by Fritz Leiber
One whirling instant to think a command, with all the intensity he could summon, "The drain, Dickon, the drain! Make for the Sanctuary! Keep in contact—unconscious minds!" to sense in a dark corner of his mind the beginning of a ghostly answer, to see loom suddenly ahead a roof edge which the angel did not wholly avoid.
Then — one crashing, lasting, final instant of unconsciousness and darkness.
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Chapter 10
Down a gray corridor in the crypts beneath the Sanctuary, two deacons escorted Jarles. This was a region shrouded in mystery, a region from which lower-ranking priests were normally barred. All elevator shafts save one stopped two levels above. It was said that a great research of some sort, involving human beings, was conducted here. It was said that a new batch of commoners was sent down here every day, and that each batch contained a high percentage of mentally defective and psychotic individuals. It was also said that most of them came up madder than when they descended.
That more than research might be involved was hinted by the rumor that recalcitrant and criminal priests were sometimes sent here, too.
Jarles tried to keep his mind from dwelling on the cruelly tantalizing mischance of his recapture by the Hierarchy at the very moment when he had become reconciled to the Witchcraft and was eagerly setting out to seek to join forces with it.
Had the Hierarchy known all along that he was hidden at Mother Jujy's, and waited all that time before it struck?
Or had Mother Jujy betrayed him? Or someone in the New Witchcraft, perhaps the Black Man? He must not even think of such a possibility! He had decided once and for all that the new witches were on the side of good, that they represented the forces with which he had resolved to ally himself. He must not, dare not, suspect them.
One of the deacons pacing beside him spoke. Both men he knew to be underlings of Cousin Deth.
"I wonder how this one will be when he comes out?" the deacon asked speculatively.
His companion was not much interested. "Who knows? I've seen them all ways and every one a bit different. Only one thing I'm sure of—Brother Dhomas will be glad to see this one. Brother Dhomas is always happy when we bring him a new mind."
"Yes, the old putterer!"
They approached an open door. Emanating from it, as chemical odors from a chemist's laboratory, Jarles sensed traces of various radiations affecting the human nervous system. Like tiny ghostly hands they tugged at his emotions—alarming, reassuring, angering, soothing.
Nervously his eyes swept the room. They were first drawn, as to a focus, to a padded chair, provided with clamps. That was bad. But the mechanisms and instruments around about were those of a psychological laboratory. That was good.
"That's right. You needn't be alarmed. We won't torture you physically. And as for mental torture, there's no such thing! There is only—experience."
It was the strangest voice, rapid yet deep, and lacking individuality. Human—but generalized. As if many people were speaking the same words in perfect rhythm with each other.
The eyes of Jarles went to the speaker. A quakingly fat priest whose baggy, dirty robe was emblazoned with the human brain and arabesque of equations in psycho-sociology that distinguished the Sixth Circle.
From the emblazonment he looked up at the face. Strangely, the face was like the voice—generalized, despite the seemingly sharp individuality of double chins, thick, mobile lips, and scanty eyebrows. As if the solidographs of a dozen facially similar priests—but each a distinct person—had been projected into the same space, with a resultant canceling out of much of their individuality.
If any feature had more individuality than the rest, it was the eyes. They dwelt on Jarles engulfingly, thirstily, almost lovingly, as if he were the most interesting thing in the world. But not exactly because he was Armon Jarles, not exactly because he was an individual.
Those eyes held Jarles, so that it was with an effort that he looked away from them to the small man in black. Odd, that he had been able to look at the Sixth Circle priest without first noticing that Cousin Deth stood beside him.
"There he is, all ready for you, Brother Dhomas," said Cousin Deth. "And his archpriestship Goniface requests me to warn you that this one must not be botched. He was too hard to get. There will be unpleasant consequences if you turn up a gibbering failure."
Without taking his eyes off Jarles, Brother Dhomas answered swiftly.
"You can't scare me, little man. You know as well as I that my methods are still empirical, the results unpredictable. If a man is botched, he's botched! That is the agreement. I guarantee nothing."
"I have warned you," said Deth.
Brother Dhomas approached Jarles, moving rather easily for one so abnormally fat.
"I have been studying your unabridged dossier and listening to the speech you made in the Great Square." He indicated the solidograph projector in front of the central chair, but his eyes never left Jarles. "You have a very interesting idealism—very interesting."
His tone was that of a surgeon commenting on an unusual tumor.
"I will leave you now," said Deth. "And I will inform his archpriestship of your intention to treat this case merely as an experiment."
Brother Dhomas looked back at him. "Spiteful little reptile, aren't you? Your tight, self-infatuated mind interests me. I would like to get my fingers into it. Or your master, Goniface. There's a mind for you! What wouldn't I give to work on a mind like that!"
Cousin Deth's face froze.
"Masks! Masks!" rumbled Brother Dhomas, with a hint of laughter. "Don't you know I like best of all men who can mask their thoughts? It gives me something to work against."
Cousin Deth walked out, followed by the two deacons who had come with Jarles.
Instantly the eyes were back on Jarles. And now they studied him with such intensity, seeming wholly to lose themselves in him, that they appeared almost vacuous.
