Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [0]
Mrs. John Francis Swanwick,
with much love
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is indebted to David Hartwell for suggesting where to look, Stan Robinson for the gingerbread-maddrake trick, Tim Sullivan and Greg Frost for early comments and Greg Frost again for designing the briefcase’s nanotechnics, Gardner Dozois for chains of the sea and for teaching the bureaucrat how to survive, Marianne for insights into bureaucracy, Bob Walters for dino parts, Alice Guerrant for whale wallows and other Tidewater features, Sean for the game of Suicide, Don Keller for nominal assistance, Jack and Jeanne Dann for the quote from Bruno, which I took from their hotel room when they weren’t looking, and Giulio Camillo for his memory theater, here expanded to a palace; Camillo was one of the most famous men of his century, a thought which should give us all pause. Any book’s influences are too numerous to mention, but riffs lifted from C. L. Moore, Dylan Thomas, Brian Aldiss, Ted Hughes, and Jamaica Kincaid are too blatant to pass unacknowledged. This novel was written under a Challenge Grant from the M. C. Porter Endowment for the Arts.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
1. The Leviathan in Flight
2. Witch Cults of Whitemarsh
3. The Dance of the Inheritors
4. Sibyls in Stone
5. Dogs Among the Roses
6. Lost in the Mushroom Rain
7. Who Is the Black Beast?
8. Conversations in the Puzzle Palace
9. The Wreck of the Atlantis
10. A Service for the Dead
11. The Sun at Midnight
12. Across the Ancient Causeway
13. A View from a Height
14. Day of Jubilee
Other Books by Michael Swanwick
Praise for Michael Swanwick
Copyright
1
The Leviathan in Flight
The bureaucrat fell from the sky.
For an instant Miranda lay blue and white beneath him, the icecaps fat and ready to melt, and then he was down. He took a highspeed across the stony plains of the Piedmont to the heliostat terminus at Port Richmond, and caught the first flight out. The airship Leviathan lofted him across the fall line and over the forests and coral hills of the Tidewater. Specialized ecologies were astir there, preparing for the transforming magic of the jubilee tides. In ramshackle villages and hidden plantations people made their varied provisions for the evacuation.
The Leviathan’s lounge was deserted. Hands clasped behind him, the bureaucrat stared moodily out the stern windows. The Piedmont was dim and blue, a storm front on the horizon. He imagined the falls, where fish-hawks hovered on rising thermals and the river Noon cascaded down and lost its name. Below, the Tidewater swarmed with life, like blue-green mold growing magnified in a petri dish. The thought of all the mud and poverty down there depressed him. He yearned for the cool, sterile environments of deep space.
Bright specks of color floated on the brown water, coffles of houseboats being towed upriver as the haut-bourgeois prudently made for the Port Richmond incline while the rates were still low. He touched a window control and the jungle leaped up at him, misty trees resolving into individual leaves. The heliostat’s shadow rippled along the north bank of the river, skimming lightly over mud flats, swaying phragmites, and gnarled water oaks. Startled, a clutch of acorn-mimetic octopi dropped from a low branch, brown circles of water fleeing as they jetted into the silt.
“Smell that air,” Korda’s surrogate said.
The bureaucrat sniffed. He smelled the faint odor of soil from the baskets of hanging vines, and a sweet whiff of droppings from the wicker birdcages. “Could use a cleansing, I suppose.”
“You have no romance in your soul.” The surrogate leaned against the windowsill, straight-armed, looking like a sentimental skeleton. The flickering image of Korda’s face reflected palely in the glass. “I’d give anything to be down here in your place.”
“Why don’t you, then?” the bureaucrat asked sourly. “You have seniority.”
“Don’t be flippant. This is not just another smuggling case. The whole concept of technology control is at stake here. If