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Chapter 18

The second bridge was similar to the first, wide as a road and unyielding to the winds that swept through the ring-shaped canyon, but didn't have the air of eternity or awe. This one was definitely intended to draw people off the mountainside and get them into the market. Once on it, Chuck found he couldn't turn around, not even to look back. When he tried, his feet stuck fast to the pavement. He could only go forward. Was there a spell laid on the bridge, or was it just influence? Or were his feet telling him the truth his head already knew, that he didn't want to go back and watch people plowing fields and changing diapers? He hurried after Bergold and Hiramus, who were waiting for him at the end of the bridge. He'd much rather talk to real people—as real as anyone was in the Dreamland. That held as much appeal for him as the bazaar did.

"You said court," Chuck said, as they walked among the brightly colored tents and stalls. "What's your government like? Who is in charge here?"

"Oh, it's a monarchy," Bergold said, holding up a forestalling hand as a young woman offered him, or rather, her embroidered handkerchiefs. "Our king is Byron the Creative. Always a king, for these last many millennia."

"That's socially incorrect," Chuck complained, shaking his head as the girl turned into an elderly basket-seller and tried to thrust a straw punnet into his hands. "You ought to have some queens."

"We will have a queen next," the Historian said, pleasantly. "His Majesty has one child, a daughter, the princess Leonora."

"One? There have been a lot of queens in history out there. I mean, my plane of existence."

"You must realize the Dreamland changes very slowly compared with your world," Bergold said. "More time seems to have passed while you have been with us, but that is because of all the minds dreaming it. By the same token, it takes a while for ideas to spread widely and be incorporated. For example, queenship. It is not enough for a government to have achieved it. It must gain acceptance in the minds of all sleepers for it to take form here. The way that we here know that something truly exists in the Waking World is if it becomes commonplace in the Dreamland. That is when it attains reality. Otherwise things come and go, often disappearing and only emerging once in a while out of the great Collective Unconscious." He smiled, almost reminiscently. "The occasional vision is good for the imagination. Things pop up in the most unlikely places. The Collective Unconscious is not only the sum of all current minds, but of all history, and that fades slowly."

"Would you call that race memory?" Chuck asked.

"Of a sort. Say rather, a repository. Dreams can bring up things that were long buried, such as visions of dinosaurs and dragons."

"Does it contain all of history, like the sky here?" Chuck asked eagerly.

"Again, not exactly. Only what sleepers' minds send, and as you may guess," Bergold said, "the views are very subjective. The more minds there are reflecting a particular thing, the closer the mass vision comes to being accurate—on the average. It varies also according to intensity, timing and number of the dreamers. That is why we treasure this place, during the times that it exists."

Chuck looked back at the Rock. "You mean it hasn't always been here?"

Bergold chuckled. "I mean that it isn't always here, and has not always been precisely this shape. Our archives record it as having countless different configurations over the millennia. Change is the nature of the Dreamland. When it is here it gives us sights of true events, although again subjective, and without discriminating between the historically important and the unimportant, nor consistently displaying them in an order that gives us historical perspective."

"It's complicated," Chuck said, feeling his head start to spin. He clasped his ears to keep it from literally lifting off his neck.

"Not at all," Bergold said cheerily. "We just accept whatever comes. It's our purpose. We're proud of it."

Chuck glanced around the busy midway, watching people come and go with their purchases. The place was as crowded as a shopping mall at Christmas. The heady air smelled of mixed spice, hot dogs, popcorn, animal dung, perfume and leather. From the other side of the ravine, Chuck had noticed that the bazaar was set up with two concentric rectangles of booths around an open green. Men and women bargained hard with one another, chatting gaily at the tops of their voices. With his newly-minted courteousness, Chuck let people barge in front of him, behind him and nearly through him, until he decided that manners didn't mean letting oneself be trampled. People carrying baskets, paper bags or pushing their shopping in wire carts ambled through the lanes, joking with one another. Children ran around, playing games. A dog sitting in a chair behind a counter sat up and barked as they went by.

"I guess there aren't that many differences between the Waking World and the Dreamland."

"On the contrary," Bergold said. "Since your world created ours, we resemble you a lot more than you resemble us. Like anything done by committee, it's a job lot. Some of it is decidedly wonderful, some uneven, but the king keeps it all in order. Guided by the Sleepers, of course. We are very honored that you have decided to favor us with your presence."

Chuck was impressed, and more than a little humbled. He never had that much faith in higher entities himself, but then, these people had proof that their lives were shaped by a force outside themselves. After all, he was right there, and he could shape reality better than people who lived there and knew what they were doing.

Hiramus stopped at a bookstall and began to turn over scrolls he found in a wooden box full of straw. Chuck lost Bergold at the next booth, which sold lights of every kind, from searchlights to birthday candles. He decided to go on without them. There was so much to see.

He glimpsed Pipistrella seated in a tent on the other side of the fairway. Even though there was no breeze, her clothes still floated around her like a mermaid's hair, defying gravity. A woman in flowing robes and a turban leaned over her hand, talking. Chuck couldn't hear them, but he didn't need to. Pip was having her fortune told. He dismissed her sneeringly as gullible for even listening to a fortune teller. At the same time, Chuck thought it might be fun to have his fortune told. Not that he would lend any real credence to anything he heard. No way! He drifted over that way, drawn by the gypsy woman's tone of voice and Pipistrella's rapt expression. No, he told himself. Don't stop. Keep walking. He wanted to find his truth for himself, not be told it. But it was tempting.

