DREAMS OF SPACE AND TIME

VONNIE BELL AND TRINITY CENTRE
Dream, January 2024

I was waiting at the gaol gate with other agents when the batch of prisoners, in striped loose cotton teeshirts and joggers, got led out. Vonnie Bell, who had murdered several classmates over a period of time, was assigned to us to transport. She was a nondescript woman in her early 20s, thin faced with rat-tailed mousy hair. I'd seen her record – 14 students, killed one at a time over several months until she was detected. She had no remorse and made it clear she'd enjoyed what she'd done and wouldn't hesitate to do it again. When shown photos of each of her victims she had simply laughed and said she wouldn't hesitate to murder more. That's why she was sentenced to transportation to Trinity Centre. We no longer warehouse irredeemable criminals.

She was handcuffed and shackled to a locked belt and shuffled her way to the transport. She had 2 guards – myself and a female guard – and our pilot was safely in his locked cab, so even if Vonnie Bell broke out of the restraint chair she couldn't get to the controls. The pilot would simply alert Trinity Centre and the transport would be met by an armed security team.

"We're all secured," I told him, once Vonnie was in the restraint seat and we were strapped in our seats.

In response, our pilot shuttered all transparent windows and pulled down his visor. We had fitted ourselves and Vonnie with a helmet and visor and pulled the opaque eye-shield into place. Even with the transport shuttered against the searing light of the rift we risked blindness – that light seeped through the panels, hence the blacked out visors. The pilot's visor had a virtual controls display so he could set coordinates through the searing brightness of the rift and come out close to Trinity Centre. Today it was a smooth ride with no turbulence and we glided into one of the ports of the huge brass-coloured sphere and into the void inside.

Trinity Centre is an enigma. In the centre of the huge void inside the sphere is a tiny, glittering piece of neutron star. Around it three brassy-gold rings rotate like a gyroscope. This is the engine of Trinity Centre. The inside of the sphere has a number of huge, evenly spaced depressions with a small, round, central hole. Also around the inner surface are the galleries where transports are parked and where thick transparent panels let you gaze at that strange engine. Some are disgorging convicts, others are transporting goods, staff or civilians.

We lifted our visors and our pilot cleared the shutters and checked us in. A security detail arrived to take Vonnie and we were free to spend some time at Trinity Centre while goods for the return journey were loaded.

The outer sphere has several layers like an onion. Around the "equator" there are several plazas (each close to one of those depressions) with eateries, entertainment machines and viewing galleries where people could look at the unfamiliar stars. We headed to one of those plazas to kill time.

Humans didn't build Trinity Centre, we discovered it almost a century ago when it was an abandoned sphere. Whoever had built it were – judging by the fitting left behind – bipedal and used to a slightly stronger gravity than us. Over the decades it was repurposed into a place to manufacture machinery and hydroponically grow foodstuffs, and a place to bring irredeemable convicts like Vonnie to feed that glittering star at the core. Soon she would be nothing but a stream of atoms, the lighter elements streaming into that spinning diamond, the heavier ones streaming elsewhere to become molecules and the building blocks of things needed back on earth. And some of those molecules doubtless went into the hotdogs and sodas served in the plazas.

SILVER BEES AND RUBY SEAS
Dream April 2023

I'm an agent. I track fugitives across multiple worlds and this one was trying to hide in a colony that was reminiscent of 19th Century North America. Resources made the electricity supply erratic at best and the closest thing to a computer was a hand-cranked, punch-card operated mechanical computing engine known as a Babbage. This was actually very agreeable to the colonists, most of whom came from religious groups who were seen as anachronisms on the moribund old Earth. The fugitive had a portable, highly technological (illegal on this world) portal key that allowed him to open personal gateways from one human-occupied world to another. I'd followed the fugitive to the basement of one of the hostels, down into a store room, where he'd used his key to open a gateway. My own key managed to register the co-ordinates of his destination and, just as the store-room door creaked open and curious locals entered (probably believing the devil himself was among them), I jumped into the rabbit-hole that opened at my feet . . .

. . . and tumbled out into a dingy, unoccupied room that looked like a staff dining-room at some faceless company: yellowed floor and walls, long metal and laminate tables seating 8 people and an empty drinks and snacks machine. The only window was into a concrete corridor that lacked a roof and walls. My fugitive had already jumped again . . . but there was someone else in there, in the corner of the room, standing motionless and watching me. Hostile?

"Sorry to divert you here . . . " he said, stepping forward, showing me his own key.

So my jump had been diverted by someone with a master key. Not hostile, but higher-ranking than me.

". . . but we need someone with your abilities. I'm Nathan, your name is whatever you want it to be, of course. Please come with me."

"Jo, Jo will do," I replied. Not my actual name of course, but it gave him a way to address me.

We took a solar-powered 2 seat pod from the abandoned building – which turned out to be the terminus where colonists had arrived decades ago – and travelled smoothly to the shoreline of a lake several kilometres distant. Although it was bright daylight, the lake was red-tinted like a lake at sunset.

"We have to leave the pod here," said Nathan, "but it's a pleasant walk into town and not far, and you'll probably enjoy a closer look at the Ruby Sea."

The sea was a vast lake, roughly circular, and most settlements were not far from it. The surface didn't move like water and I crouched for a closer look.

"It's quite safe to dip your hand into, but not so good for swimming in," Nathan said.

I dipped my hand into the ruby liquid and was met with a peculiar sensation. It was less dense than water and didn't support my hand, but it was like pushing my hand into a fine membrane – my hand didn't get wet.

"What is it?"

"It's hard to be sure – either a huge lake of micro-organisms, or a loose jelly, or a sea of red snot. You can't get wet in it, but you can't float on it. It also seems to filter normal water from the streams that trickle into it and the water skinks into aquifers."

"That's why the towns are dotted around it, I guess," I replied, "but you haven't diverted me just to admire your Ruby Sea."

"There's a café where I can explain why we needed you," Nathan said, indicating the nearby buildings.

Main Street ran parallel to the shoreline, separated from the Ruby Sea by a row of shops with living areas on the upper storeys. Behind these – between their back yards and the sea - were the freshwater wells that supplied the town. Halfway along Main Street, facing those shop-homes was a café. We sat facing the plate glass windows that overlooked Main Street. Nathan pulled a rolled-up grey item from a large pocket in his grey coat and unrolled it to reveal a scree. He tapped a few of the keys displayed below the screen and opened an aerial plan of the town. A waitress brought us two passable coffees.

"That red arc is the sea of course, then the wells, yards and shop-homes opposite us. If you wonder why we don't have homes overlooking the sea, we used to, but people found it too unsettling so they prefer to look into town instead."

"I had wondered, I guess it looks too much like a sea of blood."

"And it glows an eerie dim red at night," he said, "which people found a bit too weird."

"As if an alien sea of red snot isn't weird enough."

"We orient ourselves sea-ward and land-ward – the sea is equivalent to north on a more magnetic planet."

"What's inland?" I asked.

"No-one really knows. We have some long range views that suggest the rest of this world is rocky with no large bodies of surface water and no major surface watercourses. We sent drones up to survey further inland, but they don't get very far before failing."

Suddenly a siren sounded an ululating warning and there was a commotion outside – people running towards the nearest shop-front. Several spilled into the café and fastened the door tight behind them.

"What's happening?"

Nathan gestured for me to watch. A low buzzing preceded a huge swarm of silvery-coloured insects, moving from left to right along Main Street at head level. Not everyone had been fast enough to get indoors. People still on the street batted at the swarm as clouds of insects broke off and settled on them. In response, figures in white, thick canvas suits, white gloves, boots, hats and mesh face-coverings exited several shops, including this café.

"Beekeepers," explained Nathan, "they carry canisters of refrigerant on their backs to blast the bees off of people. They're not really bees, of course, but they swarm like bees, and they have colonies in the hills west-seawards of here. Getting cold burns is preferable to the bees taking bites out of you."

As I watched, the ‘bees' – which were the length of my hand and half the width – snipped chunks of skin from the people they settled on, and flew east-landwards carrying their parcels of flesh. It was like a wave of migrating locusts, except that instead of settling on the ground, the silvery bees settled briefly, their strong jaws sliced off a chunk of flesh, and then the flew on after the main body of the swarm. As they left, more bees settled on the bleeding victims.

The swarm passed through the town for at least 15 minutes. The beekeepers managed to limit the carnage, though quite a number of people came into the café in need of first aid. Main Street was littered with blood-splashes, bits of cloth and a lot of dead bees.

As soon as the siren sound again – an all-clear – Nathan rolled up the computer, pocketed it, and took me into the street to see what the bees had left behind. The refrigerant killed any bees it hit, and beekeepers made sure none were left moving. I crouched down and picked up one of the dead bees. Its whole body was silvery. Its translucent wings had silvery veins and its disproportionately large jaws were serrated interlocking blades, like a wasp's mandibles.

"These are the workers. They migrate like army ants – the soldiers at the front have even larger jaws for clearing any enemies out of the way." It was hard to imagine these insects having any enemies, and as though he had read my mind, Nathan added "if they had any enemies they are either extinct or are too far landwards for us to know about."

"Where on earth do they come from?" I asked as we went back to the café, carrying a few of the silvery corpses for me to investigate more closely.

In response, and accompanied by another coffee, Nathan unrolled his computer again to show me the map. "East-seawards of here are the Silver Hills. They're not silver in colour, but they contain rich veins of precious metals – silver, gold, platinum and others in smaller amounts – and we've got mines out there to extract the metal. It's a major trade commodity in return for off-world food. It all comes through a portal in the Terminus building you arrived through. You arrived at the stevedores' break room."

He paused. "Every so often the silver bees swarm through the canyons of the Silver Hills, through Main Street . . ."

"Which is just another canyon to them," I interrupted, and was gratified to see him smile in agreement.

". . . once through Main Street they go east-landwards into the Badlands. We sent drones to follow them, but the drones always died."

"And that's where I come in," I murmured, dissecting a dead silver bee on the café table. The scales were not pure chitin, they were silver plated. "You'd like me to follow and see where they go."

"Please," he replied, "We were told you're the best agent for the job."

I nodded. Outside, the beekeepers were sweeping up the silvery remains and shovelling them into buckets. "What do they do with them?"

"It's not really worth melting the silver scales off them," Nathan replied, "not when there are such rich veins of silver in our mines. We let the kids throw them onto outdoor grills – stinks like anything when they burn, but the kids can keep the silver left behind."

"Maybe the mining has disturbed them. They must be eating silver ore to deposit it in their bodies."

"Maybe, but I don't think so. They seem to breed there and when there are too many of them they swarm, just like honeybees. I think we just built our town in their way . . . and they worked out we're good to eat. They must have foraged for other things on their migrations before we settled here."

"Yeah, okay, I'll follow them. I'll need some supplies though – water, snack bars, that sort of thing."

"Easily arranged."

"When's night here? I need some sleep first."

"It's a few hours away and not very long. There's a hostel on one of the side streets where you can stay. They have a shower room too."

