Trips: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four

by Robert Silverberg

  I wrote “In the House of Double Minds” in November, 1973, right after “Schwartz.” Don Pfeil, the editor of the short-lived Los Angeles-based magazine Vertex, asked me to write it, and perhaps even suggested the theme, for split-brain research was very much in the scientific news at that time. I had a difficult time doing it, as I did with everything I wrote then, and I think Pfeil, whose taste in fiction, like Judy-Lynn del Rey’s, ran to the conservative side (literarily speaking), was no more happy about publishing it than Judy-Lynn was with “Schwartz,” though he used it anyway, in the June, 1974 issue. My mood after turning the piece in was a distinctly to-hell-with-everything one. Writing short stories, I decided, had become an impossibly difficult ordeal, and I resolved then and there to abandon doing them forever, though I intended to continue writing novels.

  As you saw in the introduction to “Schwartz,” I did indeed manage two more novels—The Stochastic Man in 1974 and Shadrach in the Furnace in 1965—and then, suffering from terminal burnout, I gave up writing books also, and let it be known that I was retiring forever from the profession of writing. My retirement lasted about four years, which was about three and a half years longer than anyone who knew me had predicted; but even after I went back to writing again late in 1978 with the novel Lord Valentine’s Castle, I kept in mind how much trouble I had had five years earlier with short stories, and I stayed away from them. It wasn’t until 1981 that Ben Bova, the fiction editor of Omni, coaxed me into trying my hand at one again, and I produced the first of what turned out to be a spate of short stories that I wrote all through the decade that followed. But that’s a story to tell in the next volume.

  ~

  Now they bring in the new ones, this spring’s crop of ten-year-olds—six boys, six girls—and leave them with me in the dormitory room that will be their home for the next dozen years. The room is bare, austere, with black slate floors and rough brick walls, furnished for the time being with cots and clothes-cabinets and little more. The air is chill, and the children, who are naked, huddle in discomfort.

  “I am Sister Mimise,” I tell them. “I will be your guide and counselor in the first twelve months of your new life in the House of Double Minds.”

  I have lived in this place for eight years, since I was fourteen, and this is the fifth year that I have had charge of the new children. If I had not been disqualified by my left-handedness, this is the year I would have been graduated into full oraclehood, but I try not to dwell on that. Caring for the children is a rewarding task in itself. They arrive scrawny and frightened, and slowly they unfold: they blossom, they ripen, they grow toward their destinies. Each year there is some special one for me, some favorite, in whom I take particular joy. In my first group, four years ago, it was long-legged laughing Jen, she who is now my lover. A year later it was soft beautiful Jalil, and then Timas, who I thought would become one of the greatest of all oracles; but after two years of training Timas cracked and was culled. And last year bright-eyed Runild, impish Runild, my pet, my darling boy, more gifted even than Timas and, I fear, even less stable. I look at the new ones, wondering who will be special among them for me this year.

  The children are pale, slender, uneasy; their thin nude bodies look more than naked because of their shaven skulls. As a result of what has been done to their brains they move clumsily today. Their left arms often dangle as though they have entirely forgotten them, and they tend to walk in a shuffling sidewise motion, dragging their left legs a little. These problems soon will disappear. The last of the operations in this group was performed only two days ago, on the short wide-shouldered girl whose breasts have already begun to grow. I can see the narrow red line marking the place where the surgeon’s beam sliced through her scalp to sever the hemispheres of her brain.

  “You have been selected,” I say in a resonant formal tone, “for the highest and most sacred office in our society. From this moment until you reach adulthood your lives and energies will be consecrated to the purpose of attaining the skills and wisdom an oracle must have. I congratulate you on having come so far.”

  And I envy you.

  I do not say that part aloud.

