Korda figured he understood Gregorian well.
He was wrong. Gregorian had found work in the Outer Circle. There he stayed, until the jubilee tides were imminent, and there was no way for Korda to effectively use him. Korda wrote him off.
Then Gregorian disappeared. He fled suddenly, without warning or notice, in a deliberately suspicious manner. Investigation revealed that shortly before his departure he had interviewed Earth’s agent and been given something. Whatever it was, nobody believed any longer that it was harmless. Alarms were rung. It all ended up in Korda’s lap.
He had handed the investigation to the bureaucrat.
“Why me?”
“I had to send someone. You were simply on deck.”
“Okay. Now, shortly after that, you contacted me at the carnival in Rose Hall. You were costumed as Death, and you were anxious to know if I’d found Gregorian. Why did you do that?”
Korda raised a line-fed glass to his lips. He was drinking steadily, drinking and unable to get drunk. “Gregorian had just sent me a package. A handful of teeth, that was all. I didn’t dare send them to a lab to be analyzed, but it seemed certain to me that they were haunts’ teeth. I’d seen hundreds in museums. Only these had bloodied roots. They’d been yanked recently.”
“That sounds like his style,” the bureaucrat said dryly. “What then?”
“Nothing. Until the other day when I heard from his half-sister that he would meet me here, and give me the proof I wanted. That’s all there is. Will you open the package now?”
“Not just yet,” the bureaucrat said. “Let’s go back a bit. Why did you create Gregorian in the first place? Something to do with regulatory votes, was it?”
“No! It’s not like that at all. I—I was going to have him raised on the Tidewater, you see. I was taking the long view by then. I realized that the reason the haunts were so elusive was that they didn’t
want
to be found. They were passing themselves as human, living in the social interstices, in migrant labor camps and over top of rundown feed stores. They are intelligent, after all, cunning, and few in number.
“To find them I needed someone who knew the Tidewater well, who moved among its people without attracting attention, who could distinguish between a joke and an offhand revelation. Someone culturally at home there.”
“That still doesn’t explain why that someone also had to be
you.
”
“But who else could I trust?” Korda said helplessly. “Who else could I trust?”
The bureaucrat stared at him for a long time. Then he nudged the package forward.
Korda ripped open the lid. When he saw what lay within, he went horribly still. “Go on,” the bureaucrat said, and suddenly he was angry. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Final, irrefutable proof.”
He reached into the box and pulled the severed head out by the hair. Two surrogates nearby put down their imaginary drinks and stared. Others further down noticed and swiveled to look. Silence spread like ripples through the room.
The bureaucrat slammed the head down on the bar.
It was inhumanly pale, the nose longer than any human’s ever was, the mouth lipless, the eyes too green. He slid a hand over the cheek, and the muscles there jumped reflexively, reshaping that part of the head. Korda stared at it, his mouth on the screen opening and closing without saying a word.
The bureaucrat left him there.
* * *
A smear of sunset was visible through the open door, and behind him the surrogates were singing,
These are the last days, the final days, the days that cannot last
, when a bellhop materialized at his elbow. “Excuse me, sir,” it murmured, “but there is a lady who wishes to speak with you. She is here in person, and she emphasizes that it is most important.”
Esme, he thought sadly, when will you put an end to this? Almost he was tempted just to walk out on her. “All right,” he said. “Show me the way.”
The device escorted him up a hidden lift to a suite just below the bulbous dome, and left at the open door. The walls were gently luminous, and in their graceful light the sheer extravagant waste of the room, with its hand-carved furniture, its enormous silk-covered bed, was appalling. He stepped within. “Hello?”
A door opened, and the last woman in the universe he expected entered.
He could say nothing.
“Have you been practicing?” Undine asked.
The bureaucrat blushed. He tried to speak, but was so full of emotion he could not. He reached across an immense distance and took her hand. He clutched it, not like a lover but like a drowning man. Were he to let her go, he knew, she would dissolve from his touch. Her face filled his vision. It was a proud face, beautiful, mischievous; and staring at it, he realized that he did not know her at all, and never had. “Come to me,” he managed at last.
She came to him.
* * *
“Don’t come yet. I have something I want to teach you.”
Not exactly groggy, the bureaucrat was in a far, wordless state, clear-headed but uneager to speak. He drew himself away from her and nodded.
Undine held her two hands cupped together, fingertips down, like a leaf, a slender, natural opening where the edges of her hands touched. “This is the
mudra
for the vagina. And this,” one hand flat, the other slammed atop it in a fist, the thumb thrust upward, “is the
mudra
for the penis. Now”—Still holding the thumb erect, she extended the little finger. She lowered her hand between her legs and hooked the finger into her vagina—“I have made myself into Hermaphrodite. Do you accept me as your goddess?”
“If the alternative is your going away again, then I suppose—”
“All these qualifications—you were born to quibble! Say yes.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now the purpose of this lesson is for you to learn what it is like for me when you make love. That is not much. You wish to understand me, yes? Then you must put yourself in my place. I will do nothing to you that you might not do to me. That is fair, eh?” She reached out to caress his hair, the side of his face. “Ah, sweetness,” she said, “how my cock yearns for your mouth.”
Unsurely, awkwardly, he bent down and closed his mouth about her thumb.
“Not so abruptly. Do I descend upon
you
as if I wanted a bite of sausage? Approach it slowly. Seduce it. Begin by licking the insides of my thighs. Ah. Now kiss my balls—that’s right, the curled fingers. Gently! Run your tongue over the surface, then suck on them ever so lightly. That’s nice.” She arched her back, breasts rising, eyelids closing. Her other hand clenched and unclenched in his hair. “Yes.
