The bureaucrat’s lips were dry, and there was a strange, vivid taste in his mouth. He had a hard time focusing on the puppeteer’s argument. “I’m not sure I’m following this.”
The golden woman threw the bureaucrat a scornful look over an upraised shoulder. Mintouchian smiled. “Where does this illusion before you exist? In my mind or yours? Or does it exist within the space in which our two minds intermesh?”
He raised his hands, and the woman dissolved in a shower of golden rings.
The bureaucrat looked up at Mintouchian, and the rings continued to spin and fall within his mind. He closed his eyes and saw them in the blackness, still falling. Opening his eyes did not rid him of them. The van seemed oppressively close and then as if it were not there at all. It seemed to pulse open and shut about him. He felt queasy. Carefully he said, “There is something wrong with me.”
But Mintouchian was not listening. In a musing, drunken voice he said, “Sometimes people ask why I got into this business. I don’t know. Usually I just say, Why would anyone want to play God? Make a face and shrug. But sometimes I think it’s because I wanted to prove to myself that other people exist.” He looked straight at and through the bureaucrat, as if he were alone and talking to himself. “But we can’t know that, can we? We can never really know.”
The bureaucrat left without saying a word.
He wandered down to the river. The docks were transformed. He looked over a sudden forest of gold mushrooms that had swallowed up a line of electric lights, and now burned with borrowed light, fairy peninsulas out into the water. He looked again and saw naked women wading in the river. With slow grace the moon-white women glided by the anchored boats, stirring them with gentle wake, their eyes level with the tips of the masts.
The bureaucrat stared up at them wonderingly, these silent phantoms, and thought, There are no such creatures, though for the life of him he could not imagine why not. Thigh-deep, they moved silent as dreams and large as dinosaurs, somnambulant yet bold as a wish. Something black turned and tumbled in the water, bumped against one rounded belly and sank away, and for one horrible instant he feared it was Undine herself, drowned in the river and gone to feed the hungry kings of the tides.
Then, with an electric thrill of terror, he saw one of the women turn to look directly at him, eyes as green as the sea and merciless as a northern squall. She smiled down on him over perfect breasts, and he stumbled back from her. Drugged, he thought, I have been drugged. And the thought made wonderful sense, struck him with the force of revelation even, though he did not know what to do with it.
With no sense of transition whatsoever he found himself walking through the woods. The trail was hedged around with mushrooms, bristling with soft-tipped spears that brushed their fleshy heads lightly against his face and arms as he passed. I must find help, he thought. If only he knew which way the trail went, toward town or away.
“What did you do then?”
“Hah?” The bureaucrat shook himself, looked around, and realized that he was sitting on the forest floor, staring at the blue screen of a television set. The sound was off and the image inverted, so that the people hung down from above like bats. “What did you say?”
“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 refreshed, 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.