Implied Spaces

by Walter Jon Williams

  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 d
ozen 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.”

  “What line are you in?”

  “Sales. Well—formerly sales. I’m about to be a manager.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Rajan cocked his head and grinned at Aristide. “You here for a visit?”

  “Yes, but I’m thinking of immigrating.”

  “Yeah, it’s a beautiful place. I’m going to be sorry to leave.”

  Rajan ate slices of mango and pineapple as he asked Franz Sandow about himself, and where on Hawaiki he’d been—which amounted to the wormhole gate and spectacular underwater sites within a radius of twenty kilometers from the Manua Resort. Rajan offered advice on a few other nearby places to visit, then leaned forward, his eyes intent.

  “Say,” he said. “You said you were immigrating, yah?”

  “I said I was thinking about it.”

  “The reason I asked is that I’ve got an apartment for sale. I’ve got to sell it quickly, and I’d give you a good price.”

  Aristide looked over his shoulder at the chaotic bulk of the resort. “They have private apartments here?”

  “No, it’s on another island. N’aruba—” Pointing. “Over there. The apartment is right on the lagoon, with underwater access. Three bedrooms, two under the surface for amphibs, a third for walkers.”

  Aristide sipped his tea while he feigned consideration of the offer.

  “How much are you asking?”

  “A hundred and fifteen thousand. It’s worth one-thirty easy—it’s just that the market’s soft right now.”

  Aristide passed a hand over his bald head.

  “I’ll take a look at it,” he said, “with the understanding that I’m not really in the market.”

  “Great! Is your morning free?”

  Aristide gave a self-conscious smile. “Actually, this morning I’m rehearsing for the massed chorale.”

  “Really? I love those. Afternoon, then?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Pick you up at two?”

  They chatted a while longer, and then Aristide excused himself. He returned to his room, Bitsy following on her short legs. As soon as the door closed, Aristide turned to Bitsy.

  “I’ve updated Let’s Be Friends!”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve gone through all the databases I can dig into without doing such a thorough job it might seem suspicious,” she said, “and I can tell already that Ravi Rajan doesn’t add up.”

  “Is the identity phony?”

  “No. Or rather, Ravi Rajan is a genuine person, though I don’t think we just met the real Ravi. According to the latest databases, the real Ravi is married, is the father of three bouncing little amphibians, and lives eight hundred kilometers away on Mora, not on N’aruba.”

  Aristide lowered himself into the great pool that led to the sea, and warm waters rose around him.

  “So we’ve got a man with a false identity trying to lure me alone to another island,” he said. “I wonder what he wants.”

  “Woof woof,” said Bitsy. “There’s your official warning.”

  The massed chorale was exactly that—seven hundred fifty aquatic and amphibian residents of Hawaiki hovering in meticulous formation in a bowl-shaped amphitheater carved out of a piece of rock. The concave face of the amphitheater didn’t face skyward, as on land, but on a horizontal line toward the audience, who would be hovering in the water.

  But this was a rehearsal, and there was no audience, just a group of busy officials, a worried composer, and one energetic, preternaturally patient, preternaturally sympathetic conductor. About two-thirds of the participants were experienced vocalists, the rest amateurs and sightseers who had volunteered for the hell of it. When Aristide had volunteered, two days earlier, his part had been assigned by an avuncular machine intelligence and all necessary information downloaded into his own personal AI. His part, like that of all the amateur volunteers, wasn’t particularly difficult, but he had taken it seriously—he had listened to his part and studied it on his own, practicing in the morning and late at night in the pool in his suite.

  He hadn’t known how to make some of the sounds called for in his part until he experimented.

  At the rehearsal Aristide rippled just the edges of his wings to hover in his assigned place. And he sang.

  He gurgled deep in his abdomen. He boomed out in full voice. He squirted ultrasonics from the bulge in his forehead. He shrieked and wailed and whistled.

  The amphitheater caught the sounds and radiated them out like the beam of a sonic searchlight. Aristide vibrated in the vast ocean of sound. His viscera quaked, his bones hummed at a hundred different frequencies.

  There was choreography as well. Dancers shot through the open space in front of the theater, forming graceful patterns, swooping in a frenetic solo, or engaging in passionate pas-de-deux. The dancer leaped to the surface to land, wings outspread, with percussive slaps, or blew lacy networks of bubbles that shimmered like aurorae i
n the ocean of sound.

  When the conductor thanked the performers and signaled the end of the rehearsal, most of the performers were reluctant to leave. It was like the first night dive, an experience so overwhelming that the participants wanted to bask for a while in the afterglow.

  But in time the great cluster began to break up. The pelagians left first, their torpedo-shaped bodies, with their ring of tentacles streamlined back, moving purposefully away like ominous squadrons of subaquatic craft. Aristide tuned himself to their conversation and found it barely comprehensible.

  He moved away himself, gliding toward the resort on its great bay with purposeful beats of his wings. Other amphibians in personal submarines motored past, leaving golden streaks of bubbles. He whistled for Bitsy.

  Bitsy turned up half a minute later, holding in her mouth and paws a fist-sized blob of pale flesh. A pair of platter-sized angelfish, black and gold, hovered about her, intent on snatching bits of the treat.

  —I found a conch, Bitsy said. Want some?

  Aristide hesitated, then took the chunk of flesh and raised it to his lips. The translucent meat tasted of sea and trembling life. He finished the conch, but the hopeful angelfish continued to cruise along with him in hopes of finding leftovers.

  —How did you break the shell? he asked.

  —Banged it on a rock.

  A pod of amphibians swooped past, chattering among themselves. Aristide listened, and after they had passed out of earshot, spoke.

  —I wish I understood more than half what they were saying.

  —It’s been a long time since you were a noob.

  —Yes, he said. It brings back long-dormant memories of adolescence.

  —Or of being a parent.

  —Not really. As a parent, I could always rely on the pretense of superiority.

  By the time he returned to his suite he was tired and hungry. It took more physical work to get from one place to another through the water, and despite the extra layer of fat, water below the thermocline could be cold.

  It was nearly time to meet the man who claimed to be Ravi Rajan. Aristide rinsed in fresh water and changed into dry clothes. He let himself into the garden behind his suite, all fragrance and blazing tropical colors. He began to walk to the hotel along the oyster-shell path, with Bitsy following.