A Time of Changes, Page 20

  61

  NOIM TREATED ME with every courtesy, indicating that I could stay with him as long as I wished—weeks, months, even years. Presumably my friends in Manneran would succeed eventually in freeing some of my assets, and I would buy land in Salla and take up the life of a country baron; or perhaps Segvord and the Duke of Sumar and other men of influence would have my indictment quashed, so that I could return to the southern province. Until then, Noim told me, his home was mine. But I detected a subtle coolness in his dealings with me, as if this hospitality was offered only out of respect for our bonding. Only after some days did the source of his remoteness reach the surface. Sitting late past dinner in his great whitewashed feasting-hall, we were talking of childhood days—our main theme of conversation, far safer than any talk of recent events—when Noim suddenly said, “Is that drug of yours known to give people nightmares?”

  “One has heard of no such cases, Noim.”

  “Here’s a case, then. One who woke up drenched with chilly sweat night after night, for weeks after we shared the drug in Manneran. One thought one would lose one’s mind.”

  “What kind of dreams?” I asked.

  “Ugly things. Monsters. Teeth. Claws. A sense of not knowing who one is. Pieces of other minds floating through one’s own.” He gulped at his wine. “You take the drug for pleasure, Kinnall?”

  “For knowledge.”

  “Knowledge of what?”

  “Knowledge of self, and knowledge of others.”

  “One prefers ignorance, then.” He shivered. “You know, Kinnall, one was never a particularly reverent person. One blasphemed, one stuck his tongue out at drainers, one laughed at the god-tales they told, yes? You’ve nearly converted one into a man of faith with that stuff. The terror of opening one’s mind—of knowing that one has no defenses, that you can slide right into one’s soul, and are doing it—it’s impossible to take.”

  “Impossible for you,” I said. “Others cherish it.”

  “One leans toward the Covenant,” said Noim. “Privacy is sacred. One’s soul is one’s own. There’s a dirty pleasure in baring it.”

  “Not baring. Sharing.”

  “Does it sound prettier that way? Very well: there’s a dirty pleasure in sharing it, Kinnall. Even though we are bondbrothers. One came away from you last time feeling soiled. Sand and grit in the soul. Is this what you want for everyone? To make us all feel filthy with guilt?”

  “There need be no guilt, Noim. One gives, one receives, one comes forth better than one was—”

  “Dirtier.”

  “Enlarged. Enhanced. More compassionate. Speak to others who have tried it,” I said.

  “Of course. As they come streaming out of Manneran, landless refugees, one will question them about the beauty and wonder of selfbaring. Excuse me: selfsharing.”

  I saw the torment in his eyes. He wanted still to love me, but the Sumaran drug had shown him things—about himself, perhaps about me—that made him hate the one who had given the drug to him. He was one for whom walls are necessary; I had not realized that. What had I done, to turn my bondbrother into my enemy? Perhaps if we could take the drug a second time, I might make things more clear to him—but no, no hope of that. Noim was frightened by inwardness. I had transformed my blaspheming bondbrother into a man of the Covenant. There was nothing I could say to him now.

  After some silence he said, “One must make a request of you, Kinnall.”

  “Anything.”

  “One hesitates to place boundaries on a guest. But if you have brought any of this drug with you from Manneran, Kinnall, if you hide it somewhere in your rooms—get rid of it, is that understood? There must be none of it in this house. Get rid of it, Kinnall.”

  Never in my life had I lied to my bondbrother. Never.

  With the jeweled case the Duke of Sumar had given me blazing against my breastbone, I said solemnly to Noim, “You have nothing to fear on that account.”

