Cel folded her arms. “We’re already shorthanded, worked half to death. I think we need a good reason to go along with this as well.”
“How about this,” Magyar said pleasantly. “One week from today there will be a test of emergency procedure know-how. All personnel who fail will be dismissed without notice and without pay in lieu. Good enough?”
Kinnis sighed. “What’s the pass rate?”
“I’ll be fair. Anyone who attends all sessions and spells their name right passes. Lessons start tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of your break.”
I was beginning to appreciate Magyar more and more.
Chapter 18
It is five weeks before Lore’s eighteenth birthday, She is at the party of a young woman called Sarah. Sarah’s family owns half the real estate in Montevideo. The party is being held in what is sometimes called an aesthetics research institute, but is really a pleasure resort, dug into cave complexes beneath the Rio Negro.
Lore and Sarah and about a hundred other invited guests are standing, bare-armed in their finery, in a vast underground auditorium. The walls, which are more than three hundred feet high, are tiled with white ceramic; the floor is paved with milky brick; the corners and doors and lights are sealed with white enamel. The air is frigid.
Sarah, whom Lore has known for only a week, has beautiful, satiny beige skin and black hair cut longer at the front than the back. Her hair is blowing this way and that in the cold breeze coming from the tunnel that leads into the cave from the right. Although the tunnel is probably ninety feet in diameter, it occupies only the top corner of the wall.
People are talking and drinking, but they have been promised a surprise by Sarah, and there is a current of tension under the conversation. They are waiting.
It is hard to say when it actually begins. Over the tinkle of crystal and the susurrus of silk Lore hears, no, feels, a change. A vibration. The breeze falters, resumes differently. Something is skimming toward them down the tunnel. Others feel it now, too. Heads turn this way and that; Lore catches the anxious glitter of diamond earrings. It is coming.
There is a whispering from the tunnel, and Lore can feel it against her skin: the approach of something huge. Everyone watches the dark hole. No one is talking. Lore thinks of beasts and their lairs, the tunnels they make. But what animal would make its home in this kind of cold?
Suddenly warmer air comes boiling, nothing from the tunnel, and she can see something approaching, something so huge and black it fills the opening of the tunnel. It is so big her mind quails, and it is gathering its muscles to leap.
God! she thinks, because this is not a projection. She can feel the heat radiating from the beast; she can feel the air moving. And there is an animal smell, dusty and hot, and the electric tension of the hunter’s mesmerizing gaze. Someone cries out, and there is a burst of muscle-straining panic: people throw themselves to the floor, pearls breaking, stones ripping from jeweled chokers. Lore catches a glimpse of eye-white and feline green, and ivory yellow reaching claws as the beast pours smoothly from the tunnel.
And then Lore wonders if time really does slow to molasses when one is in fear for one’s life, because the beast doesn’t fall upon them in a snarl of sleek pelt and glinting teeth, it… stretches.
She blinks, thinks perhaps she is a little mad as the huge panther thins and seems to shudder before her. And then it bursts, exploding into thousands of small birds, all soaring and swooping and twittering at once. The air is filled with bright avian song.
“They’re birds!” someone shouts. And Lore is laughing, climbing to her feet, unable to turn away from the swoop and flutter in the air.
Birds.
Sarah is holding out a glass. Champagne. Lore takes it. Her hands are shaking. “Electromagnetic control,” Sarah says. But Lore doesn’t want to hear the mechanics, just savor the wonder, She gulps the champagne, holds it out for a refill from one of the passing waiters. Sarah slides her arm around Lore’s waist. Her fingers are very warm just above Lore’s hip. The birds wheel twice, then begin to pour back into the tunnel.
The water room is sixty by sixty, tiled in an intricate pattern of blue and azure with walls of aquamarine and turquoise glass block. Vitrine sculptures of fish and mermaids stand in the corners. There are fountains everywhere, and water runs down the walls. The air is damp and full of the music of liquid. The tank, about twenty feet square, is sunk into the center of the floor.
Lore takes off her dress, kicks off her shoes, then peels Sarah out of her green silk sheath. Her stomach is not flat but slightly rounded, with the side ridges and sliding muscles of a belly dancer. Her navel looks naked, as though an emerald should glint there. Lore dips the tip of her little finger in. Sarah tilts her chin up: Take me.
“In the pool.”
She wants to soar and swoop and mate on the wing, gulp at the medium that buoys her, like a bird.
Lore is nervous and excited. She takes Sarah’s hand and they step to the side of the pool. The heavy pink liquid laps idly at the tiles. The first ledge is about three feet deep.
They step down, slowly, and the liquid, body temperature, slides up their ankles, their calves, and behind their knees. Up, further.
Sarah bobs a little, letting the surface tension rub between her legs. Lore moves behind her, circles her waist, and throws them both in. She keeps hold of Sarah as she kicks for the bottom, twenty feet down. She wraps one leg around the ring there and waits, shuddering with fear that she tells herself is anticipation.
It is not water, of course, but perfluorocarbon, and when Lore has no breath left in her body, she opens her mouth and breathes in. It is like breathing a fist.
Her body shoots toward the space, ancient habits demanding that she cough up the liquid and breathe air, but her lungs are full long before she reaches the silvery pink of the surface, and she can still move, still think, and the panic recedes. She is alive! She laughs, a strange, gushing affair, and experiments with pulling the perfluorocarbon in and out of her lungs. The liquid moves in and out, in and out, like a sliding arm.
She swims down and Sarah up; they meet near the middle, porpoising over each other, belly to belly. Even their skin feels different: rubbery and resilient, like that of marine mammals. Lore strokes back over Sarah, turns her face down, covers her, belly to back, and cups the small, cool breasts in her hand. Sarah dives. Clinging like limpets, they swerve at the last minute, then turn this way and that along the smooth bottom. Lore imagines they are seals diving after agile fish. They part by mutual consent, enjoying themselves, playing like children. But they swim around each other, always each other’s focus, like dolphins courting. Lore is exhilarated. Partly the champagne, partly moving in three dimensions, partly the fact that the perfluorocarbon supplies two to three times as much oxygen as air. She swims all the way to the top, until her back and buttocks poke out into the air, and floats, like a hovering hawk, until Sarah is directly beneath her. Then she stoops.
The liquid pouring into her lungs is like a river running through her. She feels as though she could be hauling herself along a rope, a line made of water, the rope running through her, tight, taut, fiercely singing. She catches Sarah and clamps an arm around her waist, a mouth at her throat. Sarah keeps swimming, laughing, until Lore traps Sarah’s legs in her own and thrusts a finger inside her.
They make love for nearly an hour. Each time they come they thrash like fish.
Chapter 19
It happened just before one in the morning, and there was nothing anyone could have done about it. I was walking away from the readout station with the latest figures when something in my peripheral vision made me turn back. The numbers on the volatile organic counters were rocketing. All the alarms went off.