Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  The bureaucrat found Chu behind the bandstand, hustling a red-faced young roisterer. She leaned against him, one palm casually resting on his rump, and teased a paper cup from his hand. “No, you don’t need any more of that,” she said patiently. “We can find better uses for—” The bureaucrat backed away unnoticed.

  He let the crowds sweep him down the main street of a transformed Rose Hall, past dance stands, rides, and peepshows. Pushing through a cluster of surrogates — kept to the fringes since they weren’t physically present — he watched the fantasia presentations for a time, shoved up against the stage with a rowdy group of soldiers with central evac armbands who hooted, whistled, and cheered on their favorites. The event was too esoteric for his offworld tastes, and he drifted on, through the odors of roast boar, fermented cider, and a dozen fairy foods.

  Children materialized underfoot and, laughing, were gone.

  Somebody hailed him by name, and the bureaucrat turned to face Death. Flickering blue light showed through the sockets of the skull mask, and the bureaucrat could see between metal ribs through to the cape. Death handed him a cup of beer.

  “And who are you?” he said, smiling.

  Death took his elbow, strolled him away from the bright center of the celebration. “Oh, do let me have my mysteries. It’s jubilee, after all.” The tattered black cape Death wore smelled musty; the costumier had taken advantage of his distant customer’s limited senses. “I’m a friend, anyway.”

  They came to a footbridge over the little stream marking the end of town. The light here faded to gloom, and the clustered buildings were silent and oppressively dark. “Have you located Gregorian yet?” the surrogate asked.

  “Just who are you?” the bureaucrat asked, not smiling.

  “No, of course you haven’t.” Death looked to the side distractedly. “Excuse me, somebody’s just… No, I don’t have time to… Okay, just leave it right there.” Then, directly again. “I’m sorry about that. Listen, I don’t have the time, I’m afraid. Just tell Gregorian, when you find him, that someone he knows — his sponsor, tell him that his old sponsor will take him in again, if he gives up this folly. Do you understand? That’s what you want too, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe it isn’t. Why don’t you tell me who you are and what you actually want, and maybe we can work together on this.”

  “No, no.” Death shook his head. “It’s a long shot, anyway,

  probably won’t work. But if you have trouble dealing with him, it’s an argument you can use. I mean it, he’ll know that my word is good.” He turned away.

  “Wait,” the bureaucrat said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you his father?”

  Death turned to look at him. For a long moment it said nothing; then, “I’m sorry. I have to leave now.” The surrogate swayed as if about to fall, and then locking gyros froze into place and it stood there, a statue.

  He touched the metal skull. It was inert, lacking the almost subliminal hum of an active unit. Slowly he walked away, turning now and again to look back, but it remained dead.

  In the thick of things again, he drained off his spiced beer and picked up a powdered fairy cruller from a drunken teenager who waved away his money: “It’s been paid for!” There was a banner on the stand reading tidewater produce and animal by-products collective. He raised the pastry in toast, and wandered into the fairway again, feeling distant and a trifle wistful. All these happy people.

  The crowd swirled about him, as changing-unchanging as waves crashing on the beach, endlessly fascinating even as the eye grabs and fails to comprehend. Faces contorted with laughter that was too shrill, too manic, skin too flushed, beaded with sweat. What am I doing here? the bureaucrat asked himself. I’m not going to accomplish anything tonight. The forced gaiety depressed him.

  The evening was growing late. The children had evaporated, and the adults remaining were louder and drunker. Sucking powdered sugar from his fingers, the bureaucrat almost stumbled into a brawl. Two drunks were pushing a surrogate around, flattening its ribs and ripping off its arms and legs one by one. The thing struggled on the ground, protesting loudly as they tore off its last remaining limb, then went dead as the operator gave up on the evening as a bad cause. The bureaucrat skirted the laughing spectators and continued down the road.

