A Time of Changes

  53

  THE TWELFTH PERSON with whom I shared the Sumaran drug was my bondbrother Noim. He was in Manneran to spend a week as my guest. Winter had come, bringing snow to Glin, hard rains to Salla, and only fog to Manneran, and northerners needed little prodding to come to our warm province. I had not seen Noim since the summer before, when we had hunted together in the Huishtors. In this last year we had drifted apart somewhat; in a sense Schweiz had come to take Noim’s place in my life, and I no longer had quite the same need for my bondbrother.

  Noim now was a wealthy landowner in Salla, having come into the inheritance of the Condorit family as well as the lands of his wife’s kin. In manhood he had become plump, though not fat; his wit and cunning were not hidden deep beneath his new layers of flesh. He had a sleek, well-oiled look, with dark unblemished skin, full, complacent lips, and round sardonic eyes. Little escaped his attention. Upon arriving at my house he surveyed me with great care, as though counting my teeth and the lines about my eyes, and, after the formal bondbrotherly greetings, after the presentation of his gift and the one he had brought from Stirron, after we had signed the contract of host and guest, Noim said unexpectedly, “Are you in trouble, Kinnall?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Your face is sharper. You’ve lost weight. Your mouth—you hold it in a quirky grin that doesn’t announce a relaxed man within. Your eyes are red-rimmed and they don’t want to look directly into other eyes. Is anything wrong?”

  “These have been the happiest months of one’s life,” I said, a shade too vehemently, perhaps.

  Noim ignored my disclaimer. “Are you having problems with Loimel?”

  “She goes her way, and one goes his own.”

  “Difficulties with the business of the Justiciary, then?”

  “Please, Noim, won’t you believe that—”

  “Your face has changes inscribed in it,” he said. “Do you deny there have been changes in your life?”

  I shrugged. “And if so?”

  “Changes for the worse?”

  “One does not think so.”

  “You’re being evasive, Kinnall. Come: what’s a bondbrother for, if not to share problems?”

  “There are no problems,” I insisted.

  “Very well.” And he let the matter drop. But I saw him watching me that evening, and again the next day at morning’s meal, studying me, probing me. I could never hide anything from him. We sat over blue wine and talked of the Sallan harvest, talked of Stirron’s new program of reforming the tax structure, talked of the renewed tensions between Salla and Glin, the bloody border raids that had lately cost me the life of a sister. And all the while Noim watched me. Halum dined with us, and we talked of our childhood, and Noim watched me. He flirted with Loimel, but his eyes did not wander from me. The depth and intensity of his concern preyed on me. He would be asking questions of others, soon, trying to get from Halum or from Loimel some notion of what might be bothering me, and he might stir up troublesome curiosities in them that way. I could not let him remain ignorant of the central experience of his bondbrother’s life. Late the second night, when everyone else had retired, I took Noim to my study, and opened the secret place where I stored the white powder, and asked him if he knew anything of the Sumaran drug. He claimed not to have heard of it. Briefly I described its effects to him. His expression darkened; he seemed to draw in on himself. “Do you use this stuff often?” he asked.

  “Eleven times thus far.”

  “Eleven—why, Kinnall?”

  “To learn the nature of one’s own self, through sharing that self with others.”

  Noim laughed explosively: it was almost a snort. “Selfbaring, Kinnall?”

  “One takes up odd hobbies in one’s middle years.”

  “And with whom have you played this game?”

  I said, “Their names don’t matter. No one you would know. People of Manneran, those with some adventure in their souls, those who are willing to take risks.”

  “Loimel?”

  Now it was my turn to snort. “Never! She knows nothing of this at all.”

  “Halum, then?”

  I shook my head. “One wishes one had the courage to approach Halum. So far one has concealed everything from her. One fears she’s too virginal, too easily shocked. It’s sad, isn’t it, Noim, when one has to hide something as exciting as this, as wonderfully rewarding, from one’s bondsister.”

  “From one’s bondbrother too,” he observed testily.

