Human dignity was the only political force that made sense after the Great War, *and human dignity was not possible when a few, any few, had power and authority over the many. To govern, on earthtwo, meant personal sacrifice. Sacrifice and devotion were synonyms for all earthtwo leaders. Those who chose to be leaders had to surrender their personal lives and serve the good, not of a ,faction or a race, but of the whole planet. It was an ideal that had become real after earthtwo had almost extinguished itself.
Earthone would have to go the same path, Zeke realized, and until it did, it was no better than a monument to Death, a planet of atrocities.
Despite his elaborate rationalisms, the nightmares came anyway. Zeke suppressed the urge to wake Carl and talk it out with him. The man was helpful and a good friend but not the friend Zeke remembered. The urg had changed him. The restlessly jovial idealistic neurotic that was Squirm had become an insouciant watcher, waiting for his chance to return to the Werld. Zeke had been out of the Cornelius Psychiatric Hostel for-five weeks now, and he still was not adjusted to the great change in his friend.
Zeke sighed and flicked on the tensor lamp on his nightstand.
He opened his journal and reviewed the entries from the last few weeks. Above each entry, he
had penciled in the countdown to the day Carl had taken him out of the asylum:
Five weeks before Alfred Omega
I've been pondering the chemical truth of who I am. The conspectus is this:
My madness is caused by an irreversible inhibition of, the monamine oxidase (MAO) in my brain. This happened initially as a result of the inspelling that put me in the asylum seven months ago. Dr. Blau mistook my inspelling for depression. ;How else could he have diagnosed me? He didn't have the imagination to suspect that within the listless shell of my disconnected personality I was surging with life power, surfing the spatiotemporal wavefront of Being itself, where time breaks into Mind.
Anyway, I must have looked sunken, for the good doctor pumped me with iproniazid, an antidepressant that inhibits MAO. MAO regulates the synthesis and utilization of neurotransmitters like serotonin, and it muffles the effect of the methylated tryptamines the doctor is administering to wake me up. With my MAO
knocked out, the neurotransmitters proliferate in my brain, amplifying my inner experiences--weirdly.
The surges I am experiencing are waves r of these backed-up methylated tryptamines converting into the substrates for enzymes like N-methyl transferase and hydroxy-indole Omethyl transferase. Those enzymes not only stimulate the production of more methylated tryptamines, they're also psychotomimetic--they're hallucinogens!
The great space of stillness that I had found in my inspelling and from which I had written Shards of Time is suddenly wild with bizarre images and pulsations. During a surge, my heart hums like a grenade; ready to blast me to nothing. My blood caulks with fear, and furious thoughts of escape cross my brain like clawtracks. `
That's the demon-world the Bardo masters warn about. The tryptamines have put me in touch with the tortured soul of the world, the wounded dream we call the unconscious. Actually, there is nothing un-about it. It should be called the metaconscious and our feeble, biology-limited awareness the unconscious. It is alive with gods and demons. The demons are psychoids, dismembered terrors and hungers hacked free of the physical world and existing solely in psychic space. They are the terrible forces that go ahead of our hope and muddle our best intents. In my life, the worst have been anger for fear's sake, lust-riddled attention; and, of course, the balloon-man with his grand, self-inflating delusions.
There, also, is God-the Archon-the metapsychic organizing power: the formless shaper of form. Its presence electrocutes me with feeling, shocking me free of rationality, time, even center.
Three weeks before Alfred Omega
I'm grateful for this time of horror. In the asylum of the State, with my bodily reeds attended, my mind is free to be the horror.
Where Nature would have killed me, the State preserves me that I may know the horror and speak.
am the Horror. The skulled mind. The weight of a scream on the tongue. The cold in the lungs as the bloodfires go out.
Two weeks before Alfred Omega
The demon psychoids and the Archon are still here, insidious and strong as they ever were, but now I recognize them in their subtlest shades. I see how they think me. I realize that my personal mind is an illusion.
The clear windows of our perceptions are actually the glimmerings from the Archon's luminous selves on the inside shell of the monad that is each of us.
I find myself sitting exactly 'at the center of an opaque, colorless bubble big as the universe. Reality happens around me, and I reach out and radiate my energies into the immensity, wanting to be a star.
One week before Alfred Omega
Chemical "madness" has collapsed me into the center of my monad. I'm becoming a black hole, locking into myself through the immense gravity of the metaconscious.
The illusion of individuality is almost gone. My pen is a rivering of Change, my hand is the story it writes, and I am
One week before Alfred Omega (twelve hours later) the pivot of stillness before a falcon dives.
Alfred Omega
Squirms return: The black hole has exploded!
Twenty-eight days after Alfred Omega Withdrawal was explosive. Deprived of iproniazid and the other drugs, the Archon vanished, and the black hole of my hallucination exploded into the thin colors of skulllocked ordinary reality.
Only, reality ain't ordinary no more. Carl has come back from Timesend as Alfred Omega! I feel that I've burst into another universe where my madness is reality. What I thought I was imagining is real( These very words are quashed by the weight of their meaning, so it must read as if I'm insane. If the iproniazid and the rest of those mind chemicals hadn't been stopped, the irreality would have broken my mind. We need our brains to protect us .from reality.
It's taken me a month to get up the nerve to write again. I know I should at least outline what's happened in the last twenty-eight days, but I'm still gonging with implications. I must understand who I am. How is it possible that I could write Shards of Time and describe exactly what was happening to Carl? I wasn't drugged, except by my adrenals from the anxiety of those exiled days. My writing, somehow, was telepathic-but what is telepathy?
Lord knows, I can't do it at will, anymore.
I at least have some idea how I may have known things I could not have known while I was in Cornelius. Chad would be amused
just long enough to ask me for another winner. I think my body acted something like a cross between an antenna and a hologram.
The tryptamine soaking my brain had an affinity for synaptic DNA and replaced the serotonin that usually bonds with the RNA receptor sites in the synapse. The tryptamine inserted itself in the RNA by pi-cloud stacking across the hydrogen bonds linking the two bases. The result was a charge-transfer, that is, an electron passed from the RNA to an empty energy band on the tryptamine. The swift bonding twisted the helix, and because this was happening in the electric field of my synapses, an electromagnetic signal was generated. The wave was instantly absorbed by low-energy electrons in the tryptamine, saturating their energy bands. That canceled the polarization of the base pairs, and the RNA rung rejoined, priming itself for the next charge-transfer.
This oscillation broadcast its own signal in harmonic resonance with all the RNA-bonded tryptamine in all the synapses of my body, setting up a three-dimensional standing waveform inside my skull and turning my brain into a radio-cybernetic matrix.
Information flooded into me from
hyperdimensional realms. I experienced telepathy, conscious projection outside my body, and a spooky ability to predict events. f was turned on.