Stations of the Tide

9.The Wreck of the Atlantis

The orchid crabs were migrating to the sea. They scuttled across the sandy road, swamping it under their numbers. Bright parasitic flowers waved gently on their armor, making the forest floor ripple under a carpet of multicolored petals, like a submarine garden seen through clear fathoms of Ocean brine.

Mintouchian cursed and threw the brakes. The New Born King slammed to a halt. Chu pulled out a cheroot and stuck it in the corner of her mouth. “Well, we’re stuck here for a while. Might as well get out and stretch our legs.”

A small community of pilgrims, the inhabitants of three other trucks — Lord of Haunts, Lucky Mathilde, the Lion Heart — and some dozen foot travelers, were patiently waiting out the migration. A line of them sat on the lowest branch of a grandfather tree, huddled like crows and staring at a blue spark of fire chocked in the fork of one limb. “Look at that,” Mintouchian said. “When I was a kid and people got hung up on the road like this, they’d swap stories, sometimes for hours on end: ghost stories, family histories, fables, hero tales, hausmarchen, dirty jokes, brags and dozens, everything you can imagine. Living back then was like being in an ocean of stories. It was great.” Disgustedly he flicked on the dashboard set with a swipe of his beefy hand and leaned back in his seat.

Chu climbed out of the cab and hooked an elbow over the hood, eyes distant. The bureaucrat followed.

He felt disconnected. He had spread himself too thin in the Puzzle Palace, and now he felt a touch of perceptual nausea, a forewarning perhaps of the relativistic sickness to which those who worked in conventional reality were particularly prone. Everything seemed bright illusion to him, the thinnest film of appearance afloat over a darker, unknowable truth. The world vibrated with the finest of tensions, as if Something were imminent. He waited for windows to open in the sky, doorways in the trees and holes in the water. For the invisible coursing spirits that surely shared this space unseen to make themselves manifest. As of course they did not.

He set his briefcase down on the running board. “I’m going for a walk.”

Chu nodded. Mintouchian didn’t even look up from his program.

He wandered deeper into the grandfather tree, careful not to step on the occasional stray crab, outriders of the main migration dimly seeking their way back to consensus. The flow of orchid crabs had split, isolating them in an island of stillness. The tree overhead was a magnificent thing, its great branches spreading out horizontally from the main bole and sending down secondary trunks at irregular distances, so that the one tree had all the volume and complexity of an entire grove.

They were rare, grandfather trees, he remembered hearing. This one was a survivor, a lonely holdout from the earliest days of great spring. From the seeds buried deep in its heart would come, an age hence, if not a new race then at least a nation within that race.

Ramshackle stairs twisted crookedly about the trunk, with landings where planked walks ran atop the branches deep into leafy obscurity. They had been painted once, red and green, yellow and orange, but the carnival colors had faded, bleached by a thousand suns as pale as the skeletons in the boneyard of an abandoned church. Small signs pointed down this branch or that to railinged platforms: the ship view. abelard’s. fresh eels. jules zee’s. the aerie. flavored beers.

Drawn upward more by capillary action than actual will, he climbed the stairs.

A drunk staggered down past him. Twisted bits of river wood were nailed to the railings in a weak attempt at decoration, and chalky shells leaned against the uprights.

The bureaucrat was hesitating at the third landing, wondering which way to go, when a dog-headed man carrying a tray of hands pushed by him. He stepped back in alarm, and the man halted and pulled the mask from his face. “Can I help you, sir?”

“Ah, I was wondering—” He saw now that the hands were metal, modulars being taken to be flash-cleaned between clients.

“The Atlantis is down that way. Take the walk straight ahead, turn left, and follow the signs. You can’t miss it.”

Bemused, the bureaucrat followed the instructions and came to a long platform with scattered tables. Clusters of surrogates and the occasional lone human lounged against the railing, staring out into the forest. He stared too.

The tree had been cut back to open a view of the forest interior. Golden light slanted into the greenery, whimseys dancing like dust motes within it. Ahead, rising from the earth like a phantom, was the landlocked corpse of an ocean vessel. The Atlantis.

It was enormous beyond scale. The ship had foundered keel first with its bow upward sometime during the last great winter, and the currents had half buried it, so that it seemed frozen in the instant of going under. A million orchid crabs were traversing its barnacled remains, and it was covered with flowers, as impossible a creation as any mnemonic address in the Puzzle Palace.