“Now let your tongue travel up the shaft. Yes. You might want to hold me steady with your hand. That’s right, slowly. Oh, and up the sides too! That feels so good. Now ease down the hood to expose the tip. Lick it now, ever so lightly. Tease me, yes. Oh, my! You were born to make my cock happy, darling, don’t let anyone ever tell you different.
“Now deeper. Take more of me into your mouth, up and down, long, regular strokes. Let your tongue play around the shaft. Mmm.” She was moving under him now. She licked her lips. “Grab the shaft in both hands. Yes. Faster.”
Suddenly she yanked him up by the hair. Their mouths met, and they kissed passionately, wetly. “Ah God, I can’t stand it,” she said. “I’ve got to have you.” She drew back, turned him around. “Sit down slowly on my lap, and I’ll guide myself in.”
“What?”
“Trust me.” She kissed his back, his sides. Hot, furtive kisses, there and gone, like blows. She put an arm around him, running her hand up his stomach, playing with his nipples. “Oh my beautiful, beautiful little girl. I want to have my cock deep inside you.”
Slowly she eased him down onto her thumb. It touched his anus, slid within. He was sitting in her lap now, her breasts pressed tight against his back. “There, is that so bad?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Good. Now move up and down, little honey, that’s right. Slowly, slowly—the night is long and we have a lot of ground to cover.”
* * *
By the time they went out on the balcony for air, it was night. The sky was glorious with light. Laughter floated up from the goblin market below, where surrogates danced amid a thousand paper lanterns. The bureaucrat looked up, away from them. The annular rings arched overhead, a smear of diamond-dust cities, and beyond them were the stars.
“Tell me the names of the black constellations,” the bureaucrat said.
Undine stood naked beside him, her body slick with sweat that did not want to evaporate into the warm night air. It was possible they could be seen from below, but he did not care.
“You surprise me,” Undine said. “Where did you learn of the black constellations?”
“In passing.” The railing was cold against his stomach, Undine’s hip warm against his. He rested a hand on the small of her back, let it slide down over her slippery, smooth flesh. “That one there, just beneath the south star—the one that looks like some sort of animal. What is it?”
“It’s called the Panther,” Undine said. “It’s a female sign, emblematic of the hunger for spiritual knowledge, and useful in certain rituals.”
“And that one over there?”
“The Golem. It’s a male sign.”
“That one that looks like a bird in flight?”
“Crow,” she said. “It’s Crow.”
He said nothing.
“You want to know how Gregorian bought me. You want to know in what coin did he pay?”
“No,” the bureaucrat said. “I don’t want to know at all. But I’m afraid I have to ask.”
She held out her wrist, adamantine census bracelet high, and made a twisting gesture.
The bracelet fell free.
Deftly, Undine caught it in midair, brought it to her wrist again, snapped it shut. “He has a plasma torch. One of his evil old clients brought it to him in payment for his services. They’re supposed to be strictly controlled, but it’s amazing what a man can do when he thinks he’s got a shot to live forever.”
“That’s all you got out of this? A way to evade the census?”
“You forget that all I did for him was to give you a message. He wanted me to warn you away from him. That wasn’t much.” She smiled. “And I warned you in the nicest possible way.”
“He sent me an arm,” the bureaucrat said harshly. “A woman’s arm. He told me you had drowned.”
“I know,” Undine said. “Or rather, so I just learned.” She looked at him with those disconcertingly direct eyes. “Well, perhaps it is a time for apologies. I came to apologize for two reasons, in fact, for what Gregorian convinced you had happened to me, and for the trouble I have learned was caused you by Mintouchian.”
“Mintouchian?” The bureaucrat felt disoriented, all at sea. “What did you have to do with Mintouchian?”
“It is a long story. Let me see how brief I can make it. Madame Campaspe, who taught both Gregorian and me, had many ways of earning money. Some of them you would not approve of, for she was a woman who set her own standards and decided right and wrong for herself. Long ago she obtained a briefcase just like yours there by the bed, and set herself up in the business of manufacturing haunt artifacts.”
“Those people in Clay Bank!”
“Yes. She had a little organization going—someone to look after the briefcase, agents in several Inner Circle boutiques, and Mintouchian to move the goods out of the Tidewater. The problem with such organizations, of course, is that being dependent on you, they feel you owe them something. So when Madame Campaspe left, and, not coincidentally, the briefcase burned out, they came to see me. To ask what they were going to do now.
“Why ask me? They did not want to hear that—they wanted someone to tell them what to do and think, when to breathe out and when in. They did not understand that I had no desire to be their mommy. I felt that it was time I disappeared. And like Madame Campaspe before me, I decided to arrange a drowning.
“Gregorian and I were discussing the provenance and disposal of several items Madame Campaspe had left me. When I mentioned that I planned to drown my old self, he offered to arrange the details for a very reasonable price—yet just enough that I did not suspect him. He had an arm airfreighted in from the North Aerie cloning facilities, and treated and tattooed it himself. I am afraid that I left more than I should have in his hands.
“Witches are always busy—it’s an occupational hazard. I was away for some time, and it was only when I came back that I learned what difficulties I had inadvertently caused you.” She looked directly at him with those disconcertingly calm and steady eyes. “All this I have told you is the truth. Will you forgive me?”
He held her tight for a long time, and then they stepped back within.
Later, they stood on the balcony again, clothed this time, for the air had cooled. “You know of the black constellations,” Undine said, “and the bright. But can you put them all together into the One?”
“The One?”
“All the stars form a single constellation. I can show it to you. Start anywhere, there, with the Ram, for example. Let your finger follow it and then jump to the next constellation, they are part of the same larger structure. You follow that next one and you come to—”