Alice said softly, "It is terribly brutal, Richard."
"Now," Burton said, "I want you to take out your weapons and drop them on the floor. Do it one by one and do it slowly. You, Nur, you be the first."
The knives and pistols clattered onto the gray metal. When they were all disarmed, Burton told them to step back while Alice picked up the weapons. In a short while there was a pile of them against the wall behind him.
"Keep your hands on your heads."
Most of their faces showed anger, indignation, or hurt puzzlement. The faces of Ah Qaaq and Gilgamesh were iron masks.
"Come to me, Gilgamesh," Burton said. "When you're five feet from me, stop. Then turn around."
The Sumerian walked slowly toward him. Now he was glaring. He said, "If you strike me, Burton, you will have made an enemy forever. I was once the king of Uruk, and I am the descendant of gods! No one lays a hand on me without punishment! I will kill you!"
"I am indeed sorry to have to do this," Burton said. "But surely you can see that the fate of the world is the issue. If we were in each other's shoes, I would not blame you for what you were doing to me. I'd resent it, yes, but I'd understand it!"
"After you've found I'm innocent, you would do well to kill me! If you don't, I'll kill you! I speak the truth!"
"We'll see."
Burton planned, if the Sumerian was not X, to install a posthypnotic command that Gilgamesh forgive him when he came out of the trance. He would have ordered him to forget the injury, but the others would no doubt remind him of it.
"Place your hands on the back of your neck," Burton said. "Then turn around. Don't worry about being hurt too much. I know precisely just how much force I'll need. You won't be unconscious for more than a few seconds."
Burton reversed the pistol and lifted it by its butt. Gilgamesh, bellowing, "No!" whirled, his arms flying out from his neck, and his hand struck the pistol and tore it from Burton's grip-Alice should have fired then. Instead, she tried to beat the Sumerian on the back with her pistol barrel. Burton was very strong, but he went down under the herculean power of Gilgamesh and then was lifted up. He struck Gilgamesh in the face, making his nose bleed and bruising the skin. The Sumerian lifted him above his head and threw him against the wall. Stunned, Burton dropped to the floor.
The others were shouting and screaming, and Alice was yelling. But she managed to bring the butt of her weapon, now reversed, down on the head of Gilgamesh. He swayed, then began to crumple.
Ah Qaaq, swift despite his fat, ran by Alice, snatching the pistol from her hand, and continued toward the end of the corridor.
Though dazed, Burton struggled to get up, shouting, "Get him! Get him! He's the Ethical! X! X!"
His legs felt as if they were balloons out of which the air was whistling. He slid back down against the wall.
The Mayan – no, no Mayan he – slammed his palm against the wall on his left. Immediately, the door at the end of the corridor slid into a recess in the wall.
Burton tried to note the exact location of the area that X had struck. The blow had undoubtedly activated machinery behind the wall. And since it opened the door, it also was inhibited from releasing whatever it was that had felled the Egyptians.
Nur, a small skinny dark flash, scooped up a pistol as he ran by the pile. Then he stopped, and he lifted the heavy weapon in both hands. The gun boomed. The projectile struck the side of the door as X went around it. Pieces of plastic flew through the exit and against the wall opposite. X fell, though only his black-clothed legs showed for a moment. Then they were gone.
Nur ran after him but stopped at the doorway. He leaned out cautiously, and at once jerked his head back. The bullet fired by X smashed itself against the wall just outside the door. Nur got down on his knees and looked around the exit again. Another boom. Nur seemed uninjured.
By then the others had picked up their weapons and were running toward the doorway.
Though regrets were useless, Burton regretted that he had not chosen Ah Qaaq first for hypnotism.
He called to Alice, who was bending over Gilgamesh, to help him up. Weeping she came to him and pulled up on his wrists. His head was clearing, and his legs seemed steadier. He'd be all right in another minute.
