"And murdered the Shoal."
"It seems the likeliest theory. It has to be somebody who knows about the Shoal and its workings. Which brings me to Randolph Jaffe."
"It's hard for me to think of him as Randolph, " Tesla said. "Even as human."
"Believe me, he is. He's also the greatest error of judgment I ever made. I told him too much."
"More than you're telling me?"
"The situation's desperate now," Kissoon said. "If I don't tell you, and get help from you, we're all lost. But with Jaffe . . . it was my stupidity. I wanted someone to share my loneliness with, and I chose badly. Had the others been alive they would have stepped in, stopped me making such a crass decision. They would have seen the corruption in him. I didn't. I was pleased he'd found me. I wanted the company. Wanted somebody to help me carry the burden of the Art. What I created was a worse burden. Someone with the power to get access to Quiddity but without the least spiritual refinement."
"He's got an army too."
"I know."
"Where do they come from?"
"The same place everything originates. The mind."
"Everything?"
"You're asking questions again."
"I can't help it."
"Yes, everything. The world and all its works; its makings and unmakings; gods, lice and cuttlefish. All from the mind."
"I don't believe you."
"Why assume I care?"
"The mind can't create everything."
"I didn't say the human mind."
"Ah."
"If you listened more closely you wouldn't ask so many questions."
"But you want me to understand, or you wouldn't be spending all this time."
"Time out of time. But yes. . . yes, I want you to understand. Given the sacrifice you'll have to make it's important you know why."
"What sacrifice?"
"I told you: I can't get out of this place in my body. I'll be found, and murdered, like the others . . ."
She shuddered, despite the warmth.
"I don't think I follow," she said.
"Yes you do."
"You want me to get you out somehow? Carry your thoughts."
"Near enough."
"Can't I simply act for you?" she said. "Be your agent? I'm good out there."
"I'm sure you are."
"You brief me, I'll do what it takes."
Kissoon shook his head. "There's so much you don't know," he said. "So vast a picture, I haven't even tried to unveil. I doubt your imagination could cope with it."
"Try me," she said.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Well, the issue here isn't simply the Jaff. He may taint Quiddity, but it'll survive."
"So what's the big problem?" Tesla said. "You give me all this shit about needing sacrifice. What for? If Quiddity can look after itself, what for?"
"Will you not simply trust me?"
She looked hard at him. The fire had sunk low but her eyes were by now well used to the amber gloom. Part of her wanted very much to put her trust in someone. But she'd spent most of her adult life learning the danger of that. Men, agents, studio executives, so many of them had asked her for her trust in the past, and she'd given it, and been fucked over. It was too late to learn a new way now. She was cynical to the marrow. If she ever stopped being that she'd stop being Tesla, and she liked being Tesla. It therefore followed—as night, day—that cynicism suited her too.
So she said:
"No. I'm sorry. I can't trust you. Don't take it personally. I'd be the same whoever you were. I want to know the bottom line."
"What does that mean?"
"I want the truth. Or I don't give you anything."
"Are you so sure you can refuse?" Kissoon said.
She half turned her face from him, glancing back, tight-lipped, the way her favorite heroines did, with a look of accusation.
"That was a threat," she said.
"You could construe it that way," he observed.
"Well, fuck you—"
He shrugged. His passivity—the almost lazy way he regarded her—inflamed her further.
"I don't have to sit and listen to this, you know!"
"No?"
"No! You're hiding something from me."
"Now you're being ridiculous."
"I don't think so."
She stood up. His eyes didn't follow her face, but lingered at groin height. She was suddenly uncomfortable being naked in his presence. She wanted the clothes that were presumably still back at the Mission, stale and bloody as they'd be. If she was to get back there, she'd better start walking. She turned to the door.
Behind her, Kissoon said:
"Wait, Tesla. Please wait. The error's mine. I concede; the error's mine. Come back, will you?"
His tone was placating, but she read a less benign undertow. He's riled, she thought; for all his spiritual poise, he's pissed. It was a lesson in the facilities of dialogue to hear the bristle beneath the purr. She turned back to hear more, no longer certain that she could get the truth from this man. She only had to be threatened once to doubt.
"Go on," she said.
"You won't sit?"
"That's right," she said. She had to pretend she wasn't afraid, though suddenly she was; had to think of her skin as fashion enough. Stand, and be defiantly naked. "I won't sit."
"Then I'll try to explain as quickly as I can," he said. He'd effectively smoothed out every ambiguity in his manner. He was considerate; even humble.
"Even I, you must understand, don't have all the facts at my disposal," he said. "But I have enough, I hope, to convince you of the danger we're in."
"Who's we?"
"The inhabitants of the Cosm."
"Again?"
"Fletcher didn't explain this to you?"
"No."
He sighed.
"Think of Quiddity as a sea," he said.
"I'm thinking . . ."
"On one side of that sea is the reality we inhabit. A continent of being, if you like, the perimeters of which are sleep and death."
"So far, so good."
"Now . . . suppose there's another continent, on the other side of the sea."
"Another reality."
