by Ian Wallace
“Seriously, Chloris, how?”
“Sir, apparently they forgot to withdraw what they inserted in me. And I’ve always used normal space fuel; this metaspace juice is heady stuff.”
“Are you in danger of structural collapse?”
“I experience no hazard indications, but at this acceleration, such indication might come simultaneously with collapse. My inertial shield is incredibly holding, but enough G’s are coming through to slow my reaction time.”
“Then reduce acceleration. Your velocity is high enough now; it needn’t increase rapidly.”
“Negative, sir.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Negative the command. I do not know the outward velocity of the Castel. At merely my present velocity, she could be years away.”
“If she is years away, by the Heisenberg principle her position is randomized and you have astronomically low probability of finding her anyhow. Repeat: reduce acceleration.”
Pause. Then: “Affirmative. But only just a little.”
“If you haven’t collapsed yet, perhaps just a little is enough. Good; you are drifting back away from me; you have done it already. Hold a moment while I stabilize . . . Now. Chloris . . . ”
“Croyd?”
“If you find the Castel, what will you do?”
“I will seek means of turning her downward. I will then seek means of bringing her under control.”
“You will seek means? You have not thought of means?”
Hesitation. Then: “No, sir.” It would be a minnow trying to influence Leviathan.
Croyd considered. He queried, “Why would you not berth in her hull and seek communication with the admiral as a first step?”
“The admiral may be unable to communicate, and in any case, I might be phantom-swarmed and rendered helpless.”
In the brain, involuntarily Croyd nodded. Your IQ stays up there.”
“Only because my deceleration relief is indescribable.”
“Chloris . . . ”
“Croyd?”
“I think of only one way to turn her around without internal cooperation, and maybe, even with internal cooperation.”
Pause. Then: “I know. That has crossed my . . . well, my brain.”
“Your mind.”
“Thank you.”
“Are we speaking of the same thing, Chloris?”
“The repulsor ploy.”
“Exactly.”
“Affirmative, I think.”
“Chloris . . . ”
“Croyd?”
“That would be a damned ironical ploy. Should you fail, you could return—but only you. Should you succeed, they could return—but only they.”
“That’s . . . how I figured it.”
Between them, for the first time, there was a wordless emotive mental passage. Then both of them shut it off.
Croyd said, dry, “You have freedom to play it as you see it. If you return alone, I will count it as gain.”
Chloris responded, dry, “I will play it as I see it.”
“If you find the Castel, reopen signals with me immediately. If I can be there, I want to be there.”
“Affirmative. Sir . . . ”
“My name is Croyd,”
“Croyd . . . ”
“Chloris?”
“I feel human, sort of.”
“You are human.”
“How so?”
Croyd paraphrased a passage from the Code of the Interplanetary Union: “A human is one having sufficient neural complexity to use symbolic language in order to sublimate survival and reproductive interests in more complex levels of aesthetic development, individual or social, but without necessarily denying the more fundamental levels of living.”
“Only the neural-complexity aspect fits me, Croyd. As for survival, I define it as survival until I will have completed a defined mission, which in this case is the turning of the Castel.”
“That is a sublimation of survival interest.”
“But I have no reproductive interest.”
“But you wish to keep the crew of the Castel alive. That wish counts as sublimation of what would otherwise be reproductive interest.”
“But I deny the more fundamental levels of living.”
“You pay no attention to the continuing efficiency of your own reonics?”
Pause. Then, small: “I do not understand aesthetic development.”
“Is that why you are finding the chase of the Castel boring?”
“It is not boring.”
Soft: “And am I in your picture, a little?”
Pause. Then, stoic-small: “I find it a value to work with you for this while.”
He told her decisively, “You are human. I pray that some god may bless you and your mission.”
Long pause. Then, querulous: ‘‘Could it be maybe a goddess?”
He responded harsh: “Too long you have known Tannen. Chloris, I have to go. Cheers.”
