Stations of the Tide

4. Sibyls in Stone

The famous witch Madame Campaspe, who claimed she had transcended humanity and thus had no need to die and who always carried with her a tame water rat, was nowhere to be found. Some said she had retired to the Piedmont, where she owned a walled estate in the Iron Lake district under an assumed name, others that she had been drowned by a horrified lover, that her clothes had been discovered by the river and taken to the local church to be burned. Nobody expected her back.

Hammers sang. Workmen were tearing walls from houses and stringing waxflowers over the streets of Rose Hall. The little river community was half-dismantled, the houses at its core reduced to roofs and floors so that they might serve as dance pavilions. They looked like so many skeletons, flanked by sad piles of rubble.

The bureaucrat and Chu stood before what was once Madame Campaspe’s house. The high roof, ironically like a squared-off version of a witch’s peaked cap, and the corner posts were all that remained intact. The interior had been filled with scrap lumber and other inflammables. “What a mess,” the bureaucrat said disgustedly of the heaped and broken wardrobes and divans, stained blankets, clotted masses of paper, and filthy brown rugs, the flotsam and jetsam of a hastily abandoned life. A broken-backed stuffed angel shark leered from the bottom. The house reeked of white kerosene.

“It’ll make a nice bonfire, anyway,” Chu said. She stepped back as a canvas-gloved woman threw in more planks. “Hey — lady! Yeah, you. You from around here?”

The woman brushed back her short black hair with her wrist, not bothering to doff her work glove. “I was born here.” Her eyes were green, cool, skeptical. “What do you want to know?”

“The woman who used to live here, the witch. Did you know her?”

“I know of her, of course. Madame Campaspe was the richest woman in Rose Hall. Tough old bird. There was plenty of gossip. But I live on the other side of town. I never actually met her.”

Chu smiled dryly. “Of course not. A big place like this, how could you meet her?”

“Actually,” the bureaucrat said, “we’re more interested in a student of hers. A man named Gregorian. Did you know him?”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“This is the man who made all the commercials,” Chu said. Then, when the woman continued to look blank, “On television. Television! Have you ever heard of television?”

Quickly the bureaucrat said, “Excuse me. I couldn’t help but notice that lovely pendant you’re wearing. Is it haunt work?”

Startled in the first flush of anger, the woman glanced down at the stone hanging between her breasts. It was smoothly polished, the length of a human thumb, straightedged on one side, curved on the other, rounded atop and tapering below to a blunt point. It was too big for a fishing weight and too edgeless and asymmetrical to be a spear point. “It’s a shell knife,” she said.

Then, brusquely, she seized her barrow and trundled it away.

The bureaucrat stared after her. “Have you noticed how evasive the locals get when we start asking questions?”

“Yes, it does seem they’ve got something to hide, doesn’t it?” Chu said thoughtfully. “There’s a local trade smuggling haunt artifacts. Stone projectile points, bits of pottery, and so on. Things that properly belong to the government. It would be easy enough for a witch to get involved in that sort of thing. They’re always poking around in odd places, nosing about boneyards, mucking about ravines. Digging holes.”

“Is there much money in haunt artifacts?”

“Well, they aren’t exactly making any more of them.”

Chu smiled at the bureaucrat, and he realized guiltily that his face must bear that exact same expression, sharp little grins with an unclean edge to them, as if they were predators that had caught scent of blood. “I wonder what they’re hiding.”

“It’ll be interesting to find out.”

They headed back to the hotel. In the weeds by the edge of town some children had caught a nautilus. Shrieking blissfully, they rode its shell, two and three at a time, while it slowly pulled itself forward with long, fluid arms. The bureaucrat commiserated silently with the wretched creature. It was hard to imagine it as it would be within the year, soaring and swooping in Ocean’s waters, a creature of preternatural speed, of uncanny grace.

In the center of town, they passed through a loose congeries of trucks belonging to entertainers and concessionaires brought in by the local businesses as a farewell gesture. A proud-bellied man was cranking out the canopy for a puppet theater. Others were raising a Wheel into the sky. It all looked tawdry, cheap, immeasurably sad.