The colors caught his eye from clear across the grassy square in the center. On a broad table under bright lamps were toys. There were whirligigs, marionettes, little trains, farm sets. Chuck loved toys. The best one was a little rainbow made of light that ran by clockwork. As he watched, it tick-tick-ticked over, completing the arch, then cranked back again to the beginning. Keeping his eye on the rhythmic movement, Chuck hurried over.

The toy was the most adorable thing he'd ever seen in his life. When he wound up the key, cunningly hidden in the base, the arch made of liquid flowing color rose up and over a wooden landscape until it fell into the pot of gold on the other side.

"This is wonderful," he said to the woman behind the table. "I have got to have this."

"Certainly," she said. "It's three chickens."

"No, it's a rainbow," Chuck said, lifting it.

"No, sir, I mean it costs three chickens." She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together.

"Is that a kind of money?" Chuck asked. He reached into his pockets, but they were empty. He frowned. He never traveled without cash! But, these weren't really his pockets. Rather, they were, but they weren't physical pockets.

"I don't have any of your kind of money because I'm not from here. I'm . . . I'm a sleeper."

"Uh-huh," the woman said. "And I'm the fount of all knowledge. Three chickens." The sleeves of her white blouse were rolled up to the shoulders of her meaty, well-scrubbed arms, as she continued to arrange knickknacks and toys on the bright calico tablecloth. Chuck appealed to her.

"Look, I really don't have any money, but I'm from what you call the Waking World. Couldn't you please just give it to me? As a present? I really am a Visitor."

"That's a fine story!" the woman said, her expression scornful. "All I can say is, if you don't have the ready, you can't have the merchandise." She took the mechanical rainbow out of his hands and put it back into its place. Sitting on the cloth, it continued to operate, arching and collapsing, arching and collapsing. Chuck waited until she was busy talking to someone else, and reached for it. She didn't even turn around, but her hand shot right over and smacked him on the wrist. Chuck clutched his arm and hopped back a pace. The woman rounded on him, seeming to grow two feet taller.

"You can't have it," she said firmly, putting a protective hand over the toy. "I don't care if you're the Seventh Sleeper yourself. There are rules around here." The little rainbow glowed through her fingers. Chuck had never wanted anything so much in his life. He was sure it was meant to be his, no matter what she said. He knew it. It had looked like a simple windup toy when he had first spotted it, but the more he was told he couldn't have it, the more beautiful it became. Its paint grew lustrous, and its light glowed more warmly, until he desired it more than anything else he had ever wanted in his life.

"Look." Chuck yanked his shirt up and showed her his navel cord. The silver strand glinted in the sunlight. "What about that? Only Visitors have something like that. Right?"

"Oh, how cute!" the woman cooed. "My son has a tail. Not as fancy as this, mind you." She reached over and twanged the cord with a flick of her finger.

"Ulll-llll-llll . . ."

The reaction shook Chuck so much he feared he would turn inside out. A warning tone rose inside him, drowning out the sound of the crowd. The vibration shook every sinew in his body. He goggled at her, helpless to move. His arms stretched out and began to wiggle. People came from all directions to watch. He wanted them to go away, but he couldn't form coherent words. They began to laugh at him, pointing. The ground started to crack under his feet. "Ulll-lll-lll . . ."

"What is wrong here?" The sharp voice of Hiramus cut through the buzz in Chuck's head, and two steady hands held him by the shoulders until the vibrating stopped. The older man stared fiercely at the crowd until it dispersed, leaving only Chuck and the dealer behind the table in the immediate vicinity. It was as if the hundreds of others simply ceased to exist. "What is going on?"

"Uh, I was trying to buy this rainbow," Chuck said, catching his breath. He reached for the toy. The woman automatically pulled it just out of reach. "I would really like to have it. But I have nothing to buy it with."

"Wait here," Hiramus said. He strode away.

Chuck was thankful to have stopped shaking. He'd been buzzing so hard he thought he would fall apart. He put a hand on his chest to feel his heartbeat. His fingers encountered a strange anomaly, a dip in his ribcage right above his sternum. Turning away from the woman behind the counter, he pulled up his sweatshirt and looked down at his chest. Chuck blinked, then stared in horror. There was a hole in his chest about the diameter of an apple just about where his heart was. He could see the ground behind him through it. Unable to believe his eyes, he felt the space with his fingers. They encountered no resistance. Part of his chest was gone! He was falling apart. Where did that piece of him go? What had caused the hole? It looked like a cartoon cannonball had gone through him. But no one had shot him. He examined the opening again. There wasn't any blood or icky stuff. His insides were there, dark red and white, but the edge was perfectly smooth, as though he was looking at them through glass. A pair of round, gold eyes regarded him quizzically. Panic-stricken, Chuck spun around. A stray cat had wandered out of the crowd, and had been looking up at him through the hole.

Scanning the ground, Chuck lifted his feet one at a time, wondering if the section had fallen out while he was vibrating, or some time before, and looked again. Where was it?

He tried to think about the last time he had seen his chest intact, and realized he never had, here in the Dreamland. He never undressed. His clothes always became pajamas and turned back to clothes again, whenever he needed them to, and his skin always cleaned and shaved itself. The piece could have been missing from his body since he arrived. Chuck had a dire, sinking feeling it had been gone all along. The space matched the hollow despair he had always felt. Only here, in the astral plane, could it ever manifest itself physically. Something was literally missing from him and his life. As if he needed the proof.

"There he is," Hiramus's voice said, from somewhere behind him. Quickly, Chuck put his shirt down to hide the hole. He didn't want anyone else to see it. He was ashamed to be so flawed.

