“Do you mean I’m walking on my brains?” she gasped incredulously.
“Just so, just so,” affirmed Brouder. “Each controls half of your body, but each has the total content of the body’s input, including thought and memory. If we were to chop you off at the bottom of the stalk, your two feet would dig into the ground and each would sprout a new you. Your head contains sensory input neural circuits only—in fact, it’s mostly hollow. Chop it off and you’d just go to sleep and dig in until you grew a new one.”
Vardia marveled at this news as much as she had at Ortega back at Zone. But this isn’t some alien creature I just met, she told herself. It is me it is talking about.
“There’s the Center,” Brouder said as they came over a rise.
It was a great building that seemed to spread out for kilometers across the horizon. There was a great bubble in the center that reflected light like a mirror, then several arms—six of them, she noted with dry amusement—made of what appeared to be transparent glass—spread out symmetrically. She saw skyscrapers of the same transparent material, a few twenty or more stories, rising around the bubble and opposite the tips of the arms.
“It’s incredible!” she managed.
“More than you know,” Brouder replied with a touch of pride. “There our best minds work out problems and store the knowledge we obtain. The silvery rails that thread through the walls and ceilings are artificial solar light sufficient to keep us awake and fed through the night, and if you look to the horizon you’ll see the River Averil coming in. The Center’s built over it, giving us a constant water source. With light and water provided—and some vitamin baths—you can work around the clock for seven to ten days. But sooner or later it catches up with you and the longer you stay awake the longer you will have to plant in the end.”
Something made her think of Nathan Brazil and that book he had been reading, the one with the lurid cover.
“You have a library here?” she asked.
“The best,” the other boasted. “It has everything we’ve ever been able to collect, both from our studies on this planet and from Entries like yourself who provide history, sociology, and even technical information.”
“Any stories?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” came the reply. “And legends, tales, whatever. The Umiau are particularly fertile in that department. The river’s how they get up to the Center.”
“What keeps the Pia away, then?” she asked apprehensively.
“They can’t take fresh water, and they’d have to breathe it, remember? The Umiau are mammals so they don’t care what sort of water they’re in.”
Brouder went on to explain the social structure of the Center. It was headed by a small group of specialists called Elders, not because they were old but because they were the best in their fields. Below them were their assistants, the Scholars, who did the research and basic project work. Brouder was a Scholar, as was Gringer. Under them were the Apprentices who learned their fields and waited for their chance to prove themselves and advance. The bottom level was the Keepers—the cleaners, gardeners, and technicians who maintained everything so that everyone could get on with his work. The Keepers chose their own lives and professions and many were retired upper-level folk who had decided they had gone as far as they could, or who had reached dead ends. But some just liked to do what they did.
Brouder took her inside and introduced her to a Scholar whose name was Mudriel. Basically, the Scholar was an industrial psychologist, and over the next several days—weeks, in fact—Vardia was kept busy with interviews, tests, and other experiments to see her total profile. In addition, they began to teach her to read the Czillian language. Mudriel, in particular, was pleased with the speed and ease with which she was mastering it.
Every evening they sent her out to a special camp near the Psych Department but out of the shade of the building. The nights saw a strange forest grow up on all sides of the Center as thousands of workers of all ranks came out and rooted. Some stayed rooted for days, even several days, sleeping off long, around-the-clock stints at work.
Vardia seemed to be Mudriel’s only customer, and she remarked on it.
“You are the first Entry to be a Czillian in our lifetimes,” Mudriel explained. “Normally, I study various departments and workers to see if they are ruining their health or efficiency, or are misplaced. It happens all the time. Sometimes, whenever possible, we bring Entries from other hexes here for debriefing. When that is not possible, I go to them. I am one of perhaps a thousand, no more, who has been in the Northern Hemisphere.”
“What’s it like?” she asked. “I understand it’s different.”
“That’s the word for it,” Mudriel agreed, and gave a brief shudder. “But we have some just as bad on our side, in one way or another. Ever think of interviewing a Pia in its own domain when it’s trying to be helpful and eat you at the same time? I have.”
“And yet you’ve survived,” she said in admiration.
Mudriel made a negative gesture. “Not always. I’ve been down to my feet once, practically wrecked for weeks three or four times, and killed twice.”
“Killed!” Vardia exclaimed. “But—”
Mudriel shrugged. “I’ve twinned four times naturally,” it replied matter-of-factly, “and once when I was left with only my brains. There are still four of me. We stay in the same job and take turns on the travel to even out the risk.”
Vardia shook her head in wonder, a gesture more human than Czillian.
While most twins were turned to other fields by the Psych Department, ones with critical jobs or super-specialized knowledge and skills often worked together side by side. Vardia met several people at the Center several times to mutual confusion.
One day Mudriel called her into its office, where it was thumbing through an enormously thick file.
“It’s time to assign you and go on to other things,” the psychologist told her. “You’ve been here long enough for us to know you better than we know almost any other Czillian. I must say, you’ve been a wonderful subject, but a puzzling one.”
“In what way?” Vardia asked. As time went by she had become more and more accustomed to her new form and surroundings, and less and less had felt the social alienation of that first night.
“You have normalized,” Mudriel pointed out. “By this time you are feeling as if you were born one of us, and your past life and that which went with it is a purely intellectual memory experience.”
“That’s true,” Vardia acknowledged. “It almost seems as if all my past happened to someone else, that I just watched it unfold.”
“That’s true of all Entries,” replied Mudriel. “Part of the change process, when the biological changes adjust and remake the psyche. Much of our personality and behavior is based on such biological things. In the animals, it’s glands, enzymes, and the like, but with us it’s various different secretions. Hormonal imbalances in your former race cause differences; by artificially injecting certain substances into a male of your species who was sexually developed, he could be given female characteristics, and vice versa. Now, time has rebalanced your mind with your new body, and it is for the best.”
“What puzzles you about me, then?” Vardia prodded.
“Your lack of skills,” replied the psychologist. “Everybody does something. But you were apparently raised to be highly intelligent yet totally ignorant. You could carry messages and conversations with ease, yet do nothing else. Your ignorance of much of your own sector amazes us.
“You were, in effect, a human recording machine. Did you, for example, realize that in the eighty-three days you’ve been with us you’ve had a longer existence than ever in your short life?”