The Propagational Library (8): Dreamtime

[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents/Overview] [Next Chapter]

Gabriel Naude briefly awoke in the middle of a bitterly cold August night with a start and a shudder: the dream hadn’t crossed over into nightmare, not quite, but it had been so strange, so… so creepily disquieting. Someone had been trying to get into, well, into his house it must have been, some building belonging to Gabe at any rate. Someone or something. A force, a presence. The walls had bulged inwards from the pressure outside, once, twice, three and four times, an effect which Gabe had seen in numerous horror movies. But none of those horror movies had achieved the effect in a house with walls of glass: black glass, opaque glass, but glass. The building and its walls did not shatter, though, or even crack. They had just pulsed those four times, slowly and steadily (was the building being squeezed?). Gabe didn’t know if they’d have done so a fifth time, or continued indefinitely, or what, but his unease in the dream was such that he woke suddenly, shivering. He got out of bed and shuffled in the darkness to the bathroom door. Groped around at the wall next to the sink, got the hand towel hanging there, mopped from his forehead the beads of chilly sweat. Drank a mouthful of tap water. Bleary-eyed, he stumbled back to bed and fell quickly asleep. He didn’t dream further.

Watching, The Librarian kicked off from that time and place and crossed the barrier, returning to a future and a place which Gabriel Naude could never have imagined. Trailing behind The Librarian appeared to be a loosely knit shawl of magnetic filings, glittering not with reflected light but almost phosphorescently, from light within. Crossing the barrier, as always, resembled (to The Librarian’s eight-sensed perception) the teeth-rattling bump of a MagCar driven a little too fast over over a speed hump. But then he was over and through, the silvery cloud trailing behind him larger by seventeen particles than when he’d most recently passed through in the other direction. The cloud distended — stretched longitudinally and then up and back down — as it crossed the barrier behind him. The Librarian watched: he didn’t think he’d ever tire of watching. When the entire cloud was through, he turned and lunged back to his future place.

If he’d had a mouth, it would have been smiling broadly.

—-

Depending on how you looked at it, either the Lanes had given him a mission, or fate had. The Librarian wasn’t sure he believe in fate (although, haha, the idea of fate was clear enough). So just say it was the Lanes, then, Eldon and Adrienne. They had shoved him through the barrier with their metal box for one reason, or really for a whole complex of reasons which fell under one name: culture. Permanently preserving it. All of it.

The mission had seemed serious and well-intentioned to Gabriel Naude — Gabe1 — but also rather, well, dumb. He’d carried this presumption of noble-sincere-but-stupid with him across the barrier, in the end, as Kali seemed to render all of human culture not only physically nonexistent but flat-out irrelevant. All the books, recordings, films, oral traditions, paintings, plays, choreographies, symphonies, philosophical tracts and Zen koans, advertising jingles, aboriginal songlines, sculptures, Tiffany lamps, architectural drawings, furred teacups, Eames chairs, episodes of Bridget Loves Bernie — he was supposed to somehow save it all? For what, or whom? And even if he just took on faith the notion that some audience, somewhere, would sometime find value in it all, he had to confront the (as he thought) show-stopping question: how?

Even if Kali had neutron-bombed the Earth, killing everyone but leaving the artifacts of culture in place, how could The Librarian — insensible, limbless, headless, utterly bodiless as he was — how could The Librarian possibly manipulate all that vast tonnage of physical things into some form to preserve them all? Even if he could conceive of (say) a perfectly climate-controlled, hermetically sealed environment, and imagine how to transfer all of those works to some perfectly non-degradable medium — even given all those absurd assumptions (because he could, after all, take all the time in the universe), how could he build anything?

Not only did cosmic rays and neutrinos and whole galaxies of matter pass through The Librarian; he passed through them. He could no more pick up a hammer than be knocked out by one.

But now he thought he understood what Adrienne Lane — and Dolly Magaziner Burghar before her — had been driving at, with the barrel-of-monkeys game. A creative work bore no more relation to its physical embodiment than The Librarian’s lunging did to the planets and galaxies (and clocks and calendars) through which he passed. A work of art was an idiosyncratic assemblage of idea-particles, some of which had to do with what it expressed and the rest of which had to do with how. A painting of a cloudburst over a Spanish prairie was one thing and a photograph of it, a different thing; the sentence The rain came hard and heavy over the grasslands outside Seville, quite another; the metrical The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain, yet more different; and the same line sung over a vaguely tango-ish lilt of a melody — well, by this point anyone would have to agree the painting and the tune were not the same creative work at all. The Librarian (who no longer spoke any language, of course, although English was still closest to his thought patterns) didn’t sense these different works as Gabriel Naude had, as natural events and places and conditions organized visually, tactilely, in language, melodically, or what-have-you. He sensed them as differently-configured clouds of the same ideas.