"Yes. As vast and complex as our own. As full of energies and species and appetites. But dominated, as the Cosm is, by one species in particular, with strange appetites."
"I don't like the sound of this."
"You wanted the truth."
"I'm not saying I believe you."
"That other place is the Metacosm. That species is the Iad Uroboros. They exist."
"And the appetites?" she said, not certain she really wanted to know.
"For purity. For singularity. For madness."
"Some hunger."
"You were right when you accused me of not telling thetruth. I told a part of it only. The Shoal did stand guard at the shores of Quiddity to prevent the Art from being misused by human ambition; but it also stood to watch the sea . . ."
"For an invasion?"
"That's what we feared. Maybe even expected. It wasn't simply our paranoia. The profoundest dreams of evil are those in which we scent the Iad across Quiddity. The deepest terrors, the foulest imaginings that haunt human heads are the echoes of their echoes. I am giving you more reason to be afraid, Tesla, than you could hear from any other lips. I'm telling you what only the strongest psyches can bear."
"Is there any good news?" Tesla said.
"Who ever promised that? Who ever said there'd be good news?"
"Jesus," she replied. "And Buddha. Mohammed."
"Fragments of stories, massaged into cults by the Shoal. Distractions."
"I can't believe that."
"Why not? Are you a Christian?"
"No."
"Buddhist? Muslim? Hindu?"
"No. No. No."
"But you insist on believing the good news anyway," Kissoon said. "Convenient."
She felt she'
d been struck, very hard, across the face, by a teacher who'd been three or four steps ahead of her throughout the entire argument, leading her steadily and stealthily to a place where she could not help but mouth absurdities. And absurd it was, to cling to hopes for Heaven when she poured piss on every religion that passed beneath her window. But she reeled not because Kissoon had scored a solid debating point. She'd taken her lumps in countless arguments, and come back to give worse. What made her sick to her stomach was that her defense against so much else he'd said was forfeit at the same moment. If even a part of what he'd told her was true, and the world she lived in—the Cosm—was in jeopardy, then what right did she have to value her little life over his desperate need for assistance? Even assuming she could find her way out of this time out of time she couldn't return to the world without wondering every moment if in leaving him she'd lost the Cosm's one chance for survival. She had to stay; had to give herself over to him, not because she entirely believed him, but because she couldn't risk being wrong.
"Don't be afraid," she heard him say. "The situation's no worse than it was five minutes ago, when you were quite the debater. You just know the truth now."
"Not much comfort," she said.
"No," he replied softly. "I do see that. And you must see that this burden has been hard to carry alone, and that without assistance my back'll break."
"I understand," she said.
She'd stepped away from the fire, and was standing against the wall of the hut, both for its support and for its coolness against her spine. Leaning there, she stared at the ground, aware that Kissoon had started to stand up. She didn't look at him, but she heard his grunts. And then his request.
"I need to occupy your body," he said. "Which means, I'm afraid, that you must vacate it."
The fire had dwindled to almost nothing, but its smoke was thickening. It pressed the top of her skull, making it impossible for her to raise her head and look at him even if she'd wanted to. She started to tremble. First her knees, then her fingers. Kissoon continued to talk as he approached. She heard his soft shuffling.
"This won't hurt," he said. "If you just stand still, and keep your eyes on the ground—"
A slow thought came, was he making the smoke heavy, by some means, in order to stop her looking at him?
"It'll be over quickly—"
He sounds like an anesthetist, she thought. The trembling intensified. The smoke pressed more heavily upon her the closer he came. She was certain now that this was indeed his doing. He didn't want her looking up at him. Why? Was he coming at her with knives, to scoop out her brain so he could slip in behind her eyes?
Resisting curiosity had never been one of her stronger points. The closer he came the more she wanted to push against the weight of smoke, and look directly at him. But it was difficult. Her body was weak, as though her blood had gone to dishwater. The smoke was like a lead hat; its brim too tight around her brow. The harder she pushed, the heavier it became.
He really doesn't want me to look, she thought, that thought feeding her passion to do so. She braced herself against the wall. He was within two yards of her now. She could smell him; his sweat was bitter and stale. Push, she told herself, push! It's only smoke. He's making you think you're being crushed, but it's only smoke.
"Relax," he murmured; the anesthetist again.
Instead she put one last surge of effort into raising her head. The lead hat dug into her temples; her skull creaked beneath the weight of the crown. But her head moved, trembling as she fought the weight. Once begun, the motion became easier. She lifted her chin an inch, then another two, raising her eyes at the same moment until she was looking straight at him.
Standing, he was crooked in every place but one, each joint and juncture a little askew, shoulder on neck, hand, on arm; thigh on hip, a zig-zag with a single straight line prodding from his groin. She stared, appalled.
"What the fuck's that for?" she said.
"Couldn't help myself," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Oh yeah?"
"When I said I want your body, I don't mean that way."
"Where have I heard that before?"
"Believe me," he said. "It's just my flesh responding to yours. Automatic. Be flattered."
