Lake of the Long Sun

Chapter 12. LEMUR

Silk knelt in silent prayer, his face to the gray-painted wall of the compartment.

Marvelous Moipe, be not angry with me, who have always honored you. Music is yours. Am I never to hear it again? Recall my music box, Moipe, how many hours I spent with it when I was a child. It is in my closet now, Moipe, and if only you will free me I will oil the dancers and its works as well, and play it each night. I have searched my conscience, Moipe, to discover that in which I have displeased you. I find this: that I dealt overharshly with Mucor when she possessed Mamelta. Those whose wits are disordered and those who, though grown, remain as children are, are yours, I know, Moipe, and for your sake 1 should have been more gentle with her. Nor should I have called her a devil, for she is none. I renounce my pride, and I will separate Mucor from Blood if I can, and treat her as I would my own child. This I swear. A singing bird to you, Moipe, if you will but-

Crane asked, "You don't think that stuff really helps, do you?"

A singing bird to you, Moipe, if you will but set us free.

Tenebrous Tartaros, be not angry with me, who have always honored you. Theft is yours, murder, and foul deeds done in darkness. Am I never again to walk freely the dark streets of my native city? Recall how I walked there with Auk, like me a thief. When I surmounted Blood's wall, you favored me, and I gladly paid the black lamb and the cock I swore. Recall that it was I who brought the Pardon of Pas to Kalan, and allow me to steal away now, Tartaros, and Doctor Crane with me. I will never forget, Tartaros, that thieves are yours and I am one. I have searched my conscience, Tartaros, to discover that in which I have displeased you. I find this: that I detested your darksome tunnels with all my heart, never thinking in my pride that you had sent me there, nor that they were a most proper place for such as I. I renounce my pride; if ever you send me there again, I will strive to be grateful, recalling your favors. This I swear. A score of black rats to you, Tartaros, if you will but set us free.

Highest Hierax, be not angry with me, who have always honored you. Death is yours. Am I never to comfort the dying again? Recall my kindnesses to Pricklythrift, Shrub, Flax, Orpine, Bharal, Kalan, and Exmoor, Hierax. Recall how Exmoor blessed me with his dying breath, and forget not that it was I who slew the bird to whom blasphemers had given your name. If only you will free us, I will bring pardon to the dying all my life, and burial to the dead. I have searched my conscience, Hierax, to discover that in which I have displeased you. I find this: that-

"I thought you fellows used beads."

"Potto took them, as I told you," Silk said dispiritedly. "He took everything, even my glasses."

"I didn't know you wore glasses."

That when I beheld those who had died in the sleep into which Pas had cast them,, I did not propose their burial, or so much as offer a prayer for them; and when Mamelta and I found the bones of she who had carried a lantern, I in my pride took her lantern without interring her bones. I renounce my pride and will be ever mindful of the dead. This I swear. A black he-goat to you, Hierax, if you will but set us free.

Enchanting Thelxiepeia, be not angry with me, who have always honored you. Prophesy and magic are yours. Am I never to cast the Thelxday lots again, nor to descry in the entrails of sacrifice the records of days to come? Recall that of the many sacrifices I offered for Orpine, for Auk, and for myself on Scylsday past, I read all save the bird's. I have searched my conscience, Thelxiepeia, to discover that in which I have displeased-

Abruptly the room was plunged in such darkness as Silk had never known, not even in the ash-choked tunnel, a darkness palpable and suffocating, without the smallest spark or hint of light.

Crane whispered urgently, "It's Lemur! Cover your head."

Despondent, not knowing why he should cover it or what he might cover it with, Silk did not.

I find this: that I sought no charm-

The door opened; Silk turned at the sound in time to see someone who nearly filled the doorway enter. The door closed again with a solid thud, but no snick from the bolt.

"Stand up, Patera." Councillor Lemur's voice was deep and rich, a resonant baritone. "I want both of you. Doctor, take this."

A thump.

"Pick it up."

Crane's voice: "This is my medical bag. How did you get it?"

Lemur laughed. (Silk, rising, felt an irrational longing to join in that laughter, so compellingly agreeable and good-natured was it.) "You think we're in the middle of the lake? We're still in the cave, but we'll be putting out shortly. I spoke to Blood and one of his drivers brought it, that's all. "Patera, I have some little presents for you, too. Take them, they're yours."

Silk held out both hands and received his prayer beads and the gammadion and silver chain his mother had given him, the beads and chain in a single, tangled mass. "Thank you," he said.

"You're a bold man, Patera. An extremely bold man, for an augur. Do you consider that you and the doctor, acting in concert, might overpower me?"

"I don't know."

"But not so bold now that you've lost your god. Doctor, what about you? You and the augur, together?"

Crane's voice, from the direction of the cot, "No." As he spoke, Silk heard the soft snap of a catch.

"I have your needler in my waistband. And yours, Patera. It's in my sleeve. In a moment I'm going to give them back to you. With your needlers back in your possession, do you think you and your friend the doctor could kill me in the dark?"

Silk said, "May all the gods forbid that I should ever kill you, or anyone, or even wish to."

Lemur laughed again, softly. "You wanted to kill Potto, didn't you, Patera? He questioned you for hours, according to what he told me. I've known Potto all my life, and there is no more objectionable man in the whorl, even when he's trying to ingratiate himself."

"It is true that I could not like him." Silk chose his words. "Yet I respected him as a member of the Ayuntamiento, and thus one of the legitimate rulers of our city. Certainly I did not wish to harm him."

