Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  “They should all be whipped. It comes from living on a planet, away from the constraints of civilization.”

  Another surrogate spoke up. “Oh, I think there’s a touch of the savage in us all. If I were a few years younger, I’d be down there myself.”

  “Sure you would.”

  A glint of light caught the bureaucrat’s eye. A door opening in the storeroom at the center of the bar. There was a flashing, near-subliminal glimpse of a narrow white face before the door closed again. It was more an impression than anything else, but enough that he decided to wait and watch to see if it would happen again.

  He stood very still for a long time. Again the door opened, and a furtive face peeked out. Yes! It was a woman. Someone small, slender, mouselike.

  Someone he knew.

  Interesting. The bureaucrat made a long, careful circuit of the floor. There were two doors to the storeroom, situated opposite each other. It would take only an instant to slip under the bar and within. He returned to his starting place and found a chair sheltered by a cascade of tentacle vines.

  Hours passed. The televisions were an impressionistic wheel of icebergs calfing, canvas cities for the cattleboat people, lingering shots of precataclysmic icecaps. He did not mind the wait. At long intervals, yet regular as clockwork, the door would open and that pinched white face peer out to scan the crowd before it closed again. She was definitely waiting for someone.

  Finally a newcomer sat down at the bar, laying down a handful of flowers on the countertop before him. Crushed kelpies and polychromes, plucked from the weeds outside. He picked up an invisible napkin and turned it over. Then he ran his hands under the edge of the bar, as if searching for something hidden. When the bartender gave him a drink, he held the nonexistent glass high so he could examine its underside.

  The bureaucrat knew those gestures.

  Soon the storeroom door opened again. The woman’s face appeared, pale in the gloom. She saw the newcomer, nodded, and raised a finger: just a minute. The door closed.

  Smoothly the bureaucrat strolled to the far side of the bar, and ducked under. A bartender device moved toward him and he held up his census bracelet. Green, exempt. It turned away, and he stepped into the storeroom.

  The single bare light hurt his eyes after the dim bar. Tier upon tier of empty shelves covered the walls. The woman was up on tiptoes lowering a box. He took her arm.

  “Hello, Esme.”

  With a squeak of indrawn breath she whirled. The box banged against a shelf. She pulled away from him, at the same time awkwardly trying to keep from dropping the package. He did not let go. “How’s your mother?”

  “You mustn’t—”

  “Still alive, eh?” There was panic in those tiny, dark eyes. The bureaucrat felt that if he tightened his grip ever so slightly, bones would splinter. “That’s how Gregorian got you running errands for him, isn’t it? He promised to resolve matters for you. Say yes.” He shook her, and she nodded. “Speak up! I can have you arrested if I want. Gregorian is using you as a courier, right?”

  He pushed forward, trapping her between his bulk and the shelves. He could feel her heart beating. “Yes.”

  “He gave you this box?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who are you supposed to give it to?”

  “The man — the man at the bar. Gregorian said he’d bring flowers.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing. He said that if the man had any questions, I should tell him that the answers were all in the box.” Esme was very still now. The bureaucrat stepped back, freeing her. He took the box. She stared at it as avidly as if it held her heart.

  The bureaucrat felt old and cynical. “Tell me, Esme,” he said, and though he meant it gently, it did not come out that way. “Which do you think would be the easier thing for Gregorian to do — kill his mother? Or simply lie to you?” Her face was a flame. He could no longer read it. He was no longer certain she was motivated by anything so simple and clean as a desire for revenge. But the time was past when he might influence her actions. He pointed to the far door. “You can leave now.”

  As soon as she was gone, the bureaucrat opened the box. He sucked some air through his teeth when he saw what it contained, but he felt no surprise, only a pervasive sense of melancholy. Then he went out to the bar and to the surrogate waiting there. “This is for you,” he said. “From your son.”

