Wolfbane

by C. M. Kornbluth

  It was little to cling to, but it at least was real. If his hands could be holding something, then there must be some reality somewhere.

  Tropile closed his eyes and managed to open them again. Yes, there was reality too; he closed his eyes and light stopped; he opened them and light returned.

  Then perhaps he was not dead, as he had thought.

  Carefully, stumblingly—his mind his only usable tool—he tried to make an estimate of his surroundings. He could hardly believe what he found.

  Item, he could scarcely move. Somehow he was bound by his feet and his head. How? He couldn’t tell.

  Item, he was bent over and he couldn’t straighten. Why? Again he couldn’t tell, but it was a fact. The great extensor muscles of his back answered his command, but his body would not move.

  Item, his eyes saw, but only in a small area.

  He couldn’t move his head, either. Still, he could see a few things. The switches in his hands, his feet, a sort of display of lights on a strange circular board.

  The lights flickered and changed their pattern.

  Without thinking, he clicked the left-hand switch:—Why? Because it was right to do so. When a certain light flared green, a certain sequence had to be clicked. Why, again? Well, when a certain light flared green, a certain sequence—

  He abandoned that problem. Never mind why; what the devil was going on?

  Glenn Tropile squinted about him like a mollusc peering out of its shell. There was another fact, the oddness of the seeing. What makes it look so queer? he asked himself.

  He found an answer, but it required some time to take it in. He was seeing in a strange perspective. One looks out of two eyes. Close one eye and the world is flat. Open it again, and there is a stereoscopic double; the saliencies of the picture leap forward, the background retreats.

  So with the lights on the board—no, not exactly; but something like that, he thought. It was as though—he squinted and strained—as though he had never really seen before. As though for all his life he had had only one eye, and now he had strangely been given two.

  His visual perception of the board was total. He could see all of it at once. It had no “front” or “back;” it was in the round; the natural thinking of it was without orientation; he engulfed and comprehended it as a unit. It had no secrets of shadow or silhouette.

  I think, Tropile mouthed slowly to himself, I think I’m going crazy.

  But that was no explanation either. Mere insanity didn’t account for what he saw.

  Then, he asked himself, was he in a state that was beyond Nirvana? He remembered, with an odd flash of guilt, that he had been meditating; watching the stages of boiling water. All right, perhaps he had been Translated. But what was this, then? Were the meditators wrong in teaching that Nirvana was the end—and yet righter than the Wolves, who dismissed Meditation as a phenomenon wholly inside the skull, and refused to discuss Translation at all?

  That was a question for which he could find nothing approaching an answer. He turned away from it and looked at his hands.

  He could see them, too, in the round, he noted; he could see every wrinkle and pore in all sixteen of them....

  Sixteen hands!

  That was the other moment when sanity might have gone.

  He closed his eyes. (Sixteen eyes! No wonder the total perception!) And after a while he opened them again.

  The hands were there. All sixteen of them.

  Cautiously, Tropile selected a finger that seemed familiar in his memory and, after a moment’s thought, flexed it. It bent. He selected another. Another—on a different hand, this time.

  He could use any or all of the sixteen hands. They were all his, all sixteen of them.

  I appear, thought Tropile crazily, to be a sort of eight-branched snowflake. Each of my branches is a human body.

  He stirred, and added another datum. I appear also to be in a tank of fluid, and yet I do not drown.

  There were certain deductions to be made from that. Either someone—the Pyramids?—had done something to his lungs, or else the fluid was as good an oxygenating medium as air. Or both.

  Suddenly a burst of data-lights twinkled on the board below him. Instantly and involuntarily, his sixteen hands began working the switches, transmitting complex directions in a lightning-like stream of on-off clicks.

  Tropile relaxed and let it happen. He had no choice; the power that made it right to respond to the board made it impossible for his brain to concentrate while the response was going on. Perhaps, he thought drowsily, perhaps he would never have awakened at all if it had not been for the long period with no lights....

