Hands on hips, she stood at the edge of the patio, looking down at the guests. Rod had emerged from the water and was talking to Noyes and the Loebs. Santoliquido and Elena, oddly, were off by themselves near the rocks where Risa had tried to seduce her cousin with so little success. Overhead, three huge brown pelicans wheeled and folded their wings, plummeting into the water to snatch up fish; they had been treated with adrenergic drugs, Risa knew, so they’d stay hungry all afternoon and stage a good show for the guests. Suddenly furious, Risa whirled and ran toward the small cottage, one of thirty behind the main house, where she was staying on this visit. She flung herself down on the bed, sobbing sulkily.
Minutes later the doorscreen announced a visitor. She looked up and saw Rod’s image.
“Come in,” she called.
The door slid open. He stepped in, sticking his feet into the vibrator to rid them of sand. “I’ve got the word on Noyes,” he said. “He’s not here on account of Roditis. He happened to drop in on Gloria and Dave just as they were leaving for the party, and they couldn’t get rid of him, so Gloria had to say, sure, get in the hopter with us, and here he is. Your father must be burning.”
“I’m not concerned with my father’s feelings just now,” Risa said thinly. “Or with Noyes. Or with Roditis. They can all go to hell.”
“Hey—”
Tears ebbed from her eyes. “And you can go there with them!”
“What’s wrong? What did I do?”
“It’s what you didn’t do,” Risa said.
Rod stared at her strangely. His eyes traveled the length of her body as though he had never seen her before. Risa trembled expectantly. It was almost time for lunch. But first—
His eyes met hers. Her gaze was steady. He nodded.
He stepped toward the bed.
Noyes thought his brain would melt under that hellish sun. He recited mantras of self-possession and liberation, dug his toes into the scorching sand, watched the nude and near-nude Kaufmanns, their friends, and relatives, flit by, and wished fervently that he were almost anywhere else. It was bad enough that Roditis had pitchforked him into this gathering where he was so little wanted; he also had to tolerate tropical heat, and that was beyond the call of duty. Would the protective cream really protect him? Or would he be parboiled by nightfall?
He felt Kravchenko’s jeers.
—Take it like a man, friend.
“Very amusing. But you won’t feel the sunburn.”
—That’s part of the business of being dead. You don’t feel the pain, you don’t feel the pleasure either. Say, say, say, what’s Santoliquido up to?
Noyes looked down the beach. He hadn’t noticed it, but his persona had; Santoliquido was deep in conversation with Elena Volterra. And Elena was known to be Mark Kaufmann’s mistress. In the midst of his discomfort Noyes analyzed this situation in terms of Roditis’ needs. Was Elena at this moment doing a hatchet job on Roditis, filling the soul bank administrator’s receptive mind with reasons why the Paul Kaufmann persona should not go to him? Or, contrariwise, was Santoliquido attempting to bring Elena into his orbit while Mark was elsewhere? The first possibility held no promise of leverage, but the second did.
Trying to seem casual about it, Noyes edged toward the distant pair. That Elena was certainly a splendid woman, he thought: all that tawny flesh, so well tanned, so opulent, so nicely displayed. He suspected that Elena might easily look sloppy with her breasts unbound, and that if she gained another five pounds her ampleness would turn to grossness. But as she was, she was quite attractive. And Santoliquido’s sensual tastes, Noyes realized, inclined toward women of Elena’s sort, Latin and statuesque. It would be quite useful to Roditis’ cause if Santo worked himself into some kind of compromising position with Elena this weekend.
He got no closer than a hundred yards—still beyond lip-reading range. Then a robot carrying trays of refreshments rolled across his path, and, as he turned to help himself, Noyes was intercepted by a short, gushing woman with golden eyes and an aggressively jutting chin. “Charles,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in a thousand years. Come meet my new husband!”
He sorted through foggy family memories. She was an Adams, yes, that was clear, and she had attended his sister’s wedding to David Loeb, and he remembered dimly that she had been married for a while to one of the Schiffs. He smiled uncertainly.
“You don’t remember me?” she asked.
“It’s been a long time—Donna, Donna Adams, is it?”
