[18-27]
§18 — The door opened, and Frazer stepped in.
“Here again,” he noted. “In the dark.”
“There’s somewhere else I should be?”
The absence reached out to touch him – held him for a while.
“Is it because it kills time?” he asked. It wasn’t a hostile question, but I didn’t really understand what he was saying. If he’d described the cargo as a ‘time-breeder’ it would have made no less sense.
“Does it?” was the best response I could manage.
He started to place his hand on the casing, then stopped, and withdrew it.
I wanted to ask him why he was there, but it was impossible to formulate the question neutrally. His presence was irritating. Concentration had become impractical. I would have left, but that would have said too much. We stood in awkward silence, beside it.
“It’s not a shrine,” he said, after a while. “It’s neatly-wrapped trash. You know that.”
“Why do you care?”
“Care what it is?”
“Care what I think it is.”
“You want to know?” he asked. “Really?”
I nodded, without particular sincerity.
“We have some trust stuff to work though here.” …
“We do?” The topic shouldn’t have surprised me, and didn’t much, but for some reason the timing did. …
“You represent the company.” …
“Sure,” I conceded. “Approximately.” It wasn’t something I’d really considered for a while. Out here, wrapped in the boundless emptiness of the Pacific, Qasm seemed very far away. Once mentioned, the relevance of my employment contract was undeniable. When I tried to mentally pull up the details, it came back in multiple versions. The fragmentation had to be some kind of security ploy I’d settled upon earlier, then deliberately de-memorized, but now it seemed odd. Frazer and the others would most probably have been somewhere out at sea, even if Qasm had never heard of them. They were on the Pythoness because she was a boat, and that’s what they did. It wasn’t at all like that for me. I was only on the Pythoness because the company wanted me to be there, for some purpose that was in no essential respect nautical. The question was, ‘why?’ From Frazer’s perspective, it had to be a concern.
“I’ve no idea what’s in there,” I said, skipping the conversation forward by several predictable steps.
“Yeah, I believe you,” he accepted. “That’s not my central concern. The question I have to ask you is this: what’s your level of commitment to this mission?” The stilted formality, with its display of social awkwardness diverted into linguistic convolution, would have been amusing under alternative circumstances. Right now it was merely another layer of irritation.
“Would I get us all killed in an attempt to reach the objective?” I translated.
“Something like that.”
It was a good question, and surprisingly hard to think through to the end. Crucially, there was a near-perfect match between the company’s operational interests and my crystallizing inclinations. It was undeniable, when examined, that the conclusions I’d reached about the best way to proceed coincided precisely with the instructions I’d received. From outside, that had to look strange – and even sinister. It wouldn’t take any peculiarly extravagant leap of paranoid speculation to see something ominous there. I wasn’t sure that I didn’t see it myself. If I was being played, it would have to look much the same, in every detail. There was a geometrical crash-site of obvious angles that remained unexplored, but my belated attempts to rectify the neglect were already becoming increasingly difficult. Exhaustion had reduced thought to a soggy crawl. Logical steps slipped backwards in the sludge. Each beginning over was executed more incompetently than the last.
“I don’t trust the company,” I tried, hoping the words would drag thought after them. It sounded evasive, even to me. “It pays me what it does so that I don’t have to trust it. That’s business. But I do have to be able to trust you. Otherwise, there’s no sleep.”
“There’s no sleep anyway,” he grumbled.
“Unless …”
“Unless what?”
“Unless we’re thinking about it the wrong way.”
It had taken a while to occur to me. When it did, eventually, arriving in a kind of non-dream, it was almost as if it had always been there. Shadows cast onto the deck from the rotating antenna made a shifting pattern of stripes, rhythmically emerging into distinctness, and then dissolving back into continuity. It produced a crude diagram, applicable to any number of problems. Scanned from one perspective, it was an oscillation. It might have recorded serial alternations between a pair of complementary states, such as waking and sleeping, most obviously. When mentally rotated, the succession was parallelized. It turned into a simultaneous array, or a set of partitions, like a row of storage lockers. The flicker was hypnotic. Without quite realizing when, I had slipped into a fugue state, and begun to think about remembering dreams that never occupied time. What if sleep wasn’t up ahead, out of reach, but concurrent, alongside? Perhaps it was next to us.
“You’re a boat guy,” I said. “You have to spend time thinking about compartments.”
“Sure,” he agreed. By the end of that single soft syllable his mind had traveled somewhere, opened and then re-sealed a door. “Isolation. Containment problems.”
“Separation in space – or at least something spacelike.”
“I’m not really getting this,” he said – although I could see that he was. “Where is sleep?” he mused, in confirmation. “That’s nuts.” He stood up. “We don’t have time for metaphysics.”
“We don’t?” I needled. “There’s a time-shortage I missed out on?”
He was about to leave, but then decided not to. Soft hallucinations drew green threads around his contour, sharpening into complex tangles upon his face. The light hurt my eyes.
“You’re saying what?” he asked. “That we’re still sleeping – dreaming – but in another compartment? Behind a bulkhead?”
“If not that, why the stray memories?”
“Scarring,” he suggested immediately. “Damage.”
It wasn’t an alternative, and he knew it. “Okay,” I agreed, to move things along.
“Thing is, I need to keep it out of my head,” he said quietly, but firmly. It was a horrible statement, frank in its brokenness, nursing black infinities.
“You need to stop thinking about it?”
He meant more than that, I was sure, but I needed to hear it spelt out.
“I don’t know.” It was overwhelming him. Frazer was acute enough, but he wasn’t a philosopher. At least, he hadn’t been. That spared him from the kind of intellectual overheating Bolton was increasingly vulnerable to, but it left him adrift among vague shadows. “You sense it, though, don’t you? The attempted intrusion? It’s prising open the inner seals. We might not have much time – whatever it looks like.”
“If we’re going to get through this,” I insisted, trawling deep into my final reserves of depleted mental clarity, “we’re going to have to make sure we know what the hell you’re talking about right now.”
In fact, the suggestion he was making had already persuaded me, almost entirely. There was some kind of cognitive invasion underway. Whatever was happening, our apprehensions were part of it. Every time we got a little closer to grasping it, it worked its way a little further in. It wants us to think about it. That was the paranoid construction.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “Whatever is in that box isn’t it – but only what brought it, fetched it.”
“A door?”
He nodded. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? That’s why they panicked. They let something in.”
“From where?” Perhaps the dreams might have told us, but they were sealed-off, somewhere else, and in any case by all indications unintelligible. At least we both knew – now – what they were about, even if that was nothing distinguishable from absolute obscurity itself.
“Fuckers,” he spat in frustration. “They’ve fucked us so bad.” It would have been cruder – I guessed – if he’d been less exhausted.
