Deleted Scene: The Astranet is a series of tubes

2800 words, 10 minute read.

“Are you ready?”

I raise a hand in a thumbs up, as does the student dreamwalker laying on the cot beside me. We’re in the AT department at the Library, where we’ll begin our journey to the standing stone circle up by the lake. Not on foot, but in spirit. Before we lay down our first etheric cable, we have to run some tests and make sure the way is clear.

Dr. [NAME] checks the electrode circlets attached to our heads, then backs away to watch the monitors displaying our brainwaves. If anything goes seriously wrong, they’ll know to wake us up. Roisin, the dreamwalker, takes my hand and traces a symbol on the back with one finger.

I fall asleep instantly and wake up on the dreamscape, which is more vivid than when I dream on my own. Beside me, Roisin gets up and stretches, looking excited and refreshed. E’s short and fat, with medium brown skin and a sloped nose. In the waking world, e wore a comfortable cotton nightgown, but now e’s dressed in an adventurer’s outfit of leather and pockets and belts, something I vaguely recognize from a recently popular movie.

I’m just in my same old jeans and t-shirt. “I wish I could fall asleep like that every night,” I say, getting up off the rocky floor.

This must be Roisin’s landing space in eir personal dreamscape, a small cave lit by bioluminescent mushrooms. The soft blue glow reveals dark tunnels leading off in several directions. I suppress my unease at being in a small, dark place with no immediate exits to fresh air. This is the astral realm, not the physical. It’s not the same, I tell myself, though the lizard part of my brain disagrees.

“If you use it too much on one person it stops being effective,” says Roisin with a dry grin. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Ah, so like basically every other cure for insomnia,” I say with a sigh. “I should have known.”

“Well, you’re asleep now, so let’s go while we can.”

Roisin takes my hand again as we walk through one of the tunnels. The mushrooms become sparser as we go, and my nervousness increases. Eventually we reach a darkness so impenetrable, it might as well be a solid wall. Turns out that’s not so far from what it really is, as Roisin presses eir free hand against it with a look of concentration.

“We’ll be stepping into the Library’s dreamscape now, so hold on, it might feel weird,” Roisin says.

“Anything to get out of this dark,” I say in a falsely cheery voice.

Roisin doesn’t respond as e’s already halfway through the dark wall. As e pulls me through behind em, I feel a tingle run through my spirit body, and there’s an instant in the middle where I don’t even have a body, spirit or physical. I’m just a consciousness floating in the void, and even that is a delicate matter.

Then the tingle returns and we’re standing in a grove of trees with wires running from their roots and trunks. If I had a body right now, I’d be gasping for breath, but as it is I can only grope for proof that I’m alive with my mind. Which is more than a little disconcerting.

“What was that?” I ask.

“The space between,” says Roisin.

“Do you do that a lot?”

“Every time I dreamwalk. You get used to it,” e says.

I don’t know about that. I turn my attention to the trees, whose trunks are ruler-straight, their branches completely symmetrical as they rise into the sky above. The bark is rough and alive, the patterned cracks through its surface like fractals branching off into smaller and smaller infinities. From knotholes in the trunks and from the ground beneath our feet spring glowing cables of steel and copper, connecting the circle of trees to one another.

This is what computers look like on the dreamscape, or at least, on the Library’s dreamscape. In my research into dreams in the past couple of years, I was tickled to discover that places as well as people have their own personal space on the astral map. It makes sense when you consider the existence of genius locii and the like, but still it hadn’t occurred to me before. Human-made institutions like the Eternal Library can become especially large thanks to all of the many imaginations adding to its growth.

Do computers dream? I’d asked Chimdi and Florian. The resulting conversation had been complicated and existential in nature. Both of them had difficulty expressing their thoughts in Casporan; Florian was able to convey more nuance in Fenian, his native language, but Chimdi shook her head and suggested I learn Mwari or Gildean if I really wanted to learn the answer. The two most technically advanced countries in the world due to their abundance of metallic resources and large populations, scholars there had been debating the question of computer sentience and spirituality since before the things even existed.

Among the tangle of tree wires, I find two glowing gold with the etheric Threads we’ve twined them to. I point it out to Roisin.

“Here’s where we’ll connect the cables,” I say.

Roisin studies them with a cocked head. “Huh. Interesting. I thought they’d be bigger.”

The cables are about the thickness of my thumb. “They might need to be in the future, but for now this is what we have to work with,” I say. “If you touch them, you can feel who made them. It takes a lot of your personal energy to spin a Thread from scratch. Big emotions, powerful memories. I’m going to start spinning one to attach now, and see what happens when we take it with us.”

