…AYE, THERE’S THE RUB

“Very well.” Piper glanced around imperiously, and went to settle on another saddle of tree root facing my perch. “There are things your Andinol brains do that ours cannot.”

“Like…?”

“You dream at night, I assume?”

“Well…of course. Most nights, at least. …Are you telling me you don’t?”

“Not at night, as you do.” She gestured at our surroundings. “This is our dream.”

I looked around, confused. “What is?”

“All of this,” she said. “The place I just showed you. This forest. My mother’s keep. The Temanghath, this morning. Our dreams surround us. We live in them.”

I felt my brows begin to climb. “This…is a dream?” I looked around again, more carefully, at the ravine, its sprawling dead tree, and the waterfall behind it. “Am I asleep then? I thought you said… Have I been asleep all this time?”

“No. As I said the last time you asked that question, you’re as awake as your kind ever are. And so am I. This dream is nothing like the ones you have at night. As I keep trying in vain to explain, our ‘waking world’ is no more or less real than yours. It’s just…very different.”

I understood her words, but…they meant nothing I could find a way to frame in my head. “So…we’re awake…inside a dream right now?”

She stared at me with a helpless expression. “If you had doctoral degrees in quantum physics, neuroscience and philosophy, I’m not sure I could explain even the broadest differences between us in any way that would make sense to you. Yet you keep insisting that I try, then faulting me for failing.”

“So…this is all just science of some kind?” An excitement kindled inside me at the possibility that all this might fit in with my world after all—that it might be possible to reconcile my current life with my previous one! Even now, I can’t say why I thought that would make anything easier for me, but, at that moment, I felt such a burst of hope.

“Not your science,” she said. “Someday maybe, but not yet.”

My brief hope died. “So, you know all about those things?” I asked, skeptically. “Physics and neuroscience?”

She sighed and shrugged. “As The Lady’s heir, it’s my job to learn everything I can about your kind. Our dream is shaped by your world. In fact, your dreams are the raw material from which our dream is made. That’s why we live in your odious cities, and not off in the countryside as most of us would prefer to. We are too dependent on what you supply.”

“Wait a minute. You make your dream out of ours? …What…does that even mean?”

“That doesn’t matter right now,” she said with what seemed mounting frustration. “Let’s just stick with your first question—about the threat Anselm’s faction poses to your people.”

“All this has something to do with that?”

“Everything. What do you usually do with your dreams—afterward?” she asked.

“Do with them? What is there to do with them? They just disappear when I wake up—if I remember them at all.”

“Precisely. And do you ever miss them—once they’re gone?”

This was starting to feel like an absurdist play. “Why would I miss a dream?”

“Well then. There you have it.” She spread her hands with a shrug. “Just as I said, nothing you even miss, much less care about—and we take only a tiny amount anyway.”

“A tiny amount of what?”

“Your dreams.” She looked at me as if waiting, almost nervously, for some reaction. But I was just drawing a bigger and bigger blank here.

“So…you guys…take our dreams.”

“Only a few of them,” she said, as if that clarified something important. “And as rarely as possible now.”

I shied away from asking ‘how that worked.’ It seemed to me we’d already beaten dead horses of that kind to something of a paste, and I was pretty sure the answer—if she gave me one—would only leave me more confused than I already was. A more practical question seemed to be… “What for?”

“I told you. We use them to make all this.” She waved at our surroundings again.

“You made this tree—and that whole place beyond the door—out of our dreams?”

She shrugged. “For all intents and purposes, yes.”

“So, you take my dream of…bananas singing the Hallelujah Chorus on a giant—”

“That’s not the kind we’d take,” she cut in.

“Oh.” I rolled my eyes. “Well, what kind do you take then?”

She gazed at me, thoughtfully, and sighed. “The useful kind. And before you even say it, I am not trying to be evasive. Explaining to you what kind of dream is useful to us, much less why, will keep us here all evening. In answer to your original question, Anselm and his faction aren’t content with just plucking a dream here and there from your sleeping minds, as the rest of us do. He feels entitled to as many of them as he can harvest, and, more importantly, encourages others to follow his example, in direct defiance of my mother’s prohibitions.”

I waited, as confused as before, for some further explanation of why that was such a problem—for us or for them. “That’s it?” I asked at last. “His giant crime is stealing too many of our dreams?” Was she having me on? “You just finished pointing out how dreams don’t matter to us—how we never even miss them. So, who cares how many—”

“Individually, most of them don’t matter,” she cut in irritably, “and we’ve imposed clear rules about which kinds can or can’t be harvested.” She sounded loonier by the second, to me. “But taken in unrestrained volumes, without any guide or limitation, as Anselm advocates doing, they matter quite a bit. No one cares if you pick one wildflower. Pick them all, though, and there will be none next year. Keep doing it—even for just a few years—and they may vanish forever.”

