'If I were to let it in fast, you'd find it painful, so I've only cracked the valve. Swallow if your ears hurt.'
Silk, who had been giving Lemur some small fraction of his attention, paused in his chant to swallow. As he did, the injured flier wliispered, 'The sun . . .' His eyes, which had been half-shut, opened wide, and he struggled to turn his face toward Silk. 'Tell your people!'
No audible response was permitted until the liturgy was complete, but Silk nodded, swinging his beads in the sign of subtraction. 'You are blessed.' While bobbing his head nine times, as the ritual demanded, he made the sign of addition.
'When the pressure here reaches three atmospheres, as it soon will, we can open that boat hole without flooding the compartment.' Lemur chuckled. 'I'll loosen up the fittings now.'
Crane started to protest, then clamped his jaw.
'We're losing control,' the flier whispered to Silk, and his eyes closed.
With his free hand, Silk stroked the flier's temple to indicate that he had heard. 'I pray you to forgive us, the living.' Another sign of addition. 'I and many another have wronged you often, my son, committing terrible crimes and numerous offenses against you. Do not hold them in your heart, but begin the life that follows life in innocence, all these wrongs forgiven.' With his beads, he traced the sign of subtraction again.
Mamelta's hand found Silk's again and closed upon it. 'He . . . Am I dreaming?'
Silk shook his head. 'I speak here for Great Pas, for Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla, for Marvelous Moipe, for Tenebrous Tartaros, for Highest Hierax, for Thoughtful Thelxiepeia, for Fierce Phaea, and for Strong Sphigx. Also for all lesser gods.' Lowering his voice, Silk added, 'The Outsider likewise forgives you, my son, for I speak here for him.'
'He's going to die?'
Silk put a finger to his lips. In a surprisingly gentle tone, Crane said, 'Lemur's going to kill him. He's opted for it. So would I.'
'So do I.' Mamelta touched the black cloth with which Silk had bandaged her head. 'They said we were going to a wonderful world of peace and plenty, where it would be noon all day. We knew they lied. When I die, I'll go home. My mother and brothers . . . Chiquito on his perch in the patio.'
Crane took out his scissors again. He was cutting away the cloth when Lemur threw open the hatch.
It was-to Silk the thought was irresistible-as if the Outsider himself had entered the hold. Where the dark steel hatch had been a moment before, there was a rectangle of liquid light, translucid and coolly lambent. The light of the Long Sun, penetrating the clear water of Lake Limna even to a depth of seventy cubits, was refracted and diffused, filling the opening that Lemur had so suddenly revealed and invading the hold with a supernal dawn of celestial blue. For a few seconds, Silk could scarcely believe that the ethereal substance was water. Leaning across the flier with his right hand (still grasping his beads) braced upon the coaming, he dipped his fingers into it.
Crane said, 'A little air escaped. Did you feel it?'
Staring down into the crystal water, Silk shook his head. A school of slender silver fish materialized at one end of the hatchway, and in the space of a breath appeared to drift to the other, ten cubits or more beneath the steel plate on which he knelt.
Lemur said, 'Move, Patera,' and picked up the flier.
Crane shouted, 'Watch out! Don't hold him like that!'
'Afraid I'll damage him further, Doctor?' Lemur smiled and lifted the flier effortlessly above his head. 'It won't matter.
'What about it, lolar? Anything to say? This is the last chance.'
'Thank the woman,' the flier gasped. 'The men. Strong wings.'
Lemur threw him down. The lambent water that filled the hatchway erupted in Silk's face, drenching and mo- mentarily blinding him. By the time he could see again, the flier had nearly passed out of sight. A brief glimpse of his agonized face, his startled eyes and open mouth, from which bubbles like spheres of thin glass streamed, and he was gone.
Lemur slammed down the hatch with a deafening crash and tightened its fastenings. 'When I open the one that we came through, the pressure here will equalize with the pressure in the rest of the ship. Keep your mouths open, or it may blow out your eardrums.'
