I was convinced (still am) that it was the pearl-necklace episode that caused Nelson Nelson to give me the Gladney case.
All mindplayers can pretty much count on getting pearl necklaced sooner or later, but it’s a far more vivid experience for pathosfinders than it is for neurosis-peddlers, say, or belljarrers, who don’t spend as much time in direct mind-to-mind contact with their clients as we do.
It seems the more time you spend working as a disembodied mind, the more intensely you get pearl necklaced.
My pearl necklace came during a routine reality affixing. Reality affixing is mandatory for mindplayers by federal law, though I don’t really believe we’re more prone to delusional thinking than anyone else. And there’s something about having to have my perceptions stamped ACCEPTABLE PER GOVERNMENT REGULATORY STANDARDS that makes me a touch uneasy. On the other hand—or lobe, if you will—a mindplayer who is convinced everybody must accept the water buffalo as a personal totem is not someone you’d want fooling around in people’s minds.
Still, I didn’t look forward to having my reality affixed, in spite of Nelson Nelson’s reassurance that government standards were broad enough to encompass all the varieties of normal. I always wanted to ask him what made him so sure about that. But there was no room for argument—either I had my reality affixed or I lost my job at the mind-play agency and my license to practice pathosfinding.
All I had to do was go headfirst into the agency’s system and let it probe me for perhaps ten minutes, if that. Of course, it can seem like days when you’re lying on the slab with your eyes out and the system hooked into your mind via the optic nerves, body awareness blocked off so that you’re completely alone with yourself. NN was always telling me that I should look at it as a particularly intense kind of meditation and that as long as I was myself, I certainly had nothing to feel uneasy about.
As long as I was myself. And who else would I be? The system had apparently stimulated this particular question, and out came the pearl necklace. That was exactly how it appeared to my inner eye, as a long, long line of pearls, each one holding a moment in the life of Alexandra Victoria Haas, a.k.a. Deadpan Allie, separate, self-contained, unrelated to those on either side of it. The connecting thread running through them was suddenly gone, and I was looking at a series of strangers who shared my face but nothing more, as though I had popped in and out of being every moment I had been alive instead of existing continuously. The realization flared like sudden pain: I have not always been as I am now.
I couldn’t remember being any different. Nor could I conceive of what I would be like in the next moments—the future me was as much a stranger as the past one.
The pearls began moving away from one another, the sequence going from ordered to random. I lunged to gather them up, and panic sent them flying apart as I fell toward disintegration.
The next thing I knew, I was fine again, and the pearl necklace was gone. The foundation of everything I’d lived was under me again; I was no longer a stranger to myself. The system ran through the rest of the affixing procedure and then disengaged. I put my eyes back in and went off to have a nap.
Naturally, the crisis was reported to Nelson Nelson. I knew it would be, but he never mentioned it. Instead he called me into his office to give me an assignment.
“In your work with artists,” he said, while I lay on the gold-lamé interview couch and tried not to be obvious about the rash the tacky upholstery was giving me, “what would you say your primary objective as a pathosfinder is?”
I rested my cheek on my left hand and thought it over. “To assist them in reaching a level where inward and outward perceptions balance well enough against each other so that—“
“Allie.” He gave me a look. “This is me you’re talking to.”
“Help them move past irrelevant and superficial mental trash.”
NN raised himself up on one elbow, his own couch creaking and groaning, and actually shook his finger at me. “Never, never, never essay-answer me.”
“Sorry.”
His eyes narrowed. He had brand-new pink-jade biogem eyes, and they made him look like a geriatric rabbit. “Don’t be sorry. In spite of your initial choice of words, you’re right.” The wrinkled old face took on a thoughtful expression. “Would you say that in many cases the pathosfinder is responsible for helping an artist locate the creative generator’s ON button as well as helping to enhance the soul of the work?”
For someone who didn’t like essay answers, he was pretty fond of essay questions. “In many cases, sure.”
Now he looked satisfied. “That’s why I’d like to put you on the Gladney case.”
“Rand Gladney? The composer? I thought he’d been sucked.”
“He was. But he’s out of full quarantine now, and his new personality’s grown into mature form. He’s lucky his old recording company had regeneration insurance on him. Of course, he’s not really Gladney anymore and never will be again.”
“Have they told him who he used to be?”
“Oh, yeah. Every detail. He wanted to know. Most victims of involuntary mind-suck do. They’re all intensely curious about their former lives, and the doctors figure honesty is the best policy. Better for them to hear about it in a sheltered environment where they can learn to deal with it. Anyway, I thought this would be a good opportunity for a pathosfinder to work with an adult who has no history whatsoever and help him become an artist.”
For the millionth time, I thought about the career in neurosis-peddling I’d given up. NN had promised (sort of) that someday he’d let me go back to it.