"A great sincerity, too," continued Brother Dhomas, nodding his head, as if he saw it through the pupils of Jarles' eyes. "Oh, yes, and negativism. Very well developed negativism."
With a sharp effort Jarles looked away.
"No, I'm not trying to hypnotize you," said Brother Dhomas, without interrupting his inspection. "Hypnotism would hinder my work, like a bad anæsthetic—deaden the reactions which I need to guide me."
His silent inspection of Jarles eventually ended.
"And now—if you will seat yourself." He indicated the central chair.
Jarles noticed then that several priests had unobtrusively drawn close to him after the departure of the deacons. Emblems intertwining diagrams of the nervous and circulatory systems proclaimed them to be priests of the Third Circle, the circle of doctors and lesser psychiatrists.
Two of them grasped his elbows and turned him toward the chair. Wildly, violently, he began to struggle—but more to convince himself that he was still a man than because he had any hope of escape. His flailing fists knocked down one priest, but two others seized the arm and bore it down. Inexorably he was drawn to the central chair, forced down in it, the clamps fastened.
And all the while Brother Dhomas kept calling to him, "That's right! That's right! Struggle now. Get it over with. It will make it easier for me afterward."
The Third Circle priests stepped back. The chair was luxuriously comfortable. But Jarles could not even turn his head.
Electrical and pneumatic recording instruments were attached to his body. Something was injected into his arm. Again Brother Dhomas read his suspicions.
"No, it's not a truth serum. Extracting the information you possess is merely a side issue. We want much more than the truth from you."
Brother Dhomas moved to a position directly in front of him, beyond the control bank of the solidograph.
"What is personality?" he said, in a new tone. "Merely a viewpoint, or a system of viewpoints. Nothing more.
"Viewpoints change. Why does not personality then change? The answer
, of course, is that it does—but usually so gradually that the change is not sensed. Your viewpoints have changed. Your dossier shows that they have changed more often, and to a much greater degree, than those of the average. Yet you think of yourself as essentially the same person. That raises a perplexing question."
He might have been speaking in a schoolroom of the novices.
"For the thoughtful person, there is no more baffling sensation than that called up by memory of viewpoints he has discarded. He remembers, perhaps in great detail, how he entertained those discarded viewpoints. But the old arguments no longer appeal to him—he has a new viewpoint which perhaps completely contradicts the old. And yet memory and a kind of intuition tell him that he was the same person then as now. And so we come back to the perplexing question.
"The answer is rather obvious. Memory is the only link between past and present viewpoints.
"But memory can link—anything. Memory is cold and dispassionate. Memory is without morality. Think of the person that you most admire and the person you most detest. Imagine them as two stages in the life of one person. Imagine memory as linking those two stages. You see, even that is possible.
"Yes, personality changes. The problem is—to accelerate the change.
"You begin to see what we intend with regard to yourself? That's right! That's right!"
Any mental barrier Jarles might have managed to set up was insufficient to prevent Brother Dhomas from reading—or guessing—his fear.
"No, no, your present consciousness won't be snuffed out and replaced by another. That would be like killing you. You forget what I told you about memory. Personality will change, but memory—individual consciousness —will continue unbroken."
Almost, Jarles felt relief. At last he knew where the attack was coming and could marshal his forces. His hatred of the Hierarchy. His new-found loyalty to the Witchcraft—only it gave him a queer shiver to think that he could call it "new-found." His love of Naurya. His detestation of creatures like Cousin Deth. But, much more important than any of those, his firm belief in the right of every commoner to freedom, equality, and a fair share in the world's riches—and his unswerving enmity to any group or individual who sought to tyrannize over the commoners. Surely beliefs like that couldn't be changed. Other beliefs—about particular organizations or individuals—might change, according to what one knew about them. But a belief in human freedom was basic. It couldn't be changed. Brother Dhomas was bluffing.
"That's right," said Brother Dhomas, "it does seem impossible. But look at my face. Is it not that of a man who has transformed his own personality many times? Didn't you sense that as soon as you looked at me? As soon as you heard my voice? How else could I have gained the needful direct experience and skill, amounting in fanciful terms to a sixth sense, except by experimenting on myself? I haven't discovered telepathy, you know. My knowledge of the human mind—of your mind—is based on deductive skill and vast empirical knowledge, gained from—experience.
"I did not shrink from experimenting on my own mind. My sole regret is that I dare not change my personality sufficiently to interfere with my basic orientation as a research psychologist, that I can enjoy only the fringes of insanity—"
Those ceaselessly probing eyes had become, for Jarles, infinite abysses in which anything might lurk. But whatever Brother Dhomas said, he was bluffing. He admittedly hadn't changed his own basic personality. He couldn't change that of Jarles.
"That's right," said Brother Dhomas. "Be overconfident. It will make you more vulnerable when you begin to wonder. And now—action!"
