Trigger and Friends by James H. Schmitz

Duffold blinked. The universe all around them was suddenly an unquiet grayness, a vaguely disturbing grayness because there was motion in it which couldn’t be identified. A rapid shifting and flowing of nothing into nothing that just missed having significance for him.

“About as good a presentation as the projector can manage,” Wintan’s voice said, almost apologetically—and Wintan, too, Duffold noticed now, was invisible in the grayness. He felt uncomfortably isolated. “You’re looking at . . . well, it would be our Palayatan’s consciousness, if he were awake.”

Duffold said nothing. He had been seized by the panicky notion that breathing might become difficult in this stuff, and he was trying to dismiss that notion. A splash of blue, a beautiful, vivid blue, blazed suddenly in the grayness and vanished. “They’re moving,” Wintan’s voice murmured. “Dream level now!”

Breathing was difficult! If only that blue would come back—

It came. Duffold gasped with relief, as gray veils exploded about him and a bright blue sky, deep with cloudbanks, spread overhead and all about. Wintan spoke from somewhere, with a touch of concern, “If this is bothering you at all, I can shut you out of it instantly, you know!”

“No,” Duffold said. He broke out laughing. “I just discovered I’m not here!”

It was true in a peculiar way. There wasn’t a trace of Wintan or himself or of their supporting chairs in sight here. He looked down through empty space where his body should have been and laughed again. But he could still feel himself and the pressure of the chair against him, at any rate; so he hadn’t become disembodied.

“Dreams are odd.” Wintan’s voice sounded as if he might be smiling, too, but the concern hadn’t quite left it. “Especially when they’re somebody else’s. And especially again when that someone isn’t human. Incidentally, this is a visual pick-up for you. All you have to do to break it is to close your eyes.”

Duffold closed his eyes experimentally and patted the side of the chair. Then he opened them again—

Yunnan’s dream had changed in that instant. He was looking down now into a section of a shallow stream, swift-moving and clear, through which a creature like a mottled egg darted behind a silver lure. Another one showed up beyond it, both flashingly quick, propelled by a blurred paddling of red legs.

“Mountain soquas,” said Wintan. “Our friend was spearing them during the day.” His voice sounded thoughtful. “No trace of anything that might indicate X, so far. I imagine they’ll stimulate a different type of sequence—”

The scene flowed, as he spoke, into something entirely different again. This was, Duffold decided, apparently an angular caricature of a Palayatan town-street, presented in unpleasantly garish colors. Something that was in part a red-legged soqua and in part an extremely stout Palayatan was speaking excitedly to a small group of other Palayatans. The next moment, they had all turned and were staring straight at Duffold. Their eyes seemed to contain some terrible accusation. Involuntarily, he cringed—just as the scene flickered out of existence.

The green luminescence was about them again. From the other chair, Wintan grinned briefly at him.

“Tapped a nightmare layer,” he explained. “It woke him up. So our little friends have bad dreams, too, occasionally!” He studied Duffold quizzically. “Did you get the guilt in that one?”

“Guilt?” Duffold repeated.

“He’d been killing soquas,” Wintan said. “Naughty thing to do, according to his subconscious, so it punished him.” He added, “No luck at all, so far, unless there was something I missed. An orderly, childish mind. No real guile in it—and it does fit the way they look and act.”

“Could it be faked?”

“Well,” Wintan said, “we couldn’t do it. Not to that extent. They’ll hit the Deep Downs next, I imagine. Should become more interesting now.”

A riot of color blazed up about them—color that was too rich and in meaningless flux and motion, or frozen into patterns that stirred Duffold uncomfortably. Something came to his memory and he turned and spoke in Wintan’s direction.

“Yes,” Wintan’s voice replied, “it’s not surprising that it makes you think of some forms of human art. We have a comparable layer.” He was silent for a moment. “How do you feel?”

“Slight headache,” Duffold said, surprised. “Why?”

“It might affect you that way. Just close your eyes a while. I’ll let you know if we run into something significant.”

