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I didn’t think it was a dream when it happened. I had been flying. Something happened, before the blackness and the room in the air, and now, the meeting with Sh
imoda. How could it happen, how could I be in a hospital when Puff had been safe, an inch from the land?
I had a bright clear memory of what happened. Memories, my whole life, weren’t they true? My airplane was already on the ground. There were no wires on the ground. Nothing could happen. Yet how could I wake in this place, or in a hospital, if nothing happened? It couldn’t happen, I had such a clear image. Floating just above the grass.
“Remember what you told me?” Shimoda said. “Illusions are seems-to-be. They aren’t real. You think your memories are real, but nothing in this world is real!”
“How can I tell if it’s real?” I remembered when we flew. It wasn’t forty years ago, it was now. Sunlight warming us, the airplanes, the mowed hayfield. “Are you saying this world, us planning to fly some passengers here, wherever we land, isn’t real?”
“Not a bit.”
The hospital was my last dream. Now I had no tubes in me, I was well and happy to be with my friend, his Travel Air, my Fleet. The hospital, was it real?
“The hospital…” he said. “It’s a dream, too. Us planning to fly passengers, that’s a dream. If it grows, shifts, if it’s subject to time and space, even here, it’s a dream. You disagree, don’t you? You think that’s true, the truth of airplanes, do you?”
“Don, a minute ago I thought I was in a hospital. Then I blinked and here I am awake again with you and the airplanes!”
He smiled. “So many dreams.”
The smile changed me. Something was wrong.
“My airplane. It’s here. But I don’t own the Fleet, any more. I sold it. Years ago.”
He looked a question at me. “Ready to fly?”
“No.”
He nodded. “Good. Why not?”
“This is a dream, too.”
“Of course it is. None of it’s true, just dreams of lessons, till you let go of the school.”
“The Dream School?”
The quick smile, he nodded.
The airplanes wavered, some sudden wind blurring their outline. Soon as we see something as an image, it begins to change, I thought. When I was with him before, the image of ground and water, of wrenches and vampires, all changed. Beliefs? Beliefs.
“Your memory,” he said. “You had a clear image, landing?”
“Clear as anything! The sound! I heard the grass whisking on the wheels…”
“Is there any chance you thought the crash was too violent for you to see? Do you think that you might have created an image that never happened, for you to remember?”
Maybe. It’s never happened before, I thought.
He took a little book from his shirt pocket, opened it. He looked at me, not at the page, and told me what the words said: “Nobody comes to Earth to dodge problems. We come here to take ‘em on.”
I hope not me, I thought. I’ll dodge this problem, please. “I have to take my memories for true. Not an image, this is my memory! I was one inch from…” l blinked. “Your Messiah’s Handbook! It’s still with you?”
“You’ve promised to believe what you remember, even when it isn’t true? This is not the Handbook. It’s…” he closed the book, read the title: “…Lesser Maxims and Short Silences.”
“Lesser Maxims? Not as powerful as the Handbook?”
He handed the little book to me,
Why you and why now? Because you asked it to be this way.
