She peered around her. The table, upside down, showed a cracked, splintered surface. The plastic was pocked and cratered, with metal splinters embedded all over its surface. Off to the right the whole wall showed a similar pattern of shrapnel impact. Godiva stood at the other side of the table. She looked astonished, but unharmed.
“Help me.” Tatty nodded to Godiva to take hold of the other end of the overturned table. Between them they lifted it off the two men. Mondrian was unconscious. Tatty dropped to her knees, looking first at his face and then feeling for his pulse. It was slow and steady. She noticed in a detached way that her own left arm was punctured and bleeding and marked by scores of metal fragments.
Luther Brachis had finally made it to his feet. He was holding his head in his hands and staring vacantly around him. His right shoulder and neck were riddled with metal fragments and bleeding profusely. The restaurant staff had finally appeared and stood looking helplessly on.
“Medical care,” said Brachis gruffly. “Did anyone send for help?”
One of the waiters nodded.
“All right, then.” Brachis motioned to Esro Mondrian. “Take him outside. I don’t want him in here a second longer than he has to be.”
“But moving him — ” began Tatty.
“He’ll live, but we have to get him to a hospital. Don’t worry, Princess Tatiana, I’ll see to that. And well get you patched up, too. And then” — Brachis shivered, and his voice dropped to a whisper — “and then I’ll get after the bastard who did this.”
He shook his head as though to clear it, reached for his shoulder, and gasped. He tilted, straightened, and started a slow crumpling. Tatty and Godiva reached out for him together. They lowered him gently to the floor. Their hands came away from his uniform covered with fresh bright blood.
Tatty wiped her palms absently on the front and side of her white dress. As she did so she suddenly thought of Chan. Where was he, what had he been doing?
A lot of things were beginning to make sense. The picture of Mondrian, back on Horus — it had been the spur that drove Chan towards intelligence. She had used it that way on purpose, to relieve her own feelings. And then the way that Chan had looked at Mondrian’s image when he came onto the display screen to ask her to go to dinner with him.
She had created Chan’s feeling deliberately, a focused and intense hatred. Was this the terrible result?
Please God, no.
But Tatty felt sure that she was right. It was her fault, she was the one who had caused this carnage. She dropped to her knees, cradled Esro Mondrian in her arms, and hid her face against his dark tunic.
First there had been that sudden, terrible moment when the whole world rushed in on him. It had created nausea, pain, and disorientation. At the time Chan would have said that nothing could ever be worse than those final few minutes in the Tolkov Stimulator. And it could never happen again. Self-awareness and loss of innocence occur at a unique moment in a life.
But there are degrees of torture, refinements of pain beyond the simple and the immediate. A more complex animal can admit more subtle agonies. Those came later, and more gradually.
Even now, when he could speak perfectly well, Chan could not put his suffering into words. All he had was analogy. It was as though the illumination level of the world around him had been increasing, hour by hour and day by day. The light had been constant and dim for many years, until the Tolkov Stimulator produced that first flood of light. Ever after that the radiance level had risen, little by little. More and more detail became visible — and the brightness reached the point of discomfort, and far beyond.
Occasionally a single event would produce a flare, a quantum change in the brightness around him. The sight of Esro Mondrian, earlier in the day, had been a supernova. It brought in a torrent of new sensation. He knew Mondrian — but how, and when, and where?
Chan brooded on the question. Mondrian’s drawn, aristocratic features were utterly familiar, more familiar to Chan than his own face. The memory was there in his brain, it had to be — but he was denied access. Thinking about it only made his mind regress along an endless loop.
Finally Chan had wandered over to Tatty’s apartment. He had no particular reason for going there, no explicit goal in mind, but he wanted to talk to her. Maybe she could help him; if not, she might be able to comfort him.
It was a shock to find Tatty preoccupied with her own affairs, rather than being wholly devoted to Chan’s. He found her cold, remote, and unsympathetic. She was obviously far off on her own mental journey, and she did not want company.
When she went into the bedroom it was a clear hint for Chan to leave. He didn’t. Instead he hung around the apartment, convinced that he had nowhere else to go.
Finally Tatty had come out again, dressed for her dinner appointment. She had checked her appearance in the full-length mirror on the living-room wall. And it was then that Chan, looking over her shoulder and also seeing his own reflection, became disoriented and faint. For the first time in his life he experienced the most intense form of self-awareness. That tall, blond figure staring back at him with eyes of sapphire blue was him — Chancellor Vercingetorix Dalton, a unique assembly of thought, emotions and memories, housed in a single and familiar frame. There he was. There was his identity.
Chan felt like screaming aloud with revelation. But that was what children did. Instead he left the apartment — quickly, so that the great flood of thoughts would not be lost or diverted by conversation with others. In the corridor he saw the approaching figure of Esro Mondrian. That had set up its own resonance within him, adding to the internal storm.
Chan did not want to speak — to anyone. He hid until Mondrian had passed by and gone to Tatty’s door, and then he watched from the shadows. When the pair left he followed them along the walkway. He had no objective, beyond an unarticulated urge to keep both of them within his sight.
At the restaurant Chan was greeted by a waiter who politely barred his way. Did Chan have a reservation?
Chan shook his head dumbly and retreated. He wandered away along the corridor. His head was throbbing, stabs of pain shooting across his eyes. At each intersection he made a random choice of direction. Up, down, east, west, north, south, on through the convoluted interior paths of Ceres.
At last, quite by accident, he found that he had traveled all the way to the surface chambers. Great transparent viewports opened out on to the jumble of ships, gantries, landing towers, and antennae that covered the outer levels of the giant asteroid. Ceres was the power center of the solar system, and as such it had a surface that bustled with activity twenty-four hours a day.
Beyond that surface stood the quiet stars. Chan settled down to stare at them.
What was he? A month ago, anyone could have answered that question: he was a moron. A misfit, a folly of nature, the brain of an infant in the body of a grown man. Just a few days ago, Chan had asked Kubo Flammarion a question. Before the Stimulator, his brain had not developed. Chan understood that — but why had it not developed? Had the cause been chemical, physiological, psychological, or what?
Flammarion had shook his head. He had no idea; but he would ask the experts.
In a few hours he was back. They did not know the answer, either. Chan had always possessed what appeared to be a perfectly normal brain; and now, after the treatment, Chan had a normal brain — or one that was rather better than normal, according to the latest tests. But as to why — Flammarion’s experts had offered nothing. Why was Einstein, why was Darwin, why was Mozart, all with brains no difference in appearance from yours or mine?