A Woman a Day

by Philip José Farmer

  “So my parents went to March, and I was born in Afen-yaw, ancient Avignon, shortly after they arrived. It’s not been too easy for me in March, and it’s been worse since I was sent here as a CWC-man. Of course, I’ve been released from all obligations to practice dietary restrictions because I am posing as a Jack. But I can’t help how my nervous system reacts. My stomach threatens to upheave every day at mealtime.”

  “Well,” said Leif, “you’ll get no sympathy from me on the food. I respect religious beliefs...

  “Sure you do,” mocked Ava.

  .. but this business about taboo dishes is beyond my comprehension.”

  “Let’s not get into that weary and fruitless discussion again,” said Ava. “I’ll stick to my beliefs; you’re stuck with yours.”

  Leif smiled and said, “So you got your big dark eyes from your mother? You charmer, you. Well, I think I’ll look in on Halla. Oh, before I go, I’m putting the ‘picker on Dannto during the operation. Will you change the beeper to the kymo? I’ll read it later.”

  Ava nodded.

  Leif hesitated and said, “I wish now I’d not kept Candle-man out of surgery. His mind would be more profitable to pick than the Archurielite’s.”

  “I could train it on him,” said Ava. “No, the walls are lined with stopray, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. Well, we’ll get him soon as possible. He makes me uneasy. I think he’s suspicious of me.”

  “It’s your face, darling.”

  “Well, it’s the one you married, honey. Come here, give me a kiss.”

  “You’d look better with your front teeth missing,” and Ava’s black eyes glittered.

  “Exit laughing,” said Leif, and did.

  He entered Halla’s room.

  “You may go to the kitchen and eat,” he said to the nurse.

  After she had left, he sat down by the bedside and began talking to the sleeping beauty. From the beginning, he’d had this session in mind, so he’d given her not an ordinary sleeping potion but a lotus pill. The semi-hypnotic drug would open the way for him to probe her subconscious.

  He hadn’t gotten far into his questions about her past when he found that a posthypnotic block had been installed. She simply would not answer anything that contradicted the fictitious personality of her sister.

  If he had cared to or had available the time needed, he could have broken down the barrier. But as he did not have days on end or a host of drugs handy, he gave up.

  He rose and went to surgery. There he stripped off his clothes, was soaped and showered but did not get the expected blast of warm air to dry him. He was forced to call a maintenance man and then, not to lose time, to dry himself off with towels. Afterwards he put on a plastic gown, mask, pants and shoes, which would be discarded after the operation. He put on his surgeon’s gloves, stood for a moment bathing in microbe-killing radiation, and then entered the operating room.

  Dannto was lying upon a table. As the Archurielite had taken only a local, he was looking around him with bright eyes at the various plastic containers above him and the tubes that ran from them to the needles in his arms.

  Though pale, he twisted his fat face into a smile. Leif held up a curved thumb and forefinger in a gesture a thousand years old and then checked on the routine. Ava, he noticed, was busy in the corner unscrewing the leads to the picker’s beeper and connecting them to the stylo. Nobody questioned what Ava was doing; Sigur, the eegie man, had gone home.

  Dannto did not object when Leif asked him if it were all right if the eegie helmet were placed over his head during the operation. Leif explained that he had many records so far of the lower classes, but none of exceptionally intelligent men. Dannto tried to hide his pleasure. It would be quite all right. Anything in the interests of science.

  Actually, it was not at all necessary that the helmet come in contact with the subject’s head. It could pick up the brain waves of a selected person at a considerable distance on its tight beam. But Leif wanted to make things look as authentic as possible; there was no use taking a chance on anybody’s recognizing its unorthodoxy.

  While he operated, Leif talked to the Urielite, first taking the precaution of asking him to keep silent unless told to talk. He chattered amusingly of this and that inconsequence, like any good doctor trying to keep his patient’s mind off the knife.

