Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  “That must have cost you a lot of money.”

  “Yes, that’s the key.” The old man leaned forward, eyebrows rising significantly. “A lot of money. It cost me a lot of money. But I’ve got plenty of it. I’m a rich man, if you get my drift.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I’ve seen your commercial. You know, about the magician. The one who can—”

  “Wait a minute, that’s not my—”

  “—adapt a man to live and breathe underwater. Well, I—”

  “Stop. This is nonsense.”

  “—want to find him. I understand you can’t tell just anybody. I’ll pay for the information, and I’ll pay well.” He reached across the table to seize the bureaucrat’s hand.

  “I don’t have what you want!” The bureaucrat shook away the grasping metal hand and stood. “Even if I knew where he was, I wouldn’t tell you. The man is a fraud. He can’t do any of what he claims.”

  “That’s not what you said on television.”

  “Shopkeeper Pouffe, take a look out here.” He led the avid old man to the railing. “Take a good look. Imagine what this is going to be like in a few months. No houses, no shelter. Seaweed where the trees are now, and angel sharks feeding in the black water. The marine life here has had millions of years to adapt to this environment. You, on the other hand, are a civilized man with a genome foreign not only to Ocean but to this entire star system. Even if Gregorian could deliver on his wild claims — and I assure you that he cannot — what kind of life could you lead here? What would you eat? How could you expect to survive?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” a bull-headed waiter said.

  He swept Pouffe’s surrogate aside, placed a hand on the bureaucrat’s back, and shoved. “Hey, what — !” Pouffe cried.

  The bureaucrat fell forward. Dizzily he clutched at the railing. The man-bull laughed, and the bureaucrat felt his legs being lifted up behind him. All existence swept sideways, trees wheeling in the sky beneath, sand turning up overfoot. The hands were warm and firm on his ankles. Then, suddenly, they were gone.

  Somebody screamed. In a blast of pain the bureaucrat crashed flat on his stomach. His arms were still clenched about the rail. Helplessly he gazed up to see the waiter and Pouffe’s surrogate locked in a hug. They might have been dancing. The man shoved violently, and the telescreen snapped off. It bounced off the edge of the platform. Headless, the machine ducked and spun. The two crashed into the railing. Wood splintered and gave.

  They toppled over the edge.

  Surrogates, waiters, even human customers, rushed to stare down over the rail. In the crush the bureaucrat was ignored.

  Slowly he pulled himself up. His legs and spine ached. One knee trembled. It felt wet. He clutched the rail with both hands and looked down. Long way down to the ground. His assailant lay unmoving atop the broken surrogate. He looked tiny as a doll. The bull mask had fallen away, revealing familiar round features.

  It was Veilleur — the false Chu.

  The bureaucrat stared. He’s dead, he thought. That could have been me. A metal hand took his elbow and pulled him back. “This way,” Pouffe said quietly. “Before anybody thinks to connect you with him down there.”

  He was led to a secluded table back among the leaves.

  “You travel in fast company. Can you tell me what that was all about?”

  “No,” the bureaucrat said. “I — I know who was behind it, but not the specifics, no.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t stop shuddering,” he said. Then, “I owe you my life, shopkeeper.”

  “That’s right, you do. It was all that combat training back when I was a young man. Fuckin’ surrogates are so weak, it’s next to impossible to overpower someone with one. You got to turn their own strength against them.” That smug, self-satisfied smirk floated on the screen. “You know how to repay me.”

  The bureaucrat sighed, stared down at his hands on the table. Weak, mortal hands. He gathered himself together. “Look—”

  “No, you look! I spent four years in the Caverns — that’s what they call the military brig on Caliban. Do you have any idea what it was like there?”

  “Pretty grim, I’d imagine.”

  “No, it’s not! That’s the hell of it. It’s all perfectly humane and bland and impersonal. Some snot-nosed tech plugs you into a simple visualization program, hooks up an IV feed and a physical-therapy program so your body don’t rot, and then leaves you imprisoned inside your own skull.

