Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  The bureaucrat found himself wishing the day were over, that the roads were safe to travel again, and he could be off and away. This town had been nothing but disappointing. The ar-cheologists who had worked here were gone, the dig covered over and ground-stabilized, all trace of Gregorian lost in the outmi-gration of citizens to the Piedmont.

  He squinted into the rain. There was a faint smudge of light in the gloom to the east, indistinct, almost nonexistent, and for a second he thought the storm was ending. Then it moved slightly. Not a natural light, then.

  Who would be out on a day like this? he wondered.

  The light brightened slowly, intensifying, drawing in on itself, picking up a touch of blue coloration. Now he could see it for what it was: the glowing videoscreen face of a surrogate trudging through the rain. Slowly the body took shape beneath that spark of blue — a scarecrow caricature of human form, with a rain slicker tied about the body and a wide-brimmed hat lashed to the headpiece to help keep water out of the mechanism.

  Raincoat flapping in the wind, the surrogate approached.

  It came straight for the hotel. The bureaucrat saw now that it carried something under one arm, a long, skinny box, exactly the right length to hold a dozen roses or perhaps a short rifle.

  The bureaucrat stepped to the edge of the doorway, down onto the top step. Rain spattered his shoes, but an overhanging eave sheltered the rest of him. The surrogate came to the foot of the stoop, and looked up at him, grinning.

  It was the false Chu.

  “Who are you?” the bureaucrat said coldly.

  “My name is Veilleur. If it matters.” Veilleur smiled with sweet indifference. “I have a message for you from Gregorian. And a gift.”

  He frowned down at that arrogant adolescent smirk. This must surely be what Gregorian had been like in his youth. “Tell Gregorian I wish to speak with him in person, on a matter of interest to us both.”

  Veilleur pursed his lips with mock regret. “I’m afraid that the master is terribly busy these days. There are so many who desire his help. But if you care to share your matter of concern with me, I’d be happy to do whatever I can.”

  “It’s of a confidential nature.”

  “Alas. Well, my business is brief. Master Gregorian understands that you have come into possession of a certain item which has some sentimental value to him.”

  “His notebook.”

  “Just so. A valuable learning tool, I might point out, that you lack the training to take advantage of.”

  “Still, it is not exactly devoid of interest.”

  “Even so, my master must beg its return. He trusts you will prove cooperative, particularly considering that the book is not, properly speaking, yours.”

  “Tell Gregorian he can pick up his book from me any time he wishes. In person.”

  “I am in the master’s confidence. What can be said to him can be said to me, what can be given him can be given me. In a sense one might say that where I am he is indeed present.”

  “I won’t play this game,” the bureaucrat said. “If he wants his book, he knows where I am.”

  “Well, what can’t be arranged one way must be arranged another,” Veilleur said philosophically. “I was also instructed to give you this.” The surrogate laid its box at the bureaucrat’s feet. “The master directed me to tell you that a man bold enough to fuck a witch deserves something to remember her by.”

  Briefly his electronic grin burned on the telescreen, bright as madness. Then the surrogate turned away.

  “I’ve spoken to Gregorian’s father!” the bureaucrat shouted. “Tell him that too!”

  The surrogate strode away without a backward glance. The wind lifted and swirled its raincoat, and then it was gone.

  Suddenly fearful, the bureaucrat crouched down and lifted the box. It held something heavy. He stepped back onto the porch, unwrapping the wet oilskin, then removed the lid.

  Stars, snakes, and comets burned wildly in the box’s dim interior. Putrefaction had just begun, and the iridobacteria were feasting.

  The laughter in the kitchen died when he entered. “Lord of ghouls, man,” Le Marie said, “what happened to you?” Chu seized his arm, steadied him.

  “I’m afraid something unfortunate has occurred,” a voice said. His own. The bureaucrat laid down the box on the kitchen table. A little girl wearing a red jeunes evacuees kerchief with tiny black stars about her neck craned up on tiptoe to reach for the box, and had her hand slapped. Mintouchian, who stood close enough to see within, hastily slapped the lid back on and rewrapped the cloth. “Something untoward.” He sounded dreadful, like a recording played at the wrong speed, false and subtly inhuman.

