Futures Near and Far (14 page)

“Interrogative,” he said, locking his gaze on her face.
“Who’s that woman?”

“Rizal, Veronica,” replied the disembodied voice of the Net.
“Specialist in plankton synthesis, related areas. Adept status.”

Veronica Rizal. Wearing a new body, wasn’t that interesting?
Unlike those people who adopted a new morph with each change of mood, Veronica
had always favored the same look — beautiful, of course, as was the rule in
these days of molecule-by-molecule cosmetology, but consistent. She was the
kind of woman who, in an earlier age, would have eschewed make-up, perfume, and
the latest clothing fashions, and simply let hygiene, heredity, and a wholesome
lifestyle frame her attractiveness.

She was playing a different game now. No wonder she was
bare. Why wear a swimsuit? Her body
was
a swimsuit. Putting anything over it would be redundant.

Louis nodded his head slowly in approval. He was likewise
naked. Though he seldom changed his morph, he had over many years refined it
the exact design he liked. Why hide the handiwork?

Veronica extracted herself from a conversation and waded out
into the surf. She dipped into a mild swell and came up wet. Louis, mesmerized,
watched the rivulets drain off her chin, her elbows, the underside of her
breasts. She’d programmed her sunscreens to give her skin an ideal medium tan;
the water droplets beaded upon it and sparkled like jewels on a fairy tale
princess.

The woman tucked her chin down, shrouding her face within a
wreath of deep red hair. Lips drawn tight, she stared at the wave retreating
down her calves and ankles, but Louis could tell her mind was not focussed on
her feet. Confirming his guess, she raised her glance and held it on a knot of
people standing down the beach, toward the turtle sanctuary. She sighed, bowed
her head again, and drifted off to the edge of another group.

Louis searched the party that Veronica had glanced at. As he
expected, he discovered within it the sandy-haired figure of Bernd Hauser, a
maestro in null gravity marine environments. Louis knew him, of course. Louis
made it a point to meet all the maestros and adepts of his field. For the last
five of these conferences, Bernd and Veronica had been arm-in-arm, sharing
smiles and hotel accommodations. That was before Bernd went off on sabbatical
to Ganymede, and came back married.

With one last glance at the lonely redhead, Louis approached
and filtered into Bernd’s group. At first he avoided the maestro, engaging in
small talk with others, but when Bernd drifted out of the conversational
spiral, Louis appeared like a Cheshire Cat beside him.

“How’s it going, Bernd?”

“Hmmm? Oh, Louis. Hello. Say, your
Homo maritimus
research is the talk of the weekend. You’ll make
adept for sure now.”

“I hope so,” Louis said modestly. He was anything but humble
inside. He’d carefully orchestrated his nomination, making sure his name was
listed first on the right papers, developing friendships with just the right
colleagues — he’d even done a significant fraction of the actual research. He
treasured every last confirmation of his achievement.

They chatted, Louis lulling Bernd with sincere, often
complimentary references to the man’s work, tempered with random gossip. Bernd
listened raptly — few people could be as spellbinding as Louis — but from time
to time, the maestro’s eyes drifted down the beach. Louis concealed his
interest.

Finally the moment came. “That new morph of Veronica’s is
exceptional, don’t you think?”

“Everything about Veronica is exceptional,” Bernd replied
wistfully.

“I couldn’t help but notice that she’s over there, and
you’re over here.”

Bernd dug his toes into the sand. “Yes. I wish it didn’t
have to be that way. My wife’s not with me at the conference, but if it got
back to her that I . . .”

“It’s not over, then?” Louis said softly.

“Oh, it’s over. But not because it was meant to be. Time and
opportunity just got in the way. I suppose I should try to talk to her, try to
explain, but I keep telling myself that if she’s angry enough, she’ll talk to
me.” He chuckled sheepishly.

It was not anger that Louis read in Veronica’s somber
posture.

“It’s probably best that you go your own directions,” Louis
said, in his most brotherly way. Bernd nodded with relief. The conversation
shifted to other topics, and when Bernd wasn’t looking, Louis slipped away
toward the main hotel, heading for the glass double doors that Veronica had
just vanished through.

o0o

He caught up to her as she perused the hotel’s Spanish
galleon exhibit. He set one hand against the mizzenmast next to her.

