The Last Defender Of Camelot Read online

  Then slowing, and slower, slower. Stopped.

  The music stopped.

  Blackness followed. Applause filled it.When the lights came on again the two robots were standing statue-like, facing the audience. Very, very slowly, they bowed.

  The applause increased.

  Then they turned and were gone.

  The music came on and the light was clear again. A babble of voices arose. Render slew the Kraken.

  "What d'you think of that?" she asked him, Render made his face serious and said: "Am I a man dreaming I am a robot, or a robot dreaming I am a man?" He grinned, then added: "I don't know."

  She punched his shoulder gaily at that and he observed that she was drunk.

  "I am not." she protested. "Not much, anyhow. Not as much as you."

  "Still, I think you ought to see a doctor about it Like me. Like now. Let's get out of here and go for a drive."

  "Not yet, Charlie. I want to see them once more, huh? Please?"

  "If I have another drink I won't be able to see that far."

  "Then order a cup of coffee."

  "Yaagh!"

  "Then order a beer."

  "I'll suffer without."

  There were people on the dance floor now, but Render's feet felt like lead.

  He lit a cigarette.

  "So you had a dog talk to you today?"

  "Yes. Something very disconcerting about that... .**

  "Was she pretty?"

  "It was a boy dog. And boy, was he uglyi"

  "Silly. I mean his mistress."

  "You know I never discuss cases, Jill."

  "You told me about her being blind and about the dog. AH I want to know is if she's pretty."

  "Well ...Yes and no." He bumped her under the table and gestured vaguely. "Well, you know ..."

  "Same thing all the way around," she told the waiter who had appeared suddenly out of an adjacent pool of darkness, nodded, and vanished as abruptly.

  "There go my good intentions," sighed Render. "See how you like being examined by a drunken sot, that's all I can say.""You'll sober up fast, you always do. Hippocratics and all that."

  He sniffed, glanced at his watch.

  "I have to be in Connecticut tomorrow. Pulling Pete out of that damned school.. .."

  She sighed, already tired of the subject.

  "I think you worry too much about him. Any kid can bust an ankle. It's part of growing up. I broke my wrist when I was seven. It was an accident. It's not the school's fault, those things sometimes happen."

  "Like hell," said Render, accepting his dark drink from the dark tray the dark man carried. "If they can't do a good job, I'll find someone who can."

  She shrugged.

  "You're the boss. All I know is what I read in the papers.

  "—And you're still set on Davos, even though you know you meet a better class of people at Saint Moritz?" she added.

  "We're going there to ski, remember? 1 like the runs better at Davos."

  "I can't score any tonight, can I?"

  He squeezed her hand.

  "You always score with me, honey."

  And they drank then- drinks and smoked their cigarettes and held their hands until the people left the dance floor and filed back to their microscopic tables, and the gelatins spun round and round, tinting clouds of smoke from hell to sunrise and back again, and the bass went whumpf Tchga-tchgaf

  "Oh, Charlie! Here they come again!"

  The sky was clear as crystal. The roads were clean. The snow bad stopped.

  Jill's breathing was the breathing of a sleeper. The S-7 raced across the bridges of the city. If Render sat very still he could convince himself that only his body was drunk; but whenever he moved his head the universe began to dance about him. As it did so, he imagined himself within a dream, and Shaper of it all.

  For one instant this was true. He turned the big clock in the sky backward, smiling as he dozed. Another instant and he was awake again, and unsmiling.The universe had taken revenge for his presumption. For one reknown moment with the helplessness which he had loved beyond helping, it had charged him the price of the lake-bottom vision once again; and as he had moved once more toward the wreck at the bottom of the world—like a swimmer, as unable to speak—he heard, from somewhere high over the Earth, and filtered down to him through the waters above the Earth, the howl of the Fenris Wolf as it prepared to devour the moon; and as this occurred, he knew that the sound was as like to the trump of a judgment as the lady by his side was unlike the moon. Every bit. In all ways. And he was afraid.

