by Bill Adams
Chapter Ten
Cold spray dashed over me. The salt blinded my eyes; I could taste it on my lips. And then the rail began to pull sideways, harder and harder. My hands slipped free; the wet deck hit me and I slid against it, and expected to keep sliding, but instead I found it pressed hard to my back. Very hard. My head felt like it was going to explode. The air was freezing cold and smelled as much like clay as like sea, and the white noise of rushing waters was so absolute it was a kind of massive silence, cutting me off from time and space. I opened my eyes against the mist and could not understand what I saw and felt. For a second I thought I’d snapped into my final trauma dream. It was insane, but it was real.
I was inside an enormous holy void, dark and splendid and narrowing to a point I couldn’t quite see, like the largest of all cathedrals standing on its head.
The disco’s deck was still almost straight up and down, and pressed to my back. There was nothing beneath my feet to hold me up. I could look down and see the side rail three or four meters away, and beyond that the spiraling waters all the way down through tatters of mist to the churning black pit far, far below, at the bottom of the whirlpool. But I did not fall.
I could feel gravity only faintly; when I bent my head back against the deck to look at the sky—a circle of bright blue with a smaller whirling circle of silhouetted scraps inscribed in it—I vaguely knew that direction was up. But the pressure that pinned me to the deck and filled my head was stronger than gravity. And suddenly I knew what it was.
The disco had slid perhaps a third of the way down the whirlpool’s funnel, but now it was moving sideways much faster than it was going down, around and around with the water—so fast that the centrifugal force was holding the Pretender and me in place against it. But because we were moving with the flow, there was no impression of speed, just the terrible suspense of failing to fall. The Maelstrom was a vastness of molten green-black glass, slowly rippling and churning and changing color, half obscured by weirdly winding mist. A drizzling rain seemed to fall from everywhere and go nowhere. On either side of our deck, the sea curved grotesquely outward to join the funnel circle, and water washed and trickled in an odd glue-like way from the edge on my left to the edge on my right.
It was the shortest possible reprieve. We were slowly slipping lower on the funnel wall; the disco’s unlikely equilibrium could end at any second, letting the current spin us, tumble us, grind us into the mill. And in any case, how long had the Doge said the whirlpool would last? Four or five minutes, and then the great vortex and its thousands of tons of seawater would collapse upon us.
It was all too immense to take in. The curved wall of water did not seem to be turning, exactly; it just rippled and shifted, while strange half-seen things happened beneath its glittering, semitranslucent surface. Vast shapes seemed to approach, only to turn two-dimensional and fall away like sheets of stained glass—every color from green and blue to red and even yellow. Whitecaps burst free from the surface like torpedoes, then exploded into mist and vanished. Was that a boulder from the sea bottom, passing like a planet in space?
Something flopped against my ankle.
I bent my head against the spin force and saw the Pretender sprawled next to my feet. His arms and legs were working to no effect, his head bobbing aimlessly. When I did get a glance at his face, it was empty, the eyes huge and staring without expression, as if his borrowed personality had been completely absorbed by the titanic flowing mirror in front of us.
And maybe my face looked the same way, maybe I would have been transfixed by the Absolute until it swallowed us, but suddenly something cut across my view like a razor slash—then flashed out of sight, jagging like lightning, and reemerged in a straight white line from the side of the funnel and immediately disappeared—again and again. I looked backward at the sky and saw a dark pencil shape sticking into the white circle and rotating around it. The instant I tried to focus on it a sickening dizziness struck me, and I had to close my eyes to keep from vomiting. Facing forward when I opened them again, I caught sight of the flickering object on the far side of the funnel for a moment, and realized what it was.
The Doge’s wedding ring. They were dangling it from the crane, hoping we could catch it. But there was no chance. It kept hitting the wall of water or rebounding from the rail of our boat. Meanwhile, a new distraction: rhythmic vibration from the deck against my back. Lights flashed all around the disco’s circular railing in the dimness; apparently, shipping so much water had tripped some emergency switch, and the boat was coming back to life. Maybe the computer was trying to talk to us even now—but we would never hear it. No way to give it orders, either, and nothing it could do.
