seemed apt to Celia Prior Flamen following her commitment. Possibly it still was. But nowadays she merely hummed its tune to herself. Singing it aloud was pointless. No matter how much she raised her clear high voice, the sound was soaked up by the layers and layers of insulation on the walls of her luxurious retreat.
That was what they called the cells in the Ginsberg: retreats.
She was thirty-five, a year younger than her husband and four years younger than her brother, though Lionel always looked, acted, and apparently felt at least a decade her senior. She was also rather beautiful, having a casque of sleek brown hair which she had never dyed or patterned despite the dictates of fashion, framing a heart-shaped face with an over-large but delightfully mobile mouth, and a taut slim body which at one moment could suggest sensual languor, at the next nervous tension barely held in check by sheer force of will.
But her mind, like a scalpel designed for healing and used for murder, had gone too deep into a place it was not intended to enter.
Watching her thoughtfully over the concealed comweb link—the camera was behind the mirror on the dressing-table at which she spent much of her time currently, inventing new faces for herself from the lavish range of cosmetics with which she had been provided— Elias Mogshack fingered his beard. He was in a dilemma. It was not the first such, and doubtless it would not be the last. But to depart even for a moment from the transcendent certainty which the public at large associated with his name was an affront to the aura of authority that had gained him his present influence.
Paradox: on the one hand, the overriding command to "be an individual" which he, personally, had put into common speech as a taken-for-granted byword, with the concomitant implication that a schizophrenic, for example, was obeying that command to the letter; on the other, the all-too-obvious fact that someone who was that much of an individual was (a) nonviable because he might forget to eat or turn to sykes or do any of a score of other ultimately fatal things, and (b) excessively demanding of other, competing individuals, as for example insisting that they listen for hours and days to some universal insight which, boiled down, amounted to something most adults had worked out for themselves in their early teens.
He had a case of it right now; there were a dozen other subjects he would have deemed more worthy of his attention had he not been snagged by the question of Celia Prior Flamen.
In principle the methods which had so caught the imagination of the public that he had been railroaded into the post of director for the Ginsberg, willingly enough of course because he wanted to see as many unfortunates as possible benefit from his teaching, were very simple. In every retreat there were data-collecting devices that monitored the sewage, the surfaces of the bed and the chairs, the very air that the patient exhaled —parameters for the construction of a computerized curve calibrated against standard examples of all the known kinds of mental disorder. Causeless anxiety, self-induced stress-response, every possible type of deviation from cool was measured and projected into the future and interpreted as therapy: drugs, hypnotism, analysis, anything available. The target was likewise simple; one might define it as the production of a personality capable of functioning viably despite the pressures of other members of the species. An ideal personality profile was raised for each patient, a beautiful symmetrical curve, and when the observed profile matched the optimum the patient was discharged. Easy.
Except that in practice it wasn't easy at all. . . .
Take this case, for example. In theory it ought to have been absolutely straightforward. Celia Prior Flamen— like the majority of the patients here and in all other mental hospitals in the western world—had turned to sykes as an escape from intolerable
That was what they called the cells in the Ginsberg: retreats.
She was thirty-five, a year younger than her husband and four years younger than her brother, though Lionel always looked, acted, and apparently felt at least a decade her senior. She was also rather beautiful, having a casque of sleek brown hair which she had never dyed or patterned despite the dictates of fashion, framing a heart-shaped face with an over-large but delightfully mobile mouth, and a taut slim body which at one moment could suggest sensual languor, at the next nervous tension barely held in check by sheer force of will.
But her mind, like a scalpel designed for healing and used for murder, had gone too deep into a place it was not intended to enter.
Watching her thoughtfully over the concealed comweb link—the camera was behind the mirror on the dressing-table at which she spent much of her time currently, inventing new faces for herself from the lavish range of cosmetics with which she had been provided— Elias Mogshack fingered his beard. He was in a dilemma. It was not the first such, and doubtless it would not be the last. But to depart even for a moment from the transcendent certainty which the public at large associated with his name was an affront to the aura of authority that had gained him his present influence.
Paradox: on the one hand, the overriding command to "be an individual" which he, personally, had put into common speech as a taken-for-granted byword, with the concomitant implication that a schizophrenic, for example, was obeying that command to the letter; on the other, the all-too-obvious fact that someone who was that much of an individual was (a) nonviable because he might forget to eat or turn to sykes or do any of a score of other ultimately fatal things, and (b) excessively demanding of other, competing individuals, as for example insisting that they listen for hours and days to some universal insight which, boiled down, amounted to something most adults had worked out for themselves in their early teens.
He had a case of it right now; there were a dozen other subjects he would have deemed more worthy of his attention had he not been snagged by the question of Celia Prior Flamen.
In principle the methods which had so caught the imagination of the public that he had been railroaded into the post of director for the Ginsberg, willingly enough of course because he wanted to see as many unfortunates as possible benefit from his teaching, were very simple. In every retreat there were data-collecting devices that monitored the sewage, the surfaces of the bed and the chairs, the very air that the patient exhaled —parameters for the construction of a computerized curve calibrated against standard examples of all the known kinds of mental disorder. Causeless anxiety, self-induced stress-response, every possible type of deviation from cool was measured and projected into the future and interpreted as therapy: drugs, hypnotism, analysis, anything available. The target was likewise simple; one might define it as the production of a personality capable of functioning viably despite the pressures of other members of the species. An ideal personality profile was raised for each patient, a beautiful symmetrical curve, and when the observed profile matched the optimum the patient was discharged. Easy.
Except that in practice it wasn't easy at all. . . .
Take this case, for example. In theory it ought to have been absolutely straightforward. Celia Prior Flamen— like the majority of the patients here and in all other mental hospitals in the western world—had turned to sykes as an escape from intolerable
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