  Ill

  "... The plain, the direct, and the blunt. This is Winchester Cathedral," said the guidebook. "With its floor-to-ceiling shafts, like so many huge treetrunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces: the ceilings are flat; each bay, separated by those shafts, is itself a thing of certainty and stability. It seems, indeed, to reflect something of the spirit of William the Conqueror. Its disdain of mere elaboration and its passionate dedication to the love of another world would make it seem. too, an appropriate setting for some tale out of Mallory... ."

  "Observe the scalloped capitals," said the guide. "In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif...."

  "Faugh!" said Render—softly though, because he was in a group inside a church.

  "Shh'" said Jill (Fotlock—that was her real last name) DeVille.

  But Render was impressed as well as distressed.

  Hating JiU's hobby though, had become so much of a reflex with him that he would sooner have taken his rest seated beneath an oriental device which dripped water onto his head than to admit he occasionally enJoyed walking through the arcades and the galleries, the passages and the tunnels, and getting ail out of breath climbing up the high twisty stairways of towers.

  So he ran his eyes over everything, burned everything down by shutting them, then built the place up again outof the still smouldering ashes of memory, all so that at a later date he would be able to repeat the performance, offering the vision to his one patient who could see only in this manner. This building he disliked less than most. Yes, he would take it back to her.

  The camera in his mind photographing the surroundings, Render walked with the others, overcoat over his arm, his fingers anxious to reach after a cigarette. He kept busy ignoring his guide, realizing this to be the nadir of all forms of human protest. As he walked through Winchester he thought of his last two sessions with Eileen Shallot. He recalled his almost unwilling Adam-attitude as he had named all the animals passing before them, led of course by the one she had wanted to see, colored fearsome by his own unease. He had felt pleasantly bucolic after boning up on an old Botany text and then proceeding to Shape and name the flowers of the fields.

  So far they had stayed out of the cides, far away from the machines. Her emotions were still too powerful at the sight of the simple, carefully introduced objects to risk plunging her into so complicated and chaotic a wilderness yet; he would build her city slowly.

  Something passed rapidly, high above the cathedral, uttering a sonic boom. Render took Jill's hand in his for a moment and smiled as she looked up at him. Knowing she verged upon beauty, Jill normally took great pains to achieve it. But today her hair was simply drawn back and knotted behind her head, and her Ups' and her eyes were pale; and her exposed ears were tiny and white and somewhat pointed.

  "Observe the scalloped capitals," he whispered. "In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif."

  "Faugh!" said she.

  "Shh!" said a sunburned little woman nearby, whose face seemed to crack and fall back together again as she pursed and unpursed her lips.

  Later as they strolled back toward their hotel. Render said, "Okay on Winchester?"

  "Ofcay on Winchester."

  "Happy?"

  "Happy."

  "Good, then we can leave this afternoon.""All right."

  "For Switzerland...."

  S
he stopped and toyed with a button on his coat.

  "Couldn't we just spend a day or two looking at some old chateaux first? After all, they're just across the channel, and you could be sampling all the local wines while I looked ..."

  "Okay," he said.

  She looked up—a trifle surprised.

  "What? No argument?" she smiled. "Where is your fighting spirit?—to let me push you around like this?"

  She took his arm then and they walked on as he said, "Yesterday, while we were galloping about in the innards of that oid castle, I heard a weak moan, and then a voice cried out, 'For the love of God, Montresor!' I think it was my fighting spirit, because I'm certain it was my voice. I've given up der geist der stets verneint. Pax vobiscum! Let us be gone to France. Alors!"

  "Dear Rendy, it'll only be another day or two...."

  "Amen," he said. "though my skis that were waxed are already waning."

  So they did that, and on the morn of the third day, when she spoke to him of castles in Spain, be reflected aloud that while psychologists drink and only grow angry, psychiatrists have been known to drink, grow angry and break things. Construing this as a veiled threat aimed at the Wedgewoods she had collected, she acquiesced to his desire to go skiing.

  Free! Render almost screamed it.

  His heart was pounding inside his head. He leaned hard. He cut to the left. The wind strapped at his face; a showed of ice crystals, like bullets of emery, fled by him, scraped against his cheek.

  He was moving. Aye—the world had ended as Weissflujoch, and Dorftali led down and away from this portal.

