Stations of the Tide

13. A View from a Height

Three men sat around the campfire.

The night was cold. The bureaucrat smoked black hashish laced with amphetamines to keep awake. Gregorian held the pipe to his mouth, urging him to suck in deeply and hold the smoke for as long as possible. The hash made the bureaucrat’s head buzz. His feet were impossibly distant, a full day’s travel down the giant’s causeway of his legs. Marooned on the mountainside, he still felt monstrously calm and alert, wired into the celestial telegraph with a direct line to the old wisdom lying at the base of his skull like moonstones in an amalgam of coprolites and saber-tooth bones. For an instant he lost hold of external reality, and plunged deep into the submarine caverns of perception, a privateer in search of booty. Then he exhaled. Oceans of smoke gushed out into the world.

The snow had stopped long ago.

Gregorian finished off the pipe, knocked out the coals against the heel of his boot, and carefully scraped the bowl clean. “Do you know how Ararat was lost?” he asked. “It’s an interesting story.”

“Tell me,” the bureaucrat said.

Their companion said nothing.

“To understand you must first know that the upper reaches of the city lie above the great winter high-tide mark. Oh, the jubilee tides smash over it all right — but it’s built to withstand the force. When the storms subside, it’s an island. A useful little place militarily — isolated, easily fortified, easily defended. System Defense used it as a planning center during the Third Unification. That’s when it was hardened. There are probably a lot of these secret places scattered about.”

The magician took a branch from the flames and stirred the fire, sending sparks swirling madly up the smoke into the sky. “As a standard procedure, System Defense masked their involvement with a civilian caretaker organization under the nominal auspices of Cultural Dissemination Oversight, with control exerted through yet another civilian front. During the reorganization at the end of the violent phase of Unification…”

The explanation went on and on. The bureaucrat listened only with the surface of his mind, letting the words pass over him in murmurous waves while he studied his opponent. Squatting before the fire, Gregorian seemed more beast than man. The flames threw red shadows up on his face, and the cool greenish light from the window wall ignited his hair from behind. Sometimes the light reached his teeth and lit up the grin. But none of it ever reached his eyes.

Decades passed. Organizations arose and fell, were folded into one another, shed responsibility, picked up new authority, and split off from parent bodies. By the time Ocean receded and great spring began, Ararat was so deeply entangled in the political substance of the System that it could be neither softened nor declassified.

“The stupidity of it — the waste! An entire city, the work of thousands of lifetimes, lost through mere regulation. And yet this is but the smallest fraction of the invisible empire of Ignorance imposed on us by the powers above.”

In person Gregorian’s voice was eerily familiar, just as his features could be decoded as a ruggeder, more compelling version of Korda’s own. “That sounds like something your father might say,” the bureaucrat remarked.

Gregorian looked up sharply. “I don’t need you here!” He pointed to the still figure across the fire from him. “Pouffe is enough company for me. If you want to die early, I can—”

“It was only an observation!”

The magician eased back, his rage gone as abruptly as it had arisen. “Yes, that’s true. Yes. Well, of course the information all came from Korda originally. It was one of his projects. He spent years trying to have Ararat declassified, tilting at windmills and fighting phantoms. Old Laocoon strangled by red tape.” He threw back his head and laughed. “But what do you and I care about that? More fool he for having wasted his life. I don’t suppose you remembered to bring my notebook?”

“I left it in my briefcase. Back in the flier.”

“Ah, well. It was of purely sentimental value. We must all learn to give things up.”

“Tell me something,” the bureaucrat said carefully. Gregorian nodded his great head. “What did Earth’s agent give you — was it proscribed technology? Or was it nothing at all?”

Gregorian pondered the question with mocking seriousness, and then, as if delivering the punch line of a particularly good joke, said, “Nothing at all. I wanted to force Korda to send somebody after me when I disappeared. It was bait, that was all.”

“Then I can go now.”

Gregorian chuckled. The fire leaned away under a sudden gust of wind, and he was a black silhouette against the window wall. A tattoo of a comet flared to life, swam across his arm, and slowly faded. A second marking fired and a third, crawling about under his skin like fire-worms on an embered log. “Stay,” he said. “We have so much to talk about.”

The magician leaned back again, in no particular hurry to get down to specifics. The city fell away quickly here, to vague silver and gray lands stretching flat and away toward Ocean, invisible at the horizon. Strange winds and smells were astir. Cinnamyrtle and isolarch haunted the nose.

