Implied Spaces

by Walter Jon Williams

  Daljit’s apartment was on the forty-ninth floor, with a view of the River District. He heard soft tones sounding inside the apartment as he approached the door. When Daljit opened the door, she looked at him with narrowed eyes.

  “Just as I was getting used to you being blond,” she said. She gestured at a pile on the floor of the hall. “Here’s your stuff. I wish you’d warn me when you’re having crap delivered here.”

  She evaded his kiss and withdrew to the kitchen.

  The scent of frying onions filled the apartment. Aristide looked ruefully at his new clothing in the paper delivery bags that Daljit had first torn open, then dropped in the hall when she realized they weren’t meant for her. He picked up his belongings and withdrew to the bathroom, where he changed. He wrapped Franz Sandow’s clothing in the torn remains of the bags and placed them on the small table near the door, then stepped to the kitchen door, where Daljit was furiously chopping vegetables with a Chinese cleaver.

  “Are you cooking dinner?” he asked. “That’s liberal of you.”

  Daljit slapped spices with the flat of her blade. There was a sudden scent of cardamom and cloves.

  “I’ll make badaami murgh,” she said, “if I can just get some peace.”

  “There was an explosion at the Stellar plant,” Aristide said. “Some casualties, apparently, since the hospital was very busy.”

  She looked at him with anger in her eyes. Light glittered off the cleaver. “I’m trying to concentrate,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Aristide said, and withdrew to the front room.

  One wall of the apartment was polarized glass, currently set to darken the room. Aristide told the glass to lighten, and then stepped forward to admire the view, Myriad City’s wild architectural profusion in brilliant crystalline light. He opened the door onto a terrace and stood for a moment with his hands on the smooth curves of the shining composite rail, the sharp wind ruffling his hair as he considered the contrast in Daljit’s mood between the morning and the present.

  The barque of the previous evening, with its cargo of poetry and delight, seemed to have run aground. He did not hold out much hope for a rescue.

  Daljit had clearly reconsidered her connection with Aristide. Perhaps the ardor of the previous evening had been the result of overstimulation—Tumusok had been her first murder, after all, and passions had been high. But in the cold light of day, she had seemingly reconsidered. Perhaps she had decided that they had been correct to end their first relationship, those long decades ago.

  And this on top of Ashtra’s rejection. Aristide wondered if he had finally reached the age when his life experience, his birth on Earth, and the great weight of his experience had finally made it impossible for him to relate to anyone born in the centuries since humanity had abandoned its birthplace.

  A shame. It was desire that kept him human. The limbic system hadn’t failed him yet.

  He looked down at the sound of a siren. On Rampart Street below a police car slithered through traffic like an eel, computer guidance giving it an uncanny ability to weave through moving vehicles with a clearance of millimeters. Ahead was a fugitive car, the fact that it was caroming off other vehicles providing clear evidence that its own computer guidance had been sabotaged—normally the traffic AI would seize control of a vehicle seconds after an accident, and steer it to a safe stop.

  As Aristide watched, the fugitive driver made a mistake, hit another car, and his vehicle spun off the road in a cloud of dust and blue tiresmoke. The car struck the stanchion of a streetlight and crumpled. A wheel bounced free and leaped down the road in a series of high, exuberant bounds.

  By the time the driver fought free of his safety gear and left the vehicle, the police car had already stopped, and its uniformed driver had disembarked. The renegade driver saw the officer approaching, and turned to run.

  The police officer shot him. From his position on the terrace Aristide could hear the distinct pop-pop-pop of the officer’s sidearm. The renegade driver fell.

  Aristide stared in complete surprise. He hadn’t thought the police in Myriad City were armed.

  The police officer walked up to the prone driver, fired a finishing round into her victim’s head at close range, then returned to her vehicle. Aristide turned and returned to the kitchen.

  “I saw the most amazing thing,” he said. “A police officer just shot someone.”

