Stations of the Tide

3. The Dance of the Inheritors

Sunset. Bold Prospero was a pirate galleon sailing toward the night. It touched the horizon, flattening into an oval as it set continents of clouds afire. Under the trees the shadows were fading into blue air. The bureaucrat trudged down the river road, passing his briefcase from hand to hand as its weight made his palms and fingers ache.

At the edge of the village, three ragged men had built a fire in the road and were roasting yams in its coals. A dark giant sat soaking broadleaves in a bowl of water, and wrapping them about the tubers. A gray, lank man stuck them in the fire, and their aged companion raked the coals back. Two television sets were wedged in the sand, one with the sound off, and the other turned away, queasily imaging at empty trail. “Soft evening,” the bureaucrat said.

“Same to you,” the lank, colorless man said. Bony knees showed through holes in his trousers. “Have a sit-down.” He hitched slightly to the side, and the bureaucrat hunkered down beside him, resting on the balls of his feet, careful not to soil his white trousers. On the pale screen, a young man stared moodily out a window at the crashing sea. A woman stood at his back, hands on his shoulders. “Old man doesn’t believe he’s seeing a mermaid,” the lank man said.

“Well, that’s the way fathers are.” Soft blue smoke wisped into the darkening sky, smelling of driftwood and cedarbloom. “You lads out hunting?”

“In a manner of speaking,” the lank one said. The giant snorted.

“We’re scavengers,” the old man said harshly. “If that’s not good enough for you, then say so now and fuck off.” They all stared at him, unblinking.

In the sudden silence, the bureaucrat could hear the show he’d interrupted. Byron, come away from that window. There’s nothing out there but cold and changing Ocean. Go into the air. Your father thinks—

My father thinks of nothing but money.

“I’ve got a bottle of vacuum-distilled brandy in my briefcase.” He fetched the bottle, took a swig, held it out. “If I could convince you…”

“Well, that is hospitable.” The flask went around twice, and then Lank said, “You must be heading into the village.”

“Yes, to see Mother Gregorian. Perhaps you know her house.”

The three exchanged glances. “You won’t get anything out of her,” Lank said. “The villagers tell stories about her, you know. She’s a type.” He nodded toward the television. “Ought to be on the show.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Naw, I don’t think so.” He raised a sticklike arm, pointed. “The road dead-ends into the first street to the waterfront. Go down to the river, to the fifth—”

“Sixth,” the old man said.

“Sixth street after that. Go up by the kirk and past the boneyard to the end, right by the marshes. Can’t miss it. Big fucking castle of a place.”

“Thanks.” He stood.

They were no longer looking at him. On the screen, an albino girlchild was standing alone in the middle of a raging argument. She was an island of serene calm, her eyes vacant and autistic. “That’s Eden, she’s the boy’s sister. Hasn’t spoken since it happened,” Lank remarked.

“What happened?”

“She saw a unicorn,” the giant said.

From the air the village had looked like a very simple antique printed circuit, of the sort Galileo might have used to build his first radio telescope, if he wasn’t confusing two different eras, a comb of crooked lines leading inward from the water, too small for there to be any need of cross-streets. The houses were small and shabby, but warm light spilled from the windows, and voices murmured within. An occasional dog stridently warned him away from boat or yard. Other than an innkeeper who nodded lazily from the door of the watermen’s hotel, he met no one by the riverfront. He turned onto the marsh road, the river cold and silver at his back. He went past a walled-in ground where skeletons hung from the trees, the bones bleached and painted and wired together so that they clacked gently in an almost unnoticeable breeze.

Beyond the boneyard the ground rose gently. He passed several large dark houses, still unscavenged, newly abandoned by their wealthy owners. Probably gone to the Piedmont to participate in the economic boom. Last on the road, just before the land wearily eased itself down into marsh, was his destination.

The house was blistered and barnacled, and it was meager light indeed that escaped the thickly curtained windows into the wider world. But under its mottling of chrysalids the wood plank ing was gracefully carved and fitted. He stood before the massive entranceway and touched the doorplate. Within, a voice gonged, “Callers, mistresses.” Then, to him, the door said, ” Please wait.”

