“His notebook.”
“Just so. A valuable learning tool, I might point out, that you lack the training to take advantage of.”
“Still, it is not exactly devoid of interest.”
“Even so, my master must beg its return. He trusts you will prove cooperative, particularly considering that the book is not, properly speaking, yours.”
“Tell Gregorian he can pick up his book from me any time he wishes. In person.”
“I am in the master’s confidence. What can be said to him can be said to me, what can be given him can be given me. In a sense one might say that where I am he is indeed present.”
“I won’t play this game,” the bureaucrat said. “If he wants his book, he knows where I am.”
“Well, what can’t be arranged one way must be arranged another,” Veilleur said philosophically. “I was also instructed to give you this.” The surrogate laid its box at the bureaucrat’s feet. “The master directed me to tell you that a man bold enough to fuck a witch deserves something to remember her by.”
Briefly his electronic grin burned on the telescreen, bright as madness. Then the surrogate turned away.
“I’ve spoken to Gregorian’s father!” the bureaucrat shouted. “Tell him that too!”
The surrogate strode away without a backward glance. The wind lifted and swirled its raincoat, and then it was gone.
Suddenly fearful, the bureaucrat crouched down and lifted the box. It held something heavy. He stepped back onto the porch, unwrapping the wet oilskin, then removed the lid.
Stars, snakes, and comets burned wildly in the box’s dim interior. Putrefaction had just begun, and the iridobacteria were feasting.
The laughter in the kitchen died when he entered. “Lord of ghouls, man,” Le Marie said, “what happened to you?” Chu seized his arm, steadied him.
“I’m afraid something unfortunate has occurred,” a voice said. His own. The bureaucrat laid down the box on the kitchen table. A little girl wearing a red jeunes evacuees kerchief with tiny black stars about her neck craned up on tiptoe to reach for the box, and had her hand slapped. Mintouchian, who stood close enough to see within, hastily slapped the lid back on and rewrapped the cloth. “Something untoward.” He sounded dreadful, like a recording played at the wrong speed, false and subtly inhuman.
A scurry of activity. Two men ran outside. A chair was scraped forward, and Le Marie folded him down into it. “I’ll call the nationals,” Chu said. “They can lift in a laboratory as soon as the rain ends.” Somebody gave the bureaucrat a drink, and he gulped it down. “My God,” he said. “My God.” Anubis emerged from beneath the table and licked his hand.
The men who had run outside returned, wet to the skin. The door slammed to behind them. “Nobody out there,” one said.
More children came crowding in. Mother Le Marie hastily set the box up atop the pie cabinet, out of reach. “What’s in there?” one of the locals asked from the far side of the kitchen.
“Undine,” the bureaucrat said. “It’s Undine’s arm.” To his utter and complete embarrassment, he burst into tears.
They led’him protesting feebly to his room, eased him down on the bed, took off his shoes. His briefcase was laid by his side. Then, with consoling murmurs, they left him alone. I shall never be able to sleep, he thought. The room smelled of mildew and old paint. Barnacles speckled the walls and encrusted the mirror, from flies blown in at night by the fever wind, over the top of a window that would not quite close. Wind through that same narrow slot stirred the curtains now. Doubtless it would never be repaired.
The dim thunder of water on the roof slowly faded as the storm abated. The rain died away to a drizzle and finally a mist.
A voice separated from the kitchen conversation and floated up the stairs. “Mushroom rain,” it said gently.
The bureaucrat could not sleep. The pillow was hard and buzzed with fatigue. His skull was stuffed with gray cotton. After some time he arose, picked up his briefcase, and went outside, shoeless and unnoticed.
The rain was so fine that the droplets seemed to hang in the air, muting and silvering a changed world. Sprays of translucent blue tubes arched over the street. Little violet mandolins sprouted from doorways, and the rooftops were hidden under delicate fantasy architectures of tan and rose and palest yellow latticework. Mushroom rain. The frothy structures were growing even as he watched.
Houses had mutated into nightmare castles caught midway in transition from stone to organic life. Like a crab, he scuttled by their swaying spires, brushing back dainty lace fans that crumbled at his touch. There was a warm orange glow in the street ahead of him, and he made for it.
The rectangle of light was the open back doorway to the New Born King’s van. He entered.
Mintouchian sat behind a small folddown table. A circle of yellow light rested on its center, and within it danced a small metal woman.
Mintouchian’s fingers were studded with radio remotes. He wove his hands back and forth, warping and interpenetrating the fields. “Ah, it’s you. Couldn’t sleep, eh?” he said. “Me neither.” He nodded toward the woman. “Lovely little thing, isn’t she?”
Looking closer, the bureaucrat could see that the woman’s figure was made up of thousands of gold rings of varying sizes, so that the arms and legs and torso tapered naturally. Her head was smooth and featureless, but angled to suggest high cheekbones and a narrow chin. She wore a simple cloth poncho tied at the waist and long enough to suggest a dress. It flew up in the air when Mintouchian spun his hands.
“Yes.” The golden woman rippled her arms with impossible, thousand-jointed fluidity. “What are you doing?”
“Thinking.” Mintouchian stared blindly down into the light. “I loved a witch once, a long time ago. She — well, you don’t want to hear the story. Very much like yours. Very much. She was drowned when I… Well. There’s no such thing as a new story, is there? As who should know better than me?”
Without interrupting the dancer, he half-closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. The wall was covered with puppets, bagged in plastic membranes and bound so tightly escape was unimaginable. It was a museum of puppetry. There were Mr. Punch and his wife, Judy, his cousin Pulchinello, moon-pale Pierrot, famed Harlequin and sweet Columbine, Tricky Dick, Till Eulenspiegel, Good Kosmonaut Minsk, all the ancient archetypes of roguery and heroism awaiting their next breath of borrowed life. “You realize that puppetry is the purest form of theater?”
“The simplest, you mean?”
“Simple! You give it a try, if you think it’s so simple! No, I mean the purest. Here I sit, the creator, and you there, the viewer. Our minds are distinct, they cannot touch. But there, between us, I place our little poppet.” The lady glided forward, swooned into a curtsy that swept the ground, drew up lightly as a leaf caught by the wind. “She exists partly in my mind, and partly in yours. For the instant they overlap.” His hands were dancing, and the metal figure with them. The bureaucrat’s attention shifted from one to the other, unable to focus entirely on either.
“Look,” Mintouchian marveled. The doll froze motionless. “She has no face, no sex. Yet look at this.” The puppet raised her head coquettishly, and glanced sidelong at the bureaucrat. Her body shifted weight on distinctly feminine hips. The bureaucrat looked up from her and saw Mintouchian staring intently into his eyes. “Do you know how television works? The screen is divided into horizontal lines, and the scanner draws a picture on the screen two lines at a time, skips two lines, then draws two more, down to the bottom. Then it goes back to the beginning and fills in those spaces it skipped the first time around. So that you don’t actually see the whole picture at any time. You assemble it within your mind. Holistic screens have been tried from time to time, but people didn’t take to them. They lacked the compulsive element of real television. Because they only provided pictures. They did not seduce the brain into cooperating with the violation of reality.” The puppet danced lightly, gracefully.