Dreams of other worlds

[Persiflage]

She was having the dream again.

And the strange thing, that she knew she was having a dream, so was it one of those strange glimpses of events unfolding, or just a dream?

And was anything ever 'just a dream?'

She saw the beings standing there, humanoid but stretched, like something from a Salvadore Dalli painting. Their skins were pellucid, mottled, shining like gold. Like gold. And their feet were covered by the waters in which they waded. The waters were as green as malachite, covered with heavy mist.

And the sky was as clear and hard as night in the countryside. Above them, in the air, a gibbous moon, full and red.

Not a moon, she thought, a planet. We are on a moon. That is Jupiter, there in the sky.

How long, she wondered. If this was a vision, how far in the future did it stretch?

Are you me? she wondered, moving towards the golden people in the pools. Are you of me? They were tall, like obelisks. They welcomed her to dip her feet in the water with them, to channel down the light and warmth to the pools, to see and approve of the life that swam around them. Tiny life. Tiny. Moving there in a soup of methane and water. The air was thin, crackling with radiation, and she knew that their golden skin was a shield, a protection.

Methane, she thought. And water. Creatures, even at the smallest dimension, wearing lacquered coats of gold, pearlescent white, and blue.

I will remember, she thought. I must tell Drix.

[Persiflage]

It was difficult to sleep. She kept trying to relax, to give herself to sleep, but her mind kept wandering back to Bryan, their impromptu picnic by the river. The thought of him conjured a memory of the kiss they'd shared. The power of the memory was so strong it was like the event itself. She lived it, over and over a dozen times. She tried to discipline her mind to stillness, but she knew that once she finally slept the moment would fade, become an echo of itself.

She filched a book from the pile by her bed--The Velveteen Rabbit was on top of Collodi's Pinochio and Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. Her pupils dilated, taking in the text despite the darkness. It wasn't long before she was absorbed in the story, not long after that before she passed out with the night-nursery conversation of the Rabbit and the Skin-Horse whispering, sibilant, in her dream.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

It lasts for always.

For always.

And the dream came again.

The golden people in the pond.

Are you real? she asked them. ARE you?

Am I?

She was standing on a knife-edge. To her right hand, the stark sky and the golden people in the pools. To the left ... to the left, Bryan, by the river. A nightmare. She couldn't move in either direction without falling, irrevocably, to one dream or the other. And balancing, she fell. The knife gutted through her innards like Occam's Razor.

"You are bleeding," her brother remarked to her. He was standing aloof, dancing on that edge with an ease she deeply envied.

"Help me!" she said. Her guts were pouring out of her as quickly as she could push them back in.

"Help yourself," he said, maddeningly. "You're the one tearing yourself."

She woke up feeling sick, feeling wrong ... and saw that, in the night, she'd lost a patch of hair as large as two hands from her left leg.

[Persiflage]

"What does it seem like to you?" she said, anxiety making her twist her hands in her lap.

"I don't know," he said. His unwillingness to touch her, his revulsion was painfully clear. The three-foot gap between them spoke volumes. "It's not right. It's a wrong thing with you." He stared at her doubly naked legs, her skirt hiked up around her thighs, her socks pushed low on her ankles, and the patches of naked red-brown skin around her knees. "When did your hair start falling out?"

"A few weeks ago. I had a dream, and then it started."

"Was it a true dream?"

"I don't know. Yes. Maybe."

"Can you give me your dream?"

"You're willing to touch me to find out?"

He hesitated for a moment, then went over to the hotel room heater and turned it on. The wall unit whooshed into life, making the room warm. "I'm afraid to touch you like this, but I love you, Nennya. If I can help you, I will." He sat down and opened his arms to his sister. She curled up next to him on the bed.

They fell asleep together, inside each other's heads.

//the dream,// he told her, moving around her memories, bringing it forward. //give me your dream.//

The golden people, the pools, the knife-edge ... Bryan. The cut, the tear, the bleeding. Without either one of them being fully aware of it, he bit into her shoulder as they slept.

