TRACING OF DREAMS (first half)

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  She nearly didn't go though with it. Something would happen, and it portended no good. Through the portal, she studied the crowd waiting for her. My God, they're drooling.

  At tonight‘s meeting, the droolers wiggled in their seats, for their minds churned with fear as they waited her arrival. Under this threat, they began to hallucinate ‒ when accosted, the Plant City Society of those Deprived of Proper Speech warded off evil by speaking in tongues. Tonight the hall shook with the trilling of synthetic languages.

  The door at the back of the room opened. Averting their eyes, the members turned rigid as Dr. Petra Finalfix, preeminent bifurcator, strode down the aisle. Dressed in a jailhouse-gray pants suit, her blemished skin barely camouflaged by makeup, this bifurcator led by hand a young woman with ticking lips and downcast left eye. The woman fixed her right eye on her liberator. Basking in the worship, Finalfix handed her up to the dais, then paraded her around like a best-of-show bitch.

  On a table in the center of the dais, pale carnations floated in a crystal bowl. The petals of the flowers complemented the translucency of the young woman’s skin. Her name? Griselda. The bifurcator had written papers on her and the aberration of her tongue. For this accomplishment, the 634 members of the society honored Finalfix.

  After the society president had made introductions, Finalfix commended the attendees for their interest, then told them of the problems that her client had suffered. Looking away from Griselda, she said, "Unfortunately, proper language furcated into alien tongues. May I demonstrate?"

  The members nodded their heads, prepared to receive something magnificent, dramatic, perhaps illusory or revelatory. As Finalfix knew, secrets provided them with all sorts of visions.

  Reminiscent of a magician, she whipped a language bifurcator from her case. Flourishing its antenna above her head, she opened a door in Griselda’s skull and shoved the base into her forebrain socket.

  Griselda fell to her knees. At this overture, sighs filled the room. Many of the members raptured, and all worshiped the bifurcator and the system of help in which she operated.

  A trickle of blood flowed from Griselda's right eye down her cheek, where it curved to touch the corner of her lips before proceeding to her chin to drip on her bodice.

  Those near the dais perhaps imagined what they saw: the blood coagulated, then dripped no more, hanging like good paint. They noticed Griselda's lips move. Those in the front row could decipher her whisper. "I’m sorry. No longer can I hold up. Please help me." Her frail body trembled, then she collapsed, her head banging on the platform, causing the device to fall out of her cranium.

  Finalfix glanced at the woman. Then turning back to the audience, she declaimed, "As usual in such cases, this woman tried to dishonor her benefactor. Still, we did our best for her, and at least she no longer mutters that alien tongue. Did you catch her phrasing there?" Finalfix mind-wrapped the members, daring them to say otherwise.

  Although she had helped Griselda find relief from her argot, she couldn't say that bifurcation had helped one Petra Finalfix. She became an acolyte to get rid of the Armenian her parents had spoken, but that didn't happen. Instead, confusions rampaged in her mind. She blamed her own bifurcator for that. What about me? I've had trials too.

  Cheers simpering from the throng brought her out of befuddlement. Overcome with the admiration, she consoled herself. Aliens are the only ones who love and respect me. Likely, after this presentation, many of the members would come to her for treatment. But they would have to hurry before they turned into rats. She had kissed a rat person once, ever since refusing to treat such. Even now, some of the members tossed their heads, twitched their whiskers and sniffed for rotten cheese.

  Finalfix's speech and demonstration over, the members sat awaiting dismissal. But before that could happen, the doors burst open. Men and women in blue uniforms marched in behind a man in a dark-brown suit. Finalfix stood as the group mounted the dais. Outwardly calm, inwardly she quivered; a surprise honor must lay in store for her.

  With the toe of his shoe the lead nudged Griselda's body. He went to the bowl on the table and chose a flower. He laid it on the dead woman's chest and crossed her hands over it. Then, he faced about, staring at the 634 members of the society. He said nothing, although his eyes sent a message to each. His hands fell to his side, and he shrugged as if too stunned to know what to do. He sat in the chair reserved for the speaker and poured himself a glass of water from a sweating pitcher. Drank it down. He put the back of his right hand against his forehead and apparently considered something for a minute.

