Implied Spaces (42 page)

In the elevator, she rested her head on his shoulder. He put an arm around her and kissed her. She smiled, and kissed him back.

Perhaps, he thought distantly, one would have preferred to kiss another. But that longing was not sufficient to keep him from kissing this one. And in any case, if one lived long enough, one would meet the other again.

The limbic system, he reminded himself, was what kept one human.

The elevator doors opened. Bitsy walked ahead, too obvious in the way she was not paying attention to the couple.

Aristide’s biometrics opened the door. They followed Bitsy inside, he closed the door, and embraced Shenai. Her perfume swirled in his senses.

He frowned, straightened. Something was different.

A man came through the bedroom door. Tecmessa gleamed in his hand. Looking in his face was like looking in a mirror.

“Uh-oh,” said Aristide.

23

“Hello, Bitsy,” said the stranger with Aristide’s face. “It’s been a long time.”

He thrust the broadsword toward the cat. Bitsy leaped; there was a crack; and the end table behind her disappeared. In Aristide’s arms, Shenai gave a nervous leap. The lamp that had sat atop the table crashed to the ground, the shade tipping wildly.

Bitsy dived under a sofa, and with another whipcrack sound a coffee table set before the sofa vanished.

Pablo turned back to Aristide with a rueful smile. “I seem to be having a little trouble controlling your weapon,” he said.

“No point in shooting Bitsy now,” Aristide said. “She sent the alarm the second she became aware of you.”

Pablo tilted his head and looked at Aristide curiously, as if judging an item of clothing perceived in a mirror.

“I’m sure alarms are going off everywhere,” Pablo said. “It won’t matter, as I have loyal soldiers stationed in this building who will keep the police at bay long enough for me to… accomplish my mission.”

Aristide gently released Shenai and guided her toward the door. She stared at Pablo in complete bewilderment.

“Pablo,” she said. “Who
is
this?”

“This would be Vindex,” Aristide said. Her eyes widened, and she stared at Pablo in wonder.

“His appearance has changed since I saw him last,” Aristide added, “and I’m not sure how he got here.”

“I wanted to fool any biometric devices designed to protect you,” Pablo said. “And as for my arrival—well, once you hid half the solar system in a bubble, I knew what was coming as well as anyone. I knew I’d lost. I set out to find out how you’d done it, and what Courtland discovered was a method of projecting wormholes from one universe to another. I’d planned to lead an invading army into Topaz, but unfortunately you destroyed Courtland, wrecked Pamphylia, and wiped out my army before I could move against you. I and my personal guard survived only because we were in a hardened research facility.” He looked at Shenai and frowned. “Who is this exactly?”

“An old friend. Shenai Ataberk.”

Pablo’s eyebrows lifted. “You’ve changed.”

“So have you,” said Shenai, more cuttingly.

“And by the way,” Aristide said, “I’d like to register an official complaint at the way you’ve been interfering with my love life. It really is your most annoying trait.”

Pablo’s eyes shifted back to Aristide.

“This will be the last time,” he said. “I promise.”

Aristide took a cautious step away from the door, farther into the room. The sword’s point followed his movement.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “You’ve got the technology now. You could be confronting the Inept at this moment, and instead you’re here talking to me.”

Scorn glittered in Pablo’s eyes.

“I’m an outlaw, a refugee with a few dozen followers,” he said. “The Inept, whoever they are, are hardly likely to take me seriously. No
—”
His eyes narrowed. “The Inept are safe from me. I suppose I can take comfort in the likelihood that someone will probably seek the Inept eventually.” He scowled. “Possibly even you.”

“The idea has its charm,” Aristide said. “Would you like me to represent you?”

He took another step into the room. From outside the hotel the sound of sirens was faintly heard. Pablo took a sideways step to maintain the proper distance from Aristide.

“I doubt you’ll approach them with the proper disdain,” he said. “And besides—you’ll be elsewhere.”

Aristide took another step. The sound of gunfire echoed up from street level.

