Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  The river jumped, and Simone led the bureaucrat into town. He followed her down a street that was nothing more than two lines and into a schematic house, all air and outline. They went up the stairs and into a room with quickly sketched-in furniture. Simone opened a dresser drawer and withdrew a hand-drawn map. She smoothed it out on the bed.

  “This is exactly the kind of place where we used to meet,” the bureaucrat said reminiscently. “Do you remember? All that fumbling and groping because we were too young and fearful to make love physically.”

  For a moment he thought Simone was going to snap at him. Then she laughed. “Oh yes. I remember. Still, it had its moments. You were so pretty then, naked.”

  “I’ve put on a little weight since, I’m afraid.”

  For an instant, there was a warm sense of unison and ca-

  maraderie between them. Then Simone coughed and tapped the paper with a fingernail. “My predecessor left me this. He knew how hard it is to work with inadequate data.” With a touch of bitterness she added, “Lots of information gets passed along this way. It’s as if the truth has gone underground.”

  The bureaucrat bent over the map of the Tidewater and traced the river’s course with a finger. It hadn’t changed much since the map was drawn. Ararat was clearly marked. It stood south of the river several hundred miles, not far from the coast. Salt marsh edged it on three sides. No roads touched on it. “If this is classified, how come it still exists?”

  “You don’t hide information by destroying it. You hide it by swamping it with bad information. Do you have the map memorized yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then put it back in the drawer, and we’ll go.”

  She led him from the house, down the road, away from Lightfoot and out of the map and cabinet altogether back into the map room proper. “Thank you,” the bureaucrat said. “That was enormously enlightening.”

  Simone looked at him wistfully. “Do you realize that we’ve never met?”

  The bureaucrat returned the conch shell to Philippe’s desk. The further Philippe looked up from his work and said, “It doesn’t work out, there can’t be a traitor in the Division.”

  “Why not?”

  Both Philippes spoke at once.

  “It just—”

  “—wouldn’t—”

  “—work out, you see. There are too many safeguards—”

  “—checks and balances—”

  “—oversight committees. No, I’m afraid—”

  “—it’s just not possible.”

  The two looked at each other and burst out laughing. It occurred to the bureaucrat that a man who liked his own company this much might wish there were more of himself in the physical universe as well as in the conventional realm. The further Philippe waved a hand amiably and said, “Oh, all right, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  “Something I’ve been wanting to mention, though,” the first said. “Though I’m afraid if I tell you now, what with your talk of traitors and such, that you’ll misconstrue it badly.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m concerned about Korda. The old man is simply not himself these days. I think he’s losing his touch.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Little things, mostly. An obsession with your current case — you know, the magician thing. But then I caught him in a rather serious breach of etiquette.”

  “Yes?”

  “He was trying to break into your desk.”

  The bureaucrat handed the phone back to his briefcase. Philippe, he noted, was just finishing off a call of his own. His other two agents doubtless, warning him of the bureaucrat’s visit.

  “Let’s put it to a vote,” Korda said. They all laid hands down on the table. “Well, that settles that.”

  The bureaucrat hadn’t expected the probe to go through. Now, however, they couldn’t probe him alone without going on record explaining why they’d exempted themselves.

  Korda seized control of the agenda again. “Frankly,” he said, “we’ve been thinking of taking you off the case, and putting—”

  “Philippe?”

  “—someone in your place. It would give you a chance to rest, and to regain your perspective. You are, after all, just a trifle overinvolved.”

  “I couldn’t take it anyway,” Philippe said suddenly. “The planetside assignment, I mean. I’m hideously swamped with work as it is.”

  Korda looked startled.

  Cagey old Philippe, though, was not about to be caught planetside when there was talk of a traitor in the Division. Even assuming it wasn’t he, Philippe would want to be at his desk when the accusations broke out into office warfare.

  “Have you any other agents who could step in?” Muschg asked. “Just so we know what we’re talking about.”

  Korda twisted slightly. “Well, yes, but. None that have the background and clearances this particular case requires.”

  “Your options seem limited.” Muschg flashed sharp little teeth in a smile. Philippe leaned back, eyes narrowing, as he saw the direction of her intent. “Perhaps you ought to have Analysis Design restructure your clearance process.”

  Nobody spoke. The silence sustained itself for a long moment, and then Korda reluctantly said, “Perhaps I should. I’ll schedule a meeting.”

  A tension went out of the air. Their business here was over then, and they all knew it; the magic moment had arrived when it was understood that nothing more would be established, discovered, or decided today. But the meeting, having once begun, must drag on for several long more hours before it could be ended. The engines of protocol had enormous inertial mass; once set in motion they took forever to grind to a stop.

  The five of them preceded to dutifully chew the scraps of the agenda until all had been gnawed to nothing-at-all.

  The dueling hall was high-ceilinged and narrow. The bureaucrat’s footsteps bounced from its ceiling and walls. A cold, sourceless, wintery light glistened on the hardwood lanes. He stooped to pick up a quicksilver ball that had not been touched in decades, and he sighed.

  He could see his fingertips reflected on the ball’s surface. In the Puzzle Palace he was unmarked. Undine’s serpent had been tattooed under his skin after his last scan; what marks he bore could not be seen here.

