“I said, what did you do then? Is there some problem with your hearing?”
“I’ve been having a little trouble preserving continuity lately.”
“Ah.” The fox-faced man opposite him gestured at the set. “Let us watch some more television, then.”
“It’s upside down,” the bureaucrat protested.
“Is it?” The fox man stood, flipped the television over effortlessly, squatted again. He was not wearing any clothing, but there was a folded pair of dungarees where he had been sitting. The bureaucrat had likewise made a pad of his jacket to protect himself from the damp. “Is that better?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me what you see.”
“There are two women fighting. One has a knife. They are rolling over and over in the dirt. Now one is standing. She brushes her hair back from her forehead. She’s all sweaty, and she holds up the knife and looks at it. There’s blood on the blade.”
The fox sighed. “I have fasted and bled for six days without results. Sometimes I doubt I will ever be holy enough to see the pictures.”
“You cannot see any images on television?”
A sly smile, a twitch of whiskers. “None of my kind can. It is ironic. We few survivors hide among you, attend your schools, work in your field, and yet we do not know you at all. We cannot even see your dreams.”
“It’s just a machine.”
“Then why can we see nothing on it but a bright and shifting light?”
“I remember—” he began, almost dropped the thought, then caught the wind and sailed effortlessly forward—“I remember talking with a man who said that the picture does not exist. That the images are made in two parts and woven together within the brain.”
“If that is so, then our brains must lack the loom, and we will never see your dreams.” The creature licked its lips with a long black tongue. The bureaucrat felt a sudden shiver of dread.
“This is madness,” he said. “I cannot be talking with you.”
“Why is that?”
“The last haunt died centuries ago.”
“There are not many of us left, true. We were very near extinction before we learned how to survive in the interstices of your society. Physically altering our appearance was easy, of course. But passing as human, earning your money without attracting your interest, is more of a challenge. We are forced to hide among the poor, in shanties at the edge of farmlands and shotgun flats in the worst parts of the Fan.
“Well, enough of that.” Fox stood, offered his hand, raised the bureaucrat to his feet. He helped him into his jacket, and handed him his briefcase. “You must leave now. I really ought to kill you. But your conversation was so interesting, the early parts especially, that I will give you a short head start.” He opened his mouth to show row upon row of sharp teeth.
“Run!” he said.
* * *
He had been running through the forest so long, crashing through tunnels of feathery arches, stumbling into towers of spiked and antlered tentacles that collapsed noiselessly about him, that it had become a steady state of existence, as natural and unquestionable as any other. Then it all melted about him, and he was in a boneyard, among skeletons grown together and refleshed, rib cages growing fungal breasts, pelvises sprouting pale phalluses, and incurvate vaginas. The dead were reborn as monsters, twins and triplets joined at hip and head, whole families overwhelmed by yeasting masses, a single skull peering up from the top, red-painted teeth agape as if it were either laughing or screaming.
Then that was gone too, and he was stumbling across flat, empty ground. Gasping, he stopped. The earth here was hard as stone. Nothing grew on it. To one side he could hear the excited water music of Cobbs Creek, in full flood and eager to merge with the river. This would be the dig site, he realized, a full eighth-mile square injected down to the bedrock with stabilizers after burying no fewer than three sealed navigation beacons in its heart, against the return of the land in a new age. He breathed convulsively, lungs afire. Was I running? he wondered, and felt the sudden dead weight of futility as he remembered that Undine was dead.
“I found him!” someone cried.
A hand touched his shoulder, spun him around. Slowly he turned, and a fist struck his jaw.
He fell, legs sprawling out beneath him. His head smashed to the ground, and his arms flew wide. With a vague, all-encompassing amazement he felt a booted foot crash into his ribs. “Whoof!” His breath fled out of him, and he knew the grinding darkness of granite-boned earth turning under impact. Something loose and giving.
Three dark figures floated above him, shifting in planes of depth, movement defining and redefining their spatial relationship with each other and himself. One of them might have been a woman. He was too alert to possibilities, his attention too quick and darting, to be sure. They danced about him, images multiplying and leaving dark trails, until he was woven into a cage of enemies. “What,” he croaked. “What do you want?”
His voice gonged and reverberated, coming deep and from a distance, like a vast drowned bell tolling from the bottom of the sea. The bureaucrat tried to raise his arms, but they responded oh so slowly. It was as if he were consciousness alone, seated within the head of a carved granite giant.
They beat him with a thousand fists, blows that rippled and overlapped, leaving pain in their wake. Then, abruptly, it was over. A round face, limned with witch-fire, floated into view.
Veilleur smiled down on him mockingly. “I told you there were ways and ways,” he said. “Nobody ever takes me seriously, that’s my problem.”
He took up the briefcase.
“Come on,” Veilleur said to the others. “I’ve got what we were after.”
Then gone.
* * *
Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibility, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness. The bureaucrat lay watching the total destruction of the universe for a long time. Perhaps he was unconscious, perhaps not. Whatever he was, it was a state of awareness he had never experienced before. He had nothing to compare it to. Could one be drugged-conscious and drugged-asleep? How would you know? The ground was hard, cold, damp, under him. His coat was torn. He suspected that some of the dampness was his own blood. There were too many facts to deal with. Still, he knew he should be concerned about the blood. He clung to that island scrap of surety even as his thoughts spun dizzily around and around, lofting him high to show him the world and then slamming him down to begin the voyage again.
He dreamed that a creature came walking down the road. It had the body of a man and the head of a fox. It wore a tattered pair of dungarees.
