There might be additional reasons.
Where had he seen Ruggedo?
Though Duncan’s impression of familiarity with him had been weak, it was not, he was almost certain, from seeing him on TV. That wispy memory could only have come from an intense face-to-face encounter.
Duncan wished that he had constructed his new persona with more access to memories of his previous selves. There were leaks, seepage of recalls, but they were not enough to help him. A more general reservoir of knowledge was available, but anything immediately identifiable with Caird and the others was cut off.
Meanwhile, Carebara had decided that verbal interrogation was not going to do the job by itself. He brought in a small machine with ten leads, which he attached to Duncan’s temples, chest, wrists, upper arms, and penis. Using this machine, named the ATM, the professor could display on the screen changes in blood pressure, heartbeat rate, electrical skin fields, voice frequencies, and perspiration rate. He also required that Duncan keep his eyes open when he breathed in the truth mist. The dilation and contraction of the pupils were another indicator of truth-telling in the subject.
But when Duncan awakened after the first session with the ATM, Carebara looked disgusted.
“Any luck?” Duncan said. He grinned.
“I know you were lying sometimes,” the professor said. “I have no doubt of that! Yet your pupils did not register that at all. You’re a unique phenomenon, Duncan.”
“Every human being is,” Duncan said. He sat up on the couch and began pulling off the electrodes attached to the leads.
“You needn’t look so smug,” Carebara said. “If we don’t get the answers to our questions, we may be in an undesirable situation.”
“We?”
“You, I mean. If you’re useless to us, and you have too much knowledge of us, well…”
“It won’t be well. Tell me, Carebara, doesn’t it bother you that PUPA so casually kills its own people if they become a nuisance or a potential danger to it? Doesn’t that make your ethical skin, your moral nose, itch even a little bit?”
Carebara looked nervously at the nearest wall screen, and he said, “It’s for the greater good.”
“Godalmighty!” Duncan said. “Five thousand years of civilization, and you killers still can’t come up with anything better than that!”
That evening, Cabtab and Snick were granted their request to spend a few hours with Duncan. The day before, they had pleaded loneliness to their guards, and the petition had apparently been sent on to whomever made the decision in such matters. Ruggedo, probably, Duncan thought. This morning the chief guard had told them that they could enjoy each other’s company for a while tonight. He did not say so, but they knew that their every move would be watched and their conversation overheard. It would do no good to turn up the sound volume on the wall screen in the hope that it would make it impossible for the detectors to eavesdrop. The guards were controlling the noise level of the TV. Moreover, any attempt at covert communication among the three would mean that all visiting privileges would be stopped. Also, they would not be permitted to swim together again.
“Why not?” Duncan had said angrily. “How could we possibly escape from this place? If we want to fantasize about escape plans, what do you care?”
“Those are the orders,” the chief guard said. He scowled and flared his nostrils. This latter characteristic had caused the prisoners to refer to him as Flapnose. The other guards were Flatass, Thinlips, Stripes, and Shifty.
That evening at seven o’clock Snick and Cabtab, escorted by Thinlips and Stripes, entered Duncan’s room. When the guards left, Duncan said, “Tonight we’re watching the old classic, The Martian Rebellion.” His back was to the eastern wall screens, and the wall strips above the long window on the west would not observe the rapid winking of his right eye. The padre’s huge body, placed between Duncan and the western strips, blocked out the eye.
Snick and Cabtab did not wink back because the wall screens would have detected that. But Snick said, “OK,” and the padre said, “Great! I love it. Can’t see it too many times for me, though I abhor the violence in it.”
“Sure you do,” Snick said.
Duncan did not remember the code number for the movie, so he called up a list on the screen, stopped the rollup when the title appeared, and chose the code number of the first remake. Then he took the glass of Tennessee mash, Wild Radical, that Snick had poured for him and sat down between her and Cab-tab. Bowls of popcorn, cheese curls, and various dips and crackers were on the coffee table before them.
Duncan sipped the liquor, bit into a cracker smeared with green pepper—guacamole dip, and said, “There’s one scene I really enjoy in this.”