  But he was awake. And his consciousness began to explore as the task ended.

  He had had an opportunity to understand something of what was happening. He understood that he was now a part of something larger than himself, beyond doubt something which served and belonged to the Pyramids. His single brain not being large enough for the job, seven others had been hooked in with it.

  But where were their personalities?

  Gone, he supposed; presumably, they had been Citizens. Sons of the Wolf did not meditate, and therefore were not Translated—except for himself, he added wryly, remembering the meditation on Rainclouds that had led him to—

  No, wait! Not Rainclouds but Water!

  Tropile caught hold of himself and forced his mind to retrace that thought. He remembered the Raincloud Meditation. It had been prompted by a particularly noble cumulus of the Ancient Ship type.

  And this was odd. Tropile had never been deeply interested in Rainclouds; had never known even the secondary classifications of Raincloud types. And he knew that the Ancient Ship variety was of the fourth order of categories.

  It was a false memory. It was not his.

  Therefore, logically, it was someone else’s memory; and being available to his own mind, as the fourteen other hands and eyes were available, it must belong to—another branch of the snowflake.

  He turned his eyes down and tried to see which of the branches was his old body. He found it quickly, with growing excitement. There was the left great toe of his own body, a deformed blade twice as thick as it should be; he had injured it in boyhood, it had come off and grown back wrong. Good! It was reassuring.

  He tried to feel the one particular body that led to that familiar toe.

  He succeeded, not easily. After a time he became more aware of that body—somewhat as a neurotic may become “stomach conscious” or “heart conscious;” but this was no neurosis, it was an intentional exploration.

  Since that worked, with some uneasiness he transferred his attention to another pair of feet and “thought” his way up from them.

  It was embarrassing.

  For the first time in his life he knew what it felt like to have breasts. For the first time in his life he knew what it was like to have one’s internal organs quite differently shaped and arranged, buttressed and stressed by different muscles. The very faint background feel of man’s internal arrangements, never questioned unless something goes wrong with them and they start to hurt, was not at all like the faint background feel that a woman has inside her.

  And when he concentrated on that feel, it was no faint background to him. It was surprising and upsetting.

  He withdrew his attention—hoping that he would be able to. He was. Gratefully he became conscious of his own body again. Somehow, he was still himself if he chose to be.

  Were the other seven?

  He reached into his mind—all of it, all eight separate intelligences that were combined within him.

  “Is anybody there?” he demanded.

  No answer—or nothing he could recognize as an answer. He drove harder, and there was still no answer. It was annoying. He resented it as bitterly, he remembered, as in the old days when he had first been learning the subtleties of Raincloud Appreciation. There had been a Raincloud Master, his name forgotten, who had been sometimes less than courteous, had driven hard—
<
br />   Another false memory!

  He withdrew and weighed it. Perhaps, he thought, that was a part of the answer. These people, these other seven, would not be driven. The attempt to call them back to consciousness would have to be delicate. When he drove hard it was painful—he remembered the instant violent agony of his own awakening—and they reacted with unhappiness.

  More gently, alert for vagrant “memories,” he combed the depths of the eightfold mind within him, reaching into the sleeping portions, touching, handling, sifting and associating, sorting. This memory of an old knife wound from an Amok—that was not the Raincloud woman; it was a man, very aged. This faint recollection of a childhood fear of drowning—was that she? It was; it fitted with this other recollection, the long detour on the road south toward the sun, around a river.

  The Raincloud woman was the first to round out in his mind, and the first he communicated with. He was not surprised to find that, early in her life, she had feared that she might be Wolf.

  He reached out for her. It was almost magic—knowing the “secret name” of a person, so that then he was yours to command. But the “secret name” was more than that; it was the gestalt of the person; it was the sum of all data and experience, never available to another person—until now.

  With her memories arranged at last in his own mind, he thought persuasively: “Citizeness Alla Narova, will you awaken and speak with me?”

  No answer—only a vague, troubled stirring.

