If they thought about it at all.

Beth worked in Klaxon City-an amus.e.m.e.nt arcade near Soho-a sight better-cla.s.s than the arcades in Clacton, where saucy hats and bingo were more the rage. In Beth's arcade of work, there were high-prize jackpot fruit machines as well as mock-casino games with real tellers. Robot croupiers were not too far-fetched in the sort of computerised world that amus.e.m.e.nt arcades had now entered, following the miniaturization of machines everywhere-even in Clacton. So there were tellers who handed out chips and made masquerade of gambles being unforethought... mingling with robots who smiled wickedly, giving the punters confidence that all was random, because how could thinking machines not deliver the chance one always seeks in life: the pure chance? Only humanity snags the wheels of chance, with their intentions and misintentions of subconscious thought.

Many fought against thought.

Beth was one who fought against thought. She just dreamed of that ultimate chance where she could safely say that she was full of unmixed happiness. A dream she forgot immediately she woke up from it, although sleep was not the necessary prerequisite for thus dreaming. Not a sought happiness, because that always failed. But a found happiness. One that simply enveloped one, given the lack of forethought or ambition that the very act of seeking it would have entailed, given self-consciousness: a self-consciousness that women of Beth's ilk luckily lacked. Meanwhile, she simply plugged on. A pretty face neatly sunk on skullbone.

A plug makes things work. An electric plug. A bath plug. A rawl-plug. Even an advertising plug. The latter made a name into a catchword and the circling businessmen would cause manufacture of anything to match the catchword and made it work in tune with the catchword's neatly fitting its round peg in a round hole whilst making square holes of us all, without us noticing.

In modern screen drama there are swishes of sound to alleviate the changes of scene, large noisy tractions of vision that overwhelm the quiet reflective scene with an abruptness that life never really has on reflection: all misery is gradual, just as lives are gradual, never fast-changing, even if one can destroy a marriage with one simple act, but it takes days, often, to percolate and reveal its repercussions. Never in drama. Never in fiction. We need the swish of the curtain. A single alert. A sudden siren set off to indicate a change of scene, a change of dream. A false plug. Where amus.e.m.e.nt is taken from not knowing where things were or who people thought they were.

The sirens were strangely in advance of the emergency.

The Death entered Klaxon City. The real Klaxon City, where pylons in a terrestrial metal garb were like vertical gantries or simple lamp standards with outspread feet, of various heights, from the top of which stretched out in the wind (the wind?) many skycraft with each one's make, build, substance, inflatability, non-inflatability, traction, torque etc. mere seeing from 'ground'-level could not fathom. You had to climb up to them to discover if they were, say, flyable. Having flown to their perches there was no guarantee of future flyability. A few weren't sufficiently rendered from the flesh and bone that some (not always the few in question) once were. Not renderable, let alone non-friable enough to safeguard against weathering. But weather was a dubious topic in Klaxon. It depended on the nature or mood of the city's geographical cavity at any one time in the vertical cross-section of its dynasty as opposed to in the more usual horizontal considerations of surface cities.

I had died more than once, and, then, it was at least once on the surface that I had died, but several times below the surface. I had suffered a fatal knife-wound in a casino when the gambling laws were relaxed, because I questioned whether the silver ball was in the right hole when the robots visibly tilted the roulette-wheel with their hands, and the tellers later blamed it on an earth tremor. There was no disembowelling of their rules. Even Henry Fifth would have been given short shrift. Unto the breach...

But I was trying to forget my past. I even imagined the deaths. How else can deaths be imagined other than by imagining them, because if real... well the rest is common sense.

As I wandered into the city streets from the brow of the hill I last left our readers watching my progress: I took one last glimpse at the Canterbury Oak, which visibly moved at its thin s.p.a.cious upper levels, giving the uncanny impression that its large trunk below moved in unison. It was soon stolid, however, etched like a giant black hold-all that G.o.d had dropped there in disgust because there wasn't enough room in it for as many effects as even magic could have managed, let alone a full-blooded religion.

