A Voyage To Dari Page 10

  I expostulated, “But where did you find the technology?”

  Hanoku spun to me, broadly spreading hands and arms. “We knew! We knew! Even those of us who had little fleet training, we knew how to use the tools on the ships! And when we felt strong enough, almost all of us rose off our islands and converged in a consensus battle plan on certain industrial enclaves on Moudjinn, and still we hold them for our strength—the Emperor has not been able to dislodge us.”

  Croyd put in, “Maybe also the feudality of Moudjinn was divided about strategy, so the Emperor could not raise a unified attack force?”

  Hanoku abruptly sat on a chair edge, grasped his knees, frowned down. “Sir, I know you are right: something has a hypnotic hold on us, and maybe that something is dividing Moudjinn. I think that we Darian pirates are guinea pigs for something—the gods know what. Because as soon as we were strong enough, some of us began to raid Sol Galaxy—the most ridiculous endeavor any pirate ever undertook: it had to be somebody’s experiment! And when my turn came—yes, my turn, because the conviction arose in me as though it had been put into me that it was my turn—I cannot begin to describe the ferocity of my joy.”

  Again he arose and paced, silently now. We waited.

  He paused. He said, low, “On that voyage I met Djeelian.”

  He meditated.

  He stood erect and about-faced toward us. “Mr. President, Governor, I really must depart for duty. I am sure the princess will be here presently. My regrets . . . it has been a pleasure.”

  Then, half-turning, he faced Croyd and stated with deliberate intensity, “Governor Croyd, it is possible that Princess Djeelian may ask you for a favor. Whatever she may ask, know that it is what I approve and fervently want.”

  Soft-saluting each of us, he departed.

  Croyd and I brooded.

  Croyd ventured, “If we can believe him—and I think we can—then I am damnably right.”

  I murmured, “If we can believe him—and I think we can—then he and Djeel have perhaps arranged that each of them should be here separately.” And I looked keenly at Croyd.

  The governor counterkeened, “What do you make of that?”

  “Nothing at all of that,” I rumbled. “What I do notice is that our good reasons for the metascience bull session have just been so mightily strengthened that this kind of talking has departed the realm of pure aesthetic pleasure and has thudded to the Erth of applicable speculation. And I seem to remember that we were just getting nicely started on the fundamentally pertinent mind-matter problem.”

  When Djeel entered, shortly after 2200, I was telling Croyd . . . seems to me you’re the first effective challenge to mind-matter fusionism in five centuries.” I broke off as I saw Croyd stand, glanced back to see Djeel, and arose—somewhat more easily than usual, she noticed. “Sit down, men,” she ordered; “I’ll mix my own drink.” She moved to Croyd’s bar (seeming to float, for some reason) and busied herself over bottles, listening to us.

  Croyd is a challenge to mind-matter fusionism? Not that he merely offers a challenge—but that he is one, in himself? Her ideas about the evening immediately ahead readjusted themselves. She had expected some gossipy philosophy, pleasant but as usual pointless, after which Djeel would find a way to get rid of old Tannen and to be alone with Croyd. But our words at her entry sharpened her; gossipy this conversation was not going to be!

  She illumined her facile mind for what she now sensed was coming: a ranging sweeping reconnaissance of space, matter, time, and mind; a swinging as vast, yet as fluidly off hand, as Croyd’s fabled personal space-time swinging. (And hadn’t she seen that happen, when he had leaped swiftly widening hundreds of kilometers from lifeboat to Castel and back?)

  As now, as, eagerly, she faced us two men with her exotic drink, Djeel was no longer certain that President Tannen was merely an amiable old man to be got rid of. One fragmentary sentence out of me had shaken that assumption; my mind too she now wanted to taste, and not only Croyd’s.

  Out of it could perhaps come the name of the curse on her Dari?

  Croyd had picked up my “challenge-to-fusionism” challenge. “You have to mean the modern doctrine that mind and matter are just two different ways of looking at the same events. I don’t question the concept, Tannen, I only question the belittling adverb just.”

