‘Put us out of our misery,’ says Alain Couperin.
‘Drop by and see it for yourself,’ Goodglass says, with a teasing twinkle in her eye. ‘Any time you like. No need to make an appointment. But — please — employ maximum discretion. This is one exhibit that I really don’t want the authorities to know about.’
For a moment Grafenwalder wonders whether she has the Denizen. But surely Rifugio can’t have lost faith in the deal already, when they’ve barely opened negotiations.
But if not a Denizen — what?
He has to know, even if it means the indignity of another visit to her miserable little habitat.
When he arrives at the Goodglass residence, hers is the only shuttle docked at the polar nub. He’s a little uncomfortable with being the only guest, but Goodglass did say to drop in whenever he liked, and he has given her fair warning of his approach. He’s waited a week before taking the trip. Ten days would have been better, but after five he’d already started hearing that she has something special; something indisputably unique. In the meantime, he has run every conceivable test on the biological samples Rifugio gave him in Chasm City and received the same numbing result each time: Rifugio appears to be in possession of the genuine article. Yet Grafenwalder is still apprehensive about closing the deal.
Inside the habitat, he’s met by Goodglass and Edric, her palanquin-bound husband. The couple waste no time in escorting him to the new exhibit. Despite the indignities they have brought upon each other, it’s all smiles and strained politeness. No one so much as mentions hamadryads, dead or alive.
Grafenwalder isn’t quite sure what to expect, but he’s still surprised at the modest dimensions of the chamber Goodglass finally shows him. The walkway brings them level with the chamber’s floor, but there’s no armoured glass screen between them and the interior. Even with the lights dimmed, Grafenwalder can already make out an arrangement of tables, set in a U-formation like a series of laboratory benches. There are upright glassy things on the tables, but that’s as much as he can tell.
‘I was expecting something alive,’ he says quietly.
‘It is alive,’ she hisses back. ‘Or at least as alive as it ever was. Merely distributed. You’ll see in a moment.’
‘I thought you said it was dangerous.’
‘Potentially it would be, if it was ever put back together.’ She pauses and extends her hand across the gloomy threshold, as if beckoning to the nearest bench. Grafenwalder catches the bright red line on her hand where it has broken a previously invisible laser beam, sweeping up and down across the aperture. Quicker than an eyeblink, a heavy armoured shield slams down on the cell. ‘But that’s not to stop it getting out,’ she says. ‘It’s to prevent anyone taking it and trying to put it back together. There are some who’d attempt it, just for the novelty.’
She pulls back her hand. After an interval, the shield whisks up into the ceiling.
‘Whatever it is, you’re serious about it,’ Grafenwalder says, intrigued despite himself.
‘I have to be. You don’t take monsters lightly.’
She waves on the lights. The room brightens, but although he can now make out the benches and the equipment upon them, Grafenwalder is none the wiser.
‘You’ll have to help me here,’ he says.
‘It’s all right. I wouldn’t know what to make of it either if I didn’t know what I was looking at.’
‘My God,’ he says wonderingly, as his eyes alight on one of the larger glass containers. ‘Isn’t that a brain?’
Goodglass nods. ‘What was once a human brain, yes. Before he — before it — started doing things to itself, throwing pieces of its humanity away like a child flinging toys from a sandpit. But what’s left of the brain is still alive, still conscious and still capable of sensory perception.’ A mischievous smile appears on her face. ‘It knows we’re here, Carl. It’s aware of us. It’s listening to us, watching us, and wondering how it can escape and kill us.’
He allows himself to take in the grisly scene, now that its full implication is clearer. The brain is being kept alive in a liquid-filled vat, nourished by scarlet and green cables that ram into the grey-brown dough of the exposed cerebellum. A stump of spinal cord curls under the brain like an inverted question mark. It looks pickled and vinegary, cobwebbed with ancient growth and tiny filaments of spidery machinery. Next to the flask is a humming grey box whose multiple analog dials twitch with a suggestion of ongoing mental processes. But that’s not all. There are dozens of glass cases, linked to other boxes, and the boxes to each other, and each case holds something unspeakable. In one, an eye hangs suspended in a kind of artificial socket, equipped with little steering motors. The eye is looking straight at Grafenwalder, as is its lidless twin on another bench. Their optic nerves are knotted ropes of fatty white nerve tissue. In another flask floats a pair of lungs, hanging like a puffed-up kite. They expand and contract with a slow, wheezing rhythm.
‘Who… ? What… ?’ he says, barely whispering.
‘Haven’t you guessed yet, Carl? Look over there. Look at the mask.’
He follows her direction. The mask sits at the end of the furthest table, on a black plinth. It’s less a mask than an entire skull, moulded in sleek silver metal. The face is handsome, in a streamlined, air-smoothed fashion, with an expression of calm amusement sculpted into the immobile lips and the blank silver surfaces that pass for eyes. It has strong cheekbones and a strong cleft chin. Between the lips is only a dark, grilled slot. The mask has a representation of human ears, and its crown is moulded with longitudinal silver waves, evoking hair that has been combed back and stiffened in place with lacquer.
Grafenwalder knows who the skull belongs to. There isn’t anyone alive around Yellowstone who wouldn’t recognise Dr Trintignant. All that’s missing is Trintignant’s customary black Homburg.
But Trintignant shouldn’t be here. Trintignant shouldn’t be anywhere. He died years ago.
‘This isn’t right,’ he says. ‘You’ve been duped… sold a fake. This can’t be him.’
‘It is. I have watertight provenance.’
‘But Trintignant hasn’t been seen around Yellowstone for years… decades. He’s supposed to have died when Richard Swift—’
‘I know about Richard Swift,’ Ursula Goodglass informs him. ‘I met him once — or what was left of him after Trintignant had completed his business. I wanted Swift for an exhibit — I was prepared to pay him for his time — but he left the system again. They say he went back to that place — the same world where Trintignant supposedly killed himself.’
Grafenwalder thinks back to what he remembers of the scandal. It had been all over Yellowstone for a few weeks. ‘But Swift brought back Trintignant’s remains. The doctor had dismantled himself, left a suicide note.’
‘That was his plan,’ Goodglass says witheringly. ‘That was what he wanted us to think — that he’d ended his own life upon completing his finest work.’
‘But he dismantled—’
‘He took himself apart in a way that implied suicide. But it was a methodical dismantling. The parts were stored in a fashion that always allowed for their eventual reassembly. Trintignant was too vain not to want to stay alive and see what posterity made of his creations. But with the Yellowstone authorities closing in on him, staying in one piece wasn’t an option.’
‘How did he end up here? Wouldn’t the authorities have been just as keen to get hold of his remains as his living self?’
‘He always had allies. Sponsors, I suppose you might call them. People who’d covertly admired his work. There’s always a market for freaks, Carl — and even more of a market for freak-makers. His friends whisked him away, out of the hands of what little authority was left here upon his return. Since then he’s passed from collection to collection, like a bad penny. He seems to bring bad luck. Perhaps I’m tempting fate just by keeping him here; tempting it even more by bringing him to this state of partial reanimation. ’ She smiles tightly. ‘We will see. If my fortunes take a dip, I shall pass Trintignant on to the next willing victim.’
‘You’re playing with fire.’
‘Then you don’t approve? I’d have expected you to applaud my audacity, Carl.’
Grafenwalder, despite himself, speaks something close to the truth. ‘I’m impressed. More than you can imagine. But I’m also alarmed that he’s being kept here.’
‘Alarmed. Why, exactly?’
