27
A political revolution, according to the dictionary tape, was the overthrow of a government, form of government, or social system, with another taking its place.
The government of the Commonwealth of Earth had not been overthrown nor had its form changed.
Caird had viewed everything available to him about the “revolution.” Though the TV news and the documentary tapes showed only a minute part of the “unrest,” they made it evident that at least a large minority of the world’s citizens had been and still were actively protesting against the government. If TV displayed a score of petitions, mass demonstrations, riots, and spraying of paint on street monitors by various groups, it refrained from showing a thousand. But the Big G had ridden out the storm, though it was not yet safe in harbor. Other storms boiled on the horizon.
It was also through the tapes that he found out the fates of those with whom he was supposed to have been intimately involved in his crimes. Caird had had no trial because of his precipitous profound psychic disturbance, as the newsheads termed it. The other alleged conspirators had been quickly dealt with, though not as swiftly as the courts had expected. The discovery that the accused had been injected with anti-TM had forced a change in legal procedures. Nevertheless, the overpowering evidence against them had resulted in their convictions. They, like him, were in institutions and subject to death or stoning if they were judged unrehabilitable.
All were strangers, evoking not a flicker of recognition in him. One woman, however, his close colleague in crime, according to what he was told, roused a feeling in his chest and groin that was as close to warmth as he could remember ever having. She was Panthea Pao Snick, short, only five feet and eight inches tall, slender but with a full bosom, dark-skinned, brown-eyed, with hair as black and sleek as a seal’s. Its dutch-boy bob was singularly attractive. Her facial bones were exquisite.
Viewing her, he could believe that she was one person who was more than a simulation, a choreography of atoms.
He had told this to Bruschino. She had said, “She may have been your lover. Whether she was or not, you sound as if you had been in love with her.”
“I wish she could be transferred here. I feel as if being with her might help me.”
“That might not help her therapy. In any event, she can’t be transferred, especially when you consider what a dangerous mixture you two were.”
Then she said, “That’s the first time you’ve looked disappointed. It’s faint, but it’s there.”
A few subdays later, he found that he could also feel anger. Its outward manifestation did not have the heat of the anger he had seen in others here. It was warm enough, however, to please him that he could feel displeasure. He had just sat down by Donna Cloyd in the dining hall and started to eat his salad. She had turned her head toward him and said, “You know, Jeff, I was very angry with you, very disappointed, too. I thought, still think, you were a traitor. I just could not…”
“Traitor! What do you mean? Traitor to whom? To you?”
“Yes. You took the coward’s way out. You deliberately became a new person just so the government could not prosecute you for your crimes. You abandoned us to our fates. I never would have thought that you’d do such a thing. It just wasn’t consonant with your character. But then, what is your character?”
“I’m sorry that you feel that way,” he said. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about! I have no way to know about it or just why you feel the way you do! Besides I don’t think I deliberately did it. It was a…well, a breakdown. I had no control over it!”
She grimaced. “If you can’t remember anything about it, how can you say you didn’t do it on purpose? I felt like killing you, I was so angry! Now, though, I ask myself how I can be angry with you when you aren’t you? The answer is, I am disgusted and angry with you, anyway!”
“You really believe that I am…was…a coward, a traitor?”
“What other explanation is there for what you did?”
“I don’t really know. But I have this feeling that I had no control over the change. I can’t prove it. But I do feel it.”
For some reason, tears were trickling down her cheeks. She had reached up and kissed him quickly on his mouth, then walked away. Puzzled, feeling that he had lost something he could not name, he watched her until she went around the corner at the end of the hall. Then came that same anger, though he did not know why he was angry. A feeling that Donna had been unjust with him? It was going to be a grim life if he did not regain the intensity of emotion which Doctor Arlene Bruschino had assured him was normal and desirable. Without it, she had said, he would be a phantom haunting humanity’s corridors. Though as he was now he could not be hurt emotionally to any extent, he could also not enjoy existence. He might as well be dead. Well, she amended, not really. As long as he was alive, he could hope that he would some day get back his full humanness with its quota of tedium, pain, and delight.
“When you lifted yourself by your own bootstraps, as it were, by making yourself Baker No Wiley, you ruptured yourself psychically.”
“Do I have to keep telling you I’m sure I wouldn’t have done that deliberately?”
“Some part of you did. However, to use another analogy, Baron Frankenstein’s hand shook or his mathematical calculations were wrong. Result: a monster.”
Why so wan, pale persona? he thought. Instead of becoming a butterfly, you dived back into the cocoon, metamorphosed backwards into the pupa.
The age-slowing elixir would increase his lifespan by seven. That meant that he could live an additional three hundred and fifty subyears—perhaps much more. Did he want to exist—it was not living—for that long in a wraithlike state?
Then he thought, I won’t live that long unless the authorities are convinced I’m cured and can be released. They’ll only give me so much time to do it. If I fail, I’ll be gorgonized.