The fire had been built on a high terrace, in a crumbling depression of stone that Gregorian called a “whale wallow.” Like all of Ararat, it was heavily eroded. Hooks protruded from rounded walls, their purpose lost. Rooms were choked with coral and mud. Fag ends of braided cables and the ribs of sea creatures jutted from among the barnacles. Here and there sheets of adamantine stood exposed, perfect and incorruptible. But these Perimeter Defense retrofits were rare, jarring intrusions in the aged city.

The bureaucrat leaned back against a carbon-whisker strut. The chains that shackled him to it rattled when he moved. To one side he could see into the command room with its stacked crates of food and survival gear. To the other, he could look out into the wide and windy world. At his back he felt the empty streets, narrow and dark, staring at him. “I want to take you up on your offer,” he said.

Lazily Gregorian said, “Now what offer do you mean?”

“I want to be your apprentice.”

“Oh, that. No, that was never meant seriously. It was intended to make you confident enough to chase me here, that was all.”

“Nevertheless.”

“You don’t know what’s involved, little brother. I might ask you to do anything, to — oh, crucify a dog, say. Or assassinate a stranger. The process changes you. I might even order you to fuck old Pouffe. Would you be willing to do that? Right here and now?”

PoufFe sat opposite the two of them, his back to the land. His face was puffy and unhealthy in the window light. His eyes were two dim stars, unblinking. The bureaucrat hesitated. “If necessary.”

“You’re not even a convincing liar. No, you must remain as you are, chained to that strut. You must stay there until the tides come. And then you must die. There is no way out. Only I could release you, and my will is unwavering.”

They both fell silent. The bureaucrat imagined he could hear Ocean, soft as a whisper in the distance.

“Tell me,” Gregorian said, “do you think that any haunts have survived into the current age?”

Surprised, the bureaucrat said, “You sent your father the head of one.”

“That? Nothing but a cheap trick I brewed up with what remains of Korda’s old lab equipment. I had all these rich old corpses left over from my money-raising endeavors, and it seemed a good use for one. But you — they tell me you spoke with a fox-headed haunt back in Cobbs Creek. What do you think? Was it real? Be honest now, there’s no reason not to.”

“They told me it was a nature spirit—”

“Bah!”

“But… Well, if he wasn’t one of your people in a mask, then I can’t imagine what else he could have been. Other than an actual haunt. He was a living being, that much I’m sure of, as solid as you or me.”

“Ahhhh.” The groan rested uneasily somewhere between satisfaction and pain. Then, casually, Gregorian drew an enormous knife from his belt. Its blade was blackened steel, its hilt elfinbone. “He’ll be ready now.”

Gregorian walked over to Pouffe, and crouched. He cut a long sliver of flesh from the old shopkeeper’s forehead. It bled hardly at all. The flesh was faintly luminous, not with the bright light of Undine’s iridobacteria but with a softer, greenish quality. It glowed in the magician’s fingers, lit up the inside of his mouth, and disappeared. He chewed noisily.

“The feverdancers are at their peak now. Ten minutes earlier and they’d still be infectious. An hour later and their toxins will begin to break down.” He spat out the sliver into his palm, and cut it in two with his knife. “Here.” He held one half to the bureaucrat’s lips. “Take. Eat.”

The bureaucrat turned away in disgust.

“Eat!” The flesh had no strong smell; or else the woodsmoke drowned it out. “I brought you here because this sacrament works best when shared. If you won’t partake, I have no use for you.” He did not reply. “Think. So long as you live, there is hope. A meteorite might strike me dead. Korda might arrive with a detachment of marines. Who can say? I might even change my mind. With death, all possibilities end. Open your mouth.”

He obeyed. The cool flesh was pressed onto his tongue. It felt rubbery. “Chew. Chew and don’t swallow until it’s gone.” Vomit rose in his throat, but he choked it down. The flesh had little flavor, but that little was distinctive. He would taste it in his mouth for the rest of his life.

Gregorian patted his knee and sat back down. “Be grateful. I’ve taught you a valuable lesson. Most people never do learn exactly how much they will do to stay alive.”

The bureaucrat kept chewing. His mouth felt numb, and his head swam dizzily. “I feel strange.”

“Did you ever hate someone? I mean, really hate. So badly that your own happiness meant nothing, or even your own life, so long as you could ruin his?”

Their chewing synchronized, jaws working in unison, noisily, wetly. “No,” the bureaucrat heard somebody say. It was his own voice. That was, in some indefinable way, odd. He was losing all sense of locality, his awareness spreading over an ever-widening area, so that he was nowhere specifically there, but only partook of ranges of greater or lesser probability. “I have,” he said in the magician’s voice.