I turned to the abodes. Solid rock-caves that had been built like houses out in the open, where a few scrawny children played hide-and-seek. I knew things would become more palatial the more towards its centre I approached. And at least there I would also find grown-ups grown-up enough to interact like real characters. Not just children acting as human scenery.

One skycraft tethered to one of the few pylons stationed this far into the city's outskirts was a strange seemingly solid rocket-ship that, like the Canterbury Oak, was misshapen where you thought misshapen would be out of the question. Its business end seemed at the bottom where a single pin glinted in the light of the Sunne#: a pin often twirling lightly in a whimsical nostalgia for its former firedrill##. n.o.body would be on board, I knew, and thus the whimsicality of its lower pin's twirling only gave tiny shadows of doubt. Like speckled ants on my skin. It was not a balloon. It seemed solid enough, with several storeys, sieved by sightholes. It just hung there as if its specific gravity was too hard to match with rhythmic gravities elsewhere. Unlike some of the other pyloned skycraft that were like proud pennants in stiff winds, it almost sagged, and visibly bloated. But that was the effect of the incessant klaxon noise, something to which I had already grown accustomed without even mentioning that I was trying all the time to forget it, relegating it, as I did, to some wishful-thinking 'white noise'. Yet this klaxon noise (whether oak- or tannoy-derived), I suspected, was indeed the 'wind' I had earlier doubted existed as such. Noise as air movement.

#The Sunne acted like the sun but was not the sun. This does not represent a fantastical or imaginary approach to cosmology, merely a shorthand for something that will eventually become quite reconcilable given the circ.u.mstances of intertextual reality. For the moment, please treat Sunne and Sun as blood brothers (i.e. crude synonyms), if you currently lack confidence to revel in their essence and truth as spiritual brothers (mutual metanyms, if not alter-nemos). Stub of pencil: Sunne = Sunnemo?

##'Firedrill' was a difficult concept to grasp in this context. This made me think that The Death would have indeed been preferable after all, rather than now (alive) having to explain what is meant by this or that word or concept. I hope they will clarify themselves naturally in the course of events, with the description needed for such events hopefully allowing collateral construction of clue-semantics vis a vis many words or concepts otherwise ungraspable.

Stub of pencil: However close you get to someone, you are never more than just a couple of ent.i.ties separated by the skulls of the head.

Greg suffered from an unbearable tinnitus of the Inner Ear. The only way-in his desperation-to cure himself of this incessant cricketing was to deafen himself. Whilst it would be relatively easy-given the will-to blind the eyes, ie with spikes, it is far more difficult to bring such instruments to bear on the hearing, short of bringing the deafness of death itself to one's aid. Slicing off the ears themselves would surely be counter-productive as this very act itself harbours the possibility of even more tinnitus that is allowed greater access-via the creatures of noise-permanently to attack an Inner Ear thus denuded of the mysteriously effective protection of the Exterior Ear. Doctors and Ear Specialists would probably disagree with this prognosis, but Greg wondered how they could know for certain. Only doing things to oneself and feeling the effect in oneself directly gives the ultimate certainty of one's own senses, i.e. the evidence of the self's senses at whatever level of felt reality one is working through. So, Death seems the only exit from the noise. Sleep does not dull it as dreams often increase the efficiency of the noise or change its very nature into a series of new home-grown noises, a gestalt of noises being dreamed as louder and more relentless. Klaxon City was one such dream. The Inner Earth. The Inner Ear.

As they scaled the pylon from their earthcraft, Greg and Beth began to stretch their legs in yawning downward strides. They had been cooped up in a serial cabin-fever for several months of travel in individual body-hugging room s.p.a.ces. The dream of a Corporate Lounge on board the earthcraft-where an urbane Captain dished out c.o.c.ktails and scintillating sights of Inner Earth-proved to be a dream even deeper than a dream being dreamed by merely one other single dream. Indeed, a single such cause-and-effect dream in the concertina of dreams proved to be even less reliable: whereby two dowager ladies known as Edith and Clare were not such ladies at all but chivvying dream-stewards ensuring that dreams were correctly threaded in the correct order on any particular ribbon of reality or strobe-strand... presumably also to ensure that believability was not unduly affected by crossing any threshold of disbelief. These two stewards-when failing to maintain their 'lady' disguises-often became, by involuntary default, large bird-headed individuals who employed the otherwise human nature of their own residual-'lady' bodies in the seeming behaviour of insect-articulated ratchet-limbs that became (in their minds at least) spiny or spiky appendages that the large beaks of their heads actively tried (but failed) to snap up self-cannibalistically as tasty buggish morsels.

