“No. You do not understand. Feeding you is very difficult. Also it is an advantage that you are bored. Is your chief person listening?”
Haendl and Innison began to speak at once; there was a fierce, brief duel of eyes which Innison lost. “I’m listening,” Haendl said.
“These are the rules of communication with us. You notice a humming from this loudspeaker. We now cause the humming to stop.” The faint hum stopped and started again. “When the loudspeaker is humming you may consider it ‘on’ and speak into it. When the loudspeaker is not humming you will consider it ‘off.’ Since this is merely a psychological trick and the loudspeaker is never really off, you will see to it by posting guards that we are not addressed except when we want to be addressed.”
“I understand,” said Haendl, wishing he dared to add some ironical honorific. He was frightened. The voice was non-human; it had never come from a warm, moist pair of lungs, swept over vibrating cartilage, resonated in the sculptured caverns of the head and emerged shaped by muscular lips and tongue. The voice was a modulated electronic output, a skillful blend of a dozen vibrating crystals. It was as cold as crystal. This he had dared to dream of attacking! With small arms and a tank and a helicopter!
The loudspeaker still buzzed faintly. Fear and all, it was an opportunity to talk with a Pyramid, to ask it what was in store for them, for all of humanity. As far as he knew, nobody had ever done so. He drew his breath ready to make some history, but a woman, the widow of the slain African, pushed him aside and yelled into the black cone: “Why did you kill my husband? What did he do to you that you crushed him flat?”
“We did not kill your husband,” said the black cone. “That was done by a Pyramid.”
“Who are you then, damn you?” Haendl shouted.
“We are best known to you as Glenn Tropile,” said the loudspeaker, and then the hum stopped; no amount of pleading or cursing would get it started again.
13
No Sicilian or Pole on Ellis Island, no American tourist caught in the bureaucracy of a French hotel had ever been as much of a stranger in town as Glenn Tropile. He knew nothing. To put it more precisely, he knew everything several decades of life had taught him, as Citizen and as Wolf.
But no part of that knowledge was in any way relevant to his present existence as one-eighth of the Snowflake.
Tropile, however, was Wolf. He was nearly Pyramid, in that he pushed until something gave, and dissected until he found bits that could be managed.
For example, there was a more or less manageable bit close at hand. The communications systems that joined one petal of the Snowflake to the others were relatively easy to penetrate, and that was quickly done.
Tropile and Alia Narova had awakened the woman between them, apprehensive of further hysterics. There were none. She was Mercedes van Dellen of Istanbul, 28 clock-years old at the time of her Translation, and a mother of two girls who had been small when she left them. She sighed and supposed they were happily married by now. She was interested and amused by the input-display and her busily-clicking hands; she confided that she liked to keep busy and (mild blasphemy) she would have had a dozen babies if it had been permitted. They felt into her mind; it was calm, always calm. So there really were people like that! She felt into theirs. They were fierce and impassioned; my goodness, don’t they get all worked up about nothing! And then the three of them flowed together; this time it was more limpid and even.
They awakened a brown-skinned woman who also appeared to be in her late twenties, but her body was a lie. The soul of Kim Seong was the soul of a bitter hag who had seen all come and seen all go, who washed corpses for her rice and mumbled: “It’s foolishness, it’s all foolishness, but what’s the good of talking? Nobody listens to you.”
She added to the pool of mind a bitterness and their first hint of comprehending the infinite reaches of space and the two eternities before and behind, too vast for meaning.
They awakened Corso Navarone of Milan, a thin young man who knew just what it was all about. He was in Love with Alia Narova as he had never Loved before. All space and time had conspired to bring them together; he was her soul, she was his flame; never had there been such a Love as theirs. What matter that an accident of surgery prevented the consummation of desire? They were together; it was enough. Hold off, ye gods, further bliss, lest Corso Navarone perish of delight.
They couldn’t believe he was real, but they had to; there he was. He refused indignantly at first to surrender his individuality to the pool, but was argued into it; how better could he know his beloved? And, once in, he wanted to stay forever and had to be argued out of it; did not absence make the heart grow fonder?
To their shared consciousness he brought fire.
The old man they awakened was one Spyros Gulbenkian. Tropile felt himself abashed before him to have claimed the name of Wolf. Spyros was a wolfpack all by himself, in a quiet way. Half Paris had worked for him and never known it for a second. His life had been incredibly busy; incidents crowded it like watchworks, and from each passing minute he had learned a new thing, a new tool or weapon, and he never forgot. He was mightily amused; he woke without shock or fear. “So I’ve cheated death!” he said, delighted. “The one thing I never hoped for! Now what is this Group Mind you tell me about? There’s no question of my being stubborn, of course—I owe you people a great deal!”
Tropile: “It’s power—sheer power. You think faster, clearer and more deeply than you ever believed possible.”
Alia Narova: “It’s being more intensely yourself. It’s feeling utterly alive.”
Mercedes van Dellen: “It’s very pleasant. I’m not sure what we do when we’re that way, but it’s nothing wrong.”
Kim Seong: “It’s no more foolish than anything else.”
Corso Navarone: “Foolish woman, it is bliss!”
Spyros Gulbenkian: “Hmmm.” But try it he did, and they found him welcome as ballast; he kept them from making mistakes. Before him in a brief session they had calculated the number of molecules in the universe; with him they did it again—this time, right.
All he wanted to know was: “Where did the mathematics come from? I’m aware that none of us is a mathematician, and I don’t trust something-for-nothing, ever!”
“I think the mathematics came out of the world,” Tropile said. “I think mathematics is just a picture of the world. If you have eyes and ears and enough brain, you have mathematics. We had enough brain. I notice that we don’t have botany, except for Kirn’s Lichen Shades Cult.”
“As long as it is not something for nothing,” Spyros Gulbenkian said. “Shall we have some words with the large black gentleman who is sleeping with his mouth open? What splendid teeth! Teeth alone are all I mourn from my youth.”
So they greeted the seventh petal, Django
Tembo of Africa. He woke to them yawning and smiling, good-humored. He alone of them had dreamed, long and pleasant dreams of wives and children. He had been an Untouchable dung-carrier in Durban, but somehow his heart was the heart of a king. He lived to serve by commanding, and by commanding to serve. They read his noble, guileless soul and fell in love with it, and he with theirs.
The last branch of the snowflake was unprepossessing. It was the body of a scrawny youth with an ill-shaped head and coarse black hair. They felt their way into his consciousness and memory, and found not much of either. Me Willy. Shifting planes of color, somehow sad—they knew it was sunset beyond the crags of Sonora, but he did not. Mama go. Mama pretty. A brown bulk with people in it; it made him dully wonder why, but they knew the Las Cruces House of Five Regulations, and how within a year he would have Donated under Regulation Two (anent Innocents). Beans good. Beans with honey good.