The bureaucrat looked up into a broad face, full of strength and warmth, and implacable as a stone. He looked like somebody’s father. The lips curled into a smile that involved all the man’s face, cheeks forming merry balls, and the man winked.
It was Gregorian.
13. A View from a Height
Three men sat around the campfire.
The night was cold. The bureaucrat smoked black hashish laced with amphetamines to keep awake. Gregorian held the pipe to his mouth, urging him to suck in deeply and hold the smoke for as long as possible. The hash made the bureaucrat’s head buzz. His feet were impossibly distant, a full day’s travel down the giant’s causeway of his legs. Marooned on the mountainside, he still felt monstrously calm and alert, wired into the celestial telegraph with a direct line to the old wisdom lying at the base of his skull like moonstones in an amalgam of coprolites and saber-tooth bones. For an instant he lost hold of external reality, and plunged deep into the submarine caverns of perception, a privateer in search of booty. Then he exhaled. Oceans of smoke gushed out into the world.
The snow had stopped long ago.
Gregorian finished off the pipe, knocked out the coals against the heel of his boot, and carefully scraped the bowl clean. “Do you know how Ararat was lost?” he asked. “It’s an interesting story.”
“Tell me,” the bureaucrat said.
Their companion said nothing.
“To understand you must first know that the upper reaches of the city lie above the great winter high-tide mark. Oh, the jubilee tides smash over it all right — but it’s built to withstand the force. When the storms subside, it’s an island. A useful little place militarily — isolated, easily fortified, easily defended. System Defense used it as a planning center during the Third Unification. That’s when it was hardened. There are probably a lot of these secret places scattered about.”
The magician took a branch from the flames and stirred the fire, sending sparks swirling madly up the smoke into the sky. “As a standard procedure, System Defense masked their involvement with a civilian caretaker organization under the nominal auspices of Cultural Dissemination Oversight, with control exerted through yet another civilian front. During the reorganization at the end of the violent phase of Unification…”
The explanation went on and on. The bureaucrat listened only with the surface of his mind, letting the words pass over him in murmurous waves while he studied his opponent. Squatting before the fire, Gregorian seemed more beast than man. The flames threw red shadows up on his face, and the cool greenish light from the window wall ignited his hair from behind. Sometimes the light reached his teeth and lit up the grin. But none of it ever reached his eyes.
Decades passed. Organizations arose and fell, were folded into one another, shed responsibility, picked up new authority, and split off from parent bodies. By the time Ocean receded and great spring began, Ararat was so deeply entangled in the political substance of the System that it could be neither softened nor declassified.
“The stupidity of it — the waste! An entire city, the work of thousands of lifetimes, lost through mere regulation. And yet this is but the smallest fraction of the invisible empire of Ignorance imposed on us by the powers above.”
In person Gregorian’s voice was eerily familiar, just as his features could be decoded as a ruggeder, more compelling version of Korda’s own. “That sounds like something your father might say,” the bureaucrat remarked.
Gregorian looked up sharply. “I don’t need you here!” He pointed to the still figure across the fire from him. “Pouffe is enough company for me. If you want to die early, I can—”
“It was only an observation!”
The magician eased back, his rage gone as abruptly as it had arisen. “Yes, that’s true. Yes. Well, of course the information all came from Korda originally. It was one of his projects. He spent years trying to have Ararat declassified, tilting at windmills and fighting phantoms. Old Laocoon strangled by red tape.” He threw back his head and laughed. “But what do you and I care about that? More fool he for having wasted his life. I don’t suppose you remembered to bring my notebook?”
“I left it in my briefcase. Back in the flier.”
“Ah, well. It was of purely sentimental value. We must all learn to give things up.”
“Tell me something,” the bureaucrat said carefully. Gregorian nodded his great head. “What did Earth’s agent give you — was it proscribed technology? Or was it nothing at all?”
Gregorian pondered the question with mocking seriousness, and then, as if delivering the punch line of a particularly good joke, said, “Nothing at all. I wanted to force Korda to send somebody after me when I disappeared. It was bait, that was all.”
“Then I can go now.”
Gregorian chuckled. The fire leaned away under a sudden gust of wind, and he was a black silhouette against the window wall. A tattoo of a comet flared to life, swam across his arm, and slowly faded. A second marking fired and a third, crawling about under his skin like fire-worms on an embered log. “Stay,” he said. “We have so much to talk about.”
The magician leaned back again, in no particular hurry to get down to specifics. The city fell away quickly here, to vague silver and gray lands stretching flat and away toward Ocean, invisible at the horizon. Strange winds and smells were astir. Cinnamyrtle and isolarch haunted the nose.
The fire had been built on a high terrace, in a crumbling depression of stone that Gregorian called a “whale wallow.” Like all of Ararat, it was heavily eroded. Hooks protruded from rounded walls, their purpose lost. Rooms were choked with coral and mud. Fag ends of braided cables and the ribs of sea creatures jutted from among the barnacles. Here and there sheets of adamantine stood exposed, perfect and incorruptible. But these Perimeter Defense retrofits were rare, jarring intrusions in the aged city.
The bureaucrat leaned back against a carbon-whisker strut. The chains that shackled him to it rattled when he moved. To one side he could see into the command room with its stacked crates of food and survival gear. To the other, he could look out into the wide and windy world. At his back he felt the empty streets, narrow and dark, staring at him. “I want to take you up on your offer,” he said.
Lazily Gregorian said, “Now what offer do you mean?”
“I want to be your apprentice.”
“Oh, that. No, that was never meant seriously. It was intended to make you confident enough to chase me here, that was all.”
“Nevertheless.”
“You don’t know what’s involved, little brother. I might ask you to do anything, to — oh, crucify a dog, say. Or assassinate a stranger. The process changes you. I might even order you to fuck old Pouffe. Would you be willing to do that? Right here and now?”
PoufFe sat opposite the two of them, his back to the land. His face was puffy and unhealthy in the window light. His eyes were two dim stars, unblinking. The bureaucrat hesitated. “If necessary.”
“You’re not even a convincing liar. No, you must remain as you are, chained to that strut. You must stay there until the tides come. And then you must die. There is no way out. Only I could release you, and my will is unwavering.”
They both fell silent. The bureaucrat imagined he could hear Ocean, soft as a whisper in the distance.
“Tell me,” Gregorian said, “do you think that any haunts have survived into the current age?”
Surprised, the bureaucrat said, “You sent your father the head of one.”