THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

Since it made him more than just uneasy to stand there, he walked back to the solid floor.

"It's not like standing on something hard. There is a slight give to my weight."

They were silent for a while. Burton finally said, "We might as well go on."

46

THEY CAME TO ANOTHER BAY MARKED BY CHARACTERS IN BAS-relief and containing a lift-shaft. Burton looked up and down this, hoping that he might see something to help them. It was as empty as the other.

When they had left this, Frigate said, "I wonder if Piscator is still alive? If only he'd come by..."

"If only!" Burton said. "We can't live by if only, even if you do most of the time."

Frigate looked hurt.

Nur said, "Piscator, as I understand it, was a Sufi. That may explain why he got through the gateway on top of the tower. From what I've heard, I'd venture that there's sort of force, analogous to an electromagnetic field, perhaps, that prevents those who haven't attained a certain ethical level from entering."

"He must have been different from most Sufis I've seen, yourself excepted," Burton said. "Those I knew in Egypt were rogues."

"There are true Sufis and false Sufis," Nur said, paying no attention to the sneer in Burton's voice. "Anyway, I suspect that the wathan reflects the ethical or spiritual development of the individuals and what it shows would make the repulsion field admit or deny entrance to a person."

"Then how would X get in that way? He's obviously not as ethically developed as the others."

"You don't know that," Nur said. "If what he says about the other Ethicals is true..."

He stopped talking for a moment. Then he said, "If the gateway field admits only the highly ethical, then X made his secret room to avoid that field. But he must have done it when the tower was built, must have pla

"No," Burton said. "The others would have been able to see his wathan. If they did, they'd know that he had degenerated, changed, anyway. And they'd have known that he was the renegade."

Frigate said, "Maybe the reason his wathan looked okay was that he had some device to distort it from its natural appearance. I mean... from the appearance it would have had if he hadn't used some kind of distorter. That way, he'd not only have passed as normal among his fellows, he'd have fooled the gateway field."

"That is possible," Nur said. "But wouldn't his colleagues know about distorters?"

"Not if they'd never seen or heard of one. It may have been X's invention." /

Burton said, "And he had his hideaway so that he could leave the tower without anybody else knowing it."

"That implies that there are no radar devices on the tower," Frigate said.

"Well?" Burton said. "If there had been, they would've detected the first and second expeditions when they came down the ledge. The radar might also have spotted the cave, though I suppose its operators wouldn't have thought anything about it if it had been noted. No, there was no radar sca

Nur said, "We all have wathans, if what the Council of Twelve told you was true. You saw theirs. What I don't understand is why they couldn't have tracked you down long before they did. Surely, a photograph of your wathan was in the records of that giant computer Spruce mentioned. I would suppose that everybody's was."

"Perhaps X arranged it so that the record in the computer wasn't a true image of my wathan," Burton said. "Perhaps that was why the agent Agneau was carrying a photograph of my physical person."

"I think that the Ethicals must have sca

"Hmm," Nur said. "I wonder if distorting the wathan also results in distorting its owner's psyche?"

Burton said, "You may remember de Marbot's report of Clemens' analysis of the co

"Perhaps that comparison isn't correct. The wathan-body combination is more like a centaur. A melding. Both the man-part and the horse-part need each other for perfect functioning. One without the other is useless. It may be that the wathan itself needs a body to become self-conscious. Certainly, the Ethicals said that the undeveloped wathan wanders in some sort of space when it's loosed by the body's death. And then the wathan is not just unaware of its own self but of anything. It's unconscious.

"Yet, according to our theory, the body generates the wathan. How, I don't know, don't even have a hypothesis. But without the body, a wathan can't come into existence. There are embryo wathans in the body embryos, and infant wathans in the infant body. Like the body, the wathan grows into adulthood.

"However, there are two stages of adulthood. Let's call the later stage superwathanhood. If a wathan doesn't attain a certain ethical or spiritual level, it's destined to wander forever after the body's death, unaware of itself.

"Unless, as happened here, a duplicate body is made and by some affinity the wathan reattaches itself to the duplicate body. This duplicate body would be intelligent but would have no concept of /. The wathan attached to it would have the self-awareness. But it couldn't have it until it interacted with the body.

"Without wathans, humans would have evolved from apes, would have had language, would have had technology and science, but no religion, yet would not have had any more knowledge of the self than an ant."

Frigate said, "What kind of language would that be? I mean, try to imagine a language in which no pronouns for / and me exist. And probably no you or yours either. To tell the truth, I don't think they'd develop language. Not as we know it, anyway. They'd just be highly intelligent animals. Living machines which would not depend upon instinct as much as animals do."

"We can talk about that some other time."

"Yeah, but what about the chimpanzees?"

"They must have had a rudimentary wathan which had a low-level consciousness of their /. However, it was never proved that apes did have language or self-awareness.

"The wathan itself can't develop self-awareness unless it has a body. If the body has a stunted brain, then the wathan is stunted. Hence, it can attain only to a certain low ethical level."

"No!" Frigate said. "You're confusing intelligence with morality. You and I have known too many people with a high intelligence and low ethical development and vice versa to believe that a high I.Q. is a necessary accompaniment to a high moral quotient."

"Yaas, but you forget about the will."

They came to another bay. Burton looked along the shaft. "Nothing here."

They walked on while Burton resumed the role of Socrates.

"The will. We have to assume that it's not entirely free. It's affected by events outside the body, its exterior environment, and by internal events, the inside environment. Injuries physical or mental, diseases, chemical changes, and so forth, can change a person's will. A maniac may have been a good person before a disease or injury made him into a torturer and killer. Psychological or chemical factors may make multiple personalities or a psychic cripple or monster.