  His feet were two gleaming rivers which raced across the stark, curving plains; they could not be frozen in their course. Downward. He flowed. Away from all the rooms of the world. Away from the stifling lack of intensity, from the day's hundred spoon-fed welfares, from the killing pace of the forced amusements that hacked at the Hydra, leisure; away.And as he fled down the run he felt a strong desire to look back over his shoulder, as though to see whether the world he had left behind and above had set one fearsome embodiment of itself, like a shadow, to trail along after him, hunt him down and drag him back to a warm and well-lit coffin in the sky, there to be laid to rest with a spike of aluminum driven through his will and a garland of alternating currents smothering his spirit.

  "I hate you," he breathed between clenched teeth, and the wind carried the words back; and he laughed then, for he always analyzed his emotions, as a matter of reflex; and he added, "Exit Orestes, mad, pursued by the Furies .. ."

  After a time the slope leveled out and he reached the bottom of the run and had to stop.

  He smoked one cigarette then and rode back up to the top so that he could come down it again lor nontherapeutic reasons.

  That night he sat before a fire is the big lodge, feeling its warmth soaking into his tired muscles. Jill massaged his shoulders as he played Rorschach with the flames, and he came upon a blazing goblet which was snatched away from him in the same instant by the sound of his name being spoken somewhere* across the Hall of the Nine Hearths.

  "Charles Render!" said the voice (only it sounded more like "Shariz Runder"), and his head instantly jerked in that direction, but his eyes danced with too many afterimages for him to isolate the source of the calling.

  "Maurice?" he queried after a moment, "Bartelmetz?"

  "Aye," came the reply, and then Render saw the familiar grizzled visage, set neckless and balding above the red and blue shag sweater that was stretched mercilessly about the wine-keg rotundity of the man who now picked his way in their direction, deftly avoiding the strewn crutches and the stacked skis and the people who, like Jill and Render, disdained sitting in chairs.

  Render stood, stretching, and shook hands as he came upon them.

  "You've put on more weight," Render observed. "That's unhealthy."

  "Nonsense, it's alt muscle. How have you been, andwhat are you up to these days?" He looked down at Jill and she smiled back at him.

  "This is Miss DeVille," said Render.

  "Jill," she acknowledged.

  He bowed slightly, finally releasing Render's aching hand.

  "... And this is Professor Maurice Bartelmetz of Vienna," finished Render, "a benighted disciple of all forms of dialectical pessimism, and a very distinguished pioneer in neuroparticipation—although you'd never guess it to look at him. I had the good fortune to be his pupil for over a year."

  Bartelmetz nodded and agreed with him, taking in the Schnapsflasche Render brought forth from a small plastic bag. and accepting the collapsible cup which he filled to the brim.

  "Ah, you are a good doctor still," he sighed. "You have diagnosed the case in an instant and you make the proper prescription. Nozdrovial"

  "Seven years in a gulp," Render acknowledged, refilling their glasses.

  "Then we shall make time more malleable by sipping it."

  They seated themselves on the floor, and the fire roared up rhnnigh the great brick chimney as the logs burned themselves back to branches, to twigs, to thin sticks, ring by yearly ring.

  Render replenished the fire.

  "I read vour last book." said Bartelmetz finally, casually, "about four years ago."

  Render reckoned that to be correct.

  "Are you doing any research work these days?"

  Render poked lazily at the fire.

  "Yes," he answered, "sort of."

  He glanced at Jili, who was dozing with her cheek against the arm of the huge leather chair that held his emergency hag, the planes of her face all crimson and flickering shadow.

  "I've hit upon a rather unusual subject and started with a piece of jobbery I eventually intend to write about."

  "Unusual? In what way?"

  "B ind from birth, for one thing."

  "You're using the ONT&R?""Yes. She's going to be a Shaper."

  "Verfluchteri—Are you aware of the possible repercussions?"

  "Of course."

  "You've heard of unlucky Pierre?"

  "No."

