I tried to remind her. She just laughed and shook her head. “All he said was, ‘And by all that’s holy, Donna Silberman, I wish you wouldn’t talk to people about our projects.’ That’s all.”

  It was my turn to be puzzled.

  “Is that word for word?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I was in recall mode.”

  And so a moment later I had my magic finger in her neck, and I clearly heard Young’s voice saying, “And by all that’s holy, Donna Silberman, I wish you wouldn’t talk to people about our projects.”

  I thanked her and she got up and left. At the door she said, “See? I told you I was telling the truth.” And then she was gone. I heard Young growling as she left. And I saw Kimball come to the door and wait for me to tell him what next. I waved him away. He shut the door. And I tried to think.

  What had happened was impossible. Donna Silberman and I had heard the same thing—and yet our memories were different. I couldn’t deny the reality of what I had heard. But I also couldn’t deny the reality of what she had heard. You can’t lie to a sympathizer.

  And now my anomalizer was as confused as I was. Very, very confused. One of its basic programs was to believe anything it got through the sympathizer—or through my mind—without question. But when two things were in conflict?

  Time for help. This one was beyond me. I punched in the query code, and using my AT&T ThinkSpeak (a nickel now for old Ma Bell) I was able to get hold of our resident expert on equipment.

  “Malfunction?” he asked, as my prebrain slowed down the quickspeak burst to intelligible speeds.

  “Sympathize with me,” I said, “and I’ll show you.”

  He was a juster too, of course, and so we didn’t require an actual physical attachment. When two justers are willing, they’re able.

  And he was as confused as I was by the conflicting memories.

  “Is there any way Young could have made a prebrain that lies?”

  “No. It can’t be done. The only way a prebrain can work is to go directly to the memory, where it’s stored. It’ll gel the truth.”

  “But both memories can’t be.”

  And I sat while he puzzled with the problem.

  “Call Cannon in,” he finally said, “and ask him some questions while I’m in sympathy.”

  And so for the denouement I became a mere transmitter. That’s what I get for not being the expert. But when I think how narrowly I avoided disaster, it still makes me sweat a little. If I had plugged into—oh well.

  Question one: “Mr. Cannon, do you feel anything unusual when you try to remember, let’s say, Miner’s interview with Young?”

  Cannon shook his head. “Nothing—except a great deal of apprehension. I remember how painful every other interview with Young has been.”

  Question two: “Did Dr. Young behave normally in the interview?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. He was very mild. Jovial, like a great big teddy bear. He shouted a lot, but there was no sting to his words. I didn’t feel tense at all.”

  Question three: “Did Dr. Young ever go near the weapons on the walls?”

  Cannon went into recall mode and summoned up an answer. “Yes, he did. He even touched the knife there on the wall—the one that was, uh, in Rodney’s throat. But he didn’t take it off the wall. I remember that clearly.”

  Question four: “Mr. Cannon, did Dr. Young install an experimental prebrain in you recently?”

  “Why yes,” Cannon said. “He said it would increase my pleasure, and it certainly did. It’s like getting a better grip on life. I’ve never been happier. I can cope with stress—in fact, come to think of it, I simply haven’t had any stress. Until Rodney died, and even that—I feel terribly guilty about it, but it just doesn’t seem real. I’m still happy.”

  He shook his head and laughed, that marvelous, warm laugh. “I’ve always been a basically happy person before, but since the new prebrain, why—I’ve felt no pain. No pain at all.”

  And the prebrain expert from Winnipeg said (and the AT&T Thinkspeak set it pounding in my ears): “Arrest Dr. Young and charge him with first degree murder. You can let everyone else go.”

  I was, to say the least, both relieved and surprised. “What’s going on?” I asked; and because Cannon and Kimball didn’t realize that I was in contact with someone outside the room, they both asked me what did I mean, even as the expert from Winnipeg said, “Don’t worry about it. Just have the police seal off Happy Head, Incorporated. No one in, and no one out. We’ll have a team down there in no time. And have Young put in maximum security, declared guilty, and waiting for a judge to sentence him. I take full responsibility.”

