Tidelands: I-Six (12)
Château Arrest. The Meeting.
Sabotage is not going well.
Eva’s Duc has been banished from the court and placed under house arrest (well, château arrest, anyway, which she supposes is its deluxe equivalent). A successful slur has linked him in the King’s mind with those voices advocating liberal reform and constitutional monarchy, but secretly pushing for much more than that – the same coterie, in fact, who will one day form the kernel of the fanatical Montagnards, sway the mass floating vote of the National Convention away from the more moderate Girondins, and start lopping heads like topping trees. Unless of course Eva can stop all that – the Revolution itself, that is – nip it all in the bud before any of that gets going. How is it Laozi puts it? Deal with the hard things when they’re still easy, and the big things when they’re still small! Or something like that.
Stopping the Revolution is one of her allocated goals in this particular match, but not something she’s yet achieved in any of the games where this has been an aim. The best she’s managed to date is to delay it by thirteen years by turning young Robespierre’s head from law to poetry, bribing the debt-hobbled Danton, and sinking Desmoulins’ fledgling political career with a juicy sex scandal (“Mother and daughter? Sacré bleu!”). By which time second lieutenant Buonaparte had been edging toward his thirties, his youthful zeal dwindled into libertinism, and more interested in chasing local tail than pursuing Jacobinism. And yet even with all that, still somehow eventually it had happened, as if it were a fated inevitability. Is that the best she can hope for, then? To delay the inevitable?
But Azimuth has played his hand well. A letter has surfaced purporting to be from her Duc to radical sympathisers in the Third Estate. It is a forgery, of course, which she will eventually expose via graphological analysis, showing how it lacks the Duc’s long looping y’s, his fussy little t’s and p’s. Her case will also be reinforced by a demonstration that the paper on which it is written can be traced to a mill in the Auvergne, a region that the Duc himself has never personally visited, lying many miles from his château … but a mill that, by great coincidence, is owned by the second cousin of the Cardinal himself! (Not true, but a lie is as good as the truth when the gloves are off.) And thus the serve is returned with top spin, and Azimuth is hoist on its own petard! Well, hopefully. But all this will take time, and while the Duc is forced to cool his heels, his communications restricted and closely monitored by the King’s own agents, the Cardinal has the board more or less to himself. She cannot help but worry what use the AI is making of this free rein.
And as for the King’s foreskin – her masterstroke – well, that never even got off the ground, bombed on the runway, as the Cardinal – through the King’s “trusted” advisers – somehow managed to convince his majesty that circumcision was part of a radical plot, some Great Jewish Conspiracy or anti-Catholic ruse (encouraging him to take his pick from a smorgasbord of unsupported rumour; for after all, it is merely sufficient that the truth be undermined by doubt – preferably, by doubts – not that the doubts themselves have any truth).
She gazes out from the sixth-floor bedroom of the château’s eastern tower, a vista that takes in the Duc’s wonderful gardens, and beyond that the lulling serenity of the rolling Bordeaux countryside. The gardens are indeed beautiful, though stylistically a bit of a mishmash – intricate mazes secreting classical marbles of fleeing dryads, naiads, nereids, nymphs and oreads; exquisite topiary honed to the forms of exotic fruits and obscure birds; pneumatic speaking statues, whispering fountains that sprinkle and dance amidst the languid koi-filled pools. Eva has given her imagination free play, not caring too much for historical accuracy and the odd jarring anachronism (were Japanese koi available even to eighteenth century French nobility?). The Duc’s garden is much admired, in fact, and of late she has had to curb her creativity a little, lest the green-fingered monarch become envious (as if the Duc’s little horticultural passion project could threaten the majestic grandeur of Versailles! But envy is never rational). Yet still it must all be maintained – so many gardeners, a veritable brigade of them, and all of whom she used to know by name, making it a point for the Duc to be seen to retain the common touch (good relations with the proletariat will play a vital role in staving off the steely caress of Madame Guillotine). But she has begun to lose track. For instance, who is that fellow Jacques is now chatting with? Is he new? A curious looking chap; curiously short. She must find a pretext to check him out.
