A Piece of Martin Cann Read online

  Adversary. Why, that was proof entire, was it not, proof he was healing? That he could reason? A man who reasoned never could be lost (one echo said that, one inperson echo teaching—what? no matter). The voice was of elegant necessity the adversary, since he had heard it at the very beginning, when only he had existed. Therefore: any voice, in that state, would be the voice of all-the-rest, the voice of all their staring eyes and crunching hands, the very adversary’s voice. Which he had never recognized; he had not been meant to know that fact. The sadness that swept over him like the waves long ago, being sucked out to the edge of the world and returning to tumble him in a wet whirl of death and salt, the sadness was his proof; as he recovered from his illness (oh, yes, he had been ill, there needed no false pride there, none at all thank you) and who were the man in black and the lady in black-and-white who had talked like steel curtains of false pride and of a good deal else? He could leave them for later; no one could explain everything at once, not even I, Father, not even I, Sister, that much had to be understood—as he recovered he ever felt more sad and (proof being firm enough) knew of his recovery because he was able to bear the addition. Once under a lesser load he had (in a place without even the possibility of time) wept; but he was stronger now, stronger in his own world. And the other world was to be his as well, for the adversary might not simply be destroyed; that had clearly been explained. It was necessary to command the adversary, and hence to own him as all followers were owned. At the end. Even as they had tried their ownership on him, with their white walls and their slow cold words. Persuading him into their world, where he would be…what? One of them. One, a single unit, lost beyond recovery, nothing owned but his defenseless skin. At his weeping they had come near to reaching him, their words like hands; but he was stronger now, and soon they would be …soon they would all be…

  Would all be Martin. Marty. That adverse voicing, that old sweet tone which would not leave. But in the ending all the voicings would be his; all hands, and all white faces staring. His, and obedient to him: yes, and he could no longer be forced to speech, since they would know and understand; he would think, only, and bowing they would obey; he would remain without change or motion feeling the revolution of all round all his words, his mind, round his world and round his will…

  All, and the black covered man, the black-and-white woman. (Of whom there were many; he remembered many—which means more-than-one.) They too with their grinding words, the ground of grinning sadness at the groan of any tight-gripped power…they too, they too would be gone at last, gone glimmering, gone white, blank and all forgot. For memory was change, change motion, and motion finally and simply time: and time (as he knew quite well) was death; time was entire death, complete death (whatever was taught by adversaries, by adversity)—and death, ah, death was for the others. Not for him.

  2

  “Words,” Dr. Herne said, “which are mostly sound. Which have, perhaps, very little true content-very little real meaning.”

  “Nevertheless…Miss Moore said. Oboelike; Miss Annell tried to keep her eyes shut as she listened. Not tight shut: tension was worse than useless. Might, indeed, harm them all. Quietly closed, then, quietly, as if relaxed, as if she were lying somewhere far away, circling evenly into sleep …Eyelids flickered open. She did not see anything.

  That was the worst. It did not seem to her that there was blackness in front of her eyes; the machines were much better than the training-machines had been. Blackness is a quality, blackness can be perceived. This (produced in a manner she had never thoroughly understood, never) was an electronic blockage of selected nerve tissue: in practice, then, nothing at all. Perception blocked. Sight, then, was not interrupted; sight was gone.

  But she could feel her eyelids close again. She did. Lightly. Lightly. Dr. Heme’s calm voice filled the room, the world. “For diagnostic purposes, we can speak of Martin Cann as a cataleptoid paranoid schizophrenic…” His tone gave the words a faint, a ridiculous lilt. “The terms are meaningless; they belong to the dark ages, and should be left there. Schizophrenia…catalepsy…assaultive episodes…hebephrenia, withdrawal, interrelation, and all the rest. Leave them for the dust to cover, leave them with the treatments that were treatments for the labels, never for the person who stood hid behind them.”

  Miss Moore’s faint, distant slowness: “Lobotomy…”

  “All—the first word on everyone’s tongue, yes. As if there weren’t worse, in those days. And worse even in ours, here and there…” Dr. Herne’s voice trailed off then, and Dr. Tempar’s, younger, sharper, picked up without hesitation the thread, using words as if he were carving them quickly, indelibly into the unseen air.

  “Tranquilizing agents, excitants, symptomatic relief. We’ve got to be done with all of that now. We know better, and it’s up to us—and to the others like us—to stop this…this…”

  She heard her own voice hesitant, offering: “Murder…”

  As if faintly surprised, Dr. Tempar repeated the word, and went quickly, decisively on. “Murder-correct. Nothing less than murder of a person. All such techniques…” and, as if at a signal (but that was not possible, she told herself), Dr. Heme’s voice returned—calm, easy, confident and sane. A good voice, then, the best of voices, for the journey which was going to begin. For the danger, and the care.

  “All such techniques are murder, since all of them attempt to destroy the person, and to substitute for him only the manageable, the explicable, the apprehendable portion of him. And reducing a person to a system of words is one step back into the acceptance, the continuance of that murder. So: we cannot, simply cannot say that Martin Cann is—whatever selection of noises out of the dark ages you want to unearth. Martin Cann is Martin Cann, and we have no business with anything less than the entire person.”