Duffold closed his eyes obediently. Now that his attention was on it, the headache seemed more than slight. He began to massage his forehead with his fingertips. Wintan’s voice went on, “It’s a nearly parallel complex of mental structures, as one would expect, considering the physical similarities. This particular area originates when the brain’s visual centers are developing in the zygote. It’s pure visual experience, preceding any outside visual stimulus. Later on, in humans anyway, it can become a fertile source of art . . . also of nightmares, incidentally.” His voice stopped, then resumed sharply, “Buchele’s tracing something—there!”

Duffold opened his eyes. Instantly, he had a sensation that was pure nightmare—of being sucked forward, swept up and out of his chair, up and into—

The sensation stopped, and a velvety blackness swam in front of him like an intangible screen. He was still in his chair. He drew in a quivering breath. The only reason he hadn’t shouted in fright was that he hadn’t been capable of making a sound.

“That—!” he gasped.

“Easy,” Wintan said quietly. “I’ve shut you off.”

“But that was that keff animal!”

“Something very like it,” Wintan said, and Duffold realized that he could see the Service man again now. Wintan was watching something that was behind the area of screening blackness for Duffold, and if he felt any of the effects that had paralyzed Duffold, he didn’t show it. He added, “It’s very interesting. We’d been wondering about the keff!”

“I thought,” Duffold said, “that Palayatans weren’t bothered by the animal.”

Wintan glanced at him. “Our present Palayatans aren’t. Did you notice the stylized quality of that image and the feeling of size—almost like a monument?”

Duffold said shortly that he hadn’t been in a frame of mind to observe details. His vulnerability was still irritating. “It looked like a keff to me. Why should it be in this fellow’s mind?”

“Ancestral image,” Wintan said, “or I miss my guess! And that means—it almost has to mean that at one time the Palayatans weren’t immune to . . . ah, wait!”

“Something new?” Duffold said quickly.

Wintan seemed to hesitate. “Yes,” he said.

“Then cut me in again. I don’t want to miss more than I have to.”

For a moment, Duffold thought Wintan hadn’t responded. Then he realized that the blackness before him wasn’t quite what it had been a few seconds ago.

He stared uncomprehendingly. An eerie shiver went over him. “What’s this?” he demanded, his voice unaccountably low.

“Something really new!” Wintan said quietly. “I think, Excellency, that they’ve found X!”

For the moment, that seemed to have no meaning to Duffold. The pale thing swimming in the dark before them was roughly circular and quite featureless. He had a feeling it was nothing tangible, a dim light—but his hair was bristling at the back of his neck. The thought came to him that if this was what the projectors were making of the thing that had been tracked down, the mind-machines were as puzzled as he was. “Something really new—” Wintan had said.

He realized that the thing wasn’t alone.

To right and left of it, like hounds cautiously circling a strange beast they had overtaken, moved two lesser areas of light. The human investigators hadn’t withdrawn.

They’re trying to make contact with it, he thought. And some of the sense of awe and oppression left him. If they could face this strangeness at first hand—

It happened quickly. One of the smaller areas of light moved closer to the large one, hesitated, and moved closer again. And something like a finger of brightness stabbed out from the large one and touched the other.

Instantly, there was only blackness. Duffold heard Wintan catch his breath, and started to ask what had happened. He checked himself, appalled.

A face swam hugely before them. It was Buchele’s, and it was the face of a personality sagging out of existence. The eyes were liquid, and the mouth slid open and went lax. Across the fading image flashed something sharp and decisive; and Duffold knew, without understanding how he knew it, that Cabon had given a command and that it had been acknowledged.

In the next instant, as the scene of darkness and its pale inhabitant reshaped itself, he knew also by whom the command had been acknowledged.

“No!” he shouted. He was struggling to get up out of the chair, as Wintan called out something he didn’t understand. But it was over by then.

Again there had been three areas of light, two small and one large. Again, a small one came gliding in towards the large one; and again light stabbed out to meet it.

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