can’t just wake up one morning and decide to become aquatic.’
‘You’re not worried about overcrowding, surely?’
‘Not really. There’s more surface area down here than on all the dry land masses combined. Earth coexists with a planet as large as Mars, and all you have to do to cross from one to the other is swim. But there are bottlenecks. Our clinics can only cope with so many transformations, and with the germline programmes making ever more headway, there’ll soon be second-generation aquatics who never came through the clinics – merchildren born of merpeople. Then we’ll have to impose much stricter quotas. Needless to say, our offspring will have priority. It’s not too late to join us, though.’
‘Become a citizen? Thanks, but I’ve got other plans for the rest of my life.’
They rode an elevator upshaft and emerged into a clean white-tiled room. With the tiled floor eventually giving way to a shimmering rectangle of turquoise water, accessed at various points by stairs and ramps, it resembled a large indoor swimming pool. Dim greenish light filtered through heavily strutted ceiling windows. That must be ocean above his head, he thought: enough of it that the full glare of sunlight was reduced to this soupy, olive- stained radiance.
‘You can locomote the rest of the way if you want to,’ Gilbert said, ‘but it would really make a lot more sense if you travelled by water instead. Do you swim?’
Geoffrey couldn’t recall the last time he’d set foot in water. ‘A bit.’
The merwoman gestured to a white door in the tiled wall to Geoffrey’s right. ‘Wetsuit in there. Leave your clothes and belongings there – they’ll be forwarded to your quarters later.’
With some diffidence, Geoffrey locked himself in the changing room and removed his clothes. He bundled them up in a wireframe basket, then examined the waiting wetsuit. It was fixed against the wall by some hidden means, legs and arms spread wide. It was a vivid yellow-green colour, with a texture like fine-grained sandpaper. He was just starting to work out the best way to get into it when the suit peeled open along hidden seams, exactly as if a kindly poltergeist were offering assistance.
Geoffrey turned and shuffled backwards, arms and legs mirroring the suit’s posture, and waited for the fabric to seal itself around his body. At first it tightened alarmingly, sucking onto his skin as if vacuum-formed. Rather to his surprise, he found that he could still breathe without difficulty. He felt, in fact, completely unclothed, and when he brushed his bare fingertips across his fabric-clad chest, it felt as if he was touching his own skin. High-res tactile- transmission system, he supposed, the kind they had in spacesuits these days. He walked out of the room, feeling more self-conscious than he would have liked. The suit enclosed him from ankle to neck, but its tight-fitting contours were barely sufficient to preserve his modesty.
‘Good,’ Gilbert said, giving him no more than a momentary glance. ‘Now for the aqua-mobility harness.’
She walked him over to the far wall, where a dozen or so sleek white devices were racked in a line. They resembled the partial skeletons of marine mammals, each with a segmented spine, a fluke, articulated side-flippers, a lacy suggestion of a skull. There was also a kind of cracked-open ribcage.
‘I’m meant to get into that?’
‘You want to keep up with me,’ Gilbert said, ‘you’d better. Back into the harness, it’ll do the rest.’
Geoffrey did as he was told, selecting the first of the harnesses. The ribcage pincered slowly around him, clutching his chest firmly, the padded insides of the ‘ribs’ reshaping to provide maximum surface-area contact. The skull enclosed his head, forming an openwork cage equipped with a breathing apparatus and suction goggles. He felt the harness detach from the wall mounting, so that he was bearing what little weight it possessed. It felt as flimsy as a cheaply made carnival costume.
‘What do I do with it?’ Geoffrey asked, feeling awkward. He could speak and see freely: the breathing apparatus was still hinged away from his mouth and nose, and the goggles had yet to clamp down onto his eye sockets.
‘Step into the water. The harness will sense your intentions and operate accordingly.’ With this, Gilbert divested herself of the exo. She slipped out of it and slid into the water, sleek as an otter. Released from the exo she was effectively naked, but her form was so thoroughly alien that Geoffrey might as well have been watching a wildlife documentary.
He took one of the sloping ramps and walked into the blood-warm water. When he was up to his waist, the harness latched on to his legs and coaxed them gently together. Without any apparent conscious volition on his part, the harness then pushed him into a horizontal swimming posture. Before he had a chance to gag on the water the mask and goggles had covered his face. The view through the goggles was as bright and clear as day, lacking any optical distortion or cloudiness.
‘Follow me,’ Gilbert said, and he heard her clearly through the water. She flexed her body and torpedoed past him, executing an exuberant barrel-roll.
He kicked his legs and paddled his arms. Miraculously, he surged forwards, the harness flexing all the way along its spine, taking his legs with it. The feeble paddling of his arms was amplified a dozen- or hundredfold by the elegant wide-spread flippers, which extended a good two metres either side of him.
Gilbert was still ahead, swimming underwater at least as fast as someone might jog on dry land, but Geoffrey was only a body length or so behind her. For all the power she put into her swimming, it was evidently a very efficient process, judging by the lack of turbulence in her wake.
‘Not claustrophobic, are you?’ she asked.
‘If I was, now would be a bit late to find out.’
‘We’ll take the express tube. You’ll like this.’
Around the pool’s submerged walls were several tunnel mouths, each ringed by a hoop of glowing primary colour. ‘Red are the exit tubes, we don’t take those,’ Gilbert said. ‘Wouldn’t be able to swim against the up-current anyway, even with power-assist.’
She aimed for the tunnel mouth ringed in glowing purple, appearing to accelerate into the maw at the last moment. Geoffrey followed, muscularly signalling his intention to steer and feeling the harness respond almost instantly. Indeed, it appeared to be adapting to him as quickly as he was adapting to it. He was swimming underwater as effortlessly as a dolphin.
He grinned. It would be madness not to enjoy this.
