In the House of Double Minds

Now they bring in the new ones, this spring’s crop of ten-year-olds—six boys, six girls—and leave them with me in the dormitory room that will be their home for the next dozen years. The room is bare, austere, with black slate floors and rough brick walls, furnished for the time being with cots and clothes-cabinets and little more. The air is chill, and the children, who are naked, huddle in discomfort.

“I am Sister Mimise,” I tell them. “I will be your guide and counselor in the first twelve months of your new life in the House of Double Minds.”

I have lived in this place for eight years, since I was fourteen, and this is the fifth year that I have had charge of the new children. If I had not been disqualified by my left-handedness, this is the year I would have been graduated into full oraclehood, but I try not to dwell on that. Caring for the children is a rewarding task in itself. They arrive scrawny and frightened, and slowly they unfold: they blossom, they ripen, they grow toward their destinies. Each year there is some special one for me, some favorite, in whom I take particular joy. In my first group, four years ago, it was long-legged laughing Jen, she who is now my lover. A year later it was soft beautiful Jalil, and then Timas, who I thought would become one of the greatest of all oracles; but after two years of training Timas cracked and was culled. And last year bright-eyed Runild, impish Runild, my pet, my darling boy, more gifted even than Timas and, I fear, even less stable. I look at the new ones, wondering who will be special among them for me this year.

The children are pale, slender, uneasy; their thin nude bodies look more than naked because of their shaven skulls. As a result of what has been done to their brains they move clumsily today. Their left arms often dangle as though they have entirely forgotten them, and they tend to walk in a shuffling sidewise motion, dragging their left legs a little. These problems soon will disappear. The last of the operations in this group was performed only two days ago, on the short wide-shouldered girl whose breasts have already begun to grow. I can see the narrow red line marking the place where the surgeon’s beam sliced through her scalp to sever the hemispheres of her brain.

“You have been selected,” I say in a resonant formal tone, “for the highest and most sacred office in our society. From this moment until you reach adulthood your lives and energies will be consecrated to the purpose of attaining the skills and wisdom an oracle must have. I congratulate you on having come so far.”

And I envy you.

I do not say that part aloud.

I feel envy and pity both. I have seen the children come and go, come and go. Out of each year’s dozen, one or two usually die along the way of natural causes or accidents. At least three go insane under the terrible pressure of the disciplines and have to be culled. So only about half the group is likely to complete the twelve years of training, and most of those will prove to have little value as oracles. The useless ones will be allowed to remain, of course, but their lives will be meaningless. The House of Double Minds has been in existence for more than a century; there are at present just one hundred forty-two oracles in residence—seventy-seven women and sixty-five men—of whom all but about forty are mere drones. A thin harvest out of some twelve hundred novices since the beginning.

These children have never met before. I call upon them to introduce themselves. They give their names in low self-conscious voices, eyes downcast.

A boy named Divvan asks, “Will we wear clothes soon?”

Their nakedness disturbs them. They hold their thighs together and stand at odd stork-like angles, keeping apart from one another, trying to conceal their undeveloped loins. They do this because they are strangers. They will forget their shame before long. As the months pass they will become closer than brothers and sisters.

“Robes will be issued this afternoon,” I tell him. “But clothing ought not to be important here, and you need have no reason to wish to hide your bodies.” Last year when this same point arose—it always does—the mischievous boy Runild suggested that I remove my own robe as a gesture of solidarity. Of course I did, but it was a mistake: the sight of a mature woman’s body was more troubling to them than even their own bareness.

Now it is the time for the first exercises, so that they may learn the ways in which the brain operation has altered the responses of their bodies. At random I choose a girl named Hirole and ask her to step forward, while the rest form a circle around her. She is tall and fragile-looking and it must be torment to her to be aware of the eyes of all the others upon her.

Smiling, I say gently, “Raise your hand, Hirole.”

She raises one hand.

“Bend your knee.”

As she flexes her knee, there is an interruption. A wiry naked boy scrambles into the room, fast as a spider, wild as a monkey, and bursts into the middle of the circle, shouldering Hirole aside. Runild again! He is a strange and moody and extraordinarily intelligent child, who, now that he is in his second year at the House, has lately been behaving in a reckless, unpredictable way. He runs around the circle, seizing several of the new children briefly, putting his face close to theirs, staring with crazy intensity into their eyes. They are terrified of him. For a moment I am too astonished to move. Then I go to him and seize him.