“Stop that creeping!” Pablo commanded. “What are you trying to do—get to a weapon? It won’t work.” He took another gliding sideways step into the room to match Aristide’s movement.

“I was trying to get away from Shenai,” Aristide said. “So she wouldn’t be hurt.”

“I don’t intend to
hurt
anyone.” Pablo’s features glowed with triumph. “You forget that my motivation throughout this entire adventure has been the desire for
revenge
. And that while my feelings for the Inept, due to their remoteness, necessarily partake of a degree of abstraction, my feelings for
you,
who have thwarted me at every turn, are entirely concrete.”

“Oh, come off it,” Aristide said. “If you kill me, they’ll just reload me from backup. There’s hardly any point to it at all.”

Tecmessa’s point described a small circle in the air. “I have no intention of killing you. While it is likely that I may spend the rest of my existence in prison, allowed to die of old age with no backup and no resurrection, or to have my brain rearranged to a more socially acceptable norm, I will in the interim be able to comfort myself with the knowledge that by using this weapon I can send you to a place—Holbrook, is it?—occupied entirely by individuals who hate your guts and who will want to see you suffer the most painful death—or life—imaginable.” Eyeteeth glimmered in his smile. “What did you say was in the place? Tubers and cruciferous vegetables?” His smile broadened.

“
Bon appétit
,” he said.

The lamp swung violently on the end of its boom and connected with the back of Pablo’s head. He took a staggering step, and a black-and-white form streaked from beneath the sofa, electricity arcing from bared fangs.

Bitsy bit Pablo on the ankle, and his body straightened with the shock.

Aristide stepped forward and wrapped his left arm, snake-style, around Tecmessa’s bare blade.

The sword was, after all, a lever. Whoever had the best leverage controlled it.

He slammed Pablo away with the palm of his right hand and pulled the sword away with the left.

Shenai stepped forward and hit Pablo on the head with a vase she’d plucked from the chest of drawers. Pablo staggered, and as he recovered Aristide shifted the sword to his right hand and ran Pablo through the heart.

Vindex fell, his face fixed, an expression of baffled fury.

Aristide looked critically at his left forearm, which was bleeding rather freely after having wrapped the sharp-edged weapon.

He and Bitsy had planned the whole thing, Aristide communicating silently on his implant.

Shenai was gazing at Pablo’s dying form with sick anger.

“Don’t look,” Aristide advised. “The sight won’t be pleasant.”

She turned away and put her head against his shoulder. After a moment’s hesitating, Aristide put his bleeding arm around her shoulders.

Gunfire rattled the windows.

“It shouldn’t be long now,” he said, “before we’re rescued.”

24

Birdsong entered through the slatted blinds, and with it the fragrance of flowers and the airy tinkle of the wind chime. The last quarter-tones of the guitarrica danced in the air as if in answer to the gay water that spouted from the mouths of the bronze fishes atop the fountain.

Discontent settled upon her like the fine grey dust of the high plateau. She thanked the musicians, but waved them away before they could begin another ghazal. The young girls bowed and retreated, leaving her alone with the fountain and her thoughts.

Recline and watch the dance of the butterfly
, Ashtra thought idly,
and the dance of the heron.

She frowned and rose from the divan, her hands supporting her heavy belly. Her silks swished lightly on the cool marble as she walked to the tall window, and adjusted the blinds so that she could gaze out.

The city of Gundapur lay below her, its domes and towers bright against the sky. Beyond she could see green fields, and on a hill the white pavilion of the sultan. The Vale of Cashdan, the great cleft in the escarpment that led to the grey upland desert, was far away, invisible even from the city’s tallest tower, but sometimes, when the wind was right, dust carried all the way from that plateau turned the sky the color of iron.

Farther still, months away, was the Womb of the World. A rider had come to the sultan with the message the Womb was now closed, a result of a war between the sorcerers on the other side. The opinion at the court was that this on balance was a good thing. “Fewer adventurers,” her husband had proclaimed, “fewer bandits, fewer wars.”

Fewer magicians,
she thought.

