Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  Three dark figures floated above him, shifting in planes of depth, movement defining and redefining their spatial relationship with each other and himself. One of them might have been a woman. He was too alert to possibilities, his attention too quick and darting, to be sure. They danced about him, images multiplying and leaving dark trails, until he was woven into a cage of enemies. “What,” he croaked. “What do you want?”

  His voice gonged and reverberated, coming deep and from a distance, like a vast drowned bell tolling from the bottom of the sea. The bureaucrat tried to raise his arms, but they responded oh so slowly. It was as if he were consciousness alone, seated within the head of a carved granite giant.

  They beat him with a thousand fists, blows that rippled and overlapped, leaving pain in their wake. Then, abruptly, it was over. A round face, limned with witch-fire, floated into view.

  Veilleur smiled down on him mockingly. “I told you there were ways and ways,” he said. “Nobody ever takes me seriously, that’s my problem.”

  He took up the briefcase.

  “Come on,” Veilleur said to the others. “I’ve got what we were after.”

  Then gone.

  Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibility, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness. The bureaucrat lay watching the total destruction of the universe for a long time. Perhaps he was unconscious, perhaps not. Whatever he was, it was a state of awareness he had never experienced before. He had nothing to compare it to. Could one be drugged-conscious and drugged-asleep? How would you know? The ground was hard, cold, damp, under him. His coat was torn. He suspected that some of the dampness was his own blood. There were too many facts to deal with. Still, he knew he should be concerned about the blood. He clung to that island scrap of surety even as his thoughts spun dizzily around and around, lofting him high to show him the world and then slamming him down to begin the voyage again.

  He dreamed that a creature came walking down the road. It had the body of a man and the head of a fox. It wore a tattered pair of dungarees.

  Fox, if Fox it was, halted when he came to where the bureaucrat lay, and crouched beside him. That sharp-nosed face sniffed at his crotch, his chest, his head. “I’m bleeding,” the bureaucrat said helpfully. Fox frowned down at him. Then that head swung away again, dissolving into the air.

  He was whirled up into the ancient sky, thrown high as planets into old night and the void.

  7. Who Is the Black Beast?

  The common room was dark and stuffy. Thick brocade curtains with tinsel-thread whales and roses choked out the afternoon sun. Floral pomanders sewn into the furniture failed to mask the smell of mildew; rots and growths were so quietly pervasive here that they seemed not decay but a natural progression, as if the hotel were slowly transforming itself from the realm of the artificial to that of the living.

  “I won’t see him,” the bureaucrat insisted. “Send him away. Where are my clothes?”

  Mother Le Marie placed soft, cool brown-spotted hands on his chest and forced him back down on the divan, more by embarrassment than actual force. “He’ll be here any minute now. There’s nothing you can do about it. Be still.”

  “I won’t pay him.” The bureaucrat felt weak and irritable, and strangely guilty, as if he had done something shameful the night before. The water-stained plaster ceiling liquefied and flowed in his vision, its cracks and imperfections undulating like strands of seaweed. He squeezed his eyes shut for an in stant. Nausea came and went in long, slow waves. His bowels felt loose.

  “You don’t have to.” Le Marie tightened her jaw, a turtle trying to smile. “Dr. Orphelin will do the work as a favor to me.”

  In the hallway, the coffin-shaped coroner hummed gently to itself. One corner caught the light and glowed a pure and holy white. The bureaucrat forced himself to look away, found his gaze returning anyway. Two bored national police officers lounged against the wall, arms folded, staring into the television room. Who was the father? old Ahab roared. I think I’m entitled to know.

  “I trust I have not grown so gullible as to consult a doctor,” the bureaucrat said with dignity. “If I want medical attention, I shall employ the qualified machinery or, in extremis, a human with proper biomedical augmentation. But I will not swill down fermented swamp guzzle at the behest of some quasi-literate, uneducated charlatan.”

  “Be sensible. The nearest diagnostician is in Green Hill, while Dr. Orphelin is—”

  “I am here.”

