Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

The bureaucrat wished he could make some kind of gesture. Another man might have run after Chu and hugged her. “Say hello to that husband of yours for me,” he said gruffly. “Tell him I said you were a good little girl while you were away.”

  “You son of a bitch.” Chu smiled, spat, and walked away.

  In the air again and heading south, the briefcase said, “Are you done with the pen?”

  The bureaucrat looked dully down at the metal cylinder he still held in his hand. He shrugged, and returned it to the briefcase. Then he snuggled back into the recliner. His shoulders ached, and the back of his skull buzzed with tension and fatigue. “Tell me when we’re near the city.”

  They passed over still fields, lifeless towns, roads on which no traffic moved. Evac authority had scoured the land, leaving behind roadblocks, abandoned trucks, and bright scrawls of paint on the roads and rooftops, sigils huge and unreadable. The marshes began then, and the traces of habitation thinned, scattered, disappeared.

  “Boss? I’ve got a request to speak with you.”

  The bureaucrat had been dozing, an irritable almost-sleep with dreams that thankfully never quite came into focus. Now he awoke with a grunt. “You’ve got what?”

  “There’s some foreign programming in the flier — a quasi-autonomous construct of some kind. Not quite an agent, but with more independence than most interactives. It wants to speak with you.”

  “Put it on.”

  In a cheerily malicious tone the flier said, “Good morning, you bastard. I trust I’m not interrupting anything?”

  The little hairs at the base of the bureaucrat’s neck stirred and lifted as he recognized the false Chu’s voice. “Veilleur! You’re dead.”

  “Yes, and the irony of that is that I died because of a nullity like you. You, who could not even imagine the richness of the life I lost, because you were fool enough to get in the way of a wizard!”

  The clouds scrolled by overhead, dark and densely contoured. “You might more reasonably direct your anger toward Gregorian for—” The bureaucrat caught himself. There was no point arguing with a recorded fragment of a dead man’s personality.

  “As well hate Ocean for drowning you! A wizard is not human — his perceptions and motives are vast, impersonal, and beyond your comprehension.”

  “Then he does have a motive? For you being here?”

  “He asked me to tell you a story.”

  “Goon.”

  “Once upon a time—”

  “Oh, good God!”

  “I see. You want to tell this story yourself, don’t you?” When the bureaucrat refused to rise to the bait, the false Chu began again. “Once upon a time there was a tailor’s boy. His job was to fetch the bolts of cloth, to measure them out, and to crank the loom while his master wove. This was in an empire of fools and rogues. The boy’s master was a rogue, and the Emperor of the land was a fool. And because the boy knew no other and no better, he was content.

  “The Emperor lived in a palace that no one could see, but which everyone said was the most beautiful structure in the universe. He owned fabulous riches that could not be touched, but were uniformly held to be beyond price. And the laws he passed were declared by all to be the wisest that had ever been, for no one could understand a word of them.

  “One day the tailor was called into the Emperor’s presence. I want you to make me a new set of clothes, said the Emperor. The finest that have ever been seen.

  As you command, said the roguish tailor, so shall it be done. He cuffed the boy on the ear. We will neither rest nor eat until we have made for you the finest raiment in all existence. Clothes so fine that fools cannot even see them.

  “Then, laden down with an enormous credit rating and many valuable options for commodities futures, the tailor and his boy returned to the shop. He pointed to an empty spool in the corner and said, There, that is the most valuable of moonbeam silk, bring it here. Carefully! if you get your grimy fingers on it, I will beat you.

  “Wondering, the boy obeyed.

  “The tailor sat down to the loom. Crank! he ordered. Our work is tremendous. We do not sleep tonight.

  “How the boy suffered then! The roguish tailor’s publicists spread the word of his commission, and many were the celebrities and media stars who bribed their way in to watch. They would gape at the empty loom being worked, the empty spools spinning, the bamboo about which bolts of costly fabrics were supposedly wrapped. Then they would see the tailor strike the boy down to the ground before their eyes, and say to themselves, Ah the man is temperamental. He is an artist.