  62

  NOT MANY DAYS LATER the news of my disgrace became public in Manneran, and swiftly reached Salla. Noim showed me the accounts. I was described as the chief adviser to the High Justice of the Port, and openly labeled a man of the greatest authority in Manneran, who, moreover, had blood ties to the prime septarchs of Salla and Glin—and yet, despite these attainments and preferments, I had fallen away from the Covenant to take up unlawful selfbaring. I had violated not merely propriety and etiquette, but also the laws of Manneran, through my use of a certain proscribed drug from Sumara Borthan that dissolves the god-given barriers between soul and soul. Through abuse of my high office, it was said, I had engineered a secret voyage to the southern continent (poor Captain Khrisch! Had he been arrested too?) and had returned with a large quantity of the drug, which I had devilishly forced on a lowborn woman whom I was keeping; I had also circulated the foul stuff among certain prominent members of the nobility, whose names were being withheld because of their thorough repentance. On the eve of my arrest I had escaped to Salla, and good riddance to me: if I attempted to return to Manneran, I would immediately be apprehended. Meanwhile I would be tried in absentia, and, according to the Grand Justiciar, there could be little doubt of the verdict. By way of restitution to the state for the great injury I had done the fabric of social stability, I would be required to forfeit all my lands and property, except only a portion to be set aside for the maintenance of my innocent wife and children. (Segvord Helalam, then, had at least accomplished that!) To prevent my highborn friends from transferring my assets to me in Salla before the trial, all that I possessed was already sequestered in anticipation of the Grand Justiciar’s decree of guilt. Thus spake the law. Let others who would make selfbaring monsters of themselves beware!

  63

  I MADE NO SECRET of my whereabouts in Salla, for I had no reason now to fear the jealousy of my royal brother. Stirron as a boy newly on the throne might have been driven to eliminate me as a potential rival, but not the Stirron who had ruled for more than seventeen years. By now he was an institution in Salla, well loved and an integral part of everyone’s existence, and I was a stranger, barely remembered by the older folk and unknown to the younger, who spoke with a Mannerangi accent and who had been publicly branded with the shame of selfbaring. Even if I cared to overthrow Stirron, where would I find followers?

  In truth I was hungry for the sight of my brother. In times of storm one turns to one’s earliest comrades; and with Noim estranged from me and Halum on the far side of the Woyn, I had only Stirron left. I had never resented having had to flee Salla on his account, for I knew that had our ages been reversed I would have caused him to flee the same way. If our relationship had grown frosty since my flight, it was a frost of his making, arising from his guilty conscience. Some years had passed, now, since my last visit to Salla City: perhaps my adversities would open his heart. I wrote Stirron a letter from Noim’s place, formally begging sanctuary in Salla. Under Sallan law I had to be taken in, for I was one of Stirron’s subjects and was guilty of no crime committed on Sallan soil: yet I thought it best to ask. The charges lodged against me by the Grand Justiciar of Manneran, I admitted, were true, but I offered Stirron a terse and (I think) eloquent justification of my deviation from the Covenant. I closed the letter with expressions of my unwavering love for him, and with a few reminiscences of the happy times we had had before the burdens of the septarchy had descended on him.

  I expected Stirron in return to invite me to visit him at the capital, so that he could hear from my own lips an explanation of the strange things I had done in Manneran. A brotherly reunion was surely in order. But no summons to Salla City came. Each time the telephone chimed, I rushed toward it, thinking it might be Stirron calling. He did not call. Several weeks of tension and gloom passed; I hunted, I swam, I read, I tried to write my new Covenant of love. Noim remained aloof from me. His one experience at soul sharing had thrust him into so deep an embarrassment that he hardly dared to meet my eyes, for I was privy to all his innerness, and th
at had become a wedge between us.

  At last came an envelope bearing the septarch’s imposing seal. It held a letter signed by Stirron, but I pray it was some steely minister, and not my brother, who composed that pinch-souled message. In fewer lines than I have fingers, the septarch told me that my request for sanctuary in the province of Salla was granted, but only on the condition that I forswear the vices I had learned in the south. If I were caught just once spreading the use of selfbaring drugs in Salla, I would be seized and driven into exile. That was all my brother had to say. Not a syllable of kindness. Not a shred of sympathy. Not an atom of warmth.

