Bemused, the bureaucrat followed the instructions and came to a long platform with scattered tables. Clusters of surrogates and the occasional lone human lounged against the railing, staring out into the forest. He stared too.
The tree had been cut back to open a view of the forest interior. Golden light slanted into the greenery, whimseys dancing like dust motes within it. Ahead, rising from the earth like a phantom, was the landlocked corpse of an ocean vessel. The Atlantis.
It was enormous beyond scale. The ship had foundered keel first with its bow upward sometime during the last great winter, and the currents had half buried it, so that it seemed frozen in the instant of going under. A million orchid crabs were traversing its barnacled remains, and it was covered with flowers, as impossible a creation as any mnemonic address in the Puzzle Palace.
The ghost of a memory tugged at his mind. He had heard of this ship before. Something.
The bureaucrat found an empty table, scraped up a chair, and sat. A light breeze ruffled his hair. Leaves rustled as a feathered serpent leaped into the air, a scissor-tailed finch perhaps, or a robin. He felt oddly at peace, put in mind of humanity’s gentle, arboreal origins. He wondered why people put so little effort into returning home, when it was so easily done.
At that moment he glanced down at the table. An outlined crow stared back at him. Before he could react, a beaked shadow fell across it. He looked up into the eyes of a crow-headed man.
Gregorian! the bureaucrat thought, with a thrill of alarm. Then he remembered the Black Beast that had haunted Dr. Orphelin and looked about him. Faded drawings of birds and animals were everywhere on the railings and tables. He’d attuned himself to such things, and was now generating his own omens “Welcome to the Haunt’s Roost,” the waiter said.
The bureaucrat pointed to a Flavored Beers sign. “Have you got lime? Or maybe orange?”
The head lifted disdainfully. “That’s only line-feed. For the surrogate trade. No real person would drink that crap.”
“Oh. Uh, well, give me a glass of lager, then. And an explanation for that ship out there.”
The waiter bowed, left, and returned with a beer and an interactive. The set looked out of place, its forced orange-and-purple housing a jarring contrast to the restaurant’s studied art-lessness. He might have been back home in an environmental retreat, trees and faraway glint of river reduced to calculated effect. The beer was thin.
He turned on the set. A smiling young woman in a brocaded vest appeared on its screen. Her braids were tipped with small silver bells. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Marivaud Quinet,
and I am a typical citizen of Miranda during the last great year. I am knowledgeable on and able to discuss matters of historical significance as well as details of daily life. I am not structured to offer advice or pornographic entertainment. This set has been sealed by the Department of Licensing and Inspection, Division of Technology Transfer. Product tampering is illegal and may result in prosecution or even unintentional physical harm.”
“Yes, I know.” The set would implode if its integrity were breached. He wondered if it would be left behind when the restaurant was evacuated, to disappear in a silvery burst of bubbles when salt corrosion finally ate through its housing. “Marivaud, tell me about the Atlantis.”
Her face grew solemn. “That was the final tragedy of our age. We were arrogant, I admit it. We made mistakes. This was the last of them, the one that brought the offplanet powers down on us, to regress our technology back yet another century.”
The bureaucrat remembered just enough history to know this was oversimplification. “What was done was necessary, Marivaud. There must be limits.”
She angrily yanked at a braid, setting its tiny bell tinkling. “We were not like the stupid cattle who live here today. We had pride! We accomplished things! We had our own scientists, our own direction. Our contribution to Prosperan culture was not small. We were known throughout the Seven Sisters!”
“I’m sure you were. Tell me about the ship.”
“The Atlantis was a liner originally. It had to be converted offshore — it was too deep for any harbor. That fragment you see now is only the prow. The true ship was as big as a city.” A montage of antique images of the ship in different configurations, the superstructure rising and falling in great waves. “Well, perhaps it only seemed so, for I saw it from so very many viewpoints, in such an overlapping woozy maze of perception. But I get ahead of myself. The first phase was to build a string of transmitters up and down the Tidewater. They were anchored to the bedrock with carbon-whisker cables and made strong enough to withstand the tides when they rolled across the land.” More images, of thick, bulbous-topped towers this time. “We rigged them with permanently sealed tokamaks, to guarantee their power over the submerged half of the great year. It took ten lesser years to…”
“Marivaud, I haven’t the time for all this. Just the sinking, please.”
“I was at home that day,” Marivaud said. “I’d built a place just above the fall line — what would be the Piedmont coast after the tides. I had a light breakfast, toast with fairy jam sprinkled with ground parsley from my garden, and a glass of stout.”
The image dissolved into the interior of a small cottage. Rain specked the windowpanes, and a fire burned in the hearth. Marivaud hastily wiped a dab of jam from the corner of her mouth. “Out at sea, the morning was bright and sunny. I was flashing from person to person, like sunlight itself. I felt so fresh and happy.”
The scene switched to the deck of the Atlantis.
Green-yellow bodies poured onto the deck. A scoop lifted away. For an instant the bureaucrat did not recognize the struggling creatures. In winter morph they bore very little resemblance to humans. They had long, eelish tails and two slim appendages that might generously be called arms; their faces were streamlined, mouths silent gasps of pain. They twisted, bodies shortening, lengthening, shifting from form to form in a desperate attempt to adapt to the air. The image focused on one, and in the agonized turn of its head the bureaucrat recognized intelligence.
“They’re haunts!”
Marivaud faded half in, serene as a madonna at the breakfast table. She nodded. “Yes, the little darlings.”
A woman in hip boots waded in among the haunts. Her gun flashed as she pressed it to the backs of heads and pulled the trigger. Haunts jerked wildly with each gasp of compressed air.
“That’s the last of them. Over they go.”
Suddenly the image shifted to the viewpoint of one of the haunts. It flew through the air and exploded into the water. Clouds of bubbles gushed away and it fled wildly. To either side swam other haunts, wild and beautiful and ecstatic.
Back on deck, the crew were assembling a pair of projectors. “Let’s run out those ghost nets again. Watch that—”
There was a knock on the door.
Marivaud opened it. A woman with hard, handsome features that echoed her own stood there. “Goguette! Come in, let me take your cloak. Have you eaten yet? What brings you here so early?”
“I’ll take some berry tea.” Goguette sat at the table. “I’ve come to share the jubilee with my little sister. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“No, of course not. Oh! Mousket’s on deck.”
A large, heroically breasted military type faded in, all jaw and dark purpose. “Mousket,” Goguette said. “She’s the commandant, right?”
“Yes. She’s having an affair with the pilot.” A quick glimpse of a slim, straight-built man with cynical eyes. To the bureaucrat she said, “He is an extremely private man. The public nature of their love embarrasses, humiliates, arouses him. That only makes it the sweeter for her. She savors his abasement.”