Part 18 (1/2)
”No, sir. I only wished a pox upon your closed door.”
King laughed. It was a silent, wheezy laugh, but his shoulders bobbed up and down. He put a hand on the young man's shoulder. ”If you don't have your paper with you, why don't you run off and get it? I'll be here for the next hour talking to this gentleman.” He pointed at Chorley.
The student hurried out. King came over to Chorley, beamed at him, and offered his hand. They shook hands. King called for more coffee. ”That lad,” he said, ”wants to see his paper safely in my hands. He must think that he's done something astounding.” He chuckled some more. ”Now, before you tell me why you wanted to meet me, I must pa.s.s on a h.e.l.lo from Judge Seresin. He said that you were one of his cleverest students. And the laziest.”
Chorley remembered his old professor Seresin, who was now a judge at the Supreme Court and, incidentally, the Head of the Commission of Inquiry into the Rainbow Opera riot. Chorley had disappointed Professor Seresin. ”I didn't complete my degree,” he said. ”I fell out a third-floor window while drinking with some friends. I don't remember it at all. I wasn't hurt. Apparently I landed in a freshly turned flower bed and got up and wandered away. There were dozens of witnesses, and a fuss, and my father put me on a boat to Europe. And that was the end of my studies. I had a full year in parts foreign, then my father died and it turned out we didn't have any money.”
The coffee came, a double order, since Chorley had ordered for himself shortly before King arrived. Chorley had also ordered a large savory scone. King eyed it. ”Please help yourself,” said Chorley, pressing the plate forward.
”No, no,” said King and slid the plate back beside Chorley's elbow. ”And so, when you discovered that your father hadn't left you anything, were you ever tempted to Try?”
”I arrived back during the first of the rush. It was like a gold rush, wasn't it?”
”Yes and no. So many people were stopped right away. It was as if they discovered that, despite there being gold in the ground, they weren't physically able to dig.” King's fingers fluttered, then made a little foray toward Chorley's scone. They broke a piece off. The fingers conveyed the fragment to his mouth; he glanced down at it, apparently surprised, then opened his mouth to accept it.
Chorley said, ”I thought then that the whole dreamhunting thing was a little vulgar. I mean-citizens were carrying blankets and pillows into the People's Park on summer nights. Founderston was my town, and it changed almost overnight. I felt somewhat resentful.” He shrugged. ”So I didn't go near the border till I went with my wife, shortly after we were married.”
”And you found that you couldn't go In.”
”That's right, I couldn't.” Chorley piled three sugar lumps into his coffee. ”I read your chapter on the Place in your History of Southland. It struck me as one of the most lucid things written about it.”
”You flatter me. And surely there are dozens of even more lucid paragraphs buried among official twaddle and statistical stuff in the Dream Regulatory Body's records?”
”I'm not going to bother the Body.”
”Why not?” King was giving Chorley a shrewd appraisal.
”The Grand Patriarch has given me this task. I'm supposed to think about the Place.”
”That's fine. That's not a novelty,” said King, and his hands pounced again on Chorley's scone. He broke off a big piece and continued to talk, gesturing with the fragment and scattering crumbs around the table like a priest scattering drops of holy water in blessing. ”Plenty of people have thought about the Place. But really intelligent debate hasn't been possible because feelings run so high. The Church preaches against dreamhunting. Dreamhunters feel defensive. And the Regulatory Body tries to smooth things over by behaving like a strict parent toward dreamhunters-in public, at least. All the discussions are about whether the Place is good or bad, and how it should be used.”
”Yes,” said Chorley, eager.
Dr. King seemed startled at the interruption. He slapped the tabletop. ”Exactly! We know how the Place can be used, but not why it's there. Do you realize that that is opposite to our views on human life? For instance, as a man who believes in the material rather than the spiritual, I know that my fundamental purpose in life is to father children and teach them the skills for survival. To, in short, do what a mother cat will for her kittens. A human version of that. So-you and I must continue the species-”
”Oh dear,” said Chorley, ”you and I?”
Dr. King patted Chorley's hand. ”No, my dear man, you with your charming wife, and I with mine. But that description of why we are here doesn't give any clues about how we should actually live our lives-the uses of our lives. How many times are we confronted with a thing for which we have a use, but no knowledge of its nature? Its purpose? That's what the Place is to us.”
Again King made a raid on Chorley's scone. Chorley didn't dare take a bite of it himself. Momentarily distracted by this, he found, when his attention returned to what Dr. King was saying, that the man was talking about Aristotle.
Chorley was bemused. Hadn't they agreed that there had been enough theological and philosophical thinking about the Place? And now King was bringing up a philosopher.
”You are familiar with Aristotle?”
Chorley, in his impatience, quoted part of a song he'd learned at the University-or rather in the bars and cafes around the University. ”Aristotle, Aristotle, was a demon for the bottle.”
Dr. King gave him a wry look. ”Was 'demon' the word you learned?”
