The screen cut from face to face, viewpoint to viewpoint, showing stunned eyes, strained faces. They stood deathly still, paralyzed with awe.
“How are they going to escape?” the bureaucrat asked. “Don’t they want to get away?”
“Of course they don’t.”
“Do they want to die?”
“Of course they don’t.” The image wavered, and the human crew turned to metal. The Atlantis was transformed into a ship of the dead, a gothic monstrosity manned by skeletons. “Surrogates were invented on Miranda,” Marivaud said proudly. “We made them first.” The image overlay was restored, and the skeletons fleshed out with human bodies.
A horrid glassy calm settled over the near reaches of Ocean, as if its surface had been stretched taut by the swell. Even as they soared up its side, the water seemed to shrink under the ship. The bureaucrat could hear it whispering and running away. Ocean rose until it filled the eye. The sky vanished, and still it grew. Winds blew across the deck.
Then they topped the swell. Beyond it a wall of white fury reached from horizon to horizon — a line squall. It rushed down on them. Involuntarily crew members moved toward and away from each other, forming clusters and gaps along the rail.
Gogo glanced toward the ghostnetter. Her eyes were bright with excitement. She bit her lip, brushed away a strand of hair from an undone braid. Her face glowed with life. She reached out to hug Underbill.
Startled, Underbill flinched away from her touch. He stared into her face with revulsion. In that unguarded instant his expression said louder than any words: You’re only a woman.
Then the squall overtook the ship, and slammed into its side. The storm swallowed it whole.
“Ahh,” Marivaud sighed. Her sister reached out and seized her hand. Softly, gently, they began to applaud.
In a faraway studio the actors rose up from their gates to take their bows.
Marivaud looked up, face expressionless. The cottage — sister, fire, and all — dissolved in a swirl of rain. “A week later, the bodies began washing up on shore.”
“What?”
“With radiation burns. We had not understood the indigenes so well as we had thought. We did not know that their brain chemistry changed in great winter. Or perhaps it was their psychology that changed. But somehow the warning signal that was supposed to drive them from the towers did not. They huddled as close to the reactors as they could. It was madness. Perhaps their mating instincts were stimulated. Perhaps they just liked the warmth. Who can say?”
Marivaud’s eyes closed. Tears squeezed between the lids. “We could do nothing. Ocean was all storm and fury — nothing could get through. Nothing except for the broadcasts we could not turn off. All the time it took for them to die, the towers up and down the coast transmitted their agony. It was like having a broken tooth in one’s mouth — the tongue keeps returning to it, drawn by the pain. I could not leave it alone.
“Sorrow swept over Continent in a great electronic wave. It was as if an enchantment had passed over the land. One moment everything was bright and beautiful. The next it was gray and lifeless. As a people we had been optimistic, sure of ourselves. Now we were… dispossesed, without a future. Those who had the strength not to listen were affected by the rest of us.
“I myself would have starved, had my sister not hand-fed me for a week. She smashed my earrings. She bullied me back to life. But after that I no longer laughed so often as before. There were people who died. Others went mad. The shame was great. When the offplanet powers convened and took away the last of our science, there was little protest. We knew we deserved it. So the high autumn of our technology passed, and we lapsed into eternal winter.”
Marivaud fell silent, her face pale and sad. The bureaucrat turned off the interactive.
After a while, a dog-headed waiter came and took the set away.
The bureaucrat drained the last of his beer and leaned back to watch the surrogates dining. It amused him in a melancholy way, to see them lifting glasses and tasting food no one else could see, in a perfect and meaningless mime show. By the railing other surrogates strolled and chatted. One of them was staring at him.
Their eyes met, and the surrogate bowed. It came to the table and took a chair. For an instant the bureaucrat couldn’t place the keen, aged face that burned on the screen. Then his schoolboy eidetics kicked in. “You’re the shopkeeper,” he said. “In Lightfoot. Your name is… Pouffe, is that right?”
There was a squint of madness in the old man’s grin. “That’s right, that’s right. Gonna ask how I found you here?”
“How did you find me here?”
“Tracked you down. Tracked you to Cobbs Creek. Gated ahead to Clay Bank, you weren’t there. Gated back to Cobbs Creek, they told me you hadn’t been gone long. I knew you’d stop here. Never met an offworlder yet who could resist taking in the sights. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Actually I’m here by chance.”
“Sure you are.” Pouffe’s lips twisted sardonically. “But I would’ve found you anyway. This isn’t the only place I’ve been waiting. Been shunting between four different gates all morning.”
“That must have cost you a lot of money.”
“Yes, that’s the key.” The old man leaned forward, eyebrows rising significantly. “A lot of money. It cost me a lot of money. But I’ve got plenty of it. I’m a rich man, if you get my drift.”
“Not exactly.”
“I’ve seen your commercial. You know, about the magician. The one who can—”
“Wait a minute, that’s not my—”
“—adapt a man to live and breathe underwater. Well, I—”
“Stop. This is nonsense.”
“—want to find him. I understand you can’t tell just anybody. I’ll pay for the information, and I’ll pay well.” He reached across the table to seize the bureaucrat’s hand.
“I don’t have what you want!” The bureaucrat shook away the grasping metal hand and stood. “Even if I knew where he was, I wouldn’t tell you. The man is a fraud. He can’t do any of what he claims.”
“That’s not what you said on television.”
“Shopkeeper Pouffe, take a look out here.” He led the avid old man to the railing. “Take a good look. Imagine what this is going to be like in a few months. No houses, no shelter. Seaweed where the trees are now, and angel sharks feeding in the black water. The marine life here has had millions of years to adapt to this environment. You, on the other hand, are a civilized man with a genome foreign not only to Ocean but to this entire star system. Even if Gregorian could deliver on his wild claims — and I assure you that he cannot — what kind of life could you lead here? What would you eat? How could you expect to survive?”
“Excuse me, sir,” a bull-headed waiter said.
He swept Pouffe’s surrogate aside, placed a hand on the bureaucrat’s back, and shoved. “Hey, what — !” Pouffe cried.
The bureaucrat fell forward. Dizzily he clutched at the railing. The man-bull laughed, and the bureaucrat felt his legs being lifted up behind him. All existence swept sideways, trees wheeling in the sky beneath, sand turning up overfoot. The hands were warm and firm on his ankles. Then, suddenly, they were gone.
Somebody screamed. In a blast of pain the bureaucrat crashed flat on his stomach. His arms were still clenched about the rail. Helplessly he gazed up to see the waiter and Pouffe’s surrogate locked in a hug. They might have been dancing. The man shoved violently, and the telescreen snapped off. It bounced off the edge of the platform. Headless, the machine ducked and spun. The two crashed into the railing. Wood splintered and gave.
They toppled over the edge.