“Hey,” he called. “Hey! I don’t even know your name.”
He stood there, unsure of himself.
The girl’s voice called to him, from where, he couldn’t tell. “Arima.”
“Arima,” he said. Then again, louder, “Arima!”
She did not answer again. After a time, he gave up. She had vanished into the labyrinth of the vast cruise ship.
He trudged back to his stateroom, yet though exhausted, his heart sang.
“Arima,” he murmured.
He flicked off the lights, and kicked off his boots, but he was too tight to peel off his clothes. He crawled into bed. Then he remembered Squizzle.
“Squiz. Hey, Squiz,” he called.
The monkey ambled in through the open door.
“Good t’see you,” he said. “Shut the door, would you?”
His head sank into the deep, soft pillow, and he fell into blessed oblivion.
***
He fell or swam through depth upon depth of interstellar ocean, every layer lit by a different coloured sun, every layer formed from coalescing gases with a different refractive index, so the light as it passed through one would shift and cavort as it reached the next. The suns shone with a myriad dazzling hues, some orange red, some deep blue, some a shimmering green. Adamantine dust, the dust of diamonds, flecked the nebulous haze, whirling in their places, to throw scintillating rays in every direction.
He swam or fell through the interstellar light show, and his hand itched, but in this place no product existed but the gifts of stars. Nothing could exist in that circus of stars except the game of stars, and his own formless consciousness.
An impossible thing occurred: a tiny hand plucked at a head, a head that could not be in this place between the stars.
The hand plucked at his head again, and he felt an irritated tremor ripple through his body. That, too, was a thing of another space, another kind of space.
When he sensed it draw near a third time, he tried to avoid it; he attempted to swim, or float, or fall away from the grasping hand. This attempt failed, for instead of retreating into the comforting bodiless abyss of light, he pressed his face into his pillow, found he was smothering himself, lurched upright in bed, and coughed.
Awake.
No stars, no light show.
All a dream.
The hand came again to worry at his head, accompanied by the soft grunts of a distressed monkey. Perhaps it was not entirely a dream.
"Mrrffgh?" he said, squinting and rubbing bleary eyes, eyes that felt sore and swollen, as if he'd spent fifteen hours poring over the Soviet encyclopaedia by candle light. He peered out from the warm embrace of the covers, a wasted effort if there ever was one, for the lights were off, and the state room had no windows, or other source of illumination. He saw black silk, swathed in shadows, painted with tar.
The room looked brighter with his eyes shut.
Squizzle's tiny fingers touched his head, brushed his hair, found his ear, and clung on.
"Rrgh. Geroff, Squiz."
The monkey held on, and even tightened his grip. At the same time, he began to shuffle and then jump up and down on the pillow. Soro felt this as a tug that soon became a painful yanking. If the monkey didn't let go, they'd have a one-eared photographer on this contest. He wondered, in his quarter-awake way, if that would change Belle's plans, and help get Sam back faster.
Probably not.
He sat up in bed, a move that cost him greater pain, for Squizzle, accustomed to climbing and swinging, had tough little fingers. The monkey clung on, and the only change was that now he was hanging from Soro's ear.
"That's enough, you scraggly little fur ball!"
He tried to push the monkey off, but that didn't work, so he resorted to prying at the little fellow's fingers. That worked, and Squizzle would have tumbled flat onto the bed, had Soro not put up a hand to catch him. He felt pretty sure the little guy couldn't hurt himself falling onto a big soft bed, but no matter how annoying or agonising the ear pull had got, he'd never have let him go splat on a hard deck, and he wasn't going to risk his hairy hide on a soft one, either.
He rubbed his ear. "Sorry, Squiz," he said. "You didn't give me much choice."
The monkey was having none of it. He burrowed under the covers, which were taking on a faint, greyish shade as his eyes adjusted.
"What happened to you, anyway?" he said. "Nightmares? Central Park squirrels ganging up on you again?"
He listened, but the monkey had gone silent.
He frowned. "Squiz?"
