Implied Spaces (12 page)

“It would be a wormhole
factory
,” Bitsy said.

Lin looked at Daljit. “Do you think the enemy would have developed this idea?”

“
I
thought of it just a few hours after discovering the enemy’s existence,” Daljit said. “And our enemy has one of the Eleven to do his thinking for him.”

Lin reached for his tobacco pouch. “This is going to be more than a three-pipe problem,” he said.

A pipe and a half later Lin said, “Let’s assume that the enemy are, ah,
recruiting
in pockets other than Midgarth. Where are they likely to be operating?”

“Anywhere people don’t normally wear implants,” Aristide said. “Olduvai has—what?—fifteen billion hunter-gatherers? There’s al-Andalus, where the imams forbid electronics to stand between themselves and Allah. Other communities with a religious foundation—New Zion, New Sinai, New Rome, New Byzantium, New Qom, New Nauvoo, New Carnac, New Konya, New Jerusalem…”

“The
other
New Jerusalem,” added Daljit.

“No,” Aristide said. “Not there. The last civil war was won by the Lutherans, who had implants. So implants are allowed now.”

“
Except
,” patiently, “in certain communities, with a religious foundation. Mennonites, for example.”

“Ah,” Aristide said. “Conceded.”

“Give me a
little
damn credit,” Daljit said.

Aristide rubbed his chin. “Sorry.”

They were all getting tired, he thought.

“The religious pockets,” said Lin, “keep very good records, even if they don’t make them available via implant. A series of disappearances would go remarked.”

“Unless the records were destroyed by some crusade or other,” Aristide said.

It was true that many of the religious pockets had a history of violence. People religious enough to want to live in a world dominated by faith were also religious enough to guard their souls against doctrinal error, which logically meant suppressing, persecuting, or killing those who might corrupt even the minor details of doctrine. Even orderly New Rome, where Pope Perpetuus had reigned for over seven hundred years, had fallen into disorder on the pontiff’s assassination by a cardinal weary of waiting his turn to sit on Peter’s throne.

After a few generations of warfare, though, the fanatics were either killed along with their backups, or were persuaded to modify their positions. Most of the religious pockets had evolved into low-density lands devoted to agriculture, abundance, popular piety, and toleration.

And in any case, it was largely the monotheist pockets that caused the trouble. Polytheists had always been more tolerant of other sects, and in addition Buddhists and Hindus were wild for implant technology, as were the Mormons of Nauvoo.

“There hasn’t been a crusade recently,” Daljit pointed out. “Other than a few bombs planted by the followers of the latest Twelfth Imam.”

“There was more to it than that,” Lin said. “But I can’t talk about it, and in the event no records were lost.”

“There are very few implants on Hawaiki,” said Bitsy.

Aristide looked at her in surprise. “It’s a high-tech pocket,” he said.

“Radio waves,” said Daljit, “don’t propagate through water.”

“Ahh.” Aristide was annoyed with himself. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“There have been disappearances reported on Hawaiki,” Bitsy said. “Three in the last eight weeks. In every case, the person was reported missing and then reappeared, alive and well.”

“And with a new brain,” muttered Daljit.

“Where on Hawaiki?” Aristide asked.

“All in the Thousand Islands chain. Which, by the way, consist of over three thousand islands.”

Lin closed his eyes and tilted his head back, as if sniffing the wind for any remaining tobacco smoke.

“It’s going to be hard putting agents in there,” he said.

“I’ll go tomorrow,” said Aristide.

Lin’s eyes opened.

“You’re not trained,” he said. “We don’t have backup in place, or a safe identity for you, or a secure form of communication.”

Aristide gave him a thin-lipped smile. “If you’ll look at my record, which I expect Bitsy is sending to you at this very instant, you’ll see that I’ve had some experience in the field of private inquiry. As for backup, communication, travel documents, and a convincing false identity, Bitsy can provide all that.”

He rose, stretched, and put his hands in his pockets.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve always wondered what it’s like to live under water.”

“‘Experience in the field of private inquiry’?” Daljit said.

“I infiltrated the Three Virtues Movement about eight hundred years ago, before I met you.”

Her eyes widened. “Really? Why?”

“They were holding my daughter hostage.”

