Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE,

wherein the Pure Boy
dons Wandag's Mantle of
Remembrance, and knows
his soul's past.


The Arkendhi "Weavers' Song" depicts the merger of souls, the creation of the Ksentos Venimentum text's Mantle of Remembrance. In this tale not Benadek but Gorb seems like the kindly god Benakh, who shelters children beneath his magical robe. Meanings entwine, coalesce, and confuse: the Old Arkendhi word for "robe" is "gorban." Does Gorb then symbolize Remembrance?
But what of Benadek, subsumed in a collective identity? Will we hear no more of him? A status check of the biocybes' input buffers indicates that there are few tales left to be integrated. Does the final chapter of this experiment draw near?
On another level, does this episode hint that the ability to become is no more than a contagious microorganism, a germ or virus carried from star to star by early explorers? Is that original organism, now integrated into mutable genes, like some super-mitochondrium? Then the fury of the one-worlders and parallel-evolutionists has been wasted, and the true tale should offend none: species evolved separately, as all but fundamentalists have long known, but becoming appeared only once, on a long vanished planet that may indeed have been called Earth.
If this quasi-organism exists, can we afford not to find it, and pass it to the unfortunate "immunes" among us, the fixed-form humans?
(Kaledrin, Senior Editor)




INTERLUDE

The Great School, Midicor IV

 

"Aw, come on, Kal! You can't publish that. Benedek is a disease?"

"I can too. Look, Ab, a few chapters ago Saphooth and his crowd were calling us mutables body stealers. If it's just a few transferred genes that came in on a virus, they can spend their energy curing the immutables' immunity, and we'll all be happy."

"Yeah," Abrovid admitted uneasily.

"You don't sound convinced."

"Yeah, well, I was just thinking . . ."

"Thinking what?"

"Well, what if instead of trying to catch our disease, they develop a vaccine instead?"

 

The boffins dismissed Gorb. He returned to his bunk to await further orders. The premature termination of his task got him back long before his bunk-mates, so the barracks was empty. Gorb was not sleepy, but with his headache worsening, he decided to try a nap. Surprisingly, he dozed almost at once.

Benadek did not sleep. For all his former hatred of the General, he felt only disgust and scorn, now. His sworn enemy was no towering honch, no godlike or devilish being, only a warped old man. He was not as evil as he was senile.

Don't underestimate him, said Nimbuk, the Inuit medicine man. Age does not diminish Evil, it refines it. Nimbuk "spoke" so seldom that Benadek hardly recognized his chemical "voice." Among my people, age is the essence of Evil, and death our salvation from it. This creature has clung to life so long that all goodness has sweated away.

No wonder Nimbuk has been so quiet, Benadek thought privately. What must he think of Achibol, and even `memories' like himself?

I agree with Nimbuk, Jack Van Duinen said. The General makes Gorb seem like an innocent babe.

Gorb is innocent, Benadek replied. Men like the General created him. Gorb only follows his programming, jumbled as it is by the afterthoughts they tacked on. But what have you come up with? Can we regain control?

If he uses the matter transmitter, Sonnenfield, the astronaut, speculated, maybe we could reverse the changes. At least we wouldn't be taken by surprise again.

We could wait a long time. His platoon's assigned to inside duty indefinitely.

Can't be helped, can it? At least we should be prepared.

I don't know if I can stand it! Anna communicated so vehemently that Gorb twitched in his sleep. That girl the General mutilated . . . in a week, there'll be another, and then another. I can't just sit by and watch that. I'll go mad.

Can you do that? the philosopher, Bowers, asked reflectively. Or are all of us trapped in our dubious sanity? I suspect we'd all have to make that choice together.

<Choice?> Anna sent bitter-acid and sharp-metallic ions afloat. Since when is sanity a matter of choice?

Excepting organic disfunction, disease, or genetic flaws, madness is a choice, Bowers answered coolly, an option all minds have. But wouldn't you feel some obligation to us? Should you escape in that manner, the rest of us would still have to . . . to live with you.

Did you notice what happened? Benadek interjected with a burst of peptide-chains. A responding trickle of small, tightly bound molecules of neutral charge indicated the others' incomprehension. Anna, when you first `spoke up'—as upset as you are—Gorb twitched. We can influence him!

