“I don’t want to see my mother’s dreams,” Sheila Brooks said sharply. “It doesn’t matter anyhow. She’s dead.”
Komodo’s head slumped. “Oh, I am sorry.”
“She died the day I was born.”
Again, Komodo felt himself falling, down and down. Shame straitjacketed him. Then he felt someone standing behind him.
It was Shig. “Please forgive me,” the severe neoteen intoned, the hallway’s Caligari shadows only exaggerating his macabre aspect. “I heard a noise and thought I would investigate. We are in a strange country and cannot be too careful.”
Shig’s head pivoted like a surveillance camera in a convenience store, first scanning Komodo, then Sheila. “Mr. Zeber is ill?”
“No,” Sheila said faintly. “Why?”
“I only hoped he could have accompanied you to enjoy our hospitality.”
“Ms. Brooks just happened to be passing by,” Komodo said.
“I see.” Then Shig stared at Komodo. “Perhaps you might wish to check the laboratory; I noticed the door ajar.” He bowed and withdrew.
“That was the guy who came to the house. Who is he?” Sheila Brooks asked.
“A longtime associate,” Komodo answered.
“Really creepy.”
Komodo turned away. “Ms. Brooks, would you mind coming with me for a moment? There is something I must attend to.”
Shig was correct. The door to the makeshift laboratory Komodo had set up in the basement of the mansion was open. That could mean only one thing: Atoms had been in there. It was a serious problem, the little misfits sneaking in, guzzling every liquid, getting sick all over the place. There wasn’t much that could be done to stop it. Back on Radioactive Island, even with the latest intelligence equipment flotjetting in like a paranoiac’s trade show, security had been difficult. Here, it was impossible. Spastic as they were, many Atoms nevertheless possessed startling aptitude when it came to breaking and entering. They could turn every tumbler, pluck out any electric eye.
Sheila Brooks saw him first, pinned up there on the ceiling like an overweight moth. It was that Bop again. Obviously the unfortunate boy had wandered into the lab, gulleted some spare helium pellets, blown up to twice his normal size, floated upward, and become wedged between a pair of ceiling beams. “Do not be alarmed, Ms. Brooks. The boy is not hurt. It’s a chronic problem.” Komodo climbed a ladder, defused the pellets, and carefully guided the boy down to avoid a potentially disastrous propulsive exhaust.
“On your way,” Komodo said, giving the resuscitated Bop a kindly tap on the backside.
“What is all this stuff?” Sheila Brooks asked, surveying the array of blue-sparking static tubes, twelve-foot Tesla coils, multidialed torque engines, blip machines, and fish-eyed mirrors. Komodo, unhappy without his toys around him, had managed to slapdash the entire lab from several beginner-level Gilbert chemistry sets he found in the multigabled attic of the mansion. He could transform any room into a set from The Bride of Frankenstein in no time.
Uncertain of his next move, Komodo grabbed a pair of steel-rimmed glasses off the workbench. “Try these,” he suggested with forced conviviality.
“What are they?” Sheila asked, suspiciously regarding the cheaters.
“You’ll see! Try them on!”
“I don’t know,” she said, indicating her electrician’s-tape-encrusted goggles. “These aren’t just for fashion, you know. They’re prescription.” But then she reached out. “Well . . . okay, just for a minute.”
Komodo’s heart began to pound as Sheila reached with both hands behind her head and began to undo the catches of her glasses. Spall-lurt went the suction cups as they separated from her face. He’d never seen her eyes; he didn’t even know what color they were.
They were green. An emerald sort of green, maybe a bit darker. A verdant sort of green, showered through with gold. Komodo felt dizzy, as if he’d walked into an intoxicating cloud.
“So?” Sheila asked after placing the thin-lensed, clear-view glasses on her face.
“Do you feel the small button on the inside of the right temple wing? Push it when I tell you to.” Then, in a most uncharacteristic pose, Komodo put his thumbs into his ears, wiggled his fingers, and stuck out his tongue. “Now!”
“Wow! It has instant replay!”
