Without the Skin he
could think as he pleased. He did not have a censor.

Now, he was on level ground again, out of the cell. But as soon as he
had put that prison-shaft behind him he was faced with the old second
Skin.

Archambaud held it out like a cloak in his hands. It looked much like
a ragged garment. It was pale and limp and roughly rectangular with
four extensions at each corner. When Rastignac put it on his back, it
would sink four tiny hollow teeth into his veins and the suckers on
the inner surface of its flat body would cling to him. Its long upper
extensions would wrap themselves around his shoulders and over his
chest; the lower, around his loins and thighs. Soon it would lose its
paleness and flaccidity, become pink and slightly convex, pulsing with
Rastignac's blood.

V

Rastignac hesitated for a few seconds. Then he allowed the habit of a
lifetime to take over. Sighing, he turned his back. In a moment he
felt the cold flesh descend over his shoulders and the little bite of
the four teeth as they attached the Skin to his shoulders. Then, as
his blood poured into the creature he felt it grow warm and strong. It
spread out and followed the passages it had long ago been conditioned
to follow, wrapped him warmly and lovingly and comfortably. And he
knew, though he couldn't feel it, that it was pushing nerves into the
grooves along the teeth. Nerves to connect with his.

A minute later he experienced the first of the expected _rapport_. It
was nothing that you could put a mental finger on. It was just a
diffused tingling and then the sudden consciousness of how the others
around him _felt_.

They were ghosts in the background of his mind. Yet, pale and
ectoplasmic as they were, they were easily identifiable. Mapfarity
loomed above the others, a transparent Colossus radiating streamers of
confidence in his clumsy strength. A meat-eater, uncertain about the
future, with a hope and trust in Rastignac to show him the right way.
And with a strong current of anger against the conqueror who had
inflicted the Skin upon him.

Archambaud was a shorter phantom, rolypoly even in his psychic
manifestations, emitting bursts of impatience because other people did
not talk fast enough to suit him, his mind leaping on ahead of their
tongues, his fingers wriggling to wrap themselves around something
valuable--preferably the eggs of the golden goose--and a general
eagerness to be up and about and onwards. He was one