The ghost of a memory tugged at his mind. He had heard of this ship before. Something.

The bureaucrat found an empty table, scraped up a chair, and sat. A light breeze ruffled his hair. Leaves rustled as a feathered serpent leaped into the air, a scissor-tailed finch perhaps, or a robin. He felt oddly at peace, put in mind of humanity’s gentle, arboreal origins. He wondered why people put so little effort into returning home, when it was so easily done.

At that moment he glanced down at the table. An outlined crow stared back at him. Before he could react, a beaked shadow fell across it. He looked up into the eyes of a crow-headed man.

Gregorian! the bureaucrat thought, with a thrill of alarm. Then he remembered the Black Beast that had haunted Dr. Orphelin and looked about him. Faded drawings of birds and animals were everywhere on the railings and tables. He’d attuned himself to such things, and was now generating his own omens “Welcome to the Haunt’s Roost,” the waiter said.

The bureaucrat pointed to a Flavored Beers sign. “Have you got lime? Or maybe orange?”

The head lifted disdainfully. “That’s only line-feed. For the surrogate trade. No real person would drink that crap.”

“Oh. Uh, well, give me a glass of lager, then. And an explanation for that ship out there.”

The waiter bowed, left, and returned with a beer and an interactive. The set looked out of place, its forced orange-and-purple housing a jarring contrast to the restaurant’s studied art-lessness. He might have been back home in an environmental retreat, trees and faraway glint of river reduced to calculated effect. The beer was thin.

He turned on the set. A smiling young woman in a brocaded vest appeared on its screen. Her braids were tipped with small silver bells. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Marivaud Quinet,

and I am a typical citizen of Miranda during the last great year. I am knowledgeable on and able to discuss matters of historical significance as well as details of daily life. I am not structured to offer advice or pornographic entertainment. This set has been sealed by the Department of Licensing and Inspection, Division of Technology Transfer. Product tampering is illegal and may result in prosecution or even unintentional physical harm.”

“Yes, I know.” The set would implode if its integrity were breached. He wondered if it would be left behind when the restaurant was evacuated, to disappear in a silvery burst of bubbles when salt corrosion finally ate through its housing. “Marivaud, tell me about the Atlantis.”

Her face grew solemn. “That was the final tragedy of our age. We were arrogant, I admit it. We made mistakes. This was the last of them, the one that brought the offplanet powers down on us, to regress our technology back yet another century.”

The bureaucrat remembered just enough history to know this was oversimplification. “What was done was necessary, Marivaud. There must be limits.”

She angrily yanked at a braid, setting its tiny bell tinkling. “We were not like the stupid cattle who live here today. We had pride! We accomplished things! We had our own scientists, our own direction. Our contribution to Prosperan culture was not small. We were known throughout the Seven Sisters!”

“I’m sure you were. Tell me about the ship.”

“The Atlantis was a liner originally. It had to be converted offshore — it was too deep for any harbor. That fragment you see now is only the prow. The true ship was as big as a city.” A montage of antique images of the ship in different configurations, the superstructure rising and falling in great waves. “Well, perhaps it only seemed so, for I saw it from so very many viewpoints, in such an overlapping woozy maze of perception. But I get ahead of myself. The first phase was to build a string of transmitters up and down the Tidewater. They were anchored to the bedrock with carbon-whisker cables and made strong enough to withstand the tides when they rolled across the land.” More images, of thick, bulbous-topped towers this time. “We rigged them with permanently sealed tokamaks, to guarantee their power over the submerged half of the great year. It took ten lesser years to…”

“Marivaud, I haven’t the time for all this. Just the sinking, please.”

“I was at home that day,” Marivaud said. “I’d built a place just above the fall line — what would be the Piedmont coast after the tides. I had a light breakfast, toast with fairy jam sprinkled with ground parsley from my garden, and a glass of stout.”

The image dissolved into the interior of a small cottage. Rain specked the windowpanes, and a fire burned in the hearth. Marivaud hastily wiped a dab of jam from the corner of her mouth. “Out at sea, the morning was bright and sunny. I was flashing from person to person, like sunlight itself. I felt so fresh and happy.”

The scene switched to the deck of the Atlantis.

