Stations of the Tide

2. Witch Cults of Whitemarsh

Gregorian kissed the old woman and threw her from the cliff. She fell toward the cold gray water headfirst, twisting. There was a small white splash as she hit, plunging deep beneath the chop. She did not surface. A little distance away, something dark and sleek as an otter broke water, dove, and disappeared.

“It’s a trick,” the real Lieutenant Chu said. On the screen Gregorian’s face appeared: heavy, mature, confident. His lips moved soundlessly. Be all that you were meant to be. The bureaucrat had killed the sound after the fifth repetition, but he knew the words by heart. Give up your weaknesses. Dare to live forever. The commercial ended, skipped to the beginning, and began again.

“A trick? How so?”

“A bird cannot change into a fish in an instant. That kind of adaptation takes time.” Lieutenant Chu rolled up her sleeve and reached into the fishbowl. The sparrowfish jerked away, bright fins swirling. Dark sand puffed up, obscuring the tank for an instant. “The sparrowfish is a burrower. It was in the sand when he thrust the rainbird into the water. One quick movement, like this,” she demonstrated, “and the bird is strangled. Plunge it into the dirt, and simultaneously the fish is startled into swimming.”

She set the small corpse down on the table. “Simple, when you know how it’s done.”

Gregorian kissed the old woman and threw her from the cliff. She fell toward the cold gray water headfirst, twisting. There was a small white splash as she hit, plunging deep beneath the chop. She did not surface. A little distance away, something dark and sleek as an otter broke water, dove, and disappeared.

The bureaucrat snapped off the television.

The government liaison leaned straight-backed against a window, the creases of her uniform imperially crisp, smoking a thin black cigarillo. Emilie Chu was thin herself, a whippet of a woman, with cynical eyes and the perpetual hint of a sneer to her lips. “No word from Bergier. It appears my impersonator has escaped.” She stroked her almost-invisible mustache with cool amusement.

“We don’t know that he’s gone yet,” the bureaucrat reminded her. The windows were clear now, and in the fresh, bright air the encounter with the false Chu seemed unlikely, the stuff of travelers’ tales. “Let’s go see the commander.”

The rear observatory was filled with uniformed schoolgirls on a day trip from the Laserfield Academy, who nudged each other and giggled as the bureaucrat followed Chu up an access ladder and through a hatch into the interior of the gas bag. The hatch closed, and the bureaucrat stood within the triangular strutting of the keel. It was dark between the looming gas cells, and a thin line of overhead lights provided more a sense of dimension than illumination. A crewman dropped to the walkway before them. “Passengers are not—” She saw Chu’s uniform and stiffened.

“Commander-Pilot Bergier, please,” the bureaucrat said.

“You want to see the commander?” She stared, as if he were a sphinx materialized from nothing to confront her with a particularly outrageous riddle.

“If it isn’t too much trouble,” Chu said with quiet menace.

The woman spun on her heel. She led them through the gullet of the airship to the prow, where stairs so steep they had to be climbed on all fours like a ladder rose to the pilothouse. On the dark wooden door was the faintest gleam of elfinbone inlay forming a large, pale rose-and-phallus design. The crewman gave three quick raps, and then seized a strut and swung up into the shadows, as agile as any monkey. A deep voice rumbled, “Enter.”

They opened the door and stepped within.

The pilothouse was small. Its windshield was shuttered, leaving it lit only by a triad of navigation screens to the fore. It had a lived-in smell of body sweat and stale clothing. Commander Bergier stood hunched over the screens, looking like an aging eagle, his face a pale beak, suddenly noble when he raised his chin, a scrawny-bearded poet brooding over the bright terrain of his world. Turning, he raised eyes fixed on some distant tragedy more compelling than present danger could ever be. Two dark cuplines curved under each eye. “Yes?” he said.

