“Yes.” A light, urbane laugh. “We seem to have a stalemate here. I need your help to survive, and you need mine to escape. Obviously we need to compromise. What do you propose?”
“Me? I propose nothing.”
“Then you’ll die!”
“I suppose so.”
There was a long, astonished silence. Then Gregorian said, “You don’t mean that.”
“Wait and see.” He turned back to the television, knelt down, and fiddled with the controls. His show came on.
“How dare you judge me? You have no moral right to, and you know it!”
“How’s that again?”
“By your own standards, you’re tainted. You said you wouldn’t use proscribed technology. You told Veilleur that if you used it, you’d be no better than a criminal yourself. Yet all the time, you held it in reserve, ready to be called on.”
The drama was coming to a head. Young Byron had been lashed to the mast of mad Ahab’s ark. His mermaid waited frantically in a cage upon the moors, for the waters to come and drown her. Knowing that she was about to die, she sang.
“I lied,” the bureaucrat said. “Now, hush. I want to hear this.”
Not much later, the briefcase said, “Boss? He’s too proud to suggest it himself. But I know what he’s going through. I could kill Gregorian right now by overloading his nervous system. It would be painless.”
The bureaucrat was resting in a nest of fat pillows, bright with Archipelago designs. He stared at the television, letting its light wash over him. He was amazingly tired. The pictures meant nothing to him anymore, they were only a meaningless flow of imagery. He was empty, spent.
Whenever he looked up, he could see Gregorian glaring at him. If there were anything to this business of occult powers, then the wizard would not die alone. But though the bureaucrat felt the tug of those eyes, he would not meet them. Nor would he permit his briefcase to relay the magician’s words. He refused to listen. That way, there would be no chance, however slight, of being talked out of anything at the last minute.
“No,” he said mildly. “I think it’s better this way, don’t you?”
The tides were coming. The land thrilled with premonitions of Ocean. Sounds carried by the bedrock were piped up from the hollows and basements below, low extended moans and great submarine sighs. Sonic monsters rumbled through the bureaucrat’s bones and belly. All the city was crackling and popping in anticipation. The carbon-whisker struts thrummed with sympathetic resonance.
Ocean’s hammer was on its way.
When that great wave came, it would fall upon Ararat and ring the city like a bell. All the waters in the world would join together in one giant fist and smash down. From underneath, the blow would feel like the fall of Civilization, like the culmination of every flood and earthquake that had ever been. It would seem unimaginable that anything could survive. It would be the final descent of blackness.
When the waters finally subsided, Gregorian would be gone.
Then, at last, the bureaucrat could sleep.
14. Day of Jubilee
The bureaucrat sat in the command room, watching the final episode of his serial. The tides had come, and most of the characters were dead.
In the swirling wreckage of Ahab’s ship two tiny figures lay exhausted atop a jagged length of decking. One was Byron, the young man who had loved, betrayed, and now mourned a woman of the sea. His eyes were half-shut, mouth a gash of salt-encrusted misery. He had suffered most of any of the cast, had gone beyond anguish and disillusionment. Yet he had managed with his failing strength to save a child from the disaster.
The second figure was the child herself, the little girl, Eden. Her eyes shone bright as sparks of jungle green from that emaciated face. The tides had shocked her from autism, and returned her to life again. She stood and pointed. “Look!” she cried. “Land!”
It was only a show, and yet the bureaucrat was glad Eden had survived. Somehow that made all the rest of it bearable.
His briefcase entered the room. “Boss? It’s time.”
“I suppose it is.” He hauled himself to his feet, then knelt and turned off the television set forever. Good-bye to all that. “Lead the way.”
Rings of light paced them down the corridor. Still-active security systems swiveled to watch them pass, exchanged coded signals and, in the absence of human intervention, went to the default function. Which, because the base had been tailored for upper-echelon theoreticians, was not to hinder.
The door opened.
The sky was an amazing blue. Caliban floated low over the horizon, flat as a disk of paper, its ring of cities a scratch of white as thin and fine as a meteor trail. They stepped outside.
The bureaucrat stood blinking in the daylight. The terrace was white and empty. The week’s storms had scoured it clean of rubble. Pouffe was gone as completely as if he had never been. Nothing remained of Gregorian but his chains.
All the world smelled of salt air and possibility. Ocean stretched far and away in all directions, its triumph over the land complete. It was too large for him to take it all in. Standing upon this infinitesimal speck of stone, the bureaucrat felt small and exhilarated. His eyes ached with the effort of seeing and not comprehending.
“This way.”
“Hold on a minute.”
Before the tides, he had only seen Ocean from orbit, and once as a smear against the distant sky on his flight to Ararat. Now it surrounded him, limitless, in constant motion. Sharp, white-tipped waves leaped up and pulled down before their shapes could be made out. Surf crashed against building sides, sending up lacy sprays of water.
To an offworlder this was an impossible environment. The land was different, its flows and motions imperceptible to the eye, so that its totality could be easily grasped, simplified, and understood. But Ocean was at the same time too simple and too complex to be mastered by perception. It abashed and humbled him.
“You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” the briefcase asked anxiously.
“No, of course not.” He gathered himself together, and gestured for the briefcase to lead him down. “I just needed a little time to adjust.”
All directions were the same on Ararat. A short walk from the military complex at its core inevitably led to an abrupt edge, and then Ocean. They strolled to the sheltered side of the island, down streets dotted with small white anemones. Sea-stilts tumbled away at their approach. Two shimmies were nesting. Already great winter life was colonizing the city.
Seagulls swooped overhead, black as sin.
The buildings opened up at a set of ancient loading docks. Red and yellow traffic arrows and cargo circles were permanently graffixed into the stone floor. Beyond was only water. They paused here, amid the gentle noise of surf and the constant whisper of wind. A kind of shared difference possessed them both, so that neither wanted to be the first to speak.
At last the bureaucrat cleared his throat. “Well.” His voice sounded false to him, too high-pitched and casual. “I suppose it’s time to set you free.”
In the stunned aftermath of the tides, when the occasional breaker still crashed over the highest parts of the city, the bureaucrat found himself unable to speak of what had just happened. The experience had been too overwhelming to be contained in thought, much less put into words. It was too large a thing for a single mind to hold.
He stood, holding off the window wall with one blind hand. The floor trembled, and the outraged howls of stressed supports sounded from a quarter-mile below. His ears still rang.
Something had died in him. A tension, a sense of purpose.
He had lost the will to return to his old niche in the Puzzle Palace. Let someone else defend whatever was hallowed and necessary. Let Philippe stand in for him. He was good at that sort of thing. But as for the bureaucrat himself, he no longer had the stomach for it.