After a moment’s hesitation she pushed the door open. Kohn sat with his back to her, one hand resting on the desk, the other on the gun. The screen was blank. Kohn turned and looked at her. His glades were on, and behind them she saw bony orbits, empty sockets. She stood frozen. Kohn rose and reached towards her.
She tried to back through the closed door. His hands grasped her upper arms. The skull half-face loomed down at her.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
She just stared, her mouth working.
‘Damn,’ Kohn said.
She saw his cheek muscles twitch, first the right, then the left. He had flesh and eyes again. He pulled the glades forward, lifted them up on to the front of his helmet, and then slumped back into the chair.
‘Sorry about that, Janis.’
‘Wuhuhu…’ She let out a shuddering breath and shook her head. ‘Is that a bug or a feature?’
‘You want bug features?’ Kohn made as if to pull the glades down again. Janis caught his wrist.
‘No, thanks.’
She was looking at his eyes, and what she saw shocked her almost as much as the holograms had. But this time it wasn’t incomprehensible. The shock came from comprehending. Still holding his wrist, she leaned over and grasped his forehead gently in her fingertips and turned his head so that she could see his eyes more clearly. The irises were faint coronae around the eclipsing black of the dilated pupils.
Everything gets everywhere…
‘You’re tripping,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid…it’s something you picked up in the lab, that and the smoke. Do you understand?’
‘I understand.’ There was an odd tone to the statement, as if were in answer to a different question. Janis frowned. What mazes had he been running? The black pits looked back at her.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Heavy,’ Moh said. ‘Sand in my veins.’
‘D’you have any vitamin-C here?’ she asked, looking around. ‘That might help bring you down more gently.’
Before she could remonstrate, Kohn rose to his feet and walked with elaborate caution to a small fridge in the corner of the room. He bit open a litre carton of orange juice and gulped it down. He dropped to the bed and lay back and closed his eyes.
‘Ah, shit,’ he said. ‘Thanks, but it’s not gonna make any difference. I am down. I been there and come back, Janis. This ain’t tripping. This is reality.’
Goddess, she thought, he must be tripping real bad.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What’s it like?’
‘Everything,’ he said.
Everything: Fugues of memory took him; any momentary slip, any lapse of attention on what was going on right now sent him slipping and sliding, sidestepping away, while in the slow now the sounds went on forming, the photons came in and made up the pictures, one movement completed itself and the next began. Volition became suspect as act preceded decision, millennia of philosophy falling down that millisecond gap. He’d just have to live with it, he decided, realizing that he already did.
Everything: The bright world the banner bright the symbol plain the greenbelt fields the greenfield streets the geodesic housing the crowds the quiet dark moments.
Everything: The plastic model spaceships hanging from black threads the old Warsaw Pact poster of a little girl cradling the earth DEFEND PEACE the stacked clutter of toys and books and tapes the VR space-helmet.
Everything: Creeping into the room at the centre of the house to watch his father working on the CAL project no sound but the click of a mouse the hardware fixes the earwax smell of solder.
Everything: The blue roundel the sectioned globe the white leaves the lenses and the muzzle swivelling.
Everything: OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW.
Everything.
He opened his mouth and a sound came out: a sob and a snarl, human pain and animal rage. He pushed the helmet off, and it rolled over the side of the bed and bounced once on the floor. Kohn kept his hands at his head, fingers clawing into his scalp. Tears leaked from under the heels of his hands and trickled with burning slowness down his cheek.
He sat and brought his head, hands clasped over it, down between his knees, and for several minutes rocked back and forth. Time was running almost normally now. Those roaring gusts were his breath, that distant booming surf his heart. This giddying black vault of luminous pictures, of echoing whispers from tiny minds locked in repetitive reminiscences, nattering conversations, clattering calculations – this was what his head looked like from the inside. This was himself.
He made a frantic effort to control it, to keep tabs on what was going on. Then he saw the rushing, whirling, snatching self as from the outside, and turned to see from whence he saw, and saw (of course):
nothing
a light on no sight
a void with the echo of a laugh, like the 2.726K background
a moment of amused illumination
nothing
everything
O
I
So it was you, all the time.
He smiled and opened his eyes, and saw Janis. She sat leaning forward on the chair by the desk, her green eyes hooded, brows drawn together, her hands on her knees. Her look held puzzlement and concern, and behind these emotions a detached, observing interest. He could smell her sweat under her scent, see where it made her blouse stick to her skin. He could see the blood behind the artificial pallor on her face.
She was absolutely beautiful. She was unbelievable. The light from the window shone in her eyes and sparkled on the tiny hairs on the backs of her hands. He could have drawn every line of her limbs under her too-formal clothes; he wanted to free her cinched waist and hold it in his own hands. Her shape, her real shape, her voice and scent – there was a place for all of them, a place in his mind pre-adapted for her. It was difficult to believe she had looked like this earlier, in the morning; but the images were there, sharp, and he hadn’t noticed.
He saw her expression change, startled, a second after his eyes opened – her lips part as if about to speak, and the unconscious shake of the head, the swift glance away and back; and her face recompose itself, the blink and check again that said, ‘No, I couldn’t possibly have seen that.’ She smiled with relief and straightened, shaking back her hair.
‘You’re down,’ she said.
Kohn nodded. He found he had come out of his foetal huddle and was sitting on the side of the bed. The comms helmet lay at his feet.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I really am back now. I thought I was, earlier, but I was still away. The juice helped. Thanks.’ He could see the reassurance, the normality, return to her expression. The hope that it was just an accidental exposure, nothing permanent…
‘How do you feel now?’ She said it with a voice that just edged over into the wrong side of casualness.
‘I’m OK,’ he said, ‘except that it wasn’t just a trip. It’s changed me. Something has changed in my mind. In my brain.’
He stood up and stalked to the window. A strip of green grass, a wall, another strip of green grass, another accommodation block. It was obvious from the shadows of the buildings that the time was about 14.30.
He turned back to her.
‘I remember everything,’ he said, watching for her reaction. There it was: the little start, the drawing back, the oh shit look. Got you, lady. You know what this is about. ‘Memory drugs, right?’