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“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 i
“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 sca
“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 ca
“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.