The psychogeneticist adjusted his spectacles with elaborate casualness. “Really? Then you think you’ve found what’s wrong with him? Why he can’t read or write?”
“Does it have to be something wrong?”
“What else would you call it? A . . . gift?”
She studied him narrowly. “I might – and you might – if he got something in return for his loss. That would depend on whether there was a net gain, wouldn’t it? And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Let’s get out in the open. You’ve known the Jacques – both of them – for years. You had me put on his case because you think he and I might find in the mind and body of the other a mutual solution to our identical aberrations. Well?”
Bell tapped imperturbably at his cigar. “As you say, the question is, whether he got enough in return – enough to compensate for his lost skills.”
She gave him a baffled look. “All right, then, I’ll do the talking. Ruy Jacques opened Grade’s private door, when Grade alone knew the combination. And when he got in the room with us, he knew what we had been talking about. It was just as though it had all been written out for him, somehow. You’d have thought the lock combination had been pasted on the door, and that he’d looked over a transcript of our conversation.”
“Only, he can’t read,” observed Bell.
“You mean, he can’t read . . . writing?”
“What else is there?”
“Possibly some sort of thought residuum . . . in things. Perhaps some message in the metal of Grade’s door, and in certain objects in the room.” She watched him closely. “I see you aren’t surprised. You’ve known this all along.”
“I admit nothing. You, on the other hand, must admit that your theory of thought-reading is superficially fantastic.”
“So would writing be – to a Neanderthal cave dweller. But tell me, Matt, where do our thoughts go after we think them? What is the extra-cranial fate of those feeble, intricate electric oscillations we pick up on the encephalograph? We know they can and do penetrate the skull, that they can pass through bone, like radio waves. Do they go on out into the universe forever? Or do dense substances like Grade’s door eventually absorb them all? Do they set up their wispy patterns in metals, which then begin to vibrate in sympathy, like piano wires responding to a noise?”
Bell drew heavily on his cigar. “Seriously, I don’t know. But I will say this: your theory is not inconsistent with certain psychogenetic predictions.”
“Such as?”
“Eventual telemusical communication of all thought. The encephalograph, you know, looks oddly like a musical sound track. Oh, we can’t expect to convert overnight to communication of pure thought by pure music. Naturally, crude transitional forms will intervene. But any type of direct idea transmission that involves the sending and receiving of rhythm and modulation as such is a cut higher than communication in a verbal medium, and may be a rudimentary step upward toward true musical communion, just as dawn man presaged true words with allusive, onomatapoeic monosyllables.”
“There’s your answer, then,” said Anna. “Why should Ruy Jacques trouble to read, when every bit of metal around him is an open book?” She continued speculatively. “You might look at it this way. Our ancestors forgot how to swing through the trees when they learned how to walk erect. Their history is recapitulated in our very young. Almost immediately after birth, a human infant can hang by his hands, apelike. And then, after a week or so, he forgets what no human infant ever really needed to know. So now Ruy forgets how to read. A great pity. Perhaps. But if the world were peopled with Ruys, they wouldn’t need to know how, for after the first few years of infancy, they’d learn to use their metal-empathic sense. They might even say, ‘It’s all very nice to be able to read and write and swing about in trees when you’re quite young, but after all, one matures.’
She pressed a button on the desk slide viewer that sat on a table by the artist’s bed. “This is a radiographic slide of Ruy’s cerebral hemispheres as viewed from above, probably old stuff to you. It shows that the ‘horns’ are not mere localized growths in the prefrontal area, but extend as slender tracts around the respective hemispheric peripheries to the visuo-sensory area of the occipital lobes, where they turn and enter the cerebral interior, there to merge in an enlarged ball-like juncture at a point over the cerebellum where the pineal ‘eye’ is ordinarily found.”
“But the pineal is completely missing in the slide,” demurred Bell.
