“No, that’s Aldebaran. I dressed him like that, in skirts and flounces, for the first several years to hide him from his father, in case he came looking. Until he was seven. He turned willful then, nasty creature, and wouldn’t wear his proper clothes. I had to give in, he walked out in the street buck naked. But I didn’t give in easy. Three days he went bare before the priest came and said this could not be.”
“How did Aldebaran come to have an ofrworld education?”
She ignored the question. “I wanted a daughter, of course. Girls are so much more tractable. A girl would not have run off to find her father, the way he did.” Abruptly she commanded, “Put your hand under my bed. Pull out what you find there.”
He reached into the vaginal shadows under the bedskirts, drew out a shallow trunk carved with half-human figures. Mother Gregorian rolled over, grunting with effort, to look. “Under that green silk — there ought to be a brown package. Yes. That. Unwrap it.”
It was alarmingly easy to obey this monster, she was so sure of her commands. He held a battered notebook in his hand, a faded scrawl of sigils running across its cover.
“That belonged to Aldebaran. He lost it just before he ran away.” Her smile hinted at stories untold. “Take it with you, perhaps it’ll tell you something.” She closed her eyes, let her face relax into a flaccid mask of pain. She was panting now, steadily as a dog in summer, but quieter.
“You’ve been very helpful,” the bureaucrat said cautiously. He could sense the old woman about to name a price for information given.
“He thought he was so clever. He thought that if he went far away enough, he could escape me. He thought he could escape me!” Her eyes flickered open, glittered venomously. “When you find him, give him a message for me. Tell him that no matter how far you go, in miles or learning or time, you cannot escape your mother.”
He could think of nothing to say. So instead, he bowed politely and turned to leave.
“Oh, and you needn’t bother about the broken saucer. We have more, and it was an incomplete set anyway.”
He smiled. “That’s a good trick. How did you know that?”
She reached a hand up in the air, a gesture that managed to be both languid and laborious, like a drowning woman reaching for the water’s surface, and tripped a switch beam. The lights went out, and the room was plunged in darkness, save for a snowflake of light on the ceiling. It was a rosette of small circles, like a festival cookie. He looked down, and there was a smaller rosette on the floor, and brighter.
Her voice came out of the darkness, gloating. “The hot-air register. When it’s open, I can hear every word in the room below. I heard the saucer crack, and Esme scuttling out into the pantry and back.” She laughed at him. “Too straightforward for you, eh? You offworlders think yourselves so sophisticated. Something as simple as our ventilation system is beyond you.”
In the room below, he met a dignified-looking man with a dark mustache, holding a glass of the daughters’ thin beer. His hair was slicked down, Piedmont style. “You must be the appraiser,” the bureaucrat said.
They shook hands. “Yes, I come here every few weeks, to draw up another schedule of prices. A year ago, these pieces were worth a fortune; now, shipping costs have gone up and they’re not so valuable. Most will have to be left behind.” The appraiser held up a battered sheaf of papers and sighed piously. “These are the figures, anyone can check them. There’s no profit in it for me. The only reason I agree to come back so often is that there are so many beautiful things here, it would be a pity if they were lost to the tides.”
Linogre and Ambrym stood nearby, and Esme out of sight. Yet he could feel her watchful from some dim recess, all tiny black beadglass eyes and quivering whiskers.
“Esme,” Linogre said. “Please show mother’s visitor to the door. We must see to her wardrobe.”
The elder two sisters swept away in the wake of the appraiser. As soon as they were gone, Esme emerged from shadow. The bureaucrat glanced up at the air register and impulsively took her hand. He felt the sudden, urgent need to get her out of this poisonous atmosphere. To save something from disaster. “Listen to me: Your mother has told me she’s cut you out of her will,” he said. “She’s not willing you a thing. Leave this house tonight, child. Right now. I’ll help carry your things. There’s nothing here for you.”
The girl’s dusty-glass eyes took on a dull sheen of malice. “I want to see her die!” she spat. “She can keep her money, I just want to see her dead and never coming back!”