Promptly, and with odd exuberance: “Cheers, Croyd! Out.”
He said quietly, “Cheers, Chloris. Out.”
Her image rheostated out. Gradually Croyd became aware again of Roland; and slowly he turned again to Roland.
CHILDE ROLAND quietly told Croyd, “If I thought you were inclined toward feudal customs, I would kneel before you and clasp your mighty testicles and swear fealty.”
Croyd, barely returning into self-orientation, gazed semistuporously at Roland. “Bypassing the rite you cite, I do not quite see why. Still, I have no special powers; I used your brain with my own minded brain, that is all.”
“And tremendously do I admire your achievement. But I would not swear fealty to an achievement. I would, however, right gladly swear fealty to your conduct of the epochal conversation between yourself and the scouter Chloris.”
Now Croyd’s awareness was all back. He demanded, “How would you have dealt with Chloris, Roland?”
“If you had not dealt with her as I would have dealt with her, why would I wish to swear fealty to you?”
“Then do you swear fealty to yourself. And I will serve you, and put my hands between your thighs if you think it necessary for the swearing, until you have put all things to rights and got me and mine safe out of here.”
Slowly Roland shook his long-haired, bearded young head. “I may have spoken too short. I would have dealt as you with Chloris if I had the imagination. But you thought of much that is beyond me, although, having listened, I agree. And this is my fundamental point, Croyd. I am a number-two leader, a solid and effective and loyal brain administrator. But I need a liege with imagination. Dzendzel has the imagination, but he deploys it for personal gain. You have even more imagination, and you deploy it on chivalric principles just on the spur of the instant and without pausing to think about it. Therefore it is you who should be my liege—our liege—and not Dzendzel.
“Let me put it baldly, Croyd. This metagalaxy exists and grows, and we have gradually been evolved by its energy mechanics, and finally we are beginning to realize ourselves as a brain for this metagalaxy that sorely needs a brain. We should be the consciousness of the metagalaxy; we should be its god. Unfortunately, we are only brain dynamics; even with me as prime coordinator, we are only brain dynamics. Your Aristotle named five human senses; he then added a sixth sense which coordinates the other five; but he insisted that finally a mind was required to use the sixth sense and accordingly direct a life. Think of me as our brain’s sixth sense: I need a liege mind, Croyd. And Dzendzel has been my liege mind. But I do not want him anymore. I want you."
Having assimilated the might of this proposition, Croyd inquired, “If I were the mind of the metagalaxy, what would I be doing?”
“That would be for you to decide, being its mind. I have made an offer. It is your problem, and I should add that if you should accept my offer, there would be hazards from Dzendzel. It is a fundamental feudal principle that if one is to have, one must conquer and hold.”
Silence.
“Forgive me.”
“Forgiven.”
“Although I often wish I could afford to be indecisive.”
“I understand. So do I.”
Silence.
Croyd said, low, “If I were to take command of the metagalaxy, Plato would applaud, recognizing me as the demiurge, confident that I would have to submit anyway to his eternal ideas. On the other hand, Dewey would make dark mutterings, until, perhaps, he would see that I as the mind would not be of the ivory-tower brain alone; instead, every galaxy in the metagalaxy would be contributing to the mind and influencing the mind in the process of being governed by the mind. If that were the case, perhaps there would be no need for intergalactic treaties; and in the special case of Dari, perhaps I could revivify her in her old genre with a vital new synthesis based on brain-analyzed reality rather than on the makeshift perception methods of our alien team fishily scrutinizing the dead relics of Dari and trying therefore to reconstruct the vitality of Dari.”
Roland was attentive.
Almost whispered Croyd, “If this is to be my metagalaxy, show her to me.”
Roland said, low, “This is your brain; use her. Take your metagalaxy, and decide whether you wish to hold her.”
He was disembodied in a black star-punctuated cosmos.