  “Then — having committed themselves — they would praise the work in progress. For no one wished to admit he was a fool.

  “By the time the work was finished, the tailor’s boy was half-mad from hunger and the drugs he took to stave off sleep. He was battered and bruised, and had he been thinking straight,

  might well have killed his master. But the hysteria of the crowd was contagious, and he, no less than anyone else, thought himself honored to participate in such a seminal work.

  “Finally came the day of the presentation. Where are my clothes? demanded the Emperor. Here, said the tailor, holding up an empty arm. Are they not fine? Notice the sheen, the glimmer of the cloth. We have woven so fine and cut so subtly that it takes a wise eye to even see the garb. To a fool, it is invisible.

  “You might not think the Emperor would fall for so obvious a fraud. But it was all of a piece with the rest of his life. A man who believes in his own nobility has no trouble believing in a piece of cloth. Without hesitation, he stripped bare, and with the tailor’s help donned seven layers of purest nothing.

  “A state holiday was declared in honor of the Emperor’s new clothes. The tailor was rewarded with so many honors, titles, and investment options that he now need not work ever again. He turned the boy out of his shop to beg in the street for his bread.

  “Thus it was that, dazed, drugged, and starving, the boy found himself standing on the street when the Emperor and all his court passed in joyous procession, and the proletariat — none of whom wished to be thought fools — cheered for the beauty of the clothes.

  “In the heightened state of awareness brought on by his deprivations, the tailor’s boy saw not an Emperor, but only a naked, rather knobby old man.

  “Am I fool? he asked himself. Of course the answer, as he saw now, was yes. He was fool. And in his despair he screamed: The Emperor has no clothes!

  “Everyone hesitated, paused. The procession stalled. The Emperor looked about him in confusion, and his courtiers as well. Up and down the street, the ragged people began whispering to one another. They saw that what he said, which none of them had wished to appear foolish by admitting, was true. The Emperor had no clothes.

  “So they rose up and slew the Emperor, and his court, and all the civil servants. They burned the Parliament to the ground, and the Armory as well. They razed the barracks, churches, and stores, and all the farms and factories. The fires burned for a week. That winter there was famine, and in its wake plague.

  “In the spring the new Republic began executing its enemies. The tailor’s boy was the first to die.”

  Silence filled the cabin. Finally the bureaucrat said, “You’re no more entertaining now than you were alive.”

  “Nothing that has happened to you since you arrived on Miranda occurred randomly,” the false Chu said. “Gregorian orchestrated it all. He taught you to see the black constellations and the pattern that contains them. It was Gregorian who arranged for you to meet Fox. It was Gregorian who put a witch in your bed and introduced you to the possibilities of the body. You may not have seen him, but he was there. He has taught you much.

  “Now that I am dead, he has need of an apprentice. He wishes you to come to Ararat, to complete your education.”

  “He actually thinks I would do that?”

  “The first step in an apprenticeship is to destroy the seeker’s old value system. And this he has done, hasn’t he? He’
s showed you that your old masters are corrupt and unworthy of your loyalty.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Tell me I’m wrong.” Veilleur laughed. “Tell me I’m wrong!”

  “Shut him up,” the bureaucrat ordered, and his briefcase obeved.

  Ararat rose from the marshes with all the natural inevitability of a mountain. Gently sloping terraces formed neighborhoods that merged in irregular planes. Above them the mercantile districts soared in yet steeper slopes. Finally came the administrative and service levels. The city was a single unified structure that slanted upward by uneven steps to a central peaked tower. Covered with greenery, it would have seemed a part of the land, a lone resurgence of the archipelago of hills that curved away to the south. Now, with the vegetation lifeless and withered, exposing windows and doorways black as missing teeth and sea-veined stone dark as thunderheads, it was a gothic monstrosity, a stage set for some lost tragedy from humanity’s habiline past.

  “Can you land us in the city?” the bureaucrat asked.

  “What city?”