I’d never thought peddling things like compulsive cleanliness to wealthy people who enjoyed feeling a little more unstable than usual was easy work until NN had made a pathosfinder out of me.
But I didn’t have to tell him I’d take the job. He knew I would.
I ran through the bare minimum of information on Gladney that NN had dumped into the data-keep in my apartment while the portable system I used for mind-to-mind contact with clients was being overhauled. Prior to having his mind stolen, Rand Gladney had been a composer of middle-high talent with a fair number of works that had settled into the cultural mainstream. At the time of his erasure, he’d been approaching a turning point in his career where he would have either ascended to greater ability and prominence or settled slowly into repetition and, eventually, semioblivion. In seven years, he had peaked twice after his breakthrough. And that was just about all NN wanted me to know about the Gladney-that-had-been. I could have easily found out more, but I trusted NN’s judgment as to how much information on Gladney’s previous incarnation I should bring with me to the job.
The Gladney-that-was-now had been out of full quarantine for a month, though he was still hospitalized and his movements were restricted. Rehabilitating mindwipes is a precarious business, like trying to stand with your hands both on and off someone’s shoulders. Personality regrowth begins with the restoration of language, first by machine, then by humans. If humans don’t replace the machine at precisely the right moment, you end up with a person unable to think in anything but a machine-type mode. People like that may be great logicians, but they’re lousy on theory. Most often they resolve the conflict between the definite and the gray in their lives by suicide or voluntary mindwipe, which is pretty much the same thing. There are very few brains hardy enough to redevelop a mind after a second erasure, the myelin sheathing on the axons just won’t stand up to that kind of abuse.
In any case, Gladney (who was apparently still going by that name for the sake of convenience) had passed all the critical points in redevelopment and had become a person, again or for the first time, depending on your point of view. He was certainly not the same person—the man who had emerged from the blank brain was reminiscent of his former self but no more that self than he was anyone else.
The extreme convolutedness of such a situation was one reason why I chose not to go into rehabbing mindwipe as a profession when I’d had the chance. Still, it was a fascinating field, easier to succeed in if you have a bit of a mystic bent, or so I’ve been told. I’d never thought of myself as particularly mystical, but I suppose all mindplayers are to a certain extent, if you accept the mind as the ghost in the biological machine or something like that.
I filed the idea way for later meditation and went over Gladney’s aptitude tests. His new personality had grown in with a definite talent for music and more—I was startled to find that he now had perfect pitch. The previous man did not. It made me wonder. Was the perfect pitch something that had shown up due to some alteration in Gladney’s brain chemistry brought about by the mindsuck? Or was it just due to a different brain organization? Possibly it was a combination of both.
Whatever it was, I didn’t really have to worry about it. I was supposed to treat Gladney as I would any other client, which is to say as though he had never been anyone else but who he was now.
“Truth to tell,” said the woman with the carnelian eyes and the too-short apple-red hair, “we ended up selecting you for your business name. Anyone operating as Deadpan Allie must have quite a lot of control over herself.” She smiled brightly. Her name was Lind Jesl, and she looked less like the chief doctor on the Gladney case than she did someone finishing up her own recovery. Except for the carnelian eyes and the hair, she was as plain as possible, her stout body concealed in a loose, gray sacksuit. The office we were sitting in was even more austere, a cream-colored box with no decorations. Even the computer desk was all folded into a stark, bare block. The whole thing reminded me of the infamous white-room image I’d come across in certain clients’ minds.
“Of course,” she went on, “your self-control will be vital when you delve our boy. An involuntary wipe is supremely sensitive and impressionable, even at such an advanced stage of regeneration. Just the experience of you probing his mind is going to make quite a mark on him. Your flavor, as ’twere, will leave a bit of an aftertaste.”
“I’m very careful.”
“Yes, certainly you are.” Her gaze snagged briefly on my equipment piled up beside me before she gave me her five-hundred-watt smile again. “And we wouldn’t have hired you if we weren’t as confident of his ability to think independently as we are of your ability to refrain from exerting too much psychic influence.”
She was putting a lot of emphasis on the very thing guaranteed by the fact that I was licensed to pathosfind in the first place. “What kind of results are you looking for?”
“Ah.” Five hundred watts went to six hundred. She folded her pudgy hands and plunked them on her stomach. “We’re hoping you’ll help him learn how to combine the various elements that make up a composer into a whole that will be greater than the sum of the parts.”
I blinked.
“We know that he has a musical bent, as ’twere. A definite leaning toward music, an affinity for playing instruments that tends to accompany perfect pitch. But as yet, these things are fragmented in him. He’s having difficulty achieving a state where they all work together. In fact, he has yet to achieve it even for a few moments.”
