A Time of Changes Read online

  35

  I WAS AT FIRST GREATLY AWARE of the functioning of my own body: the thud-thud of my heart, the pounding of the blood against the walls of arteries, the movements of fluids deep within my ears, the drifting of corpuscular bodies across my field of vision. I became enormously receptive to external stimuli, currents of air brushing my cheek, a fold of my robe touching my thigh, the pressure of the floor against the sole of my foot. I heard an unfamiliar sound as of water tumbling through a distant gorge. I lost touch with my surroundings, for as my perceptions intensified the range of them also narrowed, and I found myself incapable of perceiving the shape of the room, for I saw nothing clearly except in a constricted tunnel at the other end of which was Schweiz; beyond the rim of this tunnel there was only haze. Now I was frightened, and fought to clear my mind, as one may make a conscious effort to free the brain of the muddle caused by too much wine; but the harder I struggled to return to normal perception, the more rapidly did the pace of change accelerate. I entered a state of luminous drunkenness, in which brilliant radiant rods of colored light streamed past my face, and I was certain I must have sipped from Digant’s spring. I felt a rushing sensation, like that of air moving swiftly against my ears. I heard a high whining sound that was barely audible at first, but swept up in crescendo until it took on tangibility and appeared to fill the room to overflowing, yet the sound was not painful. The chair beneath me throbbed and pulsated in a steady beat that seemed tuned to some patient pulsation of our planet itself. Then, with no discernible feeling of having crossed a boundary, I realized that my perceptions had for some time been double: now I was aware of a second heartbeat, of a second spurt of blood within vessels, of a second churning of intestines. But it was not mere duplication, for these other rhythms were different, setting up complex symphonic interplays with the rhythms of my own body, creating percussive patterns that were so intricate that the fibers of my mind melted in the attempt to follow them. I began to sway in time with these beats, to clap my hands against my thighs, to snap my fingers; and, looking down my vision-tunnel, I saw Schweiz also swaying and clapping and snapping, and realized whose bodily rhythms it was I had been receiving. We were locked together. I had difficulty now distinguishing his heartbeat from my own, and sometimes, glancing across the table at him, I saw my own reddened, distorted face. I experienced a general liquefying of reality, a breaking down of walls and restraints; I was unable to maintain a sense of Kinnall Darival as an individual; I thought not in terms of he and I, but of we. I had lost not only my identity but the concept of self itself.

  At that level I remained a long while, until I started to think that the power of the drug was receding. Colors grew less brilliant, my perception of the room became more conventional, and I could again distinguish Schweiz’s body and mind from my own. Instead of feeling relief that the worst was over, though, I felt only disappointment that I had not achieved the kind of mingling of consciousness that Schweiz had promised.

  But I was mistaken.

  The first wild rush of the drug was over, yes, yet we were only now coming into the true communion. Schweiz and I were apart but nevertheless together. This was the real selfbaring. I saw his soul spread out before me as though on a table, and I could walk up to the table and examine those things that were on it, picking up this utensil, that vase, these ornaments, and studying them as closely as I wished.

  Here was the looming face of Schweiz’s mother. Here was a swollen pale breast streaked with blue veins and tipped by an enormous rigid nipple. Here were childhood furies. Here were memories of Earth. Through the eyes of Schweiz I saw the mother of worlds, maimed and shackled, disfigured and discolored. Beauty gleamed through the ugliness. This was the place of his birth, this disheveled city; these were highways ten thousand years old; these were the stumps of ancient temples. Here was the node of first love. Here were disappointments and departures. Betrayals, here. Shared confidences, here. Growth and change. Corrosion and despair. Journeys. Failures. Seductions. Confessions. I saw the suns of a hundred worlds.

  And I passed through the strata of Schweiz’s soul, inspecting the gritty layers of greed and the boulders of trickery, the oily pockets of maliciousness, the decaying loam of opportunism. Here was self incarnate; here was a man who had lived solely for his own sake.

