Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [49]
“Here it comes,” Korda said.
Gregorian is the most dangerous man on the planet.
“I was under a certain amount of stress at the time.…”
Why do they call him the most dangerous man on the planet? Gregorian’s granite image filled the screen. His eyes were cold moons, stern with wisdom. What does this man know that they don’t want you to learn far yourself? Find out for— Korda snapped it off.
“Gregorian couldn’t’ve paid you to do better.”
In the middle of the uncomfortable silence a phone rang. The briefcase removed it from a jacket pocket and held it out. “It’s for you.”
The bureaucrat took the receiver, grateful for the moment’s respite, and heard his own voice say, “I’m back from the bottle shop. Can I report?”
“Go ahead.”
He absorbed:
In an obscure corridor known as Curiosity Lane the bureaucrat came to a run of small shops, windows dark with disuse, and entered an undistinguished doorway. A bell jangled. It was shadowy within, shelf upon shelf crammed with thick-glassed, dusty bottles, extending back forever in a diminishing series of receding storage reaching for the Paleolithic. Gilt cupids hovered in the ceiling corners with condescending smiles.
The shopkeeper was a simple construct, no more than a goat’s head and a pair of gloves. The head dipped, and the gloves clasped each other subserviently. “Welcome to the bottle shop, master. How may I help you?”
“I’m looking to find something, uh…”—the bureaucrat waved a hand, groping for the right phrase—“of rather dubious value.”
“Then you’re in the right place. Here is where we store all the damned children of science, the outdated, obscure, and impolite information that belongs nowhere else. Flat and hollow worlds, rains of frogs, visitations of angels. Paracelsus’s alchemical system in one bottle and Isaac Newton’s in another, Pythagorean numerology corked here, phrenology there, shoulder to punt with demonology, astrology, and methods of repelling sharks. It’s all rather something of a lumber room now, but much of this information was once quite important. Some of it used to be the best there was.”
“Do you handle magic?”
“Magic of all sorts, sir. Necromancy, geomancy, ritual sacrifice, divination by means of the study of entrails, omens, crystals, dreams, or pools of ink, animism, fetishism, social Darwinism, psychohistory, continuous creation, Lamarckian genetics, psionics, and more. Indeed, what is magic but impossible science?”
“Not long ago I met a man with three eyes—” He described Dr. Orphelin’s third eye.
The shopkeeper tilted its head back thoughtfully. “I believe we have what you’re looking for.” It ran its fingers over a line of bottles, hesitated over one, yanked another out, and swirled it around. Something like a marble rattled and rolled within. With a flourish it uncorked the bottle and poured a glass eye out onto the counter. “There.”
The bureaucrat examined the eye carefully. It was perfectly human, blue, with a rounded T-shaped indentation on its back. “How does it work?”
“Simple yoga. You are in the Tidewater now. Can I take it you are aware of the kind of bodily control their mystics are reputed to have?”
He nodded.
“Good. The eye is swallowed. The adept keeps it in his stomach until he needs it. Then it’s regurgitated up into the mouth. The smooth side is pushed against the lips—open the mouth and it looks real—and manipulated by the tongue. It can be moved back and forth and up and down using the indentations in the back.” The eye was returned to the bottle and the recorked bottle to the shelf. “It was simply a conjuring trick.”
“Then how come I fell for it?”
The goat’s head dipped quizzically. “Was that a real question, or rhetorical?”
The question took the bureaucrat by surprise; he had been no more than talking to himself. Nonetheless, he said, “Answer me.”
“Very well, sir. Conjuring is like teaching, engineering, or theater in that it’s a form of data manipulation, a means of making reality do what one desires. Like theater, however, it is also an art of illusion. Both aim to convince an audience that what