He led them up a different companionway this time, and along a broader corridor (in which they passed Councillors Galago and Potto deep in conversation), and at last through a doorway guarded by two soldiers. 'This is what you were looking for, Doctor,' he told Crane, 'although you may not have known it. In this stateroom you will behold our true, biological selves. I'm over there.' He pointed toward a circle of gleaming machines; Crane hurried toward it. Silk, limping and supporting Mamelta, followed more slowly. Councillor Lemur's bio body lay upon an immaculate white pallet, an equally immaculate white sheet drawn to his chin. His eyes were closed, his cheeks sunken; his chest rose and fell gently and slowly; the faint wheeze of his breath was barely audible. A wisp of white hair escaped the circlet of black synthetic and network of multicolored wires that bound his brows. Snakelike tubes from a dozen machines (clear, straw-yellow, and darkly crimson) ducked beneath the sheet.
'No treacherous bios in here,' Lemur told them. 'We're nursed by devoted chems, and the machines that maintain us in life are maintained by citems. They love us, and we love them. We promise them immortality, and we will deliver it: a never-ending supply of replacement parts. They repay us with infinite prolongation of our merely mortal lives.' Crane was inspecting one of the machines. 'Your life-support equipment seems very impressive. I wish I had it.'
'My kidneys and liver have failed. So we have devices to perform those functions. There's a booster on my heart that's capable of taking over its function completely whenever that becomes necessary. Pulses of oxygen, of course.' Crane sucked his teeth and shook his head.
Mamelta said softly, 'This is the first time I haven't been cold.'
'The air in here is completely reprocessed every seventy seconds. It is filtered, irradiated to destroy bacteria and viruses, and maintained at a relative humidity of thirty-five percent, within a quarter degree of the normal temperature of the bio body.'
Looking down at the recumbent councillor. Silk told him, 'I'd never have thought I'd feel sorry for you. But I do.'
'I'm seldom conscious of lying here. This is me.' Lemur struck his chest, and the sound was that of the ringing hammer Silk had heard in the dark. 'Vigorous and alert, with perfect hearing and vision. All that I lack is good digestion. And at times,' Lemur paused significantly, 'patience.'
Crane was bending over the recumbent figure; before Lemur could move to stop him, he pushed up one gray eyelid with his thumb. 'This man is dead.'
'Don't be absurd!' Lemur started toward him, but Silk, acting immediately upon an impulse of which he was scarcely aware, stepped into his path. And Lemur, perhaps responding to some childhood injunction to respect an augur's habit, stopped short.
'Look.' Crane reached with thumb and forefinger into the empty socket and drew out a pinch of black detritus that might almost have been a mixture of earth and tar. After exhibiting it to Lemur, he dropped it on the pristine sheet, where it lay like so much filth, and wiped his fingers on the thin white pillow, leaving dingy, mephitic streaks. Lemur made a sound, not loud, that Silk had never heard before (though Silk had already, young as he was, heard so much grief). It was a snuffling, and in it a whine like the cry of a small shaft driven faster and faster-the sound of a drill that has struck a nail, and, impelled by a madman, spins on harder and harder and faster and faster until it smokes, destroying itself by its own boundless, ungovemed energy. Some hours later. Silk would think of that sound and recall the clockwork universe the Outsider had shown him on the Phaesday before in the ballcourt; for it was the sound of that universe dying, or rather of a part of it dying, or rather (he would decide sleepily) of the whole of it dying for someone.
Lemur crouched, slowly and unsteadily, as he sounded the note that would stay with Silk until night; his hands moved haplessly, as though of their own volition, not pawing or clawing or indeed doing anything at all, but writhing as the dead flier's hands were moving (perhaps) even then, in the cold waters of the lake as they awaited the onset of that stiffening which follows death and endures for half a day. (Or a day, or a day and a half, depending upon a variety of circumstances, and always subject to some dispute.) As he crouched, Lemur's eyes never left the mummified councillor on the snowy pallet; and at length, when one knee was on the green-tiled floor, and it seemed that Lemur could not crouch further, his arms fell.
