But that was no explanation, either. Mere insanity didn't account for
what he saw.
Then, he asked himself, was he in a state that was _beyond_ Nirvana? He
remembered, with an odd flash of guilt, that he had been Meditating,
watching the stages of boiling water. All right, perhaps he had been
Translated. But what was this, then? Were the Meditators wrong in
teaching that Nirvana was the end--and yet righter than the Wolves,
who dismissed Meditation as a phenomenon wholly inside the skull and
refused to discuss Translation at all?
That was a question for which he could find nothing approaching an
answer. He turned away from it and looked at his hands.
He could see them, too, in the round, he noted. He could see every
wrinkle and pore in all sixteen of them....
_Sixteen hands!_
* * * * *
That was the other moment when sanity might have gone. He closed his
eyes. (Sixteen eyes! No wonder the total perception!) And, after a
while, he opened them again.
The hands were there. All sixteen of them.
Cautiously, Tropile selected a finger that seemed familiar in his
memory. After a moment's thought, he flexed it. It bent. He selected
another. Another--on a different hand this time.
He could use any or all of the sixteen hands. They were all his, all
sixteen of them.
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 lightninglike 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, 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 corrected 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 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 body. He had injured it in boyhood and there was
no mistaking the way it was bent. Good! It was reassuring.
He tried to feel the one particular body that led to that familiar toe.
He succeeded, though 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. Gratefully,
he became conscious of his own body again. He was still _himself_ if he
chose to be.
Were the other seven still themselves?
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 still was none. It was annoying. He resented it as bitterly,
he remembered, as in the old days when he had first been learning the
subtleties of Ruin Appreciation. There had been a Ruin 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 anguish.
* * * * *
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 Alla Narova, will you awaken and speak with
me?"
No answer--only a vague, troubled stirring.
Gently he persisted: "I know you well, Alla 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, many times, coaxingly. Even so, it was not easy; but
at last he began to reach 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. With a shaking fear, a hysterical rush, Citizeness
Alla 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.
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 were never a coward before. Remember, Alla Narova, I
_know_ you as nobody has ever known another human being before. That's
the way you will know me. As for what we can do--we must begin by
waking the others, if we can."
"If not?"
"If not," Tropile replied grimly, "then we will think of something
else."
She was of tough stuff, he thought admiringly. When she had rested and
absorbed things, her spirit was almost that of a Wolf; she had very
nearly been right about herself.
Together they explored their twinned members. They found through them
exactly what task was theirs to do. They found how the electrostatic
harvesting scythe of the Pyramids was controlled, by and through them.
They found what limitations there were and what freedoms they owned.
They reached into the other petals of the snowflake, reached past
the linked Components into the whole complex of electrostatic field
generators and propulsion machinery, reached even past that into--
Into the great single function of the Pyramids that lay beyond.