Greg, as he neared the pylon's base, turned to take a closer look at the misshapen tree on the hill overlooking Klaxon City-knowing instinctively that it was the perpetrator of the inner sky's wall-to-wall wailing: a series of echoes that bounced around the bowl of the city's cavity. Several separate ribbons of spatial reality-mixed with tangible strobes of time-fluttered in the air-movement of noise: a wind of striated history... a vertical cross-section of which Greg traversed. The earthcraft tethered to the top of the pylon seemed, for him, to become a religious vision that curdled gradually into a huge plume of black smoke from a global-warming turning inward on itself with a heat so over-bearing several incremental levels of dream were needed to intervene as a combined firewall to guard against its ferocity. Dream-fighting on a superhuman scale. And, indeed, as each dream kicked in one by one, Greg was able to ignore the noise and the heat as he ruminatively considered the panoply of Klaxon's geography... while he continued to scale himself down. The vista of its configuration was like a huge human ear-a canyon, a ridge, a lobe, all const.i.tuents of the city's mingled G.o.d-given nature and subsequent fabrication.

Greg grabbed Beth by the hand as they left the environs of their earthcraft's pylon-without bothering to think that the meter needed inserting with an unknown currency of coinage.

"That's for others," said Greg, eventually, to himself, vaguely recalling the duty of parking fees on or within the scarce resources of a finite earth but also that he and Beth were simply crew members, not owners of the earthcraft.

The streets radiated as streets (i.e. as gaps between) from the area spa.r.s.ely planted with pylons to other areas where more cavernous buildings cl.u.s.tered around thicker clumps of variously-sized pylons-some pylons with craft tethered, others empty, and a few currently being roosted by kite-shaped birds with large black plumages. In the distance, the ambiance of a city built as a patchwork of overlapping quaint village-scenarios was disrupted as the rims of giant Angevin tanks were spotted in an apparently camouflaged industrial estate unglinting in the bright directionlessness of Sunnemo Cathedral's broken shafts through stained gla.s.s.

Greg and Beth, however, were window-shopping on a much lower level, as they pa.s.sed through a precinct where some earth-stripped caves were neatly thin-roofed and gla.s.s-fronted. These contained the hardly static wares of a thriving chamber of commerce even if the gaps between these 'shops' were deserted... window-shown to any chance pa.s.sers-by breaking this empty pattern. One labelled Sudra's Shoes brought a wry smile to their lips as they inspected the various jingle-toed items of footwear.

They dodged into something labelled Cave for some refreshment, hoping that any necessary payment by unknown coinage would be subsumed by serendipity.

Inside were two non-descript locals of short standing whose conversation Greg and Beth began to overhear-during which they decided to intervene with convenient questions, convenient to real visitors such as Greg and Beth themselves and to any possible vicarious visitors coiled on their backs like old-men-of-the-sea. Convenient if the conversation made any sense beyond its semi-conscious ability to refine sense into nonsense, or vice versa.

Beth was described in an unreported part of this exchange as middle-aged, buxom, pretty face scarred with frown-lines, still perky enough to lift her head above the narrative parapet. Greg remained naive despite a mature aura of be-whiskered pink chops. He still tried to maintain his own ident.i.ty in face of all attack to divert it elsewhere, but all descriptive resources remained counter-productive in this direction, whatever or whoever took up responsibility for them.

Crazy Lope: Where's the air from, then?

Go'spank: Sea air-it's sort of caught by the melting tectonics, you know, internal tsunamis carried within caches of air-movement made from noise.

Crazy Lope: Don't understand. Words don't do much for me. Any words. But specially those words. Where do words come from?

Go'spank: The words are like moving air, too, or fingered sound. Words are what drift through it. Tricking the above, the below and the across... (Laughs.) Greg: Been here long?

