Condemeign watched the pilot make small, hushed motions at the instrument. When he looked up again the airlock had closed behind them and a wiry steel claw reached out to wrap the tender in its cradle.
He had half expected to see a winding line of neophytes clad in robes of white writhing somewhere into a leafy nothingness with a mist-driven tempo, perhaps from Debussy to waft them on to their Dies Irae. An attendant helped him descend into the square steel room. His guide paused and looked about, floating.
"A trifle businesslike and grim," he noted. "Inside there's gravity laid on, good atmosphere. Nothing like this hot steel smell. And you can walk. Excellent footing. Just like home."
They passed, mainly by violent swimming motions into a large hall. Condemeign fell jerkily back on his feet, coming instantly again to grips with the pull of gravity. Everything was steel walls fussily disguised with a sort of furry, plastic lining laid on in thin sheets. The guide walked him up to a desk against one wall, near a door. Condemeign blinked at the soft blue illumination. The guide shook his hand.
"I must be going," he said. "Glad to have met you, Mr. Condemeign."
The guide's hunched back faded through the door. Condemeign turned listlessly to the figure at the desk. It was a woman, and before his eyes focussed in the filmy light he got an odd impression of a brown, papery bundle incongruous in its chiaroscuro lacings and bulgings.
"I am Miss Froon," she said. The smile that lit her face had last been seen on Madame La Farge. It had cut its teeth on sad suttees. It was thoroughly unoriginal.
Condemeign sighed. The perfect servant. The timeless, obsequious recorder. Was Miss Froon, perhaps, the key to the last portal. She was distressingly unattractive, rather flat in the chest and sported an overly aseptic set of teeth that flashed. He noted the brown laths of legs that poked from under the denim shorts. Miss Froon, he decided, looked really like an underdone chicken.
Miss Froon rustled the papers before her. She tapped, almost frigidly, on the glassy top of the desk.
"There are a few questions, Mr. Condemeign."