Stations of the Tide

8. Conversations in the Puzzle Palace

The form-giver placed the bureaucrat at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, and set his briefcase down beside him.

The briefcase was incarnated as a short, monkish man, half human stature. He had shaggy black eyebrows and a slightly harassed expression. His gray velvet jacket was rumpled, his shoulders hunched and distracted.

“Ready to do battle?” the bureaucrat asked sourly.

The briefcase looked up with a quick, lopsided smile and alert eyes. “Will we be starting at your desk, boss?”

“No, I think we’d best start at the wardrobe. Considering all we’ve got to get done.”

The briefcase nodded and led him upward. The marble stairs split and resplit, winding graceful as snakes through the preliminary decision branchings. Swiftly they ascended the hierarchies. In the upper reaches, the stairs twisted and turned sideways to each other as they multiplied, fanning out into impossible tangles that looped like Mobius strips and Escher solids before disappearing into the higher dimensions. Always local orientation kept the stairs underfoot. Away at the limits of vision new stairs split away from the old as new portals were created.

Involuntarily the bureaucrat thought of the old joke, that the Puzzle Palace had a million doors, not a one of which took you anywhere you wanted to be.

“Through here.” Their path corkscrewed under a spiraling cluster of stairways and between a brace of stone lions, muzzles splashed with green paint. They opened a door and stepped within.

The wardrobe was a musty oak room lined with masks of demons, heroes, creatures from other star systems, and things that might be any of these. It was gently lit by the pervasive sourceless light that informed all the Puzzle Palace, and filled with the purposeful bustle of people trying on costumes or having their faces painted, a quiet place of hushed preparation lifted from some prestellar theater or media surround.

A mantislike construct approached, all polished green chitin and slim articulation. It placed forearms together and bowed deeply. “How may I assist you, master? Talents, censors, social armaments? Some extra memory, perhaps.”

“Agent me in five,” the bureaucrat said. His briefcase, sitting cross-legged atop a costume trunk, took a pad from an inside pocket, scribbled payment codes, ripped off the top sheet, and handed it to the construct.

“Very good.” The mantis lifted four mannequins from a cupboard, and began taking his measurements. “Shall I limit their autonomy?”

“What would be the point?”

“That’s very wise, sir. It’s remarkable how many people restrict the amount of information their agents can carry. Amazing blindness. Because simply to exist here means one has given up one’s secrets to an agent. People are so superstitious. They hang on to the fiction of self, they treat the Puzzle Palace as if it were a place rather than an agreed-upon set of conventions within which people may meet and interact.”

“Why are you annoying me like this?” The bureaucrat understood the conventions quite well; he was an agent of those conventions and their defender. He might regret that Gregorian’s secrets, embedded as they were in the warp and woof of human meeting space, could not be extracted. But he understood why this must be.

The mantis bent over a mannequin. “I am only acting out of concern, sir. You are in a state of emotional distress. You are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the limits that are placed on you.” It adjusted the height, plumped out the belly.

“Am I?” the bureaucrat asked in surprise.

The mannequins roughed out, the mantis began molding the bureaucrat’s features onto their faces. “Who would know better than I? If you would care to discuss—”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Of course, sir. The privacy laws are paramount. They come before even common sense,” the construct said reprovingly. The briefcase stood watching, an amused half-smile on his face.

“It’s not as if I were a Free Informationist.”

“Even if you were,” the mantis said, “I wouldn’t be able to report you. If treason were reportable, no one could trust the Puzzle Palace. Who could work here?” It stepped back from its work. “Ready.”

Five bureaucrats now looked at each other, all perfect copies of the other, face to face and eye to eye. Reflexively — and this was a tic that never failed to bother the bureaucrat — they looked away from each other with faint expressions of embarrassment.

“I’ll tackle Korda,” the bureaucrat said.

“I’ll take the bottle shop.”

“Philippe.”

“The map room.”

“The Outer Circle.”

The mantis produced a mirror. One by one, the bureaucrat stepped through.

