This was all old stuff to the Pyramids. They knew how to handle it. They broke the subject down to its essentials, separated even those into component parts. One set of systems opened great telescopic eyes in all frequencies to gaze at the astronomical objects before them. Others began the endless series of parallel-processed calculations that determined where to shove, and how hard. Maintenance systems within all of the others performed check-tests and identified Components that needed to be replaced.
When they found a defective Component—human, reptile, protozoan, plant or whatever—they turfed it out and replaced it with a fresh one out of stores. The used Components weren’t wasted. They simply became soup stock for feeding the ones that were still in working order.
This reinforced the chronic need for new Components. Therefore some stand-by Component-seeking systems were reactivated, by supplying them, of course, with new Components. Finding new components (by issuing appropriate instructions to the single Pyramid on Earth’s Mount Everest) was itself far too complex for a single component, but the Pyramids knew how to handle it. They broke the problem down to its essentials; separated even those into many parts. There was, for example, the subsection of one certain aspect of the logistic problem involved which involved locating and procuring additional Components to handle the load.
Even that tiny specialization was too much for a single Component, but the Pyramids had resources to bring to bear. The procedure in such cases was to hitch several Components together.
This was done.
When the Pyramids finished their neuro-surgery, there floated in an oversized nutrient tank a thing like a great sea-anemone. It was composed of eight Components—all human, as it happened—arranged in a circle, facing inward, joined temple to temple, brain to brain.
At their feet, where sixteen eyes could see it, was the display board to feed them their visual Input. Sixteen hands grasped each a moulded switch to handle their binary-coded Output. There would be no storage of the Output outside of the eight-Component complex itself; it went as control signals to the electrostatic generators, tunneled through the single Pyramid on Mount Everest, which handled the task of Component-procurement.
That is, of Translation.
The programming was slow and thorough. Perhaps the Pyramid which finally activated the octuple unit and went away was pleased with itself, not knowing that one of its Components was Glenn Tropile.
Nirvana. (It pervaded all; there was nothing outside of it.)
Nirvana. (Glenn Tropile floated in it as in the amniotic fluid around him.)
Nirvana . . . The sound of one hand . . . Floating one-ness ...
There was an intrusion.
Perfection is complete; by adding to it, it is destroyed. Duality struck like a thunderbolt. One-ness shattered.
For Glenn Tropile, it seemed as though his wife were screaming at him to wake up. He tried.
It was curiously difficult and painful. Timeless poignant sadness, five years of sorrow over a lost love compressed into a microsecond. It was always so, Tropile thought drowsily, awakening; it never lasts; what’s the use of worrying over what always happens. . . .
Sudden shock and horror rocked him.
This was no ordinary awakening. No ordinary thing at all, nothing was as it ever had been before!
Tropile opened his mouth and screamed—or thought he did. But there was only a hoarse, faint flutter in his eardrums.
It was a moment when sanity might have gone. But there was one curious, mundane fact that saved him. He was holding something in his hands. He found that he could look at it, and it was a switch. A moulded switch, mounted on a board; and he was holding one in each hand.
It was little to cling to, but it at least was real. If his hands could be holding something, then there must be some reality somewhere.
Tropile closed his eyes and managed to open them again. Yes, there was reality too; he closed his eyes and light stopped; he opened them and light returned.
Then perhaps he was not dead, as he had thought.
Carefully, stumblingly—his mind his only usable tool—he tried to make an estimate of his surroundings. He could hardly believe what he found.
Item, he could scarcely move. Somehow he was bound by his feet and his head. How? He couldn’t tell.
Item, he was bent over and he couldn’t straighten. Why? Again he couldn’t tell, but it was a fact. The great extensor muscles of his back answered his command, but his body would not move.
Item, his eyes saw, but only in a small area.
He couldn’t move his head, either. Still, he could see a few things. The switches in his hands, his feet, a sort of display of lights on a strange circular board.
The lights flickered and changed their pattern.
Without thinking, he clicked the lefthand switch:—Why? Because it was right to do so. When a certain light flared green, a certain sequence had to be clicked. Why, again? Well, when a certain light flared green, a certain sequence—
He abandoned that problem. Never mind why; what the devil was going on?
Glenn Tropile squinted about him like a mollusc peering out of its shell. There was another fact, the oddness of the seeing. What makes it look so queer? he asked himself.
He found an answer, but it required some time to take it in. He was seeing in a strange perspective. One looks out of two eyes. Close one eye and the world is flat. Open it again, and there is a stereoscopic double; the saliencies of the picture leap forward, the background retreats.
So with the lights on the board—no, not exactly; but something like that, he thought. It was as though—he squinted and strained—as though he had never really seen before. As though for all his life he had had only one eye, and now he had strangely been given two.
His visual perception of the board was total. He could see all of it at once. It had no “front” or “back;” it was in the round; the natural thinking of it was without orientation; he engulfed and comprehended it as a unit. It had no secrets of shadow or silhouette.
I think, Tropile mouthed slowly to himself, I think I’m going crazy.
But that was no explanation either. Mere insanity didn’t account for what he saw.
Then, he asked himself, was he in a state that was beyond Nirvana? He remembered, with an odd flash of guilt, that he had been meditating; watching the stages of boiling water. All right, perhaps he had been Translated. But what was this, then? Were the meditators wrong in teaching that Nirvana was the end—and yet righter than the Wolves, who dismissed Meditation as a phenomenon wholly inside the skull, and refused to discuss Translation at all?
That was a question for which he could find nothing approaching an answer. He turned away from it and looked at his hands.
He could see them, too, in the round, he noted; he could see every wrinkle and pore in all sixteen of them. . . .
Sixteen hands!
That was the other moment when sanity might have gone.
He closed his eyes. (Sixteen eyes! No wonder the total perception!) And after a while he opened them again.
The hands were there. All sixteen of them.
Cautiously, Tropile selected a finger that seemed familiar in his memory and, after a moment’s thought* flexed it. It bent. He selected another. Another—on a different hand, this time.
He could use any or all of the sixteen hands. They were all his, all sixteen of them.