The bureaucrat waited.
Slowly a spiderlike creature emerged from the street. It staggered from side to side, painfully groping its way with one tapping forelimb, like a blind man’s cane. Occasionally it lost its balance and fell. It was his briefcase. Over here, the bureaucrat thought. He didn’t dare speak, for fear of waking Gregorian. Or perhaps, he thought giddily, what he really feared was that this would turn out to be just another hallucination. He held his breath. The thing groped its way toward him.
“Boss? Is that you?” He touched the briefcase’s casing so it could taste his genes, and the device collapsed at his feet. “I had a hell of a time finding you. This place has got my senses all confused.”
“Quiet!” whispered the bureaucrat. “Can you still function?”
“Yes. I’m blind, that’s all.”
“Listen carefully. I want you to make a nerve inductor. Seize control of Gregorian’s nervous system and paralyze his higher motor functions. Then walk him inside. He’s got a plasma torch there somewhere. Bring it out here and cut me free.”
Gregorian’s head rose from his chest. His eyes quietly opened, and he smiled. With dreamlike slowness he touched his belt, lovingly curled fingers about the hilt of his knife.
“That’s proscribed technology,” the briefcase said. “I’m not allowed to manufacture it on a planetary surface.”
Gregorian chuckled.
“Do it anyway.”
“I can’t!”
“This is a perfect example of what I was talking about.” Gregorian released his knife, leaned back. He seemed to be discussing a part of the night’s narration the bureaucrat had missed. “You have in that device sufficient technological power to do almost anything. More than enough to free yourself. Yet you cannot use it. And why? Because of a meaningless, bureaucratic rule. Because of a cultural failure of nerve. You have shackled your own hands, and you have no one to blame but yourself for your failure.”
“I’m ordering you for the third time. Do it anyway.”
“All right,” the briefcase said.
“You fucking — I” Gregorian leaped up, knife materializing in one hand. Then he stiffened and, off-balance, fell. He hit the stone hard. Eyes frozen open, he stared straight ahead. His body spasmed, then stilled. One arm continued to tremble uncontrollably.
“This is trickier than you’d—” the briefcase began. “Ah. Here.” The arm stopped trembling. Slowly, awkwardly, the magician rolled on his side, and got to his hands and knees. “Hey! I can see perfectly when I’m looking through his sensorium.” Gregorian’s head swiveled from side to side. “What a place!”
Three times the briefcase tried to stand Gregorian up. Each time the magician’s body overbalanced and fell. Finally the briefcase admitted defeat. “I just can’t get the hang of it, boss.”
“That’s all right,” the bureaucrat said. “Have him crawl.”
The supplies Gregorian had laid in included a diagnostician with a full line of medicinals. When the bureaucrat had run his blood through a scrubber, dosed himself with a centering drug, and washed his face, he felt a thousand times better. With the fever-dancers and fatigue poisons gone, he was left weak to the bone but clearheaded at last. He took a canteen to the doorway and rinsed out his mouth several times, spitting the residue into the street.
Then he went back inside and turned on a television. It’s begun! the set screamed. The wave front has just hit the shore! If you’re on the incline or in the Fan, we want to urge you—
What a terrific sight!
— to get out now! Yes, it is. Something glorious to see, the water cresting high with the dawn behind it, as it swallows up the land. We want to urge you. If you’re anywhere below the fall line, this is the time to get out. You won’t have another chance!
“Boss? Gregorian wants to speak with you.”
“He does?”
The bureaucrat locked arms behind his back, and strolled to the window wall. The horizon was in motion now. It was a thin, roiling line, nothing so dramatic as what they were showing on television. But the Tidewater had begun drowning at last. The jubilee tides were coming in. On the flatlands below, limp trees lay in windrows. Winds he could not hear blew indigo leaves past the silencing window glass.
In the whale wallow, immediately before him, knelt Gregorian. The briefcase had welded him into the same adamantine chains he had used on the bureaucrat. He could not stand and would not lie down. Their eyes met. His nervous system was still being monitored by the briefcase. “Put him through.”
“You can’t escape without my help,” the briefcase said in Gregorian’s calm voice.
“I’m safe enough here.”
“Oh, you’ll survive the tides all right. But how are you going to get away? You’ll be stranded on a little island that nobody will ever find. The food will only hold out so long. You don’t know the access codes that will let you send a message out to summon a flier.”
“And you do?” The bureaucrat moved his gaze up from Gregorian and across the plaza to where the briefcase had hung Pouffe’s body from a hook. He’d owed the man that much at least.
“Yes.” A light, urbane laugh. “We seem to have a stalemate here. I need your help to survive, and you need mine to escape. Obviously we need to compromise. What do you propose?”
“Me? I propose nothing.”
“Then you’ll die!”
“I suppose so.”
There was a long, astonished silence. Then Gregorian said, “You don’t mean that.”
“Wait and see.” He turned back to the television, knelt down, and fiddled with the controls. His show came on.
“How dare you judge me? You have no moral right to, and you know it!”
“How’s that again?”
“By your own standards, you’re tainted. You said you wouldn’t use proscribed technology. You told Veilleur that if you used it, you’d be no better than a criminal yourself. Yet all the time, you held it in reserve, ready to be called on.”
The drama was coming to a head. Young Byron had been lashed to the mast of mad Ahab’s ark. His mermaid waited frantically in a cage upon the moors, for the waters to come and drown her. Knowing that she was about to die, she sang.
“I lied,” the bureaucrat said. “Now, hush. I want to hear this.”
Not much later, the briefcase said, “Boss? He’s too proud to suggest it himself. But I know what he’s going through. I could kill Gregorian right now by overloading his nervous system. It would be painless.”
The bureaucrat was resting in a nest of fat pillows, bright with Archipelago designs. He stared at the television, letting its light wash over him. He was amazingly tired. The pictures meant nothing to him anymore, they were only a meaningless flow of imagery. He was empty, spent.
Whenever he looked up, he could see Gregorian glaring at him. If there were anything to this business of occult powers, then the wizard would not die alone. But though the bureaucrat felt the tug of those eyes, he would not meet them. Nor would he permit his briefcase to relay the magician’s words. He refused to listen. That way, there would be no chance, however slight, of being talked out of anything at the last minute.
“No,” he said mildly. “I think it’s better this way, don’t you?”
The tides were coming. The land thrilled with premonitions of Ocean. Sounds carried by the bedrock were piped up from the hollows and basements below, low extended moans and great submarine sighs. Sonic monsters rumbled through the bureaucrat’s bones and belly. All the city was crackling and popping in anticipation. The carbon-whisker struts thrummed with sympathetic resonance.
Ocean’s hammer was on its way.