Maya was an eco-purist, down here with a save-the-planet agenda all her own. So Drew was taken aback by the concessions she’d made to eugenics. Maybe she was facing painful tradeoffs like the rest of them. Perhaps she deemed it necessary to wage her war against pollution, ironically, so it wouldn’t continue to destroy what was left of nature’s diversity; replace it with mutated species ill-adapted to survive secondary to radiation, pollution, global warming, and all the rest.
Trotsky walked them over to a private pool off to the side, walled off from the rest, one of many, more suited to smaller launches. He tossed him a seemingly normal rubber ball. They were big on physical pastimes, presumably to counteract the sedentary lifestyle of living this closed in. Then he left Drew, after curtly saluting, of course.
It didn’t take long for Drew to start bouncing the ball off the deck and walls. Its rebound was never entirely predictable. It responded with wicked top spins, and an ever-expanding arsenal of rotational velocities and directions. He supposed that was to help him train his reflexes. Maybe the ball amplified the slight unintended variations of each of his thrown balls for instructional purposes. Perhaps it was another pleasant if unplanned effect of the crisscrossing magnetic fields and the ball’s complex polymer-metal makeup designed to prevent wear, and not deform under crushing pressures.
Seeing no reason why he shouldn’t challenge himself, Drew released the ball as hard as he could. It rebounded off several surfaces.
On the third throw, as he started to get lost in the game, the ball stopped in midair and hovered, as if caught in an invisible tractor beam. Then it dropped into the water where it floated.
What the hell?
Maya soared into the air, flying through the portal of water.
She hovered briefly in midair, caught amid the magnetic fields. Feeling a little dense, Drew suddenly realized her outfit would allow her to fly freely throughout the submarine, at virtually any speed. Her protective covering possibly even sheltered her from the shock of unintended collisions against metal surfaces by taking a turn too fast. For wings, she used underarm extensions that connected her arms to her torso, like a flying squirrel. The kiting retracted itself, pulling into the edges of the suit, leaving her hovering there looking briefly less like a flying angel, and more like a levitating Zen master. Drew found both incarnations of her equally sexy.
She smiled at him with that same cocky, slightly condescending, but ever playful manner that Trotsky had used on him. Maybe they took their cues from her, as she played up the cult of personality to amplify her hold over them.
She slowly drifted down to him as if to play up the drama of the moment, finally embraced and kissed him. “Just what else can that suit do?” Drew asked.
“It interprets magnetic fields very well, and allows us to work all kinds of magic from within them, not the least of which is amplification of my thoughts. I can achieve telekinetic control of objects and telepathic communication with the others inside the fields. Outside the fields, it’s pretty useless, and somewhat more cumbersome than an actual wet suit. A good deal heavier.”
“Sorry for being briefly more impressed by your technology than by you.”
“Such a thing is impossible, but I appreciate you pretending otherwise.”
He smiled. “Honestly, it is a very enticing world you’ve built here.”
“Just not your world.”
“Maybe someday, when you’ve left more to the imagination.”
“Fair enough, land-walker,” Maya said.
She threw him a bodysuit all his own. “Put it on.”
He stripped naked before her, which he presumed was meant for her benefit as much as his. Her expression suggested approval. “I was hoping you’d enjoy my male body as much as you enjoyed my female body.”
“Nearly as much,” she said. “But then, you’ve put on a few pounds. A few days down here will take care of that.”
Drew smiled for her sake, but realized he must have been grimacing. The thought of labor wasn’t particularly attractive to him, more like the steep price of admission he paid for her company.
She zipped him up the rest of the way. “I’ll be auto-piloting you until you get used to the suit. Since you’re not adapted to life down here, it will never work as well for you; your thought impressions are too weak.”
They were off, soaring lengthwise across and high above the massive pool.
They flitted butterfly-like from one landing site to another as she snuck in an inspection of her vessel on the fly.
Sometimes they just glided long distances, the slow passes enough for her to glean the information she needed about the ship’s status.
The instant she felt the ship dock, she flew them up to the topmost deck.
The outer hull had been retracted to allow construction workers to offload themselves and their gear to the bubble world under construction. In place of the outer hull was a force field, presumably maintained by adjusting the interpenetrating magnetic fields. “Stay here,” she said. “You won’t be able to handle the pressure off the ship.”
She flew off to join the rest of her crew. Once in position, she tossed metal girders like javelins, made full use of the suit, and its interaction with the magnetic fields, to amplify her strength, and hasten construction.
Drew noticed there was zero reliance on robotics. He wondered why.
After reading his mind through the interlaced magnetic fields, Maya explained telepathically, “Robots can have their codes overwritten, and then be sent on nasty missions to sabotage everything I’ve built. My people are less susceptible to having their heads toyed with, especially within the magnetic fields, which boosts their mind power to fend off anyone who gets too close. The energy fields cloak the base, but should that fail, it’s easy enough for any one of us to project all manner of thoughts into the minds of our attackers, make them think they’re seeing things which aren’t there.”
