Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  “I make you nervous,” Vasli said.

  “Oh no, of course not. It’s just. . .”

  “It’s just that you find my form unsettling. I know. There is no reason to let an overfastidious sense of tact lead you into falsehood. I believe in truth. I am a humble servant of truth. Were it in my power, I would have no lies or evasions anywhere, nothing concealed, hidden, or locked away from common sight.”

  The bureaucrat went to the wall, examined the collection of stone points there: fish points from Miranda, fowling points from Earth, worming points from Govinda. “Forgive me if I seem blunt, but such radical sentiments make you sound like a Free Informationist.”

  “That is because I am one.”

  The bureaucrat felt as if he’d come face to face with a mythological beast, a talking mountain, say, or Eden’s unicorn. “You are?” he said stupidly.

  “Of course I am. I gave up my own world to share what I knew with your people. It takes a radical to so destroy his own life, yes? To exile himself among people who feel uncomfortable in his presence, who fear his most deeply held values as treason, and who were not interested in what he had to say in the first place.”

  “Yes, but the concept of Free Information is…”

  “Extreme? Dangerous?” He spread his arms. “Do I look dangerous?”

  “You would give everyone total access to all information?”

  “Yes, all of it.”

  “Regardless of the harm it could do?”

  “Look. You are like a little boy who is walking along in a low country, and has found a hole in one of the dikes. You plug it with your finger, and for a moment all is well. The sea grows a little stronger, a little bigger. The hole crumbles about the edges. You have to thrust your entire hand within. Then your arm, up to the shoulder. Soon you have climbed entirely within the hole and are plugging it with your body. When it grows bigger, you take a deep breath and puff yourself up with air. But still, the ocean is there, and growing stronger. You have done nothing about your basic problem.”

  “What would you have us do with the dangerous information?”

  “Master it! Control it!”

  “How?”

  “I have no idea. I am but a single man. But if you applied all the brain and muscle now wasted in a futile attempt to control—” Abruptly he stopped. For a long moment he stared at the bureaucrat, as if mastering his emotions. His shoulders slumped. “Forgive me. I am taking out my anger on you. I heard just this morning that my original — the Vasli I once was, the man who thought he had so much to share — died, and I haven’t sorted out my feelings yet.”

  “I’m sorry,” the bureaucrat said. “This must be a sorrowful time for you.”

  Vasli shook his head. “I don’t know whether to cry or laugh. He was myself, and yet he was also the one who condemned me to die here — worldless, disembodied, alone.”

  That blind face stared upward through a thousand layers of the floating city into the outer darkness. “I have been imagining what it would be like to walk the fields of Storr again, to smell the chukchuk and rhu. To see the foibles aflame against the western stars, and hear the flowers sing! Then, I think, I could die content.”

  “You could always go back.”

  “You mistake the signal for the message. It is true that I could have myself copied and that signal transmitted home to Deneb. But I would still be here. I could then kill myself, I suppose, but other than salving the conscience of my agent, what good would it do?” He glanced at the bureaucrat’s surrogate body, tilted one edge of the mask up scornfully. “But I do not expect you to understand.”

  The bureaucrat changed the subject. “May I ask,” he said, “just what work your committee is engaged on?”

  “The Citizens’ Committee for the Prevention of Genocide, you mean? Why, just that. The destruction of indigenous races is a problem that exists in all colonized systems, my own not the least. It is too late for Miranda, of course, but perhaps some protocols will arise here that may be worth transmitting home.”

  “It is possible,” the bureaucrat said cautiously, “that you’re being overpessimistic. I, ah, know of people who have seen haunts, who have actually met and talked with them in recent memory. It’s possible that the race may yet survive.”

  “No. It is not.”

  The Denebian’s words were spoken with such absolute conviction that the bureaucrat was taken aback. “Why not?”

