Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  I’ll track him down and 1 will find him. No matter where he is. He can hide, but he can’t escape me!

  Off-camera someone asked, Is it true he’s stolen proscribed technology? Then, when he shrugged off the question, Would you say he’s dangerous?

  “Here it comes,” Korda said.

  Gregorian is the most dangerous man on the planet.

  “I was under a certain amount of stress at the time…”

  Why do they call him the most dangerous man on the planet? Gregorian’s granite image filled the screen. His eyes were cold moons, stern with wisdom. What does this man know that they don’t want you to learn for yourself? Find out for — Korda snapped it off.

  “Gregorian couldn’t’ve paid you to do better.”

  In the middle of the uncomfortable silence a phone rang. The briefcase removed it from a jacket pocket and held it out. “It’s for you.”

  The bureaucrat took the receiver, grateful for the moment’s respite, and heard his own voice say, “I’m back from the bottle shop. Can I report?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He absorbed:

  In an obscure corridor known as Curiosity Lane the bureaucrat came to a run of small shops, windows dark with disuse, and entered an undistinguished doorway. A bell jangled. It was shadowy within, shelf upon shelf crammed with thick-glassed, dusty bottles, extending back forever in a diminishing series of receding storage reaching for the Paleolithic. Gilt cupids hovered in the ceiling corners with condescending smiles.

  The shopkeeper was a simple construct, no more than a goat’s head and a pair of gloves. The head dipped, and the gloves clasped each other subserviently. “Welcome to the bottle shop, master. How may I help you?”

  “I’m looking to find something, uh …” — the bureaucrat waved a hand, groping for the right phrase — “of rather dubious value.”

  “Then you’re in the right place. Here is where we store all the damned children of science, the outdated, obscure, and impolite information that belongs nowhere else. Flat and hollow worlds, rains of frogs, visitations of angels. Paracelsus’s alchemical system in one bottle and Isaac Newton’s in another, Pythagorean numerology corked here, phrenology there, shoulder to punt with demonology, astrology, and methods of repelling sharks. It’s all rather something of a lumber room now, but much of this information was once quite important. Some of it used to be the best there was.”

  “Do you handle magic?”

  “Magic of all sorts, sir. Necromancy, geomancy, ritual sacrifice, divination by means of the study of entrails, omens, crystals, dreams, or pools of ink, animism, fetishism, social Darwinism, psychohistory, continuous creation, Lamarckian genetics, psionics, and more. Indeed, what is magic but impossible science?”

  “Not long ago I met a man with three eyes—” He described Dr. Orphelin’s third eye.

  The shopkeeper tilted its head back thoughtfully. “I believe we have what you’re looking for.” It ran its fingers over a line of bottles, hesitated over one, yanked another out, and swirled it around. Something like a marble rattled and rolled within. With a flourish it uncorked the bottle and poured a glass eye out onto the counter. “There.”

  The bureaucrat examined the eye carefully. It was perfectly human, blue, with a rounded T-shaped indentation on its back. “How does it work?”

  “Simple yoga. You are in the Tidewater now. Can I take it you are aware of the kind of bodily control their mystics are reputed to have?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. The eye is swallowed. The adept keeps it in his stomach until he needs it. Then it’s regurgitated up into the mouth. The smooth side is pushed against the lips — open the mouth and it looks real — and manipulated by the tongue. It can be moved back and forth and up and down using the indentations in the back.” The eye was returned to the bottle and the recorked bottle to the shelf. “It was simply a conjuring trick.”

  “Then how come I fell for it?”

  The goat’s head dipped quizzically. “Was that a real question, or rhetorical?”

  The question took the bureaucrat by surprise; he had been no more than talking to himself. Nonetheless, he said, “Answer me.”

