Gilpin's Space, page 12
Partly this was due to Rhoda, for of us all she was the hardest and most often hit. Once Dan had a nightmare, a vicious, violent thing. She had awakened in the midst of it, sure that he was going to tear her to pieces. Her screams had wakened him and the whole ship. Three or four times, he came to me, asking me if I couldn’t let her have some sleeping pills.
“Christ, Dr. Cormac,” he told me, “the poor kid’s not getting any sleep. She’s scared of me. She’s scared to death of what sort of dream she’s going to have. This Senoi stuff and the rest is helping everyone, but it just isn’t getting through to her. Can’t you give her something?”
I explained why I hesitated to use any opiates. “We don’t yet know at what level we’re most vulnerable, Dan. It may be that we’d be worse off under sleeping pills. I hate to take the chance.”
Finally I did give in. I shouldn’t have. She took the pill, Dan watching until he was sure she was sound asleep, even though he himself was tired out. Two hours later, Franz found her, absolutely unaware of what she was doing, clawing at the starboard lock, trying to throw herself out into Gilpin’s Space. He had wrestled her back into her cabin, while she struggled against waking; then he and Dan had listened to her raving incoherently, her nightmare compounded of terror and honor and despair, commanding suicide.
Next day, we talked to Laure about it, Geoff and I and Dan; and Dan was beside himself. “What the hell are we going to do, Mrs. Endicott?” he pleaded. “I know we can’t abort the whole thing just to get her back to Earth. All we’d be doing is sticking our own heads between Brother Breck’s jaws and hers with ’em. But we can’t just keep on the way we’ve been and watch her fly apart.”
“I was hoping, Dan, that she’d start improving like the rest of you—” She raised a hand at a hint of protest. “No, don’t say you aren’t. You’ve been adjusting, not all in exactly the same way or to the same degree, but adequately. You’ve been too close to it to notice. You really have things pretty well defused, not to the point where you can take them lightly, true, but at least so they aren’t dangerous. Rhoda’s another matter.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “Geoffrey,” she finally said, “is there any reason why we can’t set down on the next suitably safe planet or a moon big enough to have adequate gravity, revert to normal space, and stay there a few days to give her a chance to catch up on her sleep and get leveled out a little?”
“No, of course not,” Geoff answered. “But after that—?”
“We’ll all get rested, and Rhoda will have had a lot of TLC, but mostly we’ll have had a chance to think the whole thing out, carefully and not under pressure. I’m certain it’ll not be too long before we find our own new world—a week, or two, or three—but we’d still be wise to take time out. A few days out of Gilpin’s Space will give us all a respite.”
It took us two days only to find a suitable planet. All through the period following Keithy’s dream, we had reconnoitered one system after another, finding nothing interesting or noteworthy, and always circling onward in the general direction of a glowing cloud behind which a clutch of stars shone, and to which Laure was drawn. The stars themselves were too faint to see from Gilpin’s Space; and we were able to see the cloud only when, in normal space, we turned the ship’s eyes in its direction. The planet we found to rest on was not quite as large as Mars, and from space, once we had gone into orbit, it looked worn and bleak and desolate. We could see nothing growing there, though there were vast, murky, shallow seas; but once we were down, on the rounded ridge of an eroded mountain chain in the middle of one of its innumerable mini-continents, we could see vegetable life forms, rather like Earth’s lichens, clinging precariously to every inch of soil. Our surrogates and sensors told us there was nothing there to endanger us, chemically or bacteriologically. Its sun was a dull, ill-tempered red, and the temperature of the atmosphere around us was like that of a Scandinavian winter. Geoff had deliberately chosen our landing place so that we came down into twilight—to keep us from getting curious and trying to go exploring, he told us. But he need not have worried, not then. The time coincided nicely with ship’s time, which meant that after supper and perhaps some conversation, we’d go to bed; and I was surprised at how terribly eager I was, suddenly, to get there—to go to sleep, to dream no dreams other than my own.