  “There is for all species a minimum sustainable population. Once the population falls below a certain number, it is doomed. It lacks the plasticity necessary to survive the normal variations in its environment. Say, for example, that you have a species of bird reduced to a dozen specimens. You protect them, and they increase in number to a thousand. But they are still, genetically, only a dozen individuals expressed in a myriad of clones. Their genome is brittle. One day the sun will rise wrong and they will all die. A disease, say, that kills one will kill all. Any number of things.

  “Your haunts cannot exist in very large numbers, or their existence would be known for certain. Korda think otherwise, but he is a fool. It does not matter if a few individuals have lingered on beyond their time. As a race, they are dead.”

  Korda chose that moment to return. “You can go in now,” he said. “The Committee wishes to speak with you. I think you’ll be pleased with what they have to say.” Only one who knew Korda well could have caught that overpolite edge to his voice that meant he had just suffered one of his rare defeats.

  With a curt bow to the bureaucrat, Vasli glided away. Korda stared after him.

  “I didn’t know haunts were one of your interests,” the bureaucrat remarked.

  “They are my only interest,” Korda said unguardedly. Then, catching himself, “My only hobby, I mean.”

  But the words were out. Revelation cascaded into the past like a line of dominoes toppling. A thousand small remarks Korda had made, a hundred missed meetings, a dozen odd reversals of policies, all were explained. The bureaucrat carefully did not let his face change expression. “So what is it?” Korda asked. “Just what do you want?”

  “I need a flier. The Stone House is acting balky, and I’ve been waiting on them for weeks. If you could pull a few strings, I could wrap this affair up in a day. I know where Gregorian is now.”

  “Do you?” Korda looked at him sharply. Then, “Very well, I’ll do it.” He touched a data outlet. “Tomorrow morning at Tower Hill, it’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Korda hesitated oddly, looking away and then back again, as if he couldn’t quite put something into words. Then, in a puzzled tone, he asked, “Why are you staring at my feet?”

  “Oh, no reason,” the bureaucrat said. “No reason at all.” But even as he deactivated the surrogate, he was thinking, Lots of people have luxury goods from other star systems. The robot freighters crawl between the stars slowly but regularly. Gre-gorian’s father isn’t alone in wearing outsystem boots. Boots of red leather.

  The paintbox was silent when he emerged from the gate. Through the open doorway he could see that evening had come, the pearly gray light failing toward dusk. The bouncer sat in a rickety chair, staring out into the rain. The tunnels leading back into the earth were lightless holes.

  For an instant of mingled fear and relief the bureaucrat thought the place closed permanently. Then he realized how early it was still; the women would not be on duty yet.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the bouncer. The man looked up incuriously; he was a round little dandy, curly-haired and balding, a ridiculous creation. “I’m looking for someone who works here. The—” He hesitated, realizing that he knew the women here only by the nicknames the young soldiers used for them, the Pig, the Goat, and the Horse. “The tall one with short hair.”

  “Try the diner.”

  “Thanks.”

  In a shadowy doorway alongside the diner the bureaucrat waited for the Horse to emerge. He felt like a ghost — sad, voiceless, and uns
een, a melancholy pair of eyes staring into the world of the living. He lacked the stomach to wait in the light.

  Occasionally people emerged from the diner, and because a plank overhang sheltered the boardwalk there from the rain, they would usually pause to gather themselves together before braving the weather. Once, Chu stopped not an arm’s length away, engrossed in light banter with her young rooster. ” — all alike,” she said. “You think that just because you’ve got that thing between your legs, you’re hot stuff. Well, there’s nothing special about having a penis. Hell, even I have one of them.”

  He laughed unsurely.

  “You don’t believe me? I’m perfectly serious.” She took out a handful of transition notes. “You care to place a little money on that? Why are you shaking your head? Suddenly you believe me? Tell you what, I’ll give you a chance to get your money back. Double or nothing, mine is bigger than yours.”

  The rooster hesitated, then grinned. “Okay,” he said. He reached for his belt.

  “Hold on, my pretty, not out here.” Chu took his arm. “We’ll compare lengths in private.” She led him away.

