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“Thank you for your advice.”
“For pity’s sake, don’t. . .” Chu’s voice faltered. “What’s that?”
Voices floated in the air, and had in fact been in the background for some time, a babble of cries and shouts rendered soft and homogeneous by distance. They both turned to look.
Far below, the pens of evacuees crawled with motion. Fencing had been torn down, and the crowd flowed after retreating handlers. Batons swung, and the sharp crack of wood floated above the swirling noise. “The fools!” Chu said softly.
“What is it?”
“They brought out the people too early, bottled them together too tightly, handled them too roughly, and told them nothing. A textbook case of how to create a mob. Anything can set off a riot then, a cracked head, a rumor, somebody giving his neighbor a shove.” She sucked thoughtfully on a back molar. “Yeah, I’ll bet that’s how it happened.”
The cattleboat was separating from the dock, its crew hoping to isolate the riot ashore. People desperately leaped after it, and fell or were pushed into the water. The evacuation officials were regrouping downriver, behind a clutch of utility buildings. From here it was all very slow and lazy and easy to watch. After a moment Chu squared her shoulders. “Duty calls. You’ll have to kill yourself without my help. I’ve got to saunter down there and help pick up the pieces.” Abruptly she extended a hand. “No hard feelings?”
The bureaucrat hesitated. But somehow the mood had changed. The tension between them was gone, the anger dissipated. He shifted the tube from one hand to the other. They shook.
Far below, a roar went up as behavior dampers exploded in orange smoke at the front of the mob. The thought of going down there horrified the bureaucrat. But he forced himself to speak up anyway. “Do you need help? I haven’t much time, but. . .”
You ever had any riot training?”
“No.”
“Then you’re useless.” Pulling a cigarillo from one pocket, Chu started down the hill. After a few steps, she turned back. “I’ll light a candle in your memory.” She lingered, as if reluctant to break this last contact.
The bureaucrat wished he could make some kind of gesture. Another man might have run after Chu and hugged her. “Say hello to that husband of yours for me,” he said gruffly. “Tell him I said you were a good little girl while you were away.”
“You son of a bitch.” Chu smiled, spat, and walked away.
In the air again and heading south, the briefcase said, “Are you done with the pen?”
The bureaucrat looked dully down at the metal cylinder he still held in his hand. He shrugged, and returned it to the briefcase. Then he snuggled back into the recliner. His shoulders ached, and the back of his skull buzzed with tension and fatigue. “Tell me when we’re near the city.”
They passed over still fields, lifeless towns, roads on which no traffic moved. Evac authority had scoured the land, leaving behind roadblocks, abandoned trucks, and bright scrawls of paint on the roads and rooftops, sigils huge and unreadable. The marshes began then, and the traces of habitation thi
“Boss? I’ve got a request to speak with you.”
The bureaucrat had been dozing, an irritable almost-sleep with dreams that thankfully never quite came into focus. Now he awoke with a grunt. “You’ve got what?”
“There’s some foreign programming in the flier — a quasi-autonomous construct of some kind. Not quite an agent, but with more independence than most interactives. It wants to speak with you.”
“Put it on.”
In a cheerily malicious tone the flier said, “Good morning, you bastard. I trust I’m not interrupting anything?”
The little hairs at the base of the bureaucrat’s neck stirred and lifted as he recognized the false Chu’s voice. “Veilleur! You’re dead.”
“Yes, and the irony of that is that I died because of a nullity like you. You, who could not even imagine the richness of the life I lost, because you were fool enough to get in the way of a wizard!”
The clouds scrolled by overhead, dark and densely contoured. “You might more reasonably direct your anger toward Gregorian for—” The bureaucrat caught himself. There was no point arguing with a recorded fragment of a dead man’s personality.
“As well hate Ocean for drowning you! A wizard is not human — his perceptions and motives are vast, impersonal, and beyond your comprehension.”
“Then he does have a motive? For you being here?”
“He asked me to tell you a story.”
“Goon.”
“Once upon a time—”
“Oh, good God!”
“I see. You want to tell this story yourself, don’t you?” When the bureaucrat refused to rise to the bait, the false Chu began again. “Once upon a time there was a tailor’s boy. His job was to fetch the bolts of cloth, to measure them out, and to crank the loom while his master wove. This was in an empire of fools and rogues. The boy’s master was a rogue, and the Emperor of the land was a fool. And because the boy knew no other and no better, he was content.
“The Emperor lived in a palace that no one could see, but which everyone said was the most beautiful structure in the universe. He owned fabulous riches that could not be touched, but were uniformly held to be beyond price. And the laws he passed were declared by all to be the wisest that had ever been, for no one could understand a word of them.
“One day the tailor was called into the Emperor’s presence. I want you to make me a new set of clothes, said the Emperor. The finest that have ever been seen.
As you command, said the roguish tailor, so shall it be done. He cuffed the boy on the ear. We will neither rest nor eat until we have made for you the finest raiment in all existence. Clothes so fine that fools ca
“Then, laden down with an enormous credit rating and many valuable options for commodities futures, the tailor and his boy returned to the shop. He pointed to an empty spool in the corner and said, There, that is the most valuable of moonbeam silk, bring it here. Carefully! if you get your grimy fingers on it, I will beat you.
“Wondering, the boy obeyed.
“The tailor sat down to the loom. Crank! he ordered. Our work is tremendous. We do not sleep tonight.
“How the boy suffered then! The roguish tailor’s publicists spread the word of his commission, and many were the celebrities and media stars who bribed their way in to watch. They would gape at the empty loom being worked, the empty spools spi
“Then — having committed themselves — they would praise the work in progress. For no one wished to admit he was a fool.
“By the time the work was finished, the tailor’s boy was half-mad from hunger and the drugs he took to stave off sleep. He was battered and bruised, and had he been thinking straight,
might well have killed his master. But the hysteria of the crowd was contagious, and he, no less than anyone else, thought himself honored to participate in such a seminal work.
“Finally came the day of the presentation. Where are my clothes? demanded the Emperor. Here, said the tailor, holding up an empty arm. Are they not fine? Notice the sheen, the glimmer of the cloth. We have woven so fine and cut so subtly that it takes a wise eye to even see the garb. To a fool, it is invisible.
“You might not think the Emperor would fall for so obvious a fraud. But it was all of a piece with the rest of his life. A man who believes in his own nobility has no trouble believing in a piece of cloth. Without hesitation, he stripped bare, and with the tailor’s help do
“A state holiday was declared in honor of the Emperor’s new clothes. The tailor was rewarded with so many honors, titles, and investment options that he now need not work ever again. He turned the boy out of his shop to beg in the street for his bread.