“Which is?” Snick said.
“Oh, I’ll let you guess, and you tell me what you think it is when the movie’s over. On second thought, why don’t I tell you when it happens.”
As the opening music, Mulligan Tchakula’s classic “Saint Francis Kisses His Ass Goodbye” swelled and the credits were flashing in orange letters in English and Loglan, Duncan thought about when he had first seen the movie. He had been eleven obyears old, and it had put an unsmoothable dent in his memory. Whose memory? Never mind that now. This remake had been first issued 245 obyears ago, the obyear he was born. The revolt on Mars on which the movie was very loosely based had taken place forty obyears before he was born. Jerry Pao Nel, a captain in the Mars colony organics, and if the movie was to be believed, a raving, half-mad antisocial and fascist, had led an abortive revolution to free the colony from the Earth government and set up Nel’s idea of a free society. The rebellion had taken a surprisingly long time to suppress, mainly because most of the colonists supported Nel and Earth had no military forces. In the end, Nel had managed to escape in a ship bound for an unknown destination, one of the stars supposed to have planets that might be inhabitable by Terrestrials. His cryogenically frozen body was undoubtedly still in the ship; it would be a thousand more obyears before it would come within landing range of any planet.
The movie, however, showed Nel dying during a fierce battle in the mazes below Syrtis Major. The three heroes, Moses Howard Kugl, Curleigh Estarculo Lu-Dan, and Lawrence Amir Bulbul, were staunch supporters of the Earth government, rebels against the rebels. Though they had actually played a small but vital part in the war against the uprising, the movie depicted them as having defeated the revolution with very little help from others. Nor did the movie mention that, after the war, the three had been convicted of large-scale data-bank embezzlement and chicanery and had been sentenced to rehabilitation centers for ten obyears. On the other hand, the writers of this version had a sense of humor and had shown the trio as the bumbling and accident-prone but very lucky clowns they had been in real life.
Duncan enjoyed seeing The Martian Rebellion again—it had been ten subyears or seventy obyears since he had last seen it. His pleasure was diluted somewhat by anxiety. He was afraid that Snick and Cabtab would not comprehend why he had stressed the one scene. Still, they had caught on quickly that there was something about it that he could not say openly. At least, he hoped that they had.
A few seconds before it was to appear on the wall screen, he squeezed their hands. “Watch this. You’ll really enjoy it and perhaps profit from it.”
Snick said, “Oh, I’ve seen it before.”
Cabtab boomed, “I have, too, as I said. But it’s a little unbelievable, you know. If everything had not gone just right, those three bums would have been killed. It could only happen once in a thousand times, not very good odds. However, they had to try it.”
“Exactly,” Duncan said. “They had to try it. They would not have gotten another chance at a situation like that.”
“Yes,” Snick said. “What if Nel had not entered their cell to interrogate them? They could have done nothing. They would have been executed, that would’ve been the end of them and maybe of the possibility of victory for Earth.”
“But Nel did,” D
uncan said. “That made the difference.”
At the same time the prisoners were being filmed, their voices were being frequency-analyzed. If these revealed any unaccountable excitement, any undue stress, the phrases associated with them would flash orange on the CRT. That would alert the monitors, and they would rerun the phrases for study. Duncan was hoping that the monitors would attribute any stress patterns to the movie itself. Since it was about a rebellion and subversive organizations, it would, of course, excite the three viewers.
When the scene was halfway through, Duncan squeezed the hands of his compatriots again.
“See what I mean?” he said.
Snick and Cabtab nodded.