  The bureaucrat felt a wry amusement. He remembered when Chu had first shown him the trophy she’d cut from the false Chu, the day it had returned from the taxidermist. She’d opened the box and held it up laughing. “Why would you want to save such a thing?” he had asked.

  “It’ll get me the young fish.” She’d swooped it through the air, the way a child would a toy airplane, then lightly kissed the air before its tip and returned it to the box. “Take my word for it. If you want to catch the sweet young things, there’s nothing like owning a big cock.”

  Eventually the Horse emerged from the diner, alone. She paused to put up the hood on her raincoat. He stepped from the shadows, and coughed into his hand. “I want to hire your services,” he said. “Not here. I have a place in the old boatyard.”

  She looked him up and down, then shrugged. “All right, but I’ll have to charge you for the travel time.” She took his hand and waggled the tattooed finger. “And I can’t spend all night withyou. There’s a midnight mass at the church, a service for the dead.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “It’s the last service, and I don’t want to miss it. They’ll be chanting for everyone who ever died in Clay Bank. I got people I want to remember.” She took his arm. “Lead the way.” She was a homely woman, her face harsh and weathered as old wood. Under other circumstances he could imagine their being friends.

  They trudged down the river road in silence. The bureaucrat wore a poncho his briefcase had made for him. After a time his speechlessness began to feel oppressive. “What’s your name?” he asked awkwardly.

  “You mean my real name or the name I use?”

  “Whichever.”

  “It’s Arcadia.”

  At the houseboat the bureaucrat lit a candle and placed it in its sconce, while Arcadia stamped the mud from her feet. “I’ll sure be glad when this rain ends!” she remarked.

  The bundle he’d bought from the scavengers that morning was still on the nightstand. While he was gone, somebody had pulled the covers back from his bed and placed a single black crow’s feather at its center. He brushed it to the floor.

  Arcadia found a hook for her raincoat. She pushed up her census bracelet to rub her wrist. “I’ve got a rash from this. You know what I think? I think adamantine is going to be a fetish item in a year or two. People will pay good money to have these things put on them.”

  Thrusting the bundle at her, the bureaucrat said, “Here. Take off all your clothes and change into this.”

  She looked at the bundle with interest, shrugged again. “All right.”

  Til be right back.”

  He took a pair of gardening shears from his briefcase and went out into the rain. It was pitch-dark outside, and it took him a long time to clip the large armful of flowers he needed.

  By the time he returned, Arcadia had changed into the fantasia. It was covered with orange and red sequins, and cut all wrong. But it fit her well enough. It would do.

  “Roses! How nice.” Arcadia clapped her hands like a little girl. She spun about so that the fantasia swirled about her in a fluid, magical motion. “Do you like how I look?”

  “Lie down on the bed,” he said roughly. “Pull the skirt up over your waist.”

  She obeyed.

  The bureaucrat dumped the roses to the side of the bed in a wet pile. Arcadia’s skin was pale as marble in the faint light, the mounded hair between her legs dark and shadowy. Her flesh looked as though it would be cold to the touch.

  By the time he had shed his own clothing, the bureaucrat was erect. The room was sweet with the scent of roses.

  He closed his eyes as he entered her. He didn’t open them again until he was done.

  11. The Sun at Midnight

  The air filled with flying ants, their wings iridescent blurs, tiny rainbows that overlapped and created black diffraction patterns: circles and crescents forming and disappearing before the eye could fix on them. The bureaucrat gaped up and they were gone, away on their dying flight to the sea.

  “This makes no sense at all,” Chu grumbled.

  The bureaucrat stepped back from the flier. “It’s very simple. I want you to lift off and head due south until you’re well over the horizon from Tower Hill. Then swing around and treetop back. There’s a little clearing to the east, by a stream. Wait for me there. A child could do it.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Oh all right. You saw the way we were treated at the hangar?” Across the field, a gang of surrogate laborers, all rust and limping joints, were clumsily stacking the hangar’s dismantled parts onto a lifting skid. “How insistent they were that we be gone by noon? They didn’t want us to be in the way?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So tell me that somebody’s going to send an airlifter all the way out here two days before the tides just to haul out a modular storage hut.” He did not wait for Chu to respond. “They were instructed to get me away from here as quickly as possible. I intend to find out why.” He stepped back into the shadow of the trees and pitched his voice for the flier. “Now take off.”

