"I used to race every week," he went on. "Then one day, when we were still at the takeoff part of the race, I had a blackout. One moment I was sitting in the scooter, waiting for the starter's signal. Next thing I knew all the other scooters were out of sight. I hadn't moved. The starter light was blinking on my panel. I didn't know how long it had been like that, but later I learned that I had lost at least three minutes. The other competitors assumed that I had suffered a power failure, so they just took off without me.
"That was the first time. Since then I've been losing chunks of time, anything from one minute to ten. I never know when or why the next blackout is coming. Obviously, I've had to give up space scooters. A one-second blink at swing-by point could kill me."
What he was saying was a disappointment to Lola. She switched her implant to the standby mode and held up her hand before he could continue. "I agree that you have a problem, and you do need treatment. But it's not a job for a haldane. What you have is a physiological difficulty. I can give you the names of people with the right equipment and qualifications, and they can explore the physical side of what's been happening to you."
"You could, but it wouldn't be worth it." He was staring at her in mild reproach. "You didn't let me finish. First, I've been to a dozen medical specialists, the best ones on Callisto. They all agree that it's not a neurological problem. Not, in fact, a physical problem at all. Because there's another bit of information that I didn't get to. I black out, and when I wake up I have no idea what happened; but afterwards, when I lie down to sleep, I start to remember things. Things that feel as though they happened to me while I was unconscious."
"If you remember things, then you weren't unconscious."
"I'd agree with that, if what I remembered had anything to do with reality." He stared at Lola, openly troubled. "But the things that I remember never happened to me. They feel like memories, but they happen in places I've never been to in my whole life."
"For example?" Lola stared back at him, careful to conceal her surprise and satisfaction.
How about that? It looked like there was a job for a haldane here after all.
* * *
Visions. Distorted perceptions of space. Time inversions and time loops. Out-of-body experiences. They had been reported parts of the human condition for thousands of years, but surely they were much older. The religious experience had been present from the dawn of recorded history. Ten thousand years ago, the seer, in his ecstasy, foretold the distant future. The keeper of the temple felt himself rise into the sky, and saw the world below, no bigger than the palm of his hand. The sacrificial virgin felt within her the presence of the living god.
The early psychologists grappled with the bases of sensation and memory, struggling for an understanding using the inadequate tools at their disposal. They performed their long couch sessions and pronounced their exorcisms, invoking The Word according to Freud and Jung. They called on their magic potions, norepinephrine and dopamine and serotonin. They applied their mind-blistering philters, of imipramine and fluoxetine and Thorazine and chlorpromazine.
Sometimes the patient was even helped. But the mystery of the human mind remained untouched, until nonlinear statistical analysis, combined with telemetry, pulse probes, and powerful bespoke medications for both doctor and patient, brought the haldanes onto the scene.
Lola never mocked her primitive predecessors. The early psychotherapists had been like chemists before Dalton and Lavoisier, like astronomers before Kepler and Newton. They did their best to make sense of a bewildering variety of facts, but they had lacked the basic tool for the job: a general theory that would underpin everything, and make a coherent whole from a wilderness of single instances.
Whenever Lola was tempted to self-pity—recalling the loss of her parents in the war, or the first miserable years for her and Spook on Ganymede, or even the trauma of the haldane's training—she reminded herself that in other ways she had been lucky. She was fortunate to have been born at exactly the right time, just after the breakthrough.
It was still hard work. The training of a licensed haldane had a rigor and intensity that made the standard physician's apprenticeship seem casual and lightweight. In addition to their medical training and their knowledge of the effects and side effects of every psychotropic drug, Lola and her associates had to understand their computer tools, know their programs down to the last bit. Their ability to construct and validate neural network analogues had to be as good as any worker's in the field.
But it paid off. The physical mechanisms that underlay visions, déjà vu, time slips, and other-life memories had at last been dissected, defined, and captured in quantitative models.
No wonder that all religions had hated the haldanes when they first appeared in the 2050s. No wonder that preachers and demagogues still hated them.
But no one could discredit them. Prayers and politics might work, or they might not. A haldane's therapy did work, indisputably. Now the pendulum had swung too far the other way. A haldane's powers were overstated, to include direct mind reading and mind control.
Lola and the other haldanes knew that was not true. They knew the limits of what they could do. They also knew they had powers that no one but a haldane could comprehend.
Powers, and problems. You could not probe into another's troubled mind and remain untouched. When the haldane's ranks were thinned, it was almost never because one of them had chosen another field. It was usually a slide off the edge into madness, to a depth where not even a haldane could reach.
* * *
Lola had enough preliminary information. The instruments were calibrated. It was time for Sonnenberg's first interaction session.
"We'll keep this short today." She already had his chair extended to form a couch. He was lying down, the sensor cups in position over his eyes. "I'm going to put you into a trance state with stimulated recall. I'll know, from your eye movements and eye-lens muscle contractions, the direction that you're looking and how far away an object is. I'll take a cortical scan from the part of the brain that handles visual and auditory memories. I'll also know your emotional response to anything that you see and hear. But I won't actually hear and see what you see. That's why I want you to talk whenever you can, as a running commentary on everything. Understood?"
