Case and the Dreamer Read Online Free PDF

tailored exactly to him, to the emanations of his brain, the doorways of his mind, the subtle temporal cells, the neurons and synapses of his brain.
    Case was no longer asleep. This was something far deeper.
    Something began to press against the integument of his mind, gently, irresistibly, until it dissolved the wall and entered. It sought out those storage cells as yet unoccupied, meticulously respecting treasures and privacies, looking into nothing, asking only space to lay down new learning. Once this was found, it withdrew, leaving (remember: all is figure) a line into each compartment.
    Now there swiftly flowed through these lines new knowledge and new ideation. Language. Idiom. The ideological, analogical, mythological underbracing of idiom. Case was given everything a colleague and contemporary of the blue man might be expected to have, except knowledge of himself and his current situation. That he would get in his own way, in his own time: the ultimate courtesy.
    The hypnotic sound faded. The lights changed slightly. The blue man put his hands behind his back and waited.
    Case awoke.
    There is no end to the wonders of the universe, and no acrobatics of the imagination through time and space are needed to find them. A twentieth-century man could, if he would, spend half a lifetime in learning all there is to be learned about a square foot of topsoil, six inches deep. He would find animals and insects with marvelous abilities, able to speak languages of scent as well as sound; whole generations of aggression and defense; funguses capable of weaving nooses quick and strong enough to snap around a salamander, ingenious enough then to wrap and digest it. On the microphysical level are the endlessly subtle phenomena of solution and suspension, offreeze and thaw, while the living things encapsulate and encyst and metamorphose … no end of wonders.
    Consider then the cattle tick. Hatching in the ground, she sheds and grows and sheds and grows some more, and sheds and mates. At last, carrying within her the encapsulated sperm, she climbs. Eyeless, she is yet guided to climb upward until she finds a limb-tip where she clings until her reflexes are fired by a single, special spark: the odor of butyric acid, which is found in the sweat of warm-blooded mammals. At that, she leaps and, if she misses, will climb patiently again and find another tip, and hang there waiting. She has been known to hang there for
eighteen years
—and yet will react instantly and fully in the presence of the one thing she is equipped to take and designed to need. She will feed for a day, whereupon she releases the sperm she has hoarded to the eggs she carries. She falls then and dies, and the fertilized eggs are ready to take up the cycle.
    Her life, then, is composed of instants and episodes (as is yours) and could you communicate with her, she might recall episodes: the second shedding, the mating, the climb, the leap, the wait, through drought, freeze, drench, windstorm—why, that was another instant, another moment, for during that time she could be called alive only by nearly misusing the word; it was another instant, and less memorable than that first plunge into warm blood.
    Case’s first awakening, then, was but an instant after that terrible launch (for he could, but would not remember the long despair during which he gave himself to the belt’s life-support, life-suspension systems). He might have forgone these through grief and fury had not his own emergency programming been as implacable and unforgiving as that he had laid onto the belts, unconscious, automatic, indelible.
    (But hers didn’t launch, didn’t launch.)
    Therefore Case awoke (the first time) but an instant after that terrible wrench; therefore his hoarse cry; therefore he was the only human being in all the universe who could remember so distant an event as the escape from that hellish unknown planet; and to him it was not distant at all. For such is the nature of time,