Green-yellow bodies poured onto the deck. A scoop lifted away. For an instant the bureaucrat did not recognize the struggling creatures. In winter morph they bore very little resemblance to humans. They had long, eelish tails and two slim appendages that might generously be called arms; their faces were streamlined, mouths silent gasps of pain. They twisted, bodies shortening, lengthening, shifting from form to form in a desperate attempt to adapt to the air. The image focused on one, and in the agonized turn of its head the bureaucrat recognized intelligence.

“They’re haunts!”

Marivaud faded half in, serene as a madonna at the breakfast table. She nodded. “Yes, the little darlings.”

A woman in hip boots waded in among the haunts. Her gun flashed as she pressed it to the backs of heads and pulled the trigger. Haunts jerked wildly with each gasp of compressed air.

“That’s the last of them. Over they go.”

Suddenly the image shifted to the viewpoint of one of the haunts. It flew through the air and exploded into the water. Clouds of bubbles gushed away and it fled wildly. To either side swam other haunts, wild and beautiful and ecstatic.

Back on deck, the crew were assembling a pair of projectors. “Let’s run out those ghost nets again. Watch that—”

There was a knock on the door.

Marivaud opened it. A woman with hard, handsome features that echoed her own stood there. “Goguette! Come in, let me take your cloak. Have you eaten yet? What brings you here so early?”

“I’ll take some berry tea.” Goguette sat at the table. “I’ve come to share the jubilee with my little sister. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“No, of course not. Oh! Mousket’s on deck.”

A large, heroically breasted military type faded in, all jaw and dark purpose. “Mousket,” Goguette said. “She’s the commandant, right?”

“Yes. She’s having an affair with the pilot.” A quick glimpse of a slim, straight-built man with cynical eyes. To the bureaucrat she said, “He is an extremely private man. The public nature of their love embarrasses, humiliates, arouses him. That only makes it the sweeter for her. She savors his abasement.”

“Excuse me,” the bureaucrat said. “How do you know all this?”

“Didn’t you notice my earrings?” Marivaud brushed back a curtain of braids, exposing an ear all coral and cream. From it hung an amber leaf, silver-veined and delicate as a dragon’s wing. The image swelled so he could see the embedded elements of a television transceiver, signal processor, and neural feed. It was an elegantly simple arrangement that would let her effortlessly employ all electronic skills: She might talk with friends, receive entertainments, preserve a particularly beautiful sunrise, copy an Old Master drawing in her own hand, do research, take and teach educational courses, or transmit her dreams for machine analysis, at her whim. It made her brain a node within an invisible empire of interactivity, the perfect focus of a circle so infinitely large its center was everywhere, its circumference nowhere.

“Even the offworlders didn’t have these,” she said. “We were the first to combine everything into one continuous medium. It was like being in two worlds at once, like having a second, unseen life. This was when you offworlders were creating that awkward mnemonic palace of yours. Our method was superior. If it hadn’t been for the Atlantis incident, you would be a part of it now.”

“By God, you’re talking about the Trauma!” the bureaucrat cried in rising horror. “There was a ship involved — that must have been the Atlantisl Everyone on it was wired for continuous broadcast.”

“Do you want to listen to this story or narrate it yourself? Yes, of course the crew were all actors, improvisors — what do you call people who lead lives of shaped intensity in order to create public dramas?”

“I don’t think we have them anymore. What are they doing to the haunts?”

“Fitting them with broadcast chips, of course. What did you think this project was all about?”

“Why would you want to do such a thing?”

“That is exactly what I ask her myself!” Goguette said. “There are so many refined, educational, and enriching experiences available on the net. Why waste your life listening in on creatures little better than animals?”

“Ah, but such splendid animals!” Marivaud giggled. “But we are getting away from our story. You” — she addressed the bureaucrat directly — “can experience only the middle range of this. You miss the little things, the burn of rope in chafed hand, Ocean’s smell, the chill of a salt breeze across your arm. And the grand emotions you can only sense from the outside. There is no way we can share more than a fraction of this with you. So I will show you two minor players, a ghostnetter and a flash-surgeon. Their true names have been lost, so I will give the ghostnetter the offworld name of Underbill. The flash-surgeon I will name — Gogo, after my sister.”

