She watched as Clay slowly uncoiled from his fetal position, lowering both feet to the floor again, and his hands to his sides, rolling his head limply back until he appeared to stare into the ceiling, beyond the ceiling. His jaw drooped, slack, then he came forward again, slumping while his head nodded toward his chest. It took several moments before she realized the rise and fall of his breathing was synchronizing itself to the drums.
Nearly ninety minutes had passed since Clay had first gone under. Kendra murmured parting reassurance to him, then shooed them from the room.
"He's responding," Adrienne said in the rec room, "he's responding to something in there, in that state. And even I could feel … something."
"Oh yes." Kendra settled luxuriantly into a nearby lounger, raised her feet. "Powerful stimuli, aren't they?" Suppressing a warm laugh at the expense of, Adrienne surmised, the intrigued skeptic.
"How long will you leave him alone?"
"I'll check on him from time to time, but I won't resume any real contact for two to three hours."
Sarah had found her way to the inversion bar, hanging upside down by bent knees. The tips of her long braids whisked at the mat beneath. "It's not really new, Adrienne, what she's doing in there, you know? It's pretty damn ancient."
Kendra nodded. "Simple shamanic techniques, mostly. And those go back thirty, forty thousand years, it's believed. The drumming, the use of natural hallucinogens? You'll find them in nearly every primitive society the world over. They all came up with the same methods, independently, and the reason they've been around so long is because they work, girl. My main contribution is to put a more modern slant on the way they're applied. I give someone a pill or two so he doesn't have to gobble a handful of mushrooms or peyote that might make him sick. Instead of a live drummer to maintain a trance beat, I have it on compact disc, set to repeat until I turn it off. The main reason I start the hypnosis before the psychoactives have a chance to take effect is that when they do, I want the subjects carrying in as little baggage from the outside world as possible. Then after someone's under? It's just a matter of investing enough time to pick around the way any trained shrink might." She spread her hands. "Who's ready for lunch?"
They ate, they talked, they spoke of how some of the most effective techniques for healing the body and plumbing the mind came from ancient traditions. Only recently had modern medicine begun to turn its head around to the past, taking fresh looks at methodology long since dismissed as superstition and folklore, and recognizing their legitimacy.
Throughout, Kendra was never far from another trip into her office to check on Clay. He maintained a stable condition: sitting comfortably, with deep, even breathing. Later in the afternoon she decided it should be time to proceed, and again they gathered before him.
As it went on, Adrienne felt her hands grow cold even though the house was warm; felt herself prickle every time she considered that it was not really Clay's voice she was hearing. It was something else, speaking through his throat. Something that filled each of them and surrounded them every day of their lives, that predated them, and would survive them and everyone they would ever know and never meet.
He spoke with the voice of millennia.
Adrienne listened, clutching Sarah's hand and thinking, no, it just couldn't go this far, Clay could not be regressed to a level of cellular and genetic and evolutionary awareness, yet he was, he was, and she began to bite her lip, for that which he had sought all along might be coming loose, buried like an ancient vase that desert winds were scouring free. Please … let him be strong…
And what a coward she was — she would never have had courage enough to look this in the face and ask the question that demanded an answer that would have to be lived with forever:
"What is it inside you, Clay, and the others like you, that makes you different from everyone else?"
*
He was Clay, and he was Not.
In oceans of salt and aeons, where the coils of serpents gave birth to worlds, he floated — cell and zygote, embryo and fetus, past and future. He was in the plankton that fed the fish that fed the bird that fed the wolf that fed the man that fed the soil. In the mud that silted along ancient rivers, in the dust that fell to earth from a billion skies beyond.
He was all.
He was nothing.
He was aware.
for i am not like others
not like others
not like others
Yet all things were but strands of the same woven thread.
Following, then, where timeless rhythms led, he stood upon a plain where grasses flowed like green seas, where distant acacia trees grew tall as knowledge … here on the savannah, where the earliest men and women learned to stand tall, to stride, to see beyond an old horizon.
It lived, this land. It breathed. It took no notice.
Yet into him it flowed, and he knew.
The beasts of the land were driven by compulsions bred into them by spans of time that saw the birth and life and death of stars: to expand their territories, to consume, to squeeze their progeny from gaping wet wombs, and this they did until they met their limits. For nature abhors imbalance even more than a vacuum.
The lion feeds upon the gazelle, for if it does not, the land cannot support the gazelles to come.
And he knew that it was systemic perfection this way, plants and predators and prey alike fueled by a singular sun. Then he witnessed the coming of that which did not belong, borne by the Age of Man and Machine, and he understood that an organism fueled by petroleum will crush any and all fueled by the sun, for what is petroleum but millions of years of sunshine stored?
Thus the balance becomes paradise lost.
Kill the lions, the gazelles are doomed to breed themselves to extinction. Prey need predators, it is the nature of the beast. For unchecked growth leads to far worse than tumors.
He watched, then, the death of the savannah, as grass burned into fields of gray ash, and the trees shed an exodus of leaves that left them blackened skeletons curling stark against a sky gone yellow-brown with haze. His skin sloughed in layers of molt and decay, flesh uncoiling to ribbons to strands of the double helix, where all things were written, the most ancient of texts, yet could not revisions be part of the plan?
For what are mutations but defense mechanisms to ensure survival by resistance.
Survival? And he — Clay, yet Not — wondered: But whose?
He saw it crawl over a horizon that burned with the imminence of gangrene and graves, where living twitched to the teeth of starving scavengers, where forsaken prayers flowed, corrosive as bile steaming beneath a dying star.
It was immense, black as shadows and gossamer thin. It was a living night, far from the reach of the sun.
what's wrong with me? he screamed to whatever might listen. for i am not like others
not like others
not like others
biological override, he thought it told him, and he began to cry, for he thought he understood his part now, a role he never wanted to play in any god's creation, no matter what the name of the god, when the worst impulses of a species become a written imperative
And as the savannah shriveled to a blackened crisp around him, as he heard the death wails of distant cities, he began to piece together the simple logic that had eluded him long enough: