by The Prisoner
Chapter Eleven
On the Retina
“Where is he, Number 14? What is he doing?”
The woman in the white gown frowned, touching her closed eyelids gently with the tips of her fingers, touching then her temple where the white wires of the electrodes tangled in white hair. “Still at the gate, Number 2. Still at the gate.”
“If you fed another image to him—” His voice entered the operating theater through six loudspeakers, an entire campanile of consonants and vowels, as though the disembodied speaker had converted his physical substance into pure sound.
“Until the fantasy begins to develop autonomously, there is no point in that. The subject’s still in shock. I trust you observed the scene he made here,despite sedation. That he should dream at all in his present condition is astonishing to me. Let me remind you, Number 2, that rapport is difficult enough to maintain without these purposeless interruptions. Are you so possessed by the vice of conversation that you can’t restrain your tongue’s lust for half an hour?”
“Number 14, if you think because you’re wearing your white smock that—”
“Each word you say, Number 2, is a wedge between his mind and mine. Quiet now–he’s moving! He’s trying to … get in.”
“To getin !”
“Or out, I can’t be sure. Such a vacant place. Just bars, stretching up out of sight. Orangy-yellow light, no shadows. But a fine color sense. I think I’lllike this one’s dreams. He’s begun to subvocalize. Simple rhyming associations–they’re not worth repeating. I think we can flash an image to him now. Number 96, is the beam adjusted?”
The technical nurse gave one last tug at the subject’s head: clamped within the mold of tailored steel, it didn’t budge. She took a reading from the chrome Behemoth positioned above his supine body. “Yes, Number 14, the image should be clear as crystal.”
“Number 28, I want just a silhouette, at ten milliseconds, until I’ve seen how long he holds the afterimage. I suggest that we begin with a key, Number 2. It should take him past those bars.”
“I leave the matter in your fair white hands, Number 14. Entirely.”
“Number 28: a key.”
In an adjacent room a young man sorted through a file of slides, selected one, inserted it into the cybernetic idolon he served, which coded the celluloid image into the minimum series of retinal cues necessary to produce that image. This code was then transmitted to the Behemoth (alaser) positioned above the sedated subject. The infinitesimally brief image of a key was etched on to the retina of his left eye.
The woman winced as the wires twined in her white hair conveyed to her eyes the same dazzling image.
“Ah! Cut that to five milliseconds next time. It’s far too bright. No, three. He’s … How fast!”
“Yes?” the loudspeakers bellowed curiously.“Well?”
“I’m … he’s in a church. The gate is an altar screen. I’m—”
“What of the key?”
Her laughter was warm, but such a little warmth was soon lost in the vast whiteness of this place, like a single germ struggling to survive in a vat of disinfectant. “What indeed! Tell me, Number 2, if the image of a key were blurred, what would it become?”
“Don’t be a tease, woman! Just tell me what you … whathe sees.”
“An executioner’s axe, and it’s a whopping big one.”
The priest mounted the pulpit, a rude wooden platform that creaked beneath his weight. He wore a simple alb over a black surplice and a black hood of imitation leather. Reaching the platform he stooped to pry the crescent-bladed axe from the wooden block. The unseen congregation spattered tepid applause. The priest lifted the axe, signaling for silence.
“Dearly beloved,” he said, the orotund tones muffled by his hood, which had not been provided with a hole for the mouth, “and you especially, Number 6.” Again applause, again the lifted axe.
“We are gathered here today to surrender, or renderunto seizers the things that are gauds. We must axe ourselves who we really are, and let the sleeping doggerel that is within us lie. This is the first stone, and upon this stone we will spill our dirt, in order that these lies shall not have been dyed with the blood of our veins.”
He turned to the wispy, wrinkled, white-haired woman next to him and inquired of her the name of this preacher. Smiling, she pressed a senile finger to her withered lips, a finger that resembled the numeral 1.
The preacher placed a large book upon the wooden block and read to the congregation“The Crime of the Ancient Mariner,”chopping off the stanzas that displeased him. Soon the pulpit was brimming with the lopped heads of seagulls, but he continued to read the dismembered poem, while the congregation reverently filed up the aisle to receive, each, his own severed head .
“This is accomplishing nothing,” Number 2 burst out through his six speakers, after listening to the doctor chant the first thirty stanzas of the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” “We have learned only that at some point in his schooldays he was required to memorize Coleridge’s stupid ballad, and that he now associates that memory with prisons. We must establish whether or not it washe who broke into the archives and set that fire. That should be easy enough to find out. Then, we shall explore his more interesting recesses.”
“You had told me,” the doctor said, “that there was no doubt he’d done it. The two films taken from his file, one of which was found in his possession in London. His fingerprints on everything. Any court could indict with evidence that strong–legally!”
“That’s why a doubt lingers. He isn’t a bungler. It might well be that the film we found him watching was mailed to him, as he claims, in London. As for the fingerprints, they would have been available to any of us.”
“Of us? Surely you don’t think …?”
“Everyone, including myself, would like to see certain of those records destroyed. Why didyou first come to work for us, Number 14, eh? Not purely from your dedication to science. 3, likewise, would prefer to forget that unhappy incident in Poland. 4 might well wish for some final discontinuity with his 1952-model face. 6–his motives are different but even more compelling. 7? 7 is always whining that he wants to be back in London frying literature in a cork-lined cell.”
“We both know, Number 2, that my brother isincapable of such derring-do. He’s a dear boy, butquite incapable.”
“Personally, I have a higher regard for the boy’s capabilities, but that’s not the issue.”
“I would have thought you’d take more satisfaction in accusingme .”
“Not accusing, Number 14–suspecting. None of us were continually before the cameras or with witnesses during that afternoon. Any of uscould have used the tunnel to get to the Archives and back. Except 8, of course. He was inyour care at the time, wasn’t he. But 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, any ofthem , in any combination.”
“It all sounds very baroque to me.”
“Rococo, if you like. It isn’tmy idea in any case–it’s Number 1’s.”
For the first time during this exchange, she opened her eyes: they were of different colors, one milky blue, onehazel-brown. “Damn!” She closed them quickly, covered her face with her hands. The high pale brow furrowed with concentration.
“Did you lose rapport?” Number 2 asked anxiously.
“No I’m still … the priest is still chopping up seagulls.”
“And the vocal?”
“This one’s a strong subvocalizer, so that’s no problem.I do wish you wouldn’t say things to startle me like that. Icould have lost touch. Now, what image do you suggest in order to lead him back to the scene of the crime?”
“Why not a photograph of the room?”
“Too complicated. The laser would burn his eyeballs out before enough identifying detail could be established. It has to be something readily gestalted.”
“Could you suggest a descent down a spiral staircase?”
“Number 28,” she called out, “do we have anything like that?”
“Just regular staircases,” the young man replied from the next room. “There’s a code classified as ‘Vertigo.’ Would that do?”
“Possibly. Space out the cues, and it should be almostthe same sensation.”
“Right.”
Number 14 gasped. “Slower! It’s—Oh! oh, this is awful, Ican’t—Slower!”
“If I space the cues out much more,” he complained, “the program will run to five minutes before it’s completed.”
“Then cancel it. The resemblance to a stairway of any kind is nil.”
After a long pause Number 2 asked: “Where is he? In the crypt?”
“Not there, no. I don’t recognize the place. We’ll just have to let him make his way around, until I can tell. We can’t feed more cues to him for five minutes at least. That ‘Vertigo’ sequence was murderous. Number 28, make a note to modify the code for ‘Vertigo.’ Strange … I’d swear I’ve seen a place exactly like this, but for the life of me …”
He was in hell. The parks were planted with beds of tulips and marigolds. Muzak played in the busy streets. It was a holiday.CLOSEDsigns hung in all the windows. The signs in the grass saidSMILE.
He asked the taxi driver what the place was called, but the taxi driver said he wasn’t allowed to go there. Like all the other damned souls, the driver was very small, almost a miniature.
The old woman he had sat next to in church got in the back seat and sat next to him in the taxi.
“Are you going to vote today?” she asked, smiling.
“Who is there to vote for?” A rhetorical question.
She tisked. “There’s always Someone to vote for, Number 6. Here—” She dug into her purse and took out a large gilt button, which she pinned to the lapel of his jacket. It said:
GUILT
“That’s some kind of progress anyhow,” Number 2 grumbled. “It shows that his attitude is maturing.”
“No, wait—She’s getting out. He took the button off the minute she was gone, put it in the ashtray. He wore it from courtesy rather than conviction. Now he’s getting out. There’s a large hill. And there’s Rover. This must havesomething to do with his escape. Now he’s pushing Rover up the hill.”
“An allusion to Sisyphus, my dear. Number 6 has a classical education.”
“Rover’s talking to him. Do you want to hear what—”
“Of course, woman! It isn’tRover talking to him, it’sme . He’s dreaming aboutme !”
She let the patient’s unspoken words, the dream’s faint resonance in his larynx, be amplified by her own mouth, shaped by her own lips. The voice Number 2 heard was neither hers nor his, but theirs together:
“But tell me, tell me! speak again,
Thy soft response renewing—
What makes that ship drive on so fast?
What is the ocean doing?”
“Oh hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell,” the six loudspeakers chorused. But Number 2 knew better than to interrupt again, so, while Sisyphus/6 struggled at his task and the Ancient Mariner jingled interminably toward redemption, he waited, daydreaming of his own hells, the ones he had already made, the better hells to come.
Hell is filled withThe Sound of Music.Forlornly, he pushes the great beige stone up the hill; forlornly, it rolls down again. How many times? How many more? Forlornly, up the hill; forlornly down. He has read this myth, he knows the story, but he was caught within the role and his contract required him to stay with the show for its entire run, and already it was threatening the record set by The Moustrap.
“No, Number 2, the only vocal I get now is just those songs. I get the impression that he’s thinking too, but Idon’t get a glimmer what about.”
“Nonsense, nobodythinks in their dreams! That’s thewonderful thing about the id, that it doesn’t have to think.But I shouldn’t lecture you in your own speciality. Whileyou were warbling, I thought of an image certain to provewhether or not he was down there. The one film of himthat had been put on the bonfire concerned an earlier contretemps with a double we provided for his amusementway back when. What was left on the reel showed that itwas reversed, as though it had recently been playedthrough quickly and not rewound. Let’s flash the image ofhis own face on to his retina. Surely, if he saw that film,there’ll be some indication in his dream.”
“There’s one drawback in that. I’ve done the same thingwith other subjects, usually in the routine course of charting libidinal structures. Seeing oneself tends to bring onenearer consciousness, especially when there is a strongnarcissistic component.”
“If he starts to rise to the surface, we can drag him backunder with a big heavy archetype.”
“All right. Let’s have a photograph of Number 6.”
“Here it is,” Number 28 called into the amphitheater.
“28, you oaf! That was a profile! I wanted him full-face.No one ever sees himself inprofile . Damn! It’s too late.”
Outnumbered, he continued to struggle. The guards forced him down on the operating table. The surgeon appeared, all in white. Even her hair, though she was no older thanhimself, was white, spun glass, luminous. Though of different colors, her two eyes showed a distinct resemblance one to the other. In her own analytical way, she seemed to be admiring him.
“Number 28, hand me the new identity, please.”
The young man handed the surgeon a wide, somewhat Slavic face. She examined the profile, touched the mustache tentatively, ran a comb through the dark hair, changing the part from the right to the left.
“Hold still, please, Number 6. This won’t hurt.”
She grafted the face to his, tugging at the seams when she had finished to make certain it would not come off under pressure.
“Excellent! Now bring me that other body, Number 28, the one from the freezer. Once we’ve locked him in that, he’ll be no trouble at all. There’s no sturdier cage than a hundredweight or two of good solid flesh.”
“This other face, what does it look like, Number 14?”
“Like his, of course.”
“In the film, at one point, he was shown with a mustache and his hair darkened. If the face in the dream—”
“No, Number 2. The new face isexactly the same.” (And, she added with silent spite,you can go to hell. Her lie was not a matter of protecting the subject so much as it was a way of getting athim .)
The loudspeakers soughed a sigh. “Of course, that doesn’t prove itwasn’t Number 6.”
“Unfortunately, though, it won’t convince Number 1 that it couldn’t have been one of us. For my own part, I’m convinced it was 6. Shall we keep trying?”
“How much time have we left?”
“Ten minutes at most. Beyond that there’s a danger of personality disintegration–for either of us or both. Also a possibility of reversal, which is harmless but a waste of time. That is, if I try to channel the dream too often where I want it to go, he may start dreamingmy dream. Or else–I’m not sure just how it does happen–I lose an objective sense of what his dream is about, like critics who find their own theories in everyone else’s books.”
“I can see you’re under a strain, Number 14. You never start to lecture me until you’re tired. So, with the time left, I’d like—Oh, what is he doing now, by the way? Still strapped down?”
“In effect. He seems to regard the second body as a kind of straitjacket.”
(The way he stares at me, she thought.I wish he wouldn’t .)
“We must learn something about the interval he spent away from us. Not his little jaunt last week to London, but the longer absence when he was not observed. Once we know who was involved in his brainwashing, we’ll have a fair idea of what techniques were used. I suggest, therefore, that you begin with the photograph of Number 41.”
Liora!
He tried to approach her, but though the straps had been removed, his imprisoning flesh was adamantine, unyielding.
He tried to speak, but his mouth would not form the syllables of her name.
Her name–Liora. And
her eyes.
Her eyes!
“What fantasies now, eh?” If loudspeakers could wink …
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? But I thought they were in love!”
“Wait. Her eyes—”
“Only hereyes ?”
“—are glowing. The strangest thing.”
“That’s as good as nothing. I think you should charthislibidinal structure.”
“Incredibly, incredibly bright. I—I—Oh, it’s—”
“Try and get areal response out of the lout, Number 14.Let’s flash him a weapon, or somethingpositive .”
“So bright. My God, Number 2–it’s beautiful! I’ve neverseen a thing so beautiful. And he’s—Why does she—”
She screamed.
“Number 14?”
She had fainted. As she slumped forward, the electrodestore loose from her temples, unravelled from the whitehair, and at the same moment, her patient woke smilingamid the collapse of his dream.
PART III
NUMBER GAMES
“Thus, albeit straitly confined in a small enoughcage, Fabrizio led a fully occupied life; it was entirely devoted to seeking the solution of this important problem: ‘Does she love me?’ The result of thousands of observations, incessantly repeated, but also incessantly subjected to doubt, was as follows: ‘All her deliberate gestures say no, but what is involuntarily in the movement of her eyes seems to admit that she isforming an affection for me.’ ”
Stendhal,The Charterhouse of Parma
Chapter Twelve
The Nomination Committee
The fat woman ascended from the sofa, like a giant squid rising out of the sea, in a froth of pink chiffon. “May we congratulate you,” she burbled, “on yourswift recovery?” His hand still on the knob, he stared with glum astonishment at the crowd assembled in his living room. Three … four …