  “Very well, sir. Conjuring is like teaching, engineering, or theater in that it’s a form of data manipulation, a means of making reality do what one desires. Like theater, however, it is also an art of illusion. Both aim to convince an audience that what is false is so. Meaning heightens this illusion. In a drama meaning is manipulated by the plot, but normally conjuring has no added meaning. It is performed openly as a series of agile distractions. When a context and meaning are provided, the effect changes. I assume that when you saw the third eye produced, there was an implicit significance to the action?”

  “He said he was examining me for spiritual influences.”

  “Exactly, and this distorted your response. Had you seen this trick performed on a stage, it would have seemed difficult, but not baffling. Knowing that it was a trick, your mind would have been engaged in the problem of solving it. Meaning, however, diverts the mind from the challenge, and the puzzle becomes secondary to the mystery. You were so distracted by the impossibility of what you saw that the question became not, How did he do that?, but rather, Did I see that?”

  “Oh.”

  “Will that be all, sir?”

  “No. I need to know exactly what a magician on the Tidewater can and cannot do — his skills, abilities, whatever you call them. Something simple, succinct, and comprehensive.”

  “We have nothing like that.”

  “Don’t give me that. There was outright rebellion in White-marsh not a lifetime ago. We must have had agents there. Reports, councils, conclusions.”

  “Yes, of course. On our closed shelves.”

  “Damn it, I have a very serious need for that information.”

  The goat’s head shook itself dolorously and spread its gloves wide. “I can do nothing for you. Apply to the agency that suppressed it.”

  “Who was that?”

  A glove floated down to light a slim white candle. It drew a sheet of paper from a drawer and held it over the clear flame. Sooty letters appeared on the paper. “The order of restraint came from the Division of Technology Transfer.”

  The information stream ended. As he handed his briefcase the phone, the bureaucrat could hear the last of his agent unraveling itself back into oblivion.

  “I suppose what disturbs us all,” Philippe said, “is the public nature of your statements. The Stone House is furious with us, you know. They’re simply livid. We have to provide them with some coherent explanation for your actions.”

  Muschg’s briefcase whispered in her ear, and she said, “Tell us about this native woman you became involved with.”

  “Well.” Philippe and Korda looked as bemused as the bureaucrat felt; intentionally or not, Muschg was driving the three of them closer together. “Sometimes fieldwork gets complicated. If we tried to play it by the book, nothing would get done. That’s why we have field operations — because book methods have failed.”

  “What was your involvement with her?”

  “I was involved,” the bureaucrat admitted. “There was an emotional component to our relationship.”

  “And then Gregorian killed her.”

  “Yes.”

  “In order to trick you into making angry statements he could use in his commercials.”

  “Apparently so.”

  Muschg leaned back, eyebrows raised skeptically. “You see our problem,” Philippe said. “It sounds a highly unlikely scenario.”

  “This case grows murkier the longer we look at it,” Korda grumbled. “I can’t help but wonder if a probe might not be called for.”

  A tense wariness took the group. The bureaucrat met their eyes and smiled thoughtfully. “Yes,” he agreed. “A full depart-

  mental probe might be just the thing to settle matters once and for all.”

  The others stirred uneasily, doubtless mindful of all t
he dirty little secrets that accreted to one in the Puzzle Palace, did anyhow if one tried to accomplish anything at all, things no one would care to see come to light. Orimoto’s face in particular was as tightly clenched as a fist. Korda cleared his throat. “This is after all just an informal hearing,” he said.

  “Let’s not reject this too hastily; it’s an option we should explore,” the bureaucrat said. His briefcase handed around copies of the bottle shop’s list of suppressed materials. “There’s a preponderance of evidence that someone within the Division is cooperating with Gregorian.” He began ticking off points on his fingers. “Item: Evidence important to this case has been suppressed by order of Technology Transfer. Item: Gregorian was able to pass off one of his people as my planetside liaison, and this required information that could only have come from the Stone House or from one of us. Item: The—”

  “Excuse me, boss.” His briefcase held out the phone. With a twinge of exasperation the bureaucrat took the call. Himself again. “Go ahead,” he said.

