Infinite Dreams (11 page)

“They wouldn’t be allowed to. Overlay therapy is even more closely monitored than skill transfer. And you should know how many controls there are on that.”

“You’re not going to convince me and I’m not going to convince you. Why don’t we just get on with it?”

“Excellent idea.” He stood. “Come this way.”

Dr. Verden led him into a small white room that smelled of antiseptic. It held a complicated-looking bed on wheels and a plain-featured young female nurse who stood up when they came in.

“Will you need help getting undressed?” Leonard said he didn’t and Dr. Verden dismissed the nurse and gave Leonard an open-backed smock, then left.

Verden and the nurse came back in a few minutes after Leonard had changed. He was sitting on the bed feeling very vulnerable, his prosthetics an articulated jumble on the floor. He was wondering again what had happened to his original foot and leg.

The nurse had a bright pleasant voice. “Now please just lie down facing this way, Mr. Shays, on your stomach.”

“Doctor Shays,” Verden corrected her.

Leonard was going to say it didn’t matter, but then that didn’t matter either.

The woman offered him a glass of water and two pills and he wondered why she hadn’t done so while he was still upright. “There will be some pain, Dr. Shays,” she said, still with an encouraging smile.

“I know,” he said, not moving to take the pills.

“They won’t turn you into a zombi,” Dr. Verden said. “You’ll still be able to resist.”

“Not as well, I think.”

Verden snorted. “That’s right. Which only means you’ll go through the process a dozen times instead of two or three.”

“I know.”

“And if you could resist it perfectly, you could keep going back every other day for the rest of your life. Nobody ever has, though.”

Leonard made no comment, wriggled into a slightly more comfortable position.

“You have no idea the amount of discomfort you’re condemning yourself to.”

“Don’t threaten, doctor; it’s unbecoming.”

Verden began to strap him in. “I’m not threatening,”
he said mildly. “I’m counseling. I am your agent, after all, working in your own best—”

“That’s not what I got from the court order,” Leonard said. “Ouch! You don’t have to be so rough about it. I’m not going anywhere.”

“We have to make you perfectly stationary. Biometric reference points.”

Resisting personality overlay is not conceptually difficult. Every literate person knows the technique and most illiterates as well: first the best-selling novel,
Paindreamer
, then dozens of imitative efforts, described it; then a couple of sensational flix, and finally the afternoon cube saga,
Stay Out of My Mind!

The person strapped on the table need not concern himself with the processes (inductive-surgical/molecular-biological/cybernetic) going on, any more than he has to think about the way his brain is working in order to attack a regular problem. Because when the therapist attempts to change some facet of the patient’s personality, the action manifests itself to the patient in terms of a dream-problem. More often, a nightmare.

The dream is very realistic and offers two or three alternatives to the dreamer. If he chooses the right one, his own will reinforces the aim of the therapist, and helps make permanent the desired cellular changes.

If he chooses the wrong alternative—the illogical or painful one—he is reinforcing his brain cells’ tendency to revert to their original configuration, like a crumpled-up piece of paper struggling to be square again.

Sometimes the dreams have a metaphorical connection with the problem the therapist is attacking. More often they do not:

Leonard is sitting in the home of some good friends, a
young couple who have just had their first child.

“It’s just fantastic,” says the young woman, handing Leonard a cold beer, “the way he’s growing. You won’t believe it.”

Leonard sips the cold beer while the woman goes to get the child and the part of him aware that this is just a dream marvels at the solidity of the illusion.

“Here,” she says, offering the baby to Leonard, laughing brightly. “He’s such a rascal.”

The baby is about a meter long but his head is no larger than Leonard’s thumb.

“He’s always doing that,” says the husband from across the room. “He’s a regular comedian. Squeeze his chest and watch what happens!”

Leonard squeezes the baby’s chest and, sure enough, the head grows and the body shrinks until the baby is of normal proportions. He squeezes harder and the head swells larger and dangles over onto the shrunken torso, a giant embryo out of
situ
.

The husband is laughing so hard that tears come to his eyes.