"He hit you repeatedly, and eventually so hard that you were in a coma for hours. The whorl would be well rid of my cousin Potto. Don't you want your needler back?"

"Yes. Very much." Silk extended his hand blindly.

"And you'll try to kill me?"

"Hammerstone challenged me in the same way," Silk said. "I told Councillor Potto about it, and he must have told you; but you're not a soldier."

"I'm not even a chem."

Crane's voice: "He's never seen you."

"In that case, look at me now, Patera."

A faint glow, a nebulous splotch of white phosphorescence near the ceiling, appeared to relieve the utter darkness. As Silk stared in fascination, the closely shaven face of a man of sixty or thereabouts appeared. It was a noble face, with a lofty brow surmounted by a mane of silver hair, an aquiline nose, and a wide mobile-looking mouth; staring up at it, Silk realized that Councillor Lemur had to be taller even than Gib.

The face spoke: "Aren't you going to ask how I do this? My skin is self-luminescent. Even my eyes. Watch."

Two more faintly glowing splotches appeared and became Lemur's hands. One held a needler as large as Auk's by the barrel. "Take it, Doctor. It's your own."

Crane's voice, from the darkness beyond Lemur's hands: "Silk's not impressed."

Leaving Lemur, the needler vanished.

"He's a man of the spirit." Crane chuckled.

"As am I, Patera. Very much so. You've lost your god. May I propose another?"

"Tartaros? I was praying to him before you came in."

"Because of the dark, you mean." Lemur's face and hands faded, replaced by a blackness that now seemed blacker still.

"And because it's his day," Silk said. "At least, I'd assume that it's Tarsday by now."

"Tartaros and the rest are only ghosts, Patera. They've never been anything more, and ghosts fade. With the passing of three hundred years, Pas, Echidna, Tartaros, Scylla, and the rest have faded almost to invisibility. The Prolocutor knows it, and since you're going to succeed him, you should know it, too."

"Since I-" Silk fell silent, suddenly glad that the room was dark.

Lemur laughed again; and Silk-heartsick and terrified-nearly laughed with him, and found that he was smiling. "If only you could see yourself, Patera! Or have your likeness taken."

"You . . ."

"You're a trained augur, I'm told. You graduated from the schola with honors. So tell me, can Tartaros see in the dark?"

Silk nodded, and by that automatic motion discovered that he had already accepted the implication that Lemur could see in the dark as well. "Certainly. All gods can, actually."

Crane's voice: "That's what you were taught, anyhow."

Lemur's baritone, so resonant that it made Crane sound thin and scratchy in comparison. "I can, too, no less than they. By waves of energy too long for your eyes, I'm seeing you now. And I hear and see in places where I am not. When you woke, Doctor Crane held up his fingers and required you to count them. Now it's your turn. Any number you choose."

Silk raised his right hand.

"All five. Again."

Silk complied.

"Three. Crane held up three for you. Again."

"I believe you," Silk said.

"Six. You believed Crane as well, when he told you that I plan to kill you both. It's quite untrue, as you've heard. We mean to elevate and honor you both."

"Thank you," Silk said.

"First I shall tell you the story of the gods. Doctor Crane knows it already, or guesses if he does not know. A certain ruler, a man who had the strength to rule alone and so called himself the monarch, built our whorl, Patera. It was to be a message from himself to the universe. You have seen some of the people he put on board it, and in fact you have walked and talked with one."

Silk nodded, then (conscious of Crane) said, "Yes. Her name is Mamelta." "You talked about Mucor. The monarch's doctors tinkered with the minds of the men and women he put into the whorl as Blood's surgeon did with hers. But more skillfully, erasing as much as they dared of their patients' personal lives."

Silk said, "Mamelta told me she had been operated upon before she was lifted up to this whorl."

"There you have it. The surgeons found, however, that their patients' memories of their ruler, his family, and some of his officials were too deeply entrenched to be eliminated altogether. To obscure the record, they renamed them. Their ruler, the man who called himself the monarch, became Pas, the shrew he had married Echidna, and so on. She had borne him seven children. We call them Scylla, Moipe, Tartaros, Hierax, Thelxiepeia, Phaea, and Sphigx."

In the darkness, Silk traced the sign of addition.

"The monarch had wanted a son to succeed him. Scylla was as strong-willed as the monarch himself, but female. It is a law of nature, as concerns our race, that females are subject to males. Her father allowed her to found our city, however, and many others. She founded your Chapter as well, a parody of the state religion of her own whorl. She was hardly more than a child, you understand, and the rest younger even than she."

Silk swallowed and said nothing.

"His queen bore the monarch another, but she was worse yet, a fine dancer and a skilled musician, but female, too, and subject to fits of insanity. We call her Molpe."

There was a soft click.

"Nothing useful in your bag, Doctor? We searched it, naturally.

"To continue. Their third child was male, but no better than the first two, because he was bom blind. He became that Tartaros to whom you were recommending yourself, Patera. You believe he can see without light. The truth is that he cannot see -by daylight. Am I boring you?" "That wouldn't matter, but you're risking the displeasure of the gods, and endangering your own spirit."

Crane's dry chuckle came out of the darkness.

