One hot afternoon, passing through a meadow with his rifle over his shoulder, he saw a woman digging for eels. She paused in her work, casually took off her blouse, and used it to mop the sweat from her face and breasts. Korda stopped and stared.
The woman noticed him and smiled. From the distance she had seemed at first plain, but now with a subtle shifting of light he saw that she was very beautiful. Come back at sunset, she said, with some jenny-hens, and I will cook them for you.
When he returned, the woman had built a fire. She sat on a blanket alongside it. He laid his catch at her feet. Some time later, when they had both eaten their fill of the food that satisfies but does not nourish, they made love.
Even then, without the acuity of hindsight and retrospection, it seemed to him that the woman’s face changed as they made love. The flickering flames made it hard to tell. But it would seem by turns rounder, squarer, more slender. It was as if she held a thousand faces drowning just beneath her skin, and they crowded up, reaching for the surface, when passion broke her control. She rode him fiercely, as if he were an animal she had determined to use up in a single gallop. She taught him to control his orgasm, so that he might last the hours she desired.
“Did she give you a tattoo?” the bureaucrat asked.
Korda looked puzzled. “No, of course not.”
The coals were dying by the time the woman was done with him. He lay back slowly beneath her, eyes closing, sinking backward into unconsciousness and sleep. But as he fell away from the world, he had a vision of her face in orgasm, flattening out, elongating, growing skull-like and harsh.
It was not a human face.
He awoke cold and alone in the gray light of false dawn. The fire was dead, and the blanket yanked from beneath him. Korda shivered. His body was scratched, clawed, bitten, and raw. He felt as if he’d been tumbled over and over in a bramble patch. He put his clothes on, and returned to the lodge.
They laughed at him. That was a haunt woman you tangled with, they said, lucky for you she wasn’t in heat. Had an excursion pilot worked here a year ago, his brother was chewed to death by one, bit off his nipples and both his stones, licked his skin down to the muscle. Took the mortician a week to get the smile off his face.
Nor was he taken seriously in the Puzzle Palace. A polite young woman told him his sighting was anecdotal and not very good of its kind, but that she would see it filed away in some obscure bottle shop or other, and in the meantime thanked him for his time and interest.
But Korda did not care. He had found his purpose.
Listening, the bureaucrat could not help but marvel. He and Korda had never been close, but they had worked together for years. Where had this fanatic spirit come from, how had he hidden it from the bureaucrat for so long? He asked, “How did you know the location of Ararat?”
“Through the Committee. It was pretty much a fringe operation when I encountered it, cultists and mystics and other deadwood it took me forever to clear away, but there were still some old-timers associated with it who had been influential in their day. I picked up the useful bit of this and that from them.”
“So you stole enough biotech to create an unregistered clone son. Gregorian. Only his mother disappeared, and him with her. You were out of luck.”
Those were, Korda admitted, hard years. But he had only worked the harder, developing plans for the protection and preservation of the haunts, once they could be located, for sanctuaries and breeding programs, for enculturation and cultural preservation. He made them productive years, though his main goal, to locate or at least prove the existence of the haunts, remained unfilled.
But Korda kept his feelers out, and one day one of his contacts in the Tidewater found Gregorian.
“How?”
“I knew what he’d look like, you see. Every year I had pictures made up — his hormone balances had been adjusted slightly so he wouldn’t look too strikingly much like me. Just a vague similarity. I made him a little more rugged, a bit less prone to fat, that was all. Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t done out of pride.”
“Goon.”
Relations between father and son were strained, to begin with. Gregorian refused to do his father’s work in the Tidewater. He intimated he knew much about the haunts, but expressed supreme disinterest in the question of their ultimate survival. But Korda paid for Gregorian’s education anyway, and paved his way to a good entry position in the Outer Circle biotechnology labs. Time was on his side. There were no opportunities to challenge a man of Gregorian’s — Korda’s — abilities. Sooner or later he would come around.
Korda figured he understood Gregorian well.
He was wrong. Gregorian had found work in the Outer Circle. There he stayed, until the jubilee tides were imminent, and there was no way for Korda to effectively use him. Korda wrote him off.
Then Gregorian disappeared. He fled suddenly, without warning or notice, in a deliberately suspicious manner. Investigation revealed that shortly before his departure he had interviewed Earth’s agent and been given something. Whatever it was, nobody believed any longer that it was harmless. Alarms were rung. It all ended up in Korda’s lap.
He had handed the investigation to the bureaucrat.
“Why me?”
“I had to send someone. You were simply on deck.”
“Okay. Now, shortly after that, you contacted me at the carnival in Rose Hall. You were costumed as Death, and you were anxious to know if I’d found Gregorian. Why did you do that?”
Korda raised a line-fed glass to his lips. He was drinking steadily, drinking and unable to get drunk. “Gregorian had just sent me a package. A handful of teeth, that was all. I didn’t dare send them to a lab to be analyzed, but it seemed certain to me that they were haunts’ teeth. I’d seen hundreds in museums. Only these had bloodied roots. They’d been yanked recently.”
“That sounds like his style,” the bureaucrat said dryly. “What then?”
“Nothing. Until the other day when I heard from his half-sister that he would meet me here, and give me the proof I wanted. That’s all there is. Will you open the package now?”
“Not just yet,” the bureaucrat said. “Let’s go back a bit. Why did you create Gregorian in the first place? Something to do with regulatory votes, was it?”
“No! It’s not like that at all. I — I was going to have him raised on the Tidewater, you see. I was taking the long view by then. I realized that the reason the haunts were so elusive was that they didn’t want to be found. They were passing themselves as human, living in the social interstices, in migrant labor camps and over top of rundown feed stores. They are intelligent, after all, cunning, and few in number.
“To find them I needed someone who knew the Tidewater well, who moved among its people without attracting attention, who could distinguish between a joke and an offhand revelation. Someone culturally at home there.”
“That still doesn’t explain why that someone also had to be you.”
“But who else could I trust?” Korda said helplessly. “Who else could I trust?”
The bureaucrat stared at him for a long time. Then he nudged the package forward.
Korda ripped open the lid. When he saw what lay within, he went horribly still. “Go on,” the bureaucrat said, and suddenly he was angry. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Final, irrefutable proof.”
He reached into the box and pulled the severed head out by the hair. Two surrogates nearby put down their imaginary drinks and stared. Others further down noticed and swiveled to look. Silence spread like ripples through the room.