“That? Nothing but a cheap trick I brewed up with what remains of Korda’s old lab equipment. I had all these rich old corpses left over from my money-raising endeavors, and it seemed a good use for one. But you — they tell me you spoke with a fox-headed haunt back in Cobbs Creek. What do you think? Was it real? Be honest now, there’s no reason not to.”
“They told me it was a nature spirit—”
“Bah!”
“But… Well, if he wasn’t one of your people in a mask, then I can’t imagine what else he could have been. Other than an actual haunt. He was a living being, that much I’m sure of, as solid as you or me.”
“Ahhhh.” The groan rested uneasily somewhere between satisfaction and pain. Then, casually, Gregorian drew an enormous knife from his belt. Its blade was blackened steel, its hilt elfinbone. “He’ll be ready now.”
Gregorian walked over to Pouffe, and crouched. He cut a long sliver of flesh from the old shopkeeper’s forehead. It bled hardly at all. The flesh was faintly luminous, not with the bright light of Undine’s iridobacteria but with a softer, greenish quality. It glowed in the magician’s fingers, lit up the inside of his mouth, and disappeared. He chewed noisily.
“The feverdancers are at their peak now. Ten minutes earlier and they’d still be infectious. An hour later and their toxins will begin to break down.” He spat out the sliver into his palm, and cut it in two with his knife. “Here.” He held one half to the bureaucrat’s lips. “Take. Eat.”
The bureaucrat turned away in disgust.
“Eat!” The flesh had no strong smell; or else the woodsmoke drowned it out. “I brought you here because this sacrament works best when shared. If you won’t partake, I have no use for you.” He did not reply. “Think. So long as you live, there is hope. A meteorite might strike me dead. Korda might arrive with a detachment of marines. Who can say? I might even change my mind. With death, all possibilities end. Open your mouth.”
He obeyed. The cool flesh was pressed onto his tongue. It felt rubbery. “Chew. Chew and don’t swallow until it’s gone.” Vomit rose in his throat, but he choked it down. The flesh had little flavor, but that little was distinctive. He would taste it in his mouth for the rest of his life.
Gregorian patted his knee and sat back down. “Be grateful. I’ve taught you a valuable lesson. Most people never do learn exactly how much they will do to stay alive.”
The bureaucrat kept chewing. His mouth felt numb, and his head swam dizzily. “I feel strange.”
“Did you ever hate someone? I mean, really hate. So badly that your own happiness meant nothing, or even your own life, so long as you could ruin his?”
Their chewing synchronized, jaws working in unison, noisily, wetly. “No,” the bureaucrat heard somebody say. It was his own voice. That was, in some indefinable way, odd. He was losing all sense of locality, his awareness spreading over an ever-widening area, so that he was nowhere specifically there, but only partook of ranges of greater or lesser probability. “I have,” he said in the magician’s voice.
Startled, he opened his eyes and stared into his own face.
The shock threw him back into his own body. “Who did you hate so badly?” he managed to gasp. Losing identity again. He heard Gregorian laugh, a mad, sick sound with undertones of misery, and it came as much from him as from the magician. “Myself,” he said, that deep voice rumbling in the pit of his stomach. “Myself, God, Korda — about in equal proportions. I’ve never really been able to sort the three of us out.”
The magician went on speaking and, compelled by the drug, the bureaucrat fell so deeply into the words that his last trace of self melted away. Individuation unraveled beneath him. He became Gregorian, became the young magician standing long years ago in the presence of his clone-father in a dim room deep in the heavy gravity district of Laputa.
He stood ramrod-straight, feeling ill at ease. He had been late arriving, because he kept losing his way. He did not have the cues everyone else knew to guide him through the three-dimensional maze of corridors, with its broad avenues that dissolved into tangles of nonsensical loops, its ramps and stairways that ended abruptly in blank walls. This office was hideously oppressive, dark with monolithic stone structures, and it baffled him that offworlders paid prestige rates for such places. Something to do with inaccessibility. Korda was embedded in a desk across from him.
A quicksilver run of fish fled through the room, but they were mere projections of the feverdancers, and he ignored them. Out of the corner of his eye he studied the shelves of brightly lit glass flowers. In such a gravity field, the merest nudge would reduce them all to powder. Hot pink orchids drooped from holes in the ceiling, their perfume like rotting meat.
Gregorian held himself rigidly casual, his face a sardonic mask. But in truth Korda intimidated him. Gregorian was leaner, stronger, and younger, with better reflexes than his predecessor had ever had. But this fat man knew him inside and out.
“I ate shit once,” Gregorian said.
Korda was scribbling on his desk. He grunted.
There was a third presence in the room, a permanent surrogate in Denebian wraparound and white ceramic mask. His name was Vasli, and he was present in the capacity of financial adviser. Gregorian disliked the creature because his aura was blank; he left no emotional footprint on the air. Whenever he looked away, Vasli tended to fade into the furniture.
“Another time I ate a raw skragg. That’s a rodent, about two hands long and hairless. It’s almost as ugly as it is mean. Its teeth are barbed, and after you kill it, you have to break the jaw to get it off your—”
“I presume you had a good reason for doing such a thing?” Korda said in a tone of profound indifference.
“I was afraid of the brutes.”
“So you killed one and ate it to rid yourself of the fear. I see. Well, there are no skraggs here.” Korda glanced up. “Oh, do sit down. Vasli, see to this young man.”
Without moving, the construct dispatched slim metal devices that Gregorian had thought mere decorative accents to assemble a chair beneath him. They gently pushed his knees forward and eased his shoulders back, shifting his center of balance, so that he was forced to sit. The chair was low-slung and made of granite. He knew he wouldn’t be able to rise from it gracefully. “It wasn’t quite that simple. I fasted for two days, offered blood to the Goddess, then dosed myself with feverdancers and—”
“We have day clinics that do the same thing back home,” Vasli observed. “The technology is banned here, of course.”
“It was none of your foul science. I am an occultist.”
“A distinction in terminology only. Our means may differ, but we employ identical techniques. First, render the brain open to suggestion. We use magnetic resonance, while you employ drugs, ritual, sex, terror, or some combination thereof. Then, when the brain is susceptible, imprint it with new behavior patterns. We use holotherapeutic viruses as the message carriers; you eat a rat. Finally, reinforce the new pattern in your daily life. Our methods are probably identical there. The skill is extremely old; people were being reprogrammed long before machines.
“Skill!” Korda said scornfully. “I once had a paralyzing fear of drowning. So I went to Cordelia and had myself dropped off two miles out into the Kristalsee at night. It’s salty enough that you can’t sink, and there are no large surface predators. If you don’t panic, you’re fine. I suffered the agonies of Hell that night. But when I reached shore, I knew I would never fear drowning again. And I did it without the aid of drugs.” He smiled ironically at Gregorian. “You’re pale.”
A voice from another world murmured, Is that what you re doing? Am I to die to help put an end to your fear of drowning? How trivial. Gregorian ignored it. “Don’t imagine you can condescend to me, old man! I’ve had experiences you’ve never dreamed of!”