He pictured the Lix now, lying inert on a tile floor. They'd been forgotten. Good. They weren't particularly subtle beasts. To work their mischief best they needed the victims distracted. That, at the moment, they surely were. If he was quick he could still silence the witness.
His call had been answered. Help was coming, in crawling hundreds, under the door. Beetles, ants, scorpions. He unlocked his crossed legs and drew his feet up to his body, to give them free access to his genitals. Years ago he'd been able to achieve erection and ejaculation by will alone, but age, and the Loop, had taken its toll. He needed help now, and given that the laws of this suit explicitly forbade the conjuror to touch himself a little artificial aid was required. They knew their business, crawling up over him, the motion of their limbs, and their bites and stings, arousing him. This was the way he'd made the Lix, ejaculating on to his own excrement. Seminal suits had always been his favorite kind.
Now, as they worked on him, he let his thoughts return to the Lix on the tiles, allowing the rolls of sensation climbing his thronged perineum and balls to push his intention out towards the place where they lay.
A little life was all they needed, to bring a little death...
Mary Muralles had asked to be told Tesla's story before she told her own, and for all her quiet voice she spoke like a woman whose requests were seldom denied. This one certainly wasn't. Tesla was happy to tell her story, or rather the story (so little of it was hers), as best she could, hoping that Mary would be able to throw some light on its more puzzling details. She held her silence however, until Tesla had finished, which—by the time she'd told what she knew about Fletcher, the Jaff, the children of both, the Nuncio and Kissoon—was close to half an hour. It might have been much longer but that she'd had practice in the craft of concision preparing plot summaries for studios. She'd practiced with Shakespeare (the tragedies were easy, the comedies a bitch) until she'd had the trick of it down pat. But this story was not so easily pigeonholed. When she started to tell the tale it spilled out in all directions. It was a love story and an origin of species. It was about insanity, apathy and a lost ape. When it was tragic, as in Vance's death, it was also farcical. When its settings were most mundane, as at the Mall, its substance was often visionary. She could find no way to tell all this neatly. It refused. Every time she thought she had a clear line to a point something would intersect.
If she said, "It's all connected..." once in her telling she said it a dozen times, though she didn't always know (in fact seldom) how or why.
Perhaps Mary could furnish the connections.
"I'm about done," Tesla said. "It's your turn."
The other woman took a moment to gather her strength. Then she said:
"You've certainly got a good grasp of recent events, but you want to know what happened to shape those events. Of course. They're a mystery to you. But I have to say much of it's a mystery to me too. I can't answer all the problems. There's a lot I don't know. If your account proves anything, it's that there's a good deal neither of us knows. But I can tell you some facts straight off. First, and simplest: it was Kissoon who murdered the rest of the Shoal."
"Kissoon? Are you kidding me?"
"I was one of them, remember?" Mary said. "He'd been conspiring against us for years."
"Conspiring with whom?"
"At a guess? The Iad Uroboros. Or their representatives in the Cosm. With the Shoal dead, he might have intended to use the Art, and let the Iad through."
"Shit! So what he told me about the Iad, and Quiddity...all of that's true?"
"Oh yes. He only tells lies when he needs to. He told you the truth. That's part of his brilliance—"
"I don't see what's so brilliant about hiding in a hut—" Tesla said, then: "Wait a minute. This doesn't figure. If he's responsible for the deaths of the Shoal, what's he got to fear? Why's he hiding at all?"
"He isn't hiding. He's trapped there. Trinity's his prison. The only way he can get out—"
"Is by finding another body to get out in. "
"Exactly."
"Me."
"Or Randolph Jaffe before you."
"But neither of us fell for it."
"And he doesn't get many visitors. It takes a very extraordinary set of circumstances to bring anyone within sighting distance of the Loop. He created it to hide his crime. Now it hides him. Once in a while somebody like the Jaff—driven half insane—gets to the point where Kissoon can take control, and guide him in. Or you, with the Nuncio in your system. But otherwise, he's alone."
"Why's he trapped?"
"I trapped him. He thought I was dead. Had my body brought into the Loop with the others. But I rose. Confronted him. Angered him to the point where he attacked me, putting my blood on his hands."
"And chest," Tesla said, remembering the glimpse she'd had of Kissoon's blood-spattered body, when she'd first escaped him.
"The conditions of the looping suit are explicit. Blood may not be spilled inside the Loop, or the conjuror becomes its prisoner."
"What do you mean by suit?"
"Petition. Maneuver. Trick."
"Trick? You call making a loop in time a trick?"
"It's an ancient suit," Mary said. "A time out of time.
You'll find accounts of it everywhere. But there are laws pertaining to all conditions of matter, and I made him break one. He became his own victim."
"And you were trapped there too?"
"Not strictly. But I wanted him dead, and I knew nobody in the Cosm who could do it. Not with the rest of the Shoal murdered. I had to stay and hope to kill him."
"Then you'd have shed blood too."
"Better that, and be trapped, than he go on living. He'd killed fifteen great men and women. Pure, good souls. Just had them slaughtered. Tortured some of them, for the pleasure of it. Not personally of course. He'd had agents. But he'd masterminded the whole thing. Arranged that we be separated from each other, so that he could dispatch us one by one. Then had our bodies taken back in time to Trinity, where he knew no trace would remain."
"Where are they?"
"In the town. What's left of them."
"My God," Tesla remembered the House of the Stench, and shuddered, "I almost got to see them for myself."
"Kissoon prevented you of course."
"Not forcibly. It was more a matter of persuasion. He's very convincing."
"Certainly. He had us all fooled for years. The Shoal is—I mean was—the most difficult society to join in the world. There are means, incredibly elaborate, to test and purify possible members before they even realize the society exists. Somehow Kissoon faked his way through those procedures. Or else the Iad somehow tainted him once he was a member, which is possible."
"Is as little known about the Iad as he said?"
"Scarcely any information emerges from the Metacosm. It's a sealed condition of being. What we know about the Iad can be summed up in a few words. They are many; their definition of life is not that of you humans—indeed may be its antithesis; and they want the Cosm."
"What do you mean, you humans?" Tesla said. "You're as human as I am."
"Yes and no," Mary replied. "I certainly was once as you are. But the processes of purification change your nature. If I'd been human I couldn't have survived in Trinity for twenty odd years, with scorpions to eat and mud to drink. I'd be dead, the way Kissoon intended."