“The Bellers were to provide a means whereby the mental contents of a Lord could be transferred to the brain of a host. Thus, the Lord could live on
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in a new body while the old one died of its wounds.
“The Beller was constructed so that the mental contents of the Lord could be stored for a very long time indeed if an emergency demanded this. The Beller contained a power-pack for operation of the stored mind if this was desired. Moreover, the Beller automatically drew on the neural energy of the host to charge the power-pack. The uncoiling and dematricising were actually the Belter’s methods of scanning the mind and then recording it within the bell structure. Duplicating the mind, as it were. The duplication resulted in stripping the original brain, in leaving it blank.
“fm repeating,” she said, “but only to make sure you understand me.”
“I follow you,” he said. “But this stripping, dematricising, scanning, and duplication doesn’t seem to me to be a true immortality. It’s not like pouring the mental contents of one head into another. It’s not a genuine brain transference. It consists, in reality, of recording cerebral complexes, forebrain and, I suppose, hindbrain, too, to get the entire mind—or don’t Bellers have unconsciousnesses?—while destroying them. And then running off the records—tapes, if you will—to build an identical brain in a different container.
“The brain of the second party, however, is not the brain of the first party. In reality, the first party is dead. And though the second party thinks that it is the first party, because it has the brain complex of the first party, it is only a duplication.”
“A baby speaks the wisdom of the ages,” she said. “That would be true if there were no such thing as the psyche, or the soul, as you humans call it. But the Lords had indubitable proof that an
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extra-spatial, extra-temporal entity, coeval with every sentient being, exists. Even you humans have them. These duplicate the mental content of the body or soma. Rather, they reflect the psyche-soma, or perhaps it’s vice versa.
“Anyway, the psyche is the other half of the ‘real’ person. And when the duplicate soma-brain is built up in the Seller, the psyche, or soul, transfers to the Beller. And when the Seller retransfers the mental contents to the new host, the psyche then goes to the new host.”
Kickaha said, “You have proof of this psyche? Photographs? Sensual indications? And so on?”
“I’ve never seen any,” she said. “Or known anyone who had seen the proofs. But we have been assured that the proofs existed at one time.”
“Fine,” he said with a sarcasm that she may or may not have detected. “So then?”
“The experiment took over fifty years, I believe, before the Sellers were one hundred percent safe and perfectly operational. Most of the research was done on human slaves, who often died or became idiots.”
“In the name of science!”
“In the name of the Lords,” she said. “In the name of immortality for the Lords. But the human subjects, and later the Lords who became subjects, reported an almost unendurable feeling of detachment from reality, an^gony of separation, while their brains were housed in the Bellers. You see, the brains did have some perception of the world outside if the needle-antennae were extruded. But this perception was very limited.
“To overcome the isolation and panic, the perceptive powers of the antennae were improved. Sound, odor, and a limited sense of vision were
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made available through the antennae.”
Kickaha said, “These Black Bellers are former Lords?”
“No! The scientists accidentally discovered that an unused bell had the potentialities for developing into an entity. That is, an unused bell was a baby Beller. And if it were talked to, played with, taught to speak, to identify, to develop its embryonic personality—well, it became, not a thing, a mechanical device, but a person. A rather alien, peculiar person, but still a person.”
“In other words,” he said, “The framework for housing a human brain could become a brain in its own right?”
“Yes. The scientists became fascinated. They made a separate project out of raising Bellers. They found that a Beller could become as complex and as intelligent as an adult Lord. Meanwhile, the original project was abandoned, although undeveloped Bellers were to be used as receptacles for storing excess memories of Lords.”