NORMAN TALBOT

Norman Talbot was born in Gislingham, England and emigrated to Australia in 1963. He has published nine books of poetry and appeared in many anthologies. He founded the small press Nimrod Productions, which is currently publishing a series of critical monographs on science fiction writers. He has taken early retirement from the University of Newcastle, where he was an Associate Professor, to become a full-time writer. His first novel has just been submitted to the tender mercies of its potential publisher.

Here is a deadly fever-dream of a story that works as satire and as a completely realised future; like Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, it is cheerfully unnerving and joyfully experimental.

* * * *

“Dream, you Gondwanian dole-blotcher bankrupt, dream!”

I’d had the training. Looked like Dreamteam had picked me to be the one picked up.

“Moderate your language and give our friend one more shot, Leftenant Doctor.”

Shot? One millisec of Hypnovec, as they say. Designed to make your unconscious get up on its little stage and sing all its greatest hits.

“Shot or half-jolt, Madam Surgeon? He’s had a full shot this am. And he’s very old.”

“Hit double-top, Leftenant Doctor. The shot. Doesn’t much matter if there’s impairment, where he’s going. Once we’ve stripped down his dream.” Pause. “Confucius said, ‘Forgive the young their errors, but an old man who still knows nothing deserves no pity’.”

Hit, shot, jolt. Such violent words for so gentle a techne. “Impairment” sounds much more restful. InterMed also calls Hypnovec “White Light”. Nearest they get to poetry. And what’s he mean, “very old”?

All that training. And when it counts I can’t remember a thing. Except that the Visreal the Dreamteam taught me with had a red square, top left, the Gondwana branch-and-sword emblem centred, and EVENTUALITY FOUR under it. But what did it teach me? Let’s hope it taught me well!

“Stand by, InterMed Six. Highlight all anomalies, no matter how trivial. Remember, Team, observe, record, analyse, but do not respond. The unconscious we investigate holds the calling-cards of Gondwanian subversion groups, their virtual coordinates, the works. The dream will contain them; all we have to do is identify them. Unconscious minds are sumps for memory seepage. Keep clear, keep calm.”

“Yes, Madam Surgeon. Stand by all. Vids A OK. All systems receiving, Ma’am.”

White Light. From everywhere. So I dreamed.

I dreamed I was visiting a grave. Even in the dream I was concerned, because I wasn’t sure whose grave it was. My mother’s? But she drowned at McMurdo. My father’s, maybe. But it wasn’t where my father is buried in my waking life, and I was not as I am. That is to say, I was a variant, an alternative version. Oh, and young.

In my dream I had thick, short, weathered hands, calloused and knobbly at the joints. My nose when I squinted at it was coarse, quite big, open-pored. There was tangled hair, very unwashed, under the back of my cap, and I had a hack-cough. My clothing was wrong too: big loose-woven sweater (home-made?), khaki shapeless coat tied at the waist with string. A mack, grating on the sweater. Not much under that, because the sweater scratched my shoulders. Chaplin trousers, were there drawers underneath? Something. And boots.

The boots I could see properly. Black, heavy hobnails, the insteps creased and cracked by daily all-weather work, but they’d been greased faithfully. Goosegrease! Imagine when there were geese, so many that people boiled them down for grease! No, that’s silly ... Farmer’s-boy boots, laced up through twenty four little brass eyelets, and the laces tied twice round the ankles.

When I looked down at them I knew where they were standing. England, years before the Multi-Nat War. A rutted cart-track along a headland, with rain spitting out of low cloud. Winter ploughland. No hedges and a thin wind. Farther off, a bare oak, some elms. Extinct in waking life, of course. Like these clothes. And this place would be all built over. Elms might even have been extinct before De-fol. Long before our Counter-Meteorology came in.

“Madam Surgeon! That’s the second reference to the McMurdo Incident! I was in the Macquarie Island assault squad when the Gondwanian Counter-Meteorology hit us —”

“No doubt that experience will increase your alertness in this investigation, Sergeant.”

“Everything went mad, Ma’am! It was —”

“I’d prefer it remained ‘unspeakable’, Sergeant.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

But when I moved, took a step forward, everything altered. Completely. A vivid green-meadow landscape, dog-roses and whitethorn in the hedges, English birds singing: a robin, a chaffinch — take more than those four years of hiding out in the Nullarbor caverns to wipe out their songs! Light sky-blue sky. Sun. And a way off there were big leafy elms with a rookery, a few birds wheeling around and calling, old brick walls glowing warm under them. The grey block downhill, with mist round it, was a flint church-tower. East Anglia. Know it anywhere. Born there.