A little jerk here or there? That's not control, Arnie Sonnenfield derided. We've been giving him headaches for months.

It's a foothold, Benadek replied.

You're locked out of his hypothalamus and other critical brain areas, Anna protested, and you don't dare push. If he starts making antibodies against us, we could be destroyed like any infection. The antibody problem had been discovered after Gorb's self-assertion. Because Benadek had not merely changed himself, then killed the honch, but had invaded him, the takeover was vulnerable, like any invasion, to organized internal resistance. Initially, Gorb's immune system had been overwhelmed. Had Benadek and the others been a viral or bacterial onslaught, Gorb would have died, but because he did not, his own defenses still had a belated chance to fight them off. Their protective mimicry of Gorb's identifying codes was incomplete. Immune systems possessed enormous "libraries" of identified infections and seemed to create new entries as fast as invasions occurred. Even attacks on the immune system could be overcome, if the victim could be kept alive long enough.

A belated chance, but not a winning one. Benadek's desperate plunge into the Gorb-body, and the systemic chaos it caused, might well have killed that body. Both forces might have been decimated and the battlefield left a ruin. Neither side could have won quickly enough, decisively enough.

The matter-transmitter had actually saved them all: incorporating elements similar to the temples' gene-scanners in its error-checking systems, it simultaneously reinforced Gorb's normal honch patterns and edited identified disease-causing lifeforms from the transmission. All else was transmitted exactly as scanned: Gorb's weight and electrolytic balance remained the same, his stomach and intestinal content, even the dirt under his fingernails, were left intact.

Random bits of Gorb-tissue were sampled and subjected to more extensive testing—and everything so tested was destroyed in the process. Ordinarily, such sampling had no deleterious effects. After all, what loss to Gorb were a few cubic millimeters of his last meal—half-cooked rabbit and wild turnips? What matter if he lost a few brain cells, a bit of muscle even, or twenty milliliters of blood? But when the material tested included Benadek and his companions, so soon after their takeover, there was no redundancy. What was lost in the emtee's processing and sampling was lost forever. Even the memory of it, the recognition of loss, was obliterated—for what was Benadek now but the memory of himself? The sampling had broken the invaders' hastily constructed control.

Gorb's conductive buckles and studs and weapons had created eddy currents that broke tenuous chemical bonds and shattered blood proteins. While Gorb experienced the pain of misfiring nerves, he lost nothing that could not be replaced by his own DNA-coded protein factories. The invaders' losses were final, and their control could not be regained.

But the eddy currents that destroyed their coherence had muddled the scanner's readings of their foreignness. Obviously, only the M.T. to and from the outside had such screening, or the foreigners would have been eliminated in the later transmission. But even if Benadek regained control, he would have to avoid the outside transmitters, and find another way to leave the underground installation, when and if the time for that came. Nevertheless, he did not hope to control Gorb again . . . not exactly.

If Gorb knew about us, if we could somehow introduce ourselves to him, could we convince him to share this body with us? What benefits could we offer him? Day and night, in his slow, chemical thinking, Benadek pondered that question. He was less bitter in his imprisonment than he might have been without that task and the slim possibilities it offered. Anything was better than outright destruction.

A honch? Share with us? One silent voice scoffed.

He's hardly more than a mindless beast, a programmed engine of destruction, another voice protested.

Even if we revealed ourselves, and didn't drive him mad, why would he do us any favors?

Benadek let them have their say. He let them fume, protest, and deny. He waited as patiently as a seed awaits the melting snow, the cessation of winter's blasts. When the last protesting wisps of protein-thought broke down amid the mute whisper of Gorb's ordinary enzymes and simple lipids, when the last chained word-codes were silenced by free-radical combination and macrophage-ingestion, Benadek released the story he wanted them to know.

It was a brief tale of a poot, a simple girl who wanted to be more than her inborn limitations decreed. A girl, little more than a child, who struggled against her nature—was it pseudohuman? Less than human? No, he said. She was simply human. A pun? Chemical speech had no sly inflections or raised eyebrows—and no laughter. No one as much as chuckled. Benadek told of a soul reaching beyond the frontiers of its imprisoning brain and flesh in search of a dream, and dying there.

Benadek recounted meeting Sylfie—his mockery, lust, and ignorant cruelty—without explanations, apologies, or perverse pride. He described her agony, and the hope she held to the last, for generations to come, generations that would never spring from her own womb.

