The flesh in the furnace

puppets kissing and fighting, drinking and singing and dancing. Then there was the final shriek of the evil stepmother as the prince drove his sword through Wissa's neck.
        The audience gasped.
        Belina stepped from her pedestal and took the prince away, to make love to him, and the curtain fell with a whispering hiss that signaled the time for applause.
        It was a good performance and Sebastian felt good.
        He had forgotten that the puppets had wanted the ending of the play changed, but he remembered when Belina cursed him as he picked up Wissa's remains and carried the shattered little body to the Furnace where Pertos would redeposit it and re-create her for the next show.
        "You could kill him," she said.
        "Who?"
        "Godelhausser," Belina said.
        She looked up at him from a great distance.
        "No." He put Wissa down on the receival tray.
        "Yes. You're big and strong. You could kill him for us. For me" The last was added in a different tone of voice. He felt her hand on his trousers, and he pulled quickly away, terrified but not knowing of what.
        Then Godelhausser came and the puppets turned on him, and Sebastian relaxed, a spectator again.
        Belina shrieked and spat and cursed. She kicked at Godelhausser's shins, but to no avail. The winged angel fluttered at face level, arguing the humanity of letting Wissa live, but he was brushed aside. Wissa was created, found nothing had changed and shrugged at the prospect of another death. Tonight, at least, Godelhausser would recreate her and she would know some joy with the others until tomorrow's matinee when she would feel the blade again.
        Sebastian watched, grinning.
        He was glad that Pertos was not angry with them, for otherwise he might never create them again. Pertos seemed to take it in stride, seemed even to enjoy it. He could not be upset or angry. He smiled. Pertos smiled. That made Sebastian feel good.
        
        Alvon Rudi was splendidly dressed in amber and blue, with a trailing cape, epaulets of silver, with many buttons and four buckles across each black boot. If he was too heavy, it could be forgiven because he had a certain self-possession, a certain sophistication that made the extra pounds seem beneficial, like extra muscles or an abundance of wit. He was like most Earthmen, save that he was richer. He was a merchant of some sort, dealing solely with intercontinental trade on the motherworid, though this limited yard had done him well.
        He had come to wait backstage after the second performance, even though Sebastian had made it plain, after some time, that Pertos would be a while. When Pertos arrived and said Wissa must be re-created before he could talk to anyone, Rudi was understanding. He watched the other puppets with a curious intensity, always smiling but never looking very happy. Then Wissa was alive again and the puppets went to their own room with cheese and meat, bread and cake, two bottles of wine each half as tall as the prince. They went laughing, making rude jokes, and finally left the three grown men in silence that had a disturbing quality to it.
        "So like children," Alvon Rudi said. "So alive and bright, yet adults really, eh?"
        "Physical adults. But a strange combination of adult and child in their minds. Since I bought the identity wafers, I have used them in perhaps two hundred performances. They have been alive for a total of no more than a hundred and twenty days. In chronological sense, then, they are infants, newly born. But the Vonopoens give them personalities, make them adults in a way, though the knowledge is imprinted on their wafers and it is not something they learn through experience. So though they grasp most things on the level of adults, they have a childlike exuberance and naivety."
        Sebastian attempted to follow all of this, but he could not. He had seldom heard Godelhausser talk at such length to strangers. Usually he was short and somewhat mean. Now he rattled away as if he wanted to talk only to keep Alvon Rudi from speaking, as if he might be afraid of what the merchant had come to say.
        "Would you like some wine?" Pertos asked.
        "A small glass."
        "Me too?" Sebastian asked.
        "Another small glass," Pertos said, pouring the idiot's first. "And be careful not to spill it, or you'll get nothing else."
        "I will," Sebastian said, tasting