The older Visitor reappeared among the crowd, with Keir in his dolphin shape firmly in tow. As soon as Keir saw Chuck, he resumed the form of the ancient sage.

"Now, how does he pay for something?" Hiramus demanded. "We don't have money or any other means of exchange."

"You don't need it," Keir told them both. "Nothing you buy will go home with you, any of you."

"We're eating, aren't we?" Hiramus said, peevishly. "Sleeping? Why can't he take pleasure in buying and enjoying something while he is here? Why should he have to suffer a Public Humiliation Dream just because he is exercising a normal human impulse? Eh?" A much taller man than the guide, he loomed over Keir until his mustaches almost tickled Keir's head.

The little old man looked humbled. "You're quite right, Hiramus. If you are being nourished in other ways, it is appropriate that you consider the inner child as well. You see how I learn from all of you, too?" He nodded to the woman, who grumbled as she picked up the toy and slapped it into Chuck's waiting palms. Keir reached into a pocket and gave something to her. The woman stuffed it into her apron pocket.

Chuck cradled the little rainbow greedily, his misery temporarily forgotten. What a great, great thing the toy was. He'd never seen anything so wonderful in his daily life. All the true colors that ever were, lined up together, marching across his hands. It made him feel rich. He wound up the rainbow carefully with the key, and held it on his upraised palms so he could see the little arch forming and re-forming itself over its painted landscape.

"It's a pretty thing," Keir said, watching him carefully. "Worth all that angst?"

"Well . . . yes," Chuck said. "I mean, I don't know why I shouldn't have a toy. I mean, I wouldn't have thought twice, at home. I wouldn't have had to. I have my own money there."

"Do you need a toy?"

"I just like it," Chuck said, annoyed at being questioned.

"Is the having as good as the getting?"

"Of course!"

But as soon as he had said it, he wasn't sure. Now that he owned it, the glory of the toy seemed to fade a little. He put the difference in its glow down to the difference of the light. The barrow woman had spotlights suspended over her stand to make her merchandise appear its most attractive. That'd be influence again. She was exerting it to make things look so good people would feel the impulse to buy them. Now that he had the toy out in the light of day, it was slightly less spectacular.

He trailed around after Keir, playing with the rainbow toy. As it ran down, he wound up the key. The colored arch ticked over, dipped into its pot of gold, and fell back again. After a hundred or so repetitions, Chuck was beginning to find it as uninspiring as watching the construction of ten million tuna fish sandwiches. The toy no longer gave off the same bright light it had in the beginning. Perhaps its batteries needed replacing. He turned it over to see if there was a hatch. The bottom was solid. The light must be generated by the winding of the key. But he'd never heard of such a thing in his life. Maybe the rainbow wasn't made of light. He peered closely at the stripes, and thought he could see a weave pattern under the glowing surface. The toy wasn't miraculous after all. It was ordinary, even tawdry-looking. Disillusioned, Chuck stuffed it under his arm and pushed through the crowds in his guide's wake. Keir dragged him from booth to booth, explaining the wares.

"Look at these," Keir said, beckoning him to his side at a huge purple tent at one corner of the fair. Its counters were crowded with people. "Marvelous invention. Saves time."

Chuck raised his eyebrows until his forehead furrowed. All he saw were boxes, cartons, and bottles of several sizes and made of different materials. He held up a green glass bottle the size of his palm to look through it. There was nothing inside.

"They're just containers," Chuck said.

"Correct," Keir said. "If you happen to have any spare time, you can put it in here, instead of wasting it. That way, when you need extra time for something, you have it at your fingertips."

"That's insane!" Chuck said. "You can't put time in a bottle. That's just an expression, saving time." Keir gave him that little, wise smile.

"Not here," he said. "Here it's an artifact, the resolution of logic. Your mind, and everyone else's minds, makes puns out of what you hear. Sometimes it manifests itself in reality." Guiltily, Chuck remembered about the hole in his chest. He opened his mouth, but decided he didn't want Keir to ask him to show it until he got back to the train. There were too many people here. What had Hiramus called that embarrassing crowd scene? A Public Humiliation Dream. Chuck didn't want it to begin all over again. "Anyhow, keep your mind open. You'd be astonished at what you can find here that you have always taken for granted."

Feeling like a schoolboy on a distasteful assignment, Chuck picked up one item after another from the table. He didn't care for knickknacks. This stuff reminded him of the possessions of an aunt who collected Victoriana, which he'd always taken to mean anything that was hard to clean and of no real use.

A boy appeared at Chuck's elbow as he held an inlaid box in the air, dutifully examining it. It was black, and the inlay was white and red. He didn't get any more psychic message from it than that. He glanced down at the child, who was staring with bright eyes that looked as big as saucers. Chuck offered him the box, but the boy wasn't looking at that. He was looking at Chuck's rainbow with the same awe Chuck had had when he first saw it.

Chuck took the toy out from under his arm. After going to so much trouble to get it, he was tired of carrying it around with him. It looked cheap and simplistic, nothing that could hold his interest for very long. If the kid wanted it, he could have it. The boy lifted his open palms like a votary as Chuck set the little toy down in them.

At the moment he put it into the boy's hands, the toy became gorgeous again. Rainbow light brighter than before suffused the area, blotting out the purple tent and all the other customers. There seemed to be no one else in the whole world but the two of them, looking at the gleaming rainbow. Chuck regretted his impulse. Now that it looked good again, he wanted it back, but seeing the joy in the child's eyes, he knew he could never take it away. He let his hand drop.