The following morning I stood on a balcony behind Main Street, facing landwards. There was no need for a coat and I wore an open-backed shirt. Everything I needed was in a pack slung across my chest. I felt the pouch on my back ripple and open as I unfurled my wings. They were bat-like in form, with coloured, patterned membranes between the long wing-fingers. Air pumped into the wing-veins, stretching the membranes taut. It felt good to stretch them fully and face into the breeze. Apart from my shielded portal key, and a tiny shielded audio-visual recorder, I carried no electronics. With a few lazy flaps of my wings, I lifted off into the breeze and headed the same way the silver bees had gone.

At first the path was easily followed because bees injured by the refrigerant gas had died or shed scales, providing a silvery thread to follow. But as I flew further, gliding on complex thermals, the silvery thread vanished. I spotted a couple of downed camera drones which looked as though they'd been attacked and dismembered, their copper entrails pulled from their plastic shells. I made an educated guess that the bees also viewed these as prey. In the shadier canyons there were scrubby plants with feather leaves that trapped condensation. And finally, ahead of me, there was a glittering structure – a series of towers, like termite mounds angled to make best use of the sun – silvery in the sunlight. Around it hovered clouds of Silver Bees, and beyond it stretched wide-bottomed, slot-roofed canyons where the narrow canyon tops cast their wider floors into semi-shade even at the height of the day, and where silver bees tended flocks of large reddish aphid-like creatures that grazed on mossy plants clinging to the sides of the canyon. Once in a while, several silver bees plucked one of their herd from the canyon and carried it to one of their silver towers.

I settled on a rocky ledge and furled my wings to avoid attracting attention. Luckily the bees were more interested in their flocks and their flight paths. This wasn't the only silver city, judging by the blinding glints on the horizon. Streams of the insects followed paths that fanned out further into the Badlands, from silver city to silver city. Many were carrying things, chunks of aphid, perhaps, or what looked like cylindrical eggs. Other bees were flying towards this city, carrying their own packages. But not all were silver, only those leaving this city – presumably the bees that had come from the ore-rich Silver Hills - were silver-scaled. Those arriving from other directions were myriad colours.

If the bees carried supplies, then the periodic swarms from the Silver Hills carried metals for their cities. They burrowed into the Silver Hills and transported the metal in their scales. The settlement beside the Ruby Sea was, as Nathan and I suspected, just another canyon as far as the Silver Bees were concerned, and anyone caught in the open was just a convenient food source to pick up along the way and carry to the city with them.

THOR HAMMERSKJALD AND THE TRAIN
Copyright 2020, Sarah Hartwell
Dream, 2020

The train ploughs its way non-stop across the snowy continent, like an immense iron caterpillar inching its way across a vast white leaf. I boarded at West Coast Terminus and would not set foot on terra firma again until East Terminus City, more than two weeks away. Our train captain was a huge bearded man, Thor Hammerskjald, who looked like a Viking from the deep past. Nothing short of the earth opening would stop the train once it left the Terminus.

We sat in a comfortable cabin on the upper deck, Flo and I, watching the passing landscape and the humped up snow cast aside by the snow-plough at the front of the train. Pine trees, weighed down by snow and icicles, bordered the tracks at a respectful distance. Our outriders, more Viking types, but this time on steam-powered motorbikes, scouted ahead of the train, chain-sawing any tree that fell across or alongside the tracks and lining up the logs so that the train's scoops ingested them and fed the logs into its furnaces.

More outriders, these armed with guns, shot down deer or bear, or any other creature large enough to be worthwhile. They too were scooped up, fed into the conveyor belts in the belly of the train, their carcases hauled onto the production line where workers bled, skinned, gutted, boned and filleted them, and by the time they reached the kitchens they were turned into steaks, stews and soups for the passengers. Nothing was wasted, what couldn't be eaten, or cured, or tanned, or rendered in the workshops in the bowels of the ever-moving train went into the furnaces. Beasts and fuel were fed in at one end and ash and cinders were spat out and shat out in its wake.

That steak on my plate – yesterday it had been grazing on snow-covered moss too close to the tracks. One day the trees would be too far from the tracks and the creatures would migrate too far from the hunters, then the train would be diverted to other tracks where the trees had regrown and the creatures were thriving. This was how it had been for centuries. The train never stopped, it just got diverted.

Even when we reached Terminus City it wouldn't stop, but it would slow to a crawl. Passengers disembarked at one end of Terminus City and the train travelled a wide, wide arc, dropping off freight and taking on new cargo, taking on cleaners and dropping off garbage, crawling between warehouses and factories before returning to Terminus city where new passengers boarded the crawling leviathan. The turnaround took a whole day and the train never stopped.

Two weeks in each direction and a day's turnaround at each end. If you missed it, you'd have to wait a month for the next train. If you caught it, you might work your passage hauling sides of meat on the lower deck, or a fireman feeding logs and branches and bones into the furnaces, or you might have the money for a private cabin or a seat in a common cabin. Once aboard, there was no getting off until the opposite terminus.

And at the front of the train, grinning wildly, was our captain, Thor Hammerskjald, who had driven this train back and forth across the snowy continent for four decades and who was rumoured to have never touched terra firma since boarding the train as an apprentice all those years ago.

PREDATOR MACHINES
Sarah Hartwell, 2018
Dream 5th/6th September 2018

I was a specialist on a science team sent to a scrubby arid area of an alien planet to find out what had happened to the previous survey team known as SMU (or SMUD). When we arrived after many months in space (in suspended animation of course), we found a region ruled by predatory machines that hunted the organic fauna, and sometimes each other. We deduced that these machines had evolved from SMUD's AI units used in surveying the region and transporting their heavy supplies. The machines, used as rovers and repair-bots, had become autonomous, but having limited data they had used the history and entertainment files from the ship as their template. Hence our Exploration and Recovery team faced AI machine versions of pteranosaurs and allosaurs that hunted, killed and ate humans, using them as fuel. They also built more machines and roughly followed the evolutionary path from Earth, this being their only template. Once they became sufficiently advanced we knew they would break away from this template.

I went scouting the badlands in a hang-glider made from material that shielded my thermal signature so that the machine pterosaurs above me could not detect me by my body heat. I discovered that some native mammal-like creatures still survived, but were being hunted by the machines as fuel. I saw a machine-allosaur hunt and kill two creatures – one looked like a white bipedal horse and it was accompanied by a brown ape-like creature. These were the only creatures I had seen in the whole time we were here. We had originally thought the area was totally uninhabited except for the scrubby bushes growing among the yellowish-brown rocks and sand.

The machine intelligences were cannibalising the SMUD craft and the supplies in order to reproduce. Older, more primitive, ones were disassembled and used in building the next generation. Something had gone wrong in their files to make them repeat Earth's evolutionary history. Perhaps there had been radiation damage that had corrupted some of the ship's systems. My aerial surveys found no sign of the original Survey team, but I had spotted structures. To avoid attracting attention, we used low-tech methods to communicate out findings – narrow-beam directional radio signals, or even word of mouth.

With no other way to wipe out the machines we decided to bomb the machines' base and hope that some native fauna would survive outside of the bombed area. The machines' base was a large warehouse full of green crates that we recognised as holding SMUD supplies and scientific instruments. We also found an all-terrain vehicle that could be repaired; while this was being attempted I was one of the people looking out for machines among the stacked crates and outside the warehouse. I spotted a large humanoid machine – it looked like the machines had evolved. Then we noticed that these humanoid machines were the mechanical exoskeletons manned by humans and used for shifting heavy crates.

Unfortunately the exoskeletons seem to have alerted the machines to our presence and we had to abandon the idea of fixing the vehicle and set up the explosives instead. If we lured enough machines into the warehouse we could destroy them. We would then have to hunt down the stragglers before they could build replacements. We noticed that the exoskeletons did not seem to be doing anything except moving around. The machine intelligences did not attack them, recognising them as fellow machines, but they did not interact. They just moved into position and waited. The exoskeleton creatures seemed unaware of us. Perhaps they were more primitive machines with little AI and simply stood still until they received orders from somewhere.

While wiring up the explosives we discovered the remnants of SMUD's base made out of metal spars, crates and even fabric. One of the anthropologists in our team said the SMUDs had formed an alliance with small intelligent creatures that resembled domestic cats (one cat bonded to one person) and were somehow avoiding the machine predators. Then we saw the exoskeletons start to attack the predator machines. We knew that the exoskeletons were manned by SMUDs. We couldn't do much except wait for the fight to end. Many of the machines at the warehouse were disabled and others made a tactical retreat, ready to regroup. Repair-bots arrived on the scene. Many of the exoskeletons were also wrecked.

Each exoskeleton had been manned by one human and one cat. Several humans and some of the cats were killed. I tried to console one of the cats whose female human had been killed, but the main source of grief among SMUD personnel was for a basket of kittens – almost ready for field duty – that had died. Because of their reduced numbers, the SMUD team and the cats came back to our base on our small rover vehicles for safety in numbers and because the machines had not commandeered our stores and equipment. We knew we had attracted their attention and they would take action against us.

We knew we had to do something to protect this planet from the machine predators we had accidentally introduced. We decided the only option was to nuke the region from space before the machines evolved enough to make it into space and use the files from the survey ship to come to earth to hunt down humans. While stocking the craft we tried to figure out how to keep the cats in suspended animation for the journey home. Then we looked out of a window and saw other native animals coming towards us – some looked like dingo dogs, but instead of tails they had upright furry flaps on their backs. Some looked like large rodents, also with the furry flaps instead of tails. We realised that the creatures all communicated with each other to form a group intelligence and they expected us to take them to safety, like an Ark. We decided to "nuke" the region with a massive electro-magnetic pulse to "kill" the machines from orbit, then we could return the animals to safety. Then the predator machines turned up and we started fighting again while the animals came inside our base ready for us to lift off into orbit.

(And I woke up at this cliff-hanger moment)

SPIDER SHIP
Sarah Hartwell (Dream 3-4 February 2013).

The first words he heard were "Welcome home, John." The cocoon of silk had gone and he could move again, "How do you feel?"

John opened his eyes, temporarily dazzled by the hospital lighting. "I feel like I've had a very long day," he replied.

"You've had a very long seventeen years," the doctor said, smiling.

The doctor's face swam into view and John's eyes began to focus. He tried to remember what had happened yesterday. It was still just yesterday in his reckoning.

"Spiders ..." he said, furrowing his brow, "I remember spiders. Lots of spiders." He shuddered.

He had been stranded on the planet for several years after his craft had been damaged. His twelve month study mission had extended into several planetary years. He'd been given a character and a background story based on long-distance observations before insinuating himself into the society of the larger land-mass. The researchers had reckoned without the peculiar vegetation that had conveniently clothed, and then inconveniently digested, his ship. Resigned to his fate, he'd made a life for himself there - settled with a local woman, widowed young, and helped raise her children. Then there had been spiders ...

Another person came into view, "It was the only way to get you out of there. A sleeper ship would have taken too long at normal speeds. The spider ships can be sent at speeds that would kill humans."

John remembered watching the shooting star with Meli. To her it was just a wonder of the heavens. He had known its true purpose when the emergency implant in his skull began transmitting. It was an emergency retrieval craft. His cover story had been that of an explorer and Meli had become accustomed to his occasional peregrinations, so when he told her he would go looking for the fallen star she smiled indulgently. She'd wrapped him up warm in woven clothes and made him take travel rations. At first he had travelled the trade routes with trading parties or pilgrims. Later he travelled alone as his implant pulled him onward like a fish being reeled in.

