Stations of the Tide

“I’m not making any demands,” the bureaucrat began. “I only—”

“There speaks the voice of power. You maintain a stranglehold on the technology that could turn Miranda into an earthly paradise. You control manufacturing processes that allow you to undercut our economy at will. We exist at your whim and sufferance and in the form you think good. Then you walk in here carrying this whip and making demands you doubtless prefer to call requests and pretend it is for our own good. Let us not cap this performance with hypocrisy, sir.”

“Technology didn’t exactly make an ‘earthly paradise’ of Earth. Or don’t they teach classical history here?”

“The perfect display of arrogance. You deny us our material heritage, and now you have as good as asked me to thank you for it. Well, sir, I will not. I have my pride. And I—” He paused. In the sudden silence it was observable how his head nodded slightly at irregular intervals, as if he fought off sleep. His mouth opened and shut, opened and shut again. His eyes slid slowly to the side in search of his lost thought. “And, ah. And, ah—”

“The illusionist,” the bureaucrat insisted. “Lieutenant Chu’s impersonator. Have you found him yet?”

Bergier straightened, his fire and granite restored. “No, sir, we have not. We have not found him, for he is not here to be found. He has left the ship.”

“That’s not possible. You docked once, and nobody debarked. I was watching.”

“This is a seaward flight. It is all but empty. On the landward run, yes, perhaps an agile and determined man could evade me. But I have accounted for every passenger and had my crew open every stowage compartment and equipment niche in the Levi. I went so far as to send an engineer with an airpack up the gas vents. Your man is not here.”

“It’s only logical he’d’ve secured his escape beforehand. Maybe he had a collapsible glider hidden forward,” Chu suggested. “It wouldn’t have been difficult for an athletic man. He could have just opened a window and slipped away.”

More likely, the bureaucrat thought, and the thought struck him with the force of inevitability, more likely he had simply bribed the captain to lie for him. That was how he himself would’ve arranged it. To cover his suspicion, he said, “What bothers me is why Gregorian went to all this trouble to find out how much we know about him. It hardly seems worth his effort.”

Bergier scowled at his screens, said nothing. He touched a control, and the timbre of one engine changed, grew deeper. Slowly, slowly the ship began to turn.

“He was just baiting you,” Chu said. “Nothing more complicated than that.”

“Is that likely?” the bureaucrat said dubiously.

“Magicians are capable of anything. Their thinking isn’t easy to follow. Hey! Maybe that was Gregorian himself? He was wearing gloves, after all.”

“Pictures of Gregorian and of our impersonator,” the bureaucrat said. “Front and side both.” He removed them from his briefcase, shook off the moisture, laid them side by side beside the screens. “No, look at that — it’s absurd to even contemplate. What does his wearing gloves have to do with anything?”

Chu carefully compared the tall, beefy figure of Gregorian with the slight figure of her impersonator. “No,” she agreed. “Just look at those faces.” Gregorian had a dark, animal power, even in the picture. He looked more minotaur than man, so strong-jawed and heavy-browed that he passed through mere homeliness into something profound. His was the sort of face that would seem ugly in repose, then waken to beauty at the twitch of a grin, the slow wink of one eye. It could never have been hidden in the pink roundness of the false Chu’s face.

“Our intruder wore gloves because he was a magician.” Lieutenant Chu wriggled her fingers. “Magicians tattoo their hands, one marking for each piece of lore they master, starting from the middle finger and moving up the wrist. A magus will have ’em up to the elbows. Snakes and moons and whatnot. If you’d seen his hands, you’d never have mistaken him for a Piedmont official.”

Bergier cleared his throat and, when they both turned to him, said, “With the technology you deny us, a single man could operate this ship. Alone, he could manage all functions from baggage to public relations with nary a crewman under him.”

“That same technology would make your job superfluous,” the bureaucrat pointed out. “Do you think for an instant that your government would pay for an expensive luxury like this airship if they could have a fleet of fast, cheap, atmosphere-destroying shuttles?”

“Tyra

Before the bureaucrat could respond, Chu interjected, “We’ve located Gregorian’s mother.”

“Have we?”

“Yes.” Chu gri

“We’ll visit the mother first thing tomorrow morning,” the bureaucrat said. “But I’ve dealt with planetside banks before, and I very seriously doubt we’ll be able to follow the money.”

Bergier looked at him scornfully. “Money can always be traced. It leaves a trail of slime behind it wherever it goes.”

The bureaucrat smiled, unconvinced. “That’s very aphoristic.”

“Don’t you dare laugh at me! I had five wives in the Tidewater when I was younger.” Bergier popped another lozenge, mouthed it liquidly. “I had them placed where they could do the most good, spaced out along my route distant enough that not one suspected the existence of the others.” The bureaucrat saw that the commander did not observe how Chu rolled her eyes when he said this. “But then I discovered that my Ysolt was unfaithful. It drove me half mad with jealousy. That was not long after the witch cults were put down. I returned to her that day after an absence of weeks. Oh, she was hot. Her period had just begun. The whole house smelled of her.” His nostrils flared. “You have no idea what she was like at such times. I walked in the door, and she slammed me to the floor and ripped open my uniform. She was naked. It was like being raped by a whirlwind. All I could think was that we must avoid scandalizing the neighbors.

“It would have made a fish laugh to see me struggling beneath that little hellcat, I should imagine. Red-faced, half-undressed, and flailing out with one arm to close the door.

“Well and good. I was a young man. But the things she did to me! From somewhere she had acquired skills I had not taught her, ideas that were not mine. Some of them things such as I had never experienced. We had been married for years. Now, all at once, she had acquired new tastes. Where had she learned them, hey? Where?”

“Maybe she read a book,” Chu said dryly.

“Bah! She had a lover! It was obvious. She was not a subtle woman, Ysolt. She was like a child, showing off a new toy. Why don’t we see what happens if, she said… Let’s pretend you’re the woman and I’m the man … This time I’m not going to move at all, and you can… It took her hours to demonstrate everything she had learned — ‘thought of’ she said — and I had a lot of time to mull over what I should do.

“It was dark when I left her. She was sleeping it off, her long black hair sticking to her sweaty little breasts. What an angelic smile she had! I went out to discover who had cuckolded me, and I brought along a gun. He would not be difficult to find, I determined. A man with such skill as Ysolt mirrored would be known in the right quarters.

“I went down to the riverbank, to the jugs and paintpots, and asked a few questions. They said yes, a man with the kind of skill I described had been through recently.” A hidden speaker mumbled respectfully, and Bergier touched the controls. “Trim the port aerostat manually if you have to. Yes. No. You have your orders.” He was silent for a long, forlorn moment, and the bureaucrat thought he had lost the thread of his tale. But then he began again.