Mahoganys Dream

MAHOGANY'S DREAM
By
Jamel H. Cato
Copyright (c) 2004 Jamel H. Cato Protected by international laws and
treaties.
Electronic Edition published in 2005 (version 3.7)
Some rights reserved. This file has been made available to the public
under an Attribution-No Derivative Works-Noncommercial 2.0
Creative Commons license. You may freely copy or distribute this file
for noncommercial purposes as you long as you give me credit as the
author. You may NOT charge for it, modify it in any way or create
derivative works from it without my express written permission.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the author's imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.
No trees were harmed to make this electronic version.
FOREWORD (Electronic Edition)
I'm not one for long preambles, so I'll keep this brief. In the event you
obtained this file someplace other than my official download page,
there are a few things you should know about it:
1. It's free. I made this novel available for free to help build a reader
base for my future works and because I want my fiction to be read by
as many people as possible.
2. It's made to be read on a screen. This special electronic version of the

novel has been formatted for comfortable online reading.
Because of that formatting, printing this version will consume quite a
bit of paper, though you're still welcome to do so.
3. It's shareable. This file has been made available under a Creative
Commons License, which in this case means that you may freely copy
or distribute the book as long as you don't charge for it, make a
derivative work from it, or change it in any way, including removing
this Foreword.
If you enjoy the novel, I do ask two small favors: One, please tell
someone else about it. Two, consider joining my email mailing list.
You can always contact me through my website. Thanks for reading.
For Terrell and Victoria.
May all your dreams come true.
"You wake up one morning and find a snake the size of a fire truck in
your house. What to do?"
-Walter Mosley
"Too much joy weeps. Too much sorrow laughs."
-Ian McDonald From Tendelio's Story
PROLOGUE
Dreams.
In 1851, a chemist named Frederich Kekule fell to sleep on a bus in
London and had a dream that led to a groundbreaking scientific
discovery: the natural hexagonal shape of the benzene molecule, which
led to the development of gas, plastic, rubber and scores of modern
drugs. It is not an overstatement to say that mastery of the "benzene
ring" revolutionized life on earth. In his dream, Kekule saw the vision

of a snake with its tail in its mouth.
In 1983, a seven year-old orphan in North Philadelphia named Dyson
Conwell had two dreams in one night. In the first, he dreamt of an
angel carrying a golden lamp stand to the top of a towering circular
room. In the second dream, he envisioned a small boy standing outside
of a redbrick house with the address 1331 in golden numerals. It was
winter in the second dream and the boy had no coat. There were people
inside the house, for the little boy could hear a man yelling and a
woman crying. Unfortunately they chose to ignore the boy freezing to
death outside. The boy tried the front door, the back door and pounding
his fists on every window, but he could not get anyone's attention.
Eventually the cold began to overtake the helpless youth, but Dyson
awoke the moment before the boy died.
The first dream, which recurred often, led to a senior honors paper ten
years later outlining a rudimentary structure for a quantum calculator.
To Dyson's agile mind, the angel flying with the lamp stand looked like
the Greek symbol psi, which he used to solve a Schrodinger equation
that postulated the number of nuclear spins necessary to produce a
stable quantum state. For this precocious work, he was awarded a full
scholarship to Princeton University as a Kekule Scholar, in honor of the
famous chemist.
The second dream made him homeless immediately. Upon hearing it,
his foster parents promptly sent him back to the placement agency with
no explanation. This began a cycle of moving from one foster home to
another that lasted until the day one of his high school teachers bought
him a Greyhound ticket to Princeton. Forever unbeknownst to Dyson,
1331 was the exact address of a redbrick house where his foster father's
long-time mistress lived with their illegitimate child. Unarmed with this
knowledge, Dyson invented the idea that his sudden rejection by his
new family was somehow his fault. Again.
In 2009,