continue searching for information, if you like.”
“I wish you would.”
“I also found this… curiosity.” He takes out a sheaf of plastic flimsies, pushes it across the table to Aiah. “It is mostly speculation, but I thought you might want to read it, for reasons of historical and personal interest.”
The plastic flimsies smell of developing fluid. “Toward a Psychology of the Ice Man,” Aiah reads, by Constantine of Cheloki.
Aiah’s mouth goes dry. “How old is this?” she asks.
“It was published thirty-seven years ago, in a journal of philosophy.” An analytical smile touches Rohder’s lips. “There is very little science in it.”
Constantine must have met Taikoen by then, Aiah thinks.
She tries for a moment to read the blue eyes, the ruddy skin, the network of fine lines in the old mage’s face, and wonders what it is he knows. She gives up, looks down at the article, then drops her hand over it.
“I’ll look at it later. Can I see the other reports?”
Rohder closes the folder and pushes it across the polished table surface. The soft plastic cover and the flimsies inside flutter in the brief breeze. Aiah picks up the article by Constantine and slips it into the folder. She feels the throb of her heart, its acceleration to a higher state of alertness, a touch of the Adrenaline Monster upon her nerves… It is as if she is responding to the notion that the file itself is a threat, and she wonders if she will ever have the courage to make use of this information, to somehow put an end to Taikoen, or even to read the article, of historic and personal interest, that Rohder has given her.
She looks up at Rohder, forces a polite smile onto her lips. “Would you like some coffee?” she asks.
Talk turns to other matters, particularly to Rohder’s teams, who are busy increasing Caraqui’s plasm supply, and then the old man takes his leave. Aiah turns up the ventila-¦ tion to clear the cloud of cigaret smoke and looks at the closed folder waiting for her on the table.
Her nerves hum louder than the ventilation fans.
She opens the green folder, slips out Constantine’s article, and composes herself to read it: sitting straight in the straight chair, feet flat on the floor, hands framing the pages on the table. As if she were a schoolgirl at her desk.
Constantine’s style, she notices, is informed but not quite at ease. She can tell he’s been to college: he uses words like noetic and mensuration. The later Constantine, with less need to impress, would adopt a less specialized vocabulary, and a more accessible style.
He discusses at some length the legendary attributes of the ice man and discusses theories of how such creatures may be created. The tone is speculative—he endeavors to make it seem that he knows less about this matter than, in fact, he does. And then he addresses the primary contradiction of the ice man legends.
Why would the ice man, he asks, who exists in the core of creation, in the plasm itself, the great transformational substance, the heart of contingent reality that underlies our whole postmetropolitan world, wish to inhabit the body of a human being?
Constantine finds the answer in the hanged man’s lost body itself.
The attractions of plasm are many, but the most intense are those based on sensation. It is these appeals to the sensual, to enhanced and extended sight and hearing, to the stimulus of nerves and groin, that most often impel those who habituate themselves to plasm as an addict to morphia; and this sensual attraction, in subtler form, is a factor in the attraction of plasm to many of its other users, who experience sense gratification alongside plasm’s other enjoyments…
For the ice man there are no longer nerves to stimulate, no sensory organs to enhance, no sexual impulse to satisfy. The vital element of sensory feedback is missing: no longer is the sensual body able to bring pleasure to its now detached, and oddly diminished, mind.
But, Aiah thinks, a protest half-formed in her mind; but Constantine answers her objection before she can properly form it.
It is true that when mages project themselves through telepresence they use plasm to build a sensorium, an array of ectomorphic sense-artifacts used to bring sense-stimulation to the receptive centers of the mind. But the sensorium, however enhanced it may be, is built in imitation of the body’s own natural sense organs, and furthermore upon a series of sense-memories contained within the mind. Without a material body and its sense-organs to apprehend the world, and without a sensual memory, reinforced at every moment by a thousand natural stimuli, how is a detached, immaterial mentality to apprehend the world?
… The ice man must apprehend the world only through a created sensorium. For a human mage, a sensorium will be based on the mage’s own sense-organs and on sense-experience and memory. For an ice man, a sensorium will be based on organs that no longer exist and memories that grow ever more distant. Without an anchor planted in the body’s own sensual experience and memory, the ice man’s perceptions will become ever more distorted.
Aiah knits her brows and contemplates Constantine’s argument. It must be true, she thinks; Constantine knew Taikoen when he wrote this, and must have based all this on observation.
The hanged man lives in a world of erratic, distorted sense impressions. And Taikoen, the real man, died centuries ago. How, Aiah wonders, does he see the world now?
Presumably it takes the ice man a period of time to realize that the old pleasures are no longer there. The ice man at first may be gratified at being rid of the irritations and demands of the body. He can create an artificial sensorium and stimulate it as he wishes. The distortion of perception may not be at first apparent.
But when the realization comes, it must be devastating. The body, the center of perception, no longer exists. Perceptions are growing distorted, even deranged. Even self-stimulation may prove futile, as the ice man, lost in the transphysical plasm well, begins to forget even the nature of pleasure. The ice man may well grow desperate.
Constantine goes on to discuss the phenomenon of possession in some detail, explaining it, after numerous scholarly digressions, as a desperate attempt by the ice man to regain the sense perceptions that had once made him human.
Aiah turns the page, reads Constantine’s conclusion. A metallic taste tingles along her tongue.
What are we, then, to say of the psyche of the ice man, a murderous creature of deranged perception, forever isolated from the humanity that nurtured him, so desperate for a return to a world of sensible appearances and pleasures that it will accept temporary humanity at the cost of a human life?
We now know which taxonomy is appropriate for this phenomenon. This creature that is at once powerful and diminished, ubiquitous and isolated, desperate and raging, deadly but impotent, possessed of being but not truly alive. Hanged man is not the appropriate name, nor ice man. The only appropriate name for this creature is our third choice—the damned.
The conditions in which the ice man exists are, in almost literal terms, hellish. Uncertain as to its own perceptions, its spirit isolated, all pleasures artificial and fading, its only companions either victims or exploiters, the situation of the ice man is a compound of desperation and exile. Although its victims deserve our sorrow, the creature itself—damned—deserves more than a share of our compassion. Given the horrifying conditions under which the ice man must exist, an end to its existence must be looked on not as a death, not even as justice, but as a release, an act of mercy.
Aiah looks down at the last plastic flimsy, at the bottom crowded with endnotes in tiny print, at the slight smear on one corner caused by an error in copying. Her nerves sing with the document’s strangeness.
Why, she wonders, did Constantine write this thing? Even though it is in a speculative style, it still betrays too much knowledge. Anyone who had ever had dealings with an actual ice man would look at this and know without doubt that Constantine was a secret brother…
Perhaps when Constantine wrote this he simply didn’t care—his first encounter with Taikoen had not come at an edifying point of his life—but Aiah senses there’s something else at work here. She looks again over the last paragraph.
… the creature itself deserves more than a share of our compassion.
She wonders if Constantine is trying to make her feel sympathy for the ice man—pity my friend,
