The Fall of the House of Escher

Janet Berliner Gluckman asked me to contribute to a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories, to be selected and approved by David Copperfield, the magician. Each story would touch upon magic in some form or another. While I could easily imagine writing a fantasy story about magic, a science fiction story presented a bigger challenge. I grabbed up a few books about the history of legerdemain and stage magic, and soon had an idea.

A rather wealthy and powerful acquaintance, discussing the future of mass entertainment, once shook me by declaring, at the end of a conversation, “A hundred million people can’t be wrong.”

I wasn’t so sure.

I wondered whether an entertainer could ever possibly satisfy a hundred million people on a regular basis, without undergoing some sort of undesirable transformation.

I then upped the ante; how about a hundred billion people, all mesmerized by centuries of cleverly designed, spiritually empty corporate amusement. What would it take to satisfy them?

Edgar Allan Poe was, I thought, an appropriate inspiration for such a tale of illusion, show business, and fear. Connecting Poe to a charge of something like Cyberpunk makes this one of my most chilling and effective stories, I think.

 

“Hoc est corpus,” said the licorice voice. “Lich, arise.”

The void behind my eyes filled. Subtle colors pinwheeled against velvet. Oiled thoughts raced, unable to grab.

The voice slid like black syrup into my ears.

“Once dead, now quick. Arise.”

I opened my eyes. My fingers curled across palm, thumb touched pinkie, tack of prints on skin, twist and pull of muscles in wrist, the first things necessary. No pain in my joints. Hands agile and strong.

Tremors gone.

I shivered.

“I’m back,” I said.

“Quick and quick,” the voice said

I turned to see who spoke in such lovely black tones. My eyes focused on a brown oval like rich fine wood, ivory eyes with ruby pupils, face square and stern but untouched by age.

“How does it feel to be inside again, and whole? I am a doctor. You can tell.”

I opened my mouth. “No pain,” I said. “I feel … oily, inside. Smooth and slick.”

“Young,” the face said. I saw the face in profile and decided, from the timbre of the voice and general features, that this was a woman. The smoothness of her skin reminded me of the unlined surface of a painting. She wore long black robes from neck to below where I lay on an elevated bed or table. “Do you have memories?”

I swallowed. My throat felt cool. I thought of eating and remembered one last painful meal, when swallowing had been difficult. “Yes. Eating. Hurting.”

“Your name?”

“Something. Cardino.”

“Cardino, that’s all?”

“My stage name. My real name. Is. Robert … Falucci.”

“That is right. When you are ready, you may stand and join them for dinner. Roderick invites you.”

“Them?”

“Roderick suggested you, and the five voted to bring you back. You may thank them, if you wish, at dinner.”

The face smiled.

“Your name?” I asked.

“Ont. O-N-T.”

The face departed, robes swishing like waves. Lights came up. I rolled and propped myself on one elbow, expecting pain, feeling only an easeful smoothness. I suspected that I had died. I surmised I had been frozen, as I had paid them to do, the Nitrogen Fixers, and that…

Lich, she had called me. Body, corpse. In one of my flashier shows I had reanimated a headless woman. Spark coils and strobes and a big van de Graaf generator had made the hair on her severed head stand on end.

I slipped my naked legs down from the table, found the coolness of a tessellated tile floor. My fumbling fingers found the robe on the table as I stared at the ornate floor tiles: men and women, each perfectly joined in a flow of completion advancing to the far wall: courtship, embracing, copulation, birth.

I felt a sudden floating happiness.

I’ve made it.

On a heavy black oak table, I found clothes set out that might have come from a studio costume department—black stiffly formal suit out of a 1930s society movie, something for Fred Astaire. To my chagrin, I tended to corpulence even in this resurrected state. I put the robe aside and stuffed myself into the outfit and poured a glass of water from a nearby pitcher. A watercress sandwich appeared and I nibbled it while exploring the room.

I should be terrified. I’m not. Roderick…

The table on which I had been reborn occupied the center of the room, spare and black and shiny, like a stone altar. It felt cold to my touch. A yard to the right, the heavy oak table supported my sandwich plate, the pitcher and glass of water, the discarded robe, and a pair of shoes.

Lich, she had called me.

I stood in bright if diffuse illumination. No lights were visible. The room’s corners lay in shadow. Armless chairs lined the wall behind me. A door opened in the next wall. Paintings covered the wall before me. The room seemed square and complete, but I could not find a fourth wall. No matter which direction, as I made a complete turn, I counted only three walls. The decor seemed rich and fashionable, William Morris and the restrained lines of classic Japanese furniture.

Obviously, not the next decade, I thought. Maybe centuries in the future.

I walked forward and the illumination followed. Expertly painted portraits covered the wall, precise, cold renderings of five people, three pale males and two dark females, all in extravagant dress. None of them were Roderick—if Roderick was who I thought he might be—and Ont did not appear, either. The men wore tights and seemed ridiculously well endowed, with feathers puffed on their shoulders and immense fan-shaped hats rising from the crowns of their close-cropped heads. The women wore tight-fitting black gowns, their reddish hair spread like sunbursts, skin the color and sheen of rubbed maple.

I wondered if I would ever find employment in this future world. “Do you like illusions?” I asked the portraits rhetorically.

“They are life’s blood,” answered the male on the left, smiling at me.

The portrait resumed its old, painted appearance.

Assume nothing, I told myself.

Startling patterns decorated the wall behind the portraits. Flowers surrounded and gave form to skull-shapes, eyes like holograms of black olives floating within petaled sockets.

“Where is dinner?” I asked.

This time, the portraits did not answer.

The room’s only door opened onto a straight corridor that extended for a few yards, then sent me back to the room where I had been reborn. I scowled at the unresponsive portraits, then looked for intercoms, doorbells, hidden telephones. Odd that I should still feel happy and at ease, for I might be stuck like a mouse in a cage.

“I would like to go to dinner,” I said in my stage voice, precise and commanding. The door swung shut and opened again. When I stepped through, I faced another corridor, and this one led to a larger double door, half ajar.

I opened the door and stepped outside to an immense ruined garden and orchard, ranks of great squat thick trees barren of leaves and overgrown with brown creepers and tall, sere thistles spotted with patches of crusty black. Hundreds of acres spread over low desolate hills, and on the highest hill stood an edifice that would have seemed unlikely in a dream. It rose above the ruined gardens, white and yellow-gray, like ancient chalk—what must have once been a splendid mansion, its lowest level simple and elegant. An architectural cancer had set in, however, and tumorous wings and floors and towers and bridges thrust from the first floor with malign genius, twisting and joining in ways I could not make sense of. These extrusions reflected the condition of the garden: the house was overgrown, thick with its own weeds.

Beyond the house and land rose a sky gray and dull and threatening. Coils of cloud dropped from the scudding, ash-colored overcast like incipient tornadoes, and the air smelled of frustrated electricity and stale ocean.

A slender spike of alarm rose in me, then faded back into my euphoria at simply being alive and free of pain. It did not matter that everything in this place seemed nightmarish or out of balance. All would be explained, I told myself.

Roderick would explain.

If anyone besides me could have survived into this puzzling and perhaps far future, it was the resourceful and clever friend of my youth, the only Roderick of my acquaintance: Roderick Escher. I could imagine no other.

I let go of the door and stepped out on a stone pathway, then turned to look back at the building where I had been reborn. It was small and square, simply and solidly constructed of smooth pieces of yellow-gray stone, without ornament, like a dignified tomb. Frost covered the stones, and ice rime caked the soil around the building, yet the interior had not been noticeably cooler.

I squared my shoulders, examined my hands one more time, flexed the fingers, and spread them at arm’s length. I then swiped both of my hands before my face, as if to pass an imaginary coin, and smiled at the ease of movement. That established, I set out on the path through the trees of the ruined garden, toward the encrusted and cancerous-looking house.

