by Tim Clare
‘You’ve certainly refined your rhetoric.’
‘A decade of isolation brings challenges.’ He stared past her, gaslight picking out fine blades of stubble along his upper lip. ‘This isn’t easy work. You start questioning whether it serves a greater purpose.’ He tilted the glass to his mouth, swilled tea over his molars. ‘The children look to me for leadership.’
‘Children?’
Noroc’s eyes creased as he smiled. ‘I think of the staff as my family.’
‘And what does your family have to show me, Doctor?’
‘Ah. So you’re slitting open the mother’s belly to check on the baby.’
Hagar blenched, remembering Anwen. She sipped her tea, which was sharply frigid and cloying. Its unpleasantness brought her back to the room.
‘Sometimes such a measure is necessary.’ She looked at him over her glass. ‘It’s been an unusually long pregnancy. You understand my concern.’
‘This is delicate work. So you understand mine.’
‘I’m not here to shut you down. If I were, the palace garde du corps would already be heaping kindling against the walls. I come to check that my faith in you is not misplaced. Your “family” costs a great deal to feed.’
‘Have you told the Grand-Duc what goes on here?’
She glared into her drink. Its surface was ringed with a fine ochre scum.
‘I don’t report to Lord Jejunus directly.’ Morgellon had not permitted her within the palace grounds for over fifty years. Since he had not left in that time, she had not seen him.
‘Forgive me,’ said Noroc. ‘I’d forgotten you’re still in disgrace.’ She could not tell if his apology was sincere. Certainly she detected no relish in his tone. ‘I suppose citizens won’t catch a glimpse of him again till he appoints a new servant. Not in my lifetime. How is Prefect Colstrid, by the way? Still in the Grand-Duc’s favour, I take it?’
Hagar banged her glass down on the table. She wearied of indulging this man. He knew his work was important to her – but he did not know how important, could not guess that it represented her last hope. That she might contemplate closing him down was a useful fiction. She sensed the doctor responded better to threats than flattery. He had forgotten his place.
‘What passes between a peer and his servant is none of your concern.’
Dr Noroc looked up with a sudden seriousness.
‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘It’s my life’s work.’
Unit Two was divided into small rooms accessible from a long corridor. In each room, a railed balcony looked down on an iron cage.
Beneath the tart scent of carbolic acid, Hagar smelt sweat, urine, excrement.
‘Everything you see here is an answer to a question I have asked,’ said Noroc, his diction stifled by his surgical mask.
Below, a naked human male was spread-eagled across a table, held in place by iron cuffs and a stout iron band over the sternum. His left arm had been amputated at the shoulder and positioned several feet away, manacled at the wrist and elbow. Pencil marks split the distance into inches.
‘Here, the question is: will the parasite attempt to reconnect with the severed arm, or simply grow a new one? How far from the body must a limb be before the body rejects it? Where is the threshold for reintegration versus regeneration?’
Even as she watched, capillaries were extending from the shoulder stump, crawling over the flat surface of the wood, splitting and spreading like floodwater irrigating a system of ditches. To Hagar’s left, a researcher in white overalls and full-face respirator mask stood with pocketwatch and notebook, occasionally leaning against the rail to scribble an observation. By the light of four gas mantles, a fine lacework of new arteries glistened. Flesh settled in fatty puddles.
The man’s head had been shaved. His eyes were closed. He gnawed gently at a leather gag.
Hagar flicked the tip of her tongue over the gap left by her missing eye tooth. She watched the man writhing in his restraints, and her gut twisted.
‘How does this advance our cause?’
Noroc sighed through his mask. ‘By increasing our knowledge. Come.’
He moved to place a palm on her shoulder and she pulled away. His eyes narrowed; his mouth was hidden. He gestured towards the door.
In the next room, the subject was a human female. The head had been severed and placed some six feet from the supine body. Braids of meat were snaking downwards from the throat like potato roots.
‘Does the head regrow the body or the body regrow the head?’ said Noroc. ‘Where does the core of the parasite lie? Where, if you will, is its soul?’
