The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (12 page)

Bell’s eyes drifted evasively to the immobile face of the unconscious artist. “But the number of neurons in a given mammalian brain remains constant after birth,” he said.
“These cells can throw out numerous dendrites and create increasingly complex neural patterns as the subject grows older, but he can’t grow any more of the primary neurons.”

“I know. That’s the trouble. Ruy can’t grow more brain, but he has.” She touched her own “horns” wonderingly. “And I guess I have, too.
What
–
?”

Following Bell’s glance, she bent over to inspect the artist’s face, and started as from a physical blow.

Eyes like anguished talons were clutching hers.

His lips moved, and a harsh whisper swirled about her ears like a desolate wind: “. . . The Nightingale . . . in death . . . greater beauty unbearable
. . . but watch . . . THE
ROSE!
”

White-faced, Anna staggered backwards through the door.

Bell’s hurried footsteps were just behind her as she burst into her office and collapsed on the consultation couch. Her eyes were shut tight, but over her labored
breathing she heard the psychogeneticist sit down and leisurely light another cigar.

Finally she opened her eyes. “Even
you
found out something that time. There’s no use asking me what he meant.”

“Isn’t there? Who will dance the part of The Student on opening night?”

“Ruy. Only, he will really do little beyond provide support to the prima ballerina, The Nightingale, that is, at the beginning and end of the ballet.”

“And who plays The Nightingale?”

“Ruy hired a professional – La Tanid.”

Bell blew a careless cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Are you sure
you
aren’t going to take the part?”

“The role is strenuous in the extreme. For me, it would be a physical impossibility.”

“Now.”

“What do you mean –
now
?”

He looked at her sharply. “You know very well what I mean. You know it so well your whole body is quivering. Your ballet premiere is four weeks off – but you know and I know that Ruy
has already seen it. Interesting.” He tapped coolly at his cigar.
“Almost as interesting as your belief he saw you playing the part of The Nightingale.”

Anna clenched her fists. This must be faced rationally. She inhaled deeply, and slowly let her breath out. “How can even
he
see things that haven’t happened yet?”

“I don’t know for sure. But I can guess, and so could you if you’d calm down a bit. We do know that the pineal is a residuum of the single eye that our very remote seagoing
ancestors had in the centre of their fishy foreheads. Suppose this fossil eye, now buried deep in the normal brain, were reactivated. What would we be able to see with it? Nothing spatial, nothing
dependent on light stimuli. But let us approach the problem inductively. I shut one eye. The other can fix Anna van Tuyl in a depthless visual plane. But with two eyes I can follow you
stereoscopically, as you move about in space. Thus, adding an eye adds a dimension. With the pineal as a third eye I should be able to follow you through time. So Ruy’s awakened pineal should
permit him at least a hazy glimpse of the future.”

“What a marvellous – and terrible gift.”

“But not without precedent,” said Bell. “I suspect that a more or less reactivated pineal lies behind every case of clairvoyance collected in the annals of para-psychology. And
I can think of at least one historical instance in which the pineal has actually tried to penetrate the forehead, though evidently only in monolobate form. All Buddhist statues carry a mark on the
forehead symbolic of an ‘inner eye’. From what we know now, Budda’s ‘inner eye’ was something more than symbolic.”

“Granted. But a time-sensitive pineal still doesn’t explain the pain in Ruy’s hump. Nor the hump itself, for that matter.”

“What,” said Bell, “makes you think the hump is anything more than what it seems – a spinal disease characterized by a growth of laminated tissue?”

“It’s not that simple, and you know it. You’re familiar with ‘phantom limb’ cases, such as where the amputee retains an illusion of sensation or pain in the
amputated hand or foot?”

He nodded.

