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By Root 593 0

that they had been cast down from the sky like palaces from another planet. You could not, by any stretch of the mind, imagine an architecture less adapted to its surroundings. An Ideal City punished and banished to the Far North for its marble hubris, it loomed titanic and mad, its boulevards, arches, and palaces a playground for the caterwauling draughts that sharpened their claws on its flaking façades. And as it did almost every day in late winter, that typical moist fog known to the locals as cake was now seeping everywhere, slowly dimming the scene in a way that gave Brentford the impression that, too tired to will themselves further into existence, the very buildings evaporated, fading like the ghosts of their own unlikely splendour.

Once on the Beaufort Embankment, Brentford saluted the driver and waited for the aerosled to be soaked into the distance. Though the Air Architecture here was supposed to be at its most protective, the cake felt like a block of cold static drizzle, and except for a few hurried, muffled, somnambulic shapes, the gaslit streets were deserted.

Once he was sure not to be seen, Brentford crossed the embankment, took Barrington Street, and headed toward the Dunne Institute for Dream Incubation. Flanked by two twisted spires that made it look a little like a church, and guarded by the marble effigies of the brothers of Morpheus, Phantasus and Phobetor, the Institute was a sort of mental swimming pool for the tired or depressed citizen who could do with a good nap and some sweet dreams, but also for those who were seeking advice or answers to urgent but undecidable matters.

The hall, under its night-blue and starry dome, offered two different gates, one called Ivory, for recreative dreams (including erotic ones, and even nightmares, which happened to be a surprisingly sought-after commodity) and the other one Horn, for the more serious kind of incubation, in which it was indeed hard to predict what the outcome would be (after all, as Brentford had heard Gabriel say countless times, all dreams made you horny). Anonymous behind his woollen scarf, Brentford asked at the desk for the expensive Horn fare. “Single or round-trip?” asked the clerk, with a smile, though the joke was rather worn out.

Past the gates, the Institute consisted of long, swerving, stifling corridors, ill-lit with gas torches held by black marble forearms that jutted out from scarlet walls. Brentford pushed the heavy ebony door corresponding to his ticket. He found himself in a small, black-walled changing room, where he undressed completely, hanging his clothes on another protruding hand, before taking a shower that served both hygienic and symbolical purposes. He drew a curtain aside, and in the dim, glimmering light of perfumed oil-lamps, found himself facing the incubator, a huge brass cylinder with a small padded door. There was actually little this machine did except isolate the dreamer, bathing him in warm saltwater on which he could float, while playing some low-volume, low-frequency drones that were meant to soothe the brain.

Most of the incubation work was left to the dreamer, who had to choose from a distributor the right Complimentary Chemical Complements, as they were called. Brentford opted for the Shower Of Stars, which had always worked wonders for him, and had to phrase by himself, on a piece of paper he placed under his pillow, the question he wanted the dream to answer, writing it in sigils, which facilitated, it seemed, unconscious remembrance.

Brentford eased himself into the incubator, set the sound waves to a classical 2-3 Hz pulse with cyclical forays into the theta spectrum, clicked off the electric lamp at his side, and closed his eyes, concentrating on the answers he wanted about what he should do with the Inuit. As a mathematician, he had always successfully practiced this lazy brand of shamanism known as creative naps, and for some time he had kept a book of dreams that had given him a good training in recall, so incubation was only natural for him. And indeed, though he preferred to be discreet