“Therapy?”
“This is a house for the curing of the disturbed? A bedlam, is that the word?”
“This is the home of one of the world’s wealthiest men,” Heyman said stiffly, “designed by the talented young architect Albert Ngumbwe. It’s considered a landmark of artistic accomplishment.”
“Charming,” said Vornan-19 devastatingly.
The vestibule rotated and we moved along the clammy surface until abruptly we were in another room. The party was in full swing. At least a hundred people were clustered in a diamond-shaped hall of immense size and unfathomable dimensions; the din they made was fearful, although by some clever prank of acoustical engineering we had not heard a thing until we had passed the critical zone of the Mцbius strip. Now we were among a horde of elegant guests who clearly had been celebrating the night’s event long before the arrival of the guest of honor.
They danced, they sang, they drank, they puffed clouds of multi-hued smoke. Spotlights played upon them. I recognized dozens of faces in one dazzled sweep across the room: actors, financiers, political figures, playboys, spacemen. Bruton had cast a wide net through society, capturing only the distinguished, the lively, the remarkable. It surprised me that I could put names to so many of the faces, and I realized that it was a measure of Bruton’s success that he could gather under one multiplicity of roofs so many individuals that a cloistered professorial sort like myself could recognize.
A torrent of sparkling red wine flowed from a vent high on one wall and ran in a thick, bubbly river diagonally across the floor like water in a pig trough. A dark-haired girl clad only in silver hoops stood under it, giggling as it drenched her. I groped for her name and Helen said, “Deona Sawtelle. The computer heiress.” Two handsome young men in mirror-surface tuxedos tugged at her arms, trying to pull her free, and she eluded them to frolic in the flowing wine. In a moment they joined her. Nearby a superb dark-skinned woman with jeweled nostrils screamed happily in the grip of a titanic metal figure that was rhythmically clutching her to its chest. A man with a shaven and polished skull lay stretched full length on the floor while three girls scarcely out of their teens sat astride him and, I think, tried to undo his trousers. Four scholarly gentlemen with dyed beards sang raucously in a language unknown to me, and Lloyd Kolff strode across to greet them with whoops of mysteriously expressed pleasure. A woman with golden skin wept quietly at the base of a monstrous whirling construction of ebony, jade, and brass. Through the smoky air soared mechanical creatures with clanking metal wings and peacock tails, shrieking stridently and casting glittering droppings upon the guests. A pair of apes chained with loops of interlocked ivory gaily copulated near the intersection of two acute angles of the wall. This was Nineveh; this was Babylon. I stood dazzled, repelled by the excess of it all and yet delighted, as one is delighted by cosmic audacity of any kind. Was this a typical Wesley Bruton party? Or had it all been staged for the benefit of Vornan-19? I could not imagine people behaving like this under normal circumstances. They all seemed quite natural, though; it would take only some layers of dirt and a change of scene, and this could be an Apocalyptist riot, not a gathering of the elite. I caught sight of Kralick — appalled, he stood to one side of the vanished entrance, huge and bleak-faced, his ugly features no longer looking charming as dismay filtered through his flesh. He had not intended to bring Vornan into such a place.
Where was our visitor, anyway? In the first shock of our plunge into the madhouse we had lost sight of him. Vornan had been right: this was bedlam. And there he was in the midst of it. I saw him now, alongside the river of wine. The girl in the silver hoops, the computer heiress, rose on her knees, body stained deep crimson, and ran her hand lightly down her side. The hoops opened to the gentle command and dropped away. She offered one to Vornan, who accepted it gravely, and hurled the rest into the air. The mechanical birds snapped them up in midflight and began to devour them. The computer heiress, wholly bare now, clapped her hands in delight. One of the young men in the mirror tuxedos produced a flask from his pocket and sprayed the girl’s breasts and loins, leaving a thin plastic coating. She thanked him with a curtsy, and turning again to Vornan-19, scooped up wine with her hands and offered him a drink. He sipped. The whole left half of the room went into a convulsion, the floor rising twenty feet to reveal an entirely new group of revelers emerging from a cellar somewhere. Kralick, Fields, and Aster were among those of our group who vanished from view in this rotation of the main floor. I decided I should keep close to Vornan, since no other member of our committee was assuming the responsibility. Kolff was in paroxysms of laughter with his four bearded savants; Helen stood as if in a daze, trying to record every aspect of the scene; Heyman went swirling away in the arms of a voluptuous brunette with talons affixed to her fingers. I shouldered my way across the floor. A waxen young man seized my hand and kissed it. A tottering dowager sent a swirl of vomit within six inches of my shoes, and a buzzing golden-hued metallic beetle a foot in diameter emerged from the floor to clean the mess, emitting satisfied clicks; I saw the gears meshing beneath its wings when it scuttled away. A moment later I was beside Vornan.
His lips were smeared with wine, but his smile was still magnificent. As he caught sight of me, he disengaged himself from the Sawtelle girl, who was trying to pull him into the rivulet of wine, and said to me, “This is excellent, Sir Garfield. I am having a splendid evening.” His forehead furrowed. “Sir Garfield is the wrong form of address, I remember. You are Leo. It is a splendid evening, Leo. This house — it is comedy itself!”
All around us the bacchanal raged more furiously. Blobs of living light drifted at eye level; I saw one distinguished guest capture one and eat it. A fist-fight had begun between the two escorts of a bloated-looking woman who was, I realized in awe and distaste, a beauty queen of my youth. Near us two girls rolled on the floor in a vehement wrestling match, ripping away handfuls of each other’s clothing. A ring of onlookers formed and clapped rhythmically as the zones of bare flesh were revealed; suddenly pink buttocks flashed and the quarrel turned into an uninhibited sapphic embrace. Vornan seemed fascinated by the flexed legs of the girl beneath, by the thrusting pelvis of her conqueror, by the moist sucking sounds of their joined lips. He inclined his head to get a better view. Yet at the same moment a figure approached us and Vornan said to me, “Do you know this man?” I had the unsettling impression that Vornan had been looking in two directions at once, taking in a different quadrant of the room with each of his eyes. Was it so?
The newcomer was a short, chunky man no taller than Vornan-19, but at least twice as wide. His immensely powerful frame was the support for a massive dolichocephalic head that rose, without virtue of a neck, from his enormous shoulders. He had no hair, not even eyebrows or lashes, which made him look far more naked than the various nude and seminude caperers reeling about in our vicinity. Ignoring me, he pushed a vast paw at Vornan-19 and said. “So you’re the man from the future? Pleased to know you. I’m Wesley Bruton.”
“Our host, Good evening.” Vornan gave him a variant of the smile, less dazzling, more urbane, and almost at once the smile flicked away and the eyes came into play: keen, cool, penetrating. Nodding gently in my direction he said. “You know Leo Garfield, of course?”
“Only by reputation,” Bruton roared. His hand was still outstretched. Vornan had not taken it. The look of expectancy in Bruton’s eyes slowly curdled into bewildered disappointment and barely suppressed fury. Feeling I had to do something, I seized the hand myself, and as he mangled me I shouted, “So good of you to invite us, Mr. Bruton. It’s a miraculous house.” I added in a lower voice, “He doesn’t understand all of our customs. I don’t think he shakes hands.”