A Time of Changes

by Robert Silverberg

  44

  WE HAD PASSED the test. They would give us what we wanted. After the sharing of love came the haggling. We returned to the village, and in the morning our bearers brought out our cases of trade-goods, and the three chieftains brought out three squat clay pots, with the white powder visible within them. And we heaped up a high stack of knives and mirrors and heat-rods, and they carefully poured quantities of powder from two of the pots into the third. Schweiz did most of the bargaining. The guide we had brought from the coast was of little value, for, though he could talk these chieftains’ language, he had never talked to their souls. In fact the bargaining inverted itself suddenly, with Schweiz happily piling still more trinkets into the price, and the chiefs responding by adding more powder to our bowl, everyone laughing in a sort of hysterical good nature as the contest of generosity grew more frenzied. In the end we gave the villagers everything we had, keeping only a few items for gifts to our guide and bearers, and the villagers gave us enough of the drug to snare the minds of thousands.

  Captain Khrisch was waiting when we reached the harbor. “One sees you have fared well,” he remarked.

  “Is it so obvious?” I asked.

  “You were worried men when you went into this place. You are happy men coming out of it. Yes, it is obvious.”

  On the first night of our voyage back to Manneran, Schweiz called me into his cabin. He had the pot of white powder out, and he had broken the seal. I watched as he carefully poured the drug into little packets of the kind in which that first dose had come. He worked in silence, scarcely glancing at me, filling some seventy or eighty packets. When he was done, he counted out a dozen of them to one side. Indicating the others, he said, “Those are for you. Hide them well about your luggage, or you’ll need all your power with the Port Justiciary to get them safely past the customs collectors.”

  “You’ve given me five times as much as you’ve taken,” I protested.

  “Your need is greater,” Schweiz told me.

  45

  I DID NOT UNDERSTAND what he meant by that until we were in Manneran again. We landed at Hilminor, paid Captain Khrisch, went through a minimum of inspection formalities (how trusting the port officials were, not very long ago!), and set out in our groundcar for the capital. Entering the city of Manneran by the Sumar Road, we passed through a crowded district of marketplaces and open-air shops, where I saw thousands of Mannerangi jostling, haggling, bickering. I saw them driving their hard bargains and whipping out contract forms to close the deals. I saw their faces, pinched, guarded, the eyes bleak and unloving. And I thought of the drug I carried and told myself, If only I could change their frosty souls. I had a vision of myself going among them, accosting strangers, drawing this one aside and that, whispering gently to each of them, “I am a prince of Salla and a high official of the Port Justiciary, who has put such empty things aside to bring happiness to mankind, and I would show you how to find joy through selfbaring. Trust me: I love you.” No doubt some would flee from me as soon as I began to speak, frightened by the initial obscenity of my “I am,” and others might hear me out and then spit in my face and call me a madman, and some might cry for the police; but perhaps there would be a few who would listen, and feel tempted, and come off with me to a quiet dockside room where we could share the Sumaran drug. One by one I would open souls, until there were ten in Manneran like me—twenty—a hundred—a secret society of self-barers, knowing one another by the warmth and love in their eyes, going about the city unafraid to say “I” or “me” to their fellow initiates, giving up not merely the grammar of politeness but all the poisonous denials of self-love that that grammar implied. And then I would charter Captain Khrisch again for a voyage to Sumara Borthan, and return laden with packets of white powder, and continue on through Manneran, I and those who now were like me, and we would go up to this one and that, smiling, glowing, to whisper, “I would show you how to find joy through selfbaring. Trust me: I love you.”

  There was no role for Schweiz in this vision. This was not his planet; he had no stake in transforming it. All that interested him was his private spiritual need, his hunger to break through to a sense of the godhood. He had begun that breakthrough already, and could complete it on his own, apart. Schweiz had no need to skulk about the city, seducing strangers. And this was why he had given me the greater share of our Sumaran booty: I was the evangelist, I was the new prophet, I was the messiah of openness, and Schweiz realized that before I did. Until now he had been the leader—drawing me into his confidence, getting me to try the drug, luring me off to Sumara Borthan, making use of my power in the Port Justiciary, keeping me at his side for companionship and reassurance and protection. I had been in his shadow throughout. Now he would cease to eclipse me. Armed with my little packets, I alone would launch the campaign to change a world.