We stayed there for five days—our days, doing our best to ignore the planet’s, which were about nineteen hours long— and we slept beautifully, even Rhoda, especially Rhoda; Dan told us that she was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, and she slept more than half the clock around, sixteen hours or so at least. When we wakened, the sun was up, and we looked out upon our refuge. There was no color in that world, or almost none. It was all dull gray, dull brown, streaked with spines of black basaltic stone, mottled with muddy yellowish, greenish lichens—if that’s what they were. Nothing moved. No whisper of a breeze. No creature flew or crawled. And down in the low valley far below we could see, quite clearly, indisputably, a ruined city, a city so destroyed by time that only its massive walls, black and rounded and rectangular, showed that it had been purposely constructed, and by a race who, in their day, had had the power to cut and move enormous stones and to arrange them by some strange geometry.
We knew that it was dead. We knew that possibly it held the secrets of its long-past life and death within it, but we felt no urge to go investigating.
“Let it rest in peace,” Laure said. And Franz echoed her with a profound “Amen!”
We were content to rest, knowing that here we were safe from all intrusion, but we did not forget our problem or our purpose. No longer under stress, each of us gained a new perspective on our nightmares and ourselves—all of us but Rhoda. She brightened. Her eyes almost lost their haggard circles. But we could tell that, when it came to confronting Gilpin’s Space again, she had made no progress whatsoever. She turned pale, trembling even at the thought of our reentering it.
All of us came to realize that we had indeed built up effective defense mechanisms, that now we could, even in our sleep, distinguish between alien emotions and our own. We knew that we would not sleep as comfortably in the Far Reaches as we were sleeping here, but we also knew that nothing there—at least nothing we already had encountered—could injure us.
All of us except Rhoda.
As those days passed, we became more and more concerned. Dan, of course, was almost frantic. He kept appealing to Laure, to Geoff, to me. And we could offer him neither comfort nor encouragement. Rhoda’s life and background, everything that had happened to her as a child and as an adult, seemed to have doomed her to resonate emotionally. She could no more help herself than a glass, vibrating under the assault of high-pitched sound waves, can prevent its own destruction. We could see that Laure was as concerned as we ourselves, and as much at a loss for a solution.
Yet the solution, when it came, was beautifully simple. From the beginning, we had agreed to let the older kids, Keithy and the Macartneys’ Jamie, Jr., and Tammy and Malia’s, stand watch with us, knowing that they’d find it interesting and exciting, and also learn from it. Keithy especially always begged to stand watch with Laure, to whom he was devoted; and it was he who, on the fourth day of our stay and right out of the blue, showed us the answer.
He had been on duty with Franz and Bess, on one of the night watches, and he had simply blurted it out without guessing its importance. Bess, astounded and excited, had asked him to repeat it, and had questioned him in detail. Was he sure? Was he absolutely sure?
“Gee, Miss Mayhew,” he’d replied, “sure I am. I been with Mrs. Endicott a lot of times when almost everybody else has gone to sleep, and while she’s awake Miss Rhoda never had bad dreams. You know how usually when she’d dreamed something real scary, whoever’s on duty hears about it right away. It’s never happened with Mrs. Endicott.”
Keithy’s awareness of Rhoda’s problem didn’t surprise Bess; he was an observant kid. She hurried down to find me, leaving Franz on duty.
“Janet,” she asked, after she’d told me, “is there any way we can check up on this? Has anyone entered Rhoda’s nightmares in the log?”
“I have,” I said. “Geoff asked me to when it began to look as if they were going to be a serious threat to her.”
“And of course there’s a record of when Laure had the duty?”
“Of course.”
“Well, for God’s sake, let’s go check it! Janet, it makes sense. Remember what I told you about Laure? What’s been happening to her? What she’s become? She can protect us if anybody can—even if she herself doesn’t know she’s doing it.”
I didn’t buy it, not immediately, but I called Geoff, and we got the records, the written ones and those in the computer’s memory—and it checked out. Rhoda had never had a nightmare when Laure was awake.
Bess was triumphant. “I knew it!” she exulted, her Gypsy eyes flashing. “I knew it as soon as Keithy told me. While Laure’s awake, she’s been protecting her. It fits. It’s right.”
