Multiple award winner and nominee Robert Charles Wilson is a fabulously inventive writer who always manages with his tales to pull fresh jaw-dropping concepts from out of the worn fabric of science fiction. In my previous anthology, FutureShocks, he created the world of the Rationalization, a time in which the majority of human occupations have been rendered obsolete by advances in robotics, leaving humanity with too much time on its hands. Although this story shares no characters in common with “The Cartesian Theater, “it is set in the same post-Scarcity world, explores similar concerns as the previous tale, and is every bit as fascinating.
He knew her name and a few salient details. She was a dole gypsy, no fixed address, lived by the docks, slept with friends or in the lightless nooks of aibot factories or, weather permitting, under a tent on the beach. She earned no money and subsisted on her dole annuities, but—and this was among his first impressions of her—she wore brightly dyed clothing and gaudy flecks of expensive jewelry, and maybe that should have told him something, but it didn't.
Gordo had been coming to Doletown every day for more than a month, searching for her. He didn't pretend to be anything but a modestly wealthy artist slumming among the willfully unemployed. Every morning he rose from a dreamless sleep and left his neat, expensive apartment to ride down the columnar deeps of the city to Doletown. He didn't mention her name there—he dared not be that obvious—but he made friends quickly among the would-be and has-been aesthetes who comprised so large a percentage of the Doletown population, and he kept his ears open. He dropped his own name by way of a calling card. “I'm Gordo Fisk,” he would say, extending his hand, and the response might be a raised eyebrow of recognition or envy or scorn. Yes, that Gordo Fisk. The transrepresentationalist. Briefly famous, yes. Though that was fading.
Apart from her name, all he really knew about her was that she had visited the Bonnuit Sleep Clinic in the early spring of 2110—three years ago now. Because he couldn't name her directly, he discreetly mentioned the Bonnuit instead. It turned out a lot of Doletown types had visited the Bonnuit in the past, not because they had trouble sleeping but because the clinic was conveniently located and had sponsored a research program that ran until late last year. The clinic would pay volunteers a generous tithe just for sleeping in a monitored bed with devices attached to their craniums. A noninvasive night's work and a nice way to pick up pocket change when the free food, shelter, and consumer chits guaranteed by the Rationalization seemed not quite sufficient.
So her name eventually came up in conversation. Her name was Iris Seawright, and before too long Gordo found himself on a beach where the salt air smelled rank and the concrete bastions of wave/tide power stations rode the blue horizon like floating castles. It was late in the day, and a casual group of dole gypsies had assembled to build a bonfire. They stacked driftwood and flotsam while public-safety aibots flitted overhead with motherly concern. In the light of the setting sun, the flying aibots looked like seabirds made of amethyst or amber.
Iris Seawright came out of a green hempen tent, shielding her eyes, and Gordo, still meters away, knew at once that he had found her. She had been described to him, of course, but he suspected he would have known her anyway. She was everything he had imagined but more specific—somehow, more incarnate. She wasn't remarkably tall or short. Her face was elfin and sun-browned. She wore gauzy fabrics that flag-danced in the breeze from the ocean, and her golden hair was tied with a ribbon and dangled carelessly down her back. Her rings sparkled. So did her eyes.
Gordo's heart did double beats as he tried to maintain his calm. This, after all, was what he had been searching for for so long. This, or some sense of his own authenticity.
Three years ago, Gordo had gone to the Bonnuit Clinic to confess a shameful secret and to seek a cure.
The physician he saw that day was one Dr. DuBois, a man his own age. Dr. DuBois welcomed him into one of the interview rooms attached to the clinic's luxurious main atrium. The Bonnuit Clinic catered expensively to the worried well. The Rationalization guaranteed medical care to anyone who needed it, but if you wanted a human physician—not one of those competent but affectless or obsequious aibots who staffed the curbside hospitals—you had to pay money for the privilege. Perversely, the most expensive of these facilities specialized in the most trivial non-life-threatening complaints. See a machine for appendicitis: see a human being for your soul. Or so people said, up on the sunlight levels of the city.
Gordo's complaint was not physical, exactly, but neither was it wholly spiritual. Now that he had screwed up the courage to come here, he found it enormously difficult to confess.
“Your sleep is disturbed,” Dr. DuBois said encouragingly.
“Yes…well…in a way.”
“Are you reluctant to confide in me? Believe me, Mr. Fisk, there's nothing to be apologetic about. I see people every day—people who share your problem, I'm sure, if you'll only explain to me what it is. Can't fall asleep? Medication doesn't work for you? Nightmares? Existential discomfort?”
For any of those problems he would have consulted an aibot physician or neurologist. But there were some things you simply didn't want to say to a machine. That delicacy of feeling was no doubt what kept Dr. DuBois in business.