He struggles ferociously. He spits at me, hisses, claws my arms, makes thick wordless grunting sounds. Gradually I get control of him. In a low voice I say, “What’s wrong with you, Runild? You know you aren’t supposed to be in here!”

“Let me go.”

“Do you want me to report this to Brother Sleel?”

“I just want to see the new ones.”

“You’re frightening them. You’ll be able to meet them in a few days, but you’re not allowed to upset them now.” I pull him toward the door. He continues to resist and nearly breaks free. Eleven-year-old boys are amazingly strong, sometimes. He kicks my thigh savagely: I will have purple bruises tonight. He tries to bite my arm. Somehow I get him out of the room, and in the corridor he suddenly goes slack and begins to tremble, as though he has had a fit that now is over. I am trembling too. Hoarsely I say, “What’s happening to you, Runild? Do you want to be culled the way Timas and Jurda were? You can’t keep doing things like this! You—”

He looks up at me, wild-eyed, and starts to say something, and stifles it, and turns and bolts. In a moment he is gone, a brown naked streak vanishing down the hallway. I feel a great sadness: Runild was a favorite of mine, and now he is going insane, and they will have to cull him. I should report the incident immediately, but I am unable to bring myself to do it, and, telling myself that my responsibility lies with the new ones, I return to the dorm room.

“Well!” I say briskly, as if nothing unusual has happened. “He’s certainly playful today, isn’t he! That was Runild. He’s a year ahead of you. You’ll meet him and the rest of his group a little later. Now, Hirole—”

The children, preoccupied with their own altered state, quickly grow calm; they seem much less distressed by Runild’s intrusion than I am. Shakily I begin again, asking Hirole to raise a hand, to flex a knee, to close an eye. I thank her and call a boy named Mulliam into the centre of the circle. I ask him to raise one shoulder above the other, to touch his hand to his cheek, to make a fist. Then I pick a girl named Fyme and instruct her to hop on one foot, to put an arm behind her back, to kick one leg in the air.

I say, “Who can tell me one thing that was true of every response?”

Several of them answer at once. “It was always the right side! The right eye, the right hand, the right leg—”

“Correct.” I turn to a small dark-visaged boy named Bloss and ask, “Why is that? Do you think it’s just coincidence?”

“Well,” he says. “Everybody here is right-handed, because left-handers aren’t allowed to become oracles, and so everybody tended to use the side that he—”

Bloss falters, seeing heads shaking all around the circle.

Galaine, the girl whose breasts have begun to sprout, says “It’s because of the operation! The right side of our brains doesn’t understand words very well, and it’s the Right that controls the left side of the body, so when you tell us in words to do something, only our Left understands and moves the muscles it controls. It gets the jump on the Right because the Right can’t speak or be spoken to.”

“Very good, Galaine. That’s it exactly.”

I let it sink in. Now that the connections between the two halves of their brains have been cut, the Rights of these children are isolated, unable to draw on the skills of the language centre in the Left. They are only now realizing what it means to have half a brain rendered illiterate and inarticulate, to have their Left respond as though it is the entire brain, activating only the muscles it controls most directly.

Fyme says, “Does that mean we won’t ever be able to use our left sides again?”

“Not at all. Your Right isn’t paralyzed or helpless. It just isn’t very good at using words. So your Left is quicker to react when I give a verbal instruction. But if the instruction isn’t phrased in words, the Right will be able to take control and respond.”

“How can you give an instruction that isn’t in words?” Mulliam asks.

“In many ways,” I say. “I could draw a picture, or make a gesture, or use some sort of symbol. I’ll show you what I mean by going through the exercises again. Sometimes I’ll give the instructions in words, and sometimes by acting them out. When I do that, imitate what you see. Is that clear?”

I wait a moment to allow the sluggish word-skills of their Rights to grasp the scheme.

Then I say, “Raise a hand.”

They lift their right arms. When I tell them to bend a knee, they bend their right knees. But when I wordlessly close my left eye, they imitate me and close their left eyes. Their Rights are able to exert muscular control in a normal way when the instructions are delivered nonverbally; but when I use words, the Left alone perceives and acts.

I test the ability of their Lefts to override the normal motor functions of their Rights by instructing them verbally to raise their left shoulders. Their Rights, baffled by my words, take no action, forcing their Lefts to reach beyond a Left’s usual sphere of dominance. Slowly, with great difficulty, a few of the children manage to raise their left shoulders. Some can manage only a mere twitch. Fyme, Bloss, and Mulliam, with signs of struggle evident on their faces, are unable to budge their left shoulders at all. I tell the entire group to relax, and the children collapse in relief, sprawling on their cots. There is nothing to worry about, I say. In time they will all regain full motor functions in both halves of their bodies. Unless they are driven insane by the split-brain phenomena, that is, but no need to tell them that.

