Robert Thurston: Intruder

“Don’t be afraid, honey,” the woman said. Was he mistaken, or was that Eve Silverside’s voice? “You won’t falloff the slide. It’ll be all right.”

If it was a Silverside, he or she just might make him fall to the ground by pulling her hands away just as he reached the bottom edge. He shrunk back, no longer wanting to slide down.

The woman was now medium height, medium build, wearing a pristinely white lab smock. No matter what shape she took, what clothes she wore, he still saw no face. He knew there was a face there. It just wouldn’t come into focus for him in spite of the vivid details of the rest of her.

“Let go of those bars, dear, and come down. Don’t worry. Mommy’ll catch you.”

Mommy! This was his mother? No, it must be a Silverside, playing a joke. He didn’t know his mother and, in fact, knew very little about her. His father had provided no information. How could a Silverside even hope to duplicate her? Wait. This was a dream. The woman below was neither Silverside nor his mother. It was an apparition from his own mind.

One thing he did know now. He didn’t want to go down the slide, not even to his mother’s eagerly awaiting arms. He started to scream. His screams sounded childlike, shrill, highpitched, tremulous.

“No, I’m not coming down. I’m not! I’m not!”

“It’s all right, David. Mommy’s right here.”

David: his real name, or at least the one that Ariel and his father had said was the right one. Perhaps this was no dream and this was really his mother. If he slid down, he could see her better. But her arms might turn into knives, fire, pain. He was suddenly very afraid of her.

“Leave me alone!” he screamed. “Leave me alone!”

Suddenly the bars he was clutching became red-hot, and so did the metal beneath him. It felt the way a slide did when it had been standing in the sun at high noon on the hottest day of the year. (How did he know that?)

He could not hold on.

He had to let go.

He slid down, screaming.

His mother’s face seemed to come up at him, but there were still no recognizable features on it.

He saw her reach out toward him.

And woke up.

He could feel the sweat on his face as he stared up into the lovely face of Ariel Welsh. She stood beside his bunk, her arms reaching out to him just like his dream-mother’s had.

Ariel rubbed Derec’s forehead gently. The way she touched him was now one of his favorite things in life. It seemed to him that her fingertips did not actually make contact with his skin but merely gave off comforting rays as they passed above it. Ariel had told him that there were people who appeared to heal the sick because of the comforting warm emanations that came from their hands. The warmth had actually been measured and was sometimes burning hot. On the planet Solaria, she told him, such affection or healing was rare. Solarians obeyed taboos against touching others, and that seemed sad to her.

“You’re positively drenched in sweat, Derec. That must have been one whale of a dream.”

“It was. Awful.”

“I know how you feel. I just had a lulu of a nightmare myself.”

“What was your dream about?”

She didn’t want to tell him that it concerned Jacob Winterson or that she had awakened crying. He’d been somewhat jealous of Jacob, so the subject was best ignored right now.

“Nothing special. Tell me yours.”

“There was the city, Robot City, and it was all strange, mixed up. And my father in a car that looked like a disease. And…and…my mother…”

“Hush, hush. Take it easy. When you’re ready, tell me all about it, calmly and in order.”

He nodded. Getting up from the bunk, he brushed past her. As he paced, he concentrated on stretching the sleep out of his muscles and lowering his breathing to an acceptable rhythm, “I thought I was having a lucid dream, but, you know, I was never able to control it, not even for a second.”

As he related the dream, Ariel noted that his face and voice were childlike. Sometimes she forgot how young they actually were. All the responsibility and strain of their lives since they had first come to Robot City had seemed to age them incredibly. Sometimes her mental image of herself was of a much older woman, one who’d been coping with adversity for so long that the experience registered in deep lines on her face. However, a look into any mirror showed her the same young, almost adolescent, mien: the baby fat of her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes, the radiance of her long black hair, the youthful sheen of her skin. Her figure, once fairly gaunt, had filled out well, too-as Derec so often reminded her.

Looking into his tired eyes, realizing he had not slept well for some time, she wondered how a couple of kids like them had stumbled into a life filled with so much tension and danger. Why couldn’t they go back to Aurora (they had been there, excited with their love, for too brief a time) and romp without care through one of its lovely forests or swim in a placid lake? If not Aurora, the strictly regimented, uncomfortably overpopulated Earth might even do. Anywhere where they could be suitably young for a while.

“What do you make of it, Ariel? The dream?”

She wondered how much analysis he could take right now. His face pale beneath his damp, sandy hair, he looked vulnerable.

“Well, I don’t really know. Maybe all the worries you’ve had, what with the strange messages you’ve been getting from Robot City, maybe they’re just coming out in your dreams.”

Derec’s chemfets had gone haywire when he had tried to contact Robot City. Normally he could easily check on operations there from vast distances across space, but all he could sense these days was some vague activity and some nonsense he could not interpret. The last time he’d tried, he could swear the central computer was too occupied with transmitting a medley of unusual songs to bother responding to him. That wasn’t the way the chemfet system was supposed to work. The computer was the conduit between Derec’s chemfets and Robot City, allowing him to run the place and, since the responsibility was so awesome, to delegate authority properly to the appropriate robots. In a way, Robot City had become an extension of Derec, or at least of him and his wishes, his orders, his plans and dreams for the city’s future. He had previously been able to take charge of any part of the city’s operations in an instant, without having to accept musical digressions from a computer. Now a good part of the city’s activities seemed shut off from him.

He felt isolated, as if the chemfets, unable to sustain normal contact with the city, were idly traveling through his bloodstream to no useful purpose. It was a nerve-wracking feeling that may have been something like the detachment and distortion of reality that a disturbed person must feel, and he didn’t like it. His father was, Derec believed, insane, and he sometimes worried that genetics would win out, and he’d wind up in a loony bin himself.

Dr. Avery could very well be behind the present looniness in Robot City. Whenever there was trouble there, he was always the first logical suspect. Since he was the creator of the city, no one would know better than he how to disrupt it.

Ariel now smiled at him. What must she be thinking as his mind drifted off like this?

“Frost,” he said, “it all seems pretty warped when I think of it. Maybe it’s just worry about Robot City. But that part where I can’t see my mother’s face, that really scares me.”

“Take it easy, darling. Maybe you dream about her because you want to see her-”

“I never think of her! I don’t want to think of her!”