Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  Slowly she eased him down onto her thumb. It touched his anus, slid within. He was sitting in her lap now, her breasts pressed tight against his back. “There, is that so bad?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Good. Now move up and down, little honey, that’s right. Slowly, slowly — the night is long and we have a lot of ground to cover.”

  By the time they went out on the balcony for air, it was night. The sky was glorious with light. Laughter floated up from the goblin market below, where surrogates danced amid a thousand paper lanterns. The bureaucrat looked up, away from them. The annular rings arched overhead, a smear of diamond-dust cities, and beyond them were the stars.

  “Tell me the names of the black constellations,” the bureaucrat said.

  Undine stood naked beside him, her body slick with sweat that did not want to evaporate into the warm night air. It was possible they could be seen from below, but he did not care.

  “You surprise me,” Undine said. “Where did you learn of the black constellations?”

  “In passing.” The railing was cold against his stomach, Undine’s hip warm against his. He rested a hand on the small of her back, let it slide down over her slippery, smooth flesh. “That one there, just beneath the south star — the one that looks like some sort of animal. What is it?”

  “It’s called the Panther,” Undine said. “It’s a female sign, emblematic of the hunger for spiritual knowledge, and useful in certain rituals.”

  “And that one over there?”

  “The Golem. It’s a male sign.”

  “That one that looks like a bird in flight?”

  “Crow,” she said. “It’s Crow.”

  He said nothing.

  “You want to know how Gregorian bought me. You want to know in what coin did he pay?”

  “No,” the bureaucrat said. “I don’t want to know at all. But I’m afraid I have to ask.”

  She held out her wrist, adamantine census bracelet high, and made a twisting gesture.

  The bracelet fell free.

  Deftly, Undine caught it in midair, brought it to her wrist again, snapped it shut. “He has a plasma torch. One of his evil old clients brought it to him in payment for his services. They’re supposed to be strictly controlled, but it’s amazing what a man can do when he thinks he’s got a shot to live forever.”

  “That’s all you got out of this? A way to evade the census?”

  “You forget that all I did for him was to give you a message. He wanted me to warn you away from him. That wasn’t much.” She smiled. “And I warned you in the nicest possible way.”

  “He sent me an arm,” the bureaucrat said harshly. “A woman’s arm. He told me you had drowned.”

  “I know,” Undine said. “Or rather, so I just learned.” She looked at him with those disconcertingly direct eyes. “Well, perhaps it is a time for apologies. I came to apologize for two reasons, in fact, for what Gregorian convinced you had happened to me, and for the trouble I have learned was caused you by Mintou-chian.”

  “Mintouchian?” The bureaucrat felt disoriented, all at sea. “What did you have to do with Mintouchian?”

  “It is a long story. Let me see how brief I can make it. Madame Campaspe, who taught both Gregorian and me, had many ways of earning money. Some of them you would not approve of, for she was a woman who set her own standards and decided right and wrong for herself. Long ago she obtained a briefcase just like yours there by the bed, and set herself up in the business of manufacturing haunt artifacts.”

  “Those people in Clay Bank!”

  “Yes. She had a little organization going — someone to look after the briefcase, agents in several Inner Circle boutiques, and Mintouchian to move the goods out of the Tidewater. The problem with such organizations, of course, is that being dependent on you, they feel you owe them something. So when Madame Campaspe left, and, not coincidentally, the briefcase burned out, they came to see me. To ask what they were going to do now.

  “Why ask me? They did not want to hear that — they wanted someone to tell them what to do and think, when to breathe out and when in. They did not understand that I had no desire to be their mommy. I felt that it was time I disappeared. And like Madame Campaspe before me, I decided to arrange a drowning.

  “Gregorian and I were discussing the provenance and disposal of several items Madame Campaspe had left me. When I mentioned that I planned to drown my old self, he offered to arrange the details for a very reasonable price — yet just enough that I did not suspect him. He had an arm airfreighted in from the North Aerie cloning facilities, and treated and tattooed it himself. I am afraid that I left more than I should have in his hands.

