X + 

On Earth’s binary, Glenn Tropile had been reprogrammed for a new task. + 

The problem was navigation. Earth had been a disappointment to the Pyramids; it was necessary to move rapidly to a more rewarding planet. + 

The Pyramids had taken Earth out past Pluto’s orbit with a simple shove, slow and massive. It had been enough merely to approximate the direction in which they would want to go. There would be plenty of time for refinements of course later. + 

But now the time for refinements had come, earlier than they might have expected. They had now time to travel, they knew where to⁠—a star cluster reasonably sure to be rich in Componentiferous planets. It was inherent in the nature of Component mines that eventually they always played out. + 

There were always more mines, though. If that had not been so, it would have been necessary, perhaps, to stock-breed Components against future needs. But it was easier to work the vein out and move on. + 

Now the course had to be computed. There were such variables to be considered as: motion of the star cluster; acceleration of the binary-planet system; gravitational influence of every astronomical object in the island universe, without exception. + 

Precise computation on this basis was obviously not practical. That was not an answer to the problem, since the time required would approach eternity as one of its parameters. + 

It was possible to simplify the problem. Only the astronomical bodies which were relatively nearby need be treated as individuals. Farther away, the Pyramids began to group them in small bunches, still farther in large bunches, on to the point where the farthest⁠—and the most numerous⁠—bodies were lumped together as a vague gravitational “noise” whose average intensity alone it was required to know and to enter as a datum. + 

And still no single Component could handle even its own share of the problem, were the “computer” they formed to be kept within the range of permissible size. + 

It was for this that the Component which had once been Tropile was taken out of storage. + 

This was all old stuff to the Pyramids; they knew how to handle it. They broke the problem down to its essentials, separated even those into many parts. There was, for example, the subsection of one certain aspect of the logistical problem which involved locating and procuring additional Components to handle the load. + 

Even that tiny specialization was too much for a single Component, but fortunately the Pyramids had resources to bring to bear. The procedure in such cases was to hitch several Components together. + 

This was done. + 

When the Pyramids finished their neurosurgery, there floated in an oversized nutrient tank a thing like a great sea-anemone. It was composed of eight Components⁠—all human, as it happened⁠—arranged in a circle, facing inward, joined temple to temple, brain to brain. + 

At their feet, where sixteen eyes could see it, was the display board to feed them their Input. Sixteen hands each grasped a molded switch to handle their binary-coded Output. There would be no storage of the Output outside of the eight-Component complex itself; it went as control signals to the electrostatic generators, funneled through the single Pyramid on Mount Everest, which handled the task of Component-procurement. + 

That is, of Translation. + 

The programming was slow and thorough. Perhaps the Pyramid which finally activated the octuple unit and went away was pleased with itself, not knowing that one of its Components was Glenn Tropile. + 

Nirvana. (It pervaded all; there was nothing outside of it.) + 

Nirvana. (Glenn Tropile floated in it as in the amniotic fluid around him.) + 

Nirvana. (The sound of one hand.⁠ ⁠… Floating oneness.) + 

There was an intrusion. + 

Perfection is completed; by adding to it, it is destroyed. Duality struck like a thunderbolt. Oneness shattered. + 

For Glenn Tropile, it seemed as though his wife were screaming at him to wake up. He tried to. + 

It was curiously difficult and painful. Timeless poignant sadness, five years of sorrow over a lost love compressed into a microsecond. It was always so, Tropile thought drowsily, awakening. It never lasts. What’s the use of worrying over what always happens.⁠ ⁠… + 

Sudden shock and horror rocked him. + 

This was no ordinary awakening⁠—no ordinary thing at all⁠—nothing was as it ever had been before! + 

Tropile opened his mouth and screamed⁠—or thought he did. But there was only a hoarse, faint flutter in his eardrums. + 

It was a moment when sanity might have gone. But there was one curious, mundane fact that saved him. He was holding something in his hands. He found that he could look at it, and it was a switch. A molded switch, mounted on a board, and he was holding one in each hand. + 

It was little to cling to, but it at least was real. If his hands could be holding something, then there must be some reality somewhere. + 

Tropile closed his eyes and managed to open them again. Yes, there was reality, too. He closed his eyes and light stopped. He opened them and light returned. + 

Then perhaps he was not dead, as he had thought. + 

Carefully, stumbling⁠—his mind his only usable tool⁠—he tried to make an estimate of his surroundings. + 

He could hardly believe what he found. + 

Item: he could scarcely move. Somehow he was bound by his feet and his head. How? He couldn’t tell. + 

Item: he was bent over and he couldn’t straighten. Why? Again he couldn’t tell, but it was a fact. The great erecting muscles of his back answered his command, but his body would not move. + 

