Dream Baby

Dream Baby

By Bruce McAllister

He looks at me and his voice changes now, as if on cue. He wants me to feel what he is feeling, and I do, I do. I can’t look away from him and I know this is why he is CO.

“It is almost impossible to reproduce them in a laboratory, Mary, and so these remarkable talents remain mere anecdotes, events that happen once or twice within a lifetime – on a brother, a mother, a friend, a fellow soldier in war. A boy is killed on Kwajalein in 1944. That same night his mother dreams of his death. She has never before dreamed such a dream, and the dream is too accurate to be me a coincidence. He dies. She never has a dream like it again. A reporter for a major newspaper kooks out the terminal window at the Boeing 707 he is about to board. He has flown a hundred times before, enjoys air travel, and has no reason to be anxious today. As he looks through the window the plane explodes before his very eyes. He can hear the sound ringing in his ears and the sirens rising in the distance; he can feel the heat of the ignited fuel on his face. Then he blinks. The jet is as it was before – no fire, no sirens, no explosion. He is shaking – he has never experienced anything like this in his life. He does not board the plane, and the next day he hears that its fuel tanks exploded, on the ground, in another city, killing ninety. The man never has such a vision again. He enjoys air travel in the months, and years, ahead, and will die of cardiac arrest on a tennis court twenty years later. You can see the difficulty we have, Mary.”

“Yes,” I say quietly, moved by what he’s said.

“But our difficulty doesn’t mean that your dreams are any less real, Mary. It doesn’t mean that what you and the three hundred like you in the small theater of war are experiencing isn’t real.”

“Yes,” I say.

He gets up.

Dream Baby. Illustration by Elena

“I am going to have one of my colleagues interview you, if that’s all right. He will ask you questions about your dreams and he will record what you say. The tapes will remain in my care, so there isn’t any need to worry, Mary.”

I nod.

“I hope that you will view your stay here as deserved R&R, and as a chance to make contact with others who understand what it is like. For paperwork’s sake, I’ve assigned you to Golf Team. You met three of its members on your flight in, I believe. You may write to your parents as long as you make reference to a medevac unit in Pleiku rather than to our actual operation here. Is that clear?”.

(The Year`s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martins’ Press, New York)