Free! Render almost screamed it.
His heart was pounding inside his head. He leaned hard. He cut to the left. The wind strapped at his face; a shower of ice crystals, like bullets of emery, fired by him, scraped against his cheek.
He was moving. Aye—the world had ended at Weissflu-joch, and Dorftali led down and away from this portal.
His feet were two gleaming rivers which raced across the stark, curving plains; they could not be frozen in their course. Downward. He flowed. Away from all the rooms of the world. Away from the stifling lack of intensity, from the day's hundred spoon-fed welfares, from the killing pace of the forced amusements that hacked at the Hydra, leisure; away.
And as he fled down the run he felt a strong desire to look back over his shoulder, as though to see whether the world he had left behind and above had set one fearsome embodiment of itself, like a shadow, to trail along after him, hunt him down, and to drag him back to a warm and well-lit coffin in the sky, there to be laid to rest with a spike of aluminum driven through his will and a garland of alternating currents smothering his spirit.
"I hate you," he breathed between clenched teeth, and the wind carried the words back; and he laughed then, for he always analyzed his emotions, as a matter of reflex; and he added. "Exit Orestes, mad, pursued by the Furies..."
After a time the slope leveled out and he reached the bottom of the run and had to stop.
He smoked one cigarette then and rode back up to the top so that he could come down it again for non-therapeutic reasons.
That night he sat before a fire in the big lodge, feeling its warmth soaking into his tired muscles. Jill massaged his shoulders as he played Rorschach with the flames, and he came upon a blazing goblet which was snatched away from him in the same instant by the sound of his name being spoken somewhere across the Hall of the Nine Hearths.
"Charles Render!" said the voice (only it sounded more like "Sharlz Runder"), and his head instantly jerked in that direction but his eyes danced with too many afterimages for him to isolate the source of the calling.
"Maurice?" he queried after a moment, "Bartelmetz?"
"Aye," came the reply, and then Render saw the familiar grizzled visage, set neckless and balding above the red and blue shag sweater that was stretched mercilessly about the wine-keg rotundity of the man who now picked his way in their direction, deftly avoiding the strewn crutches and the stacked skis and the people who, like Jill and Render, disdain sitting in chairs.
"You've put on more weight," Render observed. "That's unhealthy."
"Nonsense, it's all muscle. How have you been, and what are you up to these days?" He looked down at Jill and she smiled back at him,
"This is Miss DeVille," said Render.
"Jill," she acknowledged.
He bowed slightly, finally releasing Render's aching hand.
"... And this is Professor Maurice Bartelmetz of Vienna," finished Render, "a benighted disciple of all forms of dialectical pessimism, and a very distinguished pioneer in neuroparticipation—although you'd never guess it to look at him. I had the good fortune to be his pupil for over a year."
Bartelmetz nodded and agreed with him, taking in the
Schnapsflasche Render brought forth from a small plastic bag, and accepting the collapsible cup which he filled to the brim.
"Ah, you are a good doctor still," he sighed. "You have diagnosed the case in an instant and you make the proper prescription. Nozdrovia!"
"Seven years in a gulp," Render acknowledged, refilling their glasses.
"Then we shall make time more malleable by sipping it."
They seated themselves on the floor, and the fire roared up through the great brick chimney as the logs burnt themselves back to branches, to twigs, to thin sticks, ring by yearly ring.
Render replenished the fire.
"I read your last book," said Bartelmetz finally, casually, "about four years ago."
Render reckoned that to be correct.
"Are you doing any research work these days?"
Render poked lazily at the fire.
"Yes," he answered, "sort of."
He glanced at Jill, who was dozing with her cheek against the arm of the huge leather chair that held his emergency bag, the planes of her face all crimson and flickering shadow.
"I've hit upon a rather unusual subject and started with a piece of jobbery I eventually intend to write about."
"Unusual? In what way?"
"Blind from birth, for one thing."
"You're using the ONT&R?"
"Yes. She's going to be a Shaper."
"Verfluchter!—Are you aware of the possible repercussions?"
"Of course."
"You've heard of unlucky Pierre?"
"No."
"Good, then it was successfully hushed. Pierre was a philosophy student at the University of Paris, and he was doing a dissertation on the evolution of consciousness. This past summer he decided it would be necessary for him to explore
the mind of an ape, for purposes of comparing a moins-nausee mind with his own, I suppose. At any rate, he obtained illegal access to an ONT&R and to the mind of our hairy cousin. It was never ascertained how far along he got in exposing the animal to the stimuli-bank, but it is to be assumed that such items as would not be immediately trans-subjective between man and ape—traffic sounds und so weiter —were what frightened the creature. Pierre is still residing in a padded cell, and all his responses are those of a frightened ape.
"So, while he did not complete his own dissertation," he finished, "he may provide significant material for someone else's."
Render shook his head.
"Quite a story," he said softly, "but I have nothing that dramatic to contend with. I've found an exceedingly stable individual—a psychiatrist, in fact—one who's already spent time in ordinary analysis. She wants to go into neuropartici-pation—but the fear of a sight-trauma was what was keeping her out. I've been gradually exposing her to a full range of visual phenomena. When I've finished she should be completely accommodated to sight, so that she can give her full attention to therapy and not be blinded by vision, so to speak. We've already had four sessions."
"And?"
"....nd it's working fine."
"You are certain about it?"
"Yes, as certain as anyone can be in these matters."
"Mm-hm," said Bartelmetz. "Tell me, do you find her excessively strong-willed? By that I mean, say, perhaps an obsessive-compulsive pattern concerning anything to which she's been introduced so far?"
"No."
"Has she ever succeeded in taking over control of the fantasy?"
"No!"
"You lie," he said simply.
Render found a cigarette. After lighting it, he smiled.
"Old father, old artificer," he conceded, "age has not withered your perceptiveness. I may trick me, but never you. —Yes, as a matter of fact, she is very difficult to keep under control. She is not satisfied just to see. She wants to Shape things for herself already. It's quite understandable— both to her and to me—but conscious apprehension and emotional acceptance never do seem to get together on things. She has become dominant on several occasions, but I've succeeded in resuming control almost immediately. After all, I am master of the bank."
"Hm," mused Bartelmetz. "Are you familiar with a Buddhist text— Shankara's Catechism?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Then I lecture you on it now. It posits—obviously not for therapeutic purposes—a true ego and a false ego. The true ego is that part of man which is immortal and shall proceed on to nirvana: the soul, if you like. Very good. Well, the false ego, on the other hand, is the normal mind, bound round with the illusions—the consciousness of you and I and everyone we have ever known professionally. Good?— Good. Now, the stuff this false ego is made up of, they call skandhas. These include the feelings, the perceptions, the aptitudes, consciousness itself, and even the physical form. Very unscientific. Yes. Now they are not the same thing as neuroses, or one of Mister Ibsen's life-lies, or an hallucination—no, even though they are all wrong, being parts of a false thing to begin with.