  “Witches are always busy — it’s an occupational hazard. I was away for some time, and it was only when I came back that I learned what difficulties I had inadvertently caused you.” She looked directly at him with those disconcertingly calm and steady eyes. “All this I have told you is the truth. Will you forgive me?”

  He held her tight for a long time, and then they stepped back within.

  Later, they stood on the balcony again, clothed this time, for the air had cooled. “You know of the black constellations,” Undine said, “and the bright. But can you put them all together into the One?”

  “The One?”

  “All the stars form a single constellation. I can show it to you. Start anywhere, there, with the Ram, for example. Let your finger follow it and then jump to the next constellation, they are part of the same larger structure. You follow that next one and you come to—”

  “The Kosmonaut! Yes, I see.”

  “Now while you’re holding all that in your head, consider the black constellations as well, how they flow one into the other and form a second continuous pattern. Have you got that? Follow my finger, loop up, down and over there. You see? Ignore the rings and moons, they’re ephemeral. Follow my finger, and now you’ve got half the sky.

  “You’ve lived most of your life offplanet, so I assume you’re familiar with both hemispheres, the northern as well as the southern? Hold them both in your mind, the hemisphere above that you can see, and the one below which you remember and they form… ?”

  He saw it: Two serpents intertwined, one of light and the other of dark. Their coils formed a tangled sphere. Above him the bright snake seized the tail of the dark snake in its mouth. Directly below him, the dark snake seized the bright snake’s tail in its mouth. Light swallowing darkness swallowing light. The pattern was there. It was real, and it went on forever and ever.

  He was shaken. He had lived within the One Constellation all his life, gazed intently at different aspects of it a thousand times, and not known it. If something so obvious, so all-encompassing, was hidden from him, what else might there be that he was missing?

  “Snakes!” he whispered. “By God, the sky is full of snakes.”

  Undine hugged him spontaneously. “That was very well done! I wish I could have gotten hold of you when you were young. I could have made a wizard out of you.”

  “Undine,” he said. “Where are you going now?”

  She was very still for a moment. “I leave for Archipelago in the morning. It comes alive this season of the great year. Through the great summer it’s a very sleepy, bucolic, nothing-happening place, but now — it’s like when you compress air in a piston, things heat up. The people move up the mountainsides, where the palaces are, and they build bright, ramshackle slums. You would like it. Good music, dancing in the streets. Drink island wine and sleep till noon.”

  The bureaucrat tried to imagine it, could not, and wished he could. “It sounds beautiful,” he said, and could not keep a touch of yearning from his voice.

  “Come with me,” Undine said. “Leave your floating worlds behind. I’ll teach you things you never imagined. Have you ever had an orgasm last three days? I can teach you that. Ever talk with God? She owes me a few favors.”

  “And Gregorian?”

  “Forget Gregorian.”
She put her arms around him, squeezed him tight. “I’ll show you the sun at midnight.”

  But though the bureaucrat yearned to go with her, to be raped away to Undine’s faraway storybook islands, there was something hard and cold in him that would not budge. He could not back down from Gregorian. It was his duty, his obligation. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s a public trust. I have to finish up this matter with Gregorian first.”

  “Ah? Well.” Undine stepped into her shoes. They closed about her calfs and ankles, fine offworld manufacture. “Then I really must be leaving.”

  “Undine, don’t.”

  She picked up an embroidered vest, buttoned it up over her blouse.

  “All I need is one day, maybe two. Tell me where to meet you. Tell me where you’ll be. I’ll find you there. You can have anything you want of me.”

  She stepped back, tense with anger. “All men are fools,” she said scornfully. “You must have noticed this yourself.” Without looking, she whipped up a scarf from where it had fallen hours before, and tied it about her shoulders. “I do not make offers that can be accepted conditionally.” She was at the door. “Or that can be taken up again, once refused.” She was gone.

