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"I want to know who's controlling the honches, what they're trying to do, how
to fight them, if I must and
. . . and what's the right thing to do."
"I was right, wasn't I?" she stated. "About the philosopher?" She knew that
Benadek's last "want" was a reflection of the scholar Bostwick's careful,
pondering manner. Had Benadek's behavior and thought-patterns not shown signs
of the philosopher's effect, Teress had been prepared to take a fire axe to
the computer terminal, the restraint chair, and the memory-storage
compartments. She still paid close attention to Benadek's utterances,
especially after his assimilation of the army security chief and the Air
Force astronaut. Like honches, military men were too fearsome to be allowed to
run freely within the mind and body of whatever Benadek eventually became.
No memories could furnish the answers he sought, she realized. They were all
long dead before the first honch was born, but they "knew" the systems the
honch-creators had used, and their thought-patterns were more appropriate than
hers or Benadek's.
"Trust me?" he had pleaded. She had little choice.
The Benadek who stood before her was not the obnoxious boy she had first met.
He answered questions with polysyllabic words or paraphrased equations that
probably held no meaning for anyone alive besides himself. Sometimes, when he
realized what he had said, the lost boy would surface in a rueful, mischievous
grin. "I didn't know that a minute ago," he would say. "I wonder what I mean?"
More and more often, he knew exactly what he meant, though no one of the
individuals he had greedily consumed could have assembled the thoughts and
concepts he wove. "I'm a catalyst," he told her. "I
allow them to `talk' with each other, but I'm not one of them, and they're not
me. I'm an arena where their ideas fight. I skim off what I want, and let them
go on and on and on."
"How did you avoid the madness the ancients suffered?"
"I'm different as are you. It has to do with changing
."
"Then I could do it too?" she asked cautiously, her expression halfway between
fear and feral eagerness.
"I feel so ignorant. If I could learn . . ."
He shook his head slowly. "Achibol was more right than he knew when he called
the transfers murder. I
could show you how to kill the relict personalities, as I did my first one,
but unless . . . until . . . you can control your own changes
, I can't teach you how to shunt them safely aside, and still let them live."
"I'll pass," she said, sighing with the release of tension that had built up
without her awareness. "One more time, you said? Promise?"
"Just once, and I'm done. I promise."
The door swung open with enough force to set wires in motion, and slammed
against its stop. "No more!" Achibol bellowed. "I've heard every despicable
word." He staggered, his robe aswirl about his skinny legs. He was drunk.
Teress backed away, frightened less by his anger than by his glazed, unfocused
eyes.
"I was afraid of your intemperance," he snarled. "You were too eager. From the
first time I told you of this place, you planned to rape it, didn't you? As
you'd have raped Teress? Sylfie?" Benadek flinched, and pain invaded his eyes.
"How many?" Achibol pressed, swaying as he stood. "How many have you destroyed
in your unholy, wanton quest?"
"None, Master," Benadek replied, regaining his composure and rising to face
Achibol squarely. "Or . . .
only one, the very first. The rest are more alive than they could hope to be
in another host. I have them all."
"Impossible you'd be driven mad! Your body and mind would be a battlefield.
You've learned how to choose a tidbit here, a dab there, and destroy the rest.
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No man could survive what you say you've done."
"Then I am either mad, Master, or as I've long suspected I'm no man, but
something different." He drew himself up to his full height, and looked the
old man straight in his hazed, fiery eyes. "I refuse to discuss it until
you're sober."
"Are you the master here, and I the apprentice?"
"I'm apprentice to Achibol, not wine." Benadek feared the old man would strike
him with his staff, or down him with its emanations. But Achibol spun
unsteadily on his heel and reeled out. Teress followed him.
Benadek's shoulders slumped. He squeezed his eyelids together to ease their
burning, swung the heavy door shut and bolted it from the inside. The red sign
glowed brightly:
EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS
Perhaps Teress could make the old man see reason, or at least sober him up so
Benadek could explain.
In the meantime, he would have to do the procedure by himself this last time,
else Achibol might, even in his drunkenness, find some way to thwart him.
Memories roiled and swirled in his blood, prototypic vestiges of thought not
yet mapped in synapses, little more than molecular codes for the living
connections they would become, if he let them. His visualizations were clearer
now, thanks to those sequences he had chosen to integrate into the vast
complexity of his brain . . .
Each strand of foreign RNA-analogue was attached to a similar strand that had
originated in the ancients'
laboratories as a retrovirus. Its own code was carried not on the double
strands of deoxyribonucleic acid but on more primitive, single-stranded RNA.
Encapsulated in sheaths of viral protein, they pierced cellular membranes,
then synthesized enzymes that cut his own stranded, coiled, and twisted
genetic molecules with an accuracy no surgeon could duplicate. Viral RNA drew
cellular nucleosides to it and created DNA versions of its foreign codes.
Spliced into the host's own genome, they programmed his brain to make new
connections in a manner similar to, but subtly different from, what his own
embryonic cells had used to create brain connections in the first place. They
created spurious thoughts and memories he could hardly distinguish from his
own.
There was haunting similarity to the change
, but the memory-codes merely governed the configurations of synapses, and
regulated the kind and the numbers of neurotransmitter molecules dopamine,
norepinephrine, serotonin, and a host of others that would determine the
intensity and "color" of the impulses that passed from one neuron to another.
What was a memory or a thought? Was it no more than a specification for what
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