He told them, finally, of the last effort she made to send that hope onward beyond her own death: himself. He told them of Benadek, whose survival was Sylfie's final cry of defiance, echoing down the myriad branching corridors of future time.

When he finished, only the white noise of Gorb-processes swirled around the invaders in their scattered hiding places. Between the pulses of Gorb-blood driven by Gorb-heart and the silent stretching of encircling capillary walls, amid the bumping and thumping of platelets, the slip and slop of dead cells being consumed and carried away, there was silence. For the duration of a hundred heartbeats, a thousand, through the sucking meioses and mitoses of a hundred thousand cells, the flabby collapses of as many others, the thoughtless, mindless silence was sustained.

Benadek waited. Meaning must create itself. His initiative must be followed not by the thrust-and-push of his will, but from without. He waited.

When the silence had endured a hundred, five hundred, a thousand heartbeats more, when a million, a hundred million nerve impulses had passed from sleeping Gorb-brain to beating heart and rolling intestine-wave, a trickle of thought rewarded Benadek's patience.

What does a honch hope for? someone asked.

What pain lies in the deepest, most hidden cells of a honch's poor brain? he replied. And what might ease it?

Even as these questions flowed, seeking their own answers, new ones were raised. They were phrased in glutamine linked to aspartic acid and lysine in specific order—protein chains, transparent to Gorb's bodily processes, that linked with others of their own kind wherever the dangling question marks of receptor shape and electromolecular charge allowed. They formed new questions and commands: neurotransmitter commands that made their way from blood to unsheathed olfactory nerves to brain, where they caused synapses to fire in specific, concerted ways.

As each question arrived, each by its own unique path, so Gorb's limited brain answered them with more conventional but no less wondrous firings of neurons. For the first time in his life—for eighteen or twenty-two years, he guessed, never having wondered before—Gorb opened his eyes and really saw.

As Benadek before him had awakened in the laboratory chair in Sufawlz, knowing not only what light switches and cathode-ray tubes were, but how they functioned and why, so Gorb opened his eyes and saw, for the first time, that the call box above the barracks door had a wire that ran down the jamb, to the baseboard, and into a hole.

He understood more: from the hole the wire ran through a conduit to the central command computers. Other wires ran to boffin quarters, to the emtees, even to the General's own bedroom. Gorb, who had never made an analogy before, who only now knew what a simile was, said clearly and succinctly, "Like nerves, those wires," and he grinned proudly.

Could Benadek have grinned, he would have responded like a proud father to his offspring's first words. But even as Gorb reveled in the new capabilities of his rapid-firing synapses, he was flooded with new realization. Within the matrix of his expanding world was a very special being whose name was . . . Gorb. Awash in a tumult of concepts never contemplated—love, responsibility, the sharing of joy and pain, self-sacrifice and noblesse oblige—Gorb saw himself not only for what he was, but what he had been. For the first time since he was a greedy, cranky infant pulling with tiny, pearl-white teeth at his mother's swollen nipple, Gorb wept.

He wept for himself, and the depth of ignorance that had allowed him to do all that he had done—the suffering he had caused, the poor pervs, deevs, and muties, the mothers, fathers, siblings, and children. He wept for dull-eyed rape victims, callous honches still ignorant, indifferent boffins locked in clever impotence, poots, bland cozies, and above all for the willful cruelty and arrogance of the intellects that had created them. He even wept for the General, the last pitiable ancient clinging to life long after it should rightfully have faded away.

"You wanted to know," he chided himself as huge sobs racked his massive frame. "You wanted to know what was behind your headaches. Maybe you didn't want to know so much, but it all came in the one package. Now take it like a soldier.

"No," he corrected himself. "Like a man."

The human mind—honch, pure-human, ancient—had only so much room for understanding, or for grief. Gorb absorbed the naked concept of guilt, and his mind rebelled. Unable to absorb more, horrified by what he understood, he escaped in the only way he could. His head slumped back on his pillowless pad and his eyes, beneath shuttering lids, rolled up.

