Barrington Bayley - Star Winds

“Has the experiment been carried out?” Rachad asked.

“Yes, by a second cousin of mine,” the duke replied. “He stayed for one year in the magenta suite. But he never emerged to put our thesis to the test. One day he accidentally opened an artery with his scarlet razor. Being unable to distinguish his flowing blood from the crimson satins, he quickly bled to death without realizing it.”

Wordlessly they left the monochrome rooms. Rachad found himself in a small picture gallery hung with a charming set of largish paintings. They all showed similar scenes: graceful men and women in long robes, conversing and relaxing in Arcadian settings, in shady groves, amid fluted columns and spacious colonnades. Their intelligent, serene faces, their ease of gesture, showed them to be a highly cultivated people. Rachad could imagine them to be the philosophers of ancient times, discoursing on the nature of the world.

“These are by Giacourt,” the duke announced evenly. “In my view, the greatest painter Maralia has ever produced. He spent his last twenty years with us.”

He conducted Rachad through the opposite door. Beyond was an identical gallery, hung with what at first seemed to be identical paintings. It took only moments, however, to realize the difference. In expression and stance, the figures had been subtly altered. They looked at one another now in a sly, speculative way, as if seized by new thoughts and feelings they could not subdue.

Beyond that was yet a third gallery, also identical. Here, using the same figures and the same settings, the artist had carried his sequence to a nauseating conclusion—an orgy of perversion, rape and hideous butchery that left Rachad sick and trembling with horror.

“Giacourt had no illusions concerning human nature,” the duke murmured. “You find such visions disturbing, perhaps? No matter… here in the Aegis you may enjoy whatever pleasures you choose. Come, and I will show you something that is the answer to all life’s strivings.”

They walked through a seemingly endless garden of multicolored orchids of enormous size which threw off clouds of heavy, sleepy scents. Purple and pink humming birds darted hither and thither, dipping their beaks into the giant bells and emerging dusted in golden powder. The garden was lit not by ceiling lights but by pulsing globes mounted on four-foot-high pedestals, so that a jungle of flaring shadows seemed to be added to the scene.

Finally they descended some steps and came to a sunken part of the garden. Here, in a low grotto, was what appeared to be a tiled circular mud bath, in which a dozen or so people sprawled with eyes closed, as if in sleep.

“This we call dream-slime,” the duke said, his distant, drifting voice adopting a caressing tone. “The recipe for the concoction was discovered by my father’s personal apothecary, after much trial and error… and considerable mental derangement of the patients he used as subjects.”

Stooping, he scooped up a handful of the mud, then took Rachad by the wrist and daubed a gob of it on the back of his hand. Immediately Rachad felt a warm, tingling sensation in the flesh of his hand. From it, a feeling of pleasure began to seep into him, a piercing, near-orgasmic pleasure, with an as-yet-undefined sense of expectancy…

He stared at the slime. On closer inspection the clay-colored stuff was actually composed of millions of motes, each a different color so that they all merged into the same muddy brown.

The pleasure intensified. With sudden panic he slopped the slime from him, letting it fall to the tiles, and wiped his hand on his breeches.

The duke laughed softly. “That was merely a foretaste. The real meaning of the slime is in the dreams it brings—waking dreams that take the place of current reality, or sleeping dreams, as you will.”

“It sounds… unhealthy,” Rachad muttered.

“Oh, no… the slime creates no fantasy world. It gives one nothing false or invented… it can create no new experience. What it does is cause one to live over again the pleasurable events one has already experienced—but to experience them intensified and heightened to exquisite, almost unbearable levels. Have you ever felt that life’s pleasures are a disappointment? How often, young man, have you desired a maid, only to find, when eventually you enjoy her, that it is less of a delight than you imagined it would be? Then what you need is the dream-slime. In it you can experience the highlights of life over again, but with an intensity that would make you faint away were you awake.”

Rachad stared bemused at the slumberers in the slime bath, for the first time noticing that they were all naked. “You will appreciate by now,” the duke said in a near-whisper, as though he barely possessed the energy to speak, “that we in the Aegis live a life of the utmost debauchery of the senses, indeed of all the faculties. And if our senses become jaded by abuse, if our bodies can no longer be stimulated to respond, why, it makes no difference. Dream-slime will add all that is missing, and more.”

Wordlessly Rachad followed his guide out of the orchid garden. His mind was scarcely on the other wonders that the duke showed to him, such as the waterfall of drugged wine that tumbled for seven of the Aegis’s levels, splashing onto rocks to form sparkling pools in which one could bathe and become sated. Indeed by this time his own capacity for new sights was itself sated, so much so that he merely felt bewildered when the duke showed him one of the most impressive of the Aegis’s artistic accomplishments: a number of salons and apartments based on illusion, which by means of clever lighting tricks, oddly shaped rooms and ingenious screens that moved unseen by the observer, left the occupant disorientated and unable to make normal perceptual judgments. He was then receptive to new perversions of the senses that were then introduced. Here were boudoirs where, by moving from one part of the room to another, one became either a midget or a giant in relation to one’s sexual partner. Here were private bordellos where women seemed to flit in and out of the walls, the floor, the air, attacking their client in endless streams and enmeshing him in an inescapable web of lechery. Here were painted picturamas so cunningly devised that Rachad could not believe that he would not be able to step into the incredible scenes they depicted.

Shortly he was to receive more evidence that the duke richly deserved his reputation for insanely wanton sensuality. Perceiving that his charge was by now surfeited with new impressions, the haughty aesthete observed that the Aegis’s day was well advanced, and that it was time to repair to the regular evening banquet.

While the meal progressed he turned the pages of The Root of Transformations , commenting lengthily on the text and pointing out significances in the illustrations, even in fine details, which were entirely novel to Rachad, and which he suspected would have been so even to Gebeth. Closing the book, the duke continued, in the vague and faltering voice that clearly belied a keen intellect, to talk of alchemical principles in general. He spoke of the fusion of positive and negative, of the alchemical marriage which must always take place within a sealed vessel, of the joust of the red and black knights, and so on. Going on from that, he gave Rachad the first clear account he had ever heard of the three primordial forces of sulphur, quicksilver and salt.

To this one-sided discourse Rachad added little, firstly because he knew little, but also because the duke’s table habits left him stupefied. His own food was familiar and appetizing, but to the duke there was served dish after dish of different foods altogether—unrecognizable stuffs which gave off bizarre aromas. The flavors, it seemed, were equally strange, a combination of the delicious and nauseous so overpowering that several times the duke lost control and turned to vomit into an urn placed near his chair.