A moment later the door opened on a pale, thin face. On seeing him, it opened in startlement, revealing an instant’s fear before tightening again into wariness. The woman lifted her chin defiantly, so that her eyes seemed simultaneously to flinch away from him. “I thought you were the appraiser.”

The bureaucrat smiled. “Mother Gregorian?”

“Oh, her.” She turned away. “I suppose you’d best come inside.” He followed her down the gullet of a hallway flocked with a floral print gone dead brown into the crowded belly of a sitting room. She seated him in a dark lionfooted chair. It was a massy thing, shag-maned atop and fringed beneath, with padded armrests. He’d hate to have to move it.

A woman hurried into the room. “Is that the appraiser? Have him look at the crystal, I—” She stopped.

Took. A metronome wedged between dusty specimen bells reached the end of its swing and began the long, slow return, ponderously counting out the slow seconds of mortality. Trophy beasts peered down at him from the tin ceiling with eyes of green and gray and orange glass. Now that he noticed, the room was full of faces. Heavy-lidded, openmouthed and disapproving, they were carved into the legs, sides and bases of the escritoires, tables, sideboards, and china cabinets that jostled one another, competing for space. Even the blond mahogany pieces had been extravagantly carved. He wondered where the shavings were now; they would not have been discarded. It was an enormously valuable room, and would have been twice as comfortable with half as much furniture. Tock. The metronome reasserted itself, and still the women studied him, as if they would never speak again.

“Honestly, Ambrym, must I wait forever for you to introduce your friend?”

“He’s not mine, he’s Mother’s.”

“All the more reason to show a little common courtesy.” She thrust forward a hand, and he stood so they could shake. “I’m Linogre Gregorian,” she said. “Esme! Where are you?”

A third woman, dressed in mousy brown, appeared, drying her hands with a cloth towel. “If that’s the appraiser, be sure he knows that Ambrym broke the—” She stopped. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had a caller.” She didn’t leave, but stood there, watching.

“Don’t be stupid, Esme, this gentleman is here to see Mama. Fetch him a glass of beer.”

“You don’t have to—”

“The Gregorians have always kept a decent house,” she said firmly. “Please, sit. The doctor is with Mother now. But if you’ll wait, I’m sure she’ll want to see you, if only briefly. You must take care, however, not to excite Mother, for she is extremely ill.”

“She’s dying,” Ambrym said. “She won’t let us take her to the Piedmont, where the good hospitals are. She’s taken a notion into her head to stay in this decaying hovel to the bitter end. I think she’s expecting to be washed away with the tides. Not that the evacuation authorities would allow that.” A faraway look came into her eyes. “That will be the final indignity, to be removed as paupers.”

“If you don’t mind, Ambrym, I’m sure our visitor is not interested in our private sorrows.” The bureaucrat did not miss the way Ambrym stepped back from her sister, nor the defiance with which she did so. “May I ask your business with our mother?”

“Yes, certainly.” Esme placed a delicate crystal beerglass in his hand. “Thank you.” She set a saucer by his elbow, lacy porcelain that was faintly translucent even in the evening light. It was a fairy mist of crockery, delicate beyond belief. “I’m from the Division of Technology Transfer within the System government. We’d like to talk with your brother, but unfortunately when he left our employ, he didn’t leave his forwarding address. Perhaps you. . . ?” He let his voice trail off, and took a sip from his glass. It was lager, thin and almost tasteless.

“I’m sure we wouldn’t know,” Linogre began coolly.

But Ambrym snapped, “Are you his agent? He left home when he was a child. He’s not entitled! We’ve worked all our lives, we’ve slaved—”

“Ambrym,” her sister said meaningfully.

“I don’t care. When I think of the years of work, the suffering, the shit she’s put me through …!” She appealed directly to the bureaucrat. “Every morning I polish her riding boots, every morning for the last five years! I have to kneel on the floor before her, while she tells me she’s thinking of leaving the best things to Linogre. It’s not as if she were ever getting out of that bed again.”

“Ambrym!”