During the time he was living, unless he battled his way out of his present state, he would be, not on Earth or Heaven or Hell, but in that unworld the ancients called Limbo. He felt the weak semblance of a shudder. He was trekking across a desert and could not turn back because there was no place to which he could return. It was a flat and hard desert with no known waterholes, no oases, and not even mirages. No mirages so far. A physical mirage was the deceptive appearance of a distant object caused by the bending of light rays in layers of air of varying density. What was far away could seem to be close. Were mental mirages just the opposite? Gould what was close seem far away?
The word miraj cometed up from the deep and across the dark skies of his mind.
Momentarily, he forgot about that. The ringing from the wallscreen called his attention to a summons to the exercise yard. But, before he reached it, miraj popped up again out of the pandora’s box of memory. He did not know where he had learned its meaning or why. It was just there. Miraj. Mohammed’s ascension to Heaven. What did that have to do with mirage? Nothing, he thought, except the similar sounds to an English-speaker. It was just one of those puns the trickster hindbrain threw gratis into the conscious.
Or was that all? The trickster never did anything at random. All its actions were connected. What was strummed at one place made a symphony throughout the web even if the hearer received the notes one at a time.
Knowing that did not help him see the connection between mirage and miraj. Some day…
The days passed, one in seven, though they seemed to be one immediately after another. The Earth circled the sun once. An obyear had passed, and he had lived fifty-two days. The seasons rose and dipped like flags in a parade swiftly marching past the reviewing stand and were gone. He would get up one morning and see the first snow, half an inch thick, on the meadow. The next morning, the following Tuesday, it was two inches deep. Two Tuesdays later, it would be six inches deep, and it stayed at that depth for several Tuesdays. Then it shrank quickly. Two days later, it was gone.
Spring was the strike of a light-green cobra. It
was not many days before it suddenly became a deep green. Summer was not as fast-forwarded as spring, but it did not last very long. Autumn put on colors to celebrate the death to come, then seemed overnight to be in the mourning of dead yellow, and then was in white again in a few subweeks.
It would be very pleasant, he thought, to watch the seasons appear slowly. In the New Era, they were like events in a TV program. The editor had ruthlessly cut out the real-life continuity.
His own life was a seldom-varying schedule. Now and then, psychicists, anatomists, physiologists, geneticists, and molecular biologists flew in to probe him. By year’s end, every cell, every molecule, every organ, every system had been recorded in three axes and at seven angles. Every firing of every neuron and the circuits of single blood cells through his arterial-venous systems had been taped. The trillions of reactions in him, electrical, chemical, and gestalt, were stored for display and study.
He was completely revealed, as naked as a man could be.
He was still a mystery.
One summer day, the third summer since he had been here, Bruschino said, “If you and I don’t get you well soon, you’re going to be warehoused. We don’t have forever, you know.”
“Are you trying to scare me into health of mind?” Caird said.
Bruschino looked sad. “No, far from it. It wouldn’t work, anyway. I have reported that you’re making progress, which is true. You have made some, and I expect you’ll make more. But the state regulates the acceptable rate of progress in criminal rehab candidates. You’ve been given more time than most because of your regression to another persona. Also, you’re a folk hero of sorts, and the state would like to publicize you as a completely rehabbed person.”
“Wrong word, regression,” he said, “I’ve gone on, ahead, to another persona. A new one. So how could it be regression?”
“This isn’t a game,” she said. “The state makes the rules and calls the shots. As of this moment, you are not a completely healthy person. You don’t seem to be a danger to the state—I’ve stressed that in my reports. I doubt that you ever will be, though I can’t be one hundred percent certain. But you’re not healthy. No healthy person sees others as a lucretian dance of atoms contained within an e-m field. You just don’t seem to care about anything. You go through the motions. You’re astute enough or cunning enough to act as if you had healthy emotions, with others, I mean. You don’t pretend when you’re with me. But you’re not really fooling the others, you know.”
“Or myself,” Caird said.
“Myself? Or my self?”
“Both.”
He was as puzzled by that answer as she was.
The following Tuesday, near the end of a relatively fruitless session, Doctor Bruschino paused, then said, “Colonel Simmons has escaped!”
She looked at his face, then up at the emotion-indicators on the wall behind him.
Caird’s blood surged with joy. The tingling throughout his body was something that he had never experienced before. It was not a memory of joy. It was the direct now emotion, though, a few seconds later, it did call up memories of emotions or emotions of memories, too fleeting and vague for him to identify the occasions on which they had happened.
“My God!” Bruschino said. “A real emotion! You’re not faking it, are you?”
“It was spontaneous,” Caird said. “You know I reacted too quickly to be faking it.”
“I believe you,” she said. “Only…you don’t remember Colonel Simmons?”
“No. I only know what I’ve seen of him on the tapes.”
“Why would you react so strongly to news of a stranger?”
“I’m a prisoner,” he said. “I identify with him, empathize with him.”
“If that’s true, then you’re making more progress than I guessed.”
She looked pleased.
“Has he been caught yet?” Caird said.
“Not yet. He will be.”
“Maybe.”
“Simmons got out of a supposedly escape-proof institution. Only three persons have done that in the last five hundred obyears.”
“And I was one of them,” Caird said. “I don’t remember how I did it, of course.”
