“Yes, my own thought had been trending that way. But isn’t that unnecessarily difficult? There must be a thousand simpler ways of jiggering the machines.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Graft a patch of your skin, make it a glove, and have an accomplice wear it. Or record your own transmission and send it out again on time delay. Only they none of them work. The system is better protected than you give it credit for.”
A chime sounded. Philippe held a conch shell to his ear. “It’s for you,” he said. When the bureaucrat took the call, his own voice said, “I’m back from the map room. Do you want to take my report?”
“Please.”
He absorbed:
The map room was copied from a fifteenth-century Venetian palazzo, star charts with the Seven Sisters prominent replacing Mediterranean coasts on the walls. Globes of the planets revolved overhead, half-shrouded in clouds. Hands behind back, the bureaucrat examined a model of the system: Prospero at the center, hot Mercutio, and then the circle of sungrazing asteroids known as the Thrinacians, the median planets, the gas giants Gargantua, Pantagruel, and Falstaff, and finally the Thulean stargrazers, those distant, cold, and sparsely peopled rocks where dangerous things were kept.
The room expanded to make space for several researchers entering at the same time. “Can I help you sir?” the curator asked him. Ignoring it, he went to the reference desk and rattled a small leather drum.
The human overseer came out of the back office, a short, stocky woman with goggles a thumb’s-length thick. She pushed them back on her forehead, where they looked like a snail’s eyestalks. “Hello, Simone,” the bureaucrat said.
“My God, it’s you! How long has it been?”
“Too long.” The bureaucrat moved to give her a hug, and Simone flinched away slightly. He extended a hand.
They shook (the cartographer was unique), and Simone said, “What can I do for you?”
“Have you ever heard of a place called Ararat? On Miranda, somewhere near the Tidewater coast. Supposedly a lost city.”
Simone grinned a cynical grin from so deep in the past the bureaucrat’s heart ached. “Have I ever heard of Ararat? The single greatest mystery of Mirandan topography? I should guess.”
“Tell me about it.”
“First human city on Miranda, planetside capital during the first great year, population several hundred thousand by the time the climatologists determined it would be inundated in their lifetimes.”
“Must’ve been pretty rough on the inhabitants.”
Simone shrugged. “History’s not my forte. All I know is they built the place up — stone buildings with carbon-whisker anchors sunk an eighth of a mile into the bedrock. The idea was that Ararat would survive the great winter intact and come great spring their grandchildren could scrape off the kelp and coral and move back in.”
“So what happened?”
“It got lost.”
“How do you lose a city?”
“You classify it.” Simone slid open a map drawer. The bureaucrat stared down onto a miniature landscape, rivers wandering over flatlands, forests blue-green with mist. Roads were white scratches on the land, thin scars connecting toy cities. Patches of clouds floated here and there. “Here’s the Tidewater one great year ago. This is the most accurate map we have.”
“It’s half-covered with clouds.”
“That’s because it only shows information I feel is reliable.”
“Where’s Ararat?”
“Hidden by the clouds. Now on our closed shelves we have hundreds of maps that do indeed show the location of Ararat. The only trouble is that they none of them agree with each other.” A splay of red lights shone through the clouds, some alone and isolated, others clustered so closely their clouds were stained pink. “You see?”
“Well, who classified Ararat?”
“That’s classified too.”
“Why was it classified?”
“It could be almost anything. System Defense, say, could have an installation there, or use it as a navigational reference point. There are a hundred planetary factions with a vested interest in keeping functions consolidated in the Piedmont. I’ve seen a Psychology Control report that says Ararat as a lost city is a stabilizing archetype, and that its rediscovery would be a destabi-lizer. Even Technology Transfer could be involved. Ararat had a reputation for pushing the edge of planetary tech — those carbon-whisker anchors, for example.”
“So how do I find it?”
She slid the drawer shut. “You don’t.”
“Simone.” The bureaucrat took her hand, squeezed.
She drew away. “It’s just not there to be done.” Then, in a brighter tone, she said, “Tell you what. I remember how interested you were in my work. As long as you’re here, let me show you something special.”
The bureaucrat had never cared for Simone’s work, and she knew it. “All right,” he said. She opened a cabinet and ducked within. He followed.
They stepped into a ghost world. Perfect trees stood in uniform stands against a paper-white sky. They stood on a simplified road, looking into a small town of outlined buildings. “It’s Light-foot,” the bureaucrat said, amazed.
“One-to-one scale,” Simone said proudly. “What do you think?”
“The river’s shifted a little to the north since this was made.”
The cartographer pulled down her goggles and stared at him through them. “Yes, I see,” she said at last. “I’ll add your update.”
The river jumped, and Simone led the bureaucrat into town. He followed her down a street that was nothing more than two lines and into a schematic house, all air and outline. They went up the stairs and into a room with quickly sketched-in furniture. Simone opened a dresser drawer and withdrew a hand-drawn map. She smoothed it out on the bed.
“This is exactly the kind of place where we used to meet,” the bureaucrat said reminiscently. “Do you remember? All that fumbling and groping because we were too young and fearful to make love physically.”
For a moment he thought Simone was going to snap at him. Then she laughed. “Oh yes. I remember. Still, it had its moments. You were so pretty then, naked.”
“I’ve put on a little weight since, I’m afraid.”
For an instant, there was a warm sense of unison and ca-
maraderie between them. Then Simone coughed and tapped the paper with a fingernail. “My predecessor left me this. He knew how hard it is to work with inadequate data.” With a touch of bitterness she added, “Lots of information gets passed along this way. It’s as if the truth has gone underground.”
The bureaucrat bent over the map of the Tidewater and traced the river’s course with a finger. It hadn’t changed much since the map was drawn. Ararat was clearly marked. It stood south of the river several hundred miles, not far from the coast. Salt marsh edged it on three sides. No roads touched on it. “If this is classified, how come it still exists?”
“You don’t hide information by destroying it. You hide it by swamping it with bad information. Do you have the map memorized yet?”
“Yes.”
“Then put it back in the drawer, and we’ll go.”
She led him from the house, down the road, away from Lightfoot and out of the map and cabinet altogether back into the map room proper. “Thank you,” the bureaucrat said. “That was enormously enlightening.”