Lieutenant Chu saluted crisply, and the bureaucrat, remembering in time that all airship commanders held parallel commissions in internal security, offered his credentials. Bergier glanced down at them, handed them back. “Not everyone welcomes your sort on our planet, sir,” the commander said. “You keep us in poverty, you live off our labor, you exploit our resources, and you pay us with nothing but condescension.”

The bureaucrat blinked, astonished. Before he could frame a response, the commander continued, “However, I am an officer, and I understand my duty.” He popped a lozenge into his mouth and sucked noisily. A rotten-sweet smell filled the cabin. “Make your demands.”

“I’m not making any demands,” the bureaucrat began. “I only—”

“There speaks the voice of power. You maintain a stranglehold on the technology that could turn Miranda into an earthly paradise. You control manufacturing processes that allow you to undercut our economy at will. We exist at your whim and sufferance and in the form you think good. Then you walk in here carrying this whip and making demands you doubtless prefer to call requests and pretend it is for our own good. Let us not cap this performance with hypocrisy, sir.”

“Technology didn’t exactly make an ‘earthly paradise’ of Earth. Or don’t they teach classical history here?”

“The perfect display of arrogance. You deny us our material heritage, and now you have as good as asked me to thank you for it. Well, sir, I will not. I have my pride. And I—” He paused. In the sudden silence it was observable how his head nodded slightly at irregular intervals, as if he fought off sleep. His mouth opened and shut, opened and shut again. His eyes slid slowly to the side in search of his lost thought. “And, ah. And, ah—”

“The illusionist,” the bureaucrat insisted. “Lieutenant Chu’s impersonator. Have you found him yet?”

Bergier straightened, his fire and granite restored. “No, sir, we have not. We have not found him, for he is not here to be found. He has left the ship.”

“That’s not possible. You docked once, and nobody debarked. I was watching.”

“This is a seaward flight. It is all but empty. On the landward run, yes, perhaps an agile and determined man could evade me. But I have accounted for every passenger and had my crew open every stowage compartment and equipment niche in the Levi. I went so far as to send an engineer with an airpack up the gas vents. Your man is not here.”

“It’s only logical he’d’ve secured his escape beforehand. Maybe he had a collapsible glider hidden forward,” Chu suggested. “It wouldn’t have been difficult for an athletic man. He could have just opened a window and slipped away.”

More likely, the bureaucrat thought, and the thought struck him with the force of inevitability, more likely he had simply bribed the captain to lie for him. That was how he himself would’ve arranged it. To cover his suspicion, he said, “What bothers me is why Gregorian went to all this trouble to find out how much we know about him. It hardly seems worth his effort.”

Bergier scowled at his screens, said nothing. He touched a control, and the timbre of one engine changed, grew deeper. Slowly, slowly the ship began to turn.

“He was just baiting you,” Chu said. “Nothing more complicated than that.”

“Is that likely?” the bureaucrat said dubiously.

“Magicians are capable of anything. Their thinking isn’t easy to follow. Hey! Maybe that was Gregorian himself? He was wearing gloves, after all.”

“Pictures of Gregorian and of our impersonator,” the bureaucrat said. “Front and side both.” He removed them from his briefcase, shook off the moisture, laid them side by side beside the screens. “No, look at that — it’s absurd to even contemplate. What does his wearing gloves have to do with anything?”

Chu carefully compared the tall, beefy figure of Gregorian with the slight figure of her impersonator. “No,” she agreed. “Just look at those faces.” Gregorian had a dark, animal power, even in the picture. He looked more minotaur than man, so strong-jawed and heavy-browed that he passed through mere homeliness into something profound. His was the sort of face that would seem ugly in repose, then waken to beauty at the twitch of a grin, the slow wink of one eye. It could never have been hidden in the pink roundness of the false Chu’s face.