‘So you’re a philosopher.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You don’t think it an important question?’
Hagar pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She could not honestly say she did not.
‘And the answer?’
The doctor held up a finger. ‘Well, of course, no two presentations of godfly infestation are identical. The sample host inflects the parasite’s talents to a significant degree.’
‘The honours manifest in different ways.’
‘Ah. No, no, no.’ She heard him laugh beneath his mask. ‘The honours are a sacred duty bestowed upon the wisest and most virtuous. The sting of the godfly consecrates and formalises a promise to defend and nurture the terrestrial world and its inhabitants. Only a unanimous consensus at a perpetuum ganzplenum can authorise the creation of a new peer.’
‘I know the rules.’
‘Then you know why we don’t speak of honours. We have no peers here. Only parasites and samples.’
He showed her a room in which two dog-sized snarls of cartilage and soft tissue lay pulsing at opposite ends of the sunken cage, separated by wooden dividers. ‘We’re isolating precisely where the parasite inheres.’
Hagar leaned over the rail, holding her hat in place, and realised that the two lumps of ochre flesh were halves of a human head, bisected laterally, trying to grow back to one another. She could make out the moth-wing twist of an ear, a hard seam of molars.
‘The parasite will always prefer to reabsorb key parts over growing new ones,’ said Noroc. ‘In the dark, underwater – as long as they’re close enough, it senses them and attempts to make them reattach.’
‘You speak as if there’s an intelligence at work.’
Noroc did not say anything, but she thought she saw his lips move beneath the mask.
In the next room, a masked researcher was down in the cage, standing over a naked human female subject strapped to a gurney. The researcher held a lancet in a reverse pencil grip, calmly making crosswise incisions in the subject’s eyeballs, then stepping back to observe their healing. The subject’s head was held in place with straps and clamps, a gag filling their mouth. Stifled whimpering escaped through the wadded gauze.
As the wet blade punctured the cornea, Hagar winced, involuntarily closing her own eye. When she glanced up she saw Noroc watching her.
‘Feel anything?’ he said. A small damp patch had appeared in the white fabric of his mask, tracing the slit of his mouth.
She resisted the urge to rub the collar of her eye, to check the surface was still intact.
‘This is very basic work,’ she said.
‘Not basic. Fundamental.’ He led her back into the corridor. ‘Contrary to folk belief and certain mythmaking efforts by various houses over the centuries, the godfly parasite is not magic. It follows rules, obeys certain economies. The more clearly we understand those rules, the greater our ability to . . .’ He cleared his throat. When he continued, he spoke in an undertone. ‘You know, much of this work is due to the, ah . . . broadness of my instructions. We could make much faster progress if you told me your final goal. What do you want, Hagar?’
Ah. So he was trying to blame her for all this. She glanced over her shoulder, down the corridor with its low, slanted ceiling. They were alone. She turned back to Noroc, looked at him squarely.
‘I want what I believe is be
st for Lord Jejunus and all sentient beings.’
‘Is the Grand-Duc aware of the work we do in his name?’
‘That’s twice you’ve asked me.’
‘The first time, you declined to answer.’
‘He directs his attention where he sees fit.’
Noroc let his gaze drift to the side. He nodded.
‘I think I take your meaning.’ He passed his cotton-gloved hands over one another in a washing motion.
In the next room, below the viewing balcony, a young human sat manacled to a sturdy wooden chair, his head fixed in place by straps. The sample was perhaps in his mid-twenties, though his shaven scalp, glossy scars and limbs tanned and coarsened from field labour gave him the wretched pseudo-age she had witnessed in soldiers. His thick fingers clenched the arms of the chair as a masked researcher harvested sticky white grubs from the cysts in his throat, tweezing them one at a time into a glass flask. Behind the researcher was a mesh cage containing several large brown rats.