  He ducked as a bowl of raw chicken clanged into the wall above his head. Lemon marinade spattered his face. Pale pieces of chicken fell limp to the floor.

  Daljit’s lip curled. “You might have the courtesy,” she said, “not to interrupt me when I’m working on something important.”

  “I—” Aristide began, and then cold certainty froze him.

  “Now you’ve wrecked dinner!” Daljit shrieked into the silence.

  Aristide ordered himself to remain calm. He took a step away from Daljit.

  “I apologize,” he said.

  Daljit looked terrible. She was flushed. Her eyes glittered. Sweat glued strands of hair to her forehead, and she panted for breath.

  He hadn’t been paying attention when he’d first spoken to her. He hadn’t seen the signs.

  “Daljit,” he began carefully, “I would like to suggest that you’re not well.”

  “I’m not well!” She gave a bitter laugh. “You have a lot of nerve, coming here and saying that!”

  Aristide tried silently calling for help on his implant. A polite voice echoed in his head, telling him that emergency services were busy right now but that he could dictate a message into their memory buffer and they would respond as soon as possible.

  That told him all he needed to know.

  “You!” Daljit snarled. “You’re the one who wanders around primitive pockets with a sword and a rag on your head,” she said. “How healthy is that, if you’d be so good as to tell me?”

  “I would like to suggest that the enemy’s agents have spread a zombie plague in the city,” he told Daljit. “I think you caught it.”

  “Me?” Daljit said. She sneered. “I think you’re fucking mistaken, is what I think.”

  But behind the denial, behind the fevered eyes, Aristide thought he saw a puzzled, anguished lucidity, a moment in which her mind tried to grapple with the idea he’d just handed her.

  “My god,” she said. “I—”

  Her words failed. A tremor ran through her jaw muscles. Then she shook her head, and Aristide could see the last vestiges of sanity vanish as her mind crumbled beneath the onslaught of serotonin, adrenaline, norepinephrine, dopamine, and testosterone that the plague was pouring into her bloodstream.

  She gave him a red-eyed feral look, and he felt his own nervous system turn to fire as he remembered the exact same look in Antonia’s eyes.

  The moment of shocked recognition almost cost him his face as Daljit hurled the skillet of frying onions at his head. As he dodged he stepped on one of the chicken pieces and fell, landing hard in the hallway. Hot oil stung his hand.

  “Stupid fuck!” Daljit shouted, and threw an empty bowl at him. It bounced off his warding hand. Aristide scuttled out of range, palming himself backward toward the front room.

  Pop-pop-pop. The sounds came through the open terrace door. The police, or someone, was shooting again.

  Aristide rose to his feet just as Daljit came out of the kitchen with a gleaming kitchen knife in one hand.

  “Get out!” she cried. “Get out get out get out!”

  It was useless to point out that she stood between him and the only exit. Aristide cautiously circled to his right and put a sofa between himself and Daljit.

  He reached for Tecmessa and hesitated. He didn’t want to banish Daljit to Holbrook, a place he reserved for enemies whose crimes were committed while in their right minds.

  If he’d returned Tecmessa’s blade to the hilt, he might have a chance of subduing Daljit with the flat of the blade. But the hilt still contained the wandlike AI, which on its own was not ve
ry useful as a weapon.

  Aristide picked up a floor lamp and assumed a guard stance.

  “Put that down!” shouted Daljit. “That’s mine!”

  “I’ll leave,” he said, “if you’ll let me get to the door.”

  “Oh, I’ll let you leave all right,” she said, and licked her lips. She flashed the kitchen knife at him, and laughed when he reacted, jerking the lamp awkwardly in the direction of the threat.

  He wished she’d kept the cleaver. It was a more vicious weapon, but a less flexible one.

  Deception was beyond her now, and when she lunged for him she telegraphed the move in half a dozen ways. Aristide thrust the lamp at her face. She fell back, frustrated, then screamed and came on again.