The spiders had been waiting for him - in the trees and bushes, on the grass, inside the craft. The first ones had dropped onto his shoulders and he'd slapped them away , thinking they were indigenous insectoid pests. More rained on him and began to spin their silk over him. Some bit him - almost painlessly - and he began to feel drunk.

The man was still speaking to him. "They were genetically engineered to act as a single being, each with its small piece of knowledge contributing to the whole ..."

He remembered them acting as a single purposeful being. The whole mass of them had acted with a single unfathomable purpose. He had been pulled bodily into the craft, stumbling at the end of ropes woven of spider silk, and collapsing onto a hammock of the same. Then the spiders, silent except their clicking arthropod joints, had cocooned him like prey in layer upon layer of their gossamer. Some had bitten him, delicately injecting their soporific venom. As he slipped into semi-consciousness, he had wondered if these spider-creatures had already consumed the crew sent to retrieve him.

"... they were genetically programmed to make you safe for the journey and tend you ...each new generation carried on its parent's programming ..."

As spider-web had clogged his nostrils, John had opened his mouth to breathe. A tube, horribly warm and biological-feeling, had slipped down his throat. Then everything had faded into a mist of spider sedative. Occasionally he surfaced to the clicking of arthropod joints and the scratching of their feet as they scurried over his cocooned body, contributing to the silent terror. Each time he'd surfaced and struggled against their silk, the spiders had sedated and wrapped him again until he'd finally woken in this hospital bed, naked and apparently healthy under a clean sheet.

"... we changed their venom to a sedative that slowed your metabolism for the long journey home. Along the way they fed you with liquefied food and they recycled your wastes in their own bodies. And they bred, so that generations, upon generations, of spiders tended to you, following the original generations orders to keep you calm, clean and fed. They sampled your blood to correct any deficiency. It was all there, all on the instructions consoles ... you did read the consoles thoroughly before letting the spiders cocoon you?"

At the edge of John's sight, a money spider had let itself down on a strand of web, perhaps attracted by the vibrations of people speaking. He screamed.

FUTURE CITY
21 January 1996, S Hartwell

The big boss was in his tiny apartment-cum-office. He was always in his tiny rooms, he never ventured out. Whatever he needed he ordered by electronic means and it was delivered. In fact he couldn't go out; a sensor on the door and a subcutaneous transceiver chip meant that warning sirens would be triggered if he tried to leave his blue-steel and iodized glass home. From his office-bedroom he controlled a sprawling commercial empire that controlled most of the country. Today, he decided, he would leave his prison home. He had noticed a weak point in the one-way glass of the bathroom (he could see out, but no-one could see in). He could bypass the door sensors and leave after his attendants were done with bringing him the morning news and his breakfast.

I had arrived in New Jersey from New Zealand quite legally, but with illegal intentions - I wanted to film the slums and decayed houses and the forced resettlement of slum dwellers into the steel-glass hives. The houses were reminiscent of the ancient cities in the Egyptian desert - shells of buildings with caved in walls and roofs, dust and debris having sifted into the honeycomb of rooms. No longer discrete housing units, holes in walls allowed the denizens to move from "home" to home, congregating around campfires built of whatever combustible debris they found. This nomadic existence delayed the resettlement squads.

When the troops came they were not gentle. Men, women, children were rounded up by weapon-toting militia and marched through the street, across the cleared no-man's land of blacktop which marked the border between the decayed houses of old and the new multi-storey domes and towers of the hives. In the streets, cars decayed though there had been rumours of slum-dwellers running cars on alcohol. Gasoline supplies had been exhausted.

The walls of the huge tower, a mile long each side, were steel and glass. Each of the "resettled" persons was allocated a living unit - mine was 11-10, that is floor eleven, unit ten. My thumbprint was taken, this would serve as my key, allowing or denying access within the hive. Floor eleven was a rough area, I learnt, a place to put the nomads. Desirable areas were on floors 25 through 30. Inside the hive were wide corridors, paved with white tiles. I took a public lift up to floor eleven; as the lift sped upwards I peered out of the glass sides. The core of the hive was hollow; the living areas were along the outer edges - not bang up against the outer glass walls, since there was a wide walkway between the living units' front walls and the hive wall. There were several rows of living units, forming concentric squares within the hive. The hollow centre was a light-well and lifts moved up the walls of this light-well.

On some of the floors there were large open areas adjacent to the light-well. One was a children's theatre or school area on the edge opposite my lift; I could see a teacher (or similar) standing in front of benches lined with children. I decided I had to take a closer look when I had time. On another floor to the left of the lift was a theatre, I could see costumed actors moving about and an audience sitting in a semi-circle. I also saw arcades of shops - and all this on the first eleven floors.

I stepped out of the lift at the eleventh floor, needing to find unit 11-10. Following signs, I turned left as I got out the lift. The walls were brown fake-marble with brass-effect light sconces and some plants (real or fake) set onto the wall at intervals. I walked past a jewellers store (the wares where in front of the unit and in the porch/doorway) on my left hand side, and past several labelled doorways before realising I had overshot my mark. Retracing my steps I found that the jewellers shop was in fact a stall (pawnshop as well as sales, probably stolen goods) set up in front of my own living unit. At first they did not believe that I was going to move into the patch they had been occupying, but my thumbprint on the door scanner proved my right of occupation and they moved out. They left behind a clutter of sandwiches and litter. "Throw it to the dogs if you don't want it" they told me. I doubted that there were any dogs since all dogs and cats kept as pets had been rounded up and destroyed when pet keeping became illegal. Some affluent people on the upper levels (penthouses) apparently owned fish in tanks. The dogs turned out to be street urchins who snatched the scraps.

Inside the door was a reception room, a living room/bedroom off to the right and the kitchen behind the living room area. Behind the reception room, off a narrow corridor, was the sanitary area. I checked the refrigerator and decided to go out and find out about getting some food; presumably there was an allowance or welfare payments.

As I left my quarters I turned right, back towards the lift. On the way I met two of the actors I had seen on a lower floor, they were walking in the opposite direction. Both were wearing masks of stiffened blue-green cloth and embroidery, looking like fancy versions of Greek masks. We spoke briefly, one was playing Agamemnon; I did not catch the name of the other character. My living unit on a corridor intermediate between light-well and outer wall, though closer to the light-well. On all the floors I had seen there was a walkway or open area adjacent to the glassed-in light-well; I hoped that by retracing my steps I would come to an arcade of shops or booths and somewhere I could get information about living in the hive - jobs, welfare payments, recreation etc.

(Another odd one as the two dreams were linked in the same timeframe. It was once again like riding around in someone's head as they tried to orient himself or herself in the hive building, having been brought in off the streets, but not actually being a ghetto person)

THE VERTICAL TOWNS
27-12-2011 (morning)
The sequel to my 1996 dream came in 2011. I woke with it fresh in my mind.

The "vertical towns" had been established in my great-grandparents' time and most of us had never known any other way of living. The first cities had been small, a few miles wide, but by merging the original hives together, the first true vertical cities had grown.

Although it wasn't forbidden, merely discouraged, there was simply no reason to go outside. My favourite places after work were the theatres and cinemas though I also frequented the swimming complex with its huge pools and tide machines or wandered round the galleries of bright shops. The towns outside the vertical cities had largely been dismantled and the building materials recycled. If we cared to look, which we rarely did, outside was inhospitable-looking scrubland.

Enclosed railways transported goods and people from city to city, both above ground in windowed tunnels or below ground in tunnels artificially lit daylight-bright. With everything available in the city, that was as much "outside" as any normal person needed. I knew of a few people who'd travelled to one or other of the two neighbouring vertical cities. To cater for them there were a few "outdoor shops" on the galleries, stocking the equipment necessary for travelling outside of the safe urban environment: blades and axes to cut through a century's growth of scrub and woodland; self-heating food; water purification tablets; bottle-stoves; insulated tents; sleeping sacks and inflatable boats. Was outside chilly or was it hot? Humid or dry? No-one knew. With the city climate so carefully regulated, no-one could even imagine those things. Those who cared to look outside said that it rained more frequently than before; that the sky was a duller colour; that lightning flashed most days.

Then everything changed.

The first most of us heard was when the orders came to evacuate the vertical city. Take only the essentials – neighbourhoods were being relocated further inland. Inland? Due to erosion and rising sea levels, our once inland city was no longer far from the changing coastline. Apparently there'd been a serious quake felt several hundred miles away and the forecast said we were in for "the big one" which would send a tsunami crashing into our beautiful steel-and-glass home. Not even these marvels of engineering could withstand what nature was likely to throw at us.

The wardens shepherded us out of the workplaces and leisure places, leaving those places dark and empty, locked behind us. No-one panicked. A huge tide of humanity flowed around the different levels, packing, congregating, being directed to this station or that terminal. Families and colleagues were accounted for.

This was our chance – those of us who styled ourselves urban explorers and who were unlikely to be missed because we often went missing for several days at a time and returned with far-fetched tales of a city-within-the-city. If you knew where to look, there were doorways into forgotten parts of our vertical city; there were whole floors lost between walls or levels. In the early days, these had been service areas needed as the city was being built. Other parts were interlinked dead spaces created as the early city swallowed up the neighbouring hives and tried to rationalise the space into a single, coherent vertical conurbation. Many had their own power generators or even surveillance screens – the legacy of superseded control rooms that were abandoned and forgotten.

It was into one of those floors-between-floors that I went with a few friends. Somehow we didn't feel comfortable with the idea of abandoning our home (later, we'd be proved right when raging weather tore open the other towers). As the lights went out all over the place, five of us sat in the dim light of an old control room accessed through a panel behind the back row of seat in a mid-level theatre. Once the rest of the place was empty (we doubted any wardens would be left behind, though we'd have to be careful of automated security) we'd find some supplies from the closed stores and find our way to a dead space with a view of the outside world. We'd need torches, because sooner or later the generators would quit working, and we even decided to get those instantly inflatable life-rafts in case the tsunami breached the tower.

Just as we each, with the exception of Kim who manned that old control room, headed for the door, it opened. None of us had ever met the man before, but he seemed familiar – one of the people with money and whose family owned whole floors; whose faces turned up in magazines.

"Not leaving either?" he asked.

No-one said anything. He unfolded a sheet of paper, something torn from an old magazine. His grandmother had been one of the original settlers in this city, had helped fund it in fact. He wasn't planning to leave either. And thanks to his grandmother, he also had some maps of some of the dead spaces and corridors inside walls where the automated security couldn't look. It didn't surprise us that there were other urban explorers hiding in secret places and closed off rooms they'd found as children or been told about by parents. Some had even gone outside.

The mid-levels came out of it the best. The heights were ravaged by incredible winds that peeled back the walls. The lower levels and under-city were flooded when the waves hit. For weeks we sat there, our glass tower an island in the changed geography of the seas. Across the deep flat waters we could see the shattered needles of other vertical cities and we wondered if there were people there looking back at us.

