The Moon Pool & Dwellers in the Mirage. Abraham Merritt
using a heavier one in the left hand than in the right. Well, one of them was much heavier than the other. Also, in a fight I use my left hand better than I do my right. These memories, or whatever they were, came in flashes. For a moment I would be Dwayanu, plus myself, looking with amused interest on old familiar things — and the next moment I would be only myself and wondering, with no amusement, what it all meant.”
“Yes, what else?”
“Well, I wasn’t entirely frank about the ritual matter,” I said, miserably. “I told you it was as though another person had taken charge of my mind and gone on with it. That was true, in a way — but God help me, I knew all the time that other person was — myself! It was like being two people and one at the same time. It’s hard to make clear . . . you know how you can be saying one thing and thinking another. Suppose you could be saying one thing and thinking two things at once. It was like that. One part of me was in revolt, horror-stricken, terrified. The other part was none of those things; it knew it had power and was enjoying exercising that power — and it had control of my will. But both were — I. Unequivocally, unmistakably — I. Hell, man — if I’d really believed it was somebody, something, besides myself, do you suppose I’d feel the remorse I do? No, it’s because I knew it was I— the same part of me that knew the helm and the swords, that I’ve gone hag-ridden ever since.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Dreams.”
He leaned over, and spoke sharply.
“What dreams?”
“Dreams of battles-dreams of feasts . . . a dream of war against yellow men, and of a battlefield beside a river and of arrows flying overhead in clouds . . . of hand-to-hand fights in which I wield a weapon like a huge hammer against big yellow-haired men I know are like myself . . . dreams of towered cities through which I pass and where white, blue-eyed women toss garlands down for my horse to trample. . . . When I wake the dreams are vague, soon lost. But always I know that while I dreamed them, they were clear, sharp-cut — real as life . . . .”
“Is that how you knew the Witch-woman was Witch-woman — through those dreams?”
“If so, I don’t remember. I only knew that suddenly I recognized her for what she was — or that other self did.”
He sat for a while in silence.
“Leif,” he asked, “in those dreams do you ever take any part in the service of Khalk’ru? Have anything at all to do with his worship?”
“I’m sure I don’t. I’d remember that, by God! I don’t even dream of the temple in the Gobi!”
He nodded, as though I had confirmed some thought in his own mind; then was quiet for so long that I became jumpy.
“Well, Old Medicine Man of the Tsalagi’, what’s the diagnosis? Reincarnation, demonic possession, or just crazy?”
“Leif, you never had any of those dreams before the Gobi?”
“I did not.”
“Well — I’ve been trying to think as Barr would, and squaring it with my own grey matter. Here’s the result. I think that everything you’ve told me is the doing of your old priest. He had you under his control when you saw yourself riding to the Temple of Khalk’ru — and wouldn’t go in. You don’t know what else he might have suggested at that time, and have commanded you to forget consciously when you came to yourself. That’s a simple matter of hypnotism. But he had another chance at you. When you were asleep that night. How do you know he didn’t come in and do some more suggesting? Obviously, he wanted to believe you were Dwayanu. He. wanted you to ‘remember’— but having had one lesson, he didn’t want you to remember what went on with Khalk’ru. That would explain why you dreamed about the pomp and glory and the pleasant things, but not the unpleasant. He was a wise old gentleman — you say that yourself. He knew enough of your psychology to foresee you would balk at a stage of the ritual. So you did — but he had tied you well up. Instantly the post-hypnotic command to the subconscious operated. You couldn’t help going on. Although your conscious self was wide-awake, fully aware, it had no control over your will. I think that’s what Barr would say. And I’d agree with him. Hell, there are drugs that do all that to you. You don’t have to go into migrations of the soul, or demons, or any medieval matter to account for it.”
“Yes,” I said, hopefully but doubtfully. “And how about the Witch-woman?”
“Somebody like her in your dreams, but forgotten. I think the explanation is what I’ve said. If it is, Leif, it worries me.”
“I don’t follow you there,” I said.
“No? Well, think this over. If all these things that puzzle you come from suggestions the old priest made — what else did he suggest? Clearly, he knew something of this place. Suppose he foresaw the possibility of your finding it. What would he want you to do when you did find it? Whatever it was, you can bet your chances of getting out that he planted it deep in your subconscious. All right — that being a reasonable deduction, what is it you will do when you come in closer contact with those red-headed ladies we saw, and with the happy few gentlemen who share their Paradise? I haven’t the slightest idea — nor have you. And if that isn’t something to worry about, tell me what is. Come on — let’s go to bed.”
We went into the tent. We had been in it before with Evalie. It had been empty then except for a pile of soft pelts and silken stuffs at one side. Now there were two such piles. We shed our clothes in the pale green darkness and turned in. I looked at my watch.
“Ten o’clock,” I said. “How many months since morning?”
“At least six. If you keep me awake I’ll murder you. I’m tired.”
So was I; but I lay long, thinking. I was not so convinced by Jim’s argument, plausible as it was. Not that I believed I had been lying dormant in some extra-spatial limbo for centuries. Nor that I had ever been this ancient Dwayanu. There was a third explanation, although I didn’t like it a bit better than than of reincarnation; and it had just as many unpleasant possibilities as that of Jim’s.
Not long ago an eminent American physician and psychologist had said he bad discovered that the average man used only about one-tenth of his brain; and scientists generally agreed he was right. The ablest thinkers, all-round geniuses, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were, might use a tenth more. Any man who could use all his brain could rule the world — but probably wouldn’t want to. In the human skull was a world only one-fifth explored at the most.
What was in the terra incognita of the brain — the unexplored eight-tenths?
Well, for one thing there might be a storehouse of ancestral memories, memories reaching back to those of the hairy, ape-like ancestors who preceded man, reaching beyond them even to those of the ffippered creatures who crawled out of the ancient seas to begin their march to men — and further back to their ancestors who had battled and bred in the steaming oceans when the continents were being bom.
Millions upon millions of years of memories! What a reservoir of knowledge if man’s consciousness could but tap it!
There was nothing more unbelievable in this than that the physical memory of the race could be contained in the two single cells which start the cycle of birth. In them are all the complexities of the human body — brain and nerves, muscles, bone and blood. In them, too, are those traits we call hereditary — family resemblances, resemblances not only of face and body but of thought, habits, emotions, reactions to environment: grandfather’s nose, great-grandmother’s eyes, great-great-grandfather’s irascibility, moodiness or what not. If all this can be carried in those seven and forty, and eight and forty, microscopic rods within the birth cells which biologists call the chromosomes, tiny mysterious gods of birth who determine from the beginning what blend of ancestors a boy or girl shall be, why could they not carry, too, the accumulated experiences, the memories of those ancestors?
Somewhere in the human brain might be a section of records, each neatly graven with lines of memories,