After several more eons of practice, backing up and starting over, he learned he could hook these clouds together on ideas held in common. You didn’t need two entirely separate clouds to represent Henry Higgins-the-phoneticist and Pygmalion-the-sculptor: you needed one cloud for all the ideas embodying the character in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; one, for those in the Shaw play; one, for their counterparts in the film of the Shaw play; one, for the Broadway musical; and so on. You just needed to arrange the same ideas, differently, and dress them up in different garb — medium, time period, manner of expression, the character’s very name.

Most importantly, The Librarian didn’t need fingers and eyes and ears, a body at all. Ideas clung unbidden to his (still quite human) consciousness. He imagined himself like a heavily-perfumed character in Louis XIV’s court, followed from room to room by a cloud of fragrance; like the Pied Piper, dancing through the little town with an inexhaustible troupe of children behind him; like the little lame balloonman in Cummings’s poem, trailing not actual children and balloons but the ideas of children and balloons behind him, with every step — and every whistle, far and wee — drawing new ones to him.

The cluster of clouds of ideas was already enormous, a super-cloud. (And although he could hear no sound out here, he somehow sensed that when he moved the cluster shifted with him, and clacked and clinked softly like an old-fashioned wind-powered wooden mobile.) But it wasn’t enough. He knew of Ovid and (as Gabriel Naude) had once read Shaw’s play, and had seen the film of the musical probably a half-dozen times. But having sensed the works didn’t enable him to recreate them. He wasn’t Ovid, or G.B. Shaw, or Lerner and Loewe: he couldn’t duplicate what they’d done. He needed to somehow get their assemblages of ideas, their clouds, and hook them up together, and bring them along for safekeeping.

—-

But again, how? He’d tried many times to return to Earth, and (of course) succeeded eventually. But he could never go back further in time than the point where Kali had roared through the solar system, waving her arms and screaming like the mad one-of-a-kind astronomical creature of destruction she apparently was.

He was stopped, always, by some sort of barrier. The barrier. It reflected everything — light, sound, time, The Librarian himself. When he lunged at it as forcefully as he could manage, he rebounded without injury but also without success of any sort. The idea cloud, propelled by momentum, squashed up against the barrier‘s surface, squashed up and spread out in slow motion, rebounded and reformed behind and all around him.

He tried this dozens of times, lunging at the thing sometimes head-on, with different forces, sometimes from one angle or another along all three dimensions of space (as well as from one or another angle along the five dimensions of time which he’d discovered) — always with the same result. It frustrated him, frustrated the hell out of him, if you wanted to know the gods’ honest truth.

He roared off angrily, determined not to return — headed off to rummage around the universe, oscillating back and forth and up and down and diagonally, in all directions through eons as well as parsecs. The cloud of ideas followed him everywhere, everywhen.

Then, exhausted, he slept. And dreamed, for the first time as The Librarian.

—-

In the dream, he was Gabe1 again. Or rather, he was Gabe1 as a boy, sitting in science class — chemistry, he thought, although this was no chemistry class he had ever actually taken — while the teacher droned on about something or other involving eggs. The teacher was waving his hands in the air; a black sphere hovered in mid-air between them, and in the center of the black sphere revolved, yes, a plain old chicken egg. It was an egg without a shell, but Gabe1 somehow knew it had not been cooked. As the teacher waved his hands about, sometimes the blackness of the sphere leached into the egg, and sometimes the contents of the egg swirled out into the sphere at large. They did not mix, not really. The egg remained an egg. The containing sphere did not become a murky crystal ball.

Blah, blah, blah droned the teacher.

Gabe1 looked to his left. The classroom had a window there, right next to his desk, and it extended floor to ceiling. Although he was in school, for some reason it was nighttime on the far side of the window, so he could see nothing but his own image in the glass.

Time accelerated. Black night turned to indigo, which lightened to navy and eventually gray; with every passing minute more of the outside world became visible through the window. Gabe1 recognized many of the old cars and people and houses from his old neighborhood — and he suddenly could no longer see his own reflection.

Startled, he looked back at the teacher. The teacher was smiling, and pointing at the egg held within the black sphere. The egg glistened, seemed to shine from within.

He woke up.

—-

…and if The Librarian had had lungs and vocal chords and a mouth to funnel sound he would have hooted in laughter. So obvious. Of course. He glanced at the cloud of ideas. Different somehow… he was so familiar with it that all he had to do was set aside enough time to count them and then… yes. Exactly one hundred-thirty-seven ideas in the cloud which had not been there before. The new ones weren’t hooked to any of the others just yet, but hung together in a loose cloud on their own, off to one side, like a cloud of gnats.

He lunged, flung himself thenward back to the point at which Gabriel Naude had ceased to exist. He did not approach the barrier, though. He stopped just short and docked himself in space and time, bobbing about like a cork without moving very much in any of the dimensions available to him.

