Kidnapper slowed to a canter and cruised purposefully through the university, then turned north and crossed a bridge into the peninsula that contained most of Vancouver proper. The chevaline did a perfectly good job of not stepping on anyone, and Hackworth soon learned to stop worrying and trust its instincts. This left his eyes free to wander through the sights of Vancouver, which had not been advisable when he'd come this way on the velocipede. He had not noticed, before, the sheer maddening profusion of the place, each person seemingly an ethnic group of one, each with his or her own costume, dialect, sect, and pedigree. It was as if, sooner or later, every part of the world became India and thus ceased to function in any sense meaningful to straight-arrow Cartesian rationalists like John Percival Hackworth, his family and friends.
Shortly after passing the Aerodrome they reached Stanley Park, an unruined peninsula several miles around, which had, thank God, been forked over to Protocol and kept much as it had always been, with the same Douglas firs and mossy red cedars that had been growing there forever. Hackworth had been here a few times and had a vague idea of how it was laid out: restaurants here and there, paths along the beach, a zoo and aquarium, public playing fields.
Kidnapper took him for a nice lope along a pebbly beach and then somewhat abruptly bounded up a slope, for that purpose switching into a gait never used by any real horse. Its legs shortened, and it clawed its way surefootedly up the forty-five-degree surface like a mountain lion. An alarmingly quick zigzag through a stand of firs brought them into an open grassy area. Then Kidnapper slowed to a mere walk, as if it were a real horse that had to be cooled down gradually, and took Hackworth into a semicircle of old totem poles.
A young woman was here, standing before one of the poles with her hands clasped behind her back, which would have given her an endearingly prim appearance if she had not been stark naked and covered with constantly shifting mediatronic tattoos. Even her hair, which fell loosely to her waist, had been infiltrated with some kind of nanosite so that each strand's color fluctuated from place to place according to a scheme not just now apparent to Hackworth. She was looking intently at the carving of a totem pole and apparently not for the first time, for her tattoos were done in much the same style.
The woman was looking at a totem pole dominated by a representation of an orca, head down and tail up, dorsal fin projecting horizontally out of the pole and evidently carved from a separate piece of wood. The orca's blowhole had a human face carved around it. The face's mouth and the orca's blowhole were the same thing. This promiscuous denial of boundaries was everywhere on the totem poles and on the woman's tattoo: The staring eyes of a bear were also the faces of some other sort of creature. The woman's navel was also the mouth of a human face, much like the orca's blowhole, and sometimes that face became the mouth of a larger face whose eyes were her nipples and whose goatee was her pubic hair. But as soon as he'd made out one pattern, it would change into something else, because unlike the totem poles the tattoo was dynamic and played with images in time the same way that the totem poles did in space.
'Hello, John,' she said. 'It's too bad I loved you because you had to leave.'
Hackworth tried to find her face, which should have been easy, it being the thing in the front of her head; but his eyes kept snagging on all the other little faces that came and went and flowed into one another, time-sharing her eyes, her mouth, even her nostrils. And he was starting to recognize patterns in her hair too, which was more than he could handle. He was pretty sure he had just caught a glimpse of Fiona in there.
She turned her back on him, her hair spinning out momentarily like a twirling skirt, and for that instant he could see through it and begin to make sense of the image. He was positive that somewhere in there he'd seen Gwen and Fiona walking along a beach.
He dismounted from Kidnapper and followed her on foot. Kidnapper followed him silently. They walked across the park for half a mile or so, and Hackworth kept his distance because when he got too close to her, the images in her hair bewildered his eyes. She took him to a wild stretch of beach where immense Douglas fir logs lay scattered around. As Hackworth clambered over the logs trying to keep up with the woman, he occasionally caught a handhold that appeared to have been carved by someone long ago.
