6
The sign in the entrance lobby was printed in bold white letters on a red background. It read: YOU ARE IN THE OFFICE OF LOLA BELMAN, LICENSED HALDANE. IF YOU THINK THAT YOU CAN BE HELPED, THEN YOU PROBABLY DON'T BELONG HERE.
The young man who fidgeted in the only chair had been staring at the sign for the past five minutes. Lola, observing him through a small pane of one-way glass, ran a final physical-response correlation, checked the drug levels in her own body, and decided that the time had come. If she didn't get started soon, she would need a booster. She closed the panel and turned her office over to Fourth-Level Fax response. It would handle most things and interrupt the session only for a real emergency.
She went through to the outer office and addressed the visitor for the first time. "Bryce Sonnenberg? I am Lola Belman. You can come with me now."
She read him as apprehensive, but not excessively so—nothing like some of the wretched mental messes who had shivered their way in to see Lola in the past ten months. In fact, most people would pass Bryce Sonnenberg on the street without giving him a second look.
She didn't assign significance to that. External appearances proved nothing. And he had come an awfully long way for a consultation.
"Sit down." Lola smiled and gestured to an easy chair covered in dark-brown suede. "Right there, if you please."
A lot of work had gone into that chair. It was designed to look normal, adjust to any angle, and feel comfortable, but a fortune in psychometric equipment sat concealed within it. The data outputs that came from its back, arms, and seat went into permanent records, while a quick-look version was provided directly to Lola's implant. She was already scanning for extreme values in Sonnenberg's physical parameters. She found nothing. He was a little uneasy, but nothing more.
Unfortunately, that was not necessarily a good sign. The hardest cases were the ones of most subtle deviation.
"I know you've spoken with my fax," said Lola. "And of course I have that record. But if you don't mind I want to go back to the very beginning. I'd like to ask who you are, what you know about me, and who suggested that I might be able to help you."
He seemed suitably doubtful. The sign in the lobby was not kidding. Anyone who came to see Lola Belman, or any other haldane, had exhausted the conventional channels of treatment.
"I'm Bryce Sonnenberg," he replied after a few silent moments. "Though of course you know that already."
"I do. But say anything you like, repeat anything you like." Whatever he said would make little difference. The real message was delivered by the psychometric monitors and models. Lola felt the powerful psychotropic drugs awakening within her, like a giant stirring from sleep. She was coming to the critical point, the very edge of stability, the place where a haldane must operate.
Sonnenberg was nodding, relaxing. "I am twenty-four years old. I was born in the Belt, on Hidalgo, but when I was only three, my mother moved us out to Callisto. I don't know who my father was." He paused and glanced doubtfully at Lola. She confirmed her first impression. Even with the worried frown on his forehead and the uncertainty in his dark eyes, Bryce Sonnenberg was handsome. It made her aware of the fact that she was only three years older than he was—and that she had been a licensed haldane for less than one year. She nodded. "Go on."
"Do you want me to talk about that kind of thing?"
"Anything you like. For the first quarter hour, it won't make much difference. We'll be calibrating the equipment."
"Right. Anyway, my mother, Miriam, is a Von Neumann designer, doing the advanced models that fine-tune the cavern biological balance after main excavation is all finished. I didn't realize, until I was eighteen years old, how good she is at her job, but in her own specialty she's top dog on the totem pole. When I was a kid I had more little Von Neumanns as friends than I did children. Our apartment was full of them. Sure you want to hear all this?"
"It's exactly what I want to hear. Go on; you're doing fine."
"Three years ago, when I reached twenty-one, mother told me that the Von Neumanns could handle the rest of the work on Callisto by themselves. She wanted to head farther out to where the work was more challenging, to Uranus or beyond. The habitat construction on Oberon was just getting started, she said. Did I want to go along? I wasn't sure, but I said I'd think about it. I did that while she was wrapping up her work. Finally she was all done, and ten months ago she was ready to go.
"So then it was up to me. I'd been changing my mind from one week to the next, but when the time came I decided I didn't want to leave Callisto. I was doing something I enjoyed, and I wanted to keep on doing it for at least a couple more years.
"But then, just four months after she left, I started to have . . . well, problems." He paused, and shook his head. "I guess you know."
