A single light approached; an orb of shifting, multi-coloured hues, like something cellular, dividing and re-dividing within a single membrane, yet with the patterns in the sphere somehow like distorted pictures, images thrown haphazardly on an unfixed screen. He felt himself float round this odd, scaleless thing, the other lights still apparently as far away as they had always been, and he felt oddly attracted to this globe of light, and that he could somehow, without damage to it or himself, enter inside it.
He was still, when he thought about it, aware he was standing in the room. He snapped his fingers, felt the edge of his tunic sleeve where it still hung at his side, then willed himself to enter the glowing, slowly pulsing sphere.
It was like walking into a room filled with babbling voices and lit with chaotic, ever-changing images. His head was full of confusion for a moment, then he thought he started to glimpse patterns and real shapes within the inchoate mix.
He let himself relax slightly, ready to watch, and just then all the images and noises seemed to coalesce, become part of some single feeling, which included the impression of touch and taste and smell as well. Quiss reacted against this, and was back in the noisy, gaudily chaotic room-feeling. He relaxed again, just a little more warily and slowly. The strange crystallisation of sensation occurred again, and slowly Quiss became aware of some sort of other thought-process, a set of feelings which was at once intimately close but still utterly cut off from him.
The truth of what was going on suddenly hit him, stunning him. He was inside somebody else's head.
He was so amazed he didn't have time to be revolted or really shocked before the novelty, the sheer interest of it all, took him, excited him. He shifted his body slightly, feeling in a very distant sort of way, like something in a dream, his feet move on the small stool he stood on, his armpits settling a little more comfortably into the leather-softened hoops.
He felt a moment of dizziness as the light and sound swelled around him, then a sudden, sharp feeling of anxiety; fear and distress. He smelled burning, heard loud, crude engine noises, saw metal wheeled vehicles frighteningly close (the fear increased, he felt dizzy again, sensed he was somehow losing contact), then he looked up, or the person whose head he was in did, and saw a blue, blue sky, like some polished, blue, shining sphere, some immense, smooth and flawless jewel.
The dizziness made him stagger (he only then realised he-or his host - was walking), and a wave of fear pulsed at him, sending him out and away, breaking off, back into the strange, dark, light-speckled space again, his heart beating wildly, his breath quickened.
He collected himself, snapped his fingers a couple of times, back in the real room inside the Castle Doors.
He vaguely considered giving up his little experiment; that experience had been frightening and alien, but he decided to persevere. This was much too fascinating to abandon now, he might not get another chance to explore so, and anyway he wasn't going to give in to some undisciplined streak of cowardice, not him.
He let himself fall gently towards another of the soft-looking orbs of shifting colours, and entered it as before. There was the same feeling of dizziness, but no fear this time.
He was looking at a pair of hands, holding small stalks in one hand, taking a stalk at a time from the bunch and planting them quickly, accurately, into holes in brown earth. His back was sore. The arms were brown, like the earth. They were his arms, the arms of the person he was inside, and he wore some sort of loose, filmy covering. The arms were very slim. He - or rather the other person - stood up, straightening that sore back, putting one arm behind their back and stretching again. The view was of lots of women doing the same thing he was; stooped, putting shoots into the ground. The landscape was fiercely lit by a high sun. The ground was brown, he could see distant shacks and what looked like thatched roofs. There were some hills in the distance, green, cut with terraces like map contours made solid. Tall trees with naked trunks and all the leaves in a round bunch at the top. The sky was blue. A thin white vapour-trail stretched across it. There were a few clouds, pure white. His belly rumbled, and he thought of -what? The child in his belly.
The woman whose body he had invaded bent back to the soil. Why yes! Now he thought about it he could feel the weight on her chest; tits! The child must be small, because his/her belly felt normal, if a bit empty (and at the back of her mind the woman, he realised, was looking forward to a small meal of some stored, baked grain in another few hours, after which she still would not feel full-she would still be hungry. She had always been hungry. She always would be hungry. Probably so would this child, like all the others). A woman! Quiss thought. A peasant; a hungry peasant; how odd! How strange to be in this way inside her body, there but not there, here but not here, listening in. He tried to sense her own feelings about her body, as the woman bent to her task again, methodically planting the small green shoots. She was chewing on something, her mouth working on some substance, she was not actually eating; something numbing, something which helped to deaden thought and make the work easier.
How very, very singular, Quiss kept thinking. And although this was a woman's body, strangely it didn't feel all that different to being inside his own; less than he would have imagined. Maybe he just wasn't making full contact, he thought, but somehow he got the impression he was. The woman didn't seem totally aware of herself. Not specifically as a woman. What about her - ?
The woman's hand moved, involuntarily, towards her sex, actually brushing the gathered-up material of her clothing between her legs. She stood up, puzzled almost, then stooped back to her work. A pain or an itch, she thought. Quiss was amazed; just by thinking something he had made the woman do it.
He imagined that she had an itch behind her right knee. She scratched there, quickly and hard, hardly breaking the rhythm of planting and stooping. Fascinating!
Then something was pulling at the woman's leg, but she ignored it. In fact she didn't seem aware of it. Quiss didn't understand; he could feel the tugging. It was quite urgent and insistent... then he remembered where he was really standing. His head swum slightly for a moment as he re-oriented himself mentally, then he was aware again of the weight under his arms and on his feet. He took his arms out of the loops and ducked down, back into the room under the Castle Doors.
"Don't do that! Don't do that!" a small attendant squeaked, jumping up and down as it tugged on the hem of his tunic. "You can't do that! It isn't allowed!"
"Don't tell me what to do, you... nanobrain!" Quiss kicked the attendant square in the chest, sending it tumbling away from him over the slate floor. It quickly picked itself up, pulled its loosened cowl-brim back down tight and glanced at the opened door. It put its little hands together, the yellow-gloved fingers meshing.
"Please get out of here," it said. "You really shouldn't be in here at all. It isn't allowed. I'm sorry, but it just isn't."
"Why not?" Quiss said, hanging on to one of the iron loops and leaning forward, glaring at the small attendant.
"It just isn't!" it screeched, jumping up in the air and waving its arms about. Quiss found something funny about the thing's antics juxtaposed with the frozen expression of aching sadness shown on its mask. He got the impression from its sheer anxiousness that it was in some way responsible for leaving the door open. It wasn't pleading with him to leave just for his sake; it was frightened stiff.