Then perhaps he was not dead, as he had thought.
Carefully, stumbling—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 erecting 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 switch in his hand, his feet, a sort of display of lights on a strangely circular board.
The lights flickered and changed their pattern.
Without thinking, he moved a switch. Why? Because it was right to move that switch. When a certain light flared green, a certain switch had to be thrown. Why? Well, when a certain light flared green, a certain switch—
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—well, 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, that 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. After a moment’s thought, he 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.
I appear, thought Tropile crazily, to be a sort of eight-branched snowflake. Each of my branches is a human body.
He stirred, and added another datum: I appear also to be in a tank of fluid and yet I do not drown.
There were certain deductions to be made from that. Either someone—the Pyramids?—had done something to his lungs, or else the fluid was as good an oxygenating medium as air. Or both.
Suddenly a burst of data-lights twinkled on the board below him. Instantly and involuntarily, his sixteen hands began working the switches, transmitting complex directions in a lightninglike stream of on-off clicks.
Tropile relaxed and let it happen. He had no choice; the power that made it right to respond to the board made it impossible for his brain to concentrate while the response was going on. Perhaps, he thought drowsily, he would never have awakened at all if it had not been for the long period with no lights. …
But he was awake. And his consciousness began to explore as the task ended.
He had had an opportunity to understand something of what was happening. He understood that he was now a part of something larger than himself, beyond doubt something which served and belonged to the Pyramids. His single brain not being large enough for the job, seven others had been hooked in with it.
But where were their personalities?
Gone, he supposed; presumably they had been Citizens. Sons of the Wolf did not Meditate and therefore were not Translated—except for himself, he corrected wryly, remembering the Meditation on Rainclouds that had led him to—
No, wait!
Not Rainclouds but Water!
Tropile caught hold of himself and forced his mind to retrace that thought. He remembered the Raincloud Meditation. It had been prompted by a particularly noble cumulus of the Ancient Ship type.
And this was odd. Tropile had never been deeply interested in Rainclouds, had never known even the secondary classifications of Raincloud types. And he knew that the Ancient Ship was of the fourth order of categories.
It was a false memory.
It was not his.
Therefore, logically, it was someone else’s memory; and being available to his own mind, as the fourteen other hands and eyes were available, it must belong to—another branch of the snowflake.
He turned his eyes down and tried to see which of the branches was his old body. He found it quickly, with growing excitement. There was the left great toe of his body. He had injured
