When spring returned to Sinegard, when the weather was warm enough that Rin could stop bundling up in her thick winter robes, Jiang took her on a hiking trip into the nearby Wudang mountain range. They walked for two hours in silence, until noon, when Jiang chose to stop at a sunny alcove that overlooked the entire valley below.
“The subject of today’s lesson will be plants.” He sat down, pulled off his satchel, and emptied the contents onto the grass. Out spilled an assortment of plants and powders, the severed arm of a cactus, several bright red poppy flowers with pods still attached, and a handful of sun-dried mushrooms.
“Are we getting high?” Rin said. “Oh, wow. We’re getting high, aren’t we?”
“
He lectured as he crushed the poppy seeds in a small stone bowl with a pestle. “None of these plants are native to Sinegard. These mushrooms were cultivated in the forests of the Hare Province. You won’t find them anywhere else; they do well only in tropical climates. This cactus grows best in the Baghra Desert between our northern border and the Hinterlands. This powder is derived from a bush found only in the rain forests of the southern hemisphere. The bush grows small orange fruit that are tasteless and sticky. But the drug is made from the dried, shredded root of the plant.”
“And possession of all of these in Sinegard is a capital offense,” Rin said, because she felt one of them might as well mention that.
“Ah. The law.” Jiang sniffed at an unidentified leaf and then tossed it away. “So inconvenient. So irrelevant.” He looked suddenly at her. “Why does Nikan frown upon drug use?”
He did this often: hurled questions at her that she hadn’t prepared answers to. If she spoke too quickly or made a hasty generalization, he challenged it, backed her up into an argumentative corner until she spelled out exactly what she meant and justified it rigorously.
Rin had enough practice by now to reason carefully before uttering a response. “Because use of psychedelics is associated with blown minds, wasted potential, and social chaos. Because drug addicts can give very little to society. Because it is an ongoing plague on our country left by the dear Federation.”
Jiang nodded slowly. “Well put. Do you agree?”
Rin shrugged. She had seen enough of the opium dens of Tikany to know the effects of addiction. She understood why the laws were so harsh. “I agree now,” she said carefully. “But I suppose I’ll change my mind after you’ve had your say.”
Jiang’s mouth quirked into a lopsided grin. “It is the nature of all things to have a dual purpose,” he said. “You’ve seen what poppy does to the common man. And given what you know of addiction, your conclusions are reasonable. Opium makes wise men stupid. It destroys local economies and weakens entire countries.”
He weighed another handful of poppy seeds in his palm. “But something so destructive inherently and simultaneously has marvelous potential. The poppy flower, more than anything, displays the duality of hallucinogens. You know poppy by three names. In its most common form, as opium nuggets smoked from a pipe, poppy makes you useless. It numbs you and closes you off to the world. Then there is the madly addictive heroin, which is extracted as a powder from the sap of the flower. But the seeds? These seeds are a shaman’s dream. These seeds, used with the proper mental preparation, give you access to the entire universe contained within your mind.”
He put the poppy seeds down and gestured to the array of psychedelics before him. “Shamans across continents have used plants to alter their states of consciousness for centuries. The medicine men of the Hinterlands used this flower to fly upward like an arrow to enter into communion with the gods. This one will put you into a trance where you might enter the Pantheon.”
Rin’s eyes widened. Here it was. Slowly the lines began to connect. She was finally beginning to understand the purpose of the last six months of research and meditation. So far she had been pursuing two separate lines of inquiry—the shamans and their abilities; the gods and the nature of the universe.
Now, with the introduction of psychedelic plants, Jiang drew these threads into one unified theory, a theory of spiritual connection through psychedelics to the dream world where the gods might reside.
The separate concepts in her mind flung connections at one another, like a web suddenly grown overnight. The formative background Jiang had been laying suddenly made total, utter sense.
She had an outline, but the picture hadn’t fully developed. Something didn’t square.