"I'll continue to do it. Echidna conceived again and bore another male, a boy who inherited his father's virile indifference to the physical sensations of others to the point of mania. You must know, Patera, as we all do, the exquisite pleasure of inflicting pain upon those we dislike. He allowed himself to be seduced by it, to the point that he came to care for nothing else and while still a child slaughtered thousands for his amusement. We call him Hierax now, the god of death.

"Shall I go on? There are three more, all girls, but you know them as well as I. Thelxiepeia with her spells and drugs and poisons, fat Phaea, and Sphigx, who combined her father's fortitude with her mother's vile temper. In a family such as hers, she would be forced to cultivate those qualities or die, unquestionably."

Silk coughed. "You indicated that you intended to return my needler, Councillor. I'd like very much to have it back."

This time the uncanny light wrapped Lemur's entire body, strong enough to glow faintly through his tunic and trousers. "Watch," he said, and held out his right arm. A dark smudge beneath the embroidered satin of his sleeve crept down his arm to the elbow, then down his forearm until Hyacinth's gold-plated needler slid into his open hand. "Here you are."

"How did you do that?" Silk inquired.

"There are thousands of minute circuits in my arms. By flexing certain muscles, I can create a magnetic field, and by tightening them in sequence while relaxing others, I can move the field. Watch."

Hyacinth's needler crept from Lemur's hand to his wrist, and disappeared into his sleeve. "You say you'd like to have it back?"

"Yes, very much."

"And you, Doctor Crane? I have already given you yours, and I plan to make use of your services. Will you count your needler as your fee, paid in advance?"

The light that streamed from Lemur was now so bright that Silk could make out Crane, seated on the cot, as he drew his needler and held it out. "You can have it back, if you want. But give Silk his, and I'll accept that."

"Doctor Crane has already tried to shoot me, you see." Lemur's shining face smiled. "He's playing a cruel trick on you, Patera."

"No, he's being the same kind friend he has been to me since we first met. There are men who are ashamed of their best impulses, because they have come to associate goodness with weakness. Give it to me, please."

It was not Hyacinth's needler but her azoth that crawled like a silver spider into Lemur's open hand. Silk reached for it, but the hand closed about it; Lemur laughed, and they were plunged in darkness again.

Crane's voice: "Silk tells me you captured a woman with him. If you've hurt her badly, I want to see her."

"I could squeeze this hard enough to crush it," Lemur told them. "That would be dangerous even for me."

Silk had succeeded in untangling the silver chain; he put it about his neck and adjusted the position of Pas's gammadion as he spoke. "Then I advise you not to do it."

"I won't. Before I told you the truth about your gods, Patera, I hinted that I'd propose a new god to you, a living god to whom the wisest might kneel. I meant myself, as you must have realized. Are you ready to worship me?"

"I'm afraid we lack an appropriate victim for sacrifice." Lemur's eyes glowed. "You're wasting your tact, Patera. Don't you want to be Prolocutor? When I happened to mention it, I expected you to kiss my rump for the thought. Instead you're acting as if you didn't hear me."

"After the first moment or two, I assumed you intended a subtle torture. To speak frankly, I still do."

"Not at all. I'm completely serious. The doctor said he wished he'd invented you. So do I. If you're what he and his masters required, you suit my purposes even better."

Silk felt as though he were choking. "You want me to tell people that you're a god, Councillor? That you are to be paid divine honors?"

Warm and rich and friendly, Lemur's voice boomed out of the darkness. "More than that. The present Prolocutor could do that, and would in a moment if I told him to. Or I could replace him with any of a hundred augurs who would."

Silk shook his head. "I doubt it. But even if you're correct, they would not be believed."

"Precisely. But you would be. His Cognizance is old. His Cognizance will die, tomorrow perhaps. In a surprising but hugely popular development, it will be discovered that he has named you as his successor, and you will explain to the people that Pas has withheld his rains out of consideration for me. They need only pay me proper honors to be forgiven. Eventually they will come to understand that I am, as I am, a greater god than Pas. After all that I've told you, do you retain some loyalty to him? And Echidna and their brats?"

Silk sighed. "I realized as you spoke how little I have ever had. Your blasphemies ought to have outraged me. I was merely shocked instead, like a maiden aunt who overhears her cook swearing; but you see, I've encountered a real god, the Outsider-"

Crane whooped with laughter.

"And Kypris, a real goddess. Thus I know wliat divinity is, the look and the sound and the true texture of it. You said something else that I ignored, Councillor."

For the first time, Lemur sounded dangerous and even deadly. "Which was . . . ?"

"You said that you were not a chem. I'm not one of those ignorant and prejudiced bios who consider themselves superior to chems, but I know-"

"You lie!" Doubly terrifying in the darkness, the blade of the azoth tore the plane of existence like so much paper, shooting past Silk's ear, manifest to every cell in his body, and horrible as nothing the universe contained could be. From the other side of the room, Crane shouted, "You'll sink us!" and the vessel lurched and shook as he spoke. Chips of burning paint and flakes of incandescent steel showered Silk with fire; he backed away in horror.

"One bom a biological man did that, Patera. A man who has become more." Something rang in the darkness as a hammer rings against an anvil. "I am a biological man and a god." The harrowing discontinuity that had wounded the very fabric of the universe was gone.

"Thank you," Silk said. He gasped for breath. "Thank you every much. Please don't do that again."

As the violence of the vessel's motion abated to steady thrumming, Lemur's luminous arm reappeared; his hand opened, and the hilt of the azoth slid smoothly into its sleeve.

There was a thump as Crane dropped his medical bag. "Are you inside there?"