“That’s the question,” countered Anna. “Is the pineal absent – or, are the ‘horns’ actually the pineal, enormously enlarged and bifurcated? I’m convinced that the latter is the fact. For reasons presently unknown to me, this heretofore small, obscure lobe has grown, bifurcated, and forced its destructive dual limbs not only through the soft cerebral tissue concerned with the ability to read, but also has gone on to skirt half the cerebral circumference to the forehead, where even the hard frontal bone of the skull has softened under its pressure.” She looked at Bell closely. “I infer that it’s just a question of time before I, too, forget how to read and write.”
Bell’s eyes drifted evasively to the immobile face of the unconscious artist. “But the number of neurons in a given mammalian brain remains constant after birth,” he said. “These cells can throw out numerous dendrites and create increasingly complex neural patterns as the subject grows older, but he can’t grow any more of the primary neurons.”
“I know. That’s the trouble. Ruy can’t grow more brain, but he has.” She touched her own “horns” wonderingly. “And I guess I have, too. What –?”
Following Bell’s glance, she bent over to inspect the artist’s face, and started as from a physical blow.
Eyes like anguished talons were clutching hers.
His lips moved, and a harsh whisper swirled about her ears like a desolate wind: “. . . The Nightingale . . . in death . . . greater beauty unbearable . . . but watch . . . THE ROSE!”
White-faced, Anna staggered backwards through the door.
Chapter Seven
Bell’s hurried footsteps were just behind her as she burst into her office and collapsed on the consultation couch. Her eyes were shut tight, but over her labored breathing she heard the psychogeneticist sit down and leisurely light another cigar.
Finally she opened her eyes. “Even you found out something that time. There’s no use asking me what he meant.”
“Isn’t there? Who will dance the part of The Student on opening night?”
“Ruy. Only, he will really do little beyond provide support to the prima ballerina, The Nightingale, that is, at the beginning and end of the ballet.”
“And who plays The Nightingale?”
“Ruy hired a professional – La Tanid.”
Bell blew a careless cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Are you sure you aren’t going to take the part?”
“The role is strenuous in the extreme. For me, it would be a physical impossibility.”
“Now.”
“What do you mean – now?”
He looked at her sharply. “You know very well what I mean. You know it so well your whole body is quivering. Your ballet premiere is four weeks off – but you know and I know that Ruy has already seen it. Interesting.” He tapped coolly at his cigar. “Almost as interesting as your belief he saw you playing the part of The Nightingale.”
Anna clenched her fists. This must be faced rationally. She inhaled deeply, and slowly let her breath out. “How can even he see things that haven’t happened yet?”
“I don’t know for sure. But I can guess, and so could you if you’d calm down a bit. We do know that the pineal is a residuum of the single eye that our very remote seagoing ancestors had in the centre of their fishy foreheads. Suppose this fossil eye, now buried deep in the normal brain, were reactivated. What would we be able to see with it? Nothing spatial, nothing dependent on light stimuli. But let us approach the problem inductively. I shut one eye. The other can
fix Anna van Tuyl in a depthless visual plane. But with two eyes I can follow you stereoscopically, as you move about in space. Thus, adding an eye adds a dimension. With the pineal as a third eye I should be able to follow you through time. So Ruy’s awakened pineal should permit him at least a hazy glimpse of the future.”
“What a marvellous – and terrible gift.”
“But not without precedent,” said Bell. “I suspect that a more or less reactivated pineal lies behind every case of clairvoyance collected in the annals of para-psychology. And I can think of at least one historical instance in which the pineal has actually tried to penetrate the forehead, though evidently only in monolobate form. All Buddhist statues carry a mark on the forehead symbolic of an ‘inner eye’. From what we know now, Budda’s ‘inner eye’ was something more than symbolic.”
“Granted. But a time-sensitive pineal still doesn’t explain the pain in Ruy’s hump. Nor the hump itself, for that matter.”
“What,” said Bell, “makes you think the hump is anything more than what it seems – a spinal disease characterized by a growth of laminated tissue?”