"I'll babble until you tell me to shut up."
"That's what I want. Now, just to get a feel for things and see how well we work together, I'm going to tap a memory that we certainly know is real. We'll take one of your recent space scooter races. Tell me when you're ready."
"Anytime." He was relaxed, reassured by Lola's casual confidence. At the same time, and appropriately, she was becoming more tense. Calibration was the easy part. Her real task lay ahead.
"Here we go then." Lola gave the computer the command to initiate transfer. "Remember, the more you say the easier it makes my job."
She had placed her own seat into an inclined position. With the sensor cups in place over her own eyes, she waited. She had not lied to Bryce Sonnenberg. What she had told him was literally true. She could not see what he saw, hear what he heard, or read his mind.
But that did not mean she would be without visual and auditory inputs. Her computer would take everything that came from Sonnenberg, feed the data as inputs to its own models, and present the computed output to Lola's implants—as sounds and pictures. Sonnenberg's words, whatever they were, would not come directly to Lola. They would be taken by the computer, merged with other signals tapped from his cerebral cortex, and used to generate a derived reality. The result could be anything from a muddled blur to crisp, realistic scenes; everything depended on Bryce Sonnenberg's powers of detailed recollection, the sophistication of the computer programs, and Lola's haldane wizardry. The computer could only do so much. Lola had to fuse her own prior experience and imagination with the computer's data feed.
There was one more stage in the process. Whatever she experienced would be read out in turn, to provide a record o
f the whole experience in derived-reality format. If necessary, another haldane could review that and give a second opinion.
Data transfer began. Within the first two seconds, Lola knew that he was going to be a great subject. After a brief flicker of false grey images, she found her hands grasping two knurled levers. Her feet were pressed together and secured by wraparound pedals. The vision centers of her brain assured her that she was sitting within a cramped little bubble, facing a hundred dials, while wrapped all around her was a transparent cover.
And beyond that cover, clear as anything that she had ever seen in her life, a mountain of grey ice and mottled black rock was rushing toward her. She was heading for impact with its left-hand edge, a sharp line that splintered the weak sunlight. Her hands and feet seemed frozen in position. At the last moment, when she was convinced that there was no way to avoid smashing into a stark and jagged rock face, she saw that the ship was arrowing into a narrow cleft.
Her hands and feet shifted to make a tiny thrust adjustment. The ship squeezed through, scraping-close to the wall. Lola saw a flashing blur of rock and ice. Then they were clear. There were stars ahead, and the ship was moving even faster than before.
Lola hit the disconnect and felt the emotional jar of the return from derived reality. Her hands and feet still clutched the controls of a ghost scooter, while her eyes saw the walls of her own office. She lay back and took a slow, deep breath. It was all very well to tell your brain that you knew you were experiencing no more than a standard—and highly successful—haldane interface, one that promised well for Bryce Sonnenberg's future. But a haldane coupling was intimate, more intimate than sex. Your heart and stomach and hindbrain didn't buy your forebrain's argument.
"That was great!" Bryce Sonnenberg was boosted to euphoria by the stimulated memory. The computer link was subsiding in a fading flicker of grey ghost images. "We couldn't have cut it closer. You see now why I love space scooting. Did you get anything?"
"You might say that." Lola silently ordered her pulse to return to normal. "I certainly know why I never go near the surface of Ganymede. And you do that for pleasure!"
"I used to, until the blackouts started. And if you can cure me, I'll do it again."
"You'll be cured." Lola sat up and removed the sensor cups. "I'm sure I'll be able to help you. You have first-rate visual recall, as good as I've ever met. Of course, your blackout dreams won't be as clear and detailed as that."
"They feel that way to me."
"I'm sure they do. One famous haldane precursor, a man called Havelock Ellis, put it perfectly. He said, 'Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?' No, Bryce, don't sit up yet!" He was reaching for the sensor cups on his eyes. "Stay just where you are. That last episode was so vivid, I want to try one more. I'm going to take one of your blackout sequences, and make a comparison. How long since you had one?"
"Just after I arrived from Callisto. Two days ago. It's a scene that keeps coming back again and again."
"Fine. We'll use that one."
Lola reached out to the computer console by her left hand. She started the search sequence, lay back, and replaced the sensors on her own eyes. "Don't be disappointed if we don't get much," she added as the grey flicker of images began again. "False memories are tricky things, and this is our first session. We've done well to get this far."
She was speaking as much to herself as to Bryce. An opening session often did not go much beyond calibration, but in this case she was going on because she was fascinated. Sonnenberg did not fit any textbook pattern of mental illness. In fact, the more that she saw of him; the less ill he seemed.
Was that his sickness, that he imagined himself to have a problem where there was none? That was the least satisfying answer. Far more interesting was the possibility of some new form of mental illness, one not recorded in the long history of psychotherapy. That was unlikely, but could it be the case?
She was asking herself that question as the computer again achieved synthesis.
Free fall.
Not in an orbiting ship, or floating outside it in a space-suit.
