RAVES FOR

LINCOLN’S DREAMS:

“A TIGHT, SOLID FANTASY WITH A STILETTO-IN-THE-HEART EPIPHANY AT THE END … FASCINATING … DEEPLY AFFECTING.”

—Twilight Zone Magazine

“[LINCOLN’S DREAMS] CLEARLY MARKS CONNIE WILLIS AS ONE OF OUR FOREMOST YOUNG NOVELISTS. THE BOOK DESERVES TO BE VERY WIDELY READ.”

—Fantasy Review

“CHARMING, UNPREDICTABLE … AN IMPRESSIVE FIRST NOVEL FROM A TALENTED WRITER.”

—Publishers Weekly

“LINCOLN’S DREAMS IS MORE THAN JUST AN ENTHRALLING NOVEL. EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE A TALENT LEAPS UP TO ANNOUNCE ITSELF AS IMPORTANT. CONNIE WILLIS IS SUCH A TALENT: A MAGISTERIAL INTELLIGENCE AT WORK. TO ENJOY MS. WILLIS’S WORK IS ONLY COMMON SENSE; TO MISS LINCOLN’S DREAMS IS TO RISK THE LOSS OF YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL. BECAUSE OF ITS EXCELLENCE, AND THE PLEASURE IT WILL BRING, I HOPE THIS WISE AND INVENTIVE BOOK FINDS A WIDE READERSHIP”

—Harlan Ellison

“MOVING AND BEAUTIFUL … A MOST ORIGINAL AND FASCINATING NOVEL.”

—Richard Adams,

author of Watership Down

“SUSPENSEFUL, THOUGHT-PROVOKING AND POIGNANT, LINCOLN’S DREAMS TOTALLY ENGAGES THE MIND AND HEART.”

—Michael Bishop,

author of No Enemy but Time

Bantam Books by Connie Willis

DOOMSDAY BOOK

FIRE WATCH

LINCOLN’S DREAMS

IMPOSSIBLE THINGS

BELLWETHER

REMAKE

UNCHARTED TERRITORY

TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG

MIRACLE AND OTHER

   CHRISTMAS STORIES

PASSAGE

Table of Contents

Cover

Other Books by this Author

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

About the Author

Copyright

To

Courtney and Cordelia

Special thanks to my research assistants,

the Smiths—Brooke and Karolyn, Brien

and Julie—for wandering among

the tombstones of Fredericksburg and

Arlington, asking questions and taking

notes, searching for clues.

FOREWORD

While I was working on Lincoln’s Dreams, any number of people asked me why I was writing a book about the Civil War, but no one at all asked me why I was writing a book about dreams. Instead, when I told them what the book was about, they began telling me about dreams they had had, as if I could tell them what they meant.

I had no idea. I have no idea what any dreams mean. All the latest research seems to indicate that they don’t mean anything—that they are nothing more than the nervous system’s charwoman, tidying up after the day’s events, taking out the trash. And that makes very good sense. (Why else would we dream about empty creamer packets that steal a parakeet?) But something in us rebels at the idea that they’re the day’s detritus, because dreams so obviously mean something.

Freud thought so, too. He wrote his dreams down in painstaking detail (they are as ridiculous as ours—full of flower monographs and false teeth) and pored over them, trying to decipher their meaning. He decided they were dispatches from our unconscious: longing sighs and murmured memories and cries for help, all sent in a complicated code.

And that seems logical, too, until it comes to the deciphering. (“The creamer packets clearly represent your yearning for your mother’s breast …”) Because it’s not a code, it’s another language. And their images can’t be reduced to symbols. Dreams are something more, something else.

Abraham Lincoln dreamed his own death. He heard the sound of crying and asked the guard, “Who is dead in the White House?” and the guard said, “The President.” And it’s perfectly clear what that dream meant. You don’t need a codebook to tell it’s a warning. Yet I find myself puzzling over it, and over that other dream of his, the one he dreamed “before every significant event of the war,” the one he dreamed the night before he died. In that dream, he was in a boat, drifting toward an unknown shore, and you don’t need Freud for that one either.

Or if you insist on the charwoman theory, it is scarcely unusual that death was on his mind—there was at least one assassination attempt a week, and he had already heard the sound of crying in the White House when Willie died. And yet, in spite of all this logic, I find them staying with me like a dream, the code impossible to decipher, troubling me, haunting me.

As the Civil War haunts me. In the first part of Lincoln’s Dreams, Jeff is offered a job researching the long-term effects of the Vietnam War. He turns it down. “I’m busy studying the long-term effects of the Civil War.” And I guess that’s what I was doing, too, writing this book. Because the Civil War isn’t over. Its images, dreamlike, stay with us—young boys lying face-down in cornfields and orchards, and Robert E. Lee on Traveller. And Lincoln, dead in the White House, and the sound of crying.

The Civil War disturbs us, all these long years after, troubling our sleep. Like a cry for help, like a warning, like a dream. And we pore over it, trying to break the code, its meaning just out of reach.

It may be that life is not man’s most precious possession, after all. Certainly men can be induced to give it away very freely at times, and the terms hardly seem to make sense unless there is something about the whole business that we don’t understand. Lives are spent for very insignificant things which benefit the dead not at all—a few rods of ground in a cornfield, for instance, or temporary ownership of a little hill or a piece of windy pasture; and now and then they are simply wasted outright, with nobody gaining anything at all.

Bruce Catton

Mr. Lincoln’s Army

CHAPTER ONE

They bred such horses in Virginia then,

Horses that were remembered after death

And buried not so far from Christian ground

That if their sleeping riders should arise