2. Ianathos

Bag-man, bag-man, coming today;

Stuff me inside and take me away.

Bag-man, bag-man, coming tonight;

Mama, oh mama, please leave me a light.

Bag-man, bag-man, take me down deep;

He can find me awake, he can find me asleep.

-Kingsport children's rhyme, archaic.

Raymond Sanderson, or just Ray, was trouble. Every intern at the hospital knew the story about how Ray had been caught cooking up drugs on the hospital grounds. A good half of them dismissed the story as not only spurious, but racist and jealous – a black student, who had been offered scholarships in both chemistry and neurochemistry, and turned them down, being accused of making drugs? And he was still a student? Really?

I knew Ray a little better than average, though; we were in the same year of our internships, and the Kingsport university hospital simply isn't that big. It had been LSD. He'd made that first batch of it mainly just to see if he could, and they had never actually caught him. I was fairly sure he still occasionally made small batches, for parties, for money on the side. To him, the question was "Is anyone getting hurt?" not "Is it illegal?".

He spent his time bouncing back and forth between blood work in one of the little labs, and working with psych patients, suicide cases, coma patients. I never was clear on what he was actually interning in. And, for seemingly no reason at all, even while I only saw him at work, he seemed to actually like me. He had asked me if I wanted to grab a beer a couple of times, even when I knew he had something far more impressive on his plate. I decided to bring him in.

It already felt like "bring him in" was the right phrase. Like Gina and I were a team, with our secret. I think he could feel the presence of that secret when I went to talk to him, with a little sample of the stuff.

"Can you figure out what that is?", I asked, putting my sample vial down in front of him.

He plucked it off the counter, held it up and peered at it. "If it's simple, probably. You can owe me one. If it's complex or organic, though, only sort-of. Unless you've got, like, grant money to throw at me. Why? What's it from?"

"It's from my cousin. Weird stuff. Egyptian, or something like that."

"Drugs?"

"Incense. Supposedly. But weird incense, so maybe drugs. Maybe poisonous."

"There's not so much of a line between drugs and poisons as you might think, when you get down to cases."

"Uh. Okay. So, how long?"

"I'll be holding the lab open to do some batch testing overnight tonight - basically, work ten minutes, wait an hour, work ten, like that. So I can do this at the same time, easy. Check in with me tomorrow, I'll see if I've found anything interesting out."

I left it with him, and went on shift.

...

That night, Gina snuck into my dreams. It was... Awkward. There's another intern, Katherine, and we've had coffee a couple times, but nothing serious. Still, blonde, petite, knows what she wants in life, and I can make her laugh out loud to the point where she waves one hand around to stop, stop. If I've got buttons, she's standing on them.

It was a sex dream, is what I'm saying.

So, when Gina called out "Hey, don't let me interrupt you", and I suddenly knew I was dreaming, it threw me. I had to take a second to collect myself, shaking my head - in the dream. Gina said, after, that when I did that, it was even weirder from where she was. She said there were all these other figments of me, doing other stuff, overlapped with me for a split second. Something like - I'd been thinking about other stuff, at the same time, and that meant there were other versions of me doing those other things. But coming to alertness yanked them all into the one person, fully dressed. She backstepped.

"Damn, coz."

"...The drug. You took the drug."

"Sure thing. We can yell at each other when we wake up; otherwise, we risk doing it twice, depending on what we remember. Besides, look!"

Successfully bamboozled, I looked. And saw the landscapes of my whole day, half-transparent, half-exploded, laid out like some kind of fractal painting all around me. My bedroom. Corridors of patients, the way home, the apartment, all one big overlapping mishmash. When I focused on this or that bit, that scene started to come real, and the bits of the other scenes faded.

A few moments later, we were standing in my apartment again - though all the boxes and files were absent. Just clean, bland space.

"Wild, isn't it? You gotta tell me about those hills, though; where you remember those from."

"The hills?"

