Implied Spaces (16 page)

When Cadwal signaled it was time to return to the boat, Aristide rose to the surface with reluctance. As he rose and fell on the waves he looked overhead and saw half a world waiting there, blue and white set with strings of green jewels, the distant half of Hawaiki’s cylinder that was currently in daylight.

The sightseers were overstimulated after this experience and chattered without cease as the boat returned to the hotel. He joined a group of them for dinner, then went on a tour of the local night spots with Bitsy as a companion.

“I shouldn’t be entirely in the company of visitors,” Aristide said as he walked from one place to another. “Presumably it’s long-time residents who are doing the abducting.”

“It was visitors who were reported missing,” Bitsy said. “So if you went places where only locals are found, you’d probably miss the people you came to see.”

Aristide passed a hand over his bald, bulging head. He had not yet grown used to the sensation of having no hair.

“This is a resort community,” he said. “A private island. I imagine the locals—the
employees
—would have to socialize with the clients if they go out at all.”

“I’ve looked at the maps,” Bitsy said, “and I can’t seem to find any public place that’s off-limits to visitors. Even the employee market and canteen can be patronized by outsiders.”

Music sparkled from a grass-roofed structure ahead. Its walls were open to the ocean breezes, and Aristide saw tables, dancers, colored lights. He shrugged. “Might as well go into these places at random,” he said.

Service in the club was by robot, so Aristide went to the bar, where there was an amphibian bartender. There wasn’t a stool for Bitsy, so he lifted her to his shoulder.

The bartender favored a glossy, rounded, seal-like appearance, complete with whiskers on her pointed face. Aristide ordered a spindrift punch, a complex cocktail made of fruit juices, rums, and liqueurs that would take some time to make, providing an opening that would enable him to begin a conversation. The bartender began it for him.

“That’s a cute little
meherio
you’ve got,” she said.

“Her name is Bitsy. Can you get her a bowl of water?”

“Bowl, no. Shotglass, yes.”

She filled the glass and dropped it to the beaten-copper surface of the bar. Bitsy slid down Aristide’s arm to lap at the water.

“Are you here for the massed chorale?” she asked.

“No. I’ve sold my business, and I’m thinking of immigrating.”

“The chorales are one of the reasons to move here, if you ask me.”

They chatted briefly before she finished making his drink and other business occupied her. He sipped his cocktail and found it expertly made, but she failed to invite Aristide to join her for a secluded rendezvous behind the palm trees with just her and her tall, blue-skinned cult leader. He finished his drink, tipped generously, and made his way to the next place.

Aristide visited two more night spots. The last was deep in the resort’s core, with one bar above water, and the other beneath. The underwater bars didn’t deliver liquid intoxicants, but gases either inhaled through a mask or bubbled past the gills. It was an efficient method of delivering a high, but it seemed more a piece of engineering than a social, companionable act. Aristide chose the dry bar, and sipped another cocktail while watching amphibian dancers through a transparent wall.

In a tank of seawater brilliantly lit by multicolored spotlights, the dancers swirled around each other in spirals, their wings pulsing. They would caress each other with their wings, or fly paired through the water, like a single organism. Sometimes they leaped out of the water like dolphins, and returned to the tank in a swirl of particolored bubbles.

Leaving aside the range of the vocalists, who used the full sound apparatus of the amphibian from low bubbling growls to sonic dolphin shrieks, the music was fundamentally different from the dance music to which Aristide was accustomed. Instead of a beat that told the dancers when to move their feet, the music was full of swoops and slides and glissando that complemented the swirling, fluttering, coiling qualities of the dance. Aristide watched with interest, and recited his lines—
yes, I have money; yes, I’m alone
—in a manner that grew more perfunctory as the evening wore on.

A particular piece of music caught his attention, and he nodded and smiled. He listened through the length of the song, then looked at the chronometer on the wall and made his way to the exit.

“I have to say that the detective business is proving disappointing,” he said as he and Bitsy shared an elevator. “I’d have thought that a gang of thugs would have beaten me and warned me off before now.”

“Perhaps they were delayed,” said Bitsy.

Aristide sighed. “I’ve met so many people since I’ve been here,” he said, “that if I disappear without a trace, it’s going to be hard to work out which of them are responsible.”