Uneasiness, and much more pronounced. It was time for Lola to show a little of her hand.
"As a matter of fact, I do know. But not in the way you think. Some idiot has been putting nonsense into your head." Lola allowed a little irritation to show through. "Forget all the simple-minded rubbish you've heard about an Oedipus complex. That was discredited centuries ago. Your problems, whatever they are, have nothing to do with your mother leaving."
"Are you reading my mind?" He was frowning, grimacing. "I've heard it said that a haldane can read people's minds, but I didn't believe it."
Now he was truly uneasy. Lola sighed to herself. It was always the case—you had to blow away the misconceptions and half-truths before you could even begin.
She shook her head. "I said I know, and I do, but not the way you think I know. You're confusing haldane technique with witchcraft." She slowed her speech by a calculated amount. "Despite what you may have heard, I don't have a cat and a broomstick. I don't have a cauldron, or a third nipple, or warts and a crystal ball. What I do have is a computer, a mass of telemetry equipment, and six years of special training and experience. I also, like every licensed haldane, have an M.D. and a doctorate in statistics. With the help of the equipment and some fancy nonlinear models, I will usually be able to deduce what you are thinking. If I can't, I don't deserve to stay in business. But one thing you can believe for sure: I can't read your mind, or anybody else's."
He stopped his grimacing, and his core body temperature edged up one-tenth of a degree. That was a good sign. He believed her, and now he was feeling a bit of a fool for swallowing the common rumors about haldanes.
"I'm sorry." Lola dropped her voice in pitch and volume. "I interrupted when you were just about to describe your problem."
" 'Problem' may be the wrong word for it." Relieved, Sonnenberg moved away from the question of what Lola could and could not do. "What's been happening to me sounds as though it ought to be a standard medical question, but it's not. I'm a mathematician. I specialize in number theory. Most of the time it's fascinating, but it's also very intense. Sometimes, after a week or two of concentrated work on a problem, I think my skull is going to crack open. Then I have to get away from the pure head work and run wild. That's why I started space racing as a hobby. Nothing spectacular. Just ion drives within the Jupiter system. Ever tried that, or seen it done?"
It was Lola's turn to grimace. "I haven't left Ganymede since I got here. I haven't been up near the surface for at least three years."
"Then you'll have to take my word for it. Low-thrust racing sounds easy, because the acceleration of the scooters is limited to a fraction of a gee—the absolute opposite of hot-rodding. But it's not easy at all. We pick up our speed and improve our times using gravity swing-by maneuvers, and that means skimming in so close to the moons that you can reach out and touch the peaks. We have no backup equipment, and flight computers are forbidden. Everything depends on your own judgment and mental calculations. Screw up, and you lose. Screw up at the wrong time, and you die. I've had friends smash into mountains. It's really exciting, but it's not something you try unless you're absolutely alert."
Or even then. Lola merely nodded, and monitored the telemetry. He was not scared by his hobby, just exhilarated. Bryce Sonnenberg did not fit the image of the ivory-tower mathematician. He was a risk taker. He was also something that she could not yet define.
"I used to race every week," he went on. "Then one day, when we were still at the takeoff part of the race, I had a blackout. One moment I was sitting in the scooter, waiting for the starter's signal. Next thing I knew all the other scooters were out of sight. I hadn't moved. The starter light was blinking on my panel. I didn't know how long it had been like that, but later I learned that I had lost at least three minutes. The other competitors assumed that I had suffered a power failure, so they just took off without me.
"That was the first time. Since then I've been losing chunks of time, anything from one minute to ten. I never know when or why the next blackout is coming. Obviously, I've had to give up space scooters. A one-second blink at swing-by point could kill me."
What he was saying was a disappointment to Lola. She switched her implant to the standby mode and held up her hand before he could continue. "I agree that you have a problem, and you do need treatment. But it's not a job for a haldane. What you have is a physiological difficulty. I can give you the names of people with the right equipment and qualifications, and they can explore the physical side of what's been happening to you."
"You could, but it wouldn't be worth it." He was staring at her in mild reproach. "You didn't let me finish. First, I've been to a dozen medical specialists, the best ones on Callisto. They all agree that it's not a neurological problem. Not, in fact, a physical problem at all. Because there's another bit of information that I didn't get to. I black out, and when I wake up I have no idea what happened; but afterwards, when I lie down to sleep, I start to remember things. Things that feel as though they happened to me while I was unconscious."