It was night when he left the house, but Caliban was high in the sky and full, Ariel low but gibbous and bright, so the river road was well-lit, and the trees had ghostly pairs of shadows arcing away from each other. The tree stars had come down from their high perches and, faintly luminous, were rooting for mites in the humus. The walk was peaceful, and the bureaucrat used it to sort out his impressions. It seemed to him that the house he’d just left was frozen in time. When the tides come, everything will change. Only some have rendered themselves beyond change, and caught by the sun, will be revealed as lifeless stone.
It wouldn’t hurt to find out who the magician’s father was. Even given that he’d doubtless broken tariff when he brought his money planetside, he must’ve been a rich and quite likely influential man. He thought again of the three sisters, unaged and unsexed by greed and inertia.
I could almost like Gregorian, he said to himself, just for escaping that woman.
At last he asked his briefcase, “Well — what is it?”
“Judging by the sketches and diagrams scattered within, it’s a magical diary — the account book an aspiring sorcerer maintains to keep track of his spiritual progress. It’s written in a floating cypher, using obsolete alchemical symbols, the sort of thing an extremely bright adolescent might invent.”
“Decode it, then.1’
“Very well.” The briefcase thought for a moment, and then said, “The first entry begins: I killed a dog today.”
4. Sibyls in Stone
The famous witch Madame Campaspe, who claimed she had transcended humanity and thus had no need to die and who always carried with her a tame water rat, was nowhere to be found. Some said she had retired to the Piedmont, where she owned a walled estate in the Iron Lake district under an assumed name, others that she had been drowned by a horrified lover, that her clothes had been discovered by the river and taken to the local church to be burned. Nobody expected her back.
Hammers sang. Workmen were tearing walls from houses and stringing waxflowers over the streets of Rose Hall. The little river community was half-dismantled, the houses at its core reduced to roofs and floors so that they might serve as dance pavilions. They looked like so many skeletons, flanked by sad piles of rubble.
The bureaucrat and Chu stood before what was once Madame Campaspe’s house. The high roof, ironically like a squared-off version of a witch’s peaked cap, and the corner posts were all that remained intact. The interior had been filled with scrap lumber and other inflammables. “What a mess,” the bureaucrat said disgustedly of the heaped and broken wardrobes and divans, stained blankets, clotted masses of paper, and filthy brown rugs, the flotsam and jetsam of a hastily abandoned life. A broken-backed stuffed angel shark leered from the bottom. The house reeked of white kerosene.
“It’ll make a nice bonfire, anyway,” Chu said. She stepped back as a canvas-gloved woman threw in more planks. “Hey — lady! Yeah, you. You from around here?”
The woman brushed back her short black hair with her wrist, not bothering to doff her work glove. “I was born here.” Her eyes were green, cool, skeptical. “What do you want to know?”
“The woman who used to live here, the witch. Did you know her?”
“I know of her, of course. Madame Campaspe was the richest woman in Rose Hall. Tough old bird. There was plenty of gossip. But I live on the other side of town. I never actually met her.”
Chu smiled dryly. “Of course not. A big place like
this, how could you meet her?”
“Actually,” the bureaucrat said, “we’re more interested in a student of hers. A man named Gregorian. Did you know him?”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“This is the man who made all the commercials,” Chu said. Then, when the woman continued to look blank, “On television. Television! Have you ever heard of television?”
Quickly the bureaucrat said, “Excuse me. I couldn’t help but notice that lovely pendant you’re wearing. Is it haunt work?”
Startled in the first flush of anger, the woman glanced down at the stone hanging between her breasts. It was smoothly polished, the length of a human thumb, straightedged on one side, curved on the other, rounded atop and tapering below to a blunt point. It was too big for a fishing weight and too edgeless and asymmetrical to be a spear point. “It’s a shell knife,” she said.
Then, brusquely, she seized her barrow and trundled it away.
The bureaucrat stared after her. “Have you noticed how evasive the locals get when we start asking questions?”
“Yes, it does seem they’ve got something to hide, doesn’t it?” Chu said thoughtfully. “There’s a local trade smuggling haunt artifacts. Stone projectile points, bits of pottery, and so on. Things that properly belong to the government. It would be easy enough for a witch to get involved in that sort of thing. They’re always poking around in odd places, nosing about boneyards, mucking about ravines. Digging holes.”