  A scurry of activity. Two men ran outside. A chair was scraped forward, and Le Marie folded him down into it. “I’ll call the nationals,” Chu said. “They can lift in a laboratory as soon as the rain ends.” Somebody gave the bureaucrat a drink, and he gulped it down. “My God,” he said. “My God.” Anubis emerged from beneath the table and licked his hand.

  The men who had run outside returned, wet to the skin. The door slammed to behind them. “Nobody out there,” one said.

  More children came crowding in. Mother Le Marie hastily set the box up atop the pie cabinet, out of reach. “What’s in there?” one of the locals asked from the far side of the kitchen.

  “Undine,” the bureaucrat said. “It’s Undine’s arm.” To his utter and complete embarrassment, he burst into tears.

  They led’him protesting feebly to his room, eased him down on the bed, took off his shoes. His briefcase was laid by his side. Then, with consoling murmurs, they left him alone. I shall never be able to sleep, he thought. The room smelled of mildew and old paint. Barnacles speckled the walls and encrusted the mirror, from flies blown in at night by the fever wind, over the top of a window that would not quite close. Wind through that same narrow slot stirred the curtains now. Doubtless it would never be repaired.

  The dim thunder of water on the roof slowly faded as the storm abated. The rain died away to a drizzle and finally a mist.

  A voice separated from the kitchen conversation and floated up the stairs. “Mushroom rain,” it said gently.

  The bureaucrat could not sleep. The pillow was hard and buzzed with fatigue. His skull was stuffed with gray cotton. After some time he arose, picked up his briefcase, and went outside, shoeless and unnoticed.

  The rain was so fine that the droplets seemed to hang in the air, muting and silvering a changed world. Sprays of translucent blue tubes arched over the street. Little violet mandolins sprouted from doorways, and the rooftops were hidden under delicate fantasy architectures of tan and rose and palest yellow latticework. Mushroom rain. The frothy structures were growing even as he watched.

  Houses had mutated into nightmare castles caught midway in transition from stone to organic life. Like a crab, he scuttled by their swaying spires, brushing back dainty lace fans that crumbled at his touch. There was a warm orange glow in the street ahead of him, and he made for it.

  The rectangle of light was the open back doorway to the New Born King’s van. He entered.

  Mintouchian sat behind a small folddown table. A circle of yellow light rested on its center, and within it danced a small metal woman.

  Mintouchian’s fingers were studded with radio remotes. He wove his hands back and forth, warping and interpenetrating the fields. “Ah, it’s you. Couldn’t sleep, eh?” he said. “Me neither.” He nodded toward the woman. “Lovely little thing, isn’t she?”

  Looking closer, the bureaucrat could see that the woman’s figure was made up of thousands of gold rings of varying sizes, so that the arms and legs and torso tapered naturally. Her head was smooth and featureless, but angled to suggest high cheekbones and a narrow chin. She wore a simple cloth poncho tied at the waist and long enough to suggest a dress. It flew up in the air when Mintouchian spun his hands.

  “Yes.” The golden woman rippled her arms with impossible, thousand-jointed fluidity
. “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking.” Mintouchian stared blindly down into the light. “I loved a witch once, a long time ago. She — well, you don’t want to hear the story. Very much like yours. Very much. She was drowned when I… Well. There’s no such thing as a new story, is there? As who should know better than me?”

  Without interrupting the dancer, he half-closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. The wall was covered with puppets, bagged in plastic membranes and bound so tightly escape was unimaginable. It was a museum of puppetry. There were Mr. Punch and his wife, Judy, his cousin Pulchinello, moon-pale Pierrot, famed Harlequin and sweet Columbine, Tricky Dick, Till Eulenspiegel, Good Kosmonaut Minsk, all the ancient archetypes of roguery and heroism awaiting their next breath of borrowed life. “You realize that puppetry is the purest form of theater?”

