Stations of the Tide

Three times the briefcase tried to stand Gregorian up. Each time the magician’s body overbalanced and fell. Finally the briefcase admitted defeat. “I just can’t get the hang of it, boss.”

“That’s all right,” the bureaucrat said. “Have him crawl.”

The supplies Gregorian had laid in included a diagnostician with a full line of medicinals. When the bureaucrat had run his blood through a scrubber, dosed himself with a centering drug, and washed his face, he felt a thousand times better. With the fever-dancers and fatigue poisons gone, he was left weak to the bone but clearheaded at last. He took a canteen to the doorway and rinsed out his mouth several times, spitting the residue into the street.

Then he went back inside and turned on a television. It’s begun! the set screamed. The wave front has just hit the shore! If you’re on the incline or in the Fan, we want to urge you—

What a terrific sight!

— to get out now! Yes, it is. Something glorious to see, the water cresting high with the dawn behind it, as it swallows up the land. We want to urge you. If you’re anywhere below the fall line, this is the time to get out. You won’t have another chance!

“Boss? Gregorian wants to speak with you.”

“He does?”

The bureaucrat locked arms behind his back, and strolled to the window wall. The horizon was in motion now. It was a thin, roiling line, nothing so dramatic as what they were showing on television. But the Tidewater had begun drowning at last. The jubilee tides were coming in. On the flatlands below, limp trees lay in windrows. Winds he could not hear blew indigo leaves past the silencing window glass.

In the whale wallow, immediately before him, knelt Gregorian. The briefcase had welded him into the same adamantine chains he had used on the bureaucrat. He could not stand and would not lie down. Their eyes met. His nervous system was still being monitored by the briefcase. “Put him through.”

“You can’t escape without my help,” the briefcase said in Gregorian’s calm voice.

“I’m safe enough here.”

“Oh, you’ll survive the tides all right. But how are you going to get away? You’ll be stranded on a little island that nobody will ever find. The food will only hold out so long. You don’t know the access codes that will let you send a message out to summon a flier.”

“And you do?” The bureaucrat moved his gaze up from Gregorian and across the plaza to where the briefcase had hung Pouffe’s body from a hook. He’d owed the man that much at least.

“Yes.” A light, urbane laugh. “We seem to have a stalemate here. I need your help to survive, and you need mine to escape. Obviously we need to compromise. What do you propose?”

“Me? I propose nothing.”

“Then you’ll die!”

“I suppose so.”

There was a long, astonished silence. Then Gregorian said, “You don’t mean that.”

“Wait and see.” He turned back to the television, knelt down, and fiddled with the controls. His show came on.

“How dare you judge me? You have no moral right to, and you know it!”

“How’s that again?”

“By your own standards, you’re tainted. You said you wouldn’t use proscribed technology. You told Veilleur that if you used it, you’d be no better than a criminal yourself. Yet all the time, you held it in reserve, ready to be called on.”

The drama was coming to a head. Young Byron had been lashed to the mast of mad Ahab’s ark. His mermaid waited frantically in a cage upon the moors, for the waters to come and drown her. Knowing that she was about to die, she sang.

“I lied,” the bureaucrat said. “Now, hush. I want to hear this.”

Not much later, the briefcase said, “Boss? He’s too proud to suggest it himself. But I know what he’s going through. I could kill Gregorian right now by overloading his nervous system. It would be painless.”

The bureaucrat was resting in a nest of fat pillows, bright with Archipelago designs. He stared at the television, letting its light wash over him. He was amazingly tired. The pictures meant nothing to him anymore, they were only a meaningless flow of imagery. He was empty, spent.

Whenever he looked up, he could see Gregorian glaring at him. If there were anything to this business of occult powers, then the wizard would not die alone. But though the bureaucrat felt the tug of those eyes, he would not meet them. Nor would he permit his briefcase to relay the magician’s words. He refused to listen. That way, there would be no chance, however slight, of being talked out of anything at the last minute.

“No,” he said mildly. “I think it’s better this way, don’t you?”

The tides were coming. The land thrilled with premonitions of Ocean. Sounds carried by the bedrock were piped up from the hollows and basements below, low extended moans and great submarine sighs. Sonic monsters rumbled through the bureaucrat’s bones and belly. All the city was crackling and popping in anticipation. The carbon-whisker struts thrummed with sympathetic resonance.

Ocean’s hammer was on its way.

When that great wave came, it would fall upon Ararat and ring the city like a bell. All the waters in the world would join together in one giant fist and smash down. From underneath, the blow would feel like the fall of Civilization, like the culmination of every flood and earthquake that had ever been. It would seem unimaginable that anything could survive. It would be the final descent of blackness.

When the waters finally subsided, Gregorian would be gone.

Then, at last, the bureaucrat could sleep.

14. Day of Jubilee

The bureaucrat sat in the command room, watching the final episode of his serial. The tides had come, and most of the characters were dead.

In the swirling wreckage of Ahab’s ship two tiny figures lay exhausted atop a jagged length of decking. One was Byron, the young man who had loved, betrayed, and now mourned a woman of the sea. His eyes were half-shut, mouth a gash of salt-encrusted misery. He had suffered most of any of the cast, had gone beyond anguish and disillusionment. Yet he had managed with his failing strength to save a child from the disaster.

The second figure was the child herself, the little girl, Eden. Her eyes shone bright as sparks of jungle green from that emaciated face. The tides had shocked her from autism, and returned her to life again. She stood and pointed. “Look!” she cried. “Land!”

It was only a show, and yet the bureaucrat was glad Eden had survived. Somehow that made all the rest of it bearable.

His briefcase entered the room. “Boss? It’s time.”

“I suppose it is.” He hauled himself to his feet, then knelt and turned off the television set forever. Good-bye to all that. “Lead the way.”

Rings of light paced them down the corridor. Still-active security systems swiveled to watch them pass, exchanged coded signals and, in the absence of human intervention, went to the default function. Which, because the base had been tailored for upper-echelon theoreticians, was not to hinder.

The door opened.

The sky was an amazing blue. Caliban floated low over the horizon, flat as a disk of paper, its ring of cities a scratch of white as thin and fine as a meteor trail. They stepped outside.

The bureaucrat stood blinking in the daylight. The terrace was white and empty. The week’s storms had scoured it clean of rubble. Pouffe was gone as completely as if he had never been. Nothing remained of Gregorian but his chains.

All the world smelled of salt air and possibility. Ocean stretched far and away in all directions, its triumph over the land complete. It was too large for him to take it all in. Standing upon this infinitesimal speck of stone, the bureaucrat felt small and exhilarated. His eyes ached with the effort of seeing and not comprehending.