Behind him, he could hear the cloud of ideas rustling, clicking softly, almost whispering (he imagined) to one another: Can he? Should he? Will he?

He dropped off to sleep. And dreamed again.

—-

A long, straight road, across a desert. A straight shot, as they used to say. He was not in a vehicle as far as he could tell, and yet he could feel the basic controls at his disposal. He could accelerate and slow down. He thought he might be able to steer left and right, too, but he wasn’t really sure about that. For now he wouldn’t need it. A straight shot. He floored it—

—the ridge across the pavement came up fast, apparently out of nowhere, far too quickly to be reacted to. He squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself, and slammed into the bump going much faster than (he was pretty sure) he’d ever let himself go again. He felt rather than heard the crash of the undercarriage on pavement, and felt himself soar up into the air, but he didn’t open his eyes yet because he knew what was coming, yes, crash as he came back down again on the far side of the ridge.

He backed off on the throttle.

—-

—and woke up.

Before him, in the metal box, frozen in the moment, Gabe1 had just opened his mouth, perhaps to scream, or to yell something to the Lanes. (The Librarian couldn’t remember anymore, and didn’t think it mattered.) About Gabe1‘s head, like a holographic still image, hung a cloud of silvery particles. (The Librarian thought that this mattered a good deal.)

He looked at Gabe1 for a while more, backed up and rolled forward a few microseconds in all five temporal dimensions. Nodded to himself, as much as he could do without a head. And then lunged backwards yet again, to a cold night the previous August…

He was thinking, in particular, of how Gabriel Naude had awoken the next morning in a fever of creation. He hadn’t been able to wait to get downstairs to the darkroom. He had taken a shot a couple days ago, on sunup, at the nearest city park; it was pretty enough, as far as it went — with an orange filter on the lens, the black-and-white film had captured what looked like a massive glow on the horizon, behind the buildings, and the trees and bushes and grass themselves had all been darkened just that much. But somehow Gabe just knew that if could get to the darkroom and overexposed the print just so…

But The Librarian didn’t care about that. Gabe would never get to make that print just so. The Librarian didn’t want to see him get interrupted by the ringing of his front doorbell; he wanted to see him as he slept, the night before. He wanted to see him now, and here, just exactly like this…

Fascinating. He watched it once, then nudged himself just a little bit back and thenwards to watch it again. And again. And again. It went like this:

As his eyelids drooped, Gabriel Naude laid the book on the floor beside his bed. He reached over and turned out the lamp on the nightstand. Nestled himself into place, closed his eyes, and within thirty minutes his system had worked itself to a state of REM sleep. As he shifted into the REM phase, the cloud of particles swirling about his pillowed head glowed ever so slightly but visibly brighter, and seemed to activate. One or two of them drifted away — not completely, just a little distance — and then back again, hooked onto the cloud at just a slightly different point. The shift in the cloud’s, well, its center of idea-gravity seemed not just to change the outward shape of the cloud, but to stretch it ever so little in that direction. As more grains of silver separated from and rejoined the cloud, the stretching and reshaping became more pronounced (although the overall conformation — the “look” — remained unchanged)…

And then Gabe moved out of REM sleep. The cloud settled back into its slightly changed shape, just moving about a little here and there…

Back into REM sleep, stage 2. More rearrangement and shifting.

The Librarian noted, finally, something truly marvelous — inexplicable, really. He had been so focused, over the course of multiple rewindings and runnings-through the course of Gabe’s sleep, so focused on the movement of particles that he almost missed the little gleam which occurred on the underside of the cloud. He shifted perspective… yes, there it was: a tiny flare. A new particle. A new idea. Not by itself, exactly, for it was hooked up to three or four others somehow. But it had not been there then. It was there now.

Limbless, The Librarian extended his consciousness in the direction of that little gleam. If he could just touch… His own cloud of particles shifted and swelled just a little that way, approached Gabe’s. At the point of closest contact, he saw one of his own particles sparkle just a bit—

Suddenly he was receding. The Librarian was leaving Gabriel Naude’s bedroom, being dragged backwards, unable to stop himself, accelerating, suddenly thinking to himself Holy shit I’m about to hit that bump in reverse and then yes, Wham and Wham there it was, Goddam but that hurts, and Gabe1 in his final microseconds was whipping by him too—

He woke up on his own side of the barrier, exhausted by sleep and unable to sleep further. And hence unable to get back through, he presumed, until he could sleep again.

But for now he was satisfied. He looked at the cloud of particles… yes. There. One new one, glittering over there and down close to the bottom. Not his own.

__________________________

Well, he’s getting out and about some! Still waiting for him to meet some new people, though,
hmm? Waiting for him to, like, mingle?

__________________________

[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents/Overview] [Next Chapter]