  The walls were lined with narrow canvas benches. He sat down on one, staring into the programmed reflection of his face on the dueling ball. Even thus distorted, it was clear he was not at all the man he had once been.

  Restless, he stood and assumed a dueler’s stance. He cocked his arm. He threw the ball as hard as he could, and followed it with his thought. It flew, changing, and became a metal hawk, a dagger, molten steel, a warhead, a stream of acid, a spear, a syringe: seven figures of terror. When it hit the target, it sank into the face and disappeared. The dummy crumbled.

  Korda entered. “Your desk told me you were here.” He eased himself down on the bench, did not meet the bureaucrat’s eyes. After a while, he said, “That Muschg. She sandbagged me. It’s going to take half a year going through the restructuring process.”

  “You can hardly expect me to be sympathetic to your problems. Under the circumstances.”

  “I, ah, may have been a trifle out of line during the meeting. It must have seemed I’d stepped out of bounds. I know you hadn’t done anything to warrant a probe.”

  “No, I hadn’t.”

  “Anyway, I knew you’d slip out of it. It was too simple a trap to catch a fox like you.”

  “Yes, I wondered about that too.”

  Korda called the ball to his hand and turned it over and over, as if searching for the principle of its operation. “I wanted Philippe to think we weren’t getting along. There’s something odd about Philippe, you know. I don’t know what to make of his behavior of late.”

  “Everyone says Philippe is doing a wonderful job.”

  “So everyone says. And yet, since I gave him your desk, I’ve had more trouble than you can imagine. It’s not just
the Stone House, you know. The Cultural Radiation Council is screaming for your nose and ears.”

  “I’ve never even heard of them.”

  “No, of course you haven’t. I protect you from them and their like. The point being that there was no way Cultural Radiation should have known about this operation. I think Philippe’s been leaking.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Korda rolled the ball from hand to hand. In an evasive tone of voice he said, “Philippe is a good man. A bit of a backbiter, you know, but still. He has an excellent record. He used to be in charge of human cloning oversight before the advisory board spun it off as a separate department.”

  “Philippe told me he didn’t know much about human cloning.”

  “That was before he came here.” Korda raised his eyes. They were heavily lined, tired, cynical. “Look it up, if you don’t believe me.”

  “I will.” So Philippe had lied to him. But how had Korda known that? Sitting beside this heavy, unhealthy spider king, the bureaucrat felt in great danger. He hoped the traitor was Philippe. Everyone talked about how good Philippe was, how slick, how subtle, but the thought of Korda as an enemy frightened him. He might sometimes seem the buffoon, but under that puffy exterior, those comic gestures, was the glimmer of cold steel.

  “Boss?” His briefcase diffidently extended the phone.

  He absorbed:

  The hall of mirrors shunted the bureaucrat to the elevator bank, where he caught a train to the starward edge of the Puzzle Palace. It let him off at the portal of a skywalk, slabs of white marble laid end to end like so many shining dominoes out into the night.

  To either side of the skywalk blazed a glory of stars, the holistic feed from observatories scattered through the Prosperan system. He walked out onto the narrow ribbon of marble, with the fortress of human knowledge burning behind him, the citadel ring of research ahead. A few scattered travelers were visible in the distance. It was a long trip to the Outer Circle, several hours experienced time. He could catch up with one if he wanted, to exchange gossip and shop talk. He did not want to.

  “Hello! Care for some company?”

  A pleasant-looking woman bustled up, wearing an odd hat, high and bulbous with a small brim. For the life of him he could not imagine what combination of interactivity it might represent. “My pleasure.”

  They matched strides. Far ahead were any number of data docks, long perpendicular branchings ending in warships, transports, freighters, and battle stations, their absolute motions frozen in conventional space, all feeding off the data linkages the skywalk carried. “Breathtaking, isn’t it?” the woman said.

  She gestured back at the Puzzle Palace, burning white as molten steel: an intricate structure of a million towers that had swallowed the sun whole. Its component parts were in constant flux, the orbits of the physical stations changing relative positions, wings and levels hinging away from one another, separating and fusing, and shifting as well with the constant yeasting restructuring of knowledge and regulation. Cordelia and chill Katharina were at the far side of the structure, encased in crystal spires of data. “I guess,” he said.

  “You know what’s humbling? What’s humbling is that all this can be done with a transmitted signal. If you stop to think about it, it seems it ought to be impossible. I mean, do you have the faintest idea how it’s done?”

  “No, I don’t,” the bureaucrat admitted. The technology was far beyond anything he was cleared to understand. While he would not say so to a chance acquaintance, of all the Puzzle Palace’s mysteries, this was the one that most intrigued him.

  There was an office rumor that the Transmittal Authority’s equipment could actually tunnel through time, sending their signals instantly through the millions of miles and then dumping them in a holding tank for the number of hours actual lightspeed transmission would take. A related but darker rumor held that the Outer Circle existed only as a convenient fiction, that there was no far asteroid belt, that the dangerous research sites were scattered tnrough the Inner Circle and planetary space. The Thu-lean stargrazers, by this theory, were nothing but a reassuring distraction.