He called, "Frigate! Tai-Peng! Turpin! Get Gilgamesh out of here! Everybody else! Out! Out before he closes the door!"
Nur yelled, "He's gone now!"
The three men came running, and they picked the Sumerian's heavy body and bore it toward the doorway. Burton leaned on Alice, his arm around her neck, and they followed the others. By the time he got to the exit, he felt recovered enough to tell Alice that he could go it by himself.
Turpin placed his grail in the doorway so the door couldn't be fully closed. Just as Alice and Burton stepped into the corridor, the door shot back out of its recess, slammed into the grail, and stopped.
Nur indicated the blood on the floor by the doorway and the red spots farther along.
"The bullet smashed against the wall, but some of the fragments got him."
The corridor ran both ways as far as they could see. It was illuminated by the shadowless light and was forty feet wide and fifty high by eye estimate. It gently curved to follow the roundness of the exterior. Burton wondered what was between the outer wall of the corridor and the outer wall of the tower. Probably, some of it was empty, but other spaces might contain machinery of some sort or storage facilities. At irregular intervals, at his eye level, the walls held bas-relief letters or symbols some of which superficially resembled runes and others Hindustani characters.
Burton left a bullet by the wall to mark the entrance if the door should somehow close.
Shortly after the bloodstains ceased, the trackers came across a bay in the center of which was a circular hole about a hundred feet across. Burton stood on the edge and looked down. Lights streamed out along the black shaft from many levels, other bays or rooms. He didn't know how deep the shaft went, but he guessed that it was miles. When he got down on his knees, his hands gripping the edge, and looked up, he saw the same thing. However, the shaft could go up no more than a mile, the height of the tower from sea level.
By then Gilgamesh was recovering. He sat on the floor holding his head and groaning. After a minute, he looked up.
"What happened?"
Burton told him. The Sumerian moaned, then said, "And you didn't strike me? It was the woman?"
"Yes, I apologize, if it will do any good. But I had to know."
"She was only fighting to save her man. And since you did not hit me, there is no insult. Though there is plenty of injury."
"I think you'll be all right," Burton said.
He forebore to say that he had hit Gilgamesh in the face. Truth could be sacrificed in this situation. He'd gone through his life making enemies because he didn't care if he did and even got a certain satisfaction from it. But during the past twenty years he'd seen that he was behaving irrationally in this respect. Nur, the Sufi, had taught him that, though not directly. Burton had learned while listening to Nur's conversations with his disciple Frigate.
"I think," Burton said, "that X took a lift of some sort. I don't see any, though. Nor do I see any controls to bring one up or down to here."
"Maybe that's because there isn't any cage," Frigate said.
Burton stared at him.
Frigate took a plastic bullet out of the bag that hung from his belt. He threw it twenty feet into the emptiness. It stopped as if it were in jelly at the level of the floor.
"Well, I'll be damned! I didn't think it was so, but it is!"
"What is?"
"There's some kind of field in the shaft. So . . . how do you go where you want to? Maybe the field moves you according to a codeword."
"That is good thinking," Nur said.
"Thank you, master. Only . . . if one person wants to go down at the same time another wants to go up . . .? Maybe the field can do both simultaneously."
If the shafts – there mu
st be others – were the only way to get from one floor to another, they were trapped. All the Ethical had to do was to let them starve.
Burton became angry. All his life he'd felt caged and he had broken out of some of the cages, though the big ones had restrained him. Now he was on the verge of solving this great mystery, and he was trapped again. This one, he might not escape from.
He stepped out into openness, putting one foot down slowly until he felt resistance. When he'd determined that his weight was going to be held, he moved entirely into the shaft. He was near panic; anybody unfamiliar with the setup would be. But here he was, standing on nothing, apparently, and an abyss below him.
He stopped, picked up the bullet, and threw it to Frigate.
"Now what?" Nur said.
Burton looked up and then down.
