Implied Spaces

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Would you like me to order you some fast food?” Bitsy asked.

  “Why not?”

  There was a half-second delay as Bitsy scanned electronic menus.

  “Noodles with lemongrass?”

  “Sure.”

  “With chicken, pork, or prawns?’

  “Prawns.”

  “The robot will deliver to the dock.”

  “Thanks.”

  Oyster shells crunched underfoot. A white cockatoo screeched from somewhere in the tropical foliage.

  “I just received a message from Endora,” Bitsy said.

  Aristide stopped. “Yes?” he said.

  “She suggests that if we need local assistance, we should contact a Lieutenant Han Baoyin in the office of the Domus in Magellan Town. Contact information is provided.”

  “Why Han?”

  “He backed himself up about eighteen hours ago. Endora just received her copy of the file.”

  “Very good.”

  He turned left through a breezeway and walked through the terrace onto the dock. Ravi Rajan, bright in his tropical shirt, waved from the end of the dock.

  “All natural fabrics,” Aristide remarked as he picked up his noodles from the robot caterer. “I’ll bet his clothes don’t have a single electronic tag in them.”

  “I could check that.”

  “Let’s not ping him. He might notice.”

  Aristide bought a soft drink to go with his noodles, then joined Rajan at the end of the dock.

  “How was the rehearsal?”

  “Magnificent.”

  “The chorales are terrific, aren’t they?” He jumped down into a monohull, then reached up a hand to help Aristide enter the boat. Bitsy jumped down on her own and investigated the boat with apparent interest. Rajan and Aristide each took a swiveling chair behind the cockpit screen, and then Rajan gave the boat his address, and the boat slipped its moorings and began to move smoothly into the bay.

  Aristide sipped his drink.

  “Is this your boat?”

  “No, it’s a taxi. I’ve got a boat for sale, if you’re interested, but right now there’s an offer on it.” He looked at Aristide. “If the deal falls through, I’d sell it to you for the amount of the offer.”

  “Let’s see the apartment first.”

  The boat increased speed and began to slam into waves. Aristide swayed in his padded chair as he dug into his noodles. Lemongrass glowed lightly on his palate. Spray dotted the windscreen. Rajan shouted over the sound of the impellers and the rushing water.

  “I brought some drinks for you, if you like!”

  At his gesture a footstool-shaped cooler rolled toward Aristide and popped its top. Beer and wine, he saw, and soft drinks.

  Any one of which might contain a mickey, or a meme plague. Aristide smiled and indicated his own drink.

  “I brought my own, thanks!”

  Rajan shrugged, made a gesture that brought the cooler near him, and took a beer for himself.

  “Is your pet okay?”

  Aristide looked at Bitsy, who was snuffling around beneath one of the bench seats.

  “She’s fine,” he said.

  The journey across the straight took about twenty minutes. The boat slowed as it approached the island, and then entered a channel. The boat’s wake slopped against mangrove roots as it cruised through the channel, then entered a lagoon. Wind brought the scent of vegetation and ruffled the surface of the water in fractal patterns.

  Branches of the lagoon trailed in all directions, separated by small islands. Most of the waterfront, including that of the islands, was occupied by homes, anything from snail-shaped organic buildings grown on the spot from seeds, to traditional tropical bungalows with thatched roofs.

  The boat headed for one of the larger buildings, white plaster with a red tile roof, and tied itself to the pier. A woman in an upstairs apartment was watering a box of gardenia, and Ravi waved at her. Aristide took Tecmessa off its scabbard, and held it up.

  “I’m going to take the apartment’s measurements, if you don’t mind.”

  Rajan didn’t seem entirely pleased.

  “If you like. Go ahead.”

  “La-la-la-la-la-la-la.“ Bitsy bounded ahead as they walked toward the building. A door slid open on Rajan’s approach. Bitsy ran inside. Aristide paused. Adrenaline roared in his ears. He was waiting for Bitsy’s woof-woof.

  “La-la-la-la-la.”

  “Look at that view!” said Rajan.

  Warily, aware that this was probably when the enemy made his move, Aristide turned.