  Now and then he inserted a statement that he hoped would send Dannto thinking along certain lines. He expected, if the train of thought continued, to extract valuable information from the waves inked upon the kymo slowly turning in the comer.

  He could not keep from thinking of the girl in the penthouse bedroom, asleep, her long, loose and wavy hair piling out gloriously upon the pillow. The head would be turned aside, the profile against the auburn hair, a cameo of vibrant flesh against gleaming tresses.

  And she, he thought, belonged to the mass of dough that he was now paring away. His hand shook. He steadied it; though he controlled himself, he could not help the desire that seized it. What if he were to slip? To make a wrong cut?

  Well, what about it? Candleman would investigate. Routinely, of course. And there would be no telling what that bloodhound would sniff out. Perhaps enough to undo all the work of the CWC for the past ten years. No, he certainly couldn’t do it. He’d allowed himself enough disobedience this morning when he’d dissected Mrs. Dannto. Moreover, Ava had left the picker and was watching him. Ava’s trained eye would grasp the deliberately false move, the premeditated, fatal slip. And, knowing, Ava’s duty would be to inform Marsey that he had disobeyed orders. That would mean his recall, or, more probably, a drumhead courtmartial and execution in Paris. It was too risky to smuggle a man like him across the border; it would not be worth taking the chance. So somebody he didn’t know was in the Corps would step up to him one night, and stab him and carve J.C. across his forehead and thus kill two birds with one cut, inspiring terror among the Jacks and squelching any suspicion the Sturch might have had that he was an Izzie or March agent. Very clever and economical.

  Thinking thus, the doctor made the correct motions and in due time removed a tumor which would never have grown if Dannto had not taken a certain medicine prescribed by Leif.

  “This will do good,” he’d said, not saying for whom. The Urielite had swallowed it in the faith that his stomach aches would vanish. So they had, but he had planted the seed of a larger one.

  The good doctor now plucked the fruit, then filled the cavity with a quivering mass of jelly. The shapeless mass would at once lock its ‘blueprint’ electromagnetic field to the injured cells. The amino-acid and CH contents would form new cells. In a surprisingly short time, the tissues would be as good as new.

  This particular jelly was somewhat different, however. Part of it consisted of a substance whose ingredients, unmixed, were harmless. If a shortwave of a certain frequency, sent at certain close intervals, struck the substance, the substance mixed, formed a violent poison, and sent the owner thereof into a quick and fatal convulsion. Leif stepped back while the nurses finished up the sterilizing and other lesser tasks. “How do you feel?”

  Dannto, pale as a toadstool, said, “Never bothered me a bit.”

  He pointed to the mirror overhead. “It’s quite an experience, looking into yourself.”

  “Very few people do,” said Leif without humor, and was not disappointed when Dannto failed to comprehend.

  “You may dress in that room, abba,” said a nurse.

  Dannto waddled towards the indicated door, but before he reached it, he was halted by Candleman’s voice. The Uzzitc had burst in through another entrance.

  “Timezen!” he swore. “Who’s responsible for the QB here?”

  “Peter Sorn is,” said Leif. “Why?”

  “That’s the same fellow I had questioned about room 113, isn’t he?”

  He whirled and stalked off, leaving the others standing staring at him. When Dannto asked Leif what the matter was, Leif shrugged. Nevertheless, he felt slightly sick.r />
  Chapter 13

  AFTER THE ROOM had been cleaned up, and the nurses and Ava had left, Leif returned to the operating room to see what the thoughtpicker had recorded during the operation. The thoughtpicker was a machine mounted upon a three wheeled carriage. It’s bulk was enclosed in a shining seamless eternalloy sphere set upon the top of the rest of the machinery.

  Sigur, the assistant eegieman, had been curious. It had taken only a word from his superior to make that curiosity voiceless; Leif had hinted that it was an invention of great importance and that the Sturch would frown upon any noising about of its presence. This followed the pattern. Sigur swore that he’d be as silent as expected.