//before, it was only the golden people.//

She could feel his excitement at the first part of her dream. She saw, as through a veil, his desire to acquire information on radiation-resistant organisms, suggestions for ways to build creatures with jeweled skin. But she pushed him, made him look at her, made him look at her struggle.

//This is you, the latest information I have on you.// It came in their shared lucid dream, as an image of a book with her face on it. She leafed through. Pages and pages of her genetic code, echoed with every cell in her body. But the text was changing, becoming strange. It shifted, became other, became different. She looked at the back cover. There was a picture of a human face there. A face that was like and unlike her own. Rounded ears, smooth pink skin ... dim traces of spots on her brow.

//Human,// she thought. //I'm becoming human.// Her brother held her tight.

//Don't be afraid. Look at yourself. Tell me why.//

She flipped through the book of her body again.

This was only the second time they'd attempted to work together in this way, exchanging and analyzing shared information. She saw her body as an infinitely mutable thing, subject only to her will.

Only to her will.

//I want to be human. I'm remaking myself. I've been doing it ever since Mommie Zarina changed me when we left, to make me stronger, faster, regenerative. I'm changing because of Bryan. I'm changing for Bryan.//

She felt his shock as her own. Several thoughts, too quickly to be examined. She felt uncomfortable, wanted to withdraw from the kenning.

//Stop, Nix. Stop.// He forced her to look at him again, look at the book of his body. //Remember what Zarina told us. When we come together like this, you must never leave without checking that you've done no harm.//

She studied him intensely, then saw with shame that she was forcing his body to undergo the same sort of mutation that she had done to herself, telling his body to shed its hair, reconfigure his ears and teeth. His body was as genetically flexible as hers, but without an internal telekinetic sense, what she'd done to him could turn into cancers. She dug deeper into him, repaired and destroyed the cells she had altered.

They shared her shame over her failure. But he hugged her, gave her the reassurance she needed.

//It's a first step,// he said. //You know what this means? It's maturity, Nennya. Premature adulthood for our species. I don't know if it's the exposure to so much information, to so many strangers, or the extremes to which we've been forced to take our talents, but we can do what we thought would only be possible much later.//

//I don't know,// she said. //I'm afraid.//

//Come back to me, every week,// he said. //Every week. If you've done this, you can reverse it. I'll help you. I'll help you, Nix.//

He felt her frustration and her anxiety, and he calmed her artificially, making her drug herself into a deep restful sleep without dreams. She woke in the room, and it was dark. Hours later. He'd left her there.

There was a key on her pillow, an iron key strung on a red ribbon. She gripped it, felt the telemetric message he'd left there. The book of her body. A message of his love. She put it around her neck and gripped it tight.

She put her shoes back on, cursing at the lateness of the hour, and felt the prickles of new hair growing back over her bald skin.

She looked at herself in the mirror. Human. Drixxen. Still somewhere in between. What do I really want? she wondered. And what am I going to tell Bryan?

[Persiflage]

Do you really want to change? Bryan's eyes were soft on her, like a touch. If you could make yourself human, would you?

If you could take away your powers, make yourself normal, would you? She eyed him curiously.

No, he said. No.

But I will change someday, she said. Another world, another place. Somewhere you can't go. I will remake myself. And the body you think is Nennya is just a shell. And she wasn't talking to Bryan anymore; she was talking to her brother.

She woke up on the beach, in the little sandy nook protected by the overhang, cold and alone.

Foolish, she thought. Foolish. She looked around for her bookbag. The contents had tipped over, fallen into the sand. She dug for her digital watch, found it either clogged with sand or screwed up by the water. She shook it a few times, but it was busted for good.

Looked out across the water. Either it was very late, or very early. No sign of the sun.

I've missed curfew, she thought, with a delicious frisson of apprehension. Oh, I'm in so much trouble.