It looked to Drew as if Maya was a lot further along with migrating her people into various underwater niches than he had imagined. The base they were building was gigantic in scale, possibly a shipyard to manufacture other subs like her master ship, or manufacture underwater kit-homes to any size or scale, able to withstand any pressure.
After assisting the construction people, and assessing the progress of the station, she rejoined Drew. “Come on. There’s little more we can do here.”
***
That night, after Maya had touched base with her key people, and finished with her assessments, she treated Drew to an all-nighter of gravity-free lovemaking within the magnetic fields. He was clumsy at first, but his learning curve wasn’t half bad. He appreciated her forcing him to up his game.
***
The next morning, Maya did as Trotsky had promised; she gave Drew a tour of what she’d been doing. He wondered how much she was leaving out, but figured he’d have to boost his mind power quite a bit to see into her thoughts as easily as she could see into his.
Through the ports Drew viewed the underwater clean up underway. Maya explained, “Every time a killer storm hits, and somebody loses a coastal city, the flotsam drifts onto a foreign shore, or creates islands of floating garbage that persist indefinitely. Sometimes, the refuse ends up down here. Some of what sinks we leave for artificial reefs. The rest, the nasty stuff, we clean up.”
“That’s a hell of a lot of mass to make disappear,” Drew said.
“The sub’s nuclear engines drive an atomizing furnace that reduces everything to nature’s most basic building blocks.” She pointed to their atomizer.
They were standing close enough to the furnace for him to have to shout. “That’s still a lot of heat you’re generating.”
“Miniscule, in the cosmic scheme of things. Besides, the floating garbage has a higher refractive index so, by reducing it, we’re more than neutralizing our contribution to global warming.”
Drew watched as the mini-subs used their extensor arms to slice the big pieces of junk int
o manageable sizes that could be brought aboard the mother ship. “I hear there’s a flotilla of this stuff the size of Texas drifting around the Pacific Ocean.”
“It’s the size of Rhode Island now, thanks to us, and shrinking all the time,” she shouted. Her hair rippled before the vented breezes of the atomizer.
“This can’t be all you’re up to. Garbage clean up doesn’t seem nearly mentally taxing enough.”
She smiled. “That’s all you get to see on this visit.”
“Why so secretive?” Drew asked, hoping to read more from her expression.
“I’m just a little pissed off at you for dragging Robin Wakefield into my life.” She drove her fist into a button, shutting off the view to the outside.
“She doesn’t know about you.”
“That’s what you think. You’ll see soon enough when you get back to her. You’ve left a door wide open for her to walk right in. And I don’t appreciate people screwing with my head. I like to do the screwing.”
“I see that much hasn’t changed, even now that I’m male.” When Maya refused to react to the admittedly cheap shot, he added, “Relax, Robin’s harmless. Rhetoric is her only real weapon, assuming she finds a way down here, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. I like to keep my clandestine affairs, well, clandestine.”
“We have limited telepresence into the future thanks to the magnetic fields. They seem to stimulate that region of the brain. I assure you, her rhetoric is not so weak a weapon as all that.” She put her hands up to her neck, covered her gills, as if, possibly, that genetic modification had come at one of Robin’s suggestions. “Explaining why I could strangle you, right now.”
“And I thought that was just sexual excitement last night.”
“Until next time, lover.” She dismissively turned her back on him.
“My stay can’t be over so soon.”
“The limits of your unupgraded body, I’m afraid,” she shouted without looking back.
He grabbed her arm, not ready to see her go.
“Our technology gets better all the time,” she said. “Soon you’ll be able to cheat on her with me for weeks at a time.”
“That was a cheap shot.” He released her.
“I’d feel better if she knew about me and was jealous. I’m not used to not being a threat to anyone I meet,” Maya said. She rose into the air, and held her position amidst the magnetic fields. The levitation trick seemed even more remarkable than drifting through them, considering that all the intersecting fields had to be coordinated psychically to hover in one spot.
“I suppose we’re all working to overcome something,” Drew chided ineffectively. Maya wasn’t much on banter. She had already glided off to attend to some project.
She certainly doesn’t have any problem with letting go for whatever else she had to work on, Drew thought.
FIFTY-TWO
“Look, it’s a midget.”
“Look, it’s an asshole.”
“Should I raise my voice? Your ears seem very far away.”
“Bend over.”
Drew bent over. Shrink Wrap grabbed the opportunity to put a choke hold on him. Now that he’d stood up straight again, the little person dangled off him, flopped in the breeze as if he were having a bad hair day. Drew pointed, gasped from under the choke hold. “You know, I think you can switch suits with that ventriloquist’s dummy.”
Shrink Wrap refused to let up on the hold, and thus to be distracted from his sole purpose for living. “You don’t know when to take a hint, pal.” As daylight gave way to darkness, Drew felt Shrink Wrap finally let up on the hold to better size up the situation. “Hey, I think you’re right.”
Drew lifted him off by the scruff of his neck and set him down.
“Quick, grab his clothes,” Shrink Wrap shout-whispered with urgency, seeing the ventriloquist chatting up Fleusy in the distance, the woman who did acrobatic tricks on top the horses. “It won’t take her long to give him the brush-off.”
