Galactic North

  “Well, Mister Grafenwalder? Have you reached a decision yet?”

  “I want to see the other samples.”

  Rifugio fingers another vial from the case. “Skin tissue. ”

  “I don’t have the means to run a thorough analysis on skin—not here anyway. Give me what you have, and I’ll take it back with me.”

  Rifugio looks pained. “I’d hoped that we might reach agreement here and now.”

  “Then you hoped wrong. Unless you want to lower your price . . .”

  “I’m afraid that part of the arrangement isn’t negotiable. However, I’m willing to let you take these samples away.” Rifugio snaps shut the lid. “As a further token of my goodwill, I’ll provide you with a moving image of the living Denizen. But I will expect a speedy decision in return.”

  Grafenwalder’s palanquin takes the sealed case and stores it inside its bombproof cargo hatch. “You’ll get it. Don’t worry about that.”

  “Take me at my word, Mister Grafenwalder. You’re not the only collector with an eye for one of these monsters.”

  Grafenwalder spends most of the return trip viewing the thirty-second movie clip, over and over again. It’s not the first time he’s seen moving imagery of something purporting to be a Denizen, but no other clip has withstood close scrutiny. This one is darker and grainier than some of the others, the swimming humanoid shifting in and out of focus, but there’s something eerily naturalistic about it, something that convinces him that it could be real. The Denizen looks plausible: it’s a monster, undoubtedly, but that monstrosity is the end result of logical design factors. It swims with effortless ease, propelling itself with the merest flick of the long fluked tail it wears in place of legs. It has arms, terminating in humanoid hands engineered for tool-use. Its head, when it swims towards the camera, merges seamlessly with its torso. It has eyes, very human eyes at that, but no nose, and its mouth is a smiling horizontal gash crammed with an unnerving excess of needle-sharp teeth. Looking at that movie, Grafenwalder feels more certain than ever that the creatures were real, and that at least one has survived. And as he studies the endlessly repeating thirty-second clip, he feels the closed book of his past creak open even wider. A question forms in his mind that he would rather not answer.

  What exactly is it that he wants with the Denizen?

  Things go tolerably well the next day, until the guests are almost ready to leave. They’ve seen the adult-phase hamadryad and registered due shock and awe. Grafenwalder is careful to remind them that, in addition to its size, this is also a living specimen, not some rotting corpse coaxed into a parodic imitation of life. Even Ursula Goodglass, who has to endure this, registers stoic approval. “You were lucky,” she tells Grafenwalder through gritted teeth. “You could just as easily have ended up with a dead one.”

  “But then I wouldn’t have tried to pretend it was alive,” he tells her.

  It’s Goodglass who has the last laugh today, however. She saves it until the guests are almost back aboard their shuttles.

  “Friends,” she says, “what I’m about to mention in no way compares with the spectacle of an adult-phase hamadryad, but I have recently come into possession of something that I think you might find suitably diverting.”

  “Something we’ve already seen two days ago?” asks Lysander Carroway.

  “No. I chose to keep it under wraps then, thinking my little hamadryad would be spectacle enough for one day. It’s never been seen in public before, at least not in its present state.”

  “Put us out of our misery,” says Alain Couperin.

  “Drop by and see it for yourself,” Goodglass says, with a teasing twinkle in her eye. “Any time you like. No need to make an appointment. But—please—employ maximum discretion. This is one exhibit that I really don’t want the authorities to know about.”

  For a moment Grafenwalder wonders whether she has the Denizen. But surely Rifugio can’t have lost faith in the deal already, when they’ve barely opened negotiations.

  But if not a Denizen—what?

  He has to know, even if it means the indignity of another visit to her miserable little habitat.