  “It’s like a monastery in there, or maybe a nice clean hotel. Nothing to hurt or alarm you. Your emotions are cranked way down low. You’re as comfy as a mouth sucking on a tit. You don’t feel anything but warm, don’t hear nothing but soft, comfortable noises. Nothing can hurt you. Nothing can reach you. You can’t escape.

  “Four years!

  “When you get out, they give you three months’ intensive rehab before you can accept the evidence of your own eyes. Even then, you still have nights when you wake up and don’t believe you exist anymore.

  “I came out of that place and went to ground. I swore I’d never again go anywhere I couldn’t go in person. That was a lifetime ago, and I’ve kept that vow right up to this very day. Do you hear what I’m telling you?”

  “You’re saying this is important to you.”

  “Damn right, it’s important!”

  “Is your life important to you? Then give up this childish fantasy. These notions of coral castles and mermaids singing. Shopkeeper, this is the real world. You must make the best of what there is.”

  Somewhere far away, a truck horn was honking regularly, insistently. The bureaucrat realized that he had been hearing it for some time. The migration must have cleared the road.

  He stood. “I have to leave now.”

  When he tried to walk away, Pouffe danced after him. “We haven’t talked money yet! I haven’t told you how much I can pay.”

  “Please. This is futile.”

  “No, you’ve got to listen to me.” Pouffe was crying now, desperate hot tears running down his rutted face. “You’ve got to listen.”

  “Is this man bothering you, sir?” a waiter asked.

  The bureaucrat hesitated for a second. Then he nodded, and the waiter turned the surrogate off.

  Back on the ground, he could not find the New Born King. The truck was gone. Chu stood on the running board of another, the Lion Heart, leaning on the horn. She stepped down at his approach. “You look odd. Pale.”

  “I should,” he said flatly. “One of Gregorian’s people just tried to kill me.”

  When he was done telling his story, Chu slammed her fist into her hand, over and over again. “That sonofabitch!” she said. “The fucking nerve of him.” She was genuinely angry.

  The bureaucrat was surprised and a little flattered by Chu’s show of emotion. He had never been quite sure that she accepted him, and always suspected she thought of him as merely an offworld buffoon, someone to be tolerated rather than respected. He felt an unexpected glow of gratitude. “I remember you telling me once not to take any of this personally.”

  “Yeah, well, when somebody tries to kill your partner, that kind of changes the game. Gregorian is going to pay for this. I’ll see that he does.” She wheeled sharply away, and stepped on a crab. “Shit!” She kicked the mutilated body away. “What a fucking glorious day.”

  “Say.” The bureaucrat peered around. “Where’s Mintou-chian?”

  “Gone,” Chu said. She stood on one foot, wiping the sole of her shoe with a handkerchief. Then she threw the cloth into the weeds. “He took your briefcase with him too.”

  “What?”

  “It was the damnedest thing. Soon as the crabs dwindled, he fired up the truck, snatched the briefcase, and lit off like his ass was on fire.” Chu shook her head. “That was when I started honking the horn here, trying to call you back.”

  “Didn’t he know that my briefcase will come back to me?”

  “Obviously not.”

  It took
the briefcase half an hour to find its way back to him. Chu had already made arrangements with the Lion Heart’s driver, and had gone off to view the corpse of her impersonator. “Oughta be good for a few laughs,” she said grimly. “Maybe I’ll cut off an ear for a souvenir.”

  The briefcase daintily picked its way down the road. When it reached the bureaucrat, it set itself down and retracted its legs. He picked it up. “Hard time getting away?”

  “No. Mintouchian didn’t even bother strapping me down. I waited until he’d gone a couple of miles downriver and was feeling confident, then rolled down the window and jumped.”

  “Hum.” The bureaucrat was silent for a moment. Then he said, “We’ll be here a few hours more than planned. There’s been a touch of violence, and we still have to deal with the nationals. Probably have to make a statement, maybe file a field report.”

  The briefcase, familiar with his moods, said nothing.

  The bureaucrat thought about Gregorian, of the magician’s abrupt shift from a distant mocking disdain to outright enmity. He’d almost died just now. He thought about Mintouchian, and about Dr. Orphelin’s warning that he had a traitor with him. Everything was changed, horribly changed.