“One more demonstration for today,” I announce. This one will show them in another way how thoroughly the separation of the hemispheres affect the mental processes. I ask Gybold, the smallest of the boys, to seat himself at the testing table at the far end of the room. There is a screen mounted on the table: I tell Gybold to fix his eyes on the center of the screen, and I flash a picture of a banana on the left side of the screen for a fraction of a second.

“What do you see, Gybold?”

“I don’t see anything, Sister Mimise,” he replies, and the other children gasp. But the “I” that is speaking is merely Gybold’s Left, which gets its visual information through his right eye; that eye did indeed see nothing. Meanwhile Gybold’s Right is answering my question in the only way it can: the boy’s left hand gropes among several objects lying on the table hidden behind the screen, finds the banana that is there, and triumphantly holds it up. Through sight and touch Gybold’s Right has prevailed over its wordlessness.

“Excellent,” I say. I take the banana from him and, drawing his left hand behind the screen where he is unable to see it, I put a drinking glass into it. I ask him to name the object in his hand.

“An apple?” he ventures. I frown, and quickly he says, “An egg? A pencil?”

The children laugh. Mulliam says, “He’s just guessing!”

“Yes, he is. But which part of Gybold’s brain is making the guesses?”

“His Left,” Galaine cries. “But it’s the Right that knows it’s holding a glass.”

They all shush her for giving away the secret. Gybold pulls his hand out from under the screen and stares at the glass, silently forming its name with his lips.

I put Herik, Chith, Simi, and Clane through related experiments. Always the results are the same. If I flash a picture to the right eye or put an object in the right hand, the children respond normally, correctly naming it. But if I transmit information only to the left eye or the left hand, they are unable to use words to describe the objects their Rights see or feel.

It is enough for now. The children are silent and have withdrawn into individual spheres of privacy. I know that they are working things out within their minds, performing small self-devised experiments, testing themselves, trying to learn the full extent of the changes the operation has brought about. They glance from one hand to another, flex fingers, whisper little calculations. They should not be allowed to look inward so much, not at the beginning. I take them to the storeroom to receive their new clothing, the simple gray monastic robes that we wear to set us apart from the ordinary people of the city. Then I turn them free, sending them romping into the broad fields of soft green grass behind the dormitory, to relax and play. They may be oracles in the making; but they are also, after all, ten-year-old children.

It is my afternoon rest period. On my way through the dark cool corridors to my chamber I am stopped by Brother Sleel, one of the senior oracles. He is a white-haired man, tall and of powerful build, and his blue eyes work almost independently of one another, constantly scanning his surroundings in restless separate searches. Sleel has never been anything but warm and kind to me, and yet I have always been afraid of him, I suppose more out of awe for his office than out of fear for the man himself. Really I feel timid with all the oracles, knowing that their minds work differently from mine and that they see things in me that I may not see myself. Sleel says, “I saw you having difficulties with Runild in the hall this morning. What was happening?”

“He wandered into my orientation meeting. I asked him to leave.”

“What was he doing?”

“He said he wanted to see the new children. But of course I couldn’t let him bother them.”

“And he started to fight with you?”

“He made some trouble. Nothing much.”

“He was fighting with you, Mimise.”

“He was rather unruly,” I admit.

Sleel’s left eye stares into mine. I feel a chill. It is the oracle-eye, the all-seeing one. Quietly he says, “I saw you fighting with him.”

I look away from him. I study my bare feet. “He wouldn’t leave. He was frightening the new ones. When I tried to lead him from the room he jumped at me, yes. But he didn’t hurt me and it was all over in a moment. Runild is high-spirited, Brother.”

“Runild is a troubled child,” Sleel says heavily. “He is disturbed. He is becoming wild, like a beast.”

“No, Brother Sleel.” How can I face that terrible eye? “He has extraordinary gifts. You know—surely you must know—that it takes time for one like him to settle down, to come to terms with—”

“I’ve had complaints from his counselor, Voree. She says she hardly knows how to handle him.”

“It’s only a phase. Voree’s had responsibility for him only a couple of weeks. As soon as she—”

“I know you want to protect him, Mimise. But don’t let your love for the boy cloud your judgement. I think this is Timas happening all over again. It’s an old, old pattern here, the brilliant novice who is unable to cope with his changes, who—”

“Are you going to cull him?” I blurt.