“So, what, he’s stealing all of our dreams? …Sorry, but I find that…ridiculous. There are billions of dreaming people on this planet. No little batch of dream thieves in one city is going to steal all dreams everywhere. And dreams aren’t wildflowers. They don’t need seeds to grow next year. They’re not part of any…dependent echo system. They just pop up again every night, don’t they? They’re only thoughts, for Pete’s sake—random, irrational, meaningless ones at that. It’s hard to think of anything more irrelevant than dreams. I mean, seriously! I can’t believe all this trouble is about something so…trivial!”

Piper gaped at me. “That…was the most amazing gush of…of ignorant, arrogant… Can you really call what happened—to you—in those tunnels this morning ‘trivial?’”

“That is so obviously not what I just said. I said I can’t believe that so much very real trouble is caused by such a trivial…dispute.”

“By all the powers and their washer women!” she snapped. “How am I supposed to explain anything to such a…a—”

“A tribal toddler?” I suggested, impatiently. The only thing more idiotic than human politics, it seemed, was fairy politics. “Look. To be recklessly frank, Your Highness, this whole story just sounds more wackadoodle by the minute; but if you guys are really managing somehow to make all this out of our dreams—and worried about…I don’t know, local shortages or something—that sounds more like your supply-chain issue, not any problem of ours. So if there’s some other big threat to people like me, how about we cut to the chase and tell me what that is. Otherwise…” I shrugged. “Thanks for all the fish,” (Yes. Even I had read the Hitchhiker series—which came suddenly to mind just then, I think, because it too had seemed so absurd.), “and maybe we should just be heading back now to get that all-important dinner party started.”

She gazed at me in apparent outrage, shaking her head, then glanced around the clearing as if expecting some panel of judges there to throw down a red card and kick me out of the game. “First of all, oh great scholar,” she said, “your assumptions about the nature and value of dreams could not possibly be more incorrect and wrong-headed if you’d hired some Andinol comic to invent them.” She paused to fume at me again, as if at a loss for words. “But since my efforts to explain the unexplainable to you—at your insistence—have won me only scorn, I’m not going to waste another minute trying, except to add that, while Anselm himself may simply over-harvest these worthless, irrelevant dreams of yours, many of his followers take things much, much farther—in ways that injure the Andinalloi they prey upon—sometimes very badly.”

Now—finally—we were getting somewhere. “Like how, exactly?”

She stood up, looking very satisfied. “I’m going to let Rain explain that to you. Later. Right now, you’re absolutely right; we’ve a dinner party to get you back in time for.” She turned and started walking back around the pool.

“No!” I shouted, standing as well. “You’ve wasted all this time blathering about everything except the one thing I keep asking you. Now you dangle it in front of me again, then say we’re out of time? No frigging way! I’m not moving from thus spot until you—”

She whirled back to face me, her eyes alight with anger. “I am heir to The Lady of this realm, you snot-nosed little man! And you are standing at the very center of our power!” She raised an arm and brushed her fingers through the air. Not a second later, I was flat on my back; thrown there, and not gently, by the very air. I lay gaping up at her, suddenly aware of what an utter idiot I’d been, recalling all at once just how real the impossible clearly was here, and moving not a muscle as I waited to see what might come next.

But the defiance in her eyes was already flickering, fading to uncertainty as she looked down at me, then to transparent dismay as she too, perhaps, took stock of what she’d done, and the potential consequences of this lapse in diplomacy. She brought a hand to her mouth, clearly appalled, and came rushing back, already reaching out to help me up.

“That was all my fault,” I said, climbing stiffly to my feet as she halted before me, a hand pressed to each of her cheeks now. “I deserved that.” She shook her head, vigorously. “And I certainly won’t tell anyone it happened, if you don’t.”

She went still, then nodded hesitantly. “That would be…very kind of you. I am so sorry. I just completely lost my…” She seemed to sag, and turned away. “Aren’t we a pair. So incompatible, they’ll likely write a song about us someday.”

“Is that what they do here?” I reached down to brush the leaves and twigs from my pants and shirt. “Seems an odd tradition—if you don’t mind my saying so,” I rushed to add.

“An appalling number of our oldest ballads seem to be about people who spent their lives acting out some quarrel.” Piper offered me a wan smile over her shoulder as she started off around the pond again. “We’re starting to remind me of a familiar tune or two.”

This time I followed her, very meekly. I’d have liked to ask more questions as we began the steep climb back out of this defile, but thought better of that as well—for now.

As we reached the ravine’s upper edge, however, Piper glanced back at me again. “I’m going to tell Rain what we talked about. I’ll have to. Everything except that last bit, of course,” she said uncomfortably, “if you’re really willing to spare me.”

