“Those people in Clay Bank!”
“Yes. She had a little organization going — someone to look after the briefcase, agents in several Inner Circle boutiques, and Mintouchian to move the goods out of the Tidewater. The problem with such organizations, of course, is that being dependent on you, they feel you owe them something. So when Madame Campaspe left, and, not coincidentally, the briefcase burned out, they came to see me. To ask what they were going to do now.
“Why ask me? They did not want to hear that — they wanted someone to tell them what to do and think, when to breathe out and when in. They did not understand that I had no desire to be their mommy. I felt that it was time I disappeared. And like Madame Campaspe before me, I decided to arrange a drowning.
“Gregorian and I were discussing the provenance and disposal of several items Madame Campaspe had left me. When I mentioned that I planned to drown my old self, he offered to arrange the details for a very reasonable price — yet just enough that I did not suspect him. He had an arm airfreighted in from the North Aerie cloning facilities, and treated and tattooed it himself. I am afraid that I left more than I should have in his hands.
“Witches are always busy — it’s an occupational hazard. I was away for some time, and it was only when I came back that I learned what difficulties I had inadvertently caused you.” She looked directly at him with those disconcertingly calm and steady eyes. “All this I have told you is the truth. Will you forgive me?”
He held her tight for a long time, and then they stepped back within.
Later, they stood on the balcony again, clothed this time, for the air had cooled. “You know of the black constellations,” Undine said, “and the bright. But can you put them all together into the One?”
“The One?”
“All the stars form a single constellation. I can show it to you. Start anywhere, there, with the Ram, for example. Let your finger follow it and then jump to the next constellation, they are part of the same larger structure. You follow that next one and you come to—”
“The Kosmonaut! Yes, I see.”
“Now while you’re holding all that in your head, consider the black constellations as well, how they flow one into the other and form a second continuous pattern. Have you got that? Follow my finger, loop up, down and over there. You see? Ignore the rings and moons, they’re ephemeral. Follow my finger, and now you’ve got half the sky.
“You’ve lived most of your life offplanet, so I assume you’re familiar with both hemispheres, the northern as well as the southern? Hold them both in your mind, the hemisphere above that you can see, and the one below which you remember and they form… ?”
He saw it: Two serpents intertwined, one of light and the other of dark. Their coils formed a tangled sphere. Above him the bright snake seized the tail of the dark snake in its mouth. Directly below him, the dark snake seized the bright snake’s tail in its mouth. Light swallowing darkness swallowing light. The pattern was there. It was real, and it went on forever and ever.
He was shaken. He had lived within the One Constellation all his life, gazed intently at different aspects of it a thousand times, and not known it. If something so obvious, so all-encompassing, was hidden from him, what else might there be that he was missing?
“Snakes!” he whispered. “By God, the sky is full of snakes.”
Undine hugged him spontaneously. “That was very well done! I wish I could have gotten hold of you when you were young. I could have made a wizard out of you.”
“Undine,” he said. “Where are you going now?”
She was very still for a moment. “I leave for Archipelago in the morning. It comes alive this season of the great year. Through the great summer it’s a very sleepy, bucolic, nothing-happening place, but now — it’s like when you compress air in a piston, things heat up. The people move up the mountainsides, where the palaces are, and they build bright, ramshackle slums. You would like it. Good music, dancing in the streets. Drink island wine and sleep till noon.”
The bureaucrat tried to imagine it, could not, and wished he could. “It sounds beautiful,” he said, and could not keep a touch of yearning from his voice.
“Come with me,” Undine said. “Leave your floating worlds behind. I’ll teach you things you never imagined. Have you ever had an orgasm last three days? I can teach you that. Ever talk with God? She owes me a few favors.”
“And Gregorian?”
“Forget Gregorian.” She put her arms around him, squeezed him tight. “I’ll show you the sun at midnight.”
But though the bureaucrat yearned to go with her, to be raped away to Undine’s faraway storybook islands, there was something hard and cold in him that would not budge. He could not back down from Gregorian. It was his duty, his obligation. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s a public trust. I have to finish up this matter with Gregorian first.”
“Ah? Well.” Undine stepped into her shoes. They closed about her calfs and ankles, fine offworld manufacture. “Then I really must be leaving.”
“Undine, don’t.”
She picked up an embroidered vest, buttoned it up over her blouse.
“All I need is one day, maybe two. Tell me where to meet you. Tell me where you’ll be. I’ll find you there. You can have anything you want of me.”
She stepped back, tense with anger. “All men are fools,” she said scornfully. “You must have noticed this yourself.” Without looking, she whipped up a scarf from where it had fallen hours before, and tied it about her shoulders. “I do not make offers that can be accepted conditionally.” She was at the door. “Or that can be taken up again, once refused.” She was gone.
The bureaucrat sat down on the-edge of the bed. He fancied he could catch the faintest trace of her scent rising from the sheets. It was very late, but the surrogates outside, aligned to offworld time standards, were partying as loudly as ever.
After a while he began to cry.
12. Across the Ancient Causeway
“You’re in a surly mood this morning.”
The flier continued southward, humming gently to itself. The bureaucrat and Chu sat, shoulders touching, in recliners as plush as two seats in the opera. After a time Chu tried again.
“I gather you found yourself a little friend to spend the night with. Better than I did, I can tell you that.”
The bureaucrat stared straight ahead.
“All right, don’t talk to me. See if I care.” Chu folded her arms, and settled back in the recliner. “I spent the fucking night in this thing, I can spend the morning here too.”
Tower Hill dwindled behind them. Gray clouds had slid down from the Piedmont, drawn by the pressure fall fronting Ocean, and they flew low over forests purple as a bruise. Behemoths were astir below, digging themselves out from the mud. Driven from their burrows by forces they did not understand and swollen with young whose birth they would not live to see, they crashed through the trees, savage, restless, and doomed.
The bureaucrat had patched his briefcase into the flight controls, bypassing the autonomous functions. Every now and then he muttered a course adjustment, and it relayed the message to the flier. There was a layer of vacuum sandwiched within the canopy’s glass to suppress outside noise, and the only sounds within the cockpit were the drowsy hum and rumble of vibrations generated by the flier itself.
They were coming up on a river settlement when Chu shook herself out of her passive torpor, slammed a hand on the dash and snapped, “What’s that below?”