“Our intruder wore gloves because he was a magician.” Lieutenant Chu wriggled her fingers. “Magicians tattoo their hands, one marking for each piece of lore they master, starting from the middle finger and moving up the wrist. A magus will have ’em up to the elbows. Snakes and moons and whatnot. If you’d seen his hands, you’d never have mistaken him for a Piedmont official.”

Bergier cleared his throat and, when they both turned to him, said, “With the technology you deny us, a single man could operate this ship. Alone, he could manage all functions from baggage to public relations with nary a crewman under him.”

“That same technology would make your job superfluous,” the bureaucrat pointed out. “Do you think for an instant that your government would pay for an expensive luxury like this airship if they could have a fleet of fast, cheap, atmosphere-destroying shuttles?”

“Tyranny always has its rationale.”

Before the bureaucrat could respond, Chu interjected, “We’ve located Gregorian’s mother.”

“Have we?”

“Yes.” Chu grinned so cockily the bureaucrat realized this must be something she had dug up on her own initiative. “She lives in a river town just below Lightfoot. There’s no heliostat station there, but if we can’t find somebody to rent us a boat, it’s not a long walk. That’ll be the best place to start our investigation. After that we’ll tackle the television spots, see if we can trace the money. All television is broadcast from the Piedmont, but if you want to follow up on the ads, there’s a gate at the heliostat station, that’s no problem.”

“We’ll visit the mother first thing tomorrow morning,” the bureaucrat said. “But I’ve dealt with planetside banks before, and I very seriously doubt we’ll be able to follow the money.”

Bergier looked at him scornfully. “Money can always be traced. It leaves a trail of slime behind it wherever it goes.”

The bureaucrat smiled, unconvinced. “That’s very aphoristic.”

“Don’t you dare laugh at me! I had five wives in the Tidewater when I was younger.” Bergier popped another lozenge, mouthed it liquidly. “I had them placed where they could do the most good, spaced out along my route distant enough that not one suspected the existence of the others.” The bureaucrat saw that the commander did not observe how Chu rolled her eyes when he said this. “But then I discovered that my Ysolt was unfaithful. It drove me half mad with jealousy. That was not long after the witch cults were put down. I returned to her that day after an absence of weeks. Oh, she was hot. Her period had just begun. The whole house smelled of her.” His nostrils flared. “You have no idea what she was like at such times. I walked in the door, and she slammed me to the floor and ripped open my uniform. She was naked. It was like being raped by a whirlwind. All I could think was that we must avoid scandalizing the neighbors.

“It would have made a fish laugh to see me struggling beneath that little hellcat, I should imagine. Red-faced, half-undressed, and flailing out with one arm to close the door.

“Well and good. I was a young man. But the things she did to me! From somewhere she had acquired skills I had not taught her, ideas that were not mine. Some of them things such as I had never experienced. We had been married for years. Now, all at once, she had acquired new tastes. Where had she learned them, hey? Where?”

“Maybe she read a book,” Chu said dryly.

“Bah! She had a lover! It was obvious. She was not a subtle woman, Ysolt. She was like a child, showing off a new toy. Why don’t we see what happens if, she said… Let’s pretend you’re the woman and I’m the man … This time I’m not going to move at all, and you can… It took her hours to demonstrate everything she had learned — ‘thought of’ she said — and I had a lot of time to mull over what I should do.

“It was dark when I left her. She was sleeping it off, her long black hair sticking to her sweaty little breasts. What an angelic smile she had! I went out to discover who had cuckolded me, and I brought along a gun. He would not be difficult to find, I determined. A man with such skill as Ysolt mirrored would be known in the right quarters.

“I went down to the riverbank, to the jugs and paintpots, and asked a few questions. They said yes, a man with the kind of skill I described had been through recently.” A hidden speaker mumbled respectfully, and Bergier touched the controls. “Trim the port aerostat manually if you have to. Yes. No. You have your orders.” He was silent for a long, forlorn moment, and the bureaucrat thought he had lost the thread of his tale. But then he began again.

