“You’re under arrest,” said the head policeman. He turned to Seven. “You’ve been a great help. We will handle it from here.”
“What will you do?” asked Chinapat.
“Of course, in time, we will return the dolphins to the sea,” the policeman said.
Seven, at last, could understand the dolphins communicating in the van. They were saying that they hadn’t much time remaining, and soon it would be too late.
“There isn’t much time,” Seven said to the cop.
The gangsters, who’d been silent, looked at each other and then at Chinapat and Seven. “You have no choice but to let us go,” said the leader. “You will regret this. Hey, what are you doing?”
Chinapat had climbed into the van and Seven joined him. He rolled down the window. “We will release them.” He didn’t wait for an answer. The police and gangsters stood on the road, watching as Chinapat squealed the tires, kicking up gravel, as he drove the van back onto the highway.
5.2
Beach, Muang District, Chon Buri
Chinapat pushed the accelerator to the floor as the van sped toward the sea. He cut off the highway, and the van bumped along a gravel road. They could both smell the sea. The dolphins, despite their weakened condition, had continued to sing during the entire journey. The rescue revived their spirits. When the van reached the end of a dirt road, Seven got out of the van and guided Chinapat as he backed onto the beach, the surf lapping at the rear wheels.
Seven spotted the
Police sirens wailed in the distance as Shockley and his men climbed back into the rowboat. “That will be the police. You’d better come with us,” he said.
Seven shook her head. She squeezed Chinapat’s hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Shockley.”
He smiled and nodded. “The rescue was worth 10,000 points. You are almost over the finish line. Why stop now?”
Seven knew that was a con. Simulations never had a finish line, only a continuous loop, with points stacking up to reach the moon but never quite reaching the stars.
5.3
Friendship Hotel, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok
Like ice into water and water into steam... Seven continued to fix her gaze at the crate of iceberg water bottles Shockley had left behind. She had never felt more alone and sad. Anger welled up inside as she picked up one of the bottles by the neck and flung it as hard as she could at the sea. It exploded in a star cluster of light, turning the shoreline a silvery glowing white.
As she leaned down for a second bottle of water, she looked to her right. Chinapat was next to her in bed in their Bangkok hotel room. They’d been drinking Mekong whiskey, and the bottles were strewn on the floor. She held an empty bottle in her hand, and as she rolled over she asked Chinapat if he was awake. He’d unhooked a red and blue wire from the insert plates at the base of his skull cables. The first two rows on the consort unit beside the bed flashed a hot white.
“Why does the dolphin simulation always upset you?” he asked. It was like asking an addict why she couldn’t go cold turkey.
He gently removed the cables from Seven and let them drop to the side.
She twisted the wires between her thumb and forefinger, and looked up at Chinapat. He was waiting for her answer.
“We’re out of the router, right?”
He nodded.
“We’re off the grid, right?” she asked.
“Right.” That seemed obvious, and he wondered why she asked.
She shook her head. “It’s not right. I’m logged at 5.2? And where are you, if you’re not at 5.2?”
Chinapat rolled over and grinned into his pillow. She’d confused the “where are you” with the “who are you” matrix.
“Listen,” he said, “and they’ll tell you themselves.”
He cranked up the volume on the black console no bigger than a shoebox. Dolphin voices echoed across the room, liming the ceiling with a blanket of white ice crystals. The hotel window overlooking Sukhumvit Road was caked with a half-inch thick sheet of frost. The rising and falling singsong notes, like musical instruments, formed patterns in the ice.
When Shockley opened the door, it was no longer the hotel. They were aboard ship, in the holding tank. As he stepped inside, Shockley handed her a glass filled to the top with pure iceberg water.
“Take another sip and relax. Another ten thousand years will pass in the blink of an eye.”
Christopher G. Moore
Canadian Christopher G. Moore is the creator of the award-winning Vincent Calvino crime fiction series and the author of the Land of Smiles Trilogy.
In his former life, he studied at Oxford University and taught law at the University of British Columbia. He wrote radio plays for the CBC and NHK before his first novel was published in New York in 1985, when he promptly left his tenured academic job for an uncertain writing career, leaving his colleagues thinking he was not quite right in the head.
His journey from Canada to Thailand, his adopted home, included some time in Japan in the early 1980s and four years in New York in the late 1980s. In 1988, he came to Thailand to harvest materials to write a book. The visit was meant to be temporary. Two decades and 22 novels later, he is still in Bangkok and far from having exhausted the rich Southeast Asian literary materials. His novels have so far appeared in a dozen languages.
For more information about the author and his books, visit his website: www.cgmoore.com. He also blogs weekly at International Crime Authors: Reality Check: www.internationalcrimeauthors.com.
The Mistress Wants Her Freedom
