Stations of the Tide (20 page)

The ghost of a memory tugged at his mind. He had heard of this ship before. Something.

The bureaucrat found an empty table, scraped up a chair, and sat. A light breeze ruffled his hair. Leaves rustled as a feathered serpent leaped into the air, a scissor-tailed finch perhaps, or a robin. He felt oddly at peace, put in mind of humanity’s gentle, arboreal origins. He wondered why people put so little effort into returning home, when it was so easily done.

At that moment he glanced down at the table. An outlined crow stared back at him. Before he could react, a beaked shadow fell across it. He looked up into the eyes of a crow-headed man.

Gregorian! the bureaucrat thought, with a thrill of alarm. Then he remembered the Black Beast that had haunted Dr. Orphelin and looked about him. Faded drawings of birds and animals were everywhere on the railings and tables. He’d attuned himself to such things, and was now generating his own omens. “Welcome to the Haunt’s Roost,” the waiter said.

The bureaucrat pointed to a Flavored Beers sign. “Have you got lime? Or maybe orange?”

The head lifted disdainfully. “That’s only line-feed. For the surrogate trade. No real person would drink that crap.”

“Oh. Uh, well, give me a glass of lager, then. And an explanation for that ship out there.”

The waiter bowed, left, and returned with a beer and an interactive. The set looked out of place, its forced orange-and-purple housing a jarring contrast to the restaurant’s studied artlessness. He might have been back home in an environmental retreat, trees and faraway glint of river reduced to calculated effect. The beer was thin.

He turned on the set. A smiling young woman in a brocaded vest appeared on its screen. Her braids were tipped with small silver bells. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Marivaud Quinet and I am a typical citizen of Miranda during the last great year. I am knowledgeable on and able to discuss matters of historical significance as well as details of daily life. I am not structured to offer advice or pornographic entertainment. This set has been sealed by the Department of Licensing and Inspection, Division of Technology Transfer. Product tampering is illegal and may result in prosecution or even unintentional physical harm.”

“Yes, I know.” The set would implode if its integrity were breached. He wondered if it would be left behind when the restaurant was evacuated, to disappear in a silvery burst of bubbles when salt corrosion finally ate through its housing. “Marivaud, tell me about the
Atlantis.
”

Her face grew solemn. “That was the final tragedy of our age. We were arrogant, I admit it. We made mistakes. This was the last of them, the one that brought the offplanet powers down on us, to regress our technology back yet another century.”

The bureaucrat remembered just enough history to know this was oversimplification. “What was done was necessary, Marivaud. There must be limits.”

She angrily yanked at a braid, setting its tiny bell tinkling. “We were not like the stupid cattle who live here today. We had pride! We accomplished things! We had our own scientists, our own direction. Our contribution to Prosperan culture was not small. We were known throughout the Seven Sisters!”

“I’m sure you were. Tell me about the ship.”

“The
Atlantis
was a liner originally. It had to be converted offshore—it was too deep for any harbor. That fragment you see now is only the prow. The true ship was as big as a city.” A montage of antique images of the ship in different configurations, the superstructure rising and falling in great waves. “Well, perhaps it only seemed so, for I saw it from so very many viewpoints, in such an overlapping woozy maze of perception. But I get ahead of myself. The first phase was to build a string of transmitters up and down the Tidewater. They were anchored to the bedrock with carbon-whisker cables and made strong enough to withstand the tides when they rolled across the land.” More images, of thick, bulbous-topped towers this time. “We rigged them with permanently sealed tokamaks, to guarantee their power over the submerged half of the great year. It took ten lesser years to…”

“Marivaud, I haven’t the time for all this. Just the sinking, please.”

“I was at home that day,” Marivaud said. “I’d built a place just above the fall line—what would be the Piedmont coast after the tides. I had a light breakfast, toast with fairy jam sprinkled with ground parsley from my garden, and a glass of stout.”

The image dissolved into the interior of a small cottage. Rain specked the windowpanes, and a fire burned in the hearth. Marivaud hastily wiped a dab of jam from the corner of her mouth. “Out at sea, the morning was bright and sunny. I was flashing from person to person, like sunlight itself. I felt so fresh and happy.”

The scene switched to the deck of the
Atlantis.

Green-yellow bodies poured onto the deck. A scoop lifted away. For an instant the bureaucrat did not recognize the struggling creatures. In winter morph they bore very little resemblance to humans. They had long, eelish tails and two slim appendages that might generously be called arms; their faces were streamlined, mouths silent gasps of pain. They twisted, bodies shortening, lengthening, shifting from form to form in a desperate attempt to adapt to the air. The image focused on one, and in the agonized turn of its head the bureaucrat recognized intelligence.

“They’re haunts!”

Marivaud faded half in, serene as a madonna at the breakfast table. She nodded. “Yes, the little darlings.”

A woman in hip boots waded in among the haunts. Her gun flashed as she pressed it to the backs of heads and pulled the trigger. Haunts jerked wildly with each gasp of compressed air.

“That’s the last of them. Over they go.”

Suddenly the image shifted to the viewpoint of one of the haunts. It flew through the air and exploded into the water. Clouds of bubbles gushed away and it fled wildly. To either side swam other haunts, wild and beautiful and ecstatic.

Back on deck, the crew were assembling a pair of projectors. “Let’s run out those ghost nets again. Watch that—”

There was a knock on the door.

Marivaud opened it. A woman with hard, handsome features that echoed her own stood there. “Goguette! Come in, let me take your cloak. Have you eaten yet? What brings you here so early?”

“I’ll take some berry tea.” Goguette sat at the table. “I’ve come to share the jubilee with my little sister. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“No, of course not. Oh! Mousket’s on deck.”