  A woman in a green-and-blue fantasia, Spirit of the Waters perhaps, or Sky and Ocean, emerald plumes flying up from her headdress, came toward him. Her costume was cut low, and she had to hold up the spangled skirt with one hand to keep it from brushing the ground. The crowd parted like water before her, cleaved by an almost tangible aura of beauty. She looked straight at him, her eyes blazing green as the soul of the forest. Nearby, a chanteuse sang that the heart was like a little bird, looking for a nest. She set the crowds swirling like brightly painted metal bobbins. The green woman was swept to him, a mermaid cast up by the sea.

  Automatically the bureaucrat took a step backward to let this vision by. But she stopped him with a touch of one green leather glove. “You,” she said, and those green eyes and crisp white teeth seemed about to tear into him, “I want you.”

  She put an arm about his waist and led him away.

  By the edge of the jubilee the woman paused to pluck a waxflower from one sagging string. She cupped it in both hands, and bent at stream’s edge to place it in the water. Other flowers bobbed and whirled on the stream, spinning slowly, a stately ballroom dance.

  As she crouched over the sphere of light, he saw that her arms above the gloves were covered with stars and triangles, snakes and eyes, gnostic tattoos of uncertain meaning.

  Her name, she said, was Undine. They strolled down Cheesefac-tory Road beyond the ruck of houses, deep into a forest of roses. Thorny vines were everywhere; they climbed pillars formed by trees that had been choked by their profusion, sprawled along the ground, exploded into bloodspeckled bushes large as hills. The air was heavy with their scent, almost cloying. “I should have trimmed these back some,” the woman said as they ducked under a looping arch of the small pink flowers. “But so close to the jubilee tides, who’d bother?”

  “Are these native?” asked the bureaucrat, amazed at their extent. The flowers were everywhere he looked.

  “Oh, no, these are feral Earth stock. The original industrielle had them planted along the roadside; she liked their look. But without any natural enemies, they just exploded. This extends, oh, kilometers around. On the Piedmont they’d be a problem; here, the tides will just wash them away.”

  They walked some way in silence. “You’re a witch,” the bureaucrat said suddenly.

  “Oh, you’ve noticed?” He could feel her amused smile burning in the night air beside his face. The tip of her tongue touched the edge of his ear, gently traced the swirls down into its dark center, withdrew. “When I heard you were looking for Gregorian, I decided to have a look at you. I studied with Gregorian when we were children. Ask me anything you want.” They came to a clearing in the rosebushes, and a small unpainted hut. “Here we are.”

  “Will you tell me where Gregorian is?”

  “That’s not what you want.” That smile again, those unblinking green eyes. “Not at the moment.”

  “This must have a thousand eyelets,” he said, clumsily unhooking the back of the fantasia. A slice of flesh appeared just below the downy nape of Undine’s neck, widened, reached downward. The tips of his fingers brushed pale skin, and she shivered slightly. A single waxflower burned on a nightstand beneath a sentimental holo of Krishna dancing. The flame leaped and fell, throwing warm shadows through the room. “There. That’s the last of them.”

  The witch turned, reached hands to shoulders, lowered the gown. Large breasts, the faintest trifle overripe, floated into view, tipped with apricot nipples. Slowly she let the cloth slip down, over a full, soft belly, its deep navel aswim in shadow. A tuft of hair appeared, and, laughing, she held the dress so that only the very topmost hint of her vagina showed.
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  “Oh, the heart is like a little bird,” she sang softly, swaying in time to the music, “that perches in your hand.”

  This woman was a trap. The bureaucrat could feel it. Gregorian had his hooks set in her just below the skin. If he were to kiss her, the barbs would pierce his own flesh, too deep and painful to rip out, and the magician would be able to play him like a fish, wearing him down, tiring him out, until he lost the will to fight and sank to the bottom of his life and died.

  “And if you do not seize it…” She was waiting.

  He should leave now. He should turn and flee.

  Instead, he reached for her face, touched it lightly, won-deringly. Her lips turned to his, and they kissed deeply. The costume rustled as it fell to the floor. Her hands reached inside his jacket to undo his shirt. “Don’t be so gentle,” she said.

