CW: Body fluids, death, and cannibalism.

Damn Shackleton and damn Amundsen and damn Hillary. All that attention, just for tramping around in the snow? I will show you how a real surveyor finds his glory. I will show you the stink and the viscera of glory. It is bone dust in the air, from a freshly sawed-open skull. Glory’s what I heap out of the brainpan with forceps and scissors and surgical knife.

Careful, now, careful—James has it in the tongs—but listen for the dull snip as I sever the brain stem. Like severing an umbilical cord, we like to joke in this business. The beginnings and the endings of a life.

And with the brain floating safe in the jar of pseudoamniotic fluid I can finally relax.

The people I have been living with, to whom I owe the pleasure of this brain, they are the Fore. Did you know that they eat their dead? Brains and all? Utterly fascinating. But of course we Englishmen know better. The jar is wired to one of our computronic microbanks and I feed in the punch-cards that will mesh it to the viewport. Diodes spark to life. The fluid begins to bubble. I hear the gray matter rocking in its new cradle.

There are much more interesting things to do with a brain.

Any man can climb up a bloody snowbank. There are only a few, a very few, on the very edges of science, with the know-how and the will, and, I daresay, the pluck, for work like this.

A clunk and a cycling cooldown signal the end of the meshing sequence. I sit cross-legged on the floor of our tent, and my assistant James fastens the viewport around my head. “Why, it’s almost as if you’re getting the electric chair,” he said, the first time he saw it, and we shared a polite laugh. Fine fellow, James. Brilliant mind.

In the darkness of the unactivated viewport I reach out. James hands me the switch and without a second’s delay I throw it. The viewport’s headphones begin to blare, to whine, a high-pitched drone that almost sets me to wincing before it disappears. One never gets used to it. Until it is gone, and it is just me and the darkness.

And into the darkness, light.

I open my eyes. Well, it is him, opening his. He speaks to his fellows in a mélange of gobbledygook but I am an old hand at knowing a man’s life from the viewport. Some things simply scream out at you. Like his name.

Auyano.

The field computronic is only powerful enough to show me a scant few flashes. The very peaks of a subject’s adrenal highs. The concentrated fears and thrills of an entire lifetime might overwhelm another, but I am a veteran field agent. In the viewport I am always composed. I see wars fought with bow and arrow, the deathly tension of the mid-village hunt, alighting my sights on something that is not a buck or a fox but a man. Chants sung around a wooden bowl full of God knows what. This man was a warrior among his people, I glean. A warrior-mage, a spellcaster in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. He lived a very interesting life, indeed.

His memory fades. I raise the viewport’s visor and turn; Auyano’s head rests on the ground in front of me. Not quite looking up. That expression on his face, peevish, disgruntled; he has the right to wear it, I suppose, given what we interrupted. Acquiring him so newly dead took some doing, and some help. We still owe a round to those boys from the Royal Constabulary.

I always ask James to leave the head nearby. This particular man’s eyelids do not stay closed but I have never shied from looking those whose lives I have lived in the eye.

I pat him on the cheek and say, “Good show, man.”

He will make a fine addition to the collection.

I nod to James and he begins the work of preserving the brain. And at night we always toss the hollowed-out head of a subject upon our campfire, and as the ashes and sparks fly up to the heavens we will toast and call cremation a sop to his people’s way of life. Occasionally it happens to be true.

• • • •

Back in London, back in civilization, back in the embrace of high society and drinks at White’s Club in the evenings, I relax. But only for one night. There is always work to be done.

My impressions of the Fore man’s life are only the beginning. At the Institute for Neuroethnology it is my job to collate memories. We veterans of the viewport can get a very good feel for the acrid taste in a subject’s mouth, the joys he feels, his embarrassments, his depressions. Funerals, rituals, feast days, that sort of thing. All make for easy sorting.

