Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  “Yes, I know.” The set would implode if its integrity were breached. He wondered if it would be left behind when the restaurant was evacuated, to disappear in a silvery burst of bubbles when salt corrosion finally ate through its housing. “Marivaud, tell me about the Atlantis.”

  Her face grew solemn. “That was the final tragedy of our age. We were arrogant, I admit it. We made mistakes. This was the last of them, the one that brought the offplanet powers down on us, to regress our technology back yet another century.”

  The bureaucrat remembered just enough history to know this was oversimplification. “What was done was necessary, Marivaud. There must be limits.”

  She angrily yanked at a braid, setting its tiny bell tinkling. “We were not like the stupid cattle who live here today. We had pride! We accomplished things! We had our own scientists, our own direction. Our contribution to Prosperan culture was not small. We were known throughout the Seven Sisters!”

  “I’m sure you were. Tell me about the ship.”

  “The Atlantis was a liner originally. It had to be converted offshore — it was too deep for any harbor. That fragment you see now is only the prow. The true ship was as big as a city.” A montage of antique images of the ship in different configurations, the superstructure rising and falling in great waves. “Well, perhaps it only seemed so, for I saw it from so very many viewpoints, in such an overlapping woozy maze of perception. But I get ahead of myself. The first phase was to build a string of transmitters up and down the Tidewater. They were anchored to the bedrock with carbon-whisker cables and made strong enough to withstand the tides when they rolled across the land.” More images, of thick, bulbous-topped towers this time. “We rigged them with permanently sealed tokamaks, to guarantee their power over the submerged half of the great year. It took ten lesser years to…”

  “Marivaud, I haven’t the time for all this. Just the sinking, please.”

  “I was at home that day,” Marivaud said. “I’d built a place just above the fall line — what would be the Piedmont coast after the tides. I had a light breakfast, toast with fairy jam sprinkled with ground parsley from my garden, and a glass of stout.”

  The image dissolved into the interior of a small cottage. Rain specked the windowpanes, and a fire burned in the hearth. Marivaud hastily wiped a dab of jam from the corner of her mouth. “Out at sea, the morning was bright and sunny. I was flashing from person to person, like sunlight itself. I felt so fresh and happy.”

  The scene switched to the deck of the Atlantis.

  Green-yellow bodies poured onto the deck. A scoop lifted away. For an instant the bureaucrat did not recognize the struggling creatures. In winter morph they bore very little resemblance to humans. They had long, eelish tails and two slim appendages that might generously be called arms; their faces were streamlined, mouths silent gasps of pain. They twisted, bodies shortening, lengthening, shifting from form to form in a desperate attempt to adapt to the air. The image focused on one, and in the agonized turn of its head the bureaucrat recognized intelligence.

  “They’re haunts!”

  Marivaud faded half in, serene as a madonna at the breakfast table. She nodded. “Yes, the little darlings.”

  A woman in hip boots waded in among the haunts. Her gun flashed as she pressed it to the backs of heads and pulled the trigger. Haunts jerked wildly with each gasp of compressed air.

  “That’s the last of them. Over they go.”

  Suddenly the image shifted to the viewpoint of one of the haunts. It flew through the air and exploded into the water. Clouds of bubbles gushed away and it fled wildly. To either side swam other haunts, wild and beautiful and ecstatic.

  Back on deck, the crew were assembling a pair of projectors. “Let’s run out those ghost nets again. Watch that—”

  There was a knock on the door.

  Marivaud opened it. A woman with hard, handsome features that echoed her own stood there. “Goguette! Come in, let me take your cloak. Have you eaten yet? What brings you here so early?”

  “I’ll take some berry tea.” Goguette sat at the table. “I’ve come to share the jubilee with my little sister. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “No, of course not. Oh! Mousket’s on deck.”

  A large, heroically breasted military type faded in, all jaw and dark purpose. “Mousket,” Goguette said. “She’s the commandant, right?”

