IGMS Issue 49 (21 page)

"So, Rhine? Please tell me you speak Traveler, yes?"

He nodded. "Some. They taught us in school, back when I was a boy." His voice rasped much as it had the day before, and his accent rang with an overlay of tones that might have been a critical part of his native language but had no place in the pidgin speech used by this part of the galaxy.

"Great. And you know why you're here?"

"Your friend thinks I used to be someone else, and that you can make me remember who. I told him he's wrong, that I've always been me." He lifted his head and smiled. His eyes were a pale mint green. "He was very certain though. When he was done I was half convinced he was right."

"But only half?"

"Mr. Conroy, look at me. Look at my hands. See all these scars? They're from a lifetime of handling stonefish. I've worked with them all my life, fishing and netting and mongering and versing. These aren't the hands of a lover or a champion caster. I've had my share of tumbles in and out of beds, and as a fry I cast discs with my friends, same as everyone else. But my life's been hard work. The man your friend wants me to be didn't do menial work like that. If he were here, his hands would be manicured, not rubbed raw by life."

I studied his outstretched hands and the crisscross traceries of too many scars. Were any of them more than twenty years old? Were some of them caused not by catching stonefish but from cooking them?

"Well, like you said, Dugli can be pretty insistent. Since we're both here, and he won't be back with brunch for a while, why don't we humor him and give this a try? Just sit back, close your eyes, and listen to my voice. Let the room fade away and picture yourself back at the pier. Imagine the sounds and smells of the place, the taste of the air, the feel of things."

I continued building a familiar sensory tableau and eased him into a suggestible state. Then I created a two word trigger that instantly plunged him deeper each time I spoke it. Then up again, then deeper. Which answered the first of Dugli's unasked questions: the natives of Bwill could indeed be hypnotized. I took my time, reinforcing the trance over and over, until I was having a conversation with a part of his subconscious mind. Everything to this point had been preamble and stage setting. It was time to get specific.

"Do you know who Nery was?"

He snorted, eyes still closed, slumped over but alert despite his posture. "Everyone knows Nery. He was famous. Dead too, for about twenty years now."

"Think about him for me. Imagine everything you know about him is arrayed before you, like silvery fish in a net."

"I see them."

"Good. Now, grasp a fish, the one that represents your earliest memory of Nery. What is it?"

"When he came from nowhere and won the world title. I'd just gotten back from days at sea, been working as part of a five-man crew and we had a hold full to bursting of stonefish, twice what we'd hoped to bring in. The whole crew had landed in a bar at the dock and was celebrating, and there on the vid was Nery, hitting every target on the range with his disc, ricocheting it off pillars and beams with precision casting like no one had ever seen. It was poetry watching him..." He fell silent, and his hands, which had been clenched tightly around an imaginary fish as he spoke, fell open and empty again.

"Take up the next fish in the net," I said. "What's that memory?"

"A story I heard from a bedmate. She was going on and on about some actresses in the tabloids, fighting over which of them was having a fling with him..."

"And the next?"

"Delivering a fresh catch to one of his restaurants. Just missed meeting the man himself. I was dropping off a cage of gargantua crabs. One of the other chefs signed for 'em. Nery was out front, hobnobbing with some diners and serving up cribble puffs..."

We went on like that for most of an hour, one gleaming fish of memory at a time. Each sounded flat, like a news clipping from Nery's life tied to a bit of episodic memory from Rhine's, up to and including where he'd been when Nery's death sentence had been announced.

"That's when I took up my knives and words. It just didn't make sense no more, that someone larger than life like that could be brought low. Just 'cause my life didn't matter wasn't excuse to snuff out his. That was my inspiration. That injustice gave me voice, and these hands that had caught and hauled began to carve and slice, and the poems just came out of me from nowhere."

This last memory convinced me. The fish poet had been born when the master spy had died. Rhine and Nery were one and the same. But knowing that wasn't the same as being able to do anything about it. I couldn't regress him back to his other self. The transpersonality techniques had installed a past into him. Whether it was fictitious or borrowed or constructed from a template didn't matter. It was whole and complete unto itself. I tried to slip past it, sneak into Nery's memories by some backdoor association, via primal emotions, even through base sensations of pain and delight, but I couldn't. There wasn't anything to sneak into. His memories hadn't simply been erased. Rhine's had overwritten them. Nery was dead, and only the fish poet remained.

I eased Rhine back to full consciousness, leaving him with the suggestion that he'd feel relaxed and well rested and with no ill effects from his hypnotic experience. 

"Did it work? Am I really Nery, like your Caliopoean believes?"

Reggie jumped into Rhine's lap and butted his head against the fish poet's stomach demanding to be petted. "No. And yes. I think he was right, but those memories, the person you were, if any of that still exists I can't reach it."

"Good." His fingers worked through the ringlets of Reggie's wooly head.

"You wouldn't want to be famous?"

"I do sonnets about people who are larger than life. They always end tragically. It's better to be a fish poet. Sure, I live on charity, but people think I'm lucky. And the hours are better."

My smile was interrupted by a rumble from my stomach. I hadn't had breakfast and it was well past time for lunch. Dugli still hadn't returned and I wasn't willing to wait any longer. After yesterday's experience, room service was out of the question.