Goguette punched her shoulder, she laughed, and they were gone. On deck, the flash-surgeon bolstered her gun. She wiped her brow with the back of her arm, glanced up past the mast-high cranes to see Caliban high above, a disk of ice melting in blue sky. Then down again to see haunts’ heads appearing and disappearing above the water.

She strolled over to the nearest projector. “My God,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”

Underbill looked up from his screen, flashed a smile. “This is the last sounding. When they’re done, our job is over.” His hands were delicate on the controls. The projector swiveled slightly, and the ghost net swung an arc forward. “Watch that group out there.” Into a microphone he said, “Point one.”

Cut to the other projector. Its operator swiveled in the opposite direction. “Point one.”

Far away black dots appeared and disappeared in the water. The ghost net crept closer, its progress traceable by the hissing line of bubbles along its length. The sounding changed direction, angling away. “Clever little babies,” Underbill muttered. “Don’t you run away from me.”

The two lines of white bubbles were slowly converging now, like a giant pair of scissors closing. The haunts caught between the ghost nets fled toward open sea. A few broke away from the main pack and doubled back through the ghost net.

“Oh!” Gogo cried. “They’re getting away.”

That confident grin again. Underbill brushed back his hair. “No, those are ones we caught earlier, with your chips telling them they can go through.”

Gogo was bouncing up and down on her toes in excitement.

She looked very young, almost a child. “Oh! Are you sure? Yes, of course.”

“Relax. Even if we let a few get away — what would it hurt?”

“There are so few of them left,” Gogo said wistfully. “So very few. We should have chipped them while they were still ashore.”

Distractedly, staring down at his screens with perfect concentration, Underbill said, “It wasn’t possible to find them all while they were on land. They’re elusive, you know that.” Into the microphone he said, “Point three.”

“Point three.”

The lines of bubbles were closing. Gogo stared off at them. “Sometimes I wonder should we be doing this at all?”

He looked up at her with frank wonder. “Do you?”

“It hurts them!” Softly: “I hurt them.”

Underbill was perfectly intent on his screen. “It was not so long ago that the indigenes were almost extinct. It was all our own fault. Unwise policies, disease — people even hunted them in the early years. Do you know what put an end to all that?”

“What?”

“The first time an indigene was chipped into the net. The first time people could feel sensation with that purity and clean zest they feel. The first—”

“The first time people could run with them through the magical night, wind in hair, to hunt and mate,” Gogo breathed. She blushed prettily. “I know it’s kind of sick.”

“That’s what I say,” Goguette interpolated.

“Oh, poof!” Marivaud said. “If you’re not enjoying this, there are other shows for you to experience.”

“No, it’s not!” Underbill said firmly. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a natural, healthful thing to be interested in the physical side of love. It shows you have a lively interest in life. Point five,” he said, “and locking.”

“Point five and locking.”

A third ghostnetter snapped on his projector, and a new line of bubbles capped the other two. The pack of haunts wheeled in confusion. Slowly the last ghost net began to draw them in. The crane operator began moving her scoop into position. “Your turn soon.”

“I’ll be ready,” she said. Then, “You’re easy to talk to.”

“Thank you.” He studied her. “What’s really bothering you?”

Her fingers closed on the grip of her gun, opened again. “I’m afraid it won’t be so good. I mean, with them in winter morph.”

“You mean you haven’t tried them?”

“I was afraid.”

Underbill smiled. “Try.”

She hesitated, then nodded. The image switched to the haunts again, fleeing through bubbles, diving to catch a passing crustacean and crunch it in small sharp teeth. Even on the screen, limited to sight and sound, the joy the creatures felt simply swimming along was obvious.

“Oh,” she said. Her eyes widened. “Oh!”

Goguette was washing dishes. A door banged open, and Marivaud came in with raindrops on her cloak and an armful of fresh-cut flowers. “You have so little time,” she said to the bureaucrat as she began arranging them. “We’ll cut forward a few hours, to the jubilee.”

Ocean roared. Abandoning their posts, those of the crew who weren’t already at the rails ran to starboard and stared. It was an impossible sight: all the water in the world humping up, as if the planet had suddenly decided it needed a higher horizon. The Atlantis listed a degree in anticipation. The grandmother of all tidal waves, the polar tsunami, was passing beneath them. The ship shot upward, carried by the power of a continent of ice melting all at once.