  When he arrives at the Goodglass residence, hers is the only shuttle docked at the polar nub. He’s a little uncomfortable with being the only guest, but Goodglass did say to drop in whenever he liked, and he has given her fair warning of his approach. He’s waited a week before taking the trip. Ten days would have been better, but after five he’d already started hearing that she has something special; something indisputably unique. In the meantime, he has run every conceivable test on the biological samples Rifugio gave him in Chasm City and received the same numbing result each time: Rifugio appears to be in possession of the genuine article. Yet Grafenwalder is still apprehensive about closing the deal.

  Inside the habitat, he’s met by Goodglass and Edric, her palanquin-bound husband. The couple waste no time in escorting him to the new exhibit. Despite the indignities they have brought upon each other, it’s all smiles and strained politeness. No one so much as mentions hamadryads, dead or alive.

  Grafenwalder isn’t quite sure what to expect, but he’s still surprised at the modest dimensions of the chamber Goodglass finally shows him. The walkway brings them level with the chamber’s floor, but there’s no armoured glass screen between them and the interior. Even with the lights dimmed, Grafenwalder can already make out an arrangement of tables, set in a U-formation like a series of laboratory benches. There are upright glassy things on the tables, but that’s as much as he can tell.

  “I was expecting something alive,” he says quietly.

  “It is alive,” she hisses back. “Or at least as alive as it ever was. Merely distributed. You’ll see in a moment.”

  “I thought you said it was dangerous.”

  “Potentially it would be, if it was ever put back together. ” She pauses and extends her hand across the gloomy threshold, as if beckoning to the nearest bench. Grafenwalder catches the bright red line on her hand where it has broken a previously invisible laser beam, sweeping up and down across the aperture. Quicker than an eyeblink, a heavy armoured shield slams down on the cell. “But that’s not to stop it getting out,” she says. “It’s to prevent anyone taking it and trying to put it back together. There are some who’d attempt it, just for the novelty.”

  She pulls back her hand. After an interval, the shield whisks up into the ceiling.

  “Whatever it is, you’re serious about it,” Grafenwalder says, intrigued despite himself.

  “I have to be. You don’t take monsters lightly.”

  She waves on the lights. The room brightens, but although he can now make out the benches and the equipment upon them, Grafenwalder is none the wiser.

  “You’ll have to help me here,” he says.

  “It’s all right. I wouldn’t know what to make of it either if I didn’t know what I was looking at.”

  “My God,” he says wonderingly, as his eyes alight on one of the larger glass containers. “Isn’t that a brain?”

  Goodglass nods. “What was once a human brain, yes. Before he—before it—started doing things to itself, throwing pieces of its humanity away like a child flinging toys from a sandpit. But what’s left of the brain is still alive, still conscious and still capable of sensory perception.” A mischievous smile appears on her face. “It knows we’re here, Carl. It’s aware of us. It’s listening to us, watching us, and wondering how it can escape and kill us.”

  He allows himself to take in the grisly scene, now that its full implication is clearer. The brain is being kept alive in a liquid-filled vat, nourished by scarlet and green cables that ram into the grey-brown dough of the exposed cerebellum. A stump of spinal cord curls under the brain like an inverted question mark. It looks pickled and vinegary, cob-webbed with ancient growth and tiny filaments of spidery machinery. Next to the flask is a humming grey box whose multiple analog dials twitch with a suggestion of ongoing mental processes. But that’s not all. Th
ere are dozens of glass cases, linked to other boxes, and the boxes to each other, and each case holds something unspeakable. In one, an eye hangs suspended in a kind of artificial socket, equipped with little steering motors. The eye is looking straight at Grafenwalder, as is its lidless twin on another bench. Their optic nerves are knotted ropes of fatty white nerve tissue. In another flask floats a pair of lungs, hanging like a puffed-up kite. They expand and contract with a slow, wheezing rhythm.

  “Who . . . ? What . . . ?” he says, barely whispering.

  "Haven’t you guessed yet, Carl? Look over there. Look at the mask.”