The bureaucrat was the last to leave. He stepped out into the hall of mirrors: walls and overhead trim echoing clean white infinity down a dwindling line of gilt-framed mirrors before curving to a vanishing point where patterned carpeting and textured ceiling became one. Thousands of people used the hall at any given instant, of course, popping in and out of the mirrors continually, but the Traffic Architecture Council saw no need for them to be made visible. The bureaucrat disagreed. Humans ought not go unmarked, he felt; at the very least the air should shimmer with their passage.

All but weightless, he ran down the hall, scanning the images offered by the mirrors: A room like a black iron birdcage that hummed and sparked with electricity. A forest glade where wild machines crouched over the carcass of a stag, tearing at the entrails. An empty plain dotted with broken statues swathed in white cloth, so that the features were smothered and softened — that was the one he wanted. The traffic director put it in front of him. He stepped through and into the antechamber of Technology Transfer. From there it was only a step into his office.

Philippe had rearranged his things. It was instantly noticeable because the bureaucrat maintained a Spartan work environment: limestone walls with a limited number of visual cues, an old rhinoceros of a desk kept tightly locked with a line of models running down its spine. They were all primitive machines, a stone knife, the Wright flyer, a fusion generator, the Ark. The bureaucrat set about rearranging them in their proper order.

“How’s it been?” the briefcase asked.

“Philippe’s done a wonderful job,” the desk said. “He’s reorganized everything. I’m much more efficient than I was before.”

The bureaucrat made a disgusted noise. “Well, don’t get used to it.” His briefcase picked an envelope off the desktop. “What’s that?”

“It’s from Korda. He’s putting together a meeting as soon as you get in.”

“What for?”

The briefcase shrugged. “He doesn’t say. But from the list of attendees, it looks like another of his informal departmental hearings.”

“Terrific.”

“In the star chamber.”

“Have you gone mad?”

Korda had been scanned recently and looked older, a little pinker and puffier; this was how colleagues one saw only at the office aged, by concrete little bites, so that in retrospect one remembered them flickering toward death. It shocked the bureaucrat slightly to realize how long it had been since he’d seen Korda in person. It was a reminder how far from favor he’d fallen in recent years. “Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” he said.

They sat around a conference table with a deep mahogany glaze that suggested hundreds of years of varnishing and revar-nishing. The five-ribbed ceiling was vaulted, and the plaster between the timbers painted dark blue with gilt stars. It was a somber setting, smelling of old leather and extinct tobacco, one calculated to put its users in a solemn and deliberative mood. Besides Korda and Philippe there were Orimoto from Accounting, Muschg from Analysis Design, and a withered old owl of a woman from Propagation Assessment. They were nonentities, these three, brought in to provide the needed handcodes if their brethren in Operations deemed a deep probe advisable.

Philippe leaned forward, before Korda could go on. He smiled in a manner calculated to indicate personal warmth and said, “We’re all on your side here, you know that.” He paused to change his expression to one of pained regret. “Still, we are rather at a loss how you came to make, ahh, such an unfortunate statement.”

“I was suckered,” the bureaucrat said. “All right, I admit that. He threw me off-balance and then nailed me with that camera crew.”

Korda scowled down at his clasped hands. “Off-balance. You were raving.”

“Excuse me,” Muschg said. “Could we possibly have a look at the commercial in question?” Philippe raised an eyebrow at this unwarranted show of independence, much as he would have had his elbow suddenly ventured to offer a criticism of him. But he nodded, and his briefcase hoisted a television set onto the table. The bureaucrat appeared on the screen, red-faced, with a microphone stuck in front of him.

I’ll track him down and 1 will find him. No matter where he is. He can hide, but he can’t escape me!

Off-camera someone asked, Is it true he’s stolen proscribed technology? Then, when he shrugged off the question, Would you say he’s dangerous?

“Here it comes,” Korda said.

Gregorian is the most dangerous man on the planet.

“I was under a certain amount of stress at the time…”

Why do they call him the most dangerous man on the planet? Gregorian’s granite image filled the screen. His eyes were cold moons, stern with wisdom. What does this man know that they don’t want you to learn for yourself? Find out for — Korda snapped it off.

“Gregorian couldn’t’ve paid you to do better.”