Fox, if Fox it was, halted when he came to where the bureaucrat lay, and crouched beside him. That sharp-nosed face sniffed at his crotch, his chest, his head. “I’m bleeding,” the bureaucrat said helpfully. Fox frowned down at him. Then that head swung away again, dissolving into the air.
He was whirled up into the ancient sky, thrown high as planets into old night and the void.
7
Who Is the Black Beast?
The common room was dark and stuffy. Thick brocade curtains with tinsel-thread whales and roses choked out the afternoon sun. Floral pomanders sewn into the furniture failed to mask the smell of mildew; rots and growths were so quietly pervasive here that they seemed not decay but a natural progression, as if the hotel were slowly transforming itself from the realm of the artificial to that of the living.
“I won’t see him,” the bureaucrat insisted. “Send him away. Where are my clothes?”
Mother Le Marie placed soft, cool brown-spotted hands on his chest and forced him back down on the divan, more by embarrassment than actual force. “He’ll be here any minute now. There’s nothing you can do about it. Be still.”
“I won’t pay him.” The bureaucrat felt weak and irritable, and strangely guilty, as if he had done something shameful the night before. The water-stained plaster ceiling liquefied and flowed in his vision, its cracks and imperfections undulating like strands of seaweed. He squeezed his eyes shut for an instant. Nausea came and went in long, slow waves. His bowels felt loose.
“You don’t have to.” Le Marie tightened her jaw, a turtle trying to smile. “Dr. Orphelin will do the work as a favor to me.”
In the hallway, the coffin-shaped coroner hummed gently to itself. One corner caught the light and glowed a pure and holy white. The bureaucrat forced himself to look away, found his gaze returning anyway. Two bored national police officers lounged against the wall, arms folded, staring into the television room.
Who was the father?
old Ahab roared.
I think I’m entitled to know.
“I trust I have not grown so gullible as to consult a doctor,” the bureaucrat said with dignity. “If I want medical attention, I shall employ the qualified machinery or, in extremis, a human with proper biomedical augmentation. But I will not swill down fermented swamp guzzle at the behest of some quasi-literate, uneducated charlatan.”
“Be sensible. The nearest diagnostician is in Green Hill, while Dr. Orphelin is—”
“I am here.”
He paused in the doorway, as if posing for a commemorative hologram: a lean man in a blue jacket of military cut with two rows of gold buttons. Then the worn white path down the middle of the carpet carried him past a rotting vacuum suit propped ornamentally against the bookcase, and he dumped his black bag alongside the divan. His hands were heavily tattooed.
“You have been drugged,” the doctor said briskly, “and a diagnostician cannot help you. The medicinal properties of our native plants are not in its data base. Why should they be? Synthetics can do anything that natural drugs can, and they can be manufactured on the spot. But if you wish to understand what has happened to you, you must go not to one of your loathsome machines but to one such as I who has spent years studying such plants.” He had a lean, ascetic face with high cheekbones and cold eyes. “I am going to examine you now. You are not required to heed a word of what I have to say. However, I insist on your cooperation in the examination.”
The bureaucrat felt foolish. “Oh, very well.”
“Thank you.” Orphelin nodded to Mother Le Marie. “You may leave now.”
The old woman looked startled, then offended. She raised her chin and walked stiffly out.
Why won’t you tell your uncle who the father is?
someone said, and a young woman’s agonized voice cried,
Because them
is
no father!
before it was muffled by the closing door.
Orphelin peeled back the bureaucrat’s eyelids, shone a small light in his ears, took a scraping from inside his mouth, and fed it to a diagnostick. “You should lose some weight,” he remarked. “If you want, I can show you how to balance real and fairy foods in a diet.” The bureaucrat stared stoically at a spray of pink silk roses, brittle and browning at the edges, and said nothing.
At last the examination ended. “Hum. Well, you shan’t be surprised to learn that you’ve taken in some variety of neurotoxin. Could be any of a number of suspects. Did you experience hallucinations or illusions?”
“What’s the difference?”
“An illusion is a misreading of actual sensory data, while a hallucination is seeing something that isn’t there. Tell me what you saw last night. Just”—he held up a hand—“the high points, please. I have neither the time nor the patience for the extended story.”
The bureaucrat told him about the giant women wading in the river.
“Hallucinations. Did you believe in their reality?”
He thought. “No. But they frightened me.”
Orphelin smiled thinly. “You wouldn’t be the first man with a fear of women. Oh be still, that was a joke. What else did you see?”
“I had a long talk with a fox-headed haunt. But that was real.”
The doctor looked at him oddly. “Was it?”
“Oh yes. I’m quite sure of it. He carried me back to the hotel, later.”
Nausea welled up again, and the room took on a heightened clarity and vividness. He could see every thread of fiber on the rug, every frayed fabric end on the divan crawling in his vision. He felt flushed, and the finger that Undine had tattooed burned.
There was a rap on the door.
“Yes?” the bureaucrat said.
Chu stuck her head in and said, “Excuse me, but the autopsy is complete, and we need you to accept the report.”
“Come in here, please,” Orphelin said. “And I’ll need somebody else as well.” Chu glanced at the bureaucrat, and then, when he shrugged, ducked into the hall. She spoke to the guards. The taller one shook his head. “Hold on,” she said. A minute later she returned with Mintouchian in tow. He looked more hound than man, his face puffy and pink, his eyes sad and bloodshot.
“There’s more to this than I had originally thought.” The doctor held out his arms. “Grasp me by the wrists and hold on as tightly as possible.” Chu took one arm, Mintouchian the other. “Pull! We’re not here to hold hands.”
They obeyed, and he slowly leaned forward, letting his head loll on his chest. The two had to struggle to hold him upright.