“you have an awful lot of nightmares. I’m surprised that you’re still willing to go to sleep.”
“Nightmares?”
“I’m going to try something, Exxa. I don’t know if it will work, but the doctor is going to start some kind of experimenting on you today, and I’ve got to do something.”
“What are you speaking of?” The stone walls of the ancient chamber receded in the distance. “And who is Exxa?”
“Let me take a chance,” the boy said. “We’re going somewhere else for a while.”
The room shifted again, and blackness closed in about them, until only the boy’s face remained in front of her. Then, slowly, the universe expanded outward once again and everything had changed.
They were walking down a country path, with a waist-high stone wall on one side and a fenced-in meadow on the other. The sun was high, and the air was still, and somewhere a frog was croaking.
“Where are we?” the girl demanded. “The Calla—”
”There are no Calla anything here,” Delbit told her. “And no Nimber, and nary a Golden Orb. This is where I grew up, before my father died, and nobody can hurt us here.”
“It’s very pretty,” the girl said, looking at the pastoral scene about her.
“Tell me about yourself,” Delbit said. “What you remember.”
“I am the princess of—”
”No, no,” Delbit said. “Your waking self. The girl without a name, that Dr. Faineworth is calling Exxa. You can do that without waking up. We will stay here, in this dream, in this pretty place, while you tell me about yourself.”
“Dream?” the girl considered.
“Tell me about yourself,” Delbit repeated.
The girl looked off into the meadow, and several cows stared back at her. “Yes,” she said, “of course. You’re the boy at that—hospital—where the doctor—Faineworth—wants to explore my dreams.”
“That’s right,” Delbit told her. “Tell me about that. What do you remember?”
The girl stared straight ahead. “I don’t remember much,” she said.
“Tell me what you can.”
“I was for a long time in a—I guess it was a hospital—another hospital—a big building in the middle of a great city—before I came here,” the girl said. “That’s the earliest thing I remember.”
“A long time?”
“Two years. A little more.”
“In a big city? New York?”
“Where is that?”
“Where you are now. But we’re pretty far uptown. Downtown, where you, ah, were found when you came back, that’s where the big buildings are.”
“Oh, yes. Big stone buildings. No, that’s not it. The city I was in was much larger. Buildings so tall they were lost in the mist. With more metal and glass. Very shiny.”
Delbit shook his head. “I don’t know any place like that.”
“Well, that’s where I was.”
“And before that?”
“I have no memory of any time before that.”
“Do you know your name?”
“At that hospital they called me Jane. Here they call me Exxa. Neither is my name. What it truly is, I cannot tell you.”
“Where is it that you go when you disappear?”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. A forest.”
“How do you do it?”
“I truly wish that I knew. I—twist something. Like turning sideways, but inside my head. And there I am.”
“And you come back the same way?”
“That is so.”
“Well, I should tell you that the doctor has it figured out, he thinks, and he’s going to start experimenting on you sometime soon.”
“He has what figured out?” the girl asked.
“I’m not sure,” Delbit said. “But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
The girl nodded. Delbit had the impression that she was quite prepared not to like it. “Thank you for telling me,” she said.
The sky darkened. They looked up.
And the girl began to scream, as giant birds with glowing red eyes and cruelly pointed beaks circled overhead, blotting out the sun. First one dived toward them, and then another, and a third.
Delbit covered his head with his hands and jerked from side to side to evade the sharp beaks and claws. One clutched at him, and he screamed as its talons pierced his scalp.
* * * * * * *
“You ripped the electrodes out,” Dr. Faineworth complained querulously.
“Sorry,” Delbit said. He was standing in front of the doctor’s desk, the position from which he received criticism and instruction.
“You were supposed to be awake—aware of what was going on.”
“It was a very powerful image,” Delbit said.
“Do not let it happen again, or I shall supply an even more powerful image.” The doctor leaned back in his chair and dismissed Delbit with a gesture. “We are ready to proceed to the next step,” he told his stout friend Edbeck, who was filling a chair to the right of the desk.
Delbit retreated to his desk in the corner and bent over it, apparently hard at work transcribing his night’s experiences. Sometimes, when they realized he was there, they sent him out of the office. And this time he didn’t want to leave. Whatever was being planned for the questioning of the girl, he wanted to know.
“When you say ‘the next step,’” Edbeck asked, his eyes half lidded and his hands folded over his belly, “are you referring to one minuscule, mincing step along a long and badly marked trail, or a giant stride along a short, well-lighted path? I only ask to have some frame of reference.”
Faineworth chuckled. “Edbeck, my friend, do you have any idea of just what it is we’re striving for here?”
“You have told me several times,” Edbeck said. “And, obviously, impressed me with the potential that lies within this girl’s fair body. Else I would not be here. My fortune is your fortune, Doctor, as soon as I sense a profit to be made. So far it is all guesswork.”
“Guesswork?”