“Sixplay capacity for each event, expandable by a factor of twelve. It can store two hundred individual events. It comes equipped with audio echo as well.”
Sheila pushed the button again. “This is great! You could make a fortune with these.”
Komodo scratched his head. “Oh, I don’t know. I just make them up for fun. To play with. I have a Braille one, too. Some of the children cannot see.”
“Do something else!”
“What?”
“Sing something, like before.”
Komodo blushed horribly, then, in a reprise of one of those solitary talent shows he used to put on for Gojiro back in the old days, he grabbed hold of a pole, whirled around, and sang a couple of bars from “Jailhouse Rock”: “And the whole rhythm section was the Purple Gang!”
“Great!”
“No.”
“Really! You’re a terrific inventor, you know.”
Komodo blushed. “I try hard and someday hope to invent some truly useful things such as the deep-sea hippodrome, the spectromarine copter, and the electric dining car runabout.”
“Who invented them?”
“Tom Swift.”
Her eyes lit up when she laughed, turned even greener, deeper. Her lips seemed thicker, almost plush; a small, inviting crook appeared in them, especially the lower. “That’s silly,” she said.
“Yes, I’m very silly,” Komodo said giddily. It was his only joke, and it had worked!
“What do you do with these things you invent if you don’t sell them?” Her eyes seemed serene now, a deep mist on an isle of pines.
“Oh, I usually destroy them, cannibalize them for parts to make other things.”
“But why? That’s such a terrible waste.”
“Waste? I don’t think so. I don’t really have all that high an opinion of my work. Nothing I’ve yet created merits preservation. Sometimes I feel I am close to creating something of value, but just as I reach the crucial stage I experience . . . a failure of inspiration. Besides, it would be an unforgivable vanity to use additional resources solely to produce these mental doodlings.”
“But if you keep breaking them up to make other things, what are you left with?”
“The last invention, whatever that may be.” He shrugged. “But probably I’ll wind up just destroying that too.”
The idea upset Sheila Brooks. “You shouldn’t sell yourself short. You are really a very gifted person. Bobby said so, after the party. He was real excited. I haven’t seen him like that for a long time. He said you represented an unbelievable opportunity.”
“Mr. Zeber sees opportunity?”
“It’s how he talks; he can’t help it. He hates that corporate thing. It’s part of what I’ve done to him—always making him take care of the business crap, hang around with those jerky studio people, while I stay in the house. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be . . .”
She trailed off for a moment, then continued with a quick smile. “Oh yeah. Bobby really thinks you’re great. He said that special-effects guy—Tim Tuttle—he does our pictures, he’s supposed to be the best or something. Anyway, he told Bobby he couldn’t figure out how you do it. He said, ‘Either that Komodo is the most innovative FX guy since Méliès or he’s using a real monster.’ ”
Komodo tugged at the collar of his black pajamas. “Well, er, that’s very . . . flattering. But—”
Right then a six-foot-wide shaft of blue-white lightning bolted through the room. It came from the other side of the wall, leaving a smoldering hole there.
Sheila Brooks jumped two feet. “Agggh!”
Komodo ran toward the next room. “Stay here, please. I’ll be right back!”
<
br /> He didn’t think she’d follow him, but she did. “What’s that?” she screamed, pointing at the pulsating gray mass, some fifty feet round and high, sitting in the center of the immense spare ballroom.
“This? Oh, it’s nothing. Just a brain,” Komodo replied, attempting informality as he ducked under another shear of razored light on his way toward a control panel on the other side of the room.
Another bolt shot from the protruding frontal lobes, igniting the thick drapes at the other end of the shuttered room. “It’s not exactly a brain,” Komodo explained breathlessly, running to subdue the flames with a foam-spurting extinguisher. “It’s a simulacrum.”
Komodo never intended to bring that inflatable Quadcameral model with him to America. They were already resident at the Traj Taj when he noticed it, wadded up in a corner of the left pocket of his black pajamas. He couldn’t resist puffing it up to its true scale. Now he regretted the installation. Why hadn’t he lied and said it was an indoor tennis court, why did he have to tell her it was a brain? After this, Sheila Brooks would have every justification to deem him less than a serious individual, a mad scientist of a certifiably demented stripe. If she fled right then, he couldn’t blame her.