The trees and thistles consented to my passage, seeming to listen to my footfalls with silent reservation. I did not so much feel watched as measured, as if all the numbers of my life, my new body, were being recorded and analyzed. I noticed as I approached the barren trunks, or the dry, lifeless wall of some past hedge, that all the branches and dry leaves were gripped by tiny strands of white fiber. Spiders, mites, I hypothesized, but saw no evidence of anything moving.

When I stumbled and kicked aside a clod of dry dirt, I saw the soil was laden with even thicker white fibers, some of which released sparkles like buried stars where tiny rocks had cut or scratched them.

As I walked, I dug with my toe into more patches, and wherever I investigated, strands underlay the topsoil like fine human hairs, a few inches beneath the dusty gray surface. I bent down to feel them. They broke under my fingers and the severed ends sparkled, but then reassembled.

The closer I approached, the house on the hill appeared even more diseased and outlandish. Among its many peculiarities, one struck me forcibly: with the exception of the ground floor, there were no windows. All the walls and towers rose in blind disregard of each other and of the desolation beyond. Moreover, as I approached the broad verandah and the stone steps leading to a large bronze door, I noticed that the house itself was layered with tiny white threads, some of which had been cut and sparkled faintly. What might have seemed cheerful—a house pricked along its intricate surfaces and lines by a myriad of stars, as if portrayed on a Christmas card—became instead flatly dreadful, dreadful in my inner estimation, yet flatly so because of my artificial and inappropriate calm.

Another wave of concern swept outward from my core, and was just as swiftly damped. Part of me wants to feel fear, but I don’t. Something in me desires to turn around and find peace again…

A lich would feel this way … Still half-dead.

From the porch, the house did not appear solid. Fine cracks spread through the stones, and to one side—the northern side, to judge from the angle of the sun—a long crack reached from the foundation to the top of the first floor, where it climbed the side of a short, stubby tower. I could easily imagine the stones crumbling. Perhaps all that held the house together were the white threads covering it like the fine webs of a silkworm or tent caterpillar.

I walked up the steps, my feet kicking aside dust and windblown fragments of desiccated leaves and twigs. The bronze door rose over my head, splotched with black and green. In its center panel, a bas relief of two hands had been cast. These hands reached out to clasp each other, desire apparent in the tension and arc of the phalanges and strain of tendons—yet the beseeching fingers did not touch.

I could not equate any of this with the Roderick I had known for so many years, beginning in university. I remembered a thin but energetic man, tall and handsome in an ascetic way, his hair flyaway fine and combed back from a high forehead, double-lobed with a crease between, above his nose, that gave him an air of intense concern and concentration. Roderick’s most remarkable feature had always been his eyes, set low and deep beneath straight brows, eyes great and absorbing, sympathetic and sad and yet enlivened by a twist and glitter of sensuous humor.

The Roderick I remembered had always been excessively neat, and concerned about money and possessions, and would have never allowed such an estate to go to ruin … Or lived in such a twisted and forbidding house.

Perhaps, then, I was going to meet another of the same name, not my friend. Perhaps my frozen body had become an item of curiosity among strangers, and resurrection could be accomplished by whimsical dilettantes. Why would the doctor suddenly abandon me, if I had any importance?

The bronze door swung open silently. Along its edges and hinges, the fine white threads parted and sparkled. The door seemed surrounded by tiny embers, which faded to orange and died, silent and unexplained.

Within, a rich darkness gradually filled with a dour luminosity, and I stepped into a long hallway. The hallway twisted along its length, corkscrewing until wall became floor, and then wall again, and finally ceiling. Smells of food and sounds of tableware and clinking glasses came through doors at the end of the twisted hall.

I followed the smells and the sounds. I had expected to have to scramble up the sloping floor, to crawl down the twisted hall, but up and down redefined themselves, and I simply walked along what remained, to my senses, the floor, making a dizzy rotation, to a dining room at the very end. Doors swung open at my approach. I expected at any moment to meet my friend Roderick—expected and hoped, but was disappointed.

The five people pictured in the portraits sat in formal suits and gowns around a long table set with many empty plates and bottles of wine. Their raiment was of the same period and fashion as my own, the twenties or thirties of my century. They were in the middle of a toast, as I entered. The woman who had presided at my rebirth was not present, nor was anyone I recognized as Roderick.

“To our revivified lich, Robert Falucci,” the five said, lifting their empty glasses and smiling. They were really quite handsome people, the two women young and brown and supple, with graceful limbs and long fingers, the three men strong and well-muscled, if a little too pale. Veins and arteries showed through the translucent skin on the men’s faces.

“Thank you,” I replied. “Pardon me, but I’m a little confused.”

“Welcome to Confusion,” the taller of the two women said, pushing her chair back to walk to my side. She took my arm and led me to an empty seat at the end of the table. Her skin radiated a gentle warmth and smelled sweetly musky. “Tonight, Musnt is presiding. I am Cant, and this is Shant, Wont, and Dont.”

I smiled. Were they joking with me? “Robert,” I said.

“We know,” Cant said. “Roderick warned us you would arrive.”

Musnt, at the head of the table, raised his glass again and with a gesture bade me to sit. Cant pushed my chair in for me and returned to her seat.

“I’ve been dead, I think,” I said in a low voice, as if ashamed.

“Gone but not forgotten,” Dont, the shorter woman, said, and hid a brief giggle behind a lace handkerchief.

“You brought me back?”

“The doctor brought you back,” Cant said with a helpful and eager expression.

“Against the wishes of Roderick’s poor sister,” Musnt said. “Some of us believe that with her, and perhaps with you, he has gone too far.”

I turned away from his accusing gaze. “Is this Roderick’s house?” I asked.

“Yes and no,” Musnt said. “We oversee his work and time. We are, so to speak, the bonds placed on the last remnants of the family Escher.”

“Roles we greatly enjoy,” Cant said. She was youthfully, tropically beautiful, and I hoped I attracted her as much as she did me.

“I think I’ve been gone a long time. How much has changed?” I asked.

The four around the table, all but Cant, looked at each other with expressions I might have found on children in a schoolyard: disdain for a new boy.

“A lot, really,” Musnt said, lifting knife and fork. Food appeared on Musnt’s plate, a green salad and two whole raw zucchinis. Food appeared on my plate, the uneaten remains of my watercress sandwich. I looked up, dismayed. Then a zucchini appeared, and they all laughed. I smiled, but there was a salt edge to my happiness now.

I felt inferior. I certainly felt out of touch.

I did not remember Roderick having a sister.

After dinner, they retired to the drawing room, which was darkly paneled and decorated in queer rococo fashion, with many reptilian cherubs and even full-sized dog-headed angels, as well as double pillars in spiral embrace and thick gold-threaded canopies. The materials appeared to be lapis and black marble and ebony, and everywhere, the sourceless lights followed, and everywhere, the busy and ubiquitous fibers overlay all surfaces.

I heard the distant murmur of a brook, rushes of air, sounds from some invisible ghostly landscape, and the voices of the five, discussing the spices used in the vegetable soup. Wont then added, “She persists in calling our work a blanding of the stew.”

“Ah, but she is only half an Escher—” Wont said.

“Or a fading reflection of the truly penultimate Escher,” Shant added.

“She would do anything for her brother,” Cant said sympathetically.

“You’ve always favored Roderick,” Dont said with a sniff. “You sound like Dr. Ont.”

Cant turned and smiled at me. “We are judges, but not muses. I am the least critical.”

Musnt opened a heavy brocaded curtain figured with seashells and they looked out upon the overgrown garden. Orange and yellow clouds moved swiftly in a twilight azure sky. Musnt flung open the glass-paneled doors and we all strode onto a marble patio.

Cant put her arm through mine and hugged my elbow against her ribs. “How nice for you to arrive on a good day, with such a fine settling,” she said. “I trust the doctor remade you well?”