A line of worry creases the young woman’s forehead. “Don’t squeeze too hard—please Leonard, don’t, you’ll hurt—”

The baby’s head explodes, red-dripping shot with gray and blue slime, all over Leonard’s chest and lap.

“What did you go and do that for?”

Leonard has both his legs and they are clad in mottled green jungle fatigues. He is cautiously leading his squad down the Street of Redemption in Beirut, in the slums, in the steambath of a summer afternoon. They crab down the rubble-strewn sidewalk, hugging the wall. Another squad, Lieutenant Shanker’s, is across the street from them and slightly behind.

They come to number 43.

God, no.

“This is the place, Lieutenant,” Leonard shouts across the street.

“Fine, Shays. You want to go in first? Or shall we take it from this angle?”

“If I … uh … if I go in first I’ll lose my leg.”

“Well hell,” says the lieutenant affably. “We don’t want that to happen. Hold on just a—”

“Never mind.” Leonard unsnaps a microton grenade from his harness and lofts it through the open door. Everybody flattens out for the explosion. Before the dust settles, Leonard steps through the door. With the corner of his eye he sees the dusty black bulk of the oneshot generator. A bright flash and singing pain as he walks two steps on his shinbones and falls, pain fading.

Leonard is fishing from a rowboat at the mouth of the Crystal River, with one of his best friends, Norm Provoost, the game warden.

He threads a shrimp onto the hook and casts. Immediately he gets a strike, a light one; sets the hook and reels in the fish.

“What you got, Len?”

“Doesn’t feel like much.” He lifts it into the boat. It’s a speckled trout—a protected species—smaller than his hand, hooked harmlessly through the lip.

“Not big enough to keep,” says Norm, while Leonard, disengages the hook. “They sure are pretty creatures.”

Leonard grasps the fish firmly above the tail and cracks its head against the side of the boat.

“For Chrissake, Shays!”

He shrugs. “We might need bait later.”

A large seminar room. Leonard’s favorite professor,
Dr. Van Wyck, has just filled a third blackboard with equations and moves to a fourth, at his customary rapid pace.

On the first board he made an error in sign. On the second board this error caused a mistake in double integration, two integrands having been wrongly consolidated. The third board, therefore, is gibberish and the fourth is utter gibberish. Van Wyck slows down.

“Something’s screwy here,” he says, wiping a yellow streak of chalk dust across his forehead. He stares at the boards for several minutes. “Can anybody see what’s wrong?”

Negative murmur from the class. Their heads are bobbing, looking back and forth from their notes to the board. Leonard sits smirking.

“Mr. Shays, your Master’s thesis was on this topic. Can’t
you
see the error?”

Leonard shakes his head and smiles.

Leonard woke up awash with dull pain, mostly in the back of his skull and under the restraining straps. With great effort he tilted his head and saw that he was no longer strapped in; only fatigue was holding him down. Bright welts across his arms.

Vague troubling memories; equations, fishing, Beirut, small child … Leonard wondered whether he had resisted as strongly with his mind as he obviously had with his body. He didn’t feel any different, only weak and hurting.

A nurse appeared with a small hypodermic.

“Wha?” His throat was too dry to talk. He swallowed, nothing.

“Hypnotic,” she said.

“Ah.” He tried to turn away, couldn’t even find strength to lift his shoulder. She was holding him down
with a light touch, swabbing a place on his arm with coldness. “You want to get well, don’t you? It’s only so the doctor can …” sharp pricking and blackness.

He woke up feeling better the second time. Dr. Verden handed him a glass of water. He drank half of it greedily, paused to wonder if it was drugged, then drank the rest anyway.

Refilling the glass: “That was quite a performance, Leonard.”

“You know what I was dreaming?”

“We know what you remember having dreamt. You remember quite a lot, under hypnosis.”

Leonard tried to sit up, felt faint, laid back down. “Did … am I still …”

Dr. Verden put down the pitcher, leafed through some pages on a clipboard. “Yes. You have essentially the same behavioral profile you had when you came in.”

“Good.”

He shrugged. “It’s only a question of time. I think you were starting to respond to the therapy, toward the end. The State monitors recommended that I terminate before … actually, I had to agree with them. You aren’t in very good shape, Leonard.”

