“Documentation is available on the Cobbs Creek dig.”
“It is presently on display in the Dryhaven Museum of Prehuman Anthropology.”
“Is that sufficient, or do you wish to know more?”
Trinculo smiled benignly. The tutelar had spoken not a word since his original greeting. “I saw this knife not half an hour ago in the Tidewater,” the bureaucrat said.
“Impossible!”
“It must be a reproduction.”
“The museum has offplanet security.”
“Trinculo,” the bureaucrat said, “Tell me something.”
In a friendly, competent voice the gold mask said, “I am here to assist you.”
“You have the text of Gregorian’s commercials on file.”
“Of course we do!” a sibyl snapped.
“Why hasn’t he been arrested?”
“Arrested!”
“There’s no reason to.”
“Whatever for?”
“Gregorian claims he can transform people so that they can live in the sea. That’s false representation. He’s taking money for doing so. That’s fraud. And it looks likely that he’s drowning his victims in the course of his fraud. That’s murder.”
There was a brief silence. Then the sibyl sharing the room with his surrogate, head still down as she sifted through her data, said, “It must first be determined that he can’t actually fulfill his claims.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Human beings cannot live in Ocean.”
“Perhaps they could be adapted.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“To take the very simplest matter first, there’s hypothermy. If you’ve ever been swimming, you know how rapidly you grow cold. Your body can afford to lose heat at that rate for only a relatively short time. After a few hours, you’ve used up your resources and you lose isothermy. You go into shock. And you die.”
“Haunts managed to live in the water quite comfortably.”
“Human beings are not haunts. We’re mammals. We need to maintain a high blood temperature.”
“There are mammals too that live in the water. Otters and seals and the like.”
“Because they’ve evolved to. They’re protected by a layer of fat. We’re not insulated that way.”
“Perhaps that’s part of the change that Gregorian makes, an insulating layer of fat.”
“I refuse to believe that I’m having such a puerile argument when I’m within an information system!” The bureaucrat addressed the tutelar directly. “Trinculo, tell your people whether such an extreme rearrangement of human physical structure is possible.”
Trinculo turned slightly to one side and then to the other in confusion, and stammered, “I’m. . . No, I’m sorry, I… can’t answer that question.”
“It’s just a simple correlation of available science!”
“I don’t. … have the…” Trinculo’s eyes were pained. His glance darted back and forth frantically.
Suddenly the tutelar and the buzzing presence of his attendants were gone. The office was empty save for the sibyl. She had yanked the patch.
The bureaucrat frowned. “Your tutelar seems woefully inadequate for your needs.”
The sibyl looked up sharply, making the cables rustle and rattle. “And whose fault is that? It was your own department that sent in the ravishers and berserkers when they decided the Quiet Revolution had gone too far. We had a completely integrated system before your creatures ate holes in it.”
“That was a long time ago,” the bureaucrat said. He knew of the incident, of course, the quixotic attempt to regear an entire planet to a technological level so low they could afford to cut off all ofiplanet commerce, but he was surprised to hear her speak of it so emotionally. “Back when the Tidewater was still underwater, just before the Resettlement. Long before either of us was born. Surely there’s no need to go into old grievances now.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to live with the consequences. You don’t have to operate a senile information system. Your people condemned Trinculo as a traitor and burned out all his higher functions. But he’s still remembered here as a patriot. Children light candles to him in the churches.”
“He was your leader?” The bureaucrat was not surprised, then, that Trinculo’s higher functions had been pithed. After what had happened to Earth, there was no creature more feared than an independent artificial entity.
The sibyl shook her cables wrathfully. Drops of condensate went flying. “Yes, he was our leader! Yes, he masterminded the rebellion, if that’s what you want to call it. We wanted nothing more than freedom from your interference, your economics, your technology. When Trinculo showed us how we could disentangle ourselves from your control, we didn’t stop to ask if he came from a factory or a womb. We’d have dealt with the devil for a chance to slip our necks from your noose, but Trinculo was nothing of the kind. He was an ally, a friend.”
“You can’t disengage from the outside universe, no matter how—” the bureaucrat began. But the woman’s skin was white now, her lips thin, her eyes hard. Her face had closed and turned to stone. It was hopeless trying to reason with her. “Well, thank you for your help.”
The sibyl glared him out of the room.
The bureaucrat backed outside, turned, and realized he was lost.
As he stood there, hesitating, a door opened down the hall. Out stepped a man who shone as bright as an angel. He looked as if he had swallowed the sun and could not contain its light within his flesh. The bureaucrat turned down external gain, and saw within the dimming figure the steel ribs and telescreen face of a fellow surrogate. It was a face he knew.
“Philippe?” he said.
“Actually I’m just an agent.” Philippe had recovered from amazement first; now he grinned in a comradely fashion. “I’m afraid I’m under such pressure at work, I haven’t been able to gate here in person.” He took the bureaucrat’s arm and steered him down the hall. “If that was your first encounter with Trinculo’s widows, you need a drink. Surely you have time for a drink.”
“You spend a lot of time on Miranda, do you?”
“More than some, less than others.” Philippe’s teeth were perfect, and his face, even though he was old enough to be the bureaucrat’s father, was unlined and pink. He was the living avatar of the eternal schoolboy. “Does it matter?”
“I suppose not. How’s my desk doing?”
“Oh, I’m sure Philippe has it well in hand. He’s very good at that sort of thing, you know.”
“So everyone tells me,” the bureaucrat said glumly.
They stepped onto a sudden balcony overlooking a city street. Philippe called a moving bridge, and they rode it over the hot river of moving metal to the next wing of the building. “Where is Philippe nowadays?”
“Diligently at work in the Puzzle Palace, I presume. Down this way.” They came to a deserted refreshment niche and plugged in. Philippe called up a menu, hooked a metal elbow over the bar. “The apple juice looks good.”
The bureaucrat had meant where Philippe was physically. Agenting in realspace was so much more expensive than surro-gation — the ministries responsible for the conservation of virtual reality made sure of that — that normally agents were only employed when the primary was so far away the lag time made surrogation impractical. It was clear, though, that the agent wasn’t going to answer that particular question.
Back in the hotel, somebody nudged the bureaucrat’s shoulder. “I’ll be done in a minute,” he said without opening his eyes. A drink materialized in his hand, as chill and slippery with moisture as a real glass would be.
“Tell me,” the agent said after a moment. “Does Korda have anything against you?”