“I don't dream,” Gordo said, almost choking on the words.
The doctor betrayed no disapproval or disgust. Why would he? Gordo's shame was specific to himself: to his situation, his history.
“Most likely you do dream,” DuBois said congenially, “and simply don't remember having done so. Dreams are elusive, Mr. Fisk. Slippery by nature. They're seldom what we expect.”
“I don't dream, or I don't remember my dreams—it's all the same—though I truly believe I don't dream at all, Dr. DuBois; that's what it feels like, although I can't prove it.”
“That must be disturbing. Even so, I have patients who might envy you. They suffer terribly from nightmares.”
Dr. DuBois was being even-handed, injecting a sense of proportion. Gordo shrugged. He would have welcomed a nightmare. He would have thrown a party for it.
“Well,” Dr. DuBois said, “we can certainly work with you, Mr. Fisk, identify the problem and address it, but before we begin may I ask why you find this dreamlessness so particularly troubling?”
“I'm an artist.”
The doctor's eyebrows rose. “Fisk? I'm thinking of the Fisks who created the Mt. Merapi Series—but surely you're too young—”
“Tomas Fisk was my father.” And Arcela Fisk was his mother, he might have added. Both were responsible for the Mt. Merapi installation, not to mention dozens of other less-grandiose works of static art.
Gordo had been apprenticed into the static arts since childhood, had willingly and eagerly accepted the role of heir-apparent that had been thrust upon him by his parents and, when they retired, by their eager public following. But he was thirty years old now, and to this point he had produced only workmanlike and undistinguished public installations, commissioned by businesses and municipalities more interested in his marketable name than in the final product. Like his parents Gordo was a transrepresentationalist, but his work had gathered only tepid applause, and his status within the movement was fragile. He had overheard himself being dismissed at gallery openings and sophisticated parties.
Worse than that, though—or at the root of it—was this inability to dream. He had been raised in a household and in a community that valued all things invisible or mysterious in human nature: things the aibots (presumably) didn't share. Visions, eccentricity, madness of the nonviolent sort, hallucinatory journeys, dream quests—dreams! His parents had discussed their dreams in minute detail at the breakfast table. As a child Gordo had willingly and eagerly joined in these conversations, and his mother and father had praised the vividness and gaudiness of his youthful fantasies. But the dreams dried up when he hit puberty, and Gordo had been reduced to silence or embarrassing fiction. He could not bring himself to say, “I don't dream anymore; my nights are black, seamless oceans of nothingness; I lie unconscious for eight hours and wake knowing I've slept; but I no longer dream.” He could hardly admit it to himself, even now. It would have been like confessing that he was hollow inside, an empty vessel from which all visionary content had been drained.
He explained this to Dr. DuBois while blushing and studying the floor.
Dr. DuBois appeared to give the issue somber thought. Then he said, “Thank you for your frankness. I understand now. We'll work up your case, Mr. Fisk, and we'll find out what's gone wrong. And then we'll fix it.”
Gordo liked the sound of that.
He observed Iris Seawright surreptitiously as he circled the bonfire, not wanting to spook her, not wanting their meeting to seem anything but natural. Night fell while he watched her, and there was the sound of waves lapping the littoral, the tide offering up bits and pieces of the world as it had been before the population decline and the Rationalization—wasteful plastic things, salt-bleached jugs and bottles like the pallid carcasses of extinct crabs. Public-safety aibots still flitted prissily overhead, keeping watch to make sure the flames didn't spread, dodging sparks that whirled up from the burning driftwood. There was conversation and singing, and Gordo saw couples and threesomes vanishing behind a concrete tidal wall to make love in the sandy darkness. Iris, he was pleased to see, listened to the music, chatted with friends, but essentially kept to herself. There was a certain singleness about her.
She finally settled on a log a comfortable distance from the fire, her face an intoxicating patchwork of firelight and moonshadow, among a group of people with whom Gordo had recently made friends. He drifted that way and nodded at the familiar faces. Before long he was introduced to her. Gordo Fisk, Iris Seawright. Pleased to meet you. The chorus of biographical data: Gordo is an artist. A successful artist. Lives up in the sunlight levels, a transrepresentationalist, maybe you've heard of him.
Iris, who had not yet pronounced more than a sentence, cocked her perfect head at him and said, “No. Name's not familiar.”
“Iris don't follow the arts,” someone else chimed in. “Iris's one of the original originals.”
“Pure dole gypsy,” a second voice said.
“Does as she wills.”
“A free spirit.”
“Goes where the wind blows.”
Et cetera. Gordo ignored all these incantations, because Iris was smiling at him now. She patted the log beside her, and he sat down, entranced.
