“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.”
“Why are you annoying me like this?” The bureaucrat understood the conventions quite well; he was an agent of those conventions and their defender. He might regret that Gregorian’s secrets, embedded as they were in the warp and woof of human meeting space, could not be extracted. But he understood why this must be.
The mantis bent over a mannequin. “I am only acting out of concern, sir. You are in a state of emotional distress. You are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the limits that are placed on you.” It adjusted the height, plumped out the belly.
“Am I?” the bureaucrat asked in surprise.
The mannequins roughed out, the mantis began molding the bureaucrat’s features onto their faces. “Who would know better than I? If you would care to discuss—”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Of course, sir. The privacy laws are paramount. They come before even common sense,” the construct said reprovingly. The briefcase stood watching, an amused half-smile on his face.
“It’s not as if I were a Free Informationist.”
“Even if you were,” the mantis said, “I wouldn’t be able to report you. If treason were reportable, no one could trust the Puzzle Palace. Who could work here?” It stepped back from its work. “Ready.”
Five bureaucrats now looked at each other, all perfect copies of the other, face to face and eye to eye. Reflexively — and this was a tic that never failed to bother the bureaucrat — they looked away from each other with faint expressions of embarrassment.
“I’ll tackle Korda,” the bureaucrat said.
“I’ll take the bottle shop.”
“Philippe.”
“The map room.”
“The Outer Circle.”
The mantis produced a mirror. One by one, the bureaucrat stepped through.
The bureaucrat was the last to leave. He stepped out into the hall of mirrors: walls and overhead trim echoing clean white infinity down a dwindling line of gilt-framed mirrors before curving to a vanishing point where patterned carpeting and textured ceiling became one. Thousands of people used the hall at any given instant, of course, popping in and out of the mirrors continually, but the Traffic Architecture Council saw no need for them to be made visible. The bureaucrat disagreed. Humans ought not go unmarked, he felt; at the very least the air should shimmer with their passage.