The logs were palimpsests. Two of them rose from the water's edge, not quite vertical, stuck like darts into the impermanent sand. Hackworth walked between them, the surf crashing around his knees. He saw weathered intimations of faces and wild beasts living in the wood, ravens, eagles, and wolves tangled into organic skeins. The water was bitterly cold on his legs, and he whooped in a couple of breaths, but the woman kept walking; the water was up past her waist now, and her hair was floating around her so that the translucent images once again became readable. Then she vanished beneath a collapsing wave two meters high.
The wave knocked Hackworth on his backside and washed him along for a short distance, flailing his arms and legs. When he got his balance back, he sat there for a few moments, letting smaller waves embrace his waist and chest, waiting for the woman to come up for a breath. But she didn't.
There was something down there. He rolled up onto his feet and tramped straight into the ocean. Just as the waves were coming up into his face, his feet contacted something hard and smooth that gave way beneath him. He was sucked downward as the water plunged into a subterranean void. A hatch slammed shut above his head, and suddenly he was breathing air again. The light was silver.
He was sitting in water up to his chest, but it rapidly drained away, drawn off by some kind of a pumping system, and then he found himself looking down a long silvery tunnel. The woman was descending it, a stone's throw ahead of him.
Hackworth had been in a few of these, normally in more industrial settings. The .entrance was dug into the beach, but the rest of it was a floating tunnel, a tube full of air, moored to the bottom. It was a cheap way to make space; the Nipponese used these things as sleeping quarters for foreign guest workers. The walls were made of membranes that drew oxygen from the surrounding seawater and ejected carbon dioxide, so that seen from a fish's point of view, the tunnels steamed like hot pasta on a cold steel plate as they excreted countless microbubbles of polluted CO2. These things extruded themselves into the water like the roots that grew out of improperly stored potatoes, forking from time to time, carrying their own Feeds forward so that they could be extended on command. They were empty and collapsed to begin with, and when they knew they were finished, they inflated themselves with scavenged oxygen and grew rigid.
Now that the cold water had drained out of Hackworth's ears, he could hear a deep drumming that he'd mistaken at first for the crash of the surf overhead; but this had a steadier beat that invited him forward.
Down the tunnel Hackworth walked, following the woman, and as he went the light grew dimmer and the tunnel narrower. He suspected that the walls of the tunnel had mediatronic properties because he kept seeing things from the corners of his eyes that were no longer there when he snapped his head around. He'd assumed that he would soon reach a chamber, a swelling in the tunnel where this woman's friends would sit pounding on enormous kettledrums, but before reaching any such thing, he came to a place where the tunnel had gone completely dark, and he had to crouch to his knees and feel his way along. When he touched the taut but yielding wall of the tunnel with his knees and his hands, he felt the drumming in his bones and realized that audio was built into the stuff; the drumming could be anywhere, or it could be recorded. Or maybe it was a lot simpler than that, maybe the tubes happened to transmit sound well, and somewhere else in the tunnel system, people were just pounding on the walls.
His head contacted the tunnel. He dropped to his belly and began to crawl along. Swarms of tiny sparkling lights kept lunging past his face, and he realized that they were his hands; light-emitting nanosites had become embedded in his flesh. They must have been put there by Dr. X's physician; but they had not come alight until he entered these tunnels.
If the woman hadn't already come through here, he would have given up at this point, thinking it a dead end, a busted tunnel that had failed to expand. The drumming was now coming into his ears and bones from all sides. He could not see a thing, though from time to time he thought he caught a glimmer of flickering yellow light.
The tunnel undulated slightly in the deep currents, rivers of bitterly cold water swirling along the floor of the straits. Whenever he allowed his mind to wander, reminding himself that he was deep below the surface of the ocean here, he had to stop and force himself not to panic. Concentrate on the nice airfilled tunnel, not what surrounds it.
There was definitely light ahead. He found himself in a swelling in the tube, just wide enough to sit up in, and rolled over on his back for a moment to rest. A lamp was burning in here, a bowl filled with some kind of melting hydrocarbon that left no ash or smoke. The mediatronic walls had animated scenes on them, barely visible in the flickering light: animals dancing in the forest.
He followed the tubes for some period of time that was quite long but difficult to estimate. From time to time
