Stations of the Tide (8 page)

In the back of his head the bureaucrat felt the buzzing encephalic presence of all twenty sibyls hooked into the system. But Trinculo’s presence was all-pervasive, riveting, a charismatic aura he could almost touch. Even knowing, as he did, that it was an artifact of the primitive technology, that his attention was artificially focused so rigidly on Trinculo that the hindbrain registered it as awe, the bureaucrat felt humbled before this glowing being. “What do you have on this object?”

He visualized the shell knife. A sibyl picked up the image and hung it in the air over the desk. Another opened a window into a museum catalog. She scanned through bright galleries that looked as if they’d been carved from ice and lifted the knife’s twin from a glass shelf. The bureaucrat wondered what the actual museum looked like; he had known collections with perfect catalogs and empty, looted source buildings.

“It’s a haunt artifact,” one sibyl said.

“A shell knife, used to unhinge the muscle of midden clams,” added another. In the air beside the knife she opened a window onto a primitive scene depicting a fish-headed haunt squatting by the river demonstrating the tool’s use, then closed it again.

“Quite useless now. Humans do not find midden clams digestible.”

“This particular knife is about three-hundred-fifty years old. It was used by a river clan of the Shellfish alliance. It is a particularly fine example of its class, and unlike most such was not gathered by the original settlers on Miranda, but is a product of the Cobbs Creek dig.”

“Documentation is available on the Cobbs Creek dig.”

“It is presently on display in the Dryhaven Museum of Prehuman Anthropology.”

“Is that sufficient, or do you wish to know more?”

Trinculo smiled benignly. The tutelar had spoken not a word since his original greeting. “I saw this knife not half an hour ago in the Tidewater,” the bureaucrat said.

“Impossible!”

“It must be a reproduction.”

“The museum has offplanet security.”

“Trinculo,” the bureaucrat said, “Tell me something.”

In a friendly, competent voice the gold mask said, “I am here to assist you.”

“You have the text of Gregorian’s commercials on file.”

“Of course we do!” a sibyl snapped.

“Why hasn’t he been arrested?”

“Arrested!”

“There’s no reason to.”

“Whatever for?”

“Gregorian claims he can transform people so that they can live in the sea. That’s false representation. He’s taking money for doing so. That’s fraud. And it looks likely that he’s drowning his victims in the course of his fraud. That’s murder.”

There was a brief silence. Then the sibyl sharing the room with his surrogate, head still down as she sifted through her data, said, “It must first be determined that he can’t actually fulfill his claims.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Human beings cannot live in Ocean.”

“Perhaps they could be adapted.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“To take the very simplest matter first, there’s hypothermy. If you’ve ever been swimming, you know how rapidly you grow cold. Your body can afford to lose heat at that rate for only a relatively short time. After a few hours, you’ve used up your resources and you lose isothermy. You go into shock. And you die.”

“Haunts managed to live in the water quite comfortably.”

“Human beings are not haunts. We’re mammals. We need to maintain a high blood temperature.”

“There are mammals too that live in the water. Otters and seals and the like.”

“Because they’ve evolved to. They’re protected by a layer of fat. We’re not insulated that way.”

“Perhaps that’s part of the change that Gregorian makes, an insulating layer of fat.”

“I refuse to believe that I’m having such a puerile argument when I’m within an information system!” The bureaucrat addressed the tutelar directly. “Trinculo, tell your people whether such an extreme rearrangement of human physical structure is possible.”

Trinculo turned slightly to one side and then to the other in confusion, and stammered, “I’m … No, I’m sorry, I … can’t answer that question.”

“It’s just a simple correlation of available science!”

“I don’t … have the…” Trinculo’s eyes were pained. His glance darted back and forth frantically.

Suddenly the tutelar and the buzzing presence of his attendants were gone. The office was empty save for the sibyl. She had yanked the patch.

The bureaucrat frowned. “Your tutelar seems woefully inadequate for your needs.”

The sibyl looked up sharply, making the cables rustle and rattle. “And whose fault is that? It was your own department that sent in the ravishers and berserkers when they decided the Quiet Revolution had gone too far. We had a completely integrated system before your creatures ate holes in it.”

“That was a long time ago,” the bureaucrat said. He knew of the incident, of course, the quixotic attempt to regear an entire planet to a technological level so low they could afford to cut off all offplanet commerce, but he was surprised to hear her speak of it so emotionally. “Back when the Tidewater was still underwater, just before the Resettlement. Long before either of us was born. Surely there’s no need to go into old grievances now.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to live with the consequences. You don’t have to operate a senile information system. Your people condemned Trinculo as a traitor and burned out all his higher functions. But he’s still remembered here as a patriot. Children light candles to him in the churches.”

“He was your leader?” The bureaucrat was not surprised, then, that Trinculo’s higher functions had been pithed. After what had happened to Earth, there was no creature more feared than an independent artificial entity.

The sibyl shook her cables wrathfully. Drops of condensate went flying. “Yes, he was our leader! Yes, he masterminded the rebellion, if that’s what you want to call it. We wanted nothing more than freedom from your interference, your economics, your technology. When Trinculo showed us how we could disentangle ourselves from your control, we didn’t stop to ask if he came from a factory or a womb. We’d have dealt with the devil for a chance to slip our necks from your noose, but Trinculo was nothing of the kind. He was an ally, a friend.”

“You can’t disengage from the outside universe, no matter how—” the bureaucrat began. But the woman’s skin was white now, her lips thin, her eyes hard. Her face had closed and turned to stone. It was hopeless trying to reason with her. “Well, thank you for your help.”

The sibyl glared him out of the room.

The bureaucrat backed outside, turned, and realized he was lost.