28
Duncan had been in the apartment for ten consecutive days. The sessions with Carebara, now held two and sometimes three times a day, lasting from one to two hours each, had yielded nothing desirable. That is, they were unfruitful if Carebara was to be believed. It was possible that he was holding back information from his subject but reporting some progress to Ruggedo. However, Cabtab and Snick could see nothing but failure during their attendance. They were not always present, and Carebara could be censoring parts of the tapes taken during their absence. They did tell Duncan that the professor was beginning to use drugs more often. These were always administered, usually by syringe or by daubing liquids on his skin, after Duncan had become unconscious. He would not have needed their testimony to know that Carebara was experimenting on him with chemicals. His headaches after the sessions were more numerous and stronger, and he was quite often nauseated to the point of vomiting. Also, two days ago, a red rash with large watery blisters covering his legs, groin, and buttocks had appeared.
“Why don’t you give up before you kill me?” Duncan said to Carebara.
“Kill or cure,” the professor said cheerily.
Duncan yelled and shot his fist out. It caught the end of Carebara’s pointed chin; Carebara staggered back and fell heavily on his back.
Duncan, swearing, his face red, picked up the open bag of medical tools and drugs and whirled the bag around by one end, syringe, bottles, cans, a stethoscope, and a box of gauzes flying out in every direction. Cabtab and Snick sat motionless, staring. His sudden rage had caught them as much by surprise as it had Carebara or, for that matter, Duncan himself. Duncan recovered quickly, though breathing heavily, and sat down on the main sofa. As he had expected, the door opened a few seconds later. Flapnose, Thinlips, and Stripes, each holding a proton gun, came in. These were, as always, set at stun power, though what was slightly stunning for one person might be heavily stunning for another. And a light charge hitting a skull might inflict permanent brain injury.
Duncan held his hands up in a gesture of placation. “You saw it,” he said. “He provoked me, made me angry. I lost control for a moment. Under the circumstances, that’s understandable.”
“Shut up!” Flapnose said. He motioned with the weapon, and Stripes, a big woman with a blonde page-boy cut, knelt by Carebara. After holstering the gun, she opened one of the professor’s eyelids, looked at the pupil, and then felt his wrist-pulse. Carebara groaned, muttered something, and tried to sit up. She pushed him back down, saying, “Take it easy, Citizen.”
Though Carebara protested that he could get up and walk, Flapnose insisted that he lie still. The guard used the wall screen to summon a man and a woman. Duncan noticed that Flapnose did not use their names. The woman was the one who had come unexpectedly from the kitchen into the hallway. Duncan had never seen the man before. He supposed that he was one of the servants. The man unfolded a stretcher, and he and the woman rolled Carebara onto it, picked it up, and bore him out of the room. Probably, Duncan thought, to take him to the hospital room he had surmised was in the complex.
Flapnose, scowling, nostrils wriggling like a rabbit’s, said, “There’ll be no more temper explosions, Beewolf. And from now on during the sessions one or more guards will always be stationed here.”
…
“I didn’t try to kill him!” Duncan said.
Flapnose did not reply. He ordered the other two to collect the objects spilled from the bag. Duncan was disappointed. He had kicked the can of TM spray under the sofa, but Stripes found it. Then the three left the room.
The guard named Flatass, Duncan thought, would be in the monitor room. There would always be at least one there. If that one considered that a situation had gotten out of control by the guards, he would call in help. Just how long it would take more armed PUPA to get to this place, Duncan did not know. That depended upon how close they lived to this area and also on the time of the call. If it occurred near midnight, very few, if any, would be able to come. He doubted that the guards were worried about this.
Duncan was worried. Not about whom the guards could get to help them but about his own lack of progress in the sessions. If Ruggedo became convinced that he, Duncan, would never be able to evoke the techniques for lying under the TM, Ruggedo would probably do away with him. Kill or stone him, Cabtab, and Snick. Somehow, he had to make the PUPA chief believe that keeping Duncan was going to be profitable.
So I don’t remember how I made a new persona? Duncan thought. What’s to stop me from recreating? Am I not the same imaginative, inventive, and uniquely endowed person as the others? The same in those senses, anyway. Why not try to rediscover the techniques? No. Rediscover was the wrong description. He could not dig into himself like some archaeologist of the psyche. He would be like the New Stone Age man who suddenly has a vision of growing plants and domesticating animals. He would invent the Agricultural Revolution of the psyche. Reinvent it.
