Impossible Dreamers

Chapter 49 (quetwi-ir): The changing mountain

Outside of dreaming, days went on much as before, except that there were more and more announcements about the Festival. A big screen was put up in the factory, where everyone could see it. Almost all that was said on it was how wonderful the Festival would be, and how happy everyone should be about it.

There was a thought scanner here, too, but unlike the ones that Liana had sometimes seen outside, this one didn't move its snaky tentacle with the eye on its end. The tentacle just stayed in one place, but it did have lights that blinked on and off every now and then. Liana was careful to try not to get too near it, and when she did, she tried to think thoughts that would be acceptable to the Bartys. She said things to herself like 'Tyro is very clever' and 'Tyro has invented everything' over and over again. Underneath these thoughts, Liana was thinking something quite different. Which thoughts would the machine listen to? The thoughts that came as words in her head, which she didn't believe? Or the thoughts that lived underneath those words, which were what she really believed, and which were the opposite?

Around her, Liana noticed that as the orders from the Barty screens called louder and louder for everyone to be happy about the festival, so people became more and more miserable. Silmoa, particularly, was now clearly very low. Rather than being in charge of other people, she had now been made into the lowest of the workers on the production line, and she was being shocked far worse than anyone else.

Liana was surprised at the way she felt about Silmoa. When they had all lived together in Seren-ila, Liana would never have felt any sort of nastiness towards Silmoa. Well, she sometimes was annoyed with her, just because she always seemed to do everything so right. She often talked about 'the Seren Way', and how everybody needed to stick to it. That made Liana feel uncomfortable, and sometimes guilty that she herself wasn't good enough. But even when Liana had those sort of unhappy feelings towards Silmoa, she never hoped anything bad would happen to her.

But then, when Silmoa became somebody who worked for the Bartys, and who could use a shocking stick on any other Seren-ilian, Liana grew really to dislike her. She would imagine terrible things happening to Silmoa – being shocked by a giant shocking-stick, or falling off the top of the Greblara mountain. Those images made Liana feel better, but only for a little while. Soon the image of Silmoa as she used to be, Silmoa her friend, and the sister of Herago, would appear in her mind, and Liana would feel ashamed. This was what the Bartys had done to her, and to every Seren-ilian. They had made her dislike her own friend. They had put distrust between people who used to know friendship. It was not just the cruelty they showed to Seren-ilians that was painful, it was the cruelty that they encouraged between the Seren-ilians themselves.

But there was another problem now. All this worrying about Silmoa was keeping Liana awake at night. When she did, eventually, fall off to sleep, it was a blank sort of sleeping, without any dreams in it. This would not do. It was as if she was being locked out of the one place in the world where she felt safe, where she could be happy. When could she get back to that place? When would she be able to meet up with Herago and Piacho and Selentaya?

Time was speeding past, like the strange objects that speeded past her on the factory line. They were something to do with the Festival, but Liana didn't know what. But every time she saw them, Liana thought about whether she and Herago really would be able to go to the Festival. Was this just a fantasy? Even if she really was seeing Herago and the others in her dreams, and she still couldn't be sure of that, would the plan to cross the mountain really be one that she and Herago could carry out. It was all very well speaking to someone in a dream, but travelling across a mountain, with two people and only one pair of wrist-flyers, seemed even more impossible. True, the two people were not adults, so they were smaller, but Herago had never used wrist-flyers, and Liana had only ever travelled on Trentaya's back when she was little – something that Trentaya wasn't really supposed to allow. Liana remembered those trips. She must have been no more than que, or maybe fay, years old. She remembered the thrill of watching the land drop away below her, and seeing the mountains from up in the sky. She remembered clinging on to her mother's back though she was held tightly by a beautiful, coloured cloth, and thinking about how amazing it would be to just fly over the mountain. She had nagged Trentaya to do that, not understanding that it wasn't possible to go through the smoke and dust. She had even thought that if they crossed the mountain, they might find Ralkino on the other side, but Trentaya told her sadly that this was not possible. But Liana had always thought that one day Ralkino would re-appear. Somehow. Now she wasn't so sure.