  He paused in the doorway, as if posing for a commemorative hologram: a lean man in a blue jacket of military cut with two rows of gold buttons. Then the worn white path down the middle of the carpet carried him past a rotting vacuum suit propped ornamentally against the bookcase, and he dumped his black bag alongside the divan. His hands were heavily tattooed.

  “You have been drugged,” the doctor said briskly, “and a diagnostician cannot help you. The medicinal properties of our native plants are not in its data base. Why should they be? Synthetics can do anything that natural drugs can, and they can be manufactured on the spot. But if you wish to understand what has happened to you, you must go not to one of your loathsome machines but to one such as I who has spent years studying such plants.” He had a lean, ascetic face with high cheekbones and cold eyes. “I am going to examine you now. You are not required to heed a word of what I have to say. However, I insist on your cooperation in the examination.”

  The bureaucrat felt foolish. “Oh, very well.”

  “Thank you.” Orphelin nodded to Mother Le Marie. “You may leave now.”

  The old woman looked startled, then offended. She raised her chin and walked stiffly out. Why won’t you tell your uncle who the father is? someone said, and a young woman’s agonized voice cried, Because there is no father! before it was muffled by the closing door.

  Orphelin peeled back the bureaucrat’s eyelids, shone a small light in his ears, took a scraping from inside his mouth, and fed it to a diagnostick. “You should lose some weight,” he remarked. “If you want, I can show you how to balance real and fairy foods in a diet.” The bureaucrat stared stoically at a spray of pink silk roses, brittle and browning at the edges, and said nothing.

  At last the examination ended. “Hum. Well, you shan’t be surprised to learn that you’ve taken in some variety of neurotoxin. Could be any of a number of suspects. Did you experience hallucinations or illusions?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “An illusion is a misreading of actual sensory data, while a hallucination is seeing something that isn’t there. Tell me what you saw last night. Just” — he held up a hand — “the high points, please. I have neither the time nor the patience for the extended story.”

  The bureaucrat told him about the giant women wading in the river.

  “Hallucinations. Did you believe in their reality?”

  He thought. “No. But they frightened me.”

  Orphelin smiled thinly. “You wouldn’t be the first man with a fear of women. Oh be still, that was a joke. What else did you see?”

  “I had a long talk with a fox-headed haunt. But that was real.”

  The doctor looked at him oddly. “Was it?”

  “Oh yes. I’m quite sure of it. He carried me back to the hotel, later.”

  Nausea welled up again, and the room took on a heightened clarity and vividness. He could see every thread of fiber on the rug, every frayed fabric end on the divan crawling in his vision. He felt flushed, and the finger that Undine had tattooed burned.

  There was a rap on the door.

  “Yes?” the bureaucrat said.

  Chu stuck her head in and said, “Excuse me, but the autopsy is complete, and we need you to accept the report.”

  “Come in here, please,” Orphelin said. “And I’ll need somebody else as well.” Chu glanced at the bureaucrat, and then, when he shrugged, ducked into the
hall. She spoke to the guards. The taller one shook his head. “Hold on,” she said. A minute later she returned with Mintouchian in tow. He looked more hound than man, his face puffy and pink, his eyes sad and bloodshot.

  “There’s more to this than I had originally thought.” The doctor held out his arms. “Grasp me by the wrists and hold on as tightly as possible.” Chu took one arm, Mintouchian the other. “Pull! We’re not here to hold hands.”

  They obeyed, and he slowly leaned forward, letting his head loll on his chest. The two had to struggle to hold him upright.

  Orphelin’s head whipped up, face transformed. His eyes were wide open, startlingly white. They quivered slightly. He parted his lips, and a third eye glared out from his mouth.

  “Krishna!” Mintouchian gasped. All three eyes glanced toward him, then dismissively away. Horrified, the bureaucrat stared into that cold third eye.

  Orphelin stared unblinkingly back. That eerie triple gaze drove like a spike deep into the bureaucrat’s skull. For a long moment nobody breathed.