The bureaucrat led the way through the lobby and into the hotel bar. It was cool and dark here, cluttered with neon signs advertising discontinued brands of alcohol and behemoth tusks gone chalky with age, and redolent with a lifetime’s spillage of cheap ale. Strings of paper flowers gone gray as dust hung over adhesive-backed holos of fighters trapped in greasy rainbow-smears while they threw the same famous punches over and over.

A sloppily fat bartender leaned back against a narrow counter, watching television. Their reflections swam up from the depths of a corroded mirror, rising from behind a ragged line of bottles, pale and popeyed, exotics from Ocean’s trenches. The bureaucrat put his briefcase up on the bar, and Chu with a nod slipped away to the toilets.

The bureaucrat coughed. With a lurch, the bartender straightened, turned, laughed. “Whoah! You want to know something, I didn’t see you there.” His head was bald as a toadstool and speckled with thumbprint-sized brown spots. Splaying his hands on the bar, he leaned forward leeringly. “So what the fuck can I do for—” He stopped. “That thing for sale?”

The bureaucrat looked down at the briefcase, up at the barkeep. He was the most physically repulsive man the bureaucrat had ever seen. Fleshy growths sprouted from his eyelids like small tentacles; they jiggled as he talked. His over-sly smile was a caricature of cunning.

“Why do you ask?”

“Well.” The man’s teeth were bruised and cracked, his gums purple, his breath sweet with corruption. “I know a man who might be interested in buying such a thing.” He winked. “Let’s not mention any names.”

“I could get in a lot of trouble if I went back up without this.”

“Not if it fell in the river.” The old troll touched the bureaucrat’s arm ingratiatingly, as if to draw him into a shared fantasy universe of conspiracy, treachery, and sleazy profit. “What the fuck. Accidents happen. A smart fucker could arrange for them to happen in front of witnesses.”

Suddenly the man’s face paled, and he sucked in air between his teeth. Lieutenant Chu’s reflection rose up in the mirror. The bartender turned away quickly.

“Where to next?” Chu asked. She glanced curiously at the fat man, now gazing fixedly into the television.

“I still have some things to see to upcountry.” The bureaucrat rapped the bar. “Excuse me! Do you have a gate here?”

“Back room,” the old man muttered. He didn’t look up.

More bodies were discovered today in the Plymouth Hundreds in Estuary Province, a newswoman said. Shown here are just a few of the dozens of corpses removed from shallow graves this morning. Authorities say the hands, feet, and heads had been removed to slow identification.

“I’d hate to be working homicide hereabouts,” Chu commented. “Lots of old scores are being settled nowadays.”

In the back room the bureaucrat related his conversation with the bartender to Chu. She whistled softly. “You really do have a way of stumbling into things! Well, now I know where to begin looking. Let me go poke around and see what I can turn up.”

“Do you need any help?”

“You’d only be in the way. See to your business. I’ll give you a nudge when I find something.” She left.

The surrogation device was an antique, ungainly as an armored squid, and too battered to be worth the cost of hauling away. The bureaucrat lay down on a cracked vinyl sofa. Tentacular sensors jointed delicately to touch his forehead. Colors swam behind closed eyelids, resolving into squares, triangles, rectangles. He touched one with his thought.

A satellite picked up the signal and handed it down to the Piedmont. A surrogate body came alive, and he walked it out into the streets of Port Richmond.

The House of Retention was a neolithic granite peak, one of the range of government buildings known locally as the Mountains of Madness. Its stone halls were infested by small turquoise lizards that skittered away at the surrogate’s approach and reappeared behind him. Its walls were damp to the touch. The bureaucrat had never been anywhere, the Puzzle Palace of course excepted, where there was so little green. He was directed to its moist interior, where sibyls operated data synthesizers under special license from the Department of Technology Transfer.

It was a long, gloomy walk, and the bureaucrat felt the weight of the building on him every step of the way. The passage took on allegorical dimensions for him, as if he were trapped inside a labyrinth, one he had entered innocently enough in his search for Gregorian, but which he now found himself too far into for retreat but not far enough for any certainty of reaching whatever truth might lie at its center.

When he came to the hall of sibyls, he chose a door at random and stepped inside. A thin, sharp-featured woman sat in the center of a workdesk. Dozens of black cables as thick as her little finger looped out of darkness to plug into her skull. They shook when she looked up to see who had entered the room. It was a clumsy setup, typical of the primitive systems his department enforced when onplanet use of higher-level technologies was unavoidable. “Hello,” the bureaucrat said, “I’m—”

“I know who you are. What do you want?”