My thoughts were heading in a different direction. How could they possibly have imagined that this mission was any kind of solution? That it – the unknown visitor – was going to simply be crushed, down there in the abyss? Where had that idea even come from? There was a dark trend to these questions. Whose idea was this, really? I was tempted to write it down before it was lost, but everything was already lost. Records were discouraged.
“Very roughly, what do think is in there?” he asked, breaking into my thoughts. It was that question again – the only one that seriously concerned any of us – and every part of it was a problem. Was it ‘in there’ – really? I seriously doubted it. ‘There’ was unfathomable. Worse, though, was the suspicion that even these doubts, like all of our thoughts now, had been compromised at the root. It was the question, or the problem, participating in us through our preoccupation with it. Our attention fed it. With each meal it dug itself deeper in. ‘It’ meant nothing, though. It was a place-holder for confusion, a sign of ignorant panic. There had to be another name for it. None of us had the slightest idea what that might be.
“Were you ever told about McGuffin?” he asked me.
The name drew a blank.
§19 — The sat-nav display had something extraordinary to show us, and it took no special expertise to understand what I was seeing. The slow vortex seethed malignantly, dominating the upper part of the screen like a vast meteorological buzz-saw. It was monstrously hypnotic.
“We’re going to collide with that?”
Frazer nodded. “Within the next twenty-four hours, unless we change course.
“That’s something we can do?”
“You know we can’t.”
“So?”
“So we have to contact the company.”
“They won’t like that.”
“We have to contact the company,” he repeated, as if to an imbecile.
“Okay.” There was no point fighting it. “What do you want me to do?”
“You have to persuade them to restore navigational control.”
“To you?”
“Of course, to me.”
“Be realistic …”
He cut me off. “Now,” he insisted. His tone pretended to an authority that we both knew didn’t exist. I shrugged. There was no need to make an issue of that – for the moment.
“Okay,” I conceded, once again. This was part of the play – something to explore.
Qasm had decided to put Frazer on the boat. Let them argue with him.
It took only a few keystrokes to make the connection, on a high-bandwidth tight-security channel. The voice at the other end was meticulously dehumanized, on a female diagonal. That was Qasm corporate culture. Anybody who wasn’t a robot was under an obligation to imitate one.
“Is there somebody else in there with you?” she asked. Even to admit that she already knew the exact position of everybody on The Pythoness was apparently more than she was willing to share.
“The captain is here.”
There was a short delay, while they processed that information. Our intention to include him was the surprise factor.
“We want him to leave.”
“I think he needs to be involved in this conversation.” A longer delay this time.
“We don’t understand the need for a ‘conversation’.”
“I can’t argue with it, so I’m arguing with you,” Frazer broke in.
‘It’ was the boat, I noticed. That was interesting. I stepped back from the console, saying nothing. There was nothing to argue about, but Frazer had to learn that for himself. We’d submitted an evasive course correction, but I knew it was going nowhere.
“The proposed course does not conform to mission parameters,” Qasm predictably responded. “We’re satisfied Pythoness is representing company objectives accurately.”
“By steering us into a super-cyclone?”
“All our data indicate that the storm is survivable.”
“You’re killing us.” It was stated calmly, as a simple matter of fact. It wasn’t – I thought – that he was convinced we would die. His conviction was only that Qasm had no concern for our survival, which was beyond all plausible dispute.
“That outcome is not anticipated.”
Qasm didn’t care, and didn’t pretend to. It was honest – which was attractive to me – although that wasn’t a judgment to share with Frazer right now. He’d probably have accepted any amount of bullshit as the price for an iota of consideration. I’d half-forgotten that he didn’t know them like I did. This had to be a serious learning-moment for him.
“How can an extra day matter?” he protested.
It was hard not to smile. He didn’t understood anything.
“The mission schedule falls outside your domain of responsibility, Captain,” came the robot-bitch reply, without the slightest discernible hesitation.
Frazer wasn’t the type for incontinent rage, but I expected him to smash something. He had no ‘domain of responsibility’ – Qasm had seen to that – and now he was being asked to absorb the consequences without dissent.
I’d have handled the exchange better, but still without significant difference in
outcome. There was no possible significant difference in outcome. Pits-Drop was on
automatic for a reason.
Frazer tensed himself to reply – and stopped. He cut the connection.
“Fuckers,” he said.
We were going into the whorl.
“Just for comparison, what am I seeing here?” I asked, drawn once again into the sat-nav display, where the green monster turned. “It looks extremely bad.”
“Probably the worst I’ve ever seen,” he confirmed. “It will tear into the Philippines before the end of the week, which is triggering a panic there already. Before then, we get it.”
“But we can cope?”
“In theory.”
“Anything we can do?”
“Beyond the obvious – stow everything tightly, lash everything down that could move, start praying – not really.”
“Okay.” The absence of options was a kind of relief. “The others know?”
“Only the basics.”
“There’s more than ‘basics’?”
“Not really. No.” Not quite a smile.
§20 — As we passed through the storm’s outer squalls, the weather worsened relentlessly. The Pythoness had begun to pitch heavily into the swelling waves. The sun was a pale disc, morbidly withdrawn. As dusk drew close, what had been diffuse fog thickened into something like the interior of a cloud, precipitating directly around us. I was feeling green, and in no mood for Scruggs.
The foul weather didn’t seem to bother him much, but something else did.
“The hum,” he whined. “It’s driving me insane.”
He was telling me, I guessed, because – by now – anything bad happening on the boat led his mind back to me. There was an insectoid lack of reflection to it. I scowled.
“It never stops,” he added. Sleeplessness had a sound, or something close to one.
It was quite obvious what he meant by ‘the hum’. Sure, it might have been designated in other ways, but the name worked. The imprecision was unavoidable. If it had really been exactly a hum, it would not have had the same power of insinuation. It drifted in upon a dark current of obscurity.
I thought that perhaps I could hear it, but I wasn’t sure. The sound – if that’s what it was – inhabited some periphery outside all intuition, at the sub-sonic lower edge of the human auditory range. There was a remoteness, but of some other kind – utterly unlocalizable. It was not at all like a voice, or like music, though it evoked both, distantly, as irritated nerves sought to latch onto the blank carrier signal.
“You can hear it though, right?” he asked again.
“No. Nothing.”
“Don’t lie,” he snarled. We had begun saying that to each other, a lot.
I smiled at him consolingly. “Sorry.”
He stepped a little closer – uncomfortably close. Instinct urged withdrawal, but I muted it, recognizing that confrontation would not be so easy to avoid.
“Back off Scruggs.”
“And if I don’t?”
“There’ll be a stupid fight. You’ll lose. That would be very bad.”
It was almost possible to sense fate arriving. The whisper of death, soft as a moth wing, stroked the anterior regions of whatever broken god’s toy played the part of his soul.
