I had taught Darva basic hypnotic techniques and now used them both on her and on myself. I was conscious of an audience for all this, but I couldn’t see anyone. The experts would be there if needed, but otherwise would remain completely out of sight, and mind. I knew, though, that a lot of big shots were watching. Yissim had said they had learned an enormous amount of new material through our case—which, in the end, was the only reason all this was going on anyway.
The big problem had always been what to do with the extra mass. It could be reduced very slowly, over a period of perhaps years, but we hardly wanted mat. I had almost 220 kilos to deal with—not an easy task. More importantly I wanted no trace of the old spell; I wanted no way that the Wardens could someday run wild again and reduce us to animals. So we had to become something with no equivalent outside my own mind.
Alone, in that how very familiar white room, I began. Hypnotized, Darva was far easier to take control of—but to be able to impose my spells so dominantly over the old that I could then wipe the old clean required tremendous concentration and mental effort. So much, in fact, that the experts believed it would be impossible ever to close those lines of communications from me to her and back again.
I cast the spell, using all the force at my command. The resistance was extremely hard and somewhat surprising. I saw immediately what the original sores had run into the first time they tried, and it was tremendous. But they hadn’t been prepared for it, nor had they used this kind of force of will, backed by my total commitment to breaking it at all cost. What we were dealing with was, of course, at heart a psych problem—her romanticizing about the two of us in the wild—that any good psych could cure back in the civilized worlds. Here it simply had to be beaten back. I had to decouple and push back her subconscious control over her body’s wa by making her consciously override it, then guide that force of will to my own. She was rated an apt 7, but she lacked the total commitment to break the pattern. I was supplying that.
It turned into an odd mental battle, almost a cross between a stubborn argument and rerouting points on a circuit diagram. At one and the same time I was constantly identifying and beating back her own subconsciously directed wa while, with her, I was trying to rind any and all routes of wa communication between conscious mind and body and then tie them up, even dominate them, while isolating this strong, primitive influence, isolating it, and beating it back into submission. None of this had any effect on her mind or thought processes, of course; we were attacking only the wa, the Warden organisms giving out the wrong signal.
As the impasse became more obvious, I began talking to her, soothing her, trying to direct her, to convince her that she must not give in to this primitive, animal will. “Darva—if you have any regard, any feeling for me, you must help me! You must beat it back!” “I do. You know I do,” she responded. “Darva—if you—love—me, let it go! You must!” The use of that word sounded odd to me, yet now I almost understood it. At least, I thought, I could use it. “Darva—I do this because I love you. If you know that and love me too, release! Let it go!” It was odd, what I had said for clinical purposes. Did I, in fact, love her? Was that why I was doing this?
Abruptly, the resistance broke—gave up, receded into the depths of her mind. It was so sudden and so unexpected that I wasn’t prepared, and the whole force of my will flooded into her, so strong it almost knocked her out. I recovered as quickly as possible, retracing the pathways, seeing how the spell had been so neatly tied and then re-tied.
The rest was absurdly simple after that, I just followed the computer models I had memorized and practiced again and again. In what seemed like a matter of minutes, at best, although later I was told it was more than seven hours, we were done.
I pushed out the waste and fatty accumulations unnecessary for life rather easily, and did some internal rearranging to expel as much water and excess tissue as possible, getting the wa to treat it like common waste and thus assist its expulsion. The shift amounted to more than 30 kilos and looked and smelled horrible, but I was in no state at that point to appreciate it. 190 kilos were still a hell of a lot, but every bit lost made the job easier.
Diagrams, pictograms, three-dimensional views and designs both internal and external flashed through my mind from training and into hers and thus to the wa itself. And she was changing, flowing, redirecting to my commands. I could literally feel it, sense it, as if it were happening inside my own body.
When the job was finished I still couldn’t relax because, thanks to the linkage, my body was in fact a mirror image of hers in every single respect, and that wasn’t my intent In fact, what took so very long was the attempt to differentiate my body from hers. There were a large number of false starts, as everything I tried to do to myself I found duplicating in her. We knew it might happen, and I hoped now she was up to the task. I could visualize only her, therefore, she must direct my own reconstitution while I concentrated on keeping her stable as she was. Doing so was difficult, because I was the stronger, but we finally worked out a system that would flow information both ways, an eerie sensation like trying to do three things at once, but one we finally mastered.
And when it was finally over, we both passed out for more than ten hours.
We both awoke, stirred, and opened our eyes. Somewhere an alarm buzzer sounded, probably to summon somebody when we awoke, I thought. Visions of computer diagrams and electrical signals pulsed in my brain, and I knew I was going to have a hell of a time getting rid of them.
“Oh, my god! It really did work!” Darva said, amazed. “Look at you!”
“Look at you,” I responded. “I’m proud of you.”
“We need mirrors,” she decided. “Say—can you sense the wa between us?”
I hadn’t really paid much attention, but now that she pointed it out I sensed what she meant The links were still there, the lines of communication from nervous system to nervous system were intact.
A door opened, and Dr. Yissim and two others entered. One was a large, burly-looking man with rugged complexion and snow-white hair and moustache. I knew at a glance that he had at one time been part of the civilized worlds. He was dressed entirely in white, but not the medical whites of Yissim. His clothing was fine, tailor-fitted and almost a uniform. The other man was in every way weird.
He was small, had a goatee, wore horn-rimmed glasses—a real anomaly here, where the Wardens made certain of your eyesight and everything else—and he was dressed in a casual tweed jacket and dark blue slacks. That alone would have been enough to cause a stare, but there was something more dramatically wrong with him.
I suddenly knew how an animal that trusted its sense of smell above all else felt when confronted with its reflection in a mirror.
The man was patently-there—I could see him, touch him, everything. But he had no wa, no Warden sense at all. On the level I had been learning to trust above all else, the Warden organism level, he simply did not exist.