“She must have,” I said. “I feel young and well. A little … anxious, however.”

Cant smiled sweetly. “Poor man. They have brought back so many, and all have felt anxious. We’re quite used to your anxiety. You will not disturb us.”

“We’re Roderick’s antitheticals,” Wont said, as if that might explain something, but it still told me nothing useful. Mired in a dense awkwardness and buried unease, I looked back at the house. It reached to the sky, a cathedral, Xanadu and the tower of Babel all in one. Towers met with buttresses in impossible ways, drawing my eye from multiple perspectives into hopeless directions.

“What did you do, in your life?” Musnt asked.

“I was a magician,” I said. “Cardino the Unbelievable.” The name seemed ridiculous, from this distance, in the middle of these marvels.

“We are all magicians,” Musnt said disdainfully. “How boring. Perhaps Roderick chose poorly.”

“I do not think so,” Cant said, and gave me another smile, this one eerily reassuring, an anxiolytic bowing curve of her smooth and plump lips. To my shock, nipples suddenly grew on her cheeks, surrounded by fine brown areolae. “If Robert wants, he can add another layer of critique to our efforts.”

“What could he possibly know, and besides, aren’t we critical enough?” Shant asked.

“Hush,” Cant said. “He’s our guest, and we’re already showing him our dark side.”

“As antitheticals should,” Musnt said.

“I don’t understand … What am I, here?” I asked, the salt taste in my mouth turning bitter. “Why am I here?”

“You’re a lich,” Musnt said, staring away at nothing in particular. “As such, you have no rights. You can be an added amusement. A spice against our blanding, if you wish, but nothing more.”

“Please don’t ask if you’re in hell, not so soon,” Shant said with a twist of disgust. “It is so common.”

“Who is this Roderick?”

“He is our master and our slave,” Shant said. “We observe all he does, bring him his audience, and bind him like chains.”

“He is a seeker of sensation without consequence,” Cant said. “We, like his audience, are perfect for him, for we are of no consequence whatsoever.” Cant sighed. “I suppose he should come down and say hello.”

“Or you can find him, which is more likely,” Shant suggested.

I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again, turning to look at the five on the patio. Finally, I said, “Are you real?”

Cant said, “If you mean embodied, no.”

“You’re dreams,” I said.

“You asked if we like illusions,” Cant said shyly, touching my shoulder with her slender hand. “We can’t help but like them. We are all of us tricks of mind and light, and cheap ones at that. Roderick, for the time being, is real, as is this house.”

“Where is Roderick?”

“Upstairs,” Shant said.

Wont chuckled at that. “That’s very general, but we really don’t know. You may find him, or he will find you. Take care you do not meet his sister first. She may not approve of you.”

At a noise from within the patio doors, I turned. I heard footsteps cross the stone floor, and looked back at Cant and the others to see their reactions. All, however, had vanished. I took a tentative step toward the doors, and was about to take another, when a tall and spectrally thin figure strode onto the patio, turned his head, and fixed me with a puzzled and then irritated glare.

“So soon? The doctor said it would take days more,” he said.

I studied the figure’s visage with halting recognition. There were similarities; the high forehead, divided into two prominences of waxen pallor, the short sharp falcon nose, the sunken cheeks hollowed even more now as if by some wasting disease …

And the eyes. The figure’s eyes burned like a flame on the taper of his thin, elongated body. The voice sounded like an echo from caverns at the center of a cold ferrous planet, metallic and sad, yet keeping some of the remembered strength of the original, and that I could not mistake.

“Roderick!”

The figure wore a tight-fitting pair of red pants and a black shirt with billowing sleeves buttoned to preposterously thick gloves like leathern mittens, while around his neck hung a heavy black collar or yoke as might be worn by an ox. At the ends of this yoke depended two brilliant silver chains threaded with thick white fiber. Around his legs twined more fibers, which seemed to grow from the floor, breaking and joining anew with his every step. He seemed to walk on faint embers. Threads grew also beneath his clothes and to his neck, forming fine webs around his mouth and eyes. Looking more closely, I saw that the threads intruded into his mouth and eyes.

Still his most arresting feature, the large and discerning eyes had assumed a blue and watery glaze, as if exposed to many brilliant suns, or visions too intense for healthy witness.

“You appear alert and well,” Roderick said, averting his gaze with a long blink, as if ashamed. His hair swept back from his forehead, still thin and fine, but white as snow, and tufted as if he had just awakened from damp and restless sleep. “The doctor has done her usual excellent work.”

“I feel well … But so many irritating … evasions! I have been treated like a … I have been called an amusement—”

Roderick raised his right hand, then stared at it with some surprise, and slowly, pulling back florid lips from prominent white teeth, as at the appearance of some vermin, peeled off the glove by tugging at one finger, then the next, until the hand rose naked and revealed. He curled and straightened the slender, bony fingers and thumb. A spot of blood bedewed the tip of each.

One drop fell to the floor and made a ruby puddle on the stone.

“Pardon me,” Roderick said, closing the naked hand tightly and pushing it into a pocket in his clinging pants. “I still emerge. You have come from a farther land than I—how ironic you seem the more healthy despite that journey!”

“I am renewed,” I said. Upon seeing Roderick, I began to feel my emotions return, fear mixing now with a leap of hope that some essential questions might be answered. “Have I truly died and been reborn?”

“You died a very young man—at the age of sixty,” Roderick said. “I took charge of your frozen remains from that ridiculous corporation twenty years later and secured you in the vaults of my own family. I had made the beginnings of my huge fortune by then and arranged such preparations very early, and so you were protected by many forces, legal and political. None interfered with our vaults. If not for me, you would long ago have been decanted and allowed to thaw and rot.”

“How long has it been?”

“Two hundred and fifty years.”

“And the others?—Wont, Cant, Musnt, Shant, Dont …”

Roderick’s face grew stern, as if I had unexpectedly uttered a string of rude words. Then he shook his head and put his still-gloved hand on my shoulder.

“All the world’s people lie in cool vaults now, or wear no form at all. People are born and die at will, ever and again. Death is conquered, disease a helpmeet and plaything. The necessities of life are not food but sensation. All is servant to the quest for stimulus. The expectant and all-devouring Nerve is our monarch, our King.”

I was suddenly dizzied by the vertigo of deep time, the precipitous awareness of having emerged from a long well or tunnel of insensate nullity leaving behind almost everyone and everything I had known. And perhaps Roderick, the friend I had once known, was no longer with me, either.

I felt as if the stones beneath me swayed.

“You alone, of all our friends, our family … are alive?” I asked.

“I alone keep my present shape, though not without some gaps,” Roderick said with a pale pride. “I am the last of the embodied and walkabout Eschers … I, and my sister. But she is not well.” His face creased into a mask of sorrow, a well-worn expression I could not entirely credit. “I have mourned her a thousand times already, and a thousand times she has returned to something like life. She feigns death, I think, to taunt me, and abhors my quest, but … I could ask for no one more obedient.”

“I don’t remember you having a sister,” I said.

Roderick closed his eyes. “Come, this place is filled with unpleasant associations. I no longer eat. The thought of using my jaws to grind severed tissue … ugh!”

Roderick led me from the dining room, back to the foyer and a staircase which rose opposite the main door. The stairs branched midpoint to either side, leading to an upper floor. Roderick ascended the stairs with an eerie grace, halting and surveying his surroundings unpredictably, as if motivated not by human desires, but by the volition of a hunting insect or spider. His eyes studied the fiber-crusted walls, lids half-closed, head shaking at some association or memory conjured by stimuli invisible to me.

“You must find a place here,” Roderick said. “You are the last in the vault. All the others have long since been freed and either vapored or joined with some neural clan or another. I have kept you in reserve, dear Robert, because I value you most highly. You have a keen mind and quick fingers. I need you.”

