The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 6

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 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