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Her face grew solemn. “That was the final tragedy of our age. We were arrogant, I admit it. We made mistakes. This was the last of them, the one that brought the offplanet powers down on us, to regress our technology back yet another century.”
The bureaucrat remembered just enough history to know this was oversimplification. “What was done was necessary, Marivaud. There must be limits.”
She angrily yanked at a braid, setting its tiny bell tinkling. “We were not like the stupid cattle who live here today. We had pride! We accomplished things! We had our own scientists, our own direction. Our contribution to Prosperan culture was not small. We were known throughout the Seven Sisters!”
“I’m sure you were. Tell me about the ship.”
“The Atlantis was a liner originally. It had to be converted offshore — it was too deep for any harbor. That fragment you see now is only the prow. The true ship was as big as a city.” A montage of antique images of the ship in different configurations, the superstructure rising and falling in great waves. “Well, perhaps it only seemed so, for I saw it from so very many viewpoints, in such an overlapping woozy maze of perception. But I get ahead of myself. The first phase was to build a string of transmitters up and down the Tidewater. They were anchored to the bedrock with carbon-whisker cables and made strong enough to withstand the tides when they rolled across the land.” More images, of thick, bulbous-topped towers this time. “We rigged them with permanently sealed tokamaks, to guarantee their power over the submerged half of the great year. It took ten lesser years to…”
“Marivaud, I haven’t the time for all this. Just the sinking, please.”
“I was at home that day,” Marivaud said. “I’d built a place just above the fall line — what would be the Piedmont coast after the tides. I had a light breakfast, toast with fairy jam sprinkled with ground parsley from my garden, and a glass of stout.”
The image dissolved into the interior of a small cottage. Rain specked the windowpanes, and a fire burned in the hearth. Marivaud hastily wiped a dab of jam from the corner of her mouth. “Out at sea, the morning was bright and su
The scene switched to the deck of the Atlantis.
Green-yellow bodies poured onto the deck. A scoop lifted away. For an instant the bureaucrat did not recognize the struggling creatures. In winter morph they bore very little resemblance to humans. They had long, eelish tails and two slim appendages that might generously be called arms; their faces were streamlined, mouths silent gasps of pain. They twisted, bodies shortening, lengthening, shifting from form to form in a desperate attempt to adapt to the air. The image focused on one, and in the agonized turn of its head the bureaucrat recognized intelligence.
“They’re haunts!”
Marivaud faded half in, serene as a mado
A woman in hip boots waded in among the haunts. Her gun flashed as she pressed it to the backs of heads and pulled the trigger. Haunts jerked wildly with each gasp of compressed air.
“That’s the last of them. Over they go.”
Suddenly the image shifted to the viewpoint of one of the haunts. It flew through the air and exploded into the water. Clouds of bubbles gushed away and it fled wildly. To either side swam other haunts, wild and beautiful and ecstatic.
Back on deck, the crew were assembling a pair of projectors. “Let’s run out those ghost nets again. Watch that—”
There was a knock on the door.
Marivaud opened it. A woman with hard, handsome features that echoed her own stood there. “Goguette! Come in, let me take your cloak. Have you eaten yet? What brings you here so early?”
“I’ll take some berry tea.” Goguette sat at the table. “I’ve come to share the jubilee with my little sister. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“No, of course not. Oh! Mousket’s on deck.”
A large, heroically breasted military type faded in, all jaw and dark purpose. “Mousket,” Goguette said. “She’s the commandant, right?”
“Yes. She’s having an affair with the pilot.” A quick glimpse of a slim, straight-built man with cynical eyes. To the bureaucrat she said, “He is an extremely private man. The public nature of their love embarrasses, humiliates, arouses him. That only makes it the sweeter for her. She savors his abasement.”
“Excuse me,” the bureaucrat said. “How do you know all this?”
“Didn’t you notice my earrings?” Marivaud brushed back a curtain of braids, exposing an ear all coral and cream. From it hung an amber leaf, silver-veined and delicate as a dragon’s wing. The image swelled so he could see the embedded elements of a television transceiver, signal processor, and neural feed. It was an elegantly simple arrangement that would let her effortlessly employ all electronic skills: She might talk with friends, receive entertainments, preserve a particularly beautiful sunrise, copy an Old Master drawing in her own hand, do research, take and teach educational courses, or transmit her dreams for machine analysis, at her whim. It made her brain a node within an invisible empire of interactivity, the perfect focus of a circle so infinitely large its center was everywhere, its circumference nowhere.
“Even the offworlders didn’t have these,” she said. “We were the first to combine everything into one continuous medium. It was like being in two worlds at once, like having a second, unseen life. This was when you offworlders were creating that awkward mnemonic palace of yours. Our method was superior. If it hadn’t been for the Atlantis incident, you would be a part of it now.”
“By God, you’re talking about the Trauma!” the bureaucrat cried in rising horror. “There was a ship involved — that must have been the Atlantisl Everyone on it was wired for continuous broadcast.”
“Do you want to listen to this story or narrate it yourself? Yes, of course the crew were all actors, improvisors — what do you call people who lead lives of shaped intensity in order to create public dramas?”
“I don’t think we have them anymore. What are they doing to the haunts?”
“Fitting them with broadcast chips, of course. What did you think this project was all about?”
“Why would you want to do such a thing?”
“That is exactly what I ask her myself!” Goguette said. “There are so many refined, educational, and enriching experiences available on the net. Why waste your life listening in on creatures little better than animals?”
“Ah, but such splendid animals!” Marivaud giggled. “But we are getting away from our story. You” — she addressed the bureaucrat directly — “can experience only the middle range of this. You miss the little things, the burn of rope in chafed hand, Ocean’s smell, the chill of a salt breeze across your arm. And the grand emotions you can only sense from the outside. There is no way we can share more than a fraction of this with you. So I will show you two minor players, a ghostnetter and a flash-surgeon. Their true names have been lost, so I will give the ghostnetter the offworld name of Underbill. The flash-surgeon I will name — Gogo, after my sister.”
Goguette punched her shoulder, she laughed, and they were gone. On deck, the flash-surgeon bolstered her gun. She wiped her brow with the back of her arm, glanced up past the mast-high cranes to see Caliban high above, a disk of ice melting in blue sky. Then down again to see haunts’ heads appearing and disappearing above the water.
She strolled over to the nearest projector. “My God,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”
Underbill looked up from his screen, flashed a smile. “This is the last sounding. When they’re done, our job is over.” His hands were delicate on the controls. The projector swiveled slightly, and the ghost net swung an arc forward. “Watch that group out there.” Into a microphone he said, “Point one.”