They fell silent, eyeing one another. The metronome doled out six heavy ticks, and the bureaucrat thought, surely Hell must be like this. Finally Linogre prevailed, and her sister looked away. From the shadows Esme said timidly, “Would you like another glass of beer?”

The bureaucrat held up his glass, all but untasted. “No, thank you.” Esme reminded him of a mouse, small and nervous, hovering at the edges of light in hopes of some small crumb. And yet on Miranda the mice were dimorphic, like everything else. At the end of the great year they would swim out into the ocean and drown in great numbers, and the few survivors would transform into — he tried to remember — little amphibious creatures, like vest-pocket seals. He wondered would she change too, come the tides?

“Don’t think I can’t see how you suck up to her,” Ambrym snapped angrily. “Miss Meek-and-Harmless. I saw you hiding away the silver gravy boat.”

“I was cleaning it!”

“In your room, uh-huh, sure.”

Panicky little eyes. “Anyway, she said it was mine.”

“When?” both sisters cried in outraged unison.

“Just yesterday. You can ask her.”

“You remember—” Linogre glanced at the bureaucrat and lowered her voice, half-turning her back to him. “You remember that Mother said we were to divide the silver evenly, share and share alike. She’s always said that.”

“Is that why you took the sugar tongs?” Ambrym asked innocently.

“I never!”

“You did.”

Listening intently, the bureaucrat put his glass down beside him. It landed a trifle harder than he’d intended, and he heard a faint crack of breaking china.

Sharp-eared Esme was the only sister to notice. With a quick warning shake of her head, she whisked away the broken fragments of saucer, and replaced them with another before anyone else had realized what had happened.

“The moment Mother’s estate is settled,” Ambrym was saying, “I intend to leave the house and never return. As far as I’m concerned, without Mother there is no family, and I am not related to either of you.”

“Ambrym!” Esme squeaked, horrified.

“This is a shameful way to talk, with Mother dying just above us!” her elder sister cried.

“She won’t die, not when she knows how happy that would make us. Spite will keep her alive,” Ambrym said. Her siblings turned disapproving frowns on her, but did not disagree.

They came to an abrupt halt then, and there was about the group a satisfied air of fulfillment, as if they had just enacted a private drama for his benefit and were awaiting applause so they could link hands and take their bows. There, their collective attitude seemed to be saying, now you know all about us. It was a well-rehearsed scene, and he could tell that no one who entered the house would be allowed to escape without witnessing some variant of it.

At that moment the doctor descended the stairs, and all three looked up expectantly. He solemnly shook his head at the sisters, and departed. It was an ambiguous gesture at best.

“Come.” Linogre started up the stairs.

In a somber mood, he followed.

She led him into a chamber so dimly lit he was not sure of its exact dimensions. An enormous bed dominated the room. Bed-curtains hung from brass hooks set into the ceiling, a tapestry of some bright land where satyrs and astronauts, nymphs and goats, frolicked. The edges were bordered with the constellations of old earth, wands and orchids, and other symbols of generative magic. Age had faded the colors, and the browned fabric was torn by its own weary weight.

Within the bed, propped up on a billowing throne of pillows, lay a grotesquely fat woman. He was reminded inevitably of a termite queen, she was so vast and passively immobile. Her face was doughy white, her mouth a tiny gasp of pain. A ringed hand hovered over a board floating atop her swollen belly, on which was arranged a circle of solitaire cards: stars, cups, queens, and knaves in solemn procession. A silent television flickered at her feet.

The bureaucrat introduced himself, and she nodded without looking up from her slow telling out of cards. “I am playing a game called Futility,” she said. “Are you familiar with it?”

“How does one win?”

“You don’t. You can only postpone losing. I’ve managed to keep this particular game going for years.” She looked up at her daughter.

“Don’t think I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“All is pattern,” she said. She had to pause ever so slightly between sentences to take in air. “Relationships between things shift and change constantly; there is no such thing as objective truth. There is only pattern, and the greater pattern within which the lesser patterns occur. I understand the greater pattern, and so I’ve learned to make the cards dance. But inevitably the game must someday end. There is a lot of life in how one tells the cards.”