“Isn’t that just a matter of”—I shrugged—“practice and experience?”
“Usually. But I know Gladney. This Gladney. There are signs of a definite barrier of some kind that he just can’t or won’t find his way around. We don’t know for certain because we haven’t delved him since the very early part of the regeneration, which he does not remember. Delicate Plant Syndrome, you see—if you keep digging up a delicate plant to see how well the roots are taking, it dies.” She sat forward, her hands disappearing into the voluminous cloth of the sacksuit. “We feel he’s ready for mind-to-mind contact now but with a pathosfinder rather than a doctor. We want him to feel less like our patient and more like a person.”
“How long has it been since you delved him therapeutically?”
“About nine or ten months. It’s been a year since the mindsuckers got him. We’re hoping to release him completely in another six months at the most. Depending on how much progress he makes with you.”
“Have you let him listen to any of his old compositions? The previous Gladney’s music, I mean?”
“Yes and no. Which is to say he’s heard it, but he doesn’t know who composed it. We removed all identification from all the recordings we’ve given him, not just Gladney’s, to foil whatever deductions he might have tried to make.”
“Does he react any differently to the Gladney compositions than he does to any of the others?”
“He reacts to all music somewhat guardedly. He puts it through some kind of mental sorting procedure, and he can tell with an accuracy of close to ninety percent, sometimes more, whether different pieces of music were composed by the same person. I suspect he could also arrange a composer’s works in the correct chronological order as well. He’s extremely bright. But—” Jesl spread her hands. “Something inside isn’t meshing.”
“Has he tried to compose?”
“Oh, yes. Some short things he won’t let us hear. We had to bug the synthesizer we gave him. His work shows potential. There are moments when it almost breaks through, but it always stops short of achieving—well, fullness, as ’twere. You’ll hear that for yourself, I’m sure.” She looked at my equipment again.
She was awfully sure about a lot of things, it seemed to me. I considered the possibility that her evaluation of his music might be faulty. Perhaps the musical direction he was taking was just different from the old Gladney’s, and what he wasn’t achieving were her expectations. But a sight reading of her Emotional Index didn’t indicate any smugness. Her certainty seemed to come from the fact that she’d been with him at every step of his regrowth. She smiled again, this time somewhat reservedly, and I realized she knew I’d been taking her Emotional Index.
“When can I see him?” I asked.
“Right now, if you like. We’ve fixed up a room for you not far from his so you’ll be within easy reach of each other. I’ll take you down there, and then we’ll visit our boy.”
The room they’d given me was an improvised efficiency with a freestanding lavabo unit and jury-rigged meal dial. My apartment at NN’s agency had spoiled me for any other kind of accommodations, no matter how temporary. The bed was a hospital bed disguised as a civilian—not very wide but, to my great relief, hard as a rock.
I’d brought only a few personal things with me, which I didn’t bother to unpack. I debated taking my equipment with me to Gladney’s room and decided against it. He might feel too pressured to begin work if I appeared wheeling my system with me. I wanted some extra time myself, just to see what an eighteen-month-old adult was like on the outside before I went inside.
The man lying on the bed had once had the pampered good looks found in most people of celebrity status. Over the months, he’d lost a good deal of them, the way an athlete or dancer will lose a certain amount of strength after a long period of inactivity. He was still attractive, but his appearance was changing, veering off in another direction. Typical of a regrown mindwipe. In a few months it was possible he would be so changed that no one from his previous life would recognize him.
He got up for Jesl’s brief introduction, touching hands with me gingerly, as though I might be a hot iron. Something like bewildered panic crossed his face as Jesl made a quick but unhurried exit, leaving us on our own.
“So, you’re my pathosfinder.” He gestured at a small area arranged around an entertainment center with a few chairs and a beverage table. He’d probably set it up himself, but I could tell he wasn’t completely at home with it.
“Anything you’d like to ask me in particular?” I said, sitting down. The chair I selected gave like soft clay under me, and I realized it was one of those damned contour things that will adapt a shape to complement your position. It was made of living fiber, supposedly the most comfortable kind of furniture there was, though how anyone could be comfortable with a chair that needed to be fed, watered, and cleaned up after was not within my understanding. Occasionally you’d hear horror stories about people who had sat down on one of those things and then needed to be surgically removed later. I wondered why they’d given Gladney a contour and then remembered it was also supposed to be a boon to the lonely. I was going to have a rough time being deadpan if it started any funny stuff with me. Fortunately, it seemed disposed to let me sit in peace; so I decided to tough it out rather than change seats. Gladney appeared to be watching me closely.
“I hardly ever use that one,” he said as it molded itself to support my elbows. “I can’t get used to it. But it’s fascinating to watch when someone else is in it.” He turned his attention to my face. “What kind of eyes are those?”