“How may I be useful?”

“All this, the house and the lands around us, survive at the whim of King Nerve,” Roderick said. “We are entertainers, and our tenure wears thin. Audiences demand so much of us, and of everything around us. You are new and unexplored.”

“What kind of entertainment?”

“Our lives and creations—the lives of my sister and I—are one illusion following on the tail of another,” Roderick said. “All that we do and think is marked and absorbed by billions. It is our prison, and our glory. Our family has always had conjurers—do you remember? It is how we met and became friends.”

“I remember. Your father—”

“I have not thought of him in a century,” Roderick said, and his eyes glowed. “Fine work, Robert! Already my mind tingles with associations. My father … and my mother …”

“But Roderick, you did not get along with your father. You abhorred magic and illusions. You called them ‘tricks,’ and said they ‘deceived the simple and the unobservant.’”

“I remained a faithful friend, did I not?”

“Yes,” I said. “You must have. You brought me back from the dead.”

“Sufficient time shows how wrong even I can be,” he murmured.

We reached the top of the stairs. A familiar figure, the doctor named Ont, passed down the endless hallway, black robes swirling like ink in water. She stopped before us, paying no attention to me, but staring at Roderick with pained solicitude, as if she might cry if he grew any more pale or thin.

“Thank you, Dr. Ont,” Roderick said, bowing slightly.

She nodded. “Is he what you wanted, what you need?”

“So soon, and unexpected, but already valuable.”

“He can help?”

“I do not know,” Roderick said.

Ont now fixed her gaze on me.

“You must be very cautious with Roderick Escher,” she warned. “He is a national cleverness, a treasure. It is my duty to sustain him, or to do his bidding, whichever he desires.”

“How is she?” Roderick asked, hands clasped before him, naked fingers preposterously thin and white against the thick leathern glove.

Ont replied, “Even this vortex soon spins itself out, and this time I fear the end will be permanent.”

“You fear … more than you hope?” Roderick asked.

Ont shook her head sternly. “I do not understand this conceit between you.” With another tip of her head, she walked on, the hall curling ahead of her steps into a corkscrew. Remaining upright, she trod the spiraling floor and vanished around the curve.

The hall straightened, but she was no longer visible.

“A century ago, I chose to come back into this world refreshed,” Roderick said, “and took from myself a kind of rib or vault of my mind, to make a sister. She became my twin. Now, let me show you how the house works …”

Roderick gripped me by the elbow and guided me to a steep, winding stair that might have coiled within the largest tower surmounting the house. He gave what he meant to be an encouraging smile, but instead revealed his teeth in a conspiratorial rictus, and climbed the steps before us. I hesitated, palms and upper lip moist with growing dread of this odd time and incomprehensible circumstance.

Soon, however, as my friend’s form vanished around the first curve in the stair, I felt even more dread at being left alone, and hoped knowledge of whatever sort might ease my apprehension.

I raced to catch up with him.

“As a species, in the plenitude of time—a very short time—we have found our success,” Roderick said. “Lacking threat from without, and at peace within, our people enjoy the fruits of the endeavors of all civilizations. All that has been suffered is here repaid.” In the tower, his voice sounded hollow, echoing into the mocking laughter of a far-off crowd.

“How?” I asked, following on Roderick’s heels. That which might have once winded me now seemed almost effortless. Whatever shortness of breath I felt was due to anxiety, not frailness of body.

“All work is stationary,” Roderick said, again favoring me with that peculiar grimace that had replaced a once fine and encouraging smile. We had made two turns around the tower.

“Then why do we walk?” I asked.

“We are chosen. Privileged, in a way. We—my sister and I, Dr. Ont, and now you—maintain the last links with physical bodies. We give a foundation to all the world’s dreams. The entire Earth is like the seed in a peach, all but disposed of. What matters is the sweet pulp of the fruit—communication and expansion along the fiber optic lines, endless interaction, endless exchange of sensations. Some have abandoned all links with the physical, the seed, having bodies no more. They flit like ghosts through the interwoven threads that make the highways and rivers and oceans of our civilization. Most, more conservative, maintain their corporeal forms like shrines, and visit them now and then, though the bodies are vestigial, cold and unfeeling. You were reborn in one such vault, made to hold such as you, and eventually to receive my sister and me—though I have decided not to go there, never to go there. I think death would be more interesting.”

“I’ve been there,” I said. “It is not.”

“Yes, and I always ask my liches … What do you recall?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Look closely at that excised segment in your world-line. You were dead two and a half centuries, and you remember nothing?”

“No,” I said.

He smiled. “No one ever has. The demands … The voices … Gone.” He stopped and looked back at me. We had stopped more than halfway up the tower. “A blankness, a darkness. A surcease from endless art.”

“In my life, you were more concerned with business than the arts.”

“The world changed after you died. Everyone turned their eyes inward, and riches could be achieved by any who linked. Riches of the inner life, available to all. We made our world self-sustaining and returned to a kind of cradle. I grew bored with predicting the weather of money when it hardly mattered and so few cared. I worked with artists, and found more and more a sympathy, until I became one myself.”

He stood before a large pale wooden door set in the concrete and plaster of the tower. “Robert, when we were boys, we dreamed of untrammeled sensual delights. Soon enough, I saw that experiences that seemed real, but carried no onerous burdens of pain, would consume all of humanity. Before my rebirth, I directed banks and shaped industries … Then I slept for twenty years, waiting for fruition. After my rebirth, my sister and I invested the riches I earned in certain industries and new businesses. We directed the flow and shape of the river of light, on which everyone floated like little boats. For a time, I controlled—but I never retired to the vaults myself.”

He touched the door with a long finger, smearing a spot of blood on the unpainted and bleached surface. “Physical desire,” he whispered, “drove the growth. Sex and lust without rejection or loss, without competition, was the beginning. Primal drives directed the river, until everyone had all the sex they wanted … In a land of ghosts and shades.”

The door swung open at two taps of his finger, two red prints on the wood. Within, more river sounds—and a series of breathless sighs.

“Now, hardly anyone cares about sex or any other basic drives. We have accessed deeper pleasures. We re-string our souls and play new tunes.”

A fog of gossamer filled the dark space beyond the door. Lights flitted along layer after layer of crossed fibers, and in the middle, a machine like a frightened sea-urchin squatted on a wheeled carriage. Its gray spines rose with rapid and sinuous grace to touch points on conjunctions between threads, and light seeped forth.

“This is the thymolecter. What I create, as well as what I think and experience, the thymolecter dispenses to waiting billions. And my thoughts are at work throughout this house, in room after room. Look!”

He turned and lifted his hand, and I saw a group of thin children form within the gossamer. They played listlessly around a bubbling green lump, poking it with a stick and laughing like fiends. It made little sense to me. “This amuses half the souls who occupy what was once the subcontinent of India.”

I curled my lip instinctively, but said nothing.

“It speaks to them,” Roderick whispered. “There is torment in every gesture, and triumph in the antagonism. This has played continuously for fifteen years, and always it changes. The audience responds, becomes part of the piece, takes it over … and I adjust a figure here, a sensibility there. Some say it is my masterpiece. And I had to fight for years to overcome the objections of the five!” His cheeks took on some color at the memory of this triumph. He must have sensed my underwhelming, for he added, “You realize we experience only the tip of the sword here, the cover of a deep book. You see it out of context, and without the intervening years to acculturate you.”

“I am sure,” I muttered, and was thankful when Roderick extinguished the entertainment.

“You’ve had experience with live audiences, of course, but never with a hundred billion respondents. My works spread in waves against a huge shore. At one time they beat up against other waves, the works of other artists. But there are far fewer artists than when you were first alive. As we have streamlined our arts for maximum impact, competition has narrowed and variety has waned, and now, the waves slide in tandem; we serve niches which do not overlap. Mine is the largest niche of all. I am the master.”

