Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [39]
“Yes.”
“Tell me what you see.”
“There are two women fighting. One has a knife. They are rolling over and over in the dirt. Now one is standing. She brushes her hair back from her forehead. She’s all sweaty, and she holds up the knife and looks at it. There’s blood on the blade.”
The fox sighed. “I have fasted and bled for six days without results. Sometimes I doubt I will ever be holy enough to see the pictures.”
“You cannot see any images on television?”
A sly smile, a twitch of whiskers. “None of my kind can. It is ironic. We few survivors hide among you, attend your schools, work in your field, and yet we do not know you at all. We cannot even see your dreams.”
“It’s just a machine.”
“Then why can we see nothing on it but a bright and shifting light?”
“I remember—” he began, almost dropped the thought, then caught the wind and sailed effortlessly forward—“I remember talking with a man who said that the picture does not exist. That the images are made in two parts and woven together within the brain.”
“If that is so, then our brains must lack the loom, and we will never see your dreams.” The creature licked its lips with a long black tongue. The bureaucrat felt a sudden shiver of dread.
“This is madness,” he said. “I cannot be talking with you.”
“Why is that?”
“The last haunt died centuries ago.”
“There are not many of us left, true. We were very near extinction before we learned how to survive in the interstices of your society. Physically altering our appearance was easy, of course. But passing as human, earning your money without attracting your interest, is more of a challenge. We are forced to hide among the poor, in shanties at the edge of farmlands and shotgun flats in the worst parts of the Fan.
“Well, enough of that.” Fox stood, offered his hand, raised the bureaucrat to his feet. He helped him into his jacket, and handed him his briefcase. “You must leave now. I really ought to kill you. But your conversation was so interesting, the early parts especially, that I will give you a short head start.” He opened his mouth to show row upon row of sharp teeth.
“Run!” he said.
* * *
He had been running through the forest so long, crashing through tunnels of feathery arches, stumbling into towers of spiked and antlered tentacles that collapsed noiselessly about him, that it had become a steady state of existence, as natural and unquestionable as any other. Then it all melted about him, and he was in a boneyard, among skeletons grown together and refleshed, rib cages growing fungal breasts, pelvises sprouting pale phalluses, and incurvate vaginas. The dead were reborn as monsters, twins and triplets joined at hip and head, whole families overwhelmed by yeasting masses, a single skull peering up from the top, red-painted teeth agape as if it were either laughing or screaming.
Then that was gone too, and he was stumbling across flat, empty ground. Gasping, he stopped. The earth here was hard as stone. Nothing grew on it. To one side he could hear the excited water music of Cobbs Creek, in full flood and eager to merge with the river. This would be the dig site, he realized, a full eighth-mile square injected down to the bedrock with stabilizers after burying no fewer than three sealed navigation beacons in its heart, against the return of the land in a new age. He breathed convulsively, lungs afire. Was I running? he wondered, and felt the sudden dead weight of futility as he remembered that Undine was dead.
“I found him!” someone cried.
A hand touched his shoulder, spun him around. Slowly he turned, and a fist struck his jaw.
He fell, legs sprawling out beneath him. His head smashed to the ground, and his arms flew wide. With a vague, all-encompassing amazement he felt a booted foot crash into his ribs. “Whoof!” His breath fled out of him, and he knew the grinding darkness of granite-boned earth turning under impact. Something loose and giving.
Three dark figures floated above him, shifting in planes of depth, movement defining and redefining their spatial relationship with each