”No, I subst.i.tuted 'demon' for the word I learned. Of course I know Aristotle. Greek philosopher. Taught Alexander the Great. Disapproved of plays, because he thought that, if people enjoyed the villains in plays, that would encourage them to behave badly. The Grand Patriarch would like him.”
King laughed his vigorous, shoulder-shaking laugh and reached for some more scone. ”Would you like your own?” Chorley said, and turned to seek a waiter.
”Oh no! No!” King desisted. ”Now-why I mention Aristotle is that, with the Place, investigators are reduced to the same state of knowledge as the ancients. We really don't have any scientific methods we can apply. There are so few fruitful experiments. Yes, we have brought out bottled air and burned it. Yes, we've collected soil samples and performed chemical tests. But what of it? Chemistry won't do it.
”Aristotle invented an early system of cla.s.sification, with a place for everything: animal, vegetable, and mineral. For instance, in Aristotle's system, put simply, man is a two-legged animal without wings. A chicken, on the other hand, is a two-legged animal with wings-”
Chorley, annoyed by this detour, said flippantly, ”And Long John Silver, having only one leg, wouldn't be a man?”
”Well-yes-but do we count his parrot? Its legs and wings?” Dr. King chortled.
Chorley wondered whether he dared to call a waiter over and order himself another scone. He didn't want to embarra.s.s King, whose trespa.s.ses were rather charming. In most situations Chorley was the one licensed to be less formal. But King was making him feel a little stiff and starchy. That was why he'd made his silly remark about Long John Silver-only to get a witty comeback.
King said, ”Aristotle is useful in the case of the Place because we can use him to ask very simple questions about it. Shall we try?” He began, ”What is the Place made of?”
”Land,” said Chorley. ”Plains, hills, riverbeds-land.”
”Good! What does it contain?”
”Vegetation. Dead pasture, brush, and trees. There are no animal remains, which is very strange.”
”No, no!” Dr. King waved his remnant scone back and forth, as if by sowing the tabletop with crumbs he might encourage a crop of little scones. ”Let us ignore what the Place lacks. Aristotle would have you start with what a thing has, not what it lacks.”
”So the missing leg doesn't count, but the parrot does?”
”Quite so! And therefore Long John Silver was a three-legged creature with wings. Now-let us say that the gra.s.s and trees in the Place are land too, shall we? We don't normally exclude gra.s.s and trees from any purchase of a property, do we?”
”All right. Then what the Place contains is dreams.”
”And what are dreams?”
”They are like thoughts. An activity of our sleeping brains.”
”Dreams are thoughts,” Dr. King said, and made a coaxing motion at Chorley. ”Thoughts suggest consciousness. So what do we have, so far, as a cla.s.sification for the Place?”
”Land-with consciousness,” said Chorley.
”Yes,” said Dr. King, then, ”Do you mind?” as he took the very last piece. It was the first time he'd asked. ”The medieval scholars who were Aristotle's heirs had the whole of creation in ranks, with ideal examples at the top of each rank. So, in the category of animals there were n.o.ble animals, like lions, 'the king of the beasts,' man above that, and above man, angels. Even gems were ranked, not according to rarity but by all sorts of other ideas, mostly religious.” King paused and then glanced guiltily at Chorley's empty plate.
Chorley had to struggle not to laugh.
King brightened again, and said, ”So, in those old categories, the animal world rises into the spiritual through man. But the mineral world does not rise into the spiritual. So what is the Place? It's invisible to most people, like a spirit. It's land; so mineral. And it has dreams; so it's conscious.”
”Conscious, and mineral,” Chorley said. ”Which leaves us none the wiser.” Then, because he felt he owed it to Dr. King, Chorley told him what he knew so far. About the telegrams, and how some of the dreams seemed set in a time further on than now. He talked about the convicts in Laura's first dream, and the ones Tziga would edit from the end of Convalescent One. The newspapers hadn't printed Lazarus's letters-but Chorley knew what at least one letter had said, the one Cas Doran had shown Grace when he questioned her. The newspapers only claimed that a dreamhunter ”a.s.sailant” calling himself Lazarus had sunk the audience at the Rainbow Opera in a nightmare as a protest against the use of convict labor. This claim had started all sorts of public discussions about, for instance, how miners' wages were low because some mines were worked by convicts. But no one was talking about the Department of Corrections' use of nightmares in prisons. Chorley told King about the letter Grace had seen in the hope of getting him talking to others. The man was a talker, and a lecture hall in the University may not have been as good as a newspaper at getting word out, but it was at least as good as the pulpits of Southland's churches.
When Chorley had finished, Dr. King shook his hand, and said, ”You will let me know how you get on with your investigation, won't you?”
”I will.”
Dr. King signaled the waiter, paid the bill, then rearranged his scarf, handkerchief, crumpled papers, wallet, and gla.s.ses case in the distorted pockets of his white linen summer suit. He shook Chorley's hand again, started away from the table, swerved, came back, asked Chorley if he was intending ”to write it all up in a book,” insisted that Chorley must, patted his pockets again, shook Chorley's hand once more, and wandered out of the cafe-disappearing only a few minutes before his student returned, panting, with the essay he was so proud of.