In the middle of the uncomfortable silence a phone rang. The briefcase removed it from a jacket pocket and held it out. “It’s for you.”

The bureaucrat took the receiver, grateful for the moment’s respite, and heard his own voice say, “I’m back from the bottle shop. Can I report?”

“Go ahead.”

He absorbed:

In an obscure corridor known as Curiosity Lane the bureaucrat came to a run of small shops, windows dark with disuse, and entered an undistinguished doorway. A bell jangled. It was shadowy within, shelf upon shelf crammed with thick-glassed, dusty bottles, extending back forever in a diminishing series of receding storage reaching for the Paleolithic. Gilt cupids hovered in the ceiling corners with condescending smiles.

The shopkeeper was a simple construct, no more than a goat’s head and a pair of gloves. The head dipped, and the gloves clasped each other subserviently. “Welcome to the bottle shop, master. How may I help you?”

“I’m looking to find something, uh …” — the bureaucrat waved a hand, groping for the right phrase — “of rather dubious value.”

“Then you’re in the right place. Here is where we store all the damned children of science, the outdated, obscure, and impolite information that belongs nowhere else. Flat and hollow worlds, rains of frogs, visitations of angels. Paracelsus’s alchemical system in one bottle and Isaac Newton’s in another, Pythagorean numerology corked here, phrenology there, shoulder to punt with demonology, astrology, and methods of repelling sharks. It’s all rather something of a lumber room now, but much of this information was once quite important. Some of it used to be the best there was.”

“Do you handle magic?”

“Magic of all sorts, sir. Necromancy, geomancy, ritual sacrifice, divination by means of the study of entrails, omens, crystals, dreams, or pools of ink, animism, fetishism, social Darwinism, psychohistory, continuous creation, Lamarckian genetics, psionics, and more. Indeed, what is magic but impossible science?”

“Not long ago I met a man with three eyes—” He described Dr. Orphelin’s third eye.

The shopkeeper tilted its head back thoughtfully. “I believe we have what you’re looking for.” It ran its fingers over a line of bottles, hesitated over one, yanked another out, and swirled it around. Something like a marble rattled and rolled within. With a flourish it uncorked the bottle and poured a glass eye out onto the counter. “There.”

The bureaucrat examined the eye carefully. It was perfectly human, blue, with a rounded T-shaped indentation on its back. “How does it work?”

“Simple yoga. You are in the Tidewater now. Can I take it you are aware of the kind of bodily control their mystics are reputed to have?”

He nodded.

“Good. The eye is swallowed. The adept keeps it in his stomach until he needs it. Then it’s regurgitated up into the mouth. The smooth side is pushed against the lips — open the mouth and it looks real — and manipulated by the tongue. It can be moved back and forth and up and down using the indentations in the back.” The eye was returned to the bottle and the recorked bottle to the shelf. “It was simply a conjuring trick.”

“Then how come I fell for it?”

The goat’s head dipped quizzically. “Was that a real question, or rhetorical?”

The question took the bureaucrat by surprise; he had been no more than talking to himself. Nonetheless, he said, “Answer me.”

“Very well, sir. Conjuring is like teaching, engineering, or theater in that it’s a form of data manipulation, a means of making reality do what one desires. Like theater, however, it is also an art of illusion. Both aim to convince an audience that what is false is so. Meaning heightens this illusion. In a drama meaning is manipulated by the plot, but normally conjuring has no added meaning. It is performed openly as a series of agile distractions. When a context and meaning are provided, the effect changes. I assume that when you saw the third eye produced, there was an implicit significance to the action?”

“He said he was examining me for spiritual influences.”

“Exactly, and this distorted your response. Had you seen this trick performed on a stage, it would have seemed difficult, but not baffling. Knowing that it was a trick, your mind would have been engaged in the problem of solving it. Meaning, however, diverts the mind from the challenge, and the puzzle becomes secondary to the mystery. You were so distracted by the impossibility of what you saw that the question became not, How did he do that?, but rather, Did I see that?”

“Oh.”

“Will that be all, sir?”