  He follows her direction. The mask sits at the end of the furthest table, on a black plinth. It’s less a mask than an entire skull, moulded in sleek silver metal. The face is handsome, in a streamlined, air-smoothed fashion, with an expression of calm amusement sculpted into the immobile lips and the blank silver surfaces that pass for eyes. It has strong cheekbones and a strong cleft chin. Between the lips is only a dark, grilled slot. The mask has a representation of human ears, and its crown is moulded with longitudinal silver waves, evoking hair that has been combed back and stiffened in place with lacquer.

  Grafenwalder knows who the skull belongs to. There isn’t anyone alive around Yellowstone who wouldn’t recognise Dr. Trintignant. All that’s missing is Trintignant’s customary black Homburg.

  But Trintignant shouldn’t be here. Trintignant shouldn’t be anywhere. He died years ago.

  “This isn’t right,” he says. “You’ve been duped . . . sold a fake. This can’t be him.”

  “It is. I have watertight provenance.”

  “But Trintignant hasn’t been seen around Yellowstone for years . . . decades. He’s supposed to have died when Richard Swift—”

  “I know about Richard Swift,” Ursula Goodglass informs him. “I met him once—or what was left of him after Trintignant had completed his business. I wanted Swift for an exhibit—I was prepared to pay him for his time—but he left the system again. They say he went back to that place—the same world where Trintignant supposedly killed himself.”

  Grafenwalder thinks back to what he remembers of the scandal. It had been all over Yellowstone for a few weeks. “But Swift brought back Trintignant’s remains. The doctor had dismantled himself, left a suicide note.”

  “That was his plan,” Goodglass says witheringly. “That was what he wanted us to think—that he’d ended his own life upon completing his finest work.”

  “But he dismantled—”

  “He took himself apart in a way that implied suicide. But it was a methodical dismantling. The parts were stored in a fashion that always allowed for their eventual reassembly. Trintignant was too vain not to want to stay alive and see what posterity made of his creations. But with the Yellowstone authorities closing in on him, staying in one piece wasn’t an option.”

  “How did he end up here? Wouldn’t the authorities have been just as keen to get hold of his remains as his living self?”

  “He always had allies. Sponsors, I suppose you might call them. People who’d covertly admired his work. There’s always a market for freaks, Carl—and even more of a market for freak-makers. His friends whisked him away, out of the hands of what little authority was left here upon his return. Since then he’s passed from collection to collection, like a bad penny. He seems to bring bad luck. Perhaps I’m tempting fate just by keeping him here; tempting it even more by bringing him to this state of partial reanimation.” She smiles tightly. “We will see. If my fortunes take a dip, I shall pass Trintignant on to the next willing victim.”

  “You’re playing with fire.”

  “Then you don’t approve? I’d have expected you to applaud my audacity, Carl.”

  Grafenwalder, despite himself, speaks something close to the truth. “I’m impressed. More than you can imagine. But I’m also alarmed that he’s being kept here.”

  “Alarmed. Why, exactly?”

  “You’re a newcomer to this game, Ursula. I’ve seen a little of your habitat now, enough to know that your security arrangements aren’t exactly top of the line.”

  “He’s in no danger of putting himself back together, Carl, unless you believe in telekinesis.”

  “I’m worried about what would happen if his admirers learn of his whereabouts. Some of them won’t be content just to know he’s being kept alive in pieces. They’ll want to take him, put him all the way back together.”

  “I don’t think anyone would be quite that foolish.”

  “Then you don’t know people. People like us, Ursula. How many collectors have you shown him to already?”

  She tilts her head, looking at him along her up-curved nose. “Less than a dozen, including yourself.”

  “That’s already too many. I wouldn’t be surprised if word has already passed beyond the Circle. Don’t tell me you’ve shown him to Rossiter?”

  “Rossiter was the second.”

  “Then it’s probably already too late.” He sighs, as if taking a great burden upon himself. “We don’t have much time. We need to make immediate arrangements to transport his remains to my habitat. They’ll be a lot safer there.”

  “Why would your place be any safer than mine?”

  “I design security systems. It’s what I do for a living.”

