Alice through the Looking Glass: a path that always turned back on itself, no matter how you struggled to reach your goal.
A concept from relativity: the twisting of space itself.
An image from a science fiction movie: a barrier of force glowing blue with brush-discharges.
A fragment of legend: a wall of magic fire enclosing the place where an enchanted maiden slept away the centuries.
So frightened by the mystery of what was happening that he could not tear himself away from it, Howson snatched these and other mental pictures from the minds of those engaged in the attempt to cure Phranakis. They were clues, no more; they were the personal labels that had been hung on catapathic grouping by people who found unlabelled concepts intolerable. Previously he had accepted Waldemar’s explanation. He hadn’t thought that the reality would be so far beyond preconception, the sun beside the moon, the continent beside the map.
He had probed the minds of conscious telepathists. There he had found the familiar world mirrored: law ruled the passage of event, solid was solid, the senses murmured their news of the body’s condition. But Phranakis had closed and locked every door to the ordinary world, and although there were windows — of one-way glass facing inward, so to say — what went on behind them was insane.
Knowing it, Howson wished with all his might for the will to resist such temptation. He saw his own fantasies paralleled in Phranakis’s — the hero-concepts, the organization of everything around his whim, so that nothing disturbed, nothing upset, nothing offended the all-wise master. Here the human will to power, checked in conscious telepathists by the deterrent of other people’s suffering, could find ghastly outlet. Already the sado-masochistic impulses Phranakis had so long detested were creeping from shadow and coloring the fantasy.
They were casting down captives from the Acropolis, that the city’s savior might the more enjoy his triumph to the music of their screams…
Abruptly the smooth course of the action was shattered. It was like an earthquake; buildings shivered, people wavered, the sky darkened. It lasted only a moment, but the impact was staggering. Howson’s contact was broken, and it was several minutes before he could resume it.
“She’s in,” the therapy watchdog reported, his face drawn by the strain into an inhuman mask. “A captive condemned to death. Trying to get the attention of the hero-ego.”
Singh nodded thoughtfully. “That figures. Fits the data we have on his sexual preferences. Any idea what the long-term plan is?”
“Fixed for a short distance,” the watchdog said. “Idea is: lure him to a sexual situation, rely on failing control to establish dominance…Three main sequences envisaged — want them?”
“If nothing more interesting is developing.”
“No.” The watchdog had to pause and swallow hard. “The captives are still being thrown off the rock. Well, either she’ll establish a quasi-real knife — under cover of a banquet, maybe — and castrate him publicly, or she’ll get him into a drunken stupor and establish a fire in the temple, which is why she wanted the material on the destruction of the Parthenon, or she’ll start picking off the reflectives and stage a slave revolt.”
Singh closed his eyes. After all his years of work as a doctor, he was still capable of being sickened at the cold-bloodedness of some of his and his colleagues” methods. What the public castration would do to Phranakis he dared not think — but it figured. If anything could blast him out of his fugue, that would. All the material on his sexual life pointed to the need to reassure himself about his masculinity. The real world had never threatened him with anything so horrible as what Ilse was preparing.
Howson was following developments better now. He had discovered the reason for the “earthquake” — some sort of electrical impulse had been applied to Phranakis’s organ of Funck, to make an opening for Ilse Kronstadt. Now it was much easier to eavesdrop; she made a link with normal consciousness. With fascinated disgust he came to comprehend her plans, and had to force himself to remember that unless something brutal jarred him out of his pleasant dream Phranakis was as good as dead, and along with him four valuable, hard-working non-telepathists whose precious individuality he had trampled on. In a sense he deserved what was coming. But — could anyone really deserve it?
“She’s getting very tired, the watchdog whispered, as though Ilse could overhear him. That was absurd — nothing could reach her now except the full violence of another telepathist. All her energy had been transmuted to will power as she altered, added to and undermined the pattern of Phranakis’s fantasy.
“Is the crisis close?” Singh muttered.
“She’s summoning up all her resources. Trying to distract him with sexual images while she fixes the knife — Oh, God!”
Everyone present, and Howson in his room high overhead, started at the moaning cry. Eyes rolling with terror, not seeing his surroundings but the fearful mental drama between Ilse and Phranakis, the watchdog gasped out the truth.
“She’s weakening! She’s losing control and he’s creating guards for himself — schizoids — an army of them! He’s made himself Cadmus and thrown down dragons” teeth and soldiers are springing from the floor !”
“Bring her back!” Singh cried, and knew even as he spoke that it was ridiculous. Someone — he didn’t bother to notice who — put the fact into words.
“If you try and wake her now she’ll leave half of herself behind. Pan. And she’d rather be dead than crippled.”
So this was how it felt to lose…
She was very tired. It was almost a relief to feel her imaginary self pinioned by the arms, unable to struggle any longer. There were soldiers all around her, huge men with swarthy faces and coarse beards, armored with bronze and leather. Like a forest they stretched away under the dim roof of the marble hall. There had been a banquet, and a thousand revelers — puppets, a human setting for the glory of the master she had attempted to overthrow.
Had there been a banquet? Already she was uncertain where illusion ended; there was actual pain from the brutal grasp on her arms, and that made it difficult to concentrate. The world wavered. She was — she was — a captive. Yes: a condemned enemy, spared by clemency, caught in treachery. And her sentence was fixed, without appeal, by her intended victim.
Death.
Justice! Approved the roar of a thousand voices, making her skull ring like the echoing marble roof, justice!
Well, then — defeat. But it was not so strange after all. Indeed, in a way she had been defeated in everything she had ever tried, for no single task — a flood of memory welled up—no single task had ever been completed.