“But I could not find the man. Everyone had heard of him — word had gone round like the latest dirty joke — and many hinted they had slept with him, but he was not to be found. There were a lot of odd types afoot in those days, after the suppression of Whitemarsh, and a sex-artist was the least of them. I learned that he was of moderate size, polite dress, wry humor. That he spoke little, lived off the largess of women, had dark eyes, rarely blinked. But the river lands swarmed with people who had something to hide. A cautious man could hide there forever, and he was the most evasive creature in the world. He moved unseen and unnoted through the night world, made no promises, had no friends, established no rhythms. It was like punching empty air! He was not to be found.

“After a few days, I changed my tactics. I decided Ysolt should find him for me. So I made myself impotent. You understand how? With my fist. Old Mother Hand and her five daughters. By the time Ysolt got to me, there was nothing could make the old soldier stand erect for her. It drove her to distraction. And I, of course, feigned embarrassment, humiliation, distress. After a time I simply refused to try.

“Sure enough, she was driven back to her lover, to this man of extraordinary skill and knowledge. She returned to me with breathing exercises and relaxation techniques that ought to have worked, but did not. All this time, I acted cold and distant toward her. It was only natural she would assume that I was blaming her for my disability. By the time the corps called me back to duty, she was ready to do anything to effect my cure.

“When next I returned, she had ‘discovered’ a man who could aid me in my distress. She knew I didn’t approve of the witch cultists. But he could prepare a potion for me. It would cost a great deal. She did not like that part. A man should not charge for such a thing. But a husband’s happiness was so important to his wife… … She finally persuaded me.

“That night I filled a small, heavy box with silver and went as directed to a small garage just below the docks. There was a blue light over the side door. I went in.

“The minute the door closed, someone threw on every light in the place. My eyes crawled. Then the bright sting of vision resolved into automobiles, racks of grease guns, welding tanks. There were six waiting for me, two of them women. They sat in truck cabs and atop hoods, looking at me with unfriendly eyes, as unblinking as owls.”

The speaker murmured again, and Bergier jerked his head to the side. “Why are you bothering me with this? I don’t want to be disturbed with routine.” Then, returning to his story, “One of the women asked to see my money. I opened my box, took out a moleskin bag containing eighty fleur-de-vie dollars, and threw it at her feet. She untied the bag, saw the flash of mint silver, and drew in her breath. This came from Whitemarsh, she said.

“I said nothing.

“The cultists traded glances. I slid a hand inside my coat and clutched my revolver. We need the money, a man said. The government dogs are slavering over our shoulders. I can smell their filthy breath.

“The woman held up a handful of silver, flashing like so many mirrors. There was a coinmaker disappeared just before the rape of Whitemarsh, she said. They took his stock and gave it away to whoever wanted it. I was there, but felt I didn’t need it. She shrugged. How quickly things change.

“I knew they thought I’d robbed a brother fugitive. I don’t suppose you know much about the suppression of Whitemarsh?”

“No,” the bureaucrat said.

“Only hearsay,” Chu said. “It’s not exactly the sort of history they teach in school.”

“They should,” the commander said. “Let the children know what government is all about. This was back when the Tidewater was young, and communes and Utopian communities were as common as mushrooms. Harmless, most of them were, pallid things here and gone in a month. But the Whitemarsh cults were different; they spread like marsh-fire. Men and women went naked in public daylight. They would not eat meat. They participated in ritual orgies. They refused to serve in the militia. Factories closed for want of laborers. Crops went unharvested. Children were not properly schooled. Private citizens minted their own coinage. They had no leaders. They paid no taxes. No government would have tolerated it.

“We fell on them with fire and steel. In a single day we destroyed the cults, drove the survivors into hiding, and showed them such horror they would never dare rise again. So you understand that I was in great danger. But I did not show fear. I asked them, did they want the money or not?