“Cat’s-eye biogem.”
“Cat’s-eye.” He sounded slightly envious. “Everyone here at the hospital has biogems. Even some of the other ’wipes. Dr. Jesl says that I can order some whenever I want to, but I don’t feel like I can yet. He had biogems.”
“Who?”
“Gladney. The original one, not me. After he was sucked, the hospital replaced them with these, which I guess are reproductions of the eyes he was born with.” He smiled. “I remember how surprised I was when they told me almost everyone has his eyes replaced with artificial ones. It still amazes me a little. I mean, my eyes don’t feel artificial—but then, I guess I wouldn’t know the difference, would I?” His smile shrank. “It’s strange to think of you going into my brain that way. Through my eyes. It’s strange to think of anyone else in there except me.” He put his hand on his chest and absently began rubbing himself. “And yet there have been a whole lot of people in there. Mindplayers. For him. And then the suckers. The doctors. And now you.”
“Direct contact with the mind is a way of life. Not just the mindplay but many forms of higher education. People buy and sell things, too. Neuroses, memories, or—” Nice rolling, Deadpan, I thought. You had to bring that up.
“Yeah. I know. People buy and sell. They steal, too.” He lifted his chin with just a trace of defiance. “I made them tell me about that, and what they wouldn’t tell me, I looked up. How Gladney’s mind got stolen because there was some guy who admired him so much that he wanted to be Gladney. So he had Gladney overlaid on his own self. He went crazy. Trying to be two people at once.” He slouched in his chair and rested his head on his right hand, digging his fingers into his thick, brown hair. I didn’t make a move. “I asked them why they didn’t just take Gladney out of him and put him back, but they said they couldn’t do that after he’d already been implanted. Even if they’d found the suckers before that, it would have been impossible because this brain”—he pointed at his head and then resumed rubbing his chest—“had already begun developing a new mind. Me. There would have been too much conflict. Doesn’t seem fair.”
“Fair to whom?”
“Gladney.” Beneath the thin material of his shirt, I could see his flesh reddening. “He just disintegrated. Evaporated when they cleaned him out of the other man. And here I am. Variation on a theme.” His gaze drifted away from me to something over my left shoulder. I turned to look. He was staring at the synthesizer near the bed. It was a small one as synthesizers go, taking up about twice as much space as my portable system did when assembled. There was a very light coating of dust on the keyboard cover.
“Use it much?” I asked.
“From time to time.”
“I’d really like to hear something you’ve composed.”
He looked mildly shocked. “Ah, you would. Why?”
“Get acquainted with your music.”
“So that after you get into my brain and find my music box, you’ll know whether it’s mine or not, huh?” He waved away his words. “Never mind. I’ve done nothing but short pieces, and I don’t think of any of them as complete. Not when I compare them to other things I’ve heard.”
“I would still like to hear something.”
He hesitated. “Would a recording be all right? I don’t like to play in front of anyone. I’m not an entertainer. Or at least not that kind of entertainer.”
“A recording would be fine.”
He got up and puttered around with the entertainment center for a minute, keeping his back to me.
Generally it’s difficult if not impossible to sight-read the Emotional Index of someone who isn’t facing you but it was easy to tell that Gladney was dry-mouthed at the idea of my hearing one of his compositions. It was far more than stage fright or shyness. His shoulders were stiffened as though he expected someone to hit him.
Abruptly music blared out of the speakers, and he jumped to adjust the volume.
“Set it to repeat once,” I told him.
He turned to me, ready to object, and then shrugged and thumbed a shiny green square on the console before sitting down again. “Just a musical doodle, really,” he muttered, apologizing for it before it could offend me.
In fact, it was a bit more than that, a dialogue between piano and clarinet, admirably synthesized but too tentative. And he’d been right—it wasn’t complete at all. It was more like an excerpt from a longer piece that he’d heard only a portion of in his mind. I was no musical authority but the second time through, I could pick out spots where a surer composer would have punched up the counterpoint and let the two instruments answer each other more quickly. There might even have been the makings of a canon in it, though I couldn’t be certain. Perhaps he’d been mistaking Bach for Gladney. Whatever he’d been doing or trying to do, something was definitely missing.
“How did you compose it?” I asked after the music finished.
He frowned.
“Did you just sit down at the synthesizer and fool around until you found a sequence or—”
“Oh.” He laughed nervously. “That’s a funny thing. I heard it in a dream, and when I woke up, I went to the synthesizer to play it out so I wouldn’t forget it. First I just played all the notes as I’d heard them. Then I put them with the appropriate instruments.”
“Was that how it was in the dream—piano and clarinet?”
“I don’t remember. I just remember the music itself. Piano and clarinet seemed right.”