"If you remember things, then you weren't unconscious."
"I'd agree with that, if what I remembered had anything to do with reality." He stared at Lola, openly troubled. "But the things that I remember never happened to me. They feel like memories, but they happen in places I've never been to in my whole life."
"For example?" Lola stared back at him, careful to conceal her surprise and satisfaction.
How about that? It looked like there was a job for a haldane here after all.
* * *
Visions. Distorted perceptions of space. Time inversions and time loops. Out-of-body experiences. They had been reported parts of the human condition for thousands of years, but surely they were much older. The religious experience had been present from the dawn of recorded history. Ten thousand years ago, the seer, in his ecstasy, foretold the distant future. The keeper of the temple felt himself rise into the sky, and saw the world below, no bigger than the palm of his hand. The sacrificial virgin felt within her the presence of the living god.
The early psychologists grappled with the bases of sensation and memory, struggling for an understanding using the inadequate tools at their disposal. They performed their long couch sessions and pronounced their exorcisms, invoking The Word according to Freud and Jung. They called on their magic potions, norepinephrine and dopamine and serotonin. They applied their mind-blistering philters, of imipramine and fluoxetine and Thorazine and chlorpromazine.
Sometimes the patient was even helped. But the mystery of the human mind remained untouched, until nonlinear statistical analysis, combined with telemetry, pulse probes, and powerful bespoke medications for both doctor and patient, brought the haldanes onto the scene.
Lola never mocked her primitive predecessors. The early psychotherapists had been like chemists before Dalton and Lavoisier, like astronomers before Kepler and Newton. They did their best to make sense of a bewildering variety of facts, but they had lacked the basic tool for the job: a general theory that would underpin everything, and make a coherent whole from a wilderness of single instances.
Whenever Lola was tempted to self-pity—recalling the loss of her parents in the war, or the first miserable years for her and Spook on Ganymede, or even the trauma of the haldane's training—she reminded herself that in other ways she had been lucky. She was fortunate to have been born at exactly the right time, just after the breakthrough.
It was still hard work. The training of a licensed haldane had a rigor and intensity that made the standard physician's apprenticeship seem casual and lightweight. In addition to their medical training and their knowledge of the effects and side effects of every psychotropic drug, Lola and her associates had to understand their computer tools, know their programs down to the last bit. Their ability to construct and validate neural network analogues had to be as good as any worker's in the field.
But it paid off. The physical mechanisms that underlay visions, déjà vu, time slips, and other-life memories had at last been dissected, defined, and captured in quantitative models.
No wonder that all religions had hated the haldanes when they first appeared in the 2050s. No wonder that preachers and demagogues still hated them.
But no one could discredit them. Prayers and politics might work, or they might not. A haldane's therapy did work, indisputably. Now the pendulum had swung too far the other way. A haldane's powers were overstated, to include direct mind reading and mind control.
Lola and the other haldanes knew that was not true. They knew the limits of what they could do. They also knew they had powers that no one but a haldane could comprehend.
Powers, and problems. You could not probe into another's troubled mind and remain untouched. When the haldane's ranks were thinned, it was almost never because one of them had chosen another field. It was usually a slide off the edge into madness, to a depth where not even a haldane could reach.
* * *
Lola had enough preliminary information. The instruments were calibrated. It was time for Sonnenberg's first interaction session.
"We'll keep this short today." She already had his chair extended to form a couch. He was lying down, the sensor cups in position over his eyes. "I'm going to put you into a trance state with stimulated recall. I'll know, from your eye movements and eye-lens muscle contractions, the direction that you're looking and how far away an object is. I'll take a cortical scan from the part of the brain that handles visual and auditory memories. I'll also know your emotional response to anything that you see and hear. But I won't actually hear and see what you see. That's why I want you to talk whenever you can, as a running commentary on everything. Understood?"
"I'll babble until you tell me to shut up."
"That's what I want. Now, just to get a feel for things and see how well we work together, I'm going to tap a memory that we certainly know is real. We'll take one of your recent space scooter races. Tell me when you're ready."