  "Good, then it was successfully hushed. Pierre was a philosophy student at the University of Paris, and was doing a dissertation on the evolution of consciousness. This past summer he decided it would be necessary for him to explore the mind of an ape, for purposes of comparing a moins-nausee mind with his own, I suppose. At any rate, he obtained illegal access to an ONT&R and to the mind of our hairy cousin. It was never ascertained how far along he got in exposing the animal to the stimuli"bank, but it is to be assumed that such items as would not be immediately trans-subjective between man and ape— traffic sounds and so weiter—were what frightened the creature. Pierre is still residing in a padded cell, and all his responses are those of a frightened ape.

  "So, while he did not complete his own dissertation," he finished, "he may provide significant material for someone else's."

  Render shook his head.

  "Quite a story," he said softly .-"but I have nothing that dramatic to contend with. I've found an exceedingly stable individual—a psychiatrist, in fact—one who's already spent time in ordinary analysis. She wants to go into neuroparticipation—but the fear of a sight-trauma was what was keeping her out. I've been gradually exposing her to a full range of visual phenomena. When I've finished she should be completely accommodated to sight, so that she can give her full attention to therapy and not be blinded by vision, so to speak. We've already had foul sessions."

  "And?"

  "... And it's working fine."

  "You are certain about it?"

  "Yes, as certain as anyone can be in these matters."

  "Mm-hm," said Bartelmetz. "Tell me, do you find her excessively strong-willed? By that I mean, say, perhaps an obsessive-compulsive pattern concerning anything to which she's been introduced so far?"

  "No.""Has she ever succeeded in taking over control of the fantasy?"

  "No!"

  "You lie," he said simply.

  Render found a cigarette. After lighting it, he smiled.
/>   "Old father, old artificer," he conceded, "age has not withered your perceptiveness. I may trick me, but never you.—Yes, as a matter of fact, she is very difficult to keep under control. She is not satisfied just to see. She wants to Shape things for herself already. It's quite understandable both to her and to me—but conscious apprehension and emotional acceptance never do seem to get together on things. She has become dominant on several occasions, but I've succeeded in resuming control almost immediately. After all. I urn master of the bank."

  "Hm," mused Bartelmetz. "Are you familiar with a Buddhist text- -Shankara's Catechism?"

  "I'm afraid not."

  "Then 1 lecture you on it now. It posits—obviously not for theraputic purposes—a true ego and a false ego. The true ego is that part of man which is immortal and shall proceed on to nirvana: the soul, if you like. Very good. Well. the false ego, on the other hand, is the normal mind, bound round with the illusions—the consciousness of you and me and everyone we have ever known professionally. Good?—Good. Now, the stuff this false ego is made up of they call skandhas. These include the feelings, the perceptions, the aptitudes, consciousness itself, and even the physical form. Very unscientific. Yes. Now they are not the same thing as neuroses, or one of Mister Ibsens life-lies, or an hallucination—no, even though they are all wrong, being parts of a false thing to begin with. Each uf the five skandhas is a part of the eccentricity that we call identity—then on lop come the neuroses and all the other messes which follow after and keep us in business. Okay?—Okay. I give you this lecture because I need a dramatic term for what 1 will say, because 1 wish to say something dramatic. View the skandhas as lying at the bottom of the pond; the neuroses, they are ripples on the top of the water; the 'true ego,' if there is one, is buried deep beneath the sand at the bottom. So. I'he ripples fill up the-the—zwischenwelt—between the object and the subject. The skaodhas are a pan of the subject, basic,unique, the stuff of his being.—So far, you are with me?"

  "With m;iny reservations."

  "Good. Now I have defined my term somewhat, I will use it. You are fooling around with skandhas. not simple neuroses. You are attempting to adjust this woman's overall conception of herself and of the world. You are using the ONT&R to do it. It is the same thing as fooling with a psychotic or an ape. All may seem to go well. but—at any moment, it is possible you may do something, show her some sight, or some way of seeing which will break in upon her selfhood, break a skandha—and pouf!—it will he like breaking through the bottom of the pond. A whirlpool will result, pulling you—where? I do not want you for a patient, young man, young artificer, so I counsel you not to proceed with this experiment. The ONT&R should not be used in such a manner."