Startled, he opened his eyes and stared into his own face.

The shock threw him back into his own body. “Who did you hate so badly?” he managed to gasp. Losing identity again. He heard Gregorian laugh, a mad, sick sound with undertones of misery, and it came as much from him as from the magician. “Myself,” he said, that deep voice rumbling in the pit of his stomach. “Myself, God, Korda — about in equal proportions. I’ve never really been able to sort the three of us out.”

The magician went on speaking and, compelled by the drug, the bureaucrat fell so deeply into the words that his last trace of self melted away. Individuation unraveled beneath him. He became Gregorian, became the young magician standing long years ago in the presence of his clone-father in a dim room deep in the heavy gravity district of Laputa.

He stood ramrod-straight, feeling ill at ease. He had been late arriving, because he kept losing his way. He did not have the cues everyone else knew to guide him through the three-dimensional maze of corridors, with its broad avenues that dissolved into tangles of nonsensical loops, its ramps and stairways that ended abruptly in blank walls. This office was hideously oppressive, dark with monolithic stone structures, and it baffled him that offworlders paid prestige rates for such places. Something to do with inaccessibility. Korda was embedded in a desk across from him.

A quicksilver run of fish fled through the room, but they were mere projections of the feverdancers, and he ignored them. Out of the corner of his eye he studied the shelves of brightly lit glass flowers. In such a gravity field, the merest nudge would reduce them all to powder. Hot pink orchids drooped from holes in the ceiling, their perfume like rotting meat.

Gregorian held himself rigidly casual, his face a sardonic mask. But in truth Korda intimidated him. Gregorian was leaner, stronger, and younger, with better reflexes than his predecessor had ever had. But this fat man knew him inside and out.

“I ate shit once,” Gregorian said.

Korda was scribbling on his desk. He grunted.

There was a third presence in the room, a permanent surrogate in Denebian wraparound and white ceramic mask. His name was Vasli, and he was present in the capacity of financial adviser. Gregorian disliked the creature because his aura was blank; he left no emotional footprint on the air. Whenever he looked away, Vasli tended to fade into the furniture.

“Another time I ate a raw skragg. That’s a rodent, about two hands long and hairless. It’s almost as ugly as it is mean. Its teeth are barbed, and after you kill it, you have to break the jaw to get it off your—”

“I presume you had a good reason for doing such a thing?” Korda said in a tone of profound indifference.

“I was afraid of the brutes.”

“So you killed one and ate it to rid yourself of the fear. I see. Well, there are no skraggs here.” Korda glanced up. “Oh, do sit down. Vasli, see to this young man.”

Without moving, the construct dispatched slim metal devices that Gregorian had thought mere decorative accents to assemble a chair beneath him. They gently pushed his knees forward and eased his shoulders back, shifting his center of balance, so that he was forced to sit. The chair was low-slung and made of granite. He knew he wouldn’t be able to rise from it gracefully. “It wasn’t quite that simple. I fasted for two days, offered blood to the Goddess, then dosed myself with feverdancers and—”

“We have day clinics that do the same thing back home,” Vasli observed. “The technology is banned here, of course.”

“It was none of your foul science. I am an occultist.”

“A distinction in terminology only. Our means may differ, but we employ identical techniques. First, render the brain open to suggestion. We use magnetic resonance, while you employ drugs, ritual, sex, terror, or some combination thereof. Then, when the brain is susceptible, imprint it with new behavior patterns. We use holotherapeutic viruses as the message carriers; you eat a rat. Finally, reinforce the new pattern in your daily life. Our methods are probably identical there. The skill is extremely old; people were being reprogrammed long before machines.

“Skill!” Korda said scornfully. “I once had a paralyzing fear of drowning. So I went to Cordelia and had myself dropped off two miles out into the Kristalsee at night. It’s salty enough that you can’t sink, and there are no large surface predators. If you don’t panic, you’re fine. I suffered the agonies of Hell that night. But when I reached shore, I knew I would never fear drowning again. And I did it without the aid of drugs.” He smiled ironically at Gregorian. “You’re pale.”

A voice from another world murmured, Is that what you re doing? Am I to die to help put an end to your fear of drowning? How trivial. Gregorian ignored it. “Don’t imagine you can condescend to me, old man! I’ve had experiences you’ve never dreamed of!”

“Don’t bluster. There’s no need to be afraid of me.”

“I fear you? You know nothing.”

