A Time of Changes

56

Sometimes, unexpectedly, in the blank dead time between one communion and another, I underwent a strange confusion of the self. A block of borrowed experience that I had stowed in the dark depths of my mind might break loose and float up into the higher levels of consciousness, intruding itself into my own identity. I remained aware of being Kinnall Darival, the septarch’s son of Salla, and yet there was suddenly among my memories a segment of the self of Noim, or Schweiz, or one of the Sumarnu, or someone else of those with whom I had shared the drug. For the length of that splicing of selves — a moment, an hour, half a day — I walked about unsure of my past, unable to determine whether some event fresh in my mind had really befallen me, or had come to me through the drug. This was disturbing but not really frightening, except the first two or three times. Eventually I learned to distinguish the quality of these unearned memories from that of my genuine past, through familiarity with the textures of each. The drug had made me many people, I realized. Was it not better to be many than to be something less than one?