  64

  AT THE CREST of the summer Halum came unexpectedly to visit us. The day of her arrival, I had gone riding far out across Noim’s land, following the track of a male stormshield that had burst from its pen. An accursed vanity had led Noim to acquire a clutch of these vicious furbearing mammals, though they are not native to Salla and thrive poorly there: he kept twenty or thirty of them, all claws and teeth and angry yellow eyes, and hoped to breed them into a profitable herd. I chased the escaped male through woods and plain, through morning and midday, hating it more with each hour, for it left a trail of the mutilated carcasses of harmless grazing beasts. These stormshields kill for sheer love of slaughter, taking but a bite or two of flesh and abandoning the rest to scavengers. Finally I cornered it in a shadowy box-canyon. “Stun it and bring it back whole,” Noim had instructed me, conscious of the animal’s value: but when trapped it rushed at me with such ferocity that I gave it the full beam, and gladly slew it. For Noim’s sake I took the trouble to strip off the precious hide. Then, weary and depressed, I rode without stopping back to the great house. A strange groundcar was parked outside, and beside it was Halum. “You know the summers in Manneran,” she explained. “One planned to go as usual to the island, but then one thought, it would be good to take a holiday in Salla, with Noim and Kinnall.”

  She had by then entered her thirtieth year. Our women marry between fourteen and sixteen, are done bearing their children by twenty-two or twenty-four, and at thirty have begun to slide into middle age, but time had left Halum untouched. Not having known the tempests of marriage and the travails of motherhood, not having spent her energies on the grapplings of the conjugal couch or the lacerations of childbed, she had the supple, pliant body of a girl: no fleshy bulges, no sagging folds, no exploded veins, no thickening of the frame. She had changed only in one respect, for in recent years her dark hair had turned silvery. This was but an enhancement, however, since it gleamed with dazzling brilliance, and offered agreeable contrast to the deep tan of her youthful face.

  In her luggage was a packet of letters for me from Manneran: messages from the duke, from Segvord, from my sons Noim and Stirron and Kinnall, from my daughters Halum and Loimel, from Mihan the archivist, and several others. Those who wrote did so in tense, self-conscious style. They were the letters one might write to a dead man if one felt guilty at having survived him. Still, it was good to hear these words out of my former-life. I regretted not finding a letter from Schweiz; Halum told me she had heard nothing from him since before my indictment, and thought he might well have left our planet. Nor was there any word from my wife. “Is Loimel too busy to write a line or two?” I asked, and Halum, looking embarrassed, said softly that Loimel never spoke of me these days: “She seems to have forgotten that she was married.”

  Halum also had brought a trove of gifts for me from my friends across the Woyn. They were startling in their opulence: massy clusters of precious metals, elaborate strings of rare gems. “Tokens of love,” Halum said, but I was not fooled. One could buy great estates with this heap of treasure. Those who loved me would not humiliate me by transferring cash to my account in Salla, but they could give me these splendors in the ordinary way of friendship, leaving me free to dispose of them according to my needs.

  “Has it been very sad for you, this uprooting?” Halum asked. “This sudden going into exile?”

  “One is no stranger to exile,” I told her. “And one still has Noim for bondlove and companionship.”

  “Knowing that it would cost you what it did,” she said, “would you play with the drug a second time, if you could turn time backward by a year?”

  “Beyond any doubt.”

  “Was it worth the loss of home and family and friends?”

  “It would be worth the loss of life itself,” I replied, “if only one could be assured by that that all of Velada Borthan would come to taste the drug.”

  That answer seemed to frighten her: she drew back, she touched the tips of her fingers to her lips, perhaps becoming aware for the first time of the intensity of her bondbrother’s madness. In speaking those words I was not uttering mere rhetorical overstatement, and something of my conviction must have reached Halum. She saw that I believed, and, seeing the depth of my commitment, feared for me.

  Noim spent many of the days that followed away from his lands, traveling to Salla City on some family business and to the Plain of Nand to inspect property he was thinking of buying. In his absence I was master of the estate, for the servants, whatever they might think of my private life, did not dare to question my authority to my face. Daily I rode out to oversee the workers in Noim’s fields, and Halum rode with me. Actually little overseeing was demanded of me, since this was midway in the seasons between planting and harvest, and the crops looked after themselves. We rode for pleasure, mainly, pausing here for a swim, there for a lunch at the edge of the woods. I showed her the stormshield pens, which did not please her, and took her among the gentler animals of the grazing fields, who came up and amiably nuzzled her.