The star points were all around him, outside and beyond him, semisurrounding him like a night sky watched clear from an atmosphereless planet. He tried to turn, and he seemed to be turning; but the panorastra turned with him, there was no change.
They were not individual close-clustered stars, but wide-apart galaxies.
At first he was bewildered at his understanding that these galaxies were outside and beyond him; for he was dwelling on the brain cortex of the metagalactic skin which enclosed the galaxies as a convoluted walnut shell encloses its kernel; and from this brain he must be looking inward, for outside the brain there was only void. But then comprehension came. If you were a box containing a ball, and with eyes everywhere on your inner surface you were gazing at the ball, seeing simultaneously all around the ball with your multinocular vision, the ball would appear to be all around you outside, containing you. And if you were half a box, the semicontained ball’s convex hemisphere that you could see would again seem outside you, concave, semicontaining you. Probably human vision works like that in the brain: the diencephalon sucking in external impressions from the eyes and registering them in negative, with convex surfaces concaved and vice versa; then the brain telencephalically reprojecting the scene, and the mind grasping it in positive. Croyd, looking within what was in effect his own enclosing metagalactic brain rind, wherein the objects originally dwelt instead of being reversed representations of what was outside, was automatically projecting their images as though they were outside.
If his theory were right, convexities should be appearing as concavities, and vice versa. For instance, Sol Galaxy—to normal extragalactic vision a pancake with a central bulge—should now appear to Croyd as a doughnut with bulging periphery and central hole. He consulted the brain for indexical data: it pointed him instantly to Sol Galaxy, hinterminding him with a snide little footnote: Named Sol Galaxy by its parochially ethnocentric Erth-based master race, although Sol, the star of Erth, is a mediocre G-type star out near the galactic periphery. His smile at the scholarly stab waned into reflectiveness as he recognized that, without special powers and without the brain, he could unaided have located Sol Galaxy or any other major galaxy by mentally revising viewpoint coordinates.
Now he coaxed the brain’s visual complex; swiftly it zoomed him in on Sol Galaxy, which was, as predicted, a doughnut. (He was convinced now that the basis of this brain’s sensorium was I-rays.) To this brain’s optic cortex he now issued a sharp corrective command: Invert all percepts! The doughnut instantly flipped into a star-coruscating pancake with central bulge; and he was ready to nose in and find Erth.
Not wholly convinced that he was God, he had nevertheless realistically to recognize that with this brain he was ready to do a god’s job.
Perhaps, whether he wanted to do a god’s job or not, he should.
Assuring himself that he did not want to do a god’s job, purely for the sake of understanding the prospect he turned his back on Erth to nose in on the S galaxy Djinn and the Eden planet Dari.
What sharply brought him out of it somewhat later—just as he had pinpointed the eruption of piracy and was about to attempt a forward time tracing to now—was a delicate unrest in his control, a subtle sense that the brain was not wholly attentive to him-as-mind but was also beginning to attend to some other mind.
On the instant when he recognized the meaning of this sense, he shut off the metagalaxy and whirled in his own Croyd person to survey the interior of Roland’s mind room.
Only, it was not Roland’s mind room. Inattentive to himself, engrossed in his metagalaxy, he had been sucked into a vaster mind room. In this room Duke Dzendzel, seated calmly on a capacious throne, held a supinely inert Greta across his lap with the small of her back on his knees and her legs dangling Croydward.
Eh, Greta it was not! on a nuance of difference in personality feel that could only be a difference in four recent years of memories.
Then it had to be Freya!
And the submissiveness of Freya struck Croyd as being unusual, apart from the unexpectedness of her presence here in the fissure. Checking about, he found Roland sitting in a chair, wholly shriveled, his glow diminished to pallor.
