Stations of the Tide

10. A Service for the Dead

That morning, the doctor wind swept a swarm of barnacle flies inland, and when the bureaucrat awoke, the houseboat was encrusted with their shells. He had to lean on the door to break it open. The salt smell of Ocean was everywhere, like the scent of a lover who has visited in the night and is gone, leaving only this ambiguous promise of return.

He scowled and spat over the houseboat’s edge.

The bottom tread of his stoop was missing. The bureaucrat hopped down onto the bare patch worn into the black earth beneath. He began to thread his way through the scattered hulks of the boats’ graveyard.

“Hey!”

He looked up. A golden-haired boy stood naked atop a cradled yacht with a stove-in bow, pissing into the rosebushes. One of the gang of scavengers who lived there. He waved with his free hand. The census bracelet glittered dully on his wrist. “That thing you were looking for? We found a whole pile of them. Come on over and take your pick.”

Five minutes later the bureaucrat had stowed a tightly bound bundle in his room, and was off again to Clay Bank. A sour church bell clanged in the distance, calling the faithful to meditation. The sky was overcast and gray. A light, almost imperceptible drizzle fell.

This far east, the farmland was too rich to squander, and save for the plantation buildings, most dwellings hugged the river. Unpainted clapboard houses teetered precariously on the lip of a high earth bluff. Halfway down to the water, a walk had been cut into the dirt and planked over, to serve a warren of jugs and storerooms dug into the bank itself.

Lieutenant Chu was waiting for him on the boardwalk outside the diner. Boats bobbed on the river, tied to pilings across which ran docks more gap than substance, the idea of Dock a beau ideal honored more in the intent than the execution. The drizzle chose that instant to intensify into rain, drops hissing on the surface of the water. They ducked inside.

“I got another warning,” the bureaucrat said when they’d found a table. He opened his briefcase and removed a handful of black feathers. A crow’s wing. “It was tacked to my door when I got home last night.”

“Funny business,” Chu said. She spread the wing, examined the bloody shoulder joint, folded open the tiny fingers at the metacarpal joint, and gave it back. “It must be those scavengers doing it. I don’t know why you insist on living there.”

The bureaucrat shrugged irritably. “Whoever’s actually placing these things, it’s at Gregorian’s instigation. I recognize his style.” Privately, though, it bothered him that Gregorian had changed tactics again, switching back from attempted assassination to mockery and harassment. It made no sense.

The diner was dim and narrow, a tunnel dug straight back from the bank. The tables halfway down were drawn away from the pool of light shed by the single milky glass skylight. Water fell from leaky seams into waiting tins. To the rear the kitchen help laughed and gossiped while the leaping flames of a gas range chased shadows about their faces. A waitress came to their table and slapped down trenchers of salt meat and mashed yams. Chu wrinkled her nose. “You got any — ?”

“No.” The evac boys at the next table laughed. “You want breakfast, you’ll take what you’re given.”

“Arrogant bitch,” Chu grumbled. “If this weren’t the last eatery in Clay Bank, I’d…”

A young soldier leaned over from the next table. “Easy up,” he said in that broad northern accent all the local Authority muscle had, Tidewater types brought in from Blackwater and Vineland provinces because they had no ties here. “Last airship comes through tomorrow. They’ve got to clean out their larder.” His beret, folded under a shoulder strap, had been customized with a rooster’s tail.

Chu stared at him until he reddened and turned away.

In a niche by the table a television was showing a documentary on the firing of the jugs. There was antique footage of workers sealing up the newdug clay. Narrow openings were left at the bottoms of what would be the doors, and to the top rear of the tunnels. Then the wood packed inside was fired. Pillars of smoke rose up like the ghosts of trees and became a forest whose canopy blotted out the sun. The show had been playing over and over ever since its original broadcast on one of the government channels. Nobody noticed it anymore.

The heat required to glaze the walls was — The bureaucrat reached over to switch channels. My brother died at sea! What was I supposed to do? I’m not his keeper, you know.

“You watch that crap?” Chu asked.

“It’s involving.”

“Who’s the weedy geek?”

“Now that’s an interesting question. He’s supposed to be Shelley, Eden’s cousin — you know, the little girl who saw the unicorn? But she had two cousins, identical twins—” Chu snorted. “All right, I admit it’s implausible. But, you know, even in the Inner Circle it happens occasionally. That’s why they have the genetic-tagging techniques, to mark them as separate individuals when it does occur.”

But Chu wasn’t listening. She stared off through the doorway into the gray rain, pensively silent. Around them rose the babble of voices from waitresses and kitchen workers, soldiers and civilians, happy and a little shrill with the excitement of the impending evacuation, all feeling the intoxication of radical change.

