Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [78]
“That sounds like his style,” the bureaucrat said dryly. “What then?”
“Nothing. Until the other day when I heard from his half-sister that he would meet me here, and give me the proof I wanted. That’s all there is. Will you open the package now?”
“Not just yet,” the bureaucrat said. “Let’s go back a bit. Why did you create Gregorian in the first place? Something to do with regulatory votes, was it?”
“No! It’s not like that at all. I—I was going to have him raised on the Tidewater, you see. I was taking the long view by then. I realized that the reason the haunts were so elusive was that they didn’t want to be found. They were passing themselves as human, living in the social interstices, in migrant labor camps and over top of rundown feed stores. They are intelligent, after all, cunning, and few in number.
“To find them I needed someone who knew the Tidewater well, who moved among its people without attracting attention, who could distinguish between a joke and an offhand revelation. Someone culturally at home there.”
“That still doesn’t explain why that someone also had to be you.”
“But who else could I trust?” Korda said helplessly. “Who else could I trust?”
The bureaucrat stared at him for a long time. Then he nudged the package forward.
Korda ripped open the lid. When he saw what lay within, he went horribly still. “Go on,” the bureaucrat said, and suddenly he was angry. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Final, irrefutable proof.”
He reached into the box and pulled the severed head out by the hair. Two surrogates nearby put down their imaginary drinks and stared. Others further down noticed and swiveled to look. Silence spread like ripples through the room.
The bureaucrat slammed the head down on the bar.
It was inhumanly pale, the nose longer than any human’s ever was, the mouth lipless, the eyes too green. He slid a hand over the cheek, and the muscles there jumped reflexively, reshaping that part of the head. Korda stared at it, his mouth on the screen opening and closing without saying a word.
The bureaucrat left him there.
* * *
A smear of sunset was visible through the open door, and behind him the surrogates were singing, These are the last days, the final days, the days that cannot last, when a bellhop materialized at his elbow. “Excuse me, sir,” it murmured, “but there is a lady who wishes to speak with you. She is here in person, and she emphasizes that it is most important.”
Esme, he thought sadly, when will you put an end to this? Almost he was tempted just to walk out on her. “All right,” he said. “Show me the way.”
The device escorted him up a hidden lift to a suite just below the bulbous dome, and left at the open door. The walls were gently luminous, and in their graceful light the sheer extravagant waste of the room, with its hand-carved furniture, its enormous silk-covered bed, was appalling. He stepped within. “Hello?”
A door opened, and the last woman in the universe he expected entered.
He could say nothing.
“Have you been practicing?” Undine asked.
The bureaucrat blushed. He tried to speak, but was so full of emotion he could not. He reached across an immense distance and took her hand. He clutched it, not like a lover but like a drowning man. Were he to let her go, he knew, she would dissolve from his touch. Her face filled his vision. It was a proud face, beautiful, mischievous; and staring at it, he realized that he did not know her at all, and never had. “Come to me,” he managed at last.
She came to him.
* * *
“Don’t come yet. I have something I want to teach you.”
Not exactly groggy, the bureaucrat was in a far, wordless state, clear-headed but uneager to speak. He drew himself away from her and nodded.
Undine held her two hands cupped together, fingertips down, like a leaf, a slender, natural opening where the edges of her hands touched. “This