Sleel smiles. He takes both my hands in his. I am engulfed by his strength, by his wisdom, by his power. I sense the unfathomable flow of perception from his mystic Right to his calm, analytic Left. He says, “If Runild gets any worse, I’ll have to. But I want to save him. I like the boy. I respect his potential. What do you suggest we do, Mimise?”

“What do I—”

“Tell me. Advise me.”

The senior oracle is playing a little game with me, I suppose. Shrugging, I say, “Obviously Runild’s trying to gain attention through all these crazy pranks. Let’s try to reach him and find out what he really wants, and perhaps there’ll be some way we can give it to him. I’ll speak to Voree. I’ll talk to his sister, Kitrin. And tomorrow I’ll talk to Runild. I think he trusts me. We were very close last year, Runild and I.”

“I know,” Sleel says gently. “Very well, see what you can do.”

Still later that afternoon, as I cross the central courtyard, Runild erupts from the second-year house and rushes up to me. His face is flushed; his bare chest is shiny with sweat. He clings to me, pulls me down to his height, looks me in the eye. His eyes have already begun to stray a little; one day they may be like Sleel’s.

I think he wants to apologize for his invasion of my group. But all he manages to say is: “I am sorry for you. You wanted so much to be one of us.” And he runs off.

To be one of them. Yes. Who does not long to dwell in the House of Double Minds, living apart from the noise and chaos of the world, devoting oneself to oracular contemplation and the service of mankind? My mother’s father’s sister was of that high company, and in early girlhood I was taken to visit her. How awesome it was to stand in the presence of her all-knowing Right, to feel the flood of warmth and understanding that emanated from her wise eyes. It was my dream to join her here, a dream doubly thwarted, for she died when I was eight, and by then the fact of my left-handedness was irremediably established.

Left-handers are never selected to undergo the oracle-making operation. The two halves of our brains are too symmetrical, too ambidextrous: we have speech centers on both sides, most of us left-handers, and so we are not likely to develop those imbalances of cerebral powers that oracles must have. Right-handers, too, are born with symmetrically functioning brains, each hemisphere developing independently and duplicating the operations of the other. But by the time they are two years old, their Lefts and Rights are linked in a way that gives them a shared pool of skills, and therefore each half is free to develop its own special capabilities, since the gifts of one half are instantly available to the other.

At the age of ten this specializing process is complete. Language, sequential thought, all the analytic and rational functions, center in the Left. Spacial perception, artistic vision, musical skill, emotional insight, centre in the Right. The brain’s left side is the scientist, the architect, the general, the mathematician. The brain’s right side is the minstrel, the sculptor, the visionary, the dreamer. Normally the two halves operate as one. The Right experiences a flash of poetic intuition, the Left clothes it in words. The Right sees a pattern of fundamental connections, the Left expresses it in a sequence of theorems. The Right conceives the shape of a symphony, the Left sets the notes down on paper. Where there is true harmony between the hemispheres of the brain, works of genius are created.

Too often, though, one side seizes command. Perhaps the Right becomes dominant, and we have a dancer, an athlete, an artist, who has trouble with words, who is inexpressive and inarticulate except through some nonverbal medium. More often, because we are a word-worshipping people, it is the Left that rules, choking the subordinate Right in a welter of verbal analysis and commentary, slowing and hindering the spontaneous intuitive perceptions of the mind. What society gains in orderliness and rationality it loses in vision and grace. We can do nothing about these imbalances—except to take advantage of their existence by accentuating and exploiting them.

And so the children come here, a dozen of our best each year, and our surgeons sever the isthmus of neural tissue that links Left and Right. Some kind of communication between the hemispheres continues to operate, since each half remains aware of what the other is immediately experiencing, if not of its accumulated memories and skills. But the Right is cut free from the tyranny of the word-intoxicated Left. The Left continues to operate its normal routines of reading and writing and conversation and computation, while the Right, now its own master, observes and registers and analyses in a way that has no need for words. Because its verbal skills are so feeble, the newly independent Right must find some other means of expression if it is to make its perceptions known: and, through the dozen years of training in the House of Double Minds, some of the children succeed in achieving this. They are able—I do not know how, no one who is not an oracle can ever know how—to transmit the unique insights of fully mature and wholly independent Rights to their Lefts, which can transmit them to the rest of us. It is a difficult and imperfect process, but it gives us access to levels of knowledge that few have ever reached before our time. Those who master that skill are our functional oracles. They dwell in realms of beauty and wisdom that, in the past, only saints and prophets and the greatest artists and a few madmen have reached.