  With disgust lining his face, he pulled out a laser gun from the holster under his left arm and pointed it at Finalfix's head. She quailed, and her knees buckled. He said, "I'm Terrance Rustig, Chief Investigating Officer, Department of Justice, United Nations. You are under arrest for using language variation to torture. Please remain silent until counsel can represent you."    This warning, the official speech, restrained expression of his feelings about the system that had turned into criminals nearly every bifurcator alive.

  Two of the officers handcuffed Finalfix. Silently she scoffed, how dare lay hands on me. Don't you know who I am?

As they led her through the crowd, she shrieked, "I followed the standards of my profession. I obeyed accepted procedures." She stared at the members, daring them to consider her as anything but compliant.

  She realized then from their slavering that they had waited to tear her apart. Their whiskers wriggled in hopes that she would flounder in among them. Through this colony of rodents, the officers had come to escort her to safety. She focused her eyes directly to the front, toward the door, looking deep and far away.

 

  In the 24th century, the world found itself a jig-saw puzzle. International City resembled such, its order transforming the surrounding slums where miscreants from over the world had gathered.

  The slum dweller‘s contribution to the city meant chaos at its edge. International City sat on the coast of former Libya. The atmosphere smelled of the garbage that littered streets and alleys. People newly here could taste it. Thousands of voices rose from this disorder day and night.

  One group, the profession of imagineers, fed and grew on that jumble, picking from it orts of sociological food to digest at their headquarters in the asteroid belt. They watched closely the city planners who considered this disorder a phenomenon that would improve due to the work of the reentry parlors.

  The drabbest of these parlors, little known but significant, had the name Bifurcators Anonymous. Here, former practitioners, fresh out of the rehabilitation camps, learned how to pursue useful occupations.

  In an alley running by that parlor, a breeze rushed, pushing before it a hunchback in clothes that flapped like baby-bird wings. Where the alley emptied into a flea market, he slipped on some rotten tomatoes and rolled up against one of the stalls near a woman reading at a news bar. He stared up at her and stammered, "Trip me you. Outside Anonymous Dr. Mangel here how stop dreaming bifurcators all."  

  Dressed in an orange and red sari that displayed her curves, Sheila Adultri stopped reading. Obviously, rat face didn't realize that she followed him. On assignment from World Justice, she tracked down bifurcators who'd evaded rehabilitation. She turned to face her suspect. He had darting eyes and hair sparsed in patches. She said, "Watch where you're going, tramp."

  The small man jumped up with alacrity and stamped his feet on the cracked pavement. "No ignoramus made been stupid by dreamers but wait can stop dream work again we professional wonder master will help come." Fluttering his arms, he turned and stumbled down the street.

  Whereas she had followed him covertly, now she had an invitation. She slipped into the wake of the misfit, caught up and latched onto his coat. She swung her purse against his head then said, "What do you mean, a dream? The purge. The profession is done for. Have you been sleeping? That system's banned."  

  Leaping up and down, the furtive man screamed, "Idiots!" Bugs ran out of his pant legs, scuttling off his shoes into a gutter. "Dream, dream people everywhere one colleague line on bastards join analyze overcome." As if his outburst had settled the matter, he twirled around then staggered through the park.

  Finches chirped and flitted about in a wind that would have smiled at Sheila but for the derelict’s confabulation. She followed Mangel into a dank haze, through apartments in process of demolition, to the entrance of a tenement that had a discolored palm-reader sign tacked to the door, then up five levels into a dark hall that made her shiver.

  The air moist, the walls and floor grimy, so slippery to the touch, she nearly dashed back out to the street. Something, however, scurrying under the floorboards stopped her. Gray light fell from an open door. Outside the door Mangel scooped up a dying rat then said, "Food enlightenment prepare jerk."