As he stood there, hesitating, a door opened down the hall. Out stepped a man who shone as bright as an angel. He looked as if he had swallowed the sun and could not contain its light within his flesh. The bureaucrat turned down external gain, and saw within the dimming figure the steel ribs and telescreen face of a fellow surrogate. It was a face he knew.

“Philippe?” he said.

*   *   *

“Actually I’m just an agent.” Philippe had recovered from amazement first; now he grinned in a comradely fashion. “I’m afraid I’m under such pressure at work, I haven’t been able to gate here in person.” He took the bureaucrat’s arm and steered him down the hall. “If that was your first encounter with Trinculo’s widows, you need a drink. Surely you have time for a drink.”

“You spend a lot of time on Miranda, do you?”

“More than some, less than others.” Philippe’s teeth were perfect, and his face, even though he was old enough to be the bureaucrat’s father, was unlined and pink. He was the living avatar of the eternal schoolboy. “Does it matter?”

“I suppose not. How’s my desk doing?”

“Oh, I’m sure Philippe has it well in hand. He’s very good at that sort of thing, you know.”

“So everyone tells me,” the bureaucrat said glumly.

They stepped onto a sudden balcony overlooking a city street. Philippe called a moving bridge, and they rode it over the hot river of moving metal to the next wing of the building. “Where is Philippe nowadays?”

“Diligently at work in the Puzzle Palace, I presume. Down this way.” They came to a deserted refreshment niche and plugged in. Philippe called up a menu, hooked a metal elbow over the bar. “The apple juice looks good.”

The bureaucrat had meant where Philippe was physically. Agenting in realspace was so much more expensive than surrogation—the ministries responsible for the conservation of virtual reality made sure of that—that normally agents were only employed when the primary was so far away the lag time made surrogation impractical. It was clear, though, that the agent wasn’t going to answer that particular question.

Back in the hotel, somebody nudged the bureaucrat’s shoulder. “I’ll be done in a minute,” he said without opening his eyes. A drink materialized in his hand, as chill and slippery with moisture as a real glass would be.

“Tell me,” the agent said after a moment. “Does Korda have anything against you?”

“Korda! Why would Korda have anything against me?”

“Well, that’s exactly what I was wondering, you see. He’s said some odd things lately. About possibly eliminating your position and reassigning your responsibilities to Philippe.”

“That’s ridiculous. My workload could never be—”

Philippe threw up his hands. “This isn’t my doing—I don’t want your job. I’m overburdened with responsibility as it is.”

“Okay,” the bureaucrat said disbelievingly. “All right. Tell me exactly what Korda said to you.”

“I don’t know. Don’t look at me like that! Honestly I don’t. Philippe only gave me the broadest outline. You know how cautious he is. He’d keep what he knew from himself, if that were possible. But, listen—I’ll be merging back into him in a couple of hours. Do you want to give him a message? He could gate down to talk with you.”

“That won’t be necessary.” The bureaucrat swallowed back his anger, hid it away from the agent. “I ought to have this case wrapped up in a day or two. I can talk with him in person then.”

“You’re that close, are you?”

“Oh yes. Gregorian’s mother gave me a great deal of information. Including an old notebook of Gregorian’s. It’s full of names and addresses.” Actually the book was largely taken up with occult diagrams and instructions for ceremonies—full of serpents, cups, and daggers—that the bureaucrat found both obscure and tedious. Other than the insights it gave into the young Gregorian’s character and youthful megalomania, its only solid lead had been the references to Madame Campaspe. But the bureaucrat wanted to give Philippe something to think about.

“Good, good,” the agent said vaguely. He stared down at his hand, swirling the liquid only he could see in its imaginary glass. “Why is it that line-fed fruit juice never tastes as good as what you get in person?”

“That’s because when you’re just being line-fed the flavor, you don’t get the body rush from the sugars and so on.” Philippe looked blank. “It’s like getting a line-fed beer—all flavor and no alcohol. Only the physical component of apple juice isn’t so pronounced, so while your body feels the difference, you’re not consciously aware of what the lack is.”

“You know a little bit of everything,” Philippe said amiably.

*   *   *

When the bureaucrat opened his eyes, Chu was waiting for him.

“I’ve found it,” she said. That small, feral smile again, conspiratorial flash of teeth and gone. “Come on out back.”

On the blind side of the hotel was a long storage shed with a single narrow door. Chu had smashed the lock. “I need a light,” the bureaucrat said. He took one from his briefcase and entered.

Amid a litter of tools, lumber, and scrapwood, were a dozen new-made crates. “They were all set to close up shop,” Chu said. Setting a sawhorse aside, she reached into a crate she’d already ripped open, and handed the bureaucrat a shell knife just like the one he’d seen earlier.

“So they’re smuggling artifacts, just as we thought, eh?”

Chu took a second shell knife from the crate, a third, a fourth.

They were all identical.

“There’s other stuff too. Pottery, digging sticks, fishnet weights. All in multiplicate.” She reached into the shadows. “Look what else I found.”

It was a briefcase, the perfect twin of the one the bureaucrat held. He could tell by its markings that it had been issued by his own department.

“You see the scam, don’t you? They got hold of some genuine haunt artifacts, fed them to the briefcase, and had it make them copies. Then they returned the originals to the source. Or maybe copies, I don’t imagine it would make any difference.”

“Only to an archeologist. Maybe not even then.”

“Did you find out where the knife came from?”

“The original was from Cobbs Creek,” the bureaucrat said. “It’s on display in Dryhaven.”

“Cobbs Creek is just down the river. Not far from Clay Bank.”

“I’m less interested in where the artifacts came from than in how the counterfeiters got hold of one of our briefcases. Have you questioned it yet?”