As the tremor of insight passed through him, he flinched, almost imperceptibly. The climax of tension arrived, and passed. He took a step back, then another. One more, all the way to the railing this time, and we were out of the pressure zone.
“Why are you protecting it?” he asked.
“‘It’?”
“You know what it is.”
“You really think that?”
“You have to. You’re lined up with it. You nurse it. Everything you do helps it.” His eyes sparkled with hate. It was still rage, more than certainty, that was pushing itself through into his words.
“I don’t know what it is. None of us do.”
“There’s no ‘us’.”
“So why are you nagging me about it?”
“Because you know something,” he said, admantly, and repetitively. “This shit – all of it – is on you.”
The ceaseless, inconclusive antagonism was nauseating, and it mingled with the lurching of the deck, indissolubly. The falling away of the world into ocean troughs never quite settled into a rhythm. It was like a mad anti-gravity experiment that could only end in vomiting, but the thin slurry of coffee and zommodrine in my guts offered no purchase to the erratic heaving. So it merely gnawed, sub-critically, at the tossed remnants of composure.
“It’s all on God, isn’t it? I mean, that’s what you have to believe? So why not more prayers?”
“I’ll tell you what I pray for,” he said, stepping closer – too close. “I pray for justice. For righteous punishment.”
“Isn’t that just being?”
“Confused heretics have always thought so.”
The response surprised me. ‘Heretics’ sounded far too high church for Scruggs. I’d imagined his forebears stoking the execution pyres of people who spoke like that.
“It’s all on God, Scruggy. You just don’t understand what he wants.”
§21 — The last vague suggestions of distinct terrestrial existence were erased in the night. The cosmos was a silent storm, a stellar cyclone. Zodh lay on the deck on his back, gaping pupils saturated with stars. Sleeplessness seemed not to affect him at all. Among all of us, he alone was not visibly deteriorating. I watched from a distance, trying to piece him together from the few fragments that I had – getting nowhere. The sea was ominously calm, the sky heavily overcast – but still. It felt like a final respite. I had taken three zommodrine caps half an hour before, vacuuming exhaustion into some unpayable liability, pushed back somewhere comfortably beyond the immediate horizon. Existence was, I guessed in that moment, okay. Then Scruggs appeared like an unwanted wraith, suspending himself in my attention zone, but not quite approaching. There was no way to dispel his presence without engaging him, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. He hovered – for maybe fifteen minutes – saying nothing, intermittently staring. Finally, in accordance with some inflexible private schedule, he came closer.
“You have some racist shit in your heart about Zodh?” he asked.
“Totally,” I admitted. “He’s a repulsive savage. I don’t even think he’s sane. No – cut that – I’m reluctant to categorize him as human.”
“He’s my friend.”
“Sure he is.” It wasn’t necessary to emphasize the sarcasm, though I smiled a little.
“It’s because he believes in something. That’s why you hate him.”
“I’ve no idea whether he believes in anything or not – and I don’t hate him. I don’t even dislike him.”
“But that’s why – isn’t it?” The stubbornness of the remark was the whole point. He wasn’t looking for nuance.
“So this is about you?” We both knew it was. If he’d had anything to say about Zodh’s ‘beliefs’, I would have hung upon his words. The topic came second only to the cargo on my list of gripping intellectual preoccupations. Scruggs – in contrast – didn’t care. He had his own inner light to follow, and it was so dazzling it cast everything else into irrelevance.
“It’s about faithlessness. It’s about evil,” he said. “The nothingness devouring us? That’s your message.”
“If he’s right about what he believes, you’re not.” Even the very little I understood about both told me that. He ignored the divisive logic, contemptuously.
“Your wrong is deeper,” he said.
§22 — Frazer didn’t want to talk, but I did. He flitted among the screens, every detail of his posture radiating an intolerance for distraction. I waited, silently, until the pretense of productive activity had tilted over into transparent farce.
“What can you do?” I asked. Information without practical discretion was worthless.
He growled noncommittally and raked his fingers through his hair. He could see there was no convincing rejoinder.
“What is it Symns?”
“I’m worried about Scruggs.”
“We’re descending into some kind of alien Hell beyond sleep. A storm of truly biblical proportions is about to engulf us. And you’re ‘worried about Scruggs’?”
“He’s going to snap.”
I had no doubt at all that he was aware of the impending event. Scruggs had been hurtling towards crisis on a parabolic curve. Everyone had been keeping out of his way, as if from an ignited dynamite stick.
“Scruggs is okay,” he said.
“No, he’s not okay.”
The simple factuality of the statement chipped through his crust of fake delusion. Frazer swallowed back the dialectical idiocy that he had been about to persevere with.
“Alright,” he said. “What do you think he’s going to do?”
“Seriously,” I admitted. “Fuck knows. Something bad.”
“So what are you recommending?”
“It was more of a begging for help thing.”
Frazer was quietly enjoying my discomfort. “Yeah, he hates you,” he acknowledged.
“Understandably.”
“When he cracks, I might have to hurt him, badly – or worse. You realize it’s something I can do?”
He registered that. The next response was cautious, and far more mentally-engaged.
“Violence is part of your skill-set?”
“Not the biggest part, but a part.”
“A professional competence?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’d take Scruggs, I guess,” he acknowledged.
“We’re stuck together, on this boat, so it’s complicated.”
“I can see that.” Comprehension crept in, slowly. He wasn’t mean enough for this type of insight to come easily. “You’re saying you’d have to kill him?” He was getting it.
“Last time I looked, we don’t have a brig. Or even handcuffs.”
“If you’re asking for my permission …”
“Of course not,” I broke in. “I’m trying to explain why this is a problem.”
“And not just your problem?”
“Exactly.”
There was a tense hiatus as he mentally digested the point, re-appraising me, and what the mission was turning into. Pits-Drop hadn’t been about killing, even a little bit. Now he had to wonder whether perhaps it was.
“You would, wouldn’t you?” he noted, scrutinizing me carefully. “What the hell are you Symns? I had you down as a corporate errand boy, but now I’m wondering if you’re some kind of hit man.”
“Why would Qasm put an assassin on a waste-disposal boat?”
“That’s supposed to sound as menacing as it does?”
“No.” It hadn’t been.
“Professional killers have to cost, don’t they? So why stow one here, with us? That’s the question I’m now asking …” He tailed off. “Did you consider that we might need to protect ourselves from you?”
“Continuously.”
He laughed. There was a hint of madness in it.
“And I’m not a ‘professional killer’,” I added (though I had recently begun to wonder about that). “Far more of a freelance corporate errand boy. I do deliveries. The killing only happens when things go very badly wrong, which they do sometimes – especially recently. It’s not a result built-in from the start, and it’s not something I like. When accidents occur, I have to deal with them. They’re still accidents.”
“Prickly issue with you?”
“A little.”