Lemur's voice was warm again. "Why do you ask?"

"Just curious. I was wondering if it might not be like conflict armor, but better."

"Which would be of some interest to your masters in the government of . . . ?"

"Paluslria."

"No. Not Paluslria. We have eliminated certain cities, and thai is one of them. Like Patera Silk, you'll soon come to serve Viron, and when you do, you must be more forth- right. Meanwhile, let it be enough for you that I am in another part of this boat. Perhaps I'll show you when we're done with the business at hand."

"Serve you, you mean."

"We gods have many names.

"Patera, you needn't concern yourself about your paramour from the past. She's nursing Doctor Crane's patient even as I speak, and worrying about you."

Crane's voice: "You use some old-fashioned words.How old are you, Councillor?"

"How old would you say I am?" Lemur extended his shining hand. "You doctors like to speak of pronounced tremors. Can you pronounce upon that one?"

"You've held office under two caldes, and for twenty-two years since the death of the last. Naturally we wondered."

"In Palustria. Yes, in Palustria, naturally you did. When you see me elsewhere you can formulate an estimate of your own, and I'll be interested to learn it.

"Patera, doesn't all this astound you?"

"I can understand how you could be a bio with prosthetic parts; our Maytera Rose is like that." Silk discovered that his own hands were trembling and pushed them into his pockets. "Not how you could be in another part of this boat."

"In the same way that a glass conveys to you the image of a room at, the opposite end of the city. In the same way that your Sacred Window showed you the tricked-out image of a woman dead three hundred years and convinced you that you had spoken with a minor goddess." Lemur chuckled. "But I've wasted too much time already, while Doctor Crane's patient lies dying. I trust he'll forgive me, I was enjoying myself." The luminous hand held up Hyacinth's needler. "Here's Doctor Crane's fee, as specified by him. Doctor, I wish you to look at a patient. To earn this fee, you need only examine him and tell him the truth. Is it a violation of medical ethics to tell a patient the truth?"

"No."

"There have been times when I've thought that it must be. This fourth prisoner of mine's a spy, too. Will you do it? He's badly injured."

"After which you'll kill Silk and me." Crane snorted. "All right, I've lived as a quacksalver. Since I've got to die, I'll die as one, too."

"Both of you will live," Lemur told him, "because you will both become admirably cooperative. I could have you so now, if I wished, but for the present you serve me better as opponents. I will not say foes. You see, I have told this fourth prisoner that the doctor who will examine him and the augur who will shrive him are no friends of mine. That they have, in fact, seen fit to intrigue against the government I direct."

The luminosity of Lemur's hand and arm brightened, and Hyacinth's engraved, gold-plated, little needler slithered like a living animal into his open palm. "Your Cognizance? Here you are." He handed the needler to Silk. "Will you, as an anointed augur, administer the Pardon of Pas to Doctor Crane's patient, if Crane judges him in imminent danger of death?"

"Of course," Silk said.

"Then let's go. I know you'll find this interesting." Lemur threw open the door. Blinking and wiping their eyes, they followed him along a narrow corridor floored with steel grating, and down a flight of steel stairs almost as steep as a ladder.

"I'm taking you all the way down to the keel," Lemur lold them. "I hope you weren't expecting this boat to rock, by the way. We've put out-I gave the order while we were playing with that azoth-and we're cruising beneath the surface now, where there's no wave action."

He led them to a heavy door set into the floor, spun two handwheels,'and threw it back. "Down here. I'm about to show you the hole in our bottom."

Silk went first. The vibration that had shaken the boat since Lemur had threatened him with the azoth was stronger liere, almost an audible sound; there was a cool freshness to the air, and the iron railing of the steps he descended felt damp beneath his hand. Green lights that seemed imitations of the ancient lights provided the first settlers by Pas, and an indefinable odor that might have been no more than the absence of any other, made him feel for the first time that he was actually beneath the waters of Lake Limna.

The flier's broken wings were the first things he saw. They had been laid out, with scraps of the nearly invisible fabric that had covered them, on the transparent canopy of a sizable yawl-shattered spars of a material that might have been polished bone, less thick than his forefinger.

"Wait there a moment, Your Cognizance," Lemur called. "I want to show you these. You and Doctor Crane both. It will be well worth your while."

"You got one after all," Crane said. "You've brought down a flier."

There was a note of defeat in his voice that made Silk turn to stare back at him.

"They'd all gone," Crane explained. "Blood and his thugs and most of the male servants. I thought this might be it, but I lioped .. ." He left the sentence incomplete and shrugged.

Lemur had picked up an oddly curved, almost tear-drop-shaped grid of the cream-colored material. "We have, Doctor. And this is the secret. Simple, yet infinitely precious. Don't you want to examine it? Wouldn't you like to provide your masters with the secret of flight? The key that opens the sky? This is its shape. Pick it up if you wish. See how light it is. Run your fingers over it, Doctor."

Crane shook his head.

"Then you, Your Cognizance. When your followers have installed you as calde, it could prove a most useful thing to know."

"I'll never be calde," Silk told him, "and I have never wished to be." He accepted the almost weightless grid, and stared at its fluid lines. "This is what lets a flier fly? This shape?"

Lemur nodded. "With the material from which it's made. Tarsier's analyzing that. When you broke into Blood's villa Phaesday night-I know all about that, you see. When you broke in, didn't you wonder why Crane's city had sent him to watch Blood?"

