Customs Officer v. Cyberathlete

Exposure to the country brings about a change in the Customs Officer.

Her home is the city port, a labyrinthine tangle of alleys and catwalks, between warehouses and stock exchanges, all leading to and from the long planked piers of the waterfront. Her home is in the garret of the customs house, where she lives with her husband (Fishmonger) and child (feckless). She's a necessarily hardened woman. But take her from under the overhang of the customs wharf and out to the sweet-smelling idyl of the grounds she now inhabits and a change comes over her: whereas before she was an officious, stubborn bureaucrat, she's now a slightly less officious, stubborn bureaucrat -- and an enthusiastic proponent of all things natural.

This new-found love acts as hard work does: keeping her from thinking of the one regret in her life.

The Cyberathlete arrives. They talk briefly. Something about the weather and the setting turns the Customs Officer reflective and confessional. She airs her secret:

Though I'm about as honest an officer as you'd ever come across, my one regret is a slip that happened a few years ago. There was a strange young man who came in off a tramp freighter with a crate of tribal objects. Now I don't need to tell you that I was ready to stamp the whole thing as immoral and potentially riotous - that's my job when I come across foreign objects that don't belong here except under the careful supervision of a university or museum. But the man gave me something and that something was enough to move my family into the garret we live in now, just above the customs office.

The Cyberathlete asks what she was given.

An ingot of gold, she whispers with a guilty voice, in a mold shaped like a young woman's finger.

They raise their guns, their guns go off.

Customer Service Representative v. Customs Officer

After the burial of the dog-masked boy and the duel between the Customer Service Representative and the Custodian, the dueling ground grows quiet. The day's warm, a breeze wafts through the valley. It cools the CS Rep, who lies in the grass under the oak, napping. He falls in and out of sleep until dark.

He'd heard the Custodian jabber about a swarm of maniacs who shot from the forest and nearly killed him. Though he doubts what he'd heard--with good reason, given the Custodian's bizarre continence--because he can't explain the death of the dog-masked boy, he feels a growing dread as the sun falls behind the peak to the west, and night falls.

Throughout the night he hears sounds from the forest. He makes out the distant, barely audible throb of drums.

And from the west, too, he hears sounds: not drumming but the mild tones of a far-off waltz, carried by the breeze.

They issue hours apart from one another, the waltz coming decidedly after the drumming, and continuing throughout most of the night.

The Customs Officer arrives the next morning with a satchel full of bureaucratic stamps.

I bring my own stamps, she says brusquely, from home. I don't make them, I buy them from a catalogue. Government issued stamps are generally substandard is the reason.

She shows him several stamps of hers without him having asked. A list of some of the stamps shown:

- Rejected Foodstuffs
- Unsanitary Packaging
- Potentially Riotous
- Of Questionable Moral Composition

They raise their guns, their guns go off.