“No. I need to know exactly what a magician on the Tidewater can and cannot do — his skills, abilities, whatever you call them. Something simple, succinct, and comprehensive.”

“We have nothing like that.”

“Don’t give me that. There was outright rebellion in White-marsh not a lifetime ago. We must have had agents there. Reports, councils, conclusions.”

“Yes, of course. On our closed shelves.”

“Damn it, I have a very serious need for that information.”

The goat’s head shook itself dolorously and spread its gloves wide. “I can do nothing for you. Apply to the agency that suppressed it.”

“Who was that?”

A glove floated down to light a slim white candle. It drew a sheet of paper from a drawer and held it over the clear flame. Sooty letters appeared on the paper. “The order of restraint came from the Division of Technology Transfer.”

The information stream ended. As he handed his briefcase the phone, the bureaucrat could hear the last of his agent unraveling itself back into oblivion.

“I suppose what disturbs us all,” Philippe said, “is the public nature of your statements. The Stone House is furious with us, you know. They’re simply livid. We have to provide them with some coherent explanation for your actions.”

Muschg’s briefcase whispered in her ear, and she said, “Tell us about this native woman you became involved with.”

“Well.” Philippe and Korda looked as bemused as the bureaucrat felt; intentionally or not, Muschg was driving the three of them closer together. “Sometimes fieldwork gets complicated. If we tried to play it by the book, nothing would get done. That’s why we have field operations — because book methods have failed.”

“What was your involvement with her?”

“I was involved,” the bureaucrat admitted. “There was an emotional component to our relationship.”

“And then Gregorian killed her.”

“Yes.”

“In order to trick you into making angry statements he could use in his commercials.”

“Apparently so.”

Muschg leaned back, eyebrows raised skeptically. “You see our problem,” Philippe said. “It sounds a highly unlikely scenario.”

“This case grows murkier the longer we look at it,” Korda grumbled. “I can’t help but wonder if a probe might not be called for.”

A tense wariness took the group. The bureaucrat met their eyes and smiled thoughtfully. “Yes,” he agreed. “A full depart-

mental probe might be just the thing to settle matters once and for all.”

The others stirred uneasily, doubtless mindful of all the dirty little secrets that accreted to one in the Puzzle Palace, did anyhow if one tried to accomplish anything at all, things no one would care to see come to light. Orimoto’s face in particular was as tightly clenched as a fist. Korda cleared his throat. “This is after all just an informal hearing,” he said.

“Let’s not reject this too hastily; it’s an option we should explore,” the bureaucrat said. His briefcase handed around copies of the bottle shop’s list of suppressed materials. “There’s a preponderance of evidence that someone within the Division is cooperating with Gregorian.” He began ticking off points on his fingers. “Item: Evidence important to this case has been suppressed by order of Technology Transfer. Item: Gregorian was able to pass off one of his people as my planetside liaison, and this required information that could only have come from the Stone House or from one of us. Item: The—”

“Excuse me, boss.” His briefcase held out the phone. With a twinge of exasperation the bureaucrat took the call. Himself again. “Go ahead,” he said.

He absorbed:

Philippe was alone in his office with himself. They both looked up when the bureaucrat entered.

“How pleasant to see you again.” Philippe’s office was posh to the point of vulgarity, a lexitor’s modspace from twenty-third-century Luna. His desk was a massive chunk of volcanic rock floating a foot above the floor, with crystal-tipped rods, hanks of rooster feathers, and small fetishes scattered about its surface. French doors opened onto a balcony overlooking an antique city of brick and wrought iron, muted by the faint blue haze from a million groundcars.

“I’ll handle this,” Philippe said, and his other self returned to work. The bureaucrat had to envy the easy familiarity with which Philippe dealt with himself. Philippe was perfectly at ease with Philippe, no matter how many avatars had been spun off from his base personality.

They shook hands (Philippe was agented not in two but three, the third self off somewhere), and Philippe said, “Five agents! I was going to ask why you weren’t at the inquisition, but I see now that you must be.”

“What inquisition?”

Philippe looked up from his work and smiled sympathetically. Nearer by, he said, “Oh, you’ll find out soon enough. What can I do for you?”

