And here I was with a full bottle.
I cracked the seal and wafted the opening under my nose. The smell was... primal. Antediluvian. It made me think of the sea and things that might be found in its deepest depths. Of darkness and tastes predating history.
Reggie pranced over, happy and proud for having licked every plate clean. He climbed onto my chair, crossed onto my lap, and navigated up my chest to shove his face next to mine for a sniff of the bottle. I don’t know if it brought primordial oceans to his mind, but he yipped in interest. I reached for one of his freshly cleaned plates.
“Dugli’s dreams of cribble puffs will probably never materialize, but at least we get to sample the mysteries of liquid stonefish.” I poured a portion onto the plate and set it on the floor. It resembled a miniature oil slick, viscous, with a sickly, greenish tinge. Reggie gave it a tentative lick. He barked, jumped back from the plate, and barked again.
“Not to your liking, boy?” He advanced on the plate, gave it another lick, and backed off again. Weird. I considered taking a swig right from the bottle, then got up to fetch a glass instead, the better to appreciate it.
That’s about the time the remains of the oil slick exploded!
Reggie went flying, horns over tail, and landed on the other side of the suite. The blast knocked me off my feet, but I managed to hold onto the bottle. It sloshed a bit but not enough for anything to splash its way up and out of the neck, let alone mingle with the air or whatever else had produced such volatile fumes. I scrambled back to where I’d left the stopper, jamming it into place. To do this I’d had to maneuver around a crater in the floor that looked down into the suite on the level below.
Reggie scampered back, none the worse for being a cannonball. He peered into the hole and barked at the Bwill couple that were now looking up, twin expressions of confusion on their orange faces. My own expression didn’t look half so calm.
Someone from the hotel took the bottle away. Then someone else escorted Reggie and me out, and not into custody as I’d feared but into an even nicer suite. A third someone must have contacted Dugli because he arrived soon after in the company of the hotel manager who assured me nothing like that had ever happened before and couldn’t apologize enough.
After the manager had groveled sufficiently to allow him to exit I confronted Dugli.
“Someone just tried to kill me.”
“Don’t be absurd. You probably had some residue on your clothes that interacted with the liqueur. Something you brought in from offworld. I understand if you’re a little on edge after the accident, but that’s all it was. Flukes happen.”
“Maybe. Or maybe someone doesn’t want Nery brought back.”
“Conroy, there are probably a hundred people on Bwill who don’t want Nery back. Do you have any idea how many he betrayed? The man was a legend. He had the culinary powers of a god, the athletic prowess of a planetary champion, and a list of romantic conquests that included every Bwill female with any real political power, wealth, or beauty. He used his talents to worm his way into people’s confidences and then robbed them blind!”
“So you’re saying someone did try to kill me?”
“Not at all. Only that someone might, if he knew what we’re attempting. But nobody does. I told you, I’m the only one who knows that Rhine was Nery. If I thought otherwise, I’d be shoving you and your pet back onto that shuttle, and climbing in right behind you, and getting offworld before the fireworks started.”
Reggie chose that moment to bump against my leg for some attention. I scooped him up and stroked the fur on his hump. He closed his eyes and pressed his head against my chest. I said nothing, content to glare at the Caliopoean.
Dugli sighed. “Look, if it will make you feel any better, I’ll shift some other people around and make it look like you’re still staying here. Meanwhile, I’ll secretly move you to a different hotel, and in the morning send Rhine to you so you can do the regression there. Okay?”
“If you don’t believe there’s a threat, why are you so quick to humor me?”
“What I believe doesn’t matter, Conroy. If you think you’re in danger, you’re not going to be focused on the task at hand. I need you at the top of your game. We’ll probably only get one chance at this.”
“Why’s that? You said no one knows Rhine was once Nery.”
“No, but people are going to start asking questions soon enough, and if I could figure it out, once they know where to look, others will too. Before that happens, I want us both on my shuttle halfway back home.”
“With a big basket of seven cheese cribble puffs, I assume?”
Dugli smiled. “Two baskets. One for each of us.”
Dugli’s driver took us to a different hotel on the opposite side of town. The driver went in and registered a room in the name of the Bwill equivalent of John Smith, and Reggie and I moved in as unobtrusively as the only human and a buffalo dog on a planet full of ruddy, smelly, craggy people can manage. My buffalito has a long history of being able to curl up and sleep anywhere. Somehow, I followed his example, because I was awakened hours later by Dugli pounding on the door to my room. Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I had the room’s security console visually confirm the person who had yet to stop knocking, and let him in. He entered, escorting the familiar figure of an aging fish poet.
“Why are you here so early?” I double-locked the door and followed my ‘guests’ into the room.
“Early? Don’t be insulting, Conroy. We’ve been up for hours. Fish poets wake before dawn to meet the new catch at the docks. They find it inspirational. Now, let’s get started. Where do you want us?” Rhine had changed into clean overalls since yesterday’s performance at the pier. He moved with a limp. Dugli seated the Bwiller on a low couch, securing him all around with throw pillows.
“I want you gone. This isn’t a stage performance, so I don’t need an audience. Besides, you’ve got some misdirection to be managing. Leave me and, uh, Rhine here. We’ll be fine. Come back later, and bring brunch.”