  The canopy slid shut. Engines came to life. The flier was a pretty piece of engineering, the kind of elegant machine normally seen only in the floating worlds. Its emerald skin shimmered in the heat of the jets. Then the flier skidded forward twelve times its own length and with a roar pulled up into the sky. Blink and it was gone.

  The trail through the woods was peaceful. The leaves had turned during the rains, gone to purples and cobalts as if all the Tidewater had been blueshifted five seconds into the past. The filtered light was quietly saddening, a somber reminder of the imminence of the land’s passing.

  The trees opened up at the foot of Tower Hill. Its slopes were a frayed green, white chalk showing through alien Terran grass. Bright tents and banners, parasols and balloons, dotted the hillside. At the top stood the ancient tower itself, overpainted in bold orange-and-pink supergraphics, an island of offworld aesthetic that clashed violently with the tragedian’s garb of the autumn forest.

  The hillside crawled with surrogates, an anthill churned with a stick. It seemed that now that the Tidewater had been scoured of human life, the demons had come out to have a carnival of their own.

  He headed upslope.

  Brittle metal laughter sounded like a million crickets. Here, a quartet of surrogates played stringed instruments. There, a crowd cheered two identical chrome wrestlers. Further on a dozen linked hands and danced in a circle. Couples strolled, arms about waists, heads touching, all perfectly indistinguishable. It was the triumph of sexlessness.

  “Have a drink!”

  He’d paused in the shadow of a pavilion to catch his breath. Now a surrogate, bowing deeply, proffered an empty hand. He blinked, realized he’d been mistaken for a surrogate himself, and accepted the invisible glass with a polite nod. There was a perverse satisfac
tion to knowing that among all the hundreds here, he alone saw the metal bones under the illusion of flesh. “Thank you.”

  “Having a good time?”

  “To tell the truth, I just arrived.”

  The surrogate leaned forward unsteadily, slapping an overfa-miliar hand on his shoulder. A round, unhealthy face leered from the screen. “Should’ve been here before the locals were cleared away. You could rent a woman to carry you around on her back like a horse. Slap ’em on the rump to make ’em move!” He winked. “Y’know, the tower up there used to be—”

  “—a television transmitter. Yes, I know the whole story.”

  Mouth stupidly open, the surrogate stared at him long enough for the bureaucrat to realize the conversation had grown tedious. “No, no, a whorehouse. You could buy anything you wanted. Anything! I remember a time my wife and I—”

  The bureaucrat set down his drink. “You’ll excuse me. I have someplace to be.”

  The tower’s lounge floor was thronged.

  Black skeletons lounged against a central ring bar. Others chatted in the scattered booths. The interior was warm and dim, cluttered with flying brass pigs and poncing felt mannequins, and lit only by the glowing facescreens of the patrons themselves, and by a wheel of televisions set into the edges of the ceiling.

  All but invisible, the bureaucrat paused by a clump of surrogates staring up at the screens. Crowded slum buildings were burning. Mobs surged through narrow streets, chanting and shaking fists. Under smoky skies, police slashed at them with electric lances. It was a tiny vision of madness, a glimpse of the end of the world. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Rioting in the Fan,” one said. “That’s the part of Port Richmond just below the falls. Evacuation authority caught a kid torching a warehouse and beat him to death.”

  “It’s disgusting,” said another. “They’re behaving just like animals. Worse than animals, because they’re enjoying it.”

  “Thing is, people have been coming down from the Piedmont to join in. Adolescents, especially — it’s kind of a rite of passage for them. They’ve shut down the incline to keep them out.”