“What, you mean the mermaid?”
“No, no, the offworlder. Look — Miriam’s had a miscarriage, and he’s arrived too late. But he’s put the child in biostasis, and now he’s taking it to the Upper World to be healed and brought to term. It’s going to live forever now. You can bet the offworlder’s going to give his bastard that ray treatment.”
“That’s nonsense. Immortality? The technology simply doesn’t exist.”
“Not down here it doesn’t.”
The bureaucrat felt a thrill of horror. She believes this, he thought. They all do. They actually believe that the knowledge exists to keep them alive forever and that it’s being withheld from them.
Orphelin took a pamphlet from a coat pocket. “I advise that you read this and think seriously about its implications.”
The bureaucrat accepted it, looked at the title. The Anti-Man. Curious, he opened it at random and read: “All affections and bonds of the will are reduced to two, namely aversion and desire, or hatred and love. Yet hatred itself is reduced to love, whence it follows that the will’s only bond is Eros.” Odd. He flipped to the credit page:
A. Gregorian
Angrily, he crushed the pamphlet in his hand. “Gregorian sent you to me! Why? What does he want of me?”
“Would you believe it?” Orphelin said. “I have not seen Gregorian from that day onward. Yet I constantly find myself doing his work. A magician does not send messages, you know — he orchestrates reality. I do not enjoy being forced into his games, and I cannot tell you what he wants of you because I do not know. One thing I do know, however: You have a Black Beast of your own. The two people who were here, the ones who held me? One of them gave you the drug last night.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Suicide is a stupid game, isn’t it?” Orphelin said. “I thought I was good at it, but Gregorian was better.”
He left.
Mother Le Marie watched him go. Behind her, the bureaucrat could see the autopsy machine, silent now that it had done analyzing Undine’s arm. The sun had shifted and left it in shadow.
“Tell me,” Mother Le Marie said. “Did my…did the doctor give you good service?”
He caught the hesitation, and thought of Orphelin’s estrangement from his parents, of his change of name, of the fact that he was the son of hoteliers. And he knew he should tell her yes, that her son had been of enormous help to him. But he could not.
After a while the old woman left.
One of the nationals put a white chit in his hand. “The autopsy results,” she said. “One woman, a bit past her prime, in good health, tattooed. Drowned almost exactly one day ago. Is this acceptable to you?”
The bureaucrat nodded heavily.
“Good.” She slipped on a signet ring, and they shook hands. He returned the chit, and she turned away. The other national began wheeling the machine away, and the bureaucrat realized that he would never see Undine again.
When he closed his eyes, he could smell her mouth and feel the light electric shock when her lips first touched his. That instant would never leave him. Gregorian had set his hooks, and now the magician stood far away and played him on hair-thin lines. Tugging him first one way, then another. Orphelin had spoken of the star chamber. It must have been at Gregorian’s behest he had done so.
The bureaucrat knew the star chamber well. He was one of three people who had keys to it.
He looked down at the pamphlet, still clutched in his hands, and in a fit of revulsion tore it in two and flung the pieces on the floor.
Mother Le Marie opened the front door and gasped. Fresh air and sunlight gushed in. Wrapping the blanket more tightly about himself, the bureaucrat peered dizzily over the old woman’s shoulder.
An insectlike metal creature walked daintily down the street on three spindly legs.
It was his briefcase.
Tilted up on one corner, the briefcase looked like nothing so much as an enormous spider. Away from the machine-saturated environs of deep space, it seemed a monstrosity, an alien visitor from some demon universe. People skittered back from it. Unmolested, it walked to the hotel. It climbed the steps, and then, retracting its legs, laid itself down at the bureaucrat’s feet.
“Well, boss,” it said, “I had one hell of a time getting back to you.”
The bureaucrat leaned to pick it up. There was a scurry of motion to one side, and he turned to face three men shouldering broadcast machines.
“Sir!” one said. “A word with you.”
There was a bustling noise outside, shouts of fear and astonishment. Old Man Le Marie materialized on the stairs. “What’s that?” he said querulously. “Ain’t he gone yet?” One or two boarders peered from their rooms without coming out. Nobody emerged from the television room. Curious, the bureaucrat glanced in and saw Mintouchian asleep on the couch. Save for him, the room was empty, a blaring void at the center of the house.
8. Conversations in the Puzzle Palace
The form-giver placed the bureaucrat at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, and set his briefcase down beside him.
The briefcase was incarnated as a short, monkish man, half human stature. He had shaggy black eyebrows and a slightly harassed expression. His gray velvet jacket was rumpled, his shoulders hunched and distracted.
“Ready to do battle?” the bureaucrat asked sourly.
The briefcase looked up with a quick, lopsided smile and alert eyes. “Will we be starting at your desk, boss?”
“No, I think we’d best start at the wardrobe. Considering all we’ve got to get done.”
The briefcase nodded and led him upward. The marble stairs split and resplit, winding graceful as snakes through the preliminary decision branchings. Swiftly they ascended the hierarchies. In the upper reaches, the stairs twisted and turned sideways to each other as they multiplied, fanning out into impossible tangles that looped like Mobius strips and Escher solids before disappearing into the higher dimensions. Always local orientation kept the stairs underfoot. Away at the limits of vision new stairs split away from the old as new portals were created.
Involuntarily the bureaucrat thought of the old joke, that the Puzzle Palace had a million doors, not a one of which took you anywhere you wanted to be.
“Through here.” Their path corkscrewed under a spiraling cluster of stairways and between a brace of stone lions, muzzles splashed with green paint. They opened a door and stepped within.
The wardrobe was a musty oak room lined with masks of demons, heroes, creatures from other star systems, and things that might be any of these. It was gently lit by the pervasive sourceless light that informed all the Puzzle Palace, and filled with the purposeful bustle of people trying on costumes or having their faces painted, a quiet place of hushed preparation lifted from some prestellar theater or media surround.
A mantislike construct approached, all polished green chitin and slim articulation. It placed forearms together and bowed deeply. “How may I assist you, master? Talents, censors, social armaments? Some extra memory, perhaps.”
“Agent me in five,” the bureaucrat said. His briefcase, sitting cross-legged atop a costume trunk, took a pad from an inside pocket, scribbled payment codes, ripped off the top sheet, and handed it to the construct.
“Very good.” The mantis lifted four mannequins from a cupboard, and began taking his measurements. “Shall I limit their autonomy?”
“What would be the point?”
“That’s very wise, sir. It’s remarkable how many people restrict the amount of information their agents can carry. Amazing blindness. Because simply to exist here means one has given up one’s secrets to an agent. People are so superstitious. They hang on to the fiction of self, they treat the Puzzle Palace as if it were a place rather than an agreed-upon set of conventions within which people may meet and interact.”