Night People

The gash on his face was leaking again. A fresh gobbet trickled down to his left wrist, wiggling across the back of his hand to drip from the thumb side of his palm.

Deven sighed and shook the crimson droplet into the maw of a cabin waste processor by his chair. Thoroughly distracted now, he glanced up from the Martian history assignment glaring up at him from the proscenium of the student work slate.

The talking head of the docent floated eerily above the reanimation of fossil sea floor denizens discovered the previous century. Another stray crimson driblet slithered across the stage of the little machine, confounding the delicate fabric of light.

Beyond the armored window of his bedroom twilight drifted across the Daedalia Planum. Deven was new to Mars. He had been born on the Oberon Habitat shortly before solar storms fried its fledgling pharmaceuticals industry.

This had been Deven’s first day at Einstein Middle School and a complete disaster.

First off, he was completely unprepared for the spelling test–thirteen out of twenty wrong. Deven was convinced the teacher had come from some mental holding tank. Anyway, she seemed to be of the opinion that telling his score to the entire class would somehow shame him into improving his performance.

Then in his Kineas class he’d been forced into the basketball drills. They didn’t do things like basketball on Oberon. A Lunar orbit doesn’t lend well to gravity type sports.

In any event, the coach was running one of their standard drills, a figure eight, three-man weave–he found all that out later on. The thing was, Deven had never even seen a basketball before, and while the other kids made it look easy, he found out differently.

The inevitable crash with another boy knocked him unconscious. His face got slashed when he connected with a bench on the sidelines. Luckily, the corner just missed his left eye.

His father was furious. Doctors were few in the Cities and very expensive.

That sort of thing generally rated a beating, but that didn’t happen this time. Deven would see the same doctor again when he got the syn-corium gel off the wound and new bruises would cause too many questions. The last doctor on Oberon had been particularly suspicious of Deven’s many falls in the colony’s microgravity.

Deven finally rolled the slate up and carefully got ready for bed. The bleeding stopped on its own when he finally got horizontal. The feeling of angry hopelessness never stopped.

He had sworn that he would not cry that night. However, it was dark in his bedroom and his face was wet with tears when he finally fell asleep.

And that was how it all began.

Deven was not particularly fond of his dreams lately. He frequently found himself stuck naked in the girls’ gym just as the bell rang. He hated the helpless feeling of stupidity he got in dreams like that.

This dream seemed to be going the same direction. It started in the school gym where he seemed to be floating forward through a doorway. He looked up and saw there was a sign over the door. It read, "Girls Locker Room."

In real life Deven had never been in the girls’ side of any gym. He had no idea what it would look like––hadn’t even thought of what to expect. He didn’t see any urinals. The fact was he didn’t know whether girls peed standing up or not. He didn’t see why they wouldn’t but he didn’t have sisters and just didn’t know for sure.

The room was darkened except for the emergency glow bugs in the floor. There was an odd crispness to the scene which seemed very different from other dreams. And there was another thing: he couldn’t see his own body. Well, he could see his feet if he looked down, but in his other dreams it always seemed as though he were watching himself, from the outside, as though he were in an old holovid. An odd different kind of smell came from the sweaty gym clothes. He could see them overflowing the feeder-tray of a big recycling hamper sitting on the blue ceram floor of the shower. The boy’s floor was gray polyag foam.

Deven heard a loud clatter and saw a wet pinkish puddle disappear as it got slurped up by the gelatinous tongue of the power mop. Mr. Victorio, the night janitor, was cleaning up the shower floor. He stumbled into the mop’s desiccator urn and nearly fell over backward. His arms windmilled as he tried to turn and regain his balance. He might have made it, but one of his boots scooted sideways and slid under one of the tanks mag-glide rails. He ended up hammering the side of his face against the main shower control panel.

Deven was taking Hispanic linguistics this year but Mr. Victorio came back up off the floor with words that he was fairly sure even his teacher, Mrs. Wu, wouldn’t know. He sure didn’t.

Before Deven could move, Mr. Victorio walked right through him to get to the towel dispenser by the sinks. Apparently people can do that sort of thing in a nightmare, and this certainly was that.

Anyway, the man’s left cheek bore a deep gash and blood was dripping all over the place. Deven could sympathize and figured this was just another dream version of his own miserable day.

Then he saw the girl’s body lying motionless on the shower floor. Blood streamed from a deep slice on the side of her neck. She was about Deven’s age and dressed up in some black frilly outfit–the kind he’d seen in several of his father’s zines.

The rest of the night Deven drifted through the usual nonsense of dream worlds. Fairy queens on winged horses became giant frog princes and his mother’s prize rocking chair morphed into an Earth style cornfield. He even had to relive a version of the spelling test. Eventually though, a pale orange strip of sunlight crept up the wall opposite his bed. Cat wandered into the room and vaulted up on Deven’s chest to tell him that it was time for school.