I still couldn’t accept it quite so readily. Maybe it’s just coincidence. She’s certainly not been protecting any of the rest of us.”
“Why should she? Probably she knows what we’re all starting to understand—that we don’t need protection, that we’re building up our own, and that we should simply because we can. But Rhoda can’t. Gilpin’s Space has changed us, but it’s not been able to change her—life’s rendered her too vulnerable, too fragile. Maybe someday she can grow to meet the challenge if she has to, but not now.”
I said nothing, recognizing the truth of what she’d said, and suddenly my mind was flooded with compassion, with pity for poor Rhoda. I thought—and so did all the rest of us except perhaps Laure—that we were the human norm and she the exception to it. We did not discover until much, much later that the reverse was true, and that humanity would find crews like ours so difficult to put together that the Far Reaches would be declared taboo, not to be entered by any official or governmentally licensed expeditions into space, and that those adventurers who, unsponsored, dared to enter and survive them would be regarded with suspicion and with actual fear.
“Well?” Bess said. “Janet, what are we going to do about it?”
“Let’s talk to Laure first. Maybe she’ll want us to keep it to ourselves and not let anyone know except, of course, Dan, and Franz—because by now he’s surely guessed where you ran off to, and probably Geoff because he’s the skipper.”
We found Laure in her cabin, and showed her all the evidence, and though she seemed as surprised as we had been, she accepted it with equanimity. “I hope it’s true,” she said. “I hope so from the bottom of my heart, and I feel it is. How I protect her, if I do, 1 do not know. Nor, at the moment, do I care. It’s not important. Let’s get Geoff in, and reschedule the duty so that I’ll be awake at least eight hours every night. I don’t think it’d be wise to bring the subject up when we’re all together, but we should let the word get around individually. It’ll be good for everyone’s morale. Both Dan and I will need a little time to prepare her, to assure her that when we’re back in Gilpin’s Space she’ll not need to fear.”
We brought Geoff in, and Franz and Dan, and briefed them. Then Laure had Keithy paged, and praised him for his astuteness, telling him that no one else had noticed it. “And now, Keith,” she said, “I want you to wait until tomorrow before you begin telling the other kids about it, but you can tell your mother and grandmother right away. And tell them I said I wish I had another merit badge to give you, a very special one.”
He left, and she turned back to us. “Geoffrey,” she said, “when we leave this planet would you mind very much if we headed directly for the Cloud, not bothering to hunt up any systems on the way? You’ll know the first night out whether Rhoda’s going to be all right, and if she isn’t we can always find another place of refuge for whatever time she needs to level off again. It’ll be a longer run than most of ours, but we have all the speed we need.”
“There’s no reason why we can’t,” Geoff told her. “And I hope we find your planet first crack out of the box. I for one won’t be sorry we’re leaving this one. Every time I look out of the port and see those ruins, I can’t help wondering what sort of agonies poured through Gilpin’s Space when their builders perished.” He looked at Laure. “No wonder that even on Old Earth men have always felt the need for special people to intercede for them with whatever gods govern the depths between the stars.”
3
We set our course for that far, far distant cloud, and from it we did not deviate. At velocities greater than any we had ever reached, we shot through those Far Reaches, and for the first three or four days it was as it had been before. Our sleep was again being violated; the only difference was that now, with Laure standing her long night watches, Rhoda, with Dan beside her, slept peacefully. No one, not even Dan, minded that she kept their cabin door locked. We all were simply grateful that, each morning when she joined the rest of us, she was more rested, more relaxed. We still were not.
The change, when it came, was so sudden that it was unbelievable. We slept that night, all of us except Laure and Dan and Franz, and some of us remembered that we dreamed—I and Malia, and Malia’s daughter Julie, a twelve-year-old, and Bess Mayhew, and Keithy and the twins. The dreams came to us as all those others had, out of the immensities of Gilpin’s Space, but they did not rend us, did not send us crying out or weeping from our beds. My dream was a dream of joy, not my own but that of some supernal entity capable of a triumphant, embracing, all-encompassing joy and love that seized me, swept me up within itself, soothed all the fears I had been carrying with me, then gently laid me down again. I did not know whether it knew that I existed, nor did I care. For moments I was wide awake, but for moments only. I went back to sleep immediately, because I knew it was the thing to do, and slept beautifully almost till breakfast time, when Geoff roused me.
