The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

the lone sound resonated in the air as the orchestra had fallen momentarily silent, and a few faces turned around to look at them. ‘I dreamt of it too!’ she said in a frenzied whisper, more of a hiss. ‘It was last summer.’

‘Mine too. And then several times after that.’

‘And did it happen every time?’

‘No, only once.’

She tugged her lip thoughtfully. ‘So your dreaming might be not the only condition. Necessary, but not sufficient.’

‘I’m not sure it is even necessary. I mean…’ He had to slap his own hollow cheek slightly to keep his thoughts on track. ‘I mean that maybe it doesn’t have to be me but anyone – it happened to you.’

‘To us. Do you remember the date of your fateful dream last summer?’

‘July 15th.’

‘Mine too! Maybe what is necessary is that more than one person dreams it.’

Applause broke out around them, and they shuffled with the rest of the crowd into the foyer for the intermission. The prince sweated and palpitated, and felt his forehead and ears grow too warm from the combined excitement of finding her and being able to talk about the Bank to someone, in person. Together, it was easier to break the pall it cast over their thoughts.

They bought lemonade and drank it buy the window – if one pulled apart the wine-colored velvet of the drapes, one could see the snow that started sifting from the low clouds, flaring like handfuls of beads when it hit the cones of streetlights and disappearing in the darkness. One could also see several stray dogs sitting by the entrance, waiting patiently for the patrons to leave, concession-stand leftovers in hand.

‘These dogs scare me,’ Lucita Almadao said, looking over the prince’s shoulder. ‘The other day, one of them startled me just as I was buying food from a street vendor, and I dropped it.’

‘This is how they hunt,’ the prince said, still looking out the window. ‘They are like lions, and hotdogs are their prey. We’re merely a vehicle. I heard that these dogs are becoming more intelligent. They know how to take the subway.’

‘I’ve seen them there.’

‘I think they might have a single mind among them.’ Once again, his sinuses itched and filled with pressure. ‘Do you think they can dream?’

Lucita Almadao’s eyes, reflected in the dark pane of the window, widened. ‘Dogs?!’

‘Why not? If it is us who’s dreaming the Bank, we cannot enter it. I would dream it for you, but I’m not enough.’

‘My dearest one,’ she quoted softly. ‘I need your assistance. We can write the others.’

‘And who will want to be the dreamers while everyone else goes to claim their fortunes?’

Outside, the dogs howled with one voice.

*

It wasn’t an easy task to train the stray dogs to dream. Their collective mind seemed very focused on food and warmth – especially warmth, since the nights had grown bitter. The prince had opened the doors of his walkup to them, despite Emilio’s protestations – had no other choice, really. They slept on the floor and by the radiator, under the kitchen chairs, on Emilio’s pullout couch. The apartment smelled like warmed fur, and filled with the quiet but constant clacking of claws on the parquet.

The prince was at first terrified and then amused when the dogs started paying for their lodgings: they arrived with wallets, sometimes empty, sometimes with money in them. One day, as he was traveling to see the widow Lucita Almadao, he learned how the dogs got the wallets.

As the train slowed down, pulling closer to the station, the prince saw a stray dog hop onto the seat next to a well-dressed man, the sheen of his sharkskin jacket making a lovely contrast with a crisp white shirt and his striped, burgundy tie, which looked Italian and expensive. The dog whined and smiled, his thick tail of a German shepherd mix thumping against the vinyl of the seat. The man smiled and petted the dog’s head gingerly – who wouldn’t, looking at those bright eyes and pink tongue. The train pulled into the station and the doors hissed open, just as the dog thrust his muzzle into the man’s jacket, grabbing the wallet from his inner pocket, and bounded onto the platform, just as the stream of incoming passengers hid him from view and prevented the robbery victim from chasing after. The man cursed, and the prince buried his face in the newspaper. That night, a German shepherd mix showed up at his door with an Italian wallet, moist but otherwise undamaged, in his mouth.

Lucita Almadao stopped by every now and again, to help talk to the dogs and to pet the stray heads, their tongues lolling gratefully and eyes squinting with pleasure. She told them about the Bank of Burkina Faso and her dead husband, breaking the dogs’ and the prince’s hearts anew. He talked to them too and showed them the emails, the constant stream of pleas by the lost and the banished, the plaintive song playing in a loop, asking again and again for assistance from foreign nationals in their quest to liberate their stolen millions or to reclaim rightful inheritance. The dogs listened, their heads tilted, their ears pricked up. Most of them left in the morning to take the bus and the subway, but came back at night with wallets and an occasional watch.

It took them almost all the way to New Year, but slowly, slowly, the dogs started dreaming in unison: their legs twitched as if they were running, and their tails wagged in their sleep. When the prince looked out of the window, he occasionally glimpsed a brick or a part of the wall, a segment of a bank vault hovering, disembodied, over the no man’s land of the frozen and snowed over yard. Once, he ran for the apparition but it crumbled, and a piece of dream-wall fell on his shoulder, almost dislocating it.

The dogs were getting better at dreaming as the prince and the widow Lucita Almadao got worse: the