All right! Yes, I killed him. 1 killed my brother! Are you happy now?

“God,” Chu said. “This must be the most boring place in the universe.”

Holding his briefcase out for balance, the bureaucrat followed Chu down the rain-slick boardwalk. They passed a stairway dug into the dirt, once braced and planked, now crumbled into a narrow slant and become almost a gully. Water gushed from its mouth. “I’ve requisitioned good seats on the heliostat tomorrow,” Chu said.

The bureaucrat grunted.

“Come on. If we miss the ship, we’ll be taken out on one of the cattleboats.” She tugged on her census bracelet in annoyance. “You haven’t seen what they’re like.”

A crate crashed onto the walk before them, and they danced back. It bounced over the edge, into the water. Scavengers were ransacking a storeroom, noisily smashing things and throwing them outside. A slick of trash floated downriver, all but motionless in the sleepy current, spreading as it withdrew: old mattresses slowly drowning, wicker baskets and dried flowers, splintered armchairs and fiddles, toy sailboats lying on their sides in the water. The scavengers were shouting, given over completely to the destruction of objects they could never afford before and could not pay the freight on now.

They came to a jug with a weathered sign hung over the door showing a silvery skeletal figure. The gate was the establishment’s sole legitimate enterprise and ostensible reason for being, though everyone knew the place was actually a paintbox. “What about the flier?” the bureaucrat asked. “No word yet from the Stone House?”

“No, and by now it’s safe to say there’s not going to be. Look, we’ve been here so long I’m growing moss on my behind. We’ve done everything we can do, the trail is cold. What good is a flier going to do anyway? It’s time to give up.”

“I’ll take your sentiments under advisement.” The bureaucrat stepped within. Chu did not follow.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been here,” the bureaucrat said. Korda’s quarters were spacious in a city where space translated directly into wealth. The grass floor was broken into staggered planes, and the arrays of stone tools set into the angled walls were indirectly lit by spots bounced off rotating porphyry columns. Everything was agonizingly clean. Even the dwarf cherry trees were potted in mirror-symmetrical pairs.

“You’re not here now,” Korda replied unsentimentally. “Why are you bothering me at home? Couldn’t it wait for the office?”

“You’ve been avoiding me at the office.”

Korda frowned. “Nonsense.”

“Pardon me.” A man in a white ceramic mask entered the room. He wore a loose wraparound, such as was the style in the worlds of Deneb. “The vote is coming up, and you’re needed.”

“You wait here.” At the archway to the next room Korda hesitated and asked the man in the mask, “Aren’t you coming, Vasli?”

The eyeless white face glanced downward. “It is my place on the Committee that is being debated just now. It’s probably best for all concerned if I wait this one out.”

The Denebian drifted to the center of the room, stood motionless. His hands were lost in the wraparound’s sleeves, his head overshadowed by the hood. He looked subtly unhuman, his motions too graceful, his stillness too complete. He was, the bureaucrat realized suddenly, that rarest of entities, a permanent surrogate. Their glances met.

“I make you nervous,” Vasli said.

“Oh no, of course not. It’s just. . .”

“It’s just that you find my form unsettling. I know. There is no reason to let an overfastidious sense of tact lead you into falsehood. I believe in truth. I am a humble servant of truth. Were it in my power, I would have no lies or evasions anywhere, nothing concealed, hidden, or locked away from common sight.”

The bureaucrat went to the wall, examined the collection of stone points there: fish points from Miranda, fowling points from Earth, worming points from Govinda. “Forgive me if I seem blunt, but such radical sentiments make you sound like a Free Informationist.”

“That is because I am one.”

The bureaucrat felt as if he’d come face to face with a mythological beast, a talking mountain, say, or Eden’s unicorn. “You are?” he said stupidly.

“Of course I am. I gave up my own world to share what I knew with your people. It takes a radical to so destroy his own life, yes? To exile himself among people who feel uncomfortable in his presence, who fear his most deeply held values as treason, and who were not interested in what he had to say in the first place.”

“Yes, but the concept of Free Information is…”

“Extreme? Dangerous?” He spread his arms. “Do I look dangerous?”

“You would give everyone total access to all information?”

“Yes, all of it.”

“Regardless of the harm it could do?”

“Look. You are like a little boy who is walking along in a low country, and has found a hole in one of the dikes. You plug it with your finger, and for a moment all is well. The sea grows a little stronger, a little bigger. The hole crumbles about the edges. You have to thrust your entire hand within. Then your arm, up to the shoulder. Soon you have climbed entirely within the hole and are plugging it with your body. When it grows bigger, you take a deep breath and puff yourself up with air. But still, the ocean is there, and growing stronger. You have done nothing about your basic problem.”