“Everyone knows. You’re not very subtle about it. Even this gentleman beside you understands.”

“Do you?” The mother looked directly at him for the first time, both she and her daughter awaiting his answer with interest.

The bureaucrat coughed into his hand. “I must have a few words in private with you, if I may, Mother Gregorian.”

She favored Linogre with a cold look. “Leave.”

As the daughter closed the door, her mother said loudly, “They want to put me away. They conspire against me, and think I don’t notice. But I notice. I notice everything.”

In the hallway Linogre made an exasperated noise. Her footsteps descended the stairs.

“It’s the only way to keep her from listening at the door,” the old woman whispered. Then, louder, almost shouting, “But I’ll stay here, I’ll die here. In this bed.” Quieter, conversationally, “This was my bridebed, you know. I had my first man here.” On the ghostcandling television, he could see Byron staring out his window again. “It’s a good bed. I’ve taken each of my husbands to it. Sometimes more than one at once. Three times it’s been my childbed — four, if you count the miscarriage. I intend to die in it. That’s little enough to ask.” She sighed, and pushed the tray of cards away. It swiveled into the wall. “What do you want of me?”

“Something very simple, I hope. I wish to speak with your son but don’t have his address, and I was hoping you’d know where he is now.”

“I haven’t heard from him since he ran away from me.” A crafty look came on her face. “What’s he done to you? Taken off with your money, I expect. He tried to run off with mine, but I was too clever for him. That’s all that’s worth anything in life, all that gives you any control.”

“So far as I know, he hadn’t done anything. I’m only going to ask him a few questions.”

“A few questions,” she said disbelievingly.

He did nothing to break their shared silence, but let it flower and bloom, content to discover when she would finally speak again. Finally Mother Gregorian frowned with annoyance and said, “What kind of questions?”

“There’s a possibility, nothing more, that some controlled technology may be missing. My agency wants me to ask your son whether he knows anything about it.”

“What’ll you do to him when you catch him?”

“I am not going to catch him at anything,” the bureaucrat said testily. “If he has the technology, I’ll ask him to return it. That’s all I can do. I don’t have the authority to take any serious action.” She smiled meanly, as if she’d just caught him out in a falsehood. “But if you don’t mind telling me just a little about him? What he was like as a child?”

The old woman shrugged painfully. “He was a normal enough boy. Full of the devil. He used to love stories, I remember. Ghosts and haunts and knights and space pirates. The priest would tell little Aldebaran stories of the martyrs. I remember how he’d sit listening, eyes big, and tremble when they died. Now he’s on the television, I saw one of his commercials just the other day.” She fiddled with the control, fanning through the spectrum of stations without finding the ad, and put it down again. It was an expensive set, sealed in orbit and guaranteed by his own department as unconvertible. “I was a virgin when he was born.”

“I beg your pardon?” he said, startled.

“Ah, I thought that would draw your attention. It has the stench of offworld technology to it, doesn’t it? Yes, but it was an ancient crime, when I was young and very, very beautiful. His father was an offworlder like yourself, very wealthy, and I was just a backwoods witch — a pharmacienne, what you’d call an herbalist.”

Her pale, spotted eyelids half closed; she lay her head further back, gazing into the past. “He came down from the sky in a red-enameled flying machine, on a dark night when Caliban and Ariel were both newborn — that’s an important time for gathering the roots, your mandragon, epipopsy, and kiss-a-clown especially. He was an important man, he had that glitter about him, but after all these years I somehow cannot remember his face — only his boots, he had wonderful boots of fine red leather he told me came from stars away, nothing you could buy on Miranda even if you had the money.” She sighed. “He wanted a motherless child, of his own genes and no others. I have no idea why. I could never wheedle that from him, for all the months we stayed together.

