Michael Swanwick - Stations of the Tide

He bowed deeply and swept out a hand. His movements were all jerky, distinct, artificial. “Welcome, dear friends, countrymen, and offworlders. It is my duty and pleasure today to entertain and enlighten you with legerdemain and scientific patter.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Then I go into a little rant about the mutability of life here, and its myriad forms of adaptation to the jubilee tides. Where Terran flora and fauna — most particularly including ourselves — cannot face the return of Ocean, to the native biota the tides are merely a passing and regular event. Evolution, endless eons of periodic flooding, blah blah blah. Sometimes I compare Nature to a magician — myself by implication — working changes on a handful of tricks. All of which leads in to the observation that much of the animal life here is dimorphic, which means simply that it has two distinct forms, depending on which season of the great year is in effect.

“Then I demonstrate.” He held the rainbird perched on his forefinger, gently stroking its head. The long tailfeathers hung down like teardrops. “The rainbird is a typical shapeshifter. When the living change comes over the Tidewater, when Ocean rises to drown half of Continent, it adapts by transforming into a more appropriate configuration.” Suddenly he plunged both hands deep into the bowl of water. The bird struggled wildly, and disappeared in a swirl of bubbles and sand.

The illusionist lifted his hands from the water. The bureaucrat noted that he had not so much as gotten his sleeves wet.

When the water cleared, a multicolored fish was swimming in great agitation in the water, long fins trailing behind. “Behold!” Chu cried. “The sparrowfish — in great summer morph an avi-form, and a pisciform for the great winter. One of the marvelous tricks that Nature here plays.”

The bureaucrat applauded. “Very neatly done,” he said with only slight irony.

“I also do tricks with a jar of liquid helium. Shattering roses and the like.”

“I doubt that will be necessary. You said there was a point to your demonstration?”

“Absolutely.” The illusionist’s eyes glittered. “It’s this: Gregorian is going to be a very difficult man to catch. He’s a magician, you see, and native to the Tidewater. He can change his own form, or that of his enemy, whichever he pleases. He can kill with a thought. More importantly, he understands the land here, and you don’t. He can tap its power and use it against you.”

“You don’t actually believe that Gregorian is a magician? That he has supernatural powers, I mean.”

“Implicitly.”

In the face of that fanatical certainty, the bureaucrat did not know what to say. “Ahem. Yes. Thank you for your concern. Now, what say we get down to business?”

“Oh yes, sir, immediately, sir.” The young man touched a pocket, and then another. His expression changed, grew pained. In an embarrassed voice he said, “Ah… I’m afraid I left my materials in the forward stowage. If you would wait?”

“Of course.” The bureaucrat tried not to be pleased by the young man’s obvious discomfort.

With Chu gone, the bureaucrat returned to his contemplation of the passing forest below. The airship soared and curved, dipped its nose and sank low in the air. The bureaucrat remembered his first sighting of it back in Port Richmond, angling in for a docking. Complex with flukes, elevators, and lifting planes, the great airship somehow transcended the antique awkwardness of its design. It descended slowly, gracefully, rotor blades thundering. Barnacles covered its underbelly, and mooring ropes hung from its jaws like strings of kelp.

A few minutes later the Leviathan docked at a heliostat tower at the edge of a dusty little river town. A lone figure in crisp white climbed the rope ladder, and then the heliostat cast off again. Nobody debarked.

The lounge door opened, and a slim woman in the uniform of internal security entered. She strode forward, hand extended, to offer her credentials. “Lieutenant-Liaison Emilie Chu,” she said. Then, “Sir? Are you quite all right?”

Gregorian kissed the old woman and threw her from the cliff. She fell toward the cold gray water headfirst, twisting. There was a small white splash as she hit, plunging deep beneath the chop. She did not surface. A little distance away, something dark and sleek as an otter broke water, dove, and disappeared.

“It’s a trick,” the real Lieutenant Chu said. On the screen Gregorian’s face appeared: heavy, mature, confident. His lips moved soundlessly. Be all that you were meant to be. The bureaucrat had killed the sound after the fifth repetition, but he knew the words by heart. Give up your weaknesses. Dare to live forever. The commercial ended, skipped to the beginning, and began again.

“A trick? How so?”

“A bird cannot change into a fish in an instant. That kind of adaptation takes time.” Lieutenant Chu rolled up her sleeve and reached into the fishbowl. The sparrowfish jerked away, bright fins swirling. Dark sand puffed up, obscuring the tank for an instant. “The sparrowfish is a burrower. It was in the sand when he thrust the rainbird into the water. One quick movement, like this,” she demonstrated, “and the bird is strangled. Plunge it into the dirt, and simultaneously the fish is startled into swimming.”

She set the small corpse down on the table. “Simple, when you know how it’s done.”

Gregorian kissed the old woman and threw her from the cliff. She fell toward the cold gray water headfirst, twisting. There was a small white splash as she hit, plunging deep beneath the chop. She did not surface. A little distance away, something dark and sleek as an otter broke water, dove, and disappeared.

The bureaucrat snapped off the television.

The government liaison leaned straight-backed against a window, the creases of her uniform imperially crisp, smoking a thin black cigarillo. Emilie Chu was thin herself, a whippet of a woman, with cynical eyes and the perpetual hint of a sneer to her lips. “No word from Bergier. It appears my impersonator has escaped.” She stroked her almost-invisible mustache with cool amusement.

“We don’t know that he’s gone yet,” the bureaucrat reminded her. The windows were clear now, and in the fresh, bright air the encounter with the false Chu seemed unlikely, the stuff of travelers’ tales. “Let’s go see the commander.”

The rear observatory was filled with uniformed schoolgirls on a day trip from the Laserfield Academy, who nudged each other and giggled as the bureaucrat followed Chu up an access ladder and through a hatch into the interior of the gas bag. The hatch closed, and the bureaucrat stood within the triangular strutting of the keel. It was dark between the looming gas cells, and a thin line of overhead lights provided more a sense of dimension than illumination. A crewman dropped to the walkway before them. “Passengers are not—” She saw Chu’s uniform and stiffened.

“Commander-Pilot Bergier, please,” the bureaucrat said.

“You want to see the commander?” She stared, as if he were a sphinx materialized from nothing to confront her with a particularly outrageous riddle.

“If it isn’t too much trouble,” Chu said with quiet menace.

The woman spun on her heel. She led them through the gullet of the airship to the prow, where stairs so steep they had to be climbed on all fours like a ladder rose to the pilothouse. On the dark wooden door was the faintest gleam of elfinbone inlay forming a large, pale rose-and-phallus design. The crewman gave three quick raps, and then seized a strut and swung up into the shadows, as agile as any monkey. A deep voice rumbled, “Enter.”

They opened the door and stepped within.