Do our dreams precede us? If dreams did not come somehow before the event, if they were not part of the pan-conscious realms of the human experience, those realms where perhaps the dreams of animals are dreamed and are the presentation of the meditations of something timeless and unending, would they serve to predict the future? We know that our dreams can speak to us about ourselves, but do they do more? Do we have connections with some kind of consciousness below our consciousness that is more than an individual consciousness?

Here was C.S. Lewis, divided utterly and frozen neatly. The machine had matched all his parts up with minute precision, but he had been frozen too quickly for anything to heal together. He was alive: they could detect the nearly undetectable mysterious signals in the cloven brain (how they showed up no scientist yet understood, but there they were). He was in cryostasis with fifty billion other humans, and like them he was dreaming. And unknown to the diminishing, thawed population, building together a world of dreams that was beginning to manifest its influences in the consciousness of the thawed and usually awake.

Had anybody considered the threat of collective dreaming on a massive scale? Perhaps, but not in the standard publications of the field. Klamm, however, had a drawer dedicated to the subject; but this was half empty. The real expert was the Janitor Angelicus . . . but nobody realized this.

[I confess, dear reader, it is a curious position for an author to find himself in. Here we have an army of frozen sleepers, trapped, but searching, finding their way into the dreams of the living who must join them for about a third of their life, seeking influence, and more importantly, achieving some clarity about what has been and is to come, though with the stubborn human inability to harness this to any good purpose. What am I to do with them? Should all the suspended humans begin to disappear one by one, overcome with the futility and sorrow? Should a wave of bizarre religious manifestations overtake the human race? Should the whole lot be put to sleep except some malleable infants the dreaming hordes then fight to control?]

C.S. Lewis joined the dream and was astonished. He wandered the vast, dark landscapes full of nightmares and he flew over sunlit meadows viewing wonders. He watched a woman transform herself into an apple, be eaten, and then ooze out of the ears of the person who had eaten her, take the shape of a swarm of butterflies and flutter toward distant caves of ice.

“What does it mean?” he wondered, and then realized that the only way to know was to try it. “Maybe later,” he muttered in his dream. He decided to explore a little more before trying anything too unusual. And in this way he eventually discovered how to enter the dreams of the thawed. Specifically, the dreams of the very same Sage of Hinga Lum Dura who had sent him to the land of cryostasis.

Here Endeth This Here Episode 9. More to Come, in the future . . . when I get hit by another idea someday . . .

“Do you have cryogenetic facilities here?” Kat asked. She’d opened the first aid kit and bound the two parts of C.S. Lewis together with the aid of an emergency realigner.

“Uh?” the sage said. Then, “Right! Quick! Uh . . . Wait! I’ll get conveyance.” Then he sank onto the grass and went into a trance.

“What?” the Criten said. “Where’s a com?”

But they didn’t need a com to call emergencies. An ambulance streaked up and stopped, quivering. Lewis was inside in no time and they plunged him into cryostasis in five seconds.

“Can he made it?” Kat asked the technurse.

“Probably. I’ve seen worse.”

Which made Kat’s mind boggle.

* * *
They were sitting in the relaxing ambiance of the slightly overheated lounge at the Cryogenic Center on Antartica Quine.

“So what were you trying to accomplish with the machete?” Kat asked the sage.

“I was going to release Unk and the Rabbit.”

“The days of the Criten ain’t over, fool,” the Criten said to the sage.

He shrugged. “I thought they were. Perhaps I misunderstood Kameldeergard, but I went to great trouble to get that metaphysicalizing machete.”

“Woulda made a clean break, eh?” the Criten asked.

“Absolute. Magical, really. Wonderful. Now its gone and C.S. Lewis is on ice.”

“Yeah,” Kat said, “and they got no room for him here.”

“Same story everywhere,” the Criten said. “Nobody has room; there’s fifty billion cryostatic souls. I hear they’ve got a new facility their shipping them all to: The Iceberg of Paradise . . . or something.”

“They’ve got a transmodular corresponder to transport them: all high-tech,” the sage pointed out.

“No doubt,” Kat said. “Only problem is we still don’t have a solution. No way to thaw them alive.”

After a pause, the Criten said, “I wonder if they dream.”

It wasn’t till they were entering the atmosphere that the Criten remembered the broken engomater control. “Oh no!”

“What?” Kat said, and then realized with horror they had no control for the engomater. “We’ll be toasted in the atmosphere.”

But they weren’t. Somehow the retro-emissions control mechanism that would automatically punish with correlative death anybody contributing to environmental pollution didn’t kick in. They entered the atmosphere with normal heat shields, left a trail of plumes and disturbances, and reached their destination without further complication.

As they stepped out of the ship, the sage greeted them: “Chow!”

“Chow?”

“Chow is what we say here,” he replied out of great serenity.

“Well . . . hi!” Kat said.

