This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Back in the laboratory, Elias began to write.

He wrote about his dreams—every one he could dredge up from memory, set down on paper in as much detail as he could manage. The flying ones. The falling ones. The strange, ordinary dreams of walking through houses that didn’t exist. He filled page after page, reaching for every scrap of remembered sleep, and as he wrote he spent the second of his day’s questions to check that his hunch was sound.

Did the sheep need to eat paper that had dreams written upon it?

Yes.

It wasn’t paper at all, then—not really. It was the dreams recorded on it. The stories. Paper was merely the vessel; what the sheep truly consumed was the dreaming itself, captured in ink.

That posed an obvious problem. One man could only remember so many of his own dreams.

A few days later, Elias brought the matter to Oliver. “This is going to sound strange,” he admitted, “but could you arrange a sort of—part-time job? Pay people to write down their dreams. Whatever they remember, in as much detail as they can. I’ll cover the cost from what I’ve made.”

Oliver’s face did something complicated.

“That is,” he said slowly, “one of the more unusual requests I have ever fielded. Pay strangers to write down their dreams.” He turned it over a moment longer, then shrugged, the strangeness already filed away as a solved problem. “Easy enough to arrange, though. Give me a little time.”

Within a week, the papers came flooding in—thousands of them, dreams of every shape and color, written by people who would never know what they were truly for. Elias also confirmed, with a question, the scale of what he’d need: each sheep would have to eat a hundred different dreams to complete the third step.

A hundred dreams each. He had the papers for it now. So he gathered the flock and began.

It was while feeding them, one paper at a time, that Elias noticed the thing he had not expected.

The sheep had preferences.

They were not indiscriminate at all. Offered a stack of dreams, each sheep nosed through them and chose—and what they chose was startlingly particular. This one reached eagerly for happy dreams and refused everything else. That one wanted only excitement—chases, adventures, narrow escapes. Another sought out dreams of love. One small ewe would eat nothing but childish dreams, bright and simple. Others wanted dreams of food, or of perfect peace, or—in the case of one deeply strange sheep—dreams composed entirely of utter nonsense, the more senseless the better.

Elias watched the sorting with a researcher’s rising excitement, and a conjecture took shape in his mind. Did the kind of dream a sheep preferred determine the kind of dream it would one day be able to make?

The Wheel of Fortune turned into being before him in answer.

It spun, and slowed, and settled on green—a modest reward, but a confirmation all the same: one month of meditation, consolidating his beast-taming space. The talent had agreed with him. The preference was the point. Each sheep was sorting itself toward the dreams it was meant to give.

It was an elegant thing, when he understood it. He would not have to assign these creatures their purposes. They were choosing for themselves, one paper at a time—the comedians and the romantics and the peacemakers and the one devoted entirely to nonsense, each becoming exactly the dream-giver its own heart pointed toward.

And then he noticed the other thing.

Roughly a fifth of the flock would not touch the pleasant dreams at all.

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They went, instead, for the nightmares—the dark papers Elias had nearly left out of the stacks entirely, the bad dreams and the frightening ones. About twenty percent of the sheep nosed straight past every happy story to seek those out, and ate them with the same quiet contentment the others showed for dreams of love and laughter.

Two paths, he remembered. Dream and Nightmare. He had wondered how he would choose which sheep walked which road. He needn’t have. The sheep were, once again, choosing for themselves.

The next day, with his questions refilled, Elias changed the designation of those sheep—steering them deliberately down the second path—and confirmed it with the talent. Were the first two steps the same for the Nightmare path as the Dream path? Yes. And was its third step simply to eat a hundred nightmares, as the others ate a hundred dreams? Yes again.

Mercy and terror, grown the same way, sorted by nothing more than the appetite of a sheep.

A week later, the first of them crossed the threshold.

Sheep that had eaten their full hundred—dreams or nightmares—lay down for a single night’s sleep, and woke changed. Elias checked their statuses one after another, and there they were: Induce Dream on the ones who had feasted on joy, and Induce Nightmare on the ones who had chosen the dark.

By then, he had also worked out the fourth and final step and found it identical in both cases. To complete the evolution, a sheep had to use its new skill a number of times—to send someone into a dream, or a nightmare, and then enter that dreamscape itself through the Dream Visitor door it had been given so long ago.

Which meant the sheep needed willing sleepers. And Elias, being Elias, volunteered himself first.

He chose a Dream sheep to begin—one with a marked preference for funny dreams—and lay down, and let it work.

Sleep took him at once. And then Elias was sitting in a chair, in a warm and crowded room, and on a small stage before him stood one of his favorite stand-up comedians from Earth—a woman he had only ever seen through a screen, in another life, on a world he would never walk again.

But here she was real. Here he was in the room, in the audience, the laughter of the crowd warm around him, and she did her set exactly as he remembered it and he laughed—really laughed, helpless and delighted, in a way he had not since a childhood that had ended on a different planet. He had never once seen her in person. Now he had. The dream had reached into the fondest corner of his memory and simply given it to him.

When at last the set ended, and the applause faded, a sheep appeared at the edge of the room, soft and patient, as though it had always been there. And slowly the dream began to dissolve—the stage, the crowd, the comedian all fading gently into light as the sheep drew the dreamscape into itself, completing the final step.

Elias crossed the dissolving room to it, knelt, and hugged the small creature.

“Thank you,” he whispered, as the dream came apart around them both. “That was wonderful.”

He woke the next morning more rested than he could remember being in years.

That, more than any status screen, was the proof. The sheep worked. Not a sedative, not a trick—a genuine, restoring night of good dreams, the kind a frayed mind could heal inside of.

So he set the Dream sheep loose to finish their evolutions on willing sleepers, and there was no shortage of volunteers. The pigs took turns. The bees, the butterflies, the ravens—all of them, with their consent, drifted off into pleasant dreams and woke happier for it. The guardians, too, one by one, agreed to a night of good sleep in the name of research, and not one of them regretted it.

The realm, for a little while, became the best-rested place on Blue Star.

And then there were the others.

The Nightmare sheep still needed willing sleepers of their own to complete their fourth step—and that was a far harder thing to ask. A night deliberately given over to terror was not a favor one requested lightly.

Cassian stepped forward before Elias could even finish explaining. “I’ll do it,” the commander said simply. “I have endured worse than a bad dream every day of my life on the frontier. Let it be me.”

It was a kind offer, and a brave one, and Elias refused it.

“Thank you,” he said. “But no. It’s my research—I need to confirm what it does myself, firsthand. That’s the rule I hold to, and I won’t break it by handing the worst part to someone else.” And privately, looking at the man who had spent a lifetime fighting horrors on a frontier of illusions, Elias could not begin to imagine what shape a nightmare would take inside a mind like Cassian’s—and did not want to find out at his friend’s expense.

So it would be him. Of course it would be him.

Night came.

Elias chose a Nightmare sheep, and held it close the way he had held its gentler kin, and lay down in the dark of his quiet room. The little creature settled against him, soft as cotton, entirely harmless to look at.

“All right,” he murmured, his heart beating a little quicker than he would have liked. “Go ahead.”

He felt sleep reach up and take him.

And then Elias opened his eyes—

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