“We haggled up a price. He gave me money enough to buy all this” — she gestured with her chin to indicate all her cluttered domain — “and later, several husbands more to my liking than he. Then he carried me away in his batwinged machine to Ararat, far deep in the forests. That’s the first city was ever built on Miranda. From the air it looked like a mountain, built up in terraces like a ziggurat, and all overgrown. I stayed there for all my pregnancy. Don’t believe those who say that haunts live there. I had it to my own, all those stone buildings larger than anything this side of the Piedmont, nobody there but myself and the beasts. The father stayed with me when he could, but it was usually just me and my thoughts, wandering among those overgrown walls. They were green with mosses, trees growing out of windows, fields of wildflowers on every roof. Nobody to talk to! I tell you, I earned that money. Sometimes I cried.”

Her eyes were soft and distant. “He spoke very fondly to me, as if I were his house pet, his soft cat, but he never once thought of rne as a woman, I could tell. I was only a convenient womb to him, when you come down to it, there was that reserve to him.

“I broke my hymen with these two thumbs. I’d been trained as a midwife, of course, and knew my diet and exercises. When he brought me ofrworld food and medicines, I threw them away. It amused him when he found out, for by then he could see that I was healthy and his bastard safe. But I made my plans. He was away the week of the birth — I’d told him the wrong date — and I gave him the slip. I was young then, I took two days’ rest, and then I left Ararat. He thought I’d be lost, you see, that I could never find my way out. But I was born in the Tidewater, and he on some floating metal world, what did he know? I’d saved up supplies in secret, and I knew what plants I could eat, so food was never a problem. I followed the flow of streams, took the easy way around marshes, and eventually I ended up at Ocean. There was nowhere else I could have ended up at, given I was consistent. It wasn’t a month before I had come here, and set workmen to building this house.”

She laughed lightly, and the laugh caught in her throat, causing her to choke. Her face twisted and reddened, until the bureaucrat feared she might be in serious distress. Then she calmed somewhat, and he poured her a glass of water from a nearby carafe. She took it without thanking him. “I fooled the bugger, all right. I bested him. I had his money safe in Piedmont banks, and his bastard with me, he never knew where to look, and he couldn’t inquire openly. Probably never bothered. Probably thought I died out there. It’s marshy around Ararat.”

“That’s a remarkable story,” the bureaucrat said.

“You think I was in love with him. It’s what anyone would think, but it’s not so. He’d come and bought me with his offplanet money. He thought himself important, and me nothing compared to him, a convenience he could pick up and put down as he wished. And he was right, damn him, that’s what made me mad. So I took his son from him, to teach him otherwise.” She cackled. “Ah, the pranks I used to play!”

“Do you have any pictures of him?”

She lifted a hand, pointed to a wall where petty portraits and ancient photomechanicals vied for space. “That picture there, in the tortoiseshell frame, bring it here.” He obeyed. “The woman, that tall goddess, was me, believe it or not. The child is young Aldebaran.”

He looked carefully. The woman was heavy and slatternly, but clearly proud of her solidity, her flesh: She’d’ve had her admirers. The child was a spooky thing, staring straight at him with eyes that were two dark circles. “This is a picture of a girl.”

“No, that’s Aldebaran. I dressed him like that, in skirts and flounces, for the first several years to hide him from his father, in case he came looking. Until he was seven. He turned willful then, nasty creature, and wouldn’t wear his proper clothes. I had to give in, he walked out in the street buck naked. But I didn’t give in easy. Three days he went bare before the priest came and said this could not be.”

“How did Aldebaran come to have an ofrworld education?”

She ignored the question. “I wanted a daughter, of course. Girls are so much more tractable. A girl would not have run off to find her father, the way he did.” Abruptly she commanded, “Put your hand under my bed. Pull out what you find there.”

He reached into the vaginal shadows under the bedskirts, drew out a shallow trunk carved with half-human figures. Mother Gregorian rolled over, grunting with effort, to look. “Under that green silk — there ought to be a brown package. Yes. That. Unwrap it.”

It was alarmingly easy to obey this monster, she was so sure of her commands. He held a battered notebook in his hand, a faded scrawl of sigils running across its cover.

“That belonged to Aldebaran. He lost it just before he ran away.” Her smile hinted at stories untold. “Take it with you, perhaps it’ll tell you something.” She closed her eyes, let her face relax into a flaccid mask of pain. She was panting now, steadily as a dog in summer, but quieter.