  “The simplest, you mean?”

  “Simple! You give it a try, if you think it’s so simple! No, I mean the purest. Here I sit, the creator, and you there, the viewer. Our minds are distinct, they cannot touch. But there, between us, I place our little poppet.” The lady glided forward, swooned into a curtsy that swept the ground, drew up lightly as a leaf caught by the wind. “She exists partly in my mind, and partly in yours. For the instant they overlap.” His hands were dancing, and the metal figure with them. The bureaucrat’s attention shifted from one to the other, unable to focus entirely on either.

  “Look,” Mintouchian marveled. The doll froze motionless. “She has no face, no sex. Yet look at this.” The puppet raised her head coquettishly, and glanced sidelong at the bureaucrat. Her body shifted weight on distinctly feminine hips. The bureaucrat looked up from her and saw Mintouchian staring intently into his eyes. “Do you know how television works? The screen is divided into horizontal lines, and the scanner draws a picture on the screen two lines at a time, skips two lines, then draws two more, down to the bottom. Then it goes back to the beginning and fills in those spaces it skipped the first time around. So that you don’t actually see the whole picture at any time. You assemble it within your mind. Holistic screens have been tried from time to time, but people didn’t take to them. They lacked the compulsive element of real television. Because they only provided pictures. They did not seduce the brain into cooperating with the violation of reality.” The puppet danced lightly, gracefully.

  The bureaucrat’s lips were dry, and there was a strange, vivid taste in his mouth. He had a hard time focusing on the puppeteer’s argument. “I’m not sure I’m following this.”

  The golden woman threw the bureaucrat a scornful look over an upraised shoulder. Mintouchian smiled. “Where does this illusion before you exist? In my mind or yours? Or does it exist within the space in which our two minds intermesh?”

  He raised his hands, and the woman dissolved in a shower of golden rings.

  The bureaucrat looked up at Mintouchian, and the rings continued to spin and fall within his mind. He closed his eyes and saw them in the blackness, still falling. Opening his eyes did not rid him of them. The van seemed oppressively close and then as if it were not there at all. It seemed to pulse open and shut about him. He felt queasy. Carefully he said, “There is something wrong with me.”

  But Mintouchian was not listening. In a musing, drunken voice he said, “Sometimes people ask why I got into this business. I don’t know. Usually I just say, Why would anyone want to play God? Make a face and shrug. But sometimes I think it’s because I wanted to prove to myself that other people exist.” He looked straight at and through the bureaucrat, as if he were alone and talking to himself. “But we can’t know that, can we? We can never really know.”

  The bureaucrat left without saying a word.

  He wandered down to the river. The docks were transformed. He looked over a sudden forest of gold mushrooms that had swallowed up a line of electric lights, and now burned with borrowed light, fairy peninsulas out into the water. He looked again and saw naked women wading in the river. With slow grace the moon-white women glided by the anchored boats, stirring them with gentle wake, their eyes level with the tips of the masts.

  The bureaucrat stared up at them wonderingly, these silent phantoms, and thought, There are no such creatures, though for the life of him he could not imagine why not. Thigh-deep, they moved silent as dreams and large as dinosaurs, somnambulant yet bold as a wish. Something black turned and tumbled in the water, bumped against one rounded belly and sank away, and for one horrible instant he feared it was Undine herself, drowned in the river and gone to feed the hungry kings of the tides.

  Then, with an electric thrill of terror, he saw one of the women turn to look directly at him, eyes as green as the sea and merciless as a northern squall. She smiled down on him over perfect breasts, and he stumbled back from her. Drugged, he thought, I have been drugged. And the thought made wonderful sense, struck him with the force of revelation even, though he did not know what to do with it.

  With no sense of transition whatsoever he found himself walking through the woods. The trail was hedged around with mushrooms, bristling with soft-tipped spears that brushed their fleshy heads lightly against his face and arms as he passed. I must find help, he thought. If only he knew which way the trail went, toward town or away.

  “What did you do then?”