THE FALL OF THE VERTICAL TOWNS
07-02-2012 (morning)
The third of the "vertical cities" dreams was early morning of 7th Feb 2012. The first dream had been the building of the vertical cities. The second dream had been abandonment of some of those cities due to flooding. The third dream seems to have been the final destruction of the remaining cities. I don't know why my mind kept returning, in time lapse fashion, to these glass towers to trace their creation and destruction.

Outside the window, the horizon is dark. For centuries the horizon has been lit by never-sleeping multi-towered vertical cities glowing from within. Only in the wild regions between the cities, where their light didn't reach and where no-one lived, was there even semi-darkness. On the concrete apron outside this tower is a scene of industry that has been going on for many days and nights without a rest. There are interstellar craft parked, looking like gigantic crouching animals, and dark figures move around in what seems to be a military camp. Fires and furnaces glow golden. The shorter outlying towers beyond this one have already been reduced to stumps as they dismantle the structure and reuse the metal and the transparent panels. The enormous interstellar craft hunch over the remains like predators at a carcase.

There are three of us in here watching the aliens dismantle our world. Somehow we escaped their notice when squadrons of their green-skinned reptilian soldiers rounded up other people from the city. We don't know what happened to our fellow citizens - we were hiding and saw nothing more of them. Our world has been reduced to a few levels about a third of the way up one side of this city. We can't get past the damaged sections to find out who else escaped the great round-up. Soon the alien settlers will finish dismantling the smaller towers of the outlying suburbs and start on the huge heart of the vertical city. There's no way out of this mess so we've decided to take our own lives when that happens - we've a good supply of drugs. What we don't have is a good supply of water, but that's probably not going to be a problem considering our remaining time is limited.

Tonight there is light on the horizon again. The two huge central towers from the neighbouring city are pulsing with light, far brighter than we've seen them lit before. The whole of the taller tower, which tapers in gentle curves to a pointed dome, pulses with a pink light. The squatter, square tower next to it (about half the height, but four times the footprint) pulses with a bluish light. It's not just a few windows, it's the whole of each tower that glows like a lantern, brightening and dimming. It might be our imagination, but we can hear and feel the pulsing as a rising and falling humming sound quite different from the racket of the alien dismantling machines. Even the aliens stopped working to look at the towers. From they way they are staring and pointing they seem surprised - the pulsing light is not their doing. The only explanation is that there are people over there. The pulsing goes on for a matter of minutes; each time glowing brighter than the last and each dim period less dim. It gives the impression of building up to something. The pulsing light dies abruptly and is replaced by flame. Both edifices have become blazing torches (they must have disabled the fire retardent systems). The three of us believe it was an act of defiance from people hiding there; depriving the invaders of materials.

The aliens know we are in here. They've seen the movement and probably the light from our torches. I guess it's not worth the effort of rounding up stragglers; they know we've nowhere to go. The destruction below means we can't even reach the freight tunnels in the lower levels and we can only reach a floor or two upwards. Three stray humans (no doubt there are others on the floors we can't reach) weren't important - they would have got to us in time. But now they've seen that stray humans can destroy city towers and all the resources they contain; it's got them worried and we can see squadrons of alien soldiers moving close to the base of this tower. From the amount of weaponry they carry they look like clean-up troops.

It's time to take the drugs and lie down to sleep at last. Outside is just the black of night and the dull yellow glare of of lights they've rigged up so they can work 24/7. And the fires on the horizon of course. We three can't reach any of the utility control centres, but maybe another group of survivors elsewhere in this city has seen the other towers burn and can figure out how to overload the power grid on this tower.

THE INUNDATION AND THE DARKNESS
Copyright 2022, Sarah Hartwell
Dream, 30th August 2022

This is pretty much a transcript of the dream. The diagram of the underground train lines was on the platform in my dream; I have added the notes on dead trains, darkness and inundation etc.

"They say there are octopuses the size of cattle," Jay said, looking at the dog-sized dying red octopus in his boat.

"Are you going to throw it back?" I asked, "They are sentient, it's cruel to just let it die like this."

"Who cares, they're just octopuses," he snorted.

I looked at the beautiful creature, its eyes seemed to lock with mine.

"You can find the big ones if you go to the Port," Jay told me, "Why don't you come and look?"

"That's miles out," I said, "by the time we got there it would already be evening and I don't fancy camping out there."

"I've got a boat moored there and we can use the old underground train, it'll only take 30 minutes."

"I thought the trains died long ago?"

"The yellow line still runs automatically. A couple of hours back and forth in the morning then a couple of hours back and forth in the evening, the old commuter rush hours. It uses solar electricity, recharges at each end. The section from Midway to Port is safe."

As he rowed back that afternoon he told me more about the old underground railway. Industrial Station in the north=east had been submerged by the inundation. Some explorers had managed to run a train as far as the intersection with the blue line but the power was erratic and the train had died on the way back to the red-yellow intersection. As the inundation progressed it knocked out the power to the blue line terminus in the north-west and the blue line train was stuck there. No-one explored the tunnels to blue line terminus because it was at the edge of the Darkness. Port was the east terminus of the yellow line and was on the original coastline. The west terminus of the yellow line was in the Darkness. No-one went there any more, although the yellow line train still shuttled back and forth from end to end.

"No-one goes west now," Jay said, "they used to, but hardly anyone came back. The few who made it back were terrified out of their wits, they couldn't even describe what was there. Whatever it is doesn't use the tunnels though. Midway is the only station still working. It's got solar. There are other stations east, and the train stops at them, but they're dark and there's no way to the surface."

I must have looked quizzical because he elaborated.

"The stairways and upper halls have collapsed. There's no point clearing the collapses because the power has gone and no-one knows how to fix it. They were used as shelters before everything went wrong. Sometimes homeless people climb through the collapsed areas and use the corridors and the platforms, but they're afraid of the trains and afraid of being trapped by more collapses. But the yellow line from Midway to Port is fine."

We agreed to meet at the top of Midway station stairs next morning to get the automatic shuttle to Port station.

The following morning was bright and clear and Jay arrived with a coil of rope and a grapnel for taking a huge red octopus, just to prove to me that they existed and came so close to shore. It was also a chance to see if the inundation was taking any more of the land north of Port promontory. I went onto the platform with a sense of trepidation, but Jay was confident, having used the yellow line train on several occasions.

The train was mainly red and silver with an empty cab section at the front – "with manual overrides" Jay told me. We could hear it rattling in the tunnel, but it was surprisingly quiet as it slowed and stopped at the platform and the multiple doors of each carriage slid open simultaneously. There were four long carriages and we got into the second one. The interior showed signs of age, but was relatively clean. There was dust and some dirt on the floor from the few passengers that now used it.

"We don't leave anything behind on the trains," said Jay, "because we don't know what is in the western darkness that might decide to explore eastwards. We don't want to tempt anything onto the train."

The doors closed behind us with a whispering "shhh" and the train accelerated into the eastbound tunnel. I found the motion unnerving, but Jay told me not to worry. Nevertheless, I couldn't shake the sense of foreboding. We passed the junction with the blue line, which had once shared a long stretch of tunnel, and we stopped at two or more of dark, disused stations with their smell of damp masonry. Then the train slowed unexpectedly.

"There's no station here, it shouldn't be slowing," Jay said, "It should be a straight run now."

An automated male voice came through the speakers which had previously announced "the next station is . . . we have now arrived at . . . please stand clear of the closing doors." This time the voice said "There is an obstruction on the track. This train will remain here awaiting instructions." The carriage lights dimmed.

"Bugger," said Jay, "there's no-one to give any instructions."

"Are we trapped?" I asked, once again afraid of the unknown and the dark tunnels and the dimmed lights.

"Don't worry about the lights -that's just a power-saving mode. It does the same when it stays at Port station."

"There is an obstruction on the track. This train will remain here awaiting instructions," repeated the voice.

"But are we stuck here?" I asked, swallowing my panic.

"If we move into the front carriage we can get into the unmanned cab and use the manual overrides."

"Do you know how to do that?" I asked, feeling my eyes widen incredulously.

"Some explorers did it on the red line and told me how to do it. They went as far as possible towards Industrial station, but got stuck when the inundation came further into the tunnel. They got the train back past the red-blue shared section and almost back to the yellow line junction before the back-up batteries died completely. We can do the same," he said confidently, "That, by the way, was when the red-blue shared section was knocked out and the whole of the blue line stopped too."

Once again the disembodied voice said, "there is an obstruction on the track. This train will remain here awaiting instructions."

We moved from the second carriage though emergency doors into the front carriage, stepping across the gap between carriages. At the front of the front carriage was the cab section. Jay prised open the doors into the cab with, of all things, a hook of his grapnel, and we stepped into the cab. There were buttons and levers, all labelled, and Jay selected those for "reverse" and "battery" and "release brakes" then held down a metal bar to engage the motors.

This time the voice said "This train is under manual control. Passengers are requested to disembark at the next station."

It stopped automatically at the next station and Jay used the override each time to send it back towards Midway station. The automated announcement told us "The next station is Midway . . ." but was interrupted by a continuous beep-beep-beep. The battery light on the panel flashed and the indicator hand on the amperes dial moved further towards zero. Then the train motor stopped and after a few moments of travelling under its own momentum, it stopped.

"But we're not at Midway yet!" I said, panic again rising.

"Come on, if we get to the back of the train we might be close enough to Midway to get onto the platform."

The dimmed lights were dimming further as their own emergency power began to die. By the time we reached the fourth carriage the lights were just a dull yellowish hue, not even enough for us to see the seats and exit doors. Brighter yellow light through the emergency door at the furthest end of the train showed us that the carriage had reached Midway station. By forcing open the last pair of doors we could step off the train and onto the platform.

There were people on the platform, a couple of explorers – a man wearing a knitted woollen hat (funny how silly details stick in the mind!) and a woman, both with ropes and other kit.

"I heard an alarm in the station," said the man, "What just happened?"

"Obstruction on the line – must be a tunnel collapse," Jay answered, "it's cut off the power to the rails just past the blue line junction and we had to use the train's battery to get back. The train is out of power now."

"It means this line is blocked too," the woman said. She found a piece of wire lying about and threw it onto the rails. Nothing. "There should have been a spark," she said, "but it's dead now."

"So the only way to Port is the long overland route now," I said, not conversant with the technicalities of power rails and batteries and outages.

"Hmm. Yes. But that's not the problem really," said Jay, "With the power gone, whatever is living to the west will soon realise it – or they – can safely use the tunnel and might start coming eastwards. We could find ourself trapped between the inundation and the darkness."

A LEAP OF FAITH
Dream – January 2002

As a Dr Who fan, I have sometimes dreamt of wandering round the TARDIS (what Dr Who fan hasn't!) which is larger on the inside than on the outside. That night I dreamt of entering something similar ...

The first room was much like the control room of the TARDIS in its later years - white walls and a central console with crystal cylinders in the centre. I didn't stop there but went through the door on the opposite wall and found myself in a short corridor. Or maybe it was a long corridor which appeared short due to some optical illusion; I could not be sure.

On the right hand side about half along the corridor (that is if it was a short one) was a large door. I pushed it open and was about to step through when I saw that there was no floor. Instead there was a gaping emptiness which looked like a view into space. Each of the other three walls had a doorway, but there was no bridge across the chasm.

"If you step into that hole, you will fall forever," said a woman's voice in my head.