  “Of course,” Miss Moore said quickly (as if he’d frightened her!). “But there must be some way to transmit perceptions—some way to talk about—”

  “We’ll talk later,” Dr. Tempar said, and clearly Dr. Herne felt that the young man had been a little too abrupt.

  “Yes, we’ll have need of all the terms,” he added, easily, slowly. “Later, when we’ve found out what, in this particular case, the terms mean. But for now we need to go into the experience, and learn to live within it.”

  Go into the experience …a favorite phrase, that, of Miss Annell’s teachers, during the maddened world of impressions, statements, hope that made up the last training year. Go into the experience…as if, perhaps, it were an oldfashioned city, an oldfashioned subway, apartment house, housing development. Into the inescapable crowding, the great thick mass that forced you where you would not go, the shrieking and hysterical surround…for “the words are only words,” a patient voice said, no 3Direction but an in person instructor studying the little class, drawing them on through willingness to patience, through patience to understanding. (As no

  3Direction might ever do.) “The experience alone teaches you, about any patient, what you will have to know. And this requires your own adjustment, and your own strength and coherence, because the experience will change you, if it can.”

  Her own voice, months before: “Any experience?”

  And, calmly: “Any experience will try to change you, yes. Some of them will try to kill you.”

  3

  PROGRAM MAY 9

  412: DRS. HERNE, TEMPAR. MISS MOORE,

  MISS ANNELL.

  413: MARTIN CANN 30395.

  FLOTATION TANK WITH FULL GEAR IN

  413 0900 OCTOBER 14.

  BLOCKAGE EQUIPMENT WITH CHAIRS (4)

  IN 412 0900 OCTOBER 14.

  CANN ATTACHMENTS COMPLETE BY 0915.

  ATTACHMENTS HERNE, TEMPAR, MOORE,

  ANNELL COMPLETE BY 0930.

  POWERED 412-413 AT 0945.

  POWER STABLE TO 1100. POWER DECREASING TO 1130.

  POWER OFF 1130.

  Attendants handled leads with care. In Room 413 Martin Cann floated; full sensory blockage was c
omplete, leads were attached, checked, confirmed. Attendants checked all this against the previous check, which had been made by the building’s computer and provided, like the scheduling, in the morning’s outprint.

  In 412 the four others were being brought into the circuit. Attendants did the work without thinking overmuch about it: the circuit wasn’t their responsibility. If the hookup went wrong there would be questions asked, yes—and no cluster position, no union protection in the known world would save the job of any fumble-fingered pinhead who misconnected a single lead, who let a poor attachment go by in final recheck. But once the job was technically perfect, the results had no interest for technicians. It was like…

  Why, if you thought about it, it was like hooking up a series of machines. What the machines were supposed to do might not be anything you could understand, or anything you’d want to. Might even be something you thought was stupid, or worse. But none of that was your business. None.

  No more was this hookup your business, then. People playing with getting killed (oh, yes, it did happen, indeed it did) in order to do something about one person who was anyway no more than a nut. Stupid, maybe: but your job was getting the leads right and hooking them up right. Nothing more, ever.

  Just like with a machine. Or—all right, then, call it five machines. After all—what’s the difference?

  THREE

  1

  Dr. Herne looked round at the others. A reasonable group, he told himself—neither very good nor very bad. There was going to be trouble, but… well, there was always trouble. Nothing that couldn’t be handled, not really.

  And was that overconfidence? He paused, looked, judged: he thought not. Dismissed the stray notion (how the mind kept up attacks against itself I) and felt confidence return. A good group, he insisted—a solid group, ready to do its work. A group without casualties… part03If there were any such thing. And Dr. Heme knew perfectly well that there was not. Never would be, since (as he sometimes thought) every change was a casualty, every shift a loss… though if psychiatry had continued its slow hardening into a religion, as had seemed enormously probable, he didn’t doubt, a hundred years gone and more, that view would undoubtedly—oh, undoubtedly—be heresy. Change, they said, might be good or bad. And never knew that it was both.

  Now, take as an example, mercury (this thought continued, pushing past its useful prime) —there was mercury in the human body, but the body knew how to handle only a certain very small amount of the stuff. Past that amount—“hatters’ shakes”, purpose tremor, confusion, involutional melancholia (a real five-dollar label for you!) and—the simple, final five—letter word-death. Change was like mercury, it might be: good or bad, depending for the most part on the ability to assimilate it, to use it. And most people (most doctors, yes, and most nurses) were not spectacularly good assimilators. You lost whatever you changed from; you gained, perhaps, a very little of the thing you changed to. Fair trade?

  Why (Dr. Heme told himself), we’ve never licked the effects of memorization. Never licked the sort of conservatism that goes with long memory training, unusual demands made on that most conservative of mental processes. And so never beaten down, to any significant degree, the need not to change, the need to keep memory always and forever wholly accurate…

  Some day.

  Some century.