(Crazy Lope seems perturbed at the interruption.) Crazy Lope: We've been here longer than you two. We've been taking the washing in.

Greg: Taking the washing in? Is that a sort of pa.s.sword?

Crazy Lope: If you don't know it's a pa.s.sword, then it's not a pa.s.sword.

Go'spank: Or if you think it's a pa.s.sword what's it a pa.s.sword for? The whole background of black noise is just one never-ending pa.s.sword, perhaps. (Laughs.) Beth: (Frowning) How do they put up with all that here?

Crazy Lope: I block it out. Or rather the blocks block it out.

Go'spank: Dream blocks, yes.

Greg: Ah, but I was brought up to believe dreams were a sickness. They are perhaps defence systems, I see. Rather necessary evils. Yet so much depends on the gaps or streets between the dreams. Are we in a dream now or a gap?

Go'spank: Wish we knew. And if we did know how would you know we knew?

Crazy Lope: Wish You Were Here. Shine on Crazy Diamond.

Beth: It seems you can't talk properly without, you know...

Go'spank: I know... It's difficult. Conversations are obstacle courses rather than proper communication. And to say all those words "I know... It's difficult. Conversations are obstacle courses rather than proper communication" has taken a lot of effort and concentration. I've never been able to say anything sensible for this length of time before, or perhaps this exact length is my personal best so far.

(The noise of a distant explosion is carried further than it would otherwise have been by sound atmospherics of the moment, as the other Cave customers do runners.) Greg: What's that?

Crazy Lope: What Go'spank just said.

Go'spank: Yes, an air cushion, even an air tsunami perhaps.

Beth: (Flicking a speck of dried mud from her eyelid) There's no noise now.

Crazy Lope: Probably the next few minutes' of noise has turned into silence because it was crowded into those earlier few seconds when the jolt came.

Greg: Sounded like a bomb.

Go'spank: No, I think it was condensed background noise of the sirens in time-shift from a period to a moment. Lope was sort of right, for once!

(Beth sniffed at the drink she had been brought by an attractive waitress who turned all heads.) Greg: What are you two characters up to here?

Crazy Lope: Bringing the washing in. Told you. (Laughs.) Greg: Yes, but...

Go'spank: (Squeaking like a grey mouse and pointing at Beth in the waitress's wake) I like your wife, Mister. She's nice.

(Beth frowns deeply but her eyes receive the information of such admiration with a glinting smile.) Go'spank: Can we show you round?

Greg: (suspiciously) If you like. We shouldn't leave our pylon too far behind in case it, you know, can't be found again.

They left into the relative outside using strung hawl-pulley hooks as direction-finders (the cost of the Cave bill blandly settled during a gap between two intersecting dream-streets) and they all looked up at the newly blackened sky-cavity, with Sunnemo Cathedral's fantasy light-source as a fairy castle nesting in a violet cloudscape now just a dull beige disc not unlike the coin just exchanged in the Cave for a packed lunch.

Greg and Beth wondered why their two benighted companions now kept calling each other Edith or Clare in some new game of nemonymous pa.s.swords.

Stub of pencil: My head's led from the diseased wood of the Canterbury Oak that wraps me. And there is much for me to think about. Can a planet from which I am able to be thus created, i.e. one called Earth, be more than just the head of the person who first imagined it? An Earth from the Ear to the Ground Who first imagined this Earth? Meanwhile, who imagined the head that imagined another head like the Earth? The thought extends both ex-ends of the dynastic ribbon of reality from first cause to last effect and realises (with both ends now missing or sharpened away) that imagination is not the best tool for imagining reality because reality is unimaginable being already there in an unimagined state. To imagine an unimagined reality would be to corrupt it or create it as a new imaginary thread through a headless head. Then this single thread, by an uncontrollable volition, would stiffen its sinews to masquerade as an imaginary weave of many threads bearing the tread of a head-leased, heavily head-led reality... the only sort of reality that causes the bodies of its inhabitants to grow cancerous.

