Stations of the Tide

“Hello, Esme.”

With a squeak of indrawn breath she whirled. The box banged against a shelf. She pulled away from him, at the same time awkwardly trying to keep from dropping the package. He did not let go. “How’s your mother?”

“You mustn’t—”

“Still alive, eh?” There was panic in those tiny, dark eyes. The bureaucrat felt that if he tightened his grip ever so slightly, bones would splinter. “That’s how Gregorian got you ru

He pushed forward, trapping her between his bulk and the shelves. He could feel her heart beating. “Yes.”

“He gave you this box?”

“Yes.”

“Who are you supposed to give it to?”

“The man — the man at the bar. Gregorian said he’d bring flowers.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. He said that if the man had any questions, I should tell him that the answers were all in the box.” Esme was very still now. The bureaucrat stepped back, freeing her. He took the box. She stared at it as avidly as if it held her heart.

The bureaucrat felt old and cynical. “Tell me, Esme,” he said, and though he meant it gently, it did not come out that way. “Which do you think would be the easier thing for Gregorian to do — kill his mother? Or simply lie to you?” Her face was a flame. He could no longer read it. He was no longer certain she was motivated by anything so simple and clean as a desire for revenge. But the time was past when he might influence her actions. He pointed to the far door. “You can leave now.”

As soon as she was gone, the bureaucrat opened the box. He sucked some air through his teeth when he saw what it contained, but he felt no surprise, only a pervasive sense of melancholy. Then he went out to the bar and to the surrogate waiting there. “This is for you,” he said. “From your son.”

Korda stared blankly up at him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Spare me. You’ve been caught consorting with the enemy, using proscribed technology, violating the embargo, abuse of public trust — it goes on and on. Don’t think I can’t prove it. A word from me, and Philippe will be all over you. There won’t be anything left but the tooth marks on your bones.”

Korda placed his hands facedown on the bar, ducked his head. Trying to regain his control. “What do you want to know?” he asked at last.

“Tell me everything,” the bureaucrat said. “From the begi

Failure brought the young Korda to the hunting lodge in Shanghai. He had entered public service in an age when the Puzzle Palace was new, and the culture filled with tales of dangerous technologies controlled, and societies rebuilt. He intended to outdo them all. But the wild horse of technology had already been broken to harness and reined in. The walls had been built, the universe contained. There were no new worlds to conquer, and the old ones had been safely bricked away. Like many another of his generation, the revelation left him lost and embittered.

Every day Korda skiffed into the marshes, or shambled into the low coral hills, and with intense self-loathing killed as many creatures as he could. Some days the marsh waters would be carpeted with feathers, and still he found no peace. He killed several behemoths, but he took no trophies, and of course they were not good to eat.

One hot afternoon, passing through a meadow with his rifle over his shoulder, he saw a woman digging for eels. She paused in her work, casually took off her blouse, and used it to mop the sweat from her face and breasts. Korda stopped and stared.

The woman noticed him and smiled. From the distance she had seemed at first plain, but now with a subtle shifting of light he saw that she was very beautiful. Come back at sunset, she said, with some je

When he returned, the woman had built a fire. She sat on a blanket alongside it. He laid his catch at her feet. Some time later, when they had both eaten their fill of the food that satisfies but does not nourish, they made love.

Even then, without the acuity of hindsight and retrospection, it seemed to him that the woman’s face changed as they made love. The flickering flames made it hard to tell. But it would seem by turns rounder, squarer, more slender. It was as if she held a thousand faces drowning just beneath her skin, and they crowded up, reaching for the surface, when passion broke her control. She rode him fiercely, as if he were an animal she had determined to use up in a single gallop. She taught him to control his orgasm, so that he might last the hours she desired.

“Did she give you a tattoo?” the bureaucrat asked.

Korda looked puzzled. “No, of course not.”

The coals were dying by the time the woman was done with him. He lay back slowly beneath her, eyes closing, sinking backward into unconsciousness and sleep. But as he fell away from the world, he had a vision of her face in orgasm, flattening out, elongating, growing skull-like and harsh.

It was not a human face.

He awoke cold and alone in the gray light of false dawn. The fire was dead, and the blanket yanked from beneath him. Korda shivered. His body was scratched, clawed, bitten, and raw. He felt as if he’d been tumbled over and over in a bramble patch. He put his clothes on, and returned to the lodge.

They laughed at him. That was a haunt woman you tangled with, they said, lucky for you she wasn’t in heat. Had an excursion pilot worked here a year ago, his brother was chewed to death by one, bit off his nipples and both his stones, licked his skin down to the muscle. Took the mortician a week to get the smile off his face.

Nor was he taken seriously in the Puzzle Palace. A polite young woman told him his sighting was anecdotal and not very good of its kind, but that she would see it filed away in some obscure bottle shop or other, and in the meantime thanked him for his time and interest.

But Korda did not care. He had found his purpose.

Listening, the bureaucrat could not help but marvel. He and Korda had never been close, but they had worked together for years. Where had this fanatic spirit come from, how had he hidden it from the bureaucrat for so long? He asked, “How did you know the location of Ararat?”

“Through the Committee. It was pretty much a fringe operation when I encountered it, cultists and mystics and other deadwood it took me forever to clear away, but there were still some old-timers associated with it who had been influential in their day. I picked up the useful bit of this and that from them.”

“So you stole enough biotech to create an unregistered clone son. Gregorian. Only his mother disappeared, and him with her. You were out of luck.”

Those were, Korda admitted, hard years. But he had only worked the harder, developing plans for the protection and preservation of the haunts, once they could be located, for sanctuaries and breeding programs, for enculturation and cultural preservation. He made them productive years, though his main goal, to locate or at least prove the existence of the haunts, remained unfilled.

But Korda kept his feelers out, and one day one of his contacts in the Tidewater found Gregorian.

“How?”

“I knew what he’d look like, you see. Every year I had pictures made up — his hormone balances had been adjusted slightly so he wouldn’t look too strikingly much like me. Just a vague similarity. I made him a little more rugged, a bit less prone to fat, that was all. Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t done out of pride.”

“Goon.”

Relations between father and son were strained, to begin with. Gregorian refused to do his father’s work in the Tidewater. He intimated he knew much about the haunts, but expressed supreme disinterest in the question of their ultimate survival. But Korda paid for Gregorian’s education anyway, and paved his way to a good entry position in the Outer Circle biotechnology labs. Time was on his side. There were no opportunities to challenge a man of Gregorian’s — Korda’s — abilities. Sooner or later he would come around.