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

your throat and halted you mid-gesture. An existential precariousness that made you an oafish brute, a bull in a china shop. A half-materialized sigh, still wavering between existence and dissolution. “Scrambled eggs,” the watchman grumbled. “To think some people spend their whole lives gushing over these things!”
    David shivered, uneasy. Though he still felt a visceral need to see the dreams he’d given birth to, upon seeing them he experienced nothing like the extraordinary rapture aesthetes spoke of.
    “Well, of course,” Marianne had told him bluntly. “Dreamers can’t derive any pleasure from contemplating their dreams. You don’t experience sexual arousal when you see your nakedbody in a mirror, do you? Well, same goes for the dreams you’ve materialized. Other people might derive a certain pleasure from them, but there’ll always be something like an incest taboo between you and your own dream. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” Yes, he understood: he was like those miners who dig gold from the depths of the earth for a large conglomerate. He labored, while others’ hands fondled the ingots …
    “Yours is a lot smaller,” said the watchman, tugging David’s sleeve. “Plus they’re not done running tests on it yet. It might even die before it hits the market.”
    These words were uttered without a trace of meanness; he was just a man used to life’s hard knocks. Giving David a shove as if they were old friends, he ushered him into a room filled with the hum of incubators. A greenhouse swelter reigned; sweat sprang to their brows. Just like everywhere else, lighting was reduced to a strict minimum, and it was hard to get an exact idea of just what was being stored in the incubators. The fat man checked a chart and tried to orient himself among the rows.
    “Over there,” he whispered. “The vet isn’t done vaccinating it yet.”
    David leaned toward the bell jar, ringed in a halo of moisture. For most dreams, the mandatory quarantine was a terrible ordeal. Many of them couldn’t stand up to the numerous injections and samplings the boy butchers at the lab believed it their duty to inflict.
    “You never can tell,” Marianne would utter with an erudite air whenever David let his indignation show. “Dreams come straight from sleep, so they could be vectors for sleeping sickness.A few troubling cases of a slowdown in bodily functions have been recorded among collectors who spend lots of time contemplating their acquisitions. Yes, in some cases even trance state and memory loss. Dreams aren’t as harmless as you claim. We must be very cautious.” Being cautious meant pricking that wondrous skin with long needles, slicing into it with scalpels, scarifying these organisms until they finally shriveled up and disintegrated. “If they croak before making it out the laboratory door,” asked the watchman, “do you still get paid?”
    “You get a kill fee,” David replied mechanically. “It’s not much, but enough to carry you till the next dive.”
    “And if it goes to auction?”
    “Ten percent of the selling price.”
    The fat man frowned and leaned over the incubator. “It’s not very big,” he observed. “That’s not gonna make you rich. Strictly for small savers. My sister-in-law, owns a deli? She loves these things. Her mantle’s covered in ’em.”
    David blinked, but the condensation inside the bell jar kept him from clearly making out the contours of the dream. He recalled the two bags of uncut gems he’d taken from the safe in the jewelry shop down below, and the crunch of raw diamonds against his chest … that had been the symbolic image allowing the dreamer’s attractional energies to be concentrated. A sort of fictional target you focused on before casting your net. Deep in the incubator was something pink and plump, with soft, gentle curves. A little netsuke, perhaps, a blissful and mysterious sphere that emanated a kind of harmonious satisfaction,