Then he heard it. Breathing. Not the soft sound of a mini monkey, but the harsh whisper of a grown human straining to suppress the sound of his breath. If he'd been uncertain, a second breath came, not in front of him, from the bed, but behind, from somewhere in the big, dark stateroom.
Soro came awake. His heart jumped and began to drum. His hands and guts went cold, and the hairs on his neck and back pricked up. He gritted his teeth to keep them from rattling, and turned around.
The chamber still lay in darkness, but his eyes continued to adjust, and if he paid attention to his peripheral vision, he could make out the shapes of his table and chair, the shapeless shadow of his bag on the floor, and the faint glimmer of the mirror in the en-suite bathroom, half visible through the open door.
His senses yelled at him. Something was off about the picture. The room should have been in total darkness, and even the most well adjusted eye, even a damn cat's eye couldn't see in the utter black.
The door. The door hung ajar, and allowed a trifle of light to seep in from the faint night lighting of the corridor outside.
It came back to him in an instant. He'd dropped into bed, as weak as a wilting flower, and the door... He'd left it open. Someone had entered through the open door, and now they were hiding in his room with him. Whoever it was, he moved with stealth, or perhaps Soro had just been too depleted to rouse, but he hadn't counted on Squizzle's superior senses.
Does he want to slash my throat? No, he'd have done it already. But maybe Squiz woke me just as he was about to do it.
The thought galvanised his tired body. Screw waiting around in the dark. He shot for the door.
He would have made it, if he hadn't paused and turned, stopped by fear for Squiz. The little monkey was resourceful, but not indestructible. As he turned back towards the bed, someone slammed into him, knocking him towards the door. He made a thud as he hit the door, and drove it shut. He stumbled forwards, back into the room, winded. He'd have a fine new bruise on his chest the next morning.
If he saw the next morning.
He heard shoes on the carpet, but now true darkness lay on the room. He saw nothing, until stars exploded in front of his eyes as something hit his temple.
He slipped, and fell backwards, and as he fell, his hands shot out by instinct, clutching at the air. His right caught nothing but a handful of air molecules, but his left snagged something blocky and cool, about the size of a fist. He heard a snap, and then he heard his own body crash into the floor. Whatever he'd grabbed, the fall flung it from his hand.
He heard shoes pound as his assailant ran across him, threw open the door, and rushed out into the corridor.
He massaged his brow, and picked himself up. He swayed as he walked back to the door, and poked his head out. He peered through the fog of pain, but saw nothing to the left or right. He shrugged, continued to rub his head, and shut the door. He clicked on the lights, checked the door was as locked as it got, and headed to the fridge, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the glare.
He didn't find any ice, but he did turn up a can of Brazilian cola, which he pressed against his temple. He sat on the edge of the bed, and called Squiz. The monkey crawled out of the covers, and climbed up his leg, his back, and perched on his shoulder, where he sat, shivering, and pawing at his hair.
He patted the monkey. "Good thing I got a night monkey, little buddy," he said. "If I'd got a day monkey, we'd both be in trouble."
/> His temple pulsed with hot pain, and the only effect of the cola was to make his hand freeze. Still, he held it in place, and after a while he began to feel better. He might even be able to get back to sleep, and as soon as the idea came to him, it grew into an insistent pull.
He checked his watch. It was a little after three a.m. He thought about calling the ship's security, or whatever nautical item served for police, but he was too tired, and he'd be way too embarrassed when they asked how the intruder gained entry.
He lay down, too tired to turn out the lights. But just as he sank into the soft mattress, something grabbed his attention, and refused to let go.
In the brief struggle, he couldn't call it a fight, he'd snatched something. He'd heard a snap. Now he saw, under his table, a boxy black object, trailing a long grey nylon strap.
"Not in a sonth of Mondays," he said.