"Yark," she said out loud. It didn't bear thinking about; the damage was done, and she was hungry. Her stomach twisted.

She stripped down to essentials and waded into the water. The ugly, uneven patches on her legs were gone, replaced by customary fur. It had been difficult, the first few days, to prevent the process from reverting. She had had to push her body away from making cosmetic changes to her skin, or more complicated changes to her internal organs. But now it was easier.

She picked up edible anemones with her toes, cut oysters away from their bedrock with her knife. She piled these in a small scooped-out trench of sand, one that rapidly filled with fresher water, keeping her breakfast cool and alive until she was ready for it.

As the dawnlight came up, she found a nesting group of seagulls, took two eggs from the clutch on the rocky outcrop, and dove, a warm egg in each hand, to avoid the screeching imprecations and the beak of the deprived mother.

The gifts of the sea. She ate her eggs and watched the sunrise, cherishing the warm taste of the yolk, not disdaining the pinprick-red blots of the embryonic birds. The oysters opened under her knife, salted by their own environment. The anemones stung her lips slightly; the taste was like ambrosia.

Rich, she thought, stretching out, taking a sip of the sand-filtered water. Rich, this world is rich with good things to eat. She hadn't enjoyed a meal like this in days.

She put on her jacket and shoes, tipping the sand carefully out of them first. She put on her school face with her clothes. No more the wild thing in the brush. No more the cat. Another young superhero in her plaid skirt, her strangeness camouflaged by others just as unusual.

Food was becoming a problem, though. She couldn't bear to eat what was served in the cafeteria anymore. Other students made jokes about the inedible quality of lunchroom fare, but they ate it anyway, and it did them no harm. She could sometimes manage a piece of fried chicken with the skin torn off, or a plain yogurt, but everything else made her sick. It took hours to digest and while she waited, her stomach cramped into painful knots. And the food anywhere else was just as bad to her.

Drix, when she had mentioned this to him, had spoken of similar problems. He could eat anything, take nourishment from it, but it took him hours to digest it. And he felt distracted and strange until it was done. He had recommended candy to her, but she couldn't stand the sweetness of it, cloying the back of her throat like vomit.

These raw, found meals were what she wanted. She grinned to herself, still half-feral. She'd be chasing down moths, spiders, and songbirds next.

Be a tame thing, Nennya, she admonished herself. You get off this beach, you get on the train, and you high-tail it to the dormitory. If you're lucky, Jane will have covered for you. Be a fifteen year old girl and go back to your safe little room.

The train rocked her back and forth, wanting to lull her to sleep, but she'd slept well. She pulled out her date book and made a few notations.

Woke at dawn. Ate anemones, oysters, two eggs. Felt v. good.
Hair on body returning to normal.

No dreams.

[Persiflage]

There was no pain, no sense of wrongness, but the effort of it made her tired. She felt mild impatience, laid down on her side, breathed deep while hands stroked her hair, her round belly, her back. All of her mates were there. They protected her, made a ring of their presence around her, protected her from harm. She panted hard, and Drix lifted her, bracing her with his arms, as she moved into a squatting position. She barely sensed his mind, and the others, making contact with hers, pouring strength into her, focusing on the inward journey of the offspring, the first generation of the new offspring, working its way out of her.

I'm on the ship, she realized, suddenly. But the dream, the Foretelling, was so powerful, held her so strongly in its grip, that she was unable to pay attention to anything but the experience. Presque-vu. Remembering the future.

The child. The baby. It was calm, its mind touched and enfolded, ready to be welcomed into family. She opened herself, her insides in sudden, powerful blossom, turning flexibly inside-out. Drix's mate with hands outstretched to catch the newborn. It was a skinny child, the legs wiry, the arms long and strong, all slick with fluid. Drix's mate cradled the body, protectively.

"A female," said Drix, gathering her wet hair from her brow and blowing her sweat cool. "Look, she's perfect. Look what we've done."