“It’s all vague to me,” I said. “Isn’t there anything besides entertainment?”

“There is discussion of entertainment,” Roderick said.

“Nothing else? No courtships, relationships, raising children?”

“Artists imagine children to be raised, far better than any real children. Remember how horrid we were?”

“I had no children … I had hoped, here—”

“A splendid idea! Eventually, perhaps we will re-enact the family. But for now …”

I sensed it coming. Roderick’s friendship, however grand, had always hung delicately upon certain favors, never difficult to grant individually, but when woven together, amounting to a subtle fabric of obligations.

“I need a favor,” Roderick said.

“I suppose I owe you my life.”

“Yes,” Roderick said, with an uninflected bluntness that chilled me. Roderick drew me from the gossamer chamber, and as he was about to close the door, I glimpsed another play of lights, arranged into curved blades slicing geometric objects. A few of the objects—angular polyhedra, flushing red—seemed to try to escape the blades.

“Half of Central America,” Roderick confided, seeing my puzzlement.

“What sort of favor?” I asked with a sigh as the door swung silently shut.

“I need you to perform magic,” Roderick said.

I brightened. “That’s all?”

“It will be enough,” Roderick said. “Nobody has performed magic of your sort for a hundred years. Few remember. It will be novel. It will be concrete. It will play on different strings. King Nerve has gotten demanding lately, and I feel …”

He did not complete this expression. “Pardon my enthusiasm, you must be exhausted,” he said, with a tone of sudden humility that again endeared him to me. “There is a kind of night here. Sleep as best you can, in a special room, and we will talk … tomorrow.”

Roderick led me through another of those helical halls, whose presence I keenly felt in every part of the house, and soon came to hate. I wondered if there were no real doors or halls, only illusions of connections between great stacks and heaps of cubicles, which Roderick could activate to carry us through the walls like Houdini or Joselyne.

In a few minutes, we came to a small narrow door, and beyond I found a pleasant though small room, with a canopy bed and a white marble lavatory, supplying a need I was beginning to feel acutely.

Roderick waited for me to return, and chided my physical limitations. “You still need to eat and drink, and suffer the consequences.”

“Can I change that?” I asked, half fearfully.

“Not now. It is part of your novelty. You are a lich. you subscribe to no services, move nothing by will alone.”

“As do the five?”

Again he shook his head and frowned. “They are projections. To you, they feel solid enough, real enough, but there is no amusement in them. They can seem to do anything. Including make my life a torment.”

“How?”

“They express the combined will of King Nerve,” he said, and answered no further questions on that subject, instead showing me the main highlights of the room. It was much larger than it seemed, and wherever I turned I beheld new walls, which met previous walls at square angles, each wall supporting shelves covered with thaumaturgical apparatus of such rareness and beauty that I lost all of my dread in a flush of professional delight.

“These can be your tools,” Roderick said with a flourish. I turned and walked from wall to apparent wall, shelf to shelf, picking up Brema brasses, numerous fine boxes nested and false-bottomed and with hidden pockets and drawers, large and small tables covered with black and white squares in which velvet-drop bags might be concealed, stacks of silver and gold and steel and bronze coins hollow and hinged and double-faced and rough on one side and smooth on the other, silk handkerchiefs and scarves and stacks of cloths of many colors; collapsing bird-cages of such beautiful craftsmanship I felt my eyes moisten; glasses filled with apparent ink and wine and milk, metal tubes of many sizes, puppet doves and mice and white rats and even monkeys, mummified heads of many expressions, some in boxes; slates spirit and otherwise, some quite small; pens and pencils and paint brushes with hidden talents; cords and retracting reels and loops; stacked boxes a la Welles in which a young woman might be rearranged at will; several Johnson Wedlocks in crystal goblets; tables and platforms and cages with seemingly impassable Jarrett pedestals; collapsible or compressible chess pieces, checkers, poker chips, potato chips, marbles, golf balls, baseballs, basketballs, soccer balls; ingenious items of clothing and collars and cufflinks manufactured by the Magnificent Traumata; handcuffs and strait jackets…

As I turned from wall to wall with delight growing to delirium, Roderick merely stood behind me, arms folded, receiving my awestruck glances with a patient smile. Finally I came to a wall on which hung one small black cabinet with glass doors. Within this cabinet there lay…

Ten sealed decks of playing cards.

I opened this cabinet eagerly, aching to try my new hands, wrists, fingers, on them. I unwrapped cellophane from a deck and tamped the stack into one hand, immediately fanning the cards into a double spiral. With a youthful and pliant fold of skin near my thumb I pushed a single Ace of Spades to prominence, remembering with hallucinatory vividness the cards most likely to be chosen by audience members in any given geography, as recorded by Maskull in his immortal Force and Suit.

I turned and presented the deck to Roderick.

“Pick a card,” I said, “any card.”

He stared at me intensely, almost resentfully, and his left eye opened wider than the right, presenting an expression composed at once of equal mix delight and apprehension. “Save it. There is altogether too much time.”

But like a child suddenly brought home to familiar toys, I could not restrain myself. I propelled the deck in an arc from one hand to the other, and back. I shuffled the cards and cut them expertly behind my back, knowing the arrangement had not even now been disturbed. With my fingers I counted from the top of the precisely split deck, and brought up a Queen of Hearts. “Appropriate for your world,” I said.

“Impressive legerdemain,” Roderick said with a slight shudder. He had never been able to judge my lights of hand, or follow my instant sleights and slides and crosses. With almost carnivorous glee I wanted to dazzle this man who controlled so much illusion, to challenge him to a duel.

“It’s magic,” I said breathlessly. “Real magic.”

“Its charm,” he said in a subdued and musing voice, “lies in its simplicity and its antiquity.” He seemed doubtful, and rested his chin on the tip of an index finger. Again a spot of blood. “Still, I insist you need to rest, to prepare. Tomorrow … We will begin, and all will be judged.”

I realized he was correct. Now was not the time. I needed to know more. It was possible, in this unreal futurity, anything I might be able to accomplish with such simple props would be laughed at. Sooner expect a bird to fly to the moon…

With a brief farewell, he departed, and left me alone in the marvelous room. My heart hammered like a pecking dove in my chest.

Nowhere in this room, unique I supposed in all the rooms of the house of Roderick Escher, did there creep or coat or insinuate any of the pale, light-guiding threads or fibers. I was alone and unwatched, unconnected to any hungry external beings, be they kings or slaves…

I fancied I was Roderick’s secret.

I undressed and showered. The bathroom filled with steam and I inhaled its warm moistness, returning again to the euphoria I had experienced upon my arrival. I toweled and picked up a thick terry cloth robe, examining the sleeves and pockets. In a table drawer I found needle and many colors of thread, and marveled at Roderick’s thoroughness.

Far too restless and exalted for sleep, I began to sew hooks and loops and pockets into the robe, for practice, and then into my suit of clothes. My fingers worked furiously, as agile as they had ever been in my prime.

I turned to the laden walls and spun through a dozen displays before finding clamps, tack, glue, brads, wire, springs, card indexes, and other necessities. I altered the suit for fit as well as fittings. I had long centuries ago learned to be a tailor and seamstress, as well as a forger and engineer.

There were no windows, no clocks, no way to learn the time of evening, if evening it actually was. I might have spent days of objective time in my obsessive labors. It did not matter here; I was not disturbed and did not rest until I became so tired I could hardly stand or clasp a needle or bend a wire.

I removed the robe, climbed into the small, comfortable bed, and immediately fell into deep slumber.

I know not how many minutes or hours, or perhaps years later, I felt a touch on my face and jerked abruptly to consciousness. My eyes burned but my nerves pulsed as if I had just drunk a dozen cups of black coffee. In the darkened room (had I turned off any lights? there were no lights to control!) I saw a whitish shape, tall and blurred. Now came to me a supreme supernatural dread, and I was immediately drenched with sweat.

