"Are you interested in the natural sciences?" Kunohara asked suddenly.
"Certainly." Paul was anxious to keep his host happy. Polite chitchat beat the hell out of being thrown back to the ravenous pseudo-bugs any day. "I mean, I'm no expert. . . ."
"Go to those stairs. Wave your hand on the topmost step, so, then go down."
Paul paused at the top of the staircase, looking down into a lower level of Kunohara's house, this one seemingly not much different than the other, except that the floor was made from some dark, glassy substance. Paul waved his hand and the lights in the lower room went out, and he suddenly realized that he was looking not at a dark floor, but at the bottom of the bubble, gazing directly down through its transparency into the river.
Without the reflections obscuring his view he could see the rocky bottom of the river-pond beneath him, which to his eyes seemed as craggy and distant as a mountain range seen from a passenger seat on a jet. From time to time vast shapes slid between stones on the riverbottom, creatures which made Paul flinch in atavistic fear, although he knew that they must be very small fish by any normal standards. There were also a few semi transparent animals a little like attenuated, spider-legged lobsters or even more unusual shapes. Paul moved down to the bottommost step and stood there, reluctant to step onto the glassy material even though he could see a low couch and other furnishings below him, indicating that the floor could hold weight. One of the lobster-things floated up and bumped its head against the bubble, black bead eyes swiveling on stalks, whip-thin legs scrabbling across the curving surface, perhaps wondering why it could not reach something it could see.
"Penaeus vannemei, postlarval stage," Kunohara said from behind him. "Baby shrimp. I changed the refraction of the bubble here on the bottom, so what you are seeing is a bit magnified. Really they would be much smaller even than we are in our present size."
"You've got . . . it's very impressive." Paul did not say so, but although the bubble-house was striking, it was also strangely modest for one of the gods of a virtual universe. "A beautiful house."
Paul waved his hand at the topmost step; when the lights came back on, he saw his own reflection stretched along the curve of the wall like a sideshow mirror. Despite the unfamiliar jumpsuit, the man looking back was definitely him, the Paul Jonas he remembered, although with enough of a beard to give him the look of a shipwreck survivor.
But why do I always look like me, he wondered? When everyone else keeps changing? Someone said !Xabbu was even a monkey for a while.
Shaking his head, he mounted the stairs and discovered the dead wood louse Kunohara had brought back floating in the center of the room, suspended in a hexahedron of white light as though fossilized in amber. Paul's host walked around it, staring; when he gestured, the bug revolved in place. A pale scrimshaw of kanji text ran across the surface of the transparent container.
"Is it . . . something you haven't seen before?"
"Worse. It is something that should not be." Kunohara grunted. "Can you drink?"
"Can I?"
"Do you have the receptors? What would you like? You are a guest. Courtesy demands I offer you something, even if you and your friends have ruined my life."
Kunohara had twice accused Paul and his companions of causing him harm, but he wasn't ready yet to pursue the subject. "I can drink. I don't know if I can get drunk, so I suppose it doesn't matter." He had a sudden thought. "You wouldn't happen to have any tea, would you?"
Kunohara's smile this time was only a few degrees short of friendly. "Forty or fifty varieties. Green teas, which are my favorite, but also black—orange pekoe, congou, souchong. I have oolong, too. What do you want?"
"I'd kill for English tea."
Kunohara frowned. "Strictly speaking, there are no 'English' teas, unless they have begun growing it in the high tropical hills of the Cotswolds while I was not looking. But I have Darjeeling and even Earl Grey."
"Darjeeling would be lovely."
Paul had no doubt that Kunohara could have magicked the tea into existence just as he had magicked them into the bubble, but his host was clearly a man of carefully preserved idiosyncrasies—both Kunohara and his environment were a strange combination of the naturalistic and absurd. An old-fashioned fire burned in a brazier in a depression in the floor filled with sand, but although there was no visible way for the smoke to vent from the bubble, the air in the room was smoke-free. As Kunohara hung a pot of water above the low flames and Paul sat down on a mat beside the fire pit to wait, he found himself overwhelmed by yet another absurdist juxtaposition—one moment about to be murdered by mutants, five minutes later waiting for water to boil for tea.
"What are those . . . things?" he asked, gesturing at the hovering wood louse.
"They are perversions," Kunohara said harshly. "A new and terrible interference with my world. Another reason for me to despise your companions."
"Renie and the others had something to do with those monsters?"
"I have found strange anomalies in my world for some time—mutations that made no sense, and which could not have come from the normal functioning of the simulation—but this is something else. Look at it! An ugly parody of humanity. These have been created deliberately. Someone with power—someone in the Grail Brotherhood, I do not doubt—has decided to punish me."
"Punish you? Mutations?" Paul sat back, shaking his head. He was beginning to realize that even if the tea behaved as it did in the real world, it was not going to be enough to clear his head. He was exhausted. "I don't understand any of this."
Kunohara stared at the wood louse in scowling silence.
Steam chuffed from the kettle, spread in a cheerful cloud, then vanished, as though overwhelmed by the chill coming from Paul's host. Paul accepted the cup which Kunohara conjured out of midair, then watched as he poured boiling water over an infuser. The fumes rising from the steeping tea were the first thing Paul had experienced in longer than he could remember that made him feel like there might be some point to the world. "I'm sorry," he said. "Maybe I'm being dense, but I'm very, very tired. It's been the long day to end all long days." He laughed, and heard a tiny edge of hysteria in his voice. He leaned his head over the cup to breathe in the vapor. "Can you just tell me what terrible thing my friends did to you?"
"Exactly what I expected them to do," Kunohara snapped. "In fact, it is myself I am angry with as much as them. They pitted themselves against a far superior force and lost, and now it is the rest of us who will pay the price."
"Lost?" Paul took his first sip. "Oh, my God, this is wonderful." He blew on the tea and sipped again, trying to make sense of what Kunohara was saying. "But . . . but nobody's lost anything yet, as far as I can tell. Except the Brotherhood. I think most of them are dead now." He stopped, suddenly fearing that in his weariness he had said too much. Was Kunohara one of the Brotherhood, or just someone who rented space from them?
His host was shaking his head. "What nonsense is this?"
Paul stared at him. There was, of course, no way to know what someone was really thinking behind his face back in the real world, let alone here. But, he reminded himself, it might have been as little as an hour since he and Renie and the others had experienced . . . whatever it was they had experienced. It was too late in the day, and he himself was too helpless, to offend potential allies.