I had a feeling I knew what the answer to my next question would be, but asked anyway. “What was the dream about?”
He was rubbing again. “Gladney.”
I managed to talk him into playing a few more of his incomplete compositions. When his discomfort went from acute to excruciating, I gave him a reprieve and told him I was going to get some rest. His relief was so tangible I could have ridden it out of the room and halfway down the hall.
There was a message in my phone, an invitation from Dr. Jesl to have dinner with her and the other medicos working on Gladney’s habilitation. I begged off and asked her if she could supply me, without his knowing it, with dupe recordings of Gladney’s recent attempts at composition, and also some of the previous Gladney’s work. She could and did, and I spent most of the rest of the day and a good part of the evening in an audio-hood.
Maybe if I’d known more about music—the real hard-core stuff, mathematics of progressions and so forth—I’d have been able to pick out more similarities (or differences) between the two Gladneys’ work. I called for recordings by other composers he’d listened to, and I played those as well. Our boy, as Jesl had called him, hadn’t been trying to crib from Bach or anyone else. He had avoided being derivative as much as possible, admirable in a beginning talent and also evident of already well-developed control, which is a good sign only as long as it doesn’t become inhibition. What he had borrowed from other composers was mostly technique—my ear was good enough to pick that up, if I listened to everything several times. The composer he seemed to have borrowed from least was, oddly enough, Gladney. Or perhaps that wasn’t so odd. Perhaps the compositions sounded too familiar.
I listened to the piano-clarinet piece over and over, trying to hear some similarity between it and any of the other Gladney’s music—a sequence of notes, rhythm, something. He’d been unable to tell me exactly what had happened in the dream where he’d heard it—just that he’d known the dream was about Gladney. That was somewhat unsettling and would have been more so if he had composed all his music after dreaming about that former persona. But he hadn’t, and I would have found it reassuring if the piano-clarinet piece hadn’t been so obviously superior to all of his other attempts. Variation on a theme, he’d called himself. It nagged at me.
I waited until Gladney had been escorted off to some kind of day-to-day culture workshop early the next afternoon and had Jesl let me into his room so I could set up for our first session. That way he wouldn’t have to receive me as a guest with all the attendant awkwardness again.
The bed, I decided, would be the best place to put him; it was obviously what he gravitated to when left to himself, so he’d probably be more receptive lying down. I rolled my equipment over and assembled the eight odd-sized components. They still reminded me of a giant set of cub’s blocks. With me as the giant cub, I supposed, building some kind of surreal structure, a little like a cubist idea of a skyscraper. It looked ready to topple over as most of the smaller pieces were clustered on one side of the largest one, a four-foot rectangle. In reality it would have been more trouble than it was worth to knock it over. By the time Gladney returned I had the compartmented tank for our eyes set out on the stand by the bed, the optic-nerve connections to the system primed, and a relaxation program ready to run the moment he was hooked in.
He didn’t seem surprised to see me, only a little resigned and nervous. “You’re not going to want to hear any more music, are you?” he asked with an attempt at a smile.
“No more recordings, no.” I patted the bed. “Come get comfortable. We don’t have to start immediately.”
Now he did smile, stripped off his overshirt and chaps (it never fails to amaze me what will come back into style), and flopped down on the bed in his secondskins.
Rather than play one of the usual preparatory games like What Would You Do? or What Do You Hear? with him, I eased him into chatting about his habilitation. I thought I’d learn more about his state of mind from simple conversation than from games. After all, what past experience could he draw on for a game? It would only oblige him to be inventive and pull his concentration from the situation at hand. Chitter-chat was the right approach. He had some rather astute observations on modern life, as any outsider would, and I hoped he wouldn’t lose them when he became an insider. He wasn’t really opening up to me—I hadn’t expected that—but watching him try to hide in his own talk was enlightening. He wasn’t going to give a single thing away, not even in mind-to-mind contact, and if I didn’t figure out a different approach, I’d end up chasing him all over his own mind.
Eventually he began winding down. I let him get away with some delaying tactics: going to the bathroom, taking his vitamins—delaying tactics can be important personal-preparation rituals, if they don’t go on for too long. When he began talking about having a snack, I made him lie down again and start breathing exercises.
He was a good breather, reaching a state of physical receptiveness more quickly than a lot of more experienced clients I’d had. When the time came I removed his eyes for him; just pressed my thumbs on his closed lids and out they popped into my palms, as smoothly as melon seeds. Gladney didn’t even twitch. The connections to his optic nerves disengaged with an audible kar-chunk. Hospital eyes are always a little more mechanical than they have to be. After I placed them in the left side of the holding tank, I slipped the system connections under his flaccid eyelids. A tiny jump in the wires told me when he was hooked in to the mental finger-painting exercise I’d selected for him. Mental finger-painting was about the right amount of effort for someone on his level. The system supplied the colors; all he had to do was stir them around.
