Star Winds

In his short tour Rachad saw only a fraction of the vast and mysterious building. But it was enough to give him the flavor of the duke’s aesthetic experiments—for he soon realized that though many men of genius had been at work here, they were all influenced by the peculiar private tastes the duke had inherited from his father. Everywhere there was quiet music, sometimes from the drifting melody mist, sometimes from indefinable distant sources, much of it strange and jarring to the ear—developed, Rachad imagined, from the odd dissonances and mindtwisting themes, lacking key or regular rhythm, that the melody mist generated. And often there were eerie cries, bellows, prolonged and unintelligible monologues, and frighteningly strange singing—though whether all of this emanated from madmen or from some form of drama that was being performed, Rachad did not inquire.

Yet despite all these sounds, an unnerving air of silence prevailed in the Aegis. Every noise, every cry, every note of music, seemed to be surrounded by this silence, seemed to be separated from every other sound by long gulfs of silence. It was a heavy, blank silence that to a newcomer was depressing. It might, Rachad thought, result from the surrounding walls of deadening adamant—yet somehow it seemed to him to be the endless silence of a long and continuing decadence.

The duke took him through a series of suites, each drenched in a particular color: the blue suite, of a rich luminous blue; the saffron suite, the magenta suite, and so on. “By lingering in these,” the duke told him, “one’s mind becomes saturated with a single color. Given long enough, I believe a human being would become incapable of perceiving any other color—anything but blue, for instance.”

“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.”