Implied Spaces (9 page)

Aristide grinned. “Perhaps you’re underestimating the percentage of medievalists who play fantasy games.”

“Perhaps.”

“But in any case, the fertile valley has to be adjacent to the ocean, because the river’s got to go
somewhere,
and in the meantime you’ve got this mountain range with its romantic tarn over
here
… so what goes in between?”

She looked at him. “You’re going to tell me it’s a squinch.”

“Bingo. By the time you’ve got all your computations done and dumped all the energy into inflating a wormhole from the quantum foam…” Aristide made little rubbing gestures with his fingers, as if he were sprinkling alchemical powders into an alembic. “… and you’ve stabilized the wormhole gate with negative-mass matter, then inflated a soupçon of electrons and protons into a pocket universe complete with a flaming gas ball in the center… Once you’ve got your misty mountain range and your moisty river valley, what goes between the mountain range and river valley is implied by the architecture, and is in fact a high desert plain, like the Gobi, only far less attractive…”

A whirring began as one of the machines in the room turned on its fans. Daljit looked briefly at her displays, then turned to Aristide again.

“So you study this desert?”

“I study what
adapts
to the desert. The desert wasn’t intended, so whatever lives there wasn’t intended to live there, either. It’s all strayed in from another ecosystem and adapted to the desert, and it’s adapting with surprising speed.”

“And what lives there?”

He gave a private little smile. “Ants and spiders, mostly.”

The mole on her cheek twitched. “Your chosen field seems less than enthralling.”

“The sword-swinging bandits provided all the excitement necessary.”

She gave him an appraising look. “So you really fought bandits with your sword? And murderous priests devoted to human sacrifice?”

Aristide reached to touch Tecmessa, which was at present carried in a long, flat case, and which leaned against Daljit’s desk.

“I cheated,” he said. “And in any case, the certainty of reincarnation devalues heroism as well as tragedy.”

“But still. It’s not the same as pressing a button and killing them at a distance, is it?”

“No.” His expression was grim. “Though I didn’t actually kill any human beings—just the priests, who I imagine were constructs.”

The last cry hovers in air,
he thought,

The creature dies, never having properly lived.

In the palm of my hand
,
through a yard of steel

I feel the last throbs of the wasted heart
.

It had been disturbingly personal, and wakened memories that he had rather remained a-slumber.

But still, it hadn’t been anything nearly as bad as the Control-Alt-Delete War. You were always terrified then, terrified every time you saw someone sick, every time you heard a sneeze or a cough. Every time you sensed sickness in your own blood you had to wonder if it was the Seraphim or a common cold that had ahold of you.

You would wait for your friends or loved ones to go into a coma, and then you knew they would have to die. Because you knew that if they woke up, they would not be themselves anymore, they would be pod people.

Sometimes, when the authorities were overwhelmed or sick themselves or out of reach, you had to kill the sick yourself. No matter how much you loved them.

Strangulation was best, because that way there was no blood that might contaminate you, or at any rate not much. But however you did it, you would have to go into quarantine, to wait in a little room with a bed and water and canned food, and if you shivered while you waited, or felt a prickle of sweat on your forehead, you would sit in silent cringing agony and wonder if it was the first touch of the Seraphim.

Aristide turned away from Daljit, faced the nearest wall. He didn’t want her to see the memory in his face.

There was no point in frightening her. If something like the Seraphim was happening now, she would be frightened soon enough.

“I understand that the priests were constructs,” Daljit said, “but why were they made so conspicuous? You’d think they’d want to hide among the population.”

“Except for the adventurers and anthropologists who come through the Womb,” Aristide said, “the people of Midgarth are stranded in the pre-technological world their ancestors built. They’re superstitious, and the priests were designed to be terrifying examples of the power of their god.” He felt moisture on his palms and wiped them on his jacket, where the intelligent spider silk began the business of decomposing sweat.

“One of the bandits we captured was a sincere convert, I think. He led us to the priests’ lair firm in the belief that we’d all be sacrificed alive.”