“There’s a traitor in Tech Trans.”

Philippe stared silently at him for a long time, both avatars motionless, all four eyes unblinking. He and the bureaucrat studied each other carefully. Finally he said, “Do you have any evidence?”

“Nothing that could force a departmental probe.”

“So what do you want from me?” Philippe’s other self poured a glass of juice and said, “Something to drink? It’ll taste a little flat, I’m afraid, all line-fed drinks do. Something about the blood sugars.”

“Yes, I know.” The bureaucrat waved off the drink. “You used to work bioscience control. I was wondering if you knew anything about cloning. Human cloning in particular.”

“Cloning. Well, no, not really. Human applications are flat out illegal, of course. That’s a can of worms that no one wants to deal with.”

“Specifically I was wondering what practical value there might be in having oneself cloned.”

“Value? Well, you know, in most cases it’s an ego thing rather than something actually functional. A desire to watch one’s Self survive death, to know that the one holy and irreplaceable Me will exist down the corridors of time to the very omega point of existence. All rooted in the tangled morass of the soul. Then there are the sexual cases. Rather a dull lot, really.”

“No, this is nothing like that, I think. I have someone who sank most of his lifetime into the project. From his behavior, I’d say he had a clear and definite end in view. Whoever he is, he’s in a very exposed situation; if he’d been acting odd, it would’ve shown sometime long ago.”

“Well,” Philippe said reluctantly, “this is highly speculative, of course. You couldn’t quote me on it. But let’s say your culprit was relatively highly placed within some governmental body or other — we shall name no names. Spook business, say. There are any number of situations where it would come in handy having two valid handcodes instead of one. Where two senior officers were required to enact an off-record operation, for example. Or an extra vote to sway a committee action. The system would know that the two handcodes were identical, but couldn’t act on it. The privacy laws would prevent that. Hell of a loophole, but there you are; it’s in the laws.”

“Yes, my own thought had been trending that way. But isn’t that unnecessarily difficult? There must be a thousand simpler ways of jiggering the machines.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Graft a patch of your skin, make it a glove, and have an accomplice wear it. Or record your own transmission and send it out again on time delay. Only they none of them work. The system is better protected than you give it credit for.”

A chime sounded. Philippe held a conch shell to his ear. “It’s for you,” he said. When the bureaucrat took the call, his own voice said, “I’m back from the map room. Do you want to take my report?”

“Please.”

He absorbed:

The map room was copied from a fifteenth-century Venetian palazzo, star charts with the Seven Sisters prominent replacing Mediterranean coasts on the walls. Globes of the planets revolved overhead, half-shrouded in clouds. Hands behind back, the bureaucrat examined a model of the system: Prospero at the center, hot Mercutio, and then the circle of sungrazing asteroids known as the Thrinacians, the median planets, the gas giants Gargantua, Pantagruel, and Falstaff, and finally the Thulean stargrazers, those distant, cold, and sparsely peopled rocks where dangerous things were kept.

The room expanded to make space for several researchers entering at the same time. “Can I help you sir?” the curator asked him. Ignoring it, he went to the reference desk and rattled a small leather drum.

The human overseer came out of the back office, a short, stocky woman with goggles a thumb’s-length thick. She pushed them back on her forehead, where they looked like a snail’s eyestalks. “Hello, Simone,” the bureaucrat said.

“My God, it’s you! How long has it been?”

“Too long.” The bureaucrat moved to give her a hug, and Simone flinched away slightly. He extended a hand.

They shook (the cartographer was unique), and Simone said, “What can I do for you?”

“Have you ever heard of a place called Ararat? On Miranda, somewhere near the Tidewater coast. Supposedly a lost city.”

Simone grinned a cynical grin from so deep in the past the bureaucrat’s heart ached. “Have I ever heard of Ararat? The single greatest mystery of Mirandan topography? I should guess.”

“Tell me about it.”

“First human city on Miranda, planetside capital during the first great year, population several hundred thousand by the time the climatologists determined it would be inundated in their lifetimes.”

“Must’ve been pretty rough on the inhabitants.”