Urgh. She can’t switch it off, even for a second: the scrutiny, the suspicion, the paranoia; which are the essence of the game, of course. But she is tired of it, tired of being on guard all the time. So is she also getting bored of Sabotage? She looks down at the sun dappling the Duc’s bare hairy feet as she wriggles his toes on his Aubusson rug, an ornate geometric pattern veining through its ivory ground with accents of red and blue …
“François?”
The Duc turns to the voice behind him.
“Go back to sleep, Geneviève. It is still early.”
The shape in the bed, having roused its tousled head, now flops back and sighs, stretches out a long languid leg and crooks one elegant knee over the eider-down duvet as she luxuriates into the space the Duc’s body has but recently occupied – like one of his spaniels seeking out the warmth of a recently vacated chair! He smiles to himself, planning to mention the comparison later, to tease her, to provoke a little banter.
Geneviève is just a maid, but the Duc insists on first name terms – in private, anyway – even as he appears to exercise what the revolutionaries will no doubt one day cite as a most egregious example of droit de seigneur. But it is a consensual relationship (as much as, in these times, their social inequality can allow for the use of such a word), and if somewhat lacking in romantic depth, at least mutually and beneficially transactional: on his side, an act of noblesse oblige, funding her younger brother Armand through the seminary so that he may one day fulfil his dreams of becoming a lawyer; on hers, in return, acting as a conduit between himself and her connections in the workers’ guilds, the farmers, artisans and labourers whose travails make them particularly susceptible to revolutionary rhetoric and the cries for radical reform, and on whose side their sympathies weigh will prove decisive in determining the balance of the outcome.
Can the Duc trust her? Has he invited into his bed his own demise, his own Charlotte Corday to his Marat (an event that is some years hence – should that day ever grace this timeline)? Hopefully not. He could use a help card, determine whether she is indeed an NPC – which would at least rule out that she was Azimuth in disguise (bleurgh! The thought!). But at the end of the day, one has to trust someone. And the Duc’s instincts tell him that she is as good a candidate for that trust as any.
There is a conundrum to being other people. Can you truly be another? Or only play at being them, wear them as a mask? To be truly and completely someone else, to feel and think as them, would be to forget who you are, and therefore to induce a sort of fugue state. There are in fact safeguards in place to prevent this, Azimuth has reassured her, but still, it can be disorientating – such as now, for instance. Can Eva trust the Duc’s instincts? They feel almost real, as if she were employing her own, but with the slightest edge of dissociation: as if she were acting, as if she were watching herself play a part. An actor can get lost in the role, of course – that has happened, Azimuth warns her, citing an historical incident, an actor playing Othello, who took his jealousy home to his real wife, manufacturing his own paranoid delusions, his own misplaced handkerchief, to the point where he was driven to snuff out his own adored candle, his own soul’s light. And despite the safeguards, she is often so engaged in the part that she later finds herself coming to, as after a dream, to remember that, no, she is not a French aristocrat, not a gardener’s daughter, not a courtesan or an assassin.
Speaking of gardeners, that new fellow is extremely short. No taller than a child.
Maybe she will check him out.
Caulden often thinks back to that first meeting.
He had entered his office one day to just find it there, hands clasped behind its back, strolling casually about his office, as pensive as any gallery patron or visitor to a museum – Caulden’s own office at that, and not some virtual simulacrum of it.
“Can I help you?” he had found himself saying, the situation giving his politeness a surreal quality.
And the creature had stopped, turned, and looked at him.
And creature it certainly was, for despite a certain “maleness” about its demeanour, there were various features that made “it” seem the most apt pronoun.
It was extremely tall and slender, its limbs elongated beyond the normal, but otherwise human in their number and general proportion. It wore a one-piece robe, like a thawb or kaftan, plain off-white, apart from a delicate, almost invisible interweaving pattern at its neck, hem and cuffs, which billowed slightly about the wrists, its bottom hem extending beyond ankle-length to the floor, so that its swaying motion covered any legs and feet it might have as it glided about the room.