I hung to the doorway, leaning forward to peer into the emptiness, thinking how lucky I was to have stopped, otherwise I would be plummeting endlessly through space.

"And if you fall forever, you will never reach anywhere nor leave anywhere and therefore you not be falling at all," she said.

I can't remember how she looked except for long straight dark brown hair. She was standing on nothingness.

"You will just be suspended in space," and she stepped towards the doorway where I stood.

She stopped about a metre from me and held out a roll of paper. I accepted the paper and unrolled it. It was a map of the inside of the TARDIS,a blue print of sorts, but the rooms were shown as disconnected from each other. I understood that it was possible to walk down a corridor, turn around and find the way back was not the way you had come. But I still did not want to step forward onto the hole where I would fall forever and thus not be falling at all; to move so fast that I remained in place.

I turned around and stepped back into the short corridor. Opposite me was a sort of alcove a metre or so deep and shaped like three sides of a hexagon which had been cut down the middle. Each side had a door and each door had a plaque like a hotel room number or nameplate.

"They are the three sleepers," said the voice though it was now inside my head, "The three sleepers who must never wake. Should they wake, then everything will end. It will all be destroyed."

"Why are they here?" I asked.

"Because here is outside of space and time and they will sleep forever. It is their dreaming which makes everything. Everything will be unmade if they are wakened."

"Who are you?" I asked the voice.

"I am you. I am you as you will be."

"Huh?" I asked.

"You as you will be in time. When you have dared go into the room where you will fall forever."

At that point, I left the TARDIS and went back into the street. I still had the map.

I woke up then, which was a pity as I was really interested - as well as really scared - to find out about falling forever so that I never fell at all!

THE ANCIENT HERO
Copyright 1992, Sarah Hartwell

The mud sucked at my fawn suede boots as I picked my way across the courtyard, between the waxed tents and bivouacs which had taken up residence there. With both hands, I clutched my robe to prevent the brocaded green hem from dragging in the sticky ooze. Hence I was looking for the less muddy patches instead of looking where I was going. I walked into a pair of callused hands before I had noticed their owner. Startled at the rough hands which gripped my shoulders, I dropped my heavy green skirts into the mud I had been studiously avoiding a few seconds earlier.

"My lady," a deep voice rumbled, "I did not see you."

I smiled apologetically, "No, no, my fault. I was preoccupied."

I grabbed two handfuls of skirt, the gold-stitched hem was soaked with mud. Spatters of mud speckled other parts of the skirt, thrown up by tramping boots and hooves and rumbling wheels of carts over-burdened with nightsoil and garbage.

"You were trying to get to the village perhaps?" the man asked. His open grim was infectious in an almost swarthy face. "To see the hero?"

"How did you ..."

"Guess? Many ladies have visited the village to catch a glimpse of the hero. While us common soldiers try to catch glimpses of the ladies as they pass."

He wiped a huge, hard hand through his unruly mud-coloured hair as if in embarrassment. The good-humoured smile revealed a chipped tooth. Instead of marring his looks, it added character to his face.

Smiling. He continued, "Not that I resent being passed by so many beautiful women - I enjoy the looking. But I'm keeping you my lady and you have more important things to do with your time!"

The tall soldier turned away to retrieve the trailing reins of a roan battle-horse which dozed absently behind him. I hadn't noticed he had a horse, so engaging was his smile and honest talk.

"Stand, Jasper," he commanded the tall beast. Obediently it stood to attention, one eye rolling as though in resignation.

"My lady, excuse me ..." and suddenly I found myself seated side-saddle on the hard soldier's saddle, breathless and unsure of how I had arrived there.

"Hold tight," the soldier said with an impish grin as he led the animal across the much towards the vast archway out of the courtyard.

Perched precariously on a saddle not designed for a lady, I was high above the activity in the castle courtyard. I could see the expanse of waxed canvas in higgledy-piggledy rows. The heat from braziers rippled the damp air, filling it with smells of cooking and of mulled ale. Rough soldiers' conversation was punctuated by the squeal of children fencing with wooden swords and by the sound of dents being hammered out of armour.

Jasper plodded stoically through the hubbub, unconcerned at it all. Two dogs, fighting a running battle, spilled out under the horse's nose but he merely rolled a large expressive eye at me, as if to say 'don't worry, hold tight'.

We passed through the shadowed arch and the sounds of the camped soldiers faded. "My" soldier's boots thudded on the flagstones and Jasper's huge metal-shod hooves clattered on the hard surface.

The village was a mere quarter mile from the castle. Jasper was obviously going to carry me all the way.

"Exercise'll do him good," the soldier grinned back at me.

A bevy of well-dressed court ladies trotted by on delicate palfreys. One looked back, laughing at the mud-stained personal maid with her escort. I felt hopeless and unimportant, outshone by their silks in my mended, cast off brocade "best" dress. The soldier grinned happily.

"Bunch of empty-heads," he laughed, "Find me a wench with brains between her ears not between her legs. Begging your pardon of course."

His conversation was refreshing. I wondered what had made him choose the profession of a soldier - I could imagine him a merchant or craftsman.

"Have you seen him? The hero I mean. I've heard so much about him - that he's at least seven foot tall and that the ladies swoon at one look of him. There's a magician too - his aide. He has a sword that shoots white fire that can melt stone," I chattered merrily, trying to cover my unimportance.

"I'm told he's just a man. Good looking enough for most women, but nothing to swoon over. But then I'm a man, I wouldn't know what makes the ladies swoon. The magician? Well, what does a soldier know of mage-craft and sorcery? Does it set limbs or cure warts?" he laughed again, a clean sound.

"Nearly there," he told me as he marched us into the village square.

Thatched roofs huddled together against the spring chill, the houses had their feet in mud and chicken muck from the birds roosting in the dirty thatch. One or two taverns reared above the low reed- or rush-thatched homes, their red tiled roofs patched with hummocks of green moss. The hero had rooms in the Red Lion. Castle ladies flocked to see him, most unladylike in their frequenting of the tavern.

"He's not here!" a shrill voice called across the chickens, geese, pigs and dogs which filled the air with noise and odour.

"Not here?" whey-faced lady trilled through the lacy handkerchief held delicately to her nose.

"But we've come all this way! A third added petulantly, one who had evidently never travelled further than the distance between bedchamber and dining hall before. "He can't be not here!"

The bevy of ladies who had passed us had dismounted and were debating staying in the 'boring, shitty village' or riding back to their comfortable castle home. "My" soldier halted across the square and stroked jasper's velvet nose absent-mindedly.

"Let's wait until they've left," he murmured, "It should be quieter then."

The colourful hopefuls mounted their fine-boned horses, dripping tassels from mane, tail and tack, and passed us by.

"He's not here," the petulant one sneered at me, "Can't see why you bothered anyway."

Jasper snorted and delicately lifted his tail to deposit a steaming heap among the filth strewn across the square. He was speaking for both of us.

My soldier walked us round to the stables behind the Red Lion. They were dark and smelt comfortably of horse-sweat and straw. A hostler appeared, recognised either Jasper or the soldier and smiled in welcome, showing the few peg teeth left to him. The soldier lifted me down to the stable-yard's cobbled surface, offered me his arm and led me through the back door into the fuggy interior.

Man-sweat, sharper than the leathery horse-sweat smell, and heady ale-fumes assailed my nostrils. There was a sharp tang of vomit in the air and a sawdust spill on the wooden boards showed where someone had puked. Bargirls, young, busty and barely-covered, slopped amber beer into pewter tankards to the raucous applause of leering clients. Two ghost-pale wolfhounds lolled before a roaring fire, their blue eyes glittering and noses twitching at every new scent wafting to them. The soldier slammed the heavy door shut, enclosing us in a cocoon of warmth and noise. Customers shouted for service or slopped their ale as they drank noisily. A dog barked and one of the wolfhounds looked up, ears pricked. A stone stairway wound behind the fireplace, upwards to the private rooms. I clutched at my escort's arm as he steered me in that direction.

"I'm not that sort of girl!" I protested.

I could feel people's eyes upon me, no doubt they thought I was very much that sort of girl going upstairs with a soldier.

"Shh" he said, putting a sausage-thick finger to his lips, "Do you want to meet the hero?"

"Not if that's what you want in return," I retorted, insulted by the implicit suggestion.

He laughed his good honest laugh, eyes twinkling and cheeks ruddy beneath their tan. He shook his head mirthfully.

"I'm not after your body, my lady. If I require a bedmate they aren't hard to find."

Looking at the bulging cleavages of the bargirls I did not doubt this; their clothing advertised a youthful body and a willingness to share it with anyone who paid. The slightly thickened waist of one of them (immediately noticeable to another woman's critical eye, but probably not to a half-drunk, lust-driven man) suggested that she'd done more than her share of bed-sharing in the last few months.

The stairway was warm, heated by the fire. A hound watched us weave between tables and vanish into the alcove at the foot of the stairs. Skirts lifted in both hands, I at least looked where I was heading. I still wondered if it was wise to be headed upstairs, alone with a stranger, however honest his smile.

"This way," my escort said in lowered tones and led me the length of a red-carpeted corridor to a stout door halfway along right-hand wall of the passage.

Without knocking, he unlatched the door. The hero had either left it unlocked or I was a gullible female in deep trouble. He ushered me inside ahead of him.

A white-haired man with deeply lined, leathery features was polishing a cylindrical sword. His sky-blue cloak spilled over his seat onto the bare boarded floor. He looked upas the soldier closed - and latched - the door. When he saw me, he grimaced.

"Arcturan, you'll get us in trouble one day," he said in a heavily accented voice.

"Merliin, that's what you always say," the voice behind me rumbled. "My lady, please be seated."

He cleared discarded clothing from another chair for me and sat himself on the bed. Clothes littered the room - rough soldier's garb, silks of metallic hue, materials like silver leaf but less fragile. Dark armour and a curious helm lay on the pillow. I recognised it as the one worn by the hero who had led our forces in battle, scything his way through opponents while a mage fought at his side with a weapon of light and fire.

"You wished to meet the 'hero', my lady. Well here I am," he said, managing a theatrical bow from his seated position.

My mouth was hanging open. I closed it and gulped like one of the fish from the castle carp pools.

"You?" I whispered.

"Nothing to swoon over, I'm afraid. About six foot tall and ordinary."

The older man snorted, "Ordinary for an Arcturan. Somewhat above average height and build for this region."

"A what?" I asked the soldier.

He sighed deeply, "An Arcturan, my lady. Arcturus is the world I came from."

"Is it across the sea? I've heard there were people across the sea - and monstrous beasts," I said brightly, "and people with skin dark as tar and eyes of coal. They wear gold as though it were common iron, even their cities are clad in gold."

"Not across the sea, I'm afraid," the hero-soldier replied, toying with some trinkets left lying on the bed.

He picked up a trinket and tossed it to me. It was an animal fashioned in gold with gem-studded eyes and fangs and it was worth more than the castle's entire treasury.

"Keep it," he said negligently, "Plenty more where that came from. Merlii is swamped with the stuff, but the dark-skinned folk of whom you speak value it highly for its decorative value. I'm from a land in the sky, my world is like yours, but we've a different star for our sun."

"She won't believe you," grunted the older man, "Arcturus and Merlii. Tell her of Arthur and Merlin - that's what she wants to know."