  “Yes. She’s having an affair with the pilot.” A quick glimpse of a slim, straight-built man with cynical eyes. To the bureaucrat she said, “He is an extremely private man. The public nature of their love embarrasses, humiliates, arouses him. That only makes it the sweeter for her. She savors his abasement.”

  “Excuse me,” the bureaucrat said. “How do you know all this?”

  “Didn’t you notice my earrings?” Marivaud brushed back a curtain of braids, exposing an ear all coral and cream. From it hung an amber leaf, silver-veined and delicate as a dragon’s wing. The image swelled so he could see the embedded elements of a television transceiver, signal processor, and neural feed. It was an elegantly simple arrangement that would let her effortlessly employ all electronic skills: She might talk with friends, receive entertainments, preserve a particularly beautiful sunrise, copy an Old Master drawing in her own hand, do research, take and teach educational courses, or transmit her dreams for machine analysis, at her whim. It made her brain a node within an invisible empire of interactivity, the perfect focus of a circle so infinitely large its center was everywhere, its circumference nowhere.

  “Even the offworlders didn’t have these,” she said. “We were the first to combine everything into one continuous medium. It was like being in two worlds at once, like having a second, unseen life. This was when you offworlders were creating that awkward mnemonic palace of yours. Our method was superior. If it hadn’t been for the Atlantis incident, you would be a part of it now.”

  “By God, you’re talking about the Trauma!” the bureaucrat cried in rising horror. “There was a ship involved — that must have been the Atlantisl Everyone on it was wired for continuous broadcast.”

  “Do you want to listen to this story or narrate it yourself? Yes, of course the crew were all actors, improvisors — what do you call people who lead lives of shaped intensity in order to create public dramas?”

  “I don’t think we have them anymore. What are they doing to the haunts?”

  “Fitting them with broadcast chips, of course. What did you think this project was all about?”

  “Why would you want to do such a thing?”

  “That is exactly what I ask her myself!” Goguette said. “There are so many refined, educational, and enriching experiences available on the net. Why waste your life listening in on creatures little better than animals?”

  “Ah, but such splendid animals!” Marivaud giggled. “But we are getting away from our story. You” — she addressed the bureaucrat directly — “can experience only the middle range of this. You miss the little things, the burn of rope in chafed hand, Ocean’s smell, the chill of a salt breeze across your arm. And the grand emotions you can only sense from the outside. There is no way we can share more than a fraction of this with you. So I will show you two minor players, a ghostnetter and a flash-surgeon. Their true names have been lost, so I will give the ghostnetter the offworld name of Underbill. The flash-surgeon I will name — Gogo, after my sister.”

  Goguette punched her shoulder, she laughed, and they were gone. On deck, the flash-surgeon bolstered her gun. She wiped her brow with the back of her arm, glanced up past the mast-high cranes to see Caliban high above, a disk of ice melting in blue sky. Then down again to see haunts’ heads appearing and disappearing above the water.

  She strolled over to the nearest projector. “My God,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”

  Underbill looked up from his screen, flashed a smile. “This is the last sounding. When they’re done, our job is over.” His hands were delicate on the controls. The p
rojector swiveled slightly, and the ghost net swung an arc forward. “Watch that group out there.” Into a microphone he said, “Point one.”

  Cut to the other projector. Its operator swiveled in the opposite direction. “Point one.”

  Far away black dots appeared and disappeared in the water. The ghost net crept closer, its progress traceable by the hissing line of bubbles along its length. The sounding changed direction, angling away. “Clever little babies,” Underbill muttered. “Don’t you run away from me.”

  The two lines of white bubbles were slowly converging now, like a giant pair of scissors closing. The haunts caught between the ghost nets fled toward open sea. A few broke away from the main pack and doubled back through the ghost net.

  “Oh!” Gogo cried. “They’re getting away.”

