Four ships, hell! Think of four living creatures, with an excellence of brain to rival your own, damned first to years to unconscious night and then, never awakening save for one uncomprehending instant, dashed in bloody splinters against an ice mountain. The wasteful callousness of it was a cold knot in Cornelius’ belly. It had to be done, no doubt, if there was to be any thinking life on Jupiter at all; but then let it be done quickly and minimally, he thought, so the next generation could be begotten by love and not by machines!
He closed the door behind him and waited for a breathless moment. Anglesey was a wheelchair and a coppery curve of helmet, facing the opposite wall. No movement, no awareness whatsoever. Good!
It would be awkward, perhaps ruinous, if Anglesey learned of this most intimate peering. But he needn’t, ever. He was blindfolded and ear-plugged by his own concentration.
Nevertheless, the psionicist moved his bulky form with care, across the room to the new esprojector. He did not much like his snooper’s role; he would not have assumed it at all if he had seen any other hope. But neither did it make him feel especially guilty. If what he suspected was true, then Anglesey was all; unawares being twisted into something not human; to spy on him might be to save him.
Gently, Cornelius activated the meters and started his tubes warming up. The oscilloscope built into Anglesey’s machine gave him the other man’s exact alpha rhythm, his basic biological clock. First you adjusted to that, then you discovered the subtler elements by feel, and when your set was fully in phase, you could probe undetected and—
Find out what was wrong. Read Anglesey’s tortured subconscious and see what there was on Jupiter that both drew and terrified him.
Five ships wrecked.
But it must be very nearly time for them to land. Maybe only five would be lost in all. Maybe ten would get through. Ten comrades for—Joe?
Cornelius sighed. He looked at the cripple, seated blind and deaf to the human world which had crippled him, and felt a pity and an anger. It wasn’t fair, none of it was.
Not even to Joe. Joe wasn’t any kind of soul-eating devil. He did not even realize, as yet, that he was Joe, that Anglesey was becoming a mere appendage. He hadn’t asked to be created, and to withdraw his human counterpart from him would be very likely to destroy him.
Somehow, there were always penalties for everybody, when men exceeded the decent limits.
Cornelius swore at himself, voicelessly. Work to do. He sat down and fitted the helmet on his own head. The carrier wave made a faint pulse, inaudible, the trembling of neurones low in his awareness. You couldn’t describe it.
Reaching up, he turned to Anglesey’s alpha. His own had a somewhat lower frequency. It was necessary to carry the signals through a heterodyning process. Still no reception . . . well, of course, he had to find the exact wave form, timbre was as basic to thought as to music. He adjusted the dials, slowly, with enormous care.
Something flashed through his consciousness, a vision of clouds rolled in a violet-red sky, a wind that galloped across horizonless immensity—he lost it. His fingers shook as he turned back.
The psibeam between Joe and Anglesey broadened. It took Cornelius into the circuit. He looked through Joe’s eyes, he stood on a hill and stared into the sky above the ice mountains, straining for sign of the first rocket; and simultaneously, he was still Jan Cornelius, blurrily seeing the meters, probing about for emotions, symbols, any key to the locked terror in Anglesey’s soul.
The terror rose up and struck him in the face.
###
Psionic detection is not a matter of passive listening in. Much as a radio receiver is necessarily also a weak transmitter, the nervous system in resonance with a source of psionic-spectrum energy is itself emitting. Normally, of course, this effect is unimportant; but when you pass the impulses, either way, through a set of heterodyning and amplifying units, with a high negative feedback—
In the early days, psionic psychotherapy vitiated itself because the amplified thoughts of one man, entering the brain of another, would combine with the latter’s own neural cycles according to the ordinary vector laws. The result was that both men felt the new beat frequencies as a nightmarish fluttering of their very thoughts. An analyst, trained into self-control, could ignore it; his patient could not, and reacted violently.
But eventually the basic human wave-timbres were measured, and psionic therapy resumed. The modern esprojector analyzed an incoming signal and shifted its characteristics over to the “listener’s” pattern. The really different pulses of the transmitting brain, those which could not possibly be mapped onto the pattern of the receiving neurones—as an exponential signal cannot very practicably be mapped onto a sinusoid—those were filtered out.
Thus compensated, the other thought could be apprehended as comfortably as one’s own. If the patient were on a psibeam circuit, a skilled operator could tune in without the patient being necessarily aware of it. The operator could neither probe the other man’s thoughts nor implant thoughts of his own.
Cornelius’ plan, an obvious one to any psionicist, had depended on this. He would receive from an unwitting Anglesey-Joe. If his theory were right, and the esman’s personality was being distorted into that of a monster—his thinking would be too alien to come through the filters. Cornelius would receive spottily or not at all. If his theory were wrong, and Anglesey was still Anglesey, he would receive only a normal human stream-of-consciousness, and could probe for other troublemaking factors.