I breathed myself into a relaxed state in a matter of moments, but I waited a full minute before popping my own eyes out and joining him in the system. I wanted to give him time to get acclimated. Some people experience a sense of continuous drifting when they first enter the system, a disorientation not unlike weightlessness, and they need a minute alone to right themselves before they have to get used to another presence.
My materialization was even more gradual than usual, to spare him any trauma. His perception of my entry was as another color, oozing in greenly and then transforming itself into a second consciousness. Bright lights flashed as he recognized me, some of them nightmare purple, but it wasn’t me he was afraid of. There was a little fear from not having a body to feel, but he was becoming accustomed to that. He was edgy about something else entirely—quick images of traps snapping shut, closet doors slamming. But there was exhilaration, too, at being in a realm where almost nothing is impossible.
The images began to flow more continuously from him, rolling over us in a tumbling series, gargantuan confetti. Most of them were portions of dreams, scenes from books he’d read; some were strange scenes he was making up in the heat of the moment, just to see if he could do it. I stabilized myself and moved with his attention, reminding him that I was still there. The image of my own face came, followed by a series of others that gradually became more bizarre. The undertones running out of him indicated this was how he imagined everyone else in the world to be—somewhat exotic, different, mysterious, alien, existing on a plane he had only the haziest conception of.
I emphasized my presence before he could become caught up enough in his grotesquely ornamented faces to get hysterical. He steadied, his energy level decreasing. I felt him adjust something and there was a sense of balance being established, as though two large masses floating in space were settling into orbit around each other. Space was a good word for it. The feeling of emptiness surrounding us was enormous and almost vivid enough to induce vertigo.
This is me. So much nothingness to be filled. He was unaware that he’d said anything; it simply came out of him as everything else had. There was a brief image of Gladney—the previous Gladney—and he tensed at the thought. Somewhere. In this big emptiness—
The Gladney-that-had-been drifted away from us and disintegrated. The thought remained incomplete. He seemed to be at a total loss now, drifting nowhere, so I gave him a new image, a simple one: the synthesizer. As soon as I was sure he saw it, I added the music, the clarinet-piano piece.
Suspicion bristled on him for a moment, and then he was rerunning the music with me. I could hear little extra things, notes and embellishments absent from the recording. He was on the verge of rolling with it, letting it come the way it had been meant to, when hard negation chopped down like a guillotine blade. We were left in silence. If he could have withdrawn from me, he would have, but he didn’t know how to.
I waited, making my presence as non-threatening as possible, while I took his Emotional Index. He registered in peculiar fragmented sensations of movement rather than visuals, because everything was movement for him. I could see that now. The universe was movement, the movement of vibration. Like a tuning fork. He was a tuning fork, and right now he was vibrating in the key of fear-sharp. One octave up I could hear a whiny echo of guilt.
The intensity of it ebbed, and I turned the music on again. This time he didn’t shut it down. He just pulled back from it as far as possible and allowed it to replay as the original recording without changes. I slowed down my time sense and concentrated, tightening myself until I was small enough to slip in between the notes. At that level they thundered, no longer recognizable as music; my consciousness vibrated in sympathy. I concentrated a little more, and the thundering rumble of the notes became more ponderous. Now I could detect something else within the vibrations of the music, faint but present. I would have to concentrate even harder to find out what it was, and I was nearly to the limit of my endurance. To concentrate that forcefully is to alter the state of consciousness in such a way that one is not actually conscious in the true sense of the word—I would not be able to monitor Gladney. From his perspective it would seem as though I’d vanished into some part of his mind inaccessible to him, or gone from being real to being imaginary.
I strained, achieving it slowly. The notes swelled until I could perceive only one at a time, and I let the nearest one swallow me up. It was a piano note, G, perfectly formed in perfect pitch, a universe created by the oscillation of a string in the air (that was how he saw it, not as synthesized piano but the real thing). Each sweep of the string through space created the universe of the note anew, the string reaching the limit of its swing before the ghost of itself opposite had disappeared. And within—
He looked up with a smile of mild interest. The face was unmistakable in spite of all the changes he’d been through in the last year and a half.
Come closer, he said.
Gladney?
The same. The smile broadened. Well, not quite the same. Those pampered good looks in full flower, the well-tended skin, the sculptured jawline, the hair brushed straight back and falling nearly to his shoulders. His face was the most solid thing about him. The rest had been sketched in vaguely. I could get no undertones from him, no feelings, no image.
He locked me in here, he said. So I won’t get out and take—
The note passed away, and we were in another. Gladney was standing on a high hill in the middle of the day.