The nearest machine gave a chiming sound. Daljit turned to her displays.

Her even brows knit as she looked at the display. Aristide turned and looked over her shoulder. She gave the display instructions and viewed the data from another angle. Then she sighed and threw herself back in her chair.

“I’ve examined your object with chemical sniffers,” she said, “with microimagery, with ultrasound, with microwaves, with spectrometry and x-rays and with lasers, and all I can tell you is that the damned thing is ordinary terra-cotta. I can give you the precise amount of trace minerals in its makeup, but it doesn’t look unusual.”

“Untraceable?”

“I can do some further correlation, see if there’s a particular combination of minerals here that only occurs in one tiny part of the multiverse. But we don’t
know
every tiny part of the multiverse, so the odds may not be on our side.”

Aristide frowned, and touched with a foreknuckle the corner of his mouth where until recently he had worn his mustache. He walked to one of the machines, opened a door, and withdrew one of the clay balls he had brought through the Womb of the World. A shriveled bit of sinew was still attached to it, the remains of the cord that had tied it to the priest.

“The organic component?” he asked.

“Has unfortunately deteriorated. You can’t expect much after three months’ ride across a pre-technological landscape. There’s no clear indication from what remains how the object was controlled.”

She raised her arms over her head and stretched, then rose from her chair. “I know a good organic chemist,” she added, “who might spot something I’ve missed.”

Aristide rolled the terra-cotta ball in the palm of his hand. “Won’t be necessary. The wormhole collapsed as soon as the connection with the operator was removed—some kind of fail-safe mechanism.” He dropped the clay ball into a clear plastic specimen bag and put it in the pocket of his jacket.

“I think the skulls and hands will give us more information,” Daljit said. “Bone tells many more tales than withered flesh.” She sighed, walked to him, touched his arm. “And I may yet find something in the other two objects.”

He drew two more bags from his pockets and looked at them.

“I agree we should examine them,” he said. “But you can automate the whole process, yes?—there’s no reason why we should wait here while your machines go through their motions. May I give you dinner?”

“You may.” Daljit was pleased by the offer.

She put each of the samples into different machines, then gave them instructions, and instructed as well a small desktop robot that would shift the samples from one machine to the next. Aristide walked to Daljit’s desk and picked up Tecmessa, swinging its case over his shoulder on its strap. He picked up Daljit’s soft spider-silk jacket from the rack behind her desk and offered it to her as she approached. She turned, backed herself into the jacket, and smoothed the lapels as he placed it over her shoulders.

“Has there been some advance in wormhole science since I was last paying attention?” he asked as she led him to the door.

“Not that I know of.”

“So it still requires a vast amount of energy and a prodigious amount of calculation to produce a successful Einstein-Rosen bridge.”

The door sprang open at her approach. She paused in the doorway and turned to him. “Yes. As I understand it.”

Aristide was grim. “That reduces the count suspects to a manageable number. The problem is that they are all enormously powerful.” Again he stroked the ghost of his mustache with a knuckle. “Use of that much energy and that much computer time should be traceable, in theory. But to detect it might require someone of Bitsy’s intelligence.”

She was amused. “Do you still have that horrible cat?”

“Yes,” said Bitsy. “He does.”

Daljit gave a start and raised a hand to her throat. Bitsy jumped onto Daljit’s desk and settled on her haunches before the display.

“I didn’t know you were here,” Daljit said weakly.

“I lurk,” said the cat.

There was a moment of silence in which Aristide managed not to laugh out loud.

Daljit cleared her throat. “I’m sorry for what I said,” she said.

Bitsy’s green eyes were fixed on the display. “As the avatar,” she said, “of a vast array of quantum parallel processors orbiting the sun as part of an as-yet-incomplete matrioshka array, I’m rather above taking offense at that sort of thing.”

There was another pause.

“Thank you,” said Daljit finally.

“But if Aristide wants to have sex with you,” the cat added, “I’m not helping.”

Daljit looked in silent surprise at the cat, and then at Aristide.

