The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 5

show me what's going on?" I said.
"I suppose you won't just go away, will you?
I was wondering how long you would wait. Why don't you come on over?"
Eyes behind smoke, cables gone, she sat at her desk. "Do you take drugs?" she said.
"Not as much as I used to. What have you got in mind?"
"Psilo-d." Nothing halfway. I said, "The Russian roulette of drug experiences."
"Aleph can take blood samples and administer the proper doses. Are you willing?"
"I suppose. I don't understand why, though . . . why you want to do this."
"Because things are very strange, and we don't have time."
"Time for what?"
"For this, Jerry ... the usual reticence, embarrassment. Getting to know each other. Do you want me?" Very nice-blind eyes looking through me. Maybe she used wave-lengths outside the visible spectrum. "Yes," I said, "I do."
"See? I've embarrassed you. We need a corrosive, an acid bath to wash all this away "
"That's drastic. Not complaining, mind you, just pointing it out."
"I know . . . and maybe it's a mistake. But I can't be passive, I can't be patient, not in this, not in anything. Understand that. And I want you, too. She keyed in a CLOSE AND SECURE command and said, "Let's go. The computer will close everything down after we leave." I reached for her arm, thinking she might need help once we got outside, but she said, "Don't bother, Jerry I know the way, and everybody knows me. No one will run into me."
We walked through passageways thick with acronyms, abbreviations, and corporate logos. I thumbed my nose at the SenTrax sunburst. She strolled with head erect and features composed. We passed through a radial tube and into a living-quarters ring. It was quiet there, the walls were bare steel, and the spin gravity had lessened. She stopped me with her arm in front of her door. Inside we kicked off our slippers and went into the main room.
Walls of Wedgewood blue tapered to a flecked eggshell ceiling. A cream carpet covered the padded floor. A futon rolled against the wall, a few low tables in black lacquer, and a console were the only furniture. A touch-sculpture, visually formless, gray and volcanic, sat in the middle of the room, and a multitude of ferns and vines hung from the ceiling.
She unrolled the futon, and we sat. Each of us had a small vial of clear liquid, the doses Aleph had determined were safe. "Shall we?" she said.
"Cheers ."
Psilo-d moves on you slowly but with pressure. Things begin to acquire an inner illumination, people a visible aura. There is a sense of immanence, of an unnameable emergence. Emotions build in waves--eventually all will be lost in an oceanic presence.
But that was some time away for us yet. She reached out and touched my face, and bare nerve endings received her.
The lust and love I had felt for her flamed, but I was incapable of moving because every word or gesture seemed so powerful I could not make it. One hand touching my face, she unbuttoned her blouse--the same silky peach one she had been wearing when I first saw her. Her hands ran over me. Then I reached out to undress her, and she did the same for me. Kneeling, we faced each other--touching, tapping, caressing, taking hold.
We coupled so quickly, there was no time for anything but a bright sexual flare.
Still we pushed our bodies together, striving to melt flesh into flesh.
Sparks of silver and gold showered from her hair, the room lights strobed with our pulses, and calm faces--bearded, with angular profiles--appeared in fresco surrounding the room, watching, nodding to a slow beat that I could not hear.
Cupping her breast, I laughed. I could feel inside my skull the arcing of circuits gone from their usual pattern. Vines stretched across the ceiling, twisted about one another in helices, drenched us in green radiance that filled the room.
"It grows like a tree," I said, among other things--Edenic babble she understood and responded to in kind; lalling of infants struck with the light. The room was vast, filled with labyrinths of brilliance and caves of darkness, and we would lose each other inside them. Then we would come together, sexual marathoners running in tandem, pushed on by the strong, impersonal force of life itself. Time passed unmeasured. I felt her beside me. The vaster hallucinations had gone, though objects still shimmered with uncertain outline, their colors sliding across wavelengths and glistening like deep-painted, polished metal.
When I closed my eyes, cartoon figures in gay red outline bicycled across the inner lids, waving happily I was buzzing with energy that cut through tiredness and forced me to sit up.
"How are you?" I said.
"Tired. Want to get some sleep?"
"I think so." I got her purse. Inside were two flat-ended