most urgent thing is to avoid the trap we’re all looking at—”
“And that is?” Franz asked.
“Paranoia.”
We exchanged glances, shamefacedly. Nobody answered her.
“Paranoia,” she repeated. “An unreasoning fear of each other and of ourselves. Let us remember that all of us are friends, close friends, that we’re alone in a vast and possibly hostile Universe where uncounted unknown beings dwell. Let’s remember, too, that not one of us is hostile, not the way Whalen Borg was hostile, that we’re all stable individuals…”
I thought of Rhoda.
“…individuals who can, and must rely on one another.” She stood. She smiled regally at all of us. “Let’s go about our business,” she said. “We’ve a ship to run, and a world to find.”
As we left the table, I looked at Geoff, and saw his own conflict expressed on his face. All men and women have the germ of violence in them, and men in the profession of arms are more aware of it than most men are. In Geoff, it had been disciplined as perfectly as Wolfe and Montcalm had disciplined it, but still he knew that it was there.
“I’d hate to have to go to bed wearing a straitjacket,” he said, half to himself and half to me; and when I told him I didn’t think I had to worry, he gave me a wry smile and kissed me very softly on the cheek.
We held our usual discussion session later in the morning, but its entire atmosphere had changed. All of us were on edge. We were guarded with each other, even though we tried hard not to be. I could feel Laure watching us, weighing us, and, behind the curtain of her half-closed, almost translucent eyelids, letting her mind plan a course of action.
We all, I think, would have been happy to shelve the problem of Keithy’s dream, hoping there’d be no recurrence, but she would not allow us to. After we had talked over our own, now seemingly inconsequential dreams, she brought us back to it. “As I said at breakfast,” she declared, “we’re threatened with a new and greater danger. But let’s consider what we have going for us. First, not one of us is even potentially a sociopath, and we are extremely compatible; I’ve never encountered any group where—even among the children—there’s so little envy and jealousy and spite and unhealthy rivalry. But there’s one thing more—”
She stood. “As you know, I have not been touched by these emotions that have troubled you. I seem to be impervious to them—why, I do not know. But this doesn’t mean that I have not been dreaming. I have. Here in Gilpin’s Space, where its Far Reaches start, I’ve dreamed more clearly than I ever have before. In my dreams, we find a planet—a planet very like Old Earth, but unharmed, uncrowded, unpolluted. I have seen it, and in my dreams I’ve walked its surface, on the sands of its blue seas, and I have seen its cloud-piercing mountains— a lovely, lovely world. No—” She smiled. “—I won’t tell you that a voice spoke to me out of a burning bush. But I do know it’s there—there for us to find. This Universe we live in is no dead machine. It lives, and everything that lives is part of it. Not everything that lives is harmless. Not everything that lives is friendly. That we cannot expect. But as for those invasions of your minds, I am certain—absolutely certain—that, as one great man said long ago, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
She stood there. Her aura, her personality, overshadowed all of us. None of us said a word. Of course, all of us did doubt her, to some degree. But how, after what we ourselves knew of Gilpin’s Space, could we dispute what she had dreamed?
Silently, we looked at her, and then we looked at one another. In our hearts, we were still afraid.
She left the wardroom, and two or three at a time, all of us went about our business expect Geoff and me and Franz and Bess. For a few moments, nothing was said. Then Bess spoke, her voice vibrant with excitement. “Laure has changed,” she said. “She is changing. Gilpin’s Space is changing her. It’s changing all of us, but Laure especially, perhaps because she’s ready for it and we are not. And it’s good—it’s a good thing.”
“What do you mean, Bess?” Geoff was puzzled.
