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?
“He turned, and to my horror I saw that he had taken on the aspect of Crow. His head was huge and black: black beak, black feathers, bright obsidian eyes. There was that little bristle of hairlike feathers at the base of the beak, the narrow nostril slits halfway to its point. I had never seen a spirit invoked before. That’s one question, he said in Crow’s harsh voice. No, I am not.
“I assumed this was all illusion, an effect of the maddrake. Angrily I strode forward and seized his arms. The little deaths flowed into him and fought beneath his skin, so that his muscles writhed and spasmed. I squeezed. I was strong then, you must know. My grip should have choked off the blood and left his arms paralyzed. The death-forces should have killed him. But he shook my hands away effortlessly, and laughed.
“You cannot overpower Crow with your little tricks.
“How did you know I was seeing Crow? I asked. Feeling that horror that comes on realizing that one is completely out of his depth.
“That’s two questions. Crow stropped his beak against a nearby skull, setting the whole skeleton aswing. I know all about you. I have an informant who tells me everything. The Black Beast.
“Who is the Black Beast? I cried.
“That’s three questions. Crow poked his beak into a skull socket, teased out some small sweetmeat. I have answered two of them, and now it is my turn. First tell me: What does it mean when I say Miranda is black?
“I was angry at how he’d tricked the questions from me, but the duel’s purpose is to test will against will; it had been fairly done. An inch down, I said, all the world-globe is an egg of blackness. Starlight does not touch it; only Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban contend for influence. Mystery is that close. This was all catechism, you see, baby stuff, and so I regained much of my confidence. As beneath the skull the brain is black. The magician understands this and contends for influence.
“Crow ruffled his feathers, then parted his beak as he threw back some dark gristly bit. That black tongue! What are the black constellations?