Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [69]
Lieutenant Chu was waiting for him on the boardwalk outside the diner. Boats bobbed on the river, tied to pilings across which ran docks more gap than substance, the idea of Dock a beau idéal honored more in the intent than the execution. The drizzle chose that instant to intensify into rain, drops hissing on the surface of the water. They ducked inside.
“I got another warning,” the bureaucrat said when they’d found a table. He opened his briefcase and removed a handful of black feathers. A crow’s wing. “It was tacked to my door when I got home last night.”
“Funny business,” Chu said. She spread the wing, examined the bloody shoulder joint, folded open the tiny fingers at the metacarpal joint, and gave it back. “It must be those scavengers doing it. I don’t know why you insist on living there.”
The bureaucrat shrugged irritably. “Whoever’s actually placing these things, it’s at Gregorian’s instigation. I recognize his style.” Privately, though, it bothered him that Gregorian had changed tactics again, switching back from attempted assassination to mockery and harassment. It made no sense.
The diner was dim and narrow, a tunnel dug straight back from the bank. The tables halfway down were drawn away from the pool of light shed by the single milky glass skylight. Water fell from leaky seams into waiting tins. To the rear the kitchen help laughed and gossiped while the leaping flames of a gas range chased shadows about their faces. A waitress came to their table and slapped down trenchers of salt meat and mashed yams. Chu wrinkled her nose. “You got any—?”
“No.” The evac boys at the next table laughed. “You want breakfast, you’ll take what you’re given.”
“Arrogant bitch,” Chu grumbled. “If this weren’t the last eatery in Clay Bank, I’d…”
A young soldier leaned over from the next table. “Easy up,” he said in that broad northern accent all the local Authority muscle had, Tidewater types brought in from Blackwater and Vineland provinces because they had no ties here. “Last airship comes through tomorrow. They’ve got to clean out their larder.” His beret, folded under a shoulder strap, had been customized with a rooster’s tail.
Chu stared at him until he reddened and turned away.
In a niche by the table a television was showing a documentary on the firing of the jugs. There was antique footage of workers sealing up the newdug clay. Narrow openings were left at the bottoms of what would be the doors, and to the top rear of the tunnels. Then the wood packed inside was fired. Pillars of smoke rose up like the ghosts of trees and became a forest whose canopy blotted out the sun. The show had been playing over and over ever since its original broadcast on one of the government channels. Nobody noticed it anymore.
The heat required to glaze the walls was—The bureaucrat reached over to switch channels. My brother died at sea! What was I supposed to do? I’m not his keeper, you know.
“You watch that crap?” Chu asked.
“It’s involving.”
“Who’s the weedy geek?”
“Now that’s an interesting question. He’s supposed to be Shelley, Eden’s cousin—you know, the little girl who saw the unicorn? But she had two cousins, identical twins—” Chu snorted. “All right, I admit it’s implausible. But, you know, even in the Inner Circle it happens occasionally. That’s why they have the genetic-tagging techniques, to mark them as separate individuals when it does occur.”
But Chu wasn’t listening. She stared off through the doorway into the gray rain, pensively silent. Around them rose the babble of voices from waitresses and kitchen workers, soldiers and civilians, happy and a little shrill with the excitement of the impending evacuation, all feeling the intoxication of radical change.
All right! Yes, I killed him. I killed my brother! Are you happy now?
“God,” Chu said. “This must be the most boring place in the universe.”
* * *
Holding his briefcase out for balance, the bureaucrat followed Chu