Somewhere, water slowly dripped.

“I’m looking for a woman named Theodora Campaspe.”

“The one with the rat?” The sibyl stared at him unblinkingly. “We have a great deal on the notorious Madame Campaspe. But whether she’s alive or dead, and in either case where, is not known.”

“There’s a rumor that she drowned.”

The sibyl pursed her lips, squinted judiciously. “Perhaps. She hasn’t been seen for a month or so. It’s well documented that her clothes were burned on the altar of Saint Jones’s outside of Rose Hall. But all that is circumstantial at best. She may simply not want to be found. And of course half our data are corrupt; she may be minding her own business without any intent to deceive anyone.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No.”

“Just what is her business, anyway? What exactly does a witch do?”

“She would never have used that word,” the sibyl said. “It has unfortunate political overtones. She always referred to herself as a spiritualist.” Her eyes grew dreamy as she drew in widely scattered snippets of information. “Most people did not make that distinction, of course. They came to her back door at night with money and requests. They wanted aphrodisiacs, contraceptives, body chrisms, stillbirth powders to sprinkle before their enemies, potions to swell breasts and change genitalia from male to female, candles to conjure up wealth, charms to win back lost love and to ease the pain of hemorrhoids. We have sworn testimony that she could shed her skin like a haunt and turn into a bird or a fish, suck the blood of her enemies, frighten children with masks, ride faithless husbands across the hills where it would take them days to return, ring bells from the tops of trees, send dreams to steal the mind or seduce the soul, emerge from swimming in the river and leave no footprints behind, kill animals by breathing in their faces, reveal the location of Ararat and disclose the existence of a gland inside the brain whose secretions are addictive on first taste, walk shadowless at noon, foresee death, prophesy war, spit thorns, avert persecution. If you want specifics, I could spend the rest of the day on them.”

“What of the magician Aldebaran Gregorian? What do you have on him?”

She bowed her head to concentrate on the search. “We have the text of his commercials, the data presentation your department made to the Stone House, a recent internal security report bylined Lieutenant-Liaison Chu, and the usual anecdotia: consorts with demons, blasphemes, hosts orgies, climbs mountains, couples with goats, eats rocks, plays chess, seduces virgins of both sexes, walks on water, fears rain, tortures innocents, defies offplanet authority, washes with milk, consults mystics on Cordelia, employs drugs on himself and others, travels in disguise, drinks urine, writes books in no known language, and so on. None of it reliable.”

“And of course you don’t know where I can find him.”

“No.”

The bureaucrat sighed. “Well, one more thing. I want to know the provenance of an artifact I saw recently.”

“Do you have a picture?”

“No, but I can visualize it quite clearly.”

“I’ll have to patch you into the system. Open a splice line, please.”

He called up the proper images, and a face appeared before him, twice human size, a gold mask afloat in midair between himself and the sibyl.

It was the face of a god.

Warmly handsome, inhumanly calm, the system tutelar said, “Welcome. My name is Trinculo. Please allow me to help you.” His expression was as grave and serene as the reflection of the moon on night waters.

In the back of his head the bureaucrat felt the buzzing encephalic presence of all twenty sibyls hooked into the system. But Trinculo’s presence was all-pervasive, riveting, a charismatic aura he could almost touch. Even knowing, as he did, that it was an artifact of the primitive technology, that his attention was artificially focused so rigidly on Trinculo that the hindbrain registered it as awe, the bureaucrat felt humbled before this glowing being. “What do you have on this object?”

He visualized the shell knife. A sibyl picked up the image and hung it in the air over the desk. Another opened a window into a museum catalog. She scanned through bright galleries that looked as if they’d been carved from ice and lifted the knife’s twin from a glass shelf. The bureaucrat wondered what the actual museum looked like; he had known collections with perfect catalogs and empty, looted source buildings.

“It’s a haunt artifact,” one sibyl said.

“A shell knife, used to unhinge the muscle of midden clams,” added another. In the air beside the knife she opened a window onto a primitive scene depicting a fish-headed haunt squatting by the river demonstrating the tool’s use, then closed it again.

“Quite useless now. Humans do not find midden clams digestible.”