But the clearest indication of its otherness was the face: like the rest of it, pale, overlong and narrow, just a lipless slit for a mouth (and which, during this and later meetings, it would never once open for breath, speech, or any other purpose). Nor did it possess any nose, to speak of, merely a slightly raised ridge, at the foot of which were two small slits for nostrils. There were small round orifices at either side of its head that (presumably) served as “ears”, which were similarly devoid of ornamentation – the faintest hint of a helix, perhaps, but no lobes or any other folds of skin. But most strikingly alien were its eyes: huge, lidless, broadly ellipsoid, tapering to points at inner and outer corners, tilted slightly upward at the latter; and completely, unnervingly black. (Though he would later notice how, like a dog’s, this was not true, but due rather to the relative enormity of the pupil, for occasionally he would glimpse a fringe of golden iris, or more rarely the white of the sclera.) All of which made it seem as if it were, like the eyes in a portrait, always watching you, whether it were or not. The rest of the head was composed of an overly large cranium – totally bald (the whole creature appeared to be hairless, as far as the bits that were uncovered) – and topped off with what he at first took to be a small flat circular cap, but which on closer inspection seemed to form an actual part of its head, the top edge primped almost like a pie crust, its sides “decorated” with that same almost invisible, interweaving pattern as on the edges of the garment, and emerging out of which were two neat little horns.
Recovering slightly, surreal politeness gave way to indignation, and Caulden had been about to say something else, something more strident, about to summon Azimuth to enact security protocols (why hadn’t it done so already?), when he found himself feeling light headed, found his legs going wobbly beneath him, and he had stumbled drunkenly toward the chair to his left, one shaking hand grasping its arm as he lowered himself down into it, all the while the thing watching intently with those huge insectoid eyes, almost as if it were guiding him there itself.
[It is best you are seated,] it finally said. But no sound had emerged from the thin line of its mouth, which was itself deeply unsettling, as only Azimuth had access to communicate with him in so intimate a manner. And yet, not like Azimuth; more insidious, somehow, like a shiver up the spine, a whisper in his bones.
But that must be it! Someone had hacked his implant, or even perhaps hacked Azimuth itself. It was all an illusion that they were perpetrating upon him, somehow (whoever “they” were).
The thing had appeared to cock its head.
[No, it is not that.]
And it had continued, commencing its explanation for its presence there, laying out its backstory at a measured pace, all in that soundless sibilance, the bone-whisper that set his teeth on edge. How, according to their predictive models, we had five years to correct our current trajectory. After which – climate collapse, global wars over dwindling resources, deluge, hurricanes, earthquakes – the usual apocalyptic dénouement.
But it was all just too delightfully clichéd – the superior race, wise and altruistic, descending from the stars just in time to save humanity from our self-destructive urges – and he had found his cynicism starting to rally.
“Not buying it, I’m afraid. Now, whoever you are, if you would kindly tell me how you circumvented our—”
[We do not expect you merely to take us at our word,] it replied. [We are willing to vouchsafe certain proofs.]
The first of these was the most spectacular, the most visceral, and for those very reasons he had distrusted it the most: travel to their world. As convincing as it was, as it felt – one second in his wood-lined office, the next on an alien shore, sea-wind in his hair, a pale bloated sun barely warming his upturned face – it was not so very far from what VR can do now – hell, can in fact do now. And the little silver city, gleaming in the distance as tweely as anything out of the Golden Age of sci-fi, even buzzed about with little silver vehicles shuttling to and fro, or suddenly zipping off vertically at impossible speed.
Another suspicious cliché.
But there was no denying the second proof: their knowledge, their technology.
For there was no way to fake that. And it was with this that they would slowly begin to win him over, helping him reverse engineer advances and developments that we would never have stumbled upon in a thousand years. Still, a small part of him holds out against it all; less out of scepticism, but as if he needs to cling to the possibly that it is all fake, a ruse, so that he can still believe in steady, quiet, rational progress. For otherwise, all of this – the quantum leaps their knowledge has afforded – well, it almost feels like cheating.
“And what about the fine print?” he had asked. “What do you want in return?”
[Simply your co-operation.] Which was not true, as it would turn out – or at least, not “simply” so. [We are beginning with the directors of the arcologies. You are our first. If this goes well, we will contact the others.]
Always “we”, Caulden had at some later point noted, never “I”.
Still, it had been a peculiar meeting – peculiarly mundane. Almost businesslike.
Not exactly what springs to mind, when you imagine First Contact scenarios.
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