Occasionally people emerged from the diner, and because a plank overhang sheltered the boardwalk there from the rain, they would usually pause to gather themselves together before braving the weather. Once, Chu stopped not an arm’s length away, engrossed in light banter with her young rooster. ” — all alike,” she said. “You think that just because you’ve got that thing between your legs, you’re hot stuff. Well, there’s nothing special about having a penis. Hell, even I have one of them.”
He laughed unsurely.
“You don’t believe me? I’m perfectly serious.” She took out a handful of transition notes. “You care to place a little money on that? Why are you shaking your head? Suddenly you believe me? Tell you what, I’ll give you a chance to get your money back. Double or nothing, mine is bigger than yours.”
The rooster hesitated, then grinned. “Okay,” he said. He reached for his belt.
“Hold on, my pretty, not out here.” Chu took his arm. “We’ll compare lengths in private.” She led him away.
The bureaucrat felt a wry amusement. He remembered when Chu had first shown him the trophy she’d cut from the false Chu, the day it had returned from the taxidermist. She’d opened the box and held it up laughing. “Why would you want to save such a thing?” he had asked.
“It’ll get me the young fish.” She’d swooped it through the air, the way a child would a toy airplane, then lightly kissed the air before its tip and returned it to the box. “Take my word for it. If you want to catch the sweet young things, there’s nothing like owning a big cock.”
Eventually the Horse emerged from the diner, alone. She paused to put up the hood on her raincoat. He stepped from the shadows, and coughed into his hand. “I want to hire your services,” he said. “Not here. I have a place in the old boatyard.”
She looked him up and down, then shrugged. “All right, but I’ll have to charge you for the travel time.” She took his hand and waggled the tattooed finger. “And I can’t spend all night withyou. There’s a midnight mass at the church, a service for the dead.”
“Fine,” he said.
“It’s the last service, and I don’t want to miss it. They’ll be chanting for everyone who ever died in Clay Bank. I got people I want to remember.” She took his arm. “Lead the way.” She was a homely woman, her face harsh and weathered as old wood. Under other circumstances he could imagine their being friends.
They trudged down the river road in silence. The bureaucrat wore a poncho his briefcase had made for him. After a time his speechlessness began to feel oppressive. “What’s your name?” he asked awkwardly.
“You mean my real name or the name I use?”
“Whichever.”
“It’s Arcadia.”
At the houseboat the bureaucrat lit a candle and placed it in its sconce, while Arcadia stamped the mud from her feet. “I’ll sure be glad when this rain ends!” she remarked.
The bundle he’d bought from the scavengers that morning was still on the nightstand. While he was gone, somebody had pulled the covers back from his bed and placed a single black crow’s feather at its center. He brushed it to the floor.
Arcadia found a hook for her raincoat. She pushed up her census bracelet to rub her wrist. “I’ve got a rash from this. You know what I think? I think adamantine is going to be a fetish item in a year or two. People will pay good money to have these things put on them.”
Thrusting the bundle at her, the bureaucrat said, “Here. Take off all your clothes and change into this.”
She looked at the bundle with interest, shrugged again. “All right.”
Til be right back.”
He took a pair of gardening shears from his briefcase and went out into the rain. It was pitch-dark outside, and it took him a long time to clip the large armful of flowers he needed.
By the time he returned, Arcadia had changed into the fantasia. It was covered with orange and red sequins, and cut all wrong. But it fit her well enough. It would do.
“Roses! How nice.” Arcadia clapped her hands like a little girl. She spun about so that the fantasia swirled about her in a fluid, magical motion. “Do you like how I look?”
“Lie down on the bed,” he said roughly. “Pull the skirt up over your waist.”
She obeyed.
The bureaucrat dumped the roses to the side of the bed in a wet pile. Arcadia’s skin was pale as marble in the faint light, the mounded hair between her legs dark and shadowy. Her flesh looked as though it would be cold to the touch.
By the time he had shed his own clothing, the bureaucrat was erect. The room was sweet with the scent of roses.
He closed his eyes as he entered her. He didn’t open them again until he was done.
11. The Sun at Midnight
The air filled with flying ants, their wings iridescent blurs, tiny rainbows that overlapped and created black diffraction patterns: circles and crescents forming and disappearing before the eye could fix on them. The bureaucrat gaped up and they were gone, away on their dying flight to the sea.
“This makes no sense at all,” Chu grumbled.
The bureaucrat stepped back from the flier. “It’s very simple. I want you to lift off and head due south until you’re well over the horizon from Tower Hill. Then swing around and treetop back. There’s a little clearing to the east, by a stream. Wait for me there. A child could do it.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Oh all right. You saw the way we were treated at the hangar?” Across the field, a gang of surrogate laborers, all rust and limping joints, were clumsily stacking the hangar’s dismantled parts onto a lifting skid. “How insistent they were that we be gone by noon? They didn’t want us to be in the way?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So tell me that somebody’s going to send an airlifter all the way out here two days before the tides just to haul out a modular storage hut.” He did not wait for Chu to respond. “They were instructed to get me away from here as quickly as possible. I intend to find out why.” He stepped back into the shadow of the trees and pitched his voice for the flier. “Now take off.”
The canopy slid shut. Engines came to life. The flier was a pretty piece of engineering, the kind of elegant machine normally seen only in the floating worlds. Its emerald skin shimmered in the heat of the jets. Then the flier skidded forward twelve times its own length and with a roar pulled up into the sky. Blink and it was gone.
The trail through the woods was peaceful. The leaves had turned during the rains, gone to purples and cobalts as if all the Tidewater had been blueshifted five seconds into the past. The filtered light was quietly saddening, a somber reminder of the imminence of the land’s passing.
The trees opened up at the foot of Tower Hill. Its slopes were a frayed green, white chalk showing through alien Terran grass. Bright tents and banners, parasols and balloons, dotted the hillside. At the top stood the ancient tower itself, overpainted in bold orange-and-pink supergraphics, an island of offworld aesthetic that clashed violently with the tragedian’s garb of the autumn forest.
The hillside crawled with surrogates, an anthill churned with a stick. It seemed that now that the Tidewater had been scoured of human life, the demons had come out to have a carnival of their own.
He headed upslope.
Brittle metal laughter sounded like a million crickets. Here, a quartet of surrogates played stringed instruments. There, a crowd cheered two identical chrome wrestlers. Further on a dozen linked hands and danced in a circle. Couples strolled, arms about waists, heads touching, all perfectly indistinguishable. It was the triumph of sexlessness.
“Have a drink!”
He’d paused in the shadow of a pavilion to catch his breath. Now a surrogate, bowing deeply, proffered an empty hand. He blinked, realized he’d been mistaken for a surrogate himself, and accepted the invisible glass with a polite nod. There was a perverse satisfaction to knowing that among all the hundreds here, he alone saw the metal bones under the illusion of flesh. “Thank you.”