  He absorbed:

  Philippe was alone in his office with himself. They both looked up when the bureaucrat entered.

  “How pleasant to see you again.” Philippe’s office was posh to the point of vulgarity, a lexitor’s modspace from twenty-third-century Luna. His desk was a massive chunk of volcanic rock floating a foot above the floor, with crystal-tipped rods, hanks of rooster feathers, and small fetishes scattered about its surface. French doors opened onto a balcony overlooking an antique city of brick and wrought iron, muted by the faint blue haze from a million groundcars.

  “I’ll handle this,” Philippe said, and his other self returned to work. The bureaucrat had to envy the easy familiarity with which Philippe dealt with himself. Philippe was perfectly at ease with Philippe, no matter how many avatars had been spun off from his base personality.

  They shook hands (Philippe was agented not in two but three, the third self off somewhere), and Philippe said, “Five agents! I was going to ask why you weren’t at the inquisition, but I see now that you must be.”

  “What inquisition?”

  Philippe looked up from his work and smiled sympathetically. Nearer by, he said, “Oh, you’ll find out soon enough. What can I do for you?”

  “There’s a traitor in Tech Trans.”

  Philippe stared silently at him for a long time, both avatars motionless, all four eyes unblinking. He and the bureaucrat studied each other carefully. Finally he said, “Do you have any evidence?”

  “Nothing that could force a departmental probe.”

  “So what do you want from me?” Philippe’s other self poured a glass of juice and said, “Something to drink? It’ll taste a little flat, I’m afraid, all line-fed drinks do. Something about the blood sugars.”

  “Yes, I know.” The bureaucrat waved off the drink. “You used to work bioscience control. I was wondering if you knew anything about cloning. Human cloning in particular.”

  “Cloning. Well, no, not really. Human applications are flat out illegal, of course. That’s a can of worms that no one wants to deal with.”

  “Specifically I was wondering what practical value there might be in having oneself cloned.”

  “Value? Well, you know, in most cases it’s an ego thing rather than something actually functional. A desire to watch one’s Self survive death, to know that the one holy and irreplaceable Me will exist down the corridors of time to the very omega point of existence. All rooted in the tangled morass of the soul. Then there are the sexual cases. Rather a dull lot, really.”

  “No, this is nothing like that, I think. I have someone who sank most of his lifetime into the project. From his behavior, I’d say he had a clear and definite end in view. Whoever he is, he’s in a very exposed situation; if he’d been acting odd, it would’ve shown sometime long ago.”

  “Well,” Philippe said reluctantly, “this is highly speculative, of course. You couldn’t quote me on it. But let’s say your culprit was relatively highly placed within some governmental body or other — we shall name no names. Spook business, say. There are any number of situations where it would come in handy having two valid handcodes instead of one. Where two senior officers were required to enact an off-record operation, for example. Or an extra vote to sway a committee action. The system would know that the two handcodes were identical, but couldn’t act on it. The privacy laws would prevent that. Hell of a loophole, but there you are; it’s in the laws.”

  “Yes, my own thought had been trending that way. But isn’t that unnecessarily difficult? There must be a thousand simpler ways of jiggering the machines.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Graft a patch of your skin, make it a glove, and have an accomplice wear it. Or record your own transmission and send it out again on time delay. Only they none of them work. The system is better protected than you give it credit for.”

  A chime sounded. Philippe held a conch shell to his ear. “It’s for you,” he said. When the bureaucrat took the call, his own voice said, “I’m back from the map room. Do you want to take my report?”

  “Please.”

  He absorbed:

  The map room was copied from a fifteenth-century Venetian palazzo, star charts with the Seven Sisters prominent replacing Mediterranean coasts on the walls. Globes of the planets revolved overhead, half-shrouded in clouds. Hands behind back, the bureaucrat examined a model of the system: Prospero at the center, hot Mercutio, and then the circle of sungrazing asteroids known as the Thrinacians, the median planets, the gas giants Gargantua, Pantagruel, and Falstaff, and finally the Thulean stargrazers, those distant, cold, and sparsely peopled rocks where dangerous things were kept.