But then the big aluminum ring swept past my eyes, less than two meters away, about level with my feet or the Pretender. It was gone in a flash, but seconds later came by again. Somehow they’d found the right place to hold it. It was clearing the water and even the low rail around the deck. It was life; all we had to do was reach for it.
Did the Pretender see it? I tried to call his name, but could barely hear it inside my own head above the leviathan roar. I pulled some coins from my pocket and scattered them at him to attract his attention. Some skipped and slid against the deck; others bounded up and flew away on crazily curved trajectories. The Pretender took no notice.
I tried to sit up, fighting the artificial gravity. It was as if I weighed several hundred kilos—and worse: when I threw myself into it, I squeegeed several centimeters along the deck in the true downward direction, gravity still waiting at the heart of the pit. Easy does it! Keeping my body flat, I rolled onto my stomach and managed to get my knees up, then crawled backward until the Pretender was directly on my left and I was looking “down” at him where he “lay” on the deck.
It was another trauma flashback: the Dead Emperor dream, its imploding bubble world, even the circle of birds that watched over the sleeping Barbarossa—but the idiotic blankness in a face so much like mine kept me angry and focused. I managed to slap him; he looked at me without rancor, saying something I couldn’t hear. But then he blinked, and pointed, and I knew he’d seen the ring go by. I nodded and squirmed against the deck, trying to bring my knees up closer to my chest and establish a base for driving my upper body erect. The Pretender seemed to understand; he grabbed my shoulder to stabilize me, and once my knees were in position, he pushed straight up at my chest and helped hold me up.
And I was standing on my knees, every joint on fire, feeling like a tentpole supporting an invisible canvas of immense weight as I peered sideways for the next orbit of the big ring. I didn’t see it the first time, but its light gilded aluminum clipped the back of my head. That must have sent it oscillating in and out of the vertical water-wall, because it seemed an eternity before I saw it coming along the right path again. By this time the Pretender had realized we’d only get one shot at this thing, and he’d managed to squirm into a new position, still supporting me with one arm but holding the other poised around my waist and entwined with my belt.
The ring went by, a little too far away this time. Fantastic colors came and went in the pulsing, gelatinous wall of water. Was it my imagination, or were there more streaks of frothy white? And the deck, was it shuddering—what would happen if the air cushion were reestablished?
I saw the glittering shape emerge from the mist and drizzle. They must have given it a bit more line, because the ring was going to pass a meter lower, behind my head, but by throwing up one arm I snagged the line itself, and the big ring whipped up and around it and I seized it with the other arm and it felt like both arms were being ripped off as the Pretender grabbed hold of me, and the aluminum ring bent under our weight, and the ten-meter disc of the Capriccio peeled away from us and shot sideways in its orbit around the funnel—
—while we swung back in the opposite direction, pendulum slaves to regular gravity again, given one spectacular view from the middle of the funnel, its whirl-speed suddenly returning with
a rush, before we smashed into the wall of water, were sucked along hungrily for black airless meters, then splashed out of it, another swing into the center—
—and as we started to swing toward the undulating solid water again, I saw the disco swooping back around the funnel toward us like a huge wooden ax-blade. But before I could even register fear it had slipped into a lower orbit as the renewed air cushion sent it frictionlessly spiraling down the side of the funnel, to vanish in less than a second, like a coin down a sewer.
Crash, we were in and out of the water one last time, but somehow I kept hold of the ring and the Pretender kept hold of me. Our rescuers knew they had us now; they’d extended the end of the crane farther toward the center and were reeling us in. That is when the terror starts—when you’ve done what you can but the clock must still run down. Surely our four minutes were over long ago, and we were still twenty or thirty meters from the surface. There was no way to measure how fast we were rising; I looked up at the dark bar that was the crane and for the first time saw that there was someone wrapped around the barrel of it, a spotter: that’s how our rescuers had seen what they were doing. Closer, the silhouetted bar was getting closer…
The Pretender slipped and clutched at me.