  “Well, I do. I’ve got it figured out, and I’ll tell you. You lose your identity when your signal is transmitted — if you stop and think about it, of course you do. At lightspeed, time stops. There’s no way you could experience the transit time. But when your signal is received, a programmed memory of the trip is retrofitted into your memory structure. That way you believe you’ve been conscious all those hours.”

  “What would be the point of that?”

  “It protects us from existential horror.” She adjusted her hat. “The fact is that all agents are artificial personalities. We’re such perfect copies of the base personality that we never really think about this. But we’re created, live for a few minutes or hours, and then are destroyed. If we experienced long blank spaces in our memories, we’d be brought face to face with our imminent deaths. We’d be forced to admit to ourselves that we do not reunite with our primaries but rather die. We’d refuse to report to our primaries. The Puzzle Palace would fill up with ghosts. See what I mean?”

  “I… suppose I do.”

  They came to a data dock, and the woman said, “Well, it’s been nice. But I’ve got to talk to at least five more people this shift if I want to meet my quota.”

  “Wait a minute,” the bureaucrat said. “Just what is your occupation, anyway?”

  The woman grinned hoydenishly. “I spread rumors.”

  With a wave of her hand she was gone.

  An edited skip. The bureaucrat emerged from the security gates into the data analogue of the Thulean stargrazers and shivered. “Whew,” he said. “Those things never fail to give me the willies.”

  The security guard was wired to so many artificial augments he seemed some chimeric fusion of man and machine. Under half-silvered implants, his eyes studied the bureaucrat with near-sexual intentness. “They’re supposed to be frightening,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. If they ever get their claws in you, they’re much worse than you’d expect. So if you’ve got anything clever in mind, just you better forget it.”

  The encounter space was enormously out of scale, a duplicate of those sheds where airships were built, structures so large that water vapor periodically formed clouds near the top and filled the interior with rain. It was taken up by a single naked giant.

  Earth.

  She crouched on all fours, more animal than human, huge, brutish, and filled with power. Her flesh was heavy and loose. Her limbs were shackled and chained, crude visualizations of the more subtle restraints and safeguards that kept her forever on the fringes of the system. The stench of her, an acrid blend of musk and urine and fermenting sweat, was overwhelming. She smelled solid and real and dangerous.

  Standing in the presence of Earth’s agent, the bureaucrat had the uncomfortable premonition that when she finally did try to break free, all the guards and shackles the system could muster would not hold her back.

  Scaffolding had been erected before the giantess. Researchers, both human and artificial, stood on scattered platforms interviewing her. While it looked to the bureaucrat that Earth’s face was turned away from them, each acted as though she were talking directly and solely to that one.

  The bureaucrat climbed high up to a platform level with her great breasts. They were round and swollen continents of flesh; standing so closely, their every defect was magnified. Blue veins flowed like subterranean rivers under pebbled skin. Complex structures of silvery-white stretch marks radiated down from the collarbones. Between the breasts were two pimple blisters the size of his head. Black nipples as wrinkled as raisins erupted from chafed milky-pink aureoles the texture of wax. A single hair as big as a tree twisted from the edge of one.

  “Uh, hello,” the bureaucrat said. Earth swung her impassive face down toward him. It was a homely visage, eyes dead as two stones, surely no representation Earth would have chosen for herself. But there
was grandeur there too, and he felt a chill of dread. “I have some questions for you,” he began awkwardly. “Can I ask you some questions?”

  “I am tolerated here only because I answer questions.” The voice was flat and without affect, an enormous dry whisper. “Ask.”

  He had come to ask about Gregorian. But standing in the overwhelming presence of Earth, he could not help himself. “Why are you here?” he asked. “What do you want from us?”

  In that same lifeless tone she replied, “What does any mother want from her daughters? I want to help you. I want to give you advice. I want to reshape you in my own image. I want to lead your lives, eat your flesh, grind your corpses, and gnaw the bones.”

  “What would become of us if you got loose? Of humans? Would you kill us all the way you did back on Earth?”

  Now a shadow of expression did come into her face, an amusement vast, cool, and intelligent. “Oh, that would be the least of it.”

  The guard touched his elbow with a motorized metal hand, a menacing reminder to stop wasting time and get on with his business. And indeed, he realized, there was only so much time allotted to him. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he said, “Some time ago you were interviewed by a man named Gregorian—”

  Everything froze.

  The air turned to jelly. Sound faded away. Too fast to follow, waves of lethargy raced through the meeting space, ripples in a pond of inertia. Guards and researchers slowed, stopped, were imprisoned within fuzzy rainbow auras. Only Earth still moved. She dipped her head and opened her mouth, extending her gray-pink tongue so that its wet tip reached to his feet. Her voice floated in the air.

  “Climb into my mouth.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “Then you will never have your questions answered.”

  He took a deep breath. Dazedly he stepped forward. It was rough, wet, and giving underfoot. Ropes of saliva swayed between the parted lips, fat bubbles caught in their thick, clear substance. Warm air gushed from the mouth. As if under a compulsion, he crossed the bridge of her tongue.