Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [60]
Korda thought about that for a moment. “If we could be sure of that, I’d close the case right now.”
The bureaucrat waited.
“Well, we can’t, of course. Too many questions left unanswered. There’s an unsatisfactory taste to this whole affair. We’ll just have to keep thrashing about until something breaks free.”
There were undertones of genuine anguish in Korda’s voice, things he wasn’t saying. He shook his head, stood, and turned to leave. Then, remembering the ball in his hand, he stopped. Eyebrows raised, he gauged the distance to the targets. With elaborate care he wound up and threw. The ball flew waveringly, straightened, became a spear, and slammed into a dummy. He smiled as it came back to his hand in the form of a dagger.
“Vicious game,” he said. “Did you ever play it?”
“Yes. Once. Once was enough.”
Korda racked the dagger. “Bad experience, eh? Well, don’t feel too bad about losing—those games were all rigged, after all. One reason they were shut down. You couldn’t help but lose.”
The bureaucrat blinked. “Oh, it wasn’t like that,” he said. “It wasn’t like that at all. I won.”
9
The Wreck of the Atlantis
The orchid crabs were migrating to the sea. They scuttled across the sandy road, swamping it under their numbers. Bright parasitic flowers waved gently on their armor, making the forest floor ripple under a carpet of multicolored petals, like a submarine garden seen through clear fathoms of Ocean brine.
Mintouchian cursed and threw the brakes. The New Born King slammed to a halt. Chu pulled out a cheroot and stuck it in the corner of her mouth. “Well, we’re stuck here for a while. Might as well get out and stretch our legs.”
A small community of pilgrims, the inhabitants of three other trucks—Lord of Haunts, Lucky Mathilde, the Lion Heart—and some dozen foot travelers, were patiently waiting out the migration. A line of them sat on the lowest branch of a grandfather tree, huddled like crows and staring at a blue spark of fire chocked in the fork of one limb. “Look at that,” Mintouchian said. “When I was a kid and people got hung up on the road like this, they’d swap stories, sometimes for hours on end: ghost stories, family histories, fables, hero tales, hausmärchen, dirty jokes, brags and dozens, everything you can imagine. Living back then was like being in an ocean of stories. It was great.” Disgustedly he flicked on the dashboard set with a swipe of his beefy hand and leaned back in his seat.
Chu climbed out of the cab and hooked an elbow over the hood, eyes distant. The bureaucrat followed.
He felt disconnected. He had spread himself too thin in the Puzzle Palace, and now he felt a touch of perceptual nausea, a forewarning perhaps of the relativistic sickness to which those who worked in conventional reality were particularly prone. Everything seemed bright illusion to him, the thinnest film of appearance afloat over a darker, unknowable truth. The world vibrated with the finest of tensions, as if Something were immanent. He waited for windows to open in the sky, doorways in the trees and holes in the water. For the invisible coursing spirits that surely shared this space unseen to make themselves manifest. As of course they did not.
He set his briefcase down on the running board. “I’m going for a walk.”
Chu nodded. Mintouchian didn’t even look up from his program.
He wandered deeper into the grandfather tree, careful not to step on the occasional stray crab, outriders of the main migration dimly seeking their way back to consensus. The flow of orchid crabs had split, isolating them in an island of stillness. The tree overhead was a magnificent thing, its great branches spreading out horizontally from the main bole and sending down secondary trunks at irregular distances, so that the one tree had all the volume and complexity of an entire grove.
They were rare, grandfather trees, he remembered hearing.