“This particular knife is about three-hundred-fifty years old. It was used by a river clan of the Shellfish alliance. It is a particularly fine example of its class, and unlike most such was not gathered by the original settlers on Miranda, but is a product of the Cobbs Creek dig.”

“Documentation is available on the Cobbs Creek dig.”

“It is presently on display in the Dryhaven Museum of Prehuman Anthropology.”

“Is that sufficient, or do you wish to know more?”

Trinculo smiled benignly. The tutelar had spoken not a word since his original greeting. “I saw this knife not half an hour ago in the Tidewater,” the bureaucrat said.

“Impossible!”

“It must be a reproduction.”

“The museum has offplanet security.”

“Trinculo,” the bureaucrat said, “Tell me something.”

In a friendly, competent voice the gold mask said, “I am here to assist you.”

“You have the text of Gregorian’s commercials on file.”

“Of course we do!” a sibyl snapped.

“Why hasn’t he been arrested?”

“Arrested!”

“There’s no reason to.”

“Whatever for?”

“Gregorian claims he can transform people so that they can live in the sea. That’s false representation. He’s taking money for doing so. That’s fraud. And it looks likely that he’s drowning his victims in the course of his fraud. That’s murder.”

There was a brief silence. Then the sibyl sharing the room with his surrogate, head still down as she sifted through her data, said, “It must first be determined that he can’t actually fulfill his claims.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Human beings cannot live in Ocean.”

“Perhaps they could be adapted.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“To take the very simplest matter first, there’s hypothermy. If you’ve ever been swimming, you know how rapidly you grow cold. Your body can afford to lose heat at that rate for only a relatively short time. After a few hours, you’ve used up your resources and you lose isothermy. You go into shock. And you die.”

“Haunts managed to live in the water quite comfortably.”

“Human beings are not haunts. We’re mammals. We need to maintain a high blood temperature.”

“There are mammals too that live in the water. Otters and seals and the like.”

“Because they’ve evolved to. They’re protected by a layer of fat. We’re not insulated that way.”

“Perhaps that’s part of the change that Gregorian makes, an insulating layer of fat.”

“I refuse to believe that I’m having such a puerile argument when I’m within an information system!” The bureaucrat addressed the tutelar directly. “Trinculo, tell your people whether such an extreme rearrangement of human physical structure is possible.”

Trinculo turned slightly to one side and then to the other in confusion, and stammered, “I’m. . . No, I’m sorry, I… can’t answer that question.”

“It’s just a simple correlation of available science!”

“I don’t. … have the…” Trinculo’s eyes were pained. His glance darted back and forth frantically.

Suddenly the tutelar and the buzzing presence of his attendants were gone. The office was empty save for the sibyl. She had yanked the patch.

The bureaucrat frowned. “Your tutelar seems woefully inadequate for your needs.”

The sibyl looked up sharply, making the cables rustle and rattle. “And whose fault is that? It was your own department that sent in the ravishers and berserkers when they decided the Quiet Revolution had gone too far. We had a completely integrated system before your creatures ate holes in it.”

“That was a long time ago,” the bureaucrat said. He knew of the incident, of course, the quixotic attempt to regear an entire planet to a technological level so low they could afford to cut off all ofiplanet commerce, but he was surprised to hear her speak of it so emotionally. “Back when the Tidewater was still underwater, just before the Resettlement. Long before either of us was born. Surely there’s no need to go into old grievances now.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to live with the consequences. You don’t have to operate a senile information system. Your people condemned Trinculo as a traitor and burned out all his higher functions. But he’s still remembered here as a patriot. Children light candles to him in the churches.”

“He was your leader?” The bureaucrat was not surprised, then, that Trinculo’s higher functions had been pithed. After what had happened to Earth, there was no creature more feared than an independent artificial entity.

The sibyl shook her cables wrathfully. Drops of condensate went flying. “Yes, he was our leader! Yes, he masterminded the rebellion, if that’s what you want to call it. We wanted nothing more than freedom from your interference, your economics, your technology. When Trinculo showed us how we could disentangle ourselves from your control, we didn’t stop to ask if he came from a factory or a womb. We’d have dealt with the devil for a chance to slip our necks from your noose, but Trinculo was nothing of the kind. He was an ally, a friend.”

