“Relax. Even if we let a few get away — what would it hurt?”
“There are so few of them left,” Gogo said wistfully. “So very few. We should have chipped them while they were still ashore.”
Distractedly, staring down at his screens with perfect concentration, Underbill said, “It wasn’t possible to find them all while they were on land. They’re elusive, you know that.” Into the microphone he said, “Point three.”
“Point three.”
The lines of bubbles were closing. Gogo stared off at them. “Sometimes I wonder should we be doing this at all?”
He looked up at her with frank wonder. “Do you?”
“It hurts them!” Softly: “I hurt them.”
Underbill was perfectly intent on his screen. “It was not so long ago that the indigenes were almost extinct. It was all our own fault. Unwise policies, disease — people even hunted them in the early years. Do you know what put an end to all that?”
“What?”
“The first time an indigene was chipped into the net. The first time people could feel sensation with that purity and clean zest they feel. The first—”
“The first time people could run with them through the magical night, wind in hair, to hunt and mate,” Gogo breathed. She blushed prettily. “I know it’s kind of sick.”
“That’s what I say,” Goguette interpolated.
“Oh, poof!” Marivaud said. “If you’re not enjoying this, there are other shows for you to experience.”
“No, it’s not!” Underbill said firmly. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a natural, healthful thing to be interested in the physical side of love. It shows you have a lively interest in life. Point five,” he said, “and locking.”
“Point five and locking.”
A third ghostnetter snapped on his projector, and a new line of bubbles capped the other two. The pack of haunts wheeled in confusion. Slowly the last ghost net began to draw them in. The crane operator began moving her scoop into position. “Your turn soon.”
“I’ll be ready,” she said. Then, “You’re easy to talk to.”
“Thank you.” He studied her. “What’s really bothering you?”
Her fingers closed on the grip of her gun, opened again. “I’m afraid it won’t be so good. I mean, with them in winter morph.”
“You mean you haven’t tried them?”
“I was afraid.”
Underbill smiled. “Try.”
She hesitated, then nodded. The image switched to the haunts again, fleeing through bubbles, diving to catch a passing crustacean and crunch it in small sharp teeth. Even on the screen, limited to sight and sound, the joy the creatures felt simply swimming along was obvious.
“Oh,” she said. Her eyes widened. “Oh!”
Goguette was washing dishes. A door banged open, and Marivaud came in with raindrops on her cloak and an armful of fresh-cut flowers. “You have so little time,” she said to the bureaucrat as she began arranging them. “We’ll cut forward a few hours, to the jubilee.”
Ocean roared. Abandoning their posts, those of the crew who weren’t already at the rails ran to starboard and stared. It was an impossible sight: all the water in the world humping up, as if the planet had suddenly decided it needed a higher horizon. The Atlantis listed a degree in anticipation. The grandmother of all tidal waves, the polar tsunami, was passing beneath them. The ship shot upward, carried by the power of a continent of ice melting all at once.
The screen cut from face to face, viewpoint to viewpoint, showing stunned eyes, strained faces. They stood deathly still, paralyzed with awe.
“How are they going to escape?” the bureaucrat asked. “Don’t they want to get away?”
“Of course they don’t.”
“Do they want to die?”
“Of course they don’t.” The image wavered, and the human crew turned to metal. The Atlantis was transformed into a ship of the dead, a gothic monstrosity manned by skeletons. “Surrogates were invented on Miranda,” Marivaud said proudly. “We made them first.” The image overlay was restored, and the skeletons fleshed out with human bodies.
A horrid glassy calm settled over the near reaches of Ocean, as if its surface had been stretched taut by the swell. Even as they soared up its side, the water seemed to shrink under the ship. The bureaucrat could hear it whispering and running away. Ocean rose until it filled the eye. The sky vanished, and still it grew. Winds blew across the deck.
Then they topped the swell. Beyond it a wall of white fury reached from horizon to horizon — a line squall. It rushed down on them. Involuntarily crew members moved toward and away from each other, forming clusters and gaps along the rail.
Gogo glanced toward the ghostnetter. Her eyes were bright with excitement. She bit her lip, brushed away a strand of hair from an undone braid. Her face glowed with life. She reached out to hug Underbill.
Startled, Underbill flinched away from her touch. He stared into her face with revulsion. In that unguarded instant his expression said louder than any words: You’re only a woman.
Then the squall overtook the ship, and slammed into its side. The storm swallowed it whole.
“Ahh,” Marivaud sighed. Her sister reached out and seized her hand. Softly, gently, they began to applaud.
In a faraway studio the actors rose up from their gates to take their bows.
Marivaud looked up, face expressionless. The cottage — sister, fire, and all — dissolved in a swirl of rain. “A week later, the bodies began washing up on shore.”
“What?”
“With radiation burns. We had not understood the indigenes so well as we had thought. We did not know that their brain chemistry changed in great winter. Or perhaps it was their psychology that changed. But somehow the warning signal that was supposed to drive them from the towers did not. They huddled as close to the reactors as they could. It was madness. Perhaps their mating instincts were stimulated. Perhaps they just liked the warmth. Who can say?”
Marivaud’s eyes closed. Tears squeezed between the lids. “We could do nothing. Ocean was all storm and fury — nothing could get through. Nothing except for the broadcasts we could not turn off. All the time it took for them to die, the towers up and down the coast transmitted their agony. It was like having a broken tooth in one’s mouth — the tongue keeps returning to it, drawn by the pain. I could not leave it alone.
“Sorrow swept over Continent in a great electronic wave. It was as if an enchantment had passed over the land. One moment everything was bright and beautiful. The next it was gray and lifeless. As a people we had been optimistic, sure of ourselves. Now we were… dispossesed, without a future. Those who had the strength not to listen were affected by the rest of us.
“I myself would have starved, had my sister not hand-fed me for a week. She smashed my earrings. She bullied me back to life. But after that I no longer laughed so often as before. There were people who died. Others went mad. The shame was great. When the offplanet powers convened and took away the last of our science, there was little protest. We knew we deserved it. So the high autumn of our technology passed, and we lapsed into eternal winter.”
Marivaud fell silent, her face pale and sad. The bureaucrat turned off the interactive.
After a while, a dog-headed waiter came and took the set away.
The bureaucrat drained the last of his beer and leaned back to watch the surrogates dining. It amused him in a melancholy way, to see them lifting glasses and tasting food no one else could see, in a perfect and meaningless mime show. By the railing other surrogates strolled and chatted. One of them was staring at him.
Their eyes met, and the surrogate bowed. It came to the table and took a chair. For an instant the bureaucrat couldn’t place the keen, aged face that burned on the screen. Then his schoolboy eidetics kicked in. “You’re the shopkeeper,” he said. “In Lightfoot. Your name is… Pouffe, is that right?”