He wasn't human; he was a monster, a freak. Yet, he looked much like anyone else. It was the inside of him that was so different.
Durach wasn't alone as I found myself standing there before him. Two women and several men were in the big arched room with him. None of them were any more pleasant on the inside than Durach. Jelahn's dive on the North Canal seemed like the memory of an anteroom to paradise compared with the feeling in this room of Durach's.
It was filthy and obscene, and it made me mad; it made me shaking mad to think that a chance thing like these freaks had been sent into the Fourth Stage world of Mohln where they didn't belong, to contaminate it, and bring hate and destruction and death to a world that had put a few men at least on the edge of marvelous super life.
Durach was bigger than he had been in the personality of LeStrang, a personality he had given to people by suggestion. He was on a couch of bright red that seemed to writhe under him. Durach was a fat white man with white hair, his fat wrapped up in a tight-fitting shiny stuff like resensilk. His face was soft and his eyes wide and bland and blue. Pale jowls hung over his collar on either side, and under his beaked nose was a small, pursed, red button of a mouth.
Silly little mouth, I thought. I wanted to laugh at it, but I didn't; I couldn't laugh. I couldn't do much of anything except stand there and try to figure out what I was really doing here—wherever I was.
The women and men around the room looked at me, very silently, terribly curious, and far away. Durach's little red mouth smiled at me. No one said anything. They just thought—about the ways I could look dead—and about the many ways it was possible for me to become dead—ways that can take so long.
And there were other thoughts pounding at my skull. They were laughing at me; they were feeling sorry for me, and they were thinking I was an idiot, at least.
I felt like a silly little mortal suddenly brought before a bunch of wicked gods. And then it hit me—
That's just about what I was!
I was scared. My mind seemed covered with a cold twisted shadow. Winds I couldn't see seemed to sweep and cry and thunder through that giant room. And I could feel power, great stores of controlled power, churning and boiling and ready to explode around me.