“I know all there is to know about you. You think a few accidental differences in upbringing and experience can make any serious difference in personality? It is not so. I am your alpha and omega, young man, and you are no more than myself writ pretty.” Korda spread his arms. “Do these old jowls and age spots disgust you? I am only what you yourself will in time become.”

“Never!”

“It is inevitable.” Korda glanced down at the desk. “I have arranged a line of credit that will allow you to access the Extension. You will study bioscience control, that ought to be useful — it will teach you the folly of thinking you can go against your genetic inheritance, for one thing. Vasli will disburse funds to cover your living expenses, with a little more for sweetening. There’s no reason we should see a great deal of each other in the next few years.”

“And in return you expect — what?”

“When you have the proper background, we will ask you to do a little field research,” Vasli said. “Nothing strenuous. We are interested in determining the possible survival of Mirandan indigenes. I don’t doubt you will find the work rewarding.”

They knew he wouldn’t turn down the education, the money, the connections Korda was offering him. The alternative was to sink back down into Midworlds obscurity, to being nothing but an unknown pharmaceur in a land no civilized person ever gave a second thought. “What’s to make me do your bidding after I’ve taken my degree?”

“Oh, I think that when the time comes, you’ll be cooperative enough. We’re giving you the chance to accomplish something. How often do you think such opportunities come along?” Then, before he could respond, Korda said, “Enough. Vasli, you can handle any details.”

The life went out of him.

Gregorian struggled up out of the chair. He touched Korda’s cheek. It was cool, inert. The man he had been speaking with had been nothing more than a mannequin, a surrogate shaped in Korda’s form so that only he could employ it. The device was built into the desk. It didn’t even have any legs.

“He had a meeting,” Vasli explained.

“An agent!” The insult made Gregorian’s voice sharp. “He wasn’t even here in person. He sent an agent!”

“What did you expect? He didn’t shake hands — what else could he have been?”

Gregorian looked at him.

Silently Vasli extended his hand. With only a tremble of hesitation, Gregorian took it. The signet ring his clone-father had sent him along with the new offworld clothing whispered permanent agent unique in his otic nerve. “This is your first time offplanet, I take it.”

Withdrawing his hand, Gregorian said, “Deneb. Your people are building a shell about Deneb, aren’t they?”

“A toroidal shell, yes. Not a full sphere but a slice from a sphere; it varies only a degree or two from the ecliptic.” As Vasli spoke, the macroartifact materialized in the air between them. For a second he thought Vasli was employing a pocket projector, and then he realized it was an effect of the runaway visualization caused by the feverdancers. “To warm the outer planets. We do not have your natural resources, you see, no sungrazers, no Midworlds. With the one exception, our planets are naturally inhospitable. So we have taken apart an ice world to create a reflective belt.”

The image swelled, so that he saw the flattened spindle forms of the individual worldlets, saw their interwoven orbits laid out and diagrammed, and the network of traffic-control stations running through its infrastructure. “Surely that’s not enough to make the outer planets habitable.”

“No, it’s only part of the engine. We’re also rekindling their cores, and imploding a moon here and there to create gateways into our sun’s chromosphere.” Small orbital suns burst into existence about the outer worlds. The ice belt redoubled in brightness where the planets passed near.

The sight dazzled and enraged Gregorian. He shivered with emotion. “That’s what we should be doing! We have the knowledge, we have the power — all we lack is the will to seize control, to make ourselves as powerful as gods!”

“My people are not exactly gods,” the artificial man said dryly. “A project this large kicks up wars in its wake. Millions have died. A far greater number have been displaced, relocated, forced out of lives they were happy in. While I myself feel it is justified, honesty compels me to admit that most of your own people would not agree. We have given up much that your culture yet retains.”

“Everyone dies — the rearrangement of when is a matter of only statistical interest.” In his mind he saw all the Prosperan system, and it seemed a paltry thing, a nugget, an ungerminated seed. “Had I the power, I’d begin demolishing worlds today. I’d take Miranda apart with my bare hands.” He felt the blood rushing through his veins, plumping his cock, the ecstatic rush of possibility through his brain. “I’d tear the stars themselves apart, and in their place build something worth seeing.”

Mouths opened one by one in the wall, closed in unison, and disappeared. More feverdancing. He wiped sweat from his forehead as white spears fell through the ceiling and noiselessly pierced the floor. The room was intolerably stuffy.

He yawned, and for an instant his eyes opened and he stared across a dying campfire at Gregorian. The magician’s head nodded, but he went on talking. Then he was back in Laputa and had missed part of the magician’s story.