“Look among your colleagues,” Aristide said to Bitsy, “for traces of the energy necessary to create those wormhole gates, and for the calculation, too.”

The cat was nonchalant. “Already on it, Pops.”

“And be careful. The guilty party will be on the lookout for anyone trying to find them.”

“I’ll be slick as butter,” Bitsy promised.

Daljit and Aristide stepped through the doorway, and the door closed silently behind them. The corridor outside the laboratory was carpeted in soft green mosses that absorbed the sound of their footsteps.

“That animal of yours is scary,” Daljit said.

“I find she settles a lot of arguments before they get started.”

“‘Speak softly and carry an omniscient feline?’”

“Quite,” he said, and took her arm.

They sat before a plate of oysters. After months of dried fruit and chunks of mutton skewered over a dung fire, Aristide had developed a vast appetite for fresh seafood.

“So how,” Daljit asked, “does the cat help you to have sex?”

Daljit had deliberately waited until an oyster was already sliding down his tongue, and Aristide managed only barely to keep from snorting shellfish out his nose.

“Bitsy confines herself to introductions,” he said, after clearing his throat. “An animal twining itself around another’s legs provides an opening for conversation.”

“And how does the avatar of an awesomely intelligent AI feel about being used for the tawdry purposes of seduction?”

Aristide was offended. “Madame,” he said, “I am never tawdry. As you should know.”

She considered him. “True,” she said. “You’re not.”

They sat on a cream-colored boat that grazed on the waters near the metropolis and gave diners a view of the city’s miraculous profile. Above their heads, visible through a transparent canopy, the sun was on the verge of its daily miracle.

They looked up as the sun—a more advanced model than that of Midgarth—began to flicker and fade. Shadows flew rapidly across its disk. And then the photosphere settled into a stable state, and photons were no longer able to escape. The sun went black—but surrounding the black disk was the corona, still glowing with heat, its swirls and columns a cosmic echo of the city’s skyline.

The corona would fade over the next seven-point-nine-one hours, after which the sun’s photosphere would grow chaotic again, and the sun blaze out to light a new day.

“How long has it been,” Daljit asked, “since you were last in Myriad City?”

Aristide’s gaze continued upward.

“I pass through from time to time,” he said. “When I’m not traveling, I keep a little cabin on Tremaine Island.”

“Where’s that?”

“Past Mehmet’s Lagoon. I hire a boatman to take me in and out.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And you’re alone out there? In that remote area?”

He shrugged, then looked down to dabble horseradish on a blue point. “It’s enough for Aristide. And besides, it’s an implied space. No one
intended
to put an island there. If I ever get bored, I can go out and contemplate the pollywogs and butterflies.”

“When you and I lived together,” she said, “you cultivated a certain seigneurial grandeur. Fresh flowers every morning, genuine paintings on the walls rather than videos of paintings. Green lawns, and deference from the neighbors.”

Aristide contemplated the thick viridian essence of his cocktail as it brewed in its crystal glass.

“I grew tired,” he said. “Not of my surroundings, but of all that was necessary to maintain them. Now if I want something, I’ll rent, and let someone else do the work.” He looked up. “But you’d be surprised how well I’ve adapted to simplicity. My cabin has a stone floor that I laid myself, out of rock that I carried to the site in a barrow. And when I took my stroll through Midgarth, I carried a rug rolled up in my pack, and that was my bed.”

She smiled. “I’ll wager it was a nice rug.”

“It was. Two hundred thousand double knots per square meter, or something like that. But still it was a rug, not a down mattress.” He began to stroke the place where his mustache had been, caught himself, and lowered his hand.

“Midgarth was something of a relief. A place that’s completely unwired, where I can’t be monitored by anyone with access to the net.”

“Are there still people who do that?”

“A surprising number. Bitsy keeps me informed of the total—and also turns off cameras here and there, so I can have a little privacy.” He frowned. “She turned off all the public cameras between your lab and the pier, so that we won’t be observed and there won’t be speculation about what this dinner might mean for our future. But it’s possible one of our fellow diners might be recording us, and in that case Bitsy can do nothing.”