"Okay, when I started dreaming - like, this kind of dreaming - I was in my parent's old house, from when I was a kid. And I wandered around a bit, through all these places I remembered. And then I thought, If I was going to find you, I should look for places you think about, right? Especially, like, bridges. As a symbol, tell myself I wanted to go across."

"I get it, yeah." It made sense, in a Gina kind of way.

"So, you know the bridge at the hospital, over the road?"

"The pedestrian thing. Walkway. 'Course."

"Right, I thought about that, and wanlked over it, into the hospital. But not the hospital bits you had here. More like your memory of the hospital, instead of the bits you were dreaming just then. Getting from that hospital to the one you were, I dunno, using? It felt like coming up, sort up. Like I was deeper down in your head than I am now."

"And the hills?"

"On the walkway. Looking out the sides, the bridge didn't go over the road. It went over these low hills way below, just going on and on, with this crazy too-bright too-full night sky."

There was more that we talked about that night, more that we explored. But that's the last clear thing either of us could recall; we didn't find the hills that night.

In the morning, we had a fight. Gina stuck her head into the bedroom, early, and called out.

"So, remember the dream?"

"Urh. Ya."

I woke up pretty rapidly, trying to remember.

"Wait. Those hills you were talking about. Did we...?"

"No, we didn't find them. I don't think so, anyway. It all kind of trails off there, though."

"Right, same. Wait. The drug."

"Yep. Sure did!"

"It's dangerous! It's a twenty-year old sample of a badly-tested drug; we don't even know if it's the right one, or one that sent people into comas!"

"But we do. He scratched it on the bottom; B3."

"Still you could have taken too much, not enough. Oh, for.... You shouldn't be taking it at all."

"How about: Fuck that. I've spent years looking for a way in on this thing that wasn't bullshit. I've got one, I'm taking it."

"A way in on what? What is the big thing that you're not telling me?"

"There's lots. Are you ready to stop rolling your eyes when I tell you about it?"

Turned out, I was. Not before I sat and fumed for a few minutes, of course. But ready.

What Gina had collected - stories around Ianathos, the temple incense turned drug that we now had on our hands - was kind of a filing cabinet of weird, but it all boiled down to a core explanation.

"All around the world, we have these old mystical traditions playing with altered states, talking about the boundary between conscious and not, between having visions and being in reality. Which is all groovy, but if you accept the idea of shared dreaming as a reality, and come at it all again, it starts to look like a lot of these stories are actually about that, and they just didn't know what they were playing with. Vision quests where people communicate over distances. Weird stories about twins. Astral travel, out-of-body-experiences, a lot of stuff drops right into the picture as things that could easily be about it."

"The really big motherlodes are the Tibetan traditions relating to Tulkas and Tulpas, and the few surviving bits of the books of Sarnath. That second one is what the HYPNOS project was about, of course; they got the recipe, and some ideas, but weren't quite right about what it did. The first one, well, the idea with Tulkas and Tulpas is more or less that you can make things out of thought, and that people can project thought-bodies out into the world. There's more to it, but that's the idea; you meditate, and get into a state where you can do these things. I've got books."

"MacIntyre the therapist, Bowley the sleep guy, and Ward, they all figured out some of it. MacIntyre wrote his lucid-dream-book, and I think he's learned to do what we just did without the drugs. I've got a couple copies of his book around here, too... Somewhere. Bowley has published a lot of papers on on Neurochemistry and such - I think he's looking for Ianathos, but didn't want to dig up the stuff we have - maybe afraid of the Department of Defense, or whatever. Not sure about Ward."

"HYPNOS wasn't the first shot at this thing, though. There have been little groups all over the place, scattered over history, that got going, figured out some parts of thing, and then went weird. People getting rich, people vanishing, people going crazy. There was a monastery in China where people in comas got taken, and their relatives could spend some time in these incense-heavy rituals, and then go and visit them spiritually, you know? The Hashishin, the proto-assassins, they suposedly had this paradise garden that they got promised, but some of the things people wrote talk about how the garden was really a place that wasn't just owned by their boss - the old man of the mountain - but was actually a paradisical dream-space that the old man maintained, and the hashishin could visit while they slept. Maybe they weren't just smoking hash, you know?"

