"Donnie..."
"Hush, Roger. Do not think of your poor brother now. This is a time for you to think of yourself, and of me."
Ume and I saw each other perfectly in the dark. Her aura was a rich blue, warmer close to her body and scintillating gold at the halo's edge. I glowed a flickering and shadowed citron, with an outer aureole of dim violet. My root chakra had a faint, hopeful carmine radiance, signifying that the spirit was willing while the flesh was weak.
"Don't worry. We are going to take a long time," Ume said. Her lips brushed my forehead, cheeks, and mouth as she spoke. "This is a very old way in my part of the world. In the West, it has been called carezza. It is unappreciated because of the impatience of occidental lovers, who seek explosive release rather than immersion in a pool of enduring light."
Her lips had taken on the golden glow now, and so had her eyes. The outermost precincts of both our minds had opened so that we could synchronize the pleasure; but in spite of what she revealed to me of her life, the real identity of Ume stayed that night and forever apart from me ... as I remained hidden from her. She had brought me to the small rented house on the Ruddsboro Road where she lived alone. It was sparsely furnished, almost ascetic, with many oddly shaped ceramic vases holding arrangements of leafless branches and dried grasses and bare, gnarled roots. The rain still fell. A brook outside the bedroom window rushed over its bed of granite boulders, filling the place with pervasive thunder. Ume had been straightforward about the sexual attraction, and I in turn was honest about my abaissement du niveau psychique. Sampson's psychoanalysis really hadn't helped me all that much spiritually, aside from bolstering my courage and putting me more or less on the track toward sobriety. I'd confessed to Ume that I was very dubious about coming up with anything useful in the creativity experiments. She had countered with suggestions for a rather different style of therapy. I had doubts about that, too, but she only smiled wisely.
"We will begin very slowly and proceed very slowly," she said, kissing my shoulders, stroking my inert arms in the lightest possible manner with the tips of her fingernails. "You must not speak. Try not even to think. Simply rest in me. Resist arousal. My mind will speak to you and my body will share its creativity. You will discover things about me and I will familiarize myself with you. There will be feedback and a very slow increase of energetic potential. Very slow. Now sit here among the cushions and take me to you gently..."
This is Ume:
...A frail, strange child. The oldest of three daughters. Her home is in the city of Sapporo on Hokkaido, the rugged northernmost island of Japan. Her mother, once a schoolteacher, now cares for the family. Her father is a photographer whose business never seems to prosper. Both parents are descended from the Ainu, the aboriginal inhabitants of the island. The heritage shames the husband and wife and they never speak of it. The oldest daughter, with her betraying fair skin and exotic eyes and the slight waviness of her silken hair, is a reproach. She is not the favored child.
...A little girl of six. Her father takes close-up photographs of her face for an advertising assignment. The child is obedient but impatient with sitting still. She wishes ardently to run out of the stuffy room to play with the little girl next door. This other child's face, distorted but recognizable, appears on three successive negatives of a film roll, in place of Ume's own.
...The father is astounded. He experiments and the miracle happens again. He begins to realize what must be happening. "Ume!" he cries. "Dear girl! You must do this again!"
...The child is eager to please him, to feel his love and admiration. She cooperates in her father's experiments for weeks. It is learned that she can imprint film not only while it is in the camera, but also when it is outside it—provided the film is not exposed to normal light. In the beginning her "thoughtographic" images vary greatly in clarity, depending upon whether she is summoning them from her imagination or "reading" them directly from her surroundings or from a book. Her best pictures are made with Polaroid film. All she has to do is stare into the lens and think about a subject while her father clicks the shutter. He makes many photos of Ume's thoughts. He praises her lavishly and dreams of the millions of yen the family will make when little Ume enters show business.