  Leif removed the kymographs, took them to a table, spread them out, and began studying. He paid no attention to the upper lines; those were the conventional waves. The bottom line, inked by the newly hooked-in style, took all his concentration for the next hour. He read the sharp peaks and plunging valleys swiftly, for his training had been thorough, and his experience had given him vast familiarity with them. Dannto’s thoughts were spread out before him; the things he expected no man would ever know.

  At the end of the hour, Leif sighed.

  Thoughts were not what one expected. When Leif had been introduced to the thoughtpicker in the CWC’s sanctum sanctorum, he’d been thrilled. Read a man’s mind? Train a narrow beam on an unsuspecting skull, pick up and amplify the very weak ‘semantic’ waves, interpret their climbs and slides, and know all his secrets?

  Be God?

  Hah!

  First, the young student had learned that beneath the well-known alpha, beta, gamma, eta, theta, and iota waves were the sigma or semantic. These almost indetectable eruptions could be correlated by the trained eye to the spoken word. With some training the learner could slide across the graph a bar with a rectangular hole in its center, blocking off each unit and seeing it as such, not as just another continuation of the jagged lines.

  Later, after hard study, the time came when the eye could run down the dales and leap over the hills inked upon the paper and know what it was reading.

  Could it?

  Not entirely. Leif had found out that if a man thought out a sentence you asked him to cerebrate, the ’picker could reproduce the words. But that was all. It couldn’t give you the emotions or the thousand other events that went with the stylo-ized waves. It couldn’t portray the inner sensations: the feelings of repulsion, annoyance, lust, love, or boredom. It couldn’t tell you a man was hungry or describe his reactions to a beautiful woman walking down the street.

  If a man thought, Forerunner, I’m hungry enough to eat the hind end of a skunk, or Boy, what a classy chassis!, and his tongue repeated sublingually those stirring words, the waves broadcast by his brain could be caught and kymoed.

  What if he stood silent upon a peak in Darien?

  You, the god with the mindreader, suddenly found yourself scanning a new tongue, the undecipherable hieroglyphics called, technically, static.

  Leif had been taught at the CWC College that the waves which could be correlated with definite spoken syllables were to be known as logikons or word-images.

  Where, the young Dr. Barker had thought, were the other ikons?

  There were none. None, at least, that could be picked up by the machine.

  This was not true telepathy, the mindreading conceived by science-fiction writers and scientists.

  This brainskimming was a travesty on that concept, a mockery of man’s hopes.

  You read a sentence and then came to a blank. Or found a word cut off in half. You knew that these pauses were full of ‘thinking’. But words were not all that were used in thinking. And, unfortunately, words were all you could interpret. Great seas of non-intelligibility surrounded little islands of knowableness.

  Leif, after studying the ’picker for ten years, concluded that a new machine needed to be built.

  It must be capable of detecting and interpreting all the impulses sent by the muscles, the nerves, the glands, and, in short, the total of organs. Suppose you could get the wave-image of bodily posture and the internal sensations integrated thereto? What would you have? The kinesthetikon?

  That, of course, would be changing from second to second. Image stepping on image’s heels.

  Then you’d have to add to that the feelings engendered by reception of beauty or ugliness from outside the skin or inside: the sight of a sunset, the taste of a thick and tender steak. These multiplex images would form a whole: the esthetikon.

  Integrate all the incredibly complicated phenomena of signs and symbols and the reactions to them, the weaving of ikons, and what would you get?

  The semantikon: the meaning-image.

  And how would you know what this image looked like?

  It wasn’t as difficult to find as you might think.

  Meaning, or another word for it, value, was what you did. Action and reaction made up the moving ikon. Idols rose and fell, and their birth, power, and toppling were you as you passed through frames of time and space and perhaps other, frames that some do not recognize and others do, even if only faintly.

  So, thought Leif, if that were true, where would you get a machine to show you the transient ikons and the one big image they formed? And if you had the machine, how would you present the semantikon to the reader so he might see that multitude of wave pictures in one word, in one symbol? How would you hurl that symbol long distances for instant communication? What could do that? What could receive it?