  They tumbled to the bed, and she slid him within her. She was wet and open already, slippery and warm and fine. Her soft, wide belly touched him, then her breasts. She was just past her prime, poised on the instant before the long slide into age, and especially arousing to him for that. She’ll never be so beautiful again, he thought, so ripe and full of juices. She clasped her legs about his waist and rocked him like a ship on the water, gently at first, then faster, as if a storm were building.

  Undine, he thought for no reason. Ysolt, Esme, Theodora — the women here have names like dried flowers or autumn leaves.

  A gust of wind sent the flowerlight scurrying for the comers, hurrying back again. Undine kissed him furiously on the face, the neck, the eyes. The bed creaking beneath them, they rolled over and over one another, now on the bottom, now on top, and over again, until he lost track of who was on top and who on the bottom, of where his body ended and hers began, of exactly which body belonged to whom. And then at last she was Ocean herself, and he lost all sense of self, and drowned.

  “Again,” she said.

  “I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” the bureaucrat said amiably. “Someone considerably younger. But if you’re willing to wait twenty minutes or so, I’ll be more than happy to try again.”

  She sat up, her magnificent breasts swaying slightly. Faint daggers of Caliban’s light slanted through the window to touch them both. The candle had long since guttered out. “You mean to say you don’t know the method by which men can have orgasm after orgasm without ejaculating?”

  He laughed. “No.”

  “The girls won’t like you if you have to stop a half hour every time you come,” she said teasingly. Then, seriously, “I’ll teach you.” She took his cock in her hand, waggled it back and forth, amused by its limpness. “After your vaunted twenty minutes. In the meantime I can show you something of interest.”

  She threw the blanket lengthwise over her shoulders, as if it were a shawl. It made a strange costume in the dim light, with sleeves that touched the ground and a back that didn’t quite reach her legs, so that two pale slivers of moon peeped out at him. Naked, he padded after her into the clearing behind the hut. “Look,” she said.

  Light was bursting from the ground in pale sheets of pink and blue and white. The rosebushes shimmered with pastel light as if already drowned in Ocean’s shallows. The ground here had been dug up recently, churned and spaded, and was now suffused with pale fire. “What is it?” he asked wonderingly.

  “Iridobacterium. They’re naturally biophosphorescent.

  You’ll find them everywhere in the soil in the Tidewater, but usually only in trace amounts. They’re useful in the spiritual arts. Pay attention now, because I’m going to explain a very minor mystery to you.”

  “I’m listening,” he said, not comprehending.

  “The only way to force a bloom is to bury an animal in the soil. When it decomposes, the iridobacteria feed on the products of decay. I’ve spent the last week poisoning dogs and burying them here.”

  “You killed dogs?” he said, horrified.

  “It was quick. What do you think is going to happen to them, when the tides come? They’re like the roses, they can’t adapt. So the humane-society people organized Dog Control Week, and paid me by the corpse. Nobody’s about to haul a bunch of mutts to the Piedmont.” She gestured. “There’s a shovel leaning against my hut.”

  He fetched the shovel. In a month this land would be under water. He imagined fishes swimming through the buildings while drowned dogs floated mouths open, caught head down in tangles of drowning rosebushes. They would rot before the hungry kings of the tides would accept their carcasses. At the witch’s direction, he shoveled the brightest patches of dirt into a rusty steel drum almost filled with rainwater. The dirt sank, and bright swirls of phosphorescence rose in the water. Undine skimmed the top with a wooden scraper, slopping the scum into a wide pan. “When the water evaporates, the powder that remains is rich in iridobacteria,” she said. “There’s several more steps necessary to process it, but now it’s in concentrated form, that can wait until I reach the Piedmont. It’s common as sin now, but it won’t grow up there.”

  “Tell me about Gregorian,” the bureaucrat said.

  “Gregorian is the only perfectly evil man I’ve ever met,” Undine said. Her face was suddenly cold, as harsh and stern as Caliban’s rocky plains. “He is smarter than you, stronger than you, more handsome than you, and far more determined. He has received an offplanet education that’s at least the equal of yours, and he’s a master of occult arts in which you do not believe. You are insane to challenge him. You are a dead man, and you do not know it.”