Easier said than done. Nevertheless, for two days, when undisturbed, and when he should have been sleeping, he worked on the formation of a new persona. Since this was to have a short life and be born for one purpose only, to fool the inquisitor, he did not conceive the ID as a fully rounded man with a long history. It was not to be put into any data bank. It was designed only to lie.
…
Lying on the big sofa, his eyes closed, the screens cut off, everything outside his skin shut out, walled off, he floated in a darkness that extended to the boundaries, if there were any, of the universe. He was alone in the void, the space that lacked planets and stars and microscopic dust, lacked all matter, hence was not really a space since space could not exist without matter. Even his presence did not affect that universe, that nothing which had had boundaries but now extended into infinity. An infinity that was not infinity because infinity had to have a starting point even if it had no end. He, his presence but not himself, had no mass to bend, however insignificantly, space. He was just an image reflected by a no-mirror.
That image would be named Jefferson Cervantes Caird, but it would not be identical with the man about whom Duncan remembered very little. Unless, by coincidence, he chose some elements of character that were those of Caird number one. Though it would have helped Duncan greatly in his effort to remember the techniques for lying, he had been denied access to the ID data-bank file on all of the first seven personae. What little he knew of them had come from Snick and the tapes of the sessions. Carebara, no doubt, had consulted these files, but he would be mainly interested in whether or not Duncan recalled the techniques. Most probably, he was not going to question Duncan about his memory of the intimate details of Caird’s life. Even if he did, Duncan could reply that he remembered only the techniques.
That may be true, Duncan thought. How do I know that I am creating these? Perhaps there is a leak from Caird, and I am displaying a mnemonic tape in my mind? Or one of my minds? That he had not the slightest doubt that what he was doing would work made this a strong possibility. His only lack of confidence was in the ability of anyone else to use his techniques. Their formation seemed to him to be ridiculously easy. That, however, was because he was unique. A chance complex of genetic traits, never to be duplicated, combined with a unique family environment, made him the only one who could use his peculiar abilities.
/> Perhaps not. All he could do for now was to make something that would give Carebara and Ruggedo hope that he would be useful.
Now, toward the image of Caird II and yet at the same time away shot a bright blue dot in the dark abyss. No direction in this nonspace. Going anywhere in this medium—even non-space was a medium—meant going everywhere. Now the blue speck swelled and filled all that Duncan could see and not see. It was a whirling filament twisted along its longitudinal axis, and its steady light had become a swiftly flashing blue. It wrapped Caird II inside it though Duncan could still dimly see him. Then it contracted, bringing the nonspace with it so that Caird II, glowing blue, was the only object that Duncan could see or even think about. How he was able to just think about it, and yet not think about what he was supposed not to be thinking about, he did not know.
The filament that had merged with Caird II had joined with, become one with, every cell of the body of Caird II. Seventy-five trillion cells now contained the same knowledge, had become identical data banks, insofar as knowing the techniques for lying were concerned. Within the nucleus of each whirled a blue filament that could not be detected by any chemical or electronic means. Or so it seemed to Duncan, and if the process worked, what difference if it could not be detected scientifically?
The blue filament held within its field all that Duncan needed to become Caird II.
Now the figure of Caird began rotating like the propeller of an ancient airplane, slowly, then faster, faster, faster, until it was solid glowing blue. And, as if an electromagnetic field holding it had been switched off, it shot forward. Also backward, sideways in three directions, and inward and outward.
It was gone. Wherever all those other images had sped to, one had entered Duncan and was now dormant within him. But it could be raised, and Carebara would think that he had finally evoked Caird I.
He slept on the sofa until the buzz signaling the turning of the supper panel reeled him awake. The professor appeared forty-five minutes later accompanied by two guards. He did not explain why Snick and Cabtab were not present. Nor did he refer to Duncan’s striking him. Duncan considered apologizing but rejected the idea. He had been justifiably angry, and though the law forbade physical violence in any situation except self-defense, Duncan felt that Carebara had gotten off easy.