A large, heroically breasted military type faded in, all jaw and dark purpose. “Mousket,” Goguette said. “She’s the commandant, right?”

“Yes. She’s having an affair with the pilot.” A quick glimpse of a slim, straight-built man with cynical eyes. To the bureaucrat she said, “He is an extremely private man. The public nature of their love embarrasses, humiliates, arouses him. That only makes it the sweeter for her. She savors his abasement.”

“Excuse me,” the bureaucrat said. “How do you know all this?”

“Didn’t you notice my earrings?” Marivaud brushed back a curtain of braids, exposing an ear all coral and cream. From it hung an amber leaf, silver-veined, and delicate as a dragon’s wing. The image swelled so he could see the embedded elements of a television transceiver, signal processor, and neural feed. It was an elegantly simple arrangement that would let her effortlessly employ all electronic skills: She might talk with friends, receive entertainments, preserve a particularly beautiful sunrise, copy an Old Master drawing in her own hand, do research, take and teach educational courses, or transmit her dreams for machine analysis, at her whim. It made her brain a node within an invisible empire of interactivity, the perfect focus of a circle so infinitely large its center was everywhere, its circumference nowhere.

“Even the offworlders didn’t have these,” she said. “We were the first to combine everything into one continuous medium. It was like being in two worlds at once, like having a second, unseen life. This was when you offworlders were creating that awkward mnemonic palace of yours. Our method was superior. If it hadn’t been for the
Atlantis
incident, you would be a part of it now.”

“By God, you’re talking about the Trauma!” the bureaucrat cried in rising horror. “There was a ship involved—that must have been the
Atlantis
! Everyone on it was wired for continuous broadcast.”

“Do you want to listen to this story or narrate it yourself? Yes, of course the crew were all actors, improvisors—what do you call people who lead lives of shaped intensity in order to create public dramas?”

“I don’t think we have them anymore. What are they doing to the haunts?”

“Fitting them with broadcast chips, of course. What did you think this project was all about?”

“Why would you want to do such a thing?”

“That is exactly what I ask her myself!” Goguette said. “There are so many refined, educational, and enriching experiences available on the net. Why waste your life listening in on creatures little better than animals?”

“Ah, but such splendid animals!” Marivaud giggled. “But we are getting away from our story. You”—she addressed the bureaucrat directly—“can experience only the middle range of this. You miss the little things, the burn of rope in chafed hand, Ocean’s smell, the chill of a salt breeze across your arm. And the grand emotions you can only sense from the outside. There is no way we can share more than a fraction of this with you. So I will show you two minor players, a ghostnetter and a flash-surgeon. Their true names have been lost, so I will give the ghostnetter the offworld name of Underhill. The flash-surgeon I will name—Gogo, after my sister.”

Goguette punched her shoulder, she laughed, and they were gone. On deck, the flash-surgeon holstered her gun. She wiped her brow with the back of her arm, glanced up past the mast-high cranes to see Caliban high above, a disk of ice melting in blue sky. Then down again to see haunts’ heads appearing and disappearing above the water.

She strolled over to the nearest projector. “My God,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”

Underhill looked up from his screen, flashed a smile. “This is the last sounding. When they’re done, our job is over.” His hands were delicate on the controls. The projector swiveled slightly, and the ghost net swung an arc forward. “Watch that group out there.” Into a microphone he said, “Point one.”

Cut to the other projector. Its operator swiveled in the opposite direction. “Point one.”

Far away black dots appeared and disappeared in the water. The ghost net crept closer, its progress traceable by the hissing line of bubbles along its length. The sounding changed direction, angling away. “Clever little babies,” Underhill muttered. “Don’t you run away from me.”

The two lines of white bubbles were slowly converging now, like a giant pair of scissors closing. The haunts caught between the ghost nets fled toward open sea. A few broke away from the main pack and doubled back through the ghost net.

“Oh!” Gogo cried. “They’re getting away.”

That confident grin again. Underhill brushed back his hair. “No, those are ones we caught earlier, with your chips telling them they can go through.”

Gogo was bouncing up and down on her toes in excitement. She looked very young, almost a child. “Oh! Are you sure? Yes, of course.”

“Relax. Even if we let a few get away—what would it hurt?”

“There are so few of them left,” Gogo said wistfully. “So very few. We should have chipped them while they were still ashore.”

Distractedly, staring down at his screens with perfect concentration, Underhill said, “It wasn’t possible to find them all while they were on land. They’re elusive, you know that.” Into the microphone he said, “Point three.”

“Point three.”

The lines of bubbles were closing. Gogo stared off at them. “Sometimes I wonder should we be doing this at all?”

He looked up at her with frank wonder. “Do you?”

“It hurts them!” Softly: “
I
hurt them.”

Underhill was perfectly intent on his screen. “It was not so long ago that the indigenes were almost extinct. It was all our own fault. Unwise policies, disease—people even hunted them in the early years. Do you know what put an end to all that?”

“What?”

“The first time an indigene was chipped into the net. The first time people could feel sensation with that purity and clean zest they feel. The first—”

“The first time people could run with them through the magical night, wind in hair, to hunt and mate,” Gogo breathed. She blushed prettily. “I know it’s kind of sick.”

“That’s what I say,” Goguette interpolated.

“Oh, poof!” Marivaud said. “If you’re not enjoying this, there are other shows for you to experience.”

“No, it’s not!” Underhill said firmly. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a natural, healthful thing to be interested in the physical side of love. It shows you have a lively interest in life. Point five,” he said, “and locking.”

“Point five and locking.”

A third ghostnetter snapped on his projector, and a new line of bubbles capped the other two. The pack of haunts wheeled in confusion. Slowly the last ghost net began to draw them in. The crane operator began moving her scoop into position. “Your turn soon.”