And if I must rush past a memory or three, if there are some tidbits that go uncollated, so be it; even though we are on a battery of immunoneural vaccines, an ethnographer cannot spend too much time in the same head on the same day. Biochemical concerns, you see.

I need my own time with Auyano for my real work, after hours.

In the museums and at the circuses and at Madame Tussauds, Londoners are captivated by the savage. But in the memory banks at the Institute a viewer can know more, can learn more about an Oneida or a Thuggee in a half-hour than in a lifetime spent in a dreary old museum. Granted, ours is a newer invention, but I cannot believe that the Barnums and Baileys of our age have not yet stormed our laboratory gates.

Somebody should begin offering tours.

When I am not out in the field, out in Burma or Swaziland or on Easter Island, harvesting brains, this is what I do. Solder in hand, custom computer bank ensconced in this unused utility closet. Working night and day.

Today I have snuck guests into the laboratory for a trial run.

“I always begin,” I tell my travelers, on the first safari I ever lead, “by crediting my forebears. Explorers like Amundsen and Scott. It’s very admirable, a career spent like that, exploring the remotest regions of our globe. And I account them lucky, despite the frostbite and the overwinters on Prince Edward Island and such. Their successors, today’s explorers, they do their best. I suppose just recently that Hillary summited some mountain . . .” I swallow down a pang of jealousy and suppress the dull ache throbbing up from my leg. Turn both into a dramatic pause. “But today’s mountaineers are pretenders to their thrones, wouldn’t you say? We have explored all of our frontiers. Our last earthly frontiers. So what is left, the world asks, for the intrepid and true explorers of our generation?”

I gesture, grandly, but they already have on their viewports.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I will tell you what is left. The frontier of the mind. That is where I’d like to invite you all today. You will experience the distant jungles of Papua New Guinea, from right here on Exeter Street— Ah, yes?”

A man in the third row raises his hand. “I’ve applied for Institute work, years and years ago. I almost remember something about—”

“Inoculations,” I answer, smoothly. “Good memory. They prevent another brain’s . . . geography, if you will, from imprinting on yours, while you’re in the viewport. But you won’t need them. You only need that sort of thing if you’re a heavy-duty user. A full-time employee, a dashing, handsome field agent.”

I draw laughter from the crowd.

“So you receive them?” he asks.

“Needle bigger than my bloody finger. Yes, I receive them. But you lot are all fine. I guarantee it. Any other questions?”

I throw the switch and we all slot ourselves into the memory. But with my modifications. No longer the default first-person viewpoint, and I have minimized the endocrine response, or else an overwhelmed traveler would glean nothing. And no, there is nothing different in the air, no difference in the events. I am an ethnographer, after all. I am simply present, and my safari group are all present, and before us is Auyano, mid-exhortation. Seconds from leading a band of men into battle.

“Everyone thank this fellow,” I say, clapping him over the shoulder. Priding myself on the realism of my sound design. “It’s his mind we’re in.”

I snap my fingers to unpause and show them Auyano’s war with the village across the river. The arrows whiz-bang inches from my visitors’ heads; they gasp. I show spells cast. I show them the funereal rites and the eaten dead. They groan and shudder and cover their mouths but it is all just symptomatic of their delight for the macabre. Tell your friends, I remind them, but they are so animated as they leave my laboratory that I am sure my instructions were redundant.

Over the next few days I will perfect the routine, the pauses, the monologue. But at White’s Club I toast my fellow scientists with such a glint in my eye, knowing that I have traveled further and farther and more than any of them.

Look at me now, Shackleton. Look, Hillary.

• • • •

Weeks go by. Word of mouth has spread and even an increase in rates has not stopped me from needing to use the boarded-up auditorium on the second floor. I have even drafted James into leading some of his own tours. I’ve struck gold, I have, but of course it’s not about the gold—otherwise I would take up the offers from the widows and the bereaved and the recent orphans, and jack them into the minds of their recently departed. But it just wouldn’t be civilized to subject an English mind to this kind of thing, wouldn’t you agree?

