The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (73 page)

“Yes,” he said, “we might do a paper on canine neuroses. Does he ever refer to his father as ‘that son of a female Shepherd’?”

“He never met his father,” she said, quite soberly. “He was raised apart from other dogs. His attitude could hardly be typical. I don’t think you’ll ever learn the
functional psychology of the dog from a mutie.”

“I imagine you’re right,” he dismissed it. “More coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

Deciding it was time to continue the discussion, he said, “So you want to be a Shaper . . .”

“Yes.”

“I hate to be the one to destroy anybody’s high ambitions,” he told her. “Like poison, I hate it. Unless they have no foundation at all in reality. Then I can be
ruthless. So – honestly, frankly, and in all sincerity, I do not see how it could ever be managed. Perhaps you’re a fine psychiatrist – but in my opinion, it is a physical and
mental impossibility for you ever to become a neuroparticipant. As for my reasons – ”

“Wait,” she said. “Not here, please. Humor me. I’m tired of this stuffy place – take me somewhere else to talk. I think I might be able to convince you there
is
a way.”

“Why not?” he shrugged. “I have plenty of time. Sure – you call it. Where?”

“Blindspin?”

He suppressed an unwilling chuckle at the expression, but she laughed aloud.

“Fine,” he said, “but I’m still thirsty.”

A bottle of champagne was tallied and he signed the check despite her protests. It arrived in a colorful “Drink While You Drive” basket, and they stood then, and she was tall, but he
was taller.

Blindspin.

A single name of a multitude of practices centered about the auto-driven auto. Flashing across the country in the sure hands of an invisible chauffeur, windows all opaque, night dark, sky high,
tires assailing the road below like four phantom buzzsaws – and starting from scratch and ending in the same place, and never knowing where you are going or where you have been – it is
possible, for a moment, to kindle some feeling of individuality in the coldest brainpan, to produce a momentary awareness of self by virtue of an apartness from all but a sense of motion. This is
because movement through darkness is the ultimate abstraction of life itself – at least that’s what one of the Vital Comedians said, and everybody in the place laughed.

Actually, now, the phenomenon known as blindspin first became prevalent (as might be suspected) among certain younger members of the community, when monitored highways deprived them of the means
to exercise their automobiles in some of the more individualistic ways which had come to be frowned upon by the National Traffic Control Authority. Something had to be done.

It was.

The first, disastrous reaction involved the simple engineering feat of disconnecting the broadcast control unit after one had entered onto a monitored highway. This resulted in the car’s
vanishing from the ken of the monitor and passing back into the control of its occupants. Jealous as a deity, a monitor will not tolerate that which denies its programmed omniscience: it will
thunder and lightning in the Highway Control Station nearest the point of last contact, sending winged seraphs in search of that which has slipped from sight.

Often, however, this was too late in happening, for the roads are many and well-paved. Escape from detection was, at first, relatively easy to achieve.

Other vehicles, though, necessarily behave as if a rebel has no actual existence. Its presence cannot be allowed for.

Boxed-in on a heavily traveled section of roadway, the offender is subject to immediate annihilation in the event of any overall speedup or shift in traffic pattern which involves movement
through his theoretically vacant position. This, in the early days of monitor-controls, caused a rapid series of collisions. Monitoring devices later became far more sophisticated, and mechanized
cutoffs reduced the collision incidence subsequent to such an action. The quality of the pulpefactions and contusions which did occur, however, remained unaltered.

The next reaction was based on a thing which had been overlooked because it was obvious. The monitors took people where they wanted to go only because people told them they wanted to go there. A
person pressing a random series of coordinates, without reference to any map, would either be left with a stalled automobile and a “RECHECK YOUR COORDINATES” light, or would suddenly be
whisked away in any direction. The latter possesses a certain romantic appeal in that it offers speed, unexpected sights, and free hands. Also, it is perfectly legal; and it is possible to navigate
all over two continents in this manner, if one is possessed of sufficient wherewithal and gluteal stamina.

As is the case in all such matters, the practice diffused upwards through the age brackets. School teachers who only drove on Sundays fell into disrepute as selling points for used autos. Such
is the way a world ends, said the entertainer.

End or no, the car designed to move on monitored highways is a mobile efficiency unit, complete with latrine, cupboard, refrigerator compartment and gaming table. It also sleeps two with ease
and four with some crowding. On occasion, three can be a real crowd.

Render drove out of the dome and into the marginal aisle. He halted the car.

“Want to jab some coordinates?” he asked.

“You do it. My fingers know too many.”

Render punched random buttons. The Spinner moved onto the highway. Render asked speed of the vehicle then, and it moved into the high-acceleration lane.

The Spinner’s lights burnt holes in the darkness. The city backed away fast; it was a smouldering bonfire on both sides of the road, stirred by sudden gusts of wind, hidden by white
swirlings, obscured by the steady fall of gray ash. Render knew his speed was only about sixty percent of what it would have been on a clear, dry night.

He did not blank the windows, but leaned back and stared out through them. Eileen “looked” ahead into what light there was. Neither of them said anything for ten or fifteen
minutes.

The city shrank to sub-city as they sped on. After a time, short sections of open road began to appear.

“Tell me what it looks like outside,” she said.

“Why didn’t you ask me to describe your dinner, or the suit of armor beside our table?”

“Because I tasted one and felt the other. This is different.”

“There is snow falling outside. Take it away and what you have left is black.”

“What else?”

“There is slush on the road. When it starts to freeze, traffic will drop to a crawl unless we outrun this storm. The slush looks like an old, dark syrup, just starting to get sugary on
top.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s it, lady.”

“Is it snowing harder or less hard than when we left the club?”

“Harder, I should say.”