  “Even that questioning you have to explain, Croyd. Otherwise you slip back into the dualism which divides all reality into two realms, mind and matter, and contends that the two are absolutely and totally different.”

  “That isn’t a necessary sideslip, Tannen, although as a working attitude dualism has its advantages until special problems arise.”

  “And your mind has special problems with matter.”

  “Precisely. And so, sooner or later, does every mind.”

  “Then if you aren’t a dualist, are you maybe saying that reality has three realms—hard eternal principles, and sleazy transient matter, and mediating mind-soul?” Here I paused, and with Croyd I stared at the weird-colored drink that Djeel (wearing a lemon-yellow blouse and royal-blue slacks with a scarlet side-trailing cummerbund) happily brought with her from the bar as she settled into the chair between us.

  (The Castel Jaloux was now well out into the meta-galactic fissure.)

  Croyd uttered, “What is it?”

  Djeel cooed, “Three realms. One-third zac, one-third Hennessey, one-third pineapple juice.”

  “If you can drink it,” I intoned, “Dari can’t be all bad.”

  Djeel downed half of it, went blue, frantically waved a hand, held out the drink; Croyd seized it; Djeel got her head down between her knees, and her wide-open mouth emitted a long whooooosh. Croyd debated whether to beat her back. I placidly beat her back. “Thanks,” Djeel gulped, and sat up, and leaned back, and breathed deeply for a few moments. Then, quieting, she held out a hand.

  Croyd inquired, “The drink?”

  She confirmed, “The drink.”

  He placed it in her hand. She sipped quietly, savoring it. She closed her eyes. “That,” she declared, “is a heavenly drink, a Dari-type drink. But I have a question. Why did I feel so light even before I drank it?”

  I told her, “I too feel light, blessed be He. Croyd has a gadget here; he has delicately lightened the gravity in this cabin to eight-tenths G. And while after all these years you may have forgotten, Djeel, that is approximately the gravity on your Dari.”

  She stared at Croyd, her lips mutely forming, “Thank you.” And she closed eyes again.

  Croyd remarked, “Perhaps I can do more to make you feel at home.” She heard him arise and go away. Then the room light that shone diffusely through her eyelids dimmed; and in her ears there arose and steadied a soft rhythmic background susurrus of surf.

  She opened eyes. The room illumination had dimmed to pale blue infused somehow with harvest-moon yellow (although no moon was visible).

  She breathed, “It is Dari.”

  Croyd, returning, smiled.

  We waited.

  She sipped. Presently she picked us up. “I am at home now on my Dari, I feel secure, I can afford to be mentally Western. Pray go on with the President’s three realms.”

  Whereupon we tore into the developing argument: pure theory, ultimate theory, sheerly for the delight of the high-speculative idea-play (what do they talk about, in that momentary halt in the tavern? of the eternal questions) and the equal delight of the three-way rapier-fencing mind-to-mind, with each one’s fencing style more personality-revealing than handwriting is.

  None of us could know that a personification of Croyd’s theory had already possessed Dari and was about to take, cold possession of all of us.

  I attacked sharply. “Well, eh? Is that your cop-out, Croyd? Not a fusionist, not a dualist, but a treblist?”

  He countered, “Let me tell you what I know. I am talking now about personal experience.”

  Djeel interjected, “Experience with your celebrated special powers?”

&nb
sp; “The celebration I do not know about; the powers I have taught myself, and them I feel. I know what this is from what I have done—and what I have felt as I have done it. My mind is more or less conscious action agent. All of my body is that, but the action-agent field that is generated between the diencephalon and telencephalon of my brain is so very consciously recipient and agent, so selectively so, that there is just no comparison between it and the rest. And I am wholly human, within the slightly broadened category of humanity that includes Tannen’s Homo sapiens and Djeel’s Meria melans and my own croyd Thoth; and I see no reason why I should not generalize my own self-knowledge into reasonable assurance that all others who are human are like this or can be like this. And whenever someone has graciously invited me into his mind, experience has confirmed my expectation.”