  Gently he persisted: “I know you well, Alla Narova. You sometimes thought you might be a Daughter of the Wolf, but never really believed it because you knew you loved your husband—and thought Wolves did not love. You loved Rainclouds, too. It was when you stood at Beachy Head and saw a great cumulus that you went into meditation—”

  And on and on.

  He repeated himself many times, coaxingly. Even so it was not easy; but at last he began to reach into her. Slowly she began to surface. Thoughts faintly sounded in his mind. Like echoes, at first; his own thoughts bouncing back at him; a sort of mental nod of agreement, “Yes, that is so.” Then—terror. A shaking fear; a hysterical rush; Citizeness Alla Narova came violently up to full consciousness and to panic.

  She was soundlessly screaming. The whole eight-branched figure quivered and twisted in its nutrient bath.

  The terrible storm raged in Tropile’s own mind as fully as in hers—but he had the advantage of knowing what it was. He helped her. He fought it for the two of them...soothing, explaining, calming.

  He won.

  At last her branch of the snowflake-body retreated, sobbing for a spell. The storm was over.

  He talked to her in his mind and she “listened.” She was incredulous, but there was no choice for her; she had to believe.

  Exhausted and passive she asked finally: “What can we do? I wish I were dead!”

  He told her: “You never were such a coward before. Remember, Alla Narova, I know you.”

  The thought returned from her: “And I know you. As nobody has ever known another human being before.”

  Then they were thinking together, inextricably: More than conversation. More than communion. More than love. Remember how you feared defloration? I remember. And you, with your fear of impotence on the wedding night! I remember. Must we be indecent to each other? I think we must. After all, you’re the first man who ever had a baby. And you’re the first woman who ever sired one. Past shame, past shyness, into a pool of ourselves.

  Tropile’s hands clicked codes as the display lights shifted. It was so damned queer. He was he and she was she and together they were—what? She was good and kind or he might not have been able to bear it. She had sheltered that poor blind man in Cadiz for a year; during the crop failure at Vincennes she had bravely gone into the fields and done unwomanly work for all; she had murdered her husband in a fit of rage, a short and secret amok—

  “Get away from me!” he screamed. It was all there in his memory. A scuffed glass paperweight, very ancient and the size of a man’s fist, with swirling streaks of color in it, dim under the hundred nicks and chips on the surface, and an inset square plate of porcelain that said in ornamental Wedgwood blue letters GOD BLESS OUR HOME. His husband had laid there snoring and the snow had begun sifting down outside the tent wall, and she had battered, and battered mercilessly, red-eyed and hissing, consumed with hate and blood lust. She had done it; how could he forget the bubbling horror of the face that kept living and sputtering after the eyes had been bashed sightless and the jaw hung smashed in eight places, limber as the backbone of a snake?

  “Get away from me!” he screamed.

  She said only: “How?”

  He began to laugh, titteringly. Perhaps if he laughed this twinness with a monster would not seem so bad. The whole thing was probably some universal joke of which he had just seen the point; he would spend the rest of his life laughing.

  “Pervert,” she said to him. “Yes, I killed my husband, and you perverted your wife, giving her what she felt was a small living death, turning her love into sickness and shame. I suppose we are well matched. I can live with you, pervert.”

  It came through; it was not part of the joke. “And I can live with you, murderess,” he said at last. “Because I know you’re not just murderess. There was Cadiz and Vincennes, too.”

  “And for you there were a hundred daily tendernesses you gave your wife to compensate for evil. You are not so bad, Tropile. You are a human being.”

  “And so are you. But what are—we?”

  “We must begin to find out. It is all so new. We must try to trick ourselves into finding out what we are, otherwise you and I will always stand in the way of Us.”

  Tropile said: “If I told a story it would be about the famous Captain Sir Roderick Flandray, Intelligence Corps, Imperial Terran Space Navy—dark, sardonic, bright with melancholy, quite impossible, my asinine ideal.”

