He got no closer than a hundred yards — still beyond lip-reading range. Then a robot carrying trays of refreshments rolled across his path, and, as he turned to help himself, Noyes was intercepted by a short, gushing woman with golden eyes and an aggressively jutting chin. “Charles,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in a thousand years. Come meet my new husband!”
He sorted through foggy family memories. She was an Adams, yes, that was clear, and she had attended his sister’s wedding to David Loeb, and he remembered dimly that she had been married for a while to one of the Schiffs. He smiled uncertainly.
“You don’t remember me?” she asked. “It’s been a long time — Donna, Donna Adams, is it?”
“Donna’s my sister. I’m Rowena. How could you forget a name like that? You should take your memory drugs more often, Charles. I don’t believe I’ll ever forget the way you carried on at Gloria’s wedding! You—”
“I didn’t catch your mated name now,” Noyes cut in quickly. “Owens. Yes, you were going to meet my husband. Nathaniel Owens. He’s right over here. A most extraordinary man. Can you imagine it, Charles, he carries seven personae! Seven!”
But he doesn’t carry them very well, Noyes decided a moment later, when he had been introduced to Nathaniel Owens. Owens was burly and barrel-chested, flaunting a thick mat of body hair as though perversely proud of its ugly coarseness, and his square, harsh-planed face looked as though it had been constructed from random components. He was about sixty, Noyes guessed. His eyes were black and not quite focused, and when he spoke his voice soared confusingly through an octave or more before settling on its pitch.
“My wife been telling you a lot of nonsense about us?” Owens demanded truculently.
“Not at all. She simply said you’re carrying seven personae.” Owens blinked and twitched. “Damned right I am! You see anything wrong with that?”
“If you can handle the strain—”
“He can handle anything, chum,” Owens said in a strangely altered voice, a basso growl. “He’s the original ьbermensch. You just have to ask and he’ll tell you.”
Noyes was still attempting to understand why Owens had suddenly spoken of himself in the third person when Owens blurted in a much higher voice, “Shut your goddam mouth!”
“It’s your goddam mouth I’m talking through,” came the deeper voice.
“Our mouth, you sniveling idiot!” It was a third voice, bland, silky. “We’re all in this cage together!”
Noyes realized, stunned, that Owens’ personae had seized control of the man and were carrying on an argument through his vocal apparatus. Owens himself stood stupefied, long arms dangling at his sides, shoulders lifting and hitching in oddly automatic motions. His eyes rolled. His wife, seeing what had happened, grabbed a drink from a roboservitor’s tray and plunged it, dagger-fashion, against Owens’ thick-muscled arm. His twisting facial muscles subsided. He looked abashed.
“Nathaniel hasn’t had much sleep lately,” Rowena Owens explained to the little group that had gathered. “Sometimes he finds it difficult to exert the proper authority when he’s tired. Feeling better now, darling?”
“I’m all right, yes,” Owens said. “I’m in full command again.” His voice was neutral; he had ceased to twitch.
Noyes stared, stricken with horror. It seemed to him that he saw his own fate mirrored in Owens’ eyes. The man’s personae had for the moment ejected him from control of his body and had transformed him into a prisoner in his own skull, assailed by dybbuks. Just as James Kravchenko ceaselessly attempted to do to him. Kravchenko had not yet succeeded even in grabbing the power of vocalization; when he spoke, it was still only an Inward murmur. But he was trying all the while. It did not soothe Noyes to reflect that he had merely the problem of keeping one persona under control, while Owens wrestled with a whole team of them.
Owens took Noyes’ shocked silence for disapproval, evidently. He said with belligerence, “What’s the matter? Don’t you believe in Scheffing transplant?”
“Well, I—”
“I know. You’re one of the Erasure people. You feel it’s all an evil, sinister manifestation of cultural decay, and you want all the personae rubbed out. Right? And here I stand with seven of them under my roof, and to you I’m the embodiment of Satan. Right? Right?”
“It isn’t that way at all,” Noyes murmured.
“As a matter of fact, my brother isn’t part of the Erasure group in the least. Are you, Charles?” Gloria had appeared from somewhere and now stood at Owens’ elbow, looking fair and lovely, as much a willowy girl as she had been on her wedding day.
“Of course not,” Noyes managed to say. “I’ve got a persona myself, you know. What gives you the idea I’m against transplant?”
Owens looked mollified. “I suppose I leaped to the conclusion. You know, there are so many of me that I tend to make snap judgments. We assess the evidence as a team, and sometimes we assess it too fast.” He thrust out his hand. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Charles Noyes. I’m with Roditis Securities.”
“Oh. Yes. Sure.” The hand enfolded his. Just as contact was made, Owens twitched again, and a kind of convulsion ran the length of his arm, forcing him to pull his hand back. Noyes watched uncomfortably as the spasm traveled down the entire right side of Owens’ body.
Gloria said quickly, “Charles is also an authority on Buddhist reincarnation theory. He and Mr. Roditis have just returned from a pilgrimage to the lamasery in San Francisco. He—”
“You believe in that crap?” Owens asked. Noyes faltered, astonished by the hairy man’s capacity for starting trouble. Rowena Owens bit her lip. As quietly as he could, Noyes said, “I think the teachings form a valuable guide to existence in a world where reincarnation is a practical fact. We must know the art of dying if we’re to master the art of living.”
“I say it’s crap,” Owens repeated loudly. “It’s an artificial movement grafted onto a materialistic society for reasons of guilt. Those of us who take part in the transplant program are set apart from ordinary humanity, from the clods, if you like, and because in effect we’ve become immortal we need to console ourselves with a new religion. So we’ve borrowed this prayer-wheel garbage from the Himalayas, only we’ve turned it upside down, since in its original form it’s inapplicable to our society. It—”
“You sound a little like Mr. Roditis now,” Noyes began. “He—”
“Let me finish! The whole idea of the Buddhists is to break the chain of incarnations and go off to nirvana, isn’t it? Born no more? And our whole idea is to grab as many incarnations as possible, down through the centuries. For us, good karma leads to rebirth. Is that Buddhism? That’s a perversion of Buddhism! I know. I’ve got a guru right here inside me, one of the best, a real theologian. Murtaugh, from the Baltimore group. You know of him?”
Awed, Noyes said, “Why, of course. He wrote The Art of Right Dying.”
“And he died right himself, and I got him! So you better not argue theology with me. I’ve got it straight from the source, Noyes.
Om mani padme hum. And I know how cynical the entire movement is. I’ve got collective karma.” Owens twitched again. He was losing control once more. “I tell you, only a tired persona wants off the wheel of sangsara. The rest of us hunger to go round and round and round again. We—” A scabrous obscenity slipped from Owens’ lips. He paused, astonished, and hammered his fist against his left cheekbone. He trembled.