He spent a while with the newly painted props that he had been lacquering the night before, hunting Pertos’ emanations on them, the sign that the puppeteer had been here, had worked here, had lived.
Then he went back to be certain Pertos was dead, for it had occurred to him that Pertos had never died before, that his life story didn’t permit death. Had Pertos been living another story, then, too?
Pertos was dead. Blood. Bone. Staring eyes.
He carried the corpse to the Furnace and attempted to feed it inside, with the notion that he could then have Pertos re-created. All. he would have to do was read the nobs, learn to use the knobs. And find out which of the identity wafers would reproduce Pertos. But the Furnace refused to accept the human meat.
Sebastian spilled all the identity wafers out and looked for something he might recognize as Pertos’ name. He had no luck. Then he thought he could look for his own identity wafer, and maybe there would be something about it that would help him find Pertos. Only he and Pertos were big, while Bitty Belina and the others were small. That might mean that he and Pertos had different identity discs. He looked through the wafers four times before he was willing to admit that there was no disc for him. And probably none for Pertos either.
And then he felt sadder than ever.
Just before noon, while Sebastian was outside examining the truck, feeling for the past and finding mostly cold vinyl and icy metal, Trimkin came with two men. They were a different pair, though Sebastian could not be expected to notice that Trimkin seemed always to be accompanied by different men each time, all of them bland.
“Is your master about?” Trimkin asked the idiot.
Sebastian almost said yes, the master is inside, before he realized that no one should ever see Petros now. If anyone saw what he had done to Pertos, they would lock him away, like they would have done over jenny, and then he would be dead himself, chained up in darkness.
“Lose your tongue?” Trimkin asked, smiling. He seemed a pleasant man. Pertos, however, could have told Sebastian that Trimkin had seemed pleasant even while he had supervised the beating his men had dealt the puppet master.
“No,” Sebastian said.
It was not a cold day really, but he was freezing. He wanted to go back into the theater, but he didn’t dare lead them there.
“No what? No, your master isn’t about? Or, no, you still have your tongue?”
Sebastian looked around the cab of the truck where he was sitting, back through the open door at Trimkin.
“I guess he’s inside,” Trimkin said.
“No!” The idiot gasped as the men turned to walk toward the theater.
“No?”
“No.”
“Where then, boy? You wouldn’t lie to us, would you?”
Sebastian shook his head.
“That’s good. Now, if he truly isn’t in the theater, where is he?”
Sebastian could not think of anything to say, and for the thousandth time in his life, he damned his slow-wittedness.
“We don’t want to harm him,” Trimkin said. “We just came to tell him that he might want to come out here, in back, and watch his truck burn.”
For the first time, Sebastian saw the hand torch and the cans of liquid in the hands of the men with Trimkin.
“Inside I guess,” Trimkin said, turning.
“Leaving!” Sebastian gasped. “Going away!”
Trimkin turned again, slowly, smiling broadly. “You wouldn’t kid me about that, would you, son?” He laughed, as if anticipating the joke, though there was a great deal in that laughter that was not humorous.
“Leaving,” Sebastian said.
Trimkin considered that. “There weren’t any handbills about the new play tonight,” he said, speaking to himself as much as to the brute in the truck. “So old Godelhausser has gotten some sense, eh?”
“Some,” Sebastian agreed.
Trimkin exploded with genuine laughter then, and the men with him joined in. His face grew red, and his thin body seemed to tremble all over, as if he had a disease of some sort.
Sebastian smiled nervously.
Trimkin placed a hand on Sebastian’s knee. “You tell your master that we congratulate his good sense”