by Ted White
It was a spiraling trap. I could see that now. I’d never been close to other people. Through the years I’d picked up the veneer of experience; I became adept at the so-called social graces. But they only widened the gap. I distrusted other people.
I sat in that darkened room for many hours. A great many thoughts ran through my head. Most were old and familiar. But many required fresh examination. I stood a few on their heads-and observed them critically. For so much of my life I’d acted upon unspoken assumptions. It was time to speak them and see if they still held up.
Too many of them did not.
When I rose from the cushion my legs were stiff and numbed and my mind felt much the same. I went to a window and pulled back its heavy drapes. It was the same window from which I’d peered on my first trip to this house. The light was pale and yellow and the hour was late. I glanced at my chronometer, but it still said 15:52; it was still broken.
I felt exhausted, and yet oddly stronger. I hadn’t put all the pieces together yet, but I knew now that they all fit. Locked in my head was a vast jigsaw puzzle. I’d never tried to work it this way before. It was comforting—genuinely comforting—to know that it could be worked.
I’d made my decision.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was a simple ceremony. “We place no great value on ritual for the sake of ritual,” Bjonn said. “That which we do is meaningful in its own right. It is as simple and as important as a lovers’ kiss.”
The simile was appropriate, I discovered.
I sat in the center of a circle of people. We were in the chapel once more, and it was again only dimly lit. Among those grouped around me were faces I knew: Lora, Jim Benford, Bjonn, Dian, Tucker, Ditmas, and others which I recognized as having seen here before, but whom I did not yet know. There was a solemnity to the occasion, but at the same time a certain warmth and cheerfulness. These people were together in a way still alien to me, and still a little frightening. As I waited, the last vestiges of the old arguments fought against the new:
This is outside my experience; it frightens me.
Nonsense. You’ve been conjuring up demons and monsters, but these people are offering to share paradise with you.
Paradise? What sort of paradise can they offer me?
Curious, but still fearful.
The paradise of self-realization. The paradise of being a whole man.
Is it? Or is it a delusion of wholeness given to a puppet on mental strings?
Don’t be afraid; they won’t take anything away from you. They only add to what you’ve got. Judge for yourself.
Well, that’s why I’m here.
“We’re here today to celebrate life,” Bjonn said. He spoke conversationally; he didn’t orate. He addressed the entire circle of which he was a part. And he spoke to me. I felt the attention of the circle focus on me. It was an uncomfortable feeling. I felt pinned down.
“Life is so precious,” Bjonn said. “We are given only a finite slice of it, and when it is gone we are finished. Yet, so many of us try to ignore this fact as we let our lives slip heedlessly through our fingers.
“We’re here to celebrate life,” he said again, “but in celebrating life we must also celebrate death. The two are one, the yin and yang of existence. We must all die. Only when we can accept this can-we fully utilize our lives.
“We’re here to celebrate the life and the death of Tad Dameron, who sits in the center of our circle. He has passed through a third of his life—perhaps only a quarter” (he smiled) “—and he has made many mistakes with it. These are not for us to dwell upon. He comes to us now to celebrate the Sacrament of Life with us, to join with us in the life that precedes death. He comes to receive his arapad, that which will catalyze his life into joy and self-realization. Who will offer him his arapad?”
I recognized the question to be more than idle. Once before someone had made that offer, and I had spurned it in blind panic. Who would make the offer this time? I felt myself tensing. I wanted to twist around and scan the faces behind me. But I did not.
“I will,” Dian said softly. She was on my far right, just within the periphery of my vision.
“How do you choose to make your offer?” Bjonn asked.
A pink flush spread across her face and she hesitated for a moment. “By the Kiss,” she said.
I flicked my eyes back to Bjonn, to find his own staring directly at me. I couldn’t make out his expression. “Very well,” he said, “come forward, please.”