“One of the men took the bag, weighed it in his hand. Then, as I had hoped, he slid a handful of coins into each of his trousers pockets. We will divide this evenly, he said. So long as the spirit is alive, Whitemarsh is not dead. He threw me a greasy bundle of herbs, and said sneeringly, This would make a corpse rise, much less your limp little self.

“I dropped the bundle in my lead box and left. At home I beat Ysolt until she bled and threw her out in the street. I waited a week, and then reported to internal security that fugitive cultists were hiding in my area. They ran a scan and found the coins, and with the coins the cultists. I still did not know which specific one had defiled my Ysolt, but they all still held most of the coins, so he had been punished. Oh yes, he had been punished well.”

After a moment’s silence the bureaucrat said, “I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

“I was sent into Whitemarsh just before it fell. I removed the coinmaker, and used a device my superiors had provided to irradiate his stock. Half of those who escaped our wrath carried their debased coinage with them. They never understood how we found them so easily. But it is observed that many of the men came down with radiation poisoning not long after, and where a man least wishes it. Disgusting sight. I still have the pictures.” He stuck his hands in his trousers pockets and raised his eyebrows. “I fed the potion they gave me to Ysolt’s dog, and it died. So much for the subtlety of wizards.”

“The irradiator is illegal,” the bureaucrat said. “Even planetary government is not allowed to use one. It can do a lot of damage.”

“You see your duty, Оhound of the people! Go to it. The trail is only sixty years cold.” Bergier stared bitterly down at his screens. “I look down at the land, and I see my life mapped out beneath me. We’re coming up on Ysolt’s Betrayal, which is sometimes called Cuckold, and further on is Penelope’s Lapse, then Feverdeath, and Abandonment. At the end of the run is Cape Disillusion, and that accounts for all my wives. I have retreated from the land, but I cannot yet completely leave it. I keep waiting. I keep waiting. For what? Perhaps for daybreak.”

Bergier threw open the shutters. The bureaucrat winced as bright white light flooded in, drowning them all in glory, turning the commander pale and old, the flesh hanging loose on his cheeks. Down below they saw the roofs and towers, spires and one gold dome of Lightfoot rising toward them, bristling with antennae.

“I am the maggot in the skull,” Bergier said deliberately, “writhing in darkness.” The illogic of the remark, and its suddenness, jolted the bureaucrat, and in a shiver of insight he realized that those staring eyes were looking not back at horror but forward. There was a premonition of senility in that slow speech, as if the old commander were staring ahead into a protracted slide into toothless misery and a death no more distinct from life than that line dividing ocean from sky.

As they started from the cabin, the commander said, “Lieutenant Chu, I will expect you to keep me posted. I will be following your progress closely.”

“Sir.” Chu closed the door, and they descended the stairs. She laughed lightly. “Did you notice the lozenges?” The bureaucrat grunted. “Swamp-witch nostrums, supposed to be good for impotence. They’re made out of roots and bull’s jism and all sorts of nasty stuff. No fool like an old fool,” she said. “He never leaves that little cabin, you know. He’s famous for it. He even sleeps there.”

The bureaucrat wasn’t listening. “He’s around here somewhere.” He peered into the darkness, holding his breath, but heard nothing. “Hiding.”

“Who?”

“Your impersonator. The young daredevil.” To his briefcase he said, “Reconstruct his gene trace and build me a locater. That’ll sniff him out.”

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

“Damn!”

The air within the envelope was still, but filled with tension. It thrummed with the vibrations of the engines, as alive as a coiled snake. The bureaucrat could feel the false Chu peering at them from the shadows. Laughing.

Chu put a hand on his arm. “Don’t.” Her eyes were serious. “If you get emotionally involved with the opposition, they’ve got you by the balls. Cool off. Maintain your detachment.”

“I don’t—”

“—need to take advice from the likes of me. I know.” She grinned cockily, the swaggering cynic again. “The planetary forces are all corrupt and ineffectual, we’re famous for it. Even so, I’m worth listening to. This is my territory. I know the people we’re up against.”

