Salt Read Free Page B

passing through a slow filter they will spend a few months in your bloodstream, and will keep all muscles and tissues supplied with oxygen, just as the medium in which they move will allow cells the energy to function. The final thing, before the mask goes over the face, is the pneumelectrics in the suit; these will slowly build muscle resistance in a long stretch, like a cat stretches but extended over days, and then a slackening, and then the stretch again – every muscle in your body, in sequence – over and over, for the length of your time. Because your muscles must not sleep, or they will waste. Now it is time, and the trance technician pulls the mask over your face, and you feel the slow seep of the cream, like a sludge, up your chin and over your nose, your cheeks, your forehead. And now you take the tablet, which you have kept under your tongue (or swallowed immediately, depending on your preference), and you let it go down your throat.
    Some people say they do not like the onset of trance, and indeed, some people do panic when they can no longer breathe, or earlier even, when the mask covers the eyes and they can no longer see. But I have always found it the most delicious of sensations. The tablet takes effect slowly, and you drift away, but it is the most relaxing feeling, the abandonment of everything. You do not need to move, the suit is stretching your muscles slowly, with an infinite care and the most sensuous precision. You do not even have to bother with the slow drawing of breath – have you ever stopped to consider how wearying it is to have to draw breath, every second, awake or sleep, for the whole of your life? With the muddling in the head of the tablet, like the finest vodjaa, it is a relief to abandon the breathing. Everything slips. Consciousness dissolves.
    A wave lifts, c-curves and falls against the infinite beach with a perfect sound of white-noise. Another.
    Another.
    The tablet encourages you to fall asleep, of course, but you do not sleep through the thirty-six years of trance. Other ships practise that form of medically-induced coma, as perhaps you know, but not us. Lock a body in a box and put it into coma. Startle it awake at the endof the process. The problem with such techniques is the mortality percentage. Depending on which technique you use, this can reach as high as twelve per cent. This represents too great a toll on the whole crew. Worse than this, it turns hibernation into a death lottery. Would you go to sleep knowing that there was a one in ten chance you would not awake?
    Mortality rates for trance are much, much lower. On our voyage, our ship lost only two people in trance. Because it is not a coma, consciousness is never really lost but it does enter the weird world of sensory deprivation. There is not even a heartbeat by which to orient yourself, not even the heaving of the chest with breath. The mind does not exactly go out, but neither does it exactly stay switched on.
    Shall I tell you what it feels like? To begin with, it is simply like falling asleep in the comfortable darkness. It is being a child again. And, at some stage (although it is difficult to say when) you wake up and it is still dark, and dreams are bothering you at the margins of your thoughts. And you sleep again, or wake again, but your mind is not settled. It processes the thoughts and the memories, and puts them together in odd ways, and stores them away. You sleep again, or you wake again, or one of the two. But you are dreaming less and less and memories bother you less and less. You are nowhere, you are nothing. Nirvana. There is no distant roar of engines to capture your senses; no tug of gravity to force your mind to constantly orient itself. No breath, no heartbeat. There is no sense of time. Moments of darkness and quiet exist, they blend seamlessly together in the mind, and who knows how many years exist between each one? Only the slow, slow rhythm of the stretch, the cat-like stretch of your