The Far Shore of Time

People talk wistfully about wanting a change in their lives, generally meaning something like a better job, a new boyfriend, a week on some island resort-anything at all, as long as it is different. I know the sovereign recipe for that. Just slip one of the helmets on your head and tap into the mind of a truly alien being, and you’ll never find anything more different as long as you live. It wasn’t just the sights and smells that were different. My borrowed body interpreted them in ways that were completely foreign to me. There was a pervading stink of rotten fish in the air, powerful enough to make me hold my nose if I’d had one to hold. But I wasn’t disliking it. It was actually making me hungry. My hearing was far better than ever before. Not only could I hear the distant sounds of insects and the lapping of the waves on the shore, I could hear precisely where they were; the frog’s multiple ears were as directional as sonar. I could hear the other alligator-frogs calling to each other-deep baritone hissing, like a dragon’s voice-but that was where the helmet’s capacities ran out. I couldn’t understand a word they said.

Then, flick, the scene changed. I was still in the creature’s body, or in the body of one just like him, but I was in a series of different places, doing a variety of different things. Once my host was teamed with another frog, both of them wearing a kind of harness and pulling something that was heavy-but I couldn’t see what it was-along a marshy dirt road between stands of head-high rushes. Once he and a couple of others were making a lot of noise-singing together or making threats, I couldn’t tell which. Once he was asleep. None of it was very intelligible.

So I called, “Next!”

Frog gone away, blackness all around me. I was looking at another picture. This one was a fat, tentacle-nosed thing the general shape of a hippopotamus, and I knew what it was at once.

I was looking at a Wet One, one of the amphibians that had killed Patrice.

Perhaps, in the interests of scientific curiosity, I should have made the effort to understand what life was like for a Wet One. I didn’t. I wasn’t ready for going into that particular mind. As soon as I saw it I yelled, “Next!”

It took a moment for Pirraghiz to react-surprised, I guess, that I wanted to cut that one so short. But then I felt the faint scrabbling of her talons as she poked at the controller on the side of the helmet, and I had a new bizarre creature to look at.

I kept going through the roster of diverse, but all nonhuman, beings that Pirraghiz had accessed for me. There was a Shelled Person, like the one I had seen in the compound. Very strange, that experience was, because the Shelled Person seemed to see other living things, like the Docs, as luminous, and it had two distinct ranges of odor-detecting senses, one for in the water and one for on land. I tried a thing that looked like a feathered gorilla, with batlike membranes that joined its arms to its body and let it leap and glide for short distances-on, I guess, a planet with a lesser gravity, because I did not think that would work on Earth. Number Five was a four-legged furry thing that made its home in a cave, with its mate and half a dozen young; why the Beloved Leaders had bothered to bug it, I didn’t know, because it certainly didn’t look very civilized to me. Number Six—

Number Six I knew very well.

Bewildered, I took the helmet off my head. It was unexpectedly dark in the room-evidently the sun had set while I was in the helmet-but I could see Pirraghiz. She wasn’t hovering nearby, as I expected; she was over by the window, pulling the drapes back from the light-givers. She turned around questioningly. “I’ve just seen Dopey!” I told her. “The one who died.”

She said comfortably, “Yes, of course. The talker. Did you simply see his image, Dannerman, or did you go on to experience him?”

“Seeing the image was plenty! He was just the way I saw him last, all tattered and beaten up, with that big turkey-gobbler thing of his drooping and all the colors gone. He’s about to die, Pirraghiz, and I don’t want to ‘experience’ any of that!”

“Dannerman, I would not ask you to. I chose that view of the talker on purpose so that it would be easy for you to recognize him. The tapes, however, are from other parts of his life.”

I scowled at her. “What parts?”

“Oh, Dannerman. They are parts that I think will interest you. Why do you not put the helmet on and see?”

So there I was in Dopey’s body. I knew it was so, because his head, the little cathead, was bent to look at the familiar, golden-mesh belly bag he wore. I could feel his little fingers, inside the muff, fiddling with what might have been a kind of keypad.