“Veronica? It’s been a long time.”

She stared blankly at him. “Oh. Louis. I just saw some of
your marine primate show.”

“Ah, and did you like it?” he asked warmly. “I seem to
recall seeing you enjoying one of the babies.”

Her distant gaze suddenly sharpened, anchoring her in the present.
But where Louis had expected a smile, a first breach through the wall of her
melancholy, he found a rockhard aura of isolation.

“I recognize the approach,” she said pointedly. “I’m happy
that you and your reef gorillas have done so well for yourselves, but I really
don’t need any company right now.”

“I was only—”

She pressed four slim fingers against his bare chest. “I
know what you were doing, Master Sheldon. I’m not the same fool I was a hundred
years ago. Sorry.”

Louis stood anchored in place by the utter dismissal in her
tone. She continued her tour into the cargo hold.

Blinking, shaking his head, Louis stalked out of the
exhibit, and out of the hotel. He claimed an empty seat in an extreme corner of
the beachfront patio, gave the waiter the coding for his favorite shitkicker
Scotch — a single malt from a tiny village on the Isle of Skye — and settled
back in the hope that the liquor would defuse his murderous frame of mind.

His mood only grew worse. Buried in his thoughts, he nearly
swallowed an ice cube. A hundred years he’d waited. He’d become the fastest
rising master of marine biology, candidate for adept in half the usual time.
He’d refined the lines, the moves, the look. Right now, he could wander down to
the beach and find twenty women eager to have him.

He would have made her feel good. She would’ve forgotten all
about that wimp Bernd Hauser. She would have realized she’d made a mistake a
century back, and he’d no longer have to acknowledge that, on one unique
occasion, a woman had actually dumped him.

The weekend’s success, the career-driven euphoria, drowned
in the Scotch. It had become an incomplete success.

He was still brooding an hour later when the object of his
thoughts strolled by in the distance, following a palm-lined path toward a
small group of bungalows. His eyes smoldered as he tracked her. She disappeared
into the third bungalow.

Even the woman’s housing arrangements insulted him.
Apprentices, journeymen, and masters like him had to squeeze into the hotel.
Only maestros and adepts received detached dwellings. Without uttering a word,
Veronica had just demonstrated that she was part of the elite, while he, in
spite of his supreme efforts, lingered down in the struggling masses of this
crowded planet of immortals.

Her own lonely dwelling . . .

A smile took hold of Louis’s lips and winched up the corners
until he would have shamed a circus clown.

o0o

“Bernd!” Louis called. Sunset was casting long shadows out
over the gulf as a large group of conference attendees converged on the hotel
ballroom for a dinner business meeting. Louis stepped up to his colleague and
placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Hello again, Louis. Anything I can do for you?”

“Actually, there is. Are you going on the night dive out at
the shoals?”

“Yes, I am.”

Louis smiled, inwardly and out. “Good. If you see Hank Sauls
out there, tell him I’m sorry I couldn’t make it. I decided I needed more time
to prepare for my speech tomorrow.”

“Sure thing. Glad to help.”

“Thanks.”

As Louis removed his hand from Bernd’s shoulder, he lifted
away a stray hair that had lain there. After Louis found his seat at the
banquet, he carefully placed the strand in a tiny inner pocket of his tuxedo,
where it remained throughout the meal.

Louis left the business meeting early. He sequestered himself
in his room and ordered the Link to refuse all calls.

As in all the better hotels, the bed also served as a
full-sized nanoplayer, programmed to generate towels, toiletries, and a broad
selection of attire. Louis set the hair he had taken from Bernd in the center
of the mattress.

On the underside of the bedframe, where it was out of the
way of guests but still readily accessible to the hotel’s staff, he found the
programming port.

Lying on the floor, staring at the blinking ready light of
the device and its minuscule key pad, he hesitated. He was one action away from
a major crime.

