“How would I know?” Duncan said. “I’m unconscious then.”
“You’re conscious now, and you should know if you’re telling the truth about as simple a thing as knowing if you’re acting or not.”
“I believe I’m telling the truth. Of course, I could be lying when I say that. The only way you can determine if I’m lying is to spray me. But if I’m sprayed, I may lie.”
Carebara threw his hands up and, muttering, stalked out.
The child had a face but no name.
What had happened to make him disappear as completely as data erased from a tape? What magnetomental shiftings of polarity had wiped out—seemed to wipe out, since he was still down there—the memory of the child in Caird? And in the seven others? Or had they, too, had such thrusts of recall? Since he did not have all of their memories, how was he to know whether or not they had glimpsed the child?
“My friend!” Cabtab boomed. He was looking inside the seven-foot-high food-storage container still called the “fridge” though it did not depend upon cold for preservation of food. “Dunc! It seems to me that you’re as screwed up as I was! I believed in a plurality of gods in this universe, and you believe in a plenum of souls in your one body. What nonsense I spouted! There is only one God, and you have only one soul! You’re just confused, that’s all, just as I was confused. Forget this gibberish about seven souls in your flesh. Act as if you only had one, and you will be whole and single again!”
“It’s not that easy,” Duncan said. “You had to have a mystical revelation before you abandoned your pantheon. Do I have to have one also? I could wait all my life in the darkness for one and die without the light.”
“Revelation?” Cabtab said. “I didn’t have any! One second, I was the priest of many gods. The next, as smoothly as stepping through a wide doorway, I was, am, the priest of the one and indivisible Lord of creation.”
“It took you a long time to rediscover what Pharaoh Akhenaten discovered eight thousand years ago,” Snick said. “Do we have to talk about such superstitious crap?”
“Sister,” the padre said, smiling ferociously, “you lack respect for the beliefs of others.”
Duncan said, “Hold it!” and he raised his hand as if he were a traffic cop. “Let’s not get into this kind of argument. We have, at the moment, much more vital things to consider. You’re transgressing on his self-image, Thea. If you challenge the validity of his religious beliefs, you’re threatening his identity. You’re chipping away at it, making him less whole, in short, less than he thinks he is or different from what he thinks he is. You’re accusing him of being wrong, and he must believe that he’s right.
“In any event, we have to cooperate if we’re going to come out of this alive. Also, need I remind you that we’re being monitored? PUPA doesn’t want dissension among its members. It has a way of dealing with people it thinks it can’t trust.”
Cabtab’s face became less red, and he made a visible effort to relax.
“You’re right, Brother Duncan. My apologies, Sister Panthea, for my violent reaction. But I advise you to watch your mouth in the future.”
“You’re a good man in many respects,” Snick said. “You’re brave, and you’re dependable when it comes to swift action. But I’d just as soon you didn’t press your goofy—”
Duncan shouted, “Thea!”
Cabtab bellowed, “At least I can make up my mind! You’re not even convinced that PUPA is—”
“Silence! Both of you!” Duncan yelled. “I said you were being watched! Every move, every expression of face and voice, is being taped. Let’s cooperate, for God’s sake, and act like adults!”
“I forgive you, Sister Thea,” the padre said.
“You forgive me?” she said. “Why, you theological shuttler! In one day you switch from pantheism to monotheism! You—”
Duncan shot out of his chair.
“That’s enough, both of you! Get out! Go to your rooms! I don’t want you in here until you agree to behave rationally! I have a lot of thinking to do! I need quiet! Out!”
“Just how do we get out?” Cabtab said. “We’re prisoners, remember?”
The door opened, and two armed men entered. One gestured with his gun at Cabtab and Snick. “You two come along.”
Snick went out quietly and swiftly. The padre said, “Bless you, my sons. You certainly are watching over us like guardian angels.” He turned his head toward Duncan on his way out and, grinning, lowered one eyelid. There were no wall screens behind Duncan, and that slow wink probably would not have been seen as such by a monitor. Nor would a monitor have thought that Duncan’s gesture of a moment ago was anything but a nervous action or perhaps a desire to get the stiffness out of his left hand. His companions had noted the signal for them to start a loud quarrel. Now Duncan knew that the activities in the room were not just being taped to be seen during a later running. The guards were observing everything that went on in this room as it occurred. They had orders to interfere in anything that looked suspicious or that might cause trouble.
He had suspected as much but had to make sure.
He did not think, however, that Snick and Cabtab’s friction was all just acting. They were quite sincere about their religious attitudes; their anger had been real.
Putting that out of his mind, he concentrated on the vision of the child’s face. That got him nowhere. After an hour, he quit trying so hard and let the thoughts come as they would. Perhaps, while he was being bathed in the stream of the unconscious, he would see the child’s face float by, or something connected to it. Lunch hour came, and his meal appeared on the rotating shelf. He ate it without tasting the food. The sun came around the corner of the tower, and the window to the west darkened. He jogged from one end of the room to the other two hundred times and then skipped with an imaginary rope. After walking on his hands twenty times across the room and doing three hundred pushups, he showered. During this, he could not keep from considering the “problem” of identity, as it was called, though he regarded tackling it as a waste of time. But since he had made an agreement with himself to let his mind wander, let it go where it wished into whatever byways and crannies it wished for several hours, he did not try to focus on any of the immediate and genuine problems.