  Korda stared blankly up at him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Spare me. You’ve been caught consorting with the enemy, using proscribed technology, violating the embargo, abuse of public trust — it goes on and on. Don’t think I can’t prove it. A word from me, and Philippe will be all over you. There won’t be anything left but the tooth marks on your bones.”

  Korda placed his hands facedown on the bar, ducked his head. Trying to regain his control. “What do you want to know?” he asked at last.

  “Tell me everything,” the bureaucrat said. “From the beginning. ”

  Failure brought the young Korda to the hunting lodge in Shanghai. He had entered public service in an age when the Puzzle Palace was new, and the culture filled with tales of dangerous technologies controlled, and societies rebuilt. He intended to outdo them all. But the wild horse of technology had already been broken to harness and reined in. The walls had been built, the universe contained. There were no new worlds to conquer, and the old ones had been safely bricked away. Like many another of his generation, the revelation left him lost and embittered.

  Every day Korda skiffed into the marshes, or shambled into the low coral hills, and with intense self-loathing killed as many creatures as he could. Some days the marsh waters would be carpeted with feathers, and still he found no peace. He killed several behemoths, but he took no trophies, and of course they were not good to eat.

  One hot afternoon, passing through a meadow with his rifle over his shoulder, he saw a woman digging for eels. She paused in her work, casually took off her blouse, and used it to mop the sweat from her face and breasts. Korda stopped and stared.

  The woman noticed him and smiled. From the distance she had seemed at first plain, but now with a subtle shifting of light he saw that she was very beautiful. Come back at sunset, she said, with some jenny-hens, and I will cook them for you.

  When he returned, the woman had built a fire. She sat on a blanket alongside it. He laid his catch at her feet. Some time later, when they had both eaten their fill of the food that satisfies but does not nourish, they made love.

  Even then, without the acuity of hindsight and retrospection, it seemed to him that the woman’s face changed as they made love. The flickering flames made it hard to tell. But it would seem by turns rounder, squarer, more slender. It was as if she held a thousand faces drowning just beneath her skin, and they crowded up, reaching for the surface, when passion broke her control. She rode him fiercely, as if he were an animal she had determined to use up in a single gallop. She taught him to control his orgasm, so that he might last the hours she desired.

  “Did she give you a tattoo?” the bureaucrat asked.

  Korda looked puzzled. “No, of course not.”

  The coals were dying by the time the woman was done with him. He lay back slowly beneath her, eyes closing, sinking backward into unconsciousness and sleep. But as he fell away from the world, he had a vision of her face in orgasm, flattening out, elongating, growing skull-like and harsh.

  It was not a human face.

  He awoke cold and alone in the gray light of false dawn. The fire was dead, and the blanket yanked from beneath him. Korda shivered. His body was scratched, clawed, bitten, and raw. He felt as if he’d been tumbled over and over in a bramble patch. He put his clothes on, and returned to the lodge.

  They laughed at him. That was a haunt woman you tangled with, they said, lucky for you she wasn’t in heat. Had an excursion pilot worked here a year ago, his brother was chewed to death by one, bit off his nipples and both
his stones, licked his skin down to the muscle. Took the mortician a week to get the smile off his face.

  Nor was he taken seriously in the Puzzle Palace. A polite young woman told him his sighting was anecdotal and not very good of its kind, but that she would see it filed away in some obscure bottle shop or other, and in the meantime thanked him for his time and interest.

  But Korda did not care. He had found his purpose.

  Listening, the bureaucrat could not help but marvel. He and Korda had never been close, but they had worked together for years. Where had this fanatic spirit come from, how had he hidden it from the bureaucrat for so long? He asked, “How did you know the location of Ararat?”

  “Through the Committee. It was pretty much a fringe operation when I encountered it, cultists and mystics and other deadwood it took me forever to clear away, but there were still some old-timers associated with it who had been influential in their day. I picked up the useful bit of this and that from them.”

  “So you stole enough biotech to create an unregistered clone son. Gregorian. Only his mother disappeared, and him with her. You were out of luck.”