That morning Deven had to dodge hazy patches of police garble fields to get to his classes. The other kids were talking about someone getting killed or something the night before. He had never seen anyone dead up close before, but the fields scrambled light and kept everyone from seeing the body. No one seemed to think it was all that unusual an occurrence for this particular neighborhood.

The principal, Mrs. Donnoghue came on over the comm system with announcements about volleyball team tryouts and that Mr. Victorio would be away from work for some time. She didn’t say a word about the police.

In the next few days Deven’s spelling improved and his scores weren’t entertaining enough to recite to the class. He even made the volleyball B team.

His nights, however, became far more interesting. He was done with his homework and in bed by 9 p.m. every evening now, impatiently waiting for sleep to come on. This was a tactic that worked well to keep him out of his father’s way during the worst of the drinking. It was no help for his mother though. Her soft crying often kept Deven awake for hours.

But eventually sleep did come and he was through again, to wherever it was that he went in these dreams. It felt like being inside a ping-pong ball at first, all pure featureless white; with a feeling that he was just waking up rather than being asleep. Sometimes he would just start drifting and discover that he had arrived somewhere. Sometimes he even knew where that was. Mostly though, it was more like switching address codes on the holo-net. If he thought of something interesting he wanted to see he was just there.

Most of the places he visited weren’t particularly interesting, like the library over at the University Sector. He had never been there, but always imagined the place would be filled with attractive energetic people doing important research and things. Deven saw a lot of the old neuro-gel processors, and student slates like his. There were plenty of people, but mostly everyone just looked tired—whispering dejectedly to their slates and falling asleep over desks.

He did have one kind of spooky moment in the rare books collection where they kept the old paged volumes–all that was left from the burnings of Earth’s Enlightenment Period. The room was set up like an old fashioned Vicky parlor and a girl around thirteen was sitting in an armchair with a high back. She glanced up from an old-style paper book and looked right at him. She didn’t look through him. She actually saw him.

That spooked him and he decided to shift to a store he remembered downtown. The girl’s face bothered him for awhile after that. She looked scared about something.

A couple of nights later he drifted through the same library. He was wandering through the stacks again when he heard a voice behind him. "Who are you?"

He looked over his shoulder quickly. It was the same girl. He didn’t even think about it this time. He was just out of there.

Then he was walking along the side of a wall of giant file cases—that was what they looked like to him. The place was lit up like a baseball field and people were standing around tables droning into comm tiaras.

He got closer and could see that the tables each held a human body–unmoving human bodies. The people doing the droning were all dressed up in red surgical gowns, and once in a while he heard a high-pitched whining sound. The whining belonged to the sonic bone saws.

He finally figured out he was dreaming about the city morgue and drifted over to one of the tables. The lonely body of a child was lying there; it was the girl he had seen the week before, still dressed up in the little black frilly outfit.

One of the technicians stood by the table holding a soniblade. She seemed surprised about something she had just found and called to one of the others at another table.

"Doctor Ramirez...Doctor...Sir! Please come over here. Please hurry." Her hands flew up to cover her eyes. "Oh God, please no," she whispered, and then screamed, "Doctor...quick...I need you!"

A portly little man with a Santa Clause face turned around looking thoroughly irritated at the interruption. He dropped his saw on the table when he saw the woman’s face. "What’s the trouble Irene?"

"This is one of the cadavers we couldn’t get to last week, Doctor," she said, in a gravelly whisper. "I just pulled it out of the stasis tank."

Her voice was shaking, and she seemed to be having a hard time breathing. "It’s been in there more than sixty hours."

The woman had reached out to touch the side of the little girl’s throat while she was talking, then she jerked it back. "Doctor...just...please...just humor me for a moment. Just take a quick look here."

Dr. Ramirez groaned and shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "Irene...this is a morgue. We have dead people here...lots of them right now. It’s late; I’m tired, and you are beginning to get on my very last nerve."

With a great show of exasperation he touched his fingertips to the side of the girl’s throat. "Alright, alright...okay, better now?"

It was only a second later that his face froze in horror and he whispered, "Oh, sweet Mother of God."

He screamed something at a clerk across the room, and then he hit the little girl as hard as he could, right in the middle of her chest.

"Who are you?"

Deven jumped back from the table and stepped into an instrument tray. Actually, he stepped right through it. He glanced to his right and found himself nearly eye to eye with the girl he had seen in the library a few seconds ago.

"What...?" he stammered out.

"I want to know who you are!" she pronounced slowly and angrily.

Behind them, total chaos had erupted around the little girl on the table and no one seemed to notice the two teenage specters.

Deven wasn’t paying much attention to all of this. His companion seemed very irritated with all the noise and confusion. She grabbed his wrist. "Come on. We’re going to have a little talk."