He retrieved it, and sat up in bed, Squiz in his lap, and together they examined the thing. He'd got himself a new, expensive Moniker digital camera. Moniker was an expensive firm, who specialised in handmade cameras and accessories, toys for the stupidly wealthy. He clicked it on, and saw a bunch of shots of a pretty young woman with sad violet eyes and angelic features, surmounted by a shimmering blonde halo. She posed on the nondescript streets of a nondescript city. Apart from those pictures, he found a bunch in some jungle. He asked Squizzle, but if the monkey knew where it was, he wasn't talking.
He lay back in bed, and tried to sleep.
It took a long time.
***
By the next day, he still hadn’t got used to being onboard the New Dawn. It wasn’t just the way he had to climb three flights of stairs to find anything resembling an ‘outside’, or the mysterious odours, some harsh and metallic, others chemical or even floral, that wafted through the corridors, perhaps emanating from the engines, perhaps from the laundry rooms. It wasn’t even the constant hum, the vibration that ran through the ship from bow to stern, although that was one of the strangest points of being aboard ship; he even felt it in his bed, during the night; it had given him an eerie feeling of being about to tumble out, although that was barely possible with a bed that size. It had translated itself into dreams of floating on a sea in the sky, to plummet down to an ever receding earth.
But it wasn’t even the unending hum that gave him the weirdest feeling, although it challenged for that role when he noticed it in his plate and fork, his food, and his very body at breakfast. It was, instead, when he stood on the fore deck, or the aft deck, or somewhere along the side. It made little difference to look at the ocean wastes before them, or the ocean wastes they had left behind. He knew the waters teemed with life, but they concealed it below a choppy, grey blue surface that glinted now and then under the bright but cloudy sky. The salt smell of the waters came to him on the same breeze that carried the oily smell of the diesel engines, with sometimes a tang of ozone. He could look in any direction, and see the same sight: white grey sky and blue grey wavelets, extending to the arc of the world.
The ship was a trap.
Back on land, anywhere on land, he could walk or run, he could crawl, climb, sidle, leap; he could move. He could be confined, but with ingenuity, effort, and a spot of luck, he could get out and go.
Here there was no getting out. Any attempt to go would lead him to plunge into the waves, and the chill waters of the Atlantic. The mere thought made him shudder, and Squizzle must have felt it too, because he turned away from the sight of the waters, and clasped his head, nuzzling against it. The voyage had affected him, too, Soro noticed; the monkey’s spirits had been low ever since they’d boarded.
And why the thought of escape? Why did he care that he couldn’t vault over the side, make his getaway? He looked once again at the camera he had ‘borrowed’ from his intruder in the night. The expensive Moniker branded device confirmed what Belle had intimated; one of the other contestants was a criminal, and interested in him.
“Interested hell!” he said, making Squiz jump. “The creature was about to try something, and I was lucky you warned me before he had a chance.” He patted the little monkey.
He’d had enemies before, of one sort or another, but never had he been locked up with them, trapped on a ship. What made it worse was that now he knew his enemy was a fellow contestant, he couldn’t trust any of them. The Moniker camera spoke of wealth, of success, but these people were the refined gold of his profession. Any one of them might have had this camera, either as something they’d bought, as a prize in some past competition, or as a gift from an overjoyed client.
“That narrows it down to just about everybody,” he said, grinning at his own frustration.
He was still tangling with the problem when the captain announced that a special event would occur soon after breakfast, and would all the passengers go and take their meal.
The thought of food held little appeal, but when he sat down in the restaurant, and the waiter served him a stack of steaming fresh pancakes, smothered in maple syrup and filled with good vanilla ice cream and fruits of the forest, his saliva glands began to work overtime. He wolfed down the pancakes, and called for more.
“Big appetite for a little guy,” said a woman with a familiar, lilting New Zealand accent.
He looked up at her, an eyebrow raised, and a retort rising to his lips, but she held up her hands for peace.
“Sorry,” she said. “Force of habit. You’ve earned a good breakfast, and I’d like you to keep up your strength. May I sit?”
“I guess.”
She smirked. “A lady loves to feel welcome.”
