Джон Макдональд - Wine of the Dreamers [= Planet of the Dreamers]

She saw the shock on Leeber’s face, his confused look around the office, the way he rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. And then she had no more time to watch Leeber. She felt the probe of unseen tendrils. She felt their softness. She tried to resist. Memory fled back to a time years before. A slushy day in a northern city. She had been playing in the gutter with the boy from next door. The water from the melting snow ran swiftly down the slope. They had built dams out of snow to contain it. But it would not be contained. It snaked around the dams, ate through them, thrusting always forward with gentle inevitability.

She moved back and back, seeking a last defensive point. And suddenly there was the sensation of the entire entity within her brain, adjusting itself to the familiar neural patterns, settling itself in a way that was oddly like the manner in which a dog, before sleeping, will turn around and around.

Words had always been planned a few seconds in advance. Her lips parted and the knowledge of the meaning of her words was simultaneous with the utterance of the words themselves.

“The sun is bad here, Major. It has made you a little dizzy. Drink a lot of water today and take salt tablets. You can get them at the dispensary. Stay out of the sun and you’ll be all right by morning.”

Leeber stood up. “Uh... thanks,” he said. He paused at the door, looked back at her with a puzzled expression, shook his head and went out.

The thought came to her. It was not written out inside her mind. It was not expressed in words, and yet the words formed to match the thought. “Now you understand? Now you believe? I will relax controls. To communicate with me, speak aloud.”

“I’ve gone mad!”

“That is what the others think. No. No, you’re not insane, Sharan. Watch your hand.”

She looked down. Her head reached out and took a pencil. It moved over toward the scratch pad. Without volition, she wrote her own name. “Sharan.” And then the room dimmed and faded and she knew nothing. As sight came back she saw that she had written another word under her own name. At least she imagined that it was a word.

“Yes, a word, Sharan. Your name in my own writing. I had to force you far back away from the threshold of consciousness in order to write it.”

It was written with bolder strokes than her own handwriting. It looked as Arabic might look if written with cursive style rather than individual word signs.

“Mad, mad, mad,” she said aloud.

Anger in her mind. Alien anger. “No. Don’t be a fool! Believe! Wait, Sharan. I’ll find your thoughts and your beliefs. I’ll learn all there is to know of you, Sharan.”

“No,” she said.

She sat rigid, and tiny soft combs moved through all parts of her mind. Memory came to her, days long passed, hopelessly cluttered and out of sequence. The music at her mother’s funeral. A passage from her doctor’s thesis. A man’s insistent lips. The song she wrote once. Discontent. Pride in her profession. Endless minutes and she felt as though she were pinned flat on a vast specimen board...

“Now I know you, Sharan. I know you well. Now do you believe?”

“Mad.”

No more anger. Resignation. Fading. Gone — dwindling slowly away, a song half heard in the far sweet dusk of summer.

She sat alone. She pulled open a drawer, took out one of the slips like the one she had given to Bard Lane. She started to fill it in. Name. Symptoms. Partial diagnosis. Prognosis.

The door opened and Jerry Delane, the young dispensary doctor, came in. She frowned at him and said, “Isn’t it customary to knock, Dr. Delane?”

He sat down facing her across the desk. He said, “I told you that I would leave Leeber’s mind and enter yours, and I did. Of course you can call me a fantasy your sick mind has dreamed up, so I’ll give you physical proof.” He pulled her dictating machine toward him, set the switch, smiled at her and spoke into it. “Fantasies cannot record their words, Sharan.”

To Sharan, all light seemed to fade in the room with the exception of the light around his smiling mouth. It seemed to grow larger, rushing toward her, overpoweringly large. And then it was as though she were moving swiftly toward the smile. Roaring down a tunnel toward the white even teeth, the murderous redness of the lips...

She was on the leather couch and he was kneeling beside her. He held a cold wet compress against the left side of her forehead. His eyes were tender.

“What...”

“You fainted and fell. You toppled against the edge of the file cabinet.”

She frowned. “I... I think I’m ill, Jerry. I had odd thoughts... delusions about—”

He stilled her words with a gentle finger against her lips. “Sharan, please. I want you to believe me. I am Raul Kinson. You must believe me.”

She stared at him. Slowly she pushed the hand away from her forehead. She walked to the desk, wavering slightly. She switched the dictation machine to play back, set it a fraction ahead. The voice, thin and metallic, said, “Fantasies cannot record their words, Sharan.”

She turned and faced him. In a dead voice she said, “I believe you now. There is no choice, is there? No choice at all.”

“No choice. Release Bard Lane. Get him over here. The three of us will talk.”

They sat and waited for Bard Lane. Raul stared at her. He said softly, “Odd, odd.”

“You can use that word?”

“I was thinking of your mind, Sharan. I have avoided the minds of women. They have all had a shifting, unfocused, intuitive pattern. Not your mind, Sharan. Every facet and phase seemed... familiar to me. As though I have always known you. As though your every emotional response to any situation would be the feminine parallel of my own reaction.”

She looked away from him. “You haven’t left me much privacy, you know.”

“Is privacy necessary? I know of a world where words are not used. Where a man and a woman, mated, can dwell within each other’s minds at will. They have true closeness, Sharan. In your mind I found... another reason for making certain that this project succeeds.”

She felt annoyance as the flush made her cheeks feel warm. “This is a brand new approach,” she said with acid tone. “Maybe you’d like to fingerprint me too.”

Bess Reilly came in. She slammed the door, yawned, hitched her bony hips onto the edge of the desk. She grinned at Jerry and said lazily, “Time’s running short, Raul. And I can’t say I’m sorry. You don’t have much fun in your dreams, do you? I’ve had to change hosts forty times to find you again.”

“I felt you near a few moments ago,” Raul said. He turned to Sharan. “I present my sister, Leesa Kinson.”

Sharan looked blankly at Bess Reilly’s familiar face. Bess stared at her. She said, “Does she believe you, Raul?”

“Yes, she does.”

“It gives me a funny feeling to have one of them understand how it is with us. I never had it happen before. Once, for a gag, I tried to make a man understand who I was when I took over the body of his bride. It took him just about an hour and a half to go crazy. I haven’t tried since. That is, until today. I took over a little blond nurse and tried to introduce myself to your friend, Bard Lane. He got a bit confused. Are you in any danger of going crazy, girl?”

“Yes,” Sharan said. “If this keeps up.”

Bess laughed. “Don’t take yourself too seriously.”

Bard Lane came in slowly and shut the door behind him. He glanced curiously at Jerry Delane and Bess Reilly. He addressed himself to Sharan. “You sent for me.”

“This is your old friend, Leesa,” Bess said. “How did the little nurse act after I moved away from her?”

Sharan saw the color leave Bard’s face. She spoke hurriedly. “Bard, we were wrong. Just believe me. They’ve proven it to me. It is impossible, I know. But it’s true. Some sort of long-range hypnosis, I guess. But there is a Raul Kinson. He had... he is using Jerry Delane’s body. He wants to talk to us. And his sister, Leesa, is... Bess is Leesa. Jerry and Bess won’t remember what has happened. That recording you made. Everything is true, Bard. I think one moment I’ve gone mad and the next moment I know it’s the truth.”