Item: his eyes saw, but only in a small area. + 

He couldn’t move his head, either. Still, he could see a few things. The switch in his hand, his feet, a sort of display of lights on a strangely circular board. + 

The lights flickered and changed their pattern. + 

Without thinking, he moved a switch. Why? Because it was right to move that switch. When a certain light flared green, a certain switch had to be thrown. Why? Well, when a certain light flared green, a certain switch⁠— + 

He abandoned that problem. Never mind why; what the devil was going on? + 

Glenn Tropile squinted about him like a mollusc peering out of its shell. There was another fact, the oddness of the seeing. What makes it look so queer, he asked himself. + 

He found an answer, but it required some time to take it in. He was seeing in a strange perspective. One looks out of two eyes. Close one eye and the world is flat. Open it again and there is a stereoscopic double; the saliencies of the picture leap forward, the background retreats. + 

So with the lights on the board⁠—no, not exactly; but something like that, he thought. It was as though⁠—he squinted and strained⁠—well, as though he had never really seen before. As though for all his life he had had only one eye, and now he had strangely been given two. + 

His visual perception of the board was total. He could see all of it at once. It had no “front” or “back.” It was in the round. The natural thinking of it was without orientation. He engulfed and comprehended it as a unit. It had no secrets of shadow or silhouette. + 

I think, Tropile mouthed slowly to himself, that I’m going crazy. + 

But that was no explanation, either. Mere insanity didn’t account for what he saw. + 

Then, he asked himself, was he in a state that was beyond Nirvana? He remembered, with an odd flash of guilt, that he had been Meditating, watching the stages of boiling water. All right, perhaps he had been Translated. But what was this, then? Were the Meditators wrong in teaching that Nirvana was the end⁠—and yet righter than the Wolves, who dismissed Meditation as a phenomenon wholly inside the skull and refused to discuss Translation at all? + 

That was a question for which he could find nothing approaching an answer. He turned away from it and looked at his hands. + 

He could see them, too, in the round, he noted. He could see every wrinkle and pore in all sixteen of them.⁠ ⁠… + 

Sixteen hands! + 

That was the other moment when sanity might have gone. He closed his eyes. (Sixteen eyes! No wonder the total perception!) And, after a while, he opened them again. + 

The hands were there. All sixteen of them. + 

Cautiously, Tropile selected a finger that seemed familiar in his memory. After a moment’s thought, he flexed it. It bent. He selected another. Another⁠—on a different hand this time. + 

He could use any or all of the sixteen hands. They were all his, all sixteen of them. + 

I appear, thought Tropile crazily, to be a sort of eight-branched snowflake. Each of my branches is a human body. + 

He stirred, and added another datum: I appear also to be in a tank of fluid and yet I do not drown. + 

There were certain deductions to be made from that. Either someone⁠—the Pyramids?⁠—had done something to his lungs, or else the fluid was as good an oxygenating medium as air. Or both. + 

Suddenly a burst of data-lights twinkled on the board below him. Instantly and involuntarily, his sixteen hands began working the switches, transmitting complex directions in a lightninglike stream of on-off clicks. + 

Tropile relaxed and let it happen. He had no choice; the power that made it right to respond to the board made it impossible for his brain to concentrate while the response was going on. Perhaps, he thought drowsily, he would never have awakened at all if it had not been for the long period with no lights.⁠ ⁠… + 

But he was awake. And his consciousness began to explore as the task ended. + 

He had had an opportunity to understand something of what was happening. He understood that he was now a part of something larger than himself, beyond doubt something which served and belonged to the Pyramids. His single brain not being large enough for the job, seven others had been hooked in with it. + 

But where were their personalities? + 

Gone, he supposed; presumably they had been Citizens. Sons of the Wolf did not Meditate and therefore were not Translated⁠—except for himself, he corrected wryly, remembering the Meditation on Rainclouds that had led him to⁠— + 

No, wait! + 

Not Rainclouds but Water! + 

Tropile caught hold of himself and forced his mind to retrace that thought. He remembered the Raincloud Meditation. It had been prompted by a particularly noble cumulus of the Ancient Ship type. + 

And this was odd. Tropile had never been deeply interested in Rainclouds, had never known even the secondary classifications of Raincloud types. And he knew that the Ancient Ship was of the fourth order of categories. + 

It was a false memory. + 

It was not his. + 

Therefore, logically, it was someone else’s memory; and being available to his own mind, as the fourteen other hands and eyes were available, it must belong to⁠—another branch of the snowflake. + 

He turned his eyes down and tried to see which of the branches was his old body. He found it quickly, with growing excitement. There was the left great toe of his body. He had injured it in boyhood and there was no mistaking the way it was bent. Good! It was reassuring. + 