She continued: “But you know, of course, that amputation isn’t an absolute prerequisite to a ‘phantom’. A child born armless may experience phantom limb sensations for
years. Suppose such a child were thrust into some improbable armless society, and their psychiatrists tried to cast his sensory pattern into their own mould. How could the child explain to them the
miracle of arms, hands, fingers – things of which he had occasional sensory intimations, but had never seen, and could hardly imagine? Ruy’s case is analogous. He is four-limbed and
presumably springs from normal stock. Hence the phantom sensations in his hump point toward a
potential
organ – a fore-shadowing of the future, rather than toward memories of a limb
once possessed. To use a brutish example, Ruy is like the tadpole rather than the snake. The snake had his legs briefly, during the evolutionary recapitulation of his embryo. The tadpole has yet to
shed his tail and develop legs. But one might assume that each has some faint phantom sensoria of legs.”

Bell appeared to consider this. “That still doesn’t account for Ruy’s pain. I wouldn’t think the process of growing a tail would be painful for a tadpole, nor a phantom
limb for Ruy – if it’s inherent in his physical structure. But be that as it may, from all indications he is still going to be in considerable pain when that narcotic wears off. What
are you going to do for him
then?
Section the ganglia leading to his hump?”

“Certainly not. Then he would
never
be able to grow that extra organ. Anyhow, even in normal phantom limb cases, cutting nerve tissue doesn’t help. Excision of neuromas from
limb stumps brings only temporary relief – and may actually aggravate a case of hyperaesthesia. No, phantom pain sensations are central rather then peripheral. However, as a temporary
analgesic I shall try a two per cent solution of novocaine near the proper thoracic ganglia.” She looked at her watch. “We’d better be getting back to him.”

Anna withdrew the syringe needle from the man’s side and rubbed the last puncture with an alcoholic swab.

“How do you feel, Ruy?” asked Bell.

The woman stooped beside the sterile linens and looked at the face of the prone man. “He doesn’t,” she said uneasily. “He’s out cold again.”

“Really?” Bell bent over beside her and reached for the man’s pulse. “But it was only two per cent novocaine. Most remarkable.”

“I’ll order a counter-stimulant,” said Anna nervously. “I don’t like this.”

“Oh, come, girl. Relax. Pulse and respiration normal. In fact, I think you’re nearer collapse than he. This is very interesting . . .” His voice trailed off in musing surmise.
“Look, Anna, there’s nothing to keep both of us here. He’s in no danger whatever. I’ve got to run along. I’m sure you can attend to him.”

I know, she thought. You want me to be alone with him.

She acknowledged his suggestion with a reluctant nod of her head, and the door closed behind his chuckle.

For some moments thereafter she studied in deep abstraction the regular rise and fall of the man’s chest.

So Ruy Jacques had set another medical precedent. He’d received a local anaesthetic that should have done nothing more than desensitise the deformed growth in his back for an hour or two.
But here he lay, in apparent coma, just as though under a general cerebral anaesthetic.

Her frown deepened.

X-ray plates had showed his dorsal growth simply as a compacted mass of cartilaginous laminated tissue (the same as hers) penetrated here and there by neural ganglia. In deadening those ganglia
she should have accomplished nothing more than local anaesthetization of that tissue mass, in the same manner that one anaesthetizes an arm or leg by deadening the appropriate spinal ganglion. But
the actual result was not local, but general. It was as though one had administered a mild local to the radial nerve of the forearm to deaden pain in the hand, but had instead anaesthetized the
cerebrum.

And
that
, of course, was utterly senseless, completely incredible, because anaesthesia works from the higher neural centres down, not vice versa. Deadening a certain area of the parietal
lobe could kill sensation in the radial nerve and the hand, but a hypo in the radial nerve wouldn’t knock out the parietal lobe of the cerebrum, because the parietal organization was neurally
superior. Analogously, anaesthetizing Ruy Jacques’ hump shouldn’t have deadened his entire cerebrum, because certainly his cerebrum was to be presumed neurally superior to that dorsal
malformation.

To be presumed . . .

But with Ruy Jacques, presumptions were – invalid.

So
that
was what Bell had wanted her to discover. Like some sinister reptile of the Mesozoic, Ruy Jacques had
two
neural organizations, one in his skull and one on his back, the
latter being superior to, and in some degree controlling, the one in his skull, just as the cerebral cortex in human beings and other higher animals assists and screens the work of the less
intricate cerebellum, and just as the cerebellum governs the still more primitive medulla oblongata in the lower vertebrata, such as in frogs and fishes. In anaesthetizing his bump, she had
disrupted communications in his highest centres of consciousness, and in anaesthetizing the higher, dorsal centre, she had apparently simultaneously deactivated his “normal” brain.