  I feel envy and pity both. I have seen the children come and go, come and go. Out of each year’s dozen, one or two usually die along the way of natural causes or accidents. At least three go insane under the terrible pressure of the disciplines and have to be culled. So only about half the group is likely to complete the twelve years of training, and most of those will prove to have little value as oracles. The useless ones will be allowed to remain, of course, but their lives will be meaningless. The House of Double Minds has been in existence for more than a century; there are at present just one hundred forty-two oracles in residence —seventy-seven women and sixty-five men —of whom all but about forty are mere drones. A thin harvest out of some twelve hundred novices since the beginning.

  These children have never met before. I call upon them to introduce themselves. They give their names in low self-conscious voices, eyes downcast.

  A boy named Divvan asks, “Will we wear clothes soon?”

  Their nakedness disturbs them. They hold their thighs together and stand at odd stork-like angles, keeping apart from one another, trying to conceal their undeveloped loins. They do this because they are strangers. They will forget their shame before long. As the months pass they will become closer than brothers and sisters.

  “Robes will be issued this afternoon,” I tell him. “But clothing ought not to be important here, and you need have no reason to wish to hide your bodies.” Last year when this same point arose —it always does —the mischievous boy Runild suggested that I remove my own robe as a gesture of solidarity. Of course I did, but it was a mistake: the sight of a mature woman’s body was more troubling to them than even their own bareness.

  Now it is the time for the first exercises, so that they may learn the ways in which the brain operation has altered the responses of their bodies. At random I choose a girl named Hirole and ask her to step forward, while the rest form a circle around her. She is tall and fragile-looking and it must be torment to her to be aware of the eyes of all the others upon her.

  Smiling, I say gently, “Raise your hand, Hirole.”

  She raises one hand.

  “Bend your knee.”

  As she flexes her knee, there is an interruption. A wiry naked boy scrambles into the room, fast as a spider, wild as a monkey, and bursts into the middle of the circle, shouldering Hirole aside. Runild again! He is a strange and moody and extraordinarily intelligent child, who, now that he is in his second year at the House, has lately been behaving in a reckless, unpredictable way. He runs around the circle, seizing several of the new children briefly, putting his face close to theirs, staring with crazy intensity into their eyes. They are terrified of him. For a moment I am too astonished to move. Then I go to him and seize him.

  He struggles ferociously. He spits at me, hisses, claws my arms, makes thick wordless grunting sounds. Gradually I get control of him. In a low voice I say, “What’s wrong with you, Runild? You know you aren’t supposed to be in here!”

  “Let me go.”

  “Do you want me to report this to Brother Sleel?”

  “I just want to see the new ones.”

  “You’re frightening them. You’ll be able to meet them in a few days, but you’re not allowed to upset them now.” I pull him toward the door. He continues to resist and nearly breaks free. Eleven-year-old boys are amazingly strong, sometimes. He kicks my thigh savagely: I will have purple bruises tonight. He tries to bite my arm. Somehow I get him out of the room, and in the corridor he suddenly goes slack and begins to tremble, as though he has had a fit that now is over. I am trembling too. Hoarsely I say, “What’s happening to you, Runild? Do you want to be culled the way Timas and Jurda were? You can’t keep doing things like this! You —”

  He looks up at me, wild-eyed, and starts to say something, and stifles it, and turns and bolts. In a moment he is
gone, a brown naked streak vanishing down the hallway. I feel a great sadness: Runild was a favorite of mine, and now he is going insane, and they will have to cull him. I should report the incident immediately, but I am unable to bring myself to do it, and, telling myself that my responsibility lies with the new ones, I return to the dorm room.

  “Well!” I say briskly, as if nothing unusual has happened. “He’s certainly playful today, isn’t he! That was Runild. He’s a year ahead of you. You’ll meet him and the rest of his group a little later. Now, Hirole —”

  The children, preoccupied with their own altered state, quickly grow calm; they seem much less distressed by Runild’s intrusion than I am. Shakily I begin again, asking Hirole to raise a hand, to flex a knee, to close an eye. I thank her and call a boy named Mulliam into the centre of the circle. I ask him to raise one shoulder above the other, to touch his hand to his cheek, to make a fist. Then I pick a girl named Fyme and instruct her to hop on one foot, to put an arm behind her back, to kick one leg in the air.

