The scene faded. Once more, an empty room.
– You see, said Grimus. I’m not really out of touch.
No, thought Flapping Eagle. You have reduced all other lives to the same level of unreality as your own. They are fictions now, illusions called up by Conceptualizing and the Rose… they cannot move you in this form. They don’t affect you. Aloud he said: -I disagree.
Grimus turned and walked from the room in that stylized bird-gait of his.
– The third part of the Dance will now begin, he said. I shall explain the manner of my death.
Flapping Eagle, seated once more in the rocking-chair. Grimus, circling around him once more.
– Grimus, said Flapping Eagle. Some questions.
– Questions? Good. Good.
– Why does the Effect leave you unscathed?
– Good question, said Grimus, and fell silent. It was as though he was thinking of the answer.
Eventually he said: -I was once a prisoner of war. Every day I feared I would be killed. It was that kind of war. I sat in trucks with dozens of others and they drove us to the execution-ground and blindfolded us. We heard soldiers coming, orders to aim… the bullets did not come. It was an expert torture. And sometimes, just to keep us believing, they really did shoot people. But it was the torture they liked. Some people died of heart attacks. Not me. I learnt two things about myself: first, that it was a matter of the utmost aportance to me whether my body lived or died. Second, that at some future time, I wanted to be the one to organize my life. Exactly as I wished it.
And so you built your own prison, thought Flapping Eagle.
– Aportance? he said.
– When a thing is neither important nor unimportant, said Grimus, when, in fact the concept of importance ceases to have meaning, you have understood aportance. This is why the Inner Dimensions could not hurt me: I am pliable, willing to believe anything, willing to accept any new horror, any vile truth about myself. I have no secrets from myself. So I can live with the Inner Dimensions. They coexist with my conscious self, continually. Do you see?
– Yes, said Flapping Eagle. I see.
– Another question, said Grimus. One tells one’s Death everything.
– Yes. Just one more. (I’ll reserve the blinks for a better moment. There will be a better moment, he told himself.)
– All the people on the island, he said, seem to come from a time roughly contemporaneous with the time I took the Elixir. So do you, in fact.
– Observant of you, said Grimus. Several reasons, really. One, I didn’t want to cause vast social problems by combining cavemen and astronauts. Two, I find my own time a great deal more interesting than either the past or the future. And three, it proved easiest to transport people from parallel dimensions if one fixed upon a constant time. Made the settings easier and so forth. No more questions?
– Yes, said Flapping Eagle, remembering.
Grimus clucked his tongue in admonition. -Such mental imprecision, he said.
– Don’t you consider your Experiment to have been a failure since the Effect has changed its course so completely?
He kept his voice deliberately level, abstract.
– Not at all, said Grimus. Good question. Not at all. My, you ask good questions. (Again, a slight feeling that something had got under his skin.) It merely changed the nature of the experiment. And helped with the necessary alienation. It is important that K should dislike me. For my Death, you know. For my Death.
– All right, said Flapping Eagle, seeing no alternative.
Tell me about it.
– Simple, said Grimus. I have put Bird-Dog through a course of deep hypnosis. At a given command she will Travel to Liv’s house. I shall of course open the Gate. She is instructed to tell Liv she hates me-and for the sake of verisimilitude I have abused her for centuries, so she shouldn’t find it too difficult to obey the post-hypnotic suggestion. She hates me and wants me killed. Liv, of course, has had her hate of me (carefully-nurtured by me, might I add) revived recently by her adventure with you. Obviously she knows, now that she is no longer in her trance, that her plan misfired somewhat, her sexual revenge I mean. So she will be very bitter, and will agree. The flux-lines say she will. I have examined them. Free will really is an illusion, you know. People behave according to the flux-lines of their potential futures.
Anyhow. They will attempt to drum up support, being sufficiently in awe of me not to attempt my murder on their own. Here again your mishaps in K were exactly correct. K is now more antagonistic to me than ever. And so we come to my murderers. A fascinating trio. Flann O’Toole is one. The thought of playing Napoleon, of leading an invading army, will be irresistible to him. The second is Peckenpaw. For him it will be a revenge for the death of his friend and a chance to return to the chase, the thrill of the chase. The third is more unlikely, perhaps. Mr Moonshy will join the merry band. He will tell himself it is to free the island from tyranny. Perhaps it will be. Perhaps he is really more interested in Trina Cherkassova than he allows. Those are the three who will come through the Gate, which I shall leave open. Flann O’Toole, as no doubt you noticed, has very powerful hands.
Strangled’s hands, remembered Flapping Eagle.
– The key figure in all this, said Grimus equably, is Liv. It is her passion which will drive them. Not Bird-Dog’s: she is a Spectre of Grimus. Not their own, for it is tempered with fear. It is Liv who will push them. Thanks to you. Angel of Death. You have prepared the Mountain of Kâf to turn upon the Simurg. And you will be the new master, because I shall have taught you how.
– You really wish to die like that, at the hands of a mob? asked Flapping Eagle.
– Of course, said Grimus with simple insanity. I have planned it for years. It is both psychologically and symbolically satisfying. The period of stability containing the seeds of its own downfall. The cataclysm being followed by a new and very similar order. It is aesthetic. It is right,
Grimus hopped across the room and pulled on a bell-cord. Though it was late at night, Bird-Dog was with them within a minute, panting and out of breath. Again Flapping Eagle felt a helpless rage at seeing his flesh and blood so humbled. Perhaps he, too, was as trapped as Bird-Dog, he thought, and then attempted without success to expunge the thought from his mind.
– Bird-Dog, said Grimus.
– Yes.
– This is my final order to you, said Grimus.
– Yes, said Bird-Dog, starting.
– The Order is Final, said Grimus.
Bird-Dog turned and walked towards the door. Flapping Eagle rushed to her and grasped her by the shoulders. -Don’t go, he said. Fight your conditioning. Say no.
– I want to go, said Bird-Dog quietly. I want him killed.
Grimus laughed happily in the background as Flapping Eagle released his sister. Who walked out of the room and shut the concealed door behind her.
Violence was all Flapping Eagle had left.
– Grimus, he said. If you don’t show me the Stone Rose now I shall happily strangle you myself for what you have done to my sister. Now, before your well-planned death can occur, as you say it will. It will be a miserable, meaningless death, Grimus.
– My, said Grimus. How cross you do get. I was just going to the Rose anyway. I have to set it in order to open the Gate.
He moved to the corner of the room nearest the centre of the house.
And pushed open a second secret door. Inside, at the heart of the house, was the Rose Room.
So that was why the house was such a crazy shape. Its labyrinthine excesses fogged the brain to such an extent that the presence of this small room went completely unnoticed. Flapping Eagle, who had been concentrating on the shape of the house when he arrived, had not even begun to guess at the room’s existence.