  And because our brains were, as usual, recording every word, I did as he said, wondering all the while how Young had pulled it off.

  It was a week later, in Winnipeg, that I got a call on the coder calling me into the assignment center. I assumed it was another job, but instead I was led into a section of the building I had never been in, and was introduced to a man I had never met.

  “Juster Benson,” he said. “I’m Juster Coletti. I’ve been given permission to satisfy your curiosity.”

  And I recognized his voice. The expert on prebrains.

  “Everything fit in with what we had here,” he told me. “When we got your information, Benson, we were able to figure out what Young had done. Apparently—and now it’s confirmed, from examination of his experimental subjects—he finally crossed the emotion barrier. We had long assumed that emotions were unfindable, because, like memories, they are not seated in any one particular place in the brain, but unlike memories they do not rely on outside sensation—they can’t be routed into certain corrals, as we do with memories.”

  I nodded, trying to look intelligent. No one was fooled.

  “Young found out that emotions do have a seat, after all. It’s an energy relationship between different parts of the brain, and so it’s in four different locations, each performing a completely different function at the same time that they’re producing emotions. He tapped that, and built a prebrain that sorts out the different types of emotions. The positive ones it builds up like feedback between a microphone and an amplified speaker. The negative ones, however, overload a memory directionalizer—sorter, pardon me.”

  And from there on it was obvious. Once he had, so to speak “crossed the emotion barrier,” it was a simple matter of putting unpleasant events—not just the emotion, but the whole memory—into an area of the brain that the prebrain was programmed not to retrieve from. It was so effective that a split second after an unpleasant event, a person with the emotional link prebrain could not remember that it had happened—so soon that negative emotions didn’t have time to build.

  “And because the brain can’t cope with being unable to remember the immediate past, it avoids insanity by hallucinating. It’s as simple as that. Unpleasant events are erased. Pleasant hallucinations replace them. The brain reads the hallucinations as reality because the prebrain has no alternative—the real events are programmed to be irretrievable. They’re still in the brain, but lost.”

  And that was that. I thanked Juster Coletti for telling me, and he commended me for trusting my impression that Cannon was telling the truth and that Young was, somehow, trapping us. “It almost worked, too. With Cannon, an honest man, unwilling to lie in order to implicate Young, particularly since he ‘knew’ that Miner had been alive when Young left the office, the only person left to suspect was Cannon himself. If you had followed logic, Benson, you would then have sympathized with Young, his first amendment rights would have been violated, and he would be a free man today.”

  As it was, of course, Young was executed only four months later.

  I thought the case was closed, and that I had a small but honorable part in it, until a few months ago, when Happy Head Incorporated introduced the new Happy Head JoyBrain. The commercials advertised it to sound suspiciously like Young’s emotional link prebrain. And so I made my way through the corridors of the assignment center until I could find Coletti again.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I asked, telling him about the JoyBrain. “I thought Young’s gift to humanity would be suppressed!”

  “Oh, of course,” Coletti said, smiling reassuringly.

  “Well, why is it free now?” I demanded.

  “We tested it. And it’s safe. You see, Juster Benson, people with a JoyBrain are not only incapable of remembering stress, they are also incapable of performing any act that causes stress. Remember how nice and cooperative Donna Silberman and John Cannon were?”

  I remembered. I remembered that neither of them could stop smiling, either.

  “Oh, yes, but that’s a pleasant byproduct of peace and happiness. We tested the JoyBrain in five cities in the United States—Ottawa, Seattle, Nashville, Phoenix, and Scranton—the five largest, and so the five with the highest crime rates.”

  “And?”

  “We didn’t allow any publicity, of course, but the crime rates dropped. In neighborhoods where implantation approached one hundred percent, crime vanished.” Coletti laughed with joy. “And then we smuggled the Joy Brain across several key borders. We finally have the key to world peace, Juster Benson. And instead of waiting for death to bring heaven, people can have eternal joy during the life we actually have.”

  “It sounds perfect,” I said.

