Zelazny, Roger - Novel 07

by Bridge of Ashes

  "True. When are you going to try?"

  "Tomorrow, if I am up to it. I feel that I will be."

  "Do you want to talk with Dr. Winchell first?"

  "Not really. This is my area of specialization, not his. He would leave the decision to me, and since I have already made it a consultation would be redundant."

  "All right. Shall we tell Dick?"

  "Not yet. This is not really so crucial a point as it may seem. It is just a repetition of the earlier business. Why disturb him when we have nothing significant to report? Wait until there is some real progress."

  Vicki nodded. They finished their drinks and talked of other things.

  The following day, with some difficulty, Lydia succeeded in breaking Dennis' contact with the man called Smith. As she had anticipated, he returned once more to his catatonic state. But now, his tendency to mutter in his sleep was greater, and he began having occasional spells of somnambulism. Vicki once saw him move past her door and followed, to find him seated in the courtyard staring at the moon. When she led him back to his bed he did not awaken, though she thought he whispered "Mother" as they went

  After two weeks, he was a truck driver named In-galls, on the road, heading toward El Paso. Lydia broke the contact immediately and continued therapy. He now occasionally muttered unconnected phrases while in a waking state. His sleepwalking became an almost nightly affair, though he never went beyond the courtyard.

  A week later, he was a pilot en route to Los Angeles. Lydia broke the contact and attempted to direct his attention to things about him.

  Four days later, he was a mining engineer in Montana. Lydia broke the contact and began taking him on walks, as she could now stimulate motor areas of his brain which had apparently undergone some development in the course of his various contacts. Still, it seemed close to his somnambulism, as his mind remained vague throughout the course of the strolling.

  Three days later, he was a crewman aboard a cargo vessel somewhere south of Hawaii. Lydia broke the contact and began playing music in his presence.

  Two days after that, he was a freshman listening to a guest speaker at a large Eastern university. Lydia broke the contact and put him to sleep.

  The following day, he was an Austrian mountain climber somewhere in the Alps. Lydia broke the contact and took him for a walk. As they walked along a ridge to the east, he began speaking to her in Russian. She answered him in that language, then broke the contact and took him home.

  Later that evening, he was the son of a farmer in northern India, and he went to the kitchen and began to eat. Lydia spoke with him softly for a time, in a speech full of labial consonants, and then gently broke the contact. She took him to his room then and caused him to sleep.

  Lydia accepted more of Dick's scotch and went to sit on the floor before the corner fireplace, shoes off, hair loose, eyes turning liquid in the flamelight.

  "What is happening?" Vicki said, coming up behind her, touching her.

  "He is just beginning to feel what he can do," Lydia said, "such as reach anywhere in the world, regard anyone's thoughts with total absorption—a vicarious pleasure, and easier than developing his own personality. So long as he is about this, this—vampirism-therapy remains at a standstill."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Keep blocking him. Try to implant a suggestion against this sort of behavior. Keep directing his attention to local stimuli."

  "Will that be sufficient?"

  Lydia sipped her drink, turned and stared into the flames. At length, she spoke, "I do not know. You see, it gets more difficult each time, now that he is growing aware of his power. I have succeeded in blocking him each time by means of technique, not strength. Just today, for the first time, he resisted me slightly. I do not know how much longer it will be before this becomes an active thing. If it should, I will not be able to block him."

  "What then?"

  "It may not come to that. The suggestion may work. If it does not... Then I suppose I would have to try another technique. Say, render him unconscious and apply the block immediately as he begins to come out of it. That may work...."

  "And if it does not...?”

  “We should know fairly soon," Lydia said.

  That night, Dennis made his way to the courtyard and began singing in Italian. Lydia spoke to him in Italian, led him back to his room, returned him to sleep and reinforced the suggestion she had implanted earlier. In the morning, she took him for a walk while the chill still lay on the land. She showed him the sunrise and spoke with him at length. He mumbled inappropriate responses. They returned to the house, where she fed him and played more music.

  That afternoon, Dennis assumed the personality of a Japanese policeman. She chatted with him in a singsong fashion for some twenty minutes before gently applying the block that was to break the contact. This time, Dennis resisted more actively. She succeeded in breaking the contact, attempted another reinforcement of the suggestion, went and called Vicki to join her for tea.

  "It is not working," she said, "and his resistance to the blocking has increased. It will not be too long before I am unable to contain him. He does not seem to be accepting the suggestions. I will try the sleep approach next time. I feel, though, that he will learn to resist it also."

  "Would it help to have Dr. Winchell prescribe some drug? A tranquilizer, perhaps? Something to slow him down, make him easier to control?" Lydia shook her head.

  "It would interfere with the therapy to have him doped up."

  "But what else is there to do?"

  "I do not know. I had not anticipated this development."

  "If we were to move again, someplace out of range... ?"

  "He is able to reach all around the world now. There is no escape that way."

  "I had better see if I can reach Dick—and then Dr. Winchell."

  Lydia nodded.

  "Go ahead."

  Now it happened that Dick's current mistress was a public information officer for Moonbase n. That evening, as Dick sat drinking in her apartment overlooking the Potomac, he told her of the latest report on his son's condition.

