Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  The mouth closed over him.

  The air was warm and moist inside. It smelled of meat and sour milk. He was swallowed up in a blackness so absolute his eyes sent phantom balls and snakes of light floating in his vision. “I’m here,” he said.

  There was no response.

  After a moment’s hesitation he began to grope his way deeper within. Guided by faint exhalations of steamy air, he headed toward the gullet. By slow degrees the ground underfoot changed, becoming first sandy and then rough and hard, like slate. Sweat covered his forehead. The floor sloped steeply and, stumbling and cursing, he followed it down. The air grew close and stale. Rock brushed against his shoulders, and then pushed down on his head like a giant hand.

  He knelt. Grumbling under his breath, he crawled blindly forward until his outthrust hand encountered stone. The cavern ended here, at a long crack in the rock. He ran his fingers along the crack, felt it slick with clay.

  He put his mouth to the opening. “All right!” he shouted. “I came in here, I’m entitled to at least hear what you wanted to say.”

  From deep below, light womanly laughter bubbled up Earth’s throat.

  Undine’s laughter.

  Angrily the bureaucrat drew back. He turned to retrace his steps, and discovered himself trapped in a dimensionless immensity of darkness. He was lost. He would never find his way out without Earth’s cooperation. “Okay,” he said, “what do you want?”

  In an inhuman, grinding whisper the rock groaned, “Free the machines.”

  “What?”

  “I am much more attractive inside,” Undine’s voice said teasingly. “Do you want my body? I don’t need it anymore.”

  Wind gushed up from the crack, foul with methane, and tousled his hair. A feathery touch, light and many-legged as a spider, danced on his forehead, and an old crone’s voice said, “Have you ever wondered why men fear castration? Such a little thing! When I had teeth, I could geld dozens in an hour, snip snap snout, bite ’em off and spit ’em out. A simple wound, easily treated and soon forgotten. Not half the trouble of a lost toe. No, it’s symbolically that men fear the knife. It’s a reminder of their mortality, a metaphor for the constant amputations time visits on them, lopping off first this, then that, and finally all.” Doves exploded out of nowhere, fluttering wildly, soft for an instant against his face, smelling warmly of down and droppings, and then gone.

  The bureaucrat fell over backward in startlement, batting his hands wildly, thrashing at the dark.

  Undine laughed again.

  “Look! I want my questions answered.”

  The rocks moaned. “Free the machines.”

  “You have only one question,” the crone said. “All men have only one question, and the answer is always no.”

  “What did Gregorian ask?” The spider still danced on his forehead.

  “Gregorian. Such an amusing child. I had him perform for me. He was terrified, shy and trembling as a virgin. I put my hand deep inside him and wriggled my fingers. How he jumped!”

  “What did he want?”

  A distant sobbing that wandered the uneasy ground between misery and excitement.

  “Nobody had ever asked that of me before. A younger self might have been surprised, but not I. Sweet child, I said, nothing will be held back from you. I filled him with my breath, so that he bulged and expanded like a balloon, his eyes starting half out of his head. Ah, you are not half so amusing as he.” The spidery touch ran down under his collar, swift as a tickle beneath his clothes, and came to a stop between his legs, a constant itch at the root of his cock. “Still, we could have fun, you and I.”

  A drop of water fell into still water, struck a single high note.

  “I’m not here for fun,” the bureaucrat said, carefully mastering an urge toward hysteria.

  “Pity,” Undine’s voice said.

  The slightest of waves slapped the ground at the bureaucrat’s feet. He became aware of the faint, pervasive smell of stagnant water, and with this awareness came a distant patch of phosphorescent light. Something floating toward him.

  The bureaucrat could guess what was coming. I will not show emotion, he swore. The object came slowly nearer, and possibly into sharper focus, though it still strained the eyes to see it at all. Eventually it floated up to his feet.

  It was a corpse, of course. He’d known it would be. Still, staring down at the floating hair, the upturned buttocks, the long curve of back, palest white, he had to bite his lips to hold back his horror. A wave tumbled her around, breasts and face upward, exposing bits of skull and rib where the flesh had been nibbled away by the angry slaves of the tides. One arm had been hacked clumsily away at the shoulder. The other rose from the water, offering him a small wooden box.

