Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [89]
The snow had stopped long ago.
Gregorian finished off the pipe, knocked out the coals against the heel of his boot, and carefully scraped the bowl clean. “Do you know how Ararat was lost?” he asked. “It’s an interesting story.”
“Tell me,” the bureaucrat said.
Their companion said nothing.
“To understand you must first know that the upper reaches of the city lie above the great winter high-tide mark. Oh, the jubilee tides smash over it all right—but it’s built to withstand the force. When the storms subside, it’s an island. A useful little place militarily—isolated, easily fortified, easily defended. System Defense used it as a planning center during the Third Unification. That’s when it was hardened. There are probably a lot of these secret places scattered about.”
The magician took a branch from the flames and stirred the fire, sending sparks swirling madly up the smoke into the sky. “As a standard procedure, System Defense masked their involvement with a civilian caretaker organization under the nominal auspices of Cultural Dissemination Oversight, with control exerted through yet another civilian front. During the reorganization at the end of the violent phase of Unification…”
The explanation went on and on. The bureaucrat listened only with the surface of his mind, letting the words pass over him in murmurous waves while he studied his opponent. Squatting before the fire, Gregorian seemed more beast than man. The flames threw red shadows up on his face, and the cool greenish light from the window wall ignited his hair from behind. Sometimes the light reached his teeth and lit up the grin. But none of it ever reached his eyes.
Decades passed. Organizations arose and fell, were folded into one another, shed responsibility, picked up new authority, and split off from parent bodies. By the time Ocean receded and great spring began, Ararat was so deeply entangled in the political substance of the System that it could be neither softened nor declassified.
“The stupidity of it—the waste! An entire city, the work of thousands of lifetimes, lost through mere regulation. And yet this is but the smallest fraction of the invisible empire of Ignorance imposed on us by the powers above.”
In person Gregorian’s voice was eerily familiar, just as his features could be decoded as a more rugged, more compelling version of Korda’s own. “That sounds like something your father might say,” the bureaucrat remarked.
Gregorian looked up sharply. “I don’t need you here!” He pointed to the still figure across the fire from him. “Pouffe is enough company for me. If you want to die early, I can—”
“It was only an observation!”
The magician eased back, his rage gone as abruptly as it had arisen. “Yes, that’s true. Yes. Well, of course the information all came from Korda originally. It was one of his projects. He spent years trying to have Ararat declassified, tilting at windmills and fighting phantoms. Old Laocoön strangled by red tape.” He threw back his head and laughed. “But what do you and I care about that? More fool he for having wasted his life. I don’t suppose you remembered to bring my notebook?”
“I left it in my briefcase. Back in the flier.”
“Ah, well. It was of purely sentimental value. We must all learn to give things up.”
“Tell me something,” the bureaucrat said carefully. Gregorian nodded his great head. “What did Earth’s agent give you—was it proscribed technology? Or was it nothing at all?”
Gregorian pondered the question with mocking seriousness, and then, as if delivering the punch line of a particularly good joke, said, “Nothing at all. I wanted to force Korda to send somebody after me when I disappeared. It was bait, that was all.”
“Then I can go now.”
Gregorian chuckled. The fire leaned away under a sudden gust of wind,