“You can’t disengage from the outside universe, no matter how—” the bureaucrat began. But the woman’s skin was white now, her lips thin, her eyes hard. Her face had closed and turned to stone. It was hopeless trying to reason with her. “Well, thank you for your help.”

The sibyl glared him out of the room.

The bureaucrat backed outside, turned, and realized he was lost.

As he stood there, hesitating, a door opened down the hall. Out stepped a man who shone as bright as an angel. He looked as if he had swallowed the sun and could not contain its light within his flesh. The bureaucrat turned down external gain, and saw within the dimming figure the steel ribs and telescreen face of a fellow surrogate. It was a face he knew.

“Philippe?” he said.

“Actually I’m just an agent.” Philippe had recovered from amazement first; now he grinned in a comradely fashion. “I’m afraid I’m under such pressure at work, I haven’t been able to gate here in person.” He took the bureaucrat’s arm and steered him down the hall. “If that was your first encounter with Trinculo’s widows, you need a drink. Surely you have time for a drink.”

“You spend a lot of time on Miranda, do you?”

“More than some, less than others.” Philippe’s teeth were perfect, and his face, even though he was old enough to be the bureaucrat’s father, was unlined and pink. He was the living avatar of the eternal schoolboy. “Does it matter?”

“I suppose not. How’s my desk doing?”

“Oh, I’m sure Philippe has it well in hand. He’s very good at that sort of thing, you know.”

“So everyone tells me,” the bureaucrat said glumly.

They stepped onto a sudden balcony overlooking a city street. Philippe called a moving bridge, and they rode it over the hot river of moving metal to the next wing of the building. “Where is Philippe nowadays?”

“Diligently at work in the Puzzle Palace, I presume. Down this way.” They came to a deserted refreshment niche and plugged in. Philippe called up a menu, hooked a metal elbow over the bar. “The apple juice looks good.”

The bureaucrat had meant where Philippe was physically. Agenting in realspace was so much more expensive than surro-gation — the ministries responsible for the conservation of virtual reality made sure of that — that normally agents were only employed when the primary was so far away the lag time made surrogation impractical. It was clear, though, that the agent wasn’t going to answer that particular question.

Back in the hotel, somebody nudged the bureaucrat’s shoulder. “I’ll be done in a minute,” he said without opening his eyes. A drink materialized in his hand, as chill and slippery with moisture as a real glass would be.

“Tell me,” the agent said after a moment. “Does Korda have anything against you?”

“Korda! Why would Korda have anything against me?”

“Well, that’s exactly what I was wondering, you see. He’s said some odd things lately. About possibly eliminating your position and reassigning your responsibilities to Philippe.”

“That’s ridiculous. My workload could never be—”

Philippe threw up his hands. “This isn’t my doing — I don’t want your job. I’m overburdened with responsibility as it is.”

“Okay,” the bureaucrat said disbelievingly. “All right. Tell me exactly what Korda said to you.”

“I don’t know. Don’t look at me like that! Honestly I don’t. Philippe only gave me the broadest outline. You know how cautious he is. He’d keep what he knew from himself, if that were possible. But, listen — I’ll be merging back into him in a couple of hours. Do you want to give him a message? He could gate down to talk with you.”

“That won’t be necessary.” The bureaucrat swallowed back his anger, hid it away from the agent. “I ought to have this case wrapped up in a day or two. I can talk with him in person then.”

“You’re that close, are you?”

“Oh yes. Gregorian’s mother gave me a great deal of information. Including an old notebook of Gregorian’s. It’s full of names and addresses.” Actually the book was largely taken up with occult diagrams and instructions for ceremonies — full of serpents, cups, and daggers — that the bureaucrat found both obscure and tedious. Other than the insights it gave into the young Gregorian’s character and youthful megalomania, its only solid lead had been the references to Madame Campaspe. But the bureaucrat wanted to give Philippe something to think about.

“Good, good,” the agent said vaguely. He stared down at his hand, swirling the liquid only he could see in its imaginary glass. “Why is it that line-fed fruit juice never tastes as good as what you get in person?”

“That’s because when you’re just being line-fed the flavor, you don’t get the body rush from the sugars and so on.” Philippe looked blank. “It’s like getting a line-fed beer — all flavor and no alcohol. Only the physical component of apple juice isn’t so pronounced, so while your body feels the difference, you’re not consciously aware of what the lack is.”