“Donna’s my sister. I’m Rowena. How could you forget a name like that? You should take your memory drugs more often, Charles. I don’t believe I’ll ever forget the way you carried on at Gloria’s wedding! You—”
“I didn’t catch your married name now,” Noyes cut in quickly.
“Owens. Yes, you were going to meet my husband. Nathaniel Owens. He’s right over here. A most extraordinary man. Can you imagine it, Charles, he carries seven personae! Seven!”
But he doesn’t carry them very well, Noyes decided a moment later, when he had been introduced to Nathaniel Owens. Owens was burly and barrel-chested, flaunting a thick mat of body hair as though perversely proud of its ugly coarseness, and his square, harsh-planed face looked as though it had been constructed from random components. He was about sixty, Noyes guessed. His eyes were black and not quite focused, and when he spoke his voice soared confusingly through an octave or more before settling on its pitch.
“My wife been telling you a lot of nonsense about us?” Owens demanded truculently.
“Not at all. She simply said you’re carrying seven personae.”
Owens blinked and twitched. “Damned right I am! You see anything wrong with that?”
“If you can handle the strain—”
“He can handle anything, chum,” Owens said in a strangely altered voice, a basso growl. “He’s the original übermensch. You just have to ask and he’ll tell you.”
Noyes was still attempting to understand why Owens had suddenly spoken of himself in the third person when Owens blurted in a much higher voice, “Shut your goddam mouth!”
“It’s your goddam mouth I’m talking through,” came the deeper voice.
“Our mouth, you sniveling idiot!” It was a third voice, bland, silky. “We’re all in this cage together!”
Noyes realized, stunned, that Owens’ personae had seized control of the man and were carrying on an argument through his vocal apparatus. Owens himself stood stupefied, long arms dangling at his sides, shoulders lifting and hitching in oddly automatic motions. His eyes rolled. His wife, seeing what had happened, grabbed a drink from a roboservitor’s tray and plunged it, dagger-fashion, against Owens’ thick-muscled arm. His twisting facial muscles subsided. He looked abashed.
“Nathaniel hasn’t had much sleep lately,” Rowena Owens explained to the little group that had gathered. “Sometimes he finds it difficult to exert the proper authority when he’s tired. Feeling better now, darling?”
“I’m all right, yes,” Owens said. “I’m in full command again.” His voice was neutral; he had ceased to twitch.
Noyes stared, stricken with horror. It seemed to him that he saw his own fate mirrored in Owens’ eyes. The man’s personae had for the moment ejected him from control of his body and had transformed him into a prisoner in his own skull, assailed by dybbuks. Just as James Kravchenko ceaselessly attempted to do to him. Kravchenko had not yet succeeded even in grabbing the power of vocalization; when he spoke, it was still only an inward murmur. But he was trying all the while. It did not soothe Noyes to reflect that he had merely the problem of keeping one persona under control, while Owens wrestled with a whole team of them.
Owens took Noyes’ shocked silence for disapproval, evidently. He said with belligerence, “What’s the matter? Don’t you believe in Scheffing transplant?”
“Well, I—”
“I know. You’re one of the Erasure people. You feel it’s all an evil, sinister manifestation of cultural decay,
and you want all the personae rubbed out. Right? And here I stand with seven of them under my roof, and to you I’m the embodiment of Satan. Right? Right?”
“It isn’t that way at all,” Noyes murmured.
“As a matter of fact, my brother isn’t part of the Erasure group in the least. Are you, Charles?” Gloria had appeared from somewhere and now stood at Owens’ elbow, looking fair and lovely, as much a willowy girl as she had been on her wedding day.
“Of course not,” Noyes managed to say. “I’ve got a persona myself, you know. What gives you the idea I’m against transplant?”
Owens looked mollified. “I suppose I leaped to the conclusion. You know, there are so many of me that I tend to make snap judgments. We assess the evidence as a team, and sometimes we assess it too fast.” He thrust out his hand. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Charles Noyes. I’m with Roditis Securities.”