“Watch yourself, buddy!”

The bureaucrat stepped back as four men hoisted a timber up out of the mud and wrestled it onto a flatbed truck. A chunky woman with red hair stood on the truckbed, working the hoist. The buildings here were as tumbledown a lot as he’d ever seen, unpainted, windows cracked, shingles missing. Crusted masses of barnacles covered their north sides.

The ground felt soft underfoot. The bureaucrat looked mournfully down at his shoes. He was standing in the mud. “What’s going on?” he asked.

A withered old shopkeeper, all but lost in the folds of his clothes, as if he had shrunk or they grown, sat watching from his porch. A silver skull dangled from his left ear, marking him as a former space marine, and a ruby pierced through one nostril made him a veteran of the Third Unification. “Ripping out the sidewalks,” he said glumly. “Genuine sea-oak, and it’s been aging in the ground for most of a century. My granddaddy laid it down back when the Tidewater was young. Cheap as dirt then, but a year from now I can name my price.”

“How do I go about renting a boat?”

“Well, I’ll tell you plain, I don’t see how you can. Not that many boats around now that the docks have been tore out.” He smiled sourly at the bureaucrat’s expression. “They were sea-oak too. Tore ’em out last month, when the railroad went away.”

The bureaucrat glanced uneasily at the Leviathan, dwindling low in the eastern sky. A swarm of midges, either vampire gnats or else barnacle flies, hovered nearby threatening to attack, and then shrank to invisibility as they drew away. The flies, airship, railroad, docks, and walks, all of Lightfoot seemed to be receding from his touch, as if caught up by an all-encompassing ebb tide. Suddenly he felt dizzy, drawn into an airless space where his inner ear spun wildly, and there was no ground underfoot.

With a shout the timber was slammed onto the flatbed. The woman handling the crane joked and chatted with the men in the mud. “You gotta see my fantasia, though. You’ll die when you see it. It’s cut right down to here.”

“Gonna show off the top of your tits, eh, Bea?” one of the men said.

She shook her head scornfully. “Halfway down the nipples. You’re going to see parts of me you never suspected existed.”

“Oh, I suspected something all right. I just never felt called on to do anything in particular about them.”

“Well, you come to the jubilee in Rose Hall tomorrow night, and you can eat your heart out.”

“Oh, is that what you want me to eat out?” He grinned wryly, then danced back as the beam slipped a few inches in its harness. “Watch that side there! A little remark like that don’t deserve to get my toes crushed.”

“Don’t you worry. It’s not your toes I’m thinking of crushing.”

“Excuse me,” the bureaucrat called up. “Is there any chance I can rent your truck? Are you the owner?”

The redheaded woman looked down at him. “Yeah, I’m the owner,” she said. “You don’t want to rent this thing, though. See, I’m running it from a battery rated for a rig twice this size, so I gotta step down the voltage, okay? Only the transformer’s going. I can get maybe a half hour out of it before it overheats and starts to melt the insulation. I been kind of nursing it along. Now Anatole’s got a spare transformer, but he thinks he oughta be able to charge an arm and a leg for it. I been holding off. I figure it gets a little closer to jubilee, he’ll take what he can get.”

“Aniobe, I keep telling you,” the shopkeeper said. “I could buy that sucker off him for half what—”

She tossed her head. “Oh, shut up, Pouffe. Don’t you go spoiling my fun!”

The bureaucrat cleared his throat. “I don’t want to go far. Just down the river a way and back again.” A barnacle fly stung his arm, and he swatted it.

“Naw, the wheel bearings are starting to seize up too. Onliest place to get lubricant nowadays is Gireaux’s, and old Gireaux has got a bad case of the touchy-feelies. Always trying to get a little kiss or something. If I wanted to get a tub of grease out of him on short notice, I’d probably have to get down on my knees and give him a sleeve job!”

