Watson, Ian - Novel 10 (13 page)

 
          
Jim slept soundly
till eight that
evening and woke with a slight headache. He hunted in his valise for the
hypno-tape which Mike Mullen had made back in Gracchus. Slipping the cassette
into his pocket, he went down to the duty attendant’s office.

 
          
Tonight
the man on duty was Neilson. Or was the name Martinson? Jim couldn’t remember.
Somebodyson was reading a magazine which he hastily shuffled from sight as Jim
came in.

 
          
Weinberger,
in miniature on the only active monitor screen, lay abed reading a magazine
too. Or at least he turned the pages now and then. Icebergs still floated in
the wall vista. In the little screen they looked much closer together: about to
shut their jaws on Weinberger. Had Somebodyson been reading the same magazine
as Nathan? Maybe the attendant had been told to spy on Weinberger’s every
thought — but this was the only way he'could
work
out
how to do it.

 
          
“I'll
be requiring privacy for most of tonight, starting around eleven. This might go
on for a long time, so don’t worry. I need a cassette player too —“

 
          
“Over
there, sir.”

 
          
“And a bridge-switch and some cable.”

 
          
Somebodyson
pointed.

 
          
While
he was about it, Jim deftly removed the pass-key for the pharmacy.

 
          
He
went to the pharmacy next and unlocked a drug cupboard, from which he filched a
handful of conditioner pills out of a jar labelled
Neo-Harmaline-MDA
.

 
          
The
popular name ‘conditioner’ was perhaps a little misleading. The untailored
Harmaline alkaloid produced relaxation and withdrawal and vivid archetypal imagery;
while MDA heightened insight and communication and reflectiveness, promoting
too a sense of social concern — in this sense MDA was a ‘truth drug’, a drug
which made one search for truth within oneself.

 
          
The
chemically retailored package was somewhat milder in effect and side-effects
than the source drugs: there would be no risk of vomiting or other upsets. Used
therapeutically in the Houses, in the way that Jim had several times used it
with disturbed clients, Neo- Harmaline-MDA produced a pleasurable feeling of
detachment from life, an acceptance that this was the true course to follow,
and a sense of the social importance of following it.

 
          
It
should serve equally well to prepare Weinberger and himself for the suggestions
of the hypno-tape without ruining their grasp on reality in any hallucinatory
fashion. Too, it should help to protect them from any risk of actually dying
when they reached the ‘
thanatos
* rhythm stage, because
it would condition them to accept the taped commands to shunt themselves from
the oceanic ‘thanatos’ state into the out-of-the-body state. There would be
sufficient
thanatos
to turn on the pheromone tap and
lure Death; but not enough for Death to be able to carry them off. Instead,
they would hunt Death together through its own domain.

 
          
If,
thought Jim, Mike Mullen’s tape worked as promised . . .

 
          
But
it would. Oh it would. Mike had been a man of superb insight.

 
          
Jim
offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Mike’s dead soul, dissolved (so he
hoped) in the ocean of unity — since he had nothing else to pray to. And a
muted vow of vengeance too, since if Nathan was right then Mike Mullen, playing
possum, had become one more victim of the Death parasite. But a moment later
Jim withdrew his vow. ‘
That
,* he
thought, ‘remains to be seen. And thanks to Mike (bless him) we two shall see
it tonight.’

 
          
As
though warding off evil, Jim made the sign of the rosette: the circle of life,
completed; the flower, gathered.

 
          
Gathered
— by what?

 
          
On
the pretext of collecting a time-switch, Jim returned to the monitor room and
replaced the pharmacy key without
Somebody
- son
realizing that it had ever been removed. Then he took the elevator down to the
blue room in the basement to rejig Weinberger’s cage for full operation from
inside.

 
          
By
now his mild hangover had disappeared.

 
          
Jim
collected Weinberger at
quarter to eleven
, and together the two men went down to the
blue room.

 
          
They
both stripped to vest and shorts for comfort, Weinberger draping his yellow
robe over one of the two chairs, Jim folding his sandy suit, shirt and
unravelled bow tie over the other.

 
          
Weinberger,
who was to wear the
thanatos
skullcap, preceded Jim
into the cage and rolled across the rubbery waves to the far side. Jim hunched
his way inside on hands and knees. Turning, he pulled the door of the Faraday
Cage till it was almost shut. With the cord he had connected earlier, he tugged
the glass wall till it clicked into position — it was already opaque from the
outside, a mirror from the inside, as were the other walls and roof panel. Then
he closed the wire door tight.

 
          
Jim
fed low power to the cage,
then
fed himself one of the
heartshaped orange pills. Weinberger accepted a pill, though he had trouble
summoning up enough saliva to swallow it. He chomped his jaws as noisily as a
wine taster before, with a wriggle of his Adam’s apple, the pill slipped down
his craw.

 
          
Now
the hypno-tape was playing. Mike Mullen’s
lilting,
lost- forever voice instructed them like a lullaby composed not to send the
listener to sleep but to transport him to another mode of consciousness.
Persuading, evoking . . .

