Stations of the Tide (22 page)

The bureaucrat was surprised and a little flattered by Chu’s show of emotion. He had never been quite sure that she accepted him, and always suspected she thought of him as merely an offworld buffoon, someone to be tolerated rather than respected. He felt an unexpected glow of gratitude. “I remember you telling me once not to take any of this personally.”

“Yeah, well, when somebody tries to kill your partner, that kind of changes the game. Gregorian is going to pay for this. I’ll see that he does.” She wheeled sharply away, and stepped on a crab. “Shit!” She kicked the mutilated body away. “What a fucking glorious day.”

“Say.” The bureaucrat peered around. “Where’s Mintouchian?”

“Gone,” Chu said. She stood on one foot, wiping the sole of her shoe with a handkerchief. Then she threw the cloth into the weeds. “He took your briefcase with him too.”

“What?”

“It was the damnedest thing. Soon as the crabs dwindled, he fired up the truck, snatched the briefcase, and lit off like his ass was on fire.” Chu shook her head. “That was when I started honking the horn here, trying to call you back.”

“Didn’t he know that my briefcase will come back to me?”

“Obviously not.”

*   *   *

It took the briefcase half an hour to find its way back to him. Chu had already made arrangements with the Lion Heart’s driver, and had gone off to view the corpse of her impersonator. “Oughta be good for a few laughs,” she said grimly. “Maybe I’ll cut off an ear for a souvenir.”

The briefcase daintily picked its way down the road. When it reached the bureaucrat, it set itself down and retracted its legs. He picked it up. “Hard time getting away?”

“No. Mintouchian didn’t even bother strapping me down. I waited until he’d gone a couple of miles downriver and was feeling confident, then rolled down the window and jumped.”

“Hum.” The bureaucrat was silent for a moment. Then he said, “We’ll be here a few hours more than planned. There’s been a touch of violence, and we still have to deal with the nationals. Probably have to make a statement, maybe file a field report.”

The briefcase, familiar with his moods, said nothing.

The bureaucrat thought about Gregorian, of the magician’s abrupt shift from a distant mocking disdain to outright enmity. He’d almost died just now. He thought about Mintouchian, and about Dr. Orphelin’s warning that he had a traitor with him. Everything was changed, horribly changed. “Did Mintouchian look surprised when you jumped?”

“He looked like he’d swallowed a toad. You should’ve been there—it would’ve made you laugh.”

“I suppose.”

But he doubted it. The bureaucrat didn’t feel like laughing. He didn’t feel like laughing at all.

10

A Service for the Dead

That morning, the doctor wind swept a swarm of barnacle flies inland, and when the bureaucrat awoke, the houseboat was encrusted with their shells. He had to lean on the door to break it open. The salt smell of Ocean was everywhere, like the scent of a lover who has visited in the night and is gone, leaving only this ambiguous promise of return.

He scowled and spat over the houseboat’s edge.

The bottom tread of his stoop was missing. The bureaucrat hopped down onto the bare patch worn into the black earth beneath. He began to thread his way through the scattered hulks of the boats’ graveyard.

“Hey!”

He looked up. A golden-haired boy stood naked atop a cradled yacht with a stove-in bow, pissing into the rosebushes. One of the gang of scavengers who lived there. He waved with his free hand. The census bracelet glittered dully on his wrist. “That thing you were looking for? We found a whole pile of them. Come on over and take your pick.”

Five minutes later the bureaucrat had stowed a tightly bound bundle in his room, and was off again to Clay Bank. A sour church bell clanged in the distance, calling the faithful to meditation. The sky was overcast and gray. A light, almost imperceptible drizzle fell.

*   *   *

This far east, the farmland was too rich to squander, and save for the plantation buildings, most dwellings hugged the river. Unpainted clapboard houses teetered precariously on the lip of a high earth bluff. Halfway down to the water, a walk had been cut into the dirt and planked over, to serve a warren of jugs and storerooms dug into the bank itself.