“Would you pour me a drink?” she asked him.

“Certainly.”

They turned their seats inward and Render raised the table. He fetched two glasses from the cupboard.

“Your health,” said Render, after he had poured.

“Here’s looking at you.”

Render downed his drink. She sipped hers. He waited for her next comment. He knew that two cannot play at the Socratic game, and he expected more questions before she said what she wanted to
say.

She said: “What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?”

Yes, he decided, he had guessed correctly.

He replied without hesitation: “The sinking of Atlantis.”

“I was serious.”

“So was I.”

“Would you care to elaborate?”

“I sank Atlantis,” he said, “personally.

“It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies. There were bridges of opal, and crimson pendants, and a milk-white
river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu, as delicately
constructed as musical instruments, all swaying with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the dozen-pillared Colliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Greek tenor saxophonist play
at sunset.

“The Greek, of course, was a patient of mine – paranoiac. The etiology of the thing is rather complicated, but that’s what I wandered into inside his mind. I gave him free rein
for a while, and in the end I had to split Atlantis in half and sink it full fathom five. He’s playing again and you’ve doubtless heard his sounds, if you like such sounds at all.
He’s good. I still see him periodically, but he is no longer the last descendent of the greatest minstrel of Atlantis. He’s just a fine, late twentieth-century saxman.

“Sometimes though, as I look back on the apocalypse I worked within his vision of grandeur, I experience a fleeting sense of lost beauty – because, for a single moment, his
abnormally intense feelings were my feelings, and he felt that his dream was the most beautiful thing in the world.”

He refilled their glasses.

“That wasn’t exactly what I meant,” she said.

“I know.”

“I meant something real.”

“It was more real than real, I assure you.”

“I don’t doubt it, but . . .”

“ – But I destroyed the foundation you were laying for your argument. Okay, I apologize. I’ll hand it back to you. Here’s something that could be real:

“We are moving along the edge of a great bowl of sand,” he said. “Into it, the snow is gently drifting. In the spring the snow will melt, the waters will run down into the
earth, or be evaporated away by the heat of the sun. Then only the sand will remain. Nothing grows in the sand, except for an occasional cactus. Nothing lives here but snakes, a few birds, insects,
burrowing things, and a wandering coyote or two. In the afternoon these things will look for shade. Any place where there’s an old fence post or a rock or a skull or a cactus to block out the
sun, there you will witness life cowering before the elements. But the colors are beyond belief, and the elements are more lovely, almost, than the things they destroy.”

“There is no such place near here,” she said.

“If I say it, then there is. Isn’t there? I’ve seen it.”

“Yes . . . you’re right.”

“And it doesn’t matter if it’s a painting by a woman named O’Keefe, or something right outside our window, does it? If I’ve seen it?”

“I acknowledge the truth of the diagnosis,” she said. “Do you want to speak it for me?”

“No, go ahead.”

He refilled the small glasses once more.

“The damage is in my eyes,” she told him, “not my brain.”

He lit her cigarette.

“I can see with other eyes if I can enter other brains.”

He lit his own cigarette.

“Neuroparticipation is based upon the fact that two nervous systems can share the same impulses, the same fantasies . . .”

“
Controlled
fantasies.”

“I could perform therapy and at the same time experience genuine visual impressions.”

“No,” said Render.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be cut off from a whole area of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can experience something you can never know – and that he cannot
appreciate it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court of biological happenstance, in a place where there is no justice – only fortuity, pure and simple.”

“The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.”

“I’m not asking the universe to help me – I’m asking you.”

“I’m sorry,” said Render.

“Why won’t you help me?”

“At this moment you are demonstrating my main reason.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“Emotion. This thing means far too much to you. When the therapist is in-phase with a patient he is narcoelectrically removed from most of his own bodily sensations. This is necessary
– because his mind must be completely absorbed by the task at hand. It is also necessary that his emotions undergo a similar suspension. This, of course, is impossible in the one sense that a
person always emotes to some degree. But the therapist’s emotions are sublimated into a generalized feeling of exhilaration – or, as in my own case, into an artistic reverie. With you,
however, the ‘seeing’ would be too much. You would be in constant danger of losing control of the dream.”

“I disagree with you.”

“Of course you do. But the fact remains that you would be dealing, and dealing constantly, with the abnormal. The power of a neurosis is unimaginable to ninety-nine point et cetera percent
of the population, because we can never adequately judge the intensity of our own – let alone those of others, when we only see them from the outside. That is why no neuroparticipant will
ever undertake to treat a full-blown psychotic. The few pioneers in that area are all themselves in therapy today. It would be like diving into a maelstrom. If the therapist loses the upper hand in
an intense session, he becomes the Shaped rather than the Shaper. The synapses respond like a fission reaction when nervous impulses are artificially augmented. The transference effect is almost
instantaneous.

“I did an awful lot of skiing five years ago. This is because I was a claustrophobe. I had to run and it took me six months to beat the thing – all because of one tiny lapse that
occurred in a measureless fraction of an instant. I had to refer the patient to another therapist. And this was only a minor repercussion. – If you were to go gaga over the scenery, girl, you
could wind up in a rest home for life.”

She finished her drink and Render refilled the glass. The night raced by. They had left the city far behind them, and the road was open and clear. The darkness eased more and more of itself
between the falling flakes. The Spinner picked up speed.

“All right,” she admitted, “maybe you’re right. Still, though, I think you can help me.”

“How?” he asked.

“Accustom me to seeing, so that the images will lose their novelty, the emotions wear off. Accept me as a patient and rid me of my sight-anxiety. Then what you have said so far will cease
to apply. I will be able to undertake the training then, and give my full attention to therapy. I’ll be able to sublimate the sight-pleasure into something else.”