I appear, thought Tropile crazily, to be a sort of eight-branched snowflake. Each of my branches is a human body.
He stirred, and added another datum. I appear also to be in a tank of fluid, and yet I do not drown.
There were certain deductions to be made from that. Either someone—the Pyramids?—had done something to his lungs, or else the fluid was as good an oxygenating medium as air. Or both.
Suddenly a burst of data-lights twinkled on the board below him. Instantly and involuntarily, his sixteen hands began working the switches, transmitting complex directions in a lightning-like stream of on-off clicks.
Tropile relaxed and let it happen. He had no choice; the power that made it right to respond to the board made it impossible for his brain to concentrate while the response was going on. Perhaps, he thought drowsily, perhaps he would never have awakened at all if it had not been for the long period with no lights. . . .
But he was awake. And his consciousness began to explore as the task ended.
He had had an opportunity to understand something of what was happening. He understood that he was now a part of something larger than himself, beyond doubt something which served and belonged to the Pyramids. His single brain not being large enough for the job, seven others had been hooked in with it.
But where were their personalities?
Gone, he supposed; presumably, they had been Citizens. Sons of the Wolf did not meditate, and therefore were not Translated—except for himself, he added wryly, remembering the meditation on Rainclouds that had led him to—
No, wait! Not Rainclouds but Water!
Tropile caught hold of himself and forced his mind to retrace that thought. He remembered the Raincloud Meditation. It had been prompted by a particularly noble cumulus of the Ancient Ship type.
And this was odd. Tropile had never been deeply interested in Rainclouds; had never known even the secondary classifications of Raincloud types. And he knew that the Ancient Ship variety was of the fourth order of categories.
It was a false memory. It was not his.
Therefore, logically, it was someone else’s memory; and being available to his own mind, as the fourteen other hands and eyes were available, it must belong to—another branch of the snowflake.
He turned his eyes down and tried to see which of the branches was his old body. He found it quickly, with growing excitement. There was the left great toe of his own body, a deformed blade twice as thick as it should be; he had injured it in boyhood, it had come off and grown back wrong. Good! It was reassuring.
He tried to feel the one particular body that led to that familiar toe.
He succeeded, not easily. After a time he became more aware of that body—somewhat as a neurotic may become “stomach conscious” or “heart conscious;” but this was no neurosis, it was an intentional exploration.
Since that worked, with some uneasiness he transferred his attention to another pair of. feet and “thought” his way up from them.
It was embarrassing.
For the first time in his life he knew what it felt like to have breasts. For the first time in his life he knew what it was like to have one’s internal organs quite differently shaped and arranged, buttressed and stressed by different muscles. The very faint background feel of man’s internal arrangements, never questioned unless something goes wrong with them and they start to hurt, was not at all like the faint background feel that a woman has inside her.
And when he concentrated on that feel, it was no faint background to him. It was surprising and upsetting.
He withdrew his attention—hoping that he would be able to. He was. Gratefully he became conscious of his own body again. Somehow, he was still himself if he chose to be.
Were the other seven?
He reached into his mind—all of it, all eight separate intelligences that were combined within him.
“Is anybody there?” he demanded.
No answer—or nothing he could recognize as an answer. He drove harder, and there was still no answer. It was annoying. He resented it as bitterly, he remembered, as in the old days when he had first been learning the subtleties of Raincloud Appreciation. There had been a Raincloud Master, his name forgotten, who had been sometimes less than courteous, had driven hard—
Another false memory!
He withdrew and weighed it. Perhaps, he thought, that was a part of the answer. These people, these other seven, would not be driven. The attempt to call them back to consciousness would have to be delicate. When he drove hard it was painful—he remembered the instant violent agony of his own awakening—and they reacted with unhappiness.
More gently, alert for vagrant “memories,” he combed the depths of the eightfold mind within him, reaching into the sleeping portions, touching, handling, sifting and associating, sorting. This memory of an old knife wound from an Amok—that was not the Raincloud woman; it was a man, very aged. This faint recollection of a childhood fear of drowning—was that she? It was; it fitted with this other recollection, the long detour on the road south toward the sun, around a river.
The Raincloud woman was the first to round out in his mind, and the first he communicated with. He was not surprised to find that, early in her life, she had feared that she might be Wolf.
He reached out for her. It was almost magic—knowing the “secret name” of a person, so that then he was yours to command. But the “secret name” was more than that; it was the gestalt of the person; it was the sum of all data and experience, never available to another person—until now.
With her memories arranged at last in his own mind, he thought persuasively: “Citizeness Alia Narova, will you awaken and speak with me?”
No answer—only a vague, troubled stirring.
Gently he persisted: “I know you well, Alia Narova. You sometimes thought you might be a Daughter of the Wolf, but never really believed it because you knew you loved your husband—and thought Wolves did not love. You loved Rainclouds, too. It was when you stood at Beachy Head and saw a great cumulus that you went into meditation—”
And on and on.
He repeated himself many times, coaxingly. Even so it was not easy; but at last he began to reach into her. Slowly she began to surface. Thoughts faintly sounded in his mind. Like echoes, at first; his own thoughts bouncing back at him; a sort of mental nod of agreement, “Yes, that is so.” Then—terror. A shaking fear; a hysterical rush; Citizeness Alia Narova came violently up to full consciousness and to panic.
She was soundlessly screaming. The whole eight-branched figure quivered and twisted in its nutrient bath.
The terrible storm raged in Tropile’s own mind as fully as in hers—but he had the advantage of knowing what it was. He helped her. He fought it for the two of them . . . soothing, explaining, calming.
He won.
At last her branch of the snowflake-body retreated, sobbing for a spell. The storm was over.
He talked to her in his mind and she “listened.” She was incredulous, but there was no choice for her; she had to believe.
Exhausted and passive she asked finally: “What can we do? I wish I were dead!”
He told her: “You never were such a coward before. Remember, Alia Narova, I know you.”
The thought returned from her: “And I know you. As nobody has ever known another human being before.”
Then they were thinking together, inextricably: More than conversation. More than communion. More than love. Remember how you feared defloration? I remember. And you, with your fear of impotence on the wedding night! I remember. Must we be indecent to each other? I think we must. After all, you’re the first man who ever had a baby. And you’re the first woman who ever sired one. Past shame, past shyness, into a pool of ourselves.
Tropile’s hands clicked codes as the display lights shifted. It was so damned queer. He was he and she was she and together they were—what? She was good and kind or he might not have been able to bear it. She had sheltered that poor blind man in Cadiz for a year; during the crop failure at Vincennes she had bravely gone into the fields and done unwomanly work for all; she had murdered her husband in a fit of rage, a short and secret amok—