 
          
Jim
felt himself drift out among the multiple images of
himself
in phantom-land. He was all of those Jim-reflections; they were all him. He
raised a hand in salute; each of them raised a hand. But whose will and whose
intention raised that hand? ‘The third Jim to the right,’ he thought
whimsically. If they were all identities, did they think thoughts too? In which
case, what did they think about him lying here — in the prime dimension?

 
          
What
was a ‘person’, anyway? A person was a cluster of different minds — different
mental systems — each with its own unique spectrum. A person was a
constellation, and his physical body was a cluster of different organs in
symbiosis, and all the cells in those organs were descended from a primitive
symbiosis long ago — from the mutually advantageous union of organisms
which were originally independent. Just as the body died constantly throughout
life, its cells replacing themselves, so did the mind die too, replacing its
mental systems with new ones. A person’s mind seemed to be continuous in time
but it wasn’t really continuous at all. On the contrary, it was quite often
discontinuous. Why shouldn’t he achieve a new sort of discontinuity right now?
Why shouldn’t he invest his awareness, his point of view, in Domain B, or C, or
D instead of here in the prime domain? For a moment he had no idea which domain
‘he’ was really in. Inevitably he, as observer, would
seem
to be at the centre of all the other domains — wherever
he ‘really’ was . . .

 
          
So many other ‘Jims’, curving away from ‘himself’ in the mirrors!

 
          
Multiple
Weinbergers curved away too, and he felt a growing sense of fusion with the
other man: an interleaving of their bodies, lives and minds.

 
          
Shifting
his head, he stared up at the reflection of himself above. The single
reflection, since the bed he lay upon was not a mirror. Or did he stare
down
at himself, from above? He no
longer knew which. He stared into his own eyes, which returned his stare. He
understood that his astral body was already waiting up above, just as Mike
Mullen promised that it would be. His eyes began to close. It seemed to him
that the eyes of his other self stayed open, still watching him.

 
          
‘I’m
dying,’ he thought; or did the tape tell him this?
‘Descending.
Sinking through myself.
Rising
into that other self, too . . .’

 
          
“Detach yourself. . . Flow in
_y
flow out...”

           
The blue basement room no longer
existed. The world had gone away. All of his life was coming to a climax here —
and the life of another person too, knotted with his. Surely this was the very
first time in the history of the world (but where had the world gone?) that two
people had shared the very same death instead of dying separate deaths . . .

 
          
“Like breath departing . . . ebbing . . .
the breathing out of the whole world . . .”

           
Reflections.
And their cousins, shadows . . .

 
          
The
spirits of the dead used to be known as ‘shades* — because they were shadows
cast by the living person upon some hidden screen: shadows which continued to
exist and move about even when the living person had died . . .

 
          
A
reflection must be an intermediate state between the living and the dead,
between the substance and the shade . . .

 
          
He
began to sense a zone of shadows beyond the world of walls and rooms and
buildings, beyond the world of living bodies, grass and trees. But that shadow
zone was light, not dark.

 
          
Perhaps,
through his mind’s eye, he saw that zone in photographic negative.
For it seemed to him that the real world had grown very dark while
that other world grew bright.

 
          
Rapture
glowed in him. It was the same rapture that he had known when he drowned, and
which he had recaptured once in Gracchus . . .

 
          
Ah,
he was drowning on this water bed . . . Quite suddenly the three episodes of
rapture linked up with each other. They were one and the same, and it was the
only real moment in his life. They — or it — encircled his life in a stream.
And into that stream he swam.

 
          
Rapture
: it was as intense as an orgasm,
so that his whole self drained into that rapture. But it wasn’t localised in
any one part of him . . .

 
          
He
smelt a salty sweetness like spilt semen. The smell was in his mind. He
was smelling
the pheromone of death . . .

 
          
“Wow. Do not die. But shunt. Leave your body
alive behind you. Leave it waiting for you. It will be linked to your spirit by
a silver cord. That cord can stretch for a million miles and never snap. Ease
your feet out of your flesh-feet, as you would ease them out of shoes. Ease your
hands out of your flesh-hands, as out of gloves. Unpeel the jacket of your
arms, roll down the trousers of your legs. Strip the vest of your chest. Free
the butterfly from the chrysalis — let it take wing!”

           
Jim opened his eyes.

 
          
He
understood that Weinberger had also opened his eyes at the same moment.

 
          
Together,
they gazed down upon themselves — and the selves on
which
they looked down did not return their gaze. How still and mute those two
corpse-selves lay below, with eyes closed.

 
          
To
right and left he could see no reflections of their bodies, but only empty
boxes defined by faint, waxen, gilded membranes which presently melted into a
golden fog. The two men were afloat in a honeycomb with a black floor. And the
cell walls of this honeycomb? Those were the electrical forces of the Faraday
cage, reflected and reflected: a network of energy.

 
          
In
the next moment the red creature, Death, perched upon Jim’s chest below. And
the golden walls intensified like sunrise. He heard the bee-hum of the increased
power.