Lieutenant Chu was waiting for him on the boardwalk outside the diner. Boats bobbed on the river, tied to pilings across which ran docks more gap than substance, the idea of Dock a
beau idéal
honored more in the intent than the execution. The drizzle chose that instant to intensify into rain, drops hissing on the surface of the water. They ducked inside.

“I got another warning,” the bureaucrat said when they’d found a table. He opened his briefcase and removed a handful of black feathers. A crow’s wing. “It was tacked to my door when I got home last night.”

“Funny business,” Chu said. She spread the wing, examined the bloody shoulder joint, folded open the tiny fingers at the metacarpal joint, and gave it back. “It must be those scavengers doing it. I don’t know why you insist on living there.”

The bureaucrat shrugged irritably. “Whoever’s actually placing these things, it’s at Gregorian’s instigation. I recognize his style.” Privately, though, it bothered him that Gregorian had changed tactics again, switching back from attempted assassination to mockery and harassment. It made no sense.

The diner was dim and narrow, a tunnel dug straight back from the bank. The tables halfway down were drawn away from the pool of light shed by the single milky glass skylight. Water fell from leaky seams into waiting tins. To the rear the kitchen help laughed and gossiped while the leaping flames of a gas range chased shadows about their faces. A waitress came to their table and slapped down trenchers of salt meat and mashed yams. Chu wrinkled her nose. “You got any—?”

“No.” The evac boys at the next table laughed. “You want breakfast, you’ll take what you’re given.”

“Arrogant bitch,” Chu grumbled. “If this weren’t the last eatery in Clay Bank, I’d…”

A young soldier leaned over from the next table. “Easy up,” he said in that broad northern accent all the local Authority muscle had, Tidewater types brought in from Blackwater and Vineland provinces because they had no ties here. “Last airship comes through tomorrow. They’ve got to clean out their larder.” His beret, folded under a shoulder strap, had been customized with a rooster’s tail.

Chu stared at him until he reddened and turned away.

In a niche by the table a television was showing a documentary on the firing of the jugs. There was antique footage of workers sealing up the newdug clay. Narrow openings were left at the bottoms of what would be the doors, and to the top rear of the tunnels. Then the wood packed inside was fired. Pillars of smoke rose up like the ghosts of trees and became a forest whose canopy blotted out the sun. The show had been playing over and over ever since its original broadcast on one of the government channels. Nobody noticed it anymore.

The heat required to glaze the walls was
—The bureaucrat reached over to switch channels.
My brother died at sea! What was I supposed to do? I’m not his keeper, you know.

“You watch that crap?” Chu asked.

“It’s involving.”

“Who’s the weedy geek?”

“Now that’s an interesting question. He’s supposed to be Shelley, Eden’s cousin—you know, the little girl who saw the unicorn? But she had two cousins, identical twins—” Chu snorted. “All right, I admit it’s implausible. But, you know, even in the Inner Circle it happens occasionally. That’s why they have the genetic-tagging techniques, to mark them as separate individuals when it does occur.”

But Chu wasn’t listening. She stared off through the doorway into the gray rain, pensively silent. Around them rose the babble of voices from waitresses and kitchen workers, soldiers and civilians, happy and a little shrill with the excitement of the impending evacuation, all feeling the intoxication of radical change.

All right! Yes, I killed him. I killed my brother! Are you happy now?

“God,” Chu said. “This must be the most boring place in the universe.”

*   *   *

Holding his briefcase out for balance, the bureaucrat followed Chu down the rain-slick boardwalk. They passed a stairway dug into the dirt, once braced and planked, now crumbled into a narrow slant and become almost a gully. Water gushed from its mouth. “I’ve requisitioned good seats on the heliostat tomorrow,” Chu said.

The bureaucrat grunted.

“Come on. If we miss the ship, we’ll be taken out on one of the cattleboats.” She tugged on her census bracelet in annoyance. “You haven’t seen what they’re like.”

