In their depths a whirlpool spun frantically on its own axis, sucking everything in to a vanishing point that never vanished but only grew fearfully dense with light—with all the sights it was seeing yet couldn’t find a way to discard from attention.
He wore the sky close as a hat. He knew the moil and coil of wisp clouds barely visible in the blue, intimately. His fingers branched the branching of the trees. His tongue tasted one by one the rows of brick teeth in that closed red mouth of a house that would swallow him, swallow him. And, at the very same time, he knew he was already swallowed, by the pulsing translucent stomach of the outside world.
This world flipped, into a new state of being.
It fell apart from lines and solids into a pointillist chaos of dots. Bright dots and dark dots. Blue dots, red dots, green dots. No form held true. No distance held fast. New forms making use of these dots in entirely arbitrary, experimental ways, sprang into being among the overwhelming debris of sense perceptions outside of him—fought to impose themselves on the flux of being—failed. Fell apart. And new forms rose.
A new creation was struggling to build itself out of the flood of information pouring at him. A new meaning. But all the sane, functional boundaries had dissolved and this chaos was saturated with meaning to such an extent it had lost all possibility of meaning any one thing or set of things. All appeared as of equal value.
A terrible, physical pressure was building in him, to crystallize this saturated world out into meaning—at all costs.
Where was the third dimension, that kept reality spaced out? This world seemed two-dimensional now—pressing tight about his eyes and ears and nose like a membrane, as packed with matter as the heart of a collapsed star. A flat sphere of dots of sense data pressing directly on to his brain, bypassing even his eyes and ears. It bound his thoughts about like a hungry womb.
The pressure in his head became an urgent need to smash his way through this membrane—to force things to become three-dimensional again, and absorb the vast excess of data.
And yet he was aware, instinctively, that the world he was seeing already was three-dimensional—that this two-dimensional quality was merely an agonizing illusion. Aware that he was trying to force something upon the world that could not be there in any rational universe—a dimension at right angles to this reality: somewhere to store the sheer volume of information flooding his brain and refusing to fade away.
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 inarticulable—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 I The boy’s mad. He can infect you with it, if you’re too near him. They said on the phone, a projective em-path. 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.”