However, when he finished stamping the fire from the drapes, Komodo saw that Sheila Brooks was not only still present, but was striding toward the model. Her arm was stretched in front of her, palm out, much in the manner of a sleepwalker. She was heading straight for the parietal opening.
“Ms. Brooks! No!” But it was too late. Komodo felt a pitch in his stomach as Sheila Brooks sank her hand deep into the loamy aperture. She was in up to the elbow before voltage recoil set in. Zam, she skittered backward on her heels, a gawk’s moonwalk. When Komodo reached her, she opened her eyes—greener now—and said, “It’s alive.”
“Not . . . exactly,” Komodo grimaced as he helped Sheila Brooks to her feet. “It is composed of a synthetic neurological material. A fiber.”
“It thinks?”
Komodo grimaced. “Not completely, not yet. This is just a crude sketch, a hollow, woefully insufficient prototype. It cannot even be considered to approach the living ideal. But it can reproduce elements of the thought process.”
“Intellectual dacron, the mind boggles. Can we go inside?”
“Inside?”
Sheila Brooks kept looking at the brain. “Yeah, I want to go inside, is that okay?”
Komodo was sweating. “Yes . . . it is possible.”
* * *
When Komodo took Sheila Brooks into that Quadcam replica, it was the first time he’d entered the great model in years. He used to go in there all the time, to sit and contemplate, imagining himself in a kind of sanctuary, a realm apart, a holy place. How he loved those moments! Within that dense and humming place, he felt renewed, as if the shroud surrounding every riddle of his life might give way. “When I am in there,” he once told Gojiro, “I feel most close to myself.”
However, after the abhorrent operation that banished the supplications from the monster’s tortured mentality, Komodo ceased to visit the huge schematic. It lay fallow, used only as a base for ring-a-levio-playing Atoms. The wild children delighted in sliding down the parietal tube, setting it churning like a revolving barrel in a fun house.
Now, riding the small lift up through the contoured folds, Komodo attempted to explain the rudiments of Quadcameral morphology to Sheila Brooks. Speaking loudly so as to be heard over the cerebral drone, he focused on the time-tiered structure of Evollooic sedimentation, chronologically delineating what he called “the ages of the Mind.” The deepest seated of these layers, or the “primary cognitioner,” was the so-called Reptilian Complex, a holdover from the Quadcam’s earliest issue. Next came the thinner, emotion-wrought limbic layer, developed with the fall of the Sauric Empire and most closely identified with the cruder mammalian populations. On top of that, Komodo announced tour-guide style, was the primates’ burgeoning Neo-Cortex, which reached its fullest flower in the portentous advent of Homo sapiens.
“A mistake often made by the humanoid host is to assume that the older segments of brain are somehow vestigial, that they exist only to perform the most menial of tasks and are subservient to the Neo-Cortex,” Komodo explained as he led the pliant Sheila Brooks through the model, holding an umbrella over her head as a shield against the occasional jet sprays of neural fluids. “Just because a cameral form is more recent does not assure superior development. This misconception can result in serious difficulties, as the nether-situated lobes seek to assert their presence in the face of attempted override by the upper regions. Much seemingly pointless contradictory behavior results from these intracranial conflicts.”
Sheila Brooks touched the breathing walls with her fingertips. “Far out.”
Following well-marked pathways, they reached the forwardmost section of the Neo-Cortex, where Komodo invited Sheila Brooks to sit on a small ottoman-shaped polypous outcropping. “This is a pleasant spot,” he said, pulling a foldout candle from his pajama pocket and lighting it. “I’ve often stopped here to reflect.”
“Kind of clammy,” Sheila Brooks allowed. “You make this from a kit?”
“Kit?” Komodo thought of the gluesodden replicas of battleships the Atoms turned out with such delirium. “No, this is more of a projection. An idea of the New Mind—the Quadcameral. It cannot be more than that.”