He had known she would be beautiful.
Of course there had been no guarantee of that. As Dr. DuBois had once said, “She could be anyone.” The code on her file had indicated her gender but nothing else. She could have been a child. She could have been an old woman stooped and angled by the years. She could have been monstrously ugly. There was no telling.
But Gordo had known, in some inexplicably powerful way, that she would be beautiful. He remembered something his father had often said (imperially, as he said most things, pronouncing a great truth): “If there is no such thing as a beautiful dream, Gordo, there can be no such thing as a beautiful mind.”
So he had known that her mind, at least, would be beautiful. But he had suspected the rest of her would be, too. He had anticipated the youth and lightness of her, the fearlessness of her gaze, even the wrinkles of curiosity and (perhaps) joy at the corners of her eyes.
He put those things out of his thoughts, however, and simply talked to her—small talk, the only kind of talk available to strangers; the weather, the night, the stars; while he memorized the look of her and while she likewise checked him out, one moment meeting his eyes with her own, the next looking at his shoes or his clothing or away into the night and the sea. Her voice was light and musical, her vocabulary simple, her grammar and syntax uncomplex. Her hands moved when she spoke, illustrating her sentences like twin trained birds.
He had known, he had known.
Cautiously, not wanting to push anything but conscious of the connection he had already made, he asked her to dinner the following night. She said yes, that might be nice. Come around about evening tomorrow, she said.
“Where?” he said.
“Oh, here. I'll be here somewhere. I'll look for you,” she said.
Dr. DuBois had performed an intricate test on Gordo to determine the cause of his anoeiric fugue—his dreamlessness. What happened was, Gordo went to the Bonnuit Clinic at an appointed hour, was helmeted with neurological inductors of the latest and subtlest kind, was given a hypnagogic potion to make him sleep, and was installed in a monitoring bed while he waited for the drug to affect him. He asked whether the drug would make him dream: he had experimented with other substances reputed to have that effect, but they had done nothing for him.
“No,” Dr. DuBois said, “this is only to put you to sleep, and to compress the equivalent of an eight-hour night into half that time—it does nothing to foster or inhibit REM states. How do you feel so far?”
“Well—sleepy,” Gordo admitted. His limbs had grown heavy, and he found himself listlessly uninterested in his body, the doctor, the room, his senses, anything at all. Dr. DuBois said reassuring things, and soon Gordo slept: the only evidence of which was, he woke again.
“No dreams,” he reported.
He had slept the regulation four hours under the influence of the drug. Dr. DuBois had meanwhile interviewed patients, gone for lunch, written the introduction to a journal article, and returned to Gordo's bedside. “We'll see about that,” he said.
They adjourned to a consultation room where DuBois was already running a collation of the session's results. Numbers scrolled down the screen of the doctor's analytical engine, followed by something that interested Gordo more: a patchwork of elementary colors, chiefly gray, blue, black, separating and reconjoining like oil on water.
Dr. DuBois studied these results. The sequence seemed to run no more than a minute. Dr. DuBois ran it twice, frowning.
Gordo said, “What is that?”
“Your four hours of sleep. From the inside. The devices you wore on your head monitored your brain activity. They're extremely subtle machines, Mr. Fisk. They can register the discharge or inhibition of a single neuron, the ebb and flow of an entire alphabet of neurotransmitters, the activity or inactivity of individual synapses and ion channels. They know where these events happen in the brain and what they signify in macroscopic and behavioral terms. They can distinguish between rage and pain, laughter and grief, love and hate. All these things and a thousand more are condensed into numbers and represented schematically in compressed time.”
“Transrepresented,” Gordo said, because this was what the transrepresentational movement in the arts was all about: taking real-world data and making beautiful abstractions of it.
“In a sense,” Dr. DuBois agreed, “in a sense.”
“And it can tell when I'm dreaming?”
The doctor hesitated a long moment. “Yes.”
“And was I?”
Another pause. “No.”
Gordo was unsurprised.
“But this is only an isolated test,” Dr. DuBois said. “You didn't dream this time. Most patients do, but in your case—well—”
Gordo watched the colors evolve and dissolve on the screen. “So what does a dream look like, if this isn't one?”
“Here—I can show you an example, if you like.”
He rooted through his desk for a file folder to which a slip of digital memory was attached and fed the slip into a port of the analytical engine. The screen immediately flushed with pearlescent filigree, with subtle paisleys and exfoliating neon fractals.
Gordo watched, wide-eyed. Then he glanced at the file folder. On it was written an identity code: YFL-500.
