Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [42]
They obeyed, and he slowly leaned forward, letting his head loll on his chest. The two had to struggle to hold him upright.
Orphelin’s head whipped up, face transformed. His eyes were wide open, startlingly white. They quivered slightly. He parted his lips, and a third eye glared out from his mouth.
“Krishna!” Mintouchian gasped. All three eyes glanced toward him, then dismissively away. Horrified, the bureaucrat stared into that cold third eye.
Orphelin stared unblinkingly back. That eerie triple gaze drove like a spike deep into the bureaucrat’s skull. For a long moment nobody breathed.
Then the doctor’s head collapsed on his chest again.
“All right,” he said calmly. “You can let go now.” They obeyed. “Have you ever considered spiritual training?” he asked.
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 offplanet,” 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, charismatically 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