“Oh. Yes. Sure.” The hand enfolded his. Just as contact was made, Owens twitched again, and a kind of convulsion ran the length of his arm, forcing him to pull his hand back. Noyes watched uncomfortably as the spasm traveled down the entire right side of Owens’ body.
Gloria said quickly, “Charles is also an authority on Buddhist reincarnation theory. He and Mr. Roditis have just returned from a pilgrimage to the lamasery in San Francisco. He—”
“You believe in that crap?” Owens asked.
Noyes faltered, astonished by the hairy man’s capacity for starting trouble. Rowena Owens bit her lip. As quietly as he could, Noyes said, “I think the teachings form a valuable guide to existence in a world where reincarnation is a practical fact. We must know the art of dying if we’re to master the art of living.”
“I say it’s crap,” Owens repeated loudly. “It’s an artificial movement grafted onto a materialistic society for reasons of guilt. Those of us who take part in the transplant program are set apart from ordinary humanity, from the clods, if you like, and because in effect we’ve become immortal we need to console ourselves with a new religion. So we’ve borrowed this prayer-wheel garbage from the Himalayas, only we’ve turned it upside down, since in its original form it’s inapplicable to our society. It—”
“You sound a little like Mr. Roditis now,” Noyes began. “He—”
“Let me finish! The whole idea of the Buddhists is to break the chain of incarnations and go off to nirvana, isn’t it? Born no more? And our whole idea is to grab as many incarnations as possible, down through the centuries. For us, good karma leads to rebirth. Is that Buddhism? That’s a perversion of Buddhism! I know. I’ve got a guru right here inside me, one of the best, a real theologian. Murtaugh, from the Baltimore group. You know of him?”
Awed, Noyes said, “Why, of course. He wrote The Art of Right Dying.”
“And he died right himself, and I got him! So you better not argue theology with me. I’ve got it straight from the source, Noyes. Om mani padme hum. And I know how cynical the entire movement is. I’ve got collective karma.” Owens twitched again. He was losing control once more. “I tell you, only a tired persona wants off the wheel of sangsara. The rest of us hunger to go round and round and round again. We—” A scabrous obscenity slipped from Owens’ lips. He paused, astonished, and hammered his fist against his left cheekbone. He trembled.
It was sickening to watch him being pulled apart this way.
Recovering, Owens said, “Sometimes it’s difficult to hang on to the reins.”
“Why did you set such a challenge for yourself?” Noyes asked. “Seven transplants—”
“Actually, only four transplants,” Owens said. “Murtaugh’s persona brought two transplants of his own along, and one of my others already had one. Three hitchhikers, four transplants. Quite a crowd. Quite. A. Crowd.”
Noyes understood. Such hitchhikers were known as secondary personae: those that existed as part of the recording of someone subsequently transplanted to another person. The problem of the secondary personae was becoming acute, now that the Scheffing process was more than a generation old. Everyone who carried a persona in addition to his own now handed it on when he was recorded, and some of these crowded minds were being picked up by recipients. In another few years, virtually every transplant would bring the recipient two or three secondary personae for each primary one. Then every transplant would create a babbling mob within the brain, even though the secondary personae were much less vivid than primaries.
There were ways around it, Noyes knew. The simplest was to accept as a transplant only a persona with no secondaries attached, as he had done. Kravchenko had not gone in for the Scheffing process until quite recently, and the recording of him that had been on file at his death had been made before the transplant, so it included no trace of Kravchenko’s inherited persona. But of course that method soon would be impossible, since everyone took a transplant young these days, and incorporated the persona in his earliest records.
Another way was to have any secondaries deleted from the persona before adopting it. The erased secondaries thus went back into the soul bank and could be rerecorded as primaries for new recipients. Noyes preferred that idea. However, personae meant prestige, and multiple personae meant multiple prestige. People nowadays seemed to want to clutter their minds. When one took on a transplant, one desired to take that persona’s whole package of secondaries, thus getting the full benefit of the transplanted soul in all its complexity.
Which was fine if one could handle it, Noyes thought. But it would be instructive for each potential transplantee to spend five minutes with Nathaniel Owens and find out what it was like to be too greedy.