“Which daughter? Françoise?” Daljit blinked in surprise. “She never mentioned it.”

“Perhaps she’s embarrassed nowadays by the youthful enthusiasms that got her in trouble.” Idly his fingers ran along Tecmessa’s case, which hung under his arm—Tecmessa had first been used in the Three Virtues crisis.

They walked along Myriad City’s Boulevard of Flowers. Tulips, planted for a city festival, were ranked in thousands beside the walks and in the median strip. Even in the light of the streetlamps the colors were brilliant. Some were so hybridized they looked more like orchids.

Above them loomed the city’s extravagant architecture, pinnacles and domes softly aglow beneath the blackness of the sky. A fresh breeze gusted from the sea, scented with salt and iodine. The sun’s corona was still visible, fainter now, a pale anemone in the sea of night.

Behind them Bitsy moved, a noiseless parting of the tulips.

“What sort of youthful enthusiasms?” Daljit asked.

He shrugged. “She was trying to make the worlds a better place.”

“Oh.” She smiled. “And you’ve never done
that
.”

He shrugged again. “I never said I set her a good example.”

The Boulevard of Flowers took a broad left turn and merged with Rampart Street. Daljit and Aristide crossed the empty road. From here they could gaze from the top of a crenellated wall of cream-colored stone down into the business district, the towers flanking one another right out into the sea, where the water lapped at transparent wall panels. Beyond the towers the sea rolled, reflecting the near-absolute black of the sky.

From overhead came the throbbing of an airship, a silver giant ghosting through the air.

Daljit turned to him. “Do you have any other skills useful in this… situation?”

He looked at the distant sea. “I was a footsoldier in the Control-Alt-Delete War,” he said. “But then so was everyone.” He remembered Carlito sweating contagion as he trembled in his fever, Antonia lunging for him with the rake. A haunted light glinted in his eyes.

“Whoever coined the phrase ‘World War,’” he said, “had no idea what the real thing would mean, a fight that involved every single human being.”

She shuddered, drew up the collar of her coat, and hugged herself. “I don’t have any skills that are remotely useful for this,” she said. “I don’t know how to fight this kind of war. I don’t know how to infiltrate an enemy, or map out a strategy, or even…” She made a wild gesture with one hand. “—
fight with a sword!”
With her hand still out, she swept it toward the city below them. “And all that could end, couldn’t it? Tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.”

He understood her despair. The Seraphim had only been the first mind-warping plague to strike. Various counter-Seraphim viruses had been released, in hopes of breaking the new allegiance of the infected. Some worked, some didn’t, but in any case there were unforeseen side effects. And then, once the Seraphim had demonstrated proof-of-concept, and other geneticists hacked the virus, imitation Seraphim appeared—the Cherubim, the Powers, the Thrones, the Dominions, each rewriting the brain to worship a new ideal. And then, as the world began what seemed an inexorable slide into Hobbes’ war of all against all, the zombie plagues appeared, designed not to change allegiance but to cause chaos in the target zone, as those infected began to methodically kill everyone who didn’t share their fury.

It had been a zombie plague that had caught Antonia, on that desperate run to Cuzco for supplies.

Aristide tried to steady himself.

“Oh, the world wouldn’t
end,
” Aristide said. “It would just change its
purpose
.” He stepped behind her and put his arms around her shivering form. “Instead of being an expression of humanity’s diversity and expression, it would become an
offering
. An offering to a new god, a god with a hundred billion worshipers whose sole purpose is to make that god happy. A god more absolute than old Jehovah in Jeremiah’s wildest dreams.”

Her pulse beat hard in her throat. He looked tenderly at the place where it throbbed, and spoke on.

“But it won’t be easy for the enemy. We’re more diverse than we were, and our culture is on guard against certain forms of attack. We live in four dozen pockets and settlements orbiting other stars. The enemy isn’t striking here, but on backward places like Midgarth, and that’s because the new god is weak. And while it’s weak, it’s vulnerable, and we can trap it and kill it.”

He straightened, touching her shoulders lightly as if steadying her, or possibly himself.

“We’re in dozens of different pocket universes now,” he said. “And half a dozen star systems. We’re not nearly as vulnerable as we were when we were all on a single planet. So I’d say it’s premature to say goodbye to all this just yet.”