I find that, without the Earth on which to be born with a head and to fill that head with learning and to experience or express life via its means, the same head creating the Earth needed another head to create it. Or have I already said that?

Klaxon City being a dynasty rather than a single city on a plain, Greg and Beth-our Ess.e.x couple, our salt of the earth-now are indeed (through the imagination of imagination that in turn can summon a new strength to dream novel-ly without the use of fiction) invested with the background noise of spirit needed to reconfigure their existence as new visitors to the Megazanthine Core whilst having already visited it once before-a fact which, effectively, was imaginable because they had ceased to exist as real people having once entered it as a by-product of producing the creamy Angevin or Angel Wine and thus became their own seed without having created the seed in the first place. It takes two to retro-tango.

As Greg and Beth left the environs of the Cave, they decided they were being escorted by two child-sized stick-figures who used Sunnemo's closure as a light source (with silent drapes) to feed their own emptiness from anything but manipulative bone... to feed it with charcoal drawings from another pencil stub that had a point of incipient darkness for any shading. Like a lost cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci combined with one by Walt Disney who now lived (from death) in such cross-hatches foreign to the smooth technicolor he once so relished. Yet these creatures maintained the dulcet tones of Edith and Clare-which gave a sense of comfort, especially as in their prior Lope and Go'spank modes their voices had been far too shrill.

Greg could just discern the tannoy-system strung with wires that had emerged from the earlier hawl-pulleys as part of one giant soundweb of communication-and the tannoy's loudspeakers themselves were shaped like large human ears rather than the more normally acoustically-efficient cones. A decorative system that didn't lose its irony in the transit from symbol to reality. One clockwork-type of tannoy (it needed to be kept wound up to keep its emissions of noise at full swell) was so violent in these emissions that it was fast burying itself into the ground... as if extreme sound was a downward motive force of drilling within Inner Earth, as well as being a wind-source, even a tornado torque.

The wailing was now deafening-now several blocks away from any possible firewall of dreams. Greg often witnessed Klaxonites pa.s.sing by along the paving-slabs with huge m.u.f.fs on their own ears-and others were clambering on the thinned-out roofs of some newly externalised cavities or chambers to restore any sound-proofing lost in the thinning process. Large coats of a glue-like substance were being 'painted' over all visible tectonic cracks that pavy-crazed this their growing 'internet' of homesteads. Yet, Greg felt that Sunnemo's intermittent emissions of daylight-if that was what it was called-would later give a better view of these customary tasks of the natives amid all the daily wear-and-tear caused by both automatic and clockwork tannoys, which would be useful since he later intended to write a semi-scientific, semi-autobiographical book about his time in Klaxon City as well as his childhood elsewhere, attempting to fill in any gaps later.

As if the thought had transgressed some stewardship of dream that Edith was currently nurturing, the word 'book' in Greg's thought evoked some literary talk on her part: "Marcel Proust's book treats of separate selves of one individual through a cross-section of time. Sometimes the selves interact, without understanding they were selves (or cells) of the same person. Nothing strange in that. Though we owe Proust a lot for his fiction and such ground-breaking concepts."

"Pessoa, too," added Clare.

"Yes, and Joseph Conrad had a feeling that there were so many layers of intention..."

Greg wondered how he could hear them talking-not that he was terribly interested in the content of the dowagers' literary musings-if the wailing tannoys were so deafening. It was as if noise not only produced air movement or downward proclivities of twisters, but also a means to transfer thoughts inside such air movement without the use of speech, but retaining a disguise of speech. He tried it out: "What are those chambers?"

He pointed to some unusually constructed areas uplifted into a huge portholed lobe of swollen earth membrane.

"They're the Healing Chambers."

Greg and Beth were taken into one. There they found creatures that evidently had once been human like them-but now suffering from Bird Flew. Each body (including face) was currently being cream mudbathed with Angevin (this being a new discovery of its curative qualities in addition to its known dream-masking) to remove feathers at their root so they would not return. Each patient-to have been admitted to this particular chamber and its specialist healing process-had been forced to show the depth of their illness by actually proving they could fly: hence the name of their disease. One of them was in such a state of desperation that, having once flown, he or she needed to show, so as to be treated, they couldn't fly any more: a method that necessitated the painful process of plucking. Those that were incurable and more intrinsically (indelibly) Bird Flown or still-Bird-Flying (albeit only in dreams) were forced from their beds and frog-marched next door to what was called a Lethal Chamber.