  “Did Mintouchian look surprised when you jumped?”

  “He looked like he’d swallowed a toad. You should’ve been there — it would’ve made you laugh.”

  “I suppose.”

  But he doubted it. The bureaucrat didn’t feel like laughing. He didn’t feel like laughing at all.

  10. A Service for the Dead

  That morning, the doctor wind swept a swarm of barnacle flies inland, and when the bureaucrat awoke, the houseboat was encrusted with their shells. He had to lean on the door to break it open. The salt smell of Ocean was everywhere, like the scent of a lover who has visited in the night and is gone, leaving only this ambiguous promise of return.

  He scowled and spat over the houseboat’s edge.

  The bottom tread of his stoop was missing. The bureaucrat hopped down onto the bare patch worn into the black earth beneath. He began to thread his way through the scattered hulks of the boats’ graveyard.

  “Hey!”

  He looked up. A golden-haired boy stood naked atop a cradled yacht with a stove-in bow, pissing into the rosebushes. One of the gang of scavengers who lived there. He waved with his free hand. The census bracelet glittered dully on his wrist. “That thing you were looking for? We found a whole pile of them. Come on over and take your pick.”

  Five minutes later the bureaucrat had stowed a tightly bound bundle in his room, and was off again to Clay Bank. A sour church bell clanged in the distance, calling the faithful to meditation. The sky was overcast and gray. A light, almost imperceptible drizzle fell.

  This far east, the farmland was too rich to squander, and save for the plantation buildings, most dwellings hugged the river. Unpainted clapboard houses teetered precariously on the lip of a high earth bluff. Halfway down to the water, a walk had been cut into the dirt and planked over, to serve a warren of jugs and storerooms dug into the bank itself.

  Lieutenant Chu was waiting for him on the boardwalk outside the diner. Boats bobbed on the river, tied to pilings across which ran docks more gap than substance, the idea of Dock a beau ideal honored more in the intent than the execution. The drizzle chose that instant to intensify into rain, drops hissing on the surface of the water. They ducked inside.

  “I got another warning,” the bureaucrat said when they’d found a table. He opened his briefcase and removed a handful of black feathers. A crow’s wing. “It was tacked to my door when I got home last night.”

  “Funny business,” Chu said. She spread the wing, examined the bloody shoulder joint, folded open the tiny fingers at the metacarpal joint, and gave it back. “It must be those scavengers doing it. I don’t know why you insist on living there.”

  The bureaucrat shrugged irritably. “Whoever’s actually placing these things, it’s at Gregorian’s instigation. I recognize his style.” Privately, though, it bothered him that Gregorian had changed tactics again, switching back from attempted assassination to mockery and harassment. It made no sense.

  The diner was dim and narrow, a tunnel dug straight back from the bank. The tables halfway down were drawn away from the pool of light shed by the single milky glass skylight. Water fell from leaky seams into waiting tins. To the rear the kitchen help laughed and gossiped while the leaping flames of a gas range chased shadows about their faces. A waitress came to their table and slapped down trenchers of salt meat and mashed yams. Chu wrinkled her nose. “You got any — ?”

  “No.” The evac boys at the next table laughed. “You want breakfast, you’ll take what you’re given.”

  “Arrogant bitch,” Chu grumbled. “If this weren’t the last eatery in Clay Bank, I’d…”

  A young soldier leaned over from the next table. “Easy up,” he said in that broad northern accent all the local Authority muscle had, Tidewater types brought in from Blackwater and Vineland provinces because they had no ties here. “Last airship comes through tomorrow. They’ve got to clean out their larder.” His beret, folded under a shoulder strap, had been customized with a rooster’s tail.

  Chu stared at him until he reddened and turned away.

  In a niche by the table a television was showing a documentary on the firing of the jugs. There was antique footage of workers sealing up the newdug clay. Narrow openings were left at the bottoms of what would be the doors, and to the top rear of the tunnels. Then the wood packed inside was fired. Pillars of smoke rose up like the ghosts of trees and became a forest whose canopy blotted out the sun. The show had been playing over and over ever since its original broadcast on one of the government channels. Nobody noticed it anymore.