"I don't know. It's not just like being in air only. There's a slight resistance to my movements. I don't have any trouble breathing, however."
Since it made him more than just uneasy to stand there, he walked back to the solid floor.
"It's not like standing on something hard. There is a slight give to my weight."
They were silent for a while. Burton finally said, "We might as well go on."
46
* * *
They came to another bay marked by characters in bas-relief and containing a lift-shaft. Burton looked up and down this, hoping that he might see something to help them. It was as empty as the other.
When they had left this, Frigate said, "I wonder if Piscator is still alive? If only he'd come by . . ."
"If only!" Burton said. "We can't live by if only, even if you do most of the time."
Frigate looked hurt.
Nur said, "Piscator, as I understand it, was a Sufi. That may explain why he got through the gateway on top of the tower. From what I've heard, I'd venture that there's sort of force, analogous to an electromagnetic field, perhaps, that prevents those who haven't attained a certain ethical level from entering."
"He must have been different from most Sufis I've seen, yourself excepted," Burton said. "Those I knew in Egypt were rogues."
"There are true Sufis and false Sufis," Nur said, paying no attention to the sneer in Burton's voice. "Anyway, I suspect that the wathan reflects the ethical or spiritual development of the individuals and what it shows would make the repulsion field admit or deny entrance to a person."
"Then how would X get in that way? He's obviously not as ethically developed as the others."
"You don't know that," Nur said. "If what he says about the other Ethicals is true . . ."
He stopped talking for a moment. Then he said, "If the gateway field admits only the highly ethical, then X made his secret room to avoid that field. But he must have done it when the tower was built, must have planned it before then. So that even then he knew he wouldn't be admitted into the gateway."
"No," Burton said. "The others would have been able to see his wathan. If they did, they'd know that he had degenerated, changed, anyway. And they'd have known that he was the renegade."
Frigate said, "Maybe the reason his wathan looked okay was that he had some device to distort it from its natural appearance. I mean . . . from the appearance it would have had if he hadn't used some kind of distorter. That way, he'd not only have passed as normal among his fellows, he'd have fooled the gateway field."
"That is possible," Nur said. "But wouldn't his colleagues know about distorters?"
"Not if they'd never seen or heard of one. It may have been X's invention."
Burton said, "And he had his hideaway so that he could leave the tower without anybody else knowing it."
"That implies that there are no radar devices on the tower," Frigate said.
"Well?" Burton said. "If there had been, they would've detected the first and second expeditions when they came down the ledge. The radar might also have spotted the cave, though I suppose its operators wouldn't have thought anything about it if it had been noted. No, there was no radar scanning the sea and the mountains. Why should there be? The Ethicals didn't believe that anybody would get that far."
Nur said, "We all have wathans, if what the Council of Twelve told you was true. You saw theirs. What I don't understand is why they couldn't have tracked you down long before they did. Surely, a photograph of your wathan was in the records of that giant computer Spruce mentioned. I would suppose that everybody's was."
"Perhaps X arranged it so that the record in the computer wasn't a true image of my wathan," Burton said. "Perhaps that was why the agent Agneau was carrying a photograph of my physical person."
"I think that the Ethicals must have scanner satellites up there," Frigate said. "Maybe these could locate your wathan. But they couldn't find it because your wathan was distorted."
"Hmm," Nur said. "I wonder if distorting the wathan also results in distorting its owner's psyche?"
Burton said, "You may remember de Marbot's report of Clemens' analysis of the connection between the wathan or ka or soul, call it what you will, and the body? The conclusion was that the wathan is the essence of the person. Otherwise, it is irrelevant. It does no good to reattach the wathan to a duplicated body because the duplicate isn't the same as the original. Similar to the nth degree, yes, but not the same. If the wathan or soul is the persona, the seat of self-consciousness, then the physical brain is not self-aware. Without the wathan, the human body would have intelligence but no self-awareness. No concept of I. The wathan uses the physical as a man uses a horse or an automobile.
