Doc’s room, as ever, was the usual battleground between a science lab and a junkyard sale. The usual mish-mash of seats half-buried under half-finished doodads. A room too small to contain every whim of the mind that occupied it.
As ever, Roseluck found a chair under all the rubble. She dumped herself there and sank as low as she dared, safe in the knowledge that Doc’s genius didn’t extend to reading body language. Not when he was possessed by enthusiasm.
“I’d like your opinion on a little thing I’ve been working on,” he said. Rummaging through a pile nearby, he talked over his shoulder. “You see, designing those ‘contaminant detectors’ – that and Twilight’s talk about dream guards – woke me up to a major flaw in the Oneiroscope design.”
“Really,” said Rose.
“Getting into dreams is one thing. Getting out without getting chomped on by a ravening plant is quite another. That’s where we need some form of mental antigen, to fool the antibodies patrolling the domain of the subject’s psyche…”
Roseluck lost the thread around the words “mental antigen”, though she hadn’t been holding on tight as far back as “getting into dreams is one thing.”
Doc’s speech spun out, an endless yarn. Pretty soon, he’d practically forget she was there. Lecturing the wall would be normal once he was in the zone.
She sighed as loudly as she dared. To think that she’d once found his runaway lectures endearing. A brief attempt at listening to him failed as soon as she heard the term “neural macrophage equivalent”.
Roseluck slipped off her seat and stared around her.
If she ever cleared this place – a process requiring industrial vehicles, by the look of it – Doc’s private quarters might make a lovely boudoir. Yes, she could put heart-shaped bouquets along the walls, perhaps set up a row of rare orchids for display. They’d have a dancefloor to themselves; not a ballroom exactly, but add a few velvet drapes here and there, perhaps a piano in the corner, hire someone like Octavia Melody to play for them. And oh, how they’d dance the night away! Doc, resplendent in his tuxedo…
His tuxedo…?
Roseluck mentally changed it. Obviously, chequered jacket and trousers would do, with a tie as garish as it was tasteless. Perhaps a straw hat too? Ah well, at least he’d look smart in his own bonkers way.
Doc, resplendent in his… bonkers way. And her, Roseluck, swirling and twirling, dress sparkling rich with the finest gemstones of Carousel Boutique. A Jewel-iette Rose, the most expensive rose in the world, tucked behind her ear, soft pink as delicate skin. Allons-y, he’d say. Let us dance under the stars, ma rose de bonne chance.
She’d close her eyes. They’d lean closer, breaths hot on each other’s muzzles, until he’d whisper –
“Dang and blast!”
Metal clashed on metal. Roseluck woke up and spun around to see a pile of gears crashing into the carcass of a washing machine.
“Almost had it then,” he said, brushing his tie down. “Well, Roseluck? What do you think?”
What little embarrassment she had left faded away. He was talking about his stupid Oneiroscope again.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sounds all right, I guess.”
Doc raised an eyebrow at her, brushing it off soon afterwards with a flippant flap of his forelimb. “Of course, fair’s fair, I wouldn’t be averse to a minor magical modification. As a temporary measure until we find the mechanical parts to replace them, you understand.”
“Yeah. You do that.”
Both of Doc’s eyebrows rose as though out of their seats with concern. “My dear, is there something the matter?”
“No,” lied Roseluck. “I’m just tired.”
“I see.” Doc rubbed the back of his neck. “Understandable, of course. It is getting late. I suppose I could escort you home, if you’d rather catch up on your sleep?”
Roseluck shrugged. In for a cent, in for a bit.
“I did have an idea about the Oneiroscope,” she said, and then tried to think one up.
“Oh?” Doc hurried over, knocking piles of wires and panels over before bouncing off a glass case and hastily righting it. “I’m agog to hear it!”
His hungry eyes met her emaciated ones. Idly, she cast about for anything plausible. Her gaze alighted on the glass. If he could be a genius, then why not her?
“We don’t have to go in to look at a dream, do we?” she said. Natural cowardice came to her rescue. “Too risky. Too dangerous. Too messy. It’d be much safer to watch them from the outside, wouldn’t it? On a glass, or something?”
“A glass?” Doc screwed up his lips doubtfully.
“Something, anyway.”
“Like a crystal ball? A magic crystal ball?” Doc started to laugh, but immediately cut himself off. By this point, Roseluck hadn’t the heart to be offended or flattered either way. “I suppose it might work, but a solid round crystal ball seems wildly impractical. I’ve never understood the appeal, even to so-called clairvoyants. Wouldn’t a flat, wide, tall glass be much more intuitive for pony eyes? Not forgetting it’d be easier to store when not in use.”
Inevitably, Roseluck watched him turn away. Already, he walked off with her idea. She’d barely started talking shop.
“What do you think, Rose?” he said suddenly.
Caught by surprise, her mind came up blank. “Huh?”
“One of the days, perhaps? I’m sure I’ve got an old goldfish tank somewhere in the backrooms. Next to the giant kettle.” He winked over his shoulder. “Our little project, eh? Just like old times.”
She looked at him, a circle trying to understand a square. How could he think they’d just roll their sleeves up and pull out the old days like a blockage in a drain? How could he be so brilliant and yet so stupid?
Perhaps, above a certain height, common sense looked so small and trivial.
“Yeah.” She put on a plastic smile. “Why not?”