“What would you have us do with the dangerous information?”

“Master it! Control it!”

“How?”

“I have no idea. I am but a single man. But if you applied all the brain and muscle now wasted in a futile attempt to control—” Abruptly he stopped. For a long moment he stared at the bureaucrat, as if mastering his emotions. His shoulders slumped. “Forgive me. I am taking out my anger on you. I heard just this morning that my original — the Vasli I once was, the man who thought he had so much to share — died, and I haven’t sorted out my feelings yet.”

“I’m sorry,” the bureaucrat said. “This must be a sorrowful time for you.”

Vasli shook his head. “I don’t know whether to cry or laugh. He was myself, and yet he was also the one who condemned me to die here — worldless, disembodied, alone.”

That blind face stared upward through a thousand layers of the floating city into the outer darkness. “I have been imagining what it would be like to walk the fields of Storr again, to smell the chukchuk and rhu. To see the foibles aflame against the western stars, and hear the flowers sing! Then, I think, I could die content.”

“You could always go back.”

“You mistake the signal for the message. It is true that I could have myself copied and that signal transmitted home to Deneb. But I would still be here. I could then kill myself, I suppose, but other than salving the conscience of my agent, what good would it do?” He glanced at the bureaucrat’s surrogate body, tilted one edge of the mask up scornfully. “But I do not expect you to understand.”

The bureaucrat changed the subject. “May I ask,” he said, “just what work your committee is engaged on?”

“The Citizens’ Committee for the Prevention of Genocide, you mean? Why, just that. The destruction of indigenous races is a problem that exists in all colonized systems, my own not the least. It is too late for Miranda, of course, but perhaps some protocols will arise here that may be worth transmitting home.”

“It is possible,” the bureaucrat said cautiously, “that you’re being overpessimistic. I, ah, know of people who have seen haunts, who have actually met and talked with them in recent memory. It’s possible that the race may yet survive.”

“No. It is not.”

The Denebian’s words were spoken with such absolute conviction that the bureaucrat was taken aback. “Why not?”

“There is for all species a minimum sustainable population. Once the population falls below a certain number, it is doomed. It lacks the plasticity necessary to survive the normal variations in its environment. Say, for example, that you have a species of bird reduced to a dozen specimens. You protect them, and they increase in number to a thousand. But they are still, genetically, only a dozen individuals expressed in a myriad of clones. Their genome is brittle. One day the sun will rise wrong and they will all die. A disease, say, that kills one will kill all. Any number of things.

“Your haunts cannot exist in very large numbers, or their existence would be known for certain. Korda think otherwise, but he is a fool. It does not matter if a few individuals have lingered on beyond their time. As a race, they are dead.”

Korda chose that moment to return. “You can go in now,” he said. “The Committee wishes to speak with you. I think you’ll be pleased with what they have to say.” Only one who knew Korda well could have caught that overpolite edge to his voice that meant he had just suffered one of his rare defeats.

With a curt bow to the bureaucrat, Vasli glided away. Korda stared after him.

“I didn’t know haunts were one of your interests,” the bureaucrat remarked.

“They are my only interest,” Korda said unguardedly. Then, catching himself, “My only hobby, I mean.”

But the words were out. Revelation cascaded into the past like a line of dominoes toppling. A thousand small remarks Korda had made, a hundred missed meetings, a dozen odd reversals of policies, all were explained. The bureaucrat carefully did not let his face change expression. “So what is it?” Korda asked. “Just what do you want?”

“I need a flier. The Stone House is acting balky, and I’ve been waiting on them for weeks. If you could pull a few strings, I could wrap this affair up in a day. I know where Gregorian is now.”

“Do you?” Korda looked at him sharply. Then, “Very well, I’ll do it.” He touched a data outlet. “Tomorrow morning at Tower Hill, it’ll be waiting for you.”

“Thank you.”

Korda hesitated oddly, looking away and then back again, as if he couldn’t quite put something into words. Then, in a puzzled tone, he asked, “Why are you staring at my feet?”

“Oh, no reason,” the bureaucrat said. “No reason at all.” But even as he deactivated the surrogate, he was thinking, Lots of people have luxury goods from other star systems. The robot freighters crawl between the stars slowly but regularly. Gre-gorian’s father isn’t alone in wearing outsystem boots. Boots of red leather.

The paintbox was silent when he emerged from the gate. Through the open doorway he could see that evening had come, the pearly gray light failing toward dusk. The bouncer sat in a rickety chair, staring out into the rain. The tunnels leading back into the earth were lightless holes.

For an instant of mingled fear and relief the bureaucrat thought the place closed permanently. Then he realized how early it was still; the women would not be on duty yet.