His brain roared!
What’s happening to me?
For a moment, the interference which turned his thoughts to saw-toothed gibberish struck him down with panic. He gulped for breath, there in the Jovian wind, and his dreadful dogs sensed the alienness in him and whined. Then, recognition, remembrance, and a blaze of anger so great that it left no room for fear. Joe filled his lungs and shouted it aloud, the hillside boomed with echoes:
“Get out of my mind!”
He felt Cornelius spiral down toward unconsciousness. The overwhelming force of his own mental blow had been too much. He laughed, it was more like a snarl, and eased the pressure.
Above him, between thunderous clouds, winked the first thin descending rocket flare.
Cornelius’ mind groped back toward the light. It broke a watery surface, the man’s mouth snapped after air, and his hands reached for the dials, to turn his machine off and escape.
“Not so fast, you.” Grimly, Joe drove home a command that locked Cornelius’ muscles rigid. “I want to know the meaning of this. Hold still and let me look!” He smashed home an impulse which could be rendered, perhaps, as an incandescent question mark. Remembrance exploded in shards through the psionicist’s forebrain.
“So. That’s all there is? You thought I was afraid to come down here and be Joe, and wanted to know why? But I told you I wasn’t!”
I should have believed—whispered Cornelius.
“Well, get out of the circuit, then.” Joe continued growling it vocally. “And don’t ever come back in the control room, understand? K-tubes or no, I don’t want to see you again. And I may be a cripple, but I can still take you apart cell by cell. Now—sign off—leave me alone. The first ship will be landing in minutes.”
You, a cripple . . . you, Joe-Anglesey?
“What?” The great gray being on the hill lifted his barbaric head as if to sudden trumpets. “What do you mean?”
Don’t you understand? said the weak, dragging thought. You know how the esprojector works. You know I could have probed Anglesey’s mind in Anglesey’s brain without making enough interference to be noticed. And I could not have probed a wholly non-human mind at all, nor could it have been aware of me. The filters would not have passed such a signal. Yet you felt me in the first fractional second. It can only mean a human mind in a nonhuman brain.
You are not the half-corpse on Jupiter V any longer. You’re Joe—Joe-Anglesey.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Joe. “You�
�re right.”
He turned Anglesey off, kicked Cornelius out of his mind with a single brutal impulse, and ran down the hill to meet the spaceship.
Cornelius woke up minutes afterward. His skull felt ready to split apart. He groped for the main switch before him, clashed it down, ripped the helmet off his head, and threw it clanging on the floor. But it took a little while to gather the strength to do the same for Anglesey. The other man was not able to do anything for himself.
###
They sat outside sickbay and waited. It was a harshly lit barrenness of metal and plastic, smelling of antiseptics: down near the heart of the satellite, with miles of rock to hide the terrible face of Jupiter.
Only Viken and Cornelius were in that cramped little room. The rest of the station went about its business mechanically, filling in the time till it could learn what had happened. Beyond the door, three biotechnicians, who were also the station’s medical staff, fought with death’s angel for the thing which had been Edward Anglesey.
“Nine ships got down,” said Viken dully. “Two males, seven females. It’s enough to start a colony.”
“It would be genetically desirable to have more,” pointed out Cornelius. He kept his own voice low, in spite of its underlying cheerfulness. There was a certain awesome quality to all this.
“I still don’t understand,” said Viken.
“Oh, it’s clear enough—now. I should have guessed it before, maybe. We had all the facts, it was only that we couldn’t make the simple, obvious interpretation of them. No, we had to conjure up Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Well,” Viken’s words grated, “we have played Frankenstein, haven’t we? Ed is dying in there.”
“It depends on how you define death.” Cornelius drew hard on his cigar, needing anything that might steady him. His tone grew purposely dry of emotion:
“Look here. Consider the data. Joe, now: a creature with a brain of human capacity, but without a mind—a perfect Lockean tabula rasa, for Anglesey’s psibeam to write on. We deduced, correctly enough—if very belatedly—that when enough had been written, there would be a personality. But the question is: whose? Because, I suppose, of normal human fear of the unknown, we assumed that any personality in so alien a body had to be monstrous. Therefore it must be hostile to Anglesey, must be swamping him—”
The door opened. Both men jerked to their feet.
The chief surgeon shook his head. “No use. Typical deep-shock traumata, close to terminus now. If we had better facilities, maybe—”
“No,” said Cornelius. “You cannot save a man who has decided not to live anymore.”
“I know.” The doctor removed his mask. “I need a cigarette. Who’s got one?” His hands shook a little as he accepted it from Viken.
“But how could he—decide—anything?” choked the physicist. “He’s been unconscious ever since Jan pulled him away from that . . . that thing.”
