He shrugs. “It was messy. The building was not empty—full of workers—and the hanged man rampaged through it. It killed over a dozen people. You don’t want to see the chromographs of that, and I didn’t bring them. The Great Bull aside, none of the mages really knew how to configure plasm so as to kill a hanged man, and it kept slipping away while they improvised their attacks. Reading the reports, I have the impression that there was a great deal of chaos within the mage team, perhaps some panic. Finally the target creature tried to merge with the plasm that was attacking it… tried to become the plasm, to seize control of it from the minds of the mages who were using it. The mages fought off the thing’s attacks, but several were so traumatized by mind-to-mind contact that they required hospital care, two for extended stays, and one, as I said, for good. Eventually they killed it, or so the team believed. In any case, if it got away, it did not return to Injido.”
A dozen people killed, several mages hospitalized. Hardly a satisfactory solution.
“And the Qanibar group?” Aiah asks.
“They had an advantage—the extortionist who cooperated with the authorities. He informed them of the body the creature was occupying, and agreed to lure the creature to a place where it was vulnerable. All plasm in the area was used before the creature turned up, and then the host body was attacked and destroyed. The creature was contained and then killed as it tried to escape to the nearest plasm source.”
“Were there any casualties?” Aiah asks.
“No. But the Qanibar police had advantages given them by good intelligence—knowing where the hanged man was going to be—and also by the fact that Qanibar was at the time a totalitarian state. They opened the action by killing the hanged man’s host, something the authorities certainly cannot do in any society that values the rights of humans beings and of victims.” He looks troubled. “Nor am I certain that the creature was, properly speaking, a hanged man or ice man. Perhaps it was a Slaver Mage who had convinced the extortionists he was a hanged man, or maybe it was a…, vampire…” His face twists uncomfortably at having to deal with yet another creature out of superstition. “Perhaps something that has not been categorized,” he continues, “or a delusion. I will continue searching for information, if you like.”
“I wish you would.”
“I also found this… curiosity.” He takes out a sheaf of plastic flimsies, pushes it across the table to Aiah. “It is mostly speculation, but I thought you might want to read it, for reasons of historical and personal interest.”
The plastic flimsies smell of developing fluid. “Toward a Psychology of the Ice Man,” Aiah reads, by Constantine of Cheloki.
Aiah’s mouth goes dry. “How old is this?” she asks.
“It was published thirty-seven years ago, in a journal of philosophy.” An analytical smile touches Rohder’s lips. “There is very little science in it.”
Constantine must have met Taikoen by then, Aiah thinks.
She tries for a moment to read the blue eyes, the ruddy skin, the network of fine lines in the old mage’s face, and wonders what it is he knows. She gives up, looks down at the article, then drops her hand over it.
“I’ll look at it later. Can I see the other reports?”
Rohder closes the folder and pushes it across the polished table surface. The soft plastic cover and the flimsies inside flutter in the brief breeze. Aiah picks up the article by Constantine and slips it into the folder. She feels the throb of her heart, its acceleration to a higher state of alertness, a touch of the Adrenaline Monster upon her nerves… It is as if she is responding to the notion that the file itself is a threat, and she wonders if she will ever have the courage to make use of this information, to somehow put an end to Taikoen, or even to read the article, of historic and personal interest, that Rohder has given her.
She looks up at Rohder, forces a polite smile onto her lips. “Would you like some coffee?” she asks.
Talk turns to other matters, particularly to Rohder’s teams, who are busy increasing Caraqui’s plasm supply, and then the old man takes his leave. Aiah turns up the ventila-■ tion to clear the cloud of cigaret smoke and looks at the closed folder waiting for her on the table.
Her nerves hum louder than the ventilation fans.
She opens the green folder, slips out Constantine’s article, and composes herself to read it: sitting straight in the straight chair, feet flat on the floor, hands framing the pages on the table. As if she were a schoolgirl at her desk.
Constantine’s style, she notices, is informed but not quite at ease. She can tell he’s been to college: he uses words like noetic and mensuration. The later Constantine, with less need to impress, would adopt a less specialized vocabulary, and a more accessible style.
He discusses at some length the legendary attributes of the ice man and discusses theories of how such creatures may be created. The tone is speculative—he endeavors to make it seem that he knows less about this matter than, in fact, he does. And then he addresses the primary contradiction of the ice man legends.
Why would the ice man, he asks, who exists in the core of creation, in the plasm itself, the great transformational substance, the heart of contingent reality that underlies our whole postmetropolitan world, wish to inhabit the body of a human being?
Constantine finds the answer in the hanged man’s lost body itself.
The attractions of plasm are many, but the most intense are those based on sensation. It is these appeals to the sensual, to enhanced and extended sight and hearing, to the stimulus of nerves and groin, that most often impel those who habituate themselves to plasm as an addict to morphia; and this sensual attraction, in subtler form, is a factor in the attraction of plasm to many of its other users, who experience sense gratification alongside plasm’s other enjoyments…
For the ice man there are no longer nerves to stimulate, no sensory organs to enhance, no sexual impulse to satisfy. The vital element of sensory feedback is missing: no longer is the sensual body able to bring pleasure to its now detached, and oddly diminished, mind.
But, Aiah thinks, a protest half-formed in her mind; but Constantine answers her objection before she can properly form it.
It is true that when mages project themselves through telepresence they use plasm to build a sensorium, an array of ectomorphic sense-artifacts used to bring sense-stimulation to the receptive centers of the mind. But the sensorium, however enhanced it may be, is built in imitation of the body’s own natural sense organs, and furthermore upon a series of sense-memories contained within the mind. Without a material body and its sense-organs to apprehend the world, and without a sensual memory, reinforced at every moment by a thousand natural stimuli, how is a detached, immaterial mentality to apprehend the world?
… The ice man must apprehend the world only through a created sensorium. For a human mage, a sensorium will be based on the mage’s own sense-organs and on sense-experience and memory. For an ice man, a sensorium will be based on organs that no longer exist and memories that grow ever more distant. Without an anchor planted in the body’s own sensual experience and memory, the ice man’s perceptions will become ever more distorted.
Aiah knits her brows and contemplates Constantine’s argument. It must be true, she thinks; Constantine knew Taikoen when he wrote this, and must have based all this on observation.