Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [48]
All but weightless, he ran down the hall, scanning the images offered by the mirrors: A room like a black iron birdcage that hummed and sparked with electricity. A forest glade where wild machines crouched over the carcass of a stag, tearing at the entrails. An empty plain dotted with broken statues swathed in white cloth, so that the features were smothered and softened—that was the one he wanted. The traffic director put it in front of him. He stepped through and into the antechamber of Technology Transfer. From there it was only a step into his office.
Philippe had rearranged his things. It was instantly noticeable because the bureaucrat maintained a Spartan work environment: limestone walls with a limited number of visual cues, an old rhinoceros of a desk kept tightly locked with a line of models running down its spine. They were all primitive machines, a stone knife, the Wright flyer, a fusion generator, the Ark. The bureaucrat set about rearranging them in their proper order.
“How’s it been?” the briefcase asked.
“Philippe’s done a wonderful job,” the desk said. “He’s reorganized everything. I’m much more efficient than I was before.”
The bureaucrat made a disgusted noise. “Well, don’t get used to it.” His briefcase picked an envelope off the desktop. “What’s that?”
“It’s from Korda. He’s putting together a meeting as soon as you get in.”
“What for?”
The briefcase shrugged. “He doesn’t say. But from the list of attendees, it looks like another of his informal departmental hearings.”
“Terrific.”
“In the star chamber.”
* * *
“Have you gone mad?”
Korda had been scanned recently and looked older, a little pinker and puffier; this was how colleagues one saw only at the office aged, by concrete little bites, so that in retrospect one remembered them flickering toward death. It shocked the bureaucrat slightly to realize how long it had been since he’d seen Korda in person. It was a reminder how far from favor he’d fallen in recent years. “Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” he said.
They sat around a conference table with a deep mahogany glaze that suggested hundreds of years of varnishing and revarnishing. The five-ribbed ceiling was vaulted, and the plaster between the timbers painted dark blue with gilt stars. It was a somber setting, smelling of old leather and extinct tobacco, one calculated to put its users in a solemn and deliberative mood. Besides Korda and Philippe there were Orimoto from Accounting, Muschg from Analysis Design, and a withered old owl of a woman from Propagation Assessment. They were nonentities, these three, brought in to provide the needed handcodes if their brethren in Operations deemed a deep probe advisable.
Philippe leaned forward before Korda could go on. He smiled in a manner calculated to indicate personal warmth and said, “We’re all on your side here, you know that.” He paused to change his expression to one of pained regret. “Still, we are rather at a loss how you came to make, ahh, such an unfortunate statement.”
“I was suckered,” the bureaucrat said. “All right, I admit that. He threw me off-balance and then nailed me with that camera crew.”
Korda scowled down at his clasped hands. “Off-balance. You were raving.”
“Excuse me,” Muschg said. “Could we possibly have a look at the commercial in question?” Philippe raised an eyebrow at this unwarranted show of independence, much as he would have had his elbow suddenly ventured to offer a criticism of him. But he nodded, and his briefcase hoisted a television set onto the table. The bureaucrat appeared on the screen, red-faced, with a microphone stuck in front of him.
I’ll track him down and I will find him. No matter where he is. He can hide, but he can’t escape me!
Off-camera someone asked, Is it true he’s stolen proscribed technology? Then, when he shrugged off the question, Would you say he