—what used to be mine. He looked around. In the distance the horizon ran wetly, melting into the sky. I live in the music now. He can’t come in unless I get out.
It wasn’t possible. If anything had been left of the old Gladney’s mind after the suckers had finished cleaning out his brain, it would have shown up while he was still in quarantine. This had to be a delusion of the present Gladney, some kind of survivor guilt. Until he ceased to think of music as being a simultaneously convex and concave prison, he would never be able to compose more than a few incomplete snatches of melody.
The outdoor scene disappeared as the note went on; now we were in a vague representation of the old Gladney’s recording studio. He looked up from the piano he was sitting at.
Can you prove who you are? I asked him.
You can see me as I was. Isn’t that enough for you?
No. The Gladney-that-is has perfect pitch—that could easily translate to his being able to reproduce his old appearance. If you are really the Gladney-that-was, you can tell me something about yourself that the Gladney-that-is has no knowledge of.
The delusion spread his hands. He’s studied up on me thoroughly. They gave him access to vid-magazines, newstapes.
There’s still plenty he doesn’t know, I said. The private things. Certain memories. Feelings. Tell me something your family could confirm as true.
His face took on a defiant look, but there was no more feeling from him than there would have been from a holo transmission. That in itself indicated he was a fabrication, but my merely telling Gladney that wasn’t going to help. Even if I could get his intellect to believe me, his emotions probably wouldn’t.
Tell me something, I prodded again.
He rose and leaned on the top of the piano. Don’t you think a man with perfect pitch would be able to interpolate the private feelings of another man who had grown from the same brain?
The studio was gone. He was leaning on a small table in a quick-eat while I stood just outside the entrance. I could hear the drumming of his fingers on the table.
Tell me a fact, then. Just one fact he couldn’t possibly know.
He straightened up abruptly. The mindsuckers damaged me. I remember only what he knows.
I’d expected him to hide behind that, but I was unsure what to do next. Arguing with the delusion was only going to strengthen its sense of presence. Even acknowledging it was giving it something to feed on. Confronting it was Gladney’s job, not mine. I was going to have to get him down in the music with me.
The note passed and was replaced by a bedroom. Gladney lay crosswise on a bed with his arms folded behind his head. He was looking at me upside down.
I’m residue, he said happily. His reversed smile was grotesque. I’m a myelin ghost. You can’t get rid of me without physically damaging his brain.
I hooked my feet under the bed and willed myself upward. His bizarre upside-down face rushed away from me as I grew through the ceiling of the phantom room, up into the emptiness to the limit of the note. The piano string swung across a sky made of the present Gladney’s face. My abrupt appearance gave him a surge of alarm that nearly dislodged me.
Where were you?
You know. The piano string moved between us. I stretched out my arms. Take my hand before that string comes back.
No.
Why not? It’s your music.
No!
From the corner of my eye, I saw the piano string return to view, slicing through space. Please, Gladney. Don’t let that string put another barrier between you and your own work.
Panic at the idea of being cut off from his music made him grab my hands; half a moment later panic at the idea of meeting his delusion head-on made him sorry he’d done it.
We were pitching and bucking in the throes of his fear, but still the piano string approached. Shortly it would pass through my wrists and fragment my concentration.
I can’t pull you in, Gladney. You have to come on your own.
I’m afraid!
Why? Say it!
I’m afraid because—
Say it!
He’ll get me!
Who?
Gladney!
You are Gladney.
No!
Then who are you?
There was no answer. The piano string was almost on us.
Are you a composer?
His affirmation ducked him under the string just before it would have severed my hands. He stared after it with a horrified elation, and then we were rushing down into the music together in the momentum of his admission.
The delusional image of Gladney watched us descend. The real one made a soft landing on the bed beside it, still gripping my hands. Without thinking, he tried to pull me onto the bed between himself and the other.
The bedroom vanished. We were on an underground tube, the only three in the coach. I moved around behind Gladney, and he had to let go of me. As soon as he did, the delusional image vanished. Gladney was startled, but not half as much as I was. He moved forward with his hands out in front of him, feeling the air.
He’s not here, Allie. Is he?
I didn’t answer. I was still trying to figure out what had happened. Delusions didn’t just go away that quickly.
Allie? He half-turned toward me, and I saw that his eyes were closed. He swung his arms back and forth awkwardly, fingers clutching at nothing. Either he was making use of a fairly sophisticated mental maneuver, a sort of sneaking up on his own blind side, or he was faking same to stay blinded to the situation. I couldn’t tell which; his undertones showed only confusion.
Suddenly his hands seized on something invisible. The delusion snapped into existence again, caught in Gladney’s grasp. The air around them crackled with sparks from Gladney’s terror.
Allie! I can’t let go!