Cut out the philosophical flab surrounding the identity of the human. Forget the many thousands of books written about it and the thousands of tapes made about it. The identity of the individual Homo sapiens was, simply, his body, which included his “mind,” his actions and reactions at any second of time. Or, if minute distinctions had to be made, at any microsecond. Never mind whether the identity was formed by heredity or by environmental influences or by an interaction of both. The causes of identity were a separate question.
A person was what he did and thought at any second of time. He was not the same at one time as he was at another time. Identity was the flux contained within the skin and the flux outside the bag of skin wrought by that bag.
There had once been a man named Jefferson Cervantes Caird. He had an identity, as all humans do, even the totally paralyzed and the idiot. It had changed from time to time just as the appearance of his body and the state of his mind had changed. Only the label, Jefferson Cervantes Caird, had not changed. Then, the label had become Robert Aquiline Tingle. On Wednesdays only. Tingle had not been just Caird acting as Tingle. Caird became Tingle every dawn of Wednesday. And on Thursday Tingle had become James Swart Dunski. On Friday, Wyatt Bumppo Repp. On Saturday, Charles Arpad Ohm. Sundays, he became Thomas Tu Zurvan, the street preacher, Father Tom, a zealous religionist, quite in contrast to the other six personae, who were all agnostics or atheists. Mondays, he metamorphosed as a persona and therefore as an identity into Will Muchluck Isharashvili.
Yet these unique people had not entirely forgotten one another. Since Caird was a courier for a secret organization, passing from day to day to transmit messages from one day to the other, he had to preserve some memory of whom and what he had been. I
n fact, some memory of all the identities. But the key words were not forgotten and memory. The thread that he followed from day to day despite his change of persona was that of a limited memory of his other identities. These memories, in a sense, leaked through from the others and were only of a nature and degree to guide him in his subversive activities. These were voices from the six men buried within him, faint but strong enough, advice, phone calls, as it were, from temporary tombs.
One bag of skin could hold more than one identity. People with multiple personalities, for instance, had two or more personae possessing them from time to time. The difference between these severely mind-wracked people and Caird was that his possession by others was entirely voluntary and depended upon his consent. Except at the last, when, threatened by death, the seven had fought for control.
At this moment, Duncan was wondering if he could dissolve the identity as Duncan and return to that of Caird. Would he have to tackle and defeat each of the seven in chronological sequence, working backward in time to the primal Caird? Or could he bypass all but Caird? If he did get to Caird, then he would become him. He would know what that one secret was that the government thought he had. He would know how he had gotten into the early phases of this situation.
There was a good chance, though, that his captors would not desire that he become Caird again. Duncan suspected that the man who had questioned him Wednesday, “Ruggedo,” would not like that. What he wanted was to discover Duncan’s techniques for lying under the mist. That was all. Or seemed to be all.
Why had he disintegrated or buried that memory? Perhaps to make sure that, if captured, he would not be able to reveal it to the ganks. Or he might have decided that he was through with becoming other people. He might have thought that he could tolerate no more becomings. The psyche could endure only so many of them. There might be a finite reservoir of psychic energy, and he might have just about drained it.
At that moment, the door opened without announcement of entry. Carebara came in followed by Snick and Cabtab. His companions looked refreshed and not at all angry with each other. The professor said, “I’ve been thinking. We may be on the wrong track trying to get to a persona that knows the transformation techniques. We’ll attempt a different approach. You’ll stay conscious, and as Beewolf, try to invent your techniques. If you did it as Caird, you can do it as Beewolf. No matter what your persona, your ingenuity is the same, and so is the potential for invention.”
You’re following the wrong sugar-trail, ant-man, Duncan thought. But I won’t tell you that.
“Very well,” Duncan said. “Let’s get to it.”
27
The swimming pool was forty feet long and fourteen feet wide and the ceiling was ten feet from the floor. The room itself was fifty feet long and twenty wide. Though sounds did not echo and become amplified as in a much larger public pool, they still carried quite well. Duncan and his two colleagues were diving, thrashing, and swimming noisily while two armed guards watched them. Starting Thursday, they had been conducted to this huge room, which was part of the complex, for an hour’s exercise every day. All three were nude, but the guards kept their eyes mainly on Snick. Duncan managed to whisper to her while they were treading water and Cabtab’s mighty bellyflops smacked loudly.
“We have to find a way to talk privately. I have a plan.”
A guard must have seen his lips moving. He shouted, “Quiet, you! No talking! Or your swimming privileges will be canceled!”
Duncan held up a placating hand, muttered, “May your dong fall off!” and swam away. Knowing that he was being observed by the wall and ceiling screens, he had held his hand over his mouth when he had spoken to her. It was possible that the monitors could lip-read.
Later, while Snick was diving from the board, and he was sure that the guards were not alert to what he was doing, he said softly, “Padre, I have a plan. Somehow we must discuss it.”