  “You would have been told in time,” I said. “You would have been offered your chance to experience the communion.”

  His eyes flashed. “Do you think I’d want it?”

  His deliberate obscenity earned only a faint smile from me. “One hopes one’s bondbrother will share all of one’s experiences. At present the drug opens a gulf between us. One has gone again and again to a place you have never visited. Do you see, Noim?”

  Noim saw. He was tempted; he hovered at the edge of the abyss; he chewed his lips and tugged at his earlobes, and everything that passed across his mind was as transparent to me as if we had already shared the Sumaran powder. For my sake he was uneasy, knowing that I had seriously strayed from the Covenant and might soon find myself in grave spiritual and legal trouble. For his own sake he was gnawed by curiosity, aware that selfbaring with one’s bondbrother was no great sin and half-eager to know the kind of communion he might have with me under the drug. Also his eyes revealed a glint of jealousy, that I had bared myself to this one and this one and that, unimportant strangers, and not to him. I tell you that I comprehended these things at that moment, though I confirmed them later when Noim’s soul was open to me.

  We said nothing to one another about these matters for several days. He came with me to my office, and watched in admiration as I dealt with matters of the highest national significance. He saw the clerks bowing in and out of my presence, and also the clerk Ulman, who had had the drug, and whose cool familiarity with me touched off suspicious vibrations in Noim’s sensitive antennae. We visited with Schweiz, and emptied many a flask of good wine, and discussed religious topics in a hearty, earnest, drunken way. (“All my life,” said Schweiz, “has been a quest for plausible reasons to believe in what I know to be irrational.”) Noim noticed that Schweiz did not always observe the grammatical niceties. Another night we dined with a group of Mannerangi nobles in a voluptuous house in the hills overlooking the city: small birdlike men, overdressed and fidgety, and huge handsome young wives. Noim was displeased by these effete dukes and barons with their talk of commerce and jewelry, but he grew more irritable when the chatter turned to the rumor that a mind-unsealing drug from the southern continent was now procurable in the capital. To this I made only polite interjections of surprise; Noim glared at me for my hypocrisy, and even refused a dish of tender Mannerangi brandy, so tight-strung were his nerves. The day after, we went to the Stone Chapel together, not for draining but merely to view the relics of the early times, for Noim had developed antiquarian interests. The drainer Jidd happened to wander through the cloister at his devotions and smiled oddly at me: I saw Noim at once calculating whether I had drawn even the priest into my subversions. A sizzling tension was building in Noim during those days, for he clearly longed to return to the subject of our early conversation, yet could not bring himself to it. I made no move toward reopening that theme. It was Noim who made the move, finally, on the eve of his departure for his home in Salla. “This drug of yours—” he began hoarsely.

  He said he felt he could not regard himself as my true bondbrother unless he sampled it. Those words came from him at great cost. His elegant clothes were rumpled by his restlessness, and a fine line of beaded perspiration stood out on his upper lip. We went to a room where no one could intrude, and I prepared the potion. As he took the flask, he briefly flashed at me his familiar grin, impudent and sly and bold, but his hand was shaking so badly he nearly spilled the drink. The drug took effect quickly for both of us.
It was a night of thick humidity with a dense greasy mist covering the city and its suburbs, and it seemed to me that fingers of that mist were sliding into our room through the partly opened window: I saw shimmering, pulsating strands of cloud groping at us, dancing between my bondbrother and myself. The early sensations of druggedness disturbed Noim, until I explained that everything was normal, the twinned heartbeats, the cottony head, the high whining sounds in the air. Now we were open. I looked into Noim and saw not only his self but his image of his self, encrusted with shame and self-contempt; there was in Noim a fierce and burning loathing of his imagined flaws, and the flaws were many. He held himself accused of laziness, lack of discipline and ambition, irreligiousness, a casual concern with high obligations, and physical and moral weakness. Why he saw himself in this way I could not understand, for the true Noim was there beside the image, and the true Noim was a tough-minded man, loyal to those he loved, harsh in judgment of folly, clear-sighted, passionate, energetic. The contrast between Noim’s Noim and the world’s was startling: it was as though he were capable of correctly evaluating everything but his own worth. I had seen such disparities before on these drug voyages; in fact they were universal in all but Schweiz, who had not been trained from childhood in self-denial; yet they were sharper in Noim than in anyone else.