I must have been gawping because the soldier laughed gently.

"You're Arthur?" I asked, "King Arthur who is to awaken in our time of need?"

He was pulling off his mud encrusted boots as I asked, swinging leather-clad legs onto the bed as he answered.

"Not a king such as the tales say. But with so much gold and stuff ... well, I bought a place for a while and got involved in local politics. We're not meant to get involved," his glance at the wizard was apologetic.

"And he's Merlin?" I gaped incredulously, half-expecting him to produce a rabbit from a pocket, "The Wizard?"

The Wizard himself answered. "First Technician, actually, on the free-trade ship Camelot. Silly name for a freighter. Your tales are all about turrets and fancy arches. The real Camelot," and he nodded at the soldier, "is an engineer's nightmare!" he rambled on about free-trade until Arthur told him to be quiet.

"But all the others - Lancelot, Guinevere, Gawain and Galahad? Where are they? Are they on your ship?" I asked.

"Gwynne is on board, in orbit. Lance and Gaway joined another ship after we portaled out of Avalon. Galahad never existed. Chap called Garrad tried to get himself killed on some damn-fool errand, villagers lynched him for his pains ... about ten spans from here I think. Used to be called Glastonbury," he laughed.

Merlin picked up a tiny metal box and talked to it. "Gwynne, can we have some real food please? I'm starved, even if our captain isn't."

A few moments later, a dish of sauteed meat appeared on the table he worked at. Moving it aside he waited and a dish of grain appeared out of the shimmering air, then a bowl of fruit foreign to the area and a glass flask of wine.

"You realise she doesn't understand a word we're saying?" Arthur asked Merlin.

The Wizard just shrugged, "We came from a distant land by ship and I can do magic like making food appear out of thin air. It's enough for a legend isn't it? Keeps the tale going to ensure us a warm welcome when we next drop in."

Merlin poured some wine and passed a pewter goblet to me.

"Best Alphan," he said, "grown on the slopes of Kalahi. Nothing else to touch it in all the land," he explained.

"Nothing else to touch it in most of known space," Arthur retorted. It was obviously an old argument and there was no malice in it.

I sniffed the wine. The spice smell was agreeable and I sipped it slowly so it didn't rush straight to my head and make me tipsy like the patrons downstairs.

Arthur spoke again, "I quit Earth when things got boring. Earth - that's what you used to call your world, by the way. Gwynne and I were playing at being barons or something. Lance was having a fling with Gwynne which spoilt the whole facade so we moved on. Seems like only yesterday."

"That's space travel for you," snorted Merlin, "Makes keeping track of time a nightmare. Portalling 'between' makes it even worse and you can skew history if you're not careful."

"They say you slept, that you would wake to aid us in our darkest hour. You did save us from the invaders," I reminded him.

"Slept like a log in stasis at lightspeed after we'd portalled back to standard time. As for darkest hour - I simply dropped in on the off-chance. Needed good iron for a client. We were in the vicinity and noticed good scrap stuff on those invaders - might get a few Glits for it."

Merlin scowled at his captain, "Plundering corpses," he muttered to himself.

"And off-loading some of that yellow metal they're so fond off down here," Arthur reminded him, but again it seemed like a well-worn and good-natured debate. "We missed the global wars by a millennium though, good metals there. But I was at the other end of known space, collecting grain for a customer."

"Genetically-modified stuff which is banned by his own system's government," Merlin muttered.

"Which made him willing to pay my prices," Arthur grinned.

"Err, which wars were those?" I asked, stupefied, "This is the first skirmish for ages."

"Centuries before your time, my girl ..." Arthur began.

"Not that we couldn't portal back and pick up some scrap," Merlin interrupted.

"Centuries before your time," Arthur repeated, ignoring Merlin's interruption, "All Earth was involved. The scientists made huge technological leaps in the first two and the third one caught them out. Wham!" and he banged his fist down on his knee, "Cities flattened, continents realigned. Reintroduction of feudalism. Back to square one as they used to say. Pity I missed that one, must have been a biggie, but we were in space on autopilot. The onboard computer recorded the bang - it was that loud. Must go back and take a look one day."

Arthur stopped his rambling speech and ferreted through some discarded clothing. Finding a small disc he announced it to be late and began to bundle his clothes together.

"Full payload, Mer, that's what I like. Metals for Syralli, French wine and Chinese silks. We'll have to lightspeed it to Syralli after portalling back to standard time or we lose a whole bunch of Glits. Pity the inflation rate is so unstable over the centuries. Does the little lady want to join us?" he looked over in my direction.

"I think I might," I said, drawing a laser dirk from my bodice and switching on my palm ID. "Space Police, undercover detective Lafay. My companion - Mordred if you recall - is already onboard your ship."

Arthur rolled his eyes. He'd guessed that I'd had Mordred blank out the room so that Arthur and Merlin's weapons wouldn't work.

"Arthur - or whichever of your aliases you wish to choose - you really are getting too old for free-trading. Manipulating time-portals has a dreadful effect on the body, not to mention on local history. For an Arcturan, you're a disgrace." I turned to Merlin, "And as for you, well Merliins should know better - your planet initiated the anti-piracy laws in the first place."

The Arcturan pirate smiled in resignation, "Fair enough Morgana. Just how many years have you been stuck on this rock while I was gadding about time and space?"

"Long enough on and off and it's been pretty boring. The word got sent back that you'd be here. Space Police put out the word that I'd been killed in off-planet fighting on the border and I portalled back and went undercover here long enough that you wouldn't work it out for yourself," I said.

"Sheesh," muttered Arthur, "And I though I'd got it all sewn up. You and Mordy kicked us off-planet last time we visited this place and you've spent the last couple of hours playing us for fools. Don't you ever give up Morgana?"

"No. This is my district, remember? And by the way - the gene-fixed grain never made it to your customer and he's pretty sore about being out of pocket. We have to be off-planet in five minutes. You'll lose Camelot, but the special court on Proxima may be lenient on sentences if you have enough Muscadet to pay them off."

"You know," murmured the Arcturan free-trader as he picked up his helm, "I was getting really fond of that horse ..."

SILICON DREAMS
Copyright 1993, S Hartwell
(This is a transcript of a dream dated 6 Feb 1993. The dream came complete with names and storyline)

"I've taken a contract to escort some guy across the waste," my partner said, coming out of the empty roadhouse, "guy named Barrington - absolutely no sense at all."

I checked the straps on Apricot's harness. The camel grunted sourly. I missed the burros, but the camels fared better across the cruel desert waste. What was now a bleak, bleached desert had still been prime, fertile wheat-land at the tail end of the last century. My partner, Mack, felt much the same. Camels were bad-tempered, smelled bad and it was a long way to fall off.

"Where do we pick him up?" I asked, securing the precious water bottles.

"Next town," Mack replied.

Mack had just returned from Oasis-town with fresh supplies while I waited at the roadhouse with Buttercup, Apricot and our gear. It was better that I didn't show my face at Oasis-town, at least not for a while. My camels were baulky, especially my pack-camel, Apricot, who was carrying much of our 'stuff' so that this Barrington could ride Mack's pack-camel, Number Two. Apricot was not pleased.

Barrington was much as I had imagined - pleasant, ineffectual and absolutely lacking in survival sense. We even had to remind him to wear a burnoose as protection against the sun's unfiltered rays. Mack kept the camel on a lead rope; damn good job as Barrington was dehydrated before midday and could hardly stay on top, never mind steer Number Two.

The camels had been well-watered and we could make it across the desert, no problem. The only danger was raiders, but the encroaching sands of the widening desert were pretty inhospitable and most raiders preferred the edges where there were more pickings. Still, there were occasional accessible homesteads, their wells long since run dry, where raiders could hole up with supplies to pick off passing camel caravans.

We found one homestead on the second day. From the look of the shifting dunes and the sand still piled up against the walls it had only recently been uncovered as the dunes shifted across the desert, driven by the prevailing winds. Barrington was parched - soft townie - and needed shade. We went through the cupboards and storage bins just in case the place had been used recently, though we had no doubt that the place was deserted and had already been picked clean.

The woman came to the back door while we were picking through the kitchen. She looked too tall and too handsome - handsome rather than actually pretty - to be a desert-dweller or nomad; her face wasn't burnt and her hair was yellow, real blonde rather than sun-bleached straw like mine, and cut tidy. Maybe she was part of a bandit crew which had staked a claim on this place and was about to lay claim to our supplies, leaving us stranded in the wilderness. She may have been a woman, but survival's a serious business so Mack hit her on the head with a hole-bottomed frying pan from the rack on the wall; not enough force to kill her, just hard enough to knock her out. He didn't trust women - apart from me and he'd more or less forgotten I was one. The pan clanged and bounced, almost out of Mack's hand, but the woman still stood there as though she hadn't even felt the blow. No wonder she survived out here, androids are pretty tough cookies.

"I'm not a threat," she said in a sad-sounding voice. Actually any well-modulated voice sounds sad in these parts, where you either holler or your throat's so dry you just croak.

Mack and I just stared. So far, the android lady hadn't made any move against us, but it didn't mean we were going to trust her. Maybe she was just a domestic companion for a lonely homesteader, but who knows what she'd been programmed for? She looked lonely, sort of lost.

"Take me with you - I can walk instead of ride," she said when we didn't say anything back to her.

"No way lady," Mack replied in tones which were almost courteous. He didn't trust her, but I could see him fishing for a plausible excuse for leaving her right here while we rode off into the sunset. "The minute they see you they'll want to buy you or steal you and the minute they find out what you are you'll be so much scrap metal. Androids ain't exactly popular right now."

True enough, women were mostly commodities hereabouts. Legally Mack owned me though he'd made me his business partner; he'd bought me way back when I was attractive enough to be desirable, not weatherworn and shrivelled from years on camel-back. Androids don't lose their looks and besides, no-one trusts them any more. It was high-tech got us into this mess in the first place.

She asked again and the weedy Barrington began to lick his lips as though contemplating a use for the android, but Mack refused point blank to have her come with us. He wanted her to stay put.

"Lady," Mack told her, "One of these days when civilization is on the up again, maybe they'll need your knowledge to help them along. You've got stuff programmed into you that'll be a godsend. But that time's not now; we need some time to get along on our own and learn our own limitations again. Your time will come."

It was probably the most philosophical speech Mack had ever made, leastways the most philosophical I'd heard him make in the ten years we'd been working the desert.

As we rode away, Barrington hunched pathetically on Number Two. He couldn't understand why we'd left the patiently waiting android female behind when we could have sold her in Oasis-town, or Cactus or Dry-Wells. It was no use him trying to remember how to get back there either; already sand-flumes were dusting the homestead and in a few days it would be covered up again. Maybe in a year or two the homestead and its inhabitant might re-emerge from its sandy shroud. It would go on that way until civilization got itself right enough to be ready for her. Maybe civilization would never straighten itself out and our android-lady would be proclaimed as an immortal goddess by a world even more desolated and downhill than this one.

Throughout the rest of the ride, I couldn't help thinking of that android lady. Barrington spent his time thinking of what he'd have done with her. I just wondered what she thought of as she whiled away the long days or maybe she just switched herself off. Barrington coveted her, but I felt sorry for her, wondering if civilization would ever be right enough to need her or if there'd even be anyone left to need her.

