Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [84]
* * *
In the air again and heading south, the briefcase said, “Are you done with the pen?”
The bureaucrat looked dully down at the metal cylinder he still held in his hand. He shrugged, and returned it to the briefcase. Then he snuggled back into the recliner. His shoulders ached, and the back of his skull buzzed with tension and fatigue. “Tell me when we’re near the city.”
They passed over still fields, lifeless towns, roads on which no traffic moved. Evac authority had scoured the land, leaving behind roadblocks, abandoned trucks, and bright scrawls of paint on the roads and rooftops, sigils huge and unreadable. The marshes began then, and the traces of habitation thinned, scattered, disappeared.
* * *
“Boss? I’ve got a request to speak with you.”
The bureaucrat had been dozing, an irritable almost-sleep with dreams that thankfully never quite came into focus. Now he awoke with a grunt. “You’ve got what?”
“There’s some foreign programming in the flier—a quasi-autonomous construct of some kind. Not quite an agent, but with more independence than most interactives. It wants to speak with you.”
“Put it on.”
In a cheerily malicious tone the flier said, “Good morning, you bastard. I trust I’m not interrupting anything?”
The little hairs at the base of the bureaucrat’s neck stirred and lifted as he recognized the false Chu’s voice. “Veilleur! You’re dead.”
“Yes, and the irony of that is that I died because of a nullity like you. You, who could not even imagine the richness of the life I lost, because you were fool enough to get in the way of a wizard!”
The clouds scrolled by overhead, dark and densely contoured. “You might more reasonably direct your anger toward Gregorian for—” The bureaucrat caught himself. There was no point arguing with a recorded fragment of a dead man’s personality.
“As well hate Ocean for drowning you! A wizard is not human—his perceptions and motives are vast, impersonal, and beyond your comprehension.”
“Then he does have a motive? For you being here?”
“He asked me to tell you a story.”
“Go on.”
“Once upon a time—”
“Oh, good God!”
“I see. You want to tell this story yourself, don’t you?” When the bureaucrat refused to rise to the bait, the false Chu began again. “Once upon a time there was a tailor’s boy. His job was to fetch the bolts of cloth, to measure them out, and to crank the loom while his master wove. This was in an empire of fools and rogues. The boy’s master was a rogue, and the Emperor of the land was a fool. And because the boy knew no other and no better, he was content.
“The Emperor lived in a palace that no one could see, but which everyone said was the most beautiful structure in the universe. He owned fabulous riches that could not be touched, but were uniformly held to be beyond price. And the laws he passed were declared by all to be the wisest that had ever been, for no one could understand a word of them.
“One day the tailor was called into the Emperor’s presence. I want you to make me a new set of clothes, said the Emperor. The finest that have ever been seen.
“As you command, said the roguish tailor, so shall it be done. He cuffed the boy on the ear. We will neither rest nor eat until we have made for you the finest raiment in all existence. Clothes so fine that fools cannot even see them.
“Then, laden down with an enormous credit rating and many valuable options for commodities futures, the tailor and his boy returned to the shop. He pointed to an empty spool in the corner and said, There, that is the most valuable of moonbeam silk, bring it here. Carefully! If you get your grimy fingers on it, I will beat you.
“Wondering, the boy obeyed.
“The tailor sat down to the loom. Crank! he ordered. Our work is tremendous. We do not sleep tonight.
“How the boy suffered then! The roguish tailor’s publicists spread the word of his commission, and many were the celebrities and media stars who bribed their way in to watch. They would gape at the empty loom being worked, the empty spools spinning, the bamboo about which bolts of costly fabrics