“It was decided before then,” said Cornelius. “As a matter of fact, that hulk in there on the operating table no longer has a mind. I know. I was there.” He shuddered a little. A stiff shot of tranquilizer was all that held nightmare away from him. Later he would have to have that memory exorcised.
The doctor took a long drag of smoke, held it in his lungs a moment, and exhaled gustily. “I guess this winds up the project,” he said. “We’ll never get another esman.”
“I’ll say we won’t.” Viken’s tone sounded rusty. “I’m going to smash that devil’s engine myself.”
“Hold on a minute,” exclaimed Cornelius. “Don’t you understand? This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning!”
“I’d better get back,” said the doctor. He stubbed out his cigarette and went through the door. It closed behind him with a deathlike quietness.
“What do you mean?” Viken said it as if erecting a barrier.
“Won’t you understand?” roared Cornelius. “Joe has all Anglesey’s habits, thoughts, memories, prejudices, interests . . . oh, yes, the different body and the different environment, they do cause some changes—but no more than any man might undergo on Earth. If you were suddenly cured of a wasting disease, wouldn’t you maybe get a little boisterous and rough? There is nothing abnormal in it. Nor is it abnormal to want to stay healthy—no? Do you see?”
Viken sat down. He spent a while without speaking. Then, enormously slow and careful: “Do you mean Joe is Ed?”
“Or Ed is Joe. Whatever you like. He calls himself Joe now, I think—as a symbol of freedom—but he is still himself. What is the ego but continuity of existence?
“He himself did not fully understand this. He only knew—he told me, and I should have believed him—that on Jupiter he was strong and happy. Why did the K-tube oscillate? A hysterical symptom! Anglesey’s subconscious was not afraid to stay on Jupiter—it was afraid to come back!
“And then, today, I listened in. By now, his whole self was focused on Joe. That is, the primary source of libido was Joe’s virile body, not Anglesey’s sick one. This meant a different pattern of impulses—not too alien to pass the filters, but alien enough to set up interference. So he felt my presence. And he saw the truth, just as I did—
“Do you know the last emotion I felt, as Joe threw me out of his mind? Not anger anymore. He plays rough, him, but all he had room to feel was joy. I knew how strong a personality Anglesey has! Whatever made me think an overgrown child-brain like Joe’s could override it? In there, the doctors—bah! They’re trying to salvage a hulk which has been shed because it is useless!”
Cornelius stopped. His throat was quite raw from talking. He paced the floor, rolled cigar smoke around his mouth but did not draw it any farther in.
When a few minutes had passed, Viken said cautiously: “All right. You should know—as you said, you were there. But what do we do now? How do we get in touch with Ed? Will he even be interested in contacting us?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Cornelius. “He is still himself, remember. Now that he has none of the cripple’s frustrations, he should be more amiable. When the novelty of his new friends wears off, he will want someone who can talk to him as an equal.”
“And precisely who will operate another pseudo?” asked Viken sarcastically. “I’m quite happy with this skinny frame of mine, thank you!”
“Was Anglesey the only hopeless cripple on Earth?” asked Cornelius quietly.
Viken gaped at him.
“And there are aging men, too,” went on the psionicist, half to himself. “Someday, my friend, when you and I feel the years close in, and so much we would like to learn—maybe we, too, would enjoy an extra lifetime in a Jovian body.” He nodded at his cigar. “A hard, lusty, stormy kind of life, granted—dangerous, brawling, violent—but life as no human, perhaps, has lived it since the days of Elizabeth the First. Oh, yes, there will be small trouble finding Jovians.”
He turned his head as the surgeon came out again.
“Well?” croaked Viken.
The doctor sat down. “It’s finished,” he said.
They waited for a moment, awkwardly.
“Odd,” said the doctor. He groped after a cigarette he didn’t have. Silently, Viken offered him one. “Odd. I’ve seen these cases before. People who simply resign from life. This is the first one I ever saw that went out smiling—smiling all the time.”
LEARNING TO BE ME
Greg Egan
Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the Big New Names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new “hard science” writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well as to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, an
d elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, and he was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon,” which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella “Oceanic.” His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels Distress and Diaspora, and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chernobyl. His most recent book is a major new novel, Teranesia. He has a website at http://www.net-space.netau/^gregegan.
Egan may have written more about transcending the boundaries of the human form and the limitations of the flesh than almost any other writer of his generation. Almost any of Egan’s stories would have been appropriate in some way for this anthology. In the end, though, we settled on this early classic, a simple but profoundly unsettling story that shows us that no matter how long we may live, we never stop learning just what it means to be human . . . and redefining it, too.
###
I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.
Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my brain, so that the jewel’s teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelled, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel’s thoughts were wrong, the teacher—faster than thought—rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.
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