  “And my story would be about doomed Iseult who flung herself from life into love like a rock-fanged Cornish coast, the poor fool. Farewell to the pleasures of the table and the stool; the world well lost for a few overrated contractions. But that is what my story would be about; I cannot help being what I am.”

  They laughed together, and together went on: “If we told a story it would be about a circular fire that grew.”

  And they jerked back in an ecstasy of terror at what they had said.

  They were silent for a long time while their hands clicked and clicked away at the switches.

  “I want no more of that,” Alla Narova said finally. “Or—?” She did not know.

  “I have never been so frightened in my life,” Glenn Tropile said, “nor have you. Nor have we ever been so tantalized by a hint of meaning. My hero is Lucifer; your heroine is Ishtar the Young. Ours is a circular fire that grows.”

  They were silent for a time, while Tropile pondered this new self with its new vocabulary and new memories. Was he still Glenn Tropile at all?

  It didn’t seem to matter.

  Many clicks later, Alla Narova said wistfully, “Of course, there is nothing we can do.”

  Wolf rose in the heart of the Component named Glenn Tropile. “Don’t say that,” Tropile cried, astonished at his own fury.

  Diplomatically, she said, “Yes, but really—”

  “Really,” he said with a savage bite, “there’s always something. We just don’t know what it is.”

  Another long silence, and then Alla Narova said, “I wonder if we can wake the others.”

  11

  Haendl was on the ragged edge of a nervous breakdown. It was something new in his life.

  It was full hot summer, and the hidden colony of Wolves in Princeton should have been full of energy and life. The crops were growing on all the fields nearby; the drained storehouses were being replenished. The aircraft that had been so painfully rebuilt and fitted for the assault on Mount Everest were standing by, ready to be manned and to take off.

  And nothing, absolutely
nothing, was going right.

  It looked as though there would be no expedition to Everest. Four times now Haendl had gathered his forces and been all ready. Four times a key man of the expedition had—vanished.

  Wolves didn’t vanish!

  And yet more than a score of them had. First Tropile—then Innison—then two dozen more, by ones and twos; no one was immune. Take Innison, for example. There was a man who was Wolf through and through. He was a doer, not a thinker; his skills were the skills of an artisan, a tinkerer, a jackleg mechanic. How could a man like that succumb to the pallid lure of meditation?

  But undeniably he had. Translated. Gone!

  It had reached a point where Haendl himself was red-eyed and fretful. He had set curious alarms for himself—had enlisted the help of others of the colony to avert the danger of Translation from himself. When he went to bed at night, a lieutenant sat next to his bed, watchfully alert lest Haendl, in that moment of reverie before sleep, fall into meditation—and himself be Translated. There was no hour of the day when Haendl permitted himself to be alone; and his companions, or guards, were ordered to shake him awake, as violently as need be, at the first hint of an abstracted look in the eyes or a reflective cast of the features. As time went on, Haendl’s self-imposed regime of constant alertness began to cost him heavily in lost rest and sleep. And the consequences of that were: More and more occasions when the bodyguards shook him awake; less and less rest.

  He was very close to breakdown indeed.

  On a hot, wet morning a few days after his useless expedition to see Citizen Germyn in Wheeling, Haendl ate a tasteless breakfast and, reeling with fatigue, set out on a tour of inspection of Princeton. Warm rain dripped from low clouds; but that was merely one more annoyance to Haendl. He hardly noticed it.

  There were upwards of a thousand Wolves in the Community; and there were signs of worry on the face of every one of them. Haendl was not the only man in Princeton who had begun laying traps for himself as a result of the unprecedented disappearances; he was not the only one who was short of sleep. A community of a thousand is close-knit. When one member in forty disappears, the morale of the whole community receives a shattering blow. To Haendl it was clear, looking into the faces of his compatriots, that not only was it going to be nearly impossible to mount the planned assault on the Pyramid on Everest this year, it was going to be unbearably difficult merely to keep the community going.