3
As he opened the door, the sights and smells of backstage MIMIC hit Alex Griffin in the face. Smelting, lifting, loading, painting. Stenches, vibrations, roar, and whine. There were always a thousand minor jobs left undone until the last minute. Some were part of the California Voodoo Game, some were unrelated aspects of the Barsoom Project.
But Barsoom and Dream Park were part of the same thing, weren't they?
Share a Dream… Share the Future. That slogan, emblazoned on a billion stickers in a hundred different languages, had become a catchphrase, a battle hymn, a mantra for an entire generation of Earthlings.
A neat irony. Mars, the god of war, had brought peace. And Dream Park was a place of illusion, whereas the Barsoom Project would pound and carve the planet Mars into a habitable world: not an illusion at all.
Griffin remembered a conversation with Norman Vail, chief psychologist for Dream Park. Halfway through an excellent bottle of Tanaka 'White Plum' '02, Vail had held forth on the mythic power of dreams.
'In dreams we walk through phantasmagoria, our judgment sleeping,' he had said intensely. Vail was sixty- seven years old, but a superb exercise and nutritional regimen had bought him the health and appearance of a forty-five-year-old outdoorsman. His skin looked more weathered than wrinkled. Tonight his bright little blue eyes were a bit unfocused. 'Our drowsy judgment cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, the possible from the absurd. An inanimate object rears from the mist, snarling. We greet it lovingly, and in the greeting transform it into a friend, an ally, to help us on our journey.'
'Well, that's dreams for you.' Alex took another sip. The wine virtually sang on his palate. Its bouquet was clear and warm, sweet to the teasing edge of cloying, but not an inch beyond.
'Alex, you see, but you do not observe. A poor trait for a detective.'
Alex placed his hand at his waist and bowed without standing. He kicked his heels onto a footstool and surrendered. 'Please instruct me, Holmes.'
'Quite. Do you perceive the parallel between dream and human existence?' Vail leaned forward eagerly. 'From the perspective of our covetous misery, our neighbor's chattel often seems the solution to our own poverty. Isn't the history of human interaction the conversion of neighbors into enemies? Or into nonhumans, that we might deprive them of said chattels, or life itself?'
'Ah… I'm not following you. Maybe you're a little drunker than I am. I'd better catch up.' He poured himself another glass of Tanaka.
'The atom bomb was supposed to kill us all. I say it transformed us into a cave full of troglodytes, up to our knees in gasoline, armed with cigarette lighters. No option save learning the other man's grunts and clicks, eh?'
'How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.'
Vail looked peeved. 'Don't you see?' He snatched the bottle from Alex's hand. Actually, it took two tries: he missed the first swipe. 'The weapon of war creates the necessity for communication. The god of war becomes the symbol of peace. Five billion people, speaking a hundred languages, dream the same dreams at night. They seek to create their wealth, rather than loot it. Finding new friends in old enemies.'
'My my. Aren't we in a philosophical mood this evening.'
'Treasure it, heathen. You shan't see such again.'
Alex had been warmed by Norman Vail's unusual burst of optimism. But when one came right down to it, wasn't Vail right?
Dreams were the ultimate intimate language. Mankind had always struggled to bring its dreams into reality. It mattered little whether they were fantasies of bloody conquest, yearnings for love, or hopes for a brave new world. Whatever the images and intent, man needed to dream, and to share those dreams.
And hadn't books, films, radio, and multivision paved the way for understanding?
Through them, a new vision of mankind had been forged.
Griffin remembered a holographic diorama at Carnation's Feed the World exhibit in Dream Park. The first image had been a Midwestern Dutch-American mother breast-feeding her baby. No sooner had the eye absorbed it than she began to darken, her eyes narrowing, her sun-blond hair drawn back into tight braids as she became African… and then Asian… and then Polynesian.
To the strains of music drawn from a hundred cultures and miraculously woven into a single skein, the concept of motherhood burst all cultural boundaries to strike a single nurturing chord. Through the cinematic eye the cornfields of Kansas became the rice paddies of Vietnam, then the banana plantations of Jamaica, and then a million acres of sugar cane in Hawaii. Earth became one vast farmland tilled by a billion calloused hands, feeding ten billion hungry mouths.
It was an image whose time had come.
Alex Griffin's thumbprint summoned a glass-walled elevator tube. He began to rise through the floors. He waved to workmen as he slid past them, dwarfed by the multileveled enormity of MIMIC.
Dream Park, like Disneyland before it, brought together all the myths of mankind and displayed them on a single stage. Cultural prejudice withered before such an onslaught of fantasy.
As individuals, human beings are weak and vulnerable. Families to tribes to nations were an inevitable progression. Mankind was ready to take the next step.
Why should Alex Griffin quit his job at Dream Park to control the North American headquarters of the Barsoom Project? Dream Park offered all the responsibility any one man could want.
The walls and floors buzzed and thrummed with activity. Elevator banks were being disguised behind secret doors and hidden panels. Workmen could ferry equipment up and down MIMIC, from one end to the other, without interrupting the Game to come.
At the bottom of MIMIC's central well, lights flashed and glittered like a flaming silver mine. Was that reality or illusion?
At the sixth floor Alex stepped out, then threw himself back against the wall as a synthesised voice chanted, 'Please take care, wide load coming through.'
An oval mosaic as immense and mysterious as a Mayan calendar hummed past, balanced impossibly on its edge upon a little robot cart. The cart flashed red lights and droned its ritual warning as it slid past, blithely made a ninety-degree turn, and trundled merrily on its way.
It had almost disappeared before he recognized the oval as a mask rendered in strips of hide and lengths of bone. It was ten feet high, striped and curlicued with dusky earth tones. Its lower teeth pierced the upper lip jaggedly.
It was hideous, then suddenly comical. The eyes were platters of ancient flattened cola cans, the nose a plastic crucifix stenciled with the name of a popular chain of motels. How many other bits of cultural effluviums could he spot?
The floors and walls jiggled as the Cowles Mach VIII speakers ran their testing sequences: peals of maniacal laughter, bursts of rain, jolts of thunder, the chilling rumble of a hundred thousand pairs of jackboots. Sudden sharp explosions and shrieks of agonized pain.
Far down the central well, cranes that looked like toys prepared shuttle bays for the coming Game. Just above Security, on level four, automated tractors plowed ground and workers planted tombstones in a voodoo graveyard.
Griffin trotted up four flights of stairs to the tenth level, which was now flooded waist-high with warm water. A pontoon catwalk bobbled around the edge. Balance was tricky, even more so since he was already drunk with the sights and sounds, the hot acid stench of burning metal.
Voodoo! Naked slaves praying for protection to dead gods, gods rotting in graves left half a world away. An impotent religion embraced by the lost and degraded. Why voodoo?
Because Richard Lopez, Game Master extraordinaire, loved the notion! As McWhirter explained it, voodoo was a cultural maze. It was African shamanism and pantheism touched with Muslim influences and transplanted to the New World. There it absorbed Christianity and eventually held millions of worshipers in thrall beneath the very noses of the oppressors. Eventually it found its way back to nineteenth-century Africa, carried by repatriated descendants of slaves. There it absorbed gods from India and Asia, and bounced back to America in the hearts of