“Landscape” was right: somehow more like a picture than a place. I was still in my scarecrow get-up, stamping along a footpath, hedge on one side, cowless meadow on the other. Big mushrooms; so it was horseless, not cowless. The graveyard was down there ahead, and at every step the landscape unfolded slickly round me. Filmic.

When I stopped to try to see the place better, I was back on the cart-track. A cut to mud-ruts and long puddles can’t tell you much, so I got moving again, and the English May-time meadow rolled sedately downhill towards the church. The boneyard was calling.

“This is not authentic dreaming, Madam Surgeon. Too much organisation, no dumping.”

“Check the system, Leftenant Doctor. REM?”

“EEGs read dream-state, Ma’am, well over into the black — I mean the eidetic, sorry Ma’am.”

“Oneirographic range?”

“Systole 7.7, diastole 16.1. Dream-state, but SDG reads irregular clonic break-ups across the Bion cells. That’s what’s inhibiting the near-memory dump. Bankrupting nuisance.”

“Watch that language, Leftenant. Cryptocyte frequency, Intern?”

“Low but increasing, Madam Surgeon. Some heavy mapping, typical Gondwanian indulgence in ecological patterning.”

“The mapping is presbyopic memory, Intern. Childhood, or some such rubbish. Concentrate on recent ‘cytes. All-body functionality, Sergeant?”

“Dream-state, Madam Surgeon, Leftenant Doctor. Conspicuous ciliary flex. But there’s too much temporo-spatial consistency —”

“Ever seen a sleep-walker, Sergeant? No, keep at it. It’s anomalies we’re looking for. What if their head-peelers have developed protected dreaming, Sergeant? With no dump?”

“Wouldn’t they go mad if they couldn’t dump, Ma’am?”

“How would you tell if a Gondwanian was mad? Carry on, Leftenant Doctor.”

“Ma’am.”

The graveyard was wide, the graves flat slabs in long soaking green grass. Not a single headstone or footstone standing anywhere. Don’t know how big it was, but very big. A round, low, yellow sun was veiled and softened by the mist, and the long grass was hung with hundreds of dewdrops refracting little glories of light. Trim-edged, raked gravel paths looped in a vast tangle of intersections and dead ends: a maze. The rules were obvious: stay on the paths. And as soon as I realised that, I saw, at the centre, a Lady.

Ha! The snobbish archaic trivia a dream dredges out of you! This Lady! Like an old Multi-Nat cigarette-ad, she was. Striding, or pacing anyway. Big red-checked hunting jacket, thick woolly collar turned up in the morning sunlight. Gleaming hair, not any particular shade of fair, flopped casually over an orange headband. Keen bony face with an imperious chin. Her eyes would be grey, alert, impatient.

That jacket said she’d been up at dawn with the guns, and wasn’t her Daddy proud of her! Brought down ten brace with twenty cartridges, eh? And her admirers, her suitors, awed: Lionel deucedly impressed anyway, Godfrey thoroughly dazzled, and Nigel more, well, disconcerted. Blast them all.

“Anomaly, Doctor: too many characters for dream.”

“Madam Surgeon?”

“No, I think merely a spread of assorted names, Sergeant. But odd, certainly. Code for identifiable subversives?”

As soon as I stepped through the lichgate, the radiant mist cut off everything except green grass, grey graves, gold gravel, and the central Lady. Did she throw me a distant glance? Probably not.

She wasn’t going anywhere, just prowling — I assumed waiting for me. If a path-curve brought me near she grew brighter, larger, but she could not possibly be any clearer. You know that terrible wrong-end-of-the-telescope sight, when guilt or a quarrel makes you feel miles away from someone inches away? Like when Deborah told me she’d virtualled into the Shakahachi Brigade screening Fujisan, and I said I wouldn’t let her join ... Let her! Damn fool... Yeah. All blood under the bridge. Well, the Lady was as clear as that. In morning sunlight.

She glanced at me on my closest path, then down at my boots. Unsurprised. Mildly, coolly displeased. And yes, her eyes were grey. Under her big jacket her skirt must have been very short: I could only see knee-length socks and sensible shoes, as they called them at one time, in another country. A Lady from True Romances, fresh from drawing the coverts. You’d never think she’d spent all night keeping Lionel, Godfrey and Nigel on the respectable side of the oaken panels of her chamber. Or shagging them rigid inside, for all I know. Blast their square-jawed, pipe-clamping young-Lord-of-the-Manor grins.