The food critic glowered but left. I dropped into a chair across from Rhine and Reggie took it as his cue to leap into my lap. We both looked at the fish poet who sat staring at his bare feet.
“So, Rhine? Please tell me you speak Traveler, yes?”
He nodded. “Some. They taught us in school, back when I was a boy.” His voice rasped much as it had the day before, and his accent rang with an overlay of tones that might have been a critical part of his native language but had no place in the pidgin speech used by this part of the galaxy.
“Great. And you know why you’re here?”
“Your friend thinks I used to be someone else, and that you can make me remember who. I told him he’s wrong, that I’ve always been me.” He lifted his head and smiled. His eyes were a pale mint green. “He was very certain though. When he was done I was half convinced he was right.”
“But only half?”
“Mr. Conroy, look at me. Look at my hands. See all these scars? They’re from a lifetime of handling stonefish. I’ve worked with them all my life, fishing and netting and mongering and versing. These aren’t the hands of a lover or a champion caster. I’ve had my share of tumbles in and out of beds, and as a fry I cast discs with my friends, same as everyone else. But my life’s been hard work. The man your friend wants me to be didn’t do menial work like that. If he were here, his hands would be manicured, not rubbed raw by life.”
I studied his outstretched hands and the crisscross traceries of too many scars. Were any of them more than twenty years old? Were some of them caused not by catching stonefish but from cooking them?
“Well, like you said, Dugli can be pretty insistent. Since we’re both here, and he won’t be back with brunch for a while, why don’t we humor him and give this a try? Just sit back, close your eyes, and listen to my voice. Let the room fade away and picture yourself back at the pier. Imagine the sounds and smells of the place, the taste of the air, the feel of things.”
/> I continued building a familiar sensory tableau and eased him into a suggestible state. Then I created a two word trigger that instantly plunged him deeper each time I spoke it. Then up again, then deeper. Which answered the first of Dugli’s unasked questions: the natives of Bwill could indeed be hypnotized. I took my time, reinforcing the trance over and over, until I was having a conversation with a part of his subconscious mind. Everything to this point had been preamble and stage setting. It was time to get specific.
“Do you know who Nery was?”
He snorted, eyes still closed, slumped over but alert despite his posture. “Everyone knows Nery. He was famous. Dead too, for about twenty years now.”
“Think about him for me. Imagine everything you know about him is arrayed before you, like silvery fish in a net.”
“I see them.”
“Good. Now, grasp a fish, the one that represents your earliest memory of Nery. What is it?”
“When he came from nowhere and won the world title. I’d just gotten back from days at sea, been working as part of a five-man crew and we had a hold full to bursting of stonefish, twice what we’d hoped to bring in. The whole crew had landed in a bar at the dock and was celebrating, and there on the vid was Nery, hitting every target on the range with his disc, ricocheting it off pillars and beams with precision casting like no one had ever seen. It was poetry watching him...” He fell silent, and his hands, which had been clenched tightly around an imaginary fish as he spoke, fell open and empty again.
“Take up the next fish in the net,” I said. “What’s that memory?”
“A story I heard from a bedmate. She was going on and on about some actresses in the tabloids, fighting over which of them was having a fling with him...”
“And the next?”
“Delivering a fresh catch to one of his restaurants. Just missed meeting the man himself. I was dropping off a cage of gargantua crabs. One of the other chefs signed for ’em. Nery was out front, hobnobbing with some diners and serving up cribble puffs...”
We went on like that for most of an hour, one gleaming fish of memory at a time. Each sounded flat, like a news clipping from Nery’s life tied to a bit of episodic memory from Rhine’s, up to and including where he’d been when Nery’s death sentence had been announced.
“That’s when I took up my knives and words. It just didn’t make sense no more, that someone larger than life like that could be brought low. Just ’cause my life didn’t matter wasn’t excuse to snuff out his. That was my inspiration. That injustice gave me voice, and these hands that had caught and hauled began to carve and slice, and the poems just came out of me from nowhere.”
This last memory convinced me. The fish poet had been born when the master spy had died. Rhine and Nery were one and the same. But knowing that wasn’t the same as being able to do anything about it. I couldn’t regress him back to his other self. The transpersonality techniques had installed a past into him. Whether it was fictitious or borrowed or constructed from a template didn’t matter. It was whole and complete unto itself. I tried to slip past it, sneak into Nery’s memories by some backdoor association, via primal emotions, even through base sensations of pain and delight, but I couldn’t. There wasn’t anything to sneak into. His memories hadn’t simply been erased. Rhine’s had overwritten them. Nery was dead, and only the fish poet remained.
I eased Rhine back to full consciousness, leaving him with the suggestion that he’d feel relaxed and well rested and with no ill effects from his hypnotic experience.
“Did it work? Am I really Nery, like your Caliopoean believes?”
Reggie jumped into Rhine’s lap and butted his head against the fish poet’s stomach demanding to be petted. “No. And yes. I think he was right, but those memories, the person you were, if any of that still exists I can’t reach it.”
