I tried to do as she said, but the only image that came to my thoughts was that of Bataldo, weeping as he walked off through the dark tree line of the Beyond. I shook my head and forced myself to remember the faces of Ea and Aria and their children. Then I settled on a memory of Jarek. I had taken the boy fishing one balmy summer day on the outskirts of Wenau. There was nothing special about that particular day, only that he had caught a huge river smad with bright orange spots. He unhooked the fish and laid it on the bank. I watched as he performed a ritual his father had taught him, wherein he thanked the fish for the food it would offer him. He passed his hand over its scales to calm it as it drowned in the air, and I remembered that on that idyllic day, a soft breeze blowing, how lovely and unusual I thought the sentiment that he expressed.
Then it came like a bolt of lightning, shattering my daydream—a sharp pain in my left buttock, as if it were being burned and bitten at the same time. The sudden force of it nearly made my eyes leap from my head. I cried out.
"Can you describe what just happened to you?" asked Anotine.
Tears had formed in the corners of my eyes. "A sharp pain in my rear end," I yelled.
"Did you experience anything else?" she asked.
"Like what?" I asked unable to hide my anger.
"The moment, perhaps?" she said.
"It hurt like hell," I told her, and she jotted all of it down.
"Did you see anything?" she asked.
I shook my head.
"Did you feel the presence of the almighty?" she asked.
"If the almighty is a searing pain in the ass, I felt it," I said.
"Good," she said, and silently mouthed the words pain in the ass as she wrote them.
I tested the straps to see if I could break free but found them immovable. "What are you doing to me?" I yelled.
"Relax, Cley," she said. "Now I want you to calculate the sum of 765 and 890."
I didn't even get through five plus zero before the next shock blasted me in the right shoulder blade. The torture proceeded in this manner. I cursed and yelled and begged to be released, but she simply smiled and told me always that it was almost over. I don't recall how many times she pressed the buttons on the black box, but near the end I merely fell into silence. It was then that I actually saw the almighty. The room faded from view, and I had a vision of Below, laughing uncontrollably at me. Through my desperate condition, I wondered if, within the depth of his diseased sleep, the Master knew I was there in his memory.
My return to consciousness was a slow and painful experience, and before I was fully awake, I had determined to leave the floating island and abandon my mission. All I needed to do was let Misrix know by thought that I wanted to return. But when I sat up and opened my eyes, I found that it was night. The spire lamps in the bedroom had been reduced to the glow of a candle again, but I was not on the brown rug. Instead, I was in Anotine's bed and she was asleep next to me. This night, she lay on her back, and one glance wilted my rage toward her, replacing it with awe.
I lay down and turned onto my side, resting my head on my hand so that I could see her. Through the window came the scent of the night blossoms and the murmur of the ocean. I reached out my free hand and cautiously passed it an inch above her body, tracing the topography of her face and breasts and stomach and thighs. I thought again of Bataldo and how he had danced with his wife without touching by the shores of the inland ocean. I remained in that position for over an hour, trapped in the moment.
11
The next morning I again woke to find Anotine gone. I recovered my clothes from where I had left them the day before in the room at the end of the hall. As I dressed, I stared at the metallic chair and shuddered at the memory of the pain it had inflicted.
A series of tables lined the perimeter of the room in the same manner they had back in the laboratory that Below kept in the ruins of the Weil-Built City. Now that I considered it, the room seemed almost a scaled-down version of that place. In keeping with the original, the tables were cluttered with strange-looking equipment, sprouting wires and needlelike appendages. Mirrors, candles, bowls of powder, and huge jars of colored liquid were scattered amidst the collection of exotic hardware. The very thought of how Anotine might make use of these in discovering the present sent me quickly down the hall to the dining room.
There I found, as I knew I would, a breakfast of eggs, sausage, and, to my delight, a steaming cup of shudder. None of this had been there, when, only a few moments earlier, I had passed the room on my way to retrieve my clothes. I smiled at the perfection of how it all looked and smelled as I took a seat. When I brought the cup of shudder to my lips and sipped it, I was swamped by a wave of nostalgia similar to when I had tasted the Rose Ear Sweet two nights earlier. It came to me as I took a bite of the sausage that I had dreamt of this very meal through the night. The implications of this phenomenon abounded, but I had no interest in considering them. I ate, as before, not so much to quell any hunger, but simply to fulfill a mysterious sense of obligation.
When I was finished eating, I pushed the plate away and took the last few sips of shudder. The drink gave me that same rush of energy I had come to rely on back when I was a busy servant of the realm, and the taste made me long for a cigarette. I made a mental note to try to appropriate one from Nunnly at our next encounter. As I was considering how I might approach him on the subject, it came to me that I was wasting valuable time. It took some effort to remember my neighbors in Wenau and the dire predicament they were in. "Don't forget," I told myself.
I left the dining room and walked down the hall to the laboratory. Perusing the tables that lined the room, I wondered what mathematical formulas, philosophical secrets, personal memories might be contained in the souls of the objects that lay before me. "This could very well be the chemical code of the antidote," I whispered as I lifted a gold, three-pronged fork with a diadem at the opposite end of the stem. I put it back down, and reached for a steel ball the size of a fist that perched upon a small stand. Lifting the sphere, I found that, although it appeared solid, it was lighter than a crumpled piece of paper. I decided that it was as good an object for study as anything. Taking it with me, I left the laboratory.
In passing the dining room, I looked in to find that the dishes had vanished, and now only radiant sunlight lay atop the table. Back out in the bedroom, I sat down cross-legged on the brown rug and brought the shiny ball up close to my eyes. Its smooth surface reflected my face and, with the distortion of its shape, spread my features out, making my nose enormous.
I tried with all my will to see past myself, as if I might find some image beneath my own that would offer a clue to the thing's essential nature. What I saw were my own eyes, and mirrored in them, twin steel orbs each bearing miniatures of my face. Of course, if I could have seen with the power of a microscope, I would have been witness to the same optical trick ad infinitum. Long after I knew this technique to be useless, I continued with it till my eyes crossed and the squinting gave me a slight headache.
The next procedure I tried was to bring the ball up to my ear. I closed my eyes and listened with the concentration I employed when listening for the weak heartbeat of a newborn child. What came to me were the myriad sounds of the island—the breeze, the distant ocean, the call of some mnemonic bird off in the wood. These gave way to the sound of my own blood pulsing in my temples. I focused so intently that I heard everything but the ball, which revealed itself to be a large marble of complete silence.