No, no. I’ve struck glory.

I allow myself to get swept up in flights of fancy. In visions of Lord Mountbatten snubbing Hillary to drink with me, and of critics pronouncing my work more educational than a term at Oxford and more lurid than the Grand Guignol. Look at all this cash I have to burn. The collector says it is a real rock from the Polar ice caps, there is a certificate of authenticity signed by Shackleton himself.

It makes for a fine paperweight.

Today’s tour differs slightly from the rest. The arrow-war and Auyano’s grandfather’s funeral and the vitality ritual, they are all the same. But when I pause time, when I walk back and forth to expound on the fletching materials for this bow or a particular facet of Fore cosmology, there is another pair of eyes burning cold fire into the back of my head. Every so often I glance behind myself, just to be sure, but I am not heartened. Auyano is still, like all the other Fore—of course he is still.

But his eyes have begun to follow me around.

I wake in a cold sweat. I am not—I haven’t given a tour at all. I am simply head-down in my office, running late for one. Getting up for the door I fall over, instead. Shackleton’s rock clatters from my desk. Left foot failing to move when I will it. Come on, I think. Come on. Then, automatically: Ataxia. A type of motor dysfunction. But I have not . . . that break hardly troubles me anymore. Furthermore, I have had no concussion, I am far too young for dementia.

I shake my foot awake and get myself to the auditorium fine. No anomalies in that day’s viewport safari. But a few weeks go by, and after I get a note from Russell and Harrow summoning me to the dean’s offices, I must walk around using my old cane.

“Everything all right, old boy?” they ask. Standing to shake my hand. Identical ties, identical horn-rimmed glasses, they are hardly distinguishable from one another. But as administrators go, I have few complaints.

“Of course, of course. Just an old wound flaring up again. That nasty fracture on Orongo, you remember, Harrow.”

I will not believe anything else. Harrow nods with a warm chuckle.

“You’ve been following Institute guidelines, yes?” Russell smooths the front of his tie. We all sit down. “Minimum amount of time spent on any given subject, on collating?”

My mouth goes dry, but lately it has always been dry. They have no proof. I’ve been sure to cut in the night watchmen.

“Of course,” I say.

“We just wanted to make you aware of a . . . it’s a minor thing, really. A tiny health risk.”

My blood freezes in my veins. I have not been caught out. But it may be worse.

“A health risk?” All I can do is repeat it.

Harrow cuts in. “The brain’s with the anatomists, now, and they’ve discovered something. Some kind of disease, something wrong with the ganglia. ‘Moth-eaten,’ is how they described the look. Seems like that man you brought back, he’s got some kind of neurodegenerative disease. And you know about those neural topography markers, the oscillatory grooves caused by the brainwaves. When you wear the thing it’s all flashes and light and feeling, it’s easy to forget how, ah, physically the port acts on a viewer’s brain, in the ways the hyperfrequencies do the overlaying . . .” Harrow trails off and his eyes go vacant. He does get so easily sidetracked.

Russell cuts in. “We’ve named it, too. Epidemiology’s located a number of indigenous names for it. The trembling sickness, the laughing sickness. I think we’ll be submitting it to the ICD, actually, under the name Ku—”

It is not my own brain that animates my mouth to say “Kuru” with such glee.

“Impressive,” says Harrow. Back in a conversational mood. Fingers steepled below his chin. “And the native accent, too. I’ve been saying, Russell, we’ve got to get some of these field researchers on the fast track—”

I must interrupt. “You were speaking of danger?”

Russell sees the panic on my face and he waves my concern off, affably.

“You’re on the neural cocktail, you get your shots every three months, you’re covered. Shielded.”

“Unless,” adds the other, “you’ve been spending more time in that particular head than necessary, is what I mean. You haven’t been, I don’t know, falling asleep with that viewport on, have you?”

