Starblood

nether-world. Now, during his third appearance, he was closer than before, more solid than before, staring from the riverbank as Ti drifted down it with the naked maidens that always accompanied him on his raft (which had now become a full-sized cabin cruiser with both propeller screw drive and air-cushion speed equipment). Even as the cruiser progressed down the stream, the second Dream Timothy followed, floating along the earth, not walking.
    Dream Timothy stood on the deck of his ship, flanked by the nubile women of substantial insubstantiality, leaned on the railing, gripping it. He called to the image of himself that drifted by the shore, asked what the Other wanted.
    The image did not answer.
    He called again, repeated his question. As he finished speaking, the shadow man raised farther off the bank and sailed outward across the water like a spirit of the dead, his arms outstretched to the more solid Dream Timothy. The specter should have been frightening, but it was not. Somehow, Dream Timothy yearned for the embrace of the supernatural figure, of this shred of unreality in a world so painfully perfect in detail.
    The specter drew closer.
    Dream Timothy leaned farther over the rail.
    And the ghost struck him, passed into him…
    … And he was awake, back in the cellar room of the Brethren house, lying on the bed. Before him, the table lamp floated free of any table, a great, heavy metal thing. Slowly, cracks began to appear in the metal. The bulb shattered. The shade was flung into a thousand tiny pieces. And the bronze from which the thing was cast began to shred like paper, to peel away in shavings and pile at the foot of the bed. He watched it until it was almost totally destroyed… Then he felt the PBT nether-world encompass him again. He was sailing down a river with the naked maidens. The world was pleasant, warm, and filled with sensuality. There was absolutely no sign of the specter he had come to think of as the Other. It had passed into him—then through him. It had vanished as before. There had been but that one moment of commingling when their bodies had meshed in the same place at the same time. And then he had experienced the delusion of being awake and of shredding a piece of bronze with his psi power. But his psi power was far too limited for such a feat; it could not even have lifted such an object. He stopped thinking of that silliness and returned to the warmth of the girls who awaited him…
    … But when he woke again, hours later, the last effects of the PBT washed from his system, he saw the ribbons of shaved bronze lying where they had fallen earlier, and he knew that he had not been dreaming this thing after all…

CHAPTER 9
    That night, of course, was a sleepless one.
    He circled that small, cozy cellar chamber a thousand times, his mind so occupied that he little cared that the scenery never changed. His thoughts required so much of his attention that, for short moments, he was even oblivious to the ache of Baker's vicious beating, to the throbbing pain of the cuts on his face and the tender gash in his lower lip. He was preoccupied with the other, that spectral vision from his PBT delusions, and what the thing meant to him. He had reached the conclusion that the other was only a second part of his personality, perhaps a part that had never been given dominance in the real world but which the drug was able to unleash through its workings in his brain.
    And for that moment when Dream Timothy and the Other had merged, had become one individual, his psionic abilities had bloomed, flowered into something more than a parlor trick. He longed for morning to arrive, for Jon Margle and the hulking Baker to appear with the next injection. He
wanted
it now! But not for the illusions, not for the dreams and the feeling of high that had led him into apathy these first three days. He desired it now to go searching for the Other again, to find the ghost image of Dream Timothy, to find some way to make that intermingling of flesh last, to make it permanent.
    Both Jon Margle and he had overlooked something that should have been considered before the PBT had been given to him. His body was human, yes, but it was nonhuman as well. His brain was obviously somehow special, or he would have had no psi power whatsoever. They should have seen that there was a strong possibility that the drug would not work on him in exactly the same manner it had worked on the tens of thousands of addicts the Brethren