Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [86]
“Can you land us in the city?” the bureaucrat asked.
“What city?”
“That big mound of stone dead ahead of us is what city,” the bureaucrat said, exasperated.
“Boss, the land in front of us is flat. There’s nothing but marshes for thirty miles.”
“That’s prepos—Why are we banking?”
“We’re not banking. The flier is level, and we’re headed dead south by the compass.”
“You’re bypassing Ararat.”
“There is nothing there.”
“We’re veering west.”
“No, we’re not.”
The city was shifting steadily to the side. “Accept my word for it. What explanation can you give me for the discrepancy between what you and I can see?”
The briefcase hesitated, then said, “It must be a hardened installation. There are such things, I know, places that have been classified secret and rendered invisible to machine perceptions. I’m ordered not to see anything, so to me it doesn’t exist.”
“Can you put us down by my directions?”
“Boss, you don’t want me to fly this thing blind into a hardened installation. The defenses would order me to flip it over, and I’d fly us right into the ground.”
“Hah.” The bureaucrat studied the land. Against the horizon, Ocean was a slug-gray smear squeezed beneath the clouds. Ararat was unapproachable from three sides, surrounded by dull, silvery stretches of water and mud. To the west, though, a broad causeway led straight from the city to a grassy opening in the trees. It was clearly a fragment of what had once been a major route into the city. A flier and as many as a dozen land vehicles sat abandoned in the meadow at its terminus. The bureaucrat pointed them out. “Can you see them?”
“Yes.”
“Then set us down there.”
* * *
The canopy sighed open.
“I can’t come with you,” the briefcase said. “As long as I’m patched in, I can suppress Gregorian’s incursions. But the machinery is rotten with unfriendly programming. Once I’m taken off, we run a good chance the flier will turn on us. At the very least it’s likely to fly off and leave us stranded here.”
“So? I don’t need you to do my work.” The bureaucrat climbed out. “If I’m not back in a few hours, come after me.”
“Got you.”
He faced the causeway. What had been obvious from the air was invisible from the ground. The roadbed was buried under land and overgrown with scrub. A crude road, however, had been bulldozed down its center, the machine itself abandoned by the mouth like a rusting watchdog. He went from truck to landwalker to truck, hoping to find one he could ride into Ararat. But the batteries had been yanked from them all. He picked up a television set left on the front seat of a mud-jitney, thinking it might be useful to keep an eye on the weather. The city loomed enormous over him. It could not be far.
The bureaucrat walked in among the trees. The woods were silent and deep. He hoped he would not meet a behemoth.
Where the ground was soft, footprints scurried ahead of him. Other than the bulldozer treads, there was no evidence of motor traffic.
Briefly he wondered why the vehicles had all been left behind in the meadow. In his mind’s eye he saw the rich, foolish old beggars stumbling toward Ararat to be reborn, pilgrims compelled to approach the holy mountain on foot. They would have come with arrogance and hope, blind with anxiety and loaded down with wealth to barter immortality from the wizard. He could not entirely despise them. It would take a grotesque kind of courage to get this far.
The air was chill. The bureaucrat shivered, glad he was wearing a jacket. It was quiet, too, oppressively so. The bureaucrat was