  "Close the door, you failures even as nincompoops," a shadow in a filthy turban said from inside the room. Mangel obeyed immediately – the door slammed a millimeter from Sheila's face. She froze for a second, then reopened the door and walked into putrid mist. In the middle of the room, Mangel knelt before a skeleton of a woman dressed in clothes such as the homeless discard. The woman shoved her crotch into Mangel’s face then said, "Go ahead, slave, make the introduction."

Gagging, Mangel lurched to his feet. "Seer meet Finalfix now three dream dead."  

  "My name’s Sheila Adultri." Her knees weakened, but with effort she maintained her composure.

  Seer Finalfix glanced away, sniffing at her sleeve. "Who cares about your name? I’m the important one because only I can return everyone to those days when I had the ears of influencers, and the world was conquering its 9,382 categories of argot. “Come, for five credits I'll read your palm." Incredulously, Sheila gave over the credits and her right hand. Finalfix slapped the hand then clutched it as if she grasped a rope that would save her from the sea. She hunched over. The folds of her turban unraveled to reveal insects scurrying about on her head. Sheila flinched when a couple of earwigs jumped onto her bare arm.

  Mangel dissected the rat. "Dinner," he said. "You not for enough."

  One eye askew, the Seer cast it blearily at Sheila. "The lines say you’ve been dreaming. You must separate yourself from the dreamers. I'd give you a consultation to handle your malady, but that’s outlawed. Maybe we should poke a socket in the lobes, eh? Still have my equipment. Hid it from the rats who arrested me."

  Sheila jerked her hand away.

  Finalfix waved her arms, dislodging more bugs, then spat. "You passed the test. Mangel, you have selected a goodie. Did you see her react to the news of my kidnapping? Why, she was appalled." The Seer grinned upside down, crusted drool cracking from the corners of her mouth. "Yes, we are three. Yes, yes, yes, bye, bye, dreamers. Let's drink on it."

  From underneath her robe, appeared, as if by legerdemain, a bottle of yellow liquid and three vials that appeared frosted. Sheila leaned closer, and the frosting slithered as Finalfix poured in the liquid.  

  Sheila gaped at the vial proffered. Tentatively, she sipped while Finalfix and Mangel downed theirs in gulps. The stuff tasted like moldy ginger syrup, and the fumes made her dizzy. Finalfix and Mangel doubled, then doubled again. She strained her eyes to coalesce the images, but the more she squinted the farther apart the two whirled. Soon, circling her like manikins on a carousel, they moved so fast that they disappeared in a ring of fumes.

  Sheila panicked, leapt up from her wooden crate, lunged through the garbage and trash that littered the floor, then ricocheted toward her destination, the sink. She stood trembling there, splashing dirty water on her face and pinching herself.

  She slunk back into the room to find Seer Finalfix unconscious on the floor. Hearing a cackle, she turned: Mangel burned a fly. When the fly’s body popped open, he said, "Good days old reliving favorite disciple Seer’s forever." Sheila waited for the rest, but Mangel just began grabbing for other insects buzzing around Finalfix’s face.

  Mangel’s agitations had worked; Finalfix moaned, rolled over then expostulated, "To treat an alien, you must be an alien; to treat a speaker of tongues, you must stargaze or something like that. That is the first great principle from which my new method derives."

  Mangel leapt around the room, snatching at the air. "Dream dream if trace escape." He smeared on a grin. "Zap proper equipment baboons."

  Dust ballooned off Seer Finalfix's coat as she sat up and shrugged her arms like someone just out of a straitjacket. "Mangel, you are foolish. You can't use your hands to catch a dream, but you are close. We can trace dreams to their dreamers, and that is my second great principle. Watch then. Oh, how we‘ll turn off all improper languages.

  Sheila lunged to the window and stared down to get her bearings. Below her, kids ran around weeds, laughing and squealing, playing their games on broken glass and uprooted pavement. Up drifted their chatter, forming around her a patch of sanity:

  "When I grow up, I'm going to be a princess."

  "Hey, I'm going to build spaceships, you wait and see. What you gonna do, Johnny?"