I rubbed my eyes to clear them.

“Who’s there?” I cried.

“It is I, Maja,” the whitish form said in a thrilling contralto.

“Who?” I asked, my voice cracking, for I only half-remembered­ my circumstances. I did not know what might face me in this unknown place and time.

“I am Roderick’s sister,” she said, and came closer, her face entering a sourceless, nacreous spot of glow. I beheld a woman of extraordinary character, her countenance as thin as the faces of the women in Klimt’s darker paintings, her eyes as large as Roderick’s, and of like cast and color. I could have sworn her high twin-lobed forehead would have blemished her femininity, had it been described so to me, yet it did not.

“What do you want?” I asked, my heart slowing its staccato beat. I felt no danger from her, only a ruinous sadness.

“Do not do this thing,” she warned, eyes intent on mine. I could not break that gaze, so frightened and yet so strong. “It is a change too drastic for the Eschers, a breach, a leap to disaster. Roderick wishes our doom, but he does not know what he does.”

“Why would he wish to die?”

This she did not answer, but instead leaned forward and whispered to me, “He believes we can die. That is his madness. He has told me to go before, to prove certain theories.”

“And you have agreed—to die?”

She nodded, eyes fixed on mine, drawing me in as if to the doors of her soul. In her there was more of the cadaver already than a living woman, yet she seemed sadly, infinitely beautiful. Her beauty was that of a guttering candle flame. The fire of her eyes was a fraction that of Roderick’s, and her body, as a taper, might supply only a few minutes more of the fuel of life. Unlike the brown women, Cant and Dont, who were unreal yet seemed solid and healthy, she was all too real, and I could have blown her away with a weak breath. “I am his twin. He took me from his mind, shaped me to equal him, in all but will. I have no will of my own. I obey him.”

“He made his own sister a slave?”

“It is done that way here. We may create versions of our self that do not possess a legal existence.”

“How bitter!” I exclaimed.

“Oh, I may protest, may try to show him my love by directing his will with persuasion. But he is stronger, and I do whatever he tells me. Now, it is his wish I try again to die. I only hope this time I might succeed.”

Behind her I saw the approach of the solicitous Dr. Ont. The doctor took Roderick’s sister by one skeletal hand, pushed her lips close to Maja’s almost translucent ear, and murmured words in a tongue I could not understand. Maja’s head fell to one side and it seemed she might collapse. Dr. Ont supported her, and they withdrew from the room.

I felt at once a heavy swell of resentment, and a commensurate surge of bluster. “How dare she come here, smelling of death. I’ve left death behind.” But in my declining terror, I was exaggerating. Roderick’s sister, Maja, had exuded no scent at all.

She had smelled, if anything, less intensely than a matching volume of empty air.

I felt I slept only a few minutes, yet when Roderick’s voice boomed into my room, waking me, I was completely refreshed, confident, ready for any challenge. I was no slave of Roderick Escher.

“Dear friend—have you made the necessary preparations?” he asked.

I looked around for his presence, but he was not there, only his voice. “I’m ready,” I said.

“Do you understand your challenge?”

“Better than ever,” I said. I had the confidence of an innocent child, thinking tigers are simply large cats; even the appearance during the night of Maja Escher held no awe for me.

“Good. Then eat hearty, and build up your strength.”

Roderick did not enter my room, but breakfast appeared on a table. The apparatuses I had chosen the night before lay beside the plates of warm vegetables, broth, breads. I put on my robe, manifested an Ace of Spades in my right hand, and threw it at the stack of toast. The card pierced the top slice of toast and stuck out upright.

I lifted the card, retrieving the toast with it, and took a bite, chewing with a broad smile. All my fears of the day before (if indeed a day had passed) had faded. I had never in my first life felt so confident before going on stage, or beginning a performance.

As I ate, I wondered at the lack of meat. Had the world’s inhabitants suddenly and humanely ended the slaughter of innocent animals? Or did they simply distance themselves from the carnal, as most of them had assumed the character of frozen meat in chilly refrigerators?

Were there any animals left to eat?

In truth, what did I know about Roderick’s brave civilization? Nothing. He had not prepared me or informed me any farther. Yet my confidence did not fade. I felt instinctively the challenge that Roderick was about to offer—to compare the overwhelming and undeniable magic of this time, against my own simple legerdemain, as Roderick had called it.

Roderick visited me in person as I finished my breakfast. “Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked as he entered through the door. His arm rose slowly to indicate the changeable wall of glass cases, now frozen at the apparatus associated with cards. He walked to the case, opened it, and removed a reel manufactured by my inspiration, Cardini, who had died just after my first birth, but whose effects I had learned by heart. “Did you know,” Roderick said, holding the tiny reel in his palm, “that a century ago, children played with dollhouses indistinguishable from the real? Little automata going about their lives, using tools perfect for their scale, living dolls sitting on furniture accurate in every way … And these houses were so cheap they were made available to the poorest of the poor?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

Roderick smiled at me, and for the first time on this, my second day in my new life, I felt a narrow chilliness behind my eyes, a suspicion of the unforeseen.

“Yet we have advanced beyond that time as the gods reach beyond the ants,” he said. “All pleasures available at will. Every nerve and region within the brain—and without!—charted and their affects explored in endless variations. Whole societies devoted to pain from injuries impossible in all past experience, to the ghostlike exertion of an infinite combination of muscles in creatures the size of planets, to the social and sexual dalliances of phantoms conjured from histories and times and places that never were.”

“Remarkable,” I said stiffly.

“An audience of such intense discernment and sophistication that nothing surprises them, nothing arouses their childlike amazement, for they have never been children!”

“Extraordinary,” I said with some pique. Did he wish for my defeat, my failure, to enjoy some petty triumph over an inferior? I steeled myself against his words, as I might have armored against the complaints of an older and better magician, criticizing my fledgling efforts.

“There are audiences of such size that they dwarf all of the Earth’s past populations,” he added.

I saw my bed fold into itself until it vanished into a corner. The wall of cases shrank into a narrow box the size of a book, leaving me with only the table and the apparatus I had chosen the night before.

“Prepare, Robert,” he said. “The curtain rises soon.”

Then his voice took on a shadowed depth, betraying a mix of emotions I could not comprehend, relief mixed with heavy grief and even guilt, and something else beyond my poor, unembellished range. “Dr. Ont came to me last night. Maja has succumbed. My sister is no more. Ont certifies that she has truly died. She has even begun to decay.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s a triumph,” he said quietly. “She goes before …”

I put on the suit I had tailored and adjusted, and inwardly smiled at its close fit and how it flattered my pudgy form. I have never been handsome, have always lacked the charm of magicians who combine grace and artistry with physical beauty. I compensate by simply being better, faster, and more ingenious.

Roderick looked around the room. Fibers grew from the floor, climbing the walls like mold, until they shrouded everything but me and my table and cards. I seemed surrounded by a forest of fungal tendrils, glowing like swarms of fireflies.

“Billions of receptors, hooked into webs and matrices and nets reaching around the Earth,” Roderick said. “Tiny little eyes like stars that have replaced any desire to leave and venture out to real stars, to other worlds. We have our own interior infinities to explore.”

I made my final arrangements, and stood in the center of the lights, the tendrils. “Tell me when I’m to begin.”

“We’ve already begun, except for the time you’ve spent in this room,” Roderick said. “Even Maja’s protests to me, and her death, have been watched and absorbed. I’ve used the drama of my own war to stay at the top of the ratings, my preparations and agonies. Even the five, the antitheticals—I have made them part of this!”

The same nacreous light that had bathed Maja’s face now surrounded me, and the fibers arranged themselves with a sound like the rubbing claws of chitinous sea-creatures.