  Also I saw, as I had seen before, my own image refracted through Noim’s sensibility: a far nobler Kinnall Darival than I recognized. How he idealized me! I was all he hoped to be, a man of action and valor, a wielder of power, an enemy of everything that was frivolous, a practitioner of the sternest inner discipline and devotion. Yet this image bore traces of a new overlay of tarnish, for was I not also now a Covenant-defiling self-barer, who had done this and this and that and that with eleven strangers, and who now had lured his own bondbrother into criminal experimentation? And also Noim found in me the true depth of my feelings for Halum, and upon making that discovery, which confirmed old suspicions, he altered his image of me once again, not for the better. Meanwhile I showed Noim how I had always seen him—quick, clever, capable—and showed him too his own Noim and the objective Noim as well, while he gave me a view of the selves of mine he now could see beside that idealized Kinnall: These mutual explorations continued a long time. I thought the exchanges were immensely valuable, since only with Noim could I attain the necessary depth of perspective, the proper parallax of character, and he only with me; we had great advantages over a pair of strangers meeting for the first time by way of the Sumaran drug. When the spell of the potion began to lift, I felt myself exhausted by the intensity of our communion, and yet ennobled, exalted, transformed.

  Not so Noim. He looked depleted and chilled. He could barely lift his eyes to mine. His mood was so frigid that I dared not break in on it, but remained still, waiting for him to recover. At length he said, “Is it all over?”

  “Yes.”

  “Promise one thing, Kinnall. Will you promise?”

  “Say it, Noim.”

  “That you never do this thing with Halum! Is it a promise? Will you promise it, Kinnall? Never. Never. Never.”

  54

  SEVERAL DAYS after Noim’s departure some guilty impulse drove me to the Stone Chapel. To fill the time until Jidd could see me, I roamed the halls and byways of the dark building, pausing at altars, bowing humbly to half-blind scholars of the Covenant holding debate in a courtyard, brushing away ambitious minor drainers who, recognizing me, solicited my trade. All about me were the things of the gods, and I failed to detect the divine presence. Perhaps Schweiz had found the godhood through the souls of other men, but I, dabbling in selfbaring, somehow had lost that other faith, and it did not matter to me. I knew that in time I would find my way back to grace under this new dispensation of love and trust that I hoped to offer. So I lurked in the godhouse of godhouses, a mere tourist.

  I went to Jidd. I had not had a draining since immediately after Schweiz first had given me the Sumaran drug. The little crooknosed man remarked on that as I took the contract from him. The pressures of the Justiciary, I explained, and he shook his head and made a chiding sound. “You must be full to overflowing,” Jidd said. I did not reply, but settled down before his mirror to peer at the lean, unfamiliar face that dwelled in it. He asked me which god I would have, and I told him the god of the innocent. He gave me a queer look at that. The holy lights came on. With soft words he guided me into the half-trance of confession. What could I say? That I had ignored my pledge, and gone on to use the selfbaring potion with everyone who would take it from me? I sat silent. Jidd prodded me. He did something I had never known a drainer to do before: hearkened back to a previous draining, and asked me to speak again of this drug whose use I had admitted earlier. Had I used it again? I pushed my face close to the mirror, fogging it with my breath. Yes. Yes. One is a miserable sinner and one has been weak once more. Then Jidd asked me how I had obtained this drug, and I said that I had taken it, the first time, in company with one who had purchased it from a man who had been to Sumara Borthan. Yes, Jidd said, and what was the name of this companion? That was a clumsy move: immediately I was on guard. It seemed to me that Jidd’s question went far beyond the needs of a draining, and certainly could have no relevance to my own condition of the moment. I refused therefore to give him Schweiz’s name, which led the drainer to ask me, a little roughly, if I feared he would breach the secrecy of the ritual.