  These long rides gave us hours each day to talk. I had not spent so much time with Halum since childhood, and we grew wonderfully close. We were cautious with one another at first, not wishing to get too near the bone with our questions, but soon we spoke as bond-kin should. I asked her why it was she had never married, and she answered me simply, “One never encountered a suitable man.” Did she regret having gone without husband and children? No, she said, she regretted nothing, for her life had been tranquil and rewarding; yet there was wistfulness in her tone. I could not press her further. On her part she questioned me about the Sumaran drug, trying to learn from me what merits it had that had led me to run such risks. I was amused by the way she phrased her inquiries: trying to sound earnest and sympathetic and objective, yet nonetheless unable to hide her horror at what I had done. It was as though her bondbrother had run amok and butchered twenty people in a marketplace, and she now wished to discover, by means of patient and good-humored questioning, just what had been the philosophical bases that had led him to take up mass murder. I also tried to maintain a temperate and dispassionate manner, so that I would not sear her with my intensity as I had done in that first interchange. I avoided all evangelizing, and, as calmly and soberly as I could, I explained to her the effects of the drug, the benefits I gained from it, and my reasons for rejecting the stony isolation of self that the Covenant imposes on us. Shortly a curious metamorphosis came over both her attitude and mine. She became less the highborn lady striving with well-meant warmth to understand the criminal, and more the student attempting to grasp the mysteries revealed by an initiated master. And I became less the descriptive reporter, and more the prophet of a new dispensation. I spoke in flights of lyricism of the raptures of soulsharing; I told her of the strange wonder of the early sensations, as one begins to open, and of the blazing moment of union with another human consciousness; I depicted the experience as something far more intimate than any meeting of souls one might have with one’s bond-kin, or any visit to a drainer. Our conversations became monologues. I lost myself in verbal ecstasies, and came down from them at times to see Halum, silver-haired and eternally young, with her eyes sparkling and her lips parted in total fascination. The outcome was inevitable. One scorching afternoon as we walked slowly through the aisles in a field of grain that rose chest-high on her, she said with
out warning, “If the drug is available to you here, may your bondsister share it with you?” I had converted her.

  65

  THAT NIGHT I dissolved some pinches of the powder in two flasks of wine. Halum looked uncertain as I handed one to her, and her uncertainty rebounded to me, so that I hesitated to go through with our project; but then she gave me a magical smile of tenderness and drained her flask. “There is no flavor of it,” she said, as I drank. We sat talking in Noim’s trophy-hall, decked with hornfowl spears and draped with stormshield furs, and as the drug began to take effect Halum started to shiver; I pulled a thick black hide from the wall and draped it about her shoulders, and through it I held her until the chill was past.

  Would this go well? Despite all my propagandizing I was frightened. In every man’s life there is something he feels driven to do, something that pricks him at the core of his soul so long as it remains undone, and yet as he approaches the doing of it he will know fear, for perhaps to fulfill the obsession will bring him more pain than pleasure. So with me and Halum and the Sumaran drug. But my fear ebbed as the drug took hold. Halum was smiling. Halum was smiling.

  The wall between our souls became a membrane, through which we could slide at will. Halum was the first to cross it. I hung back, paralyzed by prudery, thinking even now that it would be an intrusion on my bondsister’s maidenhood for me to enter her mind, and also a violation of the commandment against bodily intimacies between bond-kin. So I dangled in this absurd trap of contradictions, too inhibited to practice my own creed, for some moments after the last barriers had fallen; meanwhile Halum, realizing at last that nothing prevented her, slipped unhesitatingly into my spirit. My instant response was to try to shield myself: I did not want her to discover this or this or that, and particularly to learn of my physical desire for her. But after a moment of this embarrassed flurrying I ceased trying to plaster my soul with figleaves, and went across into Halum, allowing the true communion to begin, the inextricable entanglement of selves.