  That confident grin again. Underbill brushed back his hair. “No, those are ones we caught earlier, with your chips telling them they can go through.”

  Gogo was bouncing up and down on her toes in excitement.

  She looked very young, almost a child. “Oh! Are you sure? Yes, of course.”

  “Relax. Even if we let a few get away — what would it hurt?”

  “There are so few of them left,” Gogo said wistfully. “So very few. We should have chipped them while they were still ashore.”

  Distractedly, staring down at his screens with perfect concentration, Underbill said, “It wasn’t possible to find them all while they were on land. They’re elusive, you know that.” Into the microphone he said, “Point three.”

  “Point three.”

  The lines of bubbles were closing. Gogo stared off at them. “Sometimes I wonder should we be doing this at all?”

  He looked up at her with frank wonder. “Do you?”

  “It hurts them!” Softly: “I hurt them.”

  Underbill was perfectly intent on his screen. “It was not so long ago that the indigenes were almost extinct. It was all our own fault. Unwise policies, disease — people even hunted them in the early years. Do you know what put an end to all that?”

  “What?”

  “The first time an indigene was chipped into the net. The first time people could feel sensation with that purity and clean zest they feel. The first—”

  “The first time people could run with them through the magical night, wind in hair, to hunt and mate,” Gogo breathed. She blushed prettily. “I know it’s kind of sick.”

  “That’s what I say,” Goguette interpolated.

  “Oh, poof!” Marivaud said. “If you’re not enjoying this, there are other shows for you to experience.”

  “No, it’s not!” Underbill said firmly. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a natural, healthful thing to be interested in the physical side of love. It shows you have a lively interest in life. Point five,” he said, “and locking.”

  “Point five and locking.”

  A third ghostnetter snapped on his projector, and a new line of bubbles capped the other two. The pack of haunts wheeled in confusion. Slowly the last ghost net began to draw them in. The crane operator began moving her scoop into position. “Your turn soon.”

  “I’ll be ready,” she said. Then, “You’re easy to talk to.”

  “Thank you.” He studied her. “What’s really bothering you?”

  Her fingers closed on the grip of her gun, opened again. “I’m afraid it won’t be so good. I mean, with them in winter morph.”

  “You mean you haven’t tried them?”

  “I was afraid.”

  Underbill smiled. “Try.”

  She hesitated, then nodded. The image switched to the haunts again, fleeing through bubbles, diving to catch a passing crustacean and crunch it in small sharp teeth. Even on the screen, limited to sight and sound, the joy the creatures felt simply swimming along was obvious.

  “Oh,” she said. Her eyes widened. “Oh!”

  Goguette was washing dishes. A door banged open, and Marivaud came in with raindrops on her cloak and an armful of fresh-cut flowers. “You have so little time,” she said to the bureaucrat as she began arranging them. “We’ll cut forward a few hours, to the jubilee.”

  Ocean roared. Abandoning their posts, those of the crew who weren’t already at the rails ran to starboard and stared. It was an impossible sight: all the water in the world humping up, as if the planet had suddenly decided it needed a higher horizon. The Atlantis listed a degree in anticipation. The grandmother of all tidal waves, the polar tsunami, was passing beneath them. The ship shot upward, carried by the power of a continent of ice melting all at once.

  The screen cut from face to face, viewpoint to viewpoint, showing stunned eyes, strained faces. They stood deathly still, paralyzed with awe.

  “How are they going to escape?” the bureaucrat asked. “Don’t they want to get away?”

  “Of course they don’t.”

  “Do they want to die?”

  “Of course they don’t.” The image wavered, and the human crew turned to metal. The Atlantis was transformed into a ship of the dead, a gothic monstrosity manned by skeletons. “Surrogates were invented on Miranda,” Marivaud said proudly. “We made them first.” The image overlay was restored, and the skeletons fleshed out with human bodies.