  The view was lovely. Nothing alarming happened.

  “La-la-la.”

  Bitsy came trotting back into view.

  “Okay!” she said. “Okay!”

  Rajan showed Aristide the apartment. It was lovely and tasteful, with an open floor plan and lots of light. Reflected wavelight danced on the ceiling. There was nothing personal in the apartment except for Rajan’s toiletries in one of the bathrooms, and his suitcase in the bedroom equipped for walkers. The normality of the place fed Aristide’s paranoia: the walls seemed to loom toward him; the sounds of his feet made ominous echoes. He walked with Tecmessa held before him, his nerves leaping in anticipation of attack.

  The attack didn’t happen. No one lurked in the closets, no devouring wormholes dwelled in the ovens, no human-sized pea pods had been placed beneath the beds.

  “Throw in another thousand,” said Ravi, “you can have the furniture. Otherwise I’ll have to turn to one of the auction houses.”

  Aristide had to agree that the apartment was very nice. He said that he’d look into financing.

  Then Rajan took him back to the Manua and left him, a bit dazed, on the pier.

  “That apartment,” Bitsy said, as soon as Rajan’s boat was out of earshot, “is owned by something called the Elizabeth Daly Trust. Ravi Rajan isn’t mentioned in any of the Daly Trust’s filings.”

  Aristide stared after the receding boat.

  “You mean,” he said, “that Ravi isn’t a tool of the Venger at all, but an identity thief and confidence man trying to sell me something he doesn’t own?”

  “That would seem to be the case.”

  Aristide laughed. Adrenaline was still clattering along his neurons, making his hands and knees tremble.

  “A thousand extra for the furniture!” he said. “He might sell the place to a dozen different people!”

  “I would advise against informing the police,” Bitsy said. “They’d look into your background too, just as a matter of form, and your identity won’t hold up either.”

  Aristide began his walk down the pier. Fork-tailed gulls floated overhead on the wind.

  “This mission is cursed,” Aristide said.

  “You’re too impatient.”

  “After the massed chorale,” Aristide said, “I want to move to another resort, one where the visitors mix with the locals more freely. We newcomers are too isolated on this private island.”

  “Two victims stayed here, including General Tumusok.”

  “I’ve given the Venger’s minions every chance to come after me. They may not be here, or have picked another victim. Maybe I’ll show up better when I get within range of another radar set.”

  “I advise patience.”

  Aristide didn’t answer. He walked to the terrace and settled beneath another umbrella. The waiter brought him a pitcher of iced water without being asked, and poured with the usual flamboyant gesture.

  Aristide ordered an umbrella drink. It was time to rethink.

  Aristide forewent the clubs and bars that night, instead taking a thoughtful swim along the bay and out to the reef. Alone, flying in the darkness, he heard the distant calls of the pelagians and the rattle of coral sand as it moved along in the current. He thought of the Venger, whoever he was, pulling a handful of victims into his lair, altering them, and spitting them back into the world. The handful became a legion, the legion a host, the host a horde.

&nbs
p; He thought of Carlito lying pale in his bed while Antonia wept and cried aloud, beating with her palms on the bedroom door that Pablo Monagas Pérez had locked against her.

  In his mind he heard the mocking laughter of the Seraphim as it echoed down the centuries.

  Next morning he attended another rehearsal of the mass chorale. During the previous rehearsal the composer had heard things he didn’t like, and he had uploaded a long series of changes that Aristide hadn’t been in the mood to practice. The rehearsal itself went well, however, and as the chords boomed from the massed singers he felt his spirits lift.

  Even if his mission was a failure, he was at the least having a wonderful vacation.

  In the afternoon he went on the Mareva, and spent a few hours slowly sailing through enormous, towering coral castles, tower upon crag upon battlement, that reared up from the seabed ten kilometers from the resort. Herenui asked him if he was interested in a night dive, and he said he was.