  The heat required to glaze the walls was — The bureaucrat reached over to switch channels. My brother died at sea! What was I supposed to do? I’m not his keeper, you know.

  “You watch that crap?” Chu asked.

  “It’s involving.”

  “Who’s the weedy geek?”

  “Now that’s an interesting question. He’s supposed to be Shelley, Eden’s cousin — you know, the little girl who saw the unicorn? But she had two cousins, identical twins—” Chu snorted. “All right, I admit it’s implausible. But, you know, even in the Inner Circle it happens occasionally. That’s why they have the genetic-tagging techniques, to mark them as separate individuals when it does occur.”

  But Chu wasn’t listening. She stared off through the doorway into the gray rain, pensively silent. Around them rose the babble of voices from waitresses and kitchen workers, soldiers and civilians, happy and a little shrill with the excitement of the impending evacuation, all feeling the intoxication of radical change.

  All right! Yes, I killed him. 1 killed my brother! Are you happy now?

  “God,” Chu said. “This must be the most boring place in the universe.”

  Holding his briefcase out for balance, the bureaucrat followed Chu down the rain-slick boardwalk. They passed a stairway dug into the dirt, once braced and planked, now crumbled into a narrow slant and become almost a gully. Water gushed from its mouth. “I’ve requisitioned good seats on the heliostat tomorrow,” Chu said.

  The bureaucrat grunted.

  “Come on. If we miss the ship, we’ll be taken out on one of the cattleboats.” She tugged on her census bracelet in annoyance. “You haven’t seen what they’re like.”

  A crate crashed onto the walk before them, and they danced back. It bounced over the edge, into the water. Scavengers were ransacking a storeroom, noisily smashing things and throwing them outside. A slick of trash floated downriver, all but motionless in the sleepy current, spreading as it withdrew: old mattresses slowly drowning, wicker baskets and dried flowers, splintered armchairs and fiddles, toy sailboats lying on their sides in the water. The scavengers were shouting, given over completely to the destruction of objects they could never afford before and could not pay the freight o
n now.

  They came to a jug with a weathered sign hung over the door showing a silvery skeletal figure. The gate was the establishment’s sole legitimate enterprise and ostensible reason for being, though everyone knew the place was actually a paintbox. “What about the flier?” the bureaucrat asked. “No word yet from the Stone House?”

  “No, and by now it’s safe to say there’s not going to be. Look, we’ve been here so long I’m growing moss on my behind. We’ve done everything we can do, the trail is cold. What good is a flier going to do anyway? It’s time to give up.”

  “I’ll take your sentiments under advisement.” The bureaucrat stepped within. Chu did not follow.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve been here,” the bureaucrat said. Korda’s quarters were spacious in a city where space translated directly into wealth. The grass floor was broken into staggered planes, and the arrays of stone tools set into the angled walls were indirectly lit by spots bounced off rotating porphyry columns. Everything was agonizingly clean. Even the dwarf cherry trees were potted in mirror-symmetrical pairs.

  “You’re not here now,” Korda replied unsentimentally. “Why are you bothering me at home? Couldn’t it wait for the office?”

  “You’ve been avoiding me at the office.”

  Korda frowned. “Nonsense.”

  “Pardon me.” A man in a white ceramic mask entered the room. He wore a loose wraparound, such as was the style in the worlds of Deneb. “The vote is coming up, and you’re needed.”

  “You wait here.” At the archway to the next room Korda hesitated and asked the man in the mask, “Aren’t you coming, Vasli?”

  The eyeless white face glanced downward. “It is my place on the Committee that is being debated just now. It’s probably best for all concerned if I wait this one out.”

  The Denebian drifted to the center of the room, stood motionless. His hands were lost in the wraparound’s sleeves, his head overshadowed by the hood. He looked subtly unhuman, his motions too graceful, his stillness too complete. He was, the bureaucrat realized suddenly, that rarest of entities, a permanent surrogate. Their glances met.