"Anytime." He was relaxed, reassured by Lola's casual confidence. At the same time, and appropriately, she was becoming more tense. Calibration was the easy part. Her real task lay ahead.
"Here we go then." Lola gave the computer the command to initiate transfer. "Remember, the more you say the easier it makes my job."
She had placed her own seat into an inclined position. With the sensor cups in place over her own eyes, she waited. She had not lied to Bryce Sonnenberg. What she had told him was literally true. She could not see what he saw, hear what he heard, or read his mind.
But that did not mean she would be without visual and auditory inputs. Her computer would take everything that came from Sonnenberg, feed the data as inputs to its own models, and present the computed output to Lola's implants—as sounds and pictures. Sonnenberg's words, whatever they were, would not come directly to Lola. They would be taken by the computer, merged with other signals tapped from his cerebral cortex, and used to generate a derived reality. The result could be anything from a muddled blur to crisp, realistic scenes; everything depended on Bryce Sonnenberg's powers of detailed recollection, the sophistication of the computer programs, and Lola's haldane wizardry. The computer could only do so much. Lola had to fuse her own prior experience and imagination with the computer's data feed.
There was one more stage in the process. Whatever she experienced would be read out in turn, to provide a record of the whole experience in derived-reality format. If necessary, another haldane could review that and give a second opinion.
Data transfer began. Within the first two seconds, Lola knew that he was going to be a great subject. After a brief flicker of false grey images, she found her hands grasping two knurled levers. Her feet were pressed together and secured by wraparound pedals. The vision centers of her brain assured her that she was sitting within a cramped little bubble, facing a hundred dials, while wrapped all around her was a transparent cover.
And beyond that cover, clear as anything that she had ever seen in her life, a mountain of grey ice and mottled black rock was rushing toward her. She was heading for impact with its left-hand edge, a sharp line that splintered the weak sunlight. Her hands and feet seemed frozen in position. At the last moment, when she was convinced that there was no way to avoid smashing into a stark and jagged rock face, she saw that the ship was arrowing into a narrow cleft.
Her hands and feet shifted to make a tiny thrust adjustment. The ship squeezed through, scraping-close to the wall. Lola saw a flashing blur of rock and ice. Then they were clear. There were stars ahead, and the ship was moving even faster than before.
Lola hit the disconnect and felt the emotional jar of the return from derived reality. Her hands and feet still clutched the controls of a ghost scooter, while her eyes saw the walls of her own office. She lay back and took a slow, deep breath. It was all very well to tell your brain that you knew you were experiencing no more than a standard—and highly successful—haldane interface, one that promised well for Bryce Sonnenberg's future. But a haldane coupling was intimate, more intimate than sex. Your heart and stomach and hindbrain didn't buy your forebrain's argument.
"That was great!" Bryce Sonnenberg was boosted to euphoria by the stimulated memory. The computer link was subsiding in a fading flicker of grey ghost images. "We couldn't have cut it closer. You see now why I love space scooting. Did you get anything?"
"You might say that." Lola silently ordered her pulse to return to normal. "I certainly know why I never go near the surface of Ganymede. And you do that for pleasure!"
"I used to, until the blackouts started. And if you can cure me, I'll do it again."
"You'll be cured." Lola sat up and removed the sensor cups. "I'm sure I'll be able to help you. You have first-rate visual recall, as good as I've ever met. Of course, your blackout dreams won't be as clear and detailed as that."
"They feel that way to me."
"I'm sure they do. One famous haldane precursor, a man called Havelock Ellis, put it perfectly. He said, 'Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?' No, Bryce, don't sit up yet!" He was reaching for the sensor cups on his eyes. "Stay just where you are. That last episode was so vivid, I want to try one more. I'm going to take one of your blackout sequences, and make a comparison. How long since you had one?"
"Just after I arrived from Callisto. Two days ago. It's a scene that keeps coming back again and again."
"Fine. We'll use that one."
Lola reached out to the computer console by her left hand. She started the search sequence, lay back, and replaced the sensors on her own eyes. "Don't be disappointed if we don't get much," she added as the grey flicker of images began again. "False memories are tricky things, and this is our first session. We've done well to get this far."