  She appears to consider it, for a moment at least. Then she shakes her head. “No. It won’t happen. He’s staying here. I see where you’re coming from now, Carl. You don’t actually care about my security arrangements at all. It probably wouldn’t even bother you if Doctor Trintignant did escape back into Stoner society. It’s highly unlikely that you’d have ended up one of his victims, after all. You’ve got money and influence. It’s those poor souls down in the Mulch who’d need to watch their backs. That’s where he’d go hunting for raw material. What you can’t stand is the thought that he might be mine, not yours. I’ve got something you haven’t, something unique, something you can’t ever have, and it’s going to eat you from inside like acid.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “I will. I always have. You made a dreadful mistake when you humiliated me, Carl, assuming you didn’t have a hand in what had already happened to the hamadryad.”

  “What are you saying? That I had something to do with the fact that Shallice stiffed you?”

  He detects her hesitation. She comes perilously close to accusing him, but even here—even in this private cloister— there are limits that she knows better than to cross.

  “But you were glad of it, weren’t you?” she presses.

  “I had the superior specimen. That’s all that ever mattered to me.” With a renewed shudder of revulsion—and, he admits, something close to admiration—he turns again to survey the distributed remains of the notorious doctor. “You say he can hear us?”

  “Every word.”

  “You should kill him now. Take a hammer to his brain. Make sure he can never live again.”

  “Would you like that, Carl?”

  “It’s exactly what the authorities would do if they got hold of him.”

  “They’d give him a trial first, one imagines.”

  “He doesn’t deserve a trial. None of his victims had the benefit of justice.”

  “What history conveniently forgets,” Goodglass says, “is that many of his so-called victims came to him willingly. He was not a monster to them, but the agent of the change they craved. He was the most brilliant transformative surgeon of our era. So what if society considered his creations obscene? So what if some of them regretted what they had freely asked him to do?”

  “You’re defending him now.”

  “Not defending him—just pointing out that nothing is ever that black and white. For years Trintignant was given tacit permission to continue his work. The authorities didn’t like him, but they accepted that he fulfilled a social need.”

  Grafenwalder shakes his head—he’s seen and heard enough. “I thought you were exhibiting a monster, Ursula. Now it looks to m
e as if you’re sheltering a fugitive.”

  “I’m not, I assure you. Just because I have a balanced view of Trintignant doesn’t mean I don’t despise him. Here: let me offer you a demonstration.” And with that Goodglass taps a command sequence into the air, disarming the security system. She is able to pass her hand through the laser-mesh without bringing down the armoured screen. “Walk over to the brain, Carl,” she commands. “It isn’t a trap.”

  “I’d he happier if you walked with me.”

  “If you like.”

  He hesitates longer than he’d like, long enough for her to notice, then takes a step into the enclosure. Goodglass is only a pace behind him. The eyeballs swivel to track him, triangulating with the smoothness of motorised cameras. He moves next to the bubbling brain vat. Up close, the brain looks too small to have been the wellspring of so much evil.

  “What am I supposed to look at?”

  “Not look at—do. You can inflict pain on him, if you wish. There’s a button next to the brain. It sends an electrical current straight into his anterior cingulate cortex.”

  “Isn’t he in pain already?”

  “Not especially. He re-engineered himself to allow for this dismantling. There may be some existential trauma, but I don’t believe he’s in any great discomfort from one moment to the next.”

  Grafenwalder’s hand moves of its own volition, until it hovers above the electrical stimulator. He can feel its magnetic pull, almost willing his hand to lower. He wonders why he feels such a primal urge to bring pain to the doctor. Trintignant never hurt him; never hurt anyone he knew. All that he knows of Trintignant’s crimes is second-hand, distorted and magnified by time and the human imagination. That the doctor was tolerated, even encouraged, cannot seriously be doubted. He filled the hole in Yellowstone society where a demon was meant to fit.

  “What’s wrong, Carl? Qualms?”

  “How do I know this won’t send a jolt directly to his pleasure centre?”