“Excuse me,” he said to the bouncer. The man looked up incuriously; he was a round little dandy, curly-haired and balding, a ridiculous creation. “I’m looking for someone who works here. The—” He hesitated, realizing that he knew the women here only by the nicknames the young soldiers used for them, the Pig, the Goat, and the Horse. “The tall one with short hair.”

“Try the diner.”

“Thanks.”

In a shadowy doorway alongside the diner the bureaucrat waited for the Horse to emerge. He felt like a ghost — sad, voiceless, and unseen, a melancholy pair of eyes staring into the world of the living. He lacked the stomach to wait in the light.

Occasionally people emerged from the diner, and because a plank overhang sheltered the boardwalk there from the rain, they would usually pause to gather themselves together before braving the weather. Once, Chu stopped not an arm’s length away, engrossed in light banter with her young rooster. ” — all alike,” she said. “You think that just because you’ve got that thing between your legs, you’re hot stuff. Well, there’s nothing special about having a penis. Hell, even I have one of them.”

He laughed unsurely.

“You don’t believe me? I’m perfectly serious.” She took out a handful of transition notes. “You care to place a little money on that? Why are you shaking your head? Suddenly you believe me? Tell you what, I’ll give you a chance to get your money back. Double or nothing, mine is bigger than yours.”

The rooster hesitated, then grinned. “Okay,” he said. He reached for his belt.

“Hold on, my pretty, not out here.” Chu took his arm. “We’ll compare lengths in private.” She led him away.

The bureaucrat felt a wry amusement. He remembered when Chu had first shown him the trophy she’d cut from the false Chu, the day it had returned from the taxidermist. She’d opened the box and held it up laughing. “Why would you want to save such a thing?” he had asked.

“It’ll get me the young fish.” She’d swooped it through the air, the way a child would a toy airplane, then lightly kissed the air before its tip and returned it to the box. “Take my word for it. If you want to catch the sweet young things, there’s nothing like owning a big cock.”

Eventually the Horse emerged from the diner, alone. She paused to put up the hood on her raincoat. He stepped from the shadows, and coughed into his hand. “I want to hire your services,” he said. “Not here. I have a place in the old boatyard.”

She looked him up and down, then shrugged. “All right, but I’ll have to charge you for the travel time.” She took his hand and waggled the tattooed finger. “And I can’t spend all night withyou. There’s a midnight mass at the church, a service for the dead.”

“Fine,” he said.

“It’s the last service, and I don’t want to miss it. They’ll be chanting for everyone who ever died in Clay Bank. I got people I want to remember.” She took his arm. “Lead the way.” She was a homely woman, her face harsh and weathered as old wood. Under other circumstances he could imagine their being friends.

They trudged down the river road in silence. The bureaucrat wore a poncho his briefcase had made for him. After a time his speechlessness began to feel oppressive. “What’s your name?” he asked awkwardly.

“You mean my real name or the name I use?”

“Whichever.”

“It’s Arcadia.”

At the houseboat the bureaucrat lit a candle and placed it in its sconce, while Arcadia stamped the mud from her feet. “I’ll sure be glad when this rain ends!” she remarked.

The bundle he’d bought from the scavengers that morning was still on the nightstand. While he was gone, somebody had pulled the covers back from his bed and placed a single black crow’s feather at its center. He brushed it to the floor.

Arcadia found a hook for her raincoat. She pushed up her census bracelet to rub her wrist. “I’ve got a rash from this. You know what I think? I think adamantine is going to be a fetish item in a year or two. People will pay good money to have these things put on them.”

Thrusting the bundle at her, the bureaucrat said, “Here. Take off all your clothes and change into this.”

She looked at the bundle with interest, shrugged again. “All right.”

Til be right back.”

He took a pair of gardening shears from his briefcase and went out into the rain. It was pitch-dark outside, and it took him a long time to clip the large armful of flowers he needed.

By the time he returned, Arcadia had changed into the fantasia. It was covered with orange and red sequins, and cut all wrong. But it fit her well enough. It would do.

“Roses! How nice.” Arcadia clapped her hands like a little girl. She spun about so that the fantasia swirled about her in a fluid, magical motion. “Do you like how I look?”

“Lie down on the bed,” he said roughly. “Pull the skirt up over your waist.”

She obeyed.

The bureaucrat dumped the roses to the side of the bed in a wet pile. Arcadia’s skin was pale as marble in the faint light, the mounded hair between her legs dark and shadowy. Her flesh looked as though it would be cold to the touch.

By the time he had shed his own clothing, the bureaucrat was erect. The room was sweet with the scent of roses.

He closed his eyes as he entered her. He didn’t open them again until he was done.