* * *

In the backwash of Gorb's thudding heart, the chemical chaos of a bloodstream flooded with molecular snags and the tumbling wreckage of Gorb's emotion, the minds responsible for his enlightenment and torment waited in isolation, unable to call out above the tumult. As Gorb fell deeper into unconsciousness, they sent tentative messages afloat—short notes in fragile bottles that more often than not were smashed on the molecular logs, rocks, and flood-wreckage that swirled beyond their refuges.

When words and concepts could finally flow unbroken, when Gorb's breathing slowed and became regular and his murky blood cleared, someone asked, What was that? What happened?

I found something Gorb wanted, Anna replied contritely, and I nudged an answer his way. A tumbling, twisted DNA segment, topped off with a partly phosphorylated kinase—a meaningless molecule soon dissipated—was her equivalent of a shrug. He only wanted to know if something was really wrong with him—his headaches, you know. But it didn't stop there. The answer wasn't simple. The neurotransmitter surpluses we created allowed him to think it all through, and with their help, he . . . we lost control.

He raided us, Benadek interjected. And now, when he wakes up and integrates what he took, he'll know we're here.

Who's in control? demanded a panicky, negatively-charged flood of tiny proteins. Us or him?

He is, Benadek replied. For now, anyway.

For now?

If he wants us, he'll keep us. Otherwise . . . a few days' fever, and we'll be sweated out, a stain on his mattress.

What can we do? Arnie asked anxiously.

Wait, Anna answered him, and hope.

Benadek's wordless agreement followed her passive, quiet-flowing thought. Gorb's heart had beaten twenty-one thousand times since his overburdened mind had rebelled. He was awakening. Wait, Benadek cautioned the others. Just hope he likes us.

 

QUERY: WHO ARE YOU? Gorb's question resounded with power and confidence.

I'm the boy you thought you killed by the emtee, Benadek answered.

QUERY: THOUGHT?

Benadek created a scintillant image of himself lying next to Gorb. He showed himself flowing into Gorb. Gorb-now saw Gorb-then arrange the limp body, watched himself cut it and smear it with blood. Gorb-now shuddered. The killing hadn't been real? He could not find a word for what he felt. Before, he would not have needed one. Relief was too simple a concept.

QUERY: YOU ARE ALIVE? Gorb's questions, Benadek thought, were like hearing one of Circe's defective speakers turned up too loud. The not-sound of those questions—part bioelectric, nervous, and tight; part chemical, molecular, and loose—unnerved him.

I'm alive, Benadek volunteered. You can destroy me, if you want. There was no risk in saying that—Gorb could discover it for himself. Better to reassure him and give him time for thought. Benadek was glad Gorb was communicating, not just taking what he wanted. That mental shudder over Benadek's fraudulent "death" demonstrated Gorb's repugnance for his ignorant honch-acts, and the killing he had not actually committed.

It took Benadek a while to realize just what emotion was steering the big honch. The ex-honch, he corrected himself. He remembered something Achibol had told him long ago. "The honch template is derived from military policemen, a retired Los Angeles police lieutenant, and several sheriff's deputies. Cops." And that, Benadek knew, was what honches had been created to be. Cops. Not the twisted warriors that patchwork modifications later made of them, but simple small-town cops: peacemakers, rule-keepers and protectors. That revelation was the source of Gorb's remorse. He had been, as Achibol might have put it, a rogue, a bad cop.

QUERY: WHY DESTROY YOU? Even as he "spoke," Gorb plucked the answer from his own cells and his visitors', his demand so intense that Benadek could no longer distinguish question from answer. The thoughts that Gorb plucked from Benadek's essence, from Anna's, Jim's, and the others' coalesced as further questions, which in turn became demands . . . Finally it stopped. For a hundred heartbeats Gorb was silent, mulling what he had gathered. Then . . .

WE ARE GORB/BENADEK/ANNA/JIM/ARNIE . . . ONE. NOT MANY.

If Gorb was suggesting what Benadek thought, what he hoped. . . .

THERE MUST BE ONLY ONE. It was not a statement, it was a command.

One being, one mind? Benadek asked. If we merge, you may not be the dominant one. Have you considered that?

NO MATTER. ONE. NOT SIMPLE. HUMAN.

