Each moment that crawled by was another moment in which Equality might be killed back in my home line, but there was apparently no way to hurry the matter. The next week I was invited to the theater with Mr. Ward, who came with both his daughters. This time was I allowed to touch the hand of Mary Ward and bow over it, and pay some flattering, meaningless compliment to her.
Sitting in the theater seat, watching some meaningless play whose point I could not understand—why could the Italian fellow not simply ask the girl on the balcony to pencil him in on her sexual congress schedule? And once she was done servicing him, he could then try to get to know her? What was all that business about the name? Why were the men always fighting?—I found that I had a few questions for myself.
I could put myself in a very light meditative trance, and I found I could ask and answer questions without having to move my lips or talk aloud:
The great discovery of Hell and Mesmer was at first misunderstood, and thought to be some sort of psychic or magical effect, hypnosis or astral projection, or visions of paradise, purgatory or inferno. But later researchers discovered that the other worlds visionaries discovered in their dream journeys were all this world, the material world, the only world that exists; merely worlds occupying a might-have-been.
Simple magnets can stimulate this area of the brain, at least of some people, and tune them into a different brain as one might tune a radio. Training in autohyponosis and meditation is needed as well. The target brain must, of course, be identical or nearly so: it has to be your brain, your own, merely the ‘you’ as you would have been had the past taken a wrong turn.
We, of course, dwell in the best of all possible worlds, and so the mission fate imposes on us is to bring these unrealized and aborted versions of history back into line with true history, and impose on them the ideas and ideals they should have enjoyed had their horrible mistakes and thoughtcrimes never been made.
The key is the rhythm or sequence, almost like a melody, of the magnetic stimulant. Each world has its own rhythm, its own code, that unlocks the brain. This is partly based on the length of the deviation, how long ago the two histories divided, and partly based on a subjective knowledge of what went wrong and when. Hence, when a new world is discovered, the first priority of the advanced scout is to find a library or a wise man or newspaper archive, and see when and where the deviation event took place.
I saw an opportunity as the theater was being let out. I happened to be standing directly behind Miss Ward, and very near a hansom that her father had called, when he and the mother were greeted by someone shouting cheerfully over the murmur of the crowd. They both turned and stepped away for a moment, while other impatient members of the crowd, men in black and ladies as gorgeous as tropical birds in their plumage, stepped between us, blocking the view.
Before I could stop myself, I took Mary roughly by the arm and forced her up the step into the interior of the hansom, stepping after her, and slamming the door. Then I paused, looking in panic at the unfamiliar line of keys and switches and buttons that formed the automatic cabman.
I said, “You fool, what are you doing?”
She said, “Being abducted, apparently.” The girl was maybe four years younger than I was, a vision of perfection with her wide eyes and stormcloud masses of dark hair. Her evening gown displayed her naked, perfumed shoulders and a daring amount of cleavage, her delicate and sinuous arms were hidden in long gloves as black as the tails of two unlucky cats.
I said, “Your methods take too long! Equality could be dead already!”
She said, “Abducted by the least competent kidnapper on the continent.” She took a small silver key out of her purse, put in into one of the slots on the dash board, and said, “Home!”
And the hansom rolled into motion. The engines on this world are completely silent, but the hansoms have little silver bells on their fore and aft lanterns that jingle, and the tall, spidery and gaily painted wheels make a pleasant sound as they clatter over the cobblestones.
I took the variable-output electromagnet I had cobbled together in the Tool and Die shop and showed it to her. “This device will allow your soul to project itself from your body into another world, like this one, but with a different history. A better history.”
“Re-eally?” She drawled. This version of her had the same way of arching an eyebrow and tilting her head that was impossibly lovely, a Greek statue of the nymph or goddess brought to life by alchemy. It was an elfin look, playful, half-scornful.
My right hand leaped up and slapped the instrument out of my left hand, and I grabbed the wrist as it tried to grab my throat. When I bit painfully into the thumb, I was not sure which I was trying to do the biting. It was a somewhat self-defeating sort of brawl, no matter how you look at it.
There is no way it should have happened, because my meditative and autohypnotic skills have been honed by years of practice, whereas my skills—the native me—were those of an amateur. I found myself wondering who this Ashwathama was?
During the struggle, I stood up and banged my head against the roof. This world does not have seatbelts, but, then again, their vehicles move sedately.
The instrument spun through the air and landed in her lap. She spread her knees and caught it neatly in a triangle of velvet.
I managed to spit out my hand and gasp. “You must believe me! This is tuned to my home line. You have a—a twin—a twin sister you never knew, who needs your help. If you wake up in her body, for just a moment, and let the doctors see you with your eyes open, moving your fingers and toes, then they cannot kill her!”
She said, “That depends, doesn’t it? There is no rule against euthanizing a perfectly healthy person, is there? If she knows something the Nannies think people have a right not to know. The right not to be offended outweighs the right to free speech, or the right to life.”
I looked at her, a slow realization breaking on me. Her eyes were not those of a stranger.
