Robert Silverberg: To Live Again

Unless, he thought she regarded him as the sort of man who was lured with such tactics.

The episode had jangled his nerves. She was a handsome woman, yes, well up to advance word; no doubt it would have been an interesting hour or two in bed for him. But Roditis had enough handsome women to keep him busy for centuries. This was one he would not touch, though she had the beauty of Helen of Troy. He was unwilling to push Mark Kaufmann too far. He was about to get his uncle’s persona; he would not try to take his woman too. Once the elder Kaufmann was safe in Roditis’ brain, he planned to strike a truce with Mark; and it would be much harder to arrange that if Elena Volterra were in the picture too.

Of course, Roditis conceded, he had just made an undying enemy out of Elena. Hell hath no fury, etc. That could have its strategic uses too, though. What was Elena, anyway? A bed-hopper, a gossip, a seeker of vicarious power, an animated bundle of desires and greedy ambitions, a fleshy construct of breasts and buttocks and thighs and loins. Mark Kaufmann, who controlled real power, had not been able to harm him; what damage could Elena do?

She might succeed only in forging a Roditis-Kaufmann alliance. If she screamed loudly enough to Mark about the “insult” visited upon her, it might just give Mark the idea that John Roditis didn’t mean to grab everything within his reach. And that could be the beginning of the Kaufmann-Roditis dйtente that Roditis saw as the key to major power expansion.

So let her do her wont, Roditis thought. There’s no way the slut can hurt me. None! Noyes, crouching in darkness, was amazed to find light lancing through. Sudden brightness from above told him that the lid which had been crushing down on him was cracking. He stirred; he tested his strength and found that he could lift the lid.

What was happening? Why was Kravchenko losing control? For an uncertain and perhaps infinite span of time Noyes had lain huddled in a corner of his own mind, Kravchenko’s prisoner. No sensory inputs had reached him here. He was wholly cut off; and he had assumed that eventually Kravchenko would bear down and finish the job of destroying him. First came ejection from motor control, and then loss of the voluntary brain centers, and finally the ripping away of all contacts, so that the dybbuk would be alone in the body they had formerly shared. Bleakly Noyes had awaited his fate. He could not comprehend the turn of events; but quite plainly Kravchenko’s grasp had slipped.

Noyes burst from confinement and flooded back into every lobe of his brain.

He encountered Kravchenko. The persona seemed dazed and helpless, lost in a fog. It was an easy matter for Noyes to recapture motor and sensory power from him.

He let his eyelids flutter open and took stock. He found himself lying on a laboratory table, with apparatus strapped to his skull and chest, and technicians bustling about him. “He’s coming out of it,” one of them said. Noyes thought at first that he was in a soul bank, but then he recognized his surroundings: this was Roditis’ place in Indiana. What had they been doing to his body at the moment of his unexpected return to control, though?

A technician said, “You look a little shaken up, Mr. Noyes. Everything all right?”

“I — well, more or less,” he said. He sat up. It was not difficult for him to operate his body, and that was encouraging; it told him that relatively little time had passed since Kravchenko had thrust him out. Tentatively he formed a theory that this was only the day after St. John’s discorporation. According to the plan, he was supposed to have returned to Evansville to have all knowledge of the crime blanked. Presumably that was what had been taking place in this laboratory.

But if I’ve been blanked, Noyes wondered, how is it that I still remember the discorporation?

He realized that he would have to move warily until he could draw some clues from those about him. Something very strange had taken place, and he had to be careful not to tip his hand.

Roditis entered the room, scowling, tense. He brightened as he saw Noyes, though, and said, “Well, Charles, how did it go?”

“F-fine,” Noyes said. “My ears are ringing just a little, maybe.”

“They say you sometimes have a hangover after something like that.” Roditis dismissed the technicians with an impatient wave of one hand. His face grew serious once more. In a low voice he said, “Have you heard the news, Charles? Martin St. John was discorporated last night in New York!”

So this was a test of how well he had been blanked. Noyes said, “St. John? St. John? I’m not sure I place the name.”

“An Englishman. The persona of Paul Kaufmann had been transplanted to him. You remember, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid I’m a little hazy about all that. Discorporated, you say? Do the quaestors have any clues?”

“I doubt it,” Roditis replied. “The poor quaestors are always three jumps behind the criminals. It’s so hard to enforce the law properly when a murderer can have all sense of guilt blotted from his mind, By the way, Charles, where’d you spend the night?”

He was caught off guard. Desperately improvising he said, “If you have to know, John, I was with a woman. I’ll give you the details if you wish, but a gentleman really doesn’t—”

Roditis chuckled. “No, a gentleman doesn’t. But she’s a hot one, isn’t she? Elena, I mean.” He slapped Noyes heartily on the back. “She’s waiting here in town. I’d like you to escort her back to New York right away, yes, Charles?”

“Whatever you say?”

“And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s exercise time.” Roditis went out. Noyes, relieved, paced around the room as he drew together the strands of the mystery. He had discorporated St. John, and then Elena and Kravchenko had teamed up to push him out of his mind. Noyes shuddered at the recollection. Afterwards, the dybbuk-Kravchenko and Elena had flown out here, with Kravchenko obviously masquerading as Noyes. That was how it must have been, Noyes decided. And, naturally, Roditis had wanted to blank the crime from Noyes’ mind.

But the blanking had gone awry. Noyes thought he understood why. A blanking was a simple thing, in its way, but only if no unknown factors fouled up the settings of the machine. Doubtless they had calibrated their dials for the brainwaves of Charles Noyes — and then had tried to blank the Noyes brain, unaware that they were really working on the mind of Jim Kravchenko. The clashing of Noyes’ brain waves with Kravchenko’s consciousness had driven the dybbuk into shock, permitting Noyes to resume control. But Noyes had not been blanked after all, since he had been cut off, beyond the reach of the instruments.

So I am a murderer and still unblanked, Noyes thought and I have won out over my own dybbuk, and Roditis is sending me back to New York with Elena. What do I do now? May all the Buddhas help me, what do I do now?

Mark Kaufmann spent much of Friday afternoon patiently tracking down leads in the hope of solving the double mystery of St. John’s discorporation and Elena’s disappearance. Through various channels he was able to gain access to a great deal of information normally available only to the investigators of the quaestorate. The world was full of scanners, monitors, and other data-recording devices that took down impartial, impersonal accounts of the comings and goings of individuals, and with luck and influence one could tap this ocean of data for one’s own needs. Not all the information received was immediately relevant, but Kaufmann sifted it searching out the patterns. He had a better-than-normal faculty for finding patterns in seemingly random data. And now he had the advantage of his uncle’s judicious, practiced eye to aid him in his examination.