men." Because it was Brautigan who coined the phrase. "Speak of angels, hear the flutter of their wings,"
Prentiss's beloved Ma might have said, and Pimli supposed that if there were true manimals in these final days of the true world, then the can-toi would fill the bill much better than the taheen. If you saw them without their weird living masks, you would have thought they were taheen, with the heads of rats. But unlike the true taheen, who regarded humes (less a few remarkable exceptions such as Pimli himself) as an inferior race, the can-toi worshipped the human form as divine. Did they wear the masks in worship? They were closemouthed on die subject, but Pimli didn't think so. He thought they believed they were becoming human-which was why, when they first put on their masks (these were living flesh, grown rather than made), they took a hume name to go with their hume aspect. Pimli knew they believed they would somehow replace human beings after the Fall... although hmv they could believe such a thing was entirely beyond him. There would be heaven after the Fall, that was obvious to anyone who'd ever read the Book of Revelation... but Earth?
Some new Earth, perhaps, but Pimli wasn't even sure of that.
Two can-toi security guards, Beeman and Trelawney, stood at the end of the hall, guarding the head of the stairs going down to the basement. To Pimli, all can-toi men, even those with blond hair and skinny builds, looked weirdly like that actor from the forties and fifties, Clark Gable. They all seemed to have the same thick, sensual lips and batty ears. Then, when you got very close, you could see the artificial wrinkles at the neck and behind the ears, where their hume masks twirled into pigtails and ran into the hairy, toothy flesh that was their reality (whether they accepted it or not). And there were the eyes. Hair surrounded them, and if you looked closely, you could see that what you originally took for sockets were, in fact, holes in those peculiar masks of living flesh. Sometimes you could hear the masks themselves breathing, which Pimli found both weird and a litde revolting.
"Hile," said Beeman.
"Hile," said Trelawney.
Pimli and Finli returned the greeting, they all fisted their foreheads, and then Pimli led the way downstairs. In the lower corridor, walking past the sign which read WE MUST ALL WORK
TOGETHER TO CREATE A FIRE-FREE ENVIRONMENT and anodier reading ALL HAIL THE CAN-TOI, Finli said, very low: "They are so odd."
Pimli smiled and clapped him on the back. That was why he genuinely liked Finli O'Tego: like Ike and Mike, they thought alike.
SIX
Most of the Damli House basement was a large room jammed with equipment. Not all of the stuff worked, and they had no use for some of the instruments that did (there was plenty they didn't even understand), but they were very familiar with the surveillance equipment and the telemetry that measured darks: units of expended psychic energy. The Breakers were expressly forbidden from using their psychic abilities outside of The Study, and not all of them could, anyway. Many were like men and women so severely toilet-trained that they were unable to urinate without the visual stimuli that assured them that yes, they were in the toilet, and yes, it was all right to let go. Others, like children who aren't yet completely toilet-trained, were unable to prevent the occasional psychic outburst. This might amount to no more than giving someone they didn't like a transient headache or knocking over a bench on the Mall, but Pimli's men kept careful track, and outbursts that were deemed "on purpose" were punished, first offenses lightly, repeat offenses with rapidly mounting severity. And, as Pimli liked to lecture to the newcomers (back in the days when there had been newcomers)
"Be sure your sin will find you out." Finli's scripture was even simpler: Telemetry doesn't lie.
Today they found nothing but transient blips on the telemetry readouts. It was as meaningless as a four-hour audio recording of some group's farts and burps would have been. The videotapes and the swing-guards' daybooks likewise produced nothing of interest.
"Satisfied, sai?" Finli asked, and something in his voice caused Pimli to swing around and look at him sharply.
"Are you?"
Finli O'Tego sighed. At times like this Pimli wished that either Finli were hume or that he himself were truly taheen. The problem was Finli's inexpressive black eyes. They were almost the shoebutton eyes of a