The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny Page B

nostalgia and she wanted to dance again, as she had once long ago. The season and the company, compounded with the music and the punch and the decorations, made her foot tap, slowly, and turned her mind to memories of a spotlight and a stage filled with color and movement and herself. She listened to the talk.
    “… If you can transmit them and receive them, then you can record them, can’t you?” Minton was asking.
    “Yes,” said Render.
    “That’s what I thought. Why don’t they write more about that angle of the thing?”
    “Another five or ten years—perhaps less—and they will. Right now though, the use of playback is restricted to qualified personnel.”
    “Why?”
    “Well”—Render paused to light another cigarette—“to be completely frank, it is to keep the whole area under control until we know more about it. The thing could be exploited commercially—and perhaps with disastrous results—if it were left wide open.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean that I could take a fairly stable person and in his mind construct any sort of dream that you could name, and many that you could not—dreams ranging from violence and sex to sadism and perversion—dreams with a plot, like a total-participation story, or dreams which border upon insanity itself: wish-fulfillment dreams on any subject, cast in any manner. I could even pick a visual arts style, from expressionism to surrealism, if you’d like. A dream of violence in a cubist setting? Like that? Great! You could even be the horse of Guernica. I could set it up. I could record the whole thing and play it back to you, or anyone else, any number of times.”
    “God!”
    “Yes, God. I could make you God, too, if you’d like that—and I could make the Creation last you a full seven days. I control the time-sense, the internal clock, and I can stretch actual minutes into subjective hours.”
    “Sooner or later this thing will happen, won’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “What will the results be?”
    “No one really knows.”
    “Boss,” asked Bennie softly, “could you bring a memory to life again? Could you resurrect something from out of the past and make it live over again in a person’s mind, and make it just as though the whole thing was real, all over again?”
    Render bit his lip, stared at her strangely.
    “Yes,” he said, after a long pause, “but it wouldn’t really be a good thing to do. It would encourage living in the past, which is now a nonexistent time. It would be a detriment to mental health. It would encourage regression, reversion, would become another means of neurotic escape into the past.”
    The Nutcracker Suite finished, the sounds of Swan Lake filled the room.
    “Still,” she said, “I should like so to be the swan again…”
    She rose slowly and executed a few clumsy steps—a hefty, tipsy swan in a russet dress.
    She flushed then and sat down quickly. Then she laughed and everyone joined her.
    “Where would you like to be?” Minton asked Heydell.
    The small doctor smiled.
    “Back on a certain weekend during the summer of my third year in med school,” he said. “Yes, I’d wear out that tape in a week. How about you, son? he asked Peter.
    “I’m too young to have any good memories yet,” Peter replied. “What about you, Jill?”
    “I don’t know… I think I’d like being a little girl again,” she said, “and having Daddy—I mean, my father—read to me on a Sunday afternoon, in the wintertime.”
    She glanced at Render then.
    “And you, Charlie?” she asked. “If you were being unprofessional for a moment, what would your moment be?”
    “This one,” he said, smiling. “I’m happy right where I am, in the present, where I belong.”
    “Are you, are you really?”
    “Yes!” he said, and he took another cup of punch.
    Then he laughed.
    “Yes, I really am.”
    A soft snore came from beside him. Bennie had dozed off.
    And the music went round and round, and Jill looked from father to son and