  Then the doctor’s head collapsed on his chest again.

  “All right,” he said calmly. “You can let go now.” They obeyed. “Have you ever considered spiritual training?” he asked.

  The bureaucrat felt as if he’d just emerged from a dream. It seemed impossible now, what he had just seen. “I beg your pardon?”

  “First off, the entity you spoke with was not a haunt, attractive though that notion might seem to you. The last haunt died in captivity in lesser year 143 of the first great year after the landing. What you saw was an avatar of one of their spirits. The one we call the Fox. It is an important natural power, though unreliable in certain aspects, and is generally taken as being an auspicious omen.”

  “I spoke with a solid, living being. He was neither ghost nor hallucination.” The room was alive now, each strand of carpeting undulating in unseen currents, mottled light dancing on the ceiling.

  “Perhaps,” Mintouchian offered, “you spoke with a man in a mask.”

  Nausea made the bureaucrat snappish. “Nonsense. What would a man in a fox mask be doing out in the woods in the middle of the night?”

  Chu stroked her mustache. “He could have been waiting for you. I really think we should consider the possibility that he was part of this elaborate game that Gregorian is playing with us.”

  The doctor looked startled. “Gregorian?”

  “I studied ofiplanet,” Orphelin said when the others had been dismissed. “Many years ago. I had a Midworlds scholarship.” His back was to the bureaucrat; he had not spoken until the door was well and fully closed. “Six of the most miserable years of my life were spent in the Laputa Extension. The people who hand out the grants never consider what it’s like to go from an artificially suppressed level of technology to one of the floating worlds.”

  “What does this have to do with Gregorian?”

  Orphelin looked around for a seat, settled wearily down. His face was stiff and gray. “That was how I met Gregorian.”

  “You were friends, then?” Whenever the bureaucrat looked at Orphelin’s face too long, the flesh melted away layer by layer, and the skull rose grinning to the surface. Only by regularly glancing away could he banish the vision.

  “No, of course not.” The doctor gazed sightlessly at a dusty crucifix ringed by a small collection of sepia flats. His clasped hands rested upon his knees. “I despised him on sight.

  “We met in the dueling halls of the Puzzle Palace. Suicide was nominally illegal, but the authorities winked at it — training grounds for leadership and so on. He had a coterie of admirers listening to him talk about control theory and the biological effects of projective chaos weapons. A striking young man, charismat-ically self-assured. He had a bad reputation. His skin was pale, and he wore the offworld jewelry that was popular back then: bloodstones embedded in the fingers, bands of silver around the wrists with the veins routed through crystal channels.”

  “Yes, I remember that style,” the bureaucrat said. “Expensive, as I recall.”

  Orphelin shrugged. “It was his popularity that most offended me. I was a material phenomenologist. So while Gregorian could freely discuss what he was learning, my education was very strictly controlled, and I wasn’t allowed to take any of it out of class. What status I had in student circles came from my having studied under a pharmacienne before I came to Laputa. Oh, I was their trained ape all right! Dressed all in black with saltmouse skulls and feather fetishes hung on the fringes. I played suicide not so much for the prestige of winning, but to brush fingertips against death — morbid shock was much more common than anyone ever let on. I made dark hints that I won because I had occult powers. And Gregorian burst out laughing at the sight of me! Did you ever play suicide?”

  The bureaucrat hesitated. “Once. . . I was young.”

  “Then I don’t have to tell you that it’s a rigged game. Anyone foolish enough to play by the rules is going to lose. I had mastered the standard means of cheating — tapping in extra data sources, relaying your opponent’s signal through a millisecond-delay circuit, all the usual — and enjoyed a local reputation as a mind warrior. But Gregorian beat me three times running. I had a mistress, an Inner Circle bitch with those aristocratic near-abstract features that take three generations of intensive gene reworking to achieve. He humiliated me in front of her and his father and what few friends I had.”

  “You met his father? What was he like?”

  “I have no idea. It was edited out before we left the halls. His father was somebody important who couldn’t afford to be connected with the games. All I remember of him was that he was there.