“Look,” he said. “Scruggs gets into fights sometimes. On shore, mostly. Two scraps with Zodh, that I know about. He even took a swing at me once – which didn’t work out well for him. No one ever said anything about killing him over it.”
“Before.”
I left it at that, because I didn’t like the way this was going, anymore than he did.
§23 — The storm was a black wall. Its thrashing curtains seemed to define the boundary of creation. ‘Biblical’ had been Frazer’s word. Perhaps it might have been improved upon, but I couldn’t see how. There was no point asking whether we were going into it. We were almost there. Apparently impenetrable ramparts of world-splitting gloom directly obstructed our course. That we would soon all be dead was less a pessimistic prediction than a vivid intuition. To envision anything except annihilating chaos lying beyond the screen far overstretched my imagination.
It was early afternoon, at the edge of the crossing. In less than an hour we would have switched over, to the other side of the universe. I washed down another couple of zommodrine caps with a gulp of cold coffee, and waited. It was just bad weather for a while, polarized upon a gradient of darkness. The Pythoness bucked like a whipped animal. Behind us the hints of a lost sun still lingered. Ahead of us lay self-swallowing night, turning only into itself.
By coincidence, Bolton had derided the description of tempest waves as ‘mountainous’ only a few days before. He read a lot of seafaring fiction, and balked at the traditional hyperbole. “They’re not tsunamis,” he’d said. They did not tower – beyond all possibility of quantitive grasp – a quarter of a mile or more above the rent base level of the sea. Physical reality did not dissolve in a storm. His case had been lucidly argued. It made perfect sense at the time. We had sealed everything and retreated to the main cabin. There was no earthly reason to venture outside, beyond the perimeter of our semi-transparent capsule. To do so might, perhaps, have been survivable. After all, mariners throughout history had surely done such things. I could not – even for a moment – conceive how.
“Hold on,” Frazer said. They were the most unnecessary words I ever heard from him.
Copying the others, I had used lengths of nylon rope to lash myself to the metal frame of the horseshoe seating. Blankets and life-vests served as shock-absorbers. As we went into the wall, we were seized by forces beyond all human capacity for understanding. The scene outside was similarly incomprehensible, dominated by fluid masses in motion, immense beyond all prospect of articulation. A writer of sufficient morbity might have grasped at this unspeakable, raging, liquid horror, as a consummation of nihilism and a spiritual ravishment, but it said nothing to me. It was mere stupidity, scaled up to the proportions of cosmic aberration. Nobody spoke. Bolton discernibly groaned, his exhalation audible even through the crashing din.
The waves were not mountains. I laughed inwardly, now, at this cheap concession to intellectual sobriety. The Pythoness was a fragile speck lost amid crawling hills and valleys of water. We could only stare out upon it, appalled, our minds broken upon the edge of its vast negligence.
From beyond the shrieking insanity of the wind, twisted beyond torture, a black mass was breaking in upon us. It was the storm in itself – the thing. A continuous rumbling – tuned to the nerve-strings of our guts – shook us down through its nested chasms of somber resonance, ever deeper down, into the very death-rattle of the world, reverberating eternally among the bass-bins of Hell. Wild hammer blows rained down upon the boat, battering us into bruised prostration. We each clung to nearby fixtures, desperate for relative immobility, until our muscles screamed.
Intermittently, the scene was wracked by spasms of electric discharge. White slices of horror interrupted the thundering darkness – searing nightmare flashes of cosmic incoherence that raped our retinas into tormeted submission. I no longer knew whether my eyes were open or shut. I no longer knew anything.
Then we were upside down, or worse, clinging to what we could, as geometry snapped – releasing us into profundities without dimension. The fabric of space had splintered into a wreckage of impossible angles, colliding planes, and discontinuous vectors. The sensible world had simply collapsed upon itself. For some indeterminate period, all that came through was the spatial noise of randomly shuffled video accompanied by audio howl. It was cut-up multimedia from the interior of a time-stripped Azathothic spin-cycle. From inside, it seemed unimaginable that there could ever be an end, but eventually there was. Scruggs was working his way towards me through the swirling ruins of space. His limbs were outstretched, bracing him awkwardly against the tumbling surfaces. Strobed by the lighning flashes, it looked as if he had been crucified upon gravitational collapse. His expression was grimly determined. I prepared myself for some kind of lunatic death-fight in a spinning spatial frame.
“I know it’s you,” he said.
“Another pronoun with no anchor.” It wasn’t necessary to feign weariness, or contempt. His eyes glittered with madness.
“So how’s the storm going Symns? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
The others had to have heard, catching his words at least in rough outline, but they said nothing. I was reluctant to let my gaze drift from the maniac closing in upon me – even for a fraction of a second – but in my peripheral vision I could see them all watching, fixedly, and silent. They probably thought something was about to be settled, one way or another.
“It’s the way you pretend there’s no God. But you know, don’t you? You know what a storm is, what any storm is – and this one in particular.”
He was close now – much too close. His face – pitted like an ill-treated asteroid – was only inches from my own.
“The Lord judges you Symns.”
“Christ, Scruggs, get a grip.”
“We arrive in the release zone, and this happens – the great test, and yet here we still are, nestled in the hands of the almighty. So what now?”
There was a deafening crash, as if the iron gates of the Eschaton had been blasted open.
§24 — My auditory nerves were shot, emitting nothing – for perhaps a minute – except the thin whine of physiological damage. As my hearing began to restore itself, patchily, the ruinous proceedings rushed in. There was a brief scream of tortured metal, immediately succeeded by a sharp crack. Frazer and Bolton exchanged grimly-charged glances. They both seemed to understand what had happened.
“What was that?” I asked Bolton. I could still scarcely hear my own raised voice.
“The cage,” he said. “It could only have been the cage.” His face looked ashen in the gloom. Our lightning protection was gone.
The entire superstructure had disappeared into the sea – its splash lost among the thunder and typhoon ravings. Frazer was already unfastening himself from the horseshoe, face aglow with the firm intention of action. The storm had crossed its peak, but it had scarcely begun to subside. The idea of leaving the cabin was abhorrent to me in a way that is hard to adequately describe. Clearly, such a course was unavoidable. Frazer was already pulling the hatch door open. It was like the breaking of a dike. With the flood of water came a wave of sound, dominated by the banshee wail of the wind. An unmuffled peal of thunder came close to unfixing my precarious handholds and throwing me back off my feet. The boat pitched crazily, each lurch now a local tide, pouring water in and out of the cabin, stirring us into it. Things carefully stowed and fastened were torn free. We half crawled, half swam, to and out of the door.
