The Magic Labyrinth

by Philip José Farmer

  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 necessary 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.

  "Indeed, the wathan must get its personality traits, most of them, anyway, from the body."

  Frigate said, "Well, then. Aren't we back where we started? We still can't make a clear distinction between the wathan and the body. If the wathan furnishes the concept of the I and the free will, it's still dependent upon the body for its character traits and everything else in the genetic and nervous systems. These are actually images which it absorbs. Or photocopies. So, in that sense, the wathan is only a copy, not the original.

  "Thus, when the body dies, it stays dead. The wathan floats off, whatever that means. It has the duplicated emotions and thoughts and all that which make up a persona. It also has the free will and the self-awareness if it's reattached to a duplicate body. But it isn't the same person."

  "What you've just proved," Aphra Behn said, "is that there is no soul, not in the way it's commonly conceived of. Or, if there is one, it's superfluous, it has nothing to do with the immortality of the indivi
dual."

  Tai-Peng spoke for the first time since Burton had brought up the subject.

  "I'd say that the wathan part is all that matters. It's the only immortal part, the only thing the Ethicals can preserve. It must be the same thing as the ka of the Chancers."

  "Then the wathan is a half-assed thing!" Frigate cried. "A part only of me, the creature that died on Earth! I can't truly be resurrected unless my original body is resurrected!"

  "It's the part that God wants and which he will absorb," Nur said.

  "Who wants to be absorbed? I want to be I, the whole creature, the entire!"

  "You will have the ecstasy of being part of God's body."

  "So what? I won't be I anymore!"

  "But on Earth you as an adult weren't the same person you were at fifty," Nur said. "Your whole being, at every second of your life, was and is in the process of change. The atoms composing your body at birth were not the same as when you were eight. They'd been replaced by other atoms. Nor were they the same when you were fifty as when you were forty.

  "Your body changed, and with it your mind, your store of memories, your beliefs, youf attitudes, your reactions. You were never the same.

  "And when – or if – you, the creature, the creation, should return to the Creator, you will change then. It will be the last change. You will abide forever in the Unchanging. Unchanging because He has no need for changing. He is perfect."

  "Bullshit!" Frigate said, his face red, his hands clenched. "There is the essence of me, the unchanging thing that wants to live forever, however imperfect! Though I strive for perfection! Which may not be attainable! But the striving is the thing, that which makes life endurable, though sometimes life itself becomes almost unendurable! I want to be I, forever lasting! No matter what the change, there is something in me, an unchanging identity, the soul, whatever, that resists death, loathes it, declares it to be unnatural! Death is both insult and injury and, in a sense, unthinkable!

  "If the Creator has a plan for us, why doesn't He tell us what it is? Are we so stupid that we can't understand it? He should tell it to us directly! The books that the prophets, the revelators, and the revisionists wrote, claiming to have authority from God Himself, to have taken His dictations, these so-called revelations are false! They make no sense! Besides, they contradict each other! Does God make contradictory statements?"

  "They only seem contradictory," Nur said. "When you've attained a higher stage of thinking, you'll see that the contradictions are not what they appear to be."

  "Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis! That's all right for human logic! But I still maintain that we shouldn't have been left in ignorance. We should have been shown the Plan. Then we could make our choice, go along with the Plan or reject it!"

  "You're still in a lower stage of development, and you seem to be stuck in it," Nur said. "Remember the chimpanzees. They got to a certain level, but they could not progress further. They made a wrong choice, and . . ."

  "I'm not an ape! I'm a man, a human being!"

  "You could be more than that," Nur said.

  They came to another bay. This, however, led not to a shaft but to an entrance, huge, arched. Beyond it was a chamber the enormity of which staggered them. It was at least half a mile long and wide. Within it were thousands of tables on each of which were devices the purposes of which were not obvious.

  Skeletons by the hundreds lay on the floor and the upper parts of more hundreds were on the desks or tables. Thigh bones and pelvic bones lay on the seats of chairs, and beneath the seats were more leg bones. Death had struck instantly and en masse.

  There wasn't a single garment anywhere. The people working the experiments had been nude.

  Burton said, "The Council of Twelve which interrogated me was clothed. Perhaps they donned their outfits so they wouldn't offend my sense of modesty. If so, they didn't know me well. Or perhaps they were required to wear garments when they were in session."

  Some of the equipment on the tables was still running. The nearest to Burton was a transparent sphere the size of his head. It was seemingly without an opening, yet large bubbles of different colors rose from its top, floated up to the ceiling, and burst. By the sphere was a transparent cube in which characters flashed as the bubbles ascended.

  They walked on murmuring about the strangeness of the devices. When they'd gone a quarter of a mile, Frigate said, "Look at that!"

  He pointed at a wheeled chair which sat in a broad aisle between tables. A jumble of bones, including a skull, lay on the seat, and leg and foot bones were at its base.