When spinning a Thread for an Illuminated book, you have the enormous time, effort, and skill you’ve put into making it to feed the process. Writing an entire manuscript by hand on paper you made yourself, with ink you collected, boiled, ground, with thread spun by fiber you helped grow and harvest, brings you immeasurably close to the book’s spirit. Not so, here. All I have to rely on are my own dreams and nightmares.

I cup my hands before me and concentrate on a memory. My lost two years have begun to return since recovering the night of the quake. There are still more holes than pieces, but every speck is a treasure to me.

“Are you sure we won’t get in trouble?”

“As long as we’re not caught,” Siobhan replied with a shit-eating grin.

I sighed. I should have known that would be the answer. I awkwardly scaled the old stone wall and clambered down the steep ravine on the other side after em. Despite the slope, it was thick with brush and brambles and deep pockets of dead leaves. Tree roots exposed by erosion lent us footholds, which became handholds as we got closer to the bottom where the creek ran.

A nebulous golden cloud appears in my hands. I pull a piece off, spinning it between my fingers to get it started. In a bag at my hip there’s a drop spindle with an amethyst whorl which I had specially made for this purpose. In the physical realm, it’s much too heavy for most fibers, but here it works perfectly.

“Just follow the ley line. I’ll be right behind you, concentrating on this,” I say. It takes effort to hold the memory in my hands and speak at the same time, but earlier tests showed I’m much better at multitasking than either Florian or Chimdi, and so here I am.

“Okay,” says Roisin, “but if something bad comes up, I’m getting us out of here. I might have to grab you fast. All kinds of things are attracted to ley lines, and we’ll be toeing the boundary between dreamscape and just like, the regular astral plane.”

“Do what you must,” I reply, and turn back to my memory spinning.

It was high summer, and the creek was no more than a trickle. The bottom of the ravine was shaded, but the air was still and stifling. No one was supposed to come down here; it was a pathway for wildlife to take around and eventually under the human roads and train tracks that criss-crossed above. Mostly this meant deer, raccoons, opossums, foxes, and the like, but a few weeks ago our classmate [NAME] swore e saw a black bear. It was a rumor that came and went over the years, often accompanied by the whispered pronouncement that said bear actually lived in one of the tunnels under the roads, as if it were a cave.

Siobhan and I were going to see if this was true.

Outside the grove of computer trees, we find ourselves in a forest of books, instead. Shelves rise high and twisting into the distance, the contents of their books spilling out onto the floor and warping the land around us. One moment you’re in a cozy kitchen, the next standing on a high sea cliff, and then among the factories of some far western country in some bygone year. Figures both ghostly and solid walk around us, going about the business of their stories. The more major and remembered the character, the more presence they have, according to the studies I’ve read.

I thought the ley line would be visible, like the giant veins of glowing quartz in the Library basements, but not so. Whatever path Roisin is following, I can’t see it. Perhaps it’s like the ancient hillside petroglyphs found in [COUNTRY], which can only be seen in full from the air.

“There’s not enough food here to sustain an entire bear,” Siobhan said as we waded our way downstream. I watched eir ponytail bob in and out of the dappled sunlight ahead of me. For a long time we’d been the same height, but I’d hit a sudden growth spurt in the last year and was now a head taller.

“What about half a bear?” I replied, and Siobhan snorted.

“Half a bear… so just the front end? Or the back end? Or cut right down the middle long ways?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Ew! Don’t be gross,” I said, but I was laughing anyway.

“You’re the one who put the image in my mind.”

I agreed that the ravine, even connected as it was to other natural areas within the city, was probably too small to sustain a black bear, and especially not a grizzly, as some rumors reported. For all our trips into the mountains, the only time I’d ever seen a bear was in the zoo. It had been far away, half-hidden by a clump of trees in its enclosure. That bear lived in a smaller space than its wild cousins, but then, it was fed every day by zookeepers.

Still, a part of me (and a part of Siobhan, I expected) wanted to believe there was a bear living in the heart of Caspora City. The ravine felt magical, a secret pocket whose high walls blocked out the civilization around it. I could hear the trains running nearby, but their noise was dimmed. Wildflowers bloomed along the banks of the creek. Dragonflies the size of my palm flitted about, buzzing in my ears like living emeralds and sapphires.

A dragonfly whirs past me on the dreamscape, larger and even sparklier than the ones in my memories. It pauses on my arm and I see that it’s made of literal crystal before it takes off again. I follow it with my eyes past Roisin, who raises both eyebrows at me and gestures to the bookshelves on either side. They now resemble the steep banks of the ravine, with branches growing from the wood.