  “A year later I returned home to the Tidewater with Gregorian beside me. We shared a room at my parents’ hotel as if we were close friends. By then, antipathy had blossomed into hatred. We’d agreed to have a wizard’s duel — three questions each, winner take all.

  “The night we went in search of the maddrake root was wet and starless. We dug by the paupers’ boneyard, where we would not be disturbed. Gregorian straightened first, hands all mud. I have it, he said. He snapped the root in two and held it to my nose. Maddrake has a distinctive odor. It was only after I had swallowed my half that — that smile of his! — it occurred to me that he might have rubbed his hands with maddrake sap and offered instead the halfaman root, which is a close cousin but can be counteracted with a simple antidote. Too late. I had to trust him. We waited until the trees burned green to their cores and the wind spoke. Let us begin, I said.

  “Gregorian leaped up and walked through the bones with his arms out, making the skeletons rattle. They were not well maintained, of course. The paint was faded, and half the bones had fallen to the ground so that we trod them underfoot. The death-forces flowed up from them and crawled under my skin, and that made me bold. I felt strong with death. Turn and face me, I commanded. Or are you afraid?

  “He turned, and to my horror I saw that he had taken on the aspect of Crow. His head was huge and black: black beak, black feathers, bright obsidian eyes. There was that little bristle of hairlike feathers at the base of the beak, the narrow nostril slits halfway to its point. I had never seen a spirit invoked before. That’s one question, he said in Crow’s harsh voice. No, I am not.

  “I assumed this was all illusion, an effect of the maddrake. Angrily I strode forward and seized his arms. The little deaths flowed into him and fought beneath his skin, so that his muscles writhed and spasmed. I squeezed. I was strong then, you must know. My grip should have choked off the blood and left his arms paralyzed. The death-forces should have killed him. But he shook my hands away effortlessly, and laughed.

  “You cannot overpower Crow with your little tricks.

  “How did you know I was seeing Crow? I asked. Feeling that horror that comes on realizing that one is completely out of his depth.

  “That’s two questions. Crow stropped his beak against a nearby skull, setting the whole skeleton aswing. I know all about you. I
have an informant who tells me everything. The Black Beast.

  “Who is the Black Beast? I cried.

  “That’s three questions. Crow poked his beak into a skull socket, teased out some small sweetmeat. I have answered two of them, and now it is my turn. First tell me: What does it mean when I say Miranda is black?

  “I was angry at how he’d tricked the questions from me, but the duel’s purpose is to test will against will; it had been fairly done. An inch down, I said, all the world-globe is an egg of blackness. Starlight does not touch it; only Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban contend for influence. Mystery is that close. This was all catechism, you see, baby stuff, and so I regained much of my confidence. As beneath the skull the brain is black. The magician understands this and contends for influence.

  “Crow ruffled his feathers, then parted his beak as he threw back some dark gristly bit. That black tongue! What are the black constellations?

  “They are the shapes formed by the starless spaces between the bright constellations. The uninitiated cannot see them and believe they do not exist, but once pointed out they cannot be forgotten. They are emblematic of the mysteries anyone can master but few realize exist.

  “Crow poked about among the teeth with the tip of his beak. I’d offer you a maggot, he said, but there are barely enough here for me. One last question. Who is the Black Beast?

  “What do you mean? I said angrily. I asked you that same question, and you wouldn’t answer me. I don’t believe in your Black Beast at all.

  “Crow threw his head back then and screamed in triumph. Those beady little eyes were dark novae of malice. He spread out thumb and forefinger and said, you are that long erect. Your mistress was once involved in the Committee for the Liberation of Information, and only her mother’s money hushed up the scandal. You suspect she is unfaithful to you because she says nothing of your own infidelities. You wet the bed long into your adolescence — you wound up apprenticed to your pharmacienne after she cured your bladder problem. The Black Beast has told me all about you. The Black Beast is someone very near to you. You trust the Black Beast, but you should not. The Beast is not your friend but mine.