I would, if I could, have entered those realms. But I came forth left-handed from the womb and my brain, though it is a decent one, therefore lacked the required asymmetry of function. If I could not be an oracle I could at least serve them, I decided. And thus I came here as a girl, and asked to be of use, and in time was given the important task of easing the new children into their new lives. So I have come to know Jen and Timas and Jalil and Runild and the others, some of whom will live to be among the most famous of oracles, and so now I welcome Hirole and Mulliam and Gybold and Galaine and their companions. And I am content, I think. I am content.

We gather in the main hall for the evening meal. My new group has not come before the older novices until now, and so my twelve undergo close scrutiny, which they find embarrassing, as I lead them to their place. Each year-group sits together at its own circular table. My dozen dine with me; at the table to my left is my group of last year, now in Voree’s charge. Runild sits there with his back to me, and his mere presence creates a tension in me as if he is giving off an electric radiation. To my right is the third-year group, reduced now to nine by the culling of Timas and two deaths; the fourth-year children are just in front of me and the fifth-year ones, my darling Jen among them, at my rear. The older children are in the center of the hall. Along the sides of the great room are the tables of the instructors, those who have daily care of the ordinary education of the twelve groups of novices, and the senior oracles occupy long tables at the hall’s far end, beneath a panoply of gay red and green banners.

Sleel makes a brief speech of welcome for my twelve, and the meal is served.

I send Galaine to Voree’s table with a note: “See me on the porch after dinner.”

My appetite is poor. I finish quickly, but I stay with my group until it is time to dismiss them. All the children troop off to the auditorium for a show. A warm drizzle is falling; Voree and I stand in the shelter of the eaves. She is much older than I am, a stocky woman with kinky orange hair. Year after year I pass my fledglings on to her. She is strong, efficient, stolid, insensitive. Runild baffles her. “He’s like a monkey,” she says. “Running around naked, chattering to himself, singing crazy songs, playing pranks. He isn’t doing his lessons. He isn’t even doing his disciplines, half the time. I’ve warned him he’ll be culled, but he doesn’t seem to care.”

“What do you think he wants?”

“To have everyone notice him.”

“Yes, surely, but why?”

“Because he’s a naturally mischievous boy,” Voree says, scowling. “I’ve seen many of his sort before. They think rules are for other people. Two more weeks of this and I’ll recommend a cull.”

“He’s too brilliant to waste like that, Voree.”

“He’s wasting himself. Without the disciplines how can he become an oracle? And he’s upsetting all the others. My group’s a shambles. Now he’s bothering yours. He won’t leave his sister alone either. Culling, Mimise, that’s where he’s heading. Culling.”

There is nothing to be gained from talking to Voree. I join my group in the auditorium.

Bedtime for the younger ones comes early. I see my children to their room; then I am free until midnight. I return to the auditorium, where the older children and the off-duty staff are relaxing, playing games, dancing, drifting off in couples. Kitrin, Runild’s sister, is still there. I draw her aside. She is a slender, delicate girl of fourteen, a fifth-year novice. I am fond of her because she was in my very first group, but I have always found her shy, elusive, opaque. She is more so than ever now: I question her about her brother’s behavior and she answers me with shrugs, vague unfinished sentences, and artful evasions. Runild is wild? Well, of course, many boys are wild, she says, especially the bright ones. The disciplines seem to bore him. He’s far ahead of his group—you know that, Mimise. And so on. I get nothing from her except the strong feeling that she is hiding something about her brother. My attempts to probe fail; Kitrin is still a child, but she is halfway to oraclehood, nearly, and that gives her an advantage over me in any duel of wits. Only when I suggest that Runild is in immediate peril of culling do I break through her defences.

“No!” she gasps, eyes widening in fear, cheeks turning pale. “They mustn’t! He has to stay! He’s going to be greater than any of them!”

“He’s causing too much trouble.”

“It’s just a thing he’s going through. He’ll settle down, I promise you that.”

“Voree doesn’t think so. She’s going to request a cull.”

“No. No. What will happen to him if he’s culled? He was meant to be an oracle. His whole life will have been thrown away. We have to save him, Mimise.”

“We can do that only if he can control himself.”

“I’ll talk to him in the morning,” Kitrin says.

I wonder what she knows about Runild that she does not want to tell me.

