Robert Silverberg: In the House of Double Minds

Sleel makes a brief speech of welcome for my twelve, and the meal is served.

I send Galaine to Voree’s table with a note: “See me on the porch after dinner.”

My appetite is poor. I finish quickly, but I stay with my group until it is time to dismiss them. All the children troop off to the auditorium for a show. A warm drizzle is falling; Voree and I stand in the shelter of the eaves. She is much older than I am, a stocky woman with kinky orange hair. Year after year I pass my fledglings on to her. She is strong, efficient, stolid, insensitive. Runild baffles her. “He’s like a monkey,” she says. “Running around naked, chattering to himself, singing crazy songs, playing pranks. He isn’t doing his lessons. He isn’t even doing his disciplines, half the time. I’ve warned him he’ll be culled, but he doesn’t seem to care.”

“What do you think he wants?”

“To have everyone notice him.”

“Yes, surely, but why?”

“Because he’s a naturally mischievous boy,” Voree says, scowling. “I’ve seen many of his sort before. They think rules are for other people. Two more weeks of this and I’ll recommend a cull.”

“He’s too brilliant to waste like that, Voree.”

“He’s wasting himself. Without the disciplines how can he become an oracle? And he’s upsetting all the others. My group’s a shambles. Now he’s bothering yours. He won’t leave his sister alone either. Culling, Mimise, that’s where he’s heading. Culling.”

There is nothing to be gained from talking to Voree. I join my group in the auditorium.

Bedtime for the younger ones comes early. I see my children to their room; then I am free until midnight. I return to the auditorium, where the older children and the off-duty staff are relaxing, playing games, dancing, drifting off in couples. Kitrin, Runild’s sister, is still there. I draw her aside. She is a slender, delicate girl of fourteen, a fifth-year novice. I am fond of her because she was in my very first group, but I have always found her shy, elusive, opaque. She is more so than ever now: I question her about her brother’s behavior and she answers me with shrugs, vague unfinished sentences, and artful evasions. Runild is wild? Well, of course, many boys are wild, she says, especially the bright ones. The disciplines seem to bore him. He’s far ahead of his group—you know that, Mimise. And so on. I get nothing from her except the strong feeling that she is hiding something about her brother. My attempts to probe fail; Kitrin is still a child, but she is halfway to oraclehood, nearly, and that gives her an advantage over me in any duel of wits. Only when I suggest that Runild is in immediate peril of culling do I break through her defences.

“No!” she gasps, eyes widening in fear, cheeks turning pale. “They mustn’t! He has to stay! He’s going to be greater than any of them!”

“He’s causing too much trouble.”

“It’s just a thing he’s going through. He’ll settle down, I promise you that.”

“Voree doesn’t think so. She’s going to request a cull.”

“No. No. What will happen to him if he’s culled? He was meant to be an oracle. His whole life will have been thrown away. We have to save him, Mimise.”

“We can do that only if he can control himself.”

“I’ll talk to him in the morning,” Kitrin says.

I wonder what she knows about Runild that she does not want to tell me.

At the evening’s end I bring Jen to my chamber, as I do three or four nights a week. She is tall and supple and looks more than her fourteen years. Her counselor tells me she is moving well through her mid-novitiate and will be a splendid oracle. We lie together, lips to lips, breasts against breasts, and we stroke and caress and tickle one another, we smile with our eyes, we enter into all the rituals of love. Afterward, in the stillness that follows passion, she finds the bruise of this morning’s struggle on my thigh and questions me with a frown. “Runild,” I say. I tell her about his erratic behaviour, about Sleel’s uneasiness, about my conversation with Voree.

“They mustn’t cull him,” Jen says solemnly. “I know he’s troublesome. But the path he’s taking is so important for all of us.”

“Path? What path is that?”

“You don’t know?”

“I know nothing, Jen.”

She catches her breath, rolls away, studies me a moment. At length she says, “Runild sees into minds. When he puts his head very close to people, there’s transmission. Without using words. It’s—it’s a kind of broadcast. His Right can read the Rights of other oracles, the way you’d open a book and read it. If he could get close enough to Sleel, say, or any of them, he could read what’s in their Rights.”

“What?”

“More, Mimise. His own Right talks to his Left the same way. He can transmit messages completely, quickly, making better contact between the halves than any of the oracles can do. He hasn’t had the disciplines, even, and he has full access to his Right’s perceptions. So whatever his Right sees, including what it gets from the Rights of others, can be transmitted to his Left and expressed in words more clearly even than Sleel himself can do it!”

“I don’t believe this,” I say, barely comprehending.

“It’s true! It’s true, Mimise! He’s only just learning how, and it gets him terribly excited, it makes him wild, don’t you see, when all that contact comes flooding in? He can’t quite handle it yet, which is why he acts so strange. But once he gets his power under control—”

“How do you know anything about this, Jen?”

“Why, Kitrin told me.”

“Kitrin? I spoke to Kitrin and she never even hinted that—”

“Oh,” Jen says, looking pained. “Oh, I guess I wasn’t supposed to say. Not even to you, I guess. Oh, now I’ll be in trouble with Kitrin, and—”

“You won’t be. She doesn’t need to know how I found out. But—Jen, Jen, can this be? Can anyone have such powers?”

“Runild does.”

“So he claims. Or Kitrin claims on his behalf.”

“No,” Jen says firmly.”He does. They showed me, he and Kitrin. I felt him touch my mind. I felt him read me. He can read anyone. He can read you, Mimise.”

I must speak with Runild. But carefully, carefully, everything in its proper moment. In the morning I must first meet with my group and take them through the second-day exercises. These are designed to demonstrate that their Rights, although mute and presently isolated, are by no means inferior, and have perceptions and capabilities which in some ways are superior to those of their Lefts.

“Never think of your Right as a cripple,” I warn them. “See it, rather, as some kind of extremely intelligent animal—an animal that is sharp-witted, quick to respond, imaginative, with only one flaw, that it has no vocabulary and is never going to be able to acquire more than a few simple words at best. Nobody pities a tiger or an eagle because it doesn’t know how to speak. And there are ways of training tigers and eagles so that we can communicate with them without using words.”

I flash a picture of a house on the screen and ask the children to copy it, first using their left hands, then the right. Although they are all right-handed, they are unable to draw anything better than simple, crude two-dimensional representations with their right hands. Their left-handed drawings, while shakily drawn because of their left arms’ relatively backward muscular development and motor control, show a full understanding of the techniques of perspective. The right hand has the physical skill, but it is the left, drawing on the vision of the brain’s right hemisphere, that has the artistic ability.