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edifice not intended for grace, yet achieving grace through its secure footing, its
incalculable tapers, set-backs, thousand terraces, thousand taxiplats, million windows.
The Empyrean Tower was completed. Mervyn Alien moved in on a quiet midnight, and the
next day the Chateau d'lf at 5600 Exmoor Avenue, Meadowlands, was vacant, for sale or
for lease.
The Chateau d'lf was now Level 900, Empyrean Tower. And Roland Mario ached with
eagerness, anxiety, a hot gladness intense to the point of lust. He was slowly cleaning off
his desk when Taussig poked his head into the office.
"Well, what are you planning to do now?"
Mario inspected Taussig's curious face. "Any more big jobs?"
"Nope. And not likely to be. At least not through old man Kubal."
"How come? Has he retired?"
"Retired? Shucks, no. He's gone crazy. Schizo."
Mario drummed his fingers on his desk. "When did all this happen?"
"Just yesterday. Seems like finishing the Empyrean was too much for him. A cop found
him in Tanagra Square talking to himself, took him home. Doesn't know his nephew,
doesn't know his housekeeper. Keeps saying his name is Bray, something like that."
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"Bray?" Mario rose to his feet, his forehead knotting. Breaugh. "Sounds like senile decay,"
he said abstractedly.
"That's right," Taussig responded, still fixing Mario with bright curious eyes. "So what are
you going to do now?"
"I quit," said Mario, with an exaggerated sweep of the arm. "I'm done, I'm like old man
Kubal. The Empyrean Tower's too much for me. I've got senile decay. Take a good look,
Taussig, you'll never see me again." He closed the door in Taussig's slack face. He stepped
into the elevator, dropped to the second level, hopped the high-speed strip to his small
apartment at Melbourne House. He thumbed the lock, the scanner recognized his prints,
the door slid back. Mario entered, closed the door. He undressed Ebery's gross body,
wrapped it in a robe, sank with a grunt into a chair beside a big low table.
The table held a complex model built of wood, metal, plastic, vari-colored threads. It
represented Level 900, Empyrean Tower-the Chateau d'lf.
Mario knew it by heart. Every detail of an area a sixth of a mile square was pressed into his
brain.
Presently Mario dressed again, in coveralls of hard gray twill. He loaded his pockets with
various tools and equipment, picked up his handbag. He looked at himself in the mirror, at
the face that was Ebery and yet not quite Ebery. The torpid glaze had left the eyes. The lips
were no longer puffy, the jowls had pulled up, his face was a meaty slab. Thoughtfully
Mario pulled a cap over his forehead, surveyed the effect. The man was unrecognizable. He
attached a natty wisp of mustache. Ralston Ebery no longer existed.
Mario left the apartment. He hailed a cab, flew out to Meadowlands. The Empyrean Tower
reared over the city like a fence post standing over a field of cabbages. An aircraft beacon
scattered red rays from a neck-twisting height. A million lights from nine hundred levels
glowed, blended into a rich milky shimmer. A city in itself, where two million, three
million men and women might live their lives out if they so wished. It was a monument to
the boredom of one man, a man sated with life. The most magnificent edifice ever built,
and built for the least consequential of motives that ever caused one rock to be set on
another. The Empyrean Tower, built from the conglomerate resources of the planet's
richest wealth, was a gigantic toy, a titillation, a fancy.
But who would know this? The 221st Level housed the finest hospital in the world. The
staff read like the Medical Associations list of Yearly Honors. Level 460 held an Early
Cretaceous swamp-forest. Full-scale dinosaurs cropped at archaic vegetation, pterodactyls
slipped by on invisible guides, the air held the savage stench of swamp, black ooze, rotting
mussels, carrion.
Level 461 enclosed the first human city, Eridu of Sumer, complete with its thirty-foot brick
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