"Good for you," Keir said, appearing at his elbow. The brilliant light faded. The world swung into action again. People appeared from nowhere, stepping up to the booth to buy. The noise that had died away for just that moment came back in full force, striking the ears like cymbals. Chuck stood watching the child. He sat on a stone near the corner of the table with the toy on his knees, rapt, watching the miniature rainbow arch up and over, up and over, striking its pot of gold.

"I had my fun with it," Chuck said, and smiled reminiscently. "He reminds me of one of my kids."

"How many do you have?"

"Three," Chuck said automatically, and knew the statement to be true beyond any doubt. He had three children. He could remember all of them, and everything about them, when they were born, what they looked like, the little personality traits they had, the things he loved about them that no one but a parent would even notice.

Wow, three kids. He had thought he was a teenager, or at least the young man whose face he saw reflected in mirrors and train windows, but that didn't really add up with three children thrown into the calculation. How old was he? He still didn't know, but out of the fog in his mind came one clear memory, that of an upturned little face, his youngest son, smiling at him. "You know, at home I like to buy toys for kids. I do it as much for the fun of buying them, maybe getting a chance to play with them myself—just a little—as for seeing the kids' faces when I give the toys to them."

"I have been remiss," Keir said, with a quirk at the corner of his mouth. "Let's get you some legal tender of your own so your good impulses won't be stifled again."

Chuck followed Keir around a corner and through an arcade he hadn't noticed before. Behind him the rest of the bazaar looked the same, but inside the archway it was a whole new world. Pairs of men and women in expensive suits argued with one another on small cellular telephones, even though Chuck figured out very quickly that they were talking to one another. Burly men uniformed in plain brown overalls steered through the crowd with wheelbarrows full of big, round bags with a double-barred S or L on them, the kind Chuck had always seen in cartoons that represented bank money. Even the smell of the place was different. The tantalizing aroma of spice was gone, and the sharp scent of ink and paper tickled his nose.

"Where is this?" he asked.

"The Money Market," Keir said. "There is direct access to this place from many locations in the Dreamland. We're here to get you some fresh cash."

He followed Keir through rows of curtained booths that started to look less as though they belonged in a carnival and more like a bank. Not quite at the end of a long corridor, Keir stopped off in front of a stall that, although curtained on both sides with draperies of dove gray, had a glass shield that reached from its ceiling down to within six inches of its polished metal counter. Keir took a bag out of his shabby pocket and turned it upside down on the table. Coins, ranging in size from sequins to mayonnaise jar lids, bounded jingling out of the bag. The clean-shaven man in the pinstriped suit behind the window scooped them all up with a single sweep of his hand, and turned away. Chuck was impressed. The guy must have been a genius at marbles.

"So, what's the exchange rate?" Chuck asked, watching the man's back through the window. He was writing in a ledger and dropping the coins one by one into the pan of a balance scale. Chuck couldn't see the other side of the scale.

"One to one," Keir said.

"You mean, you buy the same amount of cash as what you have? No service charge?"

"Certainly not. The prices are fair."

"Then what exactly are you buying?" Chuck asked.

"Money," Keir said.

"But you had money," Chuck said. "Why are you exchanging it for exactly the same thing you just had? Why not give me some of that?"

Keir regarded him with a quizzical glance. "Why would I give you stale cash? This will be nice and fresh."

"Would anyone be able to tell the difference?" Chuck asked, bewildered.

"Fresh money will last longer. Some people say the old stuff has a cachet, but I've never seen the attraction one way or another. Here, look, son. This is Dreamish money."

The banker had come back. He deposited a cluster of objects and began to push them underneath the window toward Keir. Chuck looked at the collection on the counter. There were eight hens and a rooster, five loaves of bread, a cluster of retractable ballpoint pens, pencils and a couple of newspapers. "It doesn't look like cash. It looks like things you've already bought."

"Of course. In a way it is `things,' " Keir said, gathering them all into a small area. The chickens squawked a protest. "These are what money represents."

"Is that all you can get with it?"

"Not at all. Your windup rainbow cost three chickens."

"But I didn't see any chickens!

"It's symbolic! What do you buy with money? It's a medium of exchange to obtain goods or services, yes? Here in the Dreamland we are closer to roots of symbols. It's also influenced by who has it or who observes it. To your toy saleswoman, she sees coins. Someone else might see loaves of bread. It's all Sleeper's whim, depending on who's dreaming whom. Here." Keir spread out one of the newspapers, piled the loaves, pens and pencils, and shooed the chickens onto it, then dropped the whole mass into Chuck's arms. "That should hold you for a while."

"I'd rather not carry live chickens around, Keir." Chuck looked down in alarm. The rooster was staring fixedly at his nose. Chuck tilted his head back to keep it out of pecking range.

The guide shook his head impatiently. "They're not live, they're legal tender. Just wait." He led Chuck out of the labyrinth of the Money Market and into the bazaar. Within a short time, the awkward armful began to shrink. As the guide had promised, the press of other minds was forcing the symbols into coin shape. Soon, Keir was able to help Chuck stuff the much reduced objects into his hip pocket. Most of the money stayed that way, but Chuck felt an urge to take them out again and spend them on something. The chickens particularly were determined to peck a hole in his pocket. Chuck just had to make sure to take them out before he went to bed. He'd never sleep with chickens in his pants.

"Oh, I nearly forgot. Here's a present for you." Keir handed him a small green glass bottle. "A reminder of your good intentions. Keep it up."

"Thanks," said Chuck, putting it deep into his pocket with the money. He heard a tonk, probably the rooster trying out his beak on the glass.