“Geoff, I’m an anthropologist, as you know. On our Old Earth, where for millennia man has been wallowing deeper and deeper in his own artificialities, it was my job to try and understand what our less involved ancestors felt and knew of the world and its forces, of the Universe in which they found themselves;—our ancestors and some of those whom we call savages, our less involved contemporaries. Because they lacked the scientific method, they had to use direct perception—and all of them interpreted what they encountered, not the same way exactly, but similarly. They evolved animistic religions; they found and followed those among them whose perception appeared to be more complete and clearer—shamans, witch doctors, all sorts of oracles and clairvoyants, call them what you will. Here in Gilpin’s Space, in its Far Reaches, we’ve burst the man-made cocoon we were brought up in, and we’re being forced into a new direct perception, perhaps one no man or woman back on Earth ever could have known. On Earth almost all of us had shut off that telepathic ability we now know we possess. Gilpin’s Space has opened it again, probably more for Laure than for the rest of us. Somehow, she’s armored against the Universe’s agonies and sorrows, while we aren’t, and somehow she can see and hear and feel those other messages to which we’re deaf and blind.” She paused, tossed her head to send her hair flying. “Let’s listen to Laure. Whatever she suggests, let’s do it!”
“You’re serious!” Franz reached out a hand to touch her. “Do you really mean that our Laure, our Admiral’s widow, has become some sort of witch-wife?”
She took his hand in both of hers. “No, not a witch-wife. Nothing so crude. Nothing so vulgar. And may I never sleep with you again if I’m wrong! She is becoming what perhaps she might have been two thousand years ago, what perhaps in a less artificial world she might have been all along—”
“And that is—?”
“A priestess.”
Images flooded through my mind—silly ones, I suppose, a melange of Fraser’s Golden Bough interpreted by Arthur Rackham, by Burne-Jones, with just a touch of Delphos thrown in.
“A priestess,” she repeated, “a woman bom to mediate between the Universe and man. A woman like Saul Gilpin’s young Indian friend.” Then suddenly, “Don’t laugh at me,” she pleaded. “I know I’m right.”
“I’m sure you are,” Franz told her. “Considering the alternative you gave me, I have to be.”
“We aren’t laughing, Bess,” Geoff assured her, and I echoed him.
She thanked us, and she and Franz left together.
Geoff, his gray eyes somber, turned to me. “Doctor Cormac,” he said, “I hope you won’t think I’m nuts. But it makes sense to me. With all the due caution of a ship’s c.o., I say let’s follow where Laure leads. Priestess or no, she has something the rest of us don’t have.”
Onward and outward, Owl flew through Gilpin’s Space, and those raw emotions continued to assail us. Mostly, the invasions were still as negative as they had been before Keithy’s dream. But now there were enough nightmares of writhing anger, and despairs and vengeances, of imperatives abrupt and terrible, so that no matter how we tried we could not shake off our awareness of their existence and our fears. The first after Keithy’s happened to Anne two or three days later. She woke sometime in the early hours—woke to Jamie’s harsh breathing and the pressure of his hands around her throat.
“I really thought he was going to do me in,” she told us, still pale and drawn and shocked. “But he’d barely started squeezing, so I screamed—not a real scream, but some thing like ‘Jamie, you dirty bastard!’ Then there was a long, awful moment while his hands stayed where they were, while in the glow of the nightlight I saw his eyes slowly opening. Then his hands dropped, and he said ‘Jesus Christ!’ in an absolutely tortured voice. After a bit, we talked about it, and he made me feel a little better by assuring me that he’d already started to wake up and fight against it.” She shuddered. “I hope it doesn’t do it anymore, either to him or me.”
“The most important thing,” Laure said, “is that he did wake up, and that he’d already started to. Even asleep, he knew the impulse simply wasn’t his. I think our Senoi sessions and the exercises with the Structural Differential really are helping. I’m glad we started them before this sort of thing began.”
So she encouraged us. When Tammy woke to find Malia wandering round their cabin, growling like a wild animal in her sleep, and shook her awake only to have her collapse, weeping uncontrollably, so that he had to cany her back to bed to weep out her horror at a hunger so ferocious that it could be appeased only by some warm, living thing, Laure patiently pointed out that she was wandering, not actively seeking, and that plainly she, like Jamie, was already fighting against whatever clutched her mind.
We all suffered, in one degree or another, and though for a wonder there were no tragedies, our fear of each other grew with each reported nightmare. And with that fear, the tension mounted. We feared to sleep. Sleeping, we feared that we might never wake. Even though Laure kept pointing out that we were responding much more quickly to alien entries, even though she insisted—and actually, I suppose, we knew—that we were ourselves becoming, if not immune, at least impervious to domination, our fears still heightened. They became almost unbearable.