I couldn’t help the noise of my boots. She was so much more gravel-trained; made no more noise than those breakfast-cereals they had before the War. I hated my gravel-grinding, and when her lips framed a contemptuous halfsmile I hated it more. She said nothing. What could I say? The rules were obvious. Keep off the grass. The path twisted back away.

“Excuse me, Ma’am, but what is this Gondo suspect drivelling on about? Is there info for us in this at all?”

“Thank you, Leftenant Doctor, I will decide what constitutes information. If this is dreaming, it clearly has a new coding system. What will that tell us, Sergeant?”

“That they’re onto ... That our analysts won’t be able ... That they’re reduced to ...”

“All sound thinking, Sergeant, but trivial. The one important thing it can tell us is the format of this new code-system — if we can de-program it ... Leftenant Doctor, I want to splice in another team on this one. Call O/C NARCOtics and NARRatology Sector, Metro-Sanyo Quadrant.”

“NARCONARR, Ma’am?”

“You don’t approve, Doctor?”

“Bunch of X-filing whistle-blowing weirdos, Ma’am!”

“True. Get them. Do it now, Doctor.”

“Ma’am.”

She carried one glove in her other, gloved hand, and the most she would do was make one gesture with it, roundabout to her right. No, no Ariadne she! She wasn’t solving the paths for me, merely minimising the amount of time she had to listen to my boots. I did my best to follow the gesture, awkward and sweat-soaked in those damn clothes. The sun had got hotter, the mist wetter, and the gold-gravel paths more tortuous. “Torturous”, Deborah used to say.

More sensibly, I kept stopping. Shrewd, eh? Useful, in that hot graveyard, to get the cold winter of the cart-track into my lungs, and time to think. At times the writhe of a path took me away from her, but she was openly watching me now. She couldn’t know that when I stopped, flushed and sweaty, I was somewhere else.

There, between the brimming cart-ruts, were lines of moon-shapes, full of cloudy water. Goddess-worship? Some of us used it, but it wasn’t that effective: nightmares and such take their toll, but not quickly. No! Hoofprints! From the feet of shod horses, way back. Then I was ashamed of the myself that was stumbling along those jinky, dinky paths, obediently keep-off-the-grassing, on the way to inevitable rebuff by the aristocratic, aloof contempt of that Lady. By-True-Romances-out-of-Country-Life: that’s how the old horse-breeders would have put it — though that might be for racing-horses.

So I turned right-angles on my hob-nailed heel, and marched straight across the wriggling paths, the dewsoaked grass, the flat, unobtrusive, humble graves of insufficiently rude forefathers. The goosegrease on my boots was just as good against scintillating storybook dewdrops as against the long muddy ruts of deserted cart-tracks.

She should have glared, affronted, but she ignored me. Not convincing. When I got to her she stopped, looked away ... No, she was giving me her best side, treating me like the camera-bank in a damn Multi-V Reactive. Offering me the profile she had been saving for Lionel, Godfrey, Nigel. Oh, she didn’t turn as if to greet Lionel as he strode, riding-boots gleaming, up the parterre for an on-set proposal, or to lift a brave, tender hand as Godfrey and Nigel motored up to Town to join the Foreign Legion. She knew I was there, though.

“Ma’am, excuse me. This isn’t a real dream; it’s a whatsit, a ‘story’. Like those books he dreamed the titles of, True Romance and Country Lives. Info where every hit is untrue. Not even he thinks it’s true! The Gondos have ‘libraries’, stores with hundreds of books in, printed on paper. Real tree-paper. Cost millions. When we took Washington ...”

“Thank you, Leftenant Doctor. I know about books. Comment, NARCONARR?”

“Provisional comment only. This is the Maud-plot, perhaps with what is called a ‘happy ending’. The focaliser, a resentful dole-blotching lout, allegorises the Gondwanians, the Lady the Companies.”

“But why, NARCONARR?”

“It is a story he tells himself, so that he can be happy surrendering to us.”

“I see.”

“Well, my man?” Her voice was crisp. Tart. Or acid. Acidulous. I should have realised that when I stopped I’d be back on the cart-track again. To hear what she was saying I had to sort of shift from foot to foot. Must have looked to her like the village idiot, embarrassed and out-classed. Couldn’t be helped.

“Milady?”

“Do you suppose that by stamping over the maze you have ‘solved’ it?”

“Don’t think I’ve hurt nuth’n, Milady. D’you hev a look.” And I gestured back to my footsteps through the grass, distinct in the pristine brightness. Forty yards of big heavy bootmarks drawn furrow-straight over green, grey and gold, each one dark with the broken ichor of dewdrops.