And in, his mind Croyd heard the duke: I thank you, Croyd, for your Croyd-Pan woman gift. I recognize that you are Croyd, not Pan, that she is Freya, not Greta; nevertheless, I have weakened your forces, and I will be invincible by the time Pan and Greta can array themselves against me. But it is unfortunate that you have traduced my Roland; he was the best of all knights. So much the worse for both of you: your mutual villainy has canceled out my boon gift, and tomorrow the brain scan will be bitter.
For Croyd, the mind voice furzed in his own creeping mental and physical paralysis.
INSTANT BY INSTANT, as Croyd and Dzendzel gazed at each other in bland challenge-counterchallenge (while Freya lay helplessly supine across the knees of Dzendzel and Roland crouched shriveled and glowless), Croyd felt the waning even of his normal human powers; Dzendzel had telepathically retaken command of Dzendzel’s cosmic brain, and with it he had reduced Roland and Freya and was now reducing Croyd to ciphers of total passivity.
Croyd’s wavering mind, though, knew with Dzendzel’s that this was Freya, not Greta. There were attitude cues, even in her inertness. Nevertheless, she had been Greta. And somehow Croyd succeeded in formulating a Greta thought for Freya, shrouding it in a private mind language that they had known in order to prevent effective Dzendzel penetration. Croyd was unable to project this thought; but perhaps Freya (beneath her overt apathy) had retained enough sensitivity to pull it in and possibly to reply in projection.
The thought was a question: Are you total yet?
Continuing to weaken, blurredly he received a reply in the same language: Not yet.
He got off one more signal: Resist as long as you can, concentrate on that, I’ll try to make a mind diversion.
But then Dzendzel, catching the point of the unintelligible interchange, jammed the signal, knifing a cruel ultimatum through the jam in plain audible words: “Give up, Croyd. Soon you will be helpless, but I will hold you conscious and heart-sensitive so you can watch with full appreciation. And then, without desensitizing you and without awaiting tomorrow, I will start the brain scan.”
Fuzzy-witted, Croyd comprehended that his only hope was a quarter of the fissure brain that Dzendzel would not have thought to control. And he issued to the brain—from this ultimately sensitive high place—a weak command: Bring me back to Roland’s place.
Dzendzel and Freya and Roland vanished.
Still Croyd was in a gray place, bu
t a somehow more circumscribed-indefinite gray place; he knew this place, it was Roland’s place.
Now partially though not wholly screened from debilitation by the duke, he struggled into semiorientation, intercepting meanwhile the duke’s angry, frustrated searching thoughts.
As a desperate emergency measure, he requested an inhibitor screen between himself and the duke’s mastermind room. The mental snarling of the duke immediately blurred. In effect, the duke with respect to his cosmic brain was now in the situation of a mind whose control over its brain is marihuana-fuzzed; but this fuzzing was purchased at a price, for the lieutenant control of the brain by Croyd was fuzzed also, only Croyd was for the instant more immediately in touch with primary processes.
His own head was progressively clearing; he needed time: the duke possessed the sophistication to diagnose the trouble in his own brain and take projective telepathic countermeasures. There was, however, a rearguard hope: the duke’s preoccupation with this problem, together with the brain fuzz, might shake Freya sufficiently loose from thrall so that she (having learned some of Croyd’s powers at a more than rudimentary level) might further harass the duke, perhaps even releasing Roland. (Questions of how Freya had got here could be deferred; he did not even trifle with them.)
He could not, however, count on a Freya renaissance. He had to act effectively for himself, with the brain, from this inferior subcontrol position. Croyd kept shaking his head in hope of clearing it, knowing that the shaking in itself would do nothing except to challenge a sharpening of mental concentration.
Came a threshold-faint signal: “Croyd . . . ”
He went alert. With all his power he called on the brain: zero on that and amplify that! Then he went totally receptive.
More clearly: “Calling Croyd. Calling Croyd. Chloris here. Chloris here. Do you read me? Over.”
He answer-thought it intensely, subvocalizing it to harden his own intensity: “Croyd here. I read you faintly but clearly. Try to amplify transmission. Over.”