  When he arrived at the dock that evening, the boat was empty save for its crew, a fact that triggered only a mild sense of alarm. If Ari’i and Herenui had wanted to abduct him, they surely would have done it by now. Bitsy capered aboard first, and sounded no alert. The crew paid him little attention as the catamaran raced out over the night ocean to Seven Palms, another resort, and the unease faded. Aristide spent much of the journey staring up into the daylit world above, seeing the green archipelagoes like strings of emeralds in the azure sea, with a great white manta-ray-shaped storm swooping across the inverted land. It was a big storm, but not a fierce one: in Hawaiki there was no Coriolis force to spin up hurricanes and turn them as deadly as they were on Earth.

  Mareva picked up a group of sightseers at Seven Palms, and carried them to a coral plain split by long, twisting valleys of sand. Clumps of coral reached toward each other as they grew upward, forming arches and small tunnels or open-ended caves. The maze was a delight to explore at night, a surprise around every corner. Aristide sailed beneath a coral arch and came face-to-face with a green moray on the hunt, a creature two meters long and as thick as his leg. Reflected on the needle teeth—themselves an unpleasant reminder of the Priests of the Venger—he could see his own startled face.

  Aristide squalled out a startled sonic blast from his forehead. The moray was far from paralyzed, but found the sound annoying enough so that it turned around and flowed away in a disturbingly boneless, liquid manner.

  Aristide hovered in place until he got his hammering heart under control, then continued his explorations in a more cautious manner.

  The chattering group of sightseers was set ashore at Seven Palms, and the boat sped for Manua across the midnight sea. The night wind was chill, and Aristide moved into the shelter of the cockpit and wrapped himself in his own wings. Cockpit instruments glowed softly in the darkness. Herenui offered him coffee from a flask, and he accepted.

  She looked up over the counter of the cockpit.

  “We’re about to go into the Matahina Strait,” she said. “Have you seen the Bell Caves?”

  “No.”

  “We hardly ever take people there, because it’s nowhere near any of the other prime dive sites. But as long as we’re here, would you like to see them?”

  “Why not?” Getting back into the warm water would relieve his chill faster than the coffee would.

  Across the boat, Aristide caught a glimpse of Bitsy’s interested eyes glittering from beneath a bench. Yes, he thought, it is suspicious. Or extraordinarily generous.

  Herenui knelt before Aristide to give him a quick briefing. Entrance to the caves was at ten to twenty-five meters, and once inside he would find three bell-shaped caves, their domes above the surface of the water, each linked to the next by tunnels. It was impossible to get lost inside, so it was quite safe as long as Aristide didn’t bump his head, and some of the mineral formations on the roofs of the caves were interesting.

  Ari’i brought the catamaran smoothly into the shadow of an island, and Cadwal jumped overboard to place the anchor where it wouldn’t damage the coral. Bitsy followed in a near-silent, quicksilver splash. The catamaran swung at the end of its cable. The scent of citrus was a tang on the air. Fruit bats flapped in silhouette between the boat and the world overhead.

  Aristide fixed his light onto his wrist with its lanyard, took a good grip on it, and just in case put his other hand on Tecmessa in its scabbard. He rolled backward off the edge of the boat and landed in a roil of silver bubbles. He unfolded his wings as he drifted downward, and strained the first breaths of warm, life-giving water through his gills. There was a splash and a brief overpressure, and Herenui dropped into the sea beside him. With slow pulses of their wings they glided toward Cadwal’s light, where he was flashing it as a signal on the sea floor near the entrance to the cave.

  The cave, in its way, was an implied space. Hawaiki was only a few hundred years old, too young a universe for caves to have formed over slow geological time, as on Earth. These had been formed in the first hot, violent hours of the pocket’s existence, basically bubbles of gas caught in roiling, molten rock as it cooled. Yet geological and chemical forces would have been at work in the centuries since, and Aristide was interested to see how the caves had been, in effect, colonized by geology.

  Floating through the cave entrance, Aristide wondered how much of the underwater world’s attraction was based on the idea of a return to the womb. Here he was—weightless, floating in salt water the temperature of his own body, and experiencing the liberation of not having to use his lungs to breathe—and to complete the metaphor he was about to enter a dark cave.