I wrapped one arm around the taut line and grabbed with the other, catching him by his long hair.
It was no good, I needed that hand on the ring, and he got a better grip just in time for me to let go of him and reach for it. I made the mistake of looking down at him, and saw the whirlpool wall give two great pulsations, vast green curtains swirling closer and closer all around.
The tremendous howl of water suddenly rose in pitch; something stirred in the black pit of the depths, and a gray immensity began to move up toward us, faster and faster, like a freight train roaring through a tunnel, and worse, the tunnel was collapsing on all sides, as a cataract came down to meet it from what had been the sky—everything coming together in choking darkness and solid water.
And then bright light, and sweet, warm air.
We were dangling only a meter from the crane, with the Bucentaur looming festively to one side. The other boats were still in a big circle, but the flat sea now ran between, with white froth and dead fish everywhere. And the silence seemed eerie until I saw the mouths of the people cheering, and then I could hear them. It was just a different world: many sounds, but all quite small.
◆◆◆
The Venezians waited until we’d definitely finished throwing up before starting to pour their best liquor into us. They were particularly concerned with me, I realized with an ugly start, because of the appearance of my face, all blue-white, they said; the gyal-wa mask must not have liked saltwater immersion or extreme cold, but it recovered before the Doge could radio for an ambulance flitter. Soon we were wrapped in tablecloths and sitting out of the wind in a storage closet in the Bucentaur’s false gondola prow, the Doge standing in the doorway and occasionally asking the multitude jostling behind him to step back. He topped off our whiskey and continued his account of the rescue:
“You owe your lives to that Citizen Foyle—did she say she was an archaeologist? Remarkable woman. Took charge of the rescue, and crawled out on the crane while the others were still debating what to do.”
“Wouldn’t have done me any good without Chris here,” the Pretender said, nudging me. “I went completely passive for a moment. It seemed…I don’t know, so much the death intended for me. A poetical death—very nearly Shelley’s death. I thought I saw things in the void; I was transfixed…” He didn’t seem to like the sound of this confession, and turned to me abruptly. “What about you, Chris? What were you thinking?”
I wet my lips and recited:
“The ship sailed on, the ship sailed fast,
But I left not a sail, and I left not a mast;
There isn’t a plank of the hull or the deck,
And there isn’t a wretch to lament of his wreck;
Save one, whom I held, as he swam, by the hair,
And he was a subject well worthy my care;
A traitor on land, and a pirate at sea—
But I saved him to wreak further havoc for me.”
The Pretender roared with laughter, and explained to the Doge. “From the new play! Not even his own lines he’s memorized, the ham, it’s one of the spooks’.”
I played it up. “Naturally, I’m working on a one-man version of the show. You see, as an artist, I feel that other performers only distract the audience from Manfred’s essential solipsism—” and so forth. The Doge smiled politely, but the Pretender thought it pretty funny. And of course, I’d done my duty as his friend: provided a distraction.
One of the Doge’s ebony-skinned sons stepped up and whispered something in his father’s ear. The Doge murmured back, and the son nodded. A few moments later, bodyguards cleared some space behind the Doge for privacy.
“The flitter?” the Pretender asked in a low voice.
The Doge nodded. “Just reported stolen from a farm on the Dreeland coast. We don’t track all air traffic—we don’t have enough to bother—but today we happened to have satellites monitoring the ocean-current change. Their infrared indicates the flitter is no longer in the air.”
“Professional,” the Pretender noted. “Ditch in deep water fast instead of taking the time to scrub it clean. Switch to a boat—much less conspicuous on Venezia than a flitter.”
“The Tribunal is nothing if not professional,” the Doge said. “But they missed you.”
