Страница 25 из 52
8. Conversations in the Puzzle Palace
The form-giver placed the bureaucrat at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, and set his briefcase down beside him.
The briefcase was incarnated as a short, monkish man, half human stature. He had shaggy black eyebrows and a slightly harassed expression. His gray velvet jacket was rumpled, his shoulders hunched and distracted.
“Ready to do battle?” the bureaucrat asked sourly.
The briefcase looked up with a quick, lopsided smile and alert eyes. “Will we be starting at your desk, boss?”
“No, I think we’d best start at the wardrobe. Considering all we’ve got to get done.”
The briefcase nodded and led him upward. The marble stairs split and resplit, winding graceful as snakes through the preliminary decision branchings. Swiftly they ascended the hierarchies. In the upper reaches, the stairs twisted and turned sideways to each other as they multiplied, fa
Involuntarily the bureaucrat thought of the old joke, that the Puzzle Palace had a million doors, not a one of which took you anywhere you wanted to be.
“Through here.” Their path corkscrewed under a spiraling cluster of stairways and between a brace of stone lions, muzzles splashed with green paint. They opened a door and stepped within.
The wardrobe was a musty oak room lined with masks of demons, heroes, creatures from other star systems, and things that might be any of these. It was gently lit by the pervasive sourceless light that informed all the Puzzle Palace, and filled with the purposeful bustle of people trying on costumes or having their faces painted, a quiet place of hushed preparation lifted from some prestellar theater or media surround.
A mantislike construct approached, all polished green chitin and slim articulation. It placed forearms together and bowed deeply. “How may I assist you, master? Talents, censors, social armaments? Some extra memory, perhaps.”
“Agent me in five,” the bureaucrat said. His briefcase, sitting cross-legged atop a costume trunk, took a pad from an inside pocket, scribbled payment codes, ripped off the top sheet, and handed it to the construct.
“Very good.” The mantis lifted four ma
“What would be the point?”
“That’s very wise, sir. It’s remarkable how many people restrict the amount of information their agents can carry. Amazing blindness. Because simply to exist here means one has given up one’s secrets to an agent. People are so superstitious. They hang on to the fiction of self, they treat the Puzzle Palace as if it were a place rather than an agreed-upon set of conventions within which people may meet and interact.”
“Why are you a
The mantis bent over a ma
“Am I?” the bureaucrat asked in surprise.
The ma
“Oh, shut up.”
“Of course, sir. The privacy laws are paramount. They come before even common sense,” the construct said reprovingly. The briefcase stood watching, an amused half-smile on his face.
“It’s not as if I were a Free Informationist.”
“Even if you were,” the mantis said, “I wouldn’t be able to report you. If treason were reportable, no one could trust the Puzzle Palace. Who could work here?” It stepped back from its work. “Ready.”
Five bureaucrats now looked at each other, all perfect copies of the other, face to face and eye to eye. Reflexively — and this was a tic that never failed to bother the bureaucrat — they looked away from each other with faint expressions of embarrassment.
“I’ll tackle Korda,” the bureaucrat said.
“I’ll take the bottle shop.”
“Philippe.”
“The map room.”
“The Outer Circle.”
The mantis produced a mirror. One by one, the bureaucrat stepped through.
The bureaucrat was the last to leave. He stepped out into the hall of mirrors: walls and overhead trim echoing clean white infinity down a dwindling line of gilt-framed mirrors before curving to a vanishing point where patterned carpeting and textured ceiling became one. Thousands of people used the hall at any given instant, of course, popping in and out of the mirrors continually, but the Traffic Architecture Council saw no need for them to be made visible. The bureaucrat disagreed. Humans ought not go unmarked, he felt; at the very least the air should shimmer with their passage.
All but weightless, he ran down the hall, sca
Philippe had rearranged his things. It was instantly noticeable because the bureaucrat maintained a Spartan work environment: limestone walls with a limited number of visual cues, an old rhinoceros of a desk kept tightly locked with a line of models ru
“How’s it been?” the briefcase asked.
“Philippe’s done a wonderful job,” the desk said. “He’s reorganized everything. I’m much more efficient than I was before.”
The bureaucrat made a disgusted noise. “Well, don’t get used to it.” His briefcase picked an envelope off the desktop. “What’s that?”
“It’s from Korda. He’s putting together a meeting as soon as you get in.”
“What for?”
The briefcase shrugged. “He doesn’t say. But from the list of attendees, it looks like another of his informal departmental hearings.”
“Terrific.”
“In the star chamber.”
“Have you gone mad?”
Korda had been sca
They sat around a conference table with a deep mahogany glaze that suggested hundreds of years of varnishing and revar-nishing. The five-ribbed ceiling was vaulted, and the plaster between the timbers painted dark blue with gilt stars. It was a somber setting, smelling of old leather and extinct tobacco, one calculated to put its users in a solemn and deliberative mood. Besides Korda and Philippe there were Orimoto from Accounting, Muschg from Analysis Design, and a withered old owl of a woman from Propagation Assessment. They were nonentities, these three, brought in to provide the needed handcodes if their brethren in Operations deemed a deep probe advisable.