Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [77]
It was not a human face.
He awoke cold and alone in the gray light of false dawn. The fire was dead, and the blanket yanked from beneath him. Korda shivered. His body was scratched, clawed, bitten, and raw. He felt as if he’d been tumbled over and over in a bramble patch. He put his clothes on, and returned to the lodge.
They laughed at him. That was a haunt woman you tangled with, they said, lucky for you she wasn’t in heat. Had an excursion pilot worked here a year ago, his brother was chewed to death by one, bit off his nipples and both his stones, licked his skin down to the muscle. Took the mortician a week to get the smile off his face.
Nor was he taken seriously in the Puzzle Palace. A polite young woman told him his sighting was anecdotal and not very good of its kind, but that she would see it filed away in some obscure bottle shop or other, and in the meantime thanked him for his time and interest.
But Korda did not care. He had found his purpose.
Listening, the bureaucrat could not help but marvel. He and Korda had never been close, but they had worked together for years. Where had this fanatic spirit come from, how had he hidden it from the bureaucrat for so long? He asked, “How did you know the location of Ararat?”
“Through the Committee. It was pretty much a fringe operation when I encountered it, cultists and mystics and other deadwood it took me forever to clear away, but there were still some old-timers associated with it who had been influential in their day. I picked up the useful bit of this and that from them.”
“So you stole enough biotech to create an unregistered clone son. Gregorian. Only his mother disappeared, and him with her. You were out of luck.”
Those were, Korda admitted, hard years. But he had only worked the harder, developing plans for the protection and preservation of the haunts, once they could be located, for sanctuaries and breeding programs, for enculturation and cultural preservation. He made them productive years, though his main goal, to locate or at least prove the existence of the haunts, remained unfilled.
But Korda kept his feelers out, and one day one of his contacts in the Tidewater found Gregorian.
“How?”
“I knew what he’d look like, you see. Every year I had pictures made up—his hormone balances had been adjusted slightly so he wouldn’t look too strikingly much like me. Just a vague similarity. I made him a little more rugged, a bit less prone to fat, that was all. Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t done out of pride.”
“Go on.”
Relations between father and son were strained, to begin with. Gregorian refused to do his father’s work in the Tidewater. He intimated he knew much about the haunts, but expressed supreme disinterest in the question of their ultimate survival. But Korda paid for Gregorian’s education anyway, and paved his way to a good entry position in the Outer Circle biotechnology labs. Time was on his side. There were no opportunities to challenge a man of Gregorian’s—Korda’s—abilities. Sooner or later he would come around.
Korda figured he understood Gregorian well.
He was wrong. Gregorian had found work in the Outer Circle. There he stayed, until the jubilee tides were imminent, and there was no way for Korda to effectively use him. Korda wrote him off.
Then Gregorian disappeared. He fled suddenly, without warning or notice, in a deliberately suspicious manner. Investigation revealed that shortly before his departure he had interviewed Earth’s agent and been given something. Whatever it was, nobody believed any longer that it was harmless. Alarms were rung. It all ended up in Korda’s lap.
He had handed the investigation to the bureaucrat.
“Why me?”
“I had to send someone. You were simply on deck.”
“Okay. Now, shortly after that, you contacted me at the carnival in Rose Hall. You were costumed as Death, and you were anxious to know if I’d found Gregorian. Why did you do that?”
Korda raised a line-fed glass to his lips. He was drinking steadily, drinking and unable to get drunk. “Gregorian had just sent me a package. A handful