"I didn't realize he was a spy then," Silk explained. He put down the grid and fingered the swelling that Potto's fist had left on the side of his head. He felt weak and a little dizzy.

"To keep his masters appraised of Blood's progress with the eagle," Lemur told him. "More than twenty-five years ago, I realized the possibilities of flight. I saw that if our troopers could fly as fliers did, enemy troop movements would be revealed at once, that picked bodies of men could land behind an enemy's lines to disrupt communications, and all the rest of it. As soon as I was free to act, I backed various experimenters whose work appeared promising. None developed a device capable of carrying a child, much less a trooper."

Recalling Hammerstone, Silk asked, "Why not a soldier?"

Crane grunted. "They're too heavy. Lemur there weighs four times as much as you and me together."

"Ah!" Lemur turned to Crane. "You've looked into the matter, I see.".

Crane nodded. "Fliers are actually a bit smaller than most troopers. I'm small, as everybody keeps reminding me. But I'm bigger than most fliers."

"You sound as though you've seen some close up."

"Through a telescope," Crane said. "Want to object that I had nothing to compare them to?"

"To oblige you, yes."

"I didn't need anything. A small man isn't proportioned like a big one, and as a small physician I'm very much aware of that. A small man's head is bigger'in proportion to his shoulders, for instance."

Silk fidgeted. "If someone may be dying ..."

"That someone could be you, Your Cognizance." Lemur laid a heavy hand upon Silk's shoulder. "Purely as an hypothesis, let's say that I plan to pull your head off as soon as you've conveyed the Pardon of Pas to this unfortunate. If that were the case, shortening our discussion would materially shorten your life."

"As a citizen I'm entitled to a public trial, and to an advocate. As an augur-"

The pressure of Lemur's fingers increased. "It's too bad you're not an advocate yourself, Your Cognizance. If you were you'd realize that there's a further, unwritten provision. It is that the urgent needs ofViron must be served. As we speak a mendacious and malcontented radical faction is attempting to overthrow our lawfully constituted Ayuntamiento and substitute for it the rule of one inexperienced-but deep, and I admit that freely-augur, stirring up the populace by alleging a lot of superstitious taradiddle about enlightenment and the supposed favor of the gods. Am I crushing your shoulder?" "It is certainly very painful."

"It can easily become more so. Did you really speak to a goddess in a house of ill repute? Say no, or I'll crush it."

"A goddess in the sense that the god who enlightened me is a god? Doctor Crane insists that there is no such being. Whether he's right or not, I'm inclined to doubt that there are any more such gods."

Lemur tightened his grip, so that Silk would have fallen to his knees if he could. "I want to tell you in some detail, Your Cognizance, how I hit upon the notion of using a bird of prey to bring down a flier for our examination. How I saw a hawk take a merganser at twilight and conceived the idea. How I combed Viron, with the utmost secrecy, for the right man to carry it out. And how I found him."

Silk moaned, and Crane said, "And so on and so forth. Let him go, and I'll tell you how we learned of it."

"Let him go!" It was Mamelta, dashing out of the dimness and throwing herself on Silk. "You damned robot! You THING!" She was naked save for a blood-smeared rag knotted about her waist, her full breasts and rounded thighs trembling, her bare skin the color of old ivory.

Lemur released Silk and cuffed her almost casually; white bone gleamed where his long nails had torn her forehead, until blood streamed forth to cover it.

Crane crouched beside her and snapped open his brown bag.

"Very good, Doctor," Lemur said. "Patch her up by all means. But not here." He threw her over his shoulder and stalked away.

"Come on." Agilely for a man of his age, Crane mounted the steps to the trapdoor Lemur had opened for them and tugged at one of its wheels.

"We can't leave her," Silk said. He moved his shoulder experimentally and decided no bones had been broken.

"We can't help her while we're prisoners ourselves."

Lemur's mocking voice echoed from the other end of the hold. "A man is dying, and this woman is bleeding like a stuck pig. Don't either of you care?"

"I do," Silk called, and hobbled in the direction of the voice.

Beyond the bow of the yawl, the flier lay on a blanket spread on the steel floor, his sun-browned face twisted in agony. Beside him stretched a second trapdoor, far larger than the one through which they had come-large enough, as Silk realized with some astonishment, to admit the yawl. An instrument panel stood against the bulkhead at the end of the compartment.

Lemur dropped Mamelta next to the flier. In a deafening roar that reminded Silk of the talus, he called, "Rejoin us, Doctor. You can't open that hatch." To Silk he added, "I tightened those locking screws, you see. And I'm a great deal stronger than both of you together, as well as a great deal heavier."

Silk had already knelt at the flier's head. "I convey to you, my son, the forgiveness of all the gods. Recall now the words of Pas, who-"

"That's enough." Lemur took him by the shoulder again. "We want the doctor first, I think. If he won't come, you must bring him."

"I'm here," Crane announced.

"This is our flier," Lemur said. "His name's Iolar. He has told us a little, you sec, though nothing of value, not even the name of his city. I would have to agree that he's scarcely taller than you, and he may well be a trifle lighter. Yet he is flier enough, or almost enough."

Crane did not reply. After a moment he took scissors from his bag and began to cut away the flightsuit. Silk tore a strip from his robe, wound it twice about Mamelta's head, and tied it.

Lemur nodded approvingly. "She will live to be grateful for your efforts, I'm sure, Patera. So will.lolar, I hope. Are you listening, Doctor Crane?"