A round of polite laughter from their end of the table. I join in a hair before they would have caught me slacking. And after theirs has died down I cannot stop myself, the laugh goes on, forces its way out of me. I tamp it down after seconds that stretch too long.

“Of course not,” I say.

I say my goodbyes and I promise to meet them for after-supper cigars, but in the meantime I make my way to my laboratory and on the way I do not successfully suppress the urge to vomit in the bathroom.

Holy Christ. God, Saint George, and Jesus. I heave the cane away from me. Everyone I’ve ever, ah, everybody I’ve ever taken on a tour in that fellow’s mind. I have lesioned the brains of every other fright-hound and libertine in London. How many, hundreds? Thousands? Thousands, without the vaccine? They are all, they’re all—we could all—

We. The force of the syllable hits me and I crumple over again. That’s right. We. I have been flooding my brain with corrosion every night and twice on Sundays, far too often for the neural cocktail to offer me any protection. Dozens, hundreds of shows. Hundreds of chances for this disease to overlay itself, to misalign, to mutate into something that is not even kuru—and what do we know about kuru, nothing, less than nothing, what is there to know? It was discovered only days ago—

I breathe in and out, deeply. Force my head up, so that I may look myself in the eye.

I center myself. I always have.

In and out again. Simple. I bend over at the waist, carefully. I do not lose my balance as I pick up my cane.

I can fix this.

Furthermore, I can fix this without jeopardizing my position, without involving the deans or the board or the dissectors. Without involving anybody else in my misstep. I phone James to let him know I will not be needing his services for the next week or two. One great act of science, of rationality, I am sure it is within my grasp.

I am an Englishman, after all.

• • • •

Days into weeks in the laboratory. The higher-ups never come into this part of the Institute, they say. Smells too much of bone. Ha-ha.

I am one of the finest minds the Institute has ever recruited; from Harrow I went straight to Cambridge and King’s College after that. I ask for all of our scholarship on the related neurodegenerative diseases, on scrapie, on Creutzfeldt-Jakob, on encephalopathy. I ask for all of our scholarship on the cerebellum, which when lesioned might cause ataxia, see? I have begun to attack the problem already. I ask for all of our scholarship on viewport ultrafrequencies. I call in favors with the technicians, and for the time being everybody who needs time with the computronic banks will be told that there has been damage from an electrical fire.

If anybody in the Empire can fix this, it is me.

And how.

It is a masterstroke of an idea, I think, if I may say so myself. A grand gesture, almost romantic. Worthy of the heroics of Shackleton and Scott—no, not them, never them. Of Pasteur, of Salk.

Our Institute’s radio tower is hardly ever in use. But if I overload it, if I broadcast on every frequency I can, when the whole nation will be listening, I can . . . let me put it like this. If the viewport frequencies can damage, the viewport frequencies can heal. Eminently logical. I’ll look in the paper for the cricket timetables. It will undoubtedly be an interruption for fans of Somerset, but for the rest of us I will have saved Britain.

I work myself ragged. Soon I forget to eat. Soon I forget to sleep. But it will all be worth it. Dig in, man, remember those nights studying for terms. A matter just as life-and-death as this. I laugh at that until my adjoining researcher makes a point of slamming shut his door.

I note down my symptoms as clinically as I can. Emotional lability. Increasing weakness of the legs, pain in my other joints. When I am cured these will be a note of interest for the other fellows at the Royal Society. We will laugh together. I longer and louder than any of them. I am laughing now.

I am so cold.

I observe my neural functions with an EEG. Shaking as I place the electrodes onto my own temples. Irregularities in alpha-wave patterns, slowdowns in delta-wave activity. Good. One more challenge. I laugh at that. I want it to be a wry chuckle but it comes out as a sob-scream-laugh and I drop an electrode and fail to catch it as it slumps out onto the floor. A shadow falls over me. Somebody places it in my hand. I murmur a “Thank you” reflexively and I look up and I see Auyano.

He walks away and sits down, just there on the cadaver platform. Loincloth and cassowary plumes and all.

