All right! Yes, I killed him. 1 killed my brother! Are you happy now?
“God,” Chu said. “This must be the most boring place in the universe.”
Holding his briefcase out for balance, the bureaucrat followed Chu down the rain-slick boardwalk. They passed a stairway dug into the dirt, once braced and planked, now crumbled into a narrow slant and become almost a gully. Water gushed from its mouth. “I’ve requisitioned good seats on the heliostat tomorrow,” Chu said.
The bureaucrat grunted.
“Come on. If we miss the ship, we’ll be taken out on one of the cattleboats.” She tugged on her census bracelet in annoyance. “You haven’t seen what they’re like.”
A crate crashed onto the walk before them, and they danced back. It bounced over the edge, into the water. Scavengers were ransacking a storeroom, noisily smashing things and throwing them outside. A slick of trash floated downriver, all but motionless in the sleepy current, spreading as it withdrew: old mattresses slowly drowning, wicker baskets and dried flowers, splintered armchairs and fiddles, toy sailboats lying on their sides in the water. The scavengers were shouting, given over completely to the destruction of objects they could never afford before and could not pay the freight on now.
They came to a jug with a weathered sign hung over the door showing a silvery skeletal figure. The gate was the establishment’s sole legitimate enterprise and ostensible reason for being, though everyone knew the place was actually a paintbox. “What about the flier?” the bureaucrat asked. “No word yet from the Stone House?”
“No, and by now it’s safe to say there’s not going to be. Look, we’ve been here so long I’m growing moss on my behind. We’ve done everything we can do, the trail is cold. What good is a flier going to do anyway? It’s time to give up.”
“I’ll take your sentiments under advisement.” The bureaucrat stepped within. Chu did not follow.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been here,” the bureaucrat said. Korda’s quarters were spacious in a city where space translated directly into wealth. The grass floor was broken into staggered planes, and the arrays of stone tools set into the angled walls were indirectly lit by spots bounced off rotating porphyry columns. Everything was agonizingly clean. Even the dwarf cherry trees were potted in mirror-symmetrical pairs.
“You’re not here now,” Korda replied unsentimentally. “Why are you bothering me at home? Couldn’t it wait for the office?”
“You’ve been avoiding me at the office.”
Korda frowned. “Nonsense.”
“Pardon me.” A man in a white ceramic mask entered the room. He wore a loose wraparound, such as was the style in the worlds of Deneb. “The vote is coming up, and you’re needed.”
“You wait here.” At the archway to the next room Korda hesitated and asked the man in the mask, “Aren’t you coming, Vasli?”
The eyeless white face glanced downward. “It is my place on the Committee that is being debated just now. It’s probably best for all concerned if I wait this one out.”
The Denebian drifted to the center of the room, stood motionless. His hands were lost in the wraparound’s sleeves, his head overshadowed by the hood. He looked subtly unhuman, his motions too graceful, his stillness too complete. He was, the bureaucrat realized suddenly, that rarest of entities, a permanent surrogate. Their glances met.
“I make you nervous,” Vasli said.
“Oh no, of course not. It’s just. . .”
“It’s just that you find my form unsettling. I know. There is no reason to let an overfastidious sense of tact lead you into falsehood. I believe in truth. I am a humble servant of truth. Were it in my power, I would have no lies or evasions anywhere, nothing concealed, hidden, or locked away from common sight.”
The bureaucrat went to the wall, examined the collection of stone points there: fish points from Miranda, fowling points from Earth, worming points from Govinda. “Forgive me if I seem blunt, but such radical sentiments make you sound like a Free Informationist.”
“That is because I am one.”
The bureaucrat felt as if he’d come face to face with a mythological beast, a talking mountain, say, or Eden’s unicorn. “You are?” he said stupidly.
“Of course I am. I gave up my own world to share what I knew with your people. It takes a radical to so destroy his own life, yes? To exile himself among people who feel uncomfortable in his presence, who fear his most deeply held values as treason, and who were not interested in what he had to say in the first place.”
“Yes, but the concept of Free Information is…”
“Extreme? Dangerous?” He spread his arms. “Do I look dangerous?”
“You would give everyone total access to all information?”
“Yes, all of it.”
“Regardless of the harm it could do?”
“Look. You are like a little boy who is walking along in a low country, and has found a hole in one of the dikes. You plug it with your finger, and for a moment all is well. The sea grows a little stronger, a little bigger. The hole crumbles about the edges. You have to thrust your entire hand within. Then your arm, up to the shoulder. Soon you have climbed entirely within the hole and are plugging it with your body. When it grows bigger, you take a deep breath and puff yourself up with air. But still, the ocean is there, and growing stronger. You have done nothing about your basic problem.”
“What would you have us do with the dangerous information?”
“Master it! Control it!”
“How?”
“I have no idea. I am but a single man. But if you applied all the brain and muscle now wasted in a futile attempt to control—” Abruptly he stopped. For a long moment he stared at the bureaucrat, as if mastering his emotions. His shoulders slumped. “Forgive me. I am taking out my anger on you. I heard just this morning that my original — the Vasli I once was, the man who thought he had so much to share — died, and I haven’t sorted out my feelings yet.”
“I’m sorry,” the bureaucrat said. “This must be a sorrowful time for you.”
Vasli shook his head. “I don’t know whether to cry or laugh. He was myself, and yet he was also the one who condemned me to die here — worldless, disembodied, alone.”
That blind face stared upward through a thousand layers of the floating city into the outer darkness. “I have been imagining what it would be like to walk the fields of Storr again, to smell the chukchuk and rhu. To see the foibles aflame against the western stars, and hear the flowers sing! Then, I think, I could die content.”
“You could always go back.”
“You mistake the signal for the message. It is true that I could have myself copied and that signal transmitted home to Deneb. But I would still be here. I could then kill myself, I suppose, but other than salving the conscience of my agent, what good would it do?” He glanced at the bureaucrat’s surrogate body, tilted one edge of the mask up scornfully. “But I do not expect you to understand.”
The bureaucrat changed the subject. “May I ask,” he said, “just what work your committee is engaged on?”
“The Citizens’ Committee for the Prevention of Genocide, you mean? Why, just that. The destruction of indigenous races is a problem that exists in all colonized systems, my own not the least. It is too late for Miranda, of course, but perhaps some protocols will arise here that may be worth transmitting home.”
“It is possible,” the bureaucrat said cautiously, “that you’re being overpessimistic. I, ah, know of people who have seen haunts, who have actually met and talked with them in recent memory. It’s possible that the race may yet survive.”