The surrogation device was an antique, ungainly as an armored squid, and too battered to be worth the cost of hauling away. The bureaucrat lay down on a cracked vinyl sofa. Tentacular sensors jointed delicately to touch his forehead. Colors swam behind closed eyelids, resolving into squares, triangles, rectangles. He touched one with his thought.
A satellite picked up the signal and handed it down to the Piedmont. A surrogate body came alive, and he walked it out into the streets of Port Richmond.
The House of Retention was a neolithic granite peak, one of the range of government buildings known locally as the Mountains of Madness. Its stone halls were infested by small turquoise lizards that skittered away at the surrogate’s approach and reappeared behind him. Its walls were damp to the touch. The bureaucrat had never been anywhere, the Puzzle Palace of course excepted, where there was so little green. He was directed to its moist interior, where sibyls operated data synthesizers under special license from the Department of Technology Transfer.
It was a long, gloomy walk, and the bureaucrat felt the weight of the building on him every step of the way. The passage took on allegorical dimensions for him, as if he were trapped inside a labyrinth, one he had entered innocently enough in his search for Gregorian, but which he now found himself too far into for retreat but not far enough for any certainty of reaching whatever truth might lie at its center.
When he came to the hall of sibyls, he chose a door at random and stepped inside. A thin, sharp-featured woman sat in the center of a workdesk. Dozens of black cables as thick as her little finger looped out of darkness to plug into her skull. They shook when she looked up to see who had entered the room. It was a clumsy setup, typical of the primitive systems his department enforced when onplanet use of higher-level technologies was unavoidable. “Hello,” the bureaucrat said, “I’m—”
“I know who you are. What do you want?”
Somewhere, water slowly dripped.
“I’m looking for a woman named Theodora Campaspe.”
“The one with the rat?” The sibyl stared at him unblinkingly. “We have a great deal on the notorious Madame Campaspe. But whether she’s alive or dead, and in either case where, is not known.”
“There’s a rumor that she drowned.”
The sibyl pursed her lips, squinted judiciously. “Perhaps. She hasn’t been seen for a month or so. It’s well documented that her clothes were burned on the altar of Saint Jones’s outside of Rose Hall. But all that is circumstantial at best. She may simply not want to be found. And of course half our data are corrupt; she may be minding her own business without any intent to deceive anyone.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No.”
“Just what is her business, anyway? What exactly does a witch do?”
“She would never have used that word,” the sibyl said. “It has unfortunate political overtones. She always referred to herself as a spiritualist.” Her eyes grew dreamy as she drew in widely scattered snippets of information. “Most people did not make that distinction, of course. They came to her back door at night with money and requests. They wanted aphrodisiacs, contraceptives, body chrisms, stillbirth powders to sprinkle before their enemies, potions to swell breasts and change genitalia from male to female, candles to conjure up wealth, charms to win back lost love and to ease the pain of hemorrhoids. We have sworn testimony that she could shed her skin like a haunt and turn into a bird or a fish, suck the blood of her enemies, frighten children with masks, ride faithless husbands across the hills where it would take them days to return, ring bells from the tops of trees, send dreams to steal the mind or seduce the soul, emerge from swimming in the river and leave no footprints behind, kill animals by breathing in their faces, reveal the location of Ararat and disclose the existence of a gland inside the brain whose secretions are addictive on first taste, walk shadowless at noon, foresee death, prophesy war, spit thorns, avert persecution. If you want specifics, I could spend the rest of the day on them.”
“What of the magician Aldebaran Gregorian? What do you have on him?”
She bowed her head to concentrate on the search. “We have the text of his commercials, the data presentation your department made to the Stone House, a recent internal security report bylined Lieutenant-Liaison Chu, and the usual anecdotia: consorts with demons, blasphemes, hosts orgies, climbs mountains, couples with goats, eats rocks, plays chess, seduces virgins of both sexes, walks on water, fears rain, tortures innocents, defies offplanet authority, washes with milk, consults mystics on Cordelia, employs drugs on himself and others, travels in disguise, drinks urine, writes books in no known language, and so on. None of it reliable.”
“And of course you don’t know where I can find him.”
“No.”
The bureaucrat sighed. “Well, one more thing. I want to know the provenance of an artifact I saw recently.”
“Do you have a picture?”
“No, but I can visualize it quite clearly.”
“I’ll have to patch you into the system. Open a splice line, please.”
He called up the proper images, and a face appeared before him, twice human size, a gold mask afloat in midair between himself and the sibyl.
It was the face of a god.
Warmly handsome, inhumanly calm, the system tutelar said, “Welcome. My name is Trinculo. Please allow me to help you.” His expression was as grave and serene as the reflection of the moon on night waters.
In the back of his head the bureaucrat felt the buzzing encephalic presence of all twenty sibyls hooked into the system. But Trinculo’s presence was all-pervasive, riveting, a charismatic aura he could almost touch. Even knowing, as he did, that it was an artifact of the primitive technology, that his attention was artificially focused so rigidly on Trinculo that the hindbrain registered it as awe, the bureaucrat felt humbled before this glowing being. “What do you have on this object?”
He visualized the shell knife. A sibyl picked up the image and hung it in the air over the desk. Another opened a window into a museum catalog. She scanned through bright galleries that looked as if they’d been carved from ice and lifted the knife’s twin from a glass shelf. The bureaucrat wondered what the actual museum looked like; he had known collections with perfect catalogs and empty, looted source buildings.
“It’s a haunt artifact,” one sibyl said.
“A shell knife, used to unhinge the muscle of midden clams,” added another. In the air beside the knife she opened a window onto a primitive scene depicting a fish-headed haunt squatting by the river demonstrating the tool’s use, then closed it again.
“Quite useless now. Humans do not find midden clams digestible.”
“This particular knife is about three-hundred-fifty years old. It was used by a river clan of the Shellfish alliance. It is a particularly fine example of its class, and unlike most such was not gathered by the original settlers on Miranda, but is a product of the Cobbs Creek dig.”
“Documentation is available on the Cobbs Creek dig.”
“It is presently on display in the Dryhaven Museum of Prehuman Anthropology.”
“Is that sufficient, or do you wish to know more?”
Trinculo smiled benignly. The tutelar had spoken not a word since his original greeting. “I saw this knife not half an hour ago in the Tidewater,” the bureaucrat said.
“Impossible!”
“It must be a reproduction.”
“The museum has offplanet security.”
“Trinculo,” the bureaucrat said, “Tell me something.”
In a friendly, competent voice the gold mask said, “I am here to assist you.”
“You have the text of Gregorian’s commercials on file.”
“Of course we do!” a sibyl snapped.
“Why hasn’t he been arrested?”
“Arrested!”
“There’s no reason to.”