The screen cut from face to face, viewpoint to viewpoint, showing stunned eyes, strained faces. They stood deathly still, paralyzed with awe.

“How are they going to escape?” the bureaucrat asked. “Don’t they want to get away?”

“Of course they don’t.”

“Do they want to die?”

“Of course they don’t.” The image wavered, and the human crew turned to metal. The Atlantis was transformed into a ship of the dead, a gothic monstrosity manned by skeletons. “Surrogates were invented on Miranda,” Marivaud said proudly. “We made them first.” The image overlay was restored, and the skeletons fleshed out with human bodies.

A horrid glassy calm settled over the near reaches of Ocean, as if its surface had been stretched taut by the swell. Even as they soared up its side, the water seemed to shrink under the ship. The bureaucrat could hear it whispering and running away. Ocean rose until it filled the eye. The sky vanished, and still it grew. Winds blew across the deck.

Then they topped the swell. Beyond it a wall of white fury reached from horizon to horizon — a line squall. It rushed down on them. Involuntarily crew members moved toward and away from each other, forming clusters and gaps along the rail.

Gogo glanced toward the ghostnetter. Her eyes were bright with excitement. She bit her lip, brushed away a strand of hair from an undone braid. Her face glowed with life. She reached out to hug Underbill.

Startled, Underbill flinched away from her touch. He stared into her face with revulsion. In that unguarded instant his expression said louder than any words: You’re only a woman.

Then the squall overtook the ship, and slammed into its side. The storm swallowed it whole.

“Ahh,” Marivaud sighed. Her sister reached out and seized her hand. Softly, gently, they began to applaud.

In a faraway studio the actors rose up from their gates to take their bows.

Marivaud looked up, face expressionless. The cottage — sister, fire, and all — dissolved in a swirl of rain. “A week later, the bodies began washing up on shore.”

“What?”

“With radiation burns. We had not understood the indigenes so well as we had thought. We did not know that their brain chemistry changed in great winter. Or perhaps it was their psychology that changed. But somehow the warning signal that was supposed to drive them from the towers did not. They huddled as close to the reactors as they could. It was madness. Perhaps their mating instincts were stimulated. Perhaps they just liked the warmth. Who can say?”

Marivaud’s eyes closed. Tears squeezed between the lids. “We could do nothing. Ocean was all storm and fury — nothing could get through. Nothing except for the broadcasts we could not turn off. All the time it took for them to die, the towers up and down the coast transmitted their agony. It was like having a broken tooth in one’s mouth — the tongue keeps returning to it, drawn by the pain. I could not leave it alone.

“Sorrow swept over Continent in a great electronic wave. It was as if an enchantment had passed over the land. One moment everything was bright and beautiful. The next it was gray and lifeless. As a people we had been optimistic, sure of ourselves. Now we were… dispossesed, without a future. Those who had the strength not to listen were affected by the rest of us.

“I myself would have starved, had my sister not hand-fed me for a week. She smashed my earrings. She bullied me back to life. But after that I no longer laughed so often as before. There were people who died. Others went mad. The shame was great. When the offplanet powers convened and took away the last of our science, there was little protest. We knew we deserved it. So the high autumn of our technology passed, and we lapsed into eternal winter.”

Marivaud fell silent, her face pale and sad. The bureaucrat turned off the interactive.

After a while, a dog-headed waiter came and took the set away.

The bureaucrat drained the last of his beer and leaned back to watch the surrogates dining. It amused him in a melancholy way, to see them lifting glasses and tasting food no one else could see, in a perfect and meaningless mime show. By the railing other surrogates strolled and chatted. One of them was staring at him.

Their eyes met, and the surrogate bowed. It came to the table and took a chair. For an instant the bureaucrat couldn’t place the keen, aged face that burned on the screen. Then his schoolboy eidetics kicked in. “You’re the shopkeeper,” he said. “In Lightfoot. Your name is… Pouffe, is that right?”

There was a squint of madness in the old man’s grin. “That’s right, that’s right. Gonna ask how I found you here?”

“How did you find me here?”

“Tracked you down. Tracked you to Cobbs Creek. Gated ahead to Clay Bank, you weren’t there. Gated back to Cobbs Creek, they told me you hadn’t been gone long. I knew you’d stop here. Never met an offworlder yet who could resist taking in the sights. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Actually I’m here by chance.”

