I switched the current off and flung the book at him, catching him just under his left eye.
"You stole this from my library, you little swine! Why are you reading such fantasy? Reality's too big for you, I suppose?"
"No, it's not big enough," he screamed. "It's just a rotten cage! There should be laws against reality."
He ran screaming to his mother, clutching his face. I stopped to retrieve the book, noticing there was blood on one corner. As I did so, something snapped in my back. I could not move, could not straighten up, could not sit down, could not kneel, could not cry out.
Teresa entered the room, saying in her gentle voice, "Ally, stand up, please, because you and I and little Chin Ping are going to see a friend of mine."
"Mmmmurrrr. . ." By pressing the small of my back with two fingers, I caused the pain to lessen and was able to straighten up. Immediately, I was myself again.
"I must tell you about the fun we had with 'Steintrack' today, Teresa. They have a new girl in to rewrite a lot of the lyrics, and she is first class."
She took my arm, leading me toward the sub-station, saying as she did so, "I remember when I was composing a choral—"
"Remember, remember! Christ, is that all the human race ever does? Why not forget for a change, or doesn't neocortical evolution stretch that far? What about the future? Doesn't that excite your intellectual curiosity just one tiny bit?"
She burst out laughing and I remembered that she had been fond of greyhounds before I knew her. Chin Ping came running to her side, his cheek badly inflamed, and hid his face in her dress.
"What did you do to your cheek?" I asked him.
He would not answer. Then you wonder why fathers get angry with sons.
We climbed into the first car that came; Teresa punched buttons and we dived into the heart of the urbstak. Somewhere a voice was calling.
"I'm worried about 'Steintrack', love," I confided, smacking Chin Ping across the head. "Perhaps the trouble is that it's not complex enough. I enjoy telecepts when they're complex, as I'm sure you know. They become something like waking dreams, which can transport you to a different level of reality. After all, the entire spiritual history of this century has lain in the pioneering of new LORs, compatible with the expanding horizons of neocortical evolution."
"That's what rethinking courses are for," she said vaguely. "You worry too much, Ally. Maybe we should move to Self-Indulgence VI—I've heard it's fun."
"It's the boy's future that bothers me."
We stopped at an intersection station high on the outer face. As we climbed out, a sign lit nearby and a glass door swung open. The sign said, in letters of self-assertive discretion:
Ponds-Karmon Clinic Accelerative Psychoses
"Hey!" I said.
"We have an appointment," Teresa said to a sweetly fragrant receptionist who met us in the foyer. She removed our masks and frontals.
In short time, we found ourselves confronting a slight man in a stiff suit of silver, who introduced himself as Aldo Karmon. His main eccentricity was, as he explained, that he was a fringillidaephile; cardinals fluttered round the room as he spoke, followed by buntings and greenfinches. As we were admiring them, Lurido Ponds entered the room by another door and nodded familiarly at me.
"Hope you didn't mind my following you this morning," he said.
After him crawled a strange creature, which I could hardly believe to be human, so grotesquely did it drag itself over the carpet, groaning as it came. Its eyes were blurred pools of phlegm. Teresa backed away from it in horror, but Chin Ping ran forward in delight and went down on his hands and knees to it, as if the monster had been a puppy.
"That's right! We shall have Geoffrey cured in no time," Ponds said. "He likes a friendly reception. There's never a cure without love, even in phase-schizophrenia."
I ran angrily across to my son, bending to grasp his collar and drag him away from the creature. My back snapped. I found myself stuck where I was, unable to stand erect again, unable to sit or kneel. A finch settled on my left ear.
My vision seemed to be going. As I toppled forward on to the monster, who made gestures of terror at my approach, I was able to see that the finch was in fact a woodpecker, and that its beak was digging cleverly into my ear, bringing out huge ripe maggots, which it gobbled. Its claws were sinking into my shoulder, pulling away loads of fluff and fur. Farther down the tree, a weaver bird was knitting the fur and fluff into a protective blanket. I fell into the blanket, but it gave way and I plunged into the undergrowth below, landing painfully on a shingley strip of beach.
Only the mewling cries beside me forced me to retain my senses, Still sprawling, I saw a baby seal rolling about beside me/fat and white and weepy-eyed. I struck out at it, trying to blind it, but at that moment an angry bark made me pause. Heaving herself out of the waves, all anger and open mouth, was a mother seal. I saw the salty drops of water on her whiskers and recognized Teresa. I tried to call her but could not, for the waves were reaching me.
They were waves of an unknown sea. They were not of water nor of flesh. They were of a substance like jellied flesh, a flesh that had not properly formed. Each wave, as it crawled to overwhelm me, took the shape of ferns, deformed fingers, organs of an outre anatomy, all obeying biochemistries untold.
In fighting to get away from them, I fell over white dead things on the beach, and the waves were upon me. My skin experienced scalding sensations. My ulna was picking up signals from Cygnus 61. Even as I fought with the wave-things my own flesh and blood were churning in metamorphosis—in them I was drowning, not in the waves, as my identity slipped down and down into blue depths of disorder, overwhelmed by acrocyanosis and the agar-agars of an extreme anguish.
Yet in the intensity of those fevered fathoms was a womblike impetus that drew together again all that had become dissolved. The separate elements of me remarried and became a working entity, even as the tides that had taken me left me, retching but renewed.
"Two minutes, fifty seconds flat!" said Karmon, pocketing a stopwatch and jotting a note genially on a pad. "Something of a record in the way of accelerative psychoses. Congratulations, Hazelgard, how do you feel?"
The unknown psychic sea had gone; Cygnus had rung off.
"My back feels great—Geoffrey looks better too," I said. My breakdown had triggered the monster through his crisis; he looked human again. I picked myself up from the floor and embraced Teresa and Chin Ping, kissing his bruised face. He smiled at me, all open and beautiful.
"Can we have a crocodile for a pet, Dad?"
I cupped his chin in my hand.
"The Afterlife is hard for you, son. You're only eight years past your death. But we shall slowly educate you to remember the timeless months of your real existence, experiencing the universe of life in your mother's womb. Do not despair—every year, we understand more of our mysteries."
Lurido Ponds said genially, "You sound so convinced about Wombud that you almost convince me, Mister Queen Elizabeth. It'll be interesting to see which of the two sides of your life eventually stabilize."
Teresa said, smiling, "You're a hell of a strain to live with as you are, darling, but I wouldn't change a thing. The more alternatives we can generate, the better. If only I could help more in your non-Wombud incarnation . . ."
"Everything's fine," I said, "and I'm hungry—aren't you, Chin Ping? Eat, then meet my disciples."
He began jumping slowly up and down.
I went over and shook Karmon and Pond's hands; then I adjusted my nose-mask.
"Goodbye, Hazelgard. See you tomorrow as usual," Ponds said.