Crane nodded without looking up. "I'm going to have to roll you over. Put your arms above your head. Don't try to roll yourself. Let me do it."

"You see," Lemur continued conversationally, "Iolar came down right here, in the lake. In one way, that was extremely convenient for us. We sent our little boat to the surface and scooped up him and his wings without help from the Civil Guard. Or from Blood, I should add, and very much to the discomfiture of them both." Lemur chuckled.

"That was early yesterday morning. As it chanced, I was ashore at the time, so Loris directed the recovery. Whether I could've managed things better, I can't say. Loris is not Lemur, but then who is? In any event one vital part was not retrieved, although the flier himself was, with most of the wings and harness and so on that permitted him to fly. He calls it a propulsion module, or PM. Isn't that so, Iolar?"

Crane glanced up at Lemur, then looked quickly back to his patient.

"Precisely so, Doctor. Without the device, our troopers will still be able to fly in a manner of speaking. But only to glide, as a gull does when it rides the breeze without moving its wings. It should be possible for such a trooper to launch himself from a cliff or a tower and fly a great distance, given a strong and favoring wind. Only under the most extraordinary conditions, liowcver, could lie take off from a level field. Under no conceivable conditions could he fly into the eye of any wind, even the weakest. Is this too technical for you, Patera? Doctor Crane's following me, I believe."

Silk said, "So am I, I think."

"At first the deficiency appeared only temporary. Iolar had a propulsion module-he admitted as much. Presumably it was torn free by the impact when he struck the water. We could fish it up, which we tried to do all that day, or he could tell us how to make them. This last, I am sorry to say, he refuses to do."

Crane said, "You must have some sort of medical facility on this boat. Something better than this."

"Oh, we do," Lemur assured him. "In fact, we had him there for a while. But. he didn't repay our kindness, so we brought him back here. Is he conscious?"

"Didn't you hear me talking to him a minute ago? Of course he is."

"Fine. Iolar, listen to me. I'm Councillor Lemur, and I am speaking to you. I may never do this again, and what I'm about to say will be more important to you than anything you've ever heard before, or that you're ever apt to hear. Do you hear me now? Say something or move your head."

The flier lay face down, his face turned toward the long steel hatch in the deck. His voice, when it came, was weak and strangely accented. "I hear."

Lemur smiled and nodded. "You've found me to be a man of my word, haven't you? Very well, I'm giving you my word that everything I'm about to say is true. I'm not going to try to trick you again, and I'm not inclined to be patient with you any longer. These are the men Potto and I told you about. This doctor is an admitted spy, just like you. Not a spy of ours, you may be sure. A spy from Palustria, or so he says. This augur is the leader of the faction that has been trying to seize control of our city. If Doctor Crane says you're going to die, you've won our argument. I'll let the augur bring you Pas's Pardon, and that's that. But if Doctor Crane says you'll live, you'll be surrendering your life if you continue to refuse. Have I made myself clear? I'm not going to waste any more of my time, or Potto's, in trying to force the facts we need from you. We're building new equipment to find your propulsion module on the bottom. We'll get it, and you'll have died for nothing. If we don't find it, we still have the eagle. She knows her business now, and all we'll have to do to get a propulsion module is send her after the next flier we see."

Lemur pointed a finger at Crane. "No threats, Doctor. No promises. Truth will cost you nothing, and a lie gain you nothing. Is he going to live?"

"I don't know," Crane said levelly. "He's got a couple of broken ribs-they haven't punctured the lung, or he might be dead already. At least four thoracic vertebrae are in pretty bad shape. There's damage to the spinal cord, but I don't think it's been severed, although I can't be sure. Given proper care and a first-rate surgeon, I'd say he might have a good chance."

Lemur looked sceptical. "A complete recovery?"

"I doubt it. He might be able to walk."

"Now then." Lemur's voice dropped to a whisper. "Which will it be? In two or three hours we could have you ashore. Those black canisters all of you wear-how do they work?"

Silence filled the hold. Silk, bent over Mamelta, saw her eyelids flutter, and clasped her hand. Crane shrugged and snapped his bag shut, the sound as abrupt and final as the report of Auk's needler in the Cock.

"I didn't think you would," Lemur told the flier almost conversationally. "That's why I put out. Patera, you can start your rigmarole, if you want to. I don't care. He'll be dead almost before you finish it."

"What are you going to do?" Crane asked.

"Put him off the boat." Lemur strode to the instrument panel. "As a man of science you might be interested in this, Doctor. This compartment is at the bottom of our boat, as I told you. It's tightly sealed, as you discovered a few minutes ago when you tried to open the hatch. At present," he glanced at one of the gauges, "we're seventy cubits below the surface. At this depth, the water pressure around our hull is roughly three atmospheres. Has anyone explained to you how we rise and sink?"

"No," Crane said. "I've wondered." He glanced at Silk as though to see whether he, too, was curious; but Silk was chanting and swinging his beads over the head of the injured flier.

"We do it with compressed air. If we want to go deeper, we open one of our ballast tanks. That lets lake water in, so we lose buoyancy and sink. When we want to surface, we valve compressed air into that tank to force the water out. The tank becomes a float, so we gain buoyancy. Simple but effective. When I open this valve, more air will flow into this compartment." Lemur turned it, producing a loud hiss.

"If I were to let it in fast, you'd find it painful, so I've only cracked the valve. Swallow if your ears hurt."