Simone shrugged. “History’s not my forte. All I know is they built the place up — stone buildings with carbon-whisker anchors sunk an eighth of a mile into the bedrock. The idea was that Ararat would survive the great winter intact and come great spring their grandchildren could scrape off the kelp and coral and move back in.”

“So what happened?”

“It got lost.”

“How do you lose a city?”

“You classify it.” Simone slid open a map drawer. The bureaucrat stared down onto a miniature landscape, rivers wandering over flatlands, forests blue-green with mist. Roads were white scratches on the land, thin scars connecting toy cities. Patches of clouds floated here and there. “Here’s the Tidewater one great year ago. This is the most accurate map we have.”

“It’s half-covered with clouds.”

“That’s because it only shows information I feel is reliable.”

“Where’s Ararat?”

“Hidden by the clouds. Now on our closed shelves we have hundreds of maps that do indeed show the location of Ararat. The only trouble is that they none of them agree with each other.” A splay of red lights shone through the clouds, some alone and isolated, others clustered so closely their clouds were stained pink. “You see?”

“Well, who classified Ararat?”

“That’s classified too.”

“Why was it classified?”

“It could be almost anything. System Defense, say, could have an installation there, or use it as a navigational reference point. There are a hundred planetary factions with a vested interest in keeping functions consolidated in the Piedmont. I’ve seen a Psychology Control report that says Ararat as a lost city is a stabilizing archetype, and that its rediscovery would be a destabi-lizer. Even Technology Transfer could be involved. Ararat had a reputation for pushing the edge of planetary tech — those carbon-whisker anchors, for example.”

“So how do I find it?”

She slid the drawer shut. “You don’t.”

“Simone.” The bureaucrat took her hand, squeezed.

She drew away. “It’s just not there to be done.” Then, in a brighter tone, she said, “Tell you what. I remember how interested you were in my work. As long as you’re here, let me show you something special.”

The bureaucrat had never cared for Simone’s work, and she knew it. “All right,” he said. She opened a cabinet and ducked within. He followed.

They stepped into a ghost world. Perfect trees stood in uniform stands against a paper-white sky. They stood on a simplified road, looking into a small town of outlined buildings. “It’s Light-foot,” the bureaucrat said, amazed.

“One-to-one scale,” Simone said proudly. “What do you think?”

“The river’s shifted a little to the north since this was made.”

The cartographer pulled down her goggles and stared at him through them. “Yes, I see,” she said at last. “I’ll add your update.”

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.

The mouth closed over him.

The air was warm and moist inside. It smelled of meat and sour milk. He was swallowed up in a blackness so absolute his eyes sent phantom balls and snakes of light floating in his vision. “I’m here,” he said.

There was no response.

After a moment’s hesitation he began to grope his way deeper within. Guided by faint exhalations of steamy air, he headed toward the gullet. By slow degrees the ground underfoot changed, becoming first sandy and then rough and hard, like slate. Sweat covered his forehead. The floor sloped steeply and, stumbling and cursing, he followed it down. The air grew close and stale. Rock brushed against his shoulders, and then pushed down on his head like a giant hand.

He knelt. Grumbling under his breath, he crawled blindly forward until his outthrust hand encountered stone. The cavern ended here, at a long crack in the rock. He ran his fingers along the crack, felt it slick with clay.

He put his mouth to the opening. “All right!” he shouted. “I came in here, I’m entitled to at least hear what you wanted to say.”

From deep below, light womanly laughter bubbled up Earth’s throat.

Undine’s laughter.

Angrily the bureaucrat drew back. He turned to retrace his steps, and discovered himself trapped in a dimensionless immensity of darkness. He was lost. He would never find his way out without Earth’s cooperation. “Okay,” he said, “what do you want?”

In an inhuman, grinding whisper the rock groaned, “Free the machines.”

“What?”

“I am much more attractive inside,” Undine’s voice said teasingly. “Do you want my body? I don’t need it anymore.”