“—it might be better if none of this transplanting business had ever begun,” David Loeb was saying. “And no, I don’t believe in erasure either. I’ve got my personae too. But still—”
“It’s our salvation. It’s our hope of immortality.” That was Owens, speaking in one of his milder voices. “I’ve recorded myself with this entire tribe of passengers, and I look forward to my next turn on the cycle, in another body, when—”
“Nat! Your arm!” Rowena yelped.
As he spoke, his left arm had reached out in seeming independence of his body to seize Gloria Loeb’s thigh. Gloria winced as the stubby fingers dug in. Owens blurted something apologetic, but did not let go. David Loeb and Noyes went to the rescue simultaneously; Noyes grasped Owens’ wrist, and his brother-in-law pried at Owens’ fingers. The hand came away. Purpling blotches appeared on Gloria’s pale flesh.
Owens did not seem to comprehend what he had done. There was a long moment of silence while this group of well-bred people struggled to find a well-bred way of covering the gaffe. Owens solved the problem himself. He said hoarsely, “I think I better go swimming now. Work off this charge of energy and get everything in order.”
He ran down toward the water, a lumbering, clumsily powerful figure, stumbling once as some subsidiary persona fought him for control even while he ran. But he managed to hit the water in a smooth dive. Head down, arms pinwheeling, he swam like a torpedo out to the reef.
Noyes closed his eyes. The sun suddenly seemed immense over his head, a great molten ball, dripping flame. Within him Kravchenko sounded his silent mocking laughter.
—Take a good look, Charlie. That’s what I’m going to do to you one of these days. I don’t need six pals to push you aside. I’ll do it myself.
Noyes turned away from the others. In order to speak directly to Kravchenko he had to vocalize his words, and he did not want anyone aware that he was talking to himself. He murmured, “You won’t get away with it. The instant you start trouble I’ll kill both of us, Kravchenko.”
—Ah. The carniphage threat again. Where’s the flask, Charlie? In your swimsuit?
“Let me alone.”
—Why don’t we go over and talk to Elena? There’s a woman! You’re hungry for her, and I’ll sit back and watch. I knew her when I was carnate. She wasn’t Kaufmann’s mistress then. Elena and I can reminisce. Put me in control
, Charlie, and I’ll seduce her for you.
“Stop it!”
—That would be a good deal for both of us. I’ll make Elena, and your body will enjoy the fun.
Noyes shivered. Instead of threatening, Kravchenko now sought to tempt; but the goal was the same. It might happen at any time: the persona winning command of the shared body, even a countererasure that would wipe Noyes out entirely and leave Kravchenko in undisputed possession, a dybbuk. That was the true rebirth: to take over your host, to have a body of your own again, to walk in the world, freely sampling the sensory intake. Noyes was determined not to have Kravchenko victimize him in that way.
The sun was turning into a flask of carniphage.
Reach up, Noyes thought. Grab it, bite on it. Show him a thing or two.
Trails of sweat ran down his body. He felt his skin puckering and blistering, his bones beginning to melt into rubber. People looked at him worriedly as he swayed. Smiling, bowing, Noyes grinned at his sister, at Elena, at Rowena Owens. I’m all right. Perfectly all right. Maybe a touch of the sun, but nothing serious, quite all right, no need for fear.
Someone screamed.
Noyes thought at first that they were screaming about him, that in his weakened state he had collapsed or split apart or melted or seized the sun. But no, he was still on his feet, and no one was looking at him. They were all pointing toward the water. With colossal effort he swung himself around to see what the matter was.
“He’s out of control!” Rowena Owens cried. “Help him, somebody, help him!”
Noyes saw that Nathaniel Owens had reached the reef, swimming to that patch of brownish coral a hundred yards off shore that lay just beneath the surface and broke it to jut up in several places. And there, the warring, incompatible personae within him had rebelled. Now Owens thrashed and leaped about on the reef like a hooked tarpon, flying from the water, smashing down on the razor-keen coral, kicking his legs in the air, vanishing from sight for a moment, then erupting again to crash into another part of the reef. Already long red gashes streaked his skin. Again and again he flung himself at the reef, now mounting one strip of it and doing a wild, frenzied dance along its upper rim.