  "I dunna know yet; do something to help people, I guess, but I'll tell ya, bumming helps nobody." He pointed up at Sheila. With heads together the kids sighted along Johnny’s finger. Sheila flinched back into the rot.

  Finalfix said, "What’s that, Adultri, attempting to disguise your thoughts? I have a theory about that. We shall experiment on you. You are unworthy, of course, but I grant you dispensation."

  Mangel nodded like an egret searching for movement.

  Sheila’s eyes jerked apart. Pretending a need to urinate, she backed toward the bathroom. As she lifted the toilet lid, old feces bubbling from the bowl, oozed onto the floor. Gagging, she whimpered, "How can you two live in such filth?"

  Wrinkles of disdain distending her face, Finalfix yelled, "Simpleton! Auger! Dreamers arise from the world's dirt. Listen up, clown. To find dreamers, we must muck ourselves up. Get dirty and you will reach them."

  Sheila’s mind, already boggled, shorted out. Her eyelids twitched, and her chest heaved. Back to the wall, with dissemblance covering her retreat, she edged toward the door. "I have fallen out of time and place and must leave for a while. Let this all soak in. Find a clean toilet. See you later."

  Through trash on the floor, Mangel shoved the slaughtered rat with his nose.

  Suddenly from Seer Finalfix’s mind, burst a ray of light. She leapt up, ran over Mangel, and, with tears streaming down her face, grabbed Sheila’s shoulders. Taking no notice of the private detective’s clean jasmine scent, she cried out, "I've got it. More brilliance; I'm so ahead of my time it makes me weepy. Listen up. In every trouble lay a pit of equal or greater difficulty. You see before you a bifurcator, arrested by rodents because she’s a woman who only followed the system. That's my trouble. The benefit? Well, easy: my stupendous mind and new methods. We'll test hypothesis.

  "You go take your dump elsewhere if that's the kind of bitch you are, but no mucking around without direction. Oh, no. While relieving yourself, dream to become a slave of the great Seer. This will accomplish a proof – dreams arise from filth. We'll pick up the dream and trace it to where you are. By the devils, I am the epitome of something."

  She attempted a pirouette, but her legs folded like rubber; she fell to the floor. Then, she stretched out a hand toward a wiggle undulating on a piece of glass. She put the maggot in her mouth then smiled at Sheila. "Before the purge I ate steak every other day. Much better than this. Some people used to like me, you know." From her chin, dribbled greenish-brown juice.

  Holding her hands crossed in front of her face, Sheila stumbled out of the room, down the stairs onto the street. No trees, no grass, just unwashed pavement and cracked sidewalks with garbage lying about the condemned buildings. A far cry from the cleanliness of United Nations World Justice in Geneva near where she had her office.

  She had taken a boat from Marseilles across the Mediterranean to International City. Something odd had happened on that trip. With each league she cared less and less about her looks until she appeared little better than Finalfix. It scared her because she didn't know what it meant. When she disembarked at International City, she had to spend two weeks in a parlor before she regained her guise....

  As she lumbered away from the tenement, her role as one of the 15,000 investigators chosen from governments, industry and private practice, reformed. She'd contracted to help close down the bifurcator system. Now for the first time, she realized the urgency.

  Many former bifurcators had graduated from rehab camps, but perhaps 2 - 3 % had escaped assignment, and several had broken out and fled. Finalfix hadn't admitted she'd escaped, but certainly she couldn't have completed her rehabilitation.

 

  Mangel had caught a scrawny cat, which he and Seer Finalfix chewed raw. Finalfix got the intestines and organs because she had discovered groundbreaking methods. She slurped some guts, then said with mock composure, "Mangel. What's your given name?"

  "Can't tell can't make say die first." Mangel smiled into his sleeve.

  Seer Finalfix raised her left pinky, stretched to her full five-foot-two and swung a flesh-deprived leg toward Mangel’s head; she missed, impelling herself backward onto the floor.