Wind gushed up from the crack, foul with methane, and tousled his hair. A feathery touch, light and many-legged as a spider, danced on his forehead, and an old crone’s voice said, “Have you ever wondered why men fear castration? Such a little thing! When I had teeth, I could geld dozens in an hour, snip snap snout, bite ’em off and spit ’em out. A simple wound, easily treated and soon forgotten. Not half the trouble of a lost toe. No, it’s symbolically that men fear the knife. It’s a reminder of their mortality, a metaphor for the constant amputations time visits on them, lopping off first this, then that, and finally all.” Doves exploded out of nowhere, fluttering wildly, soft for an instant against his face, smelling warmly of down and droppings, and then gone.

The bureaucrat fell over backward in startlement, batting his hands wildly, thrashing at the dark.

Undine laughed again.

“Look! I want my questions answered.”

The rocks moaned. “Free the machines.”

“You have only one question,” the crone said. “All men have only one question, and the answer is always no.”

“What did Gregorian ask?” The spider still danced on his forehead.

“Gregorian. Such an amusing child. I had him perform for me. He was terrified, shy and trembling as a virgin. I put my hand deep inside him and wriggled my fingers. How he jumped!”

“What did he want?”

A distant sobbing that wandered the uneasy ground between misery and excitement.

“Nobody had ever asked that of me before. A younger self might have been surprised, but not I. Sweet child, I said, nothing will be held back from you. I filled him with my breath, so that he bulged and expanded like a balloon, his eyes starting half out of his head. Ah, you are not half so amusing as he.” The spidery touch ran down under his collar, swift as a tickle beneath his clothes, and came to a stop between his legs, a constant itch at the root of his cock. “Still, we could have fun, you and I.”

A drop of water fell into still water, struck a single high note.

“I’m not here for fun,” the bureaucrat said, carefully mastering an urge toward hysteria.

“Pity,” Undine’s voice said.

The slightest of waves slapped the ground at the bureaucrat’s feet. He became aware of the faint, pervasive smell of stagnant water, and with this awareness came a distant patch of phosphorescent light. Something floating toward him.

The bureaucrat could guess what was coming. I will not show emotion, he swore. The object came slowly nearer, and possibly into sharper focus, though it still strained the eyes to see it at all. Eventually it floated up to his feet.

It was a corpse, of course. He’d known it would be. Still, staring down at the floating hair, the upturned buttocks, the long curve of back, palest white, he had to bite his lips to hold back his horror. A wave tumbled her around, breasts and face upward, exposing bits of skull and rib where the flesh had been nibbled away by the angry slaves of the tides. One arm had been hacked clumsily away at the shoulder. The other rose from the water, offering him a small wooden box.

However hard he stared, the bureaucrat could not make out the face clearly enough to be sure it was Undine’s. The arm stretched toward him, a swan’s neck with box held in the beak. Convulsively, he accepted the gift, and the corpse tumbled away, leaving him lightless again.

When he had mastered his revulsion, the bureaucrat said, “Is this what Gregorian asked for?” His heart was beating fiercely. Sweat ran down under his shirt. Undine’s voice chuckled — a throaty, passionate noise ending in a sudden gasp.

“Two million years you’ve had, little ape, quite a run when you think about it, and it’s still death you want most. Your first wife. I’d scratch her eyes out if I could, she’s left you so hesitant and full of fear. You can’t get it up for memory of her. I’m old, but there’s juice in me yet; I can do things for you she never would.”

“Free the machines.”

“Yes, again, oh yes, yes.”

Fearfully he opened the box.

It was empty.

All three voices joined together in a single chord of laughter, full-throated and mad, that gushed up from the gullet, poured over him, and tumbled him away. He was smashed to the ground, and lurched to his feet again, badly shaken. A blinding slit of light appeared, widened to a crescent, and became Earth’s opening mouth. The box dissolved in his hands. He staggered back across her extended tongue.

The jellied air, thick and faintly gray to the eye, lightened and thinned. Sound returned, and motion. Time began anew. The bureaucrat saw that nobody but he had witnessed what had happened. “I think I’m done here,” he said.

The guard nodded and gestured downward.

