The Waves Extinguish the Wind by Boris Strugatsky & Arkady

Author:Boris Strugatsky & Arkady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2023-01-24T14:10:55+00:00

ME: What do you think Sorcerer’s goal was in visiting the Institute?

LOGOVENKO: Sorcerer told me nothing about that. COMCON told us that Sorcerer was supposedly interested in our work, and we were happy to let him learn about it. Not purely out of kindness; we had hoped to examine him as well. We have never encountered a psychocrat of such power, and an alien to boot.

ME: What did the examination show?

LOGOVENKO: The examination was not conducted. Sorcerer cut his visit short, to everyone’s complete surprise.

ME: Why do you think that happened?

LOGOVENKO: We’re all at a loss here. Here’s what I’m inclined to guess. He was introduced to Michel Desmond, a polymental. And Sorcerer possibly saw in Michel something that we had missed but that frightened him, or insulted—shocked him so much that he lost the desire to talk to us. Don’t forget that he is a psychocrat, an intellectual, yes, but by origin, by upbringing, you could even say by worldview, he’s a typical savage.

ME: I do not quite understand. What is a polymental?

LOGOVENKO: Polymentalism is an exceedingly rare metapsychic phenomenon, the coexistence of two or more individual consciousnesses in one human body. Don’t confuse it with schizophrenia—it’s not a pathology. Take our Michel Desmond. He’s a perfectly healthy, very pleasant young man with no deviations. But a decade ago it was noted, by sheer chance, that he has a double mentogram. One is a perfectly ordinary human mentogram, clearly tied to Michel’s past and present life. And another, only visible at a specific depth during mentoscopy. That mentogram belongs to a creature that has nothing in common with Michel, living in a world that we have not been able to identify. It seems to be a world of unusually high pressure and high temperatures . . . but that is beside the point. The point is that Michel has no conception of that world, or of this second consciousnesses, while that creature has no conception of Michel or our world. So I’m thinking that we discovered one such neighbor consciousness in Michel, but maybe there are more in him, beyond our instruments, and they shocked Sorcerer.

ME: Doesn’t this Desmond’s other world shock you?

LOGOVENKO: I know what you mean. No, it doesn’t. Certainly not. But I have to say, the mentoscopist who first looked into that world experienced a severe shock. Mainly, of course, because he decided Michel must be some kind of Wanderer infiltrator, a progressor from another world.

ME: How was that established not to be the case?

LOGOVENKO: We’re safe in that regard. Michel’s behavior has no correlation to the functioning of the other consciousness. A polymental’s neighboring consciousnesses do not interact in any way. They cannot interact in principle—they operate in different spaces. By the way of a crude analogy, imagine shadow puppetry. The shadows on the screen cannot interact. Of course some entirely fantastical suppositions remain, but they’re just that, fantastical.

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