I stopped fighting myself. Both of me stopped. Me and the other me were more interested in that odd remark than we were in prolonging the pointless one-man wrestling bout.
The other me was slightly swifter on the uptake, “You are Equality Ward, aren’t you? Lity? You are also Dr. Fish’s patient, the girl with sleepwalking problems?”
She said, “You are the native Ward. Your voice is pitched lower.” She tossed the instrument at me, and I caught it. She said, “You are also right-handed. My Ward is left-handed.”
I heard myself say, “The nuns beat left-handedness out of me with a ruler.”
She said, “Such a thing would never be permitted on our world. Nuns are not permitted either. And, no, I was not actually sleepwalking, that was an act, to explain why I forget things I should have known about your world and about my doppelganger’s life in it. It is—” she could not suppress a smile. Dimples appeared in her cheek. Her eyes glittered and danced. If I had not already been in love with her, I would have fallen, then and there, just seeing that impish look. “—it is an interesting life here.”
I said, “Interesting how?”
She said, “High pitched again. That must be my Ward. You mean to ask what do I find more interesting than you?”
I said, “Something like that…”
“I have four suitors here, plus my father’s manservant who dotes on me. They kneel to me as if I were a queen, and offer me gifts and tokens as if I were a goddess. None of them have struck me. Not one. Two of them met by accident on the way to my father’s house: they smote each other in the face. For me. And I have a father here, a father who cares for me as if I were a precious jewel. And my mother talks to me.”
“Your mother back home talks to you!”
“No, she talks at me. It is not the same thing. She gets mad when I remind her that I was raised by the daycare nurses, not by her, and that she has no right to tell me what to do. Sometime she forgets my name.”
I said, “Where is the Mary Ward from this world?”
She said, “Still in the coma, as far as I know. Her brain activity is not interfering with mine in any way. There is no pressure, nothing trying to shove me back, nothing. It is the only case like this I ever heard of. Usually we kill the host to make the possession permanent.”
I said, “You should not have told me that!”
“High-pitched Ward. Why? Are you lying to yourself?”
I said, “No. I just don’t like killing myself. I never have, and I believe me when I say that, because I can see it in my mind.”
“Low-pitched again. You know, that voice makes little shivers go up a girl’s spine! Why don’t you talk like that at home?” she laughed, and it was the silver bells of elfland. “It sounds like Invader Ward does not have Native Ward under control. But I would not trust you if I were you, Native Ward. We can kill our host memories just by concentrating, by mesmerism. We can also hide thoughts from our host. You did not know that our thoughts have been trained to kill? Through autohypnosis, we can trigger the amnesia mechanism already present in every brain. This mechanism is natural to humans: they are the reason why we forget so many of our dreams in the morning. ”
I said, “There are much better ways than killing yourself.”
She raised her pretty little nose in the air, and snorted. “Is that scruples? Or weakness?”
Suddenly the girl looked remarkably less attractive to me. I said harshly, “It’s strength. The same strength that allowed me to cross to this world no one seems to be able to enter, and track you down. They are going to kill your body back home!”
She shook her head. “Now I cannot tell which one of you is talking. You know as well as I that losing that body will not kill this mind here, not as long as I have a safe and empty body to inhabit here. I could probably wake her from the coma—I can almost feel her thoughts, like a word on the tip of my tongue—she’s been this way since a boating accident some months ago. But I won’t. Her mind is like an empty house, all swept and garnished. ”
I did not like her tone, so I pulled back my hand to slap her, but I stopped myself.
She looked on as I grimaced and hissed. She said, “It looks like the native has an advantage. That is unusual. We are trained at this.”
I said, “I don’t know what I was like in your world, but I made about as big a wreck I could make of my life as a rich, young, empty-headed and empty-hearted young man can make. My Dad cut me off without a penny until I had earned ten thousand dollars in some honest work. The church charity would not feed me, since I was able-bodied, so I had to find work or starve. I worked as a dogsbody in a factory that made gauges and jigs until I earned the respect of a master who took me on as a prentice. Do you know how many vices I had to give up to do that, no to mention how much sleep I lost and meals I skipped? I don’t think your paramour can force his way into my head any more forcefully than all those lovely, seductive vices I so adored. And your man does not have the heart to fight me if you are not on his side. So what gives? Why are you not on his side? Why didn’t you go back?”
She shook her head, “I don’t know what Invader Ward told you, but your world is safe, for now, because of me. You see, I am the agent that they sent to find the deviation point. Once they know that, they can tune their instruments and concentrate their thoughts all the better.”
“And you don’t want that? Why not?”
“My people can take over anyone whose doppelganger is alive in this world. We have thousands of agents. No matter what they had been doing here, they will all have an epiphany, leave their old lives, go into politics, into journalism, into entertainment, and start spreading the message by hints and whispers, never obvious, never naming ourselves, never saying what we are. We never need to be seen coordinating our message, we just let it seep in. If it takes a hundred years, we let it. History is on our side. There is nothing you can possibly do to stop us. So you want me to stay here.”
I said, “You did not answer my question. Why are you no longer loyal to your world? What do you want?”