“And your trip?” the sage asked enigmatically.

“Eh?” the Criten said.

“I think he means, How was it,” Lewis supplied.

They all looked at the sage and he beamed out of an even greater serenity, so they all said it had been fine.

“Any problems?” the sage asked, grinning.

“N—” Kat began, and then got thoughtful. “Yeah, actually. With the engomater.”

“Ah?” the sage managed, through his face was still split by the grin and his eyes were all squinted. He looked grotesque.

“Yeah,” the Criten said. “I broke the control for the Engomater, but it didn’t destroy us.”

“How peculiar,” the sage said, relaxing the grin and returning to some of the serenity, and an irritating, knowing tone of voice.

“Is it?” Kat asked.

“Isn’t it?”

“Of course, but what have you got to do with it, you cod?”

“I did it,” the sage said, returning to the grin. “I know how to control it . . . after . . . the being born out of the womb of language.”

“Oh!” replied all three.

“There is something else I must do,” the sage said, taking a silver machete out of a sheath that hung from his waist. “I must cleave in sunder that which has been joined.” And he aimed a blow at the Criten.

But C.S. Lewis interposed himself and received the blow, and was riven. Kat and the Criten looked in horror, and the sage watched in horror as his magical machete evaporated, its task forever accomplished.

“That fool!” he shouted, free of all serenity. “That thing cost me a great ordeal!”

The Criten gazed at the cryostasis ad. “If I weren’t in the opposite of marketing,” he muttered, “I’d say that sounds like a serious business proposition.” And to his surprise, he was tempted to sell the idea to the inevitable Yumar Canapia. He flipped off the vid and swivelled around to face the front of the craft, gazing on the wonders of the nebula through which they were passing.

“How long till we get there?” Kat asked.

“Another week or so. Are you sure he’ll be there?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

The Criten twiddled the engomater control, frowning. “I’m worried about all the Lounies, Kat.”

“Yeah, they look like they’re getting out of hand, don’t they?”

“I don’t suppose they’ll do any real harm.”

“You mean you hope they’ll do some real harm?”

“It’s such a bizarre situation,” the Criten said, and snapped off the little ball that controlled the engomater. “Rats!”

“Well, at least we won’t need the engomater till we get near. Maybe you should hold off on replacing it so you don’t break it again.” Kat was folding the laundry, and she tossed the Criten some socks.

They worked in silence for a while, then C.S. Lewis came in. “I’ve been watching things,” he said, sitting down and staring out at the nebula. He was jittery, and Kat noticed.

“What’s eating you?”

“It’s the Lounies,” Lewis said.

“Don’t worry about them. They’re no worse than a Spontaneous Anomalator Device—can we just call it SAD now?”

“We haven’t got to the bottom of the SAD, have we?” Lewis asked.

“Accounticon,” the Criten said, smirking.

“Now we’ve got Klamm,” Kat pointed out, “And the Raven. Have you factored them in?”

The Criten raised his eyebrows, “Oh yeah. They have to all be tied in, don’t they?”

“Anyway,” Lewis said, “I’m worried about the Lounies.”

“Did you ever meet Brother Anopheles?” the Criten asked him.

Lewis, of course, had not. “Who’s that?”

“Anopheles is keeping an eye on Felonius Assault, and he’s an agent of Klamm. Pastor Fel is actually exploiting the SADs. My theory is that the Lounies are exploding because he’s really working the SADs, or has imported more of them, or something like that.”

“Doesn’t that mean something’s impending?” Lewis asked.

“That’s what I would think; but Kat’s point—which she made before you came in—is that it can only lead to disaster.”

“Right . . . “

“So, think of what shape it could take.”

Lewis meditated for a while the Criten continued folding the socks. Kat had finished and was putting everything into the basket.

“Blow up the planet?” Lewis ventured.

“No,” the Criten said. “Try: opening up a vortex into the Transcendental Arrangement that sucks all that activity off the planet. Like the flushing of a giant toilet.”

“It can’t be that easy!” Lewis exclaimed, but he was pacing the deck now, excited.

* * *
What none of them were taking into account, was that the Doc, now that he was no longer human, was interested, for his wife’s sake, in cryogenesis.

Coming soon . . .

I wrote it all in an hour . . .[drums]

The Chronicles of Fundamentarlia

My muse, I guess, is a pretty rude one . . .[theme song]

Episode 9: C.S. Lewis on Cryogenesis

It hits me, you know, and then it leaves. I am its slave, really. [mysterious music while panning the milky way]

Inspired by a Line from Lower Wisdom

[cut to guy typing at a computer, then back to interview]

DON”T MISS IT! STARTS SOON

He must be a great guy. You know, I’ve seen him arguing with Roger Scruton on his blog, giving medical advice to Emergent futurists, questioning South Africans . . . you name it. What can I say . . .