Outside, in the heaving cross-lashed chaos, we were greeted by a scene of lurid abnormality. The Pythoness was enveloped in a cold green flame. A spectral luminosity had wrapped itself around every particle of exposed metal. Its variations in intensity were distributed in a cryptic pattern, speaking somehow of traffic, and circulation. In places, it had concentrated into patches of blazing incandescence. From these zones of green dazzlement it spread like an amoeboid wraith, advancing exploratory tendrils into regions of strategic significance. The bridge, in particular, was ablaze with it. From the single machine room window that was visible from where I stood, a hard alien light burned. Whatever it was that had happened, it had awakened the snakes. They both roamed the vessel, furiously animated, swathed in the green light, tool-heads unfolded into artificial flowers. Despite their luminosity, it was difficult to track them. They moved with the sinuous cunning of serpents.
The deck was pitching wildly. Horizontal sheets of rain cut across us. I clung grimly to the rails, expecting at any moment to be fried by twenty million volts of electrical ruin released from the grumbling sky. The glow pooled thickly upon the deck around my feet, spiraling up and around my body, down my arms. There was no pain. Straight above, the upper bridge was wrapped in a rotating green halo, illuminating the spiny wreckage of support rods, where the cage had been ripped away.
Why were we out here? I could only assume that the plan was to repair our lightning defenses. It would have been laughable, even under very different conditions. Gusts of hysterical amusement tagged at the fibers of my brain. We’d need coils of heavy copper wire, I guessed. They had to be found, then carried through tilting storm-drenched chaos and up into the aura of doom, to be fixed in place, and all the time they’d be an open invitation to electrocution. There were only two places where they could possibly be. The first of the snakes had been shadowing us since we left the cabin. It avoided close proximity, without drifting far out of range. When we split up, I lost sight of it, before – seconds later – picking up its signature lateral undulations by the door to the bridge.
When I tried to slip past it, and inside, it maneuvered gracefully to obstruct me, extended drill-bits shrieking, as if enraged. Its manipulators clicked like pincers. The thought of fighting it never seriously crossed my mind. I backed away, slowly.
So, it had to be the machine room. The second snake had posted itself there, as a sentry. It had bitten Bolton, badly, on the side of the face. I saw him fall back, shocked and defeated, almost losing his grip on the handrail. There was a lot of blood. He was yelling at me, but at first his words were lost in the wind. They became audible as I approached.
“Who’s controlling them?” he was shouting, to no one in particular. It was less a question than a cry of mental revolt.
Nothing was controlling them. At least, from what we had seen, they were as autonomous as any animal we had ever seen.
A short storm-flogged haul along the rail took me to the machine room. The technophidian guard at the hatch twisted aside to let me through, and I stepped in. The glamor had been concentrated there to an extreme degree. It shrouded the containment unit in a turbular, harsh luminosity, without compromising the heart of darkness. I stepped over to it, prepared to do what was necessary, but nothing was being asked of me. Nothing had changed. It was pointless to be there. Now that I could look around in that cramped space, the speculation that it might have held bulky stocks of electro-conductive cable seemed unthinkable. It took only the most perfunctory exploration to confirm this negative fact, beyond all question. Whatever the others had been trying to do, their endeavors had led them to the same conclusion as mine. Bolton had already withdrawn back into the cabin, to bandage his wound. The rest of us stood in the thrashing rain for a few moments, stupidly dazed.
“This boat is fucked,” Frazer stated, calmly.
§25 — It was eerily calm. After what had been threatened, our survival seemed uncanny – unreal. We sat on the horseshoe, mostly silent, exhausted to the point of perverse ecstasy.
After hours of habituation to the storm waves, the stillness was an inverted lurching.
“There’s something under the boat,” Bolton said.
“Something?” Scruggs responded. He was too tired to sound genuinely interested.
“Something big.”
“You’ve seen it?” Frazer asked. It was clear that he didn’t expect an answer in the affirmative.
Bolton hesitated, as if vaguely panicked, and mentally paralyzed by an uncertainty he was unable to fix in place. He really had no idea what he’d seen. I sympathized, though coldly and sparingly. His lack of mental discipline was breaking him on the rack. It wasn’t going to be pleasant to watch.
“Did you see this ‘big something’?” Frazer pushed.
“Yes, I saw it. Of course I saw it.”
“The confusing part of this to me, Bobby,” said Frazer, softly, “is that you’ve been down here in the cabin for over an hour, and before that outside in the night. So there’s no possible way you could have seen anything.”
It was surprising to hear this stated with such brutality.
“It must have been before,” Bolton tried. “I forgot it somehow, and then it came back. It hid for a while. It doesn’t want to be noticed.”
“Listen to yourself,” Frazer said. The demand was useless. Bolton was lost in his own confusion, beyond reach.
“Yes,” Bolton insisted, completing a circuit within some deeply buried track of interior monologue. The look in his eyes didn’t belong on this earth, or seem to have originated there. “That’s it. I’d forgotten. It was when we stopped, at the island …”
“There was no island.” Frazer was struggling to keep his voice level. Shouting was not going to help, he no doubt fully realized, but Bolton’s inability to get a grip on his own florid delusions was already pushing the discussion over an edge, and taking him with it. One additional cycle of this exchange and it would be an empty verbal brawl. Then Frazer would silence Bolton within a small number of minutes. The signal would have been cut, but remain undead. Whatever it was that we were haunted by would have thickened, and darkened.
“Wait,” I said. “I want to hear this. We all should.”
Frazer got up, without saying another word, and left the cabin. It wasn’t petulance – he just wanted no part of what was going to happen now. He was voting with his feet because command wasn’t going to work. Bolton’s shattered gaze followed him out.
“So, this island …?” I prompted, to pull him back. Whatever couldn’t be scraped out of him fast would be lost forever.
For a moment he simply looked dazed, drowning in the swirl. Was it already gone? I was less than a second from slapping him hard across the uninjured side of his face, to break the spell, when something engaged, and a spark re-ignited in his eyes. He was looking at me, and no longer into some private reconstruction of the all-consuming horizon. “Yes, the floating island …”
Some ship-wrecked part of him recognized that it was disintegrating on a reef, beyond rescue. There was only a little time remaining to salvage what we could.
“Tell me about it.”
“You don’t remember?” he begged.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s your version that we want, right now.”
“My version?” He was straying already.
“We were at the floating island …” This was closer to a straight-up lie than I had hoped would be necessary.
“Oh, yes …” Things were reconnecting somewhere behind the shimmer of glazed vision. “It was incredible, wasn’t it? The scale of it. A huge mass of jungled mountain drifting into us from out of the mist. It was like …” He was stumped. It hadn’t been like anything.
“And then?”
“Did we all go ashore?” The directionless splashing was back. At some level, he knew the story was separating him from everything.
“No, it was just you Bob.” It was another step into cynical deceit, but I could see no alternative. If it was to come out, he had to be cast into his own story. That was already settled. He’d taken the steps that mattered some hours ago, and probably much more distantly before.
“How long was I there for?” he asked me.