  I say, “Who can tell me one thing that was true of every response?”

  Several of them answer at once. “It was always the right side! The right eye, the right hand, the right leg —”

  “Correct.” I turn to a small dark-visaged boy named Bloss and ask, “Why is that? Do you think it’s just coincidence?”

  “Well,” he says. “Everybody here is right-handed, because left-handers aren’t allowed to become oracles, and so everybody tended to use the side that he —”

  Bloss falters, seeing heads shaking all around the circle.

  Galaine, the girl whose breasts have begun to sprout, says “It’s because of the operation! The right side of our brains doesn’t understand words very well, and it’s the Right that controls the left side of the body, so when you tell us in words to do something, only our Left understands and moves the muscles it controls. It gets the jump on the Right because the Right can’t speak or be spoken to.”

  “Very good, Galaine. That’s it exactly.”

  I let it sink in. Now that the connections between the two halves of their brains have been cut, the Rights of these children are isolated, unable to draw on the skills of the language centre in the Left. They are only now realizing what it means to have half a brain rendered illiterate and inarticulate, to have their Left respond as though it is the entire brain, activating only the muscles it controls most directly.

  Fyme says, “Does that mean we won’t ever be able to use our left sides again?”

  “Not at all. Your Right isn’t paralyzed or helpless. It just isn’t very good at using words. So your Left is quicker to react when I give a verbal instruction. But if the instruction isn’t phrased in words, the Right will be able to take control and respond.”

  “How can you give an instruction that isn’t in words?” Mulliam asks.

  “In many ways,” I say. “I could draw a picture, or make a gesture, or use some sort of symbol. I’ll show you what I mean by going through the exercises again. Sometimes I’ll give the instructions in words, and sometimes by acting them out. When I do that, imitate what you see. Is that clear?”

  I wait a moment to allow the sluggish word-skills of their Rights to grasp the scheme.

  Then I say, “Raise a hand.”

  They lift their right arms. When I tell them to bend a knee, they bend their right knees. But when I wordlessly close my left eye, they imitate me and close their left eyes. Their Rights are able to exert muscular control in a normal way when the instructions are delivered nonverbally; but when I use words, the Left alone perceives and acts.

  I test the ability of their Lefts to override the normal motor functions of their Rights by instructing them verbally to raise their left shoulders. Their Rights, baffled by my words, take no action, forcing their Lefts to reach beyond a Left’s usual sphere of dominance. Slowly, with great difficulty, a few of the children manage to raise their left shoulders. Some can manage only a mere twitch. Fyme, Bloss, and Mulliam, with signs of struggle evident on their faces, are unable to budge their left shoulders at all. I tell the entire group to relax, and the children collapse in relief, sprawling on their cots. There is nothing to worry about, I say. In time they will all regain full motor functions in both halves of their bodies. Unless they are driven insane by the split-brain phenomena, that is, but no need to tell them that.

  “One more demonstration for today,” I announce. This one will show them in another way how thoroughly the separation of the hemispheres affect the mental processes. I ask Gybold, the smallest of the boys, to seat himself at the testing table at the far end of the room. There is a screen mounted on the table: I tell Gybold to fix his eyes on the center of the screen, and I flash a picture of a banana on the left side of the screen for a fraction of a second.

  “What do you see, Gybold?”

  “I don’t see anything, Sister Mimise,” he replies, and the other children gasp. But the “I” that is speaking is merely Gybold’s Left, which gets its visual information through his right eye; that eye did indeed see nothing. Meanwhile Gybold’s Right is answering my question in the only way it can: the boy’s left hand gropes among several objects lying on the table hidden behind the screen, finds the banana that is there, and triumphantly holds it up. Through sight and touch Gybold’s Right has prevailed over its wordlessness.

