2312

Swan and the inspector

In the past every trip she took had been a chance to have a little love affair with a terrarium. Innie or outie, it didn’t matter. Sometimes the passion would be so intense that when the trip ended Swan couldn’t remember who she was or why she was getting off, or what she had been going to do at that destination. Had to start up a new self from scratch.

This terrarium she was in now, with Genette, whose presence would definitely keep her oriented to her task, was an old flame, the Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men, meaning “The Door in the Middle of Half the Empty Sky,” which was one of the many Chinese euphemisms for the vulva. It was a place she had helped get started back when she had been young and passionate to grow worlds. Now it was a sexliner of a rather nontheatrical naturalistic sort. There were big hot pools set just above and behind a long beach, which was bisected where the river met the sea. All these places were the site of a lot of public and semiprivate copulation.

Swan spent most of her days out riding waves in the small sea. Immersion in the murmur of surf, water in her mouth. In her nose the salt air, which was quick to put a curl in her hair. Waves and tides stimulated marshes to grow, so there were changes in the speed of rotation to create a tidal slosh in here, and far out in the cylindrical sea a point break made some sweet waves. The point break had been her idea, but since then they had extended it with a spiraling reef that continued the break around the whole cylinder, when the waves were right. Having made it all the way around the cylinder, one could then paddle a short distance sternward to the original break again, a very nice touch.

But she found herself too distracted to surf with real pleasure, and after the wild ride in the F ring, it felt a little mundane. She rode a wave entirely around the cylinder, paddled sternward to catch another—one of the neatest arrangements she had ever seen—and yet it only felt like being stuck in an Escher drawing.

So she would quit and paddle in. When she came in through the splashing lovers grunioning in the shallows, it was always to find Inspector Genette staring at Passepartout or consulting with the other Interplan investigators, also by radio with others scattered everywhere across the great whirligig. She saw how much of their work involved finding databases and sifting through them, trying to formulate questions that their data might hold answers to. Their work was as invisible as the computations that kept all the spaceships and terraria on course in their woven trajectories, with all their Aldrin cycles and Homan paths and gravity lanes defined like threads on a vast circular spiraling loom. Data analysis, pattern recognition; a big part of the work was done by their qubes and AIs. The rest was accomplished by a bunch of people behaving as Genette was now, sitting there as she approached from the beach, mycrofting spiderlike in a raised chair that looked weirdly like a toddler’s high chair at a restaurant. Several of them were there working together, by the terrace railing overlooking one of the sex pools. Swan joined them and tried to attend to what they were doing, tried to keep track of what was being investigated and how. There was a certain pleasure in hearing that they had found some leads concerning the ship floating in the clouds of Saturn, and had even identified the little transponder that had gone off when they entered its lock. There was a holding company on Earth that both held title to the ship and had ordered the batch of transponders that theirs had come from. But ultimately that meant only that there were more lines of pursuit to follow, on Earth and elsewhere. And the pursuit was going to continue to look like this, with qubes employing search algorithms to making quantum walks through the decoherent and incoherent traces of the past. She didn’t see how she could help with that. It was getting to be time to go home.

Then the lion cubs in Terminator asked her to make arrangements for the restocking of the rebuilt Terminator’s park and farm. That was something Swan could definitely help with. “I’m going to get back to work for Terminator,” she said to Genette. “I’ll stay in touch, of course, but I need to go to Earth and arrange for inoculants.”

“We’re headed there already,” Genette said. “Looks like it may be the source of our problem.”

During this passage she often met with the inspector for a last drink at the end of the evening, when the dining terrace had otherwise emptied and many people were down below in the dimly lit pools, swimming about and coupling in the shallows. Swan sat with her forearms on the railing, chin on the back of her hand, looking down at them listlessly. The inspector would climb up and sit on the rail beside her, still sometimes reading Passepartout’s screen. Sometimes they talked about the case, and Swan was struck by questions Genette threw out along the way:

If you knew there was a mad person helping you get what you wanted, would you stop them? If a person was mistreated to the point where they acted like an algorithm, did they still count as human?

These were troubling questions. And all the while they looked down at the undeniably mammalian figures in the baths, wavering in the blue underwater lights—couples and small groups, a lot of laughter, low murmurs, occasional rhythmic primate cries. Coupling or tripling, or balling into intertwined panmixia. A lot of them would be on oxytocin and having supremely affectionate experiences; others would have taken entheogenic compounds and be off in mystical tantric transports. Right now under them on the wet poolside a number of smalls were attending to an extremely tall tall, so that it looked like Gulliver in a Lilliputian brothel, creepy and heartwarming in rapid oscillation. Swan herself had served as Snow White to some dwarves in her time, and now she glanced to see if the inspector was watching them, wondering if any reaction would be visible. But Genette appeared to be looking elsewhere, at two flagrant bisexuals, both with big breasts and tall erections, and also very pregnant, lying on their sides, rolling from one sexual position to another.

“They look like walruses,” Swan said. “The pregnancy is just too much. It’s not transgressive, it’s a travesty.”

Genette shrugged. “Pornography, right? They want it to look strange.”

“Well, they’ve succeeded.” Swan laughed. “I think they want it to be transgressive, but they haven’t quite managed.”

“Sex as public performance? Isn’t that transgressive where you come from?”

“But this is a sexliner. People come here to do this.”

The inspector looked at her, head tilted to the side. “Maybe it’s just theater.”

“But bad theater, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Just showing off, then. We all do it. We live in ideas. That can be a real problem, as I have said. But not here.” Genette blessed the scene with an outstretched hand. “This is just sweet. I’m going to go down myself in a while and join them.”

The Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men was going to use Mars as a gravity handle to shoot cross-system to Earth, so Swan joined those who went out to the observation bubble to have a look as they flashed over it. She asked the inspector about going along, but got only a mime’s scowl in return.

“What?” she said. “What’s wrong with Mars?”

“I grew up there,” Genette said, standing erect, shoulders back. “I went to school there, I worked there for forty years. But they exiled me for a crime I didn’t commit, and since they have exiled me, I exile them. I shit on Mars!”

“Oh,” Swan said. “I didn’t know. What was the crime?”

The inspector waved her away. “Go. Go look at the big red bastard before you miss it.”

So she went by herself up to the bubble chamber in the bowsprit. The Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men shot by Mars right above its atmosphere, avoiding any aerobraking while maximizing the gravity sling. For a matter of ten minutes or so they were right over it—the red land, the long green lines of the canals, the canyons running down to the northern sea, the great volcanoes sticking right up out of the atmosphere—then it was behind them, shrinking like a pebble dropped from a balloon. “I hear it’s an interesting place,” someone said.