I shrugged. There was no point at all in my telling him this tale, or even helping him to click it together. I didn’t know where to begin, and – more importantly – any more of this would have made it surreptitiously mine. “Quite a while,” I said eventually, with enormous reluctance, retreating tactically into the indefinite. The nudge seemed to be enough, because he leant forward slightly, focusing.
“There was a lot of climbing,” he said. “The paths were like stairs. It was tiring, but it wasn’t mountaineering. I had to remind myself, this isn’t a temple. No one cut these steps, or built these walls.” He paused dramatically. “Was that true, though? There were no blocks, of course – no architectural pieces. It had been made as a single thing, coherently. And it was old. My geology isn’t that great, but the structure had to have been completed eighty to ninety million years ago, late in the Cretaceous, by the look of it. Soft, discolored chalk, stacked up in undistorted strata, the horizontal layers scarcely disturbed – where they were visible, beneath the growth. Lichens, moss, creepers covered almost everything. It was damp. No bugs that I could see, though, which was strange – so no flowers. Then I noticed. There were signs on the walls.”
“Signs?”
“Glyphs of some kind, artificial patterns, incredibly detailed, and obviously ordered by a communicative intelligence. They were densely packed with information, cryptically irregular, and fractalized – based on a scalar organization of what had to be systems of meaningful parts within parts, nested recursively, conforming to a mathematical scheme. Naturally, I couldn’t understand them at all, at first …” He paused, concerned, perhaps, that his flight of recollection was accelerating into desolate outer tracts beyond the perimeter of our patience. Of all the things he might realistically have worried about, that was not among them.
“Go on,” I urged.
“There was a code, evidently, so it couldn’t have been what it seemed. The puzzle announced itself openly, but it was deeply difficult. It was like nothing I had ever encountered before. You know – this might sound crazy – but it still seems as if most of the thinking I’ve ever done in my life took place up there, running sub-routines I hadn’t suspected human brains could hold together. There was time, somehow, for an entire research project: orchestrated, phased, colossally sub-divided within itself.” He looked up, or out, his voice lightening. “How do you decrypt signals from an alien intelligence?”
“Aliens?”
“Not extraterrestrials – that’s a conception including far too much positive information. It’s already a theory, an image, and it’s not even relevant. ‘Alien’ meaning only something you know nothing about. Something utterly not us. An unknown cognitive process …” He paused, perhaps worried that he was losing me – which he was. “Zero empathy communication – that’s the problem. You know, SETI-type questions.”
“Isn’t SETI precisely about aliens? The old kind? Beings from other worlds?”
“Sure – yes. In that regard the analogy wasn’t helpful. Thing is, I’m not sure what could be. A script from the absolute unknown, how do you even begin to think about that?”
“You have an answer?”
“What’s the question, really? That has to come first.” With an effort, he paused again, slowed, ratcheting down the pace, to increase the chance of something getting through. “‘Meaning’ is a diversion. It evokes too much empathy. Shared ground. You have to ask, instead, what is a message? In the abstract? What’s the content, at the deepest, most reliable level, when you strip away all the presuppositions that you can? The basics are this: You’ve been reached by a transmission. That’s the irreducible thing. Something has been received. Then comes the next step: If it’s reached us, it has to have borrowed some part of our brains.”
“‘Lend me your ears’?”
“Yes – exactly that. Except, you have to go abstract. You have to find the abstract ear, the third ear. That’s the key to all of this – really, I think, to all of it. The message has to latch on. If it’s alien – very foreign – and it isn’t tightly targeted, then it has to be extremely abstract. There’s no other way it could be adapted to an intelligent receptor in general. You can see where I’m going with this?”
I couldn’t, not remotely, but I nodded anyway.
“How could it teach me about abstraction? It’s a paradox, because that’s the very thing the lesson presupposes. To get in, it had to be there, already inside, waiting.”
“This is getting way too …” There was no way around the word “… abstract for me, Bobby.” That wasn’t actually the most serious problem – though perhaps, at another level, it was. With every word Bolton spoke, I sensed a patient clicking at inner doors, like the methodical testing of a combination lock. Bolton hadn’t heard me at all. He was in free flow, carried forward by the sheer compulsion of the sequence.
“There’s a circuit – circuitry – it was there in the pattern, once I realized that’s what I had to be looking for, and before, of course. Sure, it was information, deposited in layers, but it had to be interlock machinery. It was docking. The lichen crumbled away easily beneath my fingers, down into the labyrinth, the crypt. … Then I understood.”
“And?”
“And I was afraid.”
“You’re not making any sense Bobby,” Scruggs interjected. Like me, but still more urgently, he was pleading for more, but of another kind altogether.
Bolton looked up at Scruggs, as if seeing him for the first time. “Have you ever thought much about carnivorous plants?” he asked.
“We’re on a boat, Bobby,” Scruggs said, in a futile appeal for basic consensus.
“We’re on a fucking boat.”
“I know that,” Bolton agreed. “But it’s complicated.” His eyes were bright now, engaged. The lights were on inside, even if they were somehow green. It wasn’t that I thought he’d been devoured from within by an intelligent vegetable entity from an unencountered island – at all – or even for a moment. Nevertheless, there was the vivid impression of a visitor, something planted among us.
“Don’t you see?” Bolton continued patiently. “The process of trying to work it out –
what I had thought was the way, eventually, to grasp it – to unlock the secret, it wasn’t like
that. That was all wrong. It was unlocking me.”
“So there’s no way to understand it?” It was what I assumed – no, what I wanted – him to be saying, steered mostly by instinct, in the direction of psychological protection. Any other interpretation would have been intolerably intimate. Behind the discussion were burrowing things, and I didn’t want them getting in.
“That would just help it spread.”
“Would that be so bad?” I probed, guessing the answer, hoping that – even now – he might still be able to guide the looming conclusion in a different direction.
“I don’t know why …?” He’d forgotten a piece of the puzzle, perhaps deliberately.
Even in that blank shard of amnesia was a glimpse of something far better left unglimpsed. Scruggs, too, shuddered slightly.
“Then there was screaming,” Bolton remembered. “It was me, though, wasn’t it? I
was screaming.”
“No Bobby, you weren’t screaming,” Scruggs said. It sounded as if he was trying to convince himself. “There were no screams. It was quiet. No one heard anything.”
“No, no, of course, it was quiet.” It was as if he was scolding himself for his own stupidity. “I’d climbed up a long way by then. The boat looked tiny down below. You know, as they always say, like a toy. A small toy. You guys were all up on deck, in a group, mere specks really. I could only just tell who was who, by remembering what you’d been wearing. That’s when I saw it, floating deep down, behind and beneath the boat. It was immense. Not like a whale – it was on a different scale altogether. I thought – I remember thinking – could it be the shadow of the island, cast down into the sea? But the shape wasn’t right for that. There was too much shape, and it was designed for swimming, obviously. It was a sea creature. There was no mistaking it. It had bilateral symmetry, a body plan – a neck, flippers, a tail. The overall size, end-to-end, I guess, was about three city blocks …”
Given Bolton’s intelligence and education, he had to know how this sounded.
