Simone looked at him wistfully. “Do you realize that we’ve never met?”
The bureaucrat returned the conch shell to Philippe’s desk. The further Philippe looked up from his work and said, “It doesn’t work out, there can’t be a traitor in the Division.”
“Why not?”
Both Philippes spoke at once.
“It just—”
“—wouldn’t—”
“—work out, you see. There are too many safeguards—”
“—checks and balances—”
“—oversight committees. No, I’m afraid—”
“—it’s just not possible.”
The two looked at each other and burst out laughing. It occurred to the bureaucrat that a man who liked his own company this much might wish there were more of himself in the physical universe as well as in the conventional realm. The further Philippe waved a hand amiably and said, “Oh, all right, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“Something I’ve been wanting to mention, though,” the first said. “Though I’m afraid if I tell you now, what with your talk of traitors and such, that you’ll misconstrue it badly.”
“What is it?”
“I’m concerned about Korda. The old man is simply not himself these days. I think he’s losing his touch.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Little things, mostly. An obsession with your current case — you know, the magician thing. But then I caught him in a rather serious breach of etiquette.”
“Yes?”
“He was trying to break into your desk.”
The bureaucrat handed the phone back to his briefcase. Philippe, he noted, was just finishing off a call of his own. His other two agents doubtless, warning him of the bureaucrat’s visit.
“Let’s put it to a vote,” Korda said. They all laid hands down on the table. “Well, that settles that.”
The bureaucrat hadn’t expected the probe to go through. Now, however, they couldn’t probe him alone without going on record explaining why they’d exempted themselves.
Korda seized control of the agenda again. “Frankly,” he said, “we’ve been thinking of taking you off the case, and putting—”
“Philippe?”
“—someone in your place. It would give you a chance to rest, and to regain your perspective. You are, after all, just a trifle overinvolved.”
“I couldn’t take it anyway,” Philippe said suddenly. “The planetside assignment, I mean. I’m hideously swamped with work as it is.”
Korda looked startled.
Cagey old Philippe, though, was not about to be caught planetside when there was talk of a traitor in the Division. Even assuming it wasn’t he, Philippe would want to be at his desk when the accusations broke out into office warfare.
“Have you any other agents who could step in?” Muschg asked. “Just so we know what we’re talking about.”
Korda twisted slightly. “Well, yes, but. None that have the background and clearances this particular case requires.”
“Your options seem limited.” Muschg flashed sharp little teeth in a smile. Philippe leaned back, eyes narrowing, as he saw the direction of her intent. “Perhaps you ought to have Analysis Design restructure your clearance process.”
Nobody spoke. The silence sustained itself for a long moment, and then Korda reluctantly said, “Perhaps I should. I’ll schedule a meeting.”
A tension went out of the air. Their business here was over then, and they all knew it; the magic moment had arrived when it was understood that nothing more would be established, discovered, or decided today. But the meeting, having once begun, must drag on for several long more hours before it could be ended. The engines of protocol had enormous inertial mass; once set in motion they took forever to grind to a stop.
The five of them preceded to dutifully chew the scraps of the agenda until all had been gnawed to nothing-at-all.
The dueling hall was high-ceilinged and narrow. The bureaucrat’s footsteps bounced from its ceiling and walls. A cold, sourceless, wintery light glistened on the hardwood lanes. He stooped to pick up a quicksilver ball that had not been touched in decades, and he sighed.
He could see his fingertips reflected on the ball’s surface. In the Puzzle Palace he was unmarked. Undine’s serpent had been tattooed under his skin after his last scan; what marks he bore could not be seen here.
The walls were lined with narrow canvas benches. He sat down on one, staring into the programmed reflection of his face on the dueling ball. Even thus distorted, it was clear he was not at all the man he had once been.
Restless, he stood and assumed a dueler’s stance. He cocked his arm. He threw the ball as hard as he could, and followed it with his thought. It flew, changing, and became a metal hawk, a dagger, molten steel, a warhead, a stream of acid, a spear, a syringe: seven figures of terror. When it hit the target, it sank into the face and disappeared. The dummy crumbled.
Korda entered. “Your desk told me you were here.” He eased himself down on the bench, did not meet the bureaucrat’s eyes. After a while, he said, “That Muschg. She sandbagged me. It’s going to take half a year going through the restructuring process.”
“You can hardly expect me to be sympathetic to your problems. Under the circumstances.”
“I, ah, may have been a trifle out of line during the meeting. It must have seemed I’d stepped out of bounds. I know you hadn’t done anything to warrant a probe.”
“No, I hadn’t.”
“Anyway, I knew you’d slip out of it. It was too simple a trap to catch a fox like you.”
“Yes, I wondered about that too.”
Korda called the ball to his hand and turned it over and over, as if searching for the principle of its operation. “I wanted Philippe to think we weren’t getting along. There’s something odd about Philippe, you know. I don’t know what to make of his behavior of late.”
“Everyone says Philippe is doing a wonderful job.”
“So everyone says. And yet, since I gave him your desk, I’ve had more trouble than you can imagine. It’s not just the Stone House, you know. The Cultural Radiation Council is screaming for your nose and ears.”
“I’ve never even heard of them.”
“No, of course you haven’t. I protect you from them and their like. The point being that there was no way Cultural Radiation should have known about this operation. I think Philippe’s been leaking.”
“Why would he do that?”
Korda rolled the ball from hand to hand. In an evasive tone of voice he said, “Philippe is a good man. A bit of a backbiter, you know, but still. He has an excellent record. He used to be in charge of human cloning oversight before the advisory board spun it off as a separate department.”
“Philippe told me he didn’t know much about human cloning.”
“That was before he came here.” Korda raised his eyes. They were heavily lined, tired, cynical. “Look it up, if you don’t believe me.”
“I will.” So Philippe had lied to him. But how had Korda known that? Sitting beside this heavy, unhealthy spider king, the bureaucrat felt in great danger. He hoped the traitor was Philippe. Everyone talked about how good Philippe was, how slick, how subtle, but the thought of Korda as an enemy frightened him. He might sometimes seem the buffoon, but under that puffy exterior, those comic gestures, was the glimmer of cold steel.
“Boss?” His briefcase diffidently extended the phone.
He absorbed:
The hall of mirrors shunted the bureaucrat to the elevator bank, where he caught a train to the starward edge of the Puzzle Palace. It let him off at the portal of a skywalk, slabs of white marble laid end to end like so many shining dominoes out into the night.
To either side of the skywalk blazed a glory of stars, the holistic feed from observatories scattered through the Prosperan system. He walked out onto the narrow ribbon of marble, with the fortress of human knowledge burning behind him, the citadel ring of research ahead. A few scattered travelers were visible in the distance. It was a long trip to the Outer Circle, several hours experienced time. He could catch up with one if he wanted, to exchange gossip and shop talk. He did not want to.