One patient was jerking in his or her bed-as if pitifully trying to fly from within the heavy quilt. The nurses-who themselves were not dissimilar to human-like ostriches-continued, undeterred, the painful process of plucking that did not seem out of place amid all the wailing noises.

As Greg and Beth left-after their tour as tourists-they spotted a long winding queue of hopping creatures leading to one of the notorious Lethal Chambers. Some hopped a few feet into the air and then flopped back. Greg averted his eyes. None of this would go in the book.

Stub of pencil: The word 'indelibly' was added in brackets. It may be rubbed out later. I hope not. Despite the culling that followed the plucking, I shall ignore this topic for the moment. I shall instead treat of other matters. Greg and Beth had earlier visited the Megazanthine Core so couldn't really visit again. Yet there is a theory, as I may have mentioned already, that having produced their seed for the Angevin-bank when in company with the Hawler they were accidentally born again from that seed in re-transit-logically entailing that they never went to the Core in the first place: or that they never existed at that time to warrant their later existence beyond the fiction of their original creation. Only fiction, indeed, is able to cope with such concepts. Thanks to fiction, we are able to address the possibility-which may have never been addressed otherwise-that they could revisit the Core and thus bring back the rarer forms of Angevin needed to counter Bird Flew here in Klaxon but also in the surface cities of London, New York etc. Only an overtly illogical possibility of such a revisit could be the catalyst for the aforesaid rarefication of refinement in the Angevin process, one necessary for the ultimate virus-buster of them all. It was like a scientific process of Parthenogenesis (coincidentally the first book in the Bible)-whereby creation's re-ignition is possible by means of creative imagination rather than by years of empirical scientific study-with cells revisiting their earlier carcinogenic selves to restore them to health. A shorthand for much else. I cannot be clearer at this stage. And I hope n.o.body rubs this out, simply because they don't currently comprehend it.

Greg and Beth were offered a chance to view more specialist operations upon Klaxonites who were suffering from a version of Bird Flew deeper than their own bodies, with diseased feather-spindles spreading their cancerous spike-ends unto the soul itself. Beth, even with her hard-nosed Ess.e.x-girl image, was reluctant to accompany Greg on this part of the tour. So Greg-putting himself in the hands of a masked surgeon-was taken on his own to not a Lethal Chamber as such, but something far worse. Lethal Chambers would at least staunch the pain eventually.

Here Greg saw a patient-etherised upon a table-presenting a pink wasteland of body surface tussocked with Bird Flew. Apparently, this patient had earlier indeed managed flight as high as the highest pylon of the city, only flopping to earth with a wing-stressed bounce-because, otherwise, a mercifully heavy fall from flight would have ended his illness there and then. Illnesses tended to die with their patients. Except in the most diseased cases.

The surgeon was wielding a instrument like a pen-torch that emitted a beam of siren-sound more intense than any hearing could bear if that hearing had insufficient dream protection-which, luckily, had been provided for Greg by one of the dream stewards from Klaxon itself. Edith and Clare had washed their hands of the matter, pretending that it was impossible to offer such protection, but, if the truth were known, they simply didn't know how to do so. The dream steward who actually took over from the dowagers, in this respect, was a character by the name of Blasphemy Fitzworth, once cat's meat salesman in Victorian London, who was so full of makeshift dreams he was able to find one perfectly suitable for concocting a particular madness that produced impossibilities such as engendering Greg's immunity to the shrieking 'pen-torch' surgical instrument.

