Dreamhunter by Elizabeth Knox Read Free Book Online

whenever he spoke about his wife.
    One evening he took Tziga out drinking, to shake him out of his misery. At six in the morning, Chorley and Tziga decided to go quietly — or as quietly as a couple of scuffling, giggling drunks can — through the stage door of the Rainbow Opera. They had decided to wait for Grace in one of the galleries (this was before they owned private suites). They’d carry her off for breakfast. They’d go to a café and eat a pile of potato cakes and sour cream, just like they used to. ‘She must want a change of scene,’ Chorley said. ‘She spends half her life in this place — or the Other.’
    Chorley and Tziga stumbled up the back stairs to the first-floor gallery. The Opera was silent. The men of the fire watch, who were sitting one level above and opposite, leant out to gesture, fingers across their lips.Chorley mirrored the gesture. He put a finger to his lips and shushed Tziga. Then he tiptoed to the balustrade and looked over.
    Chorley Tiebold saw that his wife was asleep in the Opera’s dais bed and that there were two strangers lying on either side of her.
     
    THE DREAM Regulatory Body was set up under a piece of legislation known as the Intangible Resources Act. The Body came into existence six weeks after Chorley Tiebold’s discovery and, in a way, owed its existence to him. For Chorley had caused a scene, he and the fire watch had come to blows and some furniture was broken. Grace, hearing her husband’s drunken bluster, flung herself and everyone else out of sleep. Several hundred people woke up abruptly, before the happy conclusion of their dream. It was, one man later told his cronies, like being thrown into an icy pond while in the act of love. Behind the Rainbow Opera’s padded doors people surfaced shouting, gasping and gagging.
    There were complaints to the Rainbow Opera, of course. Some patrons demanded the return of their ticket price. Others cancelled their season tickets. The police considered charging Grace Tiebold with criminal negligence. But no current law quite covered what went on in dream palaces.
    The newspapers reported the incident, then refused to let the matter drop. For ten years fastidious fear, suspicion and disapproval had been brewing aboutdreamhunters and their performances. Even when dreams were only a therapy, even when Tziga Hame was the only one able to broadcast a dream wider than a room, there were people who said that dreams were wicked seductions, that dreamhunters interfered with people’s souls and that the Place was alien and unhallowed. The public was ready for a moral panic, and the newspapers whipped up the public’s fears.
    The President called a special meeting of Congress. This was the meeting at which the young Deputy Secretary of the Interior, after making a number of alert and thoughtful remarks, was appointed head of a commission of inquiry.
    Over several months the commission called its witnesses, asked its questions and discussed the testimonies. The commission gave its report and its head, Cas Doran, wrote a draft Bill based on its findings. Doran’s Intangible Resources Bill proposed that a body be set up: to regulate traffic In and out of the Place, to police the Place and its bordering countryside, and to act as a licensing body for dream parlours and palaces — deciding where they could be set up, and how they would be run. ‘The Place is not a mirage that will disappear,’ Doran wrote in the commission’s report. ‘It is a valuable resource belonging to our nation and, as such, it cannot be an ungoverned frontier.’
    When the Act was passed, and the Dream Regulatory Body set up, and its regulations written, almost everyone was satisfied.
    Chorley Tiebold was not. He complained to his wife that nowhere in the regulations did it say that a dreamhunter wasn’t allowed to sleep in the same bed as any amplifiers she used. The legislation got its start in public concern about public morals. Where was that reflected?