Steven Harper - Dreamer

Vidya crossed the room and took Katsu’s hand. “My daughter, we do not understand. You must explain to us what the children are doing. Perhaps we seem slow to you, but-”

“Communication is difficult outside the Dream,” Katsu interrupted. “It is full of lies and deceits and misunderstandings.”

“But your father and I are not Silent,” Vidya said patiently. “It is a handicap, and one we must live with.”

Still standing in the doorway to her room, Katsu closed her eyes, seeming to search for the right words to attend her thoughts.

“When a Silent child is in the womb, it feels the touch of its mother’s mind,” she said carefully. “The children in the Nursery crave the touch they were denied. They are hungry and they are angry at what has been done to them. They reach into the Dream, eating everything they can and destroying what they cannot. The former creates the expanding blackness, the latter brings monsters into the landscape of the Dream.”

“Why have they not devoured Rust?” Prasad inquired, still at the terminal. “When Silent first enter the Dream, they build their landscapes using the minds of the people physically close to them, do they not?

“They do,” Katsu said. Her eyes were still shut. “And they do use the minds of the people on Rust to enter the Dream. They do not, however, feed here.”

“And why is this, my daughter?” Vidya asked.

“Because of me,” Katsu said simply. “They like my touch and the way I dance for them. If they fed off the minds on Rust, I would not be able to enter the Dream, and they do not wish this.”

A chill went down Vidya’s spine. “Katsu, what happens to the worlds on which the children feed?”

Katsu opened her eyes. “All species which produce Silent have a trait in common. It is empathy. It allows them-us-to know what others are feeling, even feel it ourselves. We have this trait because the Dream connects our minds and brings us together in subtle ways. When the children devour someone, however, they remove that mind from the Dream. The victims lose their empathy and they feel disconnected from everyone around them. Some people commit crimes they would not otherwise consider because they cannot feel the impact of their actions on others. Others fall into loneliness and depression because they cannot feel love from other people, and some commit suicide because they want the pain to end. The Silent are even more sensitive to the Dream, and they feel the impact the most. They cannot feel the Dream or enter it without the minds around them to provide a foothold. It is like being simultaneously struck deaf and blind with no one to provide care or comfort.”

Vidya forced herself to remain calm despite the prickling the crawled down her neck and across her arms. This was the most she had heard Katsu say in one sitting, and somehow Vidya knew that showing strong emotion would only make it more difficult for her.

“How much will the children devour if they are not stopped?” she asked softly.

Katsu shook her head. “I do not know for certain. I do know that their hunger has never once been sated, and it grows stronger as they grow older.”

“There are younger children in the Nursery,” Prasad croaked. “They are not old enough to enter the Dream, but they will be soon.”

“Yes. They will feed also,” Katsu said.

Vidya’s stomach twisted. “What will happen if the children devour all the minds in the universe?” she asked, surprised at the steadiness of her voice.

“The Dream will be destroyed,” Katsu replied. “The Silent will all go mad, and there will not be a single shred of empathy among any race anywhere. Life itself would not end, but we would well wish it to.”

Silence reigned in the room for a long moment. Then Vidya turned to Prasad.

“I believe,” she said, “that we need to run.”

Padric the sprint-cat reclined on his chaise longue a safe distance away from Dr. Jillias Say. She wore lab whites and sat primly on a spindly stool as thin as she was. Her straight, dark hair was coiled into a mass of braids on the back of her head. The stone floor beneath them remained solid for the moment. Voices continued to whisper around them, though there were fewer than normal. In the distance was the rumbling blackness. Padric had not conjured up any walls to block the view in case the chaos expanded again.

“It seems,” Dr. Say said with a hint of pride, “that the children in the project are indeed causing the disturbance in the Dream.”

“You call it a disturbance?” Padric asked archly, something he found easy to do as a sprint-cat.

Dr. Say flushed slightly. “Dr. Kri is running numbers. With a bit of Max Garinn’s viral therapy to kick them forward, the next batch of children will be able to reach the Dream within six months.”

“Six months?” Padric’s claws kneaded the longue, leaving tiny rips in the satin. “Not fast enough. Dreamers, Inc. and the Children of Irfan, to name just two, have set task forces to find out what’s going on. I can call in a few favors and try to slow them down, but I can’t imagine it won’t take them more than six weeks at the outside to find you. Haven’t you been able to speed things up? You have Vidya Dasa now.”

“We have not begun research with Vidya Dasa yet,” Dr. Say said. “I suspect she is stalling and I think it was a mistake to let her into the lab in the first place. I’m sure she suspects that we lied about wanting to end the slavery of Silent women, and I can’t imagine she hasn’t told her husband. I wish we could just kick them out, but we obviously can’t do that.” She leveled a hard gaze at Padric from her stool. “And no, Mr. Sufur. No matter what inducements you might offer, I will not kill them. If it becomes necessary, I will put them into cryo-sleep, but I will not commit murder for you.”

Padric spread his whiskers in bemusement. She wouldn’t kill. What a lie. The only reason she could say such a thing in the Dream was that she truly believed it despite the fact that several Silent had died due to the project and Dr. Say’s work. This need to deny the obvious was one of the more idiotic parts of human psychology.

“I won’t ask you to do that,” Padric told her. “But we do need to find a way to speed this up. Can’t Garinn do better?”

Relief made Dr. Say’s rigid spine slump a tiny bit. “I was coming to that. Garinn says he could do it if we had Sejal.”

Padric’s tail twitched. “Oh?”

“Garinn joined us after the Unity raided his laboratory.” Dr. Say patted the severe dark braids coiled at the back of her head. “He barely escaped with his life, never mind his notes on Sejal. Sejal’s genetic structure is…I was going to say unique, but that’s true of everyone. However, Garinn’s retrovirus had its greatest success when he tried it on Sejal. He didn’t have time to study why it worked, and asking Garinn to remember every gene sequence in Sejal’s DNA would be ludicrous. We have his parents, of course, but the combination that makes up Sejal is one of countless billions. Given time, we could narrow it down, but that would take months, possibly years. Having Sejal would speed the process considerably.”

“How considerably?” Padric asked intently.

“Garinn estimates that if he could study Sejal, he could have a retrovirus that would bring the new batch of children into the Dream in three weeks, perhaps two. And there is another possiblity.”

“And that would be?”

“Sejal may be still carrying Garinn’s original retrovirus,” Say replied. “If that’s the case, the new batch could be ready in days.”

A slight tremor rumbled beneath Padric’s couch. He cast a quick glance at the roiling darkness, ready to marshal his concentration and leave the Dream. How ironic that the very nature of project he was funding made the project so difficult to complete. Already Padric had lost contact with his interests on half a dozen worlds, though he had been prepared for this. A fleet of courier ships stood ready to spring into action once the collapse began. Padric didn’t want to send them out yet, though. Reports had filtered back from ships that had gone through the real-world counterpart of the chaos. Several crews had mutinied. Captains and crew had committed suicide. Many others simply failed to report. One engineer had flooded her entire ship with plasma, killing herself and everyone on board. More deaths on Padric’s hands.