“So, maybe half a mile long?”
“I kind of think possibly a little longer,” he murmured, almost inaudibly.
“So nothing actually imaginable,” I noted. I had to. It would have been unbearably condescending to leave the claim unchecked.
“‘Imaginable’ …” he repeated after me, turning the pre-negated body of the word over slowly, exploring its convolutions of sense. “It should have been unimaginable.” It was as if he was recalling some ancient principle of reality, abandoned ninety million years ago. “I’m not insane,” he said, then, snapping back into defined co-existence with us. His words were carefully enunciated now, soft, slow, and calm. For the first time, it seemed as if talking the phenomenon through might be helping – if only at the most trivial psychological level. “I understand, of course, no animal on this planet has ever been close to that size, so it has to be something else – a communication.”
“A message?”
“I’m thinking, some kind of projection.”
“Of what?”
Scruggs stood up and left now, silently, with an apologetic glance at Bolton. He couldn’t take anymore. Why should this have been the threshold moment? Was it no more than an arbitrary point, on a continuum of alienation? Or was there something about the idea of a communicative projection that Scruggs found intolerable? If the latter was the case, and I could understand it – even part of it – I knew, then, that some essential clarity would have been reached, about us (if not it), but there was no time.
“Did you ever read anything about ontology?” Bolton asked me. I was familiar with the word, just a little, but enough to recognize it as a tangential response to my question.
“Whatology?”
“Ontology,” he repeated, missing the deflective intent of my query. “It’s the science of being. An investigation into the thingness of things, or perhaps not that – not exactly.”
“That’s a science, really?” I asked, piling in as much conspicuous skepticism as I could.
“Experimental research into pure thingness?” It wasn’t something I’d delved into far, or made any effort to keep up with, and it sounded demanding, in a way I didn’t think we needed. In fact, it struck me as a reckless way to open doors we should be trying to close, and then to triple lock. Even without such concerns, twistedly ‘going meta’ about our predicament seemed likely to further stress capabilities that were already stretched to the outer limits of their tolerance. Nonlinearity led to explosive complexity fast. The last thing we could deal with now – mentally-shattered as we were – was the recursive amplification of difficulty.
If Bolton picked up on my doubts, which was unlikely, he was nevertheless determined to bypass them.
“It’s just …” he pushed on. “I’ve been thinking about it.”
“About what?” I was in no mood to help him out, even if I could have done.
“‘About what’,” he mumbled back. “Perhaps that’s it.” It meant nothing to me.
“This is about the thing under the boat?”
You’re saying ‘being’ is some kind of Kraken? was the obvious rider, but I restrained myself from attaching it. He had to see the problem already – almost certainly with greater clarity than I did.
He looked startled, as if he’d given away more than intended. It was a reaction that was impossible to understand. More than anything he’d yet said, it was a sign that he’d lost his grip on the conversation entirely, becoming untethered from the most rudimentary content of his own elaborate discourse.
“The thing under the boat,” I reminded him, again. The circus animal.
“We have sonar?” he asked no one in particular. “If there’s anything there, it will show up.”
The jolt of disconnection might have been annoying, but it wasn’t. Arcane philosophical speculation was taking us nowhere, or at least nowhere good, so this new avenue had to be worth pursuing.
Stark negative evidence might catalyze something, I thought, as we left for the bridge. The thought of motivated technical tinkering at this point was strangely comforting.
Bolton arrived at our destination first.
“It’s been removed,” he said, as I entered. “The entire module has gone.”
“No one here would have known how to do that – except you.” It had not been meant to sound like an accusation, but – of course – it did. He looked hurt, as if now, at last, receiving the slap I had planned for him earlier.
“Could it have been pulled out remotely?” I asked, in an attempt to walk-back the thoughtless charge.
“By the snakes?”
“They were doing something here last night.”
Frazer announced his presence with a communicative cough.
“There’s no sign of the sonar mod,” Bolton explained, turning towards him.
“Was it ever installed …?”
Once asked, the sanity of the question was immediately striking. Bolton slapped his forehead theatrically.
“How could we know?” I asked.
“We couldn’t. Not with the internal databases fried. Why are you wasting your time with this? Even if we had sonar, the electronics would have been burnt-out by the lightning strike – like everything else.”
Scruggs had drifted back, too. He hung on the bridge door, smiling aggressively.
“Clowns,” he said.
Bolton and I looked at each other. There was nothing to contest.
“I don’t understand how it could come to this,” said Frazer, struggling to keep the tone of disapproval in check.
“There’s no such state as ‘understanding’,” Bolton said. “Not really. Von Neuman put it best: In mathematics, you don’t understand things. You just get used to them. You ‘understand’ at the point you’re permitted to stop thinking.”
Those were the last words I ever heard him say.
§26 — Bolton disappeared. We had no way of knowing exactly when. He’d spoken inconsequentially to Scruggs, roughly five hours before his absence was noted. Concern was slow to escalate. Scruggs and Zodh were bonded in asymmetrically animated conversation. It had the appearance of an interrogation. That was becoming the default communication format on The Pythoness. Frazer was listening attentively at a distance. I was further out still, picking up what I could. Bolton was not in the scene at all, but the discussion was about him.
“What do you mean, ‘gone’?” Scruggs was asking.
“Gone away.”
“There is no ‘away’. We’re on a boat.”
“See, like this.” Zodh was drawing something in the empty space between them with his fingers. Scruggs adamantly refused to pay attention.
“What are you saying?” he demanded, as if the digit-whorls were not it. “In simple words.”
“Simple? In a way simple. In another way not. You see.” More finger work, in a complex repeating pattern. “It’s down. True down.”
“What does that have to do with Bobby?”
Zodh suspended the ineffective demonstration. Like everything else on The Pythoness, it was going nowhere.
We conducted a preliminary search. Then another. It wasn’t easy to know what we were looking for. A final note of some kind, or an unintentional message? Signs of unaccountable damage? Traces of blood? There was nothing. At least, nothing that we could find. He was simply gone.
“Did any of you notice anything before?” I asked. “Unusual words, or behavior?”
“Who are you? Sherlock fucking Holmes?” Scruggs bristled. His expression could not have been more venomous if he had personally witnessed me throttling Bolton and dumping his body over the side.
“What’s your problem?” I snarled back.
Reluctant to escalate, and unwilling to retreat, he stood his ground, and glared, silently.
I ran some emergency calculations. If it became necessary to beat Scruggs unconscious, it would complicate things.
“Back off,” I said.
He did, a little, but enough.
