Implied Spaces (18 page)

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.

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 skull 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.

The turbidity was clogging his gills. His head rang. He felt sick to his stomach.

The net, he thought, could have taken half a dozen people.

He pulled first Cadwal, then Herenui out of the tunnel, then dragged each of them by their harnesses through the narrow tunnel into the largest cavern. There, he noticed that they seemed to be regaining consciousness and the use of their limbs, so he stunned them again.

It occurred to him that he was very tired. He paused, hovering in the darkness, and used his wings to fan water over his gills. His weariness faded.

It was only then that he thought of Bitsy.

—Bitsy? he chirped. Bitsy?

—Bitsy?

That second blast, he thought. Bitsy must have got tangled in the net, and had been drawn through the Venger’s wormhole.

Bitsy was in another universe. The Venger, or whoever or whatever was on the other side of the wormhole, had been expecting a human victim and instead got an amphibian pet. He wondered if the enemy was angry, or alarmed, or merely amused

Probably Bitsy was prancing around pretending to be very confused and much less intelligent than she was. Aristide hoped that no one would scan Bitsy to discover her true capabilities.

Maybe she would become the Venger’s mascot.

Aristide took Herenui and Cadwal by their harnesses and dragged them out of the cave. Above, the dark outline of the catamaran was visible against a million tiny, pulsating reflections of the bright world above.

He yanked the triggers on the two harnesses and there was a hiss as CO
2
inflated a pair of balloons. The two unconscious forms began to rise. The balloons made little gurgling noises as they ascended, and the gas inside expanded and was vented.

Aristide re-sheathed Tecmessa but kept the stun baton in his hand as he followed the bodies upward, and then was blinded by the sudden flare of emergency strobes flashing from the two sets of safety gear. He heard an exclamation and shaded his eyes, and he saw the catamaran lying black on the water.

He heard a roll of engines, and then the sound of Ari’i running to the foredeck and pulling up the anchor. Still half-dazzled, Aristide swam to the boat and climbed the ladder to the stern. He kept a fold of his wing over the baton.

Strobe lights blazed on Ari’i’s heavy, barrel-chested body as he returned from the foredeck, nimble as he ran along the gunwale.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Aristide said. “There was, like, a big noise. Herenui and Cadwal were in that little tunnel. Do you think they could have banged their heads together or something?”

“Damn.”

Ari’i jumped to the controls and backed the boat up to the nearest flashing light. Aristide intended to walk up behind him and hit him with the baton, but the boat lurched and he swayed and had to recover his balance. Opportunity lost.

“Help me get them aboard,” Ari’i said.

He reached under one of the bench seats and pulled out a boathook, two and a half meters long.