She said, “I like this life! What business is it of yours? What do you want?”
I said, “I want you to wake up the version of Mary Ward who comes from this world.”
She said, “That will force me out!”
I shrugged. “You are a trespasser. Why didn’t they tell me—invader me—what your mission was?”
She said, “You are so naïve! The Revision Corps can only show an unmitigated string of successes. If I fail, the mission never took place, and I was sent to the moon-city world, Earth Fourteen. Only if I succeed was I ever sent here, Earth Seventeen.”
I said, “But you did succeed. You discovered the deviation point. You will be a heroine when you return.”
She shook her head. “I can tell you are still mostly the native. My Ward would never say ‘heroine’. I think my Ward has probably figured out what is going on, even if you have not.”
All of me was agreed on the action. I snatched the device out her lap, and pressed it again her head. Sending her home would save her body, and perhaps her life. And it might allow the Mary from this world to wake up.
She said, “If I go back, I will be a dead heroine. They will kill me to keep the secret silent.”
That made my hand waver. “What is so terrible?”
She spoke rapidly, her eyes on that instrument like the eyes of a bird watching a snake. “The suffragette Mrs Pankhurst succeeded in my world because the English were unwilling to force feed her when she went on hunger strike. It was a tactic she learned from the Russians. In my world, their revolution succeeded, and was widely admired. Her success was also admired, and the public believed that the anti-suffragette women lacked the courage of any convictions. No one in my world believed that women should bear and raise children as their lot in life, and no one was allowed to say that one wife cannot do both at once.”
I said, “I know the rest. The income tax shifted the soul of America from Wall Street to Washington. Ambitious men entered politics instead of business. The abolition of alcohol trampled the state’s rights still more, and encouraged nationwide crime rings, and this led to a nationwide police force called the FBI, who were permitted to carry guns. The popular election of Senators eviscerated the Senate of its prime function, which was to protect the states from the Federal government. And the women’s vote went for ever bigger government, and the government started ruling in a feminine way, with nagging on labels, and public services messages, and reprimands meant to force the races to get along as if we were all unruly children instead of grown men. The male approach to law making, which was to have a few, simple, and clear rules that every man of honor respects, all that eroded into nothing. Honor eroded into nothing. Government by law was replaced by government by compassion. But government by compassion is not very compassionate. And the mothers did not raise their children, and so the whole generation of brats came to maturity, still children—nagging, whining, spoilt children. Children who would not work at tough and honest jobs. Children who could demand a handout from the government as a matter of right. And these children voted a straight ticket of filthy self-indulgence: to allow no-fault divorce, to allow contraception and abortion and to make all women into men in thought and deed. And at the end of that road is your mindless world of lies and gray walls that scream at you.”
She said, “Don’t send me back to that world! They have the right not to be offended there. No right is more terrible than that. It means I have no rights at all, because anything I do, even being alive at all, might offend someone.”
“Sorry, my darling, but you are not meant to be here…” But when I brought up my other hand to twist the knob and turn it on, I grabbed my own wrist instead and forced the instrument back toward my own head.
But then I realized that sending the Invader back to his home—now that we both knew the deviation point—would be tantamount to inviting an invasion here. That thought unnerved me. I was weakening. The little flashlight magnet came ever neare
r my head. I pressed victorious, pushing the little flashlight magnet ever nearer my head.
Not until it was too late did I realize what I was trying to do: the magnetic pulse could also be tuned to trigger the amnesia reflex, which would allow the possessor to kill the host, even a strong host who was doing a good job of resisting. As soon as the magnet touched me, I would die. As soon as it touched me, I would be triumphant, and Lity would be safe.
Inch by inch, I began forcing the magnet away from myself.
I gasped, “Help me!”
Lity said, “If you kill the native, you can take up permanent residence with me, here, and we can live in this lovely and romantic world! No one lies here—well, not compared to our world. When they talk about honor and chivalry and romance—they believe it! When husbands walk out on their wives, they are punished! Punished at law! This whole world is like a paradise for women, a huge romance novel!”
That encouraged me. It actually did help. I did not have the training after all; I had done this before, for years; whereas I had never fought a mental battle like this.
The magnet touched my head. I screamed in rage and triumph and panic as I saw my own fingers groping for the switch. Closer and farther, closer and farther my fingers twitched and writhed like worms.
I was thrown out of my seat and against the dashboard when a big red dog ran up alongside the hansom, passed it, and fell down on the road right in front of the vehicle. An automatic circuit in the driver brought the hansom to a dangerously abrupt halt. I took advantage of the confusion by throwing the device out of the window.
But I could not stop myself from stepping outside of the motionless cab and merely picking it up again. But then the dog leaped to his feet, wrestled the device out of my surprised hand, and ran off a few feet. He put the device down, and stared at me, his tongue lolling.
The hansom was on a small and winding back road, with trees to both sides, and the moon behind a cloud with a silver lining. The night wind was blowing strongly, and sounded as if an insubstantial giant were wading through the trees, but there was a scent of pollen in the air, a hint of springtime.
Forbidden Thoughts Page 19