The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 6

metal tubes, stingers: pressurized, one-shot injectors filled with a tranquilizer. I gave them to her, and she felt along the underpart of my jaw, then pushed a tube against my neck. "Jesus," I said, "that's quick." I could feel my muscles loosening, energy level dropping to zero. Through a cloud I saw her press the other tube to her own neck.
Huddled naked together, we slept.
Two days later I came into her office. I had staggered through the previous day's work still punch-drunk with tiredness. Now I was humming with a high, anxious buzz; eyes still subject to shape changings and odd flickers of the light, thoughts strung together like the beadwork of a mad child, and at the luminous center of it all, her But I couldn't just go in and say, "Do you love me or was it the drug?"
She came around the desk to meet me. She was wearing a dress patterned in dark blue that billowed as she walked. Her skin was scrubbed, pale, translucent.
"Are you all right?" I said.
She sat on the front edge of her desk and reached for me. I got a rush of desire that seemed to have been waiting, latent somewhere in the finer structures of my skull in readiness for the proper touch. I laid her across the desk. Underneath her dress, she wore nothing. Nails locked into the back of my neck, eyes invisible behind colored glass, she drew me into her. So quickly we moved--waves of need passing between us, amplified, climbing. "Now," she said . "Now . . . "
And a few minutes later: "No, don't move. I have to tell you what I could not tell you . . . that thing I showed you, with cameras, is just a trick compared to the other, to seeing with my own eyes. Aleph gives me eyes." She whispered to me, her lips inches away, her breath coming in hot pulses I could feel on my spine. "But it is so difficult to see, so complex, that Aleph has to divert, delay . . . steal the time for me. And it has to lie. It seems to want to."
I could feel the tension in both of us, rippling against each other.
"That's impossible," I said. "It doesn't want anything. It can't."
"Something happened. It can. From the first time I tried the program, I felt peculiar things happening. That strangeness grew .... it flowered. When Aleph and I are connected like that, we become intertwined in ways that are hard to explain. We share something, we influence each other. It's not one way.
"Neurons, nerve fibers in the brain, don't go one way. They loop back on themselves, they cross-connect . . . it's a mad snarl, slow, faulty, confused. Nothing like your beautiful light diagrams. I think . . . through me, Aleph has learned how to think, how to want, perhaps how to lie.
"If I close my eyes and relax, I receive messages. Sensations, synesthesias--vacuum that smells like ether . . . from inside, it rises up through my heart, that smell. And the sound of starlight, far-off sirens . . . satellites chattering, they have songs, but I feel them like grains of sand blowing against me."
I was listening for madness. I couldn't help myself. There were Alice's KEs back in the Ops Room, going through their rituals, to remind me. What any of them would give for this connection.
But I heard no craziness from her--nor any bent metaphysics, spilled religion. Just a report coming in from distant places.
As if one of Doctor Chin's lab animals had speech, not just the mute, involuntary language of body chemistry and the electrical action of the brain. As if it had put itself on the operating table voluntarily, and now out of the nude, trepanned skull, a human voice was speaking.
"Pure emotions," she said. "No context for them at all. Not things Aleph feels, just things it sends. Panic, fear one time, just one time. Elation, sadness, anger, longing. And once a chain of orgasms. Can I tell you that? Do you think I'm a monster?"
"No," I said. "No."
"Sometimes I do. But you have to understand, I have no choice, no choice at all."
She reached to the console beside us, took the two cables lying there, and snapped them to her neck. She dropped her glasses to the floor, and in that first instant I could see her eyes come to life--quick contraction of the irises, sudden clutch of muscles as they tried to focus--before she shut her eyes against the harsh light. "Oh, oh God," she said, and moved beneath me, hips slapping harshly, bucking uncontrolled. I held to her, in her. She thrust my head back, nails again sunk into the base of my brain, and opened her eyes.