Read Online Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick - Free Book Online Page A

do you have on him?”
    She bowed her head to concentrate on the search. “We have the text of his commercials, the data presentation your department made to the Stone House, a recent internal security report bylined Lieutenant-Liaison Chu, and the usual anecdotia: consorts with demons, blasphemes, hosts orgies, climbs mountains, couples with goats, eats rocks, plays chess, seduces virgins of both sexes, walks on water, fears rain, tortures innocents, defies offplanet authority, washes with milk, consults mystics on Cordelia, employs drugs on himself and others, travels in disguise, drinks urine, writes books in no known language, and so on. None of it reliable.”
    “And of course you don’t know where I can find him.”
    “No.”
    The bureaucrat sighed. “Well, one more thing. I want to know the provenance of an artifact I saw recently.”
    “Do you have a picture?”
    “No, but I can visualize it quite clearly.”
    “I’ll have to patch you into the system. Open a splice line, please.”
    He called up the proper images, and a face appeared before him, twice human size, a gold mask afloat in midair between himself and the sibyl.
    It was the face of a god.
    Warmly handsome, inhumanly calm, the system tutelar said, “Welcome. My name is Trinculo. Please allow me to help you.” His expression was as grave and serene as the reflection of the moon on night waters.
    In the back of his head the bureaucrat felt the buzzing encephalic presence of all twenty sibyls hooked into the system. But Trinculo’s presence was all-pervasive, riveting, a charismatic aura he could almost touch. Even knowing, as he did, that it was an artifact of the primitive technology, that his attention was artificially focused so rigidly on Trinculo that the hindbrain registered it as awe, the bureaucrat felt humbled before this glowing being. “What do you have on this object?”
    He visualized the shell knife. A sibyl picked up the image and hung it in the air over the desk. Another opened a window into a museum catalog. She scanned through bright galleries that looked as if they’d been carved from ice and lifted the knife’s twin from a glass shelf. The bureaucrat wondered what the actual museum looked like; he had known collections with perfect catalogs and empty, looted source buildings.
    “It’s a haunt artifact,” one sibyl said.
    “A shell knife, used to unhinge the muscle of midden clams,” added another. In the air beside the knife she opened a window onto a primitive scene depicting a fish-headed haunt squatting by the river demonstrating the tool’s use, then closed it again.
    “Quite useless now. Humans do not find midden clams digestible.”
    “This particular knife is about three-hundred-fifty years old. It was used by a river clan of the Shellfish alliance. It is a particularly fine example of its class, and unlike most such was not gathered by the original settlers on Miranda, but is a product of the Cobbs Creek dig.”
    “Documentation is available on the Cobbs Creek dig.”
    “It is presently on display in the Dryhaven Museum of Prehuman Anthropology.”
    “Is that sufficient, or do you wish to know more?”
    Trinculo smiled benignly. The tutelar had spoken not a word since his original greeting. “I saw this knife not half an hour ago in the Tidewater,” the bureaucrat said.
    “Impossible!”
    “It must be a reproduction.”
    “The museum has offplanet security.”
    “Trinculo,” the bureaucrat said, “Tell me something.”
    In a friendly, competent voice the gold mask said, “I am here to assist you.”
    “You have the text of Gregorian’s commercials on file.”
    “Of course we do!” a sibyl snapped.
    “Why hasn’t he been arrested?”
    “Arrested!”
    “There’s no reason to.”
    “Whatever for?”
    “Gregorian claims he can transform people so that they can live in the sea. That’s false representation. He’s taking money for doing so. That’s fraud. And it looks likely that he’s