The image fades. The wine press is gone; the grape expended. My erection is collapsing in blood, and I know that despite the dream my gonad is not a super-ejaculate, but merely squashed meat.
Beve is bringing out the pulling gear. I do not look down at my torso.
This time it is my ear he attacks. I remember Gloria, my bride-to-be, with sudden overwhelming fervor: her clear lovely features, her straight delicate nose, her pierced ears stretched down by pendant earrings... no!
Will you love me when I am ugly with mutilation, oh my darling? Will you follow me to the torture planet, as you threatened? Will you still want to hold me?
Yes, there... thereis... thereisloveinpain... the purest. Love and pain must be allied. Gloria, if ever I see you again, I will never let you go. I love you. More than possible. I ache with love, I bleed with emotion, I hurt with desire, I—
The image fogs. I try to refocus it, cannot. Instead there comes the pair of fleshy thighs, now brimming with blood-red ejaculate. I recoil. Sully not the vision of Gloria with that animal passion! Make it elevated, rarefied, that pure longing man feels for angel. Up, up! I trace up past the line of the hip, seeking to cast off the revolting filth of that prior congress. Up, to the stomach, the bosom—and the four loose teats.
I know now that I have committed adultery, miscegenation, bestiality in my torment-sponsored orgasm.
My ear is gone. I see it, an elongated and tattered mass of flesh, ripped from my head. I begin to grasp the rationale of my perfidy: my ruined face could only appall Gloria. My fingerless hand could never caress her beauty. I am half-castrate. The romance is off. I know it, though she does not. There will be no feasible return to Earth for me after this. It is not a momentary challenge that I can surmount and leave behind. I will emerge changed, less than I have been. I must be satisfied with native females, if my very semen does not crucify them. This much do I give for my mission.
But I shall prevail.
Beve is heating a needle. I had thought that the oil was next, but that is only one form of fire. I know where the heat will be applied, and again my remaining fingers clutch at the grail. Yet I do not desist.
Glowing red, the spike approaches my face. I see it point-on with my left eye until it touches the pupil.
The fluids of my eyeball burst out and dribble down my cheek. Smoke and steam rise from the carnage. I smell and see clouded nausea with my right-side perceptions. Pain? The term has become meaningless. Now I do not see Gloria or the Loo sex object or even Beve. There is only the scorching dazzle of color.
Only? No, no, no—there is more, so much much more, as that searing sword probes my optic apparatus. I see—I see—I see the scintillating Divinity! Nova-like, the Godhead strikes my belief. Surely this is the ultimate revelation. I bathe in the ecstasy of the sight of my Lord, the Vision Supreme... yes, pain is the route to the glimpse of the Eternal, and I have seen the glory, the, I see, I see.
Shattered. The agony has abated, depriving me of my soul-vision. Desolation. I, I feel, loss, gone.
Beve puts away the spent needle, turns off his flame. What can he do, more than he has done? I am invulnerable. I have withstood his mutilation, I have seen the glory. Glory, Gloria... in excelsis....
Beve brings out a slender tube. He pokes it into the hole in my face where the left nostril once stood. I feel it shoving back, abrasive but laughable as a torture, beyond the sinus cavity, down to my throat. I gag, but it continues, a snail crawling into my belly.
No, not my stomach. Beve twists, expertly, and the tube finds the trachea and slithers toward the left lung. I cough involuntarily, but nothing stops its progress until the torturer is satisfied. Yet this is a strange, gentle procedure, after the brutality of the preceding acts.
Beve lets go the hose, now lodged in my body almost its entire length. He brings out a box, opens it. I see movement: writhing things There is a funnel on the end of the catheter. Beve lifts out a worm with his tweezers, and I see that the creature's front end is a disk like that of a lamprey. A myriad-toothed grinder and sucker. He places it in the funnel and angles the tube so that the creature will slide down to the bottom. He brings out the next.
I cannot even scream as the worms consume my lung.
I see the Vision again—but this time I know it for what it is, just as I knew the pudendum the second time. The God of Fire is the nether god, I am in hell. Hell is infested by worms. The worms and maggots and vermin are the true devils here. I tour the place, entitled by my misery. I see a man, a Loo—perhaps it is Kule—I see him being subjected to the torture of the boats, an ancient Persian specialty. He is pinned face-up between two small boats that exactly fit each other, only his head and hands and feet are outside and tied there. They are feeding him the richest foods, pricking his eyes when he balks, pouring milk and honey in his mouth and over his face until he nearly chokes on it. The sun is bearing down and he cannot avoid it, though his features blister cruelly. Swarms of flies settle, completely covering his head with their noisome bodies, attracted by the honey. But the odor emanating from the interior of his prison is not sweet, for he has been many days confined and the constant enforced feasting must lead to the baser processes of nature, in quantity. And as I pass I am granted a view through a noxious peephole into the boats, and I see in the streaming shadow his naked body bathed in its own excrement and the flies breeding in that dung and urine and their massed maggots feeding on his living guts. With his extremities pinned, he can do nothing to protect himself until he expires at last and gives his carcass entirely over to the vermin.
I am minded to study the more advanced tortures of hell, but the pain that is my admission token diminishes again and I am returned to Waterloo.
Kule is there, alas no victim of flies. "Congratulations," he says. "You have now completed the first day of duress. You may step down for the night, for Beve must rest. Tomorrow, if you choose, you may undertake the second stage, but this is not necessary for a technically honorable acquittal."
I try to talk and feel the husks of the worms rattling in the cavity that was my tender lung. After a while I succeed, raspingly: "Will you make the treaty now?"
"No."
"Then I will resume tomorrow." And I faint.
I am hardly aware of time. It seems I have always been on this rack, yet I know it is only the second day. Or the third. My arm is gone, my kidney, the hair of half my head together with the skin to which it adhered, the flesh of my left side from shoulder to crotch, muscle by muscle. The stench of incineration surrounds me, dried blood and broken segments of bone decorate the floor. The Loos on the racks to either side have taken the grail and are gone in shame, but I, Christlike, persevere. The grail is the one cup I will not touch in this incarnation. Many witnesses watch me now.
Kule has now explained to me some of the history of the Loos. They did have space travel, and they colonized and made a stellar empire—but they were gentle folk, and when they were met by barbarians and tortured and driven off, they became convinced that they were not ready for space. So they retrenched and instituted a system that would bring out leaders more resistive to such hurts. Once that system was entrenched...
Kule is before me again, a worried worshiper. "Step down, Envoy," he pleads.
"Will you prepare the treaty?"
"I cannot. No one can."
"Then I will not step down."
"Envoy, we can not proceed further without depriving you of essential faculties. You must retain two legs for perambulation, one hand for—"
"They are of no use to me without that treaty."
Defeated, he goes. And so Beve is beginning on my legs and right side. I am driving the Loos into a quandary.