She turned and put her arms around him. He embraced her gently.

“Pray you’re right,” she said.

He smiled and touched her lips with a finger. “Better not pray out loud,” he said. “The wrong god might be listening.”

They walked arm in arm down Rampart, toward a round tower that reared up like a stack of silver serving trays, a part of the university complex where Daljit had her apartment. An occasional vehicle hissed by on the roadway. They paused at the lacy arched bridge that ran from the parapet to her tower. She stepped onto the bridge, her hand still in his.

“I don’t know whether to thank you or not,” she said. “It’s the strangest night of my life.”

“And mine,” said Aristide, “if that’s any consolation.”

She shook her head. “Privately owned wormholes used as weapons! Pablo, that’s terrifying.”

“It’s scary all right,” he said.

She gave a brittle laugh. “I’m going to open a bottle of gin,” she said, “drink myself to sleep, then call in sick in the morning.” She pulled her hand free of his and turned toward the tower.

“Don’t go just yet,” Aristide said. Daljit hesitated and turned to look at him over her shoulder.

Aristide turned to the cat. “Bitsy?”

Bitsy’s voice came from the deep shadow cast by a crenel. “No one new seems to be paying an unusual amount of attention to us,” she said.

Such was the ubiquity of electronics throughout the technological worlds that it was rarely necessary for the authorities, or anyone else, to do actual surveillance. Much could be learned about a target simply by monitoring databases open to the public. For that reason, it was difficult even for Bitsy to be certain that no single intelligence was keeping track of them.

Daljit’s eyes widened as she understood what Bitsy’s comments implied. Aristide gave her a reassuring smile.

“It looks as if I won’t have to call bodyguards for you,” he said.

She absorbed this, then slowly shook her head. “
Two
bottles of gin!” she cried, and began a sprint that took her across the bridge.

Aristide waited until she’d entered the building, and then turned to the cat.

“She’s changed,” he said.

Bitsy licked a paw.

“So have I,” he continued. He touched his former mustache with a foreknuckle. “Do you think the two of us have changed enough to make it interesting again?”

Bitsy put her paw on the pavement. “Sometimes,” she said, “I’m immensely grateful that I don’t possess a limbic system.”

He summoned memories of the earlier Daljit, the red-haired Amazon, and recalled a couplet.

Daljit of the Titian hair

 Accepting almost any dare.

Had someone dared her to turn male? he wondered. Or sprout wings?

The couplet triggered a series of associations: Daljit laughing, Daljit running, Daljit playing ice hockey. Daljit in bed.

Aristide collected memories, stringing lines of poetry like pearls on a cord. When he called the lines to his mind, a host of memories accompanied them. Memories which he otherwise might have lost.

Should he make a new verse? he wondered.

Daljit of the charming mole

 Hiding in her gin-soaked hole.

Perhaps tonight he was not in the poetical vein.

Aristide turned to walk up Rampart Street in the direction from which he’d come. The cat ghosted alongside.

“Any idea yet who our villain might be?” Aristide asked.

“No,” Bitsy said, “though I’m finding the game itself quite interesting. I can’t ask the questions straight out, because that would tell the enemy what I’m looking for. So the inquiries have to come from many different directions, along with requests for unrelated, innocuous data, and of course the requests all have to be plausible. All the computation I’m doing has to be disguised as something else. And in the meantime the rogue machine is covering its traces by disguising one set of data as another, and all the while lying as little as possible, because over time lies can be detected much more easily than perfectly genuine data that happen to look like something they aren’t.”

He looked down at her. “How do you rate your prospects of success?”

“Nearly hopeless. When I was looking for googolwatts of missing energy and vast amounts of computation time, I had a good chance of finding something. But now I don’t know what I’m looking for, so I’ve got to look at
everything
and hope it adds up somehow.” Her tone was petulant. “I wish I could at least
exclude
another of the Eleven. Then the two of us could work together on the problem.”

They had returned to the intersection of Rampart and Flowers, and continued along Rampart. They came to a tall, narrow tower projecting from the rampart, one with a narrow stair that would take sightseers to an enhanced view of the glittering coast below. An osprey had built a nest atop the tower, and the tower was closed to visitors until the young birds had flown.