  The bureaucrat sat down on the-edge of the bed. He fancied he could catch the faintest trace of her scent rising from the sheets. It was very late, but the surrogates outside, aligned to offworld time standards, were partying as loudly as ever.

  After a while he began to cry.

  12. Across the Ancient Causeway

  “You’re in a surly mood this morning.”

  The flier continued southward, humming gently to itself. The bureaucrat and Chu sat, shoulders touching, in recliners as plush as two seats in the opera. After a time Chu tried again.

  “I gather you found yourself a little friend to spend the night with. Better than I did, I can tell you that.”

  The bureaucrat stared straight ahead.

  “All right, don’t talk to me. See if I care.” Chu folded her arms, and settled back in the recliner. “I spent the fucking night in this thing, I can spend the morning here too.”

  Tower Hill dwindled behind them. Gray clouds had slid down from the Piedmont, drawn by the pressure fall fronting Ocean, and they flew low over forests purple as a bruise. Behemoths were astir below, digging themselves out from the mud. Driven from their burrows by forces they did not understand and swollen with young whose birth they would not live to see, they crashed through the trees, savage, restless, and doomed.

  The bureaucrat had patched his briefcase into the flight controls, bypassing the autonomous functions. Every now and then he muttered a course adjustment, and it relayed the message to the flier. There was a layer of vacuum sandwiched within the canopy’s glass to suppress outside noise, and the only sounds within the cockpit were the drowsy hum and rumble of vibrations generated by the flier itself.

  They were coming up on a river settlement when Chu shook herself out of her passive torpor, slammed a hand on the dash and snapped, “What’s that below?”

  “Gedunk,” the flier replied. “Population one hundred twenty-three, river landing, eastmost designated regional evacuation center for—”

  “I know all about Gedunk! What are we doing over it? We’ve gotten turned around somehow.” She craned about. “We’re headed north! How did that happen? We’re back over the river.” From this height, the cattleboat on the water looked a toy, the evac workers scurrying dots. To the south of town the ragged remains of the relocation camp stood forlorn. A tent that had torn loose from its pegs flapped weakly on the ground like a dying creature. The massed evacuees were crammed into side-by-side rectangular pens by the pier. A steady trickle were being one by one checked off and fed into the boat.

  “Take us down,” the bureaucrat instructed the flier. “That melon field just west of town will do.”

  The flier reshaped itself, spreading and flattening its wings, throwing out cheaters to help it dump speed. They descended.

  As the flier landed, half the white melons scattered across the field suddenly unrolled and scurried away on tiny feet, sharp-nosed creatures, gone before the eye could fix on them. Fish would graze these meadows soon. Ramshackle sheds and a broken-spined barn stood open-doored in the distance, ready for new tenants, undersea farmers, or submarine mice, whichever the lords of the tide would provide. The canopy withdrew into the flier.

  Puffs of wind pushed here, there, from every point of the compass. The air was everywhere in motion, as restless as a puppy. “Well?” Chu said.

  The bureaucrat reached into his briefcase, and extracted a slim metal tube. He pointed it at Chu. “Get out.”

  “What?”

  “I assume you’ve seen these before. You wouldn’t want me to use it. Get out.”

  She looked down at the gleaming tube, the tiny hole in its tip aimed right at her heart, then up at the bureaucrat’s dead expression. A rap of her knuckles and the flier unfolded its side. She climbed out. “I don’t suppose you’re going to bother telling me what this is all about.”

  “I’m going on to Ararat without you.”

  The wind stirred Chu’s coarse hair stiffly. She squinted against it, face hard and plain, looking not so much hurt as puzzled. “I thought we were buddies.”

  “Buddies,” the bureaucrat said. “You’ve been taking Gre-gorian’s money, running his dirty little errands, reporting every move I made to him, and you… It takes a lot of nerve to say that.”

  Chu froze, an island of stone in the rustling grasses. At last she said, “How long have you known?”

  “Ever since Mintouchian stole my briefcase.”