THE TEACHER LEARNS
Copyright 1995, S Hartwell
(A short, vivid, disturbing dream from the early 1990s; this is an "as it happened" account with no tidying up of the story.)

"Can anyone tell me what they think man's successors would look like if the human species died out?" asked the teacher, "If something else evolved to take our place. Try to imagine."

Her question was met with titters from the class. She silenced the laughers with a glare from her beak-nosed face.

"You," she said, pointing at me, "What do you think?"

"They will be much like us," I answered, "Upright bipeds with large craniums, they'll have hands adapted to manipulation. They'll have forward facing eyes and binocular vision. No tails."

"Why? Why not reptilian, avian, why mammalian? Why even humanoid?"

I shrugged, "I did not say they would be human, but they would be subject to the same forces that created us humanoids, they would evolve under similar laws to fill similar niches. Convergent evolution."

She huffed at my explanation and I rose to her challenge. I had a gift. I could go places.

"Come and see for yourself - I'll show you the end of the world and more," I said with a smile.

The air swirled, erasing all but us; the teacher and the pupil, roles reversed. Years blurred by as grey haze until we hung suspended above a landscape. A murky, sediment choked river laboured across its wide, shallow bed between ploughed fields whose dark furrows were barren. Pale grass straggled in the polluted river margin, poisoned by metal wastes, but growing despite the noxious fluid that slip viscously past. Skeletons of tall poplars lined the river bank, leaves long fallen and the bark rotted in the sulphur rains to leave only pale wood, resembling beach driftwood and pitted by acid.

"The world dies," I told my pupil as we gazed down, "not under a baking sun or under ice, but under attack from man. Come."

We drifted past the sterile fields, towards a roadway where we alighted. My pupil seemed relieved to be on terra firma at last. Several tens of metres ahead some people clustered around the wire mesh fence of a missile base. Human priorities - missiles well maintained, but earth barren. Within the fence, a sterile concrete apron surrounded the low-rise military buildings, extravagantly wasteful of space. Protesters chanted when they saw us, but we continued past them.

"This world has little time left, let them air their views in ignorance," I said.

The town greeted us with its row upon row of red brick houses, each row built only a few feet behind the other so that only alleys separated front doors of one row from back doors of the next. All faced introspectively into the town centre, their few windows alive with artificial light so that the world was lit by them rather than the houses being lit up by daylight. Perpetual dusk walked the narrow paths, broken by amber street-lamps casting dull gold puddles of illumination on the pitted concrete. I walked inwards past endless ranks of red-brick boxes; some with skylights hoping to catch sight of the sun through ever boiling clouds of acid.

We walked centre-wards as far as a children's play ground full of metal climbing frames and slides. Acid had eaten the metal into a lacework of rust and shapeless lumps of metal which appeared to have melted then re-solidified over and over. It stood in a school-yard before a low-rise but cramped school built of prefab cabins and covered passages. Beyond the school's chain-link fence contractors were bolting together modular housing. A wall with a built-on bed slotted into a base whose foundations were metal stilts sunk into the bare, packed earth. A wall with kitchen fittings bolted onto another with table and cupboards; some walls double-sided, bristling with furniture, others smooth to survive the hostile elements outside.

A thin drizzle began and workmen threw great sheets over unfinished modules. Beside the instant houses clustered mobile homes, huddled together against the elements. The grass hissed and withered as the acid water fell and my cheeks stung with it. Our clothes would suffer and rot in the noxious drizzle and we sheltered under eaves which nearly met above the narrow paths to form corridors all but protected from the sizzling corrosion.

My fellow traveller stared about her, wide-eyed in amazement at our world's future. Acid water spattered the pockmarked concrete; somewhere it dampened sterile soil and dissolved copper-tolerant grass. Metal corroded silently and imperceptibly under its onslaught; humans demoralized by their lot were scarred physically and emotionally by the corrosive acid drizzle.

"Where are the animals? Have they all died?" she asked.

I smiled wryly, "Nature has conspired with evolution as always. They are beneath us, burrowed in long hibernation like seeds. Only man walks the earth, having set himself apart from evolution and set upon the straight path to extinction. Even the slowness of nature learns from its mistakes."

Her hand went to her mouth in horror.

"Now," I said, "I have shown you the end of the world. For aeons there will be emptiness as the earth heals. I can take you beyond to the reign of the successors to man ..."

The world blurred grey with the speeding of years .....

THE FORESTS OF THE MOON
Copyright 2001, S Hartwell

It's the problem with being a transient being - one mis-step and you've crossed from one reality into another. Transient immortal sounds a contradiction in terms and it's a damn confusing way to live till you get used it. Imagine it - a lifespan measured in centuries rather than years. Not truly immortal I grant you, but in human terms we might as well be. That's the easy bit explained. Transient? In terms of how long we stay in any one reality we are transient beings. If we're careful and concentrate, we might stay around for a few years and start to get the hang of a place and time. Lose focus and we side-step into somewhere else - something just slightly different from where we were before.

And you want to know the really odd thing about it? When we arrive, it's like we had always been there. It's as though only our minds slipped from place to place, sliding into a pre-existing body like shucking off one set of clothes and slipping into another. I say we because I'm sure I can't be alone. I just haven't met another one like me … yet.

So what's it like slipping and stepping from one life into another? It's like existing everywhere at once in a million splinters scattered through the infiniverse. And I step from splinter to splinter. Everywhere I go, I am still "me" - it's just that I'm "there" instead of "here". If you understand what I'm getting at.

Damn, this isn't making sense. I doesn't make sense to me and I'm the one toing and froing between universes or realities or however you like to view the time-space continuum or quantum universes or alternate realities or infiniverse or happentracks or however you like to describe existence. Let me give you an example.

Sometimes I'll be in the middle of a meeting with people and my attention wanders. I see everyone about me as they looked aged six. Or seven. There they sit with their school-kids' faces superimposed on the here and now. I call it time disjoint; I've slipped anchor in the here-now and come slightly drift in time. That tiny warning of time disjoint is mostly enough to snap me back into the here-now - wherever the here-now happens to be at the time. Sometimes though, sometimes I lose it for just long enough that the time disjoint became a real disjoint. I try to anchor myself again and I see the same faces, same meeting, but it's a different reality. And it's rarely back to somewhere I'd been before. In fact never. I just keep moving forwards and a little bit sideways, but never back.

So I'm in this new reality and the moon is green and looks four times bigger than it was in any other of the realities I've lived in. That's because it's closer to the earth. Consequently there is much less dry land and much more ocean. On the wall outside of the meeting where the time disjoint happened (never mind imagining your audience naked, imagine seeing every one of them as a pre-schooler and wondering whether you've come adrift of time long enough to move from universe to universe - that's really weird) there is a map.

So the earth where this splinter of myself exists is mostly ocean. The Scandinavian countries are recognisable on the map but you can forget about the western edge of Europe. The Netherlands never happened. The Low Countries never poked their landscape up above sea level. Great Britain? What was Scotland in the last place I dropped anchor is a collection of islands in this place. The Pennines form a long island and a few dabs of land can be seen, but that's about it for England especially East Anglia which has never been anything other than sea-bed this time round. Parts of Asia haven't fared much better this time round either, but it's what's in the sky that's really interesting.

While I may have slipped unobtrusively into another splinter of my own pan-dimensional existence, I don't always know the quirks of the new place. Like - why is the moon green? Why is it 4 times bigger than it is everywhere else I've been?

Turns out it's bigger because the comet which nearly wiped out African proto-humans a few million years ago knocked the moon into a closer orbit. The practical upshot of this near miss included a planet mostly covered with water, no polar icecaps and a planetary population only a fraction of most other realities' earthly population. And earth is still overcrowded! The chronic overpopulation is largely due to having very little dry land on which to live.

The moon is green not because I've found myself in a place where the moon really is made of cheese, but because it is covered in trees. The moon is a big tropical forest with an oxygen-rich atmosphere capable of sustaining animal life. And I've just walked out of a meeting where scientists are trying to work out how to colonise the forests of the moon.

It's an eerie sensation looking up at that moon. It's so close I want to duck my head because it seems like it's falling towards me. So green, with varied shades of green. Of all the realities I've seen, this one is the most different.

I wonder what the moon will be like in the next place I pass through?

THE WHEEL THAT TURNS THE WORLD
Dream – April 1998

"You will be in charge of the museum," he said, handing me the key.

The museum was a brick building in the park; circular, windowless and with a thick, weathered wooden door. The key was large and made of iron, bringing to mind a gaoler's key. Inside the door, wide curved steps led underground, two small semi-circular, anterooms either side of the steps held refreshments for the visitors, or maybe they were more like pilgrims to the museum.

I had visited the museum often as it was not far from my home, but holding the key was a great responsibility. It had to be unlocked at sunrise and locked up late in the evening.

The steps led down into a huge room underground and onto a large viewing gallery. Like all of the interior, the floor and walls were pale, butter-coloured stone. The stair rail was wood, as was the rail atop the waist-high wall between the gallery and the wheel.

The wheel. That was what they all came to see, that and the room where the wheel's engineers had sat and designed their masterpiece. The engineers' room was preserved behind glass panels behind and to the left of the great wheel. Because its design had taken more than one generation to create and then build, the engineers' room contained sturdy wooden writing desks, abacuses, thick paper (replaced regularly so it did not go yellow and spoil the effect) with equations and sketches, and fountain pens from the earliest engineers; all laid out as though the occupants had merely left for refreshment. Then there were more modern desks with computers, calculators and biros, lined paper with random jottings, annotated printouts and computer micro-disks. Finally in one corner was the legacy of the Last Engineer, the 3D light-tank with its hand-manipulable solid holo-images, though like the computers this was defunct.

Though the engineers' room was interesting, especially to historians, most came to see the wheel or at least that part of it that could be seen since it was so huge that only part of the rim was ever visible at a time. The visible rim stretched from the shadows in the furthest corner and plunged down into the vast yawning darkened pit below. In the lighted space between pit and corner, visitors could see part of the wheel. It was built of metal, appearing like a huge version of a steam-engine wheel, with metal spokes that joined the rim to the hub which resided invisible in the darkness of the pit. The axle and other machinery was so far under ground that it was inaudible and only the susurrus of air caused by the rim was audible when the museum was empty. It turned steadily, not fast, nor slow, in the darkness.

In the early days some had kept vigil hoping to see the entire rim as the days passed. Now they could only visit during opening hours and had long agreed that vigil and fasting was pointless as no-one could tell when a whole rotation had been completed, at least not just by watching the wheel turn through space. There were reports of people jumping from the gallery into the pit, their shrieks diminished into silence, but no-impact was ever heard. Maybe they fell forever, since no stain appeared on the wheel. Now there were slim vertical bars preventing death-leaps. The bars did not unduly spoil the view of the wheel and their necessity was accepted - after all what would happen if someone fell into the mechanism and jammed the wheel?