He blinked, surprised by how different she seemed. She’d lost the dress, changed it for white jeans and a t-shirt printed with rolling green hills under a blue sky, but more than her clothes had changed; her entire attitude towards him had softened, although he sensed her spunky persona lay under the surface.
He surprised himself, too.
He stood, and pulled out a chair for her. “Please,” he said, and motioned for her to sit.
“Very courtly of you,” she said as she took her seat.
She tucked into her pancakes, and he had seconds. “This is delicious,” she said. “They know how to treat us.”
“Yeah,” he said, unable to keep his mind off the camera, and his mystery assailant.
“The ship is fully stocked,” she said. “Two movie theatres, three or four restaurants, a gym, a pool, a tennis court… But you’ll have to show me the boxing ring.”
He peered at her, and then he saw she was looking at the bruise on his temple. Her attention reminded him of the pain he’d been ignoring all morning, and he cursed under his breath as it began to throb.
“Come on,” she said. “Looks like you’ve got a story.”
He shook his head. “Nah. Like you said, a bit too much vigorous exercise last night.”
“Last night… When you looked like you were about to fall off your feet, you were so tired.”
He sighed. “I can’t talk about it.”
She looked hurt. “You saved my ass. Odd’s balls, you saved it twice! If you can’t trust me… I don’t agree with your professional ethic, and I don’t like your fashion sense, and I’m not sure you should really have an owl monkey on your shoulder, but I think you’ve got a bigger heart than anyone I’ve ever met. I don’t care if you got that lump trying to steal the captain’s golden nose pick, I’ll back you up.”
He gaped at her, and then his feelings caught up with him, and he had to look away, lest she see the tears start in his eyes. He’d felt so alone, so lost and alone, but Arima had changed that.
He wanted to tell her how much her words meant, but he didn’t know how to begin, so instead he said, “does the captain really have a golden nose pick?”
She rolled her eyes, and then they both laughed, though he knew it was far from the funniest joke in history.
“You’re right,” he said, wiping his face and eyes with his napkin. “A lot happened last night. But it d
idn’t start there.”
“You’d better go back to the beginning,” she said.
So he did.
***
She listened with rapt attention, her blue green eyes never straying far from his face. She didn't interrupt, and she didn't try to shoot him down with snarky comments. That last surprised him most; he knew himself, and that kind of talk was never far from his lips. He'd seen it in her, too, and braced himself against it, but the assault never came.
"I see," she said, when he'd brought her up to the quandaries of the morning.
"You see?" He couldn't resist testing her. "You see what, the hole in my head that's been letting in all the crazy?"
"Don't be a snunky munkle," she said, but her eyes laughed as he said it. "You forget, I was there at New Verity, I was with you. You say some Gell dudes tried to jank you yesterday."
He frowned. "Dudes...jank?"
She clawed at the air in mock annoyance. "I can't get the hang of your New York lingo. Everything I learned from watching TV is out of date. So now I'm playing ahead of the curve."
A slow grin spread across his face. "Yeah, I can get with that. So, the janking..."
"Right. I was there, I saw how you handled yourself at New Verity, and I can easily believe you've made some guys so pissed they want to carve angel wings in your liver."
"Thanks."
"You're remarkably welcome. So," she picked up a chunk of pancake, oozing with syrup, and jabbed it at his face to emphasise her points. "I can accept that they'd try to get at you. Reckon they probably want to scare you, or shake loose whatever you took-"
"But I didn't take anything! I mean, except a couple of pictures, and...you."
"Yeah, but what do they know? And maybe they had more going on than we saw. Maybe they think we're some kind of activists, or thingummy, investigative reporters. Maybe they think I was there to distract them, while you snapped their recipe for secret sauce."
As the pancake slice jerked towards him for the umpteenth time, a droplet of maple syrup flew through the air and splash on his lip. Arima's eyes and mouth went wide, the start of an apology coming from her throat, but Soro flicked his tongue, and licked it away. Then he winked. Arima tried to go from contrition to ire, but got lost on the way, and wound up giggling, a blush on her cheeks.