“Oh yeah. Sure I am.” I was eager to make certain this misunderstanding got patched over as thoroughly as possible. For all her difficult qualities, Piper seemed the closest thing to an ally I had, or was likely to find, here. “I’d have knocked me over too if I’d been talking to me that way. I should just have shut my mouth and listened. You told me so—a couple times. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

“I’ll ask Rain to explain whatever else you wish to know,” she said. “If he refuses, tell me, and…I’ll bother my mother about it.”

“You don’t have to get yourself in even more—”

“I owe you that much,” she interjected.

“Well…okay. Thanks then,” I said, as we left the ravine behind, and headed briskly down the forest path, back toward my charming cottage.

The remainder of our trip was composed, understandably, of awkward silences and vacuous observations about the passing landscape. As we approached the cottage, Piper glanced at the sky, then turned to me and said, “He’ll be here to get you any time.” She glanced down at my rumpled, somewhat sweaty attire. “You may want to… Oh, never mind. No one will care.”

“Well…thanks,” I said, as we reached the doorway. “For the tour, and…everything. Hope I didn’t—”

“You were fine. More than fine.” She looked chagrined. “I think maybe that’s part of the problem; for me, I mean. You’re so much calmer, and…more accepting of all this than you should be. I keep forgetting how hard it must be for you. If anyone’s embarrassed themselves today, it’s been me. Again and again.” She gave me a plaintive look. “Thank you for covering…what happened back there. With Rain.”

“I…think you’re too hard on yourself, maybe.”

She gave me a lopsided smile. “That’s what I’m talking about. When you’re not being an annoying idiot, you’re…way too reasonable.”

“I was just about to say the same to you.” I grinned to make sure she knew I was kidding, and was relieved to see her respond in kind.

“Well then,” she said, “have fun tonight. I think you’ll like Mikayl. He’s…” She looked up, seeming to search the air for something. “What do you people say…? It’s so charming.” Then she smiled and looked back down at me. “He’s a peach. Is that right?”

I laughed. “A little old-fashioned, but yes.”

She gave me a brief wave, and started back up the path toward her mother’s mansion, but turned back abruptly just as she reached the trees. “You still need a name!”

“What?”

“A last name! You still need to choose one, remember?”

“Oh! I forgot.”

“Better do it quick. Someone will probably ask tonight. That’s something you can’t seem unsure about.”

“Okay… Any suggestions?”

She shook her head. “Has to come from you, remember? Part of your story—which you’d better review as well, until Rain comes. Good luck!” She turned and hurried off into the trees.

I went inside, already sorting through possible last names. Something inspired by my story. Or rather Matt’s story, since mine was dead now and had to stay that way. I began reviewing everything Rain and I had worked out just a couple hours ago, surprised at how many of the details had already grown fuzzy, or been eclipsed completely by everything that had happened since.

Inside, I went first to my little bathroom, hoping to straighten out my hair before the mirror there—maybe check my face for smudges. Piper had laid me out pretty roughly. The memory made me smile now—for some reason. I ducked past the bathroom’s curtain to discover that someone had emptied the bathwater while I’d been gone—or maybe even while I’d been asleep. I hadn’t checked before Piper and I left. I felt my cheeks grow warm, recalling what I’d done there, and hoping their special powers hadn’t made that experiment obvious to whoever had cleaned up the tub. Stepping before the mirror, I discovered bits of leaf still in my hair, and clothes amply streaked with dust and other bits of forest floor. As I began brushing and scrubbing at things, I went back to reviewing my new story.

Basically, it was about…vanishing. A tale designed to contain as little information as possible, and explain that absence. …So, did I want a ‘vanishing’ sort of name as well, perhaps? Smith? …Matthew Jones? …Matt…Johnson? That just made me think about the tub again.

And the problem with names like Smith and Jones, I realized, was that they sounded like place holders—just the sort of thing someone would choose if they had something to hide. Besides, I supposed this was going to be the name I’d have to use for the rest of this new life. I really didn’t want to end up stuck for good with something so…boring. My last life had been boring. This one sure as hell would not be. That was just about the only thing I was sure of now.

So what then?

I stared into the mirror. “Bond,” I said with a bad fake accent, raising one eyebrow in a sad attempt to look debonair. “James Bond. …Shaken but not stirred.” I sighed. Not that one, clearly. What the hell should I call myself?

There was noticeably less light coming through the window by now. I looked down at my wrist, amusingly, where there’d once been a watch. I had no idea what time it might actually be, or when Rain might show up, but I guessed I had about ten minutes to decide who I was going to be for the rest of my fascinating, adventurous, anonymous, invisible life.