  Yet I did not recoil from the darkness of Schweiz.

  I saw beyond those things. I saw the yearning, the god-hunger in the man, Schweiz alone on a lunar plain, splayfooted on a black shield of rock under a purple sky, reaching up, grasping, taking hold of nothing. Sly and opportunistic he might be, yes, but also vulnerable, passionate, honest beneath all his capering. I could not judge Schweiz harshly. He was I. I was he. Tides of self engulfed us both. If I were to cast Schweiz down, I must also cast down Kinnall Darival. My soul was flooded with warmth for him.

  I felt him, too, probing me. I erected no barriers about my spirit as he came to explore it. And through his own eyes I saw what he was seeing in me. My fear of my father. My awe of my brother. My love for Halum. My flight into Glin. My choosing of Loimel. My petty faults and my petty virtues. Everything, Schweiz. Look. Look. Look. And it all came back refracted through his soul, nor did I find it painful to observe. Love of others begins with love of self, I thought suddenly.

  In that instant the Covenant fell and shattered within me.

  Gradually Schweiz and I pulled apart, though we remained in contact some time longer, the strength of the bond ebbing steadily. When it broke at last, I felt a shivering resonance, as if a taut string had snapped. We sat in silence. My eyes were closed. I was queasy in the pit of my stomach and conscious, as I had never been conscious before, of the gulf that keeps each of us forever alone. After some long time I looked across the room at Schweiz.

  He was watching me, waiting for me. He wore that demonic look of his, the wild grin, the bright-eyed gleam, only now it seemed to me less a look of madness than a reflection of inner joy. He appeared younger now. His face was still flushed.

  “I love you,” he said softly.

  The unexpected words were bludgeons. I crossed my wrists before my face, palms out, protecting myself.

  “What upsets you so much?” he asked. “My grammar or my meaning?”

  “Both.”

  “Can it be so terrible to say, I love you?”

  “One has never—one does not know how to—”

  “To react? To respond?” Schweiz laughed. “I don’t mean I love you in any physical way. As if that would be so hideous. But no. I mean what I say, Kinnall. I’ve been in your mind and I liked what I saw there. I love you.”

  “You talk in ‘I,’” I reminded him.

  “Why not? Must I deny self even now? Come on: break free, Kinnall. I know you want to. Do you think what I just said to you is obscene?”

  “There is such a strangeness about it.”

  “On my world those words have a holy strangeness,” said Schweiz. “And here they’re an abomination. Never to be allowed to say ‘I love you,’ eh? A whole planet denying itself that little pleasure. Oh, no, Kinnall, no, no, no!”

  “Please,” I said faintly. “One still has not fully adjusted to the things the drug did. When you shout at one like that—”

  But he would not subside.

  “You were in my mind too,” he said. “What did you find there? Was I so loathsome? Get it out, Kinnall. You have no secrets from me now. The truth. The truth!”

  “You know, then, that one found you more admirable than one had expected.”

  Schweiz chuckled. “And I the same! Why are we afraid of each other now, Kinnall? I told you: I love you! We made contact. We saw there were areas of trust. Now we have to change, Kinnall. You more than me, because you have farther to go. Come. Come. Put words to your heart. Say it.”

  “One can’t.”

  “Say ‘I.’”

  “How difficult that is.”

  “Say it. Not as an obscenity. Say it as if you love yourself.”

&nb
sp; “Please.”

  “Say it.”

  “I,” I said.

  “Was that so awful? Come, now. Tell me how you feel about me. The truth. From the deepest levels.”

  “A feeling of warmth—of affection, of trust—”

  “Of love?”

  “Of love, yes,” I admitted.

  “Then say it.”

  “Love.”

  “That isn’t what I want you to say.”

  “What, then?”

  “Something that hasn’t been said on this planet in two thousand years, Kinnall. Now: say it. I—”

  “I—”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you.”

  “I love you.”