“You’ve been very helpful,” the bureaucrat said cautiously. He could sense the old woman about to name a price for information given.

“He thought he was so clever. He thought that if he went far away enough, he could escape me. He thought he could escape me!” Her eyes flickered open, glittered venomously. “When you find him, give him a message for me. Tell him that no matter how far you go, in miles or learning or time, you cannot escape your mother.”

He could think of nothing to say. So instead, he bowed politely and turned to leave.

“Oh, and you needn’t bother about the broken saucer. We have more, and it was an incomplete set anyway.”

He smiled. “That’s a good trick. How did you know that?”

She reached a hand up in the air, a gesture that managed to be both languid and laborious, like a drowning woman reaching for the water’s surface, and tripped a switch beam. The lights went out, and the room was plunged in darkness, save for a snowflake of light on the ceiling. It was a rosette of small circles, like a festival cookie. He looked down, and there was a smaller rosette on the floor, and brighter.

Her voice came out of the darkness, gloating. “The hot-air register. When it’s open, I can hear every word in the room below. I heard the saucer crack, and Esme scuttling out into the pantry and back.” She laughed at him. “Too straightforward for you, eh? You offworlders think yourselves so sophisticated. Something as simple as our ventilation system is beyond you.”

In the room below, he met a dignified-looking man with a dark mustache, holding a glass of the daughters’ thin beer. His hair was slicked down, Piedmont style. “You must be the appraiser,” the bureaucrat said.

They shook hands. “Yes, I come here every few weeks, to draw up another schedule of prices. A year ago, these pieces were worth a fortune; now, shipping costs have gone up and they’re not so valuable. Most will have to be left behind.” The appraiser held up a battered sheaf of papers and sighed piously. “These are the figures, anyone can check them. There’s no profit in it for me. The only reason I agree to come back so often is that there are so many beautiful things here, it would be a pity if they were lost to the tides.”

Linogre and Ambrym stood nearby, and Esme out of sight. Yet he could feel her watchful from some dim recess, all tiny black beadglass eyes and quivering whiskers.

“Esme,” Linogre said. “Please show mother’s visitor to the door. We must see to her wardrobe.”

The elder two sisters swept away in the wake of the appraiser. As soon as they were gone, Esme emerged from shadow. The bureaucrat glanced up at the air register and impulsively took her hand. He felt the sudden, urgent need to get her out of this poisonous atmosphere. To save something from disaster. “Listen to me: Your mother has told me she’s cut you out of her will,” he said. “She’s not willing you a thing. Leave this house tonight, child. Right now. I’ll help carry your things. There’s nothing here for you.”

The girl’s dusty-glass eyes took on a dull sheen of malice. “I want to see her die!” she spat. “She can keep her money, I just want to see her dead and never coming back!”

It was night when he left the house, but Caliban was high in the sky and full, Ariel low but gibbous and bright, so the river road was well-lit, and the trees had ghostly pairs of shadows arcing away from each other. The tree stars had come down from their high perches and, faintly luminous, were rooting for mites in the humus. The walk was peaceful, and the bureaucrat used it to sort out his impressions. It seemed to him that the house he’d just left was frozen in time. When the tides come, everything will change. Only some have rendered themselves beyond change, and caught by the sun, will be revealed as lifeless stone.

It wouldn’t hurt to find out who the magician’s father was. Even given that he’d doubtless broken tariff when he brought his money planetside, he must’ve been a rich and quite likely influential man. He thought again of the three sisters, unaged and unsexed by greed and inertia.

I could almost like Gregorian, he said to himself, just for escaping that woman.

At last he asked his briefcase, “Well — what is it?”

“Judging by the sketches and diagrams scattered within, it’s a magical diary — the account book an aspiring sorcerer maintains to keep track of his spiritual progress. It’s written in a floating cypher, using obsolete alchemical symbols, the sort of thing an extremely bright adolescent might invent.”

“Decode it, then.¹’

“Very well.” The briefcase thought for a moment, and then said, “The first entry begins: I killed a dog today.”