Dian knelt in front of me and reached out her hands to take mine. Her body blocked Bjonn from my sight, and I wondered if that had been deliberate. I felt suddenly shy and embarrassed, as if about to perform some very intimate act before strangers, and she seemed to sense it. “It’s all right,” she whispered. Our eyes locked. It seemed to me then that she had never been more beautiful; she looked so beautiful that I wanted to cry.
She tugged me up onto my knees, and then drew my head down to meet hers. There was something asexual but very personal, very tender in her actions. I had never kissed Dian. I had exchanged mutual oral kisses with very few women in my life. It had always seemed far more intimate than genital coupling.
Our lips met. It was as if a charge of built-up static electricity was exchanged between us on that first contact. Her lips were full and very soft. They trembled slightly against mine. Then they parted. Hesitantly, I opened my own.
Something probed between my lips and against my teeth, and I thought it was her tongue. I thrust forward my own to meet it and brushed instead against—it—
The alien parasite. The dead-white blob of living jelly. The arapad.
I could not help the shudder that passed through my body. My tongue recoiled. I started to clench my teeth. Dian squeezed my hands in her own, her nails biting into my flesh. Her eyes blazed at me.
This was my last chance. There would be no recourse if I turned down the wrong path now.
A zombie, controlled by an alien puppet-master?
—Or a free man?
Which?
I could only place my trust in my intuition. Sometimes I had read its signals wrong, but it was the only part of myself I completely trusted—perhaps the only thing I’d ever really trusted.
I forced my teeth apart, made my mouth open and receptive. And tensed myself as something at once warm, and cool, slickly slimy and furry-dry thrust a questing pseudopod into my mouth.
It seemed to balk for a moment, as if sensing it might not be welcome. Then, so quickly I could not follow its movements inside me, it inflowed, like sudden liquid.
I felt its weight pass over the base of my tongue and I began gagging, but then it seemed to melt and disappear. I couldn’t breathe for a moment, and then I could, as though through cold-stuffed sinuses. A heaviness weighed at my face, spreading across under my cheeks and disappearing. Then all sensation of strangeness was gone, as if it had never been. There was not even an aftertaste in my mouth.
Dian slowly relinquished her kiss and leaned back on her heels. Her expression was soft and caring, and it seemed to me she hadn’t really wanted our kiss to end just yet. The pressure of her lips still lingered on mine, and I wanted to taste my lips with my tongue, but I refrained.
“Is—that all?” I asked. “I don’t really feel any… different….”
She smiled. “It takes a while. Come! Join our circle now!”
They made a place for me, and I found myself sitting between Dian and an older woman I didn’t know. We all linked hands.
“I touch you and I am touched by you,” Bjonn said. Lora was sitting next to him and she repeated it. Benford, next to her, repeated the statement. Each person said the words, and with each repetition they sounded sillier and more meaningless. And so it passed around the circle to the woman on my left. “I touch you and I am touched by you,” she told me. I felt awkward and strangely embarrassed. I felt no different than I had before. Nothing seemed to have happened to me. I was unchanged. I was still an outsi
der, a loner. It made me feel at once melancholy and cynical.
But when that woman—a stranger to me, someone I had never met before—when she said the words it seemed as if they took on meaning for the first time since Bjonn had said them. They became literal. She touched me. Her hand held my hand. Her fingers were coarsened by age and labor. The back of her hand was veined, its skin a little loose. Her grasp was firm, warm and dry. Her touch seemed to communicate in that moment her words. She touched me—and was she also touched by me? Did my return of her handclasp communicate something of me to her? Was it something more than just the linkage of two body-shell appendages? Was there something of me in my hand’s grip?
An alcoholic tingle seemed to be moving over my body. I felt a rush of blood to my capillaries. It heightened the sensations in my fingers, in my fingertips.