...The father's father learns of the marvel. He comes from the Ainu settlement to the city and studies the little girl. "She is possessed of an ancient demon," he says. "She will bring bad luck." The father is scornful. He has found a book. It tells how thought photos were produced by a psychic researcher named Tomokichi Fukurai in a remarkable series of experiments between 1910 and 1913. Another book, translated from English, tells how the American physician Jule Eisenbud obtained psychic photos from a hotel worker named Ted Serios. Serios also stared into a Polaroid camera. Most of his images were fuzzy and eventually his rare talent faded away. But the talent of little Ume does not. The more she practices, the better her results. Her pictures are now superbly sharp. She can do both color and black-and-white.
...The great opportunity comes at last. The girl will appear on a television show featuring local amateur performers. She and her father have prepared for a whole year. But when she comes on stage before a live audience, she is devastated by sudden shyness. Her performance is a fiasco. A week later her father is killed by falling in front of a subway train in the main Ohdori station of Sapporo.
...The televised failure has one good result. It brings the little girl to the attention of Dr. Reiko Sasaki, a respected parapsychologist. This woman becomes a second mother to the girl. The real mother is only too glad to relinquish care of her. Under Dr. Sasaki's kind tutelage, Ume again produces thought photos. She also shows evidence of being telepathic. Helped by the good doctor, the girl receives a fine education, becomes Dr. Sasaki's assistant, and cooperates in research that shows how her thought photos are made.
...Unconsciously, Ume directs photons to impinge upon a selected area of photo-emulsion, creating concrete images of her thoughts. She can affect emulsion even when it is heavily shielded. Many careful experiments prove that the photons are not derived from existing sources of light. Either Ume's mind excites the emulsion atoms or air atoms to a point where photons are emitted, or else she creates the photons ex nihilo—out of another aspect of the Greater Reality, as proponents of the new Universal Field Theory would say.
...The strange and lonely little girl is now a woman, pursuing her own goals. Dear Dr. Sasaki is gone, and so is the girl's mother. Her two sisters do not have metapsychic talent. Ume writes to them, and to her nieces and nephews. Sometimes there are answers.
Then Ume sang a poem:
Autumn light painting
shadow patterns bright and dark;
my mind reflects them.
Now her entire face was bathed in golden radiance, and her breasts became autumn moons, and her sex a mystery of midnight blue that I saluted as she sank down, enclosing me. Her hands seemed to weave a luminous fabric around about us, an auroral chamber that rippled in the remote sounds from the cascading stream outside.
She pressed her fingertips to my nipples, my breastbone, and my throat. My aura there kindled into lotuslike flames, no longer sickly but rose-gold and shimmering. Her fingers traced mystical patterns on my back, and I saw with my mind how the skin retained the cool blazing designs, and how they blossomed and became more intricate all by themselves after her hands had passed on.
I began to awaken. The penetration was very slow, a hesitant growth after a long, parched dormancy. She arched her body back and brought the fire-limning fingers over my shoulders. I kissed the golden roses of her breasts, reverently pressed lips and tongue to the aural mandala burning above her heart. It was incredibly sweet, and as I drank from it it throbbed and expanded, and became invested with rainbow colors. A blue brilliance now poured from her hands, becoming golden as it gushed over my lower limbs. She rose up, freeing me, and I groaned in protest.
Trust me! We have so long a time...
I kissed all of her turning
body, now clothed in astral fire. There were pulsating symmetries of blue-white with aureate coronas at her mons, her navel, her heart, and her throat. Both breasts were blinding stars. I was fully potent again myself, burning crimson and gold. Please! I besought her. Let me return! But she only lifted my arms, that had hung helplessly at my sides, and delineated the pathway of every nerve with scarlet epidermal radiance.
I wanted to crush her, to devour her, to impale her on the incandescent blade and burn her to ashes. No, she said. No. Wait my dear one wait.
