Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [38]
The bureaucrat’s lips were dry, and there was a strange, vivid taste in his mouth. He had a hard time focusing on the puppeteer’s argument. “I’m not sure I’m following this.”
The golden woman threw the bureaucrat a scornful look over an upraised shoulder. Mintouchian smiled. “Where does this illusion before you exist? In my mind or yours? Or does it exist within the space in which our two minds intermesh?”
He raised his hands, and the woman dissolved in a shower of golden rings.
The bureaucrat looked up at Mintouchian, and the rings continued to spin and fall within his mind. He closed his eyes and saw them in the blackness, still falling. Opening his eyes did not rid him of them. The van seemed oppressively close and then as if it were not there at all. It seemed to pulse open and shut about him. He felt queasy. Carefully he said, “There is something wrong with me.”
But Mintouchian was not listening. In a musing, drunken voice he said, “Sometimes people ask why I got into this business. I don’t know. Usually I just say, Why would anyone want to play God? Make a face and shrug. But sometimes I think it’s because I wanted to prove to myself that other people exist.” He looked straight at and through the bureaucrat, as if he were alone and talking to himself. “But we can’t know that, can we? We can never really know.”
The bureaucrat left without saying a word.
* * *
He wandered down to the river. The docks were transformed. He looked over a sudden forest of gold mushrooms that had swallowed up a line of electric lights, and now burned with borrowed light, fairy peninsulas out into the water. He looked again and saw naked women wading in the river. With slow grace the moon-white women glided by the anchored boats, stirring them with gentle wake, their eyes level with the tips of the masts.
The bureaucrat stared up at them wonderingly, these silent phantoms, and thought, There are no such creatures, though for the life of him he could not imagine why not. Thigh-deep, they moved silent as dreams and large as dinosaurs, somnambulant yet bold as a wish. Something black turned and tumbled in the water, bumped against one rounded belly and sank away, and for one horrible instant he feared it was Undine herself, drowned in the river and gone to feed the hungry kings of the tides.
Then, with an electric thrill of terror, he saw one of the women turn to look directly at him, eyes as green as the sea and merciless as a northern squall. She smiled down on him over perfect breasts, and he stumbled back from her. Drugged, he thought, I have been drugged. And the thought made wonderful sense, struck him with the force of revelation even, though he did not know what to do with it.
With no sense of transition whatsoever he found himself walking through the woods. The trail was hedged around with mushrooms, bristling with soft-tipped spears that brushed their fleshy heads lightly against his face and arms as he passed. I must find help, he thought. If only he knew which way the trail went, toward town or away.
“What did you do then?”
“Hah?” The bureaucrat shook himself, looked around, and realized that he was sitting on the forest floor, staring at the blue screen of a television set. The sound was off and the image inverted, so that the people hung down from above like bats. “What did you say?”
“I said, what did you do then? Is there some problem with your hearing?”
“I’ve been having a little trouble preserving continuity lately.”
“Ah.” The fox-faced man opposite him gestured at the set. “Let us watch some more television, then.”
“It’s upside down,” the bureaucrat protested.
“Is it?” The fox man stood, flipped the television over effortlessly, squatted again. He was not wearing any clothing, but there was a folded pair of dungarees where he had been sitting. The bureaucrat had likewise made a pad of his jacket to protect himself from the damp.