He tried to feel the one particular body that led to that familiar toe. + 

He succeeded, though not easily. After a time, he became more aware of that body⁠—somewhat as a neurotic may become “stomach conscious” or “heart conscious.” But this was no neurosis; it was an intentional exploration. + 

Since that worked, with some uneasiness he transferred his attention to another pair of feet and “thought” his way up from them. + 

It was embarrassing. + 

For the first time in his life, he knew what it felt like to have breasts. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was like to have one’s internal organs quite differently shaped and arranged, buttressed and stressed by different muscles. The very faint background feel of man’s internal arrangements, never questioned unless something goes wrong with them and they start to hurt, was not at all like the faint background feel that a woman has inside her. + 

And when he concentrated on that feel, it was no faint background to him. It was surprising and upsetting. + 

He withdrew his attention⁠—hoping that he would be able to. Gratefully, he became conscious of his own body again. He was still himself if he chose to be. + 

Were the other seven still themselves? + 

He reached into his mind⁠—all of it, all eight separate intelligences that were combined within him. + 

“Is anybody there?” he demanded. + 

No answer⁠—or nothing he could recognize as an answer. He drove harder and there still was none. It was annoying. He resented it as bitterly, he remembered, as in the old days when he had first been learning the subtleties of Ruin Appreciation. There had been a Ruin Master, his name forgotten, who had been sometimes less than courteous, had driven hard⁠— + 

Another false memory! + 

He withdrew and weighed it. Perhaps, he thought, that was a part of the answer. These people, these other seven, would not be driven. The attempt to call them back to consciousness would have to be delicate. When he drove hard, it was painful⁠—he remembered the instant violent agony of his own awakening⁠—and they reacted with anguish. + 

More gently, alert for vagrant “memories,” he combed the depths of the eightfold mind within him, reaching into the sleeping portions, touching, handling, sifting and associating, sorting. This memory of an old knife wound from an Amok⁠—that was not the Raincloud woman; it was a man, very aged. This faint recollection of a childhood fear of drowning⁠—was that she? It was; it fitted with this other recollection, the long detour on the road south toward the sun, around a river. + 

The Raincloud woman was the first to round out in his mind, and the first he communicated with. He was not surprised to find that, early in her life, she had feared that she might be Wolf. + 

He reached out for her. It was almost magic⁠—knowing the “secret name” of a person, so that then he was yours to command. But the “secret name” was more than that. It was the gestalt of the person. It was the sum of all data and experience, never available to another person⁠—until now. + 

With her memories arranged at last in his own mind, he thought persuasively: “Citizeness Alla Narova, will you awaken and speak with me?” + 

No answer⁠—only a vague, troubled stirring. + 

Gently he persisted: “I know you well, Alla Narova. You sometimes thought you might be a Daughter of the Wolf, but never really believed it because you knew you loved your husband⁠—and thought Wolves did not love. You loved Rainclouds, too. It was when you stood at Beachy Head and saw a great cumulus that you went into Meditation⁠—” + 

And on and on, many times, coaxingly. Even so, it was not easy; but at last he began to reach her. Slowly she began to surface. Thoughts faintly sounded in his mind, like echoes at first, his own thoughts bouncing back at him, a sort of mental nod of agreement: “Yes, that is so.” Then⁠—terror. With a shaking fear, a hysterical rush, Citizeness Alla Narova came violently up to full consciousness and to panic. + 

She was soundlessly screaming. The whole eight-branched figure quivered and twisted in its nutrient bath. + 

The terrible storm raged in Tropile’s own mind as fully as in hers⁠—but he had the advantage of knowing what it was. He helped her. He fought it for the two of them⁠ ⁠… soothing, explaining, calming. + 

At last her branch of the snowflake-body retreated, sobbing for a spell. The storm was over. + 

He talked to her in his mind and she “listened.” She was incredulous, but there was no choice for her; she had to believe. + 

Exhausted and passive, she asked finally: “What can we do? I wish I were dead!” + 

He told her: “You were never a coward before. Remember, Alla Narova, I know you as nobody has ever known another human being before. That’s the way you will know me. As for what we can do⁠—we must begin by waking the others, if we can.” + 

“If not?” + 

“If not,” Tropile replied grimly, “then we will think of something else.” + 

She was of tough stuff, he thought admiringly. When she had rested and absorbed things, her spirit was almost that of a Wolf; she had very nearly been right about herself. + 

Together they explored their twinned members. They found through them exactly what task was theirs to do. They found how the electrostatic harvesting scythe of the Pyramids was controlled, by and through them. They found what limitations there were and what freedoms they owned. They reached into the other petals of the snowflake, reached past the linked Components into the whole complex of electrostatic field generators and propulsion machinery, reached even past that into⁠— + 

Into the great single function of the Pyramids that lay beyond. + 