"Perhaps that comparison isn't correct. The wathan-body combination is more like a centaur. A melding. Both the man-part and the horse-part need each other for perfect functioning. One without the other is useless. It may be that the wathan itself needs a body to become self-conscious. Certainly, the Ethicals said that the undeveloped wathan wanders in some sort of space when it's loosed by the body's death. And then the wathan is not just unaware of its own self but of anything. It's unconscious.
"Yet, according to our theory, the body generates the wathan. How, I don't know, don't even have a hypothesis. But without the body, a wathan can't come into existence. There are embryo wathans in the body embryos, and infant wathans in the infant body. Like the body, the wathan grows into adulthood.
"However, there are two stages of adulthood. Let's call the later stage superwathanhood. If a wathan doesn't attain a certain ethical or spiritual level, it's destined to wander forever after the body's death, unaware of itself.
"Unless, as happened here, a duplicate body is made and by some affinity the wathan reattaches itself to the duplicate body. This duplicate body would be intelligent but would have no concept of I. The wathan attached to it would have the self-awareness. But it couldn't have it until it interacted with the body.
"Without wathans, humans would have evolved from apes, would have had language, would have had technology and science, but no religion, yet would not have had any more knowledge of the self than an ant."
Frigate said, "What kind of language would that be? I mean, try to imagine a language in which no pronouns for I and me exist. And probably no you or yours either. To tell the truth, I don't think they'd develop language. Not as we know it, anyway. They'd just be highly intelligent animals. Living machines which would not depend upon instinct as much as animals do."
"We can talk about that some other time."
"Yeah, but what about the chimpanzees?"
"They must have had a rudimentary wathan which had a low-level consciousness of their I. However, it was never proved that apes did have language or self-awareness.
"The wathan itself can't develop self-awareness unless it has a body. If the body has a stunted brain, then the wathan is stunted. Hence, it can aftain only to a certain low ethical level."
"No!" Frigate said. "You're confusing intelligence with morality. You and I have known too many people with a high intelligence and low ethical development and vice versa to believe that a high I.Q. is a necessa
ry accompaniment to a high moral quotient."
"Yaas, but you forget about the will."
They came to another bay. Burton looked along the shaft. "Nothing here."
They walked on while Burton resumed the role of Socrates.
"The will. We have to assume that it's not entirely free. It's affected by events outside the body, its exterior environment, and by internal events, the inside environment. Injuries physical or mental, diseases, chemical changes, and so forth, can change a person's will. A maniac may have been a good person before a disease or injury made him into a torturer and killer. Psychological or chemical factors may make multiple personalities or a psychic cripple or monster.
"I suggest that the wathan is so closely connected with the body that it reflects the body's mental changes. And a wathan attached to an idiot or imbecile is itself idiotic or imbecilic.
"That is why the Bthicals have resurrected idiots and imbeciles elsewhere – if our speculations are correct – so that these may get special treatment. Through the medical science of the Ethicals, the retarded are enabled to have fully developed brains. Hence, they also have highly developed wathans with a full potentiality for a choice between good and evil."
"And," Nur said, "the opportunity to become super-wathans and so reunited with God. I've been listening carefully to you, Burton. I don't agree with much of what you've said. One implication is that God doesn't care about His souls. He wouldn't allow them to float around as unconscious things. He has made provision for all of them."
"Perhaps God – if there is one – doesn't care," Burton said. "There is no evidence whatsoever that He does.
"Anyway, I argue that the human being without a wathan has no free will. That is, the ability to make choices between or among moral alternatives. To surpass the demands of body and environment and personal inclination. To lift one's self, as it were, by the self's bootstraps. Only the wathan has the free will and the self-awareness. But I admit that it has to express these through the vehicle of the body. And I admit that the wathan closely interacts with and is affected by the body.
R.W. IV - The Magic Labyrinth Page 37