"And a funny thing; HYPNOS happened just out of town, right? And if you check the records, we actually have a much higher rate of sleep-related disorders here in Kingsport than usual. Kids have been treated for night terrors, stuff like that, way more often. I dunno if one thing is connected to the other, but it seems kind of weak for it to be a coincidence."

There was more like that, all these little examples of strange stuff on the same theme. On an ordinary morning, one before I'd been visited in a dream, I would have thought it was a fun twist to put on a bunch of old stories at best, a strangely obsessive conspiracy-style hidden history at worst. But since that had just happened, I was willing to believe that at least some of these stories were probably about this same kind of thing.

Gina hadn't actually finished giving all her examples of "places that might be part of this pattern" when Ray arrived at the building, but she had gone on for a half hour or more. So, I was kind of relieved by the buzz for the door - it gave me an excuse to pause the avalanche, go down and meet him.

"Hey, Ray, what's new?"

"Your stuff. It's a lot of things, but I'd bet money that the important one is an alkaloid."

"Alkaloid - like, morphine, codine?"

"Also like atropine, caffiene, quinine, lots of lovely things. But I'm not sure which one this is, yet. Most come from plants; opium poppies have a load of... Hell, man, what happened here?"

This last, because I'd opened the door to my apartment, and the mess was visible. Files, boxes, pizza, coffee cups; all the residue of our week-long research bender.

"Hello, Joe! Whaddaya know?" Gina called from inside.

"I know plenty. You part of all this?" Ray returned, gesturing with a sweeping arm at the file boxes, metal boxes, and all, as he kicked off his shoes.

"I am. This is me, pretty much. Coffee?" She held up the pot.

"Hit me." he replied, moving to the middle of the ruoom, and turning to survey the damages.

Stepping past his to the table, I gestured to a cari for him - "Tell her about the alkaloid"

Apparently happy to be of service, Ray laid out the basics. Alkaloids as a chemical family, some basic stuff about them, and on just how many different drugs are ultimately alkaloids at base - quite a few, and not all of them narcotic. All the usual drug dangers generally applied to them; addiction, overdose, impurities, incompatibilities and overlapping effects with other medications, the works.

Gina was grinning by the end. "So, poppies. Specifically - papaver aculeatum." Shuffling papers on the table, she opened up a big flower reference guide. In it, she'd tucked one of the sheets from the ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS baggie, which pictured a flower. Facing that was a picture of an orange flower, with all the same details, labelled as papaver aculeatum, the South African Poppy.

Gina leaned back from it. "There's a whole bunch of distillation processes and plants in the originals - Uh, the stuff that was being researched; what all these files here are about. I couldn't match up which plant went with which drug number. But if a poppy fits the bill on B-3... On the stuff Ben gave you? Then this is the one."

"So. You mean you figure you can make more of whatever it is? Come to mention, what the hell is it? I mean, this is government stuff, right?" Ray asked.

Now it was Gina's turn to unload. She didn't pull the punch. Government trials, ancient drug, shared dreams, her trip the night before; she laid it all out. Later, she told me that her impression had been that Ray had already done the big thing we actually needed most. No reason not to scare him off - and if he didn't scare, then he could stick. She finished off by telling us that she'd already ordered seeds for the poppies, among other plants, which were in the mail. There was also a greenhouse on the other side of town that might have a few.

He didn't scare. He pulled out his car keys, and dangled them "So, road trip? Today, flowers, a little cooking, tonight, sleepytime with crazy incense?"

Gina smiled at the flirtation, but let out a little pffft at his keys. "We'll take my Jeep."

I had to jump in "Whoa. Hold on. Nobody's smoking anything, tonight. Tonight, Gina sees if she can dream her way into my head, or yours if you're napping, or both, without anything to help. Plus, we need to get one of those that actually works in the next couple days, and some other stuff; if we're gonna do it, we're at least going to keep something like a record", gesturing to the EEG/EKG meter.

Ray nodded, slowly "Fair enough."