Waiting.

Hallucinations, now. Of course. He says nothing but it is only rational that I scream at him and sputter and curse. This is not the way of the world, I say. You should not be here. Your life is mine, your whole life, your death is mine. It is not the other way round. It is not the other way round.

For the first time in all of my years, in my long and estimable career one of my subjects speaks back. In English, oh, God, in a perfect Etonian accent.

He tells me that it’s all gone topsy-turvy for me, now, old chap. It is my life that belongs to him. My death is his. And after that, he says, and even after that your body will not be free. Not after what you have done to mine.

And I wail, for I do not understand, and I shiver, more violently than ever, and knock over a stool to get away from him . . .

This must work. The program I am punching into the cards, through my hazy vision, through hands that shake at the typewriter. It will.

When Auyano whispers to me again he does not whisper nonsense. He tells me about medicine among his people. Such a rational nosology, I think. Especially in concert with ours. He would have made a fine Institute man. I send out requests on Institute letterhead. Typed then printed neatly then printed then scrawled. I send out requests for radio amplifiers and glial distillation formula and casuarina bark and pig fat, so that I may burn it on an open flame and rub the grease into my skin. Auyano smiles, and in his face I see further truths. Truths in the funeral rites, truths everywhere. Our science is not the only science. It is not he who would make a fine fellow at the Institute. It is I who’d be lucky to make a fine sorcerer, wouldn’t you say, old boy? I manage, through chattering teeth. Wouldn’t you say? Looking up at him. Ataxia has progressed severely. I must drag myself to his feet.

But Auyano begins to smile, wider and wider, wider than the circumference of the world, and he offers me his hand and I take it and it is a miracle he has given me a gift—I stand—

I wake at my workbench and startle James, who is over me, squinting at the instructions on my punch-cards.

“You are . . .” James shakes his head. “This is what you’ve been doing? Madness, this is madness. This program is nonsense, absolute nonsense.”

“It is not nonsense.” I look up and smile at him and his eyes go wide as he rocks away from me. I consider my appearance, bloodshot, unshaven, emaciated. But only for a moment. Back to more important things. “It is a cure.”

“A cure? For . . .” He trails off once he sees my nose back in last autumn’s Neuroanatomical Quarterly. Reaches into the output tray beside me, instead, to find his answer. It is a string of numbers. Only seemingly random. I hear that particular Jamesian scoff that has always meant “Meaningless.” Two error codes still in the output, I admit, but I’ve still got time to work them out. “You want to beam this into people’s heads?”

“Of course.”

“Good God.” When he reaches the end of the code his eyes all but bug out of him. “You’ve—you’ve loaded it into the tapes already. Our tower will be transmitting this? Come, now, man—”

“It will make things better,” I say. “It will make everything better.” He is standing very close, he is, and so much life is pulsing through his veins. Through skin stretched over a skull. He thinks I am looking him in the eyes but I am looking past them. I am put in mind of the eggs Florentine that is my usual if I breakfast at White’s Club. The fragrance of the yolk gushing out over the bread.

My throat is very dry.

“Very well, then,” I say, in such a low rasp that he has to lean in to listen. Good. Come closer. “We cannot forget our clinical trials. Individual trials. We are scientists, after all. You were in his mind as well, weren’t you?”

A dash of confusion. Then fear spreads like yolk across his features, fear. Delicious fear. Yolk and marmalade.

My other hand has been searching, searching on my desk and I find that geode paperweight from that damnable Shackleton and I club James over the head.

• • • •

When James wakes I have him tied to the cadaver examination platform. I am tweaking the signal for the headphones I am about to put on him and when he moans I turn and grin rictus at him. He sees me coming and he twists his head this way and that, it is the only thing he can do, even if it is almost nothing.

“We aren’t . . . we aren’t . . . we were mates, at Harrow, weren’t we?” he sputters.

“Oh, we were inseparable.”

