Carl May sat amongst the Pharaohs and wept. ‘I am a stranger in my own land,’ he thought. He shivered and felt sick. Painted eyes stared at him, oval, beautiful and calm: the carved and soulful eyes of strange beasts, but there was no one to talk to. His impatience had driven them away. His own easy irritation, his flashing anger, his unreasonable demands, had seared a burnt and blasted space around and no one came near him. Why should they? He wouldn’t if he were them. He lived in a kennel, and barked. If he’d been his own mother, he’d have put himself there.
He was dying. He did not care. Only that none of it had been what he wanted, none of it what he meant. He hoped Bethany would be all right. Death, he could see, was too great a punishment for the habit of correcting someone out of turn. Nausea made him feel kind: as if you needed strength to be cruel and kindness was just the easiest, most natural thing. There was no more time to investigate the notion. The mind had to die, that was the dreadful thing: bodies were two a penny, but that all the buzzing speculation of the individual mind had to go – therein lay the tragedy. He should never have got involved with the Barbers of the Bath. That had been insanity. He wished to apologize to the clones of Joanna May. But he didn’t have the strength. Too late.
After he’d got out of the pond, towelled and walked back to the VIP room, the meters – the ones put in to reassure the visitors – had started to chatter. The area had been cleared, more or less. Media men will risk anything for a story, even stay round chattering meters. What a fuss! They’d wanted to put him in the isolation room and start emergency treatments, but he knew already it was no good. It had been foretold. Let them suck out as much bone marrow as they wanted, he was finished. Philip drove him back to Eton Square. Good for Philip. He’d make the alarms chatter now, too. He wondered if it had been an accident. Probably not. Who had fixed it? Coustain? His own Divination Department? Joanna? He wouldn’t blame her. He wished she was with him. In spite of everything, he wished she was there. He thought Isaac was in the room; he hoped he was: it would be somebody to talk to. But there was no one, nothing animate. No sound at all, unless he was deaf. He would have to take his own journey through death, so alone, without servants, without friends; stand at the Throne of the Most High, and make his explanation there, without support, without witnesses. What could he say? I wanted to know what would happen next? Was that enough? There had not been time: he had been clapped like a bird in full flight, soaring. Fate was unkind, but just.
It wasn’t Isaac. It was Joanna. He saw her blue eyes. He shivered so much he could hardly speak. He said, ‘No, don’t come too near.’
She said, ‘I never did, I never dared. I should have been more brave.’
He said, ‘I know all that. I know. My fault.’
She just stared at him, but at least her eyes moved. They weren’t dead. He had, after all, spared her, saved her. Now he had his reward.
‘Joanna,’ Carl May said, ‘take me, remake me. For God’s sake, remake me.’
‘All right,’ said Joanna May.