I told him, poured it out to him, my excitement growing; and it was he who told me about Bess and Julie and Malia and the kids. I joined them in my bathrobe. We compared our experiences, our accounts cast in the individual terms of our ages and our backgrounds, but essentially the same. Strangely, the others, those who had not dreamed—or who couldn’t remember that they had—showed no disbelief, no envy. They also had been visited in sleep, and were aware of it.
“I don’t think I dreamed,” Geoff told me. “But somehow everything seems changed. When I woke up, it was like a six-year-old waking into a beautiful spring morning.”
That was pretty much the way they all described it, all those who could recall no dreams. Mrs. Rasmussen told us that, during the night, both she and Linda had felt the old, horrible dreams nudging at them, but as though from behind an impervious wall, powerlessly. Anne and Jamie’s story was the same. Even Rhoda, emerging from her cabin with tears in her eyes, had awakened with a memory—one long buried, of her father and mother before they had changed so cruelly, loving her, cherishing her.
VeeVee and the Gnat poured out their dream to Laure and to their parents, and then just stood there, faces glowing. I could see that they were simply bursting to tell something more. Tall Malia stood between Tammy and their golden-skinned, handsome children. “Listen!” she said, her mock pidgin cast aside. “Everything has changed. Though some of us may not know it yet, we’ve changed. As for me—” Her voice was at once humble and triumphant. “—I shall never fear anything again!”
Julie nodded her agreement, and Tammy looked at them with a look almost of reverence in his eyes.
Then VeeVee piped up again. “I—I can close my eyes,” she told us, “and I can see everything just the way Mutton does. I can see just what he sees.”
“And Mavis, too,” put in the Gnat. “They don’t see colors the way we do, and the way they see is different—they’re always watching for things that move. We didn’t use to be able to do that.”
“My God!” Jamie said, under his breath. “This is a new kind of second sight. What has happened?”
“I think we’ve all passed a boundary,” Franz answered. “But it’s more than that. We’ve been touched by—how can I say it? A mind, a tutelary spirit?”
“Yes,” Bess answered, speaking very softly. “And it has seen into us, and through us, and—and—” Her voice almost broke. “And we have received communion.”
Then she went up to Laure, and kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you, Laure,” she said.
She spoke for all of us.
For the next hour, during breakfast and afterward, we scarcely said a word. We, the adults, were overwhelmed by the sudden realization that, no matter how long we had been friends, how long we had been married, or whatever, we had never before really seen each other, known each other. Between us, even between me and Geoff, there had always been a subtle screen, a veil, composed of all those little fears, those small reservations and deceptions, which our individually isolated lives on Earth had made an absolute condition for getting along together. Now these were gone, dissolved, and we were bemused by the openness and beauty of their absence—all of us except the youngest children, who had not yet learned not to see too clearly. For my part, it was as though the Far Reaches had opened each of us up telepathically, not to the point where we could penetrate the privacy of each others’ minds—though we were to find that even this, as time went on, happened more and more frequently, as if by agreement—but on a very deep subconscious level where we could meet one another, as I said, needing no defenses. It manifested itself in varying degrees, for we were, after all, very different individuals, but its essence was the same.
During the course of that first day, we thought only of our new selves and our new knowledge of each other—that, and our new understanding of those Far Reaches, for we no longer felt that Gilpin’s Space was an endless emptiness stabbed through haphazardly by tormenting thoughts. Now we recognized that it was here that the infinitely complex strands of die web of life met and interlaced—the living nervous system of a living Universe, an infinity of minds with gradations of awareness, gradations of volition, and ultimately, ultimately and above all, conquering and triumphant, the power to rejoice and love. We had felt love utterly without fear, and the terrible, solemn beauty of existence had been opened to us in a song of love and joy.