  “It is perfect,” he answered. “Of course, for our protection we have left a large portion of the army and law enforcement agencies without the JoyBrain—some violence may still be necessary in self-defense or in defense of society. That’s why you haven’t been given a JoyBrain yet.”

  “Ah, I see,” I said.

  “Can you picture it? A billion people, the whole population of the world, constantly happy! Never again will war devastate us as it did thirty years ago, cutting the world population down to only half a billion or so. Never again will international rivalries keep nations from cooperating to solve the world’s problems. Can you see the vision of the future?”

  I saw a billion smiling Donna Silbermans, grinning until their cheeks ached, and I felt sick. But then I thought of John Cannon, and realized that there is joy—and joy.

  “Yes,” I said. “I can see it.”

  And Coletti urged me to come back anytime. He smiled at me as I left, a warm, glowing, joyful smile.

  I wept all the way home, and though I tried and tried, I couldn’t figure out who in the world I was mourning for. Those who had found perfect joy? Or for myself, who would refuse it, and so go unhappy to my grave.

  Mikal’s Songbird

  Some men wield power; some are tools.

  The doorknob turned. That would be dinner.

  Ansset rolled over on the hard bed, his muscles aching. As always, he tried to ignore the burning feeling of guilt in the pit of his stomach.

  But it was not Husk with food on a tray. This time it was the man called Master, though Ansset believed that was not his name. Master was always angry and fearsomely strong, one of the few men who could make Ansset feel and act like the eleven-year-old child his body said he was.

  “Get up, Songbird.”

  Ansset slowly stood. They kept him naked in his prison, and only his pride kept him from turning away from the harsh eyes that looked him up and down. Ansset’s cheeks burned with shame that took the place of the guilt he had wakened to.

  “It’s a good-bye feast we’re having for you, Chirp, and ye’re going to twitter for us.”

  Ansset shook his head.

  “If ye can sing for the bastarrd Mikal, ye can sing for honest freemen.”

  Ansset’s eyes blazed. “Watch how you speak of him, you barbarian traitor! He’s your emperor!”

  Master advanced a step, raising his hand angrily. “My orders was not to mark you, Chirp, but I can give you pain that doesn’t leave a scar if ye don’t mind how you talk to a freeman. Now ye’ll sing.”

  Ansset, afraid of the man’s brutality as only someone who has never known physical punishment can be afraid, nodded—but still hung back. “Can you please give me my clothing?”

  “It ain’t cold where we’re going,” Master retorted.

  “I’ve never sung like this,” Ansset said, embarrassed. “I’ve never performed without clothing.”

  Master leered. “What is it then that you do without clothing? Mikal’s catamite has naw secrets we can’t see.”

  Ansset didn’t understand the word, but he understood the leer, and he followed Master out the door and down a dark corridor with his heart even more darkly filled with shame. He wondered why they were having a “good-bye feast” for him. Was he to be set free? (Had someone paid some unknown ransom for him?) Or was he to be killed?

  The floor rocked gently as they walked down the wooden corridor. Ansset had long since decided he was imprisoned on a ship. The amount of real wood used in it would have seemed gaudy and pretentious in a rich man’s home. Here it seemed only shabby.

  Far above he could hear the distant cry of a bird, and a steady singing sound that he imagined to be wind whipping through ropes and cables. He had sung the melody himself sometimes, and often harmonized.

  And then Master opened the door and with a mocking bow indicated that Ansset should enter first. The boy stopped in the doorframe. Gathered around a long table were twenty or so men, some of whom he had seen before, all of them dressed in the strange costumes of Earth barbarians. Ansset couldn’t help remembering Mikal’s raucous laughter whenever they came to court, pretending to be heirs of great civilizations that to minds accustomed to thinking on a galactic scale were petty and insignificant indeed. And yet as he stood looking at their rough faces and unsmiling eyes, he felt that it was he, with the soft skin of the imperial court, that was petty and insignificant, a mere naked child, while these men held the strength of worlds in their rough, gnarled hands.

  They looked at him with the same curious, knowing, lustful look that Master had given him. Ansset relaxed his stomach and firmed his back and ribs to conquer emotion, as he had been taught in the Songhouse before he turned three. He stepped into the room.