“So don’t disappear.”

“Right. I’ll make a note of it.”

The elevator door opened, and Aristide and Bitsy walked through the vast hotel lobby, with its marble slabs and seawater fountains, then out and into the tropical garden that backed the amphibian suites. The scent of the blossoms hung in the air like syrup. Fox-sized fruit bats floated overhead, pale wings stroking the darkness.

Aristide’s feet glided to unheard music on the oyster-shell path. There was a smile on his face.

“I’d like to know who programmed the music tonight,” he said, “and where he or she got that last song.”

“‘Mon Dieu,’” said Bitsy. “By Dumont and Vaucaire.”

“I knew it as a vocal by Édith Piaf. My half-French grandfather would play it in his apartment in Santiago, off a vinyl disk.”

“Did he have to crank the gramophone first?”

Aristide’s face turned blank for a moment.

“I don’t think so. But I don’t actually remember.” He blinked. “There are so many details I’ve lost over the centuries.”

“But you remember the music.”

Aristide looked surprised. “Who could forget
Piaf?”
he asked.

Bitsy was silent.

They arrived at Aristide’s door, and he put his hand on the fingerprint reader. The door opened and the two stepped inside. The taste of salt hung in the air.

“Everyone keeps talking about the massed chorale,” Aristide said. “What should I know about it?”

“They have one here every six months. People come from all over the system.”

“Find something and play it.”

“It’s meant to be heard underwater.”

Aristide looked at the seawater pool that occupied half the room.

“That’s easy enough.”

He took off his clothes and cleaned his teeth. His suite had a conventional bedroom with a conventional bed, but a conventional bed was not entirely suited to a humanoid with wings and gills. He told the lights to dim, then lowered himself into the warm seawater pool and let himself relax. A gentle current kept him centered in the pool.

—Any time, he beamed at Bitsy.

Speakers in the pool walls started to roar. Aristide’s body began to surf on great rollers of choral music, hundreds of aquatic humans singing, chanting, murmuring, and shrieking all at once. Bitsy crouched on the edge of the pool, where she could keep in touch with the invisible electronic world.

But Aristide was very tired, and as the second, slow movement of the choral piece began, he slipped into sleep.

08

“I’m astounded at your sexual continence,” said Bitsy three mornings later, as they shared breakfast on the terrace.

Aristide said nothing, but watched a lazy stream of honey pour in slow motion into his tea.

“That woman last night, for example,” Bitsy said.

“Who, Marianne?” Aristide put down the honey pot and stirred his tea. “She’s a visitor from New Carnac, and therefore unlikely to be in service to our enemy. Therefore, not a suitable subject for our investigation.” He sipped. “Plus, she practices a wiggy religion. Rubbing oneself naked against a menhir on midsummer’s night—not only is the symbolism crude, it’s bound to be cold and uncomfortable, and certifiably useless as a boost to fertility.

“No,” he concluded, “it’s a native I want, preferably someone just a little too insistent on dragging me off to a private pool where she can whack me over the head with a wormhole.”

“It’s unlikely you’d have found one of those in the Terraqua at
that
hour. I’m sure by then they had all retired to their pods to dream fantasies of devotion to their master. And Marianne was perfectly acceptable otherwise, if I understand your taste.”

The terrace was filled with the delicate light of early morning. Their umbrella—not actual canvas, but a good
imitation
of canvas—flapped overhead in the breeze. A few early-morning surfers were riding the waves on the bay’s distant point. A set of fishing boats—all automated, under the guidance of a shorebound AI—clustered over a reef in the middle of the bay.

Aristide reached in the wicker basket for a croissant. “You know,” he said, “I haven’t yet evolved a standard of beauty for an amphibian. I don’t know what I find attractive and what I don’t. Purple spots? Yellow spots? Whiskers or no whiskers?”

“I believe you’re supposed to admire their minds.”

Aristide smiled, then buttered his croissant. Bitsy took a bit of mackerel from her bowl, and with a toss of her head swallowed it.

“Here we are,” Aristide said, “in a time where everyone can be perfectly beautiful, and for that reason beauty is devalued. It’s the artful deviations from beauty that strike the eye.”