Her vision blurred, everything dissociated, everything strange. But it was a Drixxen child, undoubtedly. She rested against her brother and his mate held out the child. No cord to cut. No navel. Soft, dark-brown. Dark-haired. And smelling sweet. Poor thing, no mental voice of her own yet, but she would have other gifts.

"I know you," she said to the baby. Drix's mate holding the baby. I know you too. This child has more of you in her than she does of me.

I know you. You're a murderer.

Drix's voice was soothing in her ears, her mind. His soft breath was now chilling. She was icy. She was cold.

She woke up. She woke up feeling cold, and sad. She rolled over and cried quietly into her pillow, so that Mitula wouldn't hear.

"Remember," Daddy Niles had said. "Remember that when you get the Foretelling, it isn't a reliable predictor of what will happen, only what could, at a given moment, under certain circumstances. Don't mistake it for an absolute. Don't be a slave to the visions. That was my mistake, and it gave me more misery than any human being ought to have. You must read them, as a book. And if necessary, take steps to rewrite them, avert them. The future is as malleable as your flesh."

[Persiflage]

((many thanks to Larry Niven's description of Stage Trees, communicated to me via Charles Stross' most excellent short story, Rogue Farm.))

Five trees, all in a circle. Dicotoledon. They grow so closely together that they almost seem one organism, but for the thin interstitial concavities between the thick black trunks, the soft triangle of negative conic space. They are huge, they are sequoia sempervirens, they stand almost a kilometer tall. One could walk three hours around the perimeter of interjoined bases and not transverse the full circumference.

The ground is snowy, and white. The land is flat in all directions. There is no sure marker of exactly where land might be; the heavy ice floes that spread over the ground like frosting may as easily be covering icy liquid as icy dirt.

The trees are black and suck up the months of sunshine gratefully. It is a private place, and a dangerous one. Human ingenuity has yet to find a way to make this ice ocean pay off, and the radiation from the sun, taken raw and unprotected, can kill. To burn and to freeze, yes, that is what this place can do.

The trees' roots run deep into the ice and the earth. They are capable of doing, to a limited extent, what her body can do. There is an awareness there, an knowlegde of how to drink, how to digest, how to use the raw minerals and elements to build. To make. To shape oneself.

Easy now to walk down the raw stone and ice steps into a fold between the roots. There is a thermal exchange there, in the doorway, and coldproof clothing that preserved human life must be discarded lest the wearer overheat.

Inside, it is still a raw, empty space. It is as dark as the womb, and as secret. It no longer appears to be a grove of trees. The truer nature of the place is revealed.

And somewhere in the top of the cathedral, one can see up, and out, see the glowing singularity, see the stars the way one could see them at the bottom of the Grand Canyon even in the daytime, see them beyond the gently waving thick black branches. The chamber is exhaling something, neither heat nor moisture, into the high air. The trees are injecting something into the atmosphere. The trees are repairing the gaping hole in the ozone layer, very slowly. It will not be enough to stem the destruction, alone, but it is meant to help. It is their last gift to humanity.

She remembered how Bryan had sobered when they had went to see the costal redwoods. When she had pointed out the browning needles, the signs of death on the young trees. They were babies by the standards of the trees around them, only a century or two old. But they were dying. The children were doomed. The oldest of them, over two millennia old. This was sobering. Two millennia. Trees like cathedral, trees that made a fog of themselves. She had collected some seeds ... so tiny, so very tiny, as small as salt grains when she shook a cone into her hand.

The trees had given her a strange, uncanny feeling when she'd seen them, touched them, approached them. She felt as though she wanted to go upon her knees; she felt suddenly what it was like to feel humbled before God.

We will build stage trees, she thought. Huge ones, with hydrostatic properties. We will build them somewhere safe, somewhere they can grow in peace. These are the bones of the ship. We will go gently, and secretly, and do no harm. Is this Antarctica?