At the evening’s end I bring Jen to my chamber, as I do three or four nights a week. She is tall and supple and looks more than her fourteen years. Her counselor tells me she is moving well through her mid-novitiate and will be a splendid oracle. We lie together, lips to lips, breasts against breasts, and we stroke and caress and tickle one another, we smile with our eyes, we enter into all the rituals of love. Afterward, in the stillness that follows passion, she finds the bruise of this morning’s struggle on my thigh and questions me with a frown. “Runild,” I say. I tell her about his erratic behaviour, about Sleel’s uneasiness, about my conversation with Voree.

“They mustn’t cull him,” Jen says solemnly. “I know he’s troublesome. But the path he’s taking is so important for all of us.”

“Path? What path is that?”

“You don’t know?”

“I know nothing, Jen.”

She catches her breath, rolls away, studies me a moment. At length she says, “Runild sees into minds. When he puts his head very close to people, there’s transmission. Without using words. It’s—it’s a kind of broadcast. His Right can read the Rights of other oracles, the way you’d open a book and read it. If he could get close enough to Sleel, say, or any of them, he could read what’s in their Rights.”

“What?”

“More, Mimise. His own Right talks to his Left the same way. He can transmit messages completely, quickly, making better contact between the halves than any of the oracles can do. He hasn’t had the disciplines, even, and he has full access to his Right’s perceptions. So whatever his Right sees, including what it gets from the Rights of others, can be transmitted to his Left and expressed in words more clearly even than Sleel himself can do it!”

“I don’t believe this,” I say, barely comprehending.

“It’s true! It’s true, Mimise! He’s only just learning how, and it gets him terribly excited, it makes him wild, don’t you see, when all that contact comes flooding in? He can’t quite handle it yet, which is why he acts so strange. But once he gets his power under control—”

“How do you know anything about this, Jen?”

“Why, Kitrin told me.”

“Kitrin? I spoke to Kitrin and she never even hinted that—”

“Oh,” Jen says, looking pained. “Oh, I guess I wasn’t supposed to say. Not even to you, I guess. Oh, now I’ll be in trouble with Kitrin, and—”

“You won’t be. She doesn’t need to know how I found out. But—Jen, Jen, can this be? Can anyone have such powers?”

“Runild does.”

“So he claims. Or Kitrin claims on his behalf.”

“No,” Jen says firmly.”He does. They showed me, he and Kitrin. I felt him touch my mind. I felt him read me. He can read anyone. He can read you, Mimise.”

I must speak with Runild. But carefully, carefully, everything in its proper moment. In the morning I must first meet with my group and take them through the second-day exercises. These are designed to demonstrate that their Rights, although mute and presently isolated, are by no means inferior, and have perceptions and capabilities which in some ways are superior to those of their Lefts.

“Never think of your Right as a cripple,” I warn them. “See it, rather, as some kind of extremely intelligent animal—an animal that is sharp-witted, quick to respond, imaginative, with only one flaw, that it has no vocabulary and is never going to be able to acquire more than a few simple words at best. Nobody pities a tiger or an eagle because it doesn’t know how to speak. And there are ways of training tigers and eagles so that we can communicate with them without using words.”

I flash a picture of a house on the screen and ask the children to copy it, first using their left hands, then the right. Although they are all right-handed, they are unable to draw anything better than simple, crude two-dimensional representations with their right hands. Their left-handed drawings, while shakily drawn because of their left arms’ relatively backward muscular development and motor control, show a full understanding of the techniques of perspective. The right hand has the physical skill, but it is the left, drawing on the vision of the brain’s right hemisphere, that has the artistic ability.

I ask them to arrange colored plastic cubes to match an intricate pattern on the screen. Left-handed, they carry out the exercise swiftly and expertly. Right-handed, they become confused, frown and bite their lips, hold the cubes long moments without knowing where to put them down, eventually array the cubes in chaotic mazes. Clane and Bloss give up entirely in a minute or two; Mulliam perseveres grimly like one who is determined to climb a mountain too steep for his strength, but he accomplishes little; Luabet’s left hand keeps darting across to do the task that is beyond the right’s powers, as if she is at war with herself. She must keep the impatient left hand behind her back in order to proceed at all. No one can complete the block design correctly with the right hand, and when I allow the children to work with both hands the hands fight for control, the formerly dominant right one unable to accept its new inferiority and angrily slapping at the cubes the left one tries to put in place.

We go on to the split-screen exercises in facial recognition and pattern analysis, to the musical exercises and the rest of the usual second-day routine. The children are fascinated by the ease with which their Rights function in all but word-linked operations. Ordinarily I am delighted, too, to watch the newly liberated Rights come to life and assert their powers. But today I am impatient to be off to Runild and I give only perfunctory attention to my proper work.

