The Embedding
Page 23
He was watching a movie — but as the new scenes arrived, the old scenes refused to yield and pass on. They too continued to be screened. He had to find somewhere to put them, where he could forget about them.
‘A dimension at right angles’? The image stung him to awareness of where he was, and who. The Man holding the Boy. And he realized with horror that these thoughts and emotions were largely Vidya's — and how he was now trapped by them.
Reason — rationality — is a concentration camp, where the sets of concepts for surviving in a chaotic universe form vast, though finite, rows of huts, separated into blocks by electric fences, which the searchlights of Attention rove over, picking out now one group of huts, now another.
Thoughts, like prisoners — imprisoned for their own security and safety — scurry and march and labour in a flat two-dimensional zone, forbidden to leap fences, gunned down by laser beams of madness and unreason if they try to.
Vidya's concentration camp had bulged at the seams. The fences fell over from sheer pressure of bodies. The outermost fence — the boundary beyond which lay the in-articulable — had snapped too. And this was unfortunate — for the concentration camp is the survival strategy of the species.
Vidya's thoughts spilled out — into Sole's mind, and into that chaos beyond, ‘whereof we cannot speak’, dragging him after them.
Sole grew vaguely aware of a flat ghost of a figure parading before his eyes, and gesticulating.
A man's voice, with a French accent, cried:
“For God's sake get away from him, Chris — leave him alone! The boy's mad. He can infect you with it, if you're too near him. They said on the phone, a projective empath. And mad. They're coming for him with an ambulance. Put him down and walk away—”
The flat, posturing ghost of dots pulled a second ghost figure back into the brick-toothed mouth that had wanted to gulp him and swallow him up in the flatness of its walls. But he was beyond boundaries, flying high.
“You don't see any vision of truth, Chris — my God, you've created a monster worse than that Xemahoa beast!”
The world flowed around him more demandingly again — a million bits of information. His present awareness, however much it distended, still ached with the strain of finding room for all this fearful wealth. The world was about to be embedded in his mind in its totality as a direct sensory apprehension, and not as something safely symbolized and distanced by words and abstract thoughts. The Greater was about to be embedded in the Lesser. Frantically he searched for adjacent dimensions of existence to receive this spill — the spill-water from a flooded dam. Yet the pressure could only discharge back into the same dimensional framework as the brain that perceived it. His fear of the coming discharge grew — a wild panic as the Embedding coiled within him.
“Come away, Chris. The boy has to be kept sedated. They'll have to operate on him. They'll have to cripple his brain, to save him. Put him inside the car, shut the door on him.”
But Vidya is my mindchild. How do I leave my mind?
Sole-Vidya had no way to leave himself.
All sensory information about the situation flowed the other way.
Inwards. Sucked into the whirlpool — occupying mental space without being able to oust what had already flowed in.
The spring would overwind — would burst and fly apart.
“Please come away,” begged Eileen. “Leave him.”
Leave Vidya? Leave himself?
Vidya's limbs thrashed about in a mechanical dance as Sole held him tighter in his arms, and loved him, agonizing with him . . .
• • •
“Kid snapped his own neck,” Rosson told Sam Bax bitterly as a male nurse lifted the dead boy into the back of the ambulance. He rubbed his own skull tenderly beneath the mop of hair.
“Injuries weren't nearly so bad with the other kids. You might say this boy was the ringleader. I can't say I didn't warn you, Sam.”
“How does this affect the use of PSF in general, Lionel?” the Director demanded in a testy tone. “Is this the first sign of a general breakdown? God, what a mess if it is. All those people we've treated and let go home.”
“Not necessarily, Sam. PSF is being used in conjunction with straightforward language procedures in the main part of the Unit. It can only do good there. Dorothy and I are working with logical patterns. There's not this saturation effect. Richard's world might give us some trouble soon, I dunno. . . I'm just astonished by the form this particular breakdown took — the projective empathy factor. Now that's really a fascinating byproduct. If Chris had damn well listened to me we might have had a chance to explore it instead of a snapped neck. We still have a chance with the other three kids. For God's sake let's be careful.”
“A kind of telepathy, is it, Lionel?”
Rosson looked doubtful.
“I think what was happening in Vidya's brain was an overload of data that his mind couldn't switch off. It was forced to go on processing it. Couldn't filter it out. The brain circuits must have fused open — repeating and repeating. And this amplified the voltage flow far beyond what the brain machine is designed for. In fact, the current got so strong that it was able to transmit some kind of echo of itself that other brains could detect. That must be how this projective empathy works — and I suppose other parapsychological phenomena. Some sort of field is laid down that another brain can pick up, which disturbs the chemical balance of the corresponding sets of neurons in the other brain and stimulates them to a ghost firing. That's your telepathy for you — such as it is. Not genuine communication of ideas from mind to mind. Not dialogue — but a domineering influence, a sort of electrochemical hypnosis. Frightening — and not very useful. Since the boy was effectively insane — and broadcasting his insanity. I felt the same effect myself, when I was close to the boy, before we sedated them. When Chris comes out of shock, perhaps he'll be better qualified to comment — he's been dragged deeper into it than me.”
Sam Bax stared irritably at Sole's body lying sedated on a second stretcher.
“With this little escapade I rather fear our Dr Sole has cooked his goose.”
Rosson looked at Sole too. His head was hurting him.
“He's been under strain. Let's not make too much fuss about it, Sam. We'll all need to pull together to clear this mess up,” he said generously — though he cursed Sole for a bastard and a fool.
Sam shrugged, unimpressed. He looked round for Eileen.
“Ah — Mrs Sole. Your husband will have to go into the Unit for observation, you realize. I'll see you're kept informed. It might be as well if you didn't visit him immediately.”
“Quite,” she answered dryly.
Shortly after, the ambulance drove away.
“Unless Sole's mind is cracked as bad as the boy's,” Sam Bax purred at Rosson, ushering him impatiently towards his own car.
Rosson tossed his mane of hair, winced as it tugged at his broken scalp.
• • •
A thousand miles over the Solomon Islands, travelling northward, minds weren't cracked at all, but deepfrozen — to a degree above absolute zero . . .
To the north of Las Vegas, beside the Atomic Energy Commission testing ground, minds weren't cracked at all, but dispersed in lightly radioactive debris drifting slowly south before settling into the desert.
The casinos were far enough south for nobody to need worry. The gambling went on. Minds reckoned the odds.
Five thousand miles further south, a Xemahoa Indian named Kayapi wasn't much worried either.
The End
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