  “I—love—you.”

  “It’s a beginning,” Schweiz said. Sweat streamed down his face and mine. “We start by acknowledging that we can love. We start by acknowledging that we have selves capable of loving. Then we begin to love. Eh? We begin to love.”

  36

  LATER I SAID, “Did you get from the drug what you were looking for, Schweiz?”

  “Partially.”

  “How so, partially?”

  “I was looking for God, Kinnall, and I didn’t quite find him, but I got a better idea of where to look. What I did find was how not to be alone any more. How to open my mind fully to someone else. That’s the first step on the road I want to travel.”

  “One is happy for your sake, Schweiz.”

  “Must you still talk to me in that third-person lingo?”

  “I can’t help myself,” I said. I was terribly tired. I was beginning to feel afraid of Schweiz again. The love I bore for him was still there, but now suspicion was creeping back. Was he exploiting me? Was he milking a dirty little pleasure out of our mutual exposures? He had pushed me into becoming a self-barer. His insistence on my speaking in “I” and “me” to him—was that a token of my liberation, was it something beautiful and pure, as he claimed, or was it only a reveling in filth? I was too new to this. I could not sit placidly while a man said, “I love you” to me, and compelled me to say to him, “I love you.”

  “Practice it,” Schweiz said. “I. I. I. I.”

  “Stop. Please.”

  “Is it that painful?”

  “It’s new and strange to me. I need—there, you see?—I need to slide into this more gradually.”

  “Take your time, then. Don’t let me rush you. But don’t ever stop moving forward.”

  “One will try. I will try,” I said.

  “Good.” After a moment he said, “Would you try the drug again, ever?”

  “With you?”

  “I don’t think there’s any need for that. I mean with someone like your bondsister. If I offered you some, would you use it with her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you afraid of the drug now?”

  I shook my head. “That isn’t easy for me to answer. I need time to come to terms with the whole experience. Time to think about it, Schweiz, before getting involved again.”

  “You’ve tasted the experience. You’ve seen that there’s only good to be had from it.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps.”

  “Without doubt!” His fervor was evangelical. His zeal tempted me anew.

  Cautiously I said, “If more were available, I would seriously consider trying it again. With Halum, maybe.”

  “Good!”

  “Not immediately. But in time. Two, three, four moontimes from now.”

  “It would have to be farther from now than that.”

  “Why?”

  Schweiz said, “This was my entire stock of the drug that we used this evening. I have no more.”

  “But you could get some, if you tried?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, certainly.”

  “Where?”

  “In Sumara Borthan,” he said.

  37

  WHEN ONE IS NEW to the ways of pleasure, it is not surprising to find guilt and remorse following first indulgence. So was it with me. In the morning of our second day at the lodge I awoke after troubled sleep, feeling such shame that I prayed the ground to swallow me. What had I done? Why had I let Schweiz goad me into such foulness? Selfbaring! Selfbaring! Sitting with him all night, saying “I” and “me” and “me” and “I,” and congratulating myself on my new freedom from convention’s strangling hand! The mists of day brought a mood of disbelief. Could I have actually opened myself like that? Yes, I must, for within me now were memories of Schweiz’s past, which I had not had access to before. And myself within him, then. I prayed for a way of undoing what I had done. I felt I had lost something of myself by surrendering my apartness. You know, to be a self-barer is not a pretty thing among us, and those who expose themselves gain only a dirty pleasure from it, a furtive kind of ecstasy. I insisted to myself that I had done nothing of that, but had embarked rather on a spiritual quest; but even as I put the phrase to myself it sounded portentous and hypocritical, a flimsy mask for shabby motives. And I was ashamed, for my sake, for my sons’ sake, for the sake of my royal father and his royal forefathers, that I had come to this. I think it was Schweiz’s “I love you” that drove me into such an abyss of regret, more than any other single aspect of the evening, for my old self saw those words as doubly obscene, even while the new self that was struggling to emerge insisted that the Earthman had meant nothing shameful, neither with his “I” nor with his “love.” But I rejected my own argument and let guilt engulf me. What had I become, to trade endearments with another man, an Earthborn merchant, a lunatic? How could I have given my soul to him? Where did I stand, now that I was so wholly vulnerable to him? For a moment I considered killing Schweiz, as a way of recovering my privacy. I went to him where he slept, and saw him with a smile on his face, and I could feel no hatred for him then.