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Framed

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Chapter 18

The second bridge was similar to the first, wide as a road and unyielding to the winds that swept through the ring-shaped canyon, but didn't have the air of eternity or awe. This one was definitely intended to draw people off the mountainside and get them into the market. Once on it, Chuck found he couldn't turn around, not even to look back. When he tried, his feet stuck fast to the pavement. He could only go forward. Was there a spell laid on the bridge, or was it just influence? Or were his feet telling him the truth his head already knew, that he didn't want to go back and watch people plowing fields and changing diapers? He hurried after Bergold and Hiramus, who were waiting for him at the end of the bridge. He'd much rather talk to real people—as real as anyone was in the Dreamland. That held as much appeal for him as the bazaar did.

"You said court," Chuck said, as they walked among the brightly colored tents and stalls. "What's your government like? Who is in charge here?"

"Oh, it's a monarchy," Bergold said, holding up a forestalling hand as a young woman offered him, or rather, her embroidered handkerchiefs. "Our king is Byron the Creative. Always a king, for these last many millennia."

"That's socially incorrect," Chuck complained, shaking his head as the girl turned into an elderly basket-seller and tried to thrust a straw punnet into his hands. "You ought to have some queens."

"We will have a queen next," the Historian said, pleasantly. "His Majesty has one child, a daughter, the princess Leonora."

"One? There have been a lot of queens in history out there. I mean, my plane of existence."

"You must realize the Dreamland changes very slowly compared with your world," Bergold said. "More time seems to have passed while you have been with us, but that is because of all the minds dreaming it. By the same token, it takes a while for ideas to spread widely and be incorporated. For example, queenship. It is not enough for a government to have achieved it. It must gain acceptance in the minds of all sleepers for it to take form here. The way that we here know that something truly exists in the Waking World is if it becomes commonplace in the Dreamland. That is when it attains reality. Otherwise things come and go, often disappearing and only emerging once in a while out of the great Collective Unconscious." He smiled, almost reminiscently. "The occasional vision is good for the imagination. Things pop up in the most unlikely places. The Collective Unconscious is not only the sum of all current minds, but of all history, and that fades slowly."

"Would you call that race memory?" Chuck asked.

"Of a sort. Say rather, a repository. Dreams can bring up things that were long buried, such as visions of dinosaurs and dragons."

"Does it contain all of history, like the sky here?" Chuck asked eagerly.

"Again, not exactly. Only what sleepers' minds send, and as you may guess," Bergold said, "the views are very subjective. The more minds there are reflecting a particular thing, the closer the mass vision comes to being accurate—on the average. It varies also according to intensity, timing and number of the dreamers. That is why we treasure this place, during the times that it exists."

Chuck looked back at the Rock. "You mean it hasn't always been here?"

Bergold chuckled. "I mean that it isn't always here, and has not always been precisely this shape. Our archives record it as having countless different configurations over the millennia. Change is the nature of the Dreamland. When it is here it gives us sights of true events, although again subjective, and without discriminating between the historically important and the unimportant, nor consistently displaying them in an order that gives us historical perspective."

"It's complicated," Chuck said, feeling his head start to spin. He clasped his ears to keep it from literally lifting off his neck.

"Not at all," Bergold said cheerily. "We just accept whatever comes. It's our purpose. We're proud of it."

Chuck glanced around the busy midway, watching people come and go with their purchases. The place was as crowded as a shopping mall at Christmas. The heady air smelled of mixed spice, hot dogs, popcorn, animal dung, perfume and leather. From the other side of the ravine, Chuck had noticed that the bazaar was set up with two concentric rectangles of booths around an open green. Men and women bargained hard with one another, chatting gaily at the tops of their voices. With his newly-minted courteousness, Chuck let people barge in front of him, behind him and nearly through him, until he decided that manners didn't mean letting oneself be trampled. People carrying baskets, paper bags or pushing their shopping in wire carts ambled through the lanes, joking with one another. Children ran around, playing games. A dog sitting in a chair behind a counter sat up and barked as they went by.

"I guess there aren't that many differences between the Waking World and the Dreamland."

"On the contrary," Bergold said. "Since your world created ours, we resemble you a lot more than you resemble us. Like anything done by committee, it's a job lot. Some of it is decidedly wonderful, some uneven, but the king keeps it all in order. Guided by the Sleepers, of course. We are very honored that you have decided to favor us with your presence."

Chuck was impressed, and more than a little humbled. He never had that much faith in higher entities himself, but then, these people had proof that their lives were shaped by a force outside themselves. After all, he was right there, and he could shape reality better than people who lived there and knew what they were doing.

Hiramus stopped at a bookstall and began to turn over scrolls he found in a wooden box full of straw. Chuck lost Bergold at the next booth, which sold lights of every kind, from searchlights to birthday candles. He decided to go on without them. There was so much to see.

He glimpsed Pipistrella seated in a tent on the other side of the fairway. Even though there was no breeze, her clothes still floated around her like a mermaid's hair, defying gravity. A woman in flowing robes and a turban leaned over her hand, talking. Chuck couldn't hear them, but he didn't need to. Pip was having her fortune told. He dismissed her sneeringly as gullible for even listening to a fortune teller. At the same time, Chuck thought it might be fun to have his fortune told. Not that he would lend any real credence to anything he heard. No way! He drifted over that way, drawn by the gypsy woman's tone of voice and Pipistrella's rapt expression. No, he told himself. Don't stop. Keep walking. He wanted to find his truth for himself, not be told it. But it was tempting.

