But not yet. Not just yet. He was coming toward that pass, but it would be a while.
And the apparition of former felicity would not absent itself.
“Look at your face,” Burris said. “Your eyelids move so stupidly, up, down, blink, blink. The eyes are so crude. Your nose admits garbage to your throat. I must admit I’m a considerable improvement over you.”
“Of course. That’s why I say go out, let yourself be admired by humanity.”
“When did humanity ever admire improved models of itself? Did Pithecanthropus fawn on the first Neanderthals? Did Neanderthal applaud the Aurignacians?”
“The analogy isn’t proper. You didn’t evolve past them, Minner. You were changed by external means. They have no reason to hate you for what you are.”
“They don’t need to hate. Only to stare. Besides, I’m in pain. It’s easier to remain here.”
“Is the pain really so hard to bear?”
“I grow accustomed to it,” Burris said. “Yet every motion stabs me. The Things were only experimenting. They made their little mistakes. This extra chamber of my heart: whenever it contracts, I feel it in my throat. This shiny and permeable gut of mine: it passes food and I ache. I should kill myself. It’s the best release.”
“Seek your comfort in literature,” the apparition counseled. “Read. You once did. You were quite a well-read man, Minner. Three thousand years of literature at your command. Several languages. Homer. Chaucer. Shakespeare.”
Burris looked at the serene face of the man he had been. He recited: “Moder, merci; let me deye.”
“Finish it.”
“The rest’s not applicable.”
“Finish it anyway.”
Burris said:
“Die, then,” the visitation said mildly. “To buy Adam out of hell and mankind that is lost. Otherwise remain alive. Minner, do you think you’re Jesus?”
“He suffered at the hands of strangers.”
“To redeem them. Will you redeem the Things if you go back to Manipool and die on their doorstep?”
Burris shrugged. “I’m no redeemer. I need redeeming myself. I’m in a bad way.”
“Whining again!”
“Sune, I se thi bodi swungin, thi brest, thin hond, thi fot thurch-stungen.”
Burris scowled. His new face was well designed for scowling; the lips rippled outward, like a sphincter door irising, baring the subdivided palisade of imperishable teeth. “What do you want of me?” he asked.
“What do you want, Minner?”
“To put off this flesh. To have my old body back.”
“A miracle, that is. And you want the miracle to happen to you within these four walls.”
“As good a place as any. As likely as any.”
“No. Go outside. Seek help.”
“I’ve been outside. I’ve been prodded and poked. Not helped. What shall I do—sell myself to a museum? Go away, you damned ghost. Out! Out!”
“Your redeemer liveth,” said the apparition.
“Tell me his address.”
No answer came. Burris found himself staring at cobwebbed shadows. The room purred with silence. Restlessness throbbed at him. His body now was designed to maintain tonus despite all idleness; it was a perfect spacefarer’s body, equipped to drift from star to star, enduring all the long silence.
So had he drifted to Manipool. It lay on his route. Man was a newcomer among the stars, hardly having left his own planets behind. There was no telling what one would meet out there and what would happen to one. Burris had been the unlucky one. He had survived. The others lay in cheerful graves under a speckled sun. The Italians, Malcondotto and Prolisse—they had not come out of surgery. They were trial runs for Manipool’s masterpiece, himself. Burris had seen Malcondotto, dead, after they had finished with him. He was at peace. He had looked so tranquil, if a monster can seem tranquil even in death. Prolisse had preceded him. Burris had not seen what they had done to Prolisse, and it had been just as well.
He had gone to the stars as a civilized man, alert, flexible of mind. No tubemonkey, no deckswabber. An officer, the highest product of mankind, armed with the higher mathematics and the highest topology. Mind stuffed with literary nuggets. A man who had loved, who had learned. Burris was glad now that he had never married. It is awkward for a starman to take a wife, but it is far more awkward to return from the stars transformed and embrace a former darling.
The ghost was back. “Consult Aoudad,” it advised. “He’ll lead you to help. He’ll make you a whole man again.”
“Aoudad?”
“Aoudad.”
“I will not see him.”
Burris was in solitude once more.
He looked at his hands. Delicate, tapering fingers, essentially unchanged except for the prehensile tentacle they had grafted to the outer phalanx on each side. Another of their little amusements. They might have put a pair of such tentacles below his arms, for that would have been useful. Or given him a prehensile tail, making him at least as efficient a brachiator as a Brazilian monkey. But these two muscular ropy things, pencil-thick and three inches long, what good were they? They had broadened his hand, he noticed for the first time, so that it would accommodate the new digit without disturbing the proportions. Considerate of them. Burris discovered some new facet of his newness every day. He thought of the dead Malcondotto. He thought of the dead Prolisse. He thought of Aoudad. Aoudad? How could Aoudad help him in any conceivable way?
They had stretched him on a table, or the Manipool equivalent of a table, something dipping and uncertain. They had measured him. What had they checked? Temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, peristalsis, pupil dilation, iodine uptake, capillary function, and how much else? They had put calipers to the salty film over his eyeballs. They had computed the volume of cell content in the seminal duct. They had searched out the pathways of neural excitation, so that they could be blocked.
Anesthesia. Successful!
Surgery.
Peel back the rind. Seek for pituitary, hypothalamus, thyroid. Calm the fluttering ventricles. Descend with tiny intangible scalpels to enter the passages. The body, Galen had suspected, was merely a bag of blood. Was there a circulatory system? Was there a circulation? On Manipool they had discovered the secrets of human construction in three easy lessons. Malcondotto, Prolisse, Burris. Two they had wasted. The third endured.
They had tied off blood vessels. They had exposed the gray silkiness of the brain. Here was the node of Chaucer. Here Piers Plowman. Aggression here. Vindictiveness. Sensory perception. Charity. Faith. In this shining bulge dwelled Proust, Hemingway, Mozart, Beethoven. Rembrandt here.
See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
He had waited for it to begin, knowing that Malcondotto had perished under their ministrations and that Prolisse, flayed and diced, was gone. Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, that time may cease and midnight never come. Midnight came. The slithering knives dug at his brain. It would not hurt, he was sure of that, and yet he feared the pain. His only body, his irreplaceable self. He had not harmed them. He had come in innocence.