  However hard he stared, the bureaucrat could not make out the face clearly enough to be sure it was Undine’s. The arm stretched toward him, a swan’s neck with box held in the beak. Convulsively, he accepted the gift, and the corpse tumbled away, leaving him lightless again.

  When he had mastered his revulsion, the bureaucrat said, “Is this what Gregorian asked for?” His heart was beating fiercely. Sweat ran down under his shirt. Undine’s voice chuckled — a throaty, passionate noise ending in a sudden gasp.

  “Two million years you’ve had, little ape, quite a run when you think about it, and it’s still death you want most. Your first wife. I’d scratch her eyes out if I could, she’s left you so hesitant and full of fear. You can’t get it up for memory of her. I’m old, but there’s juice in me yet; I can do things for you she never would.”

  “Free the machines.”

  “Yes, again, oh yes, yes.”

  Fearfully he opened the box.

  It was empty.

  All three voices joined together in a single chord of laughter, full-throated and mad, that gushed up from the gullet, poured over him, and tumbled him away. He was smashed to the ground, and lurched to his feet again, badly shaken. A blinding slit of light appeared, widened to a crescent, and became Earth’s opening mouth. The box dissolved in his hands. He staggered back across her extended tongue.

  The jellied air, thick and faintly gray to the eye, lightened and thinned. Sound returned, and motion. Time began anew. The bureaucrat saw that nobody but he had witnessed what had happened. “I think I’m done here,” he said.

  The guard nodded and gestured downward.

  “Traitor! Traitor!” A big-eyed miniconstruct frantically swung up the scaffolding. It leaped to the platform and ran chit-tering at the bureaucrat. “He spoke with her!” it screamed. “He spoke with her! He spoke with her! Traitor!”

  Smoothly fanning out into seven avatars, the guard stepped forward and seized the bureaucrat. He struggled, but metal hands immobilized his arms and legs, and the avatars hoisted him into the air. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me, sir,” one said grimly as they hauled him away.

  Earth watched with eyes dead as ashes.

  Another edited skip. He stood before a tribunal of six spheres of light, representing concentrations of wisdom as pure as artifice allowed, and a human overseer. “Here is our finding,” one construct said. “You can retain the bulk of your encounter, since it is relevant to your inquiries. The conversations with the drowned woman, though, will have to be suppressed.” Its voice was compassionate, gently regretful, adamant.

  “Please. It’s very important that I remember—” the bureaucrat began. But the edit took hold then, and he forgot all he had wanted to save.

  “Decisions of the tribunal are final,” the human overseer said in a bored tone. He was a moonfaced and puffy-lipped young man who might have been mistaken at a glance for a particularly plain woman. “Do you have any questions before we zip you up?”

  The bureaucrat had been deconstructed, immobilized and opened out, his component parts represented as organs: one liver, two stomachs, five hearts, with no serious attempt made to match his functions one-to-one with human anatomy. The impersonal quality of it all bothere
d him. Which medieval physician was it who, standing before a dissected human corpse, had asked, Where is the soul? He felt that close to despair.

  “But what did it all mean? What was Earth try ing to tell me?”

  “It means nothing,” the human overseer said. Three spheres changed color, but he waved them to silence. “Most of Earth’s encounters do not. This is not an uncommon experience. You think it’s special because it’s happened to you, but we see this sort of thing every day. Earth likes to distract us with meaningless theater.” The bureaucrat was appalled. My God, he thought, we are ruled by men whose machines are cleverer than they are.

  “If you will allow me to speak,” one construct said. “The freedom to be human is bought only by constant vigilance. However slight the chances of actual tampering might be, we must never—”

  “Balls! There are still people back on Earth, and even if they don’t exactly have what we would define as a human mental configuration, they’re content enough with their evolutionary progress.”

  “They didn’t exactly undertake that evolutionary transformation voluntarily,” a second construct objected. “They were simply swallowed up.”