  It was a role I welcomed. All my life I had been overshadowed by one man or another, so that for all my strength of body and ability of mind I had come to seem second-rate to myself. Perhaps that is a natural defect of being born a septarch’s second son. First there had been my father, whom I could never hope to equal in authority, agility, or might; then Stirron, whose kingship brought only exile for me; then my master in the Glinish logging camp; then Segvord Helalam; then Schweiz. All of them men of determination and prestige, who knew and held their places in our world, while I wandered in frequent bewilderment. Now, in the middle of my years, I could at last emerge. I had a mission. I had purpose. The spinners of the divine design had brought me to this place, had made me who I was, had readied me for my task. In joy I accepted their command.

  46

  THERE WAS A GIRL I kept for my sport, in a room on the south side of Manneran, in the tangle of old streets back of the Stone Chapel. She claimed to be a bastard of the Duke of Kongoroi, spawned when the duke was on a state visit to Manneran in the days of my father’s reign. Perhaps her story was true. Certainly she believed it. I was in the habit of going to her twice or thrice each moontime for an hour of pleasure, whenever I felt too stifled by the routine of my life, whenever I felt boredom’s hand at my throat. She was simple but passionate: lusty, available, undemanding. I did not hide my identity from her, but I gave her none of my inner self, and none was expected; we talked very little, and there was no question of love between us. In return for the price of her lodgings, she let me make occasional use of her body, and the transaction was no more complex than that: a touching of skins, a sneeze of the loins. She was the first to whom I gave the drug. I mixed it with golden wine. “We will drink this,” I said, and when she asked me why, I replied, “It will bring us closer together.” She asked, in no great curiosity, what it would do to us, and I explained, “It will open self to self, and make all walls transparent.” She offered no protests—no talk of the Covenant, no whining about privacy, no lectures of the evils of selfbaring. She did as she was told, convinced I would bring no harm to her. We took the dose, and then we lay naked on her couch waiting for the effects to begin. I stroked her cool thighs, kissed the tips of her breasts, playfully nibbled her earlobes, and soon the strangeness started, the buzzing and the rush of air, and we began to detect one another’s heartbeats and pulse. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, one feels so peculiar!” But it did not frighten her. Our souls drifted together and were fused in the clear white light coming from the Center of All Things. And I discovered what it was like to have only a slit between my thighs, and I learned how it is to wriggle one’s shoulders and have heavy breasts slap together, and I felt eggs throbbing and impatient in my ovaries. At the height of our voyage we joined our bodies. I felt my rod slide into my cavern. I felt myself moving against myself. I felt the slow sucking oceanic tide of ecstasy beginning to rise somewhere at my dark hot moist core, and I felt the hot prickling tickle of impending ecstasy dancing along my tool, and I felt the hard hairy shield of my chest crushing against the tender globes of my breasts, and I felt lips on my lips, tongue on my tongue, soul in my soul. This union of our
bodies endured for hours, or so it seemed. And in that time my self was open to her, so that she could see in it all she chose, my boyhood in Salla, my flight to Glin, my marriage, my love for my bondsister, my weaknesses, my self-deceptions, and I looked into her and saw the sweetness of her, the giddiness, the moment of first finding blood on her thighs, the other blood of a later time, the image of Kinnall Darival as she carries it in her mind, the vague and unformed commandments of the Covenant, and all the rest of her soul’s furniture. Then we were swept away by the storms of our senses. I felt her orgasm and mine, mine and mine, hers and hers, the double column of frenzy that was one, the spasm and the spurt, the thrust and the thrust, the rise and the fall. We lay sweaty and sticky and exhausted, the drug still thundering through our joined minds. I opened my eyes and saw hers, unfocused, the pupils dilated. She gave me a lopsided smile. “I—I—I—I—I,” she said. “I!” The wonder of it seemed to daze her. “I! I! I!” I planted a kiss between her breasts and felt the brush of my lips myself. “I love you,” I said.

  47

  THERE WAS A CLERK in the Port Justiciary, a certain Ulman, half my age and clearly a man of promise, whom I had come to like. He knew my power and my ancestry and showed no awe of me over that; his respect for me was based entirely on my skills in evaluating and handling the problems of the Justiciary. I kept him late one day and called him into my office when the others were gone. “There is this drug of Sumara Borthan,” I said, “that allows one mind freely to enter another.” He smiled and said that he had heard of it, yes, but understood it was difficult to obtain and dangerous to use. “There is no danger,” I answered. “And as for the difficulty of obtaining it—” I drew forth one of my little packets. His smile did not fade, though dots of color came into his cheeks. We took the drug together in my office. Hours later, when we left for our homes, I gave him some so that he could take it with his wife.