At last the session ends. The children move off to the classroom where they will receive regular school-subject instruction. Runild’s group, too, should be at school until noon. Possibly I can draw him aside after lunch. But, as though I have conjured him with a wish, I see him now, tumbling by himself in the meadow of crimson flowers by the auditorium. He sees me, too: halts in his gambol, winks, smiles, does a handspring, blows me a kiss. I go to him.

“Are you excused from classes this morning?” I ask, mock-stern.

“The flowers are so pretty,” he replies.

“The flowers will be just as pretty after school.”

“Oh, don’t be so stuffy, Mimise! I know my lessons. I’m a clever boy.”

“Perhaps too clever, Runild.”

He grins. I do not frighten him. He seems to be patronizing me; he appears to be at once very much younger and very much wiser than his years. I take him gently by the wrist and draw him down, easily, until we are sprawled side by side in the grass. He plucks a flower for me. His look is flirtatious. I accept both the flower and the look and respond with a warm smile; I am flirtatious myself. No doubt of his charm; and I can never win him by acting as an authority figure, only as a co-conspirator. There was always an underlying sexuality in our relationship, incestuous, as if I were an older sister.

We talk in banter, teasing each other. Then I say, “Something mysterious has been happening to you lately, Runild. I know that. Share your mystery with me.”

At first he denies all. He pretends innocence, but lets me know it is only pretence. His sly smile betrays him. He speaks in cryptic ellipses, hinting at arcane knowledge and defying me to pry details from him. I play his game, acting now intrigued, now eager, now sceptical, now wholly uninterested: we are stalking one another, and both of us know it. His oracle-eye pierces me. He toys with me with such subtlety that I must remind myself with a glance at his slim hairless body, that I am dealing with a child. I ought never forget that he is only eleven. Finally I press directly once more, asking him outright what strange new gift he is cultivating.

“Wouldn’t you like to know!” he cries, and pulls an outrageous face, and dashes away.

But he comes back. We talk on a more serious level. He admits that he has discovered, these past few months, that he is different from the other children and from the senior oracles, that he has a talent, a power. It disturbs and exalts him both. He is still exploring the scope of it. He will not describe the power in any specific way. Of course I know from Jen its nature, but I prefer not to reveal that. “Will you ever tell me?” I ask.

“Not today,” he says.

Gradually I win his trust. We meet casually, in corridors or courtyards, and exchange easy pleasantries, the sort I might trade with any of my former charges. He is testing me, seeing whether I am a friend or simply Sleel’s spy. I let him know of my concern for him. I let him know that his eccentric behaviour has placed him in jeopardy of culling.

“I suppose so,” he says gloomily. “But what can I do? I’m not like the others. I can’t sit still for long. Things are jumping inside my head all the time. Why should I bother with arithmetic when I can—”

He halts, suddenly guarded again.

“When you can what, Runild?”

“You know.”

“I don’t.”

“You will, soon enough.”

There are days when he seems calm. But his pranks have not ended. He finds poor Sister Sestoine, one of the oldest and dimmest of the oracles, and puts his forehead against hers and does something to her that sends her into an hour’s tears. Sestoine will not say what took place during that moment of contact, and after a while she seems to forget the episode. Sleel’s face is dark. He looks warningly at me as if to say, Time’s running short; the boy must go.

On a day of driving rain I am in my chamber in midafternoon when Runild unexpectedly enters, soaked, hair plastered to his scalp. Puddles drip from him. He strips and I rub him with a towel and stand him before the fire. He says nothing all this while; he is tense, taut, as if a mighty pressure is building within him and the time has not yet come for its release. Abruptly he turns to me. His eyes are strange: they wander, they quiver, they glow. “Come close!” he whispers hoarsely, like a man calling a woman to his bed. He grasps my shoulders, he pulls me down to his height, he pushes his blazing forehead roughly against mine. And the world changes. I see tongues of purple flame. I see crevasses opening in the earth. I see the oceans engulfing the shore. I am flooded with contact; I am swept with wild energies.

I know what it is to be an oracle.

