LITMIR.BIZ

       FIVE

      Vincent was also visiting London, but miles away from Noah and Nijinsky.

      Vincent was twentysomething, a trim, average-size guy with carefully barbered brown hair and a downturned mouth and eyes that were brown but with no sense of warmth in them. He had a slightly curved nose and nostrils that flared and a faint scar that extended half an inch above and half an inch below his lips.

      He held himself like a guy who wanted to avoid attention, but he didn’t have the gift of disappearing in a crowd. He had the curse of being noticed, no matter how careful he was to keep his eyes down and his face impassive. People still noticed him because there was just an air about Vincent that suggested tamped-down emotion and volatility barely disguised by his careful movements and his soft, almost inaudible voice.

      He was at dinner, sitting at a dark table in a nice but not stuffy Indian restaurant on Charlotte Street, picking at a poppadom. The target sat across the room at one of the larger, brighter, noisier tables.

      There were five people at that table and the target—Liselotte Osborne—was not the richest or most powerful, so she didn’t sit at the head, she sat halfway down on one side, with her back to Vincent.

      Nevertheless, Vincent had an excellent view of her eye. The left one.

      A part of Vincent’s mind was in the room, hearing without focusing on conversation punctuated by sudden bursts of laughter, seeing the reflection of yellow overhead lights in standard restaurant-grade wine glasses, wondering abstractedly about the choice of art on the papered walls.

      Another part of Vincent’s mind was across the room, perched on Liselotte Osborne’s left lower eyelid. From that vantage point Vincent saw thick-trunked trees that grew in impossibly long curves from spongy, damp pink tissue. These trees had no branches; they were like rough-barked brown palm trees, bending away to disappear out of view behind him. The bark was then glopped in uneven patches by a black tarry substance, like someone had thrown big handfuls of tar at the lashes.

      Eyelashes.

      Eyelashes with mascara.

      Vincent’s spidery legs stepped over a pair of demodex, like crocodiles with the blank faces of soulless felines. Reptilian tails of demodex babies protruded from the base of the eyelash. They wiggled.

      From his perch between two rough-barked, gooey, drooping eyelashes Vincent saw the vast, wet plain of white stretched out to the horizon, a sea of milk beneath a taut wet membrane. Within that milky sea were jagged red rivers. When he tuned his eyes to look close, he could make out the surge and pause, surge and pause of Frisbee-shaped red blood cells and the occasional spongy lymphocyte.

      He was looking out across the white of Liselotte’s eyeball—an eyeball shot through with the red capillaries of a woman who’d had too little sleep, rimmed with black tar, home to microfauna he could see and, of course, a multitude of lifeforms too small even for a biot to make out.

      Vincent felt a rush of wind and saw a barrier rushing toward him at terrifying speed. It was an endless, faintly curved wall of pink-gray that appeared to be maybe ten feet tall. It came rushing across the eyeball like a storm front, swift, irresistible. Jutting far out from that pink-gray wall were more of the dark brown palm trunks, curving upward and extending beyond the range of Vincent’s sight. Like a wall festooned with ridiculously curved pikes.

      Liselotte was blinking.

      Vincent said, “Sparkling, please,” in response to the waiter’s question about what sort of water he would prefer.

      “And are you ready to order?”

      “What’s the speciality of the house? Never mind—whatever it is, I’ll have it. Extra spicy.” He handed the menu to the waiter, who insisted on telling him the special anyway.

      It did not matter to Vincent. Food generally did not matter much to Vincent. It was just one of many pleasures to which he was indifferent, although highly spicy foods created a sensation that was something related perhaps to pleasure.

      Vincent—his real name was Michael Ford—suffered from a rare disorder called anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure. It’s usually a symptom of long-term drug use. Or schizophrenia. But Vincent was neither a junkie nor crazy.

      Well, not crazy in the clinical sense.

      Yet.

      The biot with the functional and not very clever name of V2, tensed its six legs and timed the onrushing eyelid. When

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