The Pretender shook his head. “I could imagine them mistaking Chris for me, maybe, but not Arturo. And they would probably figure me to be safe on the Bucentaur as a guest of honor. But they could count on finding Arturo aboard his own disco. So he was the one they wanted. Which makes me wonder if it was really the Tribunal.”
“I’ll run it past our intelligencers,” the Doge said thoughtfully.
Servants met us at the dock of the Doge’s palace, dry clothes at the ready. Although our theater was in the public wing of the building, in the downstroke of its T shape that pointed back into the city, I’d never visited the Doge’s quarters. The whole building was tall by Venezian standards, six stories, and the crossbar of the T extended hundreds of meters in either direction along the canal. Much of it, including the private subway stop on the lower level, was for the government staff of ombudsmen, not for guests. But the Pretender seemed to know his way around it as well as the Doge, and the Hard Men had the run of the place.
The traditional “wedding” party was canceled out of respect for Arturo’s family, and the tourists were sent home. But it was taken for granted that Arturo, as a Venezian, would have wanted us to celebrate the saving of our lives, and a small party assembled in one of the private dining rooms—actually a large hall paneled in rosewood and mirrors and set with stained glass windows.
When I caught up with the Pretender, Foyle had joined him.
“Foyle,” the Pretender said, “This is Chris Sly. Chris, Citizen Foyle. If she has a given name, it isn’t given out.”
“Thank you for my life,” I said.
“You’re very welcome.” It was the same low, cool voice I enjoyed on her diary cube—sane but not sterile, with the sort of stoic control only a passionate nature needs. “It’s good to meet an actor who can act in time.”
After this promising opening, however, she concentrated most of her attention on the Pretender. He was cool to her at first. He could afford to be grateful and beholden to me; I was a known quantity, a yes-man already in his orbit. Foyle was too much of a threat to his stature. She poured on the charm; I’d forgotten how seductively feminine she could be. But the only way she found to hold his attention was with talk about the early Kanalist site she’d helped discover. He asked a hundred questions about that, just like the Old Rite Kanalist he was supposed to be, but kept Julia happily yawning at his elbow all the while.
The Doge and his relatives dropped out by midnight, but some of
the Hard Men were determined to keep partying till morning. Once everyone else was too hammered to notice, I started pouring my drinks into plants and plates like a good spy. But I was far from sober, and could only marvel at the antics of the warriors. They were eager to impress the Boss whose body they hadn’t guarded very well.
A huge blond oaf named Arn, who wore faded Iron Brotherhood fatigues, set fire to the ends of his waxed mustache while his buddies bet on which side would burn down faster. Three hard-faced ex-Marines made an elimination derby out of smashing bottles over one another’s heads. It was like a bear-baiting—but no, not quite. It was as if dancing bears were to bait each other.
Then they began telling war stories: gory examples of black humor, or sentimental eulogies to drinking buddies blown to hell and gone. I had been wondering for some time how Foyle was taking all this. Though I knew from her diary that she was not the lesbian Julia took her for, her tolerance for overbearing males was low. But I’d forgotten she was an old soldier herself. She’d found a high place to sit and drink, and presided over the games with a grave smile and Amazonian bearing, like Hippolyta at her wedding, admired by the soldiers as they would admire the lines of an attack sloop.
The Pretender sat slumped forward, supporting his chin on one hand and occasionally pointing at a bullyboy with the other, saying, “Tell the one about—” and naming a person or a place. There wasn’t a story he hadn’t heard before, but I realized that this was how he paid them for the reverence they always showed him, the Boss who had never fought a battle except with words.
In another century, I’d craved the respect of the old-timers in the Alignment Navy, had bought them drinks in just this way. But that navy had stood for something. When you came right down to it, it had stood for suppressing exactly the sort of mercenary adventurers and corrupt-cop types who made up the Pretender’s Hard Men.
And hadn’t Arturo’s murder been just their style? He’d been fighting them for the Pretender’s soul. He’d threatened their meal tickets and bar bills and dreams of future glory.