Hagar felt for the young man, who was clearly uncomfortable and frightened – though presumably not in pain. She had procured samples for the mill from Fat Maw’s criminal class – drug smugglers, violent indigents and political enemies: separatists, pro-Hilantian radicals, foreign agents – people facing execution or a life on the labour farms. Still, she felt a grinding sadness at his predicament, almost a solidarity. She wished he would open his eyes and glance up, so she might smile, offer some momentary consolation.
Of course he was not truly like her. He had been given the honours, however Noroc’s legalistic weasel language might disguise it. He was a peer. He no longer felt pain. The maundygrubs gestating in his throat were a part of the process usually kept secret. Most peers hid the lump with high collars, silk scarves. It hardly seemed godly, appointing servants by allowing a supple white worm to burrow under their skin. Hagar had been unconscious when Morgellon did it to her. She was glad.
Noroc appeared beside her on the rail. He leaned in and whispered:
‘This is a study I think you’ll find particularly compelling.’
The researcher stoppered the flask and picked up a thin steel rod. They heated the rod over a gas flame. Blue fire flared in their mask’s lenses. After about a minute, the researcher pushed the rod into the sample’s shoulder with a twist. The sample shuddered and inhaled sharply, but did not cry out.
Hagar tensed. She pictured a valet somewhere in the facility, strapped to a cot, bucking with agony as he felt searing steel chew into phantom muscle. She had made a terrible misjudgement. This was grotesque, inhumane. Noroc’s isolation had sent him insane. He was torturing people for sport.
‘Watch the rats.’ Noroc’s voice was soft, mollifying.
Increasingly nauseous, she made herself concentrate on the mud-coloured rats in the cage below. There were three, each perhaps two feet long including the tail. She watched them rake at the mesh of their cage. They were shrieking.
The researcher withdrew the rod from the sample’s shoulder, bringing with it a little corkscrew of red flesh, which dropped to the floor, smoking. The cauterised wound began folding in on itself, a tiny puckered mouth. The rats were writhing over one another, thrashing and squealing.
Hagar shoved herself back from the rail. She rattled the door handle – yanked the door, but it would not give. She pushed; it opened and she stumbled out into the corridor. She slapped her back to the wall, gasping.
Could she have made a mistake? Was she deluded? Why would God show her such suffering, if not to chastise her, if not to demand: repent, repent?
Dr Noroc was coming. She wiped her eyes and fastened her riding goggles.
Everything was smaller through the goggles. Distant. Manageable.
Noroc stepped into the corridor. His skull flattened where it met the curvature of her lenses.
‘Naked flames irritate my eyes,’ she said, relieved at how bland the words came out. The statement was technically true.
Noroc performed a shallow bow. ‘I should have warned you. My apologies. You see now why our researchers take precautions.’
‘Those rats . . .’
Noroc straightened. ‘Please, ask whatever you wish.’
‘Are they . . . Have you . . .’
‘Yes.’ His pleasure was audible. ‘They bear pain on the sample’s behalf, experiencing it as their own. We’ve mastered creating the first sample-to-animal bonds.’
‘His servants are rats?’
Noroc’s eyes narrowed. ‘Let’s go outside.’
As they walked the weed-tangled rear courtyard, Hagar wondered – not for the first time – if Arthur had been mistaken. Perhaps Noroc had been brilliant, once, but granted the scientific freedoms he had craved, he had become a butcher, sacrificing progress to satisfy his lavish, bestial appetites. She could not see the value in these intricate, vaudevillian cruelties, except as validations of Noroc’s escalating megalomania.
She stopped, turned to him. ‘Why don’t you give yourself the honours?’
‘It’s forbidden.’
‘This whole facility is forbidden, Doctor. You’re torturing and slaying peers, whatever taxonomy you care to hide behind. Why not become one?’ She studied the oily grey filaments in his black hair. ‘Who else could do this work? Don’t you want to live to see its completion?’
He pulled the surgical mask from his face. His top lip was moist.
‘Do you consider your three and a half centuries a gift?’
She kicked at a dark green clump of urchinbane. ‘I believe they have purpose.’
