Stephen had rather wanted to talk with Henry Winter at length, if for no other reason than to cement his hopeful deduction that Henry's recent wedding had well and truly laid to rest the remnants of old animosity concerning the woman who was now Mrs. Winter. Unfortunately, there had simply been no time for conversation. Stephen had brought little
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Henry and Dax Stephen could imagine engaged in 'dangerous espionage', Henry under the guise of the introverted scholar he actually was (much like Stephen himself) and Dax under the guise of eternal intergalactic tourist-cum-researcher. Chance Silvey, not so. She did not seem to Stephen much talented in dissembling, nor inclined toward such. She did, however, seem the kind of woman whom Stephen might have imagined to appeal to Henry, had Stephen never met Camilla. She was gruff, and taciturn, and plain, and not given to wasting time. She was pretty well nigh the opposite of Camilla.
"You are perhaps fortunate to have been suspected of espionage rather than more mundane entanglements," Stephen noted, along this line. The remark was not without a certain ruefulness: Diana had once suspected Stephen of the reverse, suspected him of infidelity when in fact he had only given the appearance thereof due to the exigencies of espionage.
"Sure you must have been surprised, to return to such an abrupt and definite answer?"
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"I was," he said. "I had to get away, for at least a little while--if it hadn't been to America, I would have found some other pretext. As to more mundane enanglements--" and he thought he knew quite well what that meant "--I don't think it would ever occur to Camilla. She really is much more likely to suspect me of some kind of top-secret mission." What said mission might be, and what its ultimate purpose, he couldn't even begin to guess.
They'd reached the garden, and Henry gently lowered the wheelbarrow, scouting out the lay of the beds in a search for the best possible place to put his little friend Xipe. "I was very surprised," he said, circling a pruned-back shrub. "Camilla, when confronted with something she doesn't want to deal with, can prevaricate endlessly--I was more than half afraid that she'd do so with me. It wouldn't be an outright refusal; it would just be a refusal to give any answer at all." He had no way of knowing that his question--that he himself--was too important to Camilla to be given such treatment.
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(Personally, Stephen would not want to eat anything that had been grown in ground sanctified by the Flayed God of the Aztecs.)
He thought of the hundred little ways Diana had found to put off commitment, and the way he had hopelessly followed in her wake despite it all, and felt he understood exactly what Henry had been afraid would happen. "This would be why I wondered how you had secured her consent," he said, speculatively, half-squinting to try picturing Xipe Totec amid the autumn-dying plants.
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He tugged aside the sacking base he'd wrapped around the statue, eying it and the ground, wondering how far it would sink once he'd set it down. This was only a brief thaw; the ground was squishy in some places, but frozen beneath, and he didn't really need the statue to wind up locked into the earth next time the temperature dipped. "In the end, she did it because she wanted to," he said. "Which is the only reason she ever does anything. That I should be lucky enough that she should want to remains something of a source of wonder."
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He looked at Stephen, curious--he'd wondered if anything would be mentioned of Halloween. "I heard a very little about that," he said. "Camilla and I didn't notice a thing at the time, but Susan mentioned some sort of madness going around."
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"If it did that to any number of people at all, it's just as well we have the Rule," he said, meditatively. "Was it widespread at all? I've heard nothing of it from anyone else, but then Camilla and I have been either occupied or away from the school entirely since then." Francis would have said something, if he'd been affected (though Henry still didn't know about what had happened to his friend's room), and if Charles had...well, they'd have known.
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All things considered, Henry didn't consider it politic to admit he had reason to believe it hadn't been as horrible for Stephen as it had been for himself and Camilla--terrible or no, it was completely overwhelming, far more so than any normal human could stand. "I think she's thought better of the idea, now," he added. "Camilla and I both let her know it really wasn't something she ought to be sharing. Though I have to say that if that's how she experiences the world all the time...well. I'd go mad, myself, and I should think almost anyone else could say the same." Once upon a time he'd craved those semi-divine senses, but now, having experienced them (twice), he was quite happy to remain a dull plodding human.
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"She wanted to share it," he said, after a moment. "And I certainly didn't protest trying it. I think many would want to at least sample the senses of the--not divine, I suppose, but the immortal. Having sampled them, though, I now think most others should not. Also, as I said, if that's indeed how she experiences things all the time, I'm amazed she's got any judgement at all." Some of the things he and Camilla had done--well, they'd always wanted to live without thinking, and for a time they'd most certainly done it.
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The sensory amplification that Susan's experiments sought to confer, though -- that was something Stephen indeed deemed far from horrible. It was something he expected anyone would want, something he himself still wanted, a craving only a series of past lessons in addiction could keep at bay.
"Maddening, yes, but wonderful, did you not find?"
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He shook his head, resting a hand on Xipe Totec's head. "And the dangerous thing about Susan is that I think she would give it again, if any of us asked. I'm certain she won't give it to anybody else, but I'm not so sure she understands either the nature of addiction, or just how very alien her senses truly are to the rest of us."
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