He dreamed that a creature came walking down the road. It had the body of a man and the head of a fox. It wore a tattered pair of dungarees.
Fox, if Fox it was, halted when he came to where the bureaucrat lay, and crouched beside him. That sharp-nosed face sniffed at his crotch, his chest, his head. “I’m bleeding,” the bureaucrat said helpfully. Fox frowned down at him. Then that head swung away again, dissolving into the air.
He was whirled up into the ancient sky, thrown high as planets into old night and the void.
7. Who Is the Black Beast?
The common room was dark and stuffy. Thick brocade curtains with tinsel-thread whales and roses choked out the afternoon sun. Floral pomanders sewn into the furniture failed to mask the smell of mildew; rots and growths were so quietly pervasive here that they seemed not decay but a natural progression, as if the hotel were slowly transforming itself from the realm of the artificial to that of the living.
“I won’t see him,” the bureaucrat insisted. “Send him away. Where are my clothes?”
Mother Le Marie placed soft, cool brown-spotted hands on his chest and forced him back down on the divan, more by embarrassment than actual force. “He’ll be here any minute now. There’s nothing you can do about it. Be still.”
“I won’t pay him.” The bureaucrat felt weak and irritable, and strangely guilty, as if he had done something shameful the night before. The water-stained plaster ceiling liquefied and flowed in his vision, its cracks and imperfections undulating like strands of seaweed. He squeezed his eyes shut for an in stant. Nausea came and went in long, slow waves. His bowels felt loose.
“You don’t have to.” Le Marie tightened her jaw, a turtle trying to smile. “Dr. Orphelin will do the work as a favor to me.”
In the hallway, the coffin-shaped coroner hummed gently to itself. One corner caught the light and glowed a pure and holy white. The bureaucrat forced himself to look away, found his gaze returning anyway. Two bored national police officers lounged against the wall, arms folded, staring into the television room. Who was the father? old Ahab roared. I think I’m entitled to know.
“I trust I have not grown so gullible as to consult a doctor,” the bureaucrat said with dignity. “If I want medical attention, I shall employ the qualified machinery or, in extremis, a human with proper biomedical augmentation. But I will not swill down fermented swamp guzzle at the behest of some quasi-literate, uneducated charlatan.”
“Be sensible. The nearest diagnostician is in Green Hill, while Dr. Orphelin is—”
“I am here.”
He paused in the doorway, as if posing for a commemorative hologram: a lean man in a blue jacket of military cut with two rows of gold buttons. Then the worn white path down the middle of the carpet carried him past a rotting vacuum suit propped ornamentally against the bookcase, and he dumped his black bag alongside the divan. His hands were heavily tattooed.
“You have been drugged,” the doctor said briskly, “and a diagnostician cannot help you. The medicinal properties of our native plants are not in its data base. Why should they be? Synthetics can do anything that natural drugs can, and they can be manufactured on the spot. But if you wish to understand what has happened to you, you must go not to one of your loathsome machines but to one such as I who has spent years studying such plants.” He had a lean, ascetic face with high cheekbones and cold eyes. “I am going to examine you now. You are not required to heed a word of what I have to say. However, I insist on your cooperation in the examination.”
The bureaucrat felt foolish. “Oh, very well.”
“Thank you.” Orphelin nodded to Mother Le Marie. “You may leave now.”
The old woman looked startled, then offended. She raised her chin and walked stiffly out. Why won’t you tell your uncle who the father is? someone said, and a young woman’s agonized voice cried, Because there is no father! before it was muffled by the closing door.
Orphelin peeled back the bureaucrat’s eyelids, shone a small light in his ears, took a scraping from inside his mouth, and fed it to a diagnostick. “You should lose some weight,” he remarked. “If you want, I can show you how to balance real and fairy foods in a diet.” The bureaucrat stared stoically at a spray of pink silk roses, brittle and browning at the edges, and said nothing.
At last the examination ended. “Hum. Well, you shan’t be surprised to learn that you’ve taken in some variety of neurotoxin. Could be any of a number of suspects. Did you experience hallucinations or illusions?”
“What’s the difference?”
“An illusion is a misreading of actual sensory data, while a hallucination is seeing something that isn’t there. Tell me what you saw last night. Just” — he held up a hand — “the high points, please. I have neither the time nor the patience for the extended story.”
The bureaucrat told him about the giant women wading in the river.
“Hallucinations. Did you believe in their reality?”
He thought. “No. But they frightened me.”
Orphelin smiled thinly. “You wouldn’t be the first man with a fear of women. Oh be still, that was a joke. What else did you see?”
“I had a long talk with a fox-headed haunt. But that was real.”
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.