“Why not?” She hardly noticed the synapsial vessels that hung loose from their contacts and had begun to entwine themselves in her wild mane.
Komodo sheared the vessels off with his pocketknife and continued. “To comprehend the New Mind; one must be able to think with one himself. The sort of brain in which we sit right now represents an entire other way of being. It is my belief that adaptations inherent here are so remarkably different from the current mind that those who attain them cannot rightly be counted within the same species as those who have not.”
A sawtoothed spark of electrostatic energy serrated across the neural chamber. Again, Sheila Brooks didn’t seem to care. “But who’s going to get this brain? Anybody? People collecting tolls or selling insurance? Mary Kay agents? Or is it just gonna be those enervated guys, the ones with the giant heads and no bodies in the comic books?”
“Prediction, in these matters, is a hazardous game. However, this isn’t to say individuals exhibiting fundamental elements of the New Mind do not already exist, even if they might not yet be aware of it.”
Sheila Brooks rubbed at her cheek. “But how can they have it and not know it?”
“It is possible that the initial possessors of a new trait may never become aware of their difference, at least not in their own lifetime. Palpable cognizance of Quadcamerality and its particular capabilities may not become accessible for hundreds of generations.”
Komodo cleared his throat. How could he explain this to Sheila Brooks without an exhaustive survey of Budd Hazardous cosmologies, an avalanche of jargonized terminology? Yet he was seized with a need to make her understand. “What I am saying is that often there is a passage of time between the inception of an organism’s change and the perception of that transformation. For instance, one of the most commonly accepted schemes of the mind, which we might refer to as the Tricameral or triune brain, has, according to many studies, been extant in the Homo sapiens species for several thousand years. This, of course, is an eye blink in the scope of the geologic clock, but, in the life of the group, or Bunch, in question, it is a considerable period.
“Let us examine how the Homo sapiens have adjusted to the shift in their thinking apparatus . . .” From there, Komodo began talking about the Greeks, how back in Zeusian days they used to consult Oracles—trees, rocks, and the like—which they believed imparted the vital information of the day. The Oracle read no tea leaf, supplied no printout; the input was received internally, springing wholecloth into the minds of supplicants.
“They heard the Oracle within their minds and experienced those utterances as the voic
e of the gods. That was the value of the Oracle—it enabled the petitioner to have direct communication with the Beyond. Now how can we account for this in terms of the modern outlook? Is it fair to characterize these individuals as merely primitive, hopelessly superstitious?”
No, Komodo argued, it was a question of biology, the product of a great unfolding cerebral drama. “The consolidation and refinement of the Neo-Cortex was a period of monumental shift,” he said, “a process that is now generally called the rise of consciousness.” Komodo imagined the Greek mind to be in a state where what had been was still fresh enough to be remembered, yet, due to the ongoing cameral augmentation, these “old” thoughts could only be expressed in “new,” rational terms. It was a unique juncture: directives once deemed so important to survival were now becoming peripheralized, yet they persisted, echoed. An explanation had to be sought as to the origin of these powerful messages. Therefore, utilizing their newfound reason, these fresh-minted Tricamerals declared the voices in their heads, those that they supposed came from the Oracle, but that actually emanated from the very wellspring of their former existence, to be articulations of the newly conceived notion of Deity.
“Think of it, Ms. Brooks!” Komodo went on, inside that Quadcameral model. “To be relieved of the turmoil of not knowing, to hear the voice of what you took to be indisputable Truth within your own head. Nowadays, of course, this is no longer so. The ensuing years have witnessed the absolute triumph of consciousness. The old voices have faded, are not universally heard. Naturally, many yearn for them still, but this desire is considered more idiosyncratic than paradigmatic. Externalized replacements, faith and prayer among them, are far from instinctual. The psychic record has splintered. Perhaps it is just this condition that has led to the confusion that many experts refer to as the modern spiritual dilemma—”
“It’s not fair!”
Maybe it was being back in the model again, letting his mind wax contemplative regarding the Quadcam and its eventual purpose within the Evolloo that caused him to go on as he did, but now, hearing Sheila Brooks’s shout, Komodo was shocked into silence.
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