Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [73]
“It’ll get me the young fish.” She’d swooped it through the air, the way a child would a toy airplane, then lightly kissed the air before its tip and returned it to the box. “Take my word for it. If you want to catch the sweet young things, there’s nothing like owning a big cock.”
* * *
Eventually the Horse emerged from the diner, alone. She paused to put up the hood on her raincoat. He stepped from the shadows, and coughed into his hand. “I want to hire your services,” he said. “Not here. I have a place in the old boatyard.”
She looked him up and down, then shrugged. “All right, but I’ll have to charge you for the travel time.” She took his hand and waggled the tattooed finger. “And I can’t spend all night with you. There’s a midnight mass at the church, a service for the dead.”
“Fine,” he said.
“It’s the last service, and I don’t want to miss it. They’ll be chanting for everyone who ever died in Clay Bank. I got people I want to remember.” She took his arm. “Lead the way.” She was a homely woman, her face harsh and weathered as old wood. Under other circumstances he could imagine their being friends.
They trudged down the river road in silence. The bureaucrat wore a poncho his briefcase had made for him. After a time his speechlessness began to feel oppressive. “What’s your name?” he asked awkwardly.
“You mean my real name or the name I use?”
“Whichever.”
“It’s Arcadia.”
At the houseboat the bureaucrat lit a candle and placed it in its sconce, while Arcadia stamped the mud from her feet. “I’ll sure be glad when this rain ends!” she remarked.
The bundle he’d bought from the scavengers that morning was still on the nightstand. While he was gone, somebody had pulled the covers back from his bed and placed a single black crow’s feather at its center. He brushed it to the floor.
Arcadia found a hook for her raincoat. She pushed up her census bracelet to rub her wrist. “I’ve got a rash from this. You know what I think? I think adamantine is going to be a fetish item in a year or two. People will pay good money to have these things put on them.”
Thrusting the bundle at her, the bureaucrat said, “Here. Take off all your clothes and change into this.”
She looked at the bundle with interest, shrugged again. “All right.”
“I’ll be right back.”
He took a pair of gardening shears from his briefcase and went out into the rain. It was pitch-dark outside, and it took him a long time to clip the large armful of flowers he needed.
By the time he returned, Arcadia had changed into the fantasia. It was covered with orange and red sequins, and cut all wrong. But it fit her well enough. It would do.
“Roses! How nice.” Arcadia clapped her hands like a little girl. She spun about so that the fantasia swirled about her in a fluid, magical motion. “Do you like how I look?”
“Lie down on the bed,” he said roughly. “Pull the skirt up over your waist.”
She obeyed.
The bureaucrat dumped the roses to the side of the bed in a wet pile. Arcadia’s skin was pale as marble in the faint light, the mounded hair between her legs dark and shadowy. Her flesh looked as though it would be cold to the touch.
By the time he had shed his own clothing, the bureaucrat was erect. The room was sweet with the scent of roses.
He closed his eyes as he entered her. He didn’t open them again until he was done.
11
The Sun at Midnight
The air filled with flying ants, their wings iridescent blurs, tiny rainbows that overlapped and created black diffraction patterns: circles and crescents forming and disappearing before the eye could fix on them. The bureaucrat gaped up and they were gone, away on their dying flight to the sea.
“This makes no sense at all,” Chu grumbled.
The bureaucrat stepped back from the flier. “It’s very simple. I want you to lift off and head due south until you’re well over the horizon from Tower Hill. Then swing around and treetop back. There’s a