“Is there much money in haunt artifacts?”
“Well, they aren’t exactly making any more of them.”
Chu smiled at the bureaucrat, and he realized guiltily that his face must bear that exact same expression, sharp little grins with an unclean edge to them, as if they were predators that had caught scent of blood. “I wonder what they’re hiding.”
“It’ll be interesting to find out.”
They headed back to the hotel. In the weeds by the edge of town some children had caught a nautilus. Shrieking blissfully, they rode its shell, two and three at a time, while it slowly pulled itself forward with long, fluid arms. The bureaucrat commiserated silently with the wretched creature. It was hard to imagine it as it would be within the year, soaring and swooping in Ocean’s waters, a creature of preternatural speed, of uncanny grace.
In the center of town, they passed through a loose congeries of trucks belonging to entertainers and concessionaires brought in by the local businesses as a farewell gesture. A proud-bellied man was cranking out the canopy for a puppet theater. Others were raising a Wheel into the sky. It all looked tawdry, cheap, immeasurably sad.
The bureaucrat led the way through the lobby and into the hotel bar. It was cool and dark here, cluttered with neon signs advertising discontinued brands of alcohol and behemoth tusks gone chalky with age, and redolent with a lifetime’s spillage of cheap ale. Strings of paper flowers gone gray as dust hung over adhesive-backed holos of fighters trapped in greasy rainbow-smears while they threw the same famous punches over and over.
A sloppily fat bartender leaned back against a narrow counter, watching television. Their reflections swam up from the depths of a corroded mirror, rising from behind a ragged line of bottles, pale and popeyed, exotics from Ocean’s trenches. The bureaucrat put his briefcase up on the bar, and Chu with a nod slipped away to the toilets.
The bureaucrat coughed. With a lurch, the bartender straightened, turned, laughed. “Whoah! You want to know something, I didn’t see you there.” His head was bald as a toadstool and speckled with thumbprint-sized brown spots. Splaying his hands on the bar, he leaned forward leeringly. “So what the fuck can I do for—” He stopped. “That thing for sale?”
The bureaucrat looked down at the briefcase, up at the barkeep. He was the most physically repulsive man the bureaucrat had ever seen. Fleshy growths sprouted from his eyelids like small tentacles; they jiggled as he talked. His over-sly smile was a caricature of cunning.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well.” The man’s teeth were bruised and cracked, his gums purple, his breath sweet with corruption. “I know a man who might be interested in buying such a thing.” He winked. “Let’s not mention any names.”
“I could get in a lot of trouble if I went back up without this.”
“Not if it fell in the river.” The old troll touched the bureaucrat’s arm ingratiatingly, as if to draw him into a shared fantasy universe of conspiracy, treachery, and sleazy profit. “What the fuck. Accidents happen. A smart fucker could arrange for them to happen in front of witnesses.”
Suddenly the man’s face paled, and he sucked in air between his teeth. Lieutenant Chu’s reflection rose up in the mirror. The bartender turned away quickly.
“Where to next?” Chu asked. She glanced curiously at the fat man, now gazing fixedly into the television.
“I still have some things to see to upcountry.” The bureaucrat rapped the bar. “Excuse me! Do you have a gate here?”
“Back room,” the old man muttered. He didn’t look up.
More bodies were discovered today in the Plymouth Hundreds in Estuary Province, a newswoman said. Shown here are just a few of the dozens of corpses removed from shallow graves this morning. Authorities say the hands, feet, and heads had been removed to slow identification.
“I’d hate to be working homicide hereabouts,” Chu commented. “Lots of old scores are being settled nowadays.”
In the back room the bureaucrat related his conversation with the bartender to Chu. She whistled softly. “You really do have a way of stumbling into things! Well, now I know where to begin looking. Let me go poke around and see what I can turn up.”
“Do you need any help?”
“You’d only be in the way. See to your business. I’ll give you a nudge when I find something.” She left.