“Wonderful! I always loved having you – I mean, there’s no apprentice I’d value more. Perhaps next Tuesday, or once the summer rush is out of the way. Now, I had an idea about using a kind of light gun to spread images across a screen really fast, as it happens. Never thought about how to make it move quickly enough, but a mere mechanical conundrum shall fall mightily before the vast machines of pony genius…”
“Sure,” she murmured, turning away.
“Oh Roseluck, while you’re over there, I don’t suppose you could fetch me some of those diodes?”
“What dio–?”
“That’s my Rose! Tally-ho!”
He hadn’t even looked round. Already, he’d found some glassware and was sizing it up.
Practically sleepwalking, she shuffled around the piles to a cupboard opposite. Diodes poured out of it when she opened the door. All of them looked cracked and broken. Fruitless as ever, Roseluck patted about the floor for any that were halfway decent.
He didn’t even clean the place properly. Dust clouds rose where she patted. Overhead, she saw cobwebs and grimaced. Disgusting habits.
She followed the contours of the room, away from Doc’s voice. Surely, he had a secret stash of diodes elsewhere? Most of the junk here had turned grey under the age and the inability of Doc to hold a duster with much enthusiasm.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. There was the older cupboard, of course, once she shoved aside a mountain of ancient, fossilized junk. Awful smell, too. Like something had died.
She sniffed again. Compost?
Roseluck frowned. Definitely a floral smell. This was odd enough to begin with; Doc’s science rarely extended to biology.
She followed the smell to another pile of ancient junk and walked around it to the far corner of the room. Here, the junk resembled failed school projects, all cardboard and that mashed paper stuff they built soda volcanoes out of. The smell piled onto her nose.
She peeked around the paper and cardboard, pushing the model of a chloroplast over until it crumpled under years of neglect. There was a glass case, cracked by some forgotten accident along one side.
Inside it, in the corner, was a dead rose.
Roseluck stared at it. Time, drought, and lack of housekeeping had withered the tip to a black char, but there was no mistaking the smell.
Gently as she could, she lifted the case up and over. Now the smell was overwhelming. Beside it was an unopened box of chocolates, judging from the faded chocolate bar on the cover. With a red ribbon. She didn’t dare open it. Goodness knew what the chocolates would look like now.
A yellowed card lay beside them both. Pink and heart-shaped: the mouth-writing when she opened it was blue with splodged ink, as well as carefully looped and lined. She knew at once it was Doc’s, from school. He’d always been extremely careful whenever he wrote.
She read the message.
And in that moment, Roseluck was a circle, briefly lifted out of a flat plane, and shown a new dimension opening up alongside her to become a sphere. Looking down on an endless expanse to realize there was a her outside of it, in a direction that had seemed impossible a second before. Perhaps she could even forgive him the book.
He’d tried being romantic once.
She’d never received these gifts. But she remembered he’d brought them into school once, and then spent all day clueless what to do with them. So he’d taken them home again. She couldn’t remember if this was before or after he started inviting her over to make model space rockets.
Oh, it was unbearably cliché. Flowers, chocolates, and a card with a nauseating poem in it. Someone – perhaps he himself – had put it into his head, and he’d followed the clichés like instructions in a manual. Yes, that’d be how he did it.
He’d definitely written the poem. No one else could compare her eyes to the Green Pea Galaxy, including spectral type and how the pupil was more a supermassive black hole in the middle.
“Roseluck? Roseluck?”
She dropped the card and backed out guiltily. Had he even remembered these things were here, lost to the piles of dreams he’d collected over time?
“Yes?” She choked on the word.
Behind mountains of mess, Doc’s voice came from across the room. “It’s all right! I’ve found some diodes. Come see what I’ve got here. It’ll blow your mind, as the kids say these days.”
Roseluck cleared her throat. Now was not the time for this. Life grew inside her once more.
She skipped and jumped on her way back.
“Ah, splendid,” he said, while she wiped a few wayward tears. “Great wickering stallions! Something wrong with your eyes?”
“Just a little dust,” she managed to say.
Doc laughed. “My word! I thought you’d found the battery acid, or something dreadful. Yes, it’s awfully dusty in here, isn’t it? I keep meaning to clear it out, but you know how it is.”
Roseluck made a show of examining the bits laid out between them. “So, you think you could do it?”
“Hm?”
“Make a ball… Sorry, screen to show dreams on?”
“Hm. Well, one or two ideas tease my brain, but I’m sure I’ll catch the scallywags soon enough. Perhaps I could make something useful with that light gun device after all, if I could make the photons behave. Perhaps some tubing to conduct electricity?”
“Or a vacuum?” she said, vaguely remembering an old lecture. “So there’s minimal air resistance?”
Doc laughed. “Air resistance, bless. That said, you mean for the photons or for the electri…city?” He tapped his chin. “Or… Or for the electrons instead! Of course! Brilliant idea, when you put it like that. An electron image, in a vacuum tube. Be a dear and pass me that wire, would you?”
“Of course, captain!”
“Thank you. Yes, if we found a way to convert dreams into images via a two-dimensional interlude, I’m sure we could reverse-engineer the original to create a simulated image with electrons, not photons. If only…”
Tonight, Roseluck settled in to a romantic evening for two. Involving cathode rays, with lights dancing on a window, yes, but it all worked in a bonkers kind of way.