  The room expanded to make space for several researchers entering at the same time. “Can I help you sir?” the curator asked him. Ignoring it, he went to the reference desk and rattled a small leather drum.

  The human overseer came out of the back office, a short, stocky woman with goggles a thumb’s-length thick. She pushed them back on her forehead, where they looked like a snail’s eyestalks. “Hello, Simone,” the bureaucrat said.

  “My God, it’s you! How long has it been?”

  “Too long.” The bureaucrat moved to give her a hug, and Simone flinched away slightly. He extended a hand.

  They shook (the cartographer was unique), and Simone said, “What can I do for you?”

  “Have you ever heard of a place called Ararat? On Miranda, somewhere near the Tidewater coast. Supposedly a lost city.”

  Simone grinned a cynical grin from so deep in the past the bureaucrat’s heart ached. “Have I ever heard of Ararat? The single greatest mystery of Mirandan topography? I should guess.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “First human city on Miranda, planetside capital during the first great year, population several hundred thousand by the time the climatologists determined it would be inundated in their lifetimes.”

  “Must’ve been pretty rough on the inhabitants.”

  Simone shrugged. “History’s not my forte. All I know is they built the place up — stone buildings with carbon-whisker anchors sunk an eighth of a mile into the bedrock. The idea was that Ararat would survive the great winter intact and come great spring their grandchildren could scrape off the kelp and coral and move back in.”

  “So what happened?”

  “It got lost.”

  “How do you lose a city?”

  “You classify it.” Simone slid open a map drawer. The bureaucrat stared down onto a miniature landscape, rivers wandering over flatlands, forests blue-green with mist. Roads were white scratches on the land, thin scars connecting toy cities. Patches of clouds floated here and there. “Here’s the Tidewater one great year ago. This is the most accurate map we have.”

  “It’s half-covered with clouds.”

  “That’s because it only shows information I feel is reliable.”

  “Where’s Ararat?”

  “Hidden by the clouds. Now on our closed s
helves we have hundreds of maps that do indeed show the location of Ararat. The only trouble is that they none of them agree with each other.” A splay of red lights shone through the clouds, some alone and isolated, others clustered so closely their clouds were stained pink. “You see?”

  “Well, who classified Ararat?”

  “That’s classified too.”

  “Why was it classified?”

  “It could be almost anything. System Defense, say, could have an installation there, or use it as a navigational reference point. There are a hundred planetary factions with a vested interest in keeping functions consolidated in the Piedmont. I’ve seen a Psychology Control report that says Ararat as a lost city is a stabilizing archetype, and that its rediscovery would be a destabi-lizer. Even Technology Transfer could be involved. Ararat had a reputation for pushing the edge of planetary tech — those carbon-whisker anchors, for example.”

  “So how do I find it?”

  She slid the drawer shut. “You don’t.”

  “Simone.” The bureaucrat took her hand, squeezed.

  She drew away. “It’s just not there to be done.” Then, in a brighter tone, she said, “Tell you what. I remember how interested you were in my work. As long as you’re here, let me show you something special.”

  The bureaucrat had never cared for Simone’s work, and she knew it. “All right,” he said. She opened a cabinet and ducked within. He followed.

  They stepped into a ghost world. Perfect trees stood in uniform stands against a paper-white sky. They stood on a simplified road, looking into a small town of outlined buildings. “It’s Light-foot,” the bureaucrat said, amazed.

  “One-to-one scale,” Simone said proudly. “What do you think?”

  “The river’s shifted a little to the north since this was made.”

  The cartographer pulled down her goggles and stared at him through them. “Yes, I see,” she said at last. “I’ll add your update.”