The patient himself was resistant to any application of Angevin ointment to help with humane plucking. So, the surgeon (equally protected by one of Blasphemy Fitzworth's dreams) aimed the 'pen-torch' beam of sound towards the most obtrusive of the rooted feathers and seared hard at its clawhold for some hours, as Greg watched the surrounding flesh sizzle and then melt away from the column of healing key-hole sound. Eventually, the surgeon could yank the feather-spindle from its tenacious grip on the patient's bony soul-matter. Only the patient's resultant wild screaming at the top of his voice was the final danger of sound-deafening proportions to any onlookers. But, with that withstood, the surgeon and Greg left the patient to recover for a while-before they returned to attack the next feather's root in a long line of such feathers carpetting the patient's flesh.

Greg learned a lot from being allowed to watch the urgent Chamber Surgery that was required in view of the advancing Bird Flew throughout Upper and Inner Earth. He was told, however, there were equivalent physico-psychological operations which in fact could benefit himself. Greg was aware that the purpose of his visit to Klaxon was indeed twofold-or even threefold-i.e. to have a holiday break, to record events regarding the spread of Bird Flew for posterity and to cure himself of unGregness (or Greg Flew). Klaxon, with all its bespoke chambers of good medical practice, comprised the only symbolic literary clinic/health retreat in the Magic Mountains of Inner Earth. And his illness was not being Greg. And he wanted to be who he was by right of ident.i.ty and body recognition, i.e. to be Greg, and not anyone else. To rid himself of this disease of the slipped liver.

Firstly, dreams were a sickness in themselves, because if you suffer from too many dreams, this adversely affects any residual waking life (if any), and can be cla.s.sed as a sickness, till one is cured by losing any ability to have a waking life to be diseased... or by ridding oneself of the cancerous growth of such dreams altogether through treatment in the Klaxon Chambers of Body/Mind Commerce. It made sense at the time, i.e. at that stage of raw dreams that Greg was suffering precisely when the disease was defined or diagnosed in his case. Any diagnosis essentially depended on the dreams prevalent at the precise astrological epoch of the diagnosis itself. And other considerations of planetary transits and mind/body interaction. So it was an art rather than a science.

Secondly, dream sickness featured dreams about sickness-such as dreaming of bodily nightmares that-given just a single stretch of imagination-could even beset the dreamer whether the dreamer had this dream or not.

Thirdly, there were dreams created by tablets that were prescribed for any mind's debility during waking (non-dream) life, i.e. tablets that changed the patient's personality, changed the you you were or were ever likely to be or have been.

Greg was sick of all such dreams. They kept recurring like bad pennies of the mind-until that night in Klaxon when the doctors chose to use some of their skills on curing Greg instead of those dreaming patients spiked from outside the dream by the feathered arrows of a real disease spread by birds in waking life.

Even Man needed a retort.

Greg smiled at the latest inexplicable non-sequitur. "I'm sure I can live without dreams," he said as he self-hypnotised an attempt at persuasion that he had fully woken up-at the same time as he found himself emerging from a particularly numbing dream that had eased some of his pain. However, even more painful were the dreams that meant nothing or, worse, were filled up with nonsense or, worse still, created plugs for products such as Death-thus creating the need for yet other dreams to neutralise them, i.e. spamicidal dreams or dream redoubts.

The doctors had given him a sound-torch similar to those employed in gouging out patients' feathers, but this one had to be self-operated on his own body, by stroking it up and down like an electric razor-applying the focussed sound on the flesh, starting with the face, as he began to delineate a full limned-out Gregness of Greg with the help of a magnifying shaving-mirror which he had earlier used in the daily ablutions of attacking his own bewhiskered pink chops.

Greg: What next?

Greg-in-the-mirror: You could try the left ear. It's far too large or cauliflowery for real Greg... yes, that's it, ah, that's nice. Spread the torch up and down. Do I look more like you now? It helps with the noise of the sirens, too, the earhole closing up with a web that dissolves the sound before it hits the inner drum. Pre-empting the kick-in...

Greg: I didn't know I had such a big ear. I felt I loved Beth but she surely couldn't have loved me with an ear like that. (Laughs.) Greg-in-the-mirror: Don't delay with such things. You now quickly have to rub out the Mikeness from Greg's mouth and then the I-ness of I from each eye.

Greg: (Waving the sound-torch up and down over his face) Good as done. But it hurts the eyes...

Greg-in-the-mirror: But you can see us better now and we can see you better through them.