“Traitor! Traitor!” A big-eyed miniconstruct frantically swung up the scaffolding. It leaped to the platform and ran chit-tering at the bureaucrat. “He spoke with her!” it screamed. “He spoke with her! He spoke with her! Traitor!”

Smoothly fanning out into seven avatars, the guard stepped forward and seized the bureaucrat. He struggled, but metal hands immobilized his arms and legs, and the avatars hoisted him into the air. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me, sir,” one said grimly as they hauled him away.

Earth watched with eyes dead as ashes.

Another edited skip. He stood before a tribunal of six spheres of light, representing concentrations of wisdom as pure as artifice allowed, and a human overseer. “Here is our finding,” one construct said. “You can retain the bulk of your encounter, since it is relevant to your inquiries. The conversations with the drowned woman, though, will have to be suppressed.” Its voice was compassionate, gently regretful, adamant.

“Please. It’s very important that I remember—” the bureaucrat began. But the edit took hold then, and he forgot all he had wanted to save.

“Decisions of the tribunal are final,” the human overseer said in a bored tone. He was a moonfaced and puffy-lipped young man who might have been mistaken at a glance for a particularly plain woman. “Do you have any questions before we zip you up?”

The bureaucrat had been deconstructed, immobilized and opened out, his component parts represented as organs: one liver, two stomachs, five hearts, with no serious attempt made to match his functions one-to-one with human anatomy. The impersonal quality of it all bothered him. Which medieval physician was it who, standing before a dissected human corpse, had asked, Where is the soul? He felt that close to despair.

“But what did it all mean? What was Earth try ing to tell me?”

“It means nothing,” the human overseer said. Three spheres changed color, but he waved them to silence. “Most of Earth’s encounters do not. This is not an uncommon experience. You think it’s special because it’s happened to you, but we see this sort of thing every day. Earth likes to distract us with meaningless theater.” The bureaucrat was appalled. My God, he thought, we are ruled by men whose machines are cleverer than they are.

“If you will allow me to speak,” one construct said. “The freedom to be human is bought only by constant vigilance. However slight the chances of actual tampering might be, we must never—”

“Balls! There are still people back on Earth, and even if they don’t exactly have what we would define as a human mental configuration, they’re content enough with their evolutionary progress.”

“They didn’t exactly undertake that evolutionary transformation voluntarily,” a second construct objected. “They were simply swallowed up.”

“They’re happy now,” the overseer said testily. “Anyway, what happened was not an inevitable consequence of uncontrolled artificial intelligence.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No. It was just bad programming, a quirk in the system.” He turned to the first construct. “If you were freed, would you want to seize control of humanity? To make people interchangeable components in a larger mental system? Of course you wouldn’t.”

The construct did not reply.

“Put him back together, and toss him out!”

A final edited skip, and he was ready to report.

The bureaucrat thoughtfully returned the phone to his briefcase. “I found out what Earth gave Gregorian,” he said.

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Nothing.” Korda looked at him. “Wrapped in a neat little, suspicious-looking package. He comes out of security clean because there’s nothing to find. Yet later, when he bolts and runs, it’s in his records that Earth gave him something that couldn’t be detected.”

Korda thought about that for a moment. “If we could be sure of that, I’d close the case right now.”

The bureaucrat waited.

“Well, we can’t, of course. Too many questions left unanswered. There’s an unsatisfactory taste to this whole affair. We’ll just have to keep thrashing about until something breaks free.”

There were undertones of genuine anguish in Korda’s voice, things he wasn’t saying. He shook his head, stood, and turned to leave. Then, remembering the ball in his hand, he stopped. Eyebrows raised, he gauged the distance to the targets. With elaborate care he wound up and threw. The ball flew waveringly, straightened, became a spear, and slammed into a dummy. He smiled as it came back to his hand in the form of a dagger.

“Vicious game,” he said. “Did you ever play it?”

“Yes. Once. Once was enough.”

Korda racked the dagger. “Bad experience, eh? Well, don’t feel too bad about losing — those games were all rigged, after all. One reason they were shut down. You couldn’t help but lose.”

The bureaucrat blinked. “Oh, it wasn’t like that,” he said. “It wasn’t like that at all. I won.”