She was speaking as much to herself as to Bryce. An opening session often did not go much beyond calibration, but in this case she was going on because she was fascinated. Sonnenberg did not fit any textbook pattern of mental illness. In fact, the more that she saw of him; the less ill he seemed.
Was that his sickness, that he imagined himself to have a problem where there was none? That was the least satisfying answer. Far more interesting was the possibility of some new form of mental illness, one not recorded in the long history of psychotherapy. That was unlikely, but could it be the case?
She was asking herself that question as the computer again achieved synthesis.
Free fall.
Not in an orbiting ship, or floating outside it in a space-suit.
Free fall, real fall, toward a planetary surface. As the world spun around her, Lola caught a glimpse of a panorama of buildings. She was dropping toward them, gaining speed, falling vertically past the dark bulk of a great tower on her left-hand side.
She was not wearing a suit. And she was not on Earth. This was hard vacuum. The fog of ice crystals in front of her face was her own breath and blood, spouting out of agonized lungs.
Her motion steadied, so that she was dropping feetfirst. Now she could see where her trajectory would take her—to the roof of a lower level of the building on her left. The impact would kill her, no doubt about it, but incredibly some part of her brain was able to remain aloof. As oxygen starvation made the world before her dim and blur, she was calculating: three more seconds to impact; velocity, forty-nine meters a second.
Two seconds, fifty-two meters a second. One second. Terminal velocity, sixty meters a second. No chance of survival.
She looked down. The black flatness of the roof rushed up to meet her . . .
. . . and the computer disconnect took place.
Lola was left gasping, gulping in air to the depths of her lungs. Unbelievably, she was alive. The panorama of brightly lit buildings was disintegrating into streaks of flickering grey. She was in her own office.
And not before time. She sat up, shaking all over, and ripped the telemetry contacts from her temples, the sensor cups away from her eyes. It hadn't been a dream sequence; it had been gritty, hard-edged reality. She forced herself to her feet, convinced that Bryce Sonnenberg would need her help.
He was sitting sideways on the patient's chair, one sensor cup in each hand. Lola stared at him, unable to speak. He was the one who nodded, walked over to her side, and said, "You got it, didn't you? I can tell you did. It's not so bad for me, you see, I've been through it before. But you should have seen me the first time."
"Where is it? Where were you?"
He helped Lola to stand up. "I told you, I don't know. That's one of the scary parts. It seems like somewhere absolutely real and familiar, but wherever it is, I know I've never been there."
"Have you ever been to Earth? Or Mars?"
"Never." He released her hands. "You may not believe this, but I feel better now. You actually felt it, didn't you, even though you say you can't read minds? You know what it's like."
"I know what it's like." Lola struggled for control and managed a thin smile. "I'm not going to thank you for that."
"There are other places, too. Not as bad as that. Some of them I kind of like, the ones where I'm the boss and doing something clever. Out in the Belt, some of them. We hit the worst one first. Want to see the others?"
"I will, in due course." Lola sat down again. "But not today. We're done. I'm done."
"What's next?"
"I review your data, see if I missed anything. Then we have another session. Can you come back in three days? Midday, local time."
"Sure." Bryce Sonnenberg moved toward the door of the office. At the threshold he paused. "I know it's too early to ask, but do you really think you'll be able to help me?"
He was right—in principle, it was too early to say. But Lola was getting the clearest images she had ever seen. Bizarre information was difficult to interpret, but it was a lot better than no information at all.
"I'm sure I can help. Just don't expect instant miracles. It's a slow process." She waved good-bye, but she took little notice of his departure because she suddenly had been struck by two oddities at once.
First, he had said that some of his false memories were "out in the Belt." How could he know what the Belt was like, if he had left it for Callisto at the age of three?
Second—and more directly disturbing to Lola—she had been all set to transfer Sonnenberg's records to her general case files when she noticed the access record. It indicated that an access had been made on the previous day, when she had certainly not been using the system. The implication was as clear as if it had been written as a message on the screen: Someone else had been snooping around in her haldane file of stored experiences.
Someone. Lola swore to herself. She didn't have to go far to know who that someone was, someone who seemed unable to stay out of anything, even Lola's private case records.
When she got her hands on Spook she was going to wring his scrawny neck.