  “He’d certainly like me to believe that.”

  “All men are fools,” Undine said. Her tone was light again, her look disdainful. “Have you noticed that? Were I in your position, I’d arrange to contract an illness or develop a moral qualm about the nature of my assignment. It might be a black mark on my record, but I would outlive the embarrassment.”

  “When did you meet Gregorian?” The bureaucrat dumped more dirt in the drum, raising mad swirls of phosphorescence.

  “That was the year I spent as a ghost. I was a foundling. Madame Campaspe bought me the year I first bled — she’d seen promise in me. I was a shy, spooky little thing to begin with, and as part of my training, she imposed the discipline of invisibility. I kept to the shadows, never speaking. I slept at odd times and in odd places. When I was hungry, I crept into the homes of strangers and stole my food from their cupboards and plates. If I was seen, Madame beat me — but after the first month, I was never seen.”

  “That sounds horribly cruel.”

  “You are in no position to judge. I was watching from the heart of an ornamental umbrella bush the morning that Madame tripped over Gregorian. Literally tripped — he was sleeping on her doorstep. I learned later that he’d walked two days solid without food, he was so anxious to become her apprentice, and then collapsed on arrival. What a squawk! She kicked him into the road, and I think he broke a rib. I climbed to the roof of her potting shed and saw her harass him out of sight. Quick as a thought, I slid to the ground, stole a turnip for my breakfast from the garden, and was gone. Thinking that was the last of that ragged young man.

  “But the next day he was back.

  “She chased him away. He came back. Every morning it was the same. He scrounged for food during the day — I do not know if he stole, worked, or sold his body, for I was not quite interested enough to follow him, though by now I could walk down the center of Rose Hall in broad daylight without being noticed. But every morning he was back on the stoop.

  “After a week, she changed tactics. When she found him on the doorsill, she would throw him some small change. The little ceramic coins that were current then, the orange and green and blue chips — they’ve gone back to silver since. She treated him as a beggar. Because, you see, he held himself very proudly, and there was a dirty gray trace of lace on the cuffs of his rags; she could tell he was haut-bourgeois. She thought to shame him away. But he’d snatch the coins from the air, pop them into his mouth, and very ost
entatiously swallow. Madame pretended not to notice. From the attic window of the beautician’s shop across the street, I watched this duel between her stiff back and his nasty grin.

  “A few days later I noticed a horrible smell by the stoop, and discovered that he’d been shitting behind the topiary bushes. There was a foul heap of his leavings studded with the ceramic coins she had been throwing him. So that finally Madame had no choice but to take him in.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he had the spirit of a magician. He had that unswerving, unbreakable will that the spiritual arts require, and the sudden instinct for the unexpected. Madame could no more ignore him than a painter could ignore a child with perfect visualization. Such a gift only comes along once in a generation.

  “She tested him. You are familiar with the device used to give the experience of food to surrogates?”

  “The line-feed. Yes, very familiar.”

  “She had one mounted in a box. An offworld lover had wired it up for her. It was stripped down so that she could feed raw current into the nerve inductor. Do you know how it would feel to hold your hand within its field?”

  “It would hurt like hell.”

  “Like hell indeed.” She smiled sadly, and he could see the ghost of the schoolgirl behind her smile. “I remember that box so well. A plain thing with a hole in one side and a rheostat on top calibrated from one to seven. If I close my eyes, I can see it, and her long fingers atop it, and that damned water rat of hers perched on her shoulder. She warned me that if I took my hand out of the box before she told me to, she would kill me. It was the most terrifying moment of my life. Even Gregorian, ingenious though he was, could never top that.”

  Undine skimmed more slop off the water. Her voice was soft and reminiscent. “When she moved the dial off zero, it felt like an animal had bitten right through my flesh. Then slowly, oh, excruciatingly slowly, she moved it up to one, and that was an order of magnitude worse. What agonies I suffered! I was crying aloud by three, and blind with pain by four. At five I yanked out my hand, determined to die.