Gordo arrived at the beach at the appointed hour, but the wind was chilly and carried a periodic, stuttering drizzle—he was afraid she wouldn't show up. He waited under a sheltering abutment as the time came and the time passed. At sea, under veils of rain, aibot cargo ships drifted like gray windowless cities. Gordo had abandoned all but the faintest hope and was about to head back to the intracity lifts when he spotted a swirl of magenta behind the curve of a retaining wall: her cape. He ran to her, grinning and shivering.
“You're wet,” she said, and he said, “I'll be all right. Thank you for coming. I was hoping you would. Are you hungry? Where do you want to eat?”
“You pick. Somewhere nice.”
Somewhere uptown, she meant. Somewhere she couldn't afford to go without exhausting her dole allowance. Well, that was a reasonable request. He meant to show her a good time. So he folded his rain cape back into its pack and took her up the lifts to a premium mallway in which there was an Ethiopian-style restaurant he had discovered last year. The restaurant was quiet and dark and staffed entirely by human beings. Most menial food chores (like menial chores of every other kind) were customarily performed by aibots, so the waitstaff here were almost certainly paid fabulous wages for lending that last touch of biologique to the all-organic ambiance. And that premium was reflected in the prices on the menu, at which Iris's eyes widened prettily. Gordo didn't mind. He was happy to give her this; she deserved it—though he could not let his adulation show, for it might lead her to suspect his motives. His motives were as pure as arctic ice—well, relatively pure—but it wouldn't do to reveal them too soon. Might scare her away.
He asked her about her life.
She had been born into a large family somewhere south of Eugene, Oregon, she said, and they had all been content to subsist on the dole. The automation of the economy, the Entrepreneurial Expert System that guided and governed machine/machine production and exchange, had enabled an idyllic childhood. No one lacked for food, shelter, and an income large enough to allow that individual to function as a consumer (and thus a perceptible unit in the global calculus of economic intercourse). Iris was educated—she could read and write English—but she had never been any kind of scholar, and her spiritual life, she said, consisted of a deep need not to linger too long in any single place. “I like to move around,” she said.
“It's true what they said about you at the beach, then. Free spirit.”
“Yeah, I guess.” She shrugged. “Whatever that means.”
Gordo was not in the least disappointed that Iris wasn't an intellectual or an artist. Better that she wasn't, perhaps. Any trace of self-consciousness would have marred her perfect authenticity. After all, it wasn't the content of her mind he had come to love. It was the raw fecundity of it.
“But it's boring talking about myself,” she remarked over the wine. “What about you? People say you're famous.”
“Not famous. I do static art, Iris. No one who does that gets really famous, not famous the way video stars and lurid novelists are famous. Well-known in certain circles, you could say.”
She smiled coquettishly. “Certain circles. Huh. You paint pictures?”
“No. I create objects.”
“What kind of objects?”
“I'm a transrepresentationalist. You must know what that means.”
“Doletown people talk about it. I never paid much attention. You make things that represent other things.”
“I re-represent data as a pleasing abstraction.”
That was the dictionary definition, and it was true enough if you allowed a certain latitude to the word “pleasing.” What was important was that the original dataset should be drawn from the physical world—from sunspot cycles, say, or the microwave radiation generated by variable stars, or (as in the case of his parents’ Mt. Merapi installation) the seismic waveforms of a simmering volcano. The artist's job was to reconfigure the data in a fashion that was striking in a visual or tactile sense, to reconfigure it as art. To find patterns in it, even (or especially) meaningless patterns: accidental deviations from randomness, without scientific value but enormously useful when employed as a line or a contour or a color. To chisel abstract beauty from the sullen rock of science.
It was something aibots didn't do; thus it had the virtues of rarity and unrepeatability, a product as purely human as a pearl is purely oyster.
“And,” Iris said, folding a hunk of injira around a dollop of curried goat, “this makes money for you?”
“From time to time, it does.”
“I wish I could see one of your, um, things.”
“Maybe you can,” Gordo said, concealing his excitement. “My best-known piece is on display not far from here.”
“What's it like?”
“I can't really describe it. A column two feet wide by eight feet tall. Like glass or ice—but not glass or ice.”
“What's it about? I mean, what's the dataset? What'd you base it on?”
“That's a secret,” Gordo said, smiling in spite of himself.
“Well, what's it called?”
“YFL-500.”
Therapy didn't work. Drugs didn't work. Dr. DuBois grew frustrated with Gordo's intractable dreamlessness. It was a frustration Gordo had lived with every day of his adult life.
“Clearly,” the doctor said, “all the physiological functions of sleep are being adequately performed. There are even what you might call traces of dreams, the brain doing the sort of nocturnal dusting and cleaning that keeps us all sane. What you lack, Mr. Fisk, is the usual vocabulary of images and slipshod narrative that a layman means by the word ‘dream.’”
“Figured as much,” Gordo said.