  “Hah?” The bureaucrat shook himself, looked around, and realized that he was sitting on the forest floor, staring at the blue screen of a television set. The sound was off and the image inverted, so that the people hung down from above like bats. “What did you say?”

  “I said, what did you do then? Is there some problem with your hearing?”

  “I’ve been having a little trouble preserving continuity lately.”

  “Ah.” The fox-faced man opposite him gestured at the set. “Let us watch some more television, then.”

  “It’s upside down,” the bureaucrat protested.

  “Is it?” The fox man stood, flipped the television over effortlessly, squatted again. He was not wearing any clothing, but there was a folded pair of dungarees where he had been sitting. The bureaucrat had likewise made a pad of his jacket to protect himself from the damp. “Is that better?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  “There are two women fighting. One has a knife. They are rolling over and over in the dirt. Now one is standing. She brushes her hair back from her forehead. She’s all sweaty, and she holds up the knife and looks at it. There’s blood on the blade.”

  The fox sighed. “I have fasted and bled for six days without results. Sometimes I doubt I will ever be holy enough to see the pictures.”

  “You cannot see any images on television?”

  A sly smile, a twitch of whiskers. “None of my kind can. It is ironic. We few survivors hide among you, attend your schools, work in your field, and yet we do not know you at all. We cannot even see your dreams.”

  “It’s just a machine.”

  ’Then why can we see nothing on it but a bright and shifting light?”

  “I remember—” he began, almost dropped the thought, then caught the wind and sailed effortlessly forward — “I remember talking with a man who said that the picture does not exist. That the images are made in two parts and woven together within the brain.”

  “If that is so, then our brains must lack the loom, and we will never see your dreams.” The creature licked its lips with a long black tongue. The bureaucrat felt a sudden shiver of dread.

  “This is madness,” he said. “I cannot be talking with you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The last haunt died centuries ago.”

  “There are not many of us left, true. We were very near extinction before we learned how to survive in the interstices of your society. Physically altering our appearance was easy, of course. But passing as human, earning your money without attracting your interest, is more of a challenge. We are forced to hide among the poor, in shanties at the edge of farmlands and shotgun flats in the
worst parts of the Fan.

  “Well, enough of that.” Fox stood, offered his hand, raised the bureaucrat to his feet. He helped him into his jacket, and handed him his briefcase. “You must leave now. I really ought to kill you. But your conversation was so interesting, the early parts especially, that I will give you a short head start.” He opened his mouth to show row upon row of sharp teeth.

  “Run!” he said.

  He had been running through the forest so long, crashing through tunnels of feathery arches, stumbling into towers of spiked and antlered tentacles that collapsed noiselessly about him, that it had become a steady state of existence, as natural and unquestionable as any other. Then it all melted about him, and he was in a boneyard, among skeletons grown together and refreshed, rib cages growing fungal breasts, pelvises sprouting pale phalluses, and incurvate vaginas. The dead were reborn as monsters, twins and triplets joined at hip and head, whole families overwhelmed by yeasting masses, a single skull peering up from the top, red-painted teeth agape as if it were either laughing or screaming.

  Then that was gone too, and he was stumbling across flat, empty ground. Gasping, he stopped. The earth here was hard as stone. Nothing grew on it. To one side he could hear the excited water music of Cobbs Creek, in full flood and eager to merge with the river. This would be the dig site, he realized, a full eighth-mile square injected down to the bedrock with stabilizers after burying no fewer than three sealed navigation beacons in its heart, against the return of the land in a new age. He breathed convulsively, lungs afire. Was I running? he wondered, and felt the sudden dead weight of futility as he remembered that Undine was dead.

  “I found him!” someone cried.

  A hand touched his shoulder, spun him around. Slowly he turned, and a fist struck his jaw.

  He fell, legs sprawling out beneath him. His head smashed to the ground, and his arms flew wide. With a vague, all-encompassing amazement he felt a booted foot crash into his ribs. “Whoof!” His breath fled out of him, and he knew the grinding darkness of granite-boned earth turning under impact. Something loose and giving.