“The nights in the lab, the, the, the, all those White’s Club dinners, we had some great times, didn’t we?”

I nod. Almost upon him now. The static of the vaccine-signal almost in his ears.

“Then don’t do this,” he sobs, “don’t do this . . .” until I sniff him.

I bend down over him, my nose right over his forehead and I inhale, and I put my fingers on his temples, dragging them forwards and backwards from his skull’s forehead to its occipital and he wails a long, guttural wail. Smacking his head against the table. It is a shame. He does not know how rich the smell is. Finer than the finest venison. Finer than the cigars our club orders special from Cuba. Finer than, finer than, finer than.

You know our funeral rites? Somebody is speaking, from within, from without, from everywhere. Of course. My good friend Auyano. He says, You know them better than us? Certainly, I say, by now I must have given enough tours. At that Auyano stifles a laugh, but not for the same reasons as I. Go on, then, he says. Prove your understanding, ethnographer.

I will. I say it out loud, “I will,” and James wails again. But I am a gentleman and a scientist and an Englishman and we must hang onto our table manners, mustn’t we? Mustn’t we? Let’s have us a friendly little competition, Auyano. We will see who is more civilized. More than anything I want to smash that fragile little head against the table until I crack it open, until I can scoop out his brains with both hands, but I prove myself the winner by firing up the bone-saw first.

Auyano laughs over the whir and the scream and the scream and the scream. His laugh. As the dust billows into the air I find things to laugh at, too. And I lose myself in the scent of the brain sac bursting open, the finery of it all, it is so sumptuous that I float into it, we waft far and away together. Vaguely I wonder what that crunching is, that crackling, I wonder what I am swallowing without bothering to chew. Maybe that old Greek Herophilus was right. Maybe the soul is housed in the ventricles, below the parietal lobe, and this is how it tastes.

Somewhere along the line James has stopped screaming. White-brown billows around us. I stand up and wipe something that is not blood from my chin.

I have not learned a thing from this trial.

Ah, well. We press on, then. Mass inoculation.

But the rest of James has not yet cooled on the table. It has not even stopped twitching. A fine line of drool escapes my mouth.

Perhaps it can wait.

• • • •

His eyes are gone and his lips and I have busted open his ribs to get to the meat of his heart, his lungs, they are cold and slick in my throat smeared across my hands I have eaten of him and I have eaten of him and yet I am not full. The meat has . . . it has cooled, that is my problem, I always had a discerning palate, always the first at White’s to send back a steak just a hair too well done, that’s me. Shambling out of the laboratory, upwards. Up towards the radio tower. Auyano is here, offering his arm, encouraging me up the steps, unabashed mirth in his eyes. Telling me where to go, telling me to eat, eat, eat, English, eat!

English, you have eaten of our dead and you have eaten and eaten and wherever you go you will eat more and before you eat up the rest of us I curse you to eat yourselves. I will tell you what the frequency the computron spit out will really do. You have shown me what you want and I will give it to you.

I want to spread across the world.

I want the . . . the hunger. The hunger it is bottomless it is ecstasy. Everyone should feel like this. Rapid decrease in fine motor functions. Vision going redder, bright-red, dark. Blood vessels bursting in my eyes. I am on somebody ripping their throat out the blood the blood the name patched onto the uniform I can no longer read. Strong evidence of aphasia. Aphasia. I no longer remember what it means.

Words and everything else dripping away out of the hole in the throat of the dead man behind me. Shuffling and moaning, then standing, walking, but not like he used to. Now he is like me. Joy. Joy. More joy soon. More people like us. But the smell of them. There is nothing else in the world but the smell of the people who are not yet like us disgusting overpowering intoxicating. Down below. Down below. Down below.

There is enough of me left to know where the switch is, know what a switch is, and throw it.

The clank-clank-buzz of the activated tower after which I shamble over to the open window. One last moment of blissful hateful street-sidewalk-noise until the screams come. The stampedes.

Almost smiling now.