Slowly, one by one at first, then more swiftly and many together, the various instruments in the room revealed their functions. Jarles was assaulted by sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touches, inward tensions. And by emotions. Emotions far more specific and intense than those produced by the sympathetics and parasympathetics with which he was familiar. Perhaps the injection accounted for his greater susceptibility. He fought against them all. Locked his jaw, compressed his lips, to hold back a laughter that bore no relation to his thoughts. But it broke all barriers and burst forth in convulsive peak. Steeled himself against the reasonless tears that next began to flow. But still they flowed, and still he sobbed like one brokenhearted by some great grief. Fought the anger that tightened to a sickening knot beneath his chest, fought the fear that made his flesh prickle and teeth chatter, fought them all, but vainly. It was as if he had been dispossessed from his body and must impotently look on, tormented by a wholly mental desperation and a kind of mental shame, while Brother Dhomas elicited from his body all the responses of which it was capable, like an expert musician testing the range and capacities of an unfamiliar instrument.
For now the room was in semidarkness, and from a panel beside Brother Dhomas rose more than a dozen stubby pillars of different colored light, constantly fluctuating in rhythm with Jarles' physiological and neuro-physiological reactions. Ceaselessly Brother Dhomas' eyes went from the pillars to Jarles and back again, while his pudgy fingers squirmed like white worms over the control panel, slowly, tentatively.
From emotion to thought, from body to mind, the invasion progressed. Jarles felt that his mind was like a planet, with consciousness the illuminated side, and an inexorable force was rotating it. Ideas he tried to grasp, to hold firm, abruptly slid into darkness and were gone, beyond thought's reach, like a word that is on the tip of the tongue yet cannot be remembered. And from the other side of his mind—the night side—emerged a host of things forgotten and undreamed of. Petty hates and envies that had once flickered for an instant in his mind and then been repressed. And memories. Memories of childhood. His first confession. Sharlson Naurya—a stranger girl who had just come to Megatheopolis from another city. Fear of a bully. Fight with a bully. Work in the fields. Chores. Memories that went too far back into childhood. Himself lying in some box and goggling up at a world of giants. His mother's face—a young woman's face—bending over him. Then a fearful twilight realm, in which all inanimate things had life and were symbols of unseen powers, and words were magical formulas to control them. And then there were no words, and the unseen powers became sentient writhings, and there was no distinction between himself and the rest of the cosmos.
Slowly the dark memories retreated. Slowly the alien emotions ebbed from his flesh. For a while he was aware only of exhaustion, limpness. Then a growing jubilant relief. He was still Armon Jarles. He still believed as before. Brother Dhomas had failed.
"No," said Brother Dhomas, "that was merely exploratory. A random groping for weak points in the armor of your personality. The stimulus tapes are now being automatically correlated with the tapes recording your reactions. The results will be illuminating. Though, to be honest with you, I work more by feel.
"Also, it was necessary that you gain experience. A knowledge of your mind's hidden potentialities. Then you'll be able to work with me better. Against your own will, of course—resistance can be very helpful.
"The radiations, you see, change your neuronic gradients and potentials over neural areas whose limits and extent I can know only empirically. As a result, certain thoughts and memories are raised above, or depressed below, the threshold of consciousness, as the case may be.
"Your experience has shown you that any human mind has the wherewithal—if only in minutest traces—from which any kind of personality can be fabricated. Every person has experienced at one time or another fugitive flashes of hate and cruelty, which, if only sufficiently magnified and strengthened, would make him a monster. Every person has, at least for one split second in his life, wanted to destroy the whole world. You see?
"It is only necessary to maneuver your mind into the desired state—that's where my maximum judgment and penetration are required—and then freeze your mind by a sudden intensification of the radiations, sufficient to change the neuronic gradients and potentials permanently. If I misjudge and freeze your mind while it is in a state of temporary insanity, that is unfortuna
te.
"Our next exploration will be as purposive as the first was random. Action!"
Again the sensory bombardment, the emotional wrenching, the mental rotation. But because they were not so chaotic as the first time, they were not so instantly unnerving. In particular, the induced emotion was hardly troublesome at all—an odd mixture of fear and pleasure, promoting a watchful self-regard, so that for a moment he could smile with guarded contempt at Brother Dhomas.
But the sensations rapidly acquired a very specific and disturbing quality, though the induced emotions tended to make that disturbance chiefly mental. Where they had got that moving solidograph of himself, he could not say, but it was talking to him—himself to himself—and he heard his own voice repeating:
"Armon Jarles, there is only the cosmos and the electronic entities that constitute it, without soul or purpose, save so far as neuronic mind impose purpose upon it.
"Armon Jarles, the Hierarchy embodies the highest form of such purpose.
"Armon Jarles, the supernatural and the idealized have one trait in common. They are not. There is only reality."
Endlessly. Such statements, though, might have been patched up from recordings of his classroom recitations, his oral examinations. But then it dropped—still his own voice and image—into a more intimate key:
"Look at me, Armon Jarles. I am yourself as you will be when you have learned to see reality squarely and to disregard sentimental dreams. Look at me! I, Armon Jarles, laugh at you, Armon Jarles, for what you are now."
They must somehow have patched up even that, taking a word here and a phrase there, blending them with diabolic skill. He could never have said that! Or could he?
