Frigate said, "Maybe the reason his wathan looked okay was that he had some device to distort it from its natural appearance. I mean... from the appearance it would have had if he hadn't used some kind of distorter. That way, he'd not only have passed as normal among his fellows, he'd have fooled the gateway field."
"That is possible," Nur said. "But wouldn't his colleagues know about distorters?"
"Not if they'd never seen or heard of one. It may have been X's invention." /
Burton said, "And he had his hideaway so that he could leave the tower without anybody else knowing it."
"That implies that there are no radar devices on the tower," Frigate said.
"Well?" Burton said. "If there had been, they would've detected the first and second expeditions when they came down the ledge. The radar might also have spotted the cave, though I suppose its operators wouldn't have thought anything about it if it had been noted. No, there was no radar scanning the sea and the mountains. Why should there be? The Ethicals didn't believe that anybody would get that far."
Nur said, "We all have wathans, if what the Council of Twelve told you was true. You saw theirs. What I don't understand is why they couldn't have tracked you down long before they did. Surely, a photograph of your wathan was in the records of that giant computer Spruce mentioned. I would suppose that everybody's was."
"Perhaps X arranged it so that the record in the computer wasn't a true image of my wathan," Burton said. "Perhaps that was why the agent Agneau was carrying a photograph of my physical person."
"I think that the Ethicals must have scanner satellites up there," Frigate said. "Maybe these could locate your wathan. But they couldn't find it because your wathan was distorted."
"Hmm," Nur said. "I wonder if distorting the wathan also results in distorting its owner's psyche?"
Burton said, "You may remember de Marbot's report of Clemens' analysis of the connection between the wathan or ka or soul, call it what you will, and the body? The conclusion was that the wathan is the essence of the person. Otherwise, it is irrelevant. It does no good to reattach the wathan to a duplicated body because the duplicate isn't the same as the original. Similar to the nth degree, yes, but not the same. If the wathan or soul is the persona, the seat of self-consciousness, then the physical brain is not self-aware. Without the wathan, the human body would have intelligence but no self-awareness. No concept of 7. The wathan uses the physical as a man uses a horse or an automobile.
"Perhaps that comparison isn't correct. The wathan-body combination is more like a centaur. A melding. Both the man-part and the horse-part need each other for perfect functioning. One without the other is useless. It may be that the wathan itself needs a body to become self-conscious. Certainly, the Ethicals said that the undeveloped wathan wanders in some sort of space when it's loosed by the body's death. And then the wathan is not just unaware of its own self but of anything. It's unconscious.
"Yet, according to our theory, the body generates the wathan. How, I don't know, don't even have a hypothesis. But without the body, a wathan can't come into existence. There are embryo wathans in the body embryos, and infant wathans in the infant body. Like the body, the wathan grows into adulthood.
"However, there are two stages of adulthood. Let's call the later stage superwathanhood. If a wathan doesn't attain a certain ethical or spiritual level, it's destined to wander forever after the body's death, unaware of itself.
"Unless, as happened here, a duplicate body is made and by some affinity the wathan reattaches itself to the duplicate body. This duplicate body would be intelligent but would have no concept of /. The wathan attached to it would have the self-awareness. But it couldn't have it until it interacted with the body.
"Without wathans, humans would have evolved from apes, would have had language, would have had technology and science, but no religion, yet would not have had any more knowledge of the self than an ant."
Frigate said, "What kind of language would that be? I mean, try to imagine a language in which no pronouns for / and me exist. And probably no you or yours either. To tell the truth, I don't think they'd develop language. Not as we know it, anyway. They'd just be highly intelligent animals. Living machines which would not depend upon instinct as much as animals do."
"We can talk about that some other time."
"Yeah, but what about the chimpanzees?"
"They must have had a rudimentary wathan which had a low-level consciousness of their /. However, it was never proved that apes did have language or self-awareness.
"The wathan itself can't develop self-awareness unless it has a body. If the body has a stunted brain, then the wathan is stunted. Hence, it can attain only to a certain low ethical level."
"No!" Frigate said. "You're confusing intelligence with morality. You and I have known too many people with a high intelligence and low ethical development and vice versa to believe that a high I.Q. is a necessary accompaniment to a high moral quotient."
"Yaas, but you forget about the will."
They came to another bay. Burton looked along the shaft. "Nothing here."
They walked on while Burton resumed the role of Socrates.
"The will. We have to assume that it's not entirely free. It's affected by events outside the body, its exterior environment, and by internal events, the inside environment. Injuries physical or mental, diseases, chemical changes, and so forth, can change a person's will. A maniac may have been a good person before a disease or injury made him into a torturer and killer. Psychological or chemical factors may make multiple personalities or a psychic cripple or monster.
"I suggest that the wathan is so closely connected with the body that it reflects the body's mental changes. And a wathan attached to an idiot or imbecile is itself idiotic or imbecilic.
"That is why the Ethicals have resurrected idiots and imbeciles elsewhere—if our speculations are correct—so that these may get special treatment. Through the medical science of the Ethicals, the retarded are enabled to have fully developed brains. Hence, they also have highly developed wathans with a full potentiality for a choice between good and evil."
"And," Nur said, "the opportunity to become super-wathans and so reunited with God. I've been listening carefully to you, Burton. I don't agree with much of what you've said. One implication is that God doesn't care about His souls. He wouldn't allow them to float around as unconscious things. He has made provision for all of them."
"Perhaps God—if there is one—doesn't care," Burton said. "There is no evidence whatsoever that He does.
"Anyway, I argue that the human being without a wathan has no free will. That is, the ability to make choices between or among moral alternatives. To surpass the demands of body and environment and personal inclination. To lift one's self, as it were, by the self's bootstraps. Only the wathan has the free will and the self-awareness. But I admit that it has to express these through the vehicle of the body. And I admit that the wathan closely interacts with and is affected by the body.
"Indeed, the wathan must get its personality traits, most of them, anyway, from the body."
Frigate said, "Well, then. Aren't we back where we started? We still can't make a clear distinction between the wathan and the body. If the wathan furnishes the concept of the / and the free will, it's still dependent upon the body for its character traits and everything else in the genetic and nervous systems. These are actually images which it absorbs. Or photocopies. So, in that sense, the wathan is only a copy, not the original.
"Thus, when the body dies, it stays dead. The wathan floats off, whatever that means. It has the duplicated emotions and thoughts and all that which make up a persona. It also has the free will and the self-awareness if it's reattached to a duplicate body. But it isn't the same person."