  Did I fear that? On rare occasions I had held things back from drainers out of shame, but never out of fear of betrayal. Naive I was, and I had full faith in the ethics of the godhouse. Only now, suddenly suspicious, with that suspicion having been planted by Jidd himself, did I mistrust Jidd and all his tribe. Why did he want to know? What information was he after? What could I gain, or he, by my revealing my source of the drug? I replied tautly, “One seeks forgiveness for oneself alone, and how can telling the name of one’s companion bring that? Let him do his own confessing.” But of course there was no chance that Schweiz would go to a drainer; thus I had come down to playing word games with Jidd. All value had leaked from this draining, leaving me with an empty husk. “If you would have peace from the gods,” Jidd said, “you must speak your soul fully.” How could I do that? Confess the seduction of eleven people into selfbaring? I had no need of Jidd’s forgiveness. I had no faith in his good will. Abruptly I stood up, a little dizzy from kneeling in the dark, swaying a bit, almost stumbling. The sound of distant hymn-singing floated past me, and a trace of the scent of the precious incense of a plant of the Wet Lowlands. “One is not ready for draining today,” I told Jidd. “One must examine one’s soul more closely?” I lurched toward the door. He looked puzzledly at the money I had given him. “The fee?” he called. I told him he could keep it.

  55

  THE DAYS BECAME mere vacant rooms, separating one journey with the drug from the next. I drifted idle and detached through all my responsibilities, seeing nothing of what was around me, living only for my next communion. The real world dissolved; I lost interest in sex, wine, food, the doings of the Port Justiciary, the friction between neighboring provinces of Velada Borthan, and all other such things, which to me now were only the shadows of shadows. Possibly I was using the drug too frequently. I lost weight and existed in a perpetual haze of blurred white light. I had difficulties in sleeping, and for hours found myself twisting and shifting, a blanket of muggy tropical air clamping me to my mattress, a haggard insomniac with an ache in his eyeballs and grittiness under his lids. I walked tired through my days and blinking through my evenings. Rarely did I speak with Loimel, nor did I touch her, and hardly ever did I touch any other woman. I fell asleep at midday once while lunching with Halum. I scandalized High Justice Kalimol by replying to one of his questions with the phrase “It seems to me—” Old Segvord Helalam told me I looked ill, and suggested I go hunting with my sons in the Burnt Lowlands. Nevertheless the drug had the power of bringing me alive. I sought out new sharers, and found it ever more easy to make contact with them,
for often now they were brought to me by those who had already made the inner voyage. An odd group they were: two dukes, a marquis, a whore, a keeper of the royal archives, a seacaptain in from Glin, a septarch’s mistress, a director of the Commercial and Seafarers Bank of Manneran, a poet, a lawyer from Velis here to confer with Captain Khrisch, and many more. The circle of self-barers was widening. My supply of the drug was nearly consumed, but now there was talk among some of my new friends of outfitting a new expedition to Sumara Borthan. There were fifty of us by this time. Change was becoming infectious; there was an epidemic of it in Manneran.

  56

  SOMETIMES, unexpectedly, in the blank dead time between one communion and another, I underwent a strange confusion of the self. A block of borrowed experience that I had stowed in the dark depths of my mind might break loose and float up into the higher levels of consciousness, intruding itself into my own identity. I remained aware of being Kinnall Darival, the septarch’s son of Salla, and yet there was suddenly among my memories a segment of the self of Noim, or Schweiz, or one of the Sumarnu, or someone else of those with whom I had shared the drug. For the length of that splicing of selves—a moment, an hour, half a day—I walked about unsure of my past, unable to determine whether some event fresh in my mind had really befallen me, or had come to me through the drug. This was disturbing but not really frightening, except the first two or three times. Eventually I learned to distinguish the quality of these unearned memories from that of my genuine past, through familiarity with the textures of each. The drug had made me many people, I realized. Was it not better to be many than to be something less than one?