Since then, John had been gazing every so often into his chip of stolen black mirror, looking for … what? And why? It was a mystery to him yet. He felt uneasy about it sometimes—there seemed a unique perversity in viewing vertical destiny on a chip of horizontalia, and this paradox had in recent years begun to seem irreconcilable. He could not reason his way around it, and John’s scrying had lately, inevitably, come to nothing. When an irrefutable sign did come—a comet, no less—it showed itself to him in his servant’s fishpond. Not upon an ancient monument. Not even a holy water table.
Such an irony was, in John’s opinion, so predictable that it was hardly an irony at all.
The small blue-dressed prisoner was shrugging now, his shoulders swimming in the coat like two nubby goldfish blindly hitting the sides of a bowl. “Yes, illegal and stupid on top of it. I loathe divination, let me tell you. The idea is so boring to me. That we pick something, anything, at random and ascribe an equally random meaning to it is pure lunacy.” He paused and seemed to wait for John to curse at him, but it did not happen, so he spoke again, this time with more warmth. “Listen, I am a Surgical Doctor, and I deal inside bodies. What can I say? If that makes me a traitor to you religious people then I’m a traitor, and you’ll execute me for it, but my point is this: I deal in the physical. I don’t abide your starworship. I don’t do ‘magic.’ I wouldn’t even know what it means to see an omen or predict a happening. To my mind, that’s impossible.” He paused again. “So I can’t make you believe me because I can hardly believe myself.”
John nodded shallowly.
“Listen,” said the prisoner, apparently sensing the shift in John’s mood. “I saw this comet in a dream, and even though I don’t believe in your stupid rockets, I am here telling you that I predicted it, and it happened. And something changed, and inside me now there’s an outpouring of … of something … of knowledge, maybe, but it’s being choked to death by everyone’s disbelief, including my own. So there it is, I don’t even believe myself! Are you happy?” He was vibrating with what appeared to be rage, and thrust his mottled hands at his face to rearrange his hair again over the tattoos. John noticed, for the first time, to his amazement, that the prisoner had no ears.
“What happened to you there?” He pointed to the holes.
The man had surely known from the instant his ears had taken leave of his body that he would ever afterward be explaining their absence, thought John, and indeed he began nodding in earnest.
“Yes, that,” he said rather sadly. “That was obviously a punishment.”
“But why?”
He bridled. “Look it up. I’m sure somewhere in this disgusting place some record-keeping piece of goat shit has written down every single one of my offenses in hideous detail on my execution warrant. The ears, sir, happened many years ago, when I was in Dread Kansas, and I surely deserved it at the time, but these days I wonder if the punishment outweighed the crime, because now that I’m a visionary I’m thinking very different things about that period in my … ah, life. Let’s call it a life. Yes.” He smiled again, this time without pity. “Kansas is a place of hell.”
John was fading. Endless talk, it seemed his life was nothing but endless listening and talking. The bed and the room beyond it formed vast empty spaces and he wanted to be alone in them to gather his wits. But something about the prisoner interested him—there was a yearning in him that went beyond this undignified attempt to save his own life. John was not blind or stupid, but he was an insatiably curious man. Which was, he supposed, its own exquisite kind of stupidity. He folded his hands in his lap as he sat still on the bed. The man was probably lying about the comet. It didn’t matter. And he was dressed in clothes far too fine for a Walking Doctor, even a very successful one. Yet that didn’t matter either. His transparent motive remained, absent of any discernable use to John. If he had come to deceive, he was not very good at it, and he did not seem the sort of man likely to subject himself to anything he was not good at, even to save his life, so it followed that he must have come for some other reason.
The prisoner took a hobbled step toward John. “You must forgive me,” he said. “They will execute me here, certainly sooner rather than later. The Hierophant himself has already interviewed me once. I know I don’t deserve to die.”
“My job is not to pardon prisoners—”
“But I did foresee this calamity, and other things, and I know I could foresee more, with the right equipment and the right minds helping me interpret my visions. The fact of the matter is simple: I’m not educated in astrologics. Myself, I know the human corpus, I know medicines and surgeries and have been practicing them since I was a child at my mother’s side. I don’t know the skies and I understand even less about the voices I heard in my head.”
John said nothing.
“It’s been said … out in the country, I mean, not here … that you aren’t like other Cape men. That the head cutting and the bloodletting and Wonderblood are just a means to an end, anyway, for everyone, but you’re much more interested in the end. That’s the rumor about you.”
John raised his eyebrows and Mizar shrugged. Who knew what people said? It wasn’t any of John’s concern, though