I turned to Dian. “I—touch you,” I said, feeling the warm, gentle caress of her clasp. And in that moment a shell seemed to burst open in many marvelous colors inside my head. I stared at her, dumbfounded. Suddenly, it seemed I could see her as I had never seen her before. She radiated beauty. Her soul shone through her face like golden sunshine. And linked with her I realized the presence of another—a moon to her sun, silver to her gold—twin to mine own. Her arapad. A shining presence, alien but beautiful too, in its own right. “And,” I said, “I am touched by you.” It was at that moment a gross understatement. I was overwhelmed by her.
Her smile was a shivering tinkle of wind-chimes. Her eyes were pure and loving. Her hands told me it was true, all of it, all true.
My arapad was starting to acquaint me with reality.
“They’re not true parasites, you know,” Bjonn told me later. “Rather, they are symbiotes. They give as much—maybe more—as they receive. And, as you’ve now learned, the arapad has no consciousness. It doesn’t ‘think’ at all. They have only one function, and that is to stay alive. In order to do this, they require a host body. An arapad can live outside his host only in a dormant condition. It dehydrates, forms an outer shell of dead matter, and continues to dehydrate until, ultimately, it is reduced to a sort of spore. If it is ingested by an living creature of cellular complexity, it reverses the process.”
“Is the arapad then a single-celled creature?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” Bjonn said, smiling a little. “It appears to be made up of a cooperative of cells, each serving a different function, each capable of producing the others to complement it if separated from them. However, the entire arapad is capable of cellular fusion, at which time the entire organism, umm, mixes its cells—they flow together to form one unicell—and then fissions, dividing into two organisms, each of which returns to the multi-cellular condition. In any case, it is a very simple creature; an adult arapad, weighing almost two ounces, contains only six cells. Most of the weight is in water, of course.
“They appeared to be native to Farhome,” he said. “They lived in conjunction with the native animals. One of the original colonists had killed a native animal and cooked and eaten it. His child, a boy of three, had taken a scrap of raw meat to chew on. It contained a section of broken-off ganglion from an arapad. The child had grown his own, and then, when it fissioned, given arapads to his friends. The adults were shocked when they discovered the arapads’ existence, but quickly became convinced of their beneficence.
“As I was saying, an arapad wants to stay alive. In order to do this, it requires a healthy host body. And an arapad is willing to do all it can to maintain the upkeep on that host body.
“It polices your body. It clears out the hostile bacteria and viruses. It accelerates the healing process—it can ‘read’ the DNA information in your cells and recreate damaged parts. That’s what happened to Ditmas, you know.”
“Doesn’t that all but bestow immortality upon a host?” I asked. I was recalling Bjonn’s sermon on life and death.
“Apparently not. The arapad is immortal. I suppose the original mutant creature that became the first arapad is still around as a component of all the ones we have—they are all byproducts of it by fission. But while the arapad can lick a lot of the so-called diseases of ‘old age,’ it can’t stop the aging process itself. Or, if it can, we haven’t yet found the way to tell it to. We live long and healthy lives, Tad, but we’re still human. We still die at the end.”
“I understood we do have some conscious control over them,” I objected.
“Well, again, yes and no. The arapad allows us certain degrees of conscious control over ourselves. It allows us to function more optimally. It functions in some senses as a second nervous system. It give us much better control over our emotions, for instance. As you yourself must realize, our mental states are intimately influenced by the chemical nature of our brains. Minute chemical changes can have profound results. That’s the basis of the last several centuries of drug therapy. The arapad ‘reads’ from our genetic heritage the proper chemical balances, and restores them. That’s automatic. But one of the things we learn to do in our group sessions is to work with the arapad so that we can ourselves by conscious will effect those changes in balance. We also learn to control other aspects of our hormonal system and our metabolism. But in many senses this is gilding the lily and tampering with perfect health. Let the arapad alone and it will uncripple you in mind and body. To ask more is to be arrogant.” He smiled. “… But also human.”