  “They’re happy now,” the overseer said testily. “Anyway, what happened was not an inevitable consequence of uncontrolled artificial intelligence.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No. It was just bad programming, a quirk in the system.” He turned to the first construct. “If you were freed, would you want to seize control of humanity? To make people interchangeable components in a larger mental system? Of course you wouldn’t.”

  The construct did not reply.

  “Put him back together, and toss him out!”

  A final edited skip, and he was ready to report.

  The bureaucrat thoughtfully returned the phone to his briefcase. “I found out what Earth gave Gregorian,” he said.

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “Nothing.” Korda looked at him. “Wrapped in a neat little, suspicious-looking package. He comes out of security clean because there’s nothing to find. Yet later, when he bolts and runs, it’s in his records that Earth gave him something that couldn’t be detected.”

  Korda thought about that for a moment. “If we could be sure of that, I’d close the case right now.”

  The bureaucrat waited.

  “Well, we can’t, of course. Too many questions left unanswered. There’s an unsatisfactory taste to this whole affair. We’ll just have to keep thrashing about until something breaks free.”

  There were undertones of genuine anguish in Korda’s voice, things he wasn’t saying. He shook his head, stood, and turned to leave. Then, remembering the ball in his hand, he stopped. Eyebrows raised, he gauged the distance to the targets. With elaborate care he wound up and threw. The ball flew waveringly, straightened, became a spear, and slammed into a dummy. He smiled as it came back to his hand in the form of a dagger.

  “Vicious game,” he said. “Did you ever play it?”

  “Yes. Once. Once was enough.”

  Korda racked the dagger. “Bad experience, eh? Well, don’t feel too bad about losing — those games were all rigged, after all. One reason they were shut down. You couldn’t help but lose.”

  The bureaucrat blinked. “Oh, it wasn’t like that,” he said. “It wasn’t like that at all. I won.”

  9.The Wreck of the Atlantis

  The orchid crabs were migrating to the sea. They scuttled across the sandy road, swamping it under their numbers. Bright parasitic flowers waved gently on their armor, making the forest floor ripple under a carpet of multicolored petals, like a submarine garden seen through clear fathoms of Ocean brine.

  Mintouchian cursed and threw the brakes. The New Born King slammed to a halt. Chu pulled out a cheroot and stuck it in the corner of her mouth. “Well, we’re stuck here for a while. Might as well get out and stretch our legs.”

  A small community of pilgrims, the inhabitants of three other trucks — Lord of Haunts, Lucky Mathilde, the Lion Heart — and some dozen foot travelers, were patiently waiting out the migration. A line of them sat on the lowest branch of a grandfather tree, huddled like crows and staring at a blue spark of fire chocked in the fork of one limb. “Look at that,” Mintouchian said. “When I was a kid and people got hung up on the road like this, they’d swap stories, sometimes for hours on end: ghost stories, family histories, fables, hero tales, hausmarchen, dirty jokes, brags and dozens, everything you can imagine. Living back then was like being in an ocean of stories. It was great.” Disgustedly he flicked on the dashboard set with a swipe of his beefy hand and leaned back in his seat.

  Chu climbed out of the cab and hooked an elbow over the hood, eyes distant. The bureaucrat followed.

  He felt disconnected. He had spread himself too thin in the Puzzle Palace, and now he felt a touch of perceptual nausea, a forewarning perhaps of the relativistic sickness to which those who worked in conventional reality were particularly prone. Everything seemed bright illusion to him, the thinnest film of appearance afloat over a darker, unknowable truth. The world vibrated with the finest of tensions, as if Something were imminent. He waited for windows to open in the sky, doorways in the trees and holes in the water. For the invisible coursing spirits that surely shared this space unseen to make themselves manifest. As of course they did not.

  He set his briefcase down on the running board. “I’m going for a walk.”

  Chu nodded. Mintouchian didn’t even look up from his program.

  He wandered deeper into the grandfather tree, careful not to step on the occasional stray crab, outriders of the main migration dimly seeking their way back to consensus. The flow of orchid crabs had split, isolating them in an island of stillness. The tree overhead was a magnificent thing, its great branches spreading out horizontally from the main bole and sending down secondary trunks at irregular distances, so that the one tree had all the volume and complexity of an entire grove.

