ONE
Todd knew the mechanics of illusion passably well. He’d always enjoyed watching the special effects guys at work, or the stuntmen with their rigs; and now there was a new generation of illusionists who worked with tools that the old matte painters and model-makers of an earlier time could not even have imagined. He’d been in a couple of pictures in which he’d played entire scenes against blank green screens, which were later replaced with landscapes which only existed in the ticking minds of computers.
But the illusions at work in this room of Katya’s were of another order entirely. There was a force at work here that was both incredibly powerful and old; even venerable. It did not require electricity to fuel it, nor equations to encode it. The walls held it, with possessive caution, beguiling him by increments.
At first he could make virtually no sense of the images. It simply seemed that the walls were heavily stained. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to reading the surface, he realized he was looking at tiles, and that what he’d taken to be stains were in fact pictures, painted and baked into the ceramic. He was standing in a representation of an immense landscape, which looked more realistic the longer he looked at it. There were vast expanses of dense forests; there were stretches of sun-drenched rock; there were steep cliff-walls, their crannies nested by fearless birds; there were rivulets that became streams, in turn converging into glittering rivers, which wound their way towards the horizon, dividing into silver-fringed deltas before they finally found the sea. Such was the elaboration of the painting that it would take many hours of study, perhaps even days, to hope to discover everything that the painters had rendered. And that would only have been the case if the pictures had been static, which, as he was now astonished to see, was not the case.
There were little flickers of motion all around him. A gust of wind shook the tangle of a thicket; one of those fearless birds wheeled away from the cliff-face, three hunting dogs sniffed their way through the undergrowth, noses to the ground. “Katya … ?” Todd said.
There was no reply from behind him (where he thought she’d last been standing); so he looked back. She wasn’t there. Nor was the door through which he’d stepped to come into this new world. There was just more landscape: more trees, more rocks, more birds, wheeling.
The motion multiplied with every flicker of his gaze. There were ripples on the rivulets and streams, there were clouds over the sea, being hurried along by the same wind that filled the sails of the ships that moved below. There were men, too, all around. Riders, moving through the forest; some solitary, some in groups of three or four; one procession of five horses mounted by richly attired men, parading solemnly between the trees. And fishermen on the banks of the streams; and on little boats, bobbing around the sandbars at the delta; and in one place, inexplicably, two men laid out naked on a rock, and in another, far more explicable, another pair hanging from a tree, while their lynchers sat in the shade of the old tree they’d put to such guilty use, and looked out at the rest of the world as they shared a flagon of beer.
Again he looked around for Katya, but she wasn’t to be seen. But she’d said she’d be close by, even if — as now — he couldn’t see her. The room, he began to understand, had control of his eyes. He found his gaze repeatedly led away from where she might be, led skyward, to gawk at some passing birds (there were tiles on the vaulted roof, he saw; he could hear the squeak of the bird’s wings as they passed overhead); led into the forest, where animals he could not name moved as if in some secret ceremony, and others fought; and others lay dead; and still others were being born. (Though like did not spring from like in this world. In one spot an animal the size and shape of a tiger was giving birth to half a dozen white lizards; in another a hen the size of a horse was retreating from her eggs in panic, seeing that they’d cracked open and were spilling huge blue flies.)