They looked at each other, and at me. This time they didn’t argue. They left the room.
“Hello, Ineh,” I said softly. She didn’t answer. I moved across to the bed platform, climbed up and sat beside her, trying to keep my face calm and easy. “Thank God you came here,” thinking that she had more sense than I did, to trust Jule and Doc when I hadn’t. “I just about went crazy wondering how I’d find you.” I reached out to touch her arm. Her body jerked away; I didn’t know whether she’d meant it to or not. “Sorry.” I looked down at my hands, up again. A hard knot was forming in my throat. “I know, it’s already starting. Don’t be afraid.”
Her eyes fixed on me, wild and glassy, as though she was listening to a lunatic. She licked her lips. “I need my dream tonic. Help me.”
I shook my head. “Not that way. I’ve been through this, Ineh, and I came out the other side. I’ll help you. Trust me. Let me in, let me share the—”
Something blinding hit me behind the eyes, fed back along the nerve-paths to the ends of my senses—all her power, focused on me and driven home by fear. I cried out, holding my head. And I saw her clearly, at last: not the Ineh I thought I knew, but the Ineh I’d seen in ghost glimpses when her concentration slipped, when she couldn’t make me see her the way she wanted the world to see her, and I’d fallen through it into the way she was. The nightmare Ineh, brittle bones, sunken eyes, wasted flesh. The nightmare. The nightmare already beginning— Disgust and hatred filled me up like the urge to vomit: Ineh’s loathing for the thing she’d become in her mind, was becoming with her body; a filthy, crawling, drug-infected ruin, born to pain, deserving pain, terrified of pain but trapped inside it with no escape, trapped—
Trapped. I’d be trapped with her in this nightmare journey of pain and more pain, pain until you wailed, howled, beat yourself senseless against walls to get away from it. Your hands ripped your own flesh, your legs wouldn’t hold you up, your body betrayed and humiliated you in ways you never dreamed of and you didn’t even care…When I could sit up again in the hospital there was a corpse in the mirror, I saw a corpse and I screamed and I can’t go through it all over again I can’t—!
I threw myself down from the platform, away from the sight of her. I almost shouted for the others, almost started for the door; almost ran—out of the room, away from her and the power of her pain and myself.
But instead I turned back, and looked at her. She hunched forward, burying her face in the stained whiteness of her robe, dragging isolation over herself like a shroud. There was no reaching from mind to mind now; I’d shut her out of myself, and she wasn’t trying to get back in.
And I was going to leave her that way. I was going to leave her alone and prove to her that there was nobody on this world who wouldn’t betray her; that there was no one she could count on; that no matter what she tried to do, because of what she was it would turn against her…That if she reached the other end of this road through hell she’d only find that it hadn’t been worth the trip. I was the only one who could share the journey, who knew the roadmarks, who could make her believe there was a reason to survive it. But I was going to leave her here alone and run from her problems; just like I’d done to myself. . . .
I climbed back onto the platform. I kneeled beside Ineh, put my arms around her huddled body, feeling her muscles knot and quiver. “I’m here, I won’t leave you. You can count on me—” My voice broke.
A wall of blind hatred slammed into me, locking me out. Hopeless pain was all that was left, all that was real to her now, eating her alive from the inside. She wanted to die; and she would. I had to break through to her again, somehow, before everything imploded.
And there was only one thing still working her mind. If I could turn the rage that was holding me out into a tool to let me in…“All right!” I shouted it into her face. “You hate me, you want to blame it all on me. But you dragged me into this, you set me up to do what you didn’t have the guts to do yourself. Then you lost your nerve, and I got the shit beat out of me. If I was going to stop believing in you, that should’ve done it. But I didn’t; I didn’t give up on you. I kept on until you were free. You’re free.
“If you have to hate, remember where you were before you came here tonight! Remember who did it to you, who turned your gift into something sick and dirty. If you want to shut somebody out of your life, shut them out. If you want something enough to die for it, make it your freedom. If you want to hate somebody let it be Kinba!” I shook her. “Don’t let them win. We don’t have to let the goddamn scum of this universe destroy us. Let it out, the hate ... the pain will go with it. Let me in—” (Let me share your pain,) pushing myself aside, trying to loosen my mind, to forget any other thought, and just once let the emptiness go unguarded.
Ineh jerked upright, tears streaming down her face. She opened her mouth. And screamed. The scream went on and on, pouring out of her like blood.
My mind burst open as the images smashed into me, losing all control as she lost all control. Not even my own mind any more, but a stage in darkness for the Dreamweaver’s nightmares: Agony from a million neurons like live wires snapping ... the taste of gall, the stench of putrefying flesh, my ears screaming, knives of light slashing my eyes, agony that filled all time and went on and on and on. ... Cancer flowers spreading, the face of the torturer with a thousand faces, petals opening endlessly changing out of control controlling body, soul . . . Kinba, white yielding inevitable cajoling soothing strangling striking tearing destroying/*flash shatter hot blades broken glass*/Hedo, oblivion’s water food of gods of dreams hands of ice edge of knives/*screaming blackness eyes torn from sockets*/ Body of a slug mind full of worms bursting like a boil, endless floods of diseased image that went on and on, no escape from filthy minds, stupid, greedy, blind, empty empty minds—mutilating her gift denying her self, suffocating her soul in their soul-darkness until she was only a thing used by things. . . .
(I know, I know…Struggling up out of her nightmares, dazed, torn, falling back, into my own: In the mines, breathing poisoned air, beaten starved buried alive in the freezing guts of an alien world. No rest, no hope, no night or day . . . no escape, no end except a dead end. Warm bodies, cheaper than cold machines. No one caring if you lived or died, until finally even you didn’t care, betrayed, abandoned, a thing used by things…)
Hate them I hate them!!!/*Stars*/ Kinba, Hedo, an endless wheel flickering changing offering betraying humiliating tormenting ... no one in all the space of the living who was not there to torture/*ripping forcing violation death*/ Let me go oh let me die! die! die! Ruined, infected, weak degraded coward!! No reason to live no reason no no
(Her hands from another world, the real world, flailing, clawing, reaching for my throat; my body sprawled against her own, holding it down, holding the hands away from her face, from finding a weapon. The false light of a new day breaking, showing me the truth—life was the nightmare, and there was no waking out of it. This was real, and reality was no one’s dream. They sang it in the streets ... the streets of Oldcity, the faces of a lifetime glaring down like floodlights, smothering me in spit and blows and ugly laughter: City-boy, halfbreed, bondie, scum. All shouting whispering thinking it . . . their hands fists, their feet on my neck; taking what they wanted, over and over, and never giving a word, a touch, no friendship, no kindness, no reason—