The men grinned like hounds. Pouffe, however, shook his head and sighed. “I’m going to miss all this,” he said heavily. The bureaucrat noticed for the first time the deep-interface jacks on his wrists, gray with corrosion; he’d served time on Caliban in his day. The man must have an interesting history behind him. “All your friends say they’ll keep in touch after they move to the Piedmont, but it’s just not going to happen. Who are they kidding?”

“Oh, come off it,” Aniobe scoffed. “Any man as rich as you will have friends wherever he goes. It’s not as if you needed to have a personality or nothing.”

The last timber loaded, Aniobe shut down the truck and shipped the winch. The laborers waited to be dismissed. One, a roosterish young man with a comb of stiff black hair wandered onto the porch, and casually leaned over a tray of brightly bundled feathers — fetishes, perhaps, or fishing lures. Chu watched him carefully.

He was straightening from the tray when Chu stepped forward and seized his arm.

“I saw that!” Chu spun the man around and slammed him up against the doorpost. He stared at her, face blank with shock. “What have you got in that shirt?”

“I — nothing! W-what are—” he stammered. Aniobe stood up straight, putting hands on hips. The other laborers, the bureaucrat, the shopkeeper, all froze motionless and silent, watching the confrontation.

“Take it off!” Chu barked. “Now!”

Stunned and fearful, he obeyed. He held the shirt forward in one hand to show there was nothing hidden there.

Chu ignored it. She looked slowly up and down the young man’s torso. It was lean and muscular, with a long silvery scar curving across his abdomen, and a dark cluster of curly hair on his chest. She smiled.

“Nice,” she said.

The laborers, their boss, and the shopkeeper roared with laughter. Chu’s victim reddened, lowered his head angrily, bunched his fists, and did nothing.

“You notice the way that redhead was teasing those men?” Chu remarked as they walked away. “Provocative little bitch.” Far down the street was a weary-looking building, its ridgeline sagging, half its windows boarded over with old advertising placards cut to size. The wood was dark with rot, fragmented words and images opening small portals into a brighter world: zar, a fishtail, what was either a breast or a knee, kle, and a nose pointed straight up as if its owner hoped to catch rain in the nostrils. A faded sign over the main door read terminal hotel. The torn-up remains of the railbed ran beside it. “My husband’s the same way.”

“Why did you do that to him?” the bureaucrat asked. “That worker.”

Chu didn’t pretend not to understand. “Oh, I have plans for that young man. He’s going to have a few beers now, and try to forget what happened, but of course his friends won’t let him. By the time I’ve checked into my room, sent for my baggage, and freshened up, he’ll be a little drunk. I’ll go look him up then. He sees me, and he’s going to feel a little hot and a little uncertain and a little embarrassed. He’ll look at me, and he won’t know what he feels.

“Then I’ll give him the opportunity to sort his feelings out.”

“Your method strikes me as being a little, um, uncertain. As far as effectiveness goes.”

“Trust me,” Chu said. “I’ve done this before.”

“Aha,” the bureaucrat said vaguely. Then, “Why don’t you go ahead and book us rooms, while I see about Gregorian’s mother?”

“I thought you weren’t going to interview her until morning.”

“Wasn’t I?” The bureaucrat detoured around a rotting pile of truck tires. He had very deliberately dropped that scrap of information in front of Bergier. He didn’t trust the man. He thought it all too possible that Bergier might arrange for a messenger sometime in the night to warn the mother against speaking to him.

It was part and parcel of a more serious puzzle, the question of where the false Chu had gotten his information. He’d known not only what name to give, but to leave the airship just before the real Chu boarded. More significantly, he knew that the bureaucrat hadn’t been told his liaison was a woman.

Someone in his chain of command, either within the planetary government or Technology Transfer itself, was working with Gregorian. And while it need not be Bergier, the commander was as good a suspect as any.

“I changed my mind,” he said.