“Sure you are.” Pouffe’s lips twisted sardonically. “But I would’ve found you anyway. This isn’t the only place I’ve been waiting. Been shunting between four different gates all morning.”

“That must have cost you a lot of money.”

“Yes, that’s the key.” The old man leaned forward, eyebrows rising significantly. “A lot of money. It cost me a lot of money. But I’ve got plenty of it. I’m a rich man, if you get my drift.”

“Not exactly.”

“I’ve seen your commercial. You know, about the magician. The one who can—”

“Wait a minute, that’s not my—”

“—adapt a man to live and breathe underwater. Well, I—”

“Stop. This is nonsense.”

“—want to find him. I understand you can’t tell just anybody. I’ll pay for the information, and I’ll pay well.” He reached across the table to seize the bureaucrat’s hand.

“I don’t have what you want!” The bureaucrat shook away the grasping metal hand and stood. “Even if I knew where he was, I wouldn’t tell you. The man is a fraud. He can’t do any of what he claims.”

“That’s not what you said on television.”

“Shopkeeper Pouffe, take a look out here.” He led the avid old man to the railing. “Take a good look. Imagine what this is going to be like in a few months. No houses, no shelter. Seaweed where the trees are now, and angel sharks feeding in the black water. The marine life here has had millions of years to adapt to this environment. You, on the other hand, are a civilized man with a genome foreign not only to Ocean but to this entire star system. Even if Gregorian could deliver on his wild claims — and I assure you that he cannot — what kind of life could you lead here? What would you eat? How could you expect to survive?”

“Excuse me, sir,” a bull-headed waiter said.

He swept Pouffe’s surrogate aside, placed a hand on the bureaucrat’s back, and shoved. “Hey, what — !” Pouffe cried.

The bureaucrat fell forward. Dizzily he clutched at the railing. The man-bull laughed, and the bureaucrat felt his legs being lifted up behind him. All existence swept sideways, trees wheeling in the sky beneath, sand turning up overfoot. The hands were warm and firm on his ankles. Then, suddenly, they were gone.

Somebody screamed. In a blast of pain the bureaucrat crashed flat on his stomach. His arms were still clenched about the rail. Helplessly he gazed up to see the waiter and Pouffe’s surrogate locked in a hug. They might have been dancing. The man shoved violently, and the telescreen snapped off. It bounced off the edge of the platform. Headless, the machine ducked and spun. The two crashed into the railing. Wood splintered and gave.

They toppled over the edge.

Surrogates, waiters, even human customers, rushed to stare down over the rail. In the crush the bureaucrat was ignored.

Slowly he pulled himself up. His legs and spine ached. One knee trembled. It felt wet. He clutched the rail with both hands and looked down. Long way down to the ground. His assailant lay unmoving atop the broken surrogate. He looked tiny as a doll. The bull mask had fallen away, revealing familiar round features.

It was Veilleur — the false Chu.

The bureaucrat stared. He’s dead, he thought. That could have been me. A metal hand took his elbow and pulled him back. “This way,” Pouffe said quietly. “Before anybody thinks to connect you with him down there.”

He was led to a secluded table back among the leaves.

“You travel in fast company. Can you tell me what that was all about?”

“No,” the bureaucrat said. “I — I know who was behind it, but not the specifics, no.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t stop shuddering,” he said. Then, “I owe you my life, shopkeeper.”

“That’s right, you do. It was all that combat training back when I was a young man. Fuckin’ surrogates are so weak, it’s next to impossible to overpower someone with one. You got to turn their own strength against them.” That smug, self-satisfied smirk floated on the screen. “You know how to repay me.”

The bureaucrat sighed, stared down at his hands on the table. Weak, mortal hands. He gathered himself together. “Look—”

“No, you look! I spent four years in the Caverns — that’s what they call the military brig on Caliban. Do you have any idea what it was like there?”

“Pretty grim, I’d imagine.”

“No, it’s not! That’s the hell of it. It’s all perfectly humane and bland and impersonal. Some snot-nosed tech plugs you into a simple visualization program, hooks up an IV feed and a physical-therapy program so your body don’t rot, and then leaves you imprisoned inside your own skull.