Benadek saw what Gorb saw, and understood the sacrifice the honch was willing to make—and why. Gorb's sacrifice, and Jim's, and the others'. Not his, not Benadek's. At least, not much. Even now, fragmented, the Benadek-personality was the most complete. When they merged that personality would dominate the rest and integrate them. Gorb, Anna . . . all the memories would be Benadek's, perhaps confused by the parallel time lines of shared lives, or suppressed, to be drawn upon only in time of need. Benadek hoped they would remain, if only as poignant, contradictory memories, like the recollection of a dream.

It was not Benadek's choice to make. He could not kill those he shared a body with. Even if the power to decide had been his, not Gorb's, he could not have done it. Benadek withdrew. He withdrew not only his thoughts, but his aspiration to live once again with a body and a mind that responded to him alone, without contradictory voices—but with Anna's spirit, Jim's analytical wisdom, and Gorb's rules, all at his command. Benadek drew himself close, a benign tumor in a little-used part of Gorb's brain. Let them decide, he told himself. Let them decide their own fate.

 

 

 

 

INTERLUDE

The Great School, Midicor IV

 

"See?" Abrovid chortled. "I was right. He didn't have to kill anybody. Benadek's not a bad guy—and neither are we. Old Saphooth and his `evil invasion' can go climb a tree."

"That last chapter is reassuring," Kaledrin admitted, "but not because it's necessarily true."

"Huh? The biocybes can't lie, Kal."

"I suppose not. But that's not what I mean. Just because Chapter Twenty—and Twenty-one—undercut Saphooth doesn't mean I believe the story. It's cobbled together from old folktales, remember?"

"Is that what you think? Am I a cobbler? I wrote those specs. If I thought for one minute . . ." But Kaledrin had already turned away. He was dictating to his terminal.

 

 

 

 

AFTERTHOUGHTS


There is a test of the biocybes' reliability and Saphooth's contentions, if anyone dares try it. It's not proof, of course, because there is no "proof," only levels of confidence. But if there ever was a real Benadek whose mutated kin learned to become, and not a Benadek-virus that has infected us, wouldn't his ability to share a body with others be duplicable in his descendants?
The advantages are obvious: all the expenses of travel, entertainment, and subsistence would be halved for two. If a mutable furnished the body, and the second personality were of a fixed-form individual, the latter would gain all the advantages of mutability. There would be no cause for the jealousy that motivates MYTHIC's former director, Saphooth.
Will anyone out there volunteer to take on a passenger in his mind and body, for the sake of an increased confidence-level? A passenger like Saphooth himself, perhaps? The benefits of such a merger, as the yet-undistributed Chapter Twenty-two clearly illustrates, go both ways.
(Kaledrin, Senior Editor)





INTERLUDE

The Great School, Midicor IV

 

"You can't publish that, Kal! Somebody will actually try it!"

"I'm not worried. Of all the millions of species and millions of worlds, don't you think someone would already have tried? If they did, it didn't work, did it? We'd have heard something." Kaledrin waved his eyestalks gleefully. "I'm telling old boneyform to put up or shut up. Wait 'til he reads Chapter Twenty-two."

"When are you going to distribute it?" Abrovid asked. "You've been sitting on that data-cube for days."

"I'm going to sit on it a while longer. Then, when it's released, I'm going to take a vacation."

"Vacation?" Abrovid queried. "You don't need one yet."

"I'm not going to bask and rut, Ab. I'm going to become something else. I've wanted a change, but there's never been time. Now, whether the Board wins or loses its suit against SOMA, the pressure will be off me."

"Have you decided what somatoform you want?" Abrovid asked.

"Something different," Kaledrin replied wistfully. "I'm sick of chitin and tentacles."

 

Abrovid departed. The halls and corridors of the Great School echoed emptily with his passage, then were silent, half-lit in nighttime standby mode. Kaledrin remained. Despite the late hour, he was expecting someone.

Kaledrin glanced frequently at the wall clock, his tentacles coiling and uncoiling impatiently. Then at last, when he was about to give up, he heard the airy swoosh of the outer door, then the clatter of hard-soled footgear, the one-two, left-right bipedal gait of . . .

"What's this about, Kaledrin?" snapped Saphooth. "It better be good!"

"Oh, it is," Kaledrin replied in tones sweet as honeybug oil. He reached under himself, pulled out the data-cube, and proffered it to Saphooth. "Here. Chapter Twenty-two. When you've read it, you'll understand."

 

Back | Next
Contents
Framed