  Djeel challenged, “My friend Croyd, are you trying to tell me that your mind is not in your toes when I tramp on them?”

  He retorted, “I am saying that the mind in the brain interprets toe signals in the brain exactly as though they were toes. And the mind in the forebrain wiggles toe activators, and toes wiggle, and the mind in the brain sees them wiggle and feels brain signals of their wiggling and realistically imagines that the feeling is direct. Oh, it is most efficient, most ingenious, Djeel—the nearly perfect servo-mechanism, that’s what a brained body is; but the tip-off comes when legs are amputated but the mind still feels toes, and the peak tip-off comes when the educated mind becomes self-conscious and declares its independence and turns around to control and educate its own brain. So when we speak of mind, we make no realistic sense unless we mean this mind in the brain; and when we say that the rest of the body is also mind, what instead we ought to be saying is that the rest of the body is mindstuff caught up in compulsive periodicity.”

  Djeel met his eyes. “Does Commandcom have a mind?”

  “Commandcom?”

  I helped. “The sexy computer on the lifeboat.”

  “Eh.” Croyd grinned. “Yes, I think she does.”

  The brows of Djeel were flat. “But how can she have? She’s only matter.”

  "She?”

  “Well, you said . . . ” The Djeel brows went all twisty. “Croyd, honest, me too she hit as a she. But isn’t that . . .

  “Not absurd at all. She doesn’t have to imply sex; more deeply, she implies a gender, a prevailing mental contexture of femininity—and not all females have it. And don’t ask me to describe it, I can’t, I just sort of sense it.” In Djeel he was sensing it, underlying and transcending her hard masculine debate.

  Djeel went studious. “So Commandcom is nothing but reonic matter, and she has no sex, but she’s a she, and she has a mind. What’s left for me to believe in?”

  I interposed, “Princess, your Darian ancestors attributed souls to sticks and stones and spears and arrows, and gave them names with gender inflections. Anyhow, you are nothing but rekamatic matter, but you have a mind and would you cease to be feminine if you . . .

  “Go on, Mr. President.”

  “. . . had your brain transplanted into a sexless robot?”

  “I am unprepared to argue this question of unsexed femininity. I wish to pursue the question of live mind bodied in dead matter.”

  Croyd wanted to know, “What is dead matter?”

  “Well, nonliving matter.”

  “I do not know of any nonliving matter, Djeel. The rekamatic components of Commandcom consist of atoms. So do your neurones, including several atoms of the same species as the Commandcom atoms.”

  “Since when are atoms alive?”

  “When were they ever dead?”

  “Maybe, Croyd, you’d better define death.”

  Croyd turned to me. “Mr. President?”

  I tugged at my nose. “I think that death is the irreversible breakdown of a specified organization so that the organization can no longer operate as itself. When that happens, its components continue to live until they break down irreversibly, and so on. That’s my idea of it. Criticism?”

  Djeel ruminated. “The way you put it, the chain is endless; ultimately there can’t be any death. All the way down to atoms, anyhow.”

  I coughed. “Of course, I am leaving out of the argument positions like those of Jesus and Maimonides.”

  “All right,” said Croyd, “we are keeping the argument materialistic, which means that we must know what matter is. Now, take atoms. An atom is a living whole organization; by Tannen’s definition, it dies only by breaking down into simpler whole organizations—or it loses identity by combining with other atoms or ions. So then the rekamatic components of Commandcom consist of atoms which are living beings. The total Commandcom computer is not, I admit, a living organization—it is only an artificially formed aggregate of living components.”

  Djeel thrust, “So we seem to be all the way back to live mind bodied in nonliving matter.”

  I inserted, “I think, Princess, not quite all the way back.”

  She swung on me. “Whose side are you on?”

  “At the moment, on the side of the metascientist who has shown that even if a mind were roosting on a rock, it would be roosting not on nonliving matter but on living atoms. But a rock a mind does not roost on, or anyhow, I don’t know any cases, so Croyd still has something to show.”