“It’s not that simple, and you know it. You’re familiar with ‘phantom limb’ cases, such as where the amputee retains an illusion of sensation or pain in the amputated hand or foot?”
He nodded.
She continued: “But you know, of course, that amputation isn’t an absolute prerequisite to a ‘phantom’. A child born armless may experience phantom limb sensations for years. Suppose such a child were thrust into some improbable armless society, and their psychiatrists tried to cast his sensory pattern into their own mould. How could the child explain to them the miracle of arms, hands, fingers – things of which he had occasional sensory intimations, but had never seen, and could hardly imagine? Ruy’s case is analogous. He is four-limbed and presumably springs from normal stock. Hence the phantom sensations in his hump point toward a potential organ – a fore-shadowing of the future, rather than toward memories of a limb once possessed. To use a brutish example, Ruy is like the tadpole rather than the snake. The snake had his legs briefly, during the evolutionary recapitulation of his embryo. The tadpole has yet to shed his tail and develop legs. But one might assume that each has some faint phantom sensoria of legs.”
Bell appeared to consider this. “That still doesn’t account for Ruy’s pain. I wouldn’t think the process of growing a tail would be painful for a tadpole, nor a phantom limb for Ruy – if it’s inherent in his physical structure. But be that as it may, from all indications he is still going to be in considerable pain when that narcotic wears off. What are you going to do for him then? Section the ganglia leading to his hump?”
“Certainly not. Then he would never be able to grow that extra organ. Anyhow, even in normal phantom limb cases, cutting nerve tissue doesn’t help. Excision of neuromas from limb stumps brings only temporary relief – and may actually aggravate a case of hyperaesthesia. No, phantom pain sensations are central rather then peripheral. However, as a temporary analgesic I shall try a two per cent solution of novocaine near the proper thoracic ganglia.” She looked at her watch. “We’d better be getting back to him.”
Chapter Eight
Anna withdrew the syringe needle from the man’s side and rubbed the last puncture with an alcoholic swab.
“How do you feel, Ruy?” asked Bell.
The woman stooped beside the sterile linens and looked at the face of the prone man. “He doesn’t,” she said uneasily. “He’s out cold again.”
“Really?” Bell bent over beside her and reached for the man’s pulse. “But it was only two per cent novocaine. Most remarkable.”
“I’ll order a counter-stimulant,” said Anna nervously. “I don’t like this.”
“Oh, come, girl. Relax. Pulse and respiration normal. In fact, I think you’re nearer collapse than he. This is very interesting . . .” His voice trailed off in musing surmise. “Look, Anna, there’s nothing to keep both of us here. He’s in no danger whatever. I’ve got to run along. I’m sure you can attend to him.”
I know, she thought. You want me to be alone with him.
She acknowledged his suggestion with a reluctant nod of her head, and the door closed behind his chuckle.
For some moments thereafter she studied in deep abstraction the regular rise and fall of the man’s chest.
So Ruy Jacques had set another medical precedent. He’d received a local anaesthetic that should have done nothing more than desensitise the deformed growth in his back for an hour or two. But here he lay, in apparent coma, just as though under a general cerebral anaesthetic.
Her frown deepened.
X-ray plates had showed his dorsal growth simply as a compacted mass of cartilaginous laminated tissue (the same as hers) penetrated here and there by neural ganglia. In deadening those ganglia she should have accomplished nothing more than local anaesthetization of that tissue mass, in the same manner that one anaesthetizes an arm or leg by deadening the appropriate spinal ganglion. But the actual result was not local, but general. It was as though one had administered a mild local to the radial nerve of the forearm to deaden pain in the hand, but had instead anaesthetized the cerebrum.
And that, of course, was utterly senseless, completely incredible, because anaesthesia works from the higher neural centres down, not vice versa. Deadening a certain area of the parietal lobe could kill sensation in the radial nerve and the hand, but a hypo in the radial nerve wouldn’t knock out the parietal lobe of the cerebrum, because the parietal organization was neurally superior. Analogously, anaesthetizing Ruy Jacques’ hump shouldn’t have deadened his entire cerebrum, because certainly his cerebrum was to be presumed neurally superior to that dorsal malformation.
