“Why are you annoying me like this?” The bureaucrat understood the conventions quite well; he was an agent of those conventions and their defender. He might regret that Gregorian’s secrets, embedded as they were in the warp and woof of human meeting space, could not be extracted. But he understood why this must be.
The mantis bent over a mannequin. “I am only acting out of concern, sir. You are in a state of emotional distress. You are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the limits that are placed on you.” It adjusted the height, plumped out the belly.
“Am I?” the bureaucrat asked in surprise.
The mannequins roughed out, the mantis began molding the bureaucrat’s features onto their faces. “Who would know better than I? If you would care to discuss—”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Of course, sir. The privacy laws are paramount. They come before even common sense,” the construct said reprovingly. The briefcase stood watching, an amused half-smile on his face.
“It’s not as if I were a Free Informationist.”
“Even if you were,” the mantis said, “I wouldn’t be able to report you. If treason were reportable, no one could trust the Puzzle Palace. Who could work here?” It stepped back from its work. “Ready.”
Five bureaucrats now looked at each other, all perfect copies of the other, face to face and eye to eye. Reflexively — and this was a tic that never failed to bother the bureaucrat — they looked away from each other with faint expressions of embarrassment.
“I’ll tackle Korda,” the bureaucrat said.
“I’ll take the bottle shop.”
“Philippe.”
“The map room.”
“The Outer Circle.”
The mantis produced a mirror. One by one, the bureaucrat stepped through.
The bureaucrat was the last to leave. He stepped out into the hall of mirrors: walls and overhead trim echoing clean white infinity down a dwindling line of gilt-framed mirrors before curving to a vanishing point where patterned carpeting and textured ceiling became one. Thousands of people used the hall at any given instant, of course, popping in and out of the mirrors continually, but the Traffic Architecture Council saw no need for them to be made visible. The bureaucrat disagreed. Humans ought not go unmarked, he felt; at the very least the air should shimmer with their passage.
All but weightless, he ran down the hall, scanning the images offered by the mirrors: A room like a black iron birdcage that hummed and sparked with electricity. A forest glade where wild machines crouched over the carcass of a stag, tearing at the entrails. An empty plain dotted with broken statues swathed in white cloth, so that the features were smothered and softened — that was the one he wanted. The traffic director put it in front of him. He stepped through and into the antechamber of Technology Transfer. From there it was only a step into his office.
Philippe had rearranged his things. It was instantly noticeable because the bureaucrat maintained a Spartan work environment: limestone walls with a limited number of visual cues, an old rhinoceros of a desk kept tightly locked with a line of models running down its spine. They were all primitive machines, a stone knife, the Wright flyer, a fusion generator, the Ark. The bureaucrat set about rearranging them in their proper order.
“How’s it been?” the briefcase asked.
“Philippe’s done a wonderful job,” the desk said. “He’s reorganized everything. I’m much more efficient than I was before.”
The bureaucrat made a disgusted noise. “Well, don’t get used to it.” His briefcase picked an envelope off the desktop. “What’s that?”
“It’s from Korda. He’s putting together a meeting as soon as you get in.”
“What for?”
The briefcase shrugged. “He doesn’t say. But from the list of attendees, it looks like another of his informal departmental hearings.”
“Terrific.”
“In the star chamber.”
“Have you gone mad?”
Korda had been scanned recently and looked older, a little pinker and puffier; this was how colleagues one saw only at the office aged, by concrete little bites, so that in retrospect one remembered them flickering toward death. It shocked the bureaucrat slightly to realize how long it had been since he’d seen Korda in person. It was a reminder how far from favor he’d fallen in recent years. “Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” he said.
They sat around a conference table with a deep mahogany glaze that suggested hundreds of years of varnishing and revar-nishing. The five-ribbed ceiling was vaulted, and the plaster between the timbers painted dark blue with gilt stars. It was a somber setting, smelling of old leather and extinct tobacco, one calculated to put its users in a solemn and deliberative mood. Besides Korda and Philippe there were Orimoto from Accounting, Muschg from Analysis Design, and a withered old owl of a woman from Propagation Assessment. They were nonentities, these three, brought in to provide the needed handcodes if their brethren in Operations deemed a deep probe advisable.
Philippe leaned forward, before Korda could go on. He smiled in a manner calculated to indicate personal warmth and said, “We’re all on your side here, you know that.” He paused to change his expression to one of pained regret. “Still, we are rather at a loss how you came to make, ahh, such an unfortunate statement.”
“I was suckered,” the bureaucrat said. “All right, I admit that. He threw me off-balance and then nailed me with that camera crew.”
Korda scowled down at his clasped hands. “Off-balance. You were raving.”
“Excuse me,” Muschg said. “Could we possibly have a look at the commercial in question?” Philippe raised an eyebrow at this unwarranted show of independence, much as he would have had his elbow suddenly ventured to offer a criticism of him. But he nodded, and his briefcase hoisted a television set onto the table. The bureaucrat appeared on the screen, red-faced, with a microphone stuck in front of him.
I’ll track him down and 1 will find him. No matter where he is. He can hide, but he can’t escape me!
Off-camera someone asked, Is it true he’s stolen proscribed technology? Then, when he shrugged off the question, Would you say he’s dangerous?
“Here it comes,” Korda said.
Gregorian is the most dangerous man on the planet.
“I was under a certain amount of stress at the time…”
Why do they call him the most dangerous man on the planet? Gregorian’s granite image filled the screen. His eyes were cold moons, stern with wisdom. What does this man know that they don’t want you to learn for yourself? Find out for — Korda snapped it off.
“Gregorian couldn’t’ve paid you to do better.”
In the middle of the uncomfortable silence a phone rang. The briefcase removed it from a jacket pocket and held it out. “It’s for you.”
The bureaucrat took the receiver, grateful for the moment’s respite, and heard his own voice say, “I’m back from the bottle shop. Can I report?”
“Go ahead.”
He absorbed:
In an obscure corridor known as Curiosity Lane the bureaucrat came to a run of small shops, windows dark with disuse, and entered an undistinguished doorway. A bell jangled. It was shadowy within, shelf upon shelf crammed with thick-glassed, dusty bottles, extending back forever in a diminishing series of receding storage reaching for the Paleolithic. Gilt cupids hovered in the ceiling corners with condescending smiles.
The shopkeeper was a simple construct, no more than a goat’s head and a pair of gloves. The head dipped, and the gloves clasped each other subserviently. “Welcome to the bottle shop, master. How may I help you?”