“Is this your doing?” e asks. “Everything changed in the last few minutes.”

“Sorry, some of it leaks out, I guess,” I say.

“I wouldn’t have thought the Library’s dreamscape would be so responsive to an untrained outsider’s thoughts, but you are a Librarian,” says Roisin. “I assume that explains things.”

I don’t have the attention span to correct em, that I’m an Illuminator and not a Librarian—I don’t have a degree in library science—but that wouldn’t invalidate eir point, anyway. I took a magical oath same as all Library employees, swearing on a copy of the ancient Charter Book to uphold all of its values and laws. Unpleasant things happen if you break your oath, not just legally but spiritually. The connection between the spirit of the Library and myself must work both ways.

After some time, we came to our first tunnel. It was a monstrous black hole made from brick, its bore easily six feet in diameter. A small pinpoint of light in the distance showed there was another side. The air seeping out was cold and damp, scented with algae and dead leaves and stone.

I rubbed my arms, which were covered with goosebumps. “Should we go up and around?”

“No, we go through of course,” said Siobhan.

“What if the bear’s in there?” I said, trying to make it sound like a joke.

“It won’t be. Anyway, we’d see it blocking the light if it was,” said Siobhan. “Now come on.”

The quake hadn’t happened yet, and I wasn’t claustrophobic then, but still the tunnel creeped me out. I felt like there were eyes watching me in the darkness. Siobhan had a flashlight up front, but I couldn’t see my feet and kept wondering when I was going to put my foot into a pit and fall to my death. Running a hand along the side of the tunnel only made my fingers slimy, so I held them out to my sides instead. I wanted to hold Siobhan’s hand, but we were thirteen now and too old for that sort of thing. I would have to comfort myself, instead, and be brave.

Around us on the dreamscape, night falls as quickly as if someone shut it off with a switch. Roisin pulls a flashlight from eir belt, the same make and model as the one Siobhan had in the memory. Roisin frowns at it and switches it on. Fireflies blink through the air, revealing the gilded titles on the shelves in tiny flashes.

Suddenly, the ground shook and the tunnel groaned. I found myself on the ground, which was now soft instead of slimy. A bed. Bricks fell around us in the dark, and the light at the end winked out, covered by a huge, lumbering furry shape whose growl echoed around us, breaking the earth—

The golden cloud in my hands turns black, glowing impossibly in the darkness. The rumbling escapes my mixed-memories-turned-nightmares as books shake from the shelves, hitting us on the head and shoulders. If I let go of the Thread now, the rest of it might unravel. I steer my thoughts back to the original memory, the one in which Siobhan and I were spooked by nothing more than a pile of garbage, only to discover the bear actually sleeping behind it. We’d run, silently, until we reached the open air and burst out laughing in pure shock.

It doesn’t work, because desperately trying not to think of something only makes me think of it more. The growling sound turns to a roar, and the bookshelves crash together overhead.

“Nope, time to wake up,” shouts Roisin over the din.

E grabs my hand, and we do. I sit straight up on the cot, sweating, my heart pounding. Once the dream-induced terror fades, embarrassment replaces it. Everyone is staring, and Dr. [NAME] is kneeling beside us, asking what happened.

“It looked like you went into a non-lucid state there at the end,” e says.

I sigh and reach for my glasses. “Yes. The memory I was using to spin the Thread turned into a nightmare and escaped into the surrounding dreamscape.”

Dr. [NAME] rubs eir bearded chin in thought. “The ley line energy is useful for what we want to create, but it might also make controlling things more difficult. How far did you get?”

“We didn’t make it out of the Library,” Roisin replies, shooting me an apologetic glance. “I tried re-shaping the dreamscape to counter the nightmare, but it wouldn’t respond. Maybe another Librarian could…”

The room devolves into technical discussions and theory, but I stay quiet for once, feeling wiped out and ashamed I couldn’t do more than I did. I’d chosen the memory I did because I thought it would be pleasantly emotional, but neutral enough not to conjure up any terrors. At the time it happened, I wasn’t afraid of the dark, cramped tunnel. But now…

Chimdi appears behind me with a cold bottle of water. “Do not be sad. Today we made progress. Mwari did not land on the moon in one night.”

Usually Chimdi is terse and snappy, so it’s refreshing to hear the kindness in her voice. The water helps, too. Psychic activities are very dehydrating. I squeeze the bottle between my hands after finishing it off.

“Next time we’ll get farther. I promise,” I tell her.