The handle of the television set stung like ice. He could no longer bear to hold it. With an effort he forced his hand open and let go. The television dropped to the trail, and he shoved his hand under his armpit. He hurried forward, hugging himself for warmth. For a time the voices called after him down the trail. By slow degrees they faded away, and were gone. Now he was truly alone.
It wasn’t until he stumbled and fell that he realized the danger he was in.
He hit the ground hard and for a moment did not move, almost enjoying the sting of pain that ran along his body, all but anesthetizing one arm and the side of his face. It baffled him that mere weather could do this to him. Finally, though, he realized that the time had come to turn back. Or die.
Dizzily he stood. He’d gotten a little turned around, and when he got to his feet, he was not sure which way was which. The snow fell chokingly thick, powdering his suit and catching on his eyelashes. He could hardly see. A few gray lines to either side of the trail, trees evidently, and nothing more. The impression he had made when he fell had already been obliterated.
He started back.
It was even odds that he was headed for the flier. He wished he could be sure, but he was disoriented and it was hard to think. His attention was all taken up by the cold that sank its fangs in his flesh and did not let go. Icy needles of pain lacerated his muscles. His face stiffened with cold. He gritted his teeth, lips pulling back in an involuntary snarl, and forced himself on.
Some time later, he realized that he was surely headed in the wrong direction, because he hadn’t come upon the jettisoned television yet. He put off admitting this for as long as possible, because the thought of retracing his steps was heartbreaking. Finally, though, he had no choice but to admit his error, turn, and go back.
It was wonderfully silent.
The bureaucrat had lost all sensation in his feet long ago. Now the aching coldness was creeping up his legs, numbing his calf muscles. His knees burned from touching the cold trousers cloth. His ears were afire. A savage pain in both eyes and the center of his forehead set his head buzzing, demon voices droning meaningless words in overlapping chorus.
Then the paralyzing numbness crept higher, his knees buckled, and he fell.
He did not get up.
For a timeless long time he lay there, hallucinating the sounds of phantom machines. He was beginning to feel blessedly warm. The television had said something about that. Get up, you bastard, he thought. You’ve got to get up. There was a crunching noise, and he saw boots, black leather boots, before his face. A massive man squatted, and lifted him gently in his arms. Over the man’s shoulder he saw a blur of color in the swirling white that was surely a car or truck of some sort.
The bureaucrat looked up into a broad face, full of strength and warmth, and implacable as a stone. He looked like somebody’s father. The lips curled into a smile that involved all the man’s face, cheeks forming merry balls, and the man winked.
It was Gregorian.
13. A View from a Height
Three men sat around the campfire.
The night was cold. The bureaucrat smoked black hashish laced with amphetamines to keep awake. Gregorian held the pipe to his mouth, urging him to suck in deeply and hold the smoke for as long as possible. The hash made the bureaucrat’s head buzz. His feet were impossibly distant, a full day’s travel down the giant’s causeway of his legs. Marooned on the mountainside, he still felt monstrously calm and alert, wired into the celestial telegraph with a direct line to the old wisdom lying at the base of his skull like moonstones in an amalgam of coprolites and saber-tooth bones. For an instant he lost hold of external reality, and plunged deep into the submarine caverns of perception, a privateer in search of booty. Then he exhaled. Oceans of smoke gushed out into the world.
The snow had stopped long ago.
Gregorian finished off the pipe, knocked out the coals against the heel of his boot, and carefully scraped the bowl clean. “Do you know how Ararat was lost?” he asked. “It’s an interesting story.”
“Tell me,” the bureaucrat said.
Their companion said nothing.
“To understand you must first know that the upper reaches of the city lie above the great winter high-tide mark. Oh, the jubilee tides smash over it all right — but it’s built to withstand the force. When the storms subside, it’s an island. A useful little place militarily — isolated, easily fortified, easily defended. System Defense used it as a planning center during the Third Unification. That’s when it was hardened. There are probably a lot of these secret places scattered about.”
The magician took a branch from the flames and stirred the fire, sending sparks swirling madly up the smoke into the sky. “As a standard procedure, System Defense masked their involvement with a civilian caretaker organization under the nominal auspices of Cultural Dissemination Oversight, with control exerted through yet another civilian front. During the reorganization at the end of the violent phase of Unification…”
The explanation went on and on. The bureaucrat listened only with the surface of his mind, letting the words pass over him in murmurous waves while he studied his opponent. Squatting before the fire, Gregorian seemed more beast than man. The flames threw red shadows up on his face, and the cool greenish light from the window wall ignited his hair from behind. Sometimes the light reached his teeth and lit up the grin. But none of it ever reached his eyes.
Decades passed. Organizations arose and fell, were folded into one another, shed responsibility, picked up new authority, and split off from parent bodies. By the time Ocean receded and great spring began, Ararat was so deeply entangled in the political substance of the System that it could be neither softened nor declassified.
“The stupidity of it — the waste! An entire city, the work of thousands of lifetimes, lost through mere regulation. And yet this is but the smallest fraction of the invisible empire of Ignorance imposed on us by the powers above.”
In person Gregorian’s voice was eerily familiar, just as his features could be decoded as a ruggeder, more compelling version of Korda’s own. “That sounds like something your father might say,” the bureaucrat remarked.
Gregorian looked up sharply. “I don’t need you here!” He pointed to the still figure across the fire from him. “Pouffe is enough company for me. If you want to die early, I can—”
“It was only an observation!”
The magician eased back, his rage gone as abruptly as it had arisen. “Yes, that’s true. Yes. Well, of course the information all came from Korda originally. It was one of his projects. He spent years trying to have Ararat declassified, tilting at windmills and fighting phantoms. Old Laocoon strangled by red tape.” He threw back his head and laughed. “But what do you and I care about that? More fool he for having wasted his life. I don’t suppose you remembered to bring my notebook?”
“I left it in my briefcase. Back in the flier.”
“Ah, well. It was of purely sentimental value. We must all learn to give things up.”
“Tell me something,” the bureaucrat said carefully. Gregorian nodded his great head. “What did Earth’s agent give you — was it proscribed technology? Or was it nothing at all?”
Gregorian pondered the question with mocking seriousness, and then, as if delivering the punch line of a particularly good joke, said, “Nothing at all. I wanted to force Korda to send somebody after me when I disappeared. It was bait, that was all.”