  Again he thrust the lamp at her face. She grabbed the lamp and tried to wrench it out of his grasp. She was surprisingly strong. She slashed at his hand and he pulled it back and lost control of the lamp. She laughed in triumph and came over the sofa at him. He punched her in the nose, feeling a crunch of cartilage under his knuckles, and her reaction gave him enough time to dance away. A slash of the knife cut lint from his sleeve.

  Aristide looked for another weapon and saw a metal-framed chair on the terrace. He lunged for it, brought it up in the guard position, and held the terrace door with his improvised shield. She came after him panting for breath, and her knife drew sparks from the chair legs. Blood ran freely from her broken nose.

  If he circled to his left, he thought, he could draw her out onto the terrace, then pin her against the rail with the chair. It might give him enough time to break away and escape into the apartment, or perhaps even to defeat her in some way.

  He took the step to his left, and in her frenzy she was unable to resist the opening and jumped onto the terrace. Before Daljit could settle herself for another attack he was attacking himself, thrusting with the four legs of the chair, driving her back. She snarled and slashed with the knife. He ducked the first slash, then caught her wrist on the backswing. He leaned all his mass into the chair and drove her by sheer weight onto the terrace rail.

  He jerked his head back as her teeth snapped within centimeters of his ear—her bite was almost certainly contagious. While Aristide pinned her to the rail with his weight, he got both his hands on her wrist and began to exert steady pressure on her knife hand, bending the wrist inward. She punched to his face with her free hand, but her arm had to bend awkwardly around the chair and her strikes lacked force.

  Daljit gave a cry of despair as her fingers lost strength under Aristide’s pressure, and the knife dropped with a carbon-steel clack to the surface of the terrace. Aristide kicked it over the edge. Her feet flailed his shins. She tried to bite his wrist and he jerked his hand back. With his other hand he palmed her broken nose and she wrenched away from him, blinded with pain—partly turning her back, which is what he wanted. He grabbed her shoulder with both hands and hurled her face-first against the rail, in the corner where she had no opportunity to move left or right.

  He fully intended to strangle her. Bear down with his superior weight and get an arm across her throat, if he could do it without being bitten. Once he had choked her into unconsciousness he would find some means to tie her, then call emergency personnel and wait for rescue.

  But Daljit reacted quickly. Once in the corner, with both hands on the rail, she kicked back with both feet and connected with Aristide’s midsection. He lost his wind and took a deep step backward. Daljit fought free of Aristide and the chair and swung herself feet-first over the rail, pivoting on one arm like a gymnast on a pommel horse.

  Her feet made contact with the rail, and Daljit rose to a crouch, balancing on the rail with uncanny ease. On her bloody face was a wild grin of malicious triumph as she prepared to dive atop Aristide with her hands clawed.

  Aristide remembered the same expression on Antonia’s face.

  Aristide swung the chair backhand, and watched as Daljit overbalanced and went backward off the balcony, toward the pavement forty-nine floors below.

  He didn’t watch her fall. Instead he dropped the chair to the deck and sagged against the frame of the terrace door.

  He could hear emergency sirens wailing through the city.

  He needed to lock the doors, he thought, against any more maniacs who might infest the building. Then get into the shower and wash himself thoroughly, in case he’d got any of Daljit’s blood or saliva on him.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to move. Instead he remembered Antonia lying still in the garden, a murdered maenad spattered with her own blood.

  He thought about all the people he had killed over the centuries, and wondered why so many were those he had loved.

  11

  The sound of nearby shots shook him out of his contemplation of eternities. Aristide took his shower, and dressed in another set of his new clothing, items that had remained in their delivery bags while Daljit was on her rampage, and which hadn’t been touched.

  Images of Antonia and Carlito and Daljit rose in Aristide’s mind, then bled crimson into one another.

  “Pablo?” Endora’s voice echoed suddenly in Aristide’s implant. Her delivery was faster than normal and sounded strangely like panic.

  “Yes?” Aristide replied. “Where have you been?”

  Endora chose not to answer the question. Her voice returned to its normal fussy precision.