  "Is there a pattern?" she asked him. "Some common trait shared by all the minds he has occupied?"

  "Yes," he said. "I thought to ask Lydia about that, and she told me that all of them were, in some way, eco nuts. Not necessarily COE, but environmentalists and reformers, active or passive."

  "Interesting," she said. "If there were none of them available, I wonder what he would do?"

  Dick shrugged.

  "Who can say, Sue? Withdraw completely, once more? Or find someone else to focus on? No way of telling."

  She came over and rubbed his shoulders.

  "Then you’ve got to get him out of range," she said, 'Ho someplace where there are very few people, and where those there are have little time to think of these problems with the same immediacy of concern."

  Dick chuckled.

  "You do not understand," he said. "He can reach anywhere in the world. Here he is, the greatest telepath alive, and it is his ability that is screwing him. Here I am, the father of the greatest telepath alive, and I can get him anything—anything except the switch that will turn him off long enough for them to straighten him out."

  "The moon," she said, "is around a quarter of a million miles away."

  He turned and looked into her eyes. He began to smile, then he shook his head.

  "It wouldn't work," he said. "There is no way...."

  "There are two hospitals there," she said. "I know all the people involved. You carry a lot of weight. I could tell you which strings to pull."

  "How do we know it will do any good?"

  "What is the alternative? Your therapist admits that she cannot control him any longer. Send him to the moon where there is very little interference. Let their psych teams have a try."

  Dick took a large swallow and closed his eyes,

  "I'm thinking," he said.

  She moved around, seated herself in
the chair across from him. He reached out and took her hand.

  "Are you reading my mind?" she finally said.

  "No. Should I?"

  "I don't think you have to."

  He smiled and stood. She rose to meet him.

  "You're full of good ideas," he said. "I think Til try both of them."

  Part III

  The facility lay within a small crater in the southern lunar hemisphere. Cleaned-out, built-up, domed-over, air-conditioned, nuclear-powered, fountained, ponded, treed, painted, furnished and filled with the small noises of life, it was home to a great number of wealthy geriatric patients whose conditions precluded their ever returning to the bluegreen ball in the dark sky, save to dwell within it. It was not noted as a psychiatric facility save in the areas of senile dementia and arteriosclerotic brain disease.

  The new patient, a teenage boy, sat on a bench near a fountain, as he did every day at the same time. A therapist, Alec Stern, sat beside him reading a book, as he did every day at the same time. If Alec were to reach out and move the boy's arm into a new position, it would remain there. If he were to ask him a question, more often than not it would be met with silence. Occasionally, though, it would be answered with an inappropriate muttering. As today:

  "Pretty, isn't it—the way the colors dance on the water?" Alec asked, lowering his book for a moment.

  The boy, whose head was turned in that direction, said, "Flowers..."

  "It reminds you of the colors of flowers? Yes, that is true. Any special kind?"

  Silence.

  Alec withdrew a notebook from his pocket and scribbled in it.

  "Would you like to walk with me and look at some flowers?"

  Silence.

  He placed the book on the bench and took the boy's arm. There was no resistance as he drew him to his feet. Once he started him moving he kept walking, mechanically. He steered him around the fountain and up a walkway, coming quickly to the area of controlled lighting where the flowerbeds lay.

  "See. Tulips," he said, "and daffodils. Reds, yellows, oranges. You like them?"

  Nothing.

  "You want to touch one?"

  He took the boy's hand, pushed him forward, brushed his fingertips against the red petals of a huge tulip.

  "Soft," he said, "isn't it? Do you like it?"

  The boy remained bent forward. He helped him to straighten.

  "Come on. Let's go back."

  He took hold of his arm once again and led him down the walkway.

  Later, after the boy had been fed and put to rest in his room, Alec spoke with Dr. Chalmers.

  "The boy," Dr. Chalmers said, "Dennis?"

  "No change. Moves only with assistance. An occasional word."

  "But inside? What is his mind doing? What are his reactions to the new environment?"

  "Nothing special. He is barely aware of the change. He is a collection of pieces, most of them submerged, surfacing in a random fashion, sinking again—flashes here and there, occasional interactions. Most of them a matter of personal preoccupation."

  "Do you feel we ought to shift to brain stimulation?"

  Alec shook his head.

  "No. I would like to continue along the lines suggested by his former therapist. She was getting results near the end. Things just developed too suddenly for her to keep control in the saturation environment down there." He gestured vaguely overhead. "She foresaw a dormant period such as this following his transfer. But she also felt that the experiences he has undergone would then cause him to come out of it and seek new stimulation after a time."

  "Well, it has been almost a month."

  "Her guess was a month to six weeks."

  "And you buy that?"

  "She was good. I can see the results of her work whenever I am with him. I do not understand everything that she did. But there is some sort of effect, almost a kind of cyclical sequencing in the recurrence of imprinted personality aspects. I think we are safest in sticking with her program for now. I still do not know as much about the boy as she did. Too bad she could not have stayed on."

  "Something about a divorce and her not wanting to take sides. She was in favor of the boy's transfer up here, though."