"Are you familiar with this part of the island? Any place you'd recommend for a good meal? I'm buying."

Rhine set Reggie aside and stretched. "Have you ever had Nyonya?"

"You have Indonesian food here on Bwill?" 

"We have a culinary exchange program with several planets, yours among them. Every year we send some of our best chefs offworld for a year. Many return and open fusion restaurants. There's a woman who went to Malaysia and came back with a cargo of leaves and spices. Her place isn't far, but we can't get a pedicab this time of day. Do you know how to ride a bicycle?"

I smiled. "It's been a while, but I'm sure it will come back to me."

He limped to a comm unit on the wall and called down to the front desk. "They'll have a pair of bicycles waiting for us by the time we get downstairs. You'll probably want a basket for yours if your friend is coming."

Reggie yipped. "I wouldn't dream of denying him a taste of Nyonya-Bwill fusion."

It's true what they say about riding a bicycle. I hadn't been on one in decades, but after a wobbly beginning that startled Reggie, my body remembered what to do and I was traveling smoothly down an avenue on a sunny, noxious day. Rhine peddled effortlessly alongside. After twenty minutes of brisk, below-the-waist exercise we were deep in the corporate sector of town and guiding our bicycles down canyons formed by hundred-storey walls of capitalistic zeal, all gleaming ceramo and hurricane-proof glass that was as different from the poverty of the docks as day from night. A doorman dressed in a loose tunic, trousers, and sarong took charge of our bicycles and welcomed us to 
Nyonya Baba
. The restaurant was one of several in the building that catered to the robber barons responsible for running things on Bwill. The lunch rush had come and gone. The maître d' didn't look twice at me, but practically bowed to Rhine as she escorted us through the maze and past a dozen empty tables before seating us by a window.

"Don't take this the wrong way," I said, "but this doesn't strike me as the kind of place you could normally afford."

"It's not. But it's considered lucky to have a fish poet in your establishment, provided he can afford the fare. You're still paying, aren't you?"

I nodded, and we ordered three servings of the day's special, a variation on traditional otak-otak made with stonefish wrapped in a locally grown banana leaf. Whether a result of the exercise getting here or the exquisite meal, Rhine became loquacious. While Reggie and I ate he unwound an introduction to the intricacies of fish poetry with commentary on everything from the complex pairing of vocal pitch and stress with angle and speed of knife strokes while juggling/slicing a marinated stonefish within the strictures of a sonnet's fourteen lines.

As we topped off our meal with kuih, brightly colored cakes made from the Brill equivalent of glutinous rice, he brought his lecture to a close. "Ultimately, it's a lot like the bicycle."

I paused with a mouthful of cake. "Sorry?"

"Once you know how to do it, you don't worry about it any more. I don't have to think about the movements of the knives or the rhythms of my voice. That's automatic. All of my focus is reserved for the new part, the words I'm using for that specific poem. Everything else my body already knows how to do."

Reggie chose that moment to let loose with a long stream of otak-otak inspired flatulence, which in turn triggered an epiphany for me. I knew the solution to Dugli's problem.

When it came time to pay the bill, I asked the waiter to send the manager over. From her flawless pumpkin complexion she had to have been older than Rhine. Her long, lustrous hair was as black as the shimmering pajamas she wore. She addressed Rhine first, speaking in a local language. He waved her to me and she switched to crisp and flawless Traveler. 

"You found your meal satisfactory, sir?"

"No, I found it incredible. I've had the pleasure of dining in Singapore and Malacca many times, and your otak-otak was the finest I've ever sampled."

"I will pass your words on to our chef. Please, how else may I be of assistance?"

I'd hoped for more of a reaction, but I hadn't praised the food to soften her up. "This is going to sound very odd, but I would like to rent out your restaurant for the rest of the day." 

"Sir? I am sorry, but if you wish to host a dinner party here, you would need to give us at least six days notice."

"You misunderstand. I don't want dinner. I want the restaurant. Actually, just the kitchen. But everyone can go home. Everyone 
has
 to go home. I want to pay you for the use of your empty kitchen and have you close your restaurant. Just for the next few hours."

"What you ask is not possible."

"Normally, I suppose not. But it's your lucky day. I'm traveling with a fish poet of some renown." I took out my credit chip, keyed in the cost of lunch, moved the decimal point three places to the right, and handed it to her. "Possible?"

She stared at the chip long enough to confirm the number. Then she pulled back a sleeve to reveal a standard comm bracelet and clipped my chip to its transaction port before I could change my mind. As she handed back my chip she spoke to her wrist, a rapid singsong of instructions. In the next instant she was gone.

Rhine stared at me. "She just ordered her staff to tell all the patrons there's been a small fire in the kitchen, apologize, and ask them to leave, while inviting them to return for a complimentary meal any time in the future."

"Excellent!"

"What are you doing?"

Before I could answer our waiter returned. "If you will follow me please?"

"To the kitchen?" She nodded. I stood and tucked Reggie under my arm. "C'mon, Rhine. Time to make history."

"We're making history?"

"No, just me. You're making seven cheese cribble puffs!"