  “You’re in Daljit’s bedroom. Good.”

  “Not really,” he said. “She got the bug and—well, she’s dead.”

  He spoke aloud, rather than mentally dictating into his implant. The latter would have taken far too much of his scattered concentration.

  Endora’s voice was suddenly all business.

  “Did you get any blood on you?”

  “No,” he said. “But I’m sharing the air that she’s breathed.”

  “It’s unlikely you’ll catch it that way. You should want to wash your hands and possibly take a shower.”

  “Already done.” Aristide heard running in the corridor outside the apartment, and a thump on the door, followed shortly thereafter by a greater thumping in his chest. He made certain Tecmessa was within arm’s reach.

  The running footsteps receded.

  “What’s the situation?” he asked.

  “It’s difficult to tell. We’re having a bandwidth crisis, and that’s keeping me from getting a clear picture.”

  “Bandwidth? Your bandwidth is immense.”

  “But not infinite. Not only am I receiving millions of distress calls from victims, I’m being swamped by messages from every wrecked car, every broken window, every damaged bit of plaster. None of us ever anticipated how many inanimate objects would call for help during a major crisis. On top of all that the zombies have sabotaged a lot of the communications grid—apparently they don’t like voices in their head telling them they’re ill.”

  The scent of ghee and fried onions floated into the room from the kitchen. Aristide closed the door.

  “Is the government responding?” Aristide said.

  “It’s beginning to. But a lot of police and emergency workers have been infected, and they’ve got access to weapons. And a great many of the infected are blaming the government for their problems, and are launching attacks against government installations.”

  “Well.” Aristide lifted Tecmessa, the little ineffective wand mounted in the businesslike hilt. “I should offer help.”

  “I would advise remaining where you are, in relative safety.”

  Aristide considered the prospect of being locked in a small room with his memories, and decided against it.

  “I was backed up only this afternoon,” he said. “If I become a casualty, I’ll lose only a few hours—and,” he added, “there’s nothing in those hours I wish to remember.”

  “As you wish.” Endora knew him well enough not to dispute his decision.

  “Where will I be most useful?” he asked. He began going through Daljit’s drawers, and found a scarf he could wrap ar
ound his mouth and nose, and a floppy hat he could pull down over his forehead to minimize his exposure to flying blood and spittle.

  “Police and police stations are being attacked,” Endora said. “So are other government buildings such as offices, jails, and courthouses.”

  “It’s after office hours, so I expect the offices and courthouses are mostly empty.”

  “True.”

  “And if the police can’t defend themselves with their firearms, I don’t imagine I’ll be able to help them. What of the higher branches of government?”

  “The Prime Minister was at a dinner when the outbreak occurred, failed to reach Polity House, and is besieged at the Haçibaba Hotel along with elements of the Guard. The President was infected and his current whereabouts are unknown. The Chambers of Parliament are being attacked, and my understanding is that the High Court has been overrun.”

  Aristide reflected that he had no means of reaching any of these places. He opened the door and stepped into the hall, which he followed toward the kitchen and the foyer.

  “Can you ready a car,” he asked, “and have it at the garage elevator?”

  “Yes.”

  Aristide stepped over scattered onions and chicken and opened drawers to find Daljit’s cutlery. He stuck the larger kitchen knives in his belt and told the apartment, through his implant, to ping every object in the front closet. This told him of a plastic raincoat, of a type that folded into a small pouch. It was generic and would fit him.

  “A strong executive is essential in time of war,” he said absently, as he sealed the raincoat. “And besides, I’m fond of my old friend the Prime Minister,” he said. “I’ll go to the PM’s aid.”

  “If you insist.”

  “Anyone in the corridor outside?”

  There was a pause. Then, “I’m afraid that data is not available.”

  Aristide wrapped the scarf around his head, then his mouth and nose. His fingers were accustomed to turban wrappings and he performed this task efficiently. He tucked the ends into the raincoat and then anchored the whole thing in place with the hat.