A crate crashed onto the walk before them, and they danced back. It bounced over the edge, into the water. Scavengers were ransacking a storeroom, noisily smashing things and throwing them outside. A slick of trash floated downriver, all but motionless in the sleepy current, spreading as it withdrew: old mattresses slowly drowning, wicker baskets and dried flowers, splintered armchairs and fiddles, toy sailboats lying on their sides in the water. The scavengers were shouting, given over completely to the destruction of objects they could never afford before and could not pay the freight on now.

They came to a jug with a weathered sign hung over the door showing a silvery skeletal figure. The gate was the establishment’s sole legitimate enterprise and ostensible reason for being, though everyone knew the place was actually a paintbox. “What about the flier?” the bureaucrat asked. “No word yet from the Stone House?”

“No, and by now it’s safe to say there’s not going to be. Look, we’ve been here so long I’m growing moss on my behind. We’ve done everything we can do, the trail is cold. What good is a flier going to do anyway? It’s time to give up.”

“I’ll take your sentiments under advisement.” The bureaucrat stepped within. Chu did not follow.

*   *   *

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been here,” the bureaucrat said. Korda’s quarters were spacious in a city where space translated directly into wealth. The grass floor was broken into staggered planes, and the arrays of stone tools set into the angled walls were indirectly lit by spots bounced off rotating porphyry columns. Everything was agonizingly clean. Even the dwarf cherry trees were potted in mirror-symmetrical pairs.

“You’re not here now,” Korda replied unsentimentally. “Why are you bothering me at home? Couldn’t it wait for the office?”

“You’ve been avoiding me at the office.”

Korda frowned. “Nonsense.”

“Pardon me.” A man in a white ceramic mask entered the room. He wore a loose wraparound, such as was the style in the worlds of Deneb. “The vote is coming up, and you’re needed.”

“You wait here.” At the archway to the next room Korda hesitated and asked the man in the mask, “Aren’t you coming, Vasli?”

The eyeless white face glanced downward. “It is my place on the Committee that is being debated just now. It’s probably best for all concerned if I wait this one out.”

The Denebian drifted to the center of the room, stood motionless. His hands were lost in the wraparound’s sleeves, his head overshadowed by the hood. He looked subtly unhuman, his motions too graceful, his stillness too complete. He was, the bureaucrat realized suddenly, that rarest of entities, a permanent surrogate. Their glances met.

“I make you nervous,” Vasli said.

“Oh no, of course not. It’s just…”

“It’s just that you find my form unsettling. I know. There is no reason to let an overfastidious sense of tact lead you into falsehood. I believe in truth. I am a humble servant of truth. Were it in my power, I would have no lies or evasions anywhere, nothing concealed, hidden, or locked away from common sight.”

The bureaucrat went to the wall, examined the collection of stone points there: fish points from Miranda, fowling points from Earth, worming points from Govinda. “Forgive me if I seem blunt, but such radical sentiments make you sound like a Free Informationist.”

“That is because I am one.”

The bureaucrat felt as if he’d come face to face with a mythological beast, a talking mountain, say, or Eden’s unicorn. “You are?” he said stupidly.

“Of course I am. I gave up my own world to share what I knew with your people. It takes a radical to so destroy his own life, yes? To exile himself among people who feel uncomfortable in his presence, who fear his most deeply held values as treason, and who were not interested in what he had to say in the first place.”

“Yes, but the concept of Free Information is…”

“Extreme? Dangerous?” He spread his arms. “Do I look dangerous?”

“You would give everyone total access to all information?”

“Yes, all of it.”

“Regardless of the harm it could do?”

“Look. You are like a little boy who is walking along in a low country, and has found a hole in one of the dikes. You plug it with your finger, and for a moment all is well. The sea grows a little stronger, a little bigger. The hole crumbles about the edges. You have to thrust your entire hand within. Then your arm, up to the shoulder. Soon you have climbed entirely within the hole and are plugging it with your body. When it grows bigger, you take a deep breath and puff yourself up with air. But still, the ocean is there, and growing stronger. You have done nothing about your basic problem.”