Silk wiped his eyes.
"Oh, come now. It was.ten years ago, and we spies are supposed to be of sterner stuff."
"Has anybody ever cried for her, Doctor?" Silk asked. "You, or Blood, or Musk, or the brain surgeon? Anyone at all?"
"Not that I know of."
"Then let me cry for her. Let her have that at least."
"I wouldn't think of trying to slop you. You haven't asked why Blood didn't get rid of her."
"No."
"She's his daughter, according to what you just told me-his daughter legally, at least."
"That. wouldn't stop him. It was because the brain man said her subrogative abilities could regenerate some time after she'd healed. It was only a guess, but judging from your story about a devil, they have. And the Ayuntamiento knows it now, thanks to you. It's going to make Viron more dangerous than ever."
Silk daubed at his eyes again with a comer of his robe and wiped his nose. "More formidable, you mean. That may trouble your government in Palustria, but it doesn't bother me."
"I see." Crane slid backward on the cot until he could prop his spine against the steel wall. "You promised you'd tell me who you were working for, if I told you about Mucor. Now you're going to say you're working for His Cognizance the Prolocutor, or something like that. Is that it? Hardly what I'd call fair play."
"No. Or perhaps, in a way, I am. It's a nice ethical point. Certainly I'm doing what His Cognizance would wish me to do, but I haven't told him-haven't informed the Chapter formally, I should say. I really haven't had time, the old excuse. Would you have believed me if I'd said I was a spy for His Cognizance?"
"I wouldn't and I don't. Your Prolocutor's got spies, plenty of them. But they aren't holy augurs. He's not so foolish as that. Who is it?"
"The Outsider."
"The god?"
"Yes." Silk sensed that Crane's eyebrow had been raised again, though he was not looking at Crane's face; he filled his lungs and expelled the air through his mouth. "No one believes me-except for Maytera Marble, a little-so I don't expect you to, either, Doctor. You least of all. But I've already told Councillor Potto, and I'll tell you. The Outsider spoke to me last Phaesday, on the ballcourt at our palaestra." He waited for Crane's snort of contempt.
"Now that's interesting. We ought to be able to talk about that for a long time. Did you see him?"
Silk considered the question. "Not in the way I see you now, and in fact I feel sure it's impossible to see him like that. All visual representations of the gods are ultimately false, as I told Blood a few days ago; they're more or less appropriate, not more or less like. But the Outsider showed himself to me-his spirit, if one can speak of the spirit of a god-by showing me innumerable things he had done and made, people and animals and plants and myriad other things that he cares very much about, not all of them beautiful or lovable things to you, Doctor, or to me. Huge fires outside the whorl, a beetle that looked like a piece of jewelry but laid its eggs in dung, and a boy who can't speak and lives-well, like a wild beast.
"There was a naked criminal on a scaffold, and we came back to that when he died, and again when his body was taken down. His mother was watching with a group of his friends, and when someone said he had incited sedition, she said that she didn't think he had ever been really bad, and that she would always love him. There was a dead woman who had been left in an alley, and Patera Pike, and it was all connected, as if they were pieces of something larger." Silk paused, remembering.
"Let's get back to the god. Could you hear his voice?"
"Voices," Silk said. "One spoke into each ear most of the time. One was very masculine-not falsely deep, but solid, as if a mountain of stone were speaking. The other was feminine, a sort of gentle cooing; yet both voices were his. When my enlightenment was over, I understood far, far better than I ever had before why artists show Pas with two heads, though I believe, too, that the Outsider had a great many more voices as well. I could hear them in back of me at times, although indistinctly. It was as if a crowd were waiting behind me while its leaders whispered in my ears; but as if the crowd was actually all one person, somehow: the Outsider. Do you want to comment?"
Crane shook his head. "When both voices spoke at once, could you understand what they said?"
"Oh, yes. Even when they were saying quite different things, as they usually did. The difficult thing for me to understand, even now-one of the difficult things, anyway-is that all of this took place in an instant. I think I told someone later that it seemed to last hundreds of years, but the truth is that it didn't occupy any amount of time at all. It took place during something else that wasn't time, something I've never known at any other time. That's badly expressed, but perhaps you understand what I mean."
Crane nodded.
"One of the boys-Horn, the best player we have-was reaching for a catch. He had his fingers almost on the ball, and then this took place outside of time. It was as if the Outsider had been standing in back of me all my life, but had never spoken until it was necessary. He showed me who he was and how he felt about everything he had made. Then how he felt about me, and what he wanted me to do. He warned me that he wouldn't help me. . . ." The words faded away; Silk pressed his palm to his forehead.
Crane chuckled. "That wasn't very nice of him."
"I don't believe it's a question of niceness," Silk said slowly. "It's a matter of logic. If I was to be his agent, as he asked-he never demanded anything. I ought to have emphasized that.
"But if I was to be his agent, then he was doing it; he was preserving our manteion, because that was what he wanted me to do. He is preserving it through me. I'm the help he sent, you see; and you don't rescue the rescuer, just as you don't scrub a bar of soap or buy plums to hang on your plum tree. I said I'd try to do it, of course. I said I'd try to do whatever he wanted me to."
"So then you sallied forth to save that run-down manteion on Sun Street? And that little house where you live, and the rest of it?"
"Yes." Silk nodded, wished he had not, and added, "Not necessarily the buildings that are there now. If they could be replaced with new and larger buildings-Patera Remora, the coadjutor, hinted at that the other night-it would be even better. But that answers your question. That tells you whom I'm working for. Spying for, if you like, because I was spying on you."
"For a minor god called the Outsider."
"Yes. Correct. We were going-I was going to tell you that I knew you were a spy, the next time you came to treat my ankle. That I'd talked to people who'd provided you with information, without realizing why you wanted it, who'd carried messages for you and to you; and I'd seen a pattern in those things-I see it more clearly now, but I had seen it even then."
Crane smiled and shook his head in mock despair. "So did Councillor Lemur, unfortunately." "I see other things, too," Silk told him. "Why you were at Blood's, for example; and why I encountered Blood's talus here in the tunnels."
"We're not in the tunnels," Crane said absently, "didn't you hear me say that there's water all around us? We're in a sunken ship in the lake. Or to be a little more exact, in a ship that was built to sink, and to float to the surface on the captain's order. To swim underwater like a fish, if you can believe that. This is the secret capital of Viron. I'd be a wealthy man as well as a hero, if only I could get that information to my superiors back home."
Silk slid from tlie cot and crossed the room to its steel door. It was locked, as he had expected, and there was no pane of glass or peephole through which he could look out. Suddenly conscious of the odor of his body and the smears of ash on his clothing, he asked, "Isn't there any way we can wash here?"
Crane shook his head again. "There's a slop jar under the cot, if you want that."