At that level I remained a long while, until I started to think that the power of the drug was receding. Colors grew less brilliant, my perception of the room became more conventional, and I could again distinguish Schweiz’s body and mind from my own. Instead of feeling relief that the worst was over, though, I felt only disappointment that I had not achieved the kind of mingling of consciousness that Schweiz had promised.

But I was mistaken.

The first wild rush of the drug was over, yes, yet we were only now coming into the true communion. Schweiz and I were apart but nevertheless together. This was the real selfbaring. I saw his soul spread out before me as though on a table, and I could walk up to the table and examine those things that were on it, picking up this utensil, that vase, these ornaments, and studying them as closely as I wished.

Here was the looming face of Schweiz’s mother. Here was a swollen pale breast streaked with blue veins and tipped by an enormous rigid nipple. Here were childhood furies. Here were memories of Earth. Through the eyes of Schweiz I saw the mother of worlds, maimed and shackled, disfigured and discolored. Beauty gleamed through the ugliness. This was the place of his birth, this disheveled city; these were highways ten thousand years old; these were the stumps of ancient temples. Here was the node of first love. Here were disappointments and departures. Betrayals, here. Shared confidences, here. Growth and change. Corrosion and despair. Journeys. Failures. Seductions. Confessions. I saw the suns of a hundred worlds.

And I passed through the strata of Schweiz’s soul, inspecting the gritty layers of greed and the boulders of trickery, the oily pockets of maliciousness, the decaying loam of opportunism. Here was self incarnate; here was a man who had lived solely for his own sake.

Yet I did not recoil from the darkness of Schweiz.

I saw beyond those things. I saw the yearning, the god-hunger in the man, Schweiz alone on a lunar plain, splayfooted on a black shield of rock under a purple sky, reaching up, grasping, taking hold of nothing. Sly and opportunistic he might be, yes, but also vulnerable, passionate, honest beneath all his capering. I could not judge Schweiz harshly. He was I. I was he. Tides of self engulfed us both. If I were to cast Schweiz down, I must also cast down Kinnall Darival. My soul was flooded with warmth for him.

I felt him, too, probing me. I erected no barriers about my spirit as he came to explore it. And through his own eyes I saw what he was seeing in me. My fear of my father. My awe of my brother. My love for Halum. My flight into Glin. My choosing of Loimel. My petty faults and my petty virtues. Everything, Schweiz. Look. Look. Look. And it all came back refracted through his soul, nor did I find it painful to observe. Love of others begins with love of self, I thought suddenly.

In that instant the Covenant fell and shattered within me.

Gradually Schweiz and I pulled apart, though we remained in contact some time longer, the strength of the bond ebbing steadily. When it broke at last, I felt a shivering resonance, as if a taut string had snapped. We sat in silence. My eyes were closed. I was queasy in the pit of my stomach and conscious, as I had never been conscious before, of the gulf that keeps each of us forever alone. After some long time I looked across the room at Schweiz.

He was watching me, waiting for me. He wore that demonic look of his, the wild grin, the bright-eyed gleam, only now it seemed to me less a look of madness than a reflection of inner joy. He appeared younger now. His face was still flushed.

“I love you,” he said softly.

The unexpected words were bludgeons. I crossed my wrists before my face, palms out, protecting myself.

“What upsets you so much?” he asked. “My grammar or my meaning?”

“Both.”

“Can it be so terrible to say, I love you?”

“One has never—one does not know how to—”

“To react? To respond?” Schweiz laughed. “I don’t mean I love you in any physical way. As if that would be so hideous. But no. I mean what I say, Kinnall. I’ve been in your mind and I liked what I saw there. I love you.”

“You talk in ‘I,’” I reminded him.

“Why not? Must I deny self even now? Come on: break free, Kinnall. I know you want to. Do you think what I just said to you is obscene?”

“There is such a strangeness about it.”

“On my world those words have a holy strangeness,” said Schweiz. “And here they’re an abomination. Never to be allowed to say ‘I love you,’ eh? A whole planet denying itself that little pleasure. Oh, no, Kinnall, no, no, no!”

“Please,” I said faintly. “One still has not fully adjusted to the things the drug did. When you shout at one like that—”

But he would not subside.

“You were in my mind too,” he said. “What did you find there? Was I so loathsome? Get it out, Kinnall. You have no secrets from me now. The truth. The truth!”

“You know, then, that one found you more admirable than one had expected.”

Schweiz chuckled. “And I the same! Why are we afraid of each other now, Kinnall? I told you: I love you! We made contact. We saw there were areas of trust. Now we have to change, Kinnall. You more than me, because you have farther to go. Come. Come. Put words to your heart. Say it.”

“One can’t.”

“Say ‘I.’”

“How difficult that is.”

“Say it. Not as an obscenity. Say it as if you love yourself.”

“Please.”

“Say it.”

“I,” I said.

“Was that so awful? Come, now. Tell me how you feel about me. The truth. From the deepest levels.”

“A feeling of warmth—of affection, of trust—”

“Of love?”

“Of love, yes,” I admitted.

“Then say it.”

“Love.”

“That isn’t what I want you to say.”

“What, then?”

“Something that hasn’t been said on this planet in two thousand years, Kinnall. Now say it. I—”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

“I love you.”

“I—love—you.”

“It’s a beginning,” Schweiz said. Sweat streamed down his face and mine. “We start by acknowledging that we can love. We start by acknowledging that we have selves capable of loving. Then we begin to love. Eh? We begin to love.”

36

Later I said, “Did you get from the drug what you were looking for, Schweiz?”

“Partially.”

“How so, partially?”

“I was looking for God, Kinnall, and I didn’t quite find him, but I got a better idea of where to look. What I did find was how not to be alone any more. How to open my mind fully to someone else. That’s the first step on the road I want to travel.”

“One is happy for your sake, Schweiz.”

“Must you still talk to me in that third-person lingo?”

“I can’t help myself,” I said. I was terribly tired. I was beginning to feel afraid of Schweiz again. The love I bore for him was still there, but now suspicion was creeping back. Was he exploiting me? Was he milking a dirty little pleasure out of our mutual exposures? He had pushed me into becoming a selfbarer. His insistence on my speaking in “I” and “me” to him—was that a token of my liberation, was it something beautiful and pure, as he claimed, or was it only a reveling in filth? I was too new to this. I could not sit placidly while a man said, “I love you.”

“Practice it,” Schweiz said. “I. I. I. I.”

“Stop. Please.”

“Is it that painful?”

“It’s new and strange to me. I need—there, you see?—I need to slide into this more gradually.”

“Take your time, then. Don’t let me rush you. But don’t ever stop moving forward.”

“One will try. I will try,” I said.

“Good.” After a moment he said, “Would you try the drug again, ever?”

“With you?”

“I don’t think there’s any need for that. I mean with someone like your bondsister. If I offered you some, would you use it with her?”