He started to spring up, and the hands of his guards tightened, swift
and strong, even before his muscles had fully tightened. Bart's head
dropped. Cold common sense doused over his brave thoughts. He was
uncountable millions of light-years from his own people. He was
absolutely alone. Bravery would mean nothing; submission would mean
nothing. Would he be more of a man, somehow, if he let his mind be
wrecked?
"All right," he muttered, "I won't fight."
"You show your good sense," the Mentorian said quietly. "Give me your
left arm, please--or, if you are left-handed, your right. As you
prefer."
Deftly, almost painlessly, a needle slid into his arm. Giving in. A
dizzying welter of thoughts spun suddenly in his mind. Briscoe. Raynor
One and Raynor Three. The net between the stars. Ringg, Vorongil, Meta,
his father....
Consciousness slid away.
Years later--he never knew whether it was memory or imagination--it
seemed to him that he could reach into that patch of gray and dreamless
time and fish out questions and answers whole, the faces of Lhari
swelling up suddenly in his eyes and shrinking back into interstellar
distance, the sting-smell of drugs, the sound of unexpected voices, odd
reflex pains, cobwebs of patchy memories that fitted nowhere else into
his life so that he supposed they must go here.
He only knew that there was a time he did not remember and then a time
when he began to think there was such a thing as memory, and then a time
when he floated without a body, and then another time when the path of
every separate nerve in his body seemed to be outlined, a shimmering web
in the gray murk. There was a mirror and a face. There were blotchy
worms of light like the star-trails of peaking warp-drive through the
viewport, colors shifting and receding, a green star, the red eye of
Antares.
Then the peak-point faded, his mind began to decelerate and angle slowly
down and down into the field of awareness, and he became fuzzily aware
that he was lying full length on a sort of couch. He shook his head
groggily. It hurt. He sat up. That hurt, too. A hand closed gently
around his elbow and he felt the cold edge of a cup against his sore
mouth.
"Take a sip of this."
The liquid felt cool on his tongue, evaporating almost before he could
swallow; the fumes seemed to mount inside the root of his nose,
expanding tremendously inside his head and brain. Abruptly his head was
clear, the last traces of gray fuzz gone.