  48

  IN THE STONE CHAPEL I dared to reach out to a stranger, a short, thickbodied man in princely clothes, possibly a member of the septarch’s family. He had the clear serene eyes of a man of good faith and the poise of one who has looked within himself and is not displeased by what he has seen. But when I spoke my words to him, he shoved me away and cursed me with such fury that his anger became contagious; maddened by his words, I nearly struck him in blind frenzy. “Self-barer! Self-barer!” The shout echoed through the holy building, and people emerged from rooms of meditation to stare. It was the worst shame I had known in years. My exalted mission came into another perspective: I saw it as filthy, and myself as something pitiful, a creeping slinking dog of a man driven by who knew what compulsion to expose his shabby soul to strangers. My anger drained from me and fear flowed in: I slipped into the shadows and out a side door, dreading arrest. For a week I walked about on tiptoe, forever looking back over my shoulder. But nothing pursued me except my panging conscience.

  49

  THE MOMENT of insecurity passed. Again I saw my mission whole, and recognized the merit of what I had pledged myself to do, and felt only sorrow for the man in the Stone Chapel who had spurned my gift. And in a single week I found three strangers who would share the drug with me. I wondered how I could ever have doubted myself. But other seasons of doubt lay ahead.

  50

  I TRIED TO ARRIVE at a theoretical basis for my use of the drug, to construct a new theology of love and openness. I studied the Covenant and many of its commentaries, attempting to discover why the first settlers of Velada Borthan had found it necessary to deify mistrust and concealment. What did they fear? What were they hoping to preserve? Dark men in a dark time, with mindsnakes creeping through their skulls. In the end I came to no real understanding of them. They were convinced of their own virtue. They had acted for the best. Thou shalt not thrust the inwardness of thy soul upon thy fellow man. Thou shalt not unduly examine the needs of thine own self. Thou shalt deny thyself the easy pleasures of intimate conversation. Thou shalt stand alone before thy gods. And so we had lived, these hundreds of years, unquestioning, obedient, keeping the Covenant. Maybe nothing keeps the Covenant alive now, for most of us, except simple politeness: we are unwilling to embarrass others by baring ourselves, and so we go locked up, our inner wounds festering, and we speak our language of third-person courtliness. Was it time to create a new Covenant? A bond of love, a testament of sharing? Hidden in my rooms at home, I struggled to write one. What could I say that would be believed? That we had done well enough following the old ways, but at grievous personal cost. That the perilous conditions of the first settling no longer obtained among us, and certain customs, having become handicaps rather than assets, could be discarded. That societies must evolve if they are not to decay. That love is better than hate and trust is better than mistrust. But little of what I wrote convinced me. Why was I attacking the established order of things? Out of profound conviction, or merely out of the hunger for dirty pleasures? I was a man of my own time; I was embedded firmly in the rock of my upbringing even as I toiled to turn that rock to sand. Trapped in the tension between my old beliefs and my still unformed new ones, I swung a thousand times a day from pole to pole, from shame to exaltation. As I labored over the draft of my new Covenant’s preamble one evening, my bondsister Halum unexpectedly entered my study. “What are you writing?” she asked pleasantly. I covered one sheet with another. My face must have reflected my discomfort, for hers showed signs of apology for having intruded. “Official reports,” I said. “Foolishness. Dull bureaucratic trivia.” That night I burned all I had written, in a paroxysm of self-contempt.

  51

  IN THOSE WEEKS I took many voyages of exploration into unknown lands. Friends, strangers, casual acquaintances, a mistress: companions on strange journeys. But through all the early phase of my time of changes I said not a word to Halum about the drug. To share it with her had been my original goal, that had brought the drug to my lips in the first place. Yet I feared to approach her. It was cowardice that kept me back: what if, by coming to know me too well, she ceased to love me?

  52

  SEVERAL TIMES I came close to broaching the subject with her. I held myself back. I did not dare to move toward her. If you wish you may measure my sincerity by my hesitation; how pure, you may ask, was my new creed of openness, if I felt that my bondsister would be above such a communion? But I will not pretend there was any consistency in my thinking then. My liberation from the taboos on selfbaring was a willed thing, not a natural evolution, and I had constantly to battle against the old habits of our custom. Though I talked in “I” and “me” with Schweiz and some of the others with whom I had shared the drug, I was never comfortable in doing so. Vestiges of my broken bonds still crept together to shackle me. I looked at Halum and knew that I loved her, and told myself that the only way to fulfill that love was through the joining of her soul and mine, and in my hand was the powder that would join us. And I did not dare. And I did not dare.