Tears of frustrated fury scalded my face. I was enveloped in a thundering inferno with her coolness flickering madly out of reach. And then she guided the star-fires to my eyes ... and into my mind burst the most beautiful thing I had ever known, a psychocreative lotus-form revolving and ever-changing in a thousand glorious variations. A new rare energy spread from my loins, up my spine, and suffused my trunk and limbs. She was suspended in the flower's heart, her body golden and her hair and blazing ecu azure. I enfolded her at last and she descended. I penetrated her so profoundly that it seemed I would pierce her heart, and there we stayed, rapt together in contemplation of our own many-colored splendor. There was never a culminating orgasm as such, but we shared joy that persisted without cloying as we elaborated upon the beautiful thing flowering between us, our personal creation. Whatever it was, we had made it together, and we worshiped it for hour after hour until we seemed to pass effortlessly into dreams, separated, but still conjoined in the memory of that fantastic night's work.
We woke the next morning contented, at peace, and the best of friends.
***
Ume and I were never lovers in the conventional sense. We never lived for each other or felt a need for permanent commitment. We were more like two musicians coming together in a duet of perfect harmony, delighting in a work of art that neither of us could have created alone. Sometimes sex was a part of it, and sometimes not. Coitus was always sublimated in the service of creativity—and since what we made was abstract, vanishing as music vanishes, it was probably not a true creature of love. But it was marvelous and it did us both good.
Ume's experimental work with me at the Metapsychology Lab, on the other hand, was a failure. Under controlled conditions, I could not generate the least attoerg of detectable energy anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum—let alone produce a coherent laserlike beam. The out-spiral yoga technique only left me with top-of-the-skull headaches. (The in-spiral, on the other hand, was a great adjunct to carezza!) I spent far too much time messing around in the lab during the eight weeks of experimentation than I should have, and at the end of it I was dismissed from the creativity project as a nonstarter and my zapped windowpane was relegated to some forgotten storage cabinet.
Denis told me, "There's an off chance your creative function might become operant with practice, but I don't hold out much hope. Our educative techniques are most successful with youthful subjects. You're forty-seven and your metafunctions are encrusted with a lifetime's accumulation of neurotic dross. The more psychoenergetic powers will probably always remain latent, except possibly under conditions of great mental stress."
"No big thing," I said, glad of having escaped guinea-pig status. "I can live very well without it."
I was wrong about that. But then I've been wrong about a lot of things throughout my checkered career.
***
Lucille Cartier and Bill Sampson endured a stormy severance. In time—and most likely thanks to Ume's subliminal reassurances—Lucille came to understand that I had not acted maliciously. I was more to be pitied than censured, and she decided to forgive me. The peace pact was sealed during the Christmas season of 1992, when she presented me with what she said was a much-needed addition to my bookshop: a dark and shaggy Maine Coon kitten to chase mice, keep me company in morose moments, and lend the place tone.
The kitten became the first Marcel LaPlume. By the time I discovered that he was not only telepathic but coercive as well, I was too used to him to give him up.
2
EXCERPTS FROM:
FINAL CONVERSATION BETWEEN
CAPTAIN, ORBITER MODULE AND
SURFACE EXPLORATION TEAM
JOINT SOVIET-AMERICAN MARS EXPEDITION
NOCTIS LABYRINTHUS, MARS
2 NOVEMBER 1992
GAVRILOV: What is your position now, Volodya?
KLUCHNIKOV: We are 32 meters [garble] top of the fog is perhaps 20 meters below us. It is not stable as it was yesterday but is rising as sunlight [garble] the fissure and melts [garble].
GAVRILOV: Say again, Volodya. You are breaking up.
KLUCHNIKOV: We're 32 meters down the canyon wall. Descent is easy. Top of fog bank 20 meters below but rising. Today fog bank is rising. Do you copy, Andrei?
GAVRILOV: Roger on the copy. Fog rising ... I am scanning the other fissures of the Labyrinth of Night. Fog is filling most of them. Perhaps the small dust storm yesterday provided condensation nuclei. Is the fog hampering your operation?
KLUCHNIKOV: Not yet ... Are you receiving any video yet, Andrei?