  “That big mound of stone dead ahead of us is what city,” the bureaucrat said, exasperated.

  “Boss, the land in front of us is flat. There’s nothing but marshes for thirty miles.”

  “That’s prepos — Why are we banking?”

  “We’re not banking. The flier is level, and we’re headed dead south by the compass.”

  “You’re bypassing Ararat.”

  “There is nothing there.”

  “We’re veering west.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  The city was shifting steadily to the side. “Accept my word for it. What explanation can you give me for the discrepancy between what you and I can see?”

  The briefcase hesitated, then said, “It must be a hardened installation. There are such things, I know, places that have been classified secret and rendered invisible to machine perceptions. I’m ordered not to see anything, so to me it doesn’t exist.”

  “Can you put us down by my directions?”

  “Boss, you don’t want me to fly this thing blind into a hardened installation. The defenses would order me to flip it over, and I’d fly us right into the ground.”

  “Hah.” The bureaucrat studied the land. Against the horizon, Ocean was a slug-gray smear squeezed beneath the clouds. Ararat was unapproachable from three sides, surrounded by dull, silvery stretches of water and mud. To the west, though, a broad causeway led straight from the city to a grassy opening in the trees. It was clearly a fragment of what had once been a major route into the city. A flier and as many as a dozen land vehicles sat abandoned in the meadow at its terminus. The bureaucrat pointed them out. “Can you see them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then set us down there.”

  The canopy sighed open.

  “I can’t come with you,” the briefcase said. “As long as I’m patched in, I can suppress Gregorian’s incursions. But the machinery is rotten with unfriendly programming. Once I’m taken off, we run a good chance the flier will turn on us. At the very least it’s likely to fly off and leave us stranded here.”

  “So? I don’t need you to do my work.” The bureaucrat climbed out. “If I’m not back in a few hours, come after me.”

  “Got you.”

  He faced the causeway. What had been obvious from the air was invisible from the ground. The roadbed was buried under sand and overgrown with scrub. A crude road, however, had been bulldozed down its center, the machine itself abandoned by the mouth like a rusting watchdog. He went from truck to landwalker to truck, hoping to find one he could ride into Ararat. But the batteries had been yanked from them all. He picked up a television set left on the front seat of a mud-jitney, thinking it might be useful to keep an eye on the weather. The city loomed enormous over him. It could not be far.

  The bureaucrat walked in among the trees. The woods were silent and deep. He hoped he would not meet a behemoth.

  Where the ground was soft, footprints scurried ahead of him. Other than the bulldozer treads, there was no evidence of motor traffic.

  Briefly he wondered why the vehicles had all been left behind in the meadow. In his mind’s eye he saw the rich, foolish old beggars stumbling toward Ararat to be reborn, pilgrims compelled to approach the holy mountain on foot. They would have come with arrogance and hope, blind with anxiety and loaded down with wealth to barter immortality from the wizard. He could not entirely despise them. It would take a grotesque kind of courage to get this far.

  The air was chill. The bureaucrat shivered, glad he was wearing a jacket. It was quiet, too, oppressively so. The bureaucrat was just reflecting on this when something screamed from the heart of the marshes. He concentrated on walking, putting one foot before the other and staring straight ahead. Out of nowhere a sudden wave of loneliness washed over him.

  Well, after all, he was fearfully isolated. One by one he had left all friends, allies, and advisers behind. By now there was not a human being he had ever met closer than the Piedmont. He felt emptied and alone, and the city dominated the sky but drew no closer.

  Experience had misled him. Used to the friendly distances within the floating worlds and orbital cities of deep space, he had not realized how far away an object could be and still dominate the sky. The peak of Ararat floated above him, black and lifeless.

  The air darkened, leaching yet more warmth from the day. What, he wondered, would he find when he finally got to Ararat? Somehow he no longer believed that Gregorian would be there waiting for him. He simply could not picture it. More likely he would find the city empty, all echoing streets and staring windows. The end of his long search would be to arrive at Nowhere. The more he thought of it, the more probable he found this vision. It was exactly the sort of joke that Gregorian would make.