  “Excellent,” I say. I take the banana from him and, drawing his left hand behind the screen where he is unable to see it, I put a drinking glass into it. I ask him to name the object in his hand.

  “An apple?” he ventures. I frown, and quickly he says, “An egg? A pencil?”

  The children laugh. Mulliam says, “He’s just guessing!”

  “Yes, he is. But which part of Gybold’s brain is making the guesses?”

  “His Left,” Galaine cries. “But it’s the Right that knows it’s holding a glass.”

  They all shush her for giving away the secret. Gybold pulls his hand out from under the screen and stares at the glass, silently forming its name with his lips.

  I put Herik, Chith, Simi, and Clane through related experiments. Always the results are the same. If I flash a picture to the right eye or put an object in the right hand, the children respond normally, correctly naming it. But if I transmit information only to the left eye or the left hand, they are unable to use words to describe the objects their Rights see or feel.

  It is enough for now. The children are silent and have withdrawn into individual spheres of privacy. I know that they are working things out within their minds, performing small self-devised experiments, testing themselves, trying to learn the full extent of the changes the operation has brought about. They glance from one hand to another, flex fingers, whisper little calculations. They should not be allowed to look inward so much, not at the beginning. I take them to the storeroom to receive their new clothing, the simple gray monastic robes that we wear to set us apart from the ordinary people of the city. Then I turn them free, sending them romping into the broad fields of soft green grass behind the dormitory, to relax and play. They may be oracles in the making; but they are also, after all, ten-year-old children.

  It is my afternoon rest period. On my way through the dark cool corridors to my chamber I am stopped by Brother Sleel, one of the senior oracles. He is a white-haired man, tall and of powerful build, and his blue eyes work almost independently of one another, constantly scanning his surroundings in restless separate searches. Sleel has never been anything but warm and kind to me, and yet I have always been afraid of him, I suppose more out of awe for his office than out of fear for the man himself. Really I feel timid with all the oracles, knowing that their minds work differently from mine and that they see things in me that I may not see myself. Sleel says, “I saw you having difficulties with Runild in the hall this morning. What was happening?”

  “He wandered into my orientation meeting. I asked him to leave.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “He said he wanted t
o see the new children. But of course I couldn’t let him bother them.”

  “And he started to fight with you?”

  “He made some trouble. Nothing much.”

  “He was fighting with you, Mimise.”

  “He was rather unruly,” I admit.

  Sleel’s left eye stares into mine. I feel a chill. It is the oracle-eye, the all-seeing one. Quietly he says, “I saw you fighting with him.”

  I look away from him. I study my bare feet. “He wouldn’t leave. He was frightening the new ones. When I tried to lead him from the room he jumped at me, yes. But he didn’t hurt me and it was all over in a moment. Runild is high-spirited, Brother.”

  “Runild is a troubled child,” Sleel says heavily. “He is disturbed. He is becoming wild, like a beast.”

  “No, Brother Sleel.” How can I face that terrible eye? “He has extraordinary gifts. You know —surely you must know —that it takes time for one like him to settle down, to come to terms with —”

  “I’ve had complaints from his counselor, Voree. She says she hardly knows how to handle him.”

  “It’s only a phase. Voree’s had responsibility for him only a couple of weeks. As soon as she —”

  “I know you want to protect him, Mimise. But don’t let your love for the boy cloud your judgement. I think this is Timas happening all over again. It’s an old, old pattern here, the brilliant novice who is unable to cope with his changes, who —”

  “Are you going to cull him?” I blurt.

  Sleel smiles. He takes both my hands in his. I am engulfed by his strength, by his wisdom, by his power. I sense the unfathomable flow of perception from his mystic Right to his calm, analytic Left. He says, “If Runild gets any worse, I’ll have to. But I want to save him. I like the boy. I respect his potential. What do you suggest we do, Mimise?”