“Vasli. You know Korda well, I imagine. He’s capable of murder, isn’t he? He’d kill a man if that man got in his way.”

That white mask scrutinized him. “He can be ruthless. As who would know better than you?”

“Tell me something. Do you think he would kill six? A dozen? A hundred? Would he kill as many people as he could, would he torture them, just for the joy of knowing he had done it?”

“You will have to look within yourself to know for certain,” Vasli said. “My guess would be no.”

Now the feverdancers reached out to bake his skull into blistered cinders. But even as they welled up like a million giggling chrome fleas, shoving the young magician over backward into unconsciousness, bethought, No. Of course not. Somebody who would do such things would be nothing at all like Korda. He’d be a monster, a grotesque. Warped beyond recognition by what he’d done. He’d be somebody else altogether.

He awoke.

The night had grown old. Great masses of stone hulked over him. Lightless alleys breathed softly at his back. Below, the land was faintly visible in the sourceless predawn light. Obsidian clouds mounded and billowed up from the horizon. Lightning danced across them. Yet he could hear no thunder. Was it possible? Was the world to end in silence? The fire was almost dead, coals blanketed in ash.

Gregorian’s chin was slumped on his chest, and a thin line of drool ran down one side of his mouth. He was still unconscious. In all of Ararat, only the bureaucrat was awake and aware. His mouth was gummy, and his gut ached.

Something stumbled in the street behind him.

The bureaucrat straightened. Ararat was still. A sudden gust of wind might dislodge a chunk of coral and send it clattering and rattling down the stony slopes. But this noise was different. It had a purposeful quality. He craned his neck around and stared into the mouth of the alleyway. The blackness moved in his sight. Was that a flicker of motion? It might be no more than the random firing of nerves in his vision.

There was a metallic crash. A dim swoop of movement, clumsy and unsure. Something was there behind him. It was headed his way.

The bureaucrat waited.

Slowly a spiderlike creature emerged from the street. It staggered from side to side, painfully groping its way with one tapping forelimb, like a blind man’s cane. Occasionally it lost its balance and fell. It was his briefcase. Over here, the bureaucrat thought. He didn’t dare speak, for fear of waking Gregorian. Or perhaps, he thought giddily, what he really feared was that this would turn out to be just another hallucination. He held his breath. The thing groped its way toward him.

“Boss? Is that you?” He touched the briefcase’s casing so it could taste his genes, and the device collapsed at his feet. “I had a hell of a time finding you. This place has got my senses all confused.”

“Quiet!” whispered the bureaucrat. “Can you still function?”

“Yes. I’m blind, that’s all.”

“Listen carefully. I want you to make a nerve inductor. Seize control of Gregorian’s nervous system and paralyze his higher motor functions. Then walk him inside. He’s got a plasma torch there somewhere. Bring it out here and cut me free.”

Gregorian’s head rose from his chest. His eyes quietly opened, and he smiled. With dreamlike slowness he touched his belt, lovingly curled fingers about the hilt of his knife.

“That’s proscribed technology,” the briefcase said. “I’m not allowed to manufacture it on a planetary surface.”

Gregorian chuckled.

“Do it anyway.”

“I can’t!”

“This is a perfect example of what I was talking about.” Gregorian released his knife, leaned back. He seemed to be discussing a part of the night’s narration the bureaucrat had missed. “You have in that device sufficient technological power to do almost anything. More than enough to free yourself. Yet you cannot use it. And why? Because of a meaningless, bureaucratic rule. Because of a cultural failure of nerve. You have shackled your own hands, and you have no one to blame but yourself for your failure.”

“I’m ordering you for the third time. Do it anyway.”

“All right,” the briefcase said.

“You fucking — I” Gregorian leaped up, knife materializing in one hand. Then he stiffened and, off-balance, fell. He hit the stone hard. Eyes frozen open, he stared straight ahead. His body spasmed, then stilled. One arm continued to tremble uncontrollably.

“This is trickier than you’d—” the briefcase began. “Ah. Here.” The arm stopped trembling. Slowly, awkwardly, the magician rolled on his side, and got to his hands and knees. “Hey! I can see perfectly when I’m looking through his sensorium.” Gregorian’s head swiveled from side to side. “What a place!”

Three times the briefcase tried to stand Gregorian up. Each time the magician’s body overbalanced and fell. Finally the briefcase admitted defeat. “I just can’t get the hang of it, boss.”

“That’s all right,” the bureaucrat said. “Have him crawl.”