He had been back to the clinic five times. Five times, sleep had been induced and his sleeping brain monitored in substantive detail. Five times, the result had been the same: undifferentiated neurological murk.
And each time, by way of contrast, Gordo had asked to see the kaleidoscopic flash and gnarl of the file marked YFL-500. And Dr. DuBois had indulged him, perhaps sensing that this was all the satisfaction Gordo was going to get from his costly consultation. “Is this typical?” Gordo asked.
“More typical than your productions, Mr. Fisk, but actually it's close to the opposite end of the scale—if you can imagine a linear scale for intensity of dreaming.”
He had imagined just such a thing. “Who did it come from?”
“A volunteer. It was part of our baseline study.”
“What volunteer?”
“I can't say. I'm constrained by confidentiality protocols.”
“May I have a copy of it?”
“I can't see how that would be useful to you. What's on the file is really just numbers. To see it this way you'd need to sort the data according to an appropriate algorithm.”
“That's not a problem.”
Gordo imagined the wheels turning in Dr. DuBois's head. “What are you saying, Mr. Fisk—that you want to make art of it?”
“I collect datasets of all kinds,” Gordo said humbly.
“Well, but again, the question of confidentiality—”
“You can scrub any notation regarding the individual source. I don't want names or circumstances. Just the anonymous raw material.”
“I see. Irregular. But, hm, harmless, I suppose, as long as you don't publish the raw data or use the name of the clinic.” Perhaps thinking, as before, that it would be at least a souvenir, something to carry away from an expensive course of treatment that had not yielded a cure or anything close to one.
“I'll be very careful,” Gordo said.
He had not yet taken the full measure of Iris Seawright, but he had seen enough to know she was something he couldn't ever be—spontaneous, simple, and on some level visionary. She looked at him admiringly as they rode a crowded masslift to the gallery where several transrepresentationalist works had recently been mounted for display. Not a prestigious venue, because he was no longer an especially prestigious artist, but respectable enough that it cost money to get inside the vast and luxurious hall. Gordo had begun his career as a disappointment and he had peaked with YFL-500, which everyone admitted was a masterpiece. There had been some interest in the pieces that followed, but if you charted his career as a graph it would have displayed but a single spike, and he still wasn't sure whether the inspiration was his or, ultimately, hers.
“Oh my God,” Iris whispered when they entered the Corridor of the Static Arts, a glass-ceilinged cathedral enhanced by moonlight and patrolled by child-sized aibots with formal clothing and enormous eyes. “This is so fucking nice!”
There were no class barriers in these days of the Rationalization—snobbery of all sorts, but no lines one literally couldn't cross. Iris could have come here (or to any number of similar galleries or museums) at any time. Many of her Doletown friends did, although as aspiring and unsuccessful artists, the attitude they brought with them was usually disdainful and dismissive. Gordo was pleased that Iris was an exception.
Here were displayed items of transrepresentationalist statuary, sculpture, and painting of varying degrees of sophistication. The enormous room was dominated by Moses Bolden's Voices of Time, distilled from a map of variations in the cosmic background radiation. A couple of nocturnal visitors stood at the foot of it, gawking. Much admired, that piece, although to Gordo it looked like nothing more than a series of arcane symbols carved into a luminescent half-dome, more idiosyncratic than beautiful, and trite in its labored sense of mystery. But Iris's lovely eyes widened when the structure radiated semitones of blue and azure. If he did not much care for the art, he enjoyed her enjoyment of it. And was briefly jealous. She asked, “Did you do this?”
“No.”
“So which one is yours? Show me yours.”
“That's why we're here, Iris.”
He escorted her down the arched and curving corridor. Except for the spaces where works of art were appropriately lighted, the entire gallery was dim. The early-evening rainfall had passed, and beyond the glass wall on the right a crescent moon shone over the city's peaks and canyons. Iris was impressed by the politeness of the custodial aibots. “I guess that's the difference between Uptown and Doletown. Up here the aibots keep their distance.”
“This is it,” Gordo announced, suddenly nervous.
Iris stopped short. He had steered her this way purposely, so that she would be surprised by YFL-500 rather than absorbing it from a distance. It had been placed at a curve in the corridor for that very purpose, a challenge to the glassy ceiling and the stars.
Gordo discovered he could not speak. This was a moment he had long contemplated—long hoped for, long feared. And now that it had arrived he found himself seizing up like a faulty machine.
“Huh!” Iris said at length.
What did he want from her? Praise? No. No praise was due him. What he had hoped was that she might recognize the piece, might feel some unconscious kinship with it.
She moved around YFL-500 slowly, following its internal lace and filigree and the boldness of its structure. She extended her hand as if to touch it, then pulled back. “Wow…how'd you make this?”