  "Yeah, a certain amount of it is in Dennis' mind. Very low-key, though. And I've always been an admirer of his old man, so I am prejudiced. Whatever, it is not really material to Dennis' problem."

  "I have to send Mr. Guise a report this week. I wish you would stop around the office after lunch and give me a hand with it. He wants one every month."

  "Okay. By next time, we may have something more positive to say."

  It was almost two weeks later that Alec went to fetch him in the morning and found Dennis crouched on the floor, tracing geometric designs with a forefinger moistened with saliva. Dennis did not seem aware of Alec's entry into the cell, so Alec stood by the door, watching. After a time, he extended his awareness, slowly, carefully. But he was unable to get beyond the most intense concentration he had ever encountered, a concentration focused entirely on the properties of triangles.

  For the better part of an hour he stood there, fascinated by the action, the concentration, hoping to be noticed. Finally, he moved forward.

  When he stood behind him, he reached out and touched Dennis' shoulder.

  The boy turned suddenly and looked up at him. It was the first time he had seen those eyes focus, the first time he had witnessed anything resembling intelligence in the way that they moved, in the expression which accompanied their regard.

  Then Dennis screamed—a sentence or two. And then he collapsed, falling forward across his moist diagrams.

  Alec raised him in his arms and carried him to the bed. He deposited him upon it and checked his heartbeat, his pulse. Both were rapid. He drew up the chair and seated himself at the bedside.

  As he waited for Dennis to regain consciousness, the sounds of that scream still echoed within his awareness. He had shouted in a foreign language—he was sure of that. The sounds were too regular, too organized, to be random gibberish. Alec had not recognized the tongue, but he was certain it was a bona fide patterned utterance. Everything else about the boy's attitude—his actions, his concentration, his expression—had been informed with too much purposefulness for the picture to fall apart when it came to the vocalization. When Dennis awakened, it should not be too difficult to determine what lunar mind he had invaded....

  But it was a long while before Dennis awakened, and when he did his eyes regarded nothing in particular and his mind was almost as it had been the day before. Only the faintest hint of some recent contact remained, a tone, a touch of mood, indefinable, which had not been present previously. Nothing more, nothing of sufficient substantiality to permit an identification.

  Alec led him out, for a walk about the compound, attempting to apply neural emphasis to various sensory effects, with the usual results. He finally led him back to the bench by the fountain. It was there that he decided to attempt an exercise based on the recent phenomenon he had witnessed.

  Opening his notebook to a blank page, he sketched a triangle, a circle, a square. Then he thrust the notebook before Dennis and held it there.

  After a time, Dennis lowered his head. His eyes focused, moved. He reached out and took the notebook in his hands. He moved it to his lap and bent above it He traced the figures' outlines with his forefinger.

  "What are they?" Alex said. "Can you tell me what they are?"

  Dennis' lips moved. He whispered, "Circle, square, triangle..."

  "Excellent! Here." Alec thrust his pencil into his hand. "Can you draw more?"

  Dennis stared at the pencil, then handed it back. He shook his head. He leaned forward again, outlined the figures once more with his finger, then looked away. The notebook slid from his lap and fell to the ground. He did not seem to notice.

  "What are they?" Alec said. "Can you tell me again?"

  Dennis did not reply. His thoughts were shifting in random patterns once more.

>   Alec retrieved the notebook and began writing.

  Dennis' condition remained unchanged for most of a week following this. Attempts were made to interest him in various of the recreative and rehabilitative classes available, and though he began paying attention to music he had no apparent desire to learn to play an instrument. Entered in an art class, he confined himself to the drawing of circles, triangles and squares. His skill in reproducing these figures freehanded soon reached a state of near-mechanical perfection. His conversational abilities were restricted to a word or two— three at most—in response to numerous and simply phrased repetitions of simple questions. He never initiated a conversation.

  All of this, however, could be taken as considerable improvement, and was. The next report sent to his parents indicated progress in manual, verbal and ideational skills. What it did not include was the French episode and its aftermath.

  When Alec went to fetch him one morning, he found Dennis pacing back and forth in his room, muttering in French. On attempting to speak with him, he received replies only in French. Probing telepathically, he discovered a new identity pattern. He left Dennis pacing and went in search of a young French physician recently assigned to the facility.

  Marcel spent the entire afternoon with Dennis and came away with a sheaf of notes.

  "He believes he is the Marquis de Condorcet," he announced later that evening, arranging the notes on his desk and looking up at Alec. "In fact, he almost convinced me of it."

  "What do you mean?" Alec said.

  "He possesses incredible amounts of information about the Marquis' life—and the times."

  "It could be something like an idiot savant function," Alec offered. "Something he heard, something he absorbed long ago from some mind he touched, just now surfacing."

  "But it is fully consistent, Alec, and he did more than repeat facts. He engaged in intelligent—extremely intelligent—conversation. He was talking about his— rather, the Marquis'— Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. He did not just recite the points. He answered questions and he expanded on the thoughts which exist in the essay itself. It is more than fanciful utopianism, you know. He went on about the perfection of man as a consequence of the diffusion of knowledge, about science as a way of mind which would raise the material level of mankind as well as enhance the intellect of the individual, about—"