  He kept walking.

  In a strange way, he felt content. Ultimately it did not matter whether he found Gregorian or not. He had stayed with his task, and for all Gregorian’s efforts the wizard had not been able to turn him aside. It might be true that the masters he served were venal, and the System itself corrupt and even doomed. Still, he had not betrayed himself. And there was time enough for him to reach the city and return well before the jubilee tides. His job would be done then. He could return home.

  A speck of white floated in the air before him. A second appeared and then a third, too small to be flowers, too large for pollen. It was bitterly cold. He looked up. When had the leaves fallen? The bare-limbed trees were black skeletons against the gray sky. More white specks darted by.

  Then they were everywhere, filling all the empty space between him and the city with their millions, and in so doing, defining that space, lending it dimension and making explicit the distance he had yet to go.

  “Snow,” he said wonderingly.

  It was unpleasant, the cold, but the bureaucrat saw no reason to turn back. He could put up with a bit of discomfort. He forced his pace, hoping the exertion would generate a little heat. The television banged against his thigh as he trotted ahead. His breath puffed out in little gusts of steam. Soft, feathery flakes piled up, coating the trees, the land, the trail. Behind, fleeing footprints softened, grew indistinct, disappeared.

  He flicked on the television. A gray dragon of stormclouds doubled and redoubled upon itself, creeping down the screen upon Continent. They’re melting! an excited voice cried. We have some magnificent views of the icecaps from orbit—

  He thumbed over to the next channel — find shelter immediately. The trail wound through the trees, flat and level and monotonous. Out of breath, the bureaucrat lapsed back into a trudging gait. The television chattered on in the happy drone of people caught on the fringes of disaster. It spoke of near-miraculous rescues in Sand Province and perilous airlifts along the Shore. He was told that the militia were on alert, with flying squads in six-hour rotations. Reminded that he must be out of the Tidewater before the first wave of jubilee tides hit. That might be in as little as twelve hours or as m
uch as eighteen. He was not to stop for sleep. He was not to stop for food. He must leave at once.

  The snow was falling so thickly now he could barely see the trees to either side of him. His toes and the soles of his feet ached with the cold. Hypothermia tips! the television cried. Do not rub frostbitten skin. Thaw it gently with warm water. He could not really follow the gist of the advice; there were too many unfamiliar words.

  The announcers sounded giddily excited. Their faces were flushed, their eyes bright. Natural disasters did that to people, made them feel significant, reassured them that their actions mattered. He switched channels again, and found a woman explaining the precession of the poles. Charts and globes helped demonstrate that Miranda was now entering great winter and receiving less insolation than ever. However, the warming effects were inevitable well over a decade ago. Delicate natural feedback mechanisms assure—

  The handle of the television set stung like ice. He could no longer bear to hold it. With an effort he forced his hand open and let go. The television dropped to the trail, and he shoved his hand under his armpit. He hurried forward, hugging himself for warmth. For a time the voices called after him down the trail. By slow degrees they faded away, and were gone. Now he was truly alone.

  It wasn’t until he stumbled and fell that he realized the danger he was in.

  He hit the ground hard and for a moment did not move, almost enjoying the sting of pain that ran along his body, all but anesthetizing one arm and the side of his face. It baffled him that mere weather could do this to him. Finally, though, he realized that the time had come to turn back. Or die.

  Dizzily he stood. He’d gotten a little turned around, and when he got to his feet, he was not sure which way was which. The snow fell chokingly thick, powdering his suit and catching on his eyelashes. He could hardly see. A few gray lines to either side of the trail, trees evidently, and nothing more. The impression he had made when he fell had already been obliterated.

  He started back.

  It was even odds that he was headed for the flier. He wished he could be sure, but he was disoriented and it was hard to think. His attention was all taken up by the cold that sank its fangs in his flesh and did not let go. Icy needles of pain lacerated his muscles. His face stiffened with cold. He gritted his teeth, lips pulling back in an involuntary snarl, and forced himself on.