The first twenty-four hours were full of unfolding wonder for me. I felt as if my eyes had always been covered with film-like filters, and now the films had been removed… as if my ears had been plugged with wax, and the wax had been taken out… as if my nose had been permanently burdened with the effects of a low-grade viral infection that had deadened my sense of smell—which event Bjonn assured me was quite likely—and that this too was now gone. Colors seemed bright and vivid, deeper and richer, their interplay more subtle and complex. I saw hues and shades I’d never noticed before. Bjonn had an art object which looked like a square of brown until one examined it more closely. Then the reds and oranges, purples and greens appeared, delicate traceries, subtlety among subtleties. One could dwell upon it for hours of discovery.
The wood of the old house seemed to whisper to me, while its scents told age-old stories. I found myself running my fingers over things, tracing their contours, their curves. Dian had something she called her “feelie,” an abstract sculpture of compound and complex curves, folded into and upon itself, which she offered to my touch. I was on a jag, a voyage of discovery through my own senses. Someone brought in a leaf from outside and gave it to me. It was a maple leaf, tattered, a faded gold, already musty from its communion with the soil. It occupied me for two hours.
I didn’t sleep at all during those first twenty-four hours. It didn’t seem to be necessary. “Sleep is often the refuge of the copeless,” Benford told me with a grin. “Things look bad, so you cop out, you escape into sleep, hoping everything will be better by the time you wake up. People sleep a lot more than most of them need to.” That rang the bell of truth.
I couldn’t be bothered with sleep. I’d been asleep all my life and I’d just awakened. The world was my toy and I wanted to experience every bit of it.
But, finally, I returned to the room on the top floor and lay down on the bed. I’d been enjoying all my exterior senses; now it was time to go inside and see what it was like in there.
At first I noticed my breathing. The pattern seemed Self-conscious, rigid. I broke it into a relaxed syncopation. That amused me, and I laughed to myself. Something gurgled in my intestines. At first I tensed against the pang, and then I let it go, let myself relax again, while I followed the progress of the bubble of gas.
I’d eaten real food that day. The meal had been another engrossing experience. I’d broke my anal compulsion, too—divorced the need for evacuation from the process of eating. It had been so easy it amazed me—it still amazed me. The gas bubble seemed to be backtracking. I felt it against my diaphragm, and then it was working up my
throat and I burped, lightly. That too amused me.
I let my mind drift, setting it free to wander through my body as it would. I followed my heartbeat, calm, firm, steady, so very competent and assured, and then the rushing of my blood outward through my arteries. Gradually I entered a state of waking sleep, a state in which I was still conscious, but quiescent, my conscious mind somehow linked with and not contesting my unconscious mind. My breathing had slowed; my heartbeat was coasting; my body was more completely relaxed than it had been since I was a small baby. I was admiring myself. You’ve messed yourself up some, but on the whole, you’ve got yourself a proud piece of goods. I even felt a little smug.
The door to the room inched cautiously open. I didn’t bother to open my eyes in confirmation. Her step was friendly.
I heard her approach the bed, and then her breath was warm and lightly scented upon my face. I pursed my lips and parted them a little as hers brushed against them in a delicate kiss. It seemed to me then that I was being born again, that I had learned at last a new function for my lips beyond those of grasping at a meal tube, or framing unpleasant words to spew forth. I sensed the thousand nerve-endings in the surface of my lips as one erotic instrument. I returned her kiss.
She was leaning over me and I raised my arms to caress. her skin with my fingertips. She wore no clothes. That was fine; neither did I.
Her own fingertip traced a delicate pattern down my chest, embroidered a filigree around my nipples that sent sensuous chills through me. I ran my fingers down her spine so lightly that I touched no skin—only the fine feathery down above her skin. A long shudder undulated through her and then she was sprawling upon me in a full embrace.
We made love that night—a real and genuine love. It’ lasted a long time, long and slow in the buildup, long in the coupling, and towering in its climax, ascending from plateau to plateau before at last the thunder and lightning struck. And then we lay together, silent, touching and being touched, for a time longer yet.