  He had to admit to himself that Hawaiki had provided a pleasant womb.

  The first of the three caverns was about fifteen meters in diameter. Cadwal flashed his light on the clumps of helictites growing on the cave ceiling, three distinct formations like twisting, intricate bundles of brilliant white roots, the result of chemicals reacting with rainwater percolating from above. The darting lights of the hand flashes, Aristide thought, made the caves and the minerals more interesting than they would have been in full daylight: the totality of the surrounding darkness and the glitter of crystals in the jittering, darting flashlight beam, accompanied as they were by the bright, sharp sounds of water echoing from beneath the stony ceiling… in all a much more romantic experience than it would have been if he had been looking at the same stone, the same minerals, under the drab fluorescent light of a museum.

  Perhaps, he decided, he could make a poem along those lines.

  The tunnel into the next cave was narrow, but sonar prevented him from bumping his head. The second cave featured a bed of crystals that opened like flowers.

  Herenui turned to him and smiled.

  —One cave more, she said. Go ahead.

  Aristide turned head-down and submerged as he sought out the tunnel with his light. Light and shadow bounced weirdly in the small space: the surface above was a perfect mirror of the bottom below. If not for bubbles he would not know which way was up.

  He let out a brief sonic chirp, enough to locate the tunnel entrance and focus it in the beam of his light. There was a brown flash as Bitsy drove herself into the tunnel, leaving a corkscrew swirl of little bubbles in her wake.

  Aristide followed Bitsy into the tunnel. It was wider than the previous tunnel, enough for two to swim abreast, and five or six meters long. In complete surprise he heard, echoing in the narrow tunnel, an astonishingly perfect rendition of a large, angry dog.

  “Woof-woof!”

  Hot terror flashed through him. He clutched at Tecmessa holstered on his belt. Ahead he saw Bitsy’s face, bright eyes flaring in the light of his flash.

  —Trap! she called. Net!

  From behind Aristide there was a sizzling, a sudden actinic light that cast his crisp shadow on the tunnel wall. He glanced behind and saw Herenui diving into the tunnel, a stun baton flashing in one hand.

  Fragments of thoughts, too broken to be complete ideas, crashed in his sk
ull like cannon balls.

  DC current! Works just fine under water!

  And then:

  Damn!

  His wings gave a powerful surge and sent him shooting forward. Better to be trapped in a net than zapped unconscious in a tunnel.

  Behind him, Cadwal gave a three-note call. A signal, to someone or something.

  Tecmessa resisted coming free of its scabbard. Velcro was much stronger wet than dry. Eventually he yanked the weapon free just as the net caught him.

  The net had been ballooned out over much of the room, with its open bottom spread around the tunnel entrance. As soon as Aristide flew into the cavern, there was a sudden mechanical whine and an olive-colored nylon strap like a drawstring pulled shut the open end of the net; and then the entire net began to close as the strap pulled it into an ever-shrinking ball.

  Within the tightening net Aristide managed to perform a somersault. He thrust out Tecmessa and gave himself a precious half-second to aim.

  The sound was like a battery of artillery going off within inches of his head. His limbs felt dead. His bones rang like chimes.

  The closed bottom of the net vanished. The nylon strap, a piece of it vanished from this universe entirely, went writhing like a snake into the depths of the cave. The water in the cave was suddenly opaque, as fine silt that had settled to the bottom bounded with shock into the water.

  Tecmessa had swallowed a great draft of water, along with critical portions of the net. The horrific shock had been made by the waters filling the empty space.

  As Aristide slowly regained mastery over his mind and limbs, he realized he was still tangled in the net. He kicked, thrashed, fought.

  Another clap of thunder resounded in the closed space, and the blast accelerated Aristide’s impulse to escape. Finally the net fell free, and he sent out a sonar chirp to locate himself in the murk.

  He found Herenui and Cadwal stunned and drifting in the tunnel. The great sound had been aimed at them, and the close confines of the tunnel had channeled and concentrated the sound in their location. Aristide located Herenui’s stun baton where it had fallen from her limp fingers, and just to be certain of his safety used it to strike them both.