Roderick backed away until he stood in shadow, then lifted his hand, giving me my cue.

I had never had such a draw in my life—nor felt so alone. But was this really so different from appearing on television? I had done that often enough.

“Once upon a time,” I said, focusing ahead of me at no space in particular, and smiling confidently, “a young man on a luxury cruise was caught in a horrible shipwreck, stranded on a desert island with nobody and nothing but a crate of food and water, and a crate of unopened packs of playing cards.”

I brought out a deck of cards and peeled away the plastic. “I was that young man. I knew nothing of the magical arts, but in three solitary years I taught myself thousands of manipulations and passes and motions, until I felt I could fool even myself at times. And how was this done? How does a magician, knowing all the methods behind his effects, come to believe in magic?”

I swallowed a lump in my throat and leaped into the abyss.

“In those three years, I learned to make cards confess.” I riffled the deck of cards and formed a rippling mouth, and with one finger strummed the edges.

“We spoke to each other,” the cards said in a breathless stringy voice. “And Cardino taught us all we know.”

I produced another deck, opened it with one hand, removed the cards and arranged them on my palm, and made them speak as well, in a female voice: “And we taught him all that we know.”

I squeezed both decks up in a double arc and caught them in opposite hands. From the top of each deck I produced a Queen of Hearts, and clamped the two cards together in my teeth. “I learned the secrets of royalty,” I said through clenched jaws. Holding the decks in one hand, separated by my pointing finger, I plucked the cards from between my teeth and revealed them as two jacks. “The knaves whispered to me of court intrigues, and the kings and queens taught me the secrets of their royal numbers.”

In my hands, the two cards quickly became a pair of threes, then fives, then sevens, then nines, and then queens again. “Finally, I was rescued.” I riffled the decks together, blowing through them to make the sound of a ship’s horn. “And returned to civilization. And there, I practiced my new art, my new life. And now, having returned from that island called death, where all magic must begin—”

I looked around me, unsure what effect my next request would have. “I call for volunteers, who wish to learn what I have learned.”

The overgrown chamber whispered and lights passed among the fibrous growths like lanterns on far shores. Five figures appeared in the chambers then: Wont, Cant, Shant, Mustnt, and Dont. Cant approached first, smiling her most wistful and attractive smile. “I volunteer,” she said.

Roderick, standing in the background, his feet almost rooted to the floor by thick cables of fiber, lifted his hands in overt approval. Why encourage those he loathed—those who shackled him with so many strictures?

Was he flaunting the strength of his chains, like Houdini?

“Am I a physical person?” I asked Cant, dismissing all questions from my thoughts.

“Yes,” she said. “Very.”

“Am I the last untouched human on this world?”

“In this house, to be sure.”

“Do I have a connection with any of the external powers that can make things appear and disappear, make illusions by wish alone?”

“You do not subscribe to any services,” Cant said. “This we guarantee, as antitheticals.”

I hesitated just a moment, and then took her hand. She felt solid enough—like real flesh. “Are you real?” I asked.

“Who can say?” she replied.

“Is your form solid enough to forego false illusions, illusions of will isolated from body?”

“I can do that, and guarantee it,” Cant said. Her companions took attitudes of rapt attention.

“It is guaranteed,” they said as one.

I began to get some sense of what their function was then, and how they constrained Roderick. What would they do to constrain me?

“If I told you there were cards rolled up in your ears, what would you say?”

“All things are possible,” Cant said musically, “but for you, that is not possible.”

I held my hand up to her ear and drew out a rolled-up card, making sure to tap the auricle and the opening to the canal. She reacted with some puzzlement, then delight.

“You have doubtless been told that in the past, illusion was possible only through tricks. Tell me, then—how do I perform such tricks?”

“Concealment,” Cant said, prettily nonplused.

I showed her my hands, which were empty, then removed my coat, dropping it to the floor, and rolled up my sleeves. I pulled another card from her other ear, unrolled it, showing it to be ruined as a playing card, then converted it to a cigarette by pushing it through my fist.

“Everyone can do that,” Cant said, her smile fading. “But you—”

“I can’t do such things,” I said with a note of triumph. “I am an atavism, an innocent, an anachronic … A lich.” I held out the cigarette. “Does anybody smoke anymore?” I asked. The five did not speak. Roderick shook his head in the shadows. “I didn’t think so. King Nerve needs no chemical stimulants. All drugs are electronic. There is no one else on this planet—or in this house, at least—who can make the world dance, the real world. Except me—and I was taught by the cards.”

The remaining antitheticals came forward. Musnt, as it happened, unknowingly carried a deck of cards in the pockets of his solid but unreal dinner jacket. Producing a fountain pen, I had him mark his name on the edge of the deck, grateful that these phantoms could still write, and blew upon the ink to help it dry. “These cards have friends all over the world, and they tell tales. Have you ever heard cards whisper?” I patted the deck firmly into his hands. “Hold these. Don’t let them go anywhere.” I borrowed his jacket and put it on Dont, helping her into the sleeves with courtesy centuries out of date. The cuffs hung over her hands.

“Hold up your deck of cards, please,” I said to Musnt. He lifted the cards, his face betraying anticipation. I was grateful for small favors.

“I believe you have a set of pockets on the outside of your jacket,” I told Dont. “Investigate them, please.”

She reached into the pockets and removed two cellophane-wrapped decks of cards.

“Sneaky devils, these cards. They go anywhere and everywhere, and listen to our most intimate words. You have to be discreet around playing cards. Open the decks, please.”

She pulled the cellophane from one deck. On the edge of the deck was the awkward scrawl of Musnt, written in fountain pen. Musnt immediately looked at his deck. The edges were blank.

Fibers formed curious worms and squirmed closer, lights pulsing.

“The other deck, now,” I told Dont. She unwrapped the second deck, and there, in fountain pen, was written, Wont.

“Hand the deck to the person whose name is written on the side,” I said. She passed the deck to Wont.

“Write on the other side your name and any number,” I told Wont, giving him the pen. “And then, on a card within the deck, write the name of anybody in this room—in big, sloppy, wet letters. Show the card to everybody except me, and put it within the deck and press the deck together firmly.”

He did this.

“Now give the deck to Cant.”

He passed the deck to her. “How many decks do you carry now?” I asked. She reached into her pockets and found two more decks, which she handed to me, keeping Wont’s deck with his name written on it.

“Now find the card on which Wont has written, and the card immediately next to it, smeared with the wet ink from that card. Write your name on the face of that card, and another number. Show them to everybody but me.”

She did so.

“How many decks do we all have now?” I asked.

I went among them, counting the decks presently in circulation—five. I redistributed the decks one to each of the five Negatives.

“The cards have told each other all about you, and you have no secrets. But I am the master of the cards—and from me not even the cards have secrets!”

I reached behind their ears, one by one, and pulled the cards that had been written on, with the names Cant, Musnt, Dont, and Wont. “The gossip of the cards goes full circle,” I said. “Show us your decks!”

On the top of each deck, the cards bearing the suit and number of the written-on cards—for all had been number cards—appeared, bearing a newly written number, and a new name—Cardino.

The Negatives seemed befuddled. They showed the cards to each other and to the questing fibers.

They had forgotten the art of applause, and the fibers were silent, but no applause was necessary.

“How is this done?” Musnt asked. “You must tell …”

I pitied them, just as a caveman might pity a city slicker who has lost the art of flint knapping. From the beginning of their lives to the present moment, they had truly fooled nobody. They had lived lives of illusion without wonder, for always they could explain how things were done.

All their magic was performed by silent, subservient, electronic demiurges.

“Turn to the last card in your decks,” I said. “Show me who is King.”

On every one of their decks, the King of Hearts was inscribed with two names. They held the cards out simultaneously. Each Negative carried a card bearing his or her name, and in larger letters, RODERICK ESCHER.

