The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome by Serge Brussolo Read Free Book Online Page A

columns. David flattened the twenty and slipped it in between the pages. “Yeah,” said the man. “Just a quick look, though, or I won’t hear the end of it. Dream Number 338. It was kinda weak; the doc on call put it in an incubator. You really want to see it?”
    David tried on a pleading look. The watchman sighed, straightening up. “I just don’t get it,” he groused, “you guys’re all the same. You sell ’em, and then you come down here crying for a look. Well, c’mon—I have to go with you. If we run into anyone, I’ll say you’re my brother-in-law.”
    He pulled an imposing key from his pocket and unlocked the great doors that led to the former exhibit halls. The windows had been blacked out, resulting in a gloom pierced by rays of sunlight where dense golden dust danced about. On pedestals that had once supported masterpieces of Greek art perched cages big and small. Simple wire affairs, or solid jails with bars. Right away, David recognized the smell of dreams, the “electric” smell of resurfacing successfully.
    “Those ones there are earmarked for auction,” the watchman muttered. “They’re fresh from quarantine. Got their photos taken for the catalog yesterday. One or two of ’em are gonna go formillions!” He kept waddling from one cage to the next, a nasty grimace on his face.
    “I just don’t get why you guys all want to look at them,” he said again. “They’ve got no eyes, no mouth, nothing.
Scrambled eggs
, I call ’em—nice, right? There’s a certain resemblance. Some of the other guys, they call ’em miscarriages, but that’s not nice.”
    David hardly dared move. As with each time he managed to sneak into the storage room, he was struck with a mental and physical paralysis. “They’re not even real animals,” the fat man complained. “They don’t piss, they don’t shit. I was a watchman at the zoo for a while, I know what I’m talking about. These things, well, they look like they’re alive, but no one’s figured out just how that is. Man! I’ve fed lions and tigers; now, them you better not mess with. They’ll gobble that meat on the end of your stick right up. But these things? Just what are they, anyway? They look like flesh, even skin, but at the same time, they’re not part of our world. They’ve got no fur, no scales. You know, some of the guys even poke ’em to try to make ’em scream? But they never make a sound. What are they?”
    “Dreams,” David murmured. “Dreams, stolen from sleep.”
    “Stolen?” the big man grumbled. “I thought all this looked shady. Never thought I’d wind up guarding stolen objects!”
    David wasn’t listening to him anymore. He was like a kid on his first trip to the zoo, suddenly discovering that a rhinoceros wasn’t just a funny-looking animal with a horn balanced on the end of its nose and leather chaps too big for its body, but a living, breathing thing, enormous and monstrously impossible. He didn’tdare stick his hand through the bars of a big cage; the watchman probably would’ve stopped him anyway. But inside was something incredibly fragile, an organic … architecture? With skin more delicate than a petal. A kind of indefinable being, rolled up in a ball and barely touching the earth. Volumes harmoniously joined but lacking any precise vital function. This one looked like a shoulder. A giant shoulder so soft, so fragile, a mere brush of your finger would immediately mottle it with bruises. A belly? A breast, maybe. Or maybe all of the above at once, imbricate, interchangeable, but only just hinted at. As soon as you began walking around the cage, images poured forth, endlessly revising your first impression. No, it wasn’t a breast, more a belly, the belly of a young girl … or a cheek, a cheek flushed pink by a spot of sun … No, no, it was a back. The marvelously smooth back of a woman bathing herself. It was … everything and nothing, all at once. Volumes whose fragility put a lump in