  A horrid glassy calm settled over the near reaches of Ocean, as if its surface had been stretched taut by the swell. Even as they soared up its side, the water seemed to shrink under the ship. The bureaucrat could hear it whispering and running away. Ocean rose until it filled the eye. The sky vanished, and still it grew. Winds blew across the deck.

  Then they topped the swell. Beyond it a wall of white fury reached from horizon to horizon — a line squall. It rushed down on them. Involuntarily crew members moved toward and away from each other, forming clusters and gaps along the rail.

  Gogo glanced toward the ghostnetter. Her eyes were bright with excitement. She bit her lip, brushed away a strand of hair from an undone braid. Her face glowed with life. She reached out to hug Underbill.

  Startled, Underbill flinched away from her touch. He stared into her face with revulsion. In that unguarded instant his expression said louder than any words: You’re only a woman.

  Then the squall overtook the ship, and slammed into its side. The storm swallowed it whole.

  “Ahh,” Marivaud sighed. Her sister reached out and seized her hand. Softly, gently, they began to applaud.

  In a faraway studio the actors rose up from their gates to take their bows.

  Marivaud looked up, face expressionless. The cottage — sister, fire, and all — dissolved in a swirl of rain. “A week later, the bodies began washing up on shore.”

  “What?”

  “With radiation burns. We had not understood the indigenes so well as we had thought. We did not know that their brain chemistry changed in great winter. Or perhaps it was their psychology that changed. But somehow the warning signal that was supposed to drive them from the towers did not. They huddled as close to the reactors as they could. It was madness. Perhaps their mating instincts were stimulated. Perhaps they just liked the warmth. Who can say?”

  Marivaud’s eyes closed. Tears squeezed between the lids. “We could do nothing. Ocean was all storm and fury — nothing could get through. Nothing except for the broadcasts we could not turn off. All the time it took for them to die, the towers up and down the coast transmitted their agony. It was like having a broken tooth in one’s mouth — the tongue keeps returning to it, drawn by the pain. I could not leave it alone.

  “Sorrow swept over Continent in a great electronic wave. It was as if an enchantment had passed over the land. One moment everything was bright and beautiful. The next it was gray and lifeless. As a people we had been optimistic, sure of ourselves. Now we were… dispossesed, without a future. Those who had the strength not to listen were affected by the rest of us.

  “I myself would have starved, had my sister not hand-fed me for a week. She smashed my earrings. She bullied me back to life. But after that I no l
onger laughed so often as before. There were people who died. Others went mad. The shame was great. When the offplanet powers convened and took away the last of our science, there was little protest. We knew we deserved it. So the high autumn of our technology passed, and we lapsed into eternal winter.”

  Marivaud fell silent, her face pale and sad. The bureaucrat turned off the interactive.

  After a while, a dog-headed waiter came and took the set away.

  The bureaucrat drained the last of his beer and leaned back to watch the surrogates dining. It amused him in a melancholy way, to see them lifting glasses and tasting food no one else could see, in a perfect and meaningless mime show. By the railing other surrogates strolled and chatted. One of them was staring at him.

  Their eyes met, and the surrogate bowed. It came to the table and took a chair. For an instant the bureaucrat couldn’t place the keen, aged face that burned on the screen. Then his schoolboy eidetics kicked in. “You’re the shopkeeper,” he said. “In Lightfoot. Your name is… Pouffe, is that right?”

  There was a squint of madness in the old man’s grin. “That’s right, that’s right. Gonna ask how I found you here?”

  “How did you find me here?”

  “Tracked you down. Tracked you to Cobbs Creek. Gated ahead to Clay Bank, you weren’t there. Gated back to Cobbs Creek, they told me you hadn’t been gone long. I knew you’d stop here. Never met an offworlder yet who could resist taking in the sights. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Actually I’m here by chance.”

  “Sure you are.” Pouffe’s lips twisted sardonically. “But I would’ve found you anyway. This isn’t the only place I’ve been waiting. Been shunting between four different gates all morning.”