“Nuth’n I c’n see, leastwise.” I tried to keep my tone obsequious — or at least so rural in its component sounds that my delight would be undetectable. I may have smiled, just for a moment, but probably she was still profiling away, thinking how late the non-existent Lionel was, so it didn’t matter. She’d been trained from birth to not notice the peasantry, after all.

“The Maze is for the noble-hearted only, the gentleman of true-bred spirit. Back to your plough! Shall the Quest Itself be shamed by your invasion of it?”

Oh, very scornful. And perfectly enunciated too. Belatedly and shamefaced, I removed my cap, ground my loud boot into disapproving gravel. But as I looked down to hide my smirks I tried to see if she was acting too. Was she? And if so, did she realise I was? Hadn’t she heard Nigel was in Tijuana, acting in gay porn-films, and Godfrey giving interrogation classes to the Mandalay police? Oh, and poor old Lionel in the cellar of a Hull marina, with sinkers in his pockets and bags of white crystals up his arse?

“Are you getting this, NARCONARR? Waking-life overlap, surely. Have the Gondwanians got into our drug trade?”

“Getting it, InterMed. Checking also double focalisation convention (rare or v.rare). Extradiegetic locative signifiers identified. Each involves InterMed action: well-known defeats. Initial query: is extradiegesis designed to algebrise the audience-expectations of your own InterMed units?”

“Us, NARCONARR? For Corp’s sake, we’re only recording this crap!”

On the cart-track the rain was considerably heavier. I’d rather have been wearing my cap. The term Quest seemed to hint at those codifications of narrative so popular before Third War. Did she know other terms in the code?

“Is that it, NARCONARR? That code system, could that be the new way to splice info?”

“Not unreasonable, Madam Surgeon. But it’s more complex than that. She may be the one testing him, you see. If he now seeks to test her knowledge of the ‘code’, and if she therefore promotes him to a higher social function, we’ll know you were right. Such subtleties are typical of Gondwanian decadence.”

“Nothing’s ever open-body operations with them, it seems, Leftenant Doctor.”

“Ma’am.”

“Oi’m sorry, Milady. Oi din’t arsk t’be put intu no Quest.” I stepped closer.

“Naturally not. One does not issue an advertisement. However, and irrespective of whatever your Call may have implied — or have omitted to imply — one has grave doubts as to your eligibility.” Not narratologically sophisticated, but she knows something that might structure this dream.

“Yes’m.” Too much like a slave in an Archaeo-Reactive? Certainly her eye darted my way, then off again. Suspicion at last? I was never an actor.

“To take one small but apposite example,” she straightened her already upright back, “your dialect is barbarous. Can you not at least attempt to enunciate your words clearly?”

“Oi’d loike to, Milady, but” ... I wanted to try a modulation upwards, just to see how scornfully she would condescend to such crawling ambition, but knew I lacked the expertise. “I awriddy looked arter that, the fust time I dreamed thisyer dream.”

“Really?” She laughed, more uneasily, a Lady of the Manor confronted by a rudeness she is almost sure is deliberate, but as to whose meaning she is not at all clear. “Should you not rather say that you have dreamed yourself to be a gentleman, but that now the dream has vanished, leaving you — what you are?”

Then she erred, thus truncating the test-conversation. “And now you wonder if this cemetery, obviously both Maze and Entry to the Underworld, might not also be Wilderness? Are you not tempted to ask me, bold hero, whether I am a Virgin?”

And she added, presumably to herself but in that pitched-forward, highly audible whinny common to the country aristocracy of whenever in England she came from, “What a jumped-up boor it is!”

“No,” I said to the rain — but she could hear me. “Your term, Milady, is both ill-chosen and inapposite. It is ill-chosen, in that the Suffolk term ‘bor’ (in some enclaves ‘booer’ or even ‘booiy’) is a term of respect, related to the Dutch ‘Boer’ and German ‘Bauer’, and the common compound ‘neighbour’. It is inapposite because, while you have been consistently dismissive and contemptuous towards me, I have remained respectful, even deferential to you — as far as my acting talents allow.”

“What?”

“Madam Surgeon! I’ve got a screenful of cryptocytes, a regular bearish dump!”

“At last! De-program in order of assimilation. Sergeant, run her verifications.”

“They’re all registering high-stress emotional colour, Ma’am, but I’m not getting correlatives!”

“Sergeant?”

“None of them check yet, Ma’am. But it seems like...”

“Seems, Sergeant?”