  Mangel said, "Sorry so caused this and eruption coming volcanic Venus name tell swear reveal never anyone world end eat broccoli."

  Face on the floor, Seer Finalfix raised herself on one elbow, which slipped on grease, causing her chin to crash onto the floor. "What, exact a promise from me?" she babbled. "Why, I've never kept a promise in my life. Tell me, or I will discharge you."

  "Accept assurances greatest Buddha one name given."

  Seer Finalfix laughed so hard foam came out of her nostrils. "Buddha.  Buddha Mangel? You stupid bastard. You could have milked that name for billions. Don't you know the trust it has engendered in millions of the insecure?  

  "From now on you will be known by that name. It is only fitting as I, master of brain stuff, will need a disciple, and you will be him, you ignoramus. You thought you were my disciple before, but you weren't because you had no privilege, but now I say, you are Buddha. Listen to me, Buddha Mangel. I have sensed Adultri dreaming. Don't ask me how. I’m a genius. Come. We will trace it and save every dreamer to boot."

  Out on the street, sniggering at the morons passing by, Seer Finalfix and Dr. Buddha Mangel made their way through the murk. Dead rodents, cats and dogs lined the road. Air coated the pavement with a scum that sloughed off onto their feet as they slogged along.

  Passing a robot crew tearing down a tenement, they plowed through dozens of kids gawking at the destruction. Suddenly, she stiffened, spun on one foot, hopped on the other then crashed into the construction fence. She pushed her body off it, retraced her spin. "Spinning the brain antenna is the key. It has come. Adultri has dreamed to be my slave and disciple."

  Finalfix gazed past the skyline of International City. Her wits flew up to mingle with the clouds scudding by. In a moment of lucidity, as her wits settled, she knew that Mangel mocked a human who deserved respect, but that feeling faded when his eyes crazed. He needed her, so she commanded "kneel," and Buddha knelt. "I give you a quest. Seek Adultri at her anal source. Think of it – you’ll share some smidgen of my glory when I’m recognized for stopping mankind’s compulsion to dream argot.

  "I would go with you except I must return to our lodgings to relieve myself. Never fear though, I will guide you from there with my mega-brain. For now, go five degrees south by southeast, but never go where there's no air, for without air, dreams in synthetic tongues cannot traverse."

  Finalfix headed one way then another, finally toward her destination, and Buddha puked up cat hair and gristle.

 

  She tried to focus her brain to the task, but alas, diarrhea made it difficult to concentrate. Seer Finalfix on her throne, spoke, "Almost didn't make it, but to business. Buddha, hang in there. Seer Finalfix latches on."

  The voices of the neighborhood kids, drifting in through the bathroom window, added further distraction. "Good thing I'm the standard for speakers of proper language," she raved. "Otherwise, the fact that those kids don't like me and pick on me, that I have the shits, that the dreamers are trying to find me and revoke my brain, would turn me nuts."

  Then, she took solace in her mommy sorrowing for her when she’d had an accident in her pants. She chanted, "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy," cuddled herself, and closed her eyes. She dozed off and once again found herself back to where she had first faced arrest, hence to a rehab camp, hence to a city 2700 miles from her home. The dream, starting with facts, which temporarily calmed her with the truth, morphed into a hallucination:

  The rain falls. Seer Finalfix spots a palace with a crow's-head door. "Spirits, Food and Feel-o-Vision." She reaches into her pocket for a few credits. Enough for some feelies? Over the threshold she goes into a dungeon of smoke.

  "Here for the feelies, freako?" The waiter, like some replicant, wets his lips, grins and flaunts his biceps.

  "Yeah." Arm around her, groping, then into an open cubicle. Straps and clips and a mug of 150-proof liquid laced with meth. The waiter pulls the curtain, flips the switch. Gone, to return in 30 minutes, guaranteed.

  Keeps slurping. Senses no time. New personae enter; she, her other and her lover float down upon screamers. They love her, and funny to say, she loves them. Great, but ... flashing, deafening, slashing, hurting, then lights brightening all around, and melodies and poems, soothes, peace, jokes cracking ‒ her doppelganger laughing. He likes to make fun of baboons.