The colors caught his eye from clear across the grassy square in the center. On a broad table under bright lamps were toys. There were whirligigs, marionettes, little trains, farm sets. Chuck loved toys. The best one was a little rainbow made of light that ran by clockwork. As he watched, it tick-tick-ticked over, completing the arch, then cranked back again to the beginning. Keeping his eye on the rhythmic movement, Chuck hurried over.

The toy was the most adorable thing he'd ever seen in his life. When he wound up the key, cunningly hidden in the base, the arch made of liquid flowing color rose up and over a wooden landscape until it fell into the pot of gold on the other side.

"This is wonderful," he said to the woman behind the table. "I have got to have this."

"Certainly," she said. "It's three chickens."

"No, it's a rainbow," Chuck said, lifting it.

"No, sir, I mean it costs three chickens." She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together.

"Is that a kind of money?" Chuck asked. He reached into his pockets, but they were empty. He frowned. He never traveled without cash! But, these weren't really his pockets. Rather, they were, but they weren't physical pockets.

"I don't have any of your kind of money because I'm not from here. I'm . . . I'm a sleeper."

"Uh-huh," the woman said. "And I'm the fount of all knowledge. Three chickens." The sleeves of her white blouse were rolled up to the shoulders of her meaty, well-scrubbed arms, as she continued to arrange knickknacks and toys on the bright calico tablecloth. Chuck appealed to her.

"Look, I really don't have any money, but I'm from what you call the Waking World. Couldn't you please just give it to me? As a present? I really am a Visitor."

"That's a fine story!" the woman said, her expression scornful. "All I can say is, if you don't have the ready, you can't have the merchandise." She took the mechanical rainbow out of his hands and put it back into its place. Sitting on the cloth, it continued to operate, arching and collapsing, arching and collapsing. Chuck waited until she was busy talking to someone else, and reached for it. She didn't even turn around, but her hand shot right over and smacked him on the wrist. Chuck clutched his arm and hopped back a pace. The woman rounded on him, seeming to grow two feet taller.

"You can't have it," she said firmly, putting a protective hand over the toy. "I don't care if you're the Seventh Sleeper yourself. There are rules around here." The little rainbow glowed through her fingers. Chuck had never wanted anything so much in his life. He was sure it was meant to be his, no matter what she said. He knew it. It had looked like a simple windup toy when he had first spotted it, but the more he was told he couldn't have it, the more beautiful it became. Its paint grew lustrous, and its light glowed more warmly, until he desired it more than anything else he had ever wanted in his life.

"Look." Chuck yanked his shirt up and showed her his navel cord. The silver strand glinted in the sunlight. "What about that? Only Visitors have something like that. Right?"

"Oh, how cute!" the woman cooed. "My son has a tail. Not as fancy as this, mind you." She reached over and twanged the cord with a flick of her finger.

"Ulll-llll-llll . . ."

The reaction shook Chuck so much he feared he would turn inside out. A warning tone rose inside him, drowning out the sound of the crowd. The vibration shook every sinew in his body. He goggled at her, helpless to move. His arms stretched out and began to wiggle. People came from all directions to watch. He wanted them to go away, but he couldn't form coherent words. They began to laugh at him, pointing. The ground started to crack under his feet. "Ulll-lll-lll . . ."

"What is wrong here?" The sharp voice of Hiramus cut through the buzz in Chuck's head, and two steady hands held him by the shoulders until the vibrating stopped. The older man stared fiercely at the crowd until it dispersed, leaving only Chuck and the dealer behind the table in the immediate vicinity. It was as if the hundreds of others simply ceased to exist. "What is going on?"

"Uh, I was trying to buy this rainbow," Chuck said, catching his breath. He reached for the toy. The woman automatically pulled it just out of reach. "I would really like to have it. But I have nothing to buy it with."

"Wait here," Hiramus said. He strode away.

Chuck was thankful to have stopped shaking. He'd been buzzing so hard he thought he would fall apart. He put a hand on his chest to feel his heartbeat. His fingers encountered a strange anomaly, a dip in his ribcage right above his sternum. Turning away from the woman behind the counter, he pulled up his sweatshirt and looked down at his chest. Chuck blinked, then stared in horror. There was a hole in his chest about the diameter of an apple just about where his heart was. He could see the ground behind him through it. Unable to believe his eyes, he felt the space with his fingers. They encountered no resistance. Part of his chest was gone! He was falling apart. Where did that piece of him go? What had caused the hole? It looked like a cartoon cannonball had gone through him. But no one had shot him. He examined the opening again. There wasn't any blood or icky stuff. His insides were there, dark red and white, but the edge was perfectly smooth, as though he was looking at them through glass. A pair of round, gold eyes regarded him quizzically. Panic-stricken, Chuck spun around. A stray cat had wandered out of the crowd, and had been looking up at him through the hole.

Scanning the ground, Chuck lifted his feet one at a time, wondering if the section had fallen out while he was vibrating, or some time before, and looked again. Where was it?

He tried to think about the last time he had seen his chest intact, and realized he never had, here in the Dreamland. He never undressed. His clothes always became pajamas and turned back to clothes again, whenever he needed them to, and his skin always cleaned and shaved itself. The piece could have been missing from his body since he arrived. Chuck had a dire, sinking feeling it had been gone all along. The space matched the hollow despair he had always felt. Only here, in the astral plane, could it ever manifest itself physically. Something was literally missing from him and his life. As if he needed the proof.

"There he is," Hiramus's voice said, from somewhere behind him. Quickly, Chuck put his shirt down to hide the hole. He didn't want anyone else to see it. He was ashamed to be so flawed.