  That day I spent mostly alone. I went off into the forest and bathed at a cool pond; then I knelt before a firethorn tree and pretended it was a drainer, and confessed myself to it in shy whispers; afterward I walked through a brambly woods, coming back to the lodge thorned and smudged. Schweiz asked me if I felt unwell. No, I told him, nothing is wrong. I said little that evening, but huddled in a floating-chair. The Earthman, more talkative than ever, a torrent of buoyant words, launched himself into the details of a grand scheme for an expedition to Sumara Borthan to bring back sacks of the drug, enough to transform every soul in Manneran, and I listened without commenting, for everything had become unreal to me, and that project seemed no more strange than anything else.

  I hoped the ache of my soul would ease once I was back in Manneran and at my desk in the Justiciary. But no. I came into my house and Halum was there with Loimel, the cousins exchanging clothes with one another, and at the sight of them I nearly turned and fled. They smiled warm woman-smiles at me, secret smiles, the token of the league they had formed between themselves all their lives, and in despair I looked from my wife to my bondsister, from one cousin to the other, receiving their mirrored beauty as a double sword in my belly. Those smiles. Those knowing eyes! They needed no drug to pull the truths from me.

  Where have you been, Kinnall?

  To a lodge in the forest, to play at selfbaring with the Earthman.

  And did you show him your soul?

  Oh, yes, and he showed his.

  And then?

  Then we spoke of love. I love you, he said, and one replied, I love you.

  What a wicked child you are, Kinnall!

  Yes, Yes. Where can one hide from his shame?

  This silent dialogue whirled through my brain in an instant, as I came toward them where they sat beside the courtyard fountain. Formally I embraced Loimel, and formally I embraced my bondsister, but I kept my eyes averted from theirs, so sharp was my guilt. It was the same in the Justiciary office for me. I translated the glances of the underlings into accusing glares. There is Kinnall Darival, who revealed all our mysteries to Schweiz of Earth. Look at the Sallan self-barer slink by us! How can he stand his own
reek? I kept to myself and did my work poorly. A document concerning some transaction of Schweiz’s crossed my desk, throwing me into dismay. The thought of facing Schweiz ever again appalled me. It would have been no great chore for me to revoke his residence permit in Manneran, using the authority of the High Justice; poor payment for the trust he showed me, but I came close to doing it, and checked myself only out of a deeper shame even than I already bore.

  On the third day of my return, when my children too had begun to wonder what was wrong with me, I went to the Stone Chapel to seek healing from the drainer Jidd.

  It was a damp day of heavy heat. The soft furry sky seemed to hang in looping folds over Manneran, and everything was coated in glistening beads of bright moisture. That day the sunlight was a strange color, almost white, and the ancient black stone blocks of the holy building gave off blinding reflections as though they were edged with prisms; but once inside the chapel, I found myself in dark, cool, quiet halls. Jidd’s cell had pride of place in the chapel’s apse, behind the great altar. He awaited me already robed; I had reserved his time hours in advance. The contract was ready. Quickly I signed and gave him his fee. This Jidd was no more lovely than any other of his trade, but just then I was almost pleased by his ugliness, his jagged knobby nose and thin long lips, his hooded eyes, his dangling earlobes. Why mock the man’s face? He would have chosen another for himself, if he had been consulted. And I was kindly disposed to him, for I hoped he would heal me. Healers were holy men. Give me what I need from you, Jidd, and I will bless your ugly face! He said, “Under Whose auspices will you drain?”