No-one knows how much the wheel weighs, its diameter or speed, and the sophisticated equipment of the engineers is now defunct. Once such equipment had been commonplace across the world; now only dead screens and empty light-tanks were found in museums. Maybe other parts of the mechanism to which this wheel belonged is viewed by people in other museums, in other lands. Maybe a piston, or cog rises high above the Pyramids, protected by a great glass dome long since sand-blasted into opacity. Travel is uncommon enough that not even the museum keepers know and the fragmented peoples of the world no longer communicate with ease across such distances. Here in this museum we watch the our part of the great mechanism, the huge Wheel that Drives the World and know that as long as it turns, the world turns in the heaven and turns around the great hub that we call the sun.

TRANSPORT THROUGH TIME
Dream - 1996

It started in the mid 1700s - I caught the mail stagecoach in the West Country, needing to go to Croydon. I was a young woman in a full skirt and the stagecoach was in black and yellow livery. Several bumpy hours later, along rutted roads between green fields, the stagecoach stopped at an inn in order to change horses. The team of four was unhitched and taken away and the passengers went for a drink while fresh horses were tacked up for hitching. As I walked into the inn, I passed close to the stalls and stables and noted several dapple grey horses which would probably replace the team of chestnut horses being led sweating away.

A short while later, I went back out ready to resume my journey on the mail coach. A steam engine passed close to the inn so I caught that instead. It rattled its way across a countryside of green fields, discharging a plume of smoke and smut and occasionally letting off steam. Bored with looking out of the window, I sat back and dozed to the comforting rattle-clank-jostle of my carriage.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in the lower deck of a double decker diesel bus trundling through town traffic. I worried that I had missed my stop, never mind that over 200 years had elapsed since my journey started! 200 years and I had not reached Croydon. Outside it was the swinging sixties. When I stood up to get off, I found that I was in the carriage of a very new underground train pulling into a station in Central London in the 1990s. I had been travelling from seventeen forty something, through to nineteen ninety six and I had still not reached Croydon - 250 years later!

In 1996, I had absolutely no idea why I was going to Croydon. In June 2003 I believe I unravelled this dream. In the early days of commercial flight, Croydon was London's only airport. My journey had taken in the different forms of passenger transport as it evolved from coach, through rail, to diesel bus to modern underground (the early London Underground was built in the late 1800s). I believe the Underground train was taking me to the Airport (there is an Underground link to Heathrow Airport). It was about 15 years later that I learned of Croydon's role as London's airport.

MY PET HUMAN
Dream – sometime mid 1990s

I was standing on what felt like the wooden deck of a ship with a metal railing in front of me. Either that or it was an old Victorian Seaside Pier like that at Brighton or Southend-on-Sea. I was aware that there were several other people with me and that we had been rounded up by the aliens who had taken over Earth. They had taken it over very quickly and there had been almost no fighting. Humans were unnecessary, we took up the room they needed so we were being exterminated.

The scene changed. I was inside an apartment and there was another person with me, a male. One of the alien settlers was also in the apartment somewhere.

"What's happening?" I asked in a whisper.

"They don't need humans around," he whispered back, "They've been killing everyone off - from grown-ups right through to little kids."

"Are they about to kill us?" I asked.

"No. Some of them are keeping people as pets."

"Are we pets then?"

"Until he gets bored of us and has as put to sleep."

This dream seemed to link emotionally with several others where for some reason I am locked in a room waiting for men in white coats to give me a lethal injection. I am always looking for an escape or I try to fight them, but there is never a way to escape. There is an overwhelming sense of futility, hopelessness, despair, anger etc. I never find out why I am being put to sleep, but it always seems to be because I am inconvenient rather than because I have committed any crime. Sometimes it is so vivid that I am surprised to wake up alive.

THE LAST OF THE DINOSAURS
Dream 28th May, 1990

CurrTok raised one delicate forelimb to scratch the base of his frill; something had bitten him on the delicate skin just at the base of his bony frill and it itched. He cleared the dust from his slit-pupilled eyes with a membrane and settled back on his haunches to wait for his clutch-sister and mate, DiffTok, to return to the sandstone ridge. DiffTok - how her blue-green-rust mottlings raised his frill! She was eggling and clutch-sister and now mate to the waiting Encephalosaurus and it was she who had bio-engineered the strange filament-pelted creatures to provide food on the long migration.

CurrTok whistled in impatience and moved his weight onto the thick tail that helped him balance when in an upright stance. DiffTok was late and it was the last night of migration; after this dayfail there would be no more Encephalosaurs on primeval earth. Somewhere, far off, a Brachiosaur bull grunted sonorously and its mate bellowed an answer. The Brachiosaur cows had raised few calves this season and the Encephalosaur knew why - the climate had changed and the swamps were drying as the earth began to heat up. The change was imperceptible but cumulative; their records, already packed safely for the migration, chronicled the slow drying through several lifetimes. The Brachiosaurs raised fewer young and the starving carnivores raided 'Ceph cities. Soon all the 'Cephs would be gone and all trace of the sandstone cities and silico-carbon-based technology would have been dismantled or eroded. CurrTok cocked his frilled head, it was as it should be, no trace would remain.

DiffTok sprinted up to meet him on his watching ledge; she held a woven cage containing the precious warm-bloods she had bio-engineered. The creatures were small, about the size of Curr-Tok's skull minus its bony frill, but they bred fast and bore live young like the late hadrosaur tribes. The migration vessels carried enough silage pellets to feed the small creatures and their offspring which would convert vegetable protein to animal protein usable by CurrTok's people and to provide a breeding stock in their new habitat should the indigenous life prove unsuitable for consumption. The ships carried sufficient dried Brach' to ensure that they would not be reduced to eating their breeding stock. DiffTok and her fellow bio-engineers could readily adapt the warmbloods to suit a new environment, enlarging them, improving protein yield, even endowing them with a basic intelligence sufficient for them to be trained to perform small, useful tasks. CurrTok clucked his throat pouch thoughtfully they would survive, thanks to the diligence of DiffTok and her colleagues. DiffTok herself seemed more agitated, her rudimentary throat pouch - for only males possessed such courting dress - was blanched to dun and the mottlings of her frill were subdued.

"What is wrong, beloved clutch-sister? Do you now feel, as I did earlier, the strangeness of leaving the nest?" CurrTok asked gently, "ThellZub likened it to the feeling of leaving the brood for the first time and knowing that he could no longer rely on parental care for his survival."

"It is not that dear Curr'. I lost a whole damn cage of the things" his mate whistled, her small throat pouch vibrating, "the new palms are not nearly ligneous enough to withstand their chewing. There was simply no metal to spare for pens at the breeding centre."

"We have enough to supply our needs and CharZub has plenty in the pens of his vessel. We will endure," sighed CurrTok tenderly rubbing his mate's knobby frill.

"What of the escaped creatures?" DiffTok demanded, "Is it right to leave a genetically engineered species to breed uncontrolled on this planet?"

"Good luck to them if they survive!" CurrTok grunted irritably, shifting his weight again and scratching the irritating spot beneath his own bony frill, "If they make it through the drying out they deserve to inherit the damn place."

DiffTok chirped a conciliatory note, "We foresaw the meteor storm in time dear Curr', the other ships have left and it is time for us to go too." She hefted the woven cage of chittering furry-bodied warmbloods and blinked her third eyelid, "Lead on dear mate, your frill is rising and we have not time for egg sitting!"

"Such a pity," DiffTok murmured as her mate turned toward where the ship waited, "this world was such a beautiful place. Soon it will be uninhabitable for us. I sometimes wonder if there was anything we could have done to prevent it?"

The two Encephalosaurs ascended the sandstone ridge to the vast metal ship wherein their tribe waited. Soon they would rise into the heavens to find landfall on a suitable world. No remnant of 'Ceph civilization would remain.

Behind them they left a chittering group of furry, viviparous, fast-breeding warm-blooded creatures and a world ripe for the taking.

BODY LOAN
Copyright 1988, S Hartwell
(I've no idea why I had this sci-fi dream, but it was like being immersed in a sci-fi film city and came complete with plot, cast of aliens and location! All I've added are street names. The dream seemed to stress the respectability of the Body Loan business.)

 "Agency requires healthy males/females for body loan. Excellent rates. Phone ...."

The ad appeared in the Saturday sits vac column which I had found beside the garbage disposal bin on the corner of Proximastrasse and Rue Centauri. Had I not been broke with, as they used to say back on good old Terra, not a Yen to my name, I would not have considered Body Loaning. Oh it was respectable enough and hundreds of citizens across the spaceways used it, but somehow it carried a popular image of being slightly sordid - like the visiting masseuse or the nude model. I classed it with selling blood, except few hospitals used the real article nowadays. Still, I was broke and needed money and the ad promised good rates so I fiddled a vidphone booth just long enough for the Body Loan receptionist to give me directions before the machine cut me off.

The agency was in a well-kept backstreet, Magellan Ave or something, and it was lit up in muted glowtubes which prevented it from looking too tacky. The frontage bore the legend "Ursa Metro Body Loan Bureau" in red on a lit up cream background. The same receptionist sat behind a high bar and recognised me by my voice. She produced a sheaf of forms, peeled off one and handed it to me.

"There's a pen in the booth," she said, smiling and indicating an alcove to one side of the bar.

I sat in the pseudo-hide chair at the pseudo-wood table and picked a pen from the pseudo-something-or-other dispenser. The form asked the usual application form things - name address, history, medical details. I filled them in as honestly as I dared. Against previous occupation I wrote "relocated citizen, n/a" instead of "deported vagrant" and handed the form to the receptionist.

She barely glanced at it before putting it in the duplicator slot. In a few moments every branch of the agency would have a copy uploaded onto computers. I waited those few moments and grew fidgety. Then an androgyne stepped from a door I'd not noticed and ushered me into the heart of the agency. Ursa Metro seemed full of the genderless "drogs" - in the stores, on the streets - hundreds upon thousands of genderless humanoids come from some backward planetoid to seek their fortune and looking human enough to settle in human enclaves and take human jobs for less than human wages. Many were employed within the "entertainment sector" meaning the sex industry where their quasi-human bodies appealed to curious or sexually misdirected humans. The drog outlined the wages and conditions, both quite acceptable to me, and sent me for a medical at the electronic hands and appendages of their computer medic. Obviously the computer liked me because when I stepped from the metallic booth the drog smiled an offer at me.

Body Loan is, despite its popular image, a respectable business. Business people of all races who are unable to meet in person due to physical intolerances of each other's atmosphere or travel difficulties, hire a suitable body. Their personality is transferred into the hired body (the host's personality ‘hibernates') and transactions are completed after which they return their borrowed body to the Body Loan Bureau and transfer their mind back to their own on-ice body. Transfers across millions of lightyears are everyday events and a failsafe ensures that the body returns to the Bureau after a preset time anyway - just in case. Then the host personality is unhibernated, paid and given a little radiopager ready for the next load. Not half as difficult as selling blood, providing the borrower doesn't abuse the body.

Of course, however hard the Body Loan Bureau screens its clients, there are a few borrowers who merely want to borrow an ‘alien' form to allow them to indulge in certain pleasures - a sexual liaison with a someone physically incompatible with the borrower's native form, use of drugs which have no chemical effect on the borrower's native form or suchlike. Plus the occasional hazard of having a body borrowed for illegal purposes. No doubt such things deter many would be body-lenders, but the money makes the risk worthwhile.