“I am the maggot in the skull,” Bergier said deliberately, “writhing in darkness.” The illogic of the remark, and its suddenness, jolted the bureaucrat, and in a shiver of insight he realized that those staring eyes were looking not back at horror but forward. There was a premonition of senility in that slow speech, as if the old commander were staring ahead into a protracted slide into toothless misery and a death no more distinct from life than that line dividing ocean from sky.
As they started from the cabin, the commander said, “Lieutenant Chu, I will expect you to keep me posted. I will be following your progress closely.”
“Sir.” Chu closed the door, and they descended the stairs. She laughed lightly. “Did you notice the lozenges?” The bureaucrat grunted. “Swamp-witch nostrums, supposed to be good for impotence. They’re made out of roots and bull’s jism and all sorts of nasty stuff. No fool like an old fool,” she said. “He never leaves that little cabin, you know. He’s famous for it. He even sleeps there.”
The bureaucrat wasn’t listening. “He’s around here somewhere.” He peered into the darkness, holding his breath, but heard nothing. “Hiding.”
“Who?”
“Your impersonator. The young daredevil.” To his briefcase he said, “Reconstruct his gene trace and build me a locater. That’ll sniff him out.”
“That’s proscribed technology,” the briefcase said. “I’m not allowed to manufacture it on a planetary surface.”
“Damn!”
The air within the envelope was still, but filled with tension. It thrummed with the vibrations of the engines, as alive as a coiled snake. The bureaucrat could feel the false Chu peering at them from the shadows. Laughing.
Chu put a hand on his arm. “Don’t.” Her eyes were serious. “If you get emotionally involved with the opposition, they’ve got you by the balls. Cool off. Maintain your detachment.”
“I don’t—”
“—need to take advice from the likes of me. I know.” She grinned cockily, the swaggering cynic again. “The planetary forces are all corrupt and ineffectual, we’re famous for it. Even so, I’m worth listening to. This is my territory. I know the people we’re up against.”
“Watch yourself, buddy!”
The bureaucrat stepped back as four men hoisted a timber up out of the mud and wrestled it onto a flatbed truck. A chunky woman with red hair stood on the truckbed, working the hoist. The buildings here were as tumbledown a lot as he’d ever seen, unpainted, windows cracked, shingles missing. Crusted masses of barnacles covered their north sides.
The ground felt soft underfoot. The bureaucrat looked mournfully down at his shoes. He was standing in the mud. “What’s going on?” he asked.
A withered old shopkeeper, all but lost in the folds of his clothes, as if he had shrunk or they grown, sat watching from his porch. A silver skull dangled from his left ear, marking him as a former space marine, and a ruby pierced through one nostril made him a veteran of the Third Unification. “Ripping out the sidewalks,” he said glumly. “Genuine sea-oak, and it’s been aging in the ground for most of a century. My granddaddy laid it down back when the Tidewater was young. Cheap as dirt then, but a year from now I can name my price.”
“How do I go about renting a boat?”
“Well, I’ll tell you plain, I don’t see how you can. Not that many boats around now that the docks have been tore out.” He smiled sourly at the bureaucrat’s expression. “They were sea-oak too. Tore ’em out last month, when the railroad went away.”
The bureaucrat glanced uneasily at the Leviathan, dwindling low in the eastern sky. A swarm of midges, either vampire gnats or else barnacle flies, hovered nearby threatening to attack, and then shrank to invisibility as they drew away. The flies, airship, railroad, docks, and walks, all of Lightfoot seemed to be receding from his touch, as if caught up by an all-encompassing ebb tide. Suddenly he felt dizzy, drawn into an airless space where his inner ear spun wildly, and there was no ground underfoot.
With a shout the timber was slammed onto the flatbed. The woman handling the crane joked and chatted with the men in the mud. “You gotta see my fantasia, though. You’ll die when you see it. It’s cut right down to here.”
“Gonna show off the top of your tits, eh, Bea?” one of the men said.
She shook her head scornfully. “Halfway down the nipples. You’re going to see parts of me you never suspected existed.”
“Oh, I suspected something all right. I just never felt called on to do anything in particular about them.”
“Well, you come to the jubilee in Rose Hall tomorrow night, and you can eat your heart out.”
“Oh, is that what you want me to eat out?” He grinned wryly, then danced back as the beam slipped a few inches in its harness. “Watch that side there! A little remark like that don’t deserve to get my toes crushed.”
“Don’t you worry. It’s not your toes I’m thinking of crushing.”
“Excuse me,” the bureaucrat called up. “Is there any chance I can rent your truck? Are you the owner?”
The redheaded woman looked down at him. “Yeah, I’m the owner,” she said. “You don’t want to rent this thing, though. See, I’m running it from a battery rated for a rig twice this size, so I gotta step down the voltage, okay? Only the transformer’s going. I can get maybe a half hour out of it before it overheats and starts to melt the insulation. I been kind of nursing it along. Now Anatole’s got a spare transformer, but he thinks he oughta be able to charge an arm and a leg for it. I been holding off. I figure it gets a little closer to jubilee, he’ll take what he can get.”
“Aniobe, I keep telling you,” the shopkeeper said. “I could buy that sucker off him for half what—”
She tossed her head. “Oh, shut up, Pouffe. Don’t you go spoiling my fun!”
The bureaucrat cleared his throat. “I don’t want to go far. Just down the river a way and back again.” A barnacle fly stung his arm, and he swatted it.
“Naw, the wheel bearings are starting to seize up too. Onliest place to get lubricant nowadays is Gireaux’s, and old Gireaux has got a bad case of the touchy-feelies. Always trying to get a little kiss or something. If I wanted to get a tub of grease out of him on short notice, I’d probably have to get down on my knees and give him a sleeve job!”
The men grinned like hounds. Pouffe, however, shook his head and sighed. “I’m going to miss all this,” he said heavily. The bureaucrat noticed for the first time the deep-interface jacks on his wrists, gray with corrosion; he’d served time on Caliban in his day. The man must have an interesting history behind him. “All your friends say they’ll keep in touch after they move to the Piedmont, but it’s just not going to happen. Who are they kidding?”
“Oh, come off it,” Aniobe scoffed. “Any man as rich as you will have friends wherever he goes. It’s not as if you needed to have a personality or nothing.”
The last timber loaded, Aniobe shut down the truck and shipped the winch. The laborers waited to be dismissed. One, a roosterish young man with a comb of stiff black hair wandered onto the porch, and casually leaned over a tray of brightly bundled feathers — fetishes, perhaps, or fishing lures. Chu watched him carefully.
He was straightening from the tray when Chu stepped forward and seized his arm.
“I saw that!” Chu spun the man around and slammed him up against the doorpost. He stared at her, face blank with shock. “What have you got in that shirt?”
“I — nothing! W-what are—” he stammered. Aniobe stood up straight, putting hands on hips. The other laborers, the bureaucrat, the shopkeeper, all froze motionless and silent, watching the confrontation.