Free Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick

now, her lips thin, her eyes hard. Her face had closed and turned to stone. It was hopeless trying to reason with her. “Well, thank you for your help.”
    The sibyl glared him out of the room.
    The bureaucrat backed outside, turned, and realized he was lost.
    As he stood there, hesitating, a door opened down the hall. Out stepped a man who shone as bright as an angel. He looked as if he had swallowed the sun and could not contain its light within his flesh. The bureaucrat turned down external gain, and saw within the dimming figure the steel ribs and telescreen face of a fellow surrogate. It was a face he knew.
    “Philippe?” he said.
    *   *   *
     
    “Actually I’m just an agent.” Philippe had recovered from amazement first; now he grinned in a comradely fashion. “I’m afraid I’m under such pressure at work, I haven’t been able to gate here in person.” He took the bureaucrat’s arm and steered him down the hall. “If that was your first encounter with Trinculo’s widows, you need a drink. Surely you have time for a drink.”
    “You spend a lot of time on Miranda, do you?”
    “More than some, less than others.” Philippe’s teeth were perfect, and his face, even though he was old enough to be the bureaucrat’s father, was unlined and pink. He was the living avatar of the eternal schoolboy. “Does it matter?”
    “I suppose not. How’s my desk doing?”
    “Oh, I’m sure Philippe has it well in hand. He’s very good at that sort of thing, you know.”
    “So everyone tells me,” the bureaucrat said glumly.
    They stepped onto a sudden balcony overlooking a city street. Philippe called a moving bridge, and they rode it over the hot river of moving metal to the next wing of the building. “Where is Philippe nowadays?”
    “Diligently at work in the Puzzle Palace, I presume. Down this way.” They came to a deserted refreshment niche and plugged in. Philippe called up a menu, hooked a metal elbow over the bar. “The apple juice looks good.”
    The bureaucrat had meant where Philippe was physically. Agenting in realspace was so much more expensive than surrogation—the ministries responsible for the conservation of virtual reality made sure of that—that normally agents were only employed when the primary was so far away the lag time made surrogation impractical. It was clear, though, that the agent wasn’t going to answer that particular question.
    Back in the hotel, somebody nudged the bureaucrat’s shoulder. “I’ll be done in a minute,” he said without opening his eyes. A drink materialized in his hand, as chill and slippery with moisture as a real glass would be.
    “Tell me,” the agent said after a moment. “Does Korda have anything against you?”
    “Korda! Why would Korda have anything against me?”
    “Well, that’s exactly what I was wondering, you see. He’s said some odd things lately. About possibly eliminating your position and reassigning your responsibilities to Philippe.”
    “That’s ridiculous. My workload could never be—”
    Philippe threw up his hands. “This isn’t my doing—I don’t want your job. I’m overburdened with responsibility as it is.”
    “Okay,” the bureaucrat said disbelievingly. “All right. Tell me exactly what Korda said to you.”
    “I don’t know. Don’t look at me like that! Honestly I don’t. Philippe only gave me the broadest outline. You know how cautious he is. He’d keep what he knew from himself, if that were possible. But, listen—I’ll be merging back into him in a couple of hours. Do you want to give him a message? He could gate down to talk with you.”
    “That won’t be necessary.” The bureaucrat swallowed back his anger, hid it away from the agent. “I ought to have this case wrapped up in a day or two. I can talk with him in person then.”
    “You’re that close, are you?”
    “Oh yes. Gregorian’s mother gave me a great deal of information. Including an old notebook of Gregorian’s. It’s