By the time he returned, Arcadia had changed into the fantasia. It was covered with orange and red sequins, and cut all wrong. But it fit her well enough. It would do.
“Roses! How nice.” Arcadia clapped her hands like a little girl. She spun about so that the fantasia swirled about her in a fluid, magical motion. “Do you like how I look?”
“Lie down on the bed,” he said roughly. “Pull the skirt up over your waist.”
She obeyed.
The bureaucrat dumped the roses to the side of the bed in a wet pile. Arcadia’s skin was pale as marble in the faint light, the mounded hair between her legs dark and shadowy. Her flesh looked as though it would be cold to the touch.
By the time he had shed his own clothing, the bureaucrat was erect. The room was sweet with the scent of roses.
He closed his eyes as he entered her. He didn’t open them again until he was done.
11. The Sun at Midnight
The air filled with flying ants, their wings iridescent blurs, tiny rainbows that overlapped and created black diffraction patterns: circles and crescents forming and disappearing before the eye could fix on them. The bureaucrat gaped up and they were gone, away on their dying flight to the sea.
“This makes no sense at all,” Chu grumbled.
The bureaucrat stepped back from the flier. “It’s very simple. I want you to lift off and head due south until you’re well over the horizon from Tower Hill. Then swing around and treetop back. There’s a little clearing to the east, by a stream. Wait for me there. A child could do it.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Oh all right. You saw the way we were treated at the hangar?” Across the field, a gang of surrogate laborers, all rust and limping joints, were clumsily stacking the hangar’s dismantled parts onto a lifting skid. “How insistent they were that we be gone by noon? They didn’t want us to be in the way?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So tell me that somebody’s going to send an airlifter all the way out here two days before the tides just to haul out a modular storage hut.” He did not wait for Chu to respond. “They were instructed to get me away from here as quickly as possible. I intend to find out why.” He stepped back into the shadow of the trees and pitched his voice for the flier. “Now take off.”
The canopy slid shut. Engines came to life. The flier was a pretty piece of engineering, the kind of elegant machine normally seen only in the floating worlds. Its emerald skin shimmered in the heat of the jets. Then the flier skidded forward twelve times its own length and with a roar pulled up into the sky. Blink and it was gone.
The trail through the woods was peaceful. The leaves had turned during the rains, gone to purples and cobalts as if all the Tidewater had been blueshifted five seconds into the past. The filtered light was quietly saddening, a somber reminder of the imminence of the land’s passing.
The trees opened up at the foot of Tower Hill. Its slopes were a frayed green, white chalk showing through alien Terran grass. Bright tents and banners, parasols and balloons, dotted the hillside. At the top stood the ancient tower itself, overpainted in bold orange-and-pink supergraphics, an island of offworld aesthetic that clashed violently with the tragedian’s garb of the autumn forest.
The hillside crawled with surrogates, an anthill churned with a stick. It seemed that now that the Tidewater had been scoured of human life, the demons had come out to have a carnival of their own.
He headed upslope.
Brittle metal laughter sounded like a million crickets. Here, a quartet of surrogates played stringed instruments. There, a crowd cheered two identical chrome wrestlers. Further on a dozen linked hands and danced in a circle. Couples strolled, arms about waists, heads touching, all perfectly indistinguishable. It was the triumph of sexlessness.
“Have a drink!”
He’d paused in the shadow of a pavilion to catch his breath. Now a surrogate, bowing deeply, proffered an empty hand. He blinked, realized he’d been mistaken for a surrogate himself, and accepted the invisible glass with a polite nod. There was a perverse satisfaction to knowing that among all the hundreds here, he alone saw the metal bones under the illusion of flesh. “Thank you.”
“Having a good time?”
“To tell the truth, I just arrived.”
The surrogate leaned forward unsteadily, slapping an overfa-miliar hand on his shoulder. A round, unhealthy face leered from the screen. “Should’ve been here before the locals were cleared away. You could rent a woman to carry you around on her back like a horse. Slap ’em on the rump to make ’em move!” He winked. “Y’know, the tower up there used to be—”
“—a television transmitter. Yes, I know the whole story.”
Mouth stupidly open, the surrogate stared at him long enough for the bureaucrat to realize the conversation had grown tedious. “No, no, a whorehouse. You could buy anything you wanted. Anything! I remember a time my wife and I—”
The bureaucrat set down his drink. “You’ll excuse me. I have someplace to be.”
The tower’s lounge floor was thronged.
Black skeletons lounged against a central ring bar. Others chatted in the scattered booths. The interior was warm and dim, cluttered with flying brass pigs and poncing felt mannequins, and lit only by the glowing facescreens of the patrons themselves, and by a wheel of televisions set into the edges of the ceiling.
All but invisible, the bureaucrat paused by a clump of surrogates staring up at the screens. Crowded slum buildings were burning. Mobs surged through narrow streets, chanting and shaking fists. Under smoky skies, police slashed at them with electric lances. It was a tiny vision of madness, a glimpse of the end of the world. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Rioting in the Fan,” one said. “That’s the part of Port Richmond just below the falls. Evacuation authority caught a kid torching a warehouse and beat him to death.”
“It’s disgusting,” said another. “They’re behaving just like animals. Worse than animals, because they’re enjoying it.”
“Thing is, people have been coming down from the Piedmont to join in. Adolescents, especially — it’s kind of a rite of passage for them. They’ve shut down the incline to keep them out.”
“They should all be whipped. It comes from living on a planet, away from the constraints of civilization.”
Another surrogate spoke up. “Oh, I think there’s a touch of the savage in us all. If I were a few years younger, I’d be down there myself.”
“Sure you would.”
A glint of light caught the bureaucrat’s eye. A door opening in the storeroom at the center of the bar. There was a flashing, near-subliminal glimpse of a narrow white face before the door closed again. It was more an impression than anything else, but enough that he decided to wait and watch to see if it would happen again.
He stood very still for a long time. Again the door opened, and a furtive face peeked out. Yes! It was a woman. Someone small, slender, mouselike.
Someone he knew.
Interesting. The bureaucrat made a long, careful circuit of the floor. There were two doors to the storeroom, situated opposite each other. It would take only an instant to slip under the bar and within. He returned to his starting place and found a chair sheltered by a cascade of tentacle vines.
Hours passed. The televisions were an impressionistic wheel of icebergs calfing, canvas cities for the cattleboat people, lingering shots of precataclysmic icecaps. He did not mind the wait. At long intervals, yet regular as clockwork, the door would open and that pinched white face peer out to scan the crowd before it closed again. She was definitely waiting for someone.
Finally a newcomer sat down at the bar, laying down a handful of flowers on the countertop before him. Crushed kelpies and polychromes, plucked from the weeds outside. He picked up an invisible napkin and turned it over. Then he ran his hands under the edge of the bar, as if searching for something hidden. When the bartender gave him a drink, he held the nonexistent glass high so he could examine its underside.