The fibers seemed to give a mighty heave. Roderick came forward, and I saw the fibers fleeing from his legs, his suit, his face and skin.

The Negatives turned to each other in confusion. Cant giggled. They compared their decks, searched them. “They’re made of matter,” Wont said. “They aren’t false—”

“Tricks,” Shant said.

“Can you do them?” Wont asked.

“In an instant,” Shant said. Cards fluttered down around him, twisted, formed a tall mannequin and danced around us all. The fibers withdrew from around him as if singed by flames.

“Not the point,” Roderick said, free of fibers now. “You can do anything you want, but you subscribe. Cardino does these things by himself, alone.”

The fibers bunched around my feet. Shant made his cards and the mannequin vanish. “How?” he asked, shrugging.

“Skill,” Roderick said.

“Skill of the body,” Shant said haughtily. “Who needs that?”

“Self-discipline, training, years of concentrated effort,” Roderick said. “Isn’t that right, Cardino?”

“Yes,” I said, the confidence of my performance fading. I was caught in a game whose rules I could not understand. Roderick was using me, and I did not know why.

“Nothing any of us can experience compares to what this man does all by himself,” Roderick continued.

The five froze in place for a moment. I could see some change in their structure, a momentary fluctuation in their illusory shapes.

Roderick lifted his arms and stared at his body. “I’m free!” he said to me in an undertone, as if confiding to a priest.

“What’s all this about?” I asked.

“It’s about skill and friendship and death,” Roderick said.

The five began to move again. The fibers touched my shoes, the hem of my pants. Instinctively, I kicked at them, sending glowing bits scattering like sparks. They recoiled, toughened, pushed in more insistently.

“My time is ending,” Roderick said. “I’ve done all I can, experienced all I can.”

The five smiled and circled around me. “They favor you,” Cant said, and she bent to push a wave of growing fibers toward my legs. I backed off, kicked again without effect, shouted to Roderick,

“What do they want?”

“You,” Roderick said. “My time is done. Maja is dead; I go to follow her.”

I turned and ran from the room, sliding on the clumps of fibers, falling. The fibers lightly touched my face, felt at my cheeks, prodded my lips as if to push into my mouth, but I jumped to my feet and ran through the door. Roderick followed, and behind him a surge of fibers clogged the door.

Wherever I ran in the house, eager fibers grew from the walls, the floor, fell from the ceiling, like webs trying to ensnare me. Cant appeared in a twisted hallway ahead. I fell to my hands and knees, staring as the floor twisted into a corkscrew, afraid I would pitch forward into the architectural madness.

Dr. Ont appeared, shoulders dipped in failure, hands beseeching to explain. “Roderick, do not—”

“It is done!” Roderick cried.

A cold wind flowed down the hall, conveying a low moan of endless agony. Roderick helped me to my feet, his thin fingers cold even through the fabric of my suit.

“Can you feel it?” he whispered to me. “King Nerve has released me. I’m dying, Robert!” He turned to Dr. Ont. “I’m dying, and there’s nothing you can do! I know all the permutations! I’ve experienced it all, and I am bored. Let me die!”

Dr. Ont stared at Roderick with an expression of infinite pity. “Your sister—”

Roderick gripped my shoulders. “We are walled in like prisoners by the laziness of gods, all desires sated, all refinements exhausted. Let them crown the new master!”

The moaning grew louder. Behind Dr. Ont, Roderick’s sister appeared, even more haggard and pale, the feeblest energy of purpose animating a husk, her dry and shrunken mouth trying to speak.

Dr. Ont stood aside as Roderick saw her. “Maja!” Roderick cried, holding up his hands to block out sight of her.

“Still alive,” Dr. Ont said. “I was wrong. She cannot die. We have all forgotten how.”

The five brushed past Roderick, smiling only at me.

“The House of Escher loses all support,” Cant said, lightly brushing my arm. “The flow is with you. The world wants you. You will teach them your experience. You will show them what it feels to be skilled and to have fleshly talents, to work and touch in a primal way. Roderick was absolutely correct—you are a marvel!”

I looked at Roderick, frozen in terror, and then at Maja, her eyes like pits sucking in nothing, as isolated as any corpse—but still alive.

The walls shuddered around me. The fibers withdrew from the stones, and where they no longer held, cracks appeared, running in crazed patterns over the white and yellow surfaces. The tiles of the floor heaved up, their tessellations disrupted, all order scattered.

Cant took my hand and led me through the disintegrating corridors, down the shivering and swaying stairs. Behind me, the stairs buckled and crumbled, and the beams of the ceiling split and jabbed down to the floor like broken elbows. Ahead, a tide of fibers withdrew from the house like sea sucked from a cave, and above the ripping snap of tearing timbers, the rumble and slam of stone blocks falling and shattering, I heard Roderick’s high, chicken-cluck shriek, the cry of an avatar driven past desperation into madness:

“No death! No Death! King Nerve forever!”

And his bray of laughter at the final jest revealed, all his plans cocked asunder.

The antitheticals blew me through the front door like a wind, and down the walk into the ruined garden, among the twisted and fiber-covered trees, until I was away from the house of Roderick Escher. All of his spreading distractions and entertainments, all of his chambers filled with the world’s diversions, the pandering to the commonest denominators of a frozen or disembodied horde … the impossible and convoluted towers leaned, shuddered, and collapsed, blowing dust and splinters through the door and the windows of the first floor.

The fibers pushed from the ground, binding my feet, rising up my legs toward my trunk, feeling through my suit, probing for secrets, for solutions. I felt voices and demands in my head, petulant, childish:

Show us.

Do for us.

Give us.

The fibers burrowed into my flesh with thousands of pricks like tiny cold needles.

Cant took my arm. “You are favored,” she said.

The voices picked at my thoughts, rudely invaded my memories, making crude and cruel jokes. They seemed to know nothing but expletives, arranged in no sensible order, and they applied them accompanied by demands that went beyond the obscene, demands that echoed again and again; and I saw that this new world was composed not of gods, but of rude, ill-bred children who had never faced responsibility or consequence, and whose lives were all secrecy, all privilege, conducted behind thick and impersonal walls.

Tingles shot up my hands and feet and along my spine, and I felt sparks at the very basement of my reason.

Do for us, do everything, live for us, let us feel, all new and all unique, all superlatives and all gladness and joy, and no death no end.

My hands jerked out, holding a pack of cards, and I felt a will other than mine—a collective will—move my fingers, attempt to spread the cards into a fan. The fingers jerked and spilled the cards into the dirt, across the creeping fibers. “Get them away from me!” I cried in furious panic.

The blocks and timbers and reduced towers of the House of Escher settled with a final groaning sigh, but I pictured Roderick and Maja buried beneath its timbers, still alive.

The fibers lanced into my tongue. The voices filling my head hissed and slid and insinuated like snakes, like worms in my living brain, demanding tapeworms, asking numbing questions, prodding, prickling, insatiable.

Cant said, “You must assert yourself. They demand much, but you have so much to give—”

The fibers shoved down my throat, piercing and threading through my tissues as if to connect with every cell of my being. I clawed at my mouth, my throat, my body, trying to tug free, but the fibers were strong as steel wires, though thinner than the strands of a spider’s web.

“Newness is a treasure,” Musnt said, standing beside Cant. Wont and Shant and Dont joined her.

My legs buckled, but the fibers stiffened and held me like a puppet. I could not speak, could only gag, could hardly hear above the dissonant voices.

Amuse.

Give all.

Share all.

“Hail to the new and most masterful,” Cant said worshipfully, smiling simply, innocently. Even in my terror and pain that smile seemed angelic.

“A hundred billion people cannot be wrong,” Shant said, and touched the crown of my head with his outspread hand.

“We anoint the new Master of King Nerve,” the five said as one, and I could breathe for myself, and speak for myself, no more.