“It's a question of, of—well, technically, each micron-layer of crystals, and every crystal in each layer, is polarized so that it refracts or absorbs light. The polarization is binary…it's code, and the span from top to bottom is a timescale. It's a portrait of an event—”
“What event?”
He hesitated. He hovered on the brink, it seemed to him, of a vast abyss. “I've never told anyone—”
“Well, you don't have to tell, if you want to keep it secret.”
“It's a dream,” he said, almost gasping at his own audacity.
“A dream? Really? Someone's real dream?”
“A dream as recorded by very sensitive neurological machinery. But what makes it art is that I found the narrative in the data. Do you see it, Iris? Caught in the crystal? Like a shadow hidden by a rainbow. It begins at the top, that ghost of clarity, and it pulses, it expands and contracts according to its own logic, and it vanishes, down below, into chaos, into fractured light.”
“Like a prism,” Iris said.
“Yes, like a prism, in a sense, but—”
“Is it your dream? A dream you had?”
“I don't dream,” Gordo said aloud for the second time in his life. He felt numb, weightless.
“That's too bad,” Iris said, and she gave YFL-500 another thoughtful look. “Anyway,” she said. “It's very pretty.”
There was no way to tell her how difficult, how exacting the work had been.
He had taken the binary file YFL-500 to his studio with fierce anticipation. What he had seen on the display panel of Dr. DuBois's analytical engine had already been a crude act of transrepresentation—raw and ridiculously literal as it was, it hinted at the riches the file might contain. The data was complex, but (like a dream) not entirely random, and to Gordo it was a mute command: Carve my beauty out of this stone of numbers. Make tangible what lies beyond the power of words.
He hacked at the data for six months before he began to recognize the major and minor chords embedded in it. The stacked, polarized crystals were his own idea. He had commissioned his tools from an aibot prototyper, three times attempted a rendition, and three times failed to achieve the effect he was aiming for.
As he worked he could not help speculating about the source of the data, the dreamer of the dream. Dr. DuBois had said this was a “particularly rich and vivid” dataset, but might not any dream yield some similar strange beauty? (Excepting the products of his own gray sleep.) Gordo suspected not. And it was as he envisioned this hypothetical dreamer—a woman, he was almost certain—that the work finally attained the coherence it needed.
In due time the finished piece was debuted. He called it YFL-500 after the numbered Bonnuit file and refused to publicly divulge the source of his data. At first the piece aroused no particular attention, but word quickly spread among the community of critics and opinion makers and, in time, the art-literate public. It was called a remarkable departure for an artist who previously had been considered too pedestrian to create anything of lasting worth. By such faint but real praise his name was once more elevated, and before long Gordo began to think of himself as a genuine artist.
In time he went back to see Dr. DuBois.
“I have no new therapy for the dreamless,” the doctor said, “unless something else is bothering you? Insomnia, perhaps?”
“Actually,” Gordo said, “what I want is more data.”
More dreams. More raw material. The more intricate the better, he explained.
“But this is unethical,” Dr. DuBois protested.
“No more unethical than the first time you did it.”
“Even so—even with the names and details deleted, these measurements were given to us in trust. They were donated for a specific purpose, for research. Contracts to that effect were signed. If anyone were to discover that they had been manipulated for mass entertainment—”
“Hardly mass,” Gordo said. Hardly entertainment, he thought.
“The piece you created must have been lucrative, though, yes?”
“It made some money for me. But more important—”
“In this context, shouldn't I decide what's important? What you're looking for, it seems to me, is a kind of silent partner.”
“I suppose so.”
Dr. DuBois waited. Gordo measured the pause and then said, “You want to be compensated for the risk.”
“We can work out the details later,” the doctor said.
As they left the gallery, Iris asked him where he lived.
“Couple levels up,” Gordo said. “Not far. Come for a drink?”
“Yeah,” Iris said, “I'd like that.”
He keyed the door and let her in with mounting excitement. Not just sexual excitement, though that was definitely an ingredient. She seemed willing, and the thought of making love to the woman who was the source of YFL-500 was almost unbearably tantalizing. But he took nearly as much pleasure simply in being near her, in a place as private as his home. Gordo was a private man, by and large. Only his most intimate friends had visited him here. Was Iris an intimate friend? Not yet. But there was a kind of unspoken intimacy between them, the shared space of her unconscious mind, with which he had long since fallen in love—not that she was aware of that, of course.
And in time he might ask other intimacies of her.
“Super nice place,” Iris said, tossing her rain cape over the back of a sofa.
“I like it,” Gordo said. “Mostly for the view.”
