Dhalgren

The terrace was enclosed in a glass dome. In the center was a six-foot in diameter celestial globe of clear plastic. Light from the garden below struggled in the smoke above, glowing like dilute milk.

'Now I guess you've taken LSD and all that stuff.'

'Sure.'

'Well, all they'd been doing was looking at all the pretty pictures everyone had been drawing.' Kamp touched the globe, removed his fingers. Ares passed across Libra. The stars were glittering stones set in the etched constellations. 'They had spherical rear-projection rooms, practically as big as this place here. They could cover it with colors and shapes and flashes. They put earphones on me and blasted in beeps and clicks and oscillating frequencies. Anyway, I was supposed to pick out patterns from all this. Later I learned that mine was the control group: We were given no patterns at all. I was told all the ones I had seen I had imposed myself… But after two hours of testing, two hours of fillips and curlicues of light and noise, when I went outside, into the real world, I was just astounded at how… rich and complicated everything suddenly looked and sounded: The textures of concrete, tree bark, grass, the shadings from sky to cloud. But rich in comparison to the sensory- overload chamber. Rich… and I suddenly realized what the kids had been calling a sensory overload was really information deprivation. It's the pattern that colors and shapes assume that tell you whether it's a cow or a car you're looking at. It's the very finest alternations in color differentiation over a surface that tell you whether it's maple or pine, styrene or polyethylene, linen or flannel. Take any view in front of you and cut off the top and bottom till you've only got an inch-wide strip and you'll still be amazed at all the information you can get from just running your eye along that. Well, all this started me thinking back to the moon. Because that had been a place — and it happened in every mile en route — where standard information patterns just broke down. And yet, that's something we haven't been able to talk about — to anyone — since we got back. We'd trained for prolonged free-fall by spending time underwater in diving suits. I remember when we actually hit sustained weightlessness, I broadcast back, 'Hey, it's just like being underwater!' and yet as I said that into the chin mike, I was thinking: You certainly could never mistake the two conditions for one another. But I couldn't think of any way to say what was different about it, so I just described the way everybody, who'd never been there themselves, had told me it was going to feel like. Later I thought, that's like telling someone the world is flat and sending him off to the edge; but because he doesn't know quite how to describe such gentle roundness, he mumbles and stammers and says, 'Well yeah, I was at the… edge.' And the thing about the moon itself, the one thing I've really never told anybody, because I don't think I would have known how before those experiments: it's another world, and when you're there, you have no way of knowing what anything means. Physically. That whole landscape tells you nothing about itself, on any level, in the way that the most desolate stretch of sand on earth tells you about winds that have blown over it, rains that have or have not fallen, or the feel it might have beneath your feet if you walked across it. 'An airless, waterless void…' the way they say in all the science-fiction stories? No, that refers to some desert on earth, or what space between the stars looks like when you're safely tucked under the atmosphere. The moon is a different world, with a different order that you don't understand. There isn't that richness — not because it isn't in bright colors, or because it's all brown, purple, and grey. It's because as you run your eyes over the rocks and dirt, you have no way to know what the tiny alterations in color mean. Even though it has a horizon and perspective, and… well, rocks and dirt, it's more like being in that sensory-overload chamber than anything else. And of course, it isn't like that at all. It wasn't horrible. Horror still has something to do with earth. I suppose it was frightening. But even that was absorbed in the excitement of it. I—' he paused—'do not know how to tell you about it.' He smiled and shrugged. 'And that's probably the one thing I really haven't told anybody before. Oh, I've said, 'You can't describe it. You'd have to be there.' But that's my first wife telling her mother-in-law about the time we went to Persia. And that isn't what I mean.'

Kid smiled back and wished he hadn't.

It isn't his moon I distrust so much, he thought, as it is that first wife in Persia. 'I understand,' he said, 'as much as I'll let myself.'

'Maybe,' Kamp said after a moment, 'you do. Let's go back down to the party.'

Walking down the steps, Kid felt self-betrayed and wondered if there were any benefit from the feeling. He wanted to find Lanya and Denny.

Outside on the terrace, while the Captain, beside him, looked around as if for someone else to talk to, Kid thought: I feel the responsibility for him now he probably hoped I felt the night I walked him up here. That is not right, and I don't like it.

Ernestine Throckmorton said, 'Captain! Kid! Ah, there you are,' and began to talk definitely only to Kamp.

Kid excused himself, wondering whether she really was an angel, and went down into the gardens.

Lanya was crossing the bridge in a fury of emerald and indigo.

'Hey,' he said. 'Have you seen Denny?'

She turned. 'You haven't. He's feeling abandoned.'

Paul Fenster, holding his drink beneath his chin, stepped around Kid and said: 'Jesus Christ, you'll never believe what was going on back there in April. I didn't think I was going to be able to make it.' He laughed.

Lanya didn't, and asked, 'What?'

'A whole bunch of black kids, back in April, they've got this whole routine worked out. They've got this white boy, called Tarzan: And they were just performing! And of course Roger's nice old colonel from Alabama was there — the one I was telling you about who gave me so much trouble when I was visiting — and of course he was laughing harder than anybody else. I kid you not, they were swinging from the God-damn trees!'

'What did you do?' Lanya had begun to laugh.

'Sweated a lot,' Fenster said. 'And tried to think of some way to leave. You know, guys who come to parties like this in berets and talk about liberating the furniture: Now I'm pretty into that. But I guess that type all had sense, enough to get out of Bellona while there was some getting. This Stepin Fetchit stuff, though — well, all I can say is, it's been a while!'

'Suffering's supposed to be good for the something-or-other,' Kid said.

'It damn,' Fenster replied, 'well better be!' He grunted (simianly?) and walked on across the bridge.

Lanya took Kid's hand. '…Denny?'

'Yeah.'

'I just left him.' Her dress was shimmering black. A silver circle rose on the hem. 'In March.' She gestured with her head.

He said, 'You're beautiful.'

He thought, she's wistful.

'Thank you. You really like the dress?'

He nodded, kept nodding, and suddenly she laughed and closed his mouth with her fingers.

'I believe you. But I was beginning to think it was too much. Of course I was expecting just to stand around in some elegantly arbored corner holding court; not run around working. Where, I wonder, is Roger?'

Kid held her cool hands against his face with his warm ones. 'Let's find Denny.'

Dawn broke on her waist. 'You find him,' she said. 'I'll see you a little later.' A scarlet sun, haloed in yellow, eclipsed the silver moon.

He wondered why but said. 'Okay,' and left her on the bridge.

The stream became a pool in March, scaled with immobile leaves.

'I told that bitch!' Dollar stood and rocked on bowed legs. 'I told that bitch. After what she tried, you know? I just told her.'

Denny sat cross-legged on the stone bench and didn't look like he was listening too hard.

Kid walked around the pool. 'You trying to get in trouble at my party?'

Dollar's head jerked: he looked scared.

Denny said, 'Dollar's okay. He ain't done nothing.'

'I ain't done nothing,' Dollar echoed. 'It's a real nice party, Kid.'

Kid put his hand on the back of Dollar's pitted neck and squeezed. 'You have a good time. Don't let anything