  Those were, Korda admitted, hard years. But he had only worked the harder, developing plans for the protection and preservation of the haunts, once they could be located, for sanctuaries and breeding programs, for enculturation and cultural preservation. He made them productive years, though his main goal, to locate or at least prove the existence of the haunts, remained unfilled.

  But Korda kept his feelers out, and one day one of his contacts in the Tidewater found Gregorian.

  “How?”

  “I knew what he’d look like, you see. Every year I had pictures made up — his hormone balances had been adjusted slightly so he wouldn’t look too strikingly much like me. Just a vague similarity. I made him a little more rugged, a bit less prone to fat, that was all. Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t done out of pride.”

  “Goon.”

  Relations between father and son were strained, to begin with. Gregorian refused to do his father’s work in the Tidewater. He intimated he knew much about the haunts, but expressed supreme disinterest in the question of their ultimate survival. But Korda paid for Gregorian’s education anyway, and paved his way to a good entry position in the Outer Circle biotechnology labs. Time was on his side. There were no opportunities to challenge a man of Gregorian’s — Korda’s — abilities. Sooner or later he would come around.

  Korda figured he understood Gregorian well.

  He was wrong. Gregorian had found work in the Outer Circle. There he stayed, until the jubilee tides were imminent, and there was no way for Korda to effectively use him. Korda wrote him off.

  Then Gregorian disappeared. He fled suddenly, without warning or notice, in a deliberately suspicious manner. Investigation revealed that shortly before his departure he had interviewed Earth’s agent and been given something. Whatever it was, nobody believed any longer that it was harmless. Alarms were rung. It all ended up in Korda’s lap.

  He had handed the investigation to the bureaucrat.

  “Why me?”

  “I had to send someone. You were simply on deck.”

  “Okay. Now, shortly after that, you contacted me at the carnival in Rose Hall. You were costumed as Death, and you were anxious to know if I’d found Gregorian. Why did you do that?”

  Korda raised a line-fed glass to his lips. He was drinking steadily, drinking and unable to get drunk. “Gregorian had just sent me a package. A handful of teeth, that was all. I didn’t dare send them to a lab to be analyzed, but it seemed certain to me that they were haunts’ teeth. I’d seen hundreds in museums. Only these had bloodied roots. They’d been yanked recently.”

  “That sounds like his style,” the bureaucrat said dryly. “What then?”

  “Nothing. Until the other day when I heard from his half-sister that he would meet me here, and give me the proof I wanted. That’s all there is. Will you open the package now?”

  “Not just yet,” the bureaucrat said. “Let’s go back a bit. Why did you create Gregorian in the first place? Something to do with regulatory votes, was it?”

  “No! It’s not like that at all. I — I was going to have him raised on the Tidewater, you see. I was taking the long view by then. I realized that the reason the haunts were so elusive was that they didn’t want to be found. They were passing themselves as human, living in the social interstices, in migrant labor camps and over top of rundown feed stores. They are intelligent, after all, cunning, and few in number.

  “To find them I needed someone who knew the Tidewater well, who moved among its people without attracting attention, who could distinguish between a joke and an offhand revelation. Someone culturally at home there.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why that someone also had to be you.”

  “But who else could I trust?” Korda said helplessly. “Who else could I trust?”

  The bureaucrat stared at him for a long time. Then he nudged the package forward.

  Korda ripped open the lid. When he saw what lay within, he went horribly still. “Go on,” the bureaucrat said, and suddenly he was angry. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Final, irrefutable proof.”

  He reached into the box and pulled the severed head out by the hair. Two surrogates nearby put down their imaginary drinks and stared. Others further down noticed and swiveled to look. Silence spread like ripples through the room.

  The bureaucrat slammed the head down on the bar.

  It was inhumanly pale, the nose longer than any human’s ever was, the mouth lipless, the eyes too green. He slid a hand over the cheek, and the muscles there jumped reflexively, reshaping that part of the head. Korda stared at it, his mouth on the screen opening and closing without saying a word.