She went to the window that constituted one wall of the apartment. In sunlight it would have rendered the exterior world as a shadowy forest of clifflike habitats, roof gardens, turbines, blunt concrete aibot hives. By night the window was clear as fine crystal. Here was the crescent moon again, pale against the glistening vertical lightscape of the city. Firefly aibots darted between tall buildings; cargo drones cruised above the city with weightless ease.
Iris gave the city a cursory glance and paced the room, stopping to admire this or that of his possessions.
Gordo owned a few antiques, a few valuable contemporary pieces. She paused by a mahogany table on which was displayed the only object he owned that had been crafted by his father. She picked it up—a little cavalierly, Gordo thought—and inspected it.
“A seashell,” she said.
“Not exactly. The root dataset was a recording of wave impacts on the shore of a beach somewhere in the Pacific. It was rendered as a Fibonacci series—that's why it looks like a conch shell. A little joke.”
“It's a joke?”
“In a way. Hold it up to the light.”
She did, and a faint sound emerged from the bell-like opening.
“It stores photonic energy and rereleases it as mechanical vibrations. The sound reflects the original data.”
“The sea!” Iris said, grinning.
Gordo nodded. The piece had always struck him as painfully obvious, almost a novelty item. But even as a minor work of Fisk pere it would command a large sum at auction—more than any work of his own except YFL-500.
She put the shell back in its place and looked, in turn, at a glass sculpture by Bekaa, a two-hundred-year-old Tiffany lamp, and a framed Eberhardt.
“You must be fucking rich,” she said.
He shrugged.
“You're cute, too. Do you have anything to drink?”
Good idea. His mouth was dry. “Glass of wine?”
“Is the wine an antique too?”
“The word is ‘vintage.’”
“Good vintage?”
“Not bad.”
“I'd like that,” she said, settling down on the sofa, loosening a button on her blouse.
There had been other dreams, other works. YMG-004. YFX-037. EMG-200. Pick of the files, Dr. DuBois assured him. Dreams gaudy and vivid, dreams subtle and complex. Gordo had made art of them, and the work was good, it was professional, it was attractive.
But—despite his best efforts—none of these pieces possessed the verve and color of YFL-500.
“Perhaps,” Dr. DuBois offered, “it's the dreamer, not the dream.”
Gordo had already considered that possibility. “I would love to meet the woman who was the source for YFL-500.”
“What makes you think the subject was a woman?”
“Intuition. Wishful thinking.”
“A waking dream?”
Gordo smiled wanly. “You could say that.”
“Well, you're right. It was a woman.”
Gordo's pulse sped up. “I thought that information was confidential.”
“Anything I tell you,” Dr. DuBois said, leaning over his desk and giving Gordo a meaningful look, “I tell you in confidence. Correct?”
Gordo nodded.
“And will stay that way?”
“Of course.”
“Frankly, our partnership to date hasn't been as lucrative as I'd hoped.”
“I've done everything I can—”
“Oh, I understand, Mr. Fisk.” They were still “Mr. Fisk” and “Dr. DuBois” to one another, despite the intimacy of their financial arrangement. “I don't blame you at all. Still, I can't help thinking that if we had access to the original source of YFL-500, we might recover some momentum.”
“What are you saying? That you want to contact her? Get her back in the clinic?”
“No! I don't want to have any contact with her at all. That would make me legally vulnerable…and I'd like to hang on to my medical license. No; I think you should contact her.”
“And then what?”
“See what happens. Aren't you curious?”
Achingly curious. The only reason he hadn't proposed this to DuBois was that he had imagined the physician would be shocked. He should have known the doctor's ethics were flexible. That fact had been pretty firmly established.
“She's younger than you, she's not of your station in life. She's a dole gypsy, and I don't have a firm address for her. But I can describe her.”
Gordo said, “I imagine she's beautiful.”
“Not bad-looking.”
“Hair short? Hair long?”
“Long, and tied down her back. At least when she came in here three years ago to sell us a dream.”
“But even if I find her, that doesn't solve our problem.”
“Ideally, you won't just find her. You'll befriend her. Grow close to her. Close enough that you can arrange the recording of another dream, or two, or more.”
“Convince her to come and see you, you mean?”
“No, no—as I said, I want no direct connection with this. But the gear that records nocturnal brain activity needn't be as bulky as what we use here. In fact, I've prototyped some much stealthier inductive devices. Things you could install in a pillow, say, or a bed frame.”
“And record her dreams without her knowledge? Isn't that a criminal act?”
“I've never heard of such a prosecution. Define it any way you want, Mr. Fisk. Do it, or don't do it. All I'm saying is, I can supply you the technology. And her name. Don't you at least want to know her name?”