  She turned back to Croyd, who sat sprawl-kneed on an ottoman, head down, tapping his drinking glass with a fingernail tip. “We have then this supposed Commandcom mind roosting on an artificially formed aggregate of living components, although it would not roost on a rock. Tell me the difference.”

  “Djeel, now you are the one who sounds like a dualist.”

  "Shouldn’t everybody be?”

  He flashed her an appreciative smile. “To tell the truth, I’m one—functionally, that is: mind and matter behave as though they were different. But way down deep, I’m a mentalistic monist.”

  "What’s that?”

  “I’ll give you my version of it. Everything that is real is mindstuff, sentient agent, having the potential of becoming conscious under the right complex conditions. But most everything that we can notice has gone a simpler route: it is mindstuff, particles all strung up in zany reverberating circuits, and we call it matter. But when those circuits get sufficiently wire-wound in complex superganglia involving choice possibilities, this is a brain, and it extrudes a conscious field called mind, and this mind can transcend its own circuits and use them to be conscious and intuitive and creative.”

  Djeel stared, tossed off her drink, rose, and demanded “Drinks, gentlemen?”

  I said, “Zac and pineapple juice. No Hennessey.”

  Croyd said, “Zac roosting on rocks.”

  Taking our glasses, she commanded, “Keep talking, I am listening. It is good in a rare way to hear men talking about something long-range practical.” And she headed for the bar.

  H-Hour minus 1+:

  I demanded, “Why isn’t this, after all, mind-matter dualism?”

  Croyd worked at the phrasing. “There is a duality, but it is only functional. Consider all that raw metaspace out there. Tannen, Djeel, we are right now driving through the stuff that both matter and mind are made of—absolutely primitive and trivial subjective emphemerae of subjective events that spontaneously bubble and wearily unbubble and lose identity, leaving no trace, a languid-random champagning of lambent mindless localized emotility. And yet, out of that silly little stuff may randomly arise clusters of events, and they get caught into patterns, and these patterns are what we call matter, and they evolve into galaxies, and they evolve into life, and life evolves into mind. So matter is mindstuff caught in stupid unimaginative measurable repetitive patterns, and mind is mindstuff that uses these patterns—in a brain, with a body—to enlighten and free itself. It’s all the same, only different.”

  Djeel was returning carefully, two tall drinks wedged between her upper arms and breasts, a third short drink steadied in both hands. She stooped a little to let me extract my tall drink. She ha
nded Croyd his short drink; momentarily she traded gazes with him; then she settled into her chair, with a slight shiver removed her own tall cold drink from the body pocket between left arm and breast, and observed, “I’m glad you added that business about freeing oneself. Me, I like to think I’m an individualist.”

  “Is individualism,” I inquired, “a problem on your Dari?”

  “On Dari we don’t worry about these abstractions. We learn about the gods, have fun, and obey the lore.”

  “Is the lore fun?”

  “It is if you stay with it. And so are the gods. But if you goof, the gods and the lore are pretty awful.”

  I drawled, “Are you obeying the lore and the gods? I thought you were Westernized.”

  She shrugged tinily. “I translate all of it into Western idiom and keep on having my fun.”

  Croyd asked, “What’s your Dari idea of an individual?” She frowned. “I think an individual is somebody who finds a new way to do something without offending the gods or the lore to the point where he fails to survive.” She looked at him happily and semisecretively. “I’m an individual, but I’ll never tell you why.”

  I hazarded, “Because you add Hennessey to zac and pineapple juice, and you survive.”

  Djeel turned seriously to me. “I believe in the freedom of the individual mind. And if I respect our lore, it is because I have been away from our lore, and I have inspected it from far away, and I have freely chosen to return to it.”

  “I’d suggest”—Croyd ruminated—“that so far the individual mind hasn’t freed itself very much. It is still a prey to its emotions and habits, and the wellsprings of the emotions are glandular, while the habits are mechanistic. Even if you consider ours the freest minds of all—shall we consider ours three free minds?—how free are we?”