“You have to come and see, Zacharias!” Scopique was enthusing, putting his arm beneath the derelict and hoisting him up.
Aping lent a hand, and together they began to carry Gentle to the window, from which his mind was already departing. He left them to their kindness, the exhilaration he’d felt like an engine in him. Out and along the dreary corridor he went, passing cells in which prisoners were clamoring to be released to see the suns. He had no sense of the building’s geography, and for a few moments his speeding soul lost its way in the maze of gray brick, until he encountered two guards hurrying up a flight of stone stairs and went with them, an invisible mind, into a brighter suite of rooms. There were more guards here, forsaking games of cards to head out into the open air.
“Where’s Captain N’ashap?” one of them said.
“I’ll go and tell him,” another said, and broke from his comrades towards a closed door, only to be called back by another, who told him, “He’s in conference—with the mys-tif,” the reply winning a ribald laugh from his fellows.
Turning his spirit’s back on the open air, Gentle flew towards the door, passing through it without harm or hesitation. The room beyond was not, as he’d expected, N’ashap’s office but an antechamber, occupied by two empty chairs and a bare table. On the wall behind the table hung a painting of a small child, so wretchedly rendered the subject’s sex was indeterminate. To the left of the picture, which was signed Aping, lay another door, as securely closed as the one he’d just passed through. But there was a voice audible from the far side: Vigor N’ashap, in a little ecstasy.
“Again! Again!” he was saying, then an outpouring in a foreign tongue, followed by cries of “Yes!” and “There! There!”
Gentle went to the door too quickly to prepare himself for what lay on the other side. Even if he had—even if he’d conjured the sight of N’ashap with his breeches down and his Oethac prick purple—he could not have imagined Pie loh’ pah’s condition, given that in all their months together he had never once seen the mystif naked. Now he did, and the shock of its beauty was second only to that of its humiliation. It had a body as serene as its face, and as ambiguous, even in plain sight. There was no hair on any part of it; nor nipples; nor navel. Between its legs, however, which were presently spread as it knelt in front of N’ashap, was the source of its transforming self, the core its couplers touched with thought. It was neither phallic nor vaginal, but a third genital form entirely, fluttering at its groin like an agitated dove and with every flutter reconfiguring its glistening heart, so that Gentle, mesmerized, found a fresh echo in , each motion. His own flesh was mirrored there, unfolding as it passed between Dominions. So was the sky above Patashoqua and the sea beyond the shuttered window, turning its solid back to living water. And breath, blown into a closed fist; and the power breaking from it: all there, all there.
N’ashap was disdainful of the sight. Perhaps, in his heat, he didn’t even see it. He had the rnystif s head clamped between his scarred hands and was pushing the sharp tip of his member into its mouth. The mystif made no objection. Its hands hung by its sides, until N’ashap demanded their attention upon his shaft. Gentle could bear the sight no longer. He pitched his mind across the room towards the Oethac’s back. Hadn’t he heard Scopique say that thought was power? If so, Gentle thought, I’m a mote, diamond hard. Gentle heard N’ashap gasp with pleasure as he pierced the mystif’s throat; then he struck the Oethac’s skull. The room disappeared, and hot meat pressed on him from all sides, but his momentum carried him out the other side, and he turned to see N’ashap’s hands go from the mystif’s head to his own, a shriek of pain coming from his lipless mouth.
Pie’s face, slack until now, filled with alarm as blood poured from N’ashap’s nostrils. Gentle felt a thrill of satisfaction at the sight, but the mystif rose and went to the officer’s assistance, picking up a piece -of its own discarded clothing to help staunch the flow. N’ashap twice waved its help away at first, but Pie’s pliant voice softened him, and after a time the captain sank back in his cushioned chair and allowed himself to be tended. The mystif s cooings and caresses were almost as distressing to Gentle as the scene he’d just interrupted, and he retreated, confounded and repulsed, first to the door, then through it into the antechamber.