The older Visitor reappeared among the crowd, with Keir in his dolphin shape firmly in tow. As soon as Keir saw Chuck, he resumed the form of the ancient sage.

"Now, how does he pay for something?" Hiramus demanded. "We don't have money or any other means of exchange."

"You don't need it," Keir told them both. "Nothing you buy will go home with you, any of you."

"We're eating, aren't we?" Hiramus said, peevishly. "Sleeping? Why can't he take pleasure in buying and enjoying something while he is here? Why should he have to suffer a Public Humiliation Dream just because he is exercising a normal human impulse? Eh?" A much taller man than the guide, he loomed over Keir until his mustaches almost tickled Keir's head.

The little old man looked humbled. "You're quite right, Hiramus. If you are being nourished in other ways, it is appropriate that you consider the inner child as well. You see how I learn from all of you, too?" He nodded to the woman, who grumbled as she picked up the toy and slapped it into Chuck's waiting palms. Keir reached into a pocket and gave something to her. The woman stuffed it into her apron pocket.

Chuck cradled the little rainbow greedily, his misery temporarily forgotten. What a great, great thing the toy was. He'd never seen anything so wonderful in his daily life. All the true colors that ever were, lined up together, marching across his hands. It made him feel rich. He wound up the rainbow carefully with the key, and held it on his upraised palms so he could see the little arch forming and re-forming itself over its painted landscape.

"It's a pretty thing," Keir said, watching him carefully. "Worth all that angst?"

"Well . . . yes," Chuck said. "I mean, I don't know why I shouldn't have a toy. I mean, I wouldn't have thought twice, at home. I wouldn't have had to. I have my own money there."

"Do you need a toy?"

"I just like it," Chuck said, annoyed at being questioned.

"Is the having as good as the getting?"

"Of course!"

But as soon as he had said it, he wasn't sure. Now that he owned it, the glory of the toy seemed to fade a little. He put the difference in its glow down to the difference of the light. The barrow woman had spotlights suspended over her stand to make her merchandise appear its most attractive. That'd be influence again. She was exerting it to make things look so good people would feel the impulse to buy them. Now that he had the toy out in the light of day, it was slightly less spectacular.

He trailed around after Keir, playing with the rainbow toy. As it ran down, he wound up the key. The colored arch ticked over, dipped into its pot of gold, and fell back again. After a hundred or so repetitions, Chuck was beginning to find it as uninspiring as watching the construction of ten million tuna fish sandwiches. The toy no longer gave off the same bright light it had in the beginning. Perhaps its batteries needed replacing. He turned it over to see if there was a hatch. The bottom was solid. The light must be generated by the winding of the key. But he'd never heard of such a thing in his life. Maybe the rainbow wasn't made of light. He peered closely at the stripes, and thought he could see a weave pattern under the glowing surface. The toy wasn't miraculous after all. It was ordinary, even tawdry-looking. Disillusioned, Chuck stuffed it under his arm and pushed through the crowds in his guide's wake. Keir dragged him from booth to booth, explaining the wares.

"Look at these," Keir said, beckoning him to his side at a huge purple tent at one corner of the fair. Its counters were crowded with people. "Marvelous invention. Saves time."

Chuck raised his eyebrows until his forehead furrowed. All he saw were boxes, cartons, and bottles of several sizes and made of different materials. He held up a green glass bottle the size of his palm to look through it. There was nothing inside.

"They're just containers," Chuck said.

"Correct," Keir said. "If you happen to have any spare time, you can put it in here, instead of wasting it. That way, when you need extra time for something, you have it at your fingertips."

"That's insane!" Chuck said. "You can't put time in a bottle. That's just an expression, saving time." Keir gave him that little, wise smile.

"Not here," he said. "Here it's an artifact, the resolution of logic. Your mind, and everyone else's minds, makes puns out of what you hear. Sometimes it manifests itself in reality." Guiltily, Chuck remembered about the hole in his chest. He opened his mouth, but decided he didn't want Keir to ask him to show it until he got back to the train. There were too many people here. What had Hiramus called that embarrassing crowd scene? A Public Humiliation Dream. Chuck didn't want it to begin all over again. "Anyhow, keep your mind open. You'd be astonished at what you can find here that you have always taken for granted."

Feeling like a schoolboy on a distasteful assignment, Chuck picked up one item after another from the table. He didn't care for knickknacks. This stuff reminded him of the possessions of an aunt who collected Victoriana, which he'd always taken to mean anything that was hard to clean and of no real use.

A boy appeared at Chuck's elbow as he held an inlaid box in the air, dutifully examining it. It was black, and the inlay was white and red. He didn't get any more psychic message from it than that. He glanced down at the child, who was staring with bright eyes that looked as big as saucers. Chuck offered him the box, but the boy wasn't looking at that. He was looking at Chuck's rainbow with the same awe Chuck had had when he first saw it.

Chuck took the toy out from under his arm. After going to so much trouble to get it, he was tired of carrying it around with him. It looked cheap and simplistic, nothing that could hold his interest for very long. If the kid wanted it, he could have it. The boy lifted his open palms like a votary as Chuck set the little toy down in them.

At the moment he put it into the boy's hands, the toy became gorgeous again. Rainbow light brighter than before suffused the area, blotting out the purple tent and all the other customers. There seemed to be no one else in the whole world but the two of them, looking at the gleaming rainbow. Chuck regretted his impulse. Now that it looked good again, he wanted it back, but seeing the joy in the child's eyes, he knew he could never take it away. He let his hand drop.

