Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [95]
“This is trickier than you’d—” the briefcase began. “Ah. Here.” The arm stopped trembling. Slowly, awkwardly, the magician rolled on his side, and got to his hands and knees. “Hey! I can see perfectly when I’m looking through his sensorium.” Gregorian’s head swiveled from side to side. “What a place!”
Three times the briefcase tried to stand Gregorian up. Each time the magician’s body overbalanced and fell. Finally the briefcase admitted defeat. “I just can’t get the hang of it, boss.”
“That’s all right,” the bureaucrat said. “Have him crawl.”
* * *
The supplies Gregorian had laid in included a diagnostician with a full line of medicinals. When the bureaucrat had run his blood through a scrubber, dosed himself with a centering drug, and washed his face, he felt a thousand times better. With the feverdancers and fatigue poisons gone, he was left weak to the bone but clearheaded at last. He took a canteen to the doorway and rinsed out his mouth several times, spitting the residue into the street.
Then he went back inside and turned on a television. It’s begun! the set screamed. The wave front has just hit the shore! If you’re on the incline or in the Fan, we want to urge you—
What a terrific sight!
—to get out now! Yes, it is. Something glorious to see, the water cresting high with the dawn behind it, as it swallows up the land. We want to urge you. If you’re anywhere below the fall line, this is the time to get out. You won’t have another chance!
“Boss? Gregorian wants to speak with you.”
“He does?”
The bureaucrat locked arms behind his back, and strolled to the window wall. The horizon was in motion now. It was a thin, roiling line, nothing so dramatic as what they were showing on television. But the Tidewater had begun drowning at last. The jubilee tides were coming in. On the flatlands below, limp trees lay in windrows. Winds he could not hear blew indigo leaves past the silencing window glass.
In the whale wallow, immediately before him, knelt Gregorian. The briefcase had welded him into the same adamantine chains he had used on the bureaucrat. He could not stand and would not lie down. Their eyes met. His nervous system was still being monitored by the briefcase. “Put him through.”
“You can’t escape without my help,” the briefcase said in Gregorian’s calm voice.
“I’m safe enough here.”
“Oh, you’ll survive the tides all right. But how are you going to get away? You’ll be stranded on a little island that nobody will ever find. The food will only hold out so long. You don’t know the access codes that will let you send a message out to summon a flier.”
“And you do?” The bureaucrat moved his gaze up from Gregorian and across the plaza to where the briefcase had hung Pouffe’s body from a hook. He’d owed the man that much at least.
“Yes.” A light, urbane laugh. “We seem to have a stalemate here. I need your help to survive, and you need mine to escape. Obviously we need to compromise. What do you propose?”
“Me? I propose nothing.”
“Then you’ll die!”
“I suppose so.”
There was a long, astonished silence. Then Gregorian said, “You don’t mean that.”
“Wait and see.” He turned back to the television, knelt down, and fiddled with the controls. His show came on.
“How dare you judge me? You have no moral right to, and you know it!”
“How’s that again?”
“By your own standards, you’re tainted. You said you wouldn’t use proscribed technology. You told Veilleur that if you used it, you’d be no better than a criminal yourself. Yet all the time, you held it in reserve, ready to be called on.”
The drama was coming to a head. Young Byron had been lashed to the mast of mad Ahab’s ark. His mermaid waited frantically in a cage upon the moors, for the waters to come and drown her. Knowing that she was about to die, she sang.
“I lied,” the bureaucrat said. “Now, hush. I want to hear this.”
* * *
Not much later, the briefcase said, “Boss? He’s too proud to suggest it himself. But I know what he’s going through. I could kill Gregorian