Free fall, real fall, toward a planetary surface. As the world spun around her, Lola caught a glimpse of a panorama of buildings. She was dropping toward them, gaining speed, falling vertically past the dark bulk of a great tower on her left-hand side.
She was not wearing a suit. And she was not on Earth. This was hard vacuum. The fog of ice crystals in front of her face was her own breath and blood, spouting out of agonized lungs.
Her motion steadied, so that she was dropping feetfirst. Now she could see where her trajectory would take her—to the roof of a lower level of the building on her left. The impact would kill her, no doubt about it, but incredibly some part of her brain was able to remain aloof. As oxygen starvation made the world before her dim and blur, she was calculating: three more seconds to impact; velocity, forty-nine meters a second.
Two seconds, fifty-two meters a second. One second. Terminal velocity, sixty meters a second. No chance of survival.
She looked down. The black flatness of the roof rushed up to meet her . . .
. . . and the computer disconnect took place.
Lola was left gasping, gulping in air to the depths of her lungs. Unbelievably, she was alive. The panorama of brightly lit buildings was disintegrating into streaks of flickering grey. She was in her own office.
And not before time. She sat up, shaking all over, and ripped the telemetry contacts from her temples, the sensor cups away from her eyes. It hadn't been a dream sequence; it had been gritty, hard-edged reality. She forced herself to her feet, convinced that Bryce Sonnenberg would need her help.
He was sitting sideways on the patient's chair, one sensor cup in each hand. Lola stared at him, unable to speak. He was the one who nodded, walked over to her side, and said, "You got it, didn't you? I can tell you did. It's not so bad for me, you see, I've been through it before. But you should have seen me the first time."
"Where is it? Where were you?"
He helped Lola to stand up. "I told you, I don't know. That's one of the scary parts. It seems like somewhere absolutely real and familiar, but wherever it is, I know I've never been there."
"Have you ever been to Earth? Or Mars?"
"Never." He released her hands. "You may not believe this, but I feel better now. You actually felt it, didn't you, even though you say you can't read minds? You know what it's like."
"I know what it's like." Lola struggled for control and managed a thin smile. "I'm not going to thank you for that."
"There are other places, too. Not as bad as that. Some of them I kind of like, the ones where I'm the boss and doing something clever. Out in the Belt, some of them. We hit the worst one first. Want to see the others?"
"I will, in due course." Lola sat down again. "But not today. We're done. I'm done."
"What's next?"
"I review your data, see if I missed anything. Then we have another session. Can you come back in three days? Midday, local time."
"Sure." Bryce Sonnenberg moved toward the door of the office. At the threshold he paused. "I know it's too early to ask, but do you really think you'll be able to help me?"
He was right—in principle, it was too early to say. But Lola was getting the clearest images she had ever seen. Bizarre information was difficult to interpret, but it was a lot better than no information at all.
"I'm sure I can help. Just don't expect instant miracles. It's a slow process." She waved good-bye, but she took little notice of his departure because she suddenly had been struck by two oddities at once.
First, he had said that some of his false memories were "out in the Belt." How could he know what the Belt was like, if he had left it for Callisto at the age of three?
Second—and more directly disturbing to Lola—she had been all set to transfer Sonnenberg's records to her general case files when she noticed the access record. It indicated that an access had been made on the prev
ious day, when she had certainly not been using the system. The implication was as clear as if it had been written as a message on the screen: Someone else had been snooping around in her haldane file of stored experiences.
Someone. Lola swore to herself. She didn't have to go far to know who that someone was, someone who seemed unable to stay out of anything, even Lola's private case records.
When she got her hands on Spook she was going to wring his scrawny neck.
7
"Look after Spook. Don't let him get into trouble."
Lola had never forgotten her mother's plea. She had done her best to honor it, to look after him, to make sure he was well cared for. And she had done well.
In fact, in the eyes of at least one person she had done far too well.
Spook was fifteen years old, certainly not a kid any more. Surely he was entitled to a bit of breathing space. On the other hand . . .
He looked at Lola, standing at the entrance to his private domain, and knew he was in deep trouble. She wouldn't normally charge into his den without giving at least a few minutes' warning.
"All right." Lola ignored the new setting, Spook's careful reconstruction of the sky as seen by a high-gee probe in one of the local comet clusters of the Kuiper Belt. "You've really done it this time. Those are absolutely private files you've dabbled in. Haldane files. Patient files. Do you realize what would happen if a patient learned that someone who wasn't a haldane had been poking around in them?"
"I've not been poking around." There was a time to tell the truth, but this wasn't it. "I just copied one small file."
"Copying one is as bad as if you copied all of them. Unless a patient gives permission, nobody except a haldane is supposed to see anything."
"Suppose it wasn't a patient's file?"
That stopped her, as it was designed to do. She glared at him. "The only things in that directory—"
"Not true. I didn't touch a patient's file. And I wasn't trying to peek, not really. I summoned your directory by accident—I'm a Belman, too, you know, and you didn't protect properly with a unique ID. Once I had it I couldn't help noticing a file in there. It was called 'Wartime Memories.' And your name was on it."
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