  “Up on the table!” roared Master behind him, and hands lifted him onto the wood smeared with spilled wine and rough with crumbs and fragments of food. “Now sing, ye little bastarrd.”

  The eyes looked his naked body over, and Ansset almost cried. But he was a Songbird, and many called him the best who had ever lived. Hadn’t Mikal brought him from one end of the galaxy to his new Capital on old Earth? And when he sang, no matter who the audience, he would sing well.

  And so he closed his eyes and shaped the ribs around his lungs, and let a low tone pass through his throat. At first he sang without words, soft and low, knowing the sound would be hard to hear. “Louder,” someone said, but he ignored the instructions. Gradually the jokes and laughter died down as the men strained to hear.

  The melody was a wandering one, passing through tones and quarter-tones easily, gracefully, still low in pitch, but rising and falling rhythmically. Unconsciously Ansset moved his hands in strange gestures to accompany his song. He was never aware of those gestures, except that once he had read in a newsheet, “To hear Mikal’s Songbird is heavenly, but to watch his hands dance as he sings is nirvana.” That was a prudent thing to write about Mikal’s favorite—when the writer lived in Capital. Nevertheless, no one had even privately disputed the comment.

  And now Ansset began to sing words. They were words of his own captivity, and the melody became high, in the soft upper notes that opened his throat and tightened the muscles at the back of his head and tensed the muscles along the front of his thighs. The notes pierced, and as he slid up and down through haunting thirdtones (a technique that few Songbirds could master) his words spoke of dark, shameful evenings in a dirty cell, a longing for the kind looks of Father Mikal (not by name, never by name in front of these barbarians), of dreams of the broad lawns that stretched from the palace to the Susquehanna River, and of lost, forgotten days that ended in wakeful evenings in a tiny cell of splintered wood.

  And he sang of his guilt.

  At last he became tired, and the song drifted off into a whispered dorian scale that ended on the wrong note, on a dissonant note that faded into silence that sounded like part of the song.

  Finally Ansset opened his eyes. All the men who were not weeping were watching him. None seemed willing to break the mood, until a youngish man down the table said in the thick accent, “Ah, but thet was better than hame and Mitherma.” His comment was greeted by sighs and chuckles of agreement, and the looks that met Ansset’s eyes were no longer leering and lustful, but rather soft and kind. Ansset had never thought to see such looks in those rough faces.

  “Will ye have some wine, boy?” asked Master’s voice behind him, and Husk poured. Ansset sipped the wine, and dipped a finger in it to cast a drop into the air in the graceful gesture of court. “Thank you,” he said, handing back the metal cup with the same grace he would have used with a goblet at court. He lowered his head, though it hurt him to use that gesture of respect to such men, and asked, “May I leave now?”

  “Do you have to? Can’t you sing again?” the men around the table murmured, as if they had forgotten he was their prisoner. And Ansset refused as if he were free to choose. “I can’t do it twice. I can never do it twice.”

  They lifted him off the table, then, and Master’s strong arms carried him back to his room. Ansset lay on the bed after the door locked shut, trembling. The last time he had sung was for Mikal, and the song had been light and happy. Then Mikal had smiled the soft smile that only touched his old face when he was alone with his Songbird, had touched the back of Ansset’s hand, and Ansset had kissed the old hand and gone out to walk along the river. It was then that they had taken him—rough hands from behind, the sharp slap of the needle, and then waking in the cell where now he lay looking at the walls.

  He always woke in the evening, aching from some unknown effort of the day, and wracked by guilt. He strained to remember, but always in the effort drifted off to sleep, only to wake again the next evening suffering from the lost day behind him. But tonight he did not try to puzzle out what lay behind the blocks in his mind. Instead he drifted off to sleep thinking of the songs in Mikal’s kind gray eyes, humming of the firm hands that ruled an empire a galaxy wide and could still stroke the forehead of a sweet-singing child and weep at a sorrowful song. Ah, sang Ansset in his mind, ah, the weeping of Mikal’s sorrowful hands.