As full realization came, she grew aware of a curious numbness in her thighs, and of faint overtones of mingled terror and awe in the giddy throbbing in her forehead. Slowly, she sank into the
bedside chair.

For as this man was, so must she become. The day lay ahead when
her
pineal growths must stretch to the point of disrupting the grey matter in her occipital lobes, and destroy her ability
to read. And the time must come, too, when
her
dorsal growth would inflame her whole body with its anguished writhing, as it had done his, and try with probable equal futility to burst its
bonds.

And all of this must come – soon; before her ballet premiere, certainly. The enigmatic skein of the future would be unravelled to her evolving intellect even as it now was to Ruy
Jacques’. She could find all the answers she sought . . . Dream’s end . . . The Nightingale’s death song . . . The Rose. And she would find them whether she wanted to or not.

She groaned uneasily.

At the sound, the man’s eyelids seemed to tremble; his breathing slowed momentarily, then became faster.

She considered this in perplexity. He was unconscious, certainly; yet he made definite responses to aural stimuli. Possibly she had anaesthetized neither member of the hypothetical brain-pair,
but had merely cut, temporarily, their lines of intercommunication, just as one might temporarily disorganize the brain of a laboratory animal by anaesthetizing the pons Varolii linking the two
cranial hemispheres.

Of one thing she was sure: Ruy Jacques, unconscious, and temporarily mentally disintegrate, was not going to conform to the behavior long standardized for other unconscious and disintegrate
mammals. Always one step beyond what she ever expected. Beyond man. Beyond genius.

She arose quietly and tiptoed the short distance to the bed.

When her lips were a few inches from the artist’s right ear, she said softly: “What is your name?”

The prone figure stirred uneasily. His eyelids fluttered, but did not open. His wine-colored lips parted, then shut, then opened again. His reply was a harsh, barely intelligible whisper:
“Zhak.”

“What are you doing?”

“Searching . . .”

“For what?”

“A red rose.”

“There are many red roses.”

Again his somnolent, metallic whisper: “No, there is but one.”

She suddenly realized that her own voice was becoming tense, shrill. She forced it back into a lower pitch. “Think of that rose. Can you see it?”

“Yes . . . yes!”

She cried:
“What is the rose?”

It seemed that the narrow walls of the room would clamour forever their outraged metallic modesty, if something hadn’t frightened away their pain. Ruy Jacques opened his eyes and struggled
to rise on one elbow.

On his sweating forehead was a deep frown. But his eyes were apparently focused on nothing in particular, and despite his seemingly purposive motor reaction, she knew that actually her question
had but thrown him deeper into his strange spell.

Swaying a little on the dubious support of his right elbow, he muttered: “
You
are not the rose . . . not yet . . . not yet . . .”

She gazed at him in shocked stupor as his eyes closed slowly and he slumped back on the sheet. For a long moment there was no sound in the room but his deep and rhythmic breathing.

Without turning from her glum perusal of the clinic grounds framed in her window, Anna threw the statement over her shoulder as Bell entered the office. “Your friend
Jacques refuses to return for a checkup. I haven’t seen him since he walked out a week ago.”

“Is that fatal?”

She turned blood-shot eyes on him. “Not to Ruy.”

The man’s expression twinkled. “He’s your patient, isn’t he? It’s your duty to make a house call.”

“I certainly shall. I was going to call him on the visor to make an appointment.”

“He doesn’t have a visor. Everybody just walks in. There’s something doing in his studio nearly every night. If you’re bashful, I’ll be glad to take you.”

“No thanks. I’ll go alone – early.”

Bell chuckled. “I’ll see you tonight.”

Number 98 was a sad, ramshackled, four-storey, plaster-front affair, evidently thrown up during the materials shortage of the late forties.

Anna took a deep breath, ignored the unsteadiness of her knees, and climbed the half dozen steps of the front stoop.