“You won’t get out of here. No one has ever done it. Not that I’m worried about you trying. You don’t have the desire. If you did, you wouldn’t have the fire to carry out any plans you might think of.”
The tone of her voice and her expression made him think that she wished that he would at least think about escaping. Then he would be on the path to recovery.
“Do you have any details on how Simmons did it?” he said.
“Those would be known only to the organics. Actually, I’m not supposed to know about Simmons. But I have my sources of information, legitimate sources, of course.”
“And you’re not supposed to tell me about him, either?”
Arlene waved her hand. “I’m free to do anything which might help you recover. Within reason, of course.”
“How about helping me escape?”
She laughed, and she said, “I might describe for you the many security systems which make it impossible for you to get out of here. That, I think, would be permissible. It would discourage you, and thus keep you from even trying.”
“Would you?”
She narrowed her eyes and leaned forward.
“Are you really interested? I mean, do you feel excited at all when you think of the possibility?”
“Somewhat,” he said. “I like it. I’ve been bored for a long time, and I’m tired of being shut up. But…”
“But what?”
“What would I do even if I could get away? All that out there.”
He gestured with his left hand to indicate…what? He did not know.
“I don’t know much about anything out there, and I really don’t want to do anything. Yet… I might find something.”
“You have to find your self, if you’ll pardon the cliché,” she said. “That must be done here.”
“I have a self.”
“Sort of.”
“Very well,” he said, feeling a low-burning anger. “So, just how do I get it to be not sort of?”
After looking above and beyond him, no doubt checking the wall indicators, she said, “You’ve had no sexual intercourse since you came here. You’ve not even masturbated. Until last Tuesday, you’ve never had an oneirogenetic erection. That morning, at 3:06, you had a semierection. You were dreaming. What was that about?”
He hesitated, then said, “It was about you.”
Her eyes widened very slightly, and her expression hinted at pleasure. It was a momentary change, but it had been there. He was certain of that. Or was it that he wanted her to be pleased?
“Would you describe it?”
“It was spring, and we were on a hill above a meadow. The sun was bright, and the meadow below was filled with animals of various kinds—cattle, some big bulls, deer, does and big antlered bucks, goats, lots of billygoats, sheep, many rams. They were all gamboling. It seemed to be rutting season. I don’t know. I only had a vague impression of that. But someone in the woods on the other side of the hill was playing a flute. And you were doing the dance of the seven veils for me. I was lying on my side watching you. There was a basket of bread and cheese and a flagon of wine by me.
“You removed the veils one by one as you danced…suggestively. Then, before you could take off the last veil, I stood up and I, ah, seized you and bore you to the ground. But I only had a hard-on not stiff enough to get it all the way in, and the remaining veil was also an obstacle. I asked you to take it off, but you said I’d have to do that. And I couldn’t. I never did. Then the dream faded.”
“Were you angry? Frustrated? Keenly disappointed?”
“Somewhat angry, as angry as I’m capable of feeling. Frustrated, yes. Disappointed, but not keenly. You know that ‘keenly’ is something I don’t know the meaning of—not emotionally, anyway.”
“What do you
think about my being the woman in your truncated wet dream?”
He crossed his legs, then wondered if he had a Freudian desire to hide his crotch. Why should he? Nothing was happening. Yet, it was. A very slight warmth and swelling. Like a hot-air balloon that was not fully inflated because the burner had run out of fuel. Or, the balloon had a slit in it and the expanded air was escaping.
“Well. You’re easily the most attractive woman in this place. No race there. I don’t remember any woman I knew before I came here. Of course, I’ve seen some beauties on TV, and Panthea Snick, as I’ve told you, gives me a certain hard-to-define warmth. But you’re the only woman I really know, and you’re some woman.”
Her cheeks were slightly flushed, perhaps from embarrassment, which he doubted, or from excitement. Whether the latter was caused by the sexual images or from a hope that they were making therapeutic progress, he could not know. Perhaps it was both.
She looked up past him at the wallscreen. He was momentarily irritated. Why did she persist in trying to get to him via a machine? Why didn’t she go directly to him? His face and body language were not enough for her?
Arlene Bruschino said, “Think about it, Jeff. The dream came from your unconscious. The question is, whose unconscious? Wiley’s? Caird’s? Duncan’s? Ohm’s? Etcetera?”
“From mine…my present self. Whose else?”
“Think about it.”
He sat for a while, drank some tea, and frowned a lot. Arlene kept looking from his face to the wall behind him and back again. Finally, he said, “I, my new persona, haven’t been in existence long enough to have an unconscious. Not a very developed one, anyway. A nearly empty one, say. But this implies that the unconscious, that sea without shores, can be compartmentalized. Let’s see. Caird had the original unconscious. It was all his. Then Caird made Tingle, and Tingle had a pipeline to the unconscious. But most of what was Caird’s was denied to him. The two were, however, not completely separate. Then Tingle made Dunski. Or did he? Did Caird make all six of his other personae all at once, one after the other? Or did Caird make Tingle, and Tingle make Dunski, and Dunski make Repp and so on?”