We went from the tube to a raft in the middle of the ocean, bright sun beating down on the water. Gladney still had hold of the delusion. His eyes were open now. A shadow passed over us—a high-flying piano string.
High A-sharp, Gladney said automatically, identifying the note. We’re getting close to the end of the melody. What do I do with him then?
You’re asking me? It’s yours. What do you do when music’s over?
We were in the lower branches of a large tree, then back to the tube very briefly (B-flat grace note, Gladney said), in the bedroom, on a windy rooftop several thousand feet above the ground. Gladney was plunging us to the end of the song. The images began to blend into one another, flickering and flapping. Gladney and his delusion flashed on and off in a variety of positions, Gladney still holding on, as though they were wrestling or dancing. The music went from slow motion subsonic to recognizable melody. The background imagery faded away completely, leaving the two Gladneys in their dance/struggle. The delusion offered no resistance, but Gladney was too occupied to notice. The struggle became a tumbling, end over end over end over end. I saw Gladney’s hospital room, the synthesizer, Gladney himself standing before it, staring it down as though it were an enemy. Dr. Jesl appeared briefly, carnelian eyes blind to the two figures tumbling past her through the entertainment center, where Gladney sat studying a newstape of the Gladney-that-had-been on the holo screen. The tumblers rolled on to the vision of a dimly remembered dream, that dream of Gladney, the old Gladney, lifting his head to the sight of three people, visible only from neck to thigh, rushing forward at him.
The dream-Gladney cried out, fell back, and vanished, and then the tumblers were beyond the end of the melody. But still they went on, and the music went on with them, the piano and clarinet finally making contact, playing together and opposite each other in complement.
After some measurable time, the tumbling began to slow. When the music stopped, there was only one figure, not two, that stopped with it. He drifted in emptiness, excited and drained all at once. That was enough, I decided. Before he could think of doing anything else, I cued another relaxation exercise and wrapped it around him. As soon as he was completely absorbed in mental finger-painting I broke the contact between us and withdrew.
It took a minute or so for his vitals to calm down. I changed the exercise from finger-painting to simple abstract visuals. He was overstimulated, in need of a passive mode. After his pulse went down below eighty, I disconnected him from the system and put his eyes back in.
A soon as he saw me, he broke into a sweat. “Don’t try to talk,” I told him, covering the connections and slipping them into the drawer in the largest component.
“I can talk.”
“Sure. I just didn’t want you to feel like you had to.” He turned his face away while I dismantled the system. His breathing was extremely loud in the room. Rhythmic. I let him be. The inexperienced are often overcome by an intense feeling of embarrassment after mindplay, particularly pathosfinding. It takes some getting over.
“Listen,” he said, after a bit, still not looking at me. “You don’t know what it’s like. What it was like.” He rubbed his forehead tiredly. “I was almost him. I wanted him, and I didn’t want him.” He paused and I knew he was staring at the synthesizer. “If I’d been him, I would have been someone. I just came out of nowhere, out of his brain. But I’m not him. Now I’m a figment of my own imagination.”
I opened my mouth to say something conciliatory but neutral when the image of the pearl necklace popped into my mind. I have not always been as I am now. And neither was anybody else. I wanted to tell him so. I wanted to tell him he’d get over that, too, that he wasn’t the only person who’d ever met the stranger in himself. Granted, his experience had been more extreme, but it was pretty much the same. I could no more tell him something like that than I could map out his life for him.
“You can’t have somebody else’s past,” I said as gently as I could. “And there’s no such thing as a ghost, myelin or otherwise. It’s always just you.”
“I could buy memories. People do that.” His face was hard. “They even buy whole minds, remember?”
“And it drives them mad, trying to be two people at once. Remember?”
That gave him pause. “God, I’m tired,” he said after a moment.
“Take a nap. I’m just down the hall if you want to talk later.”
“Allie—”
I waited while he tried to settle on what it was he wanted to say. The words never came. He waved one hand, dismissing me. I let myself out, wondering how long he was going to sulk. If we prize our illusions, we are even that much more jealous of our delusions because they’re so patently untrue. I was sure, though, that in a few more sessions, he’d adjust to being exactly what he was, no more and no less, and he would accept his music as his music only, to make without the fear or the desire that it came from him at the behest of something beyond his control.
Dr. Jesl phoned me sometime later, rousing me from a doze. “Our boy has a supreme mad-on for you,” she said. “Thing is, I can’t tell just what it’s all about. I don’t think he knows, either.” She sounded more amused than worried.
I was still too exhausted to explain about mindplay embarrassment compounded by the loss of a self-imposed handicap. “He’ll get over it,” I told her.
Which he did. And I was only a little bit spooked later on when he correctly distinguished all of the old Gladney’s music as having been composed by him without anyone’s identifying it for him. Great minds, I told myself, think alike.