The surrogation device was an antique, ungainly as an armored squid, and too battered to be worth the cost of hauling away. The bureaucrat lay down on a cracked vinyl sofa. Tentacular sensors jointed delicately to touch his forehead. Colors swam behind closed eyelids, resolving into squares, triangles, rectangles. He touched one with his thought.
A satellite picked up the signal and handed it down to the Piedmont. A surrogate body came alive, and he walked it out into the streets of Port Richmond.
The House of Retention was a neolithic granite peak, one of the range of government buildings known locally as the Mountains of Madness. Its stone halls were infested by small turquoise lizards that skittered away at the surrogate’s approach and reappeared behind him. Its walls were damp to the touch. The bureaucrat had never been anywhere, the Puzzle Palace of course excepted, where there was so little green. He was directed to its moist interior, where sibyls operated data synthesizers under special license from the Department of Technology Transfer.
It was a long, gloomy walk, and the bureaucrat felt the weight of the building on him every step of the way. The passage took on allegorical dimensions for him, as if he were trapped inside a labyrinth, one he had entered innocently enough in his search for Gregorian, but which he now found himself too far into for retreat but not far enough for any certainty of reaching whatever truth might lie at its center.
When he came to the hall of sibyls, he chose a door at random and stepped inside. A thin, sharp-featured woman sat in the center of a workdesk. Dozens of black cables as thick as her little finger looped out of darkness to plug into her skull. They shook when she looked up to see who had entered the room. It was a clumsy setup, typical of the primitive systems his department enforced when onplanet use of higher-level technologies was unavoidable. “Hello,” the bureaucrat said, “I’m—”
“I know who you are. What do you want?”
Somewhere, water slowly dripped.
“I’m looking for a woman named Theodora Campaspe.”
“The one with the rat?” The sibyl stared at him unblinkingly. “We have a great deal on the notorious Madame Campaspe. But whether she’s alive or dead, and in either case w
here, is not known.”
“There’s a rumor that she drowned.”
The sibyl pursed her lips, squinted judiciously. “Perhaps. She hasn’t been seen for a month or so. It’s well documented that her clothes were burned on the altar of Saint Jones’s outside of Rose Hall. But all that is circumstantial at best. She may simply not want to be found. And of course half our data are corrupt; she may be minding her own business without any intent to deceive anyone.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No.”
“Just what is her business, anyway? What exactly does a witch do?”
“She would never have used that word,” the sibyl said. “It has unfortunate political overtones. She always referred to herself as a spiritualist.” Her eyes grew dreamy as she drew in widely scattered snippets of information. “Most people did not make that distinction, of course. They came to her back door at night with money and requests. They wanted aphrodisiacs, contraceptives, body chrisms, stillbirth powders to sprinkle before their enemies, potions to swell breasts and change genitalia from male to female, candles to conjure up wealth, charms to win back lost love and to ease the pain of hemorrhoids. We have sworn testimony that she could shed her skin like a haunt and turn into a bird or a fish, suck the blood of her enemies, frighten children with masks, ride faithless husbands across the hills where it would take them days to return, ring bells from the tops of trees, send dreams to steal the mind or seduce the soul, emerge from swimming in the river and leave no footprints behind, kill animals by breathing in their faces, reveal the location of Ararat and disclose the existence of a gland inside the brain whose secretions are addictive on first taste, walk shadowless at noon, foresee death, prophesy war, spit thorns, avert persecution. If you want specifics, I could spend the rest of the day on them.”
“What of the magician Aldebaran Gregorian? What do you have on him?”
She bowed her head to concentrate on the search. “We have the text of his commercials, the data presentation your department made to the Stone House, a recent internal security report bylined Lieutenant-Liaison Chu, and the usual anecdotia: consorts with demons, blasphemes, hosts orgies, climbs mountains, couples with goats, eats rocks, plays chess, seduces virgins of both sexes, walks on water, fears rain, tortures innocents, defies offplanet authority, washes with milk, consults mystics on Cordelia, employs drugs on himself and others, travels in disguise, drinks urine, writes books in no known language, and so on. None of it reliable.”
Stations of the Tide Page 5