Stations of the Tide

“I trust I have not grown so gullible as to consult a doctor,” the bureaucrat said with dignity. “If I want medical attention, I shall employ the qualified machinery or, in extremis, a human with proper biomedical augmentation. But I will not swill down fermented swamp guzzle at the behest of some quasi-literate, uneducated charlatan.”

“Be sensible. The nearest diagnostician is in Green Hill, while Dr. Orphelin is—”

“I am here.”

He paused in the doorway, as if posing for a commemorative hologram: a lean man in a blue jacket of military cut with two rows of gold buttons. Then the worn white path down the middle of the carpet carried him past a rotting vacuum suit propped ornamentally against the bookcase, and he dumped his black bag alongside the divan. His hands were heavily tattooed.

“You have been drugged,” the doctor said briskly, “and a diagnostician ca

The bureaucrat felt foolish. “Oh, very well.”

“Thank you.” Orphelin nodded to Mother Le Marie. “You may leave now.”

The old woman looked startled, then offended. She raised her chin and walked stiffly out. Why won’t you tell your uncle who the father is? someone said, and a young woman’s agonized voice cried, Because there is no father! before it was muffled by the closing door.

Orphelin peeled back the bureaucrat’s eyelids, shone a small light in his ears, took a scraping from inside his mouth, and fed it to a diagnostick. “You should lose some weight,” he remarked. “If you want, I can show you how to balance real and fairy foods in a diet.” The bureaucrat stared stoically at a spray of pink silk roses, brittle and browning at the edges, and said nothing.

At last the examination ended. “Hum. Well, you shan’t be surprised to learn that you’ve taken in some variety of neurotoxin. Could be any of a number of suspects. Did you experience hallucinations or illusions?”

“What’s the difference?”

“An illusion is a misreading of actual sensory data, while a hallucination is seeing something that isn’t there. Tell me what you saw last night. Just” — he held up a hand — “the high points, please. I have neither the time nor the patience for the extended story.”

The bureaucrat told him about the giant women wading in the river.

“Hallucinations. Did you believe in their reality?”

He thought. “No. But they frightened me.”

Orphelin smiled thinly. “You wouldn’t be the first man with a fear of women. Oh be still, that was a joke. What else did you see?”

“I had a long talk with a fox-headed haunt. But that was real.”

The doctor looked at him oddly. “Was it?”

“Oh yes. I’m quite sure of it. He carried me back to the hotel, later.”

Nausea welled up again, and the room took on a heightened clarity and vividness. He could see every thread of fiber on the rug, every frayed fabric end on the divan crawling in his vision. He felt flushed, and the finger that Undine had tattooed burned.

There was a rap on the door.

“Yes?” the bureaucrat said.

Chu stuck her head in and said, “Excuse me, but the autopsy is complete, and we need you to accept the report.”

“Come in here, please,” Orphelin said. “And I’ll need somebody else as well.” Chu glanced at the bureaucrat, and then, when he shrugged, ducked into the hall. She spoke to the guards. The taller one shook his head. “Hold on,” she said. A minute later she returned with Mintouchian in tow. He looked more hound than man, his face puffy and pink, his eyes sad and bloodshot.

“There’s more to this than I had originally thought.” The doctor held out his arms. “Grasp me by the wrists and hold on as tightly as possible.” Chu took one arm, Mintouchian the other. “Pull! We’re not here to hold hands.”

They obeyed, and he slowly leaned forward, letting his head loll on his chest. The two had to struggle to hold him upright.

Orphelin’s head whipped up, face transformed. His eyes were wide open, startlingly white. They quivered slightly. He parted his lips, and a third eye glared out from his mouth.

“Krishna!” Mintouchian gasped. All three eyes glanced toward him, then dismissively away. Horrified, the bureaucrat stared into that cold third eye.

Orphelin stared unblinkingly back. That eerie triple gaze drove like a spike deep into the bureaucrat’s skull. For a long moment nobody breathed.

Then the doctor’s head collapsed on his chest again.

“All right,” he said calmly. “You can let go now.” They obeyed. “Have you ever considered spiritual training?” he asked.

The bureaucrat felt as if he’d just emerged from a dream. It seemed impossible now, what he had just seen. “I beg your pardon?”

“First off, the entity you spoke with was not a haunt, attractive though that notion might seem to you. The last haunt died in captivity in lesser year 143 of the first great year after the landing. What you saw was an avatar of one of their spirits. The one we call the Fox. It is an important natural power, though unreliable in certain aspects, and is generally taken as being an auspicious omen.”

“I spoke with a solid, living being. He was neither ghost nor hallucination.” The room was alive now, each strand of carpeting undulating in unseen currents, mottled light dancing on the ceiling.

“Perhaps,” Mintouchian offered, “you spoke with a man in a mask.”

Nausea made the bureaucrat snappish. “Nonsense. What would a man in a fox mask be doing out in the woods in the middle of the night?”

Chu stroked her mustache. “He could have been waiting for you. I really think we should consider the possibility that he was part of this elaborate game that Gregorian is playing with us.”

The doctor looked startled. “Gregorian?”

“I studied ofiplanet,” Orphelin said when the others had been dismissed. “Many years ago. I had a Midworlds scholarship.” His back was to the bureaucrat; he had not spoken until the door was well and fully closed. “Six of the most miserable years of my life were spent in the Laputa Extension. The people who hand out the grants never consider what it’s like to go from an artificially suppressed level of technology to one of the floating worlds.”

“What does this have to do with Gregorian?”

Orphelin looked around for a seat, settled wearily down. His face was stiff and gray. “That was how I met Gregorian.”

“You were friends, then?” Whenever the bureaucrat looked at Orphelin’s face too long, the flesh melted away layer by layer, and the skull rose gri

“No, of course not.” The doctor gazed sightlessly at a dusty crucifix ringed by a small collection of sepia flats. His clasped hands rested upon his knees. “I despised him on sight.

“We met in the dueling halls of the Puzzle Palace. Suicide was nominally illegal, but the authorities winked at it — training grounds for leadership and so on. He had a coterie of admirers listening to him talk about control theory and the biological effects of projective chaos weapons. A striking young man, charismat-ically self-assured. He had a bad reputation. His skin was pale, and he wore the offworld jewelry that was popular back then: bloodstones embedded in the fingers, bands of silver around the wrists with the veins routed through crystal cha