She might have laughed, in different circumstances. Had she been able to open the door and walk away, for instance, instead of being lost out of time, with a beast on the threshold and a desert beyond. Every time she thought she had a grasp of what was going on here she lost it again. The man was one surprise after another, and none of them pleasant.
He reached towards her, his pupils vast, crowding out the whites. She thought of Raul; of how there was beauty in his gaze, despite his hybrid's face. There was no beauty here; nothing even vaguely readable. No appetite; no anger. If there was feeling at all, it was eclipsed.
"I can't do this," she said.
"You must. Give up the body. I have to have the body or the Iad wins. You want that?"
"No!"
"Then stop resisting. Your spirit'll be safe in Trinity."
"Where?"
Momentarily he let something show in his eyes, a spark of fury—self-directed, she thought.
"Trinity?" she said, throwing the question out to delay his touching and claiming her. "What's Trinity?"
As she asked this question several things happened simultaneously, their speed defying her power to divide one from the other, but central to them all the fact that his hold on the situation slipped as she asked him about Trinity. First she felt the smoke dissolving above her, its weight no longer bearing her down. Taking her chance while it was still available she reached for the handle of the door. Her eyes were still on him however, and in the same instant as her release she saw him transfigured. It was a glimpse, no more, but so powerful as to be unforgettable. He appeared with his upper body covered in blood, splashes of it reaching as far as his face. He knew she saw, because his hands went up to cover the stains, but his hands and arms were also running with blood. Was it his? Before she could look to find a wound he had control of the vision once again, but like a juggler attempting to hold too many balls in the air catching one meant losing another. The blood vanished, and he appeared before her unscathed again, only to unleash some other secret his will had kept in check.
It was far more cataclysmic than the blood splashes: its shock wave striking the door behind her. Too powerful for the Lix, even if they were massed, it was a force Kissoon was clearly in terror of. His eyes went from her to the door itself, his hands dropping to his sides and all expression gone from his face. She sensed that every particle of his energies was being put to a single purpose: the stilling of whatever raged on the threshold. This too had its consequence, as the hold he'd had upon her—bringing her here, and keeping her—finally and comprehensively slipped. She felt the reality she'd left catch hold of her spine, and pull. She didn't even attempt to resist. It was as inevitable a claim as gravity.
The last glimpse she had of Kissoon he was once more bloodstained, and standing, his face still drained of expression in front of the door. Then it threw itself open.
There was a moment when she was certain whatever had beaten against the door would be waiting on the step to devour her, and Kissoon too. She thought she even glimpsed its brightness—so bright, so blindingly bright—flood Kissoon's features. But his will got the better of it at the last moment, and its glare diminished at the very moment the world she'd left claimed her and hauled her through the door.
She was flung back the way she'd come, at ten times the speed of her arrival, so fast she wasn't even able to interpret the sights she was passing—the steel tower, the town—until she was miles beyond them.
She wasn't alone this time, however. There was somebody near to her, calling her name.
"Tesla? Tesla! Tesla!"
She knew the voice. It was Raul.
"I hear you," she muttered, aware that through the blur of speed another, darker reality was vaguely visible. There were p
oints of light in it—candle flames perhaps—and faces.
"Tesla!"
"Almost there," she gasped. "Almost there. Almost there."
Now the desert was being subsumed; the darkness took precedence. She opened her eyes wide to see Raul more clearly. There was a wide smile on his face as he went down on his haunches to greet her.
"You came back," he said.
The desert had gone. It was all night now. Stones beneath her, stars above; and, as she guessed, candles, being carried by a ring of astonished women.
Beneath her, between body and ground, were the clothes she'd slipped from when she'd called her body to her, recreating it in Kissoon's Loop. She reached up to touch Raul's face, as much as to be certain she was indeed back in the solid world as for the contact. His cheeks were wet.
"You've been working hard," she said, thinking it was sweat. Then she realized her error. Not sweat at all; tears.
"Oh, poor Raul," she said, and sat up to embrace him. "Did I disappear completely?"
He pressed himself to her. "First like fog," he said. "Then . . . just gone."
"Why are we here?" she said. "I was in the Mission when he shot me."
Thinking of the shot, she looked down at where the bullet had struck. There was no wound; not even blood.
"The Nuncio," she said. "It healed me."
The fact was not lost on the women. Seeing the unmarked skin they muttered prayers, and backed away.
"No .. ." she murmured, still looking down at her body. "It wasn't the Nuncio. This is the body I imagined."
"Imagined?" said Raul.
"Conjured," she replied, scarcely even aware of Raul's confusion because she had a puzzle of her own. Her left nipple, twice the size of its neighbor, was now on the right. She kept staring at them, shaking her head. It wasn't the kind of thing she'd make a mistake about. Somehow, on the journey to the Loop, or back, she'd been flipped. She brought her legs up for study. Several scratches—Butch's work—that had adorned one shin now marked the other.
"I can't figure it," she said to Raul.
Not even understanding the question he was hard-pressed to reply, so simply shrugged.
"Never mind," she said, and started to get dressed.
Only then did she ask what had happened to the Nuncio.
"Did I get it all?" she said.
"No. The Death-Boy got it."