“Good.” His fingers worked through the ringlets of Reggie’s wooly head.
“You wouldn’t want to be famous?”
“I do sonnets about people who are larger than life. They always end tragically. It’s better to be a fish poet. Sure, I live on charity, but people think I’m lucky. And the hours are better.”
My smile was interrupted by a rumble from my stomach. I hadn’t had breakfast and it was well past time for lunch. Dugli still hadn’t returned and I wasn’t willing to wait any longer. After yesterday’s experience, room service was out of the question.
“Are you familiar with this part of the island? Any place you’d recommend for a good meal? I’m buying.”
Rhine set Reggie aside and stretched. “Have you ever had Nyonya?”
“You have Indonesian food here on Bwill?”
“We have a culinary exchange program with several planets, yours among them. Every year we send some of our best chefs offworld for a year. Many return and open fusion restaurants. There’s a woman who went to Malaysia and came back with a cargo of leaves and spices. Her place isn’t far, but we can’t get a pedicab this time of day. Do you know how to ride a bicycle?”
I smiled. “It’s been a while, but I’m sure it will come back to me.”
He limped to a comm unit on the wall and called down to the front desk. “They’ll have a pair of bicycles waiting for us by the time we get downstairs. You’ll probably want a basket for yours if your friend is coming.”
Reggie yipped. “I wouldn’t dream of denying him a taste of Nyonya-Bwill fusion.”
It’s true what they say about riding a bicycle. I hadn’t been on one in decades, but after a wobbly beginning that startled Reggie, my body remembered what to do and I was traveling smoothly down an avenue on a sunny, noxious day. Rhine peddled effortlessly alongside. After twenty minutes of brisk, below-the-waist exercise we were deep in the corporate sector of town and guiding our bicycles down canyons formed by hundred-storey walls of capitalistic zeal, all gleaming ceramo and hurricane-proof glass that was as different from the poverty of the docks as day from night. A doorman dressed in a loose tunic, trousers, and sarong took charge of our bicycles and welcomed us to Nyonya Baba. The restaurant was one of several in the building that catered to the robber barons responsible for running things on Bwill. The lunch rush had come and gone. The maître d’ didn’t look twice at me, but practically bowed to Rhine as she escorted us through the maze and past a dozen empty tables before seating us by a window.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but this doesn’t strike me as the kind of place you could normally afford.”
“It’s not. But it’s considered lucky to have a fish poet in your establishment, provided he can afford the fare. You’re still paying, aren’t you?”
I nodded, and we ordered three servings of the day’s special, a variation on traditional otak-otak made with stonefish wrapped in a locally grown banana leaf. Whether a result of the exercise getting here or the exquisite meal, Rhine became loquacious. While Reggie and I ate he unwound an introduction to the intricacies of fish poetry with commentary on everything from the complex pairing of vocal pitch and stress with angle and speed of knife strokes while juggling/slicing a marinated stonefish within the strictures of a sonnet’s fourteen lines.
As we topped off our meal with kuih, brightly colored cakes made from the Brill equivalent of glutinous rice, he brought his lecture to a close. “Ultimately, it’s a lot like the bicycle.”
I paused with a mouthful of cake. “Sorry?”
“Once you know how to do it, you don’t worry about it any more. I don’t have to think about the movements of the knives or the rhythms of my voice. That’s automatic. All of my focus is reserved for the new part, the words I’m using for that specific poem. Everything else my body already knows how to do.”
Reggie chose that moment to let loose with a long stream of otak-otak inspired flatulence, which in turn triggered an epiphany for me. I knew the solution to Dugli’s problem.
When it came time to pay the bill, I asked the waiter to send the manager over. From her flawless pumpkin complexion
she had to have been older than Rhine. Her long, lustrous hair was as black as the shimmering pajamas she wore. She addressed Rhine first, speaking in a local language. He waved her to me and she switched to crisp and flawless Traveler.
“You found your meal satisfactory, sir?”
“No, I found it incredible. I’ve had the pleasure of dining in Singapore and Malacca many times, and your otak-otak was the finest I’ve ever sampled.”
“I will pass your words on to our chef. Please, how else may I be of assistance?”
I’d hoped for more of a reaction, but I hadn’t praised the food to soften her up. “This is going to sound very odd, but I would like to rent out your restaurant for the rest of the day.”
“Sir? I am sorry, but if you wish to host a dinner party here, you would need to give us at least six days notice.”
“You misunderstand. I don’t want dinner. I want the restaurant. Actually, just the kitchen. But everyone can go home. Everyone has to go home. I want to pay you for the use of your empty kitchen and have you close your restaurant. Just for the next few hours.”
“What you ask is not possible.”
“Normally, I suppose not. But it’s your lucky day. I’m traveling with a fish poet of some renown.” I took out my credit chip, keyed in the cost of lunch, moved the decimal point three places to the right, and handed it to her. “Possible?”
She stared at the chip long enough to confirm the number. Then she pulled back a sleeve to reveal a standard comm bracelet and clipped my chip to its transaction port before I could change my mind. As she handed back my chip she spoke to her wrist, a rapid singsong of instructions. In the next instant she was gone.
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