  The question was, he suspected, wrongly phrased. It wasn’t what. It was who.

  The answer was obvious. He’d seen just such a machine that very morning. Four machines. As a result of his busyness—or stupidity—he’d probably lost forever his chance to study one.

  Sighing, he bent over Dannto’s record. As he’d expected, there was nothing unusual here. The Sandalphon was a man. A man didn’t differ from his fellows as much as he liked to think. No matter how high his position or his deeds, his morals or his I. Q., he concerned himself with much the same things as the fellow next door and had much the same reactions.

  Dannto was scared of dying on the table under Leifs knife, even though he had great confidence in his ability. There was one main suspicion; what if some of his inferiors had managed to bribe the doctor into slipping with the blade?

  That was rejected as unworthy. Barker was a fine doctor and a pleasant fellow, even if his conversation did sometimes border on unreality. He was, in a way, a very modest person. Look how he’d snatched Halla from the hands of the angel of death. Yet he’d poohpoohed her wounds in order to save him, Dannto, his temporal master, grief and worry.

  Here Leif read snatches of thoughts, interspersed by stretches of ‘static’, the technical term for uninterpretable waves. The gist was that Dannto had first seen Halla ten years ago when she’d applied for a job. She had been the secretary of the Metatron of Northern Asia. When that man had been killed in an accident (ha, thought Leif, the good old murderous CWC again) she’d applied for transfer to Paris and, rare event, gotten it.

  Here there were flashes of something; a partial phrase of ‘the first time I saw her unveiled’; followed by a cavalry charge of lancelike peaks, interpreted by Leif as emotion. Then there was a sentence of approval on high heels, lipstick and discard of veils, although they’d been for some years a more or less established fact.

  A pause. There were many pauses, for the brain, like other organs of the body, rested between beats. Then, out of nowhere, speculations about Candleman; how he’d raved on hearing the pronouncements of the council of Rek; denounced the increasing degeneration of the Haijac as signified by the daring dresses of women and the increased use of alcohol and the unconcerns of those who ought to stamp such things out.

  An interjected and irrelevant thought about asking Barker for a stronger laxative; then the tag end of a joke he’d heard the other day; then the recent offer of a bribe by the director of a spaceship construction department, and
his hesitation over whether or not it might be a trap, devised by his inferiors to displace him and his final conclusion that he would denounce the would-be briber. He didn’t need the money, anyway.

  Here and there hopped his thoughts, a kangaroo going no place in particular, stopping to nibble at this and that tender bush.

  Candleman entered again, like a draft in a haunted house, drifting in through a broken window and rippling the neck with the thought that perhaps a ghost was behind him. The Uzzite’s long hunt for Jacques Cuze was becoming a problem, interfering with his efficiency on other matters. Candleman’s keen and hot pursuit of the underground character was almost metaphysical, he had so many complicated theories as to who Cuze was, where he was, what he was doing now and going to do next. More static: probably a picture of Candleman in some pose or other; then, verification, the sub-vocalized English phrase “axenosed bloodhound,” applied to Candleman.

  Static. A wonder if he should diet. Halla had made some teasing references to his paunch getting in the way. A dwelling on his past jealousies over this and that man who’d been interested in her; there were so many. Some he’d transferred; others demoted; about three of the most tiresome he’d sent to H. Not that he distrusted Halla, but then you never know. Remember Sigmen’s warnings to believe only what you saw a woman doing and then check on that. Static. That old bastard Sigmen must have hated women for some good reason. Was he... static... forgive me, good Forerunner, for these unreal thoughts. I am weak and these awful... offal... heh, heh... ideas sometimes seize me... sent, no doubt, by the sinister Backrunner, who can implant unreality by telepathy. J.C.? J.C.? That fool, Candleman, and his Jacques Cuze. Jude Changer is the man behind that, you can bet... static... gap.