Silk, who had been giving Lemur some small fraction of his attention, paused in his chant to swallow. As he did, the injured flier wliispered, "The sun . . ." His eyes, which had been half-shut, opened wide, and he struggled to turn his face toward Silk. "Tell your people!"

No audible response was permitted until the liturgy was complete, but Silk nodded, swinging his beads in the sign of subtraction. "You are blessed." While bobbing his head nine times, as the ritual demanded, he made the sign of addition.

"When the pressure here reaches three atmospheres, as it soon will, we can open that boat hole without flooding the compartment." Lemur chuckled. "I'll loosen up the fittings now."

Crane started to protest, then clamped his jaw.

"We're losing control," the flier whispered to Silk, and his eyes closed.

With his free hand, Silk stroked the flier's temple to indicate that he had heard. "I pray you to forgive us, the living." Another sign of addition. "I and many another have wronged you often, my son, committing terrible crimes and numerous offenses against you. Do not hold them in your heart, but begin the life that follows life in innocence, all these wrongs forgiven." With his beads, he traced the sign of subtraction again.

Mamelta's hand found Silk's again and closed upon it. "He . . . Am I dreaming?"

Silk shook his head. "I speak here for Great Pas, for Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla, for Marvelous Moipe, for Tenebrous Tartaros, for Highest Hierax, for Thoughtful Thelxiepeia, for Fierce Phaea, and for Strong Sphigx. Also for all lesser gods." Lowering his voice, Silk added, "The Outsider likewise forgives you, my son, for I speak here for him."

"He's going to die?"

Silk put a finger to his lips. In a surprisingly gentle tone, Crane said, "Lemur's going to kill him. He's opted for it. So would I."

"So do I." Mamelta touched the black cloth with which Silk had bandaged her head. "They said we were going to a wonderful world of peace and plenty, where it would be noon all day. We knew they lied. When I die, I'll go home. My mother and brothers . . . Chiquito on his perch in the patio."

Crane took out his scissors again. He was cutting away the cloth when Lemur threw open the hatch.

It was-to Silk the thought was irresistible-as if the Outsider himself had entered the hold. Where the dark steel hatch had been a moment before, there was a rectangle of liquid light, translucid and coolly lambent. The light of the Long Sun, penetrating the clear water of Lake Limna even to a depth of seventy cubits, was refracted and diffused, filling the opening that Lemur had so suddenly revealed and invading the hold with a supernal dawn of celestial blue. For a few seconds, Silk could scarcely believe that the ethereal substance was water. Leaning across the flier with his right hand (still grasping his beads) braced upon the coaming, he dipped his fingers into it.

Crane said, "A little air escaped. Did you feel it?"

Staring down into the crystal water, Silk shook his head. A school of slender silver fish materialized at one end of the hatchway, and in the space of a breath appeared to drift to the other, ten cubits or more beneath the steel plate on which he knelt.

Lemur said, "Move, Patera," and picked up the flier.

Crane shouted, "Watch out! Don't hold him like that!"

"Afraid I'll damage him further, Doctor?" Lemur smiled and lifted the flier effortlessly above his head. "It won't matter.

"What about it, lolar? Anything to say? This is the last chance."

"Thank the woman," the flier gasped. "The men. Strong wings."

Lemur threw him down. The lambent water that filled the hatchway erupted in Silk's face, drenching and mo- mentarily blinding him. By the time he could see again, the flier had nearly passed out of sight. A brief glimpse of his agonized face, his startled eyes and open mouth, from which bubbles like spheres of thin glass streamed, and he was gone.

Lemur slammed down the hatch with a deafening crash and tightened its fastenings. "When I open the one that we came through, the pressure here will equalize with the pressure in the rest of the ship. Keep your mouths open, or it may blow out your eardrums."

He led them up a different companionway this time, and along a broader corridor (in which they passed Councillors Galago and Potto deep in conversation), and at last through a doorway guarded by two soldiers. "This is what you were looking for, Doctor," he told Crane, "although you may not have known it. In this stateroom you will behold our true, biological selves. I'm over there." He pointed toward a circle of gleaming machines; Crane hurried toward it. Silk, limping and supporting Mamelta, followed more slowly. Councillor Lemur's bio body lay upon an immaculate white pallet, an equally immaculate white sheet drawn to his chin. His eyes were closed, his cheeks sunken; his chest rose and fell gently and slowly; the faint wheeze of his breath was barely audible. A wisp of white hair escaped the circlet of black synthetic and network of multicolored wires that bound his brows. Snakelike tubes from a dozen machines (clear, straw-yellow, and darkly crimson) ducked beneath the sheet.

"No treacherous bios in here," Lemur told them. "We're nursed by devoted chems, and the machines that maintain us in life are maintained by citems. They love us, and we love them. We promise them immortality, and we will deliver it: a never-ending supply of replacement parts. They repay us with infinite prolongation of our merely mortal lives." Crane was inspecting one of the machines. "Your life-support equipment seems very impressive. I wish I had it."

"My kidneys and liver have failed. So we have devices to perform those functions. There's a booster on my heart that's capable of taking over its function completely whenever that becomes necessary. Pulses of oxygen, of course." Crane sucked his teeth and shook his head.

Mamelta said softly, "This is the first time I haven't been cold."

"The air in here is completely reprocessed every seventy seconds. It is filtered, irradiated to destroy bacteria and viruses, and maintained at a relative humidity of thirty-five percent, within a quarter degree of the normal temperature of the bio body."