If he proceeded and got caught, he wouldn’t be facing mere
fines or imprisonment. They’d sentence him to a personality remorph. Like a
retardate or a psychotic, he’d have his chemical levels balanced, his neural
circuits redesigned. Worse, they’d tinker with the identity genome. He’d emerge
“healthy and well-adjusted” according to the technicians in charge of the
procedure, but he would not be the same person who went in. He’d be like all
those hapless political victims back in the days before the passage of the
Preservation of Identity Act.

He drew in a breath. With one command from him, the bed
scanned Bernd’s hair for its genetic information. After a few considerably more
complex instructions, Louis lay down and let the player go to work on him.

Louis’s skin began to ripple. A hazel tone washed away the
blue of his irises. His spine stretched, adding an inch to his height. He
writhed, desperate to scratch, but before his willpower gave out, his flesh
grew quiescent. The strange creak in his bones faded. He stood up and looked
into the mirror.

The very image of Bernd Hauser gazed back at him.

Almost. The nose was a little different, the hairline drawn
into the beginnings of a widow’s peak. His morph was a clone of what Bernd
would have looked like in early adulthood, without the customizations the man
had overlaid upon it.

Not good enough. Louis called up Bernd’s entry in the Baker
edition of
Contemporary Marine Biologists
and funneled the visual parameters into the programming port. He lay back down
and within seconds, his nose thinned, his hairline moved forward, several moles
disappeared, and his complexion evened out.

There. Louis checked repeatedly. Yes. He looked as much like
Bernd as Bernd did.

A little more programming, and he wore a print shirt of the
same style as those he’d seen on Bernd many times. All that was left was to
unbutton it and leave it untucked, in accord with Bernd’s laidback approach to
his attire.

He grinned at the image in the mirror. He wouldn’t get
caught. It was as simple as that.

o0o

Louis lingered in the shadow of the palms that lined the
walkway to Veronica’s bungalow. He watched her outline glide across the closed
blinds of her window. Mosquitoes whined in bloodlust and frustration as they
tried to penetrate his personal body shield. Other than the insects’ complaint,
the only sound that reached his ears was the gentle rumble of the breakers
against the nearby beach. No one was watching, and her silhouette indicated no
companion in her quarters.

He strode to her door, and raised his hand to knock.

He savored the instant, knowing that this was the point when
other men faltered. For him, the moment of commitment burned with a kiss almost
as sweet as that of victory.

He tapped his knuckles lightly against the wood.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Bernd.”

Louis was deliciously aware of the pulse in his temples as
he waited for her response. The very fact that she had not immediately told him
to leave provided the opportunity for a thousand strategies.

He thought he heard the hum of a nanoplayer generating a
garment. Seconds later, Veronica opened the door a body-width, and stood in the
gap.

She wore a silk bathrobe. So — she did not want to be naked
in front of Bernd Hauser, though she had no compunction about it in public that
afternoon. Yet she positioned her body at an angle that permitted him an
enticing view of her cleavage, and had chosen a style that made only a token
effort at covering her thighs.

Vulnerable, cautious — but not inaccessible.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Do you want me to leave?”

She pulled her lips inward, between her teeth, and let them
out again, a nervous gesture that did not fit her perfect features. “No . . .”

“Can I come in?”

“I’m not sure your — Christine, is it? — would approve of
you being here.”

“This is between you and me,” Louis said. “I . . .
left some things unsaid.”

“Yes, you did,” she said, strain taking the breath from her
voice. She inhaled suddenly, eyes watering. “You left a
lot
unsaid.”

He reached out and cupped her neck. With one thumb, he
stroked the soft, fine curls just behind her ear.

Her mouth parted. Her eyelids fluttered almost to closure.

“Let me come in,” he said.

Veronica laughed tonelessly, without mirth. She stood aside.
“I am so spineless.”

Louis slid into the room. Veronica closed the door and
turned to face him, shoulders slumped. The backed-up tears at last rolled down
her cheeks.

Now, thought Louis. He had to move swiftly, take the
initiative, before she considered longterm consequences, before logic
overwhelmed her immediate need for emotional support.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He spread his arms.