“I know. Asymmetrical.”

“Bad jokes aside. It just means you’ll have more sessions, of shorter duration. You’ll be here longer. Unless you decide to cooperate.”

Leonard looked at the ceiling. “Better get used to my being around.”

Salad has just been served at a formal dinner and Leonard is eating it with the wrong fork. The young lady
across from him notices this, and looks away quickly with a prim smile. Leonard replaces the fork and finishes the salad with his fingers.

Leonard and Scottie, newly married, are walking across the campus of the University of Florida, on a lovely spring day. She makes a sound between “Eek” and “Ack.”

“It’s just a snake, Scottie.”

“It’s
not
just a snake. It’s a
coral
snake.” And it is; red-touch-yella-bite-a-fella. “Leonard!”

“I won’t hurt it.” Leonard is chasing after it and with some difficulty picks it up by the tail. The snake loops around and begins to gnaw on Leonard’s wrist. Scottie screams while Leonard watches the slow pulse of poison, holding on stoically even though the snake is hurting him.

Leonard repeats the Beirut dream in almost every detail, but this time he tries not to look at the laser boobytrap before setting it off.

“You’re weakening, Dr. Shays. Why don’t you just give in, cooperate?” Dr. Verden said this into the clipboard, a few pages thicker this time, and then favored his patient with a cool stare.

Leonard yawned elaborately. “It occurred to me this morning that I won’t have to resist indefinitely. Only until Scotty’s father gets tired of paying.”

Without hesitating: “He paid in advance, on contract.”

“You’re a good liar, Doctor. Facile.”

“And you’re a lousy patient, Doctor. But challenging.”

Scottie came in for a few minutes and stood at the other end of the bed while Leonard delivered a nonstop monologue, full of bitterness but surprisingly free of profanity, about her failure as a wife and as a human being. During
her stay she said only “Hello, Leonard” and “Good-bye.”

The doctor did not come back in after Scottie left. Leonard sat and tried to think about the whole thing dispassionately.

If Scottie gave up on him, surely the old man would too. There was only a month to go before their marriage contract ran out. If Scottie let it lapse, he would probably be released immediately. He resolved to be even nastier to her if she visited again.

But could he last a month? Despite what Verden said, he had felt as much in control this session as he had before. And it seemed to have hurt less. Whether he could last another dozen sessions, though … well, he really had no way of telling.

Leonard never paid any attention to the soap operas and he made it a point of pride not to read best-sellers. He only had a sketchy, cocktail-party idea of what people thought went on in your head during overlay therapy. Supposedly, you resisted with your “will”—the term seeming to Leonard reasonably accurate but trivial—and a strong-willed person thus could defend his identity better than a weak person could. But there were limits, popular wisdom said, dark limits of stress that would break the most obstinate.

In fiction, people often escaped therapy by refusing to come out of one of the induced dreams—a pleasant dream always coming around at just the right time—by some application of existential
machismo
that was never too well explained. Pure poppycock, of course. Leonard always knew what was going on during a scenario, and he could control its progress to a certain extent, but when the pivotal moment came he had to take some action (even inaction was a decision) and then the dream would fade, to be replaced
by the next one. To decide to stay in one dream was as meaningful as making up your mind to stay on a moving escalator, by effort of will, after it had reached the top.

Physical escape out of the question, it looked to Leonard as if his only hope was to keep plugging away at it. The monitors kept Verden from exhausting Leonard or drugging him; such measures could only be taken in rehabilitating a felon or a “dangerously violent” patient. Ironically, Leonard had been against the idea of the monitors when federal law had created them to enforce “mental civil rights.” It had seemed like a sop thrown to an hysterical electorate after
Paindreamer.
But maybe the government had been right, just this once.

Fake a cure? Impossible unless you were a consummate actor and a psychometrics expert. And Verden checked your behavioral profile under hypnosis.

For a few moments Leonard considered the possibility that Verden and Scottie were right, that he was actually coming loose from his moorings. He decided that, although it might be true, it was an unproductive angle of attack.