‘And do you believe you are the same person you were before you received your . . . infection?’
‘Of course not.’
Noroc nodded, turning away from her. His steel toecap clipped a loose slab and he stumbled. He was drunk. Of course he was. So was everyone here. That was how they survived.
He steadied himself, smeared a palm across his glistening brow.
‘I wonder how much of a person the parasite leaves intact,’ he said. ‘I wonder whether the person who wakes up a peer is the same one who bowed their head to receive the anointing sting. Whether they are . . . directed. I see signs of an additional intelligence.’
‘I feel no presence. I’m not a Mucorian.’
‘Certainly the godfly parasite is more subtle than a Mucorian.’ He smiled. ‘In a Mucorian the host consciousness is completely and permanently supplanted. All traces of the host personality disappear within twelve hours. It’s impossible to say whether they’re still aware in any meaningful way – all attempts at removing the fungus once its fibres have penetrated the brain stem have resulted in the death of the sample. Yet Mucorians have fine motor control. They can understand commands. They can speak. They retain the sample’s known languages. Something must remain. Unfortunately thus far we’ve been able to learn little from the Mucorians themselves. They seem . . .’ he circled his palm, ‘. . . unresponsive to questions of a reflexive existential nature.’
‘You’re holding them captive and torturing them.’
Noroc flashed her a look of boredom. ‘Without my intervention they wouldn’t have hosts at all. I’m giving them life.’
Mucorians had been created by the Hilanta as biological weapons. The art’s crowning glory, really. By the last of the wars, Hilantia had revived dozens of the old technologies – mycocraft in particular. They had cultivated paralysing moulds, boulder-sized puffballs that could be launched from siege weapons, and windborne spores that caused madness. Vesperi had been routed from their homeland – the great aerie-cities of Lepakkoma were completely destroyed. The perpetuum had lost northern Albion. With Lord Bechstein preoccupied by domestic purges and Lord Jejunus holed up in his throne room in Athanasia, the remaining perpetuum forces had been in disarray. It was then the Hilanta had introduced the Mucorian parasite, presumably intending to strike a knockout blow.
The parasite was a fungus that could be ingested or introduced through open wounds. Once spores took root in the
brain, the parasite took control, suppressing pain, assisting with healing, sharpening perception and linking with other Mucorian-controlled minds in a crude network. Compared to the honours, their powers were limited – indeed, Hagar was unsure whether the parasite suppressed pain or simply had no capacity for understanding it – but crucially, the parasite was sovereign over its host – as the Hilanta discovered to their cost. They had meant to raise an army of soldier-slaves from their prisoners of war. Instead, the Mucorians rose up against their masters. Being largely impervious to the fungal weapons from which they were developed, they turned the tide of war decisively.
Despite their contribution, it was hard for Mucorians to find a place in society when they inhabited the bodies of that nation’s war dead. Still, their continuing existence was a powerful disincentive to Hilantian dreams of conquest, so the perpetuum officially recognised the Mucorians, and granted them a tiny island off the remote Dellamore Atolls, as well as several unassuming embassies. It would always be an uneasy alliance. The bodies they used aged normally. To survive as a species, Mucorians needed hosts.
‘We’ve three live samples in Unit Four which we’ve infected with the Mucorian fungus. If you wish to view them you’re very welcome.’
‘Perhaps later.’
‘But your comparison is suggestive, Hagar. Yes, the Mucorian parasite dominates the host, but as you know, there are less wasteful, resource-intensive ways to overthrow an empire than total conquest. The godfly parasite’s influence may be more insidious.’ He licked a corner of handkerchief and dabbed his lips. ‘The power behind the throne.’
Hagar watched him gravely, trying to ignore her quickening breaths. ‘That doesn’t sound like science, Doctor.’
‘All disciplines intersect eventually.’ He looked at her. ‘Haven’t you ever wondered what the parasite derives from this relationship? What it gets in return for its lavish gifts?’
‘I’m not a naturalist.’
‘You know the insects worship it? The godstuff.’
