The doctor looked at him oddly. “Was it?”
“Oh yes. I’m quite sure of it. He carried me back to the hotel, later.”
Nausea welled up again, and the room took on a heightened clarity and vividness. He could see every thread of fiber on the rug, every frayed fabric end on the divan crawling in his vision. He felt flushed, and the finger that Undine had tattooed burned.
There was a rap on the door.
“Yes?” the bureaucrat said.
Chu stuck her head in and said, “Excuse me, but the autopsy is complete, and we need you to accept the report.”
“Come in here, please,” Orphelin said. “And I’ll need somebody else as well.” Chu glanced at the bureaucrat, and then, when he shrugged, ducked into the hall. She spoke to the guards. The taller one shook his head. “Hold on,” she said. A minute later she returned with Mintouchian in tow. He looked more hound than man, his face puffy and pink, his eyes sad and bloodshot.
“There’s more to this than I had originally thought.” The doctor held out his arms. “Grasp me by the wrists and hold on as tightly as possible.” Chu took one arm, Mintouchian the other. “Pull! We’re not here to hold hands.”
They obeyed, and he slowly leaned forward, letting his head loll on his chest. The two had to struggle to hold him upright.
Orphelin’s head whipped up, face transformed. His eyes were wide open, startlingly white. They quivered slightly. He parted his lips, and a third eye glared out from his mouth.
“Krishna!” Mintouchian gasped. All three eyes glanced toward him, then dismissively away. Horrified, the bureaucrat stared into that cold third eye.
Orphelin stared unblinkingly back. That eerie triple gaze drove like a spike deep into the bureaucrat’s skull. For a long moment nobody breathed.
Then the doctor’s head collapsed on his chest again.
“All right,” he said calmly. “You can let go now.” They obeyed. “Have you ever considered spiritual training?” he asked.
The bureaucrat felt as if he’d just emerged from a dream. It seemed impossible now, what he had just seen. “I beg your pardon?”
“First off, the entity you spoke with was not a haunt, attractive though that notion might seem to you. The last haunt died in captivity in lesser year 143 of the first great year after the landing. What you saw was an avatar of one of their spirits. The one we call the Fox. It is an important natural power, though unreliable in certain aspects, and is generally taken as being an auspicious omen.”
“I spoke with a solid, living being. He was neither ghost nor hallucination.” The room was alive now, each strand of carpeting undulating in unseen currents, mottled light dancing on the ceiling.
“Perhaps,” Mintouchian offered, “you spoke with a man in a mask.”
Nausea made the bureaucrat snappish. “Nonsense. What would a man in a fox mask be doing out in the woods in the middle of the night?”
Chu stroked her mustache. “He could have been waiting for you. I really think we should consider the possibility that he was part of this elaborate game that Gregorian is playing with us.”
The doctor looked startled. “Gregorian?”
“I studied ofiplanet,” Orphelin said when the others had been dismissed. “Many years ago. I had a Midworlds scholarship.” His back was to the bureaucrat; he had not spoken until the door was well and fully closed. “Six of the most miserable years of my life were spent in the Laputa Extension. The people who hand out the grants never consider what it’s like to go from an artificially suppressed level of technology to one of the floating worlds.”
“What does this have to do with Gregorian?”
Orphelin looked around for a seat, settled wearily down. His face was stiff and gray. “That was how I met Gregorian.”
“You were friends, then?” Whenever the bureaucrat looked at Orphelin’s face too long, the flesh melted away layer by layer, and the skull rose grinning to the surface. Only by regularly glancing away could he banish the vision.
“No, of course not.” The doctor gazed sightlessly at a dusty crucifix ringed by a small collection of sepia flats. His clasped hands rested upon his knees. “I despised him on sight.
“We met in the dueling halls of the Puzzle Palace. Suicide was nominally illegal, but the authorities winked at it — training grounds for leadership and so on. He had a coterie of admirers listening to him talk about control theory and the biological effects of projective chaos weapons. A striking young man, charismat-ically self-assured. He had a bad reputation. His skin was pale, and he wore the offworld jewelry that was popular back then: bloodstones embedded in the fingers, bands of silver around the wrists with the veins routed through crystal channels.”
“Yes, I remember that style,” the bureaucrat said. “Expensive, as I recall.”
Orphelin shrugged. “It was his popularity that most offended me. I was a material phenomenologist. So while Gregorian could freely discuss what he was learning, my education was very strictly controlled, and I wasn’t allowed to take any of it out of class. What status I had in student circles came from my having studied under a pharmacienne before I came to Laputa. Oh, I was their trained ape all right! Dressed all in black with saltmouse skulls and feather fetishes hung on the fringes. I played suicide not so much for the prestige of winning, but to brush fingertips against death — morbid shock was much more common than anyone ever let on. I made dark hints that I won because I had occult powers. And Gregorian burst out laughing at the sight of me! Did you ever play suicide?”
The bureaucrat hesitated. “Once. . . I was young.”
“Then I don’t have to tell you that it’s a rigged game. Anyone foolish enough to play by the rules is going to lose. I had mastered the standard means of cheating — tapping in extra data sources, relaying your opponent’s signal through a millisecond-delay circuit, all the usual — and enjoyed a local reputation as a mind warrior. But Gregorian beat me three times running. I had a mistress, an Inner Circle bitch with those aristocratic near-abstract features that take three generations of intensive gene reworking to achieve. He humiliated me in front of her and his father and what few friends I had.”
“You met his father? What was he like?”
“I have no idea. It was edited out before we left the halls. His father was somebody important who couldn’t afford to be connected with the games. All I remember of him was that he was there.
“A year later I returned home to the Tidewater with Gregorian beside me. We shared a room at my parents’ hotel as if we were close friends. By then, antipathy had blossomed into hatred. We’d agreed to have a wizard’s duel — three questions each, winner take all.
“The night we went in search of the maddrake root was wet and starless. We dug by the paupers’ boneyard, where we would not be disturbed. Gregorian straightened first, hands all mud. I have it, he said. He snapped the root in two and held it to my nose. Maddrake has a distinctive odor. It was only after I had swallowed my half that — that smile of his! — it occurred to me that he might have rubbed his hands with maddrake sap and offered instead the halfaman root, which is a close cousin but can be counteracted with a simple antidote. Too late. I had to trust him. We waited until the trees burned green to their cores and the wind spoke. Let us begin, I said.
“Gregorian leaped up and walked through the bones with his arms out, making the skeletons rattle. They were not well maintained, of course. The paint was faded, and half the bones had fallen to the ground so that we trod them underfoot. The death-forces flowed up from them and crawled under my skin, and that made me bold. I felt strong with death. Turn and face me, I commanded. Or are you afraid?