Doppelganger fades out. Holding hands, she and a significant float on. Grinning tube, writhing life, sucks mightily. The other spared, but oh, the Seer. Tube grimaces then belches and spits. Out all slimy and sloppy and ghoulish, croaks, "The Offworld, the land of imagination," and with Technicolor oozing from pores and with body distorting, comes as if wrenched, "THE PROVINCE OF THE SANE."

  A suck. "Got another," the tube says and, from a transient, winks and passes the essence from its end. Landscape, no images. About to learn meaning ahead when brilliance ends, and the straw in her mouth reasserts itself.

  "That's it, gooney," the waiter says as he steals the rest of her money. "No more money, no more trips." Impelled toward the door, she buzzes. Outside, she tastes the damp. Decides on rain. A fun-car hits the puddle in front of her, washes her with scum, and the rats course her synapses, cheering.

 

  Whatever force had held her up gave way, and her chin took a dive to catch on the doorknob, which kept her from falling off the toilet. Her eyes sprang open and her body shook, disturbing a colony of ants removing scum from her legs. Strands of her hair stuck together with dried slobber and vomit. Now foul of breath and red of eye, once she had worn immaculate suits and the most expensive shoes and had showered every day. She had married rich when 22, but never had children. (Good – too many grew into rats.) Things had gone well for her, but her husband committed suicide, leaving a note charging her with improper use of language. That's when she decided to become a bifurcator.

  She had hoped to rid herself of her Armenian background by specializing in bifurcation. Making everyone a proper speaker ‒ that would do it. However, her personal Armenian genocide never quite vanished.

  Now years later, she sat on a filthy toilet, trying to wipe off her bum with a newspaper, but her robe got in the way. "Can’t be bothered with trivia," she mumbled and launched into the other room.

  "Buddha, where are you?" she whined. She searched a closet and paced the hall. "Mangel has failed as I knew he would," she sputtered. Throwing herself on the floor, she kicked and screamed, then stood up with determination. "I’ll fix him with my brain antenna." She spun and fell toward the southeast. "There we are.”

  She lunged that way, but after five steps, ran into a wall. She stopped, scratched her head, then smiled, snapped her fingers and walked out of conundrum.

  After an hour staggering through the slum, Finalfix decided that dreamers jammed her brain. She pissed in the gutter to improve her thinking. Ants and roaches scurried away as her bloody urine bore into the rot.

  At the bottom of her piss hole, maggots as large as her little finger writhed over fester. She plunged her hand into the mass of movement and stuffed heaps of larvae into her mouth. So ecstatic to have a full belly, she forgot why she wandered the streets.

  Thus, surprise smacked her when she chanced to peer through the window of a coffee generator. Adultri sat in there with some man. The Seer burst through the door shouting, "Adultri, my slave, I have traced your dream. Come, kneel before your master."

  Sheila retched. Her own behavior amazed her. Her companion glanced askance at Finalfix. His face turned resolute. In a whir, he flew off his seat, spinning across three meters of dirt floor. The blur of motion burst upon the Seer. Karate kicks drove into her body. She fell backwards through the door, crumpling on the sidewalk. She screamed, "Help, help! Rats on the loose. Adultri, flee before they torture you." She covered her head with her arms, forcing her face into garbage covering a sewer. She shouted down through the grate, "I'll try to save you. Will you like me then?"

  The answer rummaged in Sheila's mind: “Yes” bounced around and came out of her mouth strangled. Neither the man nor Finalfix seemed to notice, and predetermination of the Seer’s fate continued undisturbed.

  Sheila's companion, named Angel, ignored Finalfix's raving. Sheila averted her face as he guided her past the cowerer. She said. "When I’m near that reject, I fumble like a sickie. Would you believe that I sort of like her? I’d help her, can you credit that?"

 

  The final half of the tale "Tracing of Dreams" from the book Eve of Valor will post on or about 1 Dec.

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  To get the book Eve of Valor: click here.