Idly she tapped one heavy sapphire ring against the cypress windowsill. Its facets cast sunlight on the ceiling.

Her husband had proved to be considerate, even lavish. He had given her silks, jewels, and a large household staff. He gave her a generous allowance, and—for Gundapur—a fair amount of freedom.

But in this decisive man she could see no trace of the boy she had married seven years before. And though he was generous, he didn’t have the gift of intimacy. He spent little time in her company, preferring the society of other merchants or of companions he had made on his long journey. From excursions with his friends he returned late, if at all. He remained a stranger.

So, at times like these, when the dim sun’s heat hung heavy in the air, and the wind chime rang softly to the fitful, uncertain breeze, she thought of the swordsman and sorcerer she had met on her journey from County Toi, and recalled the hours spent beneath the willows next to the oasis where her caravan had tarried for fear of the evil Priests of the Venger…

Lucky, she thought, that the child she carried was her husband’s. She had counted the days, and was certain.

But with that anxiety faded, Ashtra could afford to indulge her fantasies.

He had called her “Ashtra of the Sapphire Eyes.” He had made verses for her. Her husband had never done such things, and never would.

Was he truly a prince in disguise? She liked to think he was. He was certainly more princely than the sultan, who she had now met on several occasions, and found a coarse, greedy man, too fond of the consumption tax, the bastinado, and the strangler’s bowstring as instruments of state policy.

By contrast, the sorcerer Aristide would have graced the sultan’s court, or any other. It was he, after all, who had inspired the expedition that destroyed the Priests of the Venger, and killed two of them in person even though others were afraid even to approach. The expedition, staggering down from the Vale with laden camels, had brought astounding wealth to Gundapur. The sultan had confiscated much of this for his own use, but enough was left that the price of palaces in the city had risen sharply, and drunken, boasting caravan guards had been a feature of urban life for two months before the city’s vice dens finally cleansed their purses…

Ashtra wondered if Aristide had returned to the Womb in time to pass through it before it was destroyed. She wondered if he was even now engaged with other sorcerers in some unimaginable combat for unimaginable stakes, on some unimaginable world full of unimaginable treasures and the monsters that guarded them.

She wondered what would have happened if she had accepted Aristide’s offer and traveled to the Womb. Would she now be princess of some foreign land, crowned with gold and jewels? Or would she have been caught in the war, or trapped on that side of the Womb when it was destroyed?

Would she now be at the window of another palace, her belly heavy, staring out at the world and waiting for her sorcerer-husband to return from another of his adventures?

If there is a child,
he had said,
I desire you send it to the College… particularly if it is a girl.

She had been dwelling on these words of late. Ashtra had the feeling that her child would be a girl, and she suspected her husband would be indifferent to anything but a healthy son. The girl wouldn’t be the magician’s child, but Aristide wouldn’t know that, nor would the scholars of the College. She knew of her own experience the limited opportunities faced by girls of her own class.

At the very least, a girl educated at the College would prove more valuable, and raise a larger bride-price from any future husband. She could only think her new merchant family would approve of that.

Of course, she thought, the College might not survive the closing of the Womb. Time would tell. But if it lasted, and if the child was a girl, then she would have to think seriously of this plan.

It would be necessary, Ashtra considered, for her husband to think it was his own idea…

She tapped her sapphire ring on the cypress-wood sill, and thought again of Aristide, his intense face, his precise hands.

She wondered again what would have become of her if she’d gone with him, on his quest toward the Womb of the World.

Ashtra indulged her fantasies a long moment, and then she drew away from the window and walked across the cool marble floors.

He would probably have abandoned her, she thought, in some mud-walled town. Got her with child and abandoned her.

All in all, she decided, things had probably worked out for the best.

Excelsior!

[a reassurance]

There were accidental cities once, that

Grew on hills or twined about rivers,

Swelling on paths of least resistance, spreading

On the land like a stain, wine and its lees.

Here a castle, there a market; there a

Noble goddess of gold and ivory

Crouched in her temple amid a foul slum.

By the city wall, a tannery filled

Mansions of the wealthy with its odor.