To be presumed . . .
But with Ruy Jacques, presumptions were – invalid.
So that was what Bell had wanted her to discover. Like some sinister reptile of the Mesozoic, Ruy Jacques had two neural organizations, one in his skull and one on his back, the latter being superior to, and in some degree controlling, the one in his skull, just as the cerebral cortex in human beings and other higher animals assists and screens the work of the less intricate cerebellum, and just as the cerebellum governs the still more primitive medulla oblongata in the lower vertebrata, such as in frogs and fishes. In anaesthetizing his bump, she had disrupted communications in his highest centres of consciousness, and in anaesthetizing the higher, dorsal centre, she had apparently simultaneously deactivated his “normal” brain.
As full realization came, she grew aware of a curious numbness in her thighs, and of faint overtones of mingled terror and awe in the giddy throbbing in her forehead. Slowly, she sank into the bedside chair.
For as this man was, so must she become. The day lay ahead when her pineal growths must stretch to the point of disrupting the grey matter in her occipital lobes, and destroy her ability to read. And the time must come, too, when her dorsal growth would inflame her whole body with its anguished writhing, as it had done his, and try with probable equal futility to burst its bonds.
And all of this must come – soon; before her ballet premiere, certainly. The enigmatic skein of the future would be unravelled to her evolving intellect even as it now was to Ruy Jacques’. She could find all the answers she sought . . . Dream’s end . . . The Nightingale’s death song . . . The Rose. And she would find them whether she wanted to or not.
She groaned uneasily.
At the sound, the man’s eyelids seemed to tremble; his breathing slowed momentarily, then became faster.
She considered this in perplexity. He was unconscious, certainly; yet he made definite responses to aural stimuli. Possibly she had anaesthetized neither member of the hypothetical brain-pair, but had merely cut, temporarily, their lines of intercommunication, just as one might temporarily disorganize the brain of a laboratory animal by anaesthetizing the pons Varolii linking the two cranial hemispheres.
Of one thing she was sure: Ruy Jacques, unconsciou
s, and temporarily mentally disintegrate, was not going to conform to the behavior long standardized for other unconscious and disintegrate mammals. Always one step beyond what she ever expected. Beyond man. Beyond genius.
She arose quietly and tiptoed the short distance to the bed.
When her lips were a few inches from the artist’s right ear, she said softly: “What is your name?”
The prone figure stirred uneasily. His eyelids fluttered, but did not open. His wine-colored lips parted, then shut, then opened again. His reply was a harsh, barely intelligible whisper: “Zhak.”
“What are you doing?”
“Searching . . .”
“For what?”
“A red rose.”
“There are many red roses.”
Again his somnolent, metallic whisper: “No, there is but one.”
She suddenly realized that her own voice was becoming tense, shrill. She forced it back into a lower pitch. “Think of that rose. Can you see it?”
“Yes . . . yes!”
She cried: “What is the rose?”
It seemed that the narrow walls of the room would clamour forever their outraged metallic modesty, if something hadn’t frightened away their pain. Ruy Jacques opened his eyes and struggled to rise on one elbow.
On his sweating forehead was a deep frown. But his eyes were apparently focused on nothing in particular, and despite his seemingly purposive motor reaction, she knew that actually her question had but thrown him deeper into his strange spell.
Swaying a little on the dubious support of his right elbow, he muttered: “You are not the rose . . . not yet . . . not yet . . .”
She gazed at him in shocked stupor as his eyes closed slowly and he slumped back on the sheet. For a long moment there was no sound in the room but his deep and rhythmic breathing.
Chapter Nine
Without turning from her glum perusal of the clinic grounds framed in her window, Anna threw the statement over her shoulder as Bell entered the office. “Your friend Jacques refuses to return for a checkup. I haven’t seen him since he walked out a week ago.”
The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Page 9
