He tried to feel the one particular body that led to that familiar toe.
He succeeded, though not easily. After a time, he became more aware of that body—somewhat as a neurotic may become “stomach conscious” or “heart conscious.” But this was no neurosis; it was an intentional exploration.
Since that worked, with some uneasiness he transferred his attention to another pair of feet and “thought” his way up from them.
It was embarrassing.
For the first time in his life, he knew what it felt like to have breasts. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was like to have one’s internal organs quite differently shaped and arranged, buttressed and stressed by different muscles. The very faint background feel of man’s internal arrangements, never questioned unless something goes wrong with them and they start to hurt, was not at all like the faint background feel that a woman has inside her.
And when he concentrated on that feel, it was no faint background to him. It was surprising and upsetting.
He withdrew his attention—hoping that he would be able to. Gratefully, he became conscious of his own body again. He was still himself if he chose to be.
Were the other seven still themselves?
He reached into his mind—all of it, all eight separate intelligences that were combined within him.
“Is anybody there?” he demanded.
No answer—or nothing he could recognize as an answer. He drove harder and there still was none. It was annoying. He resented it as bitterly, he remembered, as in the old days when he had first been learning the subtleties of Ruin Appreciation. There had been a Ruin Master, his name forgotten, who had been sometimes less than courteous, had driven hard—
Another false memory!
He withdrew and weighed it. Perhaps, he thought, that was a part of the answer. These people, these other seven, would not be driven. The attempt to call them back to consciousness would have to be delicate. When he drove hard, it was painful—he remembered the instant violent agony of his own awakening—and they reacted with anguish.
More gently, alert for vagrant “memories,” he combed the depths of the eightfold mind within him, reaching into the sleeping portions, touching, handling, sifting and associating, sorting. This memory of an old knife wound from an Amok—that was not the Raincloud woman; it was a man, very aged. This faint recollection of a childhood fear of drowning—was that she? It was; it fitted with this other recollection, the long detour on the road south toward the sun, around a river.
The Raincloud woman was the first to round out in his mind, and the first he communicated with. He was not surprised to find that, early in her life, she had feared that she might be Wolf.
He reached out for her. It was almost magic—knowing the “secret name” of a person, so that then he was yours to command. But the “secret name” was more than that. It was the gestalt of the person. It was the sum of all data and experience, never available to another person—until now.
With her memories arranged at last in his own mind, he thought persuasively: “Citizeness Alla Narova, will you awaken and speak with me?”
No answer—only a vague, troubled stirring.
Gently he persisted: “I know you well, Alla Narova. You sometimes thought you might be a Daughter of the Wolf, but never really believed it because you knew you loved your husband—and thought Wolves did not love. You loved Rainclouds, too. It was when you stood at Beachy Head and saw a great cumulus that you went into Meditation—”
And on and on, many times, coaxingly. Even so, it was not easy; but at last he began to reach her. Slowly she began to surface. Thoughts faintly sounded in his mind, like echoes at first, his own thoughts bouncing back at him, a sort of mental nod of agreement: “Yes, that is so.” Then—terror. With a shaking fear, a hysterical rush, Citizeness Alla Narova came violently up to full consciousness and to panic.
She was soundlessly screaming. The whole eight-branched figure quivered and twisted in its nutrient bath.
The terrible storm raged in Tropile’s own mind as fully as in hers—but he had the advantage of knowing what it was. He helped her. He fought it for the two of them … soothing, explaining, calming.
At last her branch of the snowflake-body retreated, sobbing for a spell. The storm was over.
He talked to her in his mind and she “listened.” She was incredulous, but there was no choice for her; she had to believe.
Exhausted and passive, she asked finally: “What can we do? I wish I were dead!”
He told her: “You were never a coward before. Remember, Alla Narova, I know you as nobody has ever known another human being before. That’s the way you will know me. As for what we can do—we must begin by waking the others, if we can.”
“If not?”
“If not,” Tropile replied grimly, “then we will think of something else.”
She was of tough stuff, he thought admiringly. When she had rested and absorbed things, her spirit was almost that of a Wolf; she had very nearly been right about herself.
Together they explored their twinned members. They found through them exactly what task was theirs to do. They found how the electrostatic harvesting scythe of the Pyramids was controlled, by and through them. They found what limitations there were and what freedoms they owned. They reached into the other petals of the snowflake, reached past the linked Components into the whole complex of electrostatic field generators and propulsion machinery, reached even past that into—
Into the great single function of the Pyramids that lay beyond.
XI
Haendl was on the ragged edge of breakdown, which was something new in his life.
It was full hot summer and the hidden colony of Wolves in Princeton should have been full of energy and life. The crops were growing on all the fields nearby; the