"Good for you," Keir said, appearing at his elbow. The brilliant light faded. The world swung into action again. People appeared from nowhere, stepping up to the booth to buy. The noise that had died away for just that moment came back in full force, striking the ears like cymbals. Chuck stood watching the child. He sat on a stone near the corner of the table with the toy on his knees, rapt, watching the miniature rainbow arch up and over, up and over, striking its pot of gold.

"I had my fun with it," Chuck said, and smiled reminiscently. "He reminds me of one of my kids."

"How many do you have?"

"Three," Chuck said automatically, and knew the statement to be true beyond any doubt. He had three children. He could remember all of them, and everything about them, when they were born, what they looked like, the little personality traits they had, the things he loved about them that no one but a parent would even notice.

Wow, three kids. He had thought he was a teenager, or at least the young man whose face he saw reflected in mirrors and train windows, but that didn't really add up with three children thrown into the calculation. How old was he? He still didn't know, but out of the fog in his mind came one clear memory, that of an upturned little face, his youngest son, smiling at him. "You know, at home I like to buy toys for kids. I do it as much for the fun of buying them, maybe getting a chance to play with them myself—just a little—as for seeing the kids' faces when I give the toys to them."

"I have been remiss," Keir said, with a quirk at the corner of his mouth. "Let's get you some legal tender of your own so your good impulses won't be stifled again."

Chuck followed Keir around a corner and through an arcade he hadn't noticed before. Behind him the rest of the bazaar looked the same, but inside the archway it was a whole new world. Pairs of men and women in expensive suits argued with one another on small cellular telephones, even though Chuck figured out very quickly that they were talking to one another. Burly men uniformed in plain brown overalls steered through the crowd with wheelbarrows full of big, round bags with a double-barred S or L on them, the kind Chuck had always seen in cartoons that represented bank money. Even the smell of the place was different. The tantalizing aroma of spice was gone, and the sharp scent of ink and paper tickled his nose.

"Where is this?" he asked.

"The Money Market," Keir said. "There is direct access to this place from many locations in the Dreamland. We're here to get you some fresh cash."

He followed Keir through rows of curtained booths that started to look less as though they belonged in a carnival and more like a bank. Not quite at the end of a long corridor, Keir stopped off in front of a stall that, although curtained on both sides with draperies of dove gray, had a glass shield that reached from its ceiling down to within six inches of its polished metal counter. Keir took a bag out of his shabby pocket and turned it upside down on the table. Coins, ranging in size from sequins to mayonnaise jar lids, bounded jingling out of the bag. The clean-shaven man in the pinstriped suit behind the window scooped them all up with a single sweep of his hand, and turned away. Chuck was impressed. The guy must have been a genius at marbles.

"So, what's the exchange rate?" Chuck asked, watching the man's back through the window. He was writing in a ledger and dropping the coins one by one into the pan of a balance scale. Chuck couldn't see the other side of the scale.

"One to one," Keir said.

"You mean, you buy the same amount of cash as what you have? No service charge?"

"Certainly not. The prices are fair."

"Then what exactly are you buying?" Chuck asked.

"Money," Keir said.

"But you had money," Chuck said. "Why are you exchanging it for exactly the same thing you just had? Why not give me some of that?"

Keir regarded him with a quizzical glance. "Why would I give you stale cash? This will be nice and fresh."

"Would anyone be able to tell the difference?" Chuck asked, bewildered.

"Fresh money will last longer. Some people say the old stuff has a cachet, but I've never seen the attraction one way or another. Here, look, son. This is Dreamish money."

The banker had come back. He deposited a cluster of objects and began to push them underneath the window toward Keir. Chuck looked at the collection on the counter. There were eight hens and a rooster, five loaves of bread, a cluster of retractable ballpoint pens, pencils and a couple of newspapers. "It doesn't look like cash. It looks like things you've already bought."

"Of course. In a way it is `things,' " Keir said, gathering them all into a small area. The chickens squawked a protest. "These are what money represents."

"Is that all you can get with it?"

"Not at all. Your windup rainbow cost three chickens."

"But I didn't see any chickens!

"It's symbolic! What do you buy with money? It's a medium of exchange to obtain goods or services, yes? Here in the Dreamland we are closer to roots of symbols. It's also influenced by who has it or who observes it. To your toy saleswoman, she sees coins. Someone else might see loaves of bread. It's all Sleeper's whim, depending on who's dreaming whom. Here." Keir spread out one of the newspapers, piled the loaves, pens and pencils, and shooed the chickens onto it, then dropped the whole mass into Chuck's arms. "That should hold you for a while."

"I'd rather not carry live chickens around, Keir." Chuck looked down in alarm. The rooster was staring fixedly at his nose. Chuck tilted his head back to keep it out of pecking range.

The guide shook his head impatiently. "They're not live, they're legal tender. Just wait." He led Chuck out of the labyrinth of the Money Market and into the bazaar. Within a short time, the awkward armful began to shrink. As the guide had promised, the press of other minds was forcing the symbols into coin shape. Soon, Keir was able to help Chuck stuff the much reduced objects into his hip pocket. Most of the money stayed that way, but Chuck felt an urge to take them out again and spend them on something. The chickens particularly were determined to peck a hole in his pocket. Chuck just had to make sure to take them out before he went to bed. He'd never sleep with chickens in his pants.

"Oh, I nearly forgot. Here's a present for you." Keir handed him a small green glass bottle. "A reminder of your good intentions. Keep it up."

"Thanks," said Chuck, putting it deep into his pocket with the money. He heard a tonk, probably the rooster trying out his beak on the glass.

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Framed