Stations of the Tide Read Online Free PDF Page A

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