A Time of Changes

43

We all became one, the ten of them and the two of us. First there were the strange sensations of going up, the heightening of perception, the loss of bearings, the visions of celestial light, the hearing of eerie sounds; then came the detecting of other heartbeats and bodily rhythms about me, the doubling, the overlapping of awarenesses; then came the dissolution of self, and we became one, who had been twelve. I was plunged into a sea of souls and I perished. I was swept into the Center of All Things. I had no way of knowing whether I was Kinnall the septarch’s son, or Schweiz the man of old Earth, or the fire-tenders, or the chiefs, or the priests, or the girls, or the priestess, for they were inextricably mixed up in me and I in them. And the sea of souls was a sea of love. How could it be anything else than that? We were each other. Love of self bound us each to each, all to all. Love of self is love of others; love of others is love of self. And I loved. I knew more clearly than ever why Schweiz had said to me, I love you, as we were coming out of the drug the first time — that odd phrase, so obscene on Borthan, so incongruous in any case when man is speaking to man. I said to the ten Sumarnu, I love you, though not in words, for I had no words that they would understand, and even if I had spoken to them in my own tongue and they had understood, they would have resented the foulness of my words, for among my people I love you is an obscenity, and no help for it. I love you. And I meant it, and they accepted the gift of my love. I who was part of them. I who not long ago had patronized them as amusing primitives worshiping bonfires in the woods. Through them I sensed the sounds of the forest and the heaving of the tides, and, yes, the merciful love of the great world-mother, who lies sighing and quaking beneath our feet, and who has bestowed on us the drug-root for the healing of our sundered selves. I learned what it is to be Sumarnu and live simply at the meeting-place of two small rivers. I discovered how one can lack groundcars and banking houses and still belong to the community of civilized humanity. I found out what half-souled things the people of Velada Borthan have made of themselves in the name of holiness, and how whole it is possible to be, if one follows the way of the Sumarnu. None of this came to me in words or even in a flow of images, but rather in a rush of received knowledge, knowledge that entered and became part of me after a manner I can neither describe nor explain. I hear you saying now that I must be either lying or lazy, to offer you as little specific detail of the experience as I have done. But I reply that one cannot put into words that never was in words. One can deal only in approximations, and one’s best effort can be nothing more than a distortion, a coarsening of the truth. For I must transform perceptions into words and set them down as my skills permit, and then you must pick my words from the page and convert them into whatever system of perceptions your mind habitually employs, and at each stage of this transmission a level of density leaches away, until you are left only with the shadow of what befell me in the clearing in Sumara Borthan. So how can I explain? We were dissolved in one another. We were dissolved in love. We who had no language in common came to total comprehension of our separate selves. When the drug at length lost its hold on us, part of me remained in them and part of them remained in me. If you would know more than that, if you would have a glimpse of what it is to be released from the prison of your skull, if you would taste love for the first time in your life, I say to you, Look for no explanations fashioned out of words, but put the flask to your lips. Put the flask to your lips.