“This isn’t the place,” Cabtab said, and he upended and swam to the bottom.
When the hour was nearly up, a guard blew a whistle and conducted Cabtab to the door of a dressing room. When the padre had dried off and put his robes on, he came out. Snick was sent into the room then. When she left it, Duncan entered. He felt more than just frustrated. The only occasions when all three were together were in the pool room, during the sessions, and when they were allowed to eat in Duncan’s room. There was no time when they were not closely watched.
The sessions were notable only for their lack of success. Carebara’s thousands of questions, his insistent and sometimes tricky probings, had not dented in the least Duncan’s platinum-hard psychic shell. Snick and Cabtab had sincerely tried to help the professor, but their suggestions had been valueless. Even Duncan’s ideas, inspired by watching the sometimes censored tapes of the sessions, had been without fruit.
Carebara was the most worried. He had not said so, but it was evident that he was desperate. Perhaps that was partly because his failure would cause him to be transferred elsewhere. He would have to be given a new ID and thus would be in a dangerous situation. Or, Duncan thought, Carebara might believe, with good reason, that he would be stoned and hidden. That course would be the easiest and least perilous for PUPA.
Going to the swimming pool every day gave Duncan the layout of part of the apartment complex. Cabtab’s room, a much smaller area than Duncan’s, was next door to his, north. Beyond was Snick’s room, also much smaller. And beyond that and the hallway outside their three rooms was, apparently, a wall beyond which was the apartment of another government official or perhaps a hallway. The route from the three rooms to the pool went invariably south along the wide hallway. This was lined by blank wall screens before which were some marble pedestals topped by marble busts. Duncan recognized the faces of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, and Wang Shen. Wang Shen, the last of the world conquerors and the greatest, unlike his egomaniacal predecessors, had insisted that no statues or monuments be erected to him and that any tapes made of his life or any shows portraying him as a character reveal his face as little as possible. Nevertheless, his wishes had not always been honored, and Duncan recalled seeing his features now and then. Just where, he did not remember.
What Duncan found strange about the busts was that they were of men who, excepting Wang Shen, were not admired. Descriptions of their military exploits were kept to a minimum in the history texts, and what was described was dealt with in terms of revulsion. Yet the owner of this apartment must have a high esteem for these bloody warriors. The very presence of the busts told Duncan much about the man who had installed them here.
The hallway along which the three prisoners were conducted went straight south for at least sixty or seventy feet. Duncan counted seven closed doors on his left before reaching the end of the hallway. There, just before he turned left into another hallway, was a very large door. Down the hallway, thirty feet away, was another door to the right. The prisoners and the guards entered this before coming to the end of the hallway. Beyond was a sort of foyer. An arched entrance opened to the swimming pool room, but the prisoners were instructed to go into the door immediately to their right. This led to another very narrow hallway along which were three doors. Each of these opened to a small dressing room. When the prisoners came out, they went through another arched entrance into the huge room containing the pool, and, at the far south end, some gymnastic equipment.
Once, Duncan had overheard two guards talking quietly as they went down the hallway. One had said something about “the hangar.” Was there a big room in the apartment that was a landing place for small aircraft? If so, the roof above it had to open to admit the vessels. And, once, a door had swung open as they were going down the main hallway. A middle-aged but good-looking woman had come out of the large room. He had only glimpsed the sinks, tables, and the racks of knives, forks, and spoons before she stepped back in and closed the door. Her alarmed expression and the guard’s growl at her to get back into the room told D
uncan that she was not supposed to reveal her presence to the prisoners.
He surmised that she was just one of several servants permanently attached to the place. How many? He would never know until his plan became reality, but he would have to be ready for the appearance of an unknown number. The servants would also have their quarters, probably not far from the kitchen and the rooms of the master, Ruggedo.
Going north from the kitchen along the main hallway that led back to his room were five doors. One, he suspected, gave entrance to a storage room next to the kitchen. The others were probably entrances to the monitor room, the guards’ living quarters and bedrooms and, perhaps, the guards’ recreation room.
Somewhere in this complex should be a small hospital room for those not deathly sick. Ruggedo would not want anyone stationed here to go to the metropolitan hospital. There would be too many questions, too much to cover up. Which meant that a doctor would be needed. Probably, the doctor was a member of the PUPA and lived nearby in the tower.
Duncan and his colleagues were allowed to watch the newscasts of every day, and they could order any of 129,634 dramatic, comedy, adventure, and documentary tapes. But when Duncan asked for a series of documentaries on the members of the WGC, the World Government Council, he was refused. No reason was given, though he requested one. That told him what he already suspected. Ruggedo was one of the council, and the prisoners were not to know that. Duncan had guessed that only an extremely powerful official could have such an enormous amount of living space for himself and also keep it a secret. Even the governor of a state or member of a national governing council could not have such power.
Ruggedo was a member of both PUPA and the WGC.
Duncan asked himself—no one else to question—why a WGC official would be one of a subversive group. Or, probably, the founder and head of the organization. Did he not have as much power now as any human could have? The answer was that he wanted more power. He wanted to be the head person, not just one of the heads.