The supplies Gregorian had laid in included a diagnostician with a full line of medicinals. When the bureaucrat had run his blood through a scrubber, dosed himself with a centering drug, and washed his face, he felt a thousand times better. With the fever-dancers and fatigue poisons gone, he was left weak to the bone but clearheaded at last. He took a canteen to the doorway and rinsed out his mouth several times, spitting the residue into the street.

Then he went back inside and turned on a television. It’s begun! the set screamed. The wave front has just hit the shore! If you’re on the incline or in the Fan, we want to urge you—

What a terrific sight!

— to get out now! Yes, it is. Something glorious to see, the water cresting high with the dawn behind it, as it swallows up the land. We want to urge you. If you’re anywhere below the fall line, this is the time to get out. You won’t have another chance!

“Boss? Gregorian wants to speak with you.”

“He does?”

The bureaucrat locked arms behind his back, and strolled to the window wall. The horizon was in motion now. It was a thin, roiling line, nothing so dramatic as what they were showing on television. But the Tidewater had begun drowning at last. The jubilee tides were coming in. On the flatlands below, limp trees lay in windrows. Winds he could not hear blew indigo leaves past the silencing window glass.

In the whale wallow, immediately before him, knelt Gregorian. The briefcase had welded him into the same adamantine chains he had used on the bureaucrat. He could not stand and would not lie down. Their eyes met. His nervous system was still being monitored by the briefcase. “Put him through.”

“You can’t escape without my help,” the briefcase said in Gregorian’s calm voice.

“I’m safe enough here.”

“Oh, you’ll survive the tides all right. But how are you going to get away? You’ll be stranded on a little island that nobody will ever find. The food will only hold out so long. You don’t know the access codes that will let you send a message out to summon a flier.”

“And you do?” The bureaucrat moved his gaze up from Gregorian and across the plaza to where the briefcase had hung Pouffe’s body from a hook. He’d owed the man that much at least.

“Yes.” A light, urbane laugh. “We seem to have a stalemate here. I need your help to survive, and you need mine to escape. Obviously we need to compromise. What do you propose?”

“Me? I propose nothing.”

“Then you’ll die!”

“I suppose so.”

There was a long, astonished silence. Then Gregorian said, “You don’t mean that.”

“Wait and see.” He turned back to the television, knelt down, and fiddled with the controls. His show came on.

“How dare you judge me? You have no moral right to, and you know it!”

“How’s that again?”

“By your own standards, you’re tainted. You said you wouldn’t use proscribed technology. You told Veilleur that if you used it, you’d be no better than a criminal yourself. Yet all the time, you held it in reserve, ready to be called on.”

The drama was coming to a head. Young Byron had been lashed to the mast of mad Ahab’s ark. His mermaid waited frantically in a cage upon the moors, for the waters to come and drown her. Knowing that she was about to die, she sang.

“I lied,” the bureaucrat said. “Now, hush. I want to hear this.”

Not much later, the briefcase said, “Boss? He’s too proud to suggest it himself. But I know what he’s going through. I could kill Gregorian right now by overloading his nervous system. It would be painless.”

The bureaucrat was resting in a nest of fat pillows, bright with Archipelago designs. He stared at the television, letting its light wash over him. He was amazingly tired. The pictures meant nothing to him anymore, they were only a meaningless flow of imagery. He was empty, spent.

Whenever he looked up, he could see Gregorian glaring at him. If there were anything to this business of occult powers, then the wizard would not die alone. But though the bureaucrat felt the tug of those eyes, he would not meet them. Nor would he permit his briefcase to relay the magician’s words. He refused to listen. That way, there would be no chance, however slight, of being talked out of anything at the last minute.

“No,” he said mildly. “I think it’s better this way, don’t you?”

The tides were coming. The land thrilled with premonitions of Ocean. Sounds carried by the bedrock were piped up from the hollows and basements below, low extended moans and great submarine sighs. Sonic monsters rumbled through the bureaucrat’s bones and belly. All the city was crackling and popping in anticipation. The carbon-whisker struts thrummed with sympathetic resonance.

Ocean’s hammer was on its way.

When that great wave came, it would fall upon Ararat and ring the city like a bell. All the waters in the world would join together in one giant fist and smash down. From underneath, the blow would feel like the fall of Civilization, like the culmination of every flood and earthquake that had ever been. It would seem unimaginable that anything could survive. It would be the final descent of blackness.

When the waters finally subsided, Gregorian would be gone.

Then, at last, the bureaucrat could sleep.