“Sorry, Madam Surgeon.”

What came next? I was at too sudden an advantage. At random I quoted, “I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh”. Fairly appropriate, for a dream. She swallowed (rather loudly and not at all like a dream) and muttered “Jane Eyre” to the vanishing Lionel.

Then she stepped close, very close, to me. A light breeze stirred, and the mist was almost gone. A blackbird was singing, then a robin, answered by another. I put my right arm round her and kissed her cold cheek.

She sighed. Yes, really. Then she muttered something (“Very well”? “Lionel, farewell”? “Oh, hell”? Certainly not “At last, my own!”) and kissed me hard on the lips. Then she slipped my left hand inside her coat and onto her right breast. It was erect, cold and lovely: she wasn’t wearing anything under that big woolly-on-the-inside coat. I swayed — rather than go back to the cart-track — and she leaned her whole weight into my chest. A sturdy Lady.

“Go on, go on!”

“Ma’am?”

“Why doesn’t he go on? Bankruptcy, but that Lady Chatterley stuff gets to me! My first, you know, was with a Senior W.O. when I was in Officer Training ...”

“Sergeant! It’s Sergeant Barry, Ma’am! He’s fallen!”

“Mm.”

“Are you all right, Madam Surgeon?”

“Oh. Oh. That’s so nice ...”

“NARCONARR! This dole-blotcher dream has had ... had an effect on my CO. And my Senior Sergeant has totally lost it. I need a Plot whatsis —”

“Summary, Leftenant? Reprise? Narrative Redirection?”

“That last, NARCONARR. Urgent.”

“Would a cemetery focus be acceptable, Leftenant? Touch of Night Thoughts?”

“Anything! This is bottom-line urgent! My Sergeant’s in some sort of fit!”

“Narrative Redirection highcast, all channels. Stand by, Leftenant. Stand by all.”

“I’m supposed to weep and sigh full sore.”

“Skip it. I’m not the sort of knight-at-arms who’d believe his own dream.” Then I remembered. “This is EVENTUALITY FOUR. What do I do?” The dream juddered.

“Great shareholder! Save! Save! It’s an analytics trap, a virus. The Gondos’ve activated the graveyard in his dream! All the graves are opening! NARCONARR!”

“A pierced-frame effect, designed to trivialise the romantic-tableau genre —”

“The Surgeon’s kissing the Sergeant, NARCONARR! She’s pressing her burning lips to his! And, er, he’s responding ... That is, he’s — oh shareholder! He’s got these gleaming fangs, he’s biting her throat, he’s drinking her blood ... I see it all now, Intern. The Sergeant is the Undead One! He comes out of his grave each night, to feast on the vital fluids of Commissioned Officers...”

“Sir?”

“No, no, Leftenant, you’ve merely contracted an old horror trope! Get out of that audit-damned dream at once: it’s carrying a Gondwanian hyper-virus. Severely contagious!”

“Intern, my love, come to my arms! Let me protect you. Madam Surgeon hath become the willing and helpless prey of that monster from beyond the grave, but you I’ll protect, to the last drop of my blood!”

“Arrgh!”

“Ah Intern darling! What big teeth you have!”

“Leftenant Doctor? Hello? NARCONARR here ... Leftenant, reactivate the screens at once. Leftenant! Oh stocktake, the Gondos have got them all. The whole team. Horrible way to go: trapped in a loop of stereotyped endings.”

* * * *

“I think you’re doing it ... You are the Man of My Dreams.”

“In point of fact, Lady, you’re in mine. Will you excuse me for a moment’s Address to the Audience?

“NARCONARR scholars, this transmission is about to close. You are advised that Dreamteam’s hyperviral nanocomplex, code-name ‘Stockchar’, is spreading through your system now. It is programmed to develop new series of non-predictable evolutionary changes at every narrative node: within a year and a day NARCONARR will be narratologically dysfunctional.

“Only Dreamteam can provide the nanocomplex closure you will need. Dreamteam seriously advises that, to ensure your own survival, you encourage the Companies to the conference table before the witching hour, Halloween next. Transmission closes.

“Now, where were we? The First Kiss node, I believe?”

* * * *

AFTERWORD

One of my favourite poems is “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, but remember, the title is quoting from a male nightmare that blames the girl. The poem doesn’t...

This SF story appropriates one level of Keats’s poem, in a context where merciless Corporate Medical Espionage teams raid dreams to scavenge secrets from the material dumped in them. Probably this version of a “theatre of war” started with my first reading of Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head stories.

— Norman Talbot