Then he was not on Terra either. Because, even though THL had in the sudden great showdown toppled the combined probe constellated out of the resources of its two immense opponents, the citizens of Terra had already been briefed fully, had already been exposed systematically to the entire truth—and nothing, short of planet-wide genocide, could reverse that.
It made no sense. Bewildered, he made his way across the room, to the window; if he could see out, find a landscape familiar or at least some aspect which linked to a comprehensible theory—any comprehensible theory—that would serve to reorient him in space and time . . . he peered out.
Below, streets wide, with trees blossoming in pink-hued splendor; a pattern of arranged public buildings, an aesthetically satisfying syndrome clearly planned by master builders who had had at their disposal a virtually unlimited variety of materials. These streets, these impressive, durable buildings, none of the constructs beyond the window had come into existence haphazardly. And none seemed destined to crumble away.
He could not recall any urban area on Terra so free of harsh functional autofacs; either the industrial combines here were subsurface, or cammed into the overall design somehow, disguised so effectively that they blended even under his own expert scrutiny. And no creditor jet-balloons. Instinctively, he searched for sign of one; flapples cranked back and forth in their eccentric fashion—this much was familiar. And on the ped-runnels crowds roamed busily, fragmenting at junctions and streaming beyond the range of his vision intent (this, too, was customary; this was eternal and everywhere, a verity of his life on Terra) on their errands. Life and motion: activity of a dedicated, almost obsessive seriousness; the momentum of the city told him that what he saw below had not popped obligingly into existence in response to his scrutiny. Life here had gone on for a long time before him. There was too much of it, and far too much kinetic force, to be explained away as a projection of his own psyche; this which he saw was not delusional, an oscillation of the LSD injected into his blood stream by the THL soldier.
Beside him, the white-oak blonde deftly appeared, said softly in his ear, “A cup of hot syn-cof?” She paused. Still numbed, Rachmael failed to answer; he heard her, but his bewilderment stifled even a reflexive response. “It will really make you feel better,” the girl continued, after a time. “I know how you feel; I know very well what you’re going through because I remember going through the same experience myself when I first found myself here. I thought I had gone out of my mind.” She patted him, then, on the arm. “Come on. We’ll go into the kitchen.”
Trustingly, he found himself accepting her small warm hand; she led him silently through the living room of people intent on the image of Omar Jones enlarged to godlike proportions on the TV screen, and presently he and the girl were seated opposite each other at a small brightly decorated plastic-surfaced table. She smiled at him, encouragingly; still unable to speak he found himself hopefully smiling back, an echo resonating in response to her relaxed friendliness. Her life, the proximity of her dynamism, her body warmth, awoke him minutely but nevertheless critically from his shock-induced apathy. Once again, for the first time since the LSD dart had plunged into him, he felt himself gain vigor; he felt alive.
He discovered, all at once, a cup of syn-cof in his hand; he sipped and as he did so he tried, against the weight of the still-formidable apathy that pervaded him, to frame a remark calculated to convey his thanks. It seemed to require a million years and all the energy available, but the task edified him: whatever had happened to him and wherever in the name of god he was, the havoc of the mind-obliterating hallucinogen had by no means truly left his system. It might well be days, even weeks, before he found himself entirely rid of it; to that he was already stoically resigned.
“Thanks,” he managed, finally.
The girl said, “What did you experience?”
Haltingly, with painstaking care, he answered, “I—got an LSD dart in me. Can’t tell how long I was under.” Thousands of years, he thought. From the days of Rome to the present. Evolution through centuries, and each hour a year. But there was no point in communicating that; he would not be telling the girl something new. Undoubtedly, when she had lived on Terra, she had been exposed—like everyone else at one time or another—to at least a residual dose of the chemical lingering in one of the major population center’s water supply: the still-lethal legacy inherited from the war of ’92, so taken for granted that it had become a part of nature, not desired but silently endured.
“I asked,” the girl repeated, with quiet, almost professional persuasiveness, fixing the focus of his attention on her and what she was asking, “what you experienced. What did you see? Better to tell someone now, before it gets dim; later it’s very difficult to recall.”
“The garrison state,” he said hoarsely. “Barracks. I was there. Not long; they got to me fairly fast. But I did seek.”
“Anything else?” The girl did not seem perturbed. But she listened tensely, obviously determined to miss nothing. “What about the soldier who fired the dart at you? Was there anything about him? Anything odd? Weird or unexplainable?”
He hesitated. “Christ,” he said, “the hallucinations; you know lysergic acid—you’re familiar with what it does. My god—I was inundated by every kind of perception. You want to hear about the Day of Judgment again, in addition to having gone through it yourself? Or the—”
“The soldier,” the white-oak-haired girl said patiently.
With a ragged, sharp-pained exhalation, Rachmael said, “Okay. I hallucinated a cyclops, of the cephalopodan variety.” For an interval he became silent; the effort of putting his recollection into words exhausted his precariously limited strength. “Is that enough?” he said, then, feeling anger.
“Aquatic?” Her luminous, intelligent eyes bored steadily at him; she did not let him evade her. “Requiring, or evidently requiring—”
“A saline envelope. I could see—” He made himself breathe with regularity, halting his sentence midway. “Signs of dehydration, cracking, of the dermatoid folds. From the effluvium I’d assume a rapid evaporation of epithelial moisture. Probably indicates a homeostatic breakdown.” He looked away, at that point, no longer able to meet her steady, critical gaze; the strain was too much for his vitiated powers, his ability to collect and maintain his attention. Five years old, he said to himself. The abreaction of the drug period; regression to the space-time axis of early childhood, along with the limited range of consciousness, the minute faculties of a preschool-age kid, and this is the topic that has to be dealt with; this is just too much. And it would be, he thought, even if I could pull out and function as an adult again, with an adult’s ability to reason. He rubbed his forehead, feeling the ache, the constriction; like a deep, chronic sinusitis which had flared to its most malignant stage. A pain-threshold alteration, he speculated dully. Due to the drug. Routine common discomfort, ordinary somatic promptings, everything enlarged to the point of unbearability, and signifying nothing, nothing at all.
Conscious of his grim, introverted silence, the girl said, “Under LSD before, did you ever experience a physiognomic alteration of this sort? Think back to the initial mandatory episode during your grammar-school days. Can you remember back that far?”
“That was under a control,” Rachmael said. “One of those Wes-Dem Board of Education psychologists, those middle-age do-gooding ladies in blue smocks who—what the hell did they used to call themselves?—something like psycheleticians. Or psychedelictrix; I forget which. I guess both groups got to me at one time or another. And then of course under the McLean Mental Health Act I took it again at sixteen and again at twenty-three.” But the control, he thought; that made all the difference. Someone there all the time, trained, able to do and say the right thing: able to maintain contact with the stable objective koinos kosmos so that I never forgot that what I was seeing emanated from my own psyche, type-basics, or as Jung once called them, archetypes rising out of the unconscious and swamping the personal conscious. Out of the collective, supra-personal inner space, the great sea of non-individual life.
The sea, he thought. And that physiognomic transformation of the THL soldier; my perception of him became transmuted along those lines. So I did see a type-basic, as in the previous times; not the same one, of course, because each episode under the drug is unique.
“What would you say,” the girl said, “if I told you that what you saw was not mysticomimetic at all?”
“What I saw,” Rachmael said, “could not have been psycheletic; it wasn’t an expansion of consciousness or a rise in the sensitivity of my percept-system.”