  47

  * * *

  The chair was overstuffed and covered with a soft material marked with thin alternating pale-red and pale-green zigzagging lines. Burton brushed the bones from the seat with a callousness which drew a protest from Croomes. He sat down, noting aloud that the chair fitted itself to his body. On the top of each massive arm, near the end, was a wide metal circle. He gingerly pressed down on the black center of the white disc on his right. Nothing happened.

  But when he pressed on the fingertip-thick center on the left, a long thin metal rod slid out.

  "Aha!"

  He pulled back slowly on the rod.

  Nur said, "There's a light coming from beneath the chair."

  The chair lifted soundlessly from the floor for a few inches.

  "Press on the forward edge of the disc on your right," Frigate said. "Maybe it controls the speed."

  Burton frowned because he did not like anyone telling him what to do. But he did use a fingertip to push the metal as suggested. The chair moved toward the ceiling at a very slow rate.

  Ignoring the exclamations and several more suggestions, he pushed the lever to dead center. The chair straightened out at a horizontal level, continuing to move forward. He increased its speed, then moved the left-hand rod toward the right. The chair turned with the rod, maintaining its angle – no banking as in an airplane – and headed for the faraway wall. After making the chair go up to the ceiling and then down to the floor, whirling it a few times, and speeding it up to an estimated ten miles per hour, Burton landed the chair.

  He was smiling; his black eyes were shiny with eagerness.

  "We may have a vehicle to lift us up the shaft!" he cried.

  Frigate and some of the others weren't satisfied with the demonstration.

  "It must be capable of even greater speed," the American said. "What happens if you have to stop suddenly? Do you hurtle on out of the chair?"

  "There's one way of finding out," Burton said. He made the chair lift a few inches, then accelerated it toward the wall, half a mile distant. When he was within twenty yards of the wall, he removed pressure from the right-hand disc. The chair at once slowed down but not so quickly that its passenger was in danger of being ejected. And when it was within five feet of the wall, it stopped.

  When he returned, Burton said, "It must have built-in sensors. I tried to ram it into the wall, but it wouldn't do it."

  "Fine," Frigate said. "We can try to go through the shaft. But what if the Ethical is observing us now? What if he can cut off the power by remote control? We'd fall to our deaths or at least be stuck halfway between floors."

  "We'll go one at a time. Each one will stop off at a floor before the next one goes. He won't be able to catch more than one of us, and the others will be warned."

  Though Burton thought that Frigate was too cautious, he had to admit to himself that his speculations were well founded.

  "Also," Frigate said, "The two chairs must have been moving when their occupants died. What made the chairs stop?"

  "Obviously, the sensors in the chairs," Burton drawled.

  "Fine. Then we'll each get a chair and find out how to get used to handling it. After that, what? Up or down?"

  "We'll go to the top floor first. I feel that the headquarters, the nerve center of these operations, must be there."

  "Then we should go down instead," Frigate said, grinning. "Your predictions
were always of the Moseilima type, you know. The opposite always happened."

  The fellow had his way of getting back at him. He knew too much about Burton's Earthly life, knew all his faults and failings.

  "No," Burton said, "not true. I warned the British government two years before the Sepoy Mutiny happened that it was coming. I was ignored. I was Cassandra then, not Moseilima."

  "Touché!" Frigate said.

  Gilgamesh pulled up his chair alongside Burton's a few minutes later. He seemed troubled and not well.

  "My head still hurts bad. I see things double now and then."

  "Can you make it? Or do you wish to stay here and rest?"

  The Sumerian shook his massive taurine head.

  "No. I wouldn't be able to find you. I just wanted you to know that I'm sick."

  Alice must have struck him harder than she'd intended.

  Tom Turpin called to Burton then. "Hey, I found out how they get their food here. Look!"

  He'd been fiddling around with a big metal box which had many dials and buttons on it. It was set on a table and was connected by a black cable to a plug in the floor.

  Turpin opened the glass-fronted door. Within were dishes and cups and cutlery, the dishes full of food and the cups full of liquid.

  "This is their equivalent of the grail," Tom said, his pale yellow face smiling. "I don't know what any of the controls except this does, but I punched all the buttons and in a few seconds the whole meal formed before my eyes." He opened the door and removed the contents. "Wow! Smell that beef! And that bread!" Burton thought it would be best to eat now. There would probably be other devices like this elsewhere, but he couldn't be sure. Besides, they were famished.

  Turpin tried another combination of buttons and dials. This time, the meal was a mélange of French and Italian and Arabic cooking. All items were delicious, though some were under-cooked, and the filet of camel's hump was too highly spiced for most of them. They tried other combinations with some surprising results, not all delightful. By experimentation, Turpin found the dial which regulated the degree of cooking, and they were able to get the meal well-done, medium, medium-rare, or rare. All except Gilgamesh ate voraciously, drank some of the liquor, and lit up the cigarettes and cigars also provided by the box. There was no lack of water; faucets were all over the place.