“Vicious game,” he said. “Did you ever play it?”
“Yes. Once. Once was enough.”
Korda racked the dagger. “Bad experience, eh? Well, don’t feel too bad about losing — those games were all rigged, after all. One reason they were shut down. You couldn’t help but lose.”
The bureaucrat blinked. “Oh, it wasn’t like that,” he said. “It wasn’t like that at all. I won.”
9.The Wreck of the Atlantis
The orchid crabs were migrating to the sea. They scuttled across the sandy road, swamping it under their numbers. Bright parasitic flowers waved gently on their armor, making the forest floor ripple under a carpet of multicolored petals, like a submarine garden seen through clear fathoms of Ocean brine.
Mintouchian cursed and threw the brakes. The New Born King slammed to a halt. Chu pulled out a cheroot and stuck it in the corner of her mouth. “Well, we’re stuck here for a while. Might as well get out and stretch our legs.”
A small community of pilgrims, the inhabitants of three other trucks — Lord of Haunts, Lucky Mathilde, the Lion Heart — and some dozen foot travelers, were patiently waiting out the migration. A line of them sat on the lowest branch of a grandfather tree, huddled like crows and staring at a blue spark of fire chocked in the fork of one limb. “Look at that,” Mintouchian said. “When I was a kid and people got hung up on the road like this, they’d swap stories, sometimes for hours on end: ghost stories, family histories, fables, hero tales, hausmarchen, dirty jokes, brags and dozens, everything you can imagine. Living back then was like being in an ocean of stories. It was great.” Disgustedly he flicked on the dashboard set with a swipe of his beefy hand and leaned back in his seat.
Chu climbed out of the cab and hooked an elbow over the hood, eyes distant. The bureaucrat followed.
He felt disconnected. He had spread himself too thin in the Puzzle Palace, and now he felt a touch of perceptual nausea, a forewarning perhaps of the relativistic sickness to which those who worked in conventional reality were particularly prone. Everything seemed bright illusion to him, the thinnest film of appearance afloat over a darker, unknowable truth. The world vibrated with the finest of tensions, as if Something were imminent. He waited for windows to open in the sky, doorways in the trees and holes in the water. For the invisible coursing spirits that surely shared this space unseen to make themselves manifest. As of course they did not.
He set his briefcase down on the running board. “I’m going for a walk.”
Chu nodded. Mintouchian didn’t even look up from his program.
He wandered deeper into the grandfather tree, careful not to step on the occasional stray crab, outriders of the main migration dimly seeking their way back to consensus. The flow of orchid crabs had split, isolating them in an island of stillness. The tree overhead was a magnificent thing, its great branches spreading out horizontally from the main bole and sending down secondary trunks at irregular distances, so that the one tree had all the volume and complexity of an entire grove.
They were rare, grandfather trees, he remembered hearing. This one was a survivor, a lonely holdout from the earliest days of great spring. From the seeds buried deep in its heart would come, an age hence, if not a new race then at least a nation within that race.
Ramshackle stairs twisted crookedly about the trunk, with landings where planked walks ran atop the branches deep into leafy obscurity. They had been painted once, red and green, yellow and orange, but the carnival colors had faded, bleached by a thousand suns as pale as the skeletons in the boneyard of an abandoned church. Small signs pointed down this branch or that to railinged platforms: the ship view. abelard’s. fresh eels. jules zee’s. the aerie. flavored beers.
Drawn upward more by capillary action than actual will, he climbed the stairs.
A drunk staggered down past him. Twisted bits of river wood were nailed to the railings in a weak attempt at decoration, and chalky shells leaned against the uprights.
The bureaucrat was hesitating at the third landing, wondering which way to go, when a dog-headed man carrying a tray of hands pushed by him. He stepped back in alarm, and the man halted and pulled the mask from his face. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Ah, I was wondering—” He saw now that the hands were metal, modulars being taken to be flash-cleaned between clients.
“The Atlantis is down that way. Take the walk straight ahead, turn left, and follow the signs. You can’t miss it.”
Bemused, the bureaucrat followed the instructions and came to a long platform with scattered tables. Clusters of surrogates and the occasional lone human lounged against the railing, staring out into the forest. He stared too.
The tree had been cut back to open a view of the forest interior. Golden light slanted into the greenery, whimseys dancing like dust motes within it. Ahead, rising from the earth like a phantom, was the landlocked corpse of an ocean vessel. The Atlantis.
It was enormous beyond scale. The ship had foundered keel first with its bow upward sometime during the last great winter, and the currents had half buried it, so that it seemed frozen in the instant of going under. A million orchid crabs were traversing its barnacled remains, and it was covered with flowers, as impossible a creation as any mnemonic address in the Puzzle Palace.
The ghost of a memory tugged at his mind. He had heard of this ship before. Something.
The bureaucrat found an empty table, scraped up a chair, and sat. A light breeze ruffled his hair. Leaves rustled as a feathered serpent leaped into the air, a scissor-tailed finch perhaps, or a robin. He felt oddly at peace, put in mind of humanity’s gentle, arboreal origins. He wondered why people put so little effort into returning home, when it was so easily done.
At that moment he glanced down at the table. An outlined crow stared back at him. Before he could react, a beaked shadow fell across it. He looked up into the eyes of a crow-headed man.
Gregorian! the bureaucrat thought, with a thrill of alarm. Then he remembered the Black Beast that had haunted Dr. Orphelin and looked about him. Faded drawings of birds and animals were everywhere on the railings and tables. He’d attuned himself to such things, and was now generating his own omens “Welcome to the Haunt’s Roost,” the waiter said.
The bureaucrat pointed to a Flavored Beers sign. “Have you got lime? Or maybe orange?”
The head lifted disdainfully. “That’s only line-feed. For the surrogate trade. No real person would drink that crap.”
“Oh. Uh, well, give me a glass of lager, then. And an explanation for that ship out there.”
The waiter bowed, left, and returned with a beer and an interactive. The set looked out of place, its forced orange-and-purple housing a jarring contrast to the restaurant’s studied art-lessness. He might have been back home in an environmental retreat, trees and faraway glint of river reduced to calculated effect. The beer was thin.
He turned on the set. A smiling young woman in a brocaded vest appeared on its screen. Her braids were tipped with small silver bells. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Marivaud Quinet,
and I am a typical citizen of Miranda during the last great year. I am knowledgeable on and able to discuss matters of historical significance as well as details of daily life. I am not structured to offer advice or pornographic entertainment. This set has been sealed by the Department of Licensing and Inspection, Division of Technology Transfer. Product tampering is illegal and may result in prosecution or even unintentional physical harm.”
“Yes, I know.” The set would implode if its integrity were breached. He wondered if it would be left behind when the restaurant was evacuated, to disappear in a silvery burst of bubbles when salt corrosion finally ate through its housing. “Marivaud, tell me about the Atlantis.”