“It’s like a monastery in there, or maybe a nice clean hotel. Nothing to hurt or alarm you. Your emotions are cranked way down low. You’re as comfy as a mouth sucking on a tit. You don’t feel anything but warm, don’t hear nothing but soft, comfortable noises. Nothing can hurt you. Nothing can reach you. You can’t escape.

“Four years!

“When you get out, they give you three months’ intensive rehab before you can accept the evidence of your own eyes. Even then, you still have nights when you wake up and don’t believe you exist anymore.

“I came out of that place and went to ground. I swore I’d never again go anywhere I couldn’t go in person. That was a lifetime ago, and I’ve kept that vow right up to this very day. Do you hear what I’m telling you?”

“You’re saying this is important to you.”

“Damn right, it’s important!”

“Is your life important to you? Then give up this childish fantasy. These notions of coral castles and mermaids singing. Shopkeeper, this is the real world. You must make the best of what there is.”

Somewhere far away, a truck horn was honking regularly, insistently. The bureaucrat realized that he had been hearing it for some time. The migration must have cleared the road.

He stood. “I have to leave now.”

When he tried to walk away, Pouffe danced after him. “We haven’t talked money yet! I haven’t told you how much I can pay.”

“Please. This is futile.”

“No, you’ve got to listen to me.” Pouffe was crying now, desperate hot tears running down his rutted face. “You’ve got to listen.”

“Is this man bothering you, sir?” a waiter asked.

The bureaucrat hesitated for a second. Then he nodded, and the waiter turned the surrogate off.

Back on the ground, he could not find the New Born King. The truck was gone. Chu stood on the running board of another, the Lion Heart, leaning on the horn. She stepped down at his approach. “You look odd. Pale.”

“I should,” he said flatly. “One of Gregorian’s people just tried to kill me.”

When he was done telling his story, Chu slammed her fist into her hand, over and over again. “That sonofabitch!” she said. “The fucking nerve of him.” She was genuinely angry.

The bureaucrat was surprised and a little flattered by Chu’s show of emotion. He had never been quite sure that she accepted him, and always suspected she thought of him as merely an offworld buffoon, someone to be tolerated rather than respected. He felt an unexpected glow of gratitude. “I remember you telling me once not to take any of this personally.”

“Yeah, well, when somebody tries to kill your partner, that kind of changes the game. Gregorian is going to pay for this. I’ll see that he does.” She wheeled sharply away, and stepped on a crab. “Shit!” She kicked the mutilated body away. “What a fucking glorious day.”

“Say.” The bureaucrat peered around. “Where’s Mintou-chian?”

“Gone,” Chu said. She stood on one foot, wiping the sole of her shoe with a handkerchief. Then she threw the cloth into the weeds. “He took your briefcase with him too.”

“What?”

“It was the damnedest thing. Soon as the crabs dwindled, he fired up the truck, snatched the briefcase, and lit off like his ass was on fire.” Chu shook her head. “That was when I started honking the horn here, trying to call you back.”

“Didn’t he know that my briefcase will come back to me?”

“Obviously not.”

It took the briefcase half an hour to find its way back to him. Chu had already made arrangements with the Lion Heart’s driver, and had gone off to view the corpse of her impersonator. “Oughta be good for a few laughs,” she said grimly. “Maybe I’ll cut off an ear for a souvenir.”

The briefcase daintily picked its way down the road. When it reached the bureaucrat, it set itself down and retracted its legs. He picked it up. “Hard time getting away?”

“No. Mintouchian didn’t even bother strapping me down. I waited until he’d gone a couple of miles downriver and was feeling confident, then rolled down the window and jumped.”

“Hum.” The bureaucrat was silent for a moment. Then he said, “We’ll be here a few hours more than planned. There’s been a touch of violence, and we still have to deal with the nationals. Probably have to make a statement, maybe file a field report.”

The briefcase, familiar with his moods, said nothing.

The bureaucrat thought about Gregorian, of the magician’s abrupt shift from a distant mocking disdain to outright enmity. He’d almost died just now. He thought about Mintouchian, and about Dr. Orphelin’s warning that he had a traitor with him. Everything was changed, horribly changed.

“Did Mintouchian look surprised when you jumped?”

“He looked like he’d swallowed a toad. You should’ve been there — it would’ve made you laugh.”

“I suppose.”

But he doubted it. The bureaucrat didn’t feel like laughing. He didn’t feel like laughing at all.