  She looked at him.

  “It had to be one of the two of you who drugged me in Clay Bank. Mintouchian was the more obvious suspect. But he was only a petty criminal, one of the gang that was counterfeiting haunt artifacts. His job was running crates to Port Richmond in the New Born King. He stole my briefcase so he could start the operation up again. But Gregorian’s goons had already tried stealing it, and knew it could escape. Which meant he didn’t work for Gregorian. Which meant that the traitor was you.”

  “Shit!” Chu turned away irritably, swung back again. “Listen, you don’t know the way things are here—”

  “I’ve heard that one before.”

  “You don’t! I — look, I can’t talk to you like this. Climb up out of the flier. Stand on your own two feet and look me in the eye.”

  He raised the metal tube slightly. “You’re in no position to give orders.”

  “Shoot me, then! Shoot me or talk to me, one or the other.” She was so angry her eyes bulged. Her jaw jutted defiantly.

  The bureaucrat sighed. With poor grace he clambered out of the flier. “All right. Talk.”

  “I will. Okay, I took Gregorian’s money — I told you when we first met that the planetary forces were all corrupt. My salary doesn’t even cover expenses! It’s understood that an operative is going to work the opposition for a little juice. It’s the only way we can survive.”

  “Reconfigure for flight,” the bureaucrat said to the flier. He felt sick and disgusted, and yearned for the clean, empty sky. To judge by Chu’s expression, it showed on his face.

  “You idiot! Gregorian would’ve had you killed if it hadn’t been for me. So I left the occasional dead crow in your bed. I didn’t do anything any op in my place wouldn’t have, and I did a lot less than some. The only reason you aren’t dead now is that I told Gregorian it wasn’t necessary. Without me, you’ll never come back from Ararat.”

  “Wasn’t that the original plan?”

  Chu stiffened. “I am an officer. I would have brought you out alive. Listen to me. You’re completely out of your depth. If you have to leave me behind, then don’t go to Ararat. You can’t deal with Gregorian. He’s crazy, a sociopath, a madman. With him thinking I was his creature, we could have taken him. But alone? No.”

  “Thank you for your advice.”

  “For pity’s sake, don’t. . .�
� Chu’s voice faltered. “What’s that?”

  Voices floated in the air, and had in fact been in the background for some time, a babble of cries and shouts rendered soft and homogeneous by distance. They both turned to look.

  Far below, the pens of evacuees crawled with motion. Fencing had been torn down, and the crowd flowed after retreating handlers. Batons swung, and the sharp crack of wood floated above the swirling noise. “The fools!” Chu said softly.

  “What is it?”

  “They brought out the people too early, bottled them together too tightly, handled them too roughly, and told them nothing. A textbook case of how to create a mob. Anything can set off a riot then, a cracked head, a rumor, somebody giving his neighbor a shove.” She sucked thoughtfully on a back molar. “Yeah, I’ll bet that’s how it happened.”

  The cattleboat was separating from the dock, its crew hoping to isolate the riot ashore. People desperately leaped after it, and fell or were pushed into the water. The evacuation officials were regrouping downriver, behind a clutch of utility buildings. From here it was all very slow and lazy and easy to watch. After a moment Chu squared her shoulders. “Duty calls. You’ll have to kill yourself without my help. I’ve got to saunter down there and help pick up the pieces.” Abruptly she extended a hand. “No hard feelings?”

  The bureaucrat hesitated. But somehow the mood had changed. The tension between them was gone, the anger dissipated. He shifted the tube from one hand to the other. They shook.

  Far below, a roar went up as behavior dampers exploded in orange smoke at the front of the mob. The thought of going down there horrified the bureaucrat. But he forced himself to speak up anyway. “Do you need help? I haven’t much time, but. . .”

  You ever had any riot training?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re useless.” Pulling a cigarillo from one pocket, Chu started down the hill. After a few steps, she turned back. “I’ll light a candle in your memory.” She lingered, as if reluctant to break this last contact.