“An astronaut just back from Mars. I’ve never seen anyone’s skin tanned quite that color.”
The astronaut held no interest for her. She worked at kicking herself back into high. The party was approaching a climactic moment, she felt, a time when commitments were being made and decisions taken. The clink of ice in glasses, the foggy vapors of psychedelic inhalants, the press of warm flesh all about her—she was wired into everything, she was alive and receptive, she was entering into the twitching hour, the hour of galvanic jerks. She grew wild and reckless. Impulsively she kissed Bliss, straining on tiptoes, jabbing her tongue deep into his startled mouth. Then she broke free. Someone was playing with the lights: they grew redder, then gained force and zoomed to blue-white ferocity. Far across the room a crowd was surging and billowing around the fallen figure of Francis Xavier Byrne, slumped loose-jointedly against the base of the bar. His eyes were open but glassy. Nicholson crouched over him, reaching into his shirt, making delicate adjustments of the controls of the chain mail beneath. “It’s all right,” Steiner was saying. “Give him some air. It’s all right!” Confusion. Hubbub. A torrent of tangled input.
“—they say there’s been a permanent change in the weather patterns. Colder winters from now on, because of accumulations of dust in the atmosphere that screen the sun’s rays. Until we freeze altogether by around the year 2200—”
“—but the carbon dioxide is supposed to start a greenhouse effect that’s causing warmer weather, I thought, and—”
“—the proposal to generate electric power from—”
“—the San Andreas fault—”
“—financed by debentures convertible into—”
“—capsules of botulism toxin—”
“—to be distributed at a ratio of one per thousand families, throughout Greenland and the Kamchatka Metropolitan Area—”
“—in the sixteenth century, when you could actually hope to found your own empire in some unknown part of the—”
“—unresolved conflicts of Capricorn personality—”
“—intense concentration and meditation upon the completed mandala so that the contents of the work are transferred to and identified with the mind and body of the beholder. I mean, technically what occurs is the reabsorption of cosmic forces. In the process of construction these forces—”
“—butterflies, which are no longer to be found anywhere in—”
“—were projected out from the chaos of the unconscious, in the process of absorption, the powers are drawn back in again—”
“—reflecting transformations of the DNA in the light-collecting organ, which—”
“—the snow—”
“—a thousand years, can you imagine that? And—”
“—her body—”
“—formerly a toad—”
“—just back from Mars, and there’s that look in his eye—”
“Hold me,” Nikki said. “Just hold me. I’m very dizzy.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“Just hold me.” She pressed against cool sweet-smelling fabric. His chest unyielding beneath it. Steiner. Very male. He steadied her, but only for a moment. Other responsibilities summoned him. When he released her, she swayed. He beckoned to someone else, blond, soft-faced. The mind reader, Tom. Passing her along the chain from man to man.
“You feel better now,” the telepath told her.
“Are you positive of that?”
“Very.”
“Can you read any mind in the room?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Even his?”
Again a nod. “He’s the clearest of all. He’s been using it so long, all the channels are worn deep.”
“Then he really is a thousand years old?”
“You didn’t believe it?”
Nikki shrugged. “Sometimes I don’t know what I believe.”
“He’s old.”
“You’d be the one to know.”
“He’s a phenomenon. He’s absolutely extraordinary.” A pause—quick, stabbing. “Would you like to see into his mind?”
“How can I?”
“I’ll patch you right in, if you’d like me to.” His glacial eyes flashed sudden mischievous warmth. “Yes?”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
“You’re very sure. You’re curious as hell. Don’t kid me. Don’t play games, Nikki. You want to see into him.”
“Maybe.” Grudgingly.
“You do. Believe me, you do. Here. Relax, let your shoulders slump a little, loosen up, make yourself receptive, and I’ll establish the link.”
“Wait,” she said.
But it was too late. The mind reader serenely parted her consciousness like Moses doing the Red Sea and rammed something into her forehead, something thick but insubstantial, a truncheon of fog. She quivered and recoiled. She felt violated. It was like her first time in bed, in that moment when all the fooling around at last was over, the kissing and the nibbling and the stroking, and suddenly there was this object deep inside her body. She had never forgotten that sense of being impaled. But of course it had been not only an intrusion but also a source of ecstasy. As was this. The object within her was the consciousness of Nicholson. In wonder she explored its surface, rigid and weathered, pitted with the myriad ablations of reentry. Ran her trembling hands over its bronzy roughness. Remained outside it. Tom, the mind reader, gave her a nudge. Go on, go on. Deeper. Don’t hold back. She folded herself around Nicholson and drifted into him like ectoplasm seeping into sand. Suddenly she lost her bearings. The discrete and impermeable boundary marking the end of her self and the beginning of his became indistinct. It was impossible to distinguish between her experiences and his, nor could she separate the pulsations of her nervous system from the impulses traveling along his. Phantom memories assailed and engulfed her. She was transformed into a node of pure perception: a steady, cool, isolated eye, surveying and recording. Images flashed. She was toiling upward along a dazzling snowy crest, with jagged Himalayan fangs hanging above her in the white sky and a warm-muzzled yak snuffling wearily at her side.
A platoon of swarthy little men accompanied her, slanty eyes, heavy coats, thick boots. The stink of rancid butter, the cutting edge of an impossible wind: and there, gleaming in the sudden sunlight, a pile of fire-bright yellow plaster with a thousand winking windows, a building, a lamasery strung along a mountain ridge. The nasal sound of distant horns and trumpets. The hoarse chanting of lotus-legged monks. What were they chanting? Om? Om? Om! Om, and flies buzzed around her nose, and she lay hunkered in a flimsy canoe, coursing silently down a midnight river in the heart of Africa, drowning in humidity. Brawny naked men with purple-black skins crouching close. Sweaty fronds dangling from flamboyantly excessive shrubbery; the snouts of crocodiles rising out of the dark water like toothy flowers; great nauseating orchids blossoming high in the smooth-shanked trees. And on shore, five white men in Elizabethan costume, wide-brimmed hats, drooping sweaty collars, lace, fancy buckles, curling red beards. Errol Flynn as Sir Francis Drake, blunderbuss dangling in crook of arm. The white men laughing, beckoning, shouting to the men in the canoe. Am I slave or slavemaster? No answer. Only a blurring and a new vision: autumn leaves blowing across the open doorways of straw-thatched huts, shivering oxen crouched in bare stubble-strewn fields, grim long-mustachioed men with close-cropped hair riding diagonal courses toward the horizon. Crusaders, are they? Or warriors of Hungary on their way to meet the dread Mongols? Defenders of the imperiled Anglo-Saxon realm against the Norman invaders? They could be any of these. But always that steady cool eye, always that unmoving consciousness at the center of every scene. Him, eternal, all-enduring. And then: the train rolling westward, belching white smoke, the plains unrolling infinityward, the big brown fierce-eyed bison standing in shaggy clumps along the right of way, the man with turbulent shoulder-length hair laughing, slapping a twenty-dollar gold piece on the table. Picking up his rifle—a.50-caliber breech-loading Springfield—he aims casually through the door of the moving train, he squeezes off a shot, another, another. Three shaggy brown corpses beside the tracks, and the train rolls onward, honking raucously.