The Sea is Full of Stars

somewhere, or else somebody had gone to a tremendous amount of bother just for art.

As he followed it, he tried to remember back. He had fragments of memories; in fact, he had memories from all sorts of sources, but none took precedence and many were confusing. He thought he was somebody named Aristotle Martinez, since that was the only male memories he had and he felt that he was a male. But it was an incomplete set of memories, with more gaps than whole parts, and he seemed very distant, like looking at a character in a play rather than at one’s own self.

And then there was Ming Dawn Palavri. He had at least as many memories of hers as of Ari’s, and in some cases it seemed that the Ming memories, while also distant, were more complete than much of Ari’s. Talk about your hybrids! He could tap either life, male or female, and think very much along those lines. Considering what a skunk Ari was, he suspected that he’d rather have been Ming, which explained the memory jostling. Split personalities, split nature, dual sexuality, part fish and part mammal, water breather and air breather—this was some mixed-up existence he was headed into!

But there were others in his head, too. Less so, less fully formed and detailed, but very much there. Some of Angel was there, oddly, and so were Alpha and Beta, although they were so synched that they seemed to have no separate identity. Alpha and Beta gave him the shivers; he could follow their single-minded logic and their view of the universe, but who would want to? Angel was a different story. He didn’t have her clearly at all, but those snippets he could make out were as bizarre a view of the universe as the Alpha-Beta concept, if different. Or were they? Alpha and Beta knew who their god was and joyfully lived to serve him and him alone. Angel believed in a different, more grandiose God of the cosmos that she could not see yet felt was with her seeing and hearing all and guiding her, and she joyfully lived to serve Him and Him alone. Hmmm… That didn’t sound like much of a choice.

The worst part was, none of them were him. They were all there, along with a lot of data, a lot of shared experiences, and some pretty nasty memories as well, but not a one of them fit like an old suit and comfortable chair. Ari didn’t really fit because he didn’t like him very much and didn’t want to be him. He had the fullest picture of Ming, yet he didn’t want to be Ming, either, because he wanted the real Ming back. He wanted to make it up to her, even make love to her. Hell, maybe mate with her.

The others he wanted to forget, although he knew they’d probably be a part of his nightmares. Still, he had the impression that it wasn’t supposed to work like this. They said he should be mentally intact; instead, he seemed a whole new person. Damn. Being yanked around was one thing, but at least he’d known who he was and had an intact ego and personality; now he felt like two very different people, with several others around as onlookers. He’d heard of people with multiple personalities, and perhaps that was what he was experiencing.

He was coming to a junction, but didn’t have to choose which branch to take. It was immediately obvious; if he’d been breathing air instead of water, it would have been breathtaking.

It was a city! And not just caves and kelp and coral, although it did look like a vast coral reef. The lifesigns to his sixth sense were so strong that he had to dampen it; there were a lot of beings over there, hopefully beings like him.

And if it wasn’t electrified and lighting up the sea bottom, then it was doing a pretty fair imitation.

In less than five minutes he encountered the first denizens of this new world, and had the mermaid vision reinforced, although the bodies were not like the classical mermaids of old, appearing more alien. Still, the ears, like clamshells set into each side of the head, the quite Terran-looking faces that seemed to be those of women, even though they might not all have been, and the long, translucent, and slightly glowing “hair,” were very much as he’d suspected.

In less than ten minutes two such creatures wearing armbands with some kind of symbol and carrying what appeared to be ray guns had placed him under arrest.

He’d almost gotten used to a kind of local telepathy with the two women, so he wasn’t completely thrown by the way the authorities spoke to him, only their attitudes. It was telepathy, but very much on the surface. He could no more read their true thoughts than he could have read those butterfly things’ thoughts back in that entry place, yet the communication was clear. It was a combination—another hybrid!— involving the sending of a specific (or, if you wanted to address many, a broad) audio signal that acted as a carrier for the thoughts, which were perceived much like words and sentences. And it was clear from the start that this communication method left no room for weaseling or error. You understood exactly what the speaker meant.

Not that the two cops had been all that communicative. He’d just swam down on the main line for the city and they suddenly materialized on either side of him.

“Hold! What is your name?” one asked flat out, the “tone” conveying the kind of arrogant authority he expected of cops.

“I—” he began, and stopped. Hell, just which name did he use when he felt like neither? “I am Ari Martinez,” he finally responded, picking the one that was most correct in the basics, although he didn’t really exactly feel like Ari Martinez. “I was—” He hesitated, but his mind sent the requisite mental holograms showing him and his former companions being pushed into the void of the Gate. “I awoke on an island above in a terrible storm and my impulse was to come down here.”

“Smart impulse. That’s a hurricane up there. We just hope it doesn’t knock off the electricity plant,” the other cop said. “Well, you may have suddenly become like us, but that doesn’t make you one of us. Just ask the Crown Regent of Chalidang, for one.”

As he tried to make sense of that cryptic remark, the other cop snapped something tight around his neck, just below the gills. “Hey! What’s that?”

“It is an electric collar. You will come with us and do as we say, or either of us can press one stud on our wrist controllers and you will be shocked at whatever level we choose up to unconsciousness. Don’t make us do this. Sometimes you don’t move much after you get the big shock, and you just got here.”

He knew just the type of device, if not the thing itself, and he had no desire to test it out.

Their wrist controllers, not something he had paid much attention to before, were interesting little gadgets. There was a series of buttons, some small readouts in tiny windows, and they flanked a circular section that looked like a speaker. By locking down one of the buttons, they could beam their report in, presumably broadcast to headquarters; they also seemed to receive information back through it, but the signal was obviously so localized that it could only be heard or understood by the wearer.

Just as the water gave fully three-dimensional movements, so, too, had the city been designed for those who could simply float around and glide about and needed no surface roads, elevators, or much else. Buildings rose twenty stories yet had entrances on each floor, while vast tracts of apartments looked like great stylized obelisks and mounds with holes all over. All of the structures and even the layout of the city was clearly designed to keep water flowing, and there were large domed structures whose sole purpose was to either warm or cool the water passing through, and thus create the patterns. It kept the water fresh and oxygenated even when one of the denizens was not moving.

And yet, for all its alien strangeness, many aspects of the city were common to most communities of any size. There was municipal lighting, and inside lighting as well, with energy bands marking an incredible pattern of colorful routings. Ari suspected it was like the corridors back in the entry place; the streets had both a color and a frequency to identify them. Along them would be numbers. The colors from this illumination identified broad categories, like east or north, up and down, but the bands also carried frequency information that his mind accepted and differentiated from all the others. He was sure that if you knew the system, as he did not, you could easily navigate the whole thing.

That was one thing he missed from his brief union with the two women: knowing what it was like to be a genius, to quickly deduce and file away information as effortlessly as you’d scratch an itch. He knew that together they could have figured out this system just by looking at it, and that there was no way he could do it on his own. Still, he realized that certain bands, apparently all associated with yellow, were for commercial traffic only. This traffic involved some fairly large containers being “driven” by heavy duty motors and a driver with long rods for steering, while others were small rounded containers pushed by beefy tradesmen.

It was a sophisticated, modern culture, probably as much as some of the water breathing worlds of the Realm. There were electric water scooters lined up outside what could only have been the police building, ready to