My Right and my Left are asunder. It is not like having one brain cleft in two; it is like having two brains, independent, equal. I feel them ticking like two clocks, with separate beats; and the Left goes tick-tock-tick-tock, machine-dreary, while the Right leaps and dances and soars and sings in lunatic rhythms. But they are not lunatic rhythms, for their frantic pulses have a regularity of irregularity, a pattern of patternlessness. I grow used to the strangeness; I become comfortable within both brains, the Left which I think of as “me,” and the Right which is “me” too, but an altered and unfamiliar self without a name. My earliest memories lie open to me in my Right. I see into a realm of shadows. I am an infant again; I have access to the first hours of my life, to all my first years, those years in which words meant nothing to me. The pre-verbal data all rests within my Right, shapes and textures and odors and sounds, and I do not need to give names to anything, I do not need to denote or analyze, I need only feel, experience, relive. All that is there is clear and sharp. I see how it has always been with me, how that set of recorded experiences had directed my behavior even as the experiences of later years have done so. I can reach that hidden realm now, and understand it, and use it.

I feel the flow of data from Right to Left—the wordless responses, the intuitive reactions, the quick spontaneous awareness of structures. The world holds new meanings for me. I think, but not in words, and I tell myself things, but not in words, and my Left, groping and fumbling (for it has not had the disciplines) seeks words, sometimes finding them, to express what I am giving it. So this is what oracles do. This is what they feel. This is the knowledge they have. I am transfigured. It is my fantasy come true: they have snipped that rubbery band of connective tissue; they have set free my Right; they have made me one of them. And I will never again be what once I was. I will think in tones and colors now. I will explore kingdoms unknown to the wordbound ones. I will live in a land of music. I will not merely speak and write: I will feel and know.

Only it is fading now.

The power is leaving me. I had it only a moment; and was it my own power or only a glimpse of Runild’s? I cling, I grapple, and yet it goes, it goes, it goes, and I am left with shreds and bits, and then not even those, only an aftertaste, an echo of an echo, a diminishing shaft of feeble light. My eyes open. I am on my knees; sweat covers my body; my heart is pounding. Runild stands above me. “You see now?” he says. “You see? This is what it’s like for me all the time. I can connect minds. I can make connections, Mimise.”

“Do it again,” I beg.

He shakes his head. “Too much will hurt you,” he says. And goes from me.

I have told Sleel what I have learned. Now they have the boy with them in the inner oracle-house, nine of them, the highest oracles, questioning him, testing him. I do not see how they can fail to welcome his gift, to give him special honor, to help him through his turbulent boyhood so that he can take his place supreme among oracles. But Jen thinks otherwise. She thinks he distresses them by scrabbling their minds in his still unfocused attempts at making contact, and that they will fear him once they have had an explicit demonstration of what he can do; she thinks, too, that he is a threat to their authority, of his way of joining the perceptions of his Right to the analytic powers of his Left by a direct mental flow is far superior to their own laborious method of symbolic translation. Jen thinks they will surely cull him and may even put him to death. How can I believe such things? She is not yet an oracle herself; she is still a girl; she may be wrong. The conference continues hour after hour, and no one emerges from the oracle-house.

In the evening they come forth. The rain has stopped. I see the senior oracles march across the courtyard. Runild is among them, very small at Sleel’s side. There are no expressions on any faces. Runild’s eyes meet mine: his look is blank, unreadable. Have I somehow betrayed him in trying to save him? What will happen to him? The procession reaches the far side of the quadrangle. A car is waiting. Runild and two of the senior oracles get into it.

After dinner Sleel calls me aside, thanks me for my help, tells me that Runild is to undergo study by experts at an institute far away. His power of mind-contact is so remarkable, says Sleel, that it requires prolonged analysis.

Mildly I ask whether it would not have been better to keep him here, among the surroundings that have become home to him, and let the experts come to the House of Double Minds to examine him. Sleel shakes his head. There are many experts, the testing equipment is not portable, the tests will be lengthy.

I wonder if I will ever see Runild again.

In the morning I meet with my group at the usual time. They have lived here several weeks now, and their early fears are gone from them. Already I see the destinies unfolding: Galaine is fast-witted but shallow, Mulliam and Chith are plodders, Fyme and Hirole and Divvan may have the stuff of oracles, the rest are mediocrities. An average group. Hirole, perhaps, is becoming my favorite. There are no Jens among them, no Runilds.

“Today we start to examine the idea of nonverbal words,” I begin. “For example, if we say, Let this green ball stand for the word ‘same,’ and this blue box stand for the word ‘different,’ then we can…”

My voice drones on. The children listen placidly. So the training proceeds in the House of Double Minds. Beneath the vault of my skull my dreaming Right throbs a bit, as though reliving its moment of freedom. Through the corridors outside the room the oracles move, deep in contemplation, shrouded in impenetrable wisdom, and we who serve them go obediently about our tasks.