It’s all coming in small and dry at the sinking end of summer; Stark looks glumly over the shriveled crop and wonders whether they’ll provide any juice at all.
“Are they supposed to look like that?” asks Antonia.
“They didn’t used to,” Stark admits. They follow the reaper along the elevated walkway into the big barn.
“You tried fertilizer?”
Stark shakes his head. “Costs money.”
“Pesticides?”
“They can swat their own flies.”
“Crop rotation? Irrigation? Er, compost? Anything?”
“Look,” snaps Stark, “if I wanted to tend to something I’d grow corn,” as the brain harvest squishes out onto the threshing floor.
That the remainder of the research group be persuaded, by means of entirely positive entreaties, to continue working at the company and attending interview sessions.
That the control group be compensated for their time, released, and replaced with one better representative of area demographics.
That all particle transmission containment procedures be reviewed end-to-end, rethought, reinforced and reinstituted on an enterprise scale.
That, considering press coverage attitude and buzzword penetration, further investigation in this vein be rebranded and possibly shifted to another subsidiary (see attached).
That, given stockholder preference and the anticipated cost/benefit ratio, investigation in this vein continue.
They watch him in the side mirror of the car, sipping Thai iced teas. He’s brooding, flipping pizza in a sullen chain restaurant kitchen, not looking up.
“I believed my own hype,” mutters Liz. “Stupid. I thought if I loved him, that if I tried, I could fuck the crazy out of his brain.”
Delarivier shakes her head. “Your failure lies in where you placed his crazy.”
“You don’t have to put our whole relationship in terms of my failure,” says Liz.
“I didn’t. You did.”
“Then where was it really, smartass?”
“Men,” says Delarivier, “are crazy down to the bones.”
“It was at this point,” says Sherrinford, “that he shook my hand–”
“Aha!” says Sacker. “From which gesture you surely gathered a panoply of interesting details.”
“It was neither limp and cold, like a dead fisherman’s, nor crushingly tight like that of some great Russian sadist,” says Sherrinford. “His fingers were slightly moist from the exertion of climbing the stairs. The shake was appropriately firm, and ended after a clasp and a slight vertical movement.”
“And what did you deduce?” asks Sacker, mustaches twitching.
“Almost completely nothing,” says Sherrinford, “the only people who don’t shake hands like that are in books.”
The secrets of the Witches of Athay include a method for storing all the blood in your body in a jar in the cooling cellar. Isabella does so, with a knife and a pipette, then gives Patrick the umbrella and leads him out into the storm of glass. The music of the shards is beautiful; the cuts don’t hurt. She seals them up with superglue.
In the cooling cellar again, she pours her blood back in through her ear.
“I think you should have waited,” says Patrick.
“What?” says Isabella, as, in a pattern of tiny fountains, she begins to leak.