Drew raced to strip the ventriloquist’s dummy at their feet from which Two Mouths had foolishly allowed himself to get separated. Perhaps he’d been rehearsing his act before the mirrors when Fleusy caught his eye. Simultaneously, Shrink Wrap raced to rid himself of his ratty outfit.
While Shrink Wrap donned the freshly pressed suit, Drew redressed the dummy with Shrink Wrap’s old knockoffs.
“Thanks, pal. You have no idea what it costs to get a suit in miniature. I think they take a regular-sized one and add the charges to shrink it.” He proudly modeled his new suit in front of a mirror set low to the ground. The toy poodles, each dyed a different sherbert color, had been admiring themselves in between snipping at one another, perhaps to ruin the competition’s hairdos.
“Why don’t you get to work on the ventriloquist?” Drew suggested helpfully. “If he started a collection of dummies, you’d never have to buy clothes again. What he needs is a good doll fetish.”
“Genius!” Shrink Wrap rubbed his chin, and strategized how he was going to set about doing this. “It’ll take fiendish manipulativeness. Maybe I shouldn’t.”
“Conscience compromises cunning,” Drew stated flatly.
“I suppose I owe it to myself if I expect to grow as a person.”
They regarded Two Mouths putting the moves on Fleusy, using some canny manipulativeness all his own. He was probably hoping a combination of guilting her and persistence would do the job, until, with each passing day, she finally folded. Judging from Fleusy’s face, he should be realizing by now he’d get better play from one of his own dolls. The what-goes-around-comes-around psychology took hold of Shrink Wrap; Drew could just feel the beat change.
“Think of Two Mouths doing the same act with the same dummy over and over again. You’ll be saving him from himself,” Drew said. “Damn self-sacrificing of you.”
“It’s settled, then. Now, where were we?”
“Maybe if you stood on stilts, you could pretend to be a dwarf,” Drew mused aloud, slipping back into their old act.
“Maybe if you had five dollars to spare, you could buy some humanity at the military surplus store from one of the people who gave up theirs,” Shrink Wrap blurted, not missing a beat.
“Hey, I think I see Carmine,” Drew said excitedly, looking through the open flap of the circus tent in the distance. The “netherworld” lay across a patch of lawn and the other carnival regulars still setting up for the big show. The gap between them was as big, anyway, as could be expected with a one-ring show. “I’ll catch you later.”
As he footed it away from Shrink Wrap, he heard him utter behind his back, “Poor bastard.”
As if running interference for Carmine, the Strong Man blocked his way next. Standing in a stretched tank top and shorts, which didn’t leave much to the imagination, he picked Drew up and cracked his back unconventionally—with a spine-crushing bear hug. Then he lifted Drew over his shoulders, parallel to the ground, and bent his back against his neck and shoulders. With each new series of cracks, Drew figured he’d be getting even more of the silent treatment, as the bones finished grinding to powder.
Strong Man continued to ham up their familiar David and Goliath routine, while making sure only to appear to be murdering him to unsuspecting eyes. He dangled Drew upside down by the ankles, while pinning his hands under his feet, as he did more twisting and contorting. He bent down on one knee, and slammed Drew’s back over his knee. Grabbed hold of his neck and head next in a wicked choke hold. He used both his hands, and gave the whole assortment a final twist.
Finally he set Drew down, and held out his palm.
“What’s that for?” Drew said.
“I expect to be paid for the chiropractic services.”
The young boy, who’d stared at them bug-eyed the entire time, laughed riotously. It was probably the only break he’d gotten all day from feeding the animals.
Drew, sour-faced, still playing to his young audience, peeled off a couple of twenty dollar bills from h
is billfold.
“Thanks,” Strong Man said. He took Drew’s wallet and the bulk of the money, and left Drew with the two twenty dollar bills.
The kid reprised his howling.
“He must take himself for one of the clowns,” Drew mumbled as he staggered off.
The kid wiped his eyes, then returned to his chores. He picked up his steel bucket, and tossed a wedge of meat to the tiger in the cage.
Drew felt disconcerted Strong Man’s deceptively gentle touch still didn’t feel as benign as it used to; feeling his age, no doubt. When the pain seemed unbearable and groaning was no longer enough to take the edge off, Drew said, lecturing himself, “Love comes in many forms.” He rubbed his lower back, wondered if he’d ever walk fully upright again.
Drew ambled closer to the smaller of the two big top-tents the carnies used as a backstage area to get into costume and into character, and to prepare their acts.
The moment he stepped through the flap, Drew ran smack dab into Molly Three Breasts. “Why, if it isn’t the ghost whisperer,” she said. “Was wondering when you’d be coming through.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Ghost Whisperer?” he said, then pondered what the defensiveness in his tone was all about.
She returned her eyes to the makeup mirror, and dabbed a sponge on her face. Dissembling, she said, “Just a nickname, hon. Around here everyone’s got one. Lets you know you’ve been accepted as one of us.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 165