  Dr. Heme shook his head. The group, now…, well, the new nurse, Annell, she looked as frightened as everybody else felt, which might be a good sign. And might not—how could anyone, finally, tell? Reports and charts and interviews were meaningless until you’d been hooked up. Until you shoved off…Well, Tempar looked as grim as ever; Dr. Heme had decided privately that the man never smiled. Certainly he’d never been caught at it. And Moore…ah, well, there was always Moore. And what did right-of-approval for the group mean when he’d have gained nothing by refusing her? Who else, within necessary age and experience limits, would be any better? Chance once more, he thought tiredly: losing the cities and the population pressure was fine—for die survivors of the Teen Plagues, at any rate, forty years gone and more—but what was gained? 3direction instead of personal contact, clusters, towns, special-function groupings that did their own work in crippling the ability to work widi any group selected at random, so that even the lessons of the Teen Plagues, the new insights regarding mind and body function (so far as they could ever be separated), were badly learned, badly applied. Change…the assimilation of which made necessary—well, Moore.

  Perhaps ten seconds had passed. “Well,” he said, firmly enough, as if he had never been away. “Are we ready to go?”

  Tempar, instantly: “Ready.” An activist, of course—and, hence, perhaps a necessary element. Time, if you called it time, would tell.

  Miss Moore said: “Whenever you give the order, Doctor.” Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman but a damned bad sign in a nurse. Too much submission, too much—Dr. Heme, groping for the label, gave the search up in a sigh. The group, after all, had to be, as nearly as possible, unitary; it was, in a very special way, one organism. He sank his dislike of tire woman where it belonged, in the subconscious pit he had no need to reach. In the pit labelled It Makes No Difference.

  And told himself, then, that the label had to be right. Had to.

  Dr. Heme shut his eyes for a second. When had he done so much worrying? Not for ten years—not for twenty. Every new group made him nervous, of course, but, still, this time…

  There was something odd about…well, what?

  The group? Or Martin Cann? Or…

  And that, too, went into the same pit. It Makes No Difference. He opened his eyes and found that he was looking at Annell. The youngster, the first-timer. Her vision had been blocked; only his was left. For the last minute, the last second of control…

  “Ready,” she said, very slowly. He made sure his words sounded as if they were addressed (as they were) to the entire group:

  “Are you sure you understand tire case?”

  But she was already nodding. The others answered; he paid no attention. Annell was nodding, murmuring; she’d be all right.

  “No one can really understand, this early,” he said. “From the outside…but we’ll have a chance to improve our knowledge now. Yes.” Sure the technicians were watching, the other side of the fade-wall, he made a hand signal. Five seconds passed.

  The room went black, went soundless. The world…

  Changed.

  There was a great light, and a voice that filled all space. Saying nothing then that could be understood, or was meant to. For the voice spoke to no one, no one at all. They had not been created. Dr. Herne, Heme, changing, looked round for the others. Seeing, of course…

  Nothing. Nothing at all.

  The world of Martin Cann had become, in some part, very suddenly and terribly clear.

  For they had not been created. Not yet. There had been no more than evening, and morning—the first day. Light, and light alone (his mind went on, his mind irresistibly went on), had thus far been created by the Lord, who…,

  No.

  He said the word, he thought, aloud. He did not fully realize at that time that it had been his first word, the first true action shaped in this new world.

  No.

  2

  Why, who was this? And what invasion…

  No: there was no invasion, but an addition. Only some other had come, come to share, come to exist with him, come to be a new number, no longer one but two…And there, there, so easily perceived, lay the black trap waiting. He saw it (of course) perfectly—if there had been such a thing as time, real time, he would have seen it in the smallest possible part of time that there was or ever could be—he saw it, knowing that time did not exist, since there could never be time without death, and death was not for him, not for him, never at all for him. This addition (he made a sharpness, a bitterness, of the single word) was after all the adversary. About whom, yes, a great deal was known; he had had, for most of his
remembrance, reflection, thought, reasoning, he had had learning to do, and indeed he had done his work. Knowing (as an instance, an important instance it might be) that the adversary was always and everywhere the same, always, always and everywhere recognizable: the adversary, in fact, was all-the-rest…- and this one addition in particular.

  This one, yes, in black, this one who stood and stared, who spoke sliding over tire face of the waters, over the crown of the deep; not of them, but not to be denied. Once, long ago, he had described himself—even so far had his daring carried him though that one, the one who had used the slow thick words, tire blackness and the distance, the hot big hands that patted and held, might have been a different aspect: it didn’t matter, of course. They were all, these others, the same. They were all one. And here was one more, then, one more in black, one more he knew. Describing himself…that had been a slip on his part, but it was necessary that such slips be made, that the adversary be defeated at the last. (He had to be defeated: he had admitted as much, in some other, some forgotten-perhaps aspect.) “The spirit of negation.” Exactly—those had been the words. Now the words held the meaning of an actual form. Now the words shivered, fractured, and (new-set round blackness) cohered; the spirit of negation had come upon him, disguised in his black, and had said the word. No. And was to be …to be, to be…to be cast down, cast down from the high places, fallen like a star…