  The bureaucrat left him there.

  A smear of sunset was visible through the open door, and behind him the surrogates were singing, These are the last days, the final days, the days that cannot last, when a bellhop materialized at his elbow. “Excuse me, sir,” it murmured, “but there is a lady who wishes to speak with you. She is here in person, and she emphasizes that it is most important.”

  Esme, he thought sadly, when will you put an end to this? Almost he was tempted just to walk out on her. “All right,” he said. “Show me the way.”

  The device escorted him up a hidden lift to a suite just below the bulbous dome, and left at the open door. The walls were gently luminous, and in their graceful light the sheer extravagant waste of the room, with its hand-carved furniture, its enormous silk-covered bed, was appalling. He stepped within. “Hello?”

  A door opened, and the last woman in the universe he expected entered.

  He could say nothing.

  “Have you been practicing?” Undine asked.

  The bureaucrat blushed. He tried to speak, but was so full of emotion he could not. He reached across an immense distance and took her hand. He clutched it, not like a lover but like a drowning man. Were he to let her go, he knew, she would dissolve from his touch. Her face filled his vision. It was a proud face, beautiful, mischievous; and staring at it, he realized that he did not know her at all, and never had. “Come to me,” he managed at last.

  She came to him.

  “Don’t come yet. I have something I want to teach you.”

  Not exactly groggy, the bureaucrat was in a far, wordless state, clear-headed but uneager to speak. He drew himself away from her and nodded.

  Undine held her two hands cupped together, fingertips down, like a leaf, a slender, natural opening where the edges of her hands touched. “This is the mudra for the vagina. And this,” one hand flat, the other slammed atop it in a fist, the thumb thrust upward, “is the mudra for the penis. Now” — Still holding the thumb erect, she extended the little finger. She lowered her hand between her legs and hooked the finger into her vagina — “I have made myself into Hermaphrodite. Do you accept me as your goddess?”

  “If the alternati
ve is your going away again, then I suppose—”

  “All these qualifications — you were born to quibble! Say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now the purpose of this lesson is for you to learn what it is like for me when you make love. That is not much. You wish to understand me, yes? Then you must put yourself in my place. I will do nothing to you that you might not do to me. That is fair, eh?” She reached out to caress his hair, the side of his face. “Ah, sweetness,” she said, “how my cock yearns for your mouth.”

  Unsurely, awkwardly, he bent down and closed his mouth about her thumb.

  “Not so abruptly. Do I descend upon you as if I wanted a bite of sausage? Approach it slowly. Seduce it. Begin by licking the insides of my thighs. Ah. Now kiss my balls — that’s right, the curled fingers. Gently! Run your tongue over the surface, then suck on them ever so lightly. That’s nice.” She arched her back, breasts rising, eyelids closing. Her other hand clenched and unclenched in his hair. “Yes.

  “Now let your tongue travel up the shaft. Yes. You might want to hold me steady with your hand. That’s right, slowly. Oh, and up the sides too! That feels so good. Now ease down the hood to expose the tip. Lick it now, ever so lightly. Tease me, yes. Oh, my! You were born to make my cock happy, darling, don’t let anyone ever tell you different.

  “Now deeper. Take more of me into your mouth, up and down, long, regular strokes. Let your tongue play around the shaft. Mmm.” She was moving under him now. She licked her lips. “Grab the shaft in both hands. Yes. Faster.”

  Suddenly she yanked him up by the hair. Their mouths met, and they kissed passionately, wetly. “Ah God, I can’t stand it,” she said. “I’ve got to have you.” She drew back, turned him around. “Sit down slowly on my lap, and I’ll guide myself in.”

  “What?”

  “Trust me.” She kissed his back, his sides. Hot, furtive kisses, there and gone, like blows. She put an arm around him, running her hand up his stomach, playing with his nipples. “Oh my beautiful, beautiful little girl. I want to have my cock deep inside you.”