The xypotech version of Norbert disliked the girl, then despised. They fell out of synchronization, and suffered a sharp divarication. From Norbert’s point of view, Exorbert’s behavior became odd, then erratic, then grotesque: Exobert developed interests in esoteric cults, chaos mathematics, theosophy, imaginary energies, and the claims of those who said they could speak with the dead or deleted, or could find lost colony ships.
Exorbert began making calls to Norbert’s friends both natural and assigned, first by phone and then by dreamscape; tweaking Norbert’s subpersonalities on the flimsiest excuses; making unauthorized sales, manipulating apple genetics; altering work schedules; and sending strange training drugs into the foodstock of the farm Moreaus, or Norbert’s show-winning near-hound, Chymical Wedding.
Norbert fought unsuccessfully to undo all the strangeness and madness his ghostly twin was bringing into his life, and he vowed to fight forever. But when Norbert returned one winter Sunday to the family farm, and found all the farmhands celebrating the Wednesday Ciderfest, and his beloved near-hound giddy with stimulant and dancing on his hind legs on the baking table, crushing apple pies beneath his paws, Norbert’s resolve broke.
He could not struggle against the invisible superior twin. He had to forswear the girl. When the Noösphere offered to edit the memory chains related to his infatuation to drive Norbert’s personality closer to his archetype, and perhaps form a reconciliation between Norbert and Exobert, Norbert accepted the dangerous honor.
Against the wishes of the Noösphere and his father Yngbert, however, Norbert refused to have the process remove any sense of guilt or regret which might haunt him in later years.
And the alteration in his mind, even if done awkwardly, counted as Refinement. It elevated him from a mere Rustic to a Gentleman-Farmer.
But not only was no reunification forthcoming, his family and his ghost became ever more strangers to him.
Svartvestra was so stung by the cruel rejection, she recorded a fornication performance just in mockery of his love-style. He could no longer go into public houses or pink sections of the dreamscape without encountering jeers and sneers from her subscribers, or hearing trained near-dogs whistle the theme song from her base sound track.
It drove him into his archetype indeed. His soul became iron: he turned off his emotions so often the parish peace officer Maier twice served him a writ for renouncing his humanity, and asked him sarcastically why he did not use Foxcrafty to become a Myrmidon entirely. Each time Norbert restored his emotion, bitter anger overcame him.
But the technique for assuming an aspect of that ideal stoicism was still open to Norbert. Brash thought patterns were permanently imprinted, and could not fade with time. He used to amuse himself by falling into that allegedly higher state of mind, and putting his ungloved hand above a candle flame until he smelled flesh burning.
The unremoved regret hardened into resolve, and he ate a dream-apple, opening his nervous system to strange influences, and fell in love again, this time with a hamadryad bound by land-marriage to a fertile valley near the North Pole, where the gentle shadows were always long and the sun never reached zenith, even at noon.
Her name was Rose, the most common name on the planet. She was in every way the opposite of the frivolous and glamorous Svartvestra, but the end was the same. He was too artificial for her, too willing to alter himself, yet, ironically, too unwilling to drink the mind-altering love potion that would make their emotion for each other permanent structures, buttressed by neuro-circuitry, in all their personalities. Exorbert objected to the love potion, and Norbert feared to overrule the objection, not knowing, if he fought in his thoughts with Exorbert, which meant fighting the entire Noösphere of Rosycross, who or what he might end up evolving into.
He was brash, was he not? To remain himself, he fled the world, joined the Guild, took their coin, and signed the articles on the first vessel from Promixa.
Had he known how mad Tellus was, he would have waited longer, slumbered longer, and fled farther.
Tellus disturbed his mind.
3. A Discontented Consciousness
His consciousness, even his conception of what a consciousness was, perforce differed remarkably from that of a dawn-age man.
Basically there were three zones of thought in his mind: an inner zone which he thought of as himself, his own basic memories, ideals, reasoning processes, passions, appetites, and drives; an outer zone, which was the shared memories of the world-mind in which he lived, the spirit of the age; and a large middle zone where the two mingled, where he kept, as a mental menagerie, a wide variety of servant personalities, which he could use like masks to fend off unwanted thought-streams from the outer zone. There were well-worn channels in this middle zone reaching to the outer, where entities like family albums and social organizations kept their thoughts, or ghosts met in parliament to discuss matters too remote in the future to concern him. It was also a lively market for exchanging intellectual property, which logicians bred like livestock, or daring hunters recovered from deep in the outer zone.
Intellectually, he knew this outer zone extended infinitely, into the mind of the Noösphere like an atmosphere; but for all practical purposes, it was like the dome of the sky, mere backdrop. Every now and again the world changed, like blowing winds that changed his mood. The spirit of the age only took over his mind and body during Mass, or planetary consensus, or for a riot or military exercise, and this was as rare as rainfall.
What he had not expected, when coming to senile Tellus, was to discover how little of the innermost zone was actually his own, himself. Most of his opinions about everything had come from his family or had been written in by censor of the Lord of the Afternoon of Promixa Centauri.
His taste in women was dictated by the seamstresses guild; his taste in sport by the gamesters guild; his sweet tooth was entirely an invention of the pastry and confectioner’s guild.
Once on Earth, the outer zone was an alien atmosphere to him, with roaring shapes larger than gods moving through it; the middle zone changed suddenly, and was filled with moods and merchandise stranger than the bottom of the sea. He was told he would become used to the revolting practices of the Earthlings in time. Everyone had assured him, from his ghostly counselor to his personality advocate, to his libido coordinator, to his cliometry planner, that while Tellus was insane, many of the outer systems, telephone and memory reflex storage, were perfectly safe, sagacious and discreet.
But then one day he found himself without his clothing and feathered like a duck from crown to heel, having lost his skin in a haiku recital wager to a sly redhaired woman in a place that was a cross between a butcher shop and a gambling den. There, standing on naked feet in a stain of his own blood, he realized two things. First, he did not even like haiku, or, for that matter, the smell of duck meat. Second, everyone who so blithely said Tellus was safe was mad. Tellus was a world of fads and fashions and hysteria. Inviting the mind of Tellus into your mind was inviting disaster.
That same day he threw away all his receiver decks and augmentation sets, even the small coral button his mother gave him at birth. He sacked his advocate and coordinator and planner and reduced his interface to be the stark minimum necessary to carry out his duties as a Starfarer: public postal and library channels, navigation feeds, weather and riot reporting, navigational computation, and little beyond that.
He put in a request to be slotted to the Sky Island, which was a lighter-than-air platform in the stratosphere used for catching deorbiting cargo rigs, because it was the most dangerous and most highly rewarded duty station. He worked extra shifts, hoping a stray container, white hot with reentry heat, might accidentally miss the magnetic vortex, strike the cage, and crush his feathery body, which he hated. It was two seasons of frugal living, eating only noodles and vitamin slurry, until he earned enough to buy himself a proper human skin again. He deliberately bought one in a color modern fashion despised, a pinkish pale hue allegedly from a sunken land called Europe, very different from the jet-black, silver-eyed coloration of Rosycross.