By the second round of drinks Iris had shed her diaphanous blouse and put her feet up on Gordo's mahogany living-room table. The table was an antique. Antiques, like therapy, could not be manufactured by aibots. It was a costly table. Gordo thought her feet looked just fine, resting there. Exquisite, he thought, those feet. Small, pale, flawless. Also not manufactured by aibots.
“This has been nice, Gordo,” she said. “I mean really nice. Thank you.”
Gordo sipped his drink and thought it might be going to his head, possibly because he was tired. Or he was tired because the drink was going to his head. Or something. He tried to assemble his thoughts. She seemed inclined to stay: should he record her dreams tonight? (If they slept at all.) Or wait for another night, presuming there would be another night? Prospects seemed bright. Maybe better to forget about Dr. DuBois's spyware for now. Make love for the sake of making love. For the sake of her perfection.
No, not perfection. Perfection was not what he wanted or expected. If anything, Gordo thought, Iris Seawright seemed a little simple-minded, or at least not well educated. But she ran deep. He knew that: he had seen what was inside her. He had built a monument to her long before he'd ever met her.
She nestled into his shoulder and put her hand on his thigh.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“A little woozy,” he said.
“Yeah. That's how it starts.”
“What starts?”
She ignored the question and stood up. Gordo remained seated. Getting up didn't seem like a good idea, somehow.
“What would you say is the most valuable small thing you own, Gordo?”
“Valuable?”
“On the resale market. Small thing. Not, like, real estate. Something you have in the apartment. Something portable.”
Gordo wondered what the point of this was but found himself answering, again, honestly: “The Fibonacci seashell,” he said. “After that…I suppose the psalter on the mantel. It's silver and it's very old. Other things…some of the furniture…”
“Smaller than furniture,” Iris said, and she was putting her blouse back on, looking curiously businesslike, unaffected by the drink (though why a mere two glasses of wine should have taken him so strongly he failed to understand)….
He opened his mouth and answered her questions in detail, as if she were an insurance adjuster; then she said, “And do you have a bag, a backpack, anything like that?”
He answered that question too. She was almost unbearably beautiful, Gordo thought, moving around the apartment methodically, gathering up his possessions and tucking them into his old camping pack. He didn't want to close his eyes, because he might not be able to will them open again. He realized he had been drugged.
He said, “What did you give me?”
“Relax,” Iris said. “It's the same stuff they give you to make you sleep at the Bonnuit Clinic. Bunch of us from the beach used to go there to sell dreams. And rip off a dose or two when the docs weren't looking.”
“You gave me a drug? So you could steal my things?”
“I don't think of it as theft,” Iris said.
“What?”
“Royalties,” she said.
Gordo was silent for what might have been a minute or an hour. His thoughts were becoming incoherent. Finally he said, “How did you know?”
“Well, you don't have to be a genius to draw a conclusion. YFL-500 was the code they put on my file at the clinic.”
“You have…a good memory.”
“‘Nearly eidetic.’ A teacher told me that once. Then she told me what ‘eidetic’ meant. She said if I cared at all about schoolwork I could be a great scholar. But remembering isn't the same as understanding.”
“Maybe that's why. Why you dream so vividly.”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “So that was really my dream, huh? Made into art. Wow.”
Gordo nodded groggily. Wow. He watched as she stuffed the Fibonacci seashell, his father's legacy to him, into the backpack. “No point stealing that,” he said. “Everything's microtagged. And that piece is well known. If you put it on auction—”
“Who said anything about stealing? It's a gift, right, Gordo?”
“No,” he said helplessly.
“Well, then, report it. We'll go to court. But I might have to mention YFL-500, and the clinic, and that doctor you must be paying off. Motive and all that.”
Gordo would have slumped deeper into the sofa, had that been possible.
“Don't worry,” she said. “You'll sleep soon. Before you do, though, Gordo, I have to ask: why me? Couldn't you steal someone else's dream?”
“Not as good. I tried.”
“Or a dream of your own? Oh—right. You don't dream.” Gordo considered that statement, and she mistook his expression for misery. “Don't be so fucking hard on yourself. You do okay. Data's just data, right?”
She had seemed beautiful. She was beautiful. He could not dispel the illusion. She possessed not just a superficial but a profound beauty. A beauty invisible. He had believed in it. He had believed in it fiercely. It had seemed so real.
He closed his eyes.
“Sleep, baby,” Iris said. “Maybe this time you'll dream.”
“But I did.” Even with his eyes closed he could see her. The vision of her. The vision he had made, though it did not entirely fit her: it was, he realized, a transrepresentation, a very fine one, delicate and beautiful, and he was sorry to lose it, but it was slipping away now, lost in morning light.
“I did,” he said, or tried to say. “I dreamed,” he said into her absence. “I dreamed of you.”