GAVRILOV: Negative on the video signal. Wayne, you had better give that fancy American camera a good kick.
STURGIS: Listen, I been pounding on this sucker ever since we went over the rim and she started cutting out [garble] seals on the housing when we bumped her. But if it's something else, like maybe a glitch in the power supply, I can likely fix [garble] to put our money on the ciné camera today. She's doing fine, so we'll have the record. Tough luck about your travelog, Andrei.
GAVRILOV: [laughs] Well, you fellows will just have to give me a word-picture of your descent into Night's Labyrinth. Be sure to let me know at once if you see green men with four arms.
STURGIS : Hey, you betcha. Ol' Tars Tarkas himself creeping up out of the mist [garble] but red layers of rock. We're taking regular samples. It's sedimentary and a fast eyeball scan shows no evidence of macrofossils. There's a sizable dike of blackish igneous rock a few hundred meters to the east of us. On our way back up we'll work our way over and grab a specimen.
KLUCHNIKOV: Wayne, do you see how the dust in the crevices is not so dry and fluffy anymore? It is more like coarse sand. I will take some ... under the surface it begins to firm up even more. The outcroppings have that spongy look even more down here than on the surface. They are something like orange coral, but there is no coral structure. No regularity indicative of life.
STURGIS: Hey ... you know? Hey.
KLUCHNIKOV: What?
STURGIS: Over here. Like a little, shallow cave. Does that look like a puddle of ice to you?
KLUCHNIKOV: It does. Sheltered [garble] from yesterday. There is no dust on it. I will chip some out.
STURGIS: Oh-oh. Here comes the fog.
KLUCHNIKOV: Helmet lamps.
STURGIS: Aye-aye, Commander ... Helps a little. No problem climbing down [garble] goddam crunchy sand. And some of the outcroppings have sharp edges. But outside of that [garble].
KLUCHNIKOV: Wayne, do not descend so quickly. I cannot see you.
STURGIS : Sorry, Volodya, I wanted to ... the damnedest thing. You got me in sight now?
KLUCHNIKOV: Yes. This fog, ulcers to its soul, is getting thicker than clotted cream and—
STURGIS: Hey. Hey. I don't believe this. Put your headlamp to a rock. Look. Just look.
KLUCHNIKOV: The rocks look wet.
GAVRILOV: Say again, Exploration Team? You found wet rocks?
STURGIS: It looks like a thin coating of ice on the rocky outcropping, with liquid water in a film on the surface. I'm taking a sample.
KLUCHNIKOV: Fog ... it is the fog. Look—the porous rocks are all getting this—this icy rind. And if we go lower...
STURGIS: Now you wait for me.
KLUCHNIKOV: Usrat'sa mozhno.... This is incredible.
STURGIS: Sheesh. Oh, wow.
GAVRILOV: What is it? What have you found? What do you see?
KLUCHNIKOV: Down here there is plenty of light, you unde
rstand, but the fog turns everything to an orange haze ... and the rocks have a glistening coating. It is much darker than the ice. In my helmet lamp it is sometimes dark blue-green, sometimes brown. Yey bogu. It changes before my eyes.
STURGIS: It's alive.
GAVRILOV: You think you have found Martian life!
STURGIS: Well, it's not like any chemical reaction I ever saw... but then I'm only a geologist. What this stuff is starting to look like is a gelatinous marine growth. It's swelling very slowly. It must be frozen—what's the ambient, Volodya?—but there's this glistening film of what sure as hell looks like liquid at the surface.
KLUCHNIKOV: The ambient temperature is minus seventeen Celsius.
STURGIS: Jeez—that's warm. There must be a thermal vent at the bottom of the fissure. That was one of the hypotheses about this damn Labyrinth, with the craters all connected by wormholes...
GAVRILOV: Life. Life on Mars. What a magnificent achievement for the Diamond Anniversary of the Revolution.
INTERVENTION Page 43
