Stations of the Tide Read Free Page B

to call requests and pretend it is for our own good. Let us not cap this performance with hypocrisy, sir.”
    “Technology didn’t exactly make an ‘earthly paradise’ of Earth. Or don’t they teach classical history here?”
    “The perfect display of arrogance. You deny us our material heritage, and now you have as good as asked me to thank you for it. Well, sir, I will not. I have my pride. And I—” He paused. In the sudden silence it was observable how his head nodded slightly at irregular intervals, as if he fought off sleep. His mouth opened and shut, opened and shut again. His eyes slid slowly to the side in search of his lost thought. “And, ah. And, ah—”
    “The illusionist,” the bureaucrat insisted. “Lieutenant Chu’s impersonator. Have you found him yet?”
    Bergier straightened, his fire and granite restored. “No, sir, we have not. We have not found him, for he is not here to be found. He has left the ship.”
    “That’s not possible. You docked once, and nobody debarked. I was watching.”
    “This is a seaward flight. It is all but empty. On the landward run, yes, perhaps an agile and determined man could evade me. But I have accounted for every passenger and had my crew open every stowage compartment and equipment niche in the Leviathan. I went so far as to send an engineer with an airpack up the gas vents. Your man is not here.”
    “It’s only logical he’d’ve secured his escape beforehand. Maybe he had a collapsible glider hidden forward,” Chu suggested. “It wouldn’t have been difficult for an athletic man. He could have just opened a window and slipped away.”
    More likely, the bureaucrat thought, and the thought struck him with the force of inevitability, more likely he had simply bribed the captain to lie for him. That was how he himself would’ve arranged it. To cover his suspicion, he said, “What bothers me is why Gregorian went to all this trouble to find out how much we know about him. It hardly seems worth his effort.”
    Bergier scowled at his screens, said nothing. He touched a control, and the timbre of one engine changed, grew deeper. Slowly, slowly the ship began to turn.
    “He was just baiting you,” Chu said. “Nothing more complicated than that.”
    “Is that likely?” the bureaucrat said dubiously.
    “Magicians are capable of anything. Their thinking isn’t easy to follow. Hey! Maybe that was Gregorian himself? He was wearing gloves, after all.”
    “Pictures of Gregorian and of our impersonator,” the bureaucrat said. “Front and side both.” He removed them from his briefcase, shook off the moisture, laid them side by side beside the screens. “No, look at that—it’s absurd to even contemplate. What does his wearing gloves have to do with anything?”
    Chu carefully compared the tall, beefy figure of Gregorian with the slight figure of her impersonator. “No,” she agreed. “Just look at those faces.” Gregorian had a dark, animal power, even in the picture. He looked more minotaur than man, so strong-jawed and heavy-browed that he passed through mere homeliness into something profound. His was the sort of face that would seem ugly in repose, then waken to beauty at the twitch of a grin, the slow wink of one eye. It could never have been hidden in the pink roundness of the false Chu’s face.
    “Our intruder wore gloves because he was a magician.” Lieutenant Chu wriggled her fingers. “Magicians tattoo their hands, one marking for each piece of lore they master, starting from the middle finger and moving up the wrist. A magus will have ’em up to the elbows. Snakes and moons and whatnot. If you’d seen his hands, you’d never have mistaken him for a Piedmont official.”
    Bergier cleared his throat and, when they both turned to him, said, “With the technology you deny us, a single man could operate this ship. Alone, he could manage all functions from baggage to public relations with nary a crewman under him.”
    “That same