Looking down at the recumbent councillor. Silk told him, "I'd never have thought I'd feel sorry for you. But I do."

"I'm seldom conscious of lying here. This is me." Lemur struck his chest, and the sound was that of the ringing hammer Silk had heard in the dark. "Vigorous and alert, with perfect hearing and vision. All that I lack is good digestion. And at times," Lemur paused significantly, "patience."

Crane was bending over the recumbent figure; before Lemur could move to stop him, he pushed up one gray eyelid with his thumb. "This man is dead."

"Don't be absurd!" Lemur started toward him, but Silk, acting immediately upon an impulse of which he was scarcely aware, stepped into his path. And Lemur, perhaps responding to some childhood injunction to respect an augur's habit, stopped short.

"Look." Crane reached with thumb and forefinger into the empty socket and drew out a pinch of black detritus that might almost have been a mixture of earth and tar. After exhibiting it to Lemur, he dropped it on the pristine sheet, where it lay like so much filth, and wiped his fingers on the thin white pillow, leaving dingy, mephitic streaks. Lemur made a sound, not loud, that Silk had never heard before (though Silk had already, young as he was, heard so much grief). It was a snuffling, and in it a whine like the cry of a small shaft driven faster and faster-the sound of a drill that has struck a nail, and, impelled by a madman, spins on harder and harder and faster and faster until it smokes, destroying itself by its own boundless, ungovemed energy. Some hours later. Silk would think of that sound and recall the clockwork universe the Outsider had shown him on the Phaesday before in the ballcourt; for it was the sound of that universe dying, or rather of a part of it dying, or rather (he would decide sleepily) of the whole of it dying for someone.

Lemur crouched, slowly and unsteadily, as he sounded the note that would stay with Silk until night; his hands moved haplessly, as though of their own volition, not pawing or clawing or indeed doing anything at all, but writhing as the dead flier's hands were moving (perhaps) even then, in the cold waters of the lake as they awaited the onset of that stiffening which follows death and endures for half a day. (Or a day, or a day and a half, depending upon a variety of circumstances, and always subject to some dispute.) As he crouched, Lemur's eyes never left the mummified councillor on the snowy pallet; and at length, when one knee was on the green-tiled floor, and it seemed that Lemur could not crouch further, his arms fell.

Then the silver azoth that Si.lk had taken from a drawer in Hyacinth's dressing table, on the night of the same day that the Outsider had revealed to Silk the essence of the universe in which he existed, fell from Lemur's tapestried sleeve and skittered across the floor.

And Crane dove for it, bumping hard against one of the medical machines that surrounded the dead councillor's bed and sending it crashing down on its side; but quickly and deftly, gray-bearded though he was, he snatched up the axoth.

Its terrible beam shot forth, and Lemur exploded in a ball of flame. Silk and Mamelta staggered back, covering their faces with their arms.

Crane dashed past them and was out the door by the time that Silk could see again.

Mamelta screamed.

Silk held her arm and dragged her behind him, conscious that he should silence her but conscious also that it would probably prove impossible and that there was not a second to waste in any event.

The soldiers at the door were firing when Silk opened it. Before he could draw back, they charged down the broad corridor, running at thrice the speed even a fleet boy like Horn could have managed and ten times the best that Silk, handicapped by his ankle and the shrieking Mamelta, could hope to achieve; the two of them had not covered half the distance when there was a flash from the companionway and a double explosion-horribly painful, though not loud to ears still shocked and ringing from Lemur's detonation.

"We must get there before he shuts the hatch," Silk told Mamelta, and then, when she still would not run, he (to his own later amazement) picked her up bodily, and throwing her over one shoulder like a rolled mattress or a sack of flour, ran himself, stumbling and staggering, once crashing into a bulkhead and nearly falling headlong down the companionway. Someone was shouting, "Wait! Wait!" and he had reached the hatch before he realized that it was himself.

It was shut, but he dropped Mamelta and wrenched around the handwheels. A roaring wind from below lifted it as he did.

"Doctor!"

"Help me!" Crane shouted. "We can get away in the boat."

Haifa dozen slug guns boomed in the corridor as Silk and Mamelta stumbled down the short companionway into the boat hold, and a slug slammed the hatch like a sledgehammer as he retightened its fastenings.

Wlien he reached Crane, the little physician was heaving at the longer hatch that covered the boat hole. The three of them threw it back, with chill lake water gushing in after it, helping to lift it as air pressure had opened the much smaller hatch above. For a moment Silk was conscious of floundering in rising water. He spat, managed to get his face clear, and gasped for breath.

The flood slacked, then held steady for a second or two that seemed a minute at least; he was conscious of the full-throated hoot of the air valve, and of someone (whether it was Mamelta or Crane he could not be sure) struggling and splashing nearby.

The flow reversed. Slowly at first, then swifter and swifter, sweeping him along, the flood that had practically filled the compartment rushed back to Lake Limna. Helpless as a doll in a maelstrom, he spun in a dizzy whorl of blue light, slowed (his lungs ready to burst), and caught sight of another figure suspended like himself with splayed limbs and drifting hair,

And then, dimly, of a monstrous mottled face-black, red, and gold-far larger than any wall of the manse, and a gaping mouth that closed upon the splayed figure he had seen. It passed below him as a floater rushing down some reeling mountain meadow might pass a floating thistle seed, and the turbulence of its wake sent him spinning.