“You know a little bit of everything,” Philippe said amiably.

When the bureaucrat opened his eyes, Chu was waiting for him.

“I’ve found it,” she said. That small, feral smile again, conspiratorial flash of teeth and gone. “Come on out back.”

On the blind side of the hotel was a long storage shed with a single narrow door. Chu had smashed the lock. “I need a light,” the bureaucrat said. He took one from his briefcase and entered.

Amid a litter of tools, lumber, and scrapwood, were a dozen new-made crates. “They were all set to close up shop,” Chu said. Setting a sawhorse aside, she reached into a crate she’d already ripped open, and handed the bureaucrat a shell knife just like the one he’d seen earlier.

“So they’re smuggling artifacts, just as we thought, eh?”

Chu took a second shell knife from the crate, a third, a fourth.

They were all identical.

“There’s other stuff too. Pottery, digging sticks, fishnet weights. All in multiplicate.” She reached into the shadows. “Look what else I found.”

It was a briefcase, the perfect twin of the one the bureaucrat held. He could tell by its markings that it had been issued by his own department.

“You see the scam, don’t you? They got hold of some genuine haunt artifacts, fed them to the briefcase, and had it make them copies. Then they returned the originals to the source. Or maybe copies, I don’t imagine it would make any difference.”

“Only to an archeologist. Maybe not even then.”

“Did you find out where the knife came from?”

“The original was from Cobbs Creek,” the bureaucrat said. “It’s on display in Dryhaven.”

“Cobbs Creek is just down the river. Not far from Clay Bank.”

“I’m less interested in where the artifacts came from than in how the counterfeiters got hold of one of our briefcases. Have you questioned it yet?”

“Don’t waste your breath.” Chu held it open to the light so that he could see the interior, blackened and blistered. “It’s dead.”

“Idiots.” The bureaucrat took patch lines from his own briefcase and wired the two together. “They must’ve overloaded it. It’s a delicate piece of equipment; if you order it to keep making copies of something and don’t take care to keep it supplied with the elements it needs, it’ll dismantle itself trying to follow instructions. I need a full readout of this thing’s memory.”

His briefcase was silent for a second, then said, “There’s nothing left but the identification number. It managed to disassemble all its insulation before it died, and the protected memory rotted out.”

“Shit.”

“Give me a hand with this crate,” Chu said.

Grunting and puffing, they wrestled the crate outside, and let it fall to the ground with a crash. The bureaucrat went back in for his briefcase, took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. “Won’t all this noise alert the counterfeiters?”

“I’m counting on it.”

“Hah?”

Chu took out a cheroot, lit it. “You think the nationals are going to arrest anybody over this? With the jubilee tides so close? A petty little counterfeiting ring that’s probably not even cheating Mirandans? Face it, these things are being sold to offplanet tourists. Hereabouts that amounts to a victimless crime. The briefcase might have been a bigger noise, but it’s dead. Anyway, the hot rumor is that the Stone House is going to announce a general amnesty on crimes committed in the Tidewater, a few days before the tides. To make things easier for the evacuation authority. So the national police aren’t going to be very excited about this. I figure there’s only two things we can do. The first is to throw this crap in the river, so they can’t make any more profit off it.”

“And the second?”

“That’s to make so much noise hauling it out that anyone involved will know we’re on to them. They don’t know about the amnesty. I figure that barkeep must be a mile away by now, and running fast. Wait here, and I’ll go requisition a wheelbarrow.”

When they came back from the river, the bar was empty and the bartender gone. He had left without even turning off the television. Chu went behind the bar, found a bottle of remscela and poured them both a shot. “To crime,” she said.

“I still hate to see them get away.”

“Enforcement is a dirty business, sonny,” Chu said scornfully. “And there’s a lot more dirt down here than you have up in Cloud-wonderland. Buck up, and enjoy your drink like a grown-up.”

On the television a man was arguing with old Ahab about the man’s twin brother, long ago lost at sea. Murderer! Ahab shouted. He was your twin, and your responsibility!

Since when am I my brother’s keeper?

Unseen by either, a mermaid peered in at them through a window, her face open with wonder, and with pain.