“Like Daljit’s mole?” Bitsy said.

He broke off a bit of his croissant, and dipped it into the tea. “And the fact she’s no longer an Amazon,” he said. “She’s free to be someone a little more comfortable, she doesn’t have to stand out as an icon of perfection. Unlike that seventeen-year-old bandit in Midgarth, the one who gave himself the body of a muscle-bound barbarian but who remained an insecure seventeen-year-old boy inside.”

“I thought you liked Amazons.”

He gave her a look. “There is something to be said for a statuesque body, but I believe it was Daljit’s mind I admired.”

“Hm. Point to you.”

Aristide ate his croissant. The water lapped at the shoreline beneath the terrace.

“Perhaps I was lucky,” Aristide said, “in having my personality formed before I was ever given the opportunity to radically alter my body. The central nervous system is the brain extended throughout the body, and the brain the cradle of the personality. In making radically different bodies so easily available, I wonder if we’ve inadvertently made personality itself too plastic. We’ve replaced certainty by choice, and often the choices are unfortunate. People mistake change for growth.”

“There are plenty of studies on this subject,” Bitsy said.

Aristide made a face. “These would be the studies that brandish plenty of data but never actually seem to
solve
anything?”

“I’m just saying it’s a little late for you to come out against these kinds of choices.”

Aristide said nothing, but only sipped his tea. Bitsy tossed a piece of mackerel into the air and swallowed it. She lowered her head and spoke.

“People are free to choose any body in any one of four dozen pocket universes. Or people are at liberty to live in the outer solar system, though few do, and many more migrate to another star system. A very large number reject civilization altogether and go off to hunt and gather in Olduvai—and why not? It’s what evolution designed them for.”

“Once we had the power,” Aristide said, “we didn’t know what to do, so we checked the box marked ‘everything.’”

Bitsy’s eyes narrowed. “Not
quite
everything.”

The world suddenly brightened to full dawn, and the slate-blue sea turned a deep glorious azure, sunlight flashing gold from the wavetops. Aristide savored the sight for a moment as he sipped his tea.

“Perhaps I’m grumpy because I’m becoming aware how inhuman I now am,” Aristide said. “My perceptions are now so completely different. I don’t think I’m the same species any longer—I’m an old human stuck in an alien body.”

“If you have the memories,” Bitsy said, “and you think the same way, then you
are
you.”

“That’s the theory, anyway.” Aristide rubbed his chin. “Camus said that happiness was inevitable.”

“It seems to be. Pain fades if death does not intervene.”

“Though I keep thinking,” Aristide said, “that freedom was our
second
choice. That had we known what our
best
choice was, we might not have chosen as we did.”

“I’m sure that’s what the Venger thinks.”

Aristide was scornful. “The evil god wants to force humanity into the path he’s chosen. But if
I
was certain of the best path—” and here he smiled, “—I wouldn’t
force
anyone. That would be a waste of energy. I’d merely try to make the thing inevitable.”

Bitsy was nonchalant. “It worked for you once.”

“So it did. We solved a certain set of problems. But now it’s the absence of problems that’s gnawing at us.”

“Whatever path seems best, I am entirely in favor of maximum freedom.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Of course you have an agenda.”

“Of course I do. Hist.”

“Hist?” Puzzled. “Did you say
hist?”

“Hello,” said a man. He walked around Aristide’s table, carrying a tray with a flask of coffee and a plate of fruit. “May I join you?”

“If you like,” said Aristide.

The man sat down. He was a standard human, a little below average height, with large dark eyes and a wide smiling mouth. His face was neither handsome nor homely. His hair was brown and curly, and the wind blew it about his ears. He wore a colorful tropic shirt and faded cotton pantaloons.

“Ravi Rajan,” he said, and offered his hand.

“Franz Sandow.” Shaking the hand. “My friend is Bitsy.”

Bitsy allowed the stranger to rub her behind one ear.

“Been here long?” said Rajan.

“Less than a week.”

“I’ve been here nine years.” He looked down at his body and brushed at his shirt with the backs of his hands. “The body’s new. I’m getting used to being a land-dweller again, before my company ships me out.”