“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 planned it before then. So that even then he knew he wouldn’t be admitted into the gateway.”
“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 scanning the sea and the mountains. Why should there be? The Ethicals didn’t believe that anybody would get that far.”
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 scanner satellites up there,” Frigate said. “Maybe these could locate your wathan. But they couldn’t find it because your wathan was distorted.”
“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 connection between the wathan or ka or soul, call it what you will, and the body? The conclusion was that the wathan is the essence of the person. Otherwise, it is irrelevant. It does no good to reattach the wathan to a duplicated body because the duplicate isn’t the same as the original. Similar to the nth degree, yes, but not the same. If the wathan or soul is the persona, the seat of self-consciousness, then the physical brain is not self-aware. Without the wathan, the human body would have intelligence but no self-awareness. No concept of 7. The wathan uses the physical as a man uses a horse or an automobile.
“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.
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201