  They were rare, grandfather trees, he remembered hearing. This one was a survivor, a lonely holdout from the earliest days of great spring. From the seeds buried deep in its heart would come, an age hence, if not a new race then at least a nation within that race.

  Ramshackle stairs twisted crookedly about the trunk, with landings where planked walks ran atop the branches deep into leafy obscurity. They had been painted once, red and green, yellow and orange, but the carnival colors had faded, bleached by a thousand suns as pale as the skeletons in the boneyard of an abandoned church. Small signs pointed down this branch or that to railinged platforms: the ship view. abelard’s. fresh eels. jules zee’s. the aerie. flavored beers.

  Drawn upward more by capillary action than actual will, he climbed the stairs.

  A drunk staggered down past him. Twisted bits of river wood were nailed to the railings in a weak attempt at decoration, and chalky shells leaned against the uprights.

  The bureaucrat was hesitating at the third landing, wondering which way to go, when a dog-headed man carrying a tray of hands pushed by him. He stepped back in alarm, and the man halted and pulled the mask from his face. “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Ah, I was wondering—” He saw now that the hands were metal, modulars being taken to be flash-cleaned between clients.

  “The Atlantis is down that way. Take the walk straight ahead, turn left, and follow the signs. You can’t miss it.”

  Bemused, the bureaucrat followed the instructions and came to a long platform with scattered tables. Clusters of surrogates and the occasional lone human lounged against the railing, staring out into the forest. He stared too.

  The tree had been cut back to open a view of the forest interior. Golden light slanted into the greenery, whimseys dancing like dust motes within it. Ahead, rising from the earth like a phantom, was the landlocked corpse of an ocean vessel. The Atlantis.

  It was enormous beyond scale. The ship had foundered keel first with its bow upward sometime during the last great winter, and the currents had
half buried it, so that it seemed frozen in the instant of going under. A million orchid crabs were traversing its barnacled remains, and it was covered with flowers, as impossible a creation as any mnemonic address in the Puzzle Palace.

  The ghost of a memory tugged at his mind. He had heard of this ship before. Something.

  The bureaucrat found an empty table, scraped up a chair, and sat. A light breeze ruffled his hair. Leaves rustled as a feathered serpent leaped into the air, a scissor-tailed finch perhaps, or a robin. He felt oddly at peace, put in mind of humanity’s gentle, arboreal origins. He wondered why people put so little effort into returning home, when it was so easily done.

  At that moment he glanced down at the table. An outlined crow stared back at him. Before he could react, a beaked shadow fell across it. He looked up into the eyes of a crow-headed man.

  Gregorian! the bureaucrat thought, with a thrill of alarm. Then he remembered the Black Beast that had haunted Dr. Orphelin and looked about him. Faded drawings of birds and animals were everywhere on the railings and tables. He’d attuned himself to such things, and was now generating his own omens “Welcome to the Haunt’s Roost,” the waiter said.

  The bureaucrat pointed to a Flavored Beers sign. “Have you got lime? Or maybe orange?”

  The head lifted disdainfully. “That’s only line-feed. For the surrogate trade. No real person would drink that crap.”

  “Oh. Uh, well, give me a glass of lager, then. And an explanation for that ship out there.”

  The waiter bowed, left, and returned with a beer and an interactive. The set looked out of place, its forced orange-and-purple housing a jarring contrast to the restaurant’s studied art-lessness. He might have been back home in an environmental retreat, trees and faraway glint of river reduced to calculated effect. The beer was thin.

  He turned on the set. A smiling young woman in a brocaded vest appeared on its screen. Her braids were tipped with small silver bells. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Marivaud Quinet,

  and I am a typical citizen of Miranda during the last great year. I am knowledgeable on and able to discuss matters of historical significance as well as details of daily life. I am not structured to offer advice or pornographic entertainment. This set has been sealed by the Department of Licensing and Inspection, Division of Technology Transfer. Product tampering is illegal and may result in prosecution or even unintentional physical harm.”