On the third search cycle, Frazer found something. There was a hand-print on the containment unit. It appeared suspended, perhaps a half inch from the surface. The detail was exquisite. To describe it as something like a delicate grease mark on a glass screen might suggest smudging, misleadingly, but in every other respect that was the impression.
“It’s Bobby’s?” Scruggs queried for all of us.
There was no point asking whether we had a reference copy of his fingerprints. Qasm information security procedures meant we had nothing.
“Is there anything on this boat only Bolton could have touched?” I asked?
“Something in his locker?” Scruggs suggested.
We looked for something that could serve as fingerprint dust, settling eventually on a packet of antiseptic powder from the medical supplied. Frazer extracted a plastic protractor from Bolton’s locker. There was a surreptitious quality to his procedure, and an odd expression accompanying it. At the time, it was easy to overlook. The prints clearly matched.
We had all known they would.
“What do you think he was trying to do?” Scruggs asked.
“Does it matter?” I wondered aloud.
“How could it not?” Frazer snapped back.
Another pointless argument invited us in. No one was tempted by it.
“It annihilated him?” Scruggs asked.
“Or something,” I muttered. It was as if I could hear the sharp ‘pop’ – the sound of a tennis ball twisted through a hidden dimension. Still, it might not have been like that. It might not have been like anything much. A stupid accident, suicide, the sea …
“This thing’s directly killing us now?” Frazer said. His voice was a soft snarl.
Whatever fear there might have been swimming through his words was swept away by the disgust.
“We don’t know that,” I said.
The phrase was getting tedious, even to me. I needed to have it printed on a T shirt. Question your conclusions. No one wanted to hear it. Starved of even fragile hypotheticals, there was no enthusiasm for any deeper submergence into unbelief.
“We need to call this in,” Frazer said.
“Then we’re going to need a mobile device. You have anything at all like that? A phone? A smart watch?”
“What do you think I am, a Chinese teenager?”
“So nothing?”
“Of course nothing. The contract specified nothing.” He took a bitter delight in this detail.
“How about Scruggs?”
“Does he seem like the smart watch type to you?” Frazer said, cutting across him.
“So it’s just between us,” I concluded. The remark was intended to be upsetting.
§27 — Scruggs tumbled down into the cabin, scarcely keeping his physical balance. His mental balance had not been sustained so well.
“We’re going to be okay,” he said. “We’re saved.” His features were animated by a kind of rapture. “I met it.”
“‘It being?” I asked, before Frazer could.
“An angel,” Scruggs replied. His confidence – without declining by the slightest degree in inner luminosity – stumbled before our incomprehension. “Or something.”
“I’m betting on ‘something’,” Frazer grunted, before pulling himself back, wearily, from mere dismissal. “Did it speak?”
“It told me everything.”
“And the main point of this ‘everything’ was?”
“It’s hard to remember, exactly,” Scruggs admitted, his voice twisted in frustration.
“The message was huge, you know, beyond libraries, like whole cities of meaning, planet minds. The voice was like … a song.”
“That’s useful,” said Frazer drily. “Maybe you could hum it for us?”
“I’m being serious,” Scruggs protested, as if the opposite possibility were in any way the problem. “I’ve never been more serious. Not ever. This …” he made some wild, world encompassing gesture with his right hand “… is nothing in comparison. Nothing at all. It’s trash and lies. Seen through the eyes of an angel, it’s lost being. Confusion …”
“Roughly, what did it say?” I asked him.
He glared at me, his features suddenly petrified. If it had only been the two of us, his response would have been to close like a cliff-face – but everyone was listening. This was his one chance, and he knew it.
“The Lord fathoms the abyss for our sakes.”
“Christ.” Frazer rolled his eyes upwards.
“Don’t mock this,” Scruggs said. “Don’t mock what you don’t understand. If you refuse his helping hand, you’re not getting out. He wants to rescue us.”
“There’s new information?” I asked. Protocol would be to debrief Scruggs, methodically – and privately. There was no opportunity for anything like that under current conditions. There was no escape from the circus. If it went fast, it was just possible that Frazer’s abrasiveness wouldn’t grind it away.
Scruggs needed no prompting.
“Death,” he said. “That’s what Bobby saw beneath the boat. His death.”
“The angels told you that?” Frazer sneered. He’d had enough. Madness had swallowed the boat, and right now Scruggs incarnated the fact. He was an opportunistic target, too exposed to neglect.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Scruggs persisted, ignoring the jab. “Look at it.”
“Bobby’s death had flippers?”
“It isn’t literal.”
“No, it isn’t. Not remotely. What it is, is bullshit.”
Scruggs took a step backwards, as if physically jolted by the savagery of Frazer’s derision. There was a woundedness to his stance, expression, and voice now. Despite that, he still wasn’t prepared to stop.
“You have to see it,” he pleaded.
“See what?” I asked. I wanted to know.
Scruggs stared at me, his features twisted by a mixture of gratitude and loathing.
“Go on,” I urged him. “It could be important.”
“Of course it’s important,” he almost yelled. “It’s the only important thing. It’s written.”
“It?”
“Everything. The library isn’t in this world. This world is in the library, and the library is in The Book. We were told, and refused to believe. Now it’s too late. You have to see that,” he repeated.
Frazer had been restraining himself, his face rigid with infuriation. Now the psychological bulkhead burst.
“How does this shit help us?” he snarled. “At all?” He was staring at me, rather than at Scruggs. It made sense from his perspective. Without my intervention, he wouldn’t have been hearing any of this. He wanted his crew back. That was his problem though, not mine. He didn’t need his crew. That was the point he was insistently missing. They were all useless to him, and had been since the moment we set out. We hadn’t even needed the snakes, but if any action were required, they could manage it perfectly well. Scruggs’ theocosmic visions were as relevant to the success of our mission as anything he might say, or do.
“Why not let him continue?” I suggested. “We don’t know where significant information is going to come from. It’s not as if we’re pressed for time.”
Frazer’s fury was still cresting, but he had nothing to say.
Scruggs hated doing this, I could tell. He was not far from the brink of tears – and he was not the weepy type. His head was tilted slightly downwards, and averted, as he squirmed upon the hook of social judgment. Still, despite all of that, he was driven to speak.
“Everything we could need to know is in The Book,” he said. “That’s the point. It’s all there. We only have to search for it, in the right place.”
“What do we need to know?” I asked him.
At first, it seemed as if the question had caught him by surprise.
“This is The Fall,” he said eventually. “The descent never ended.”
“So it’s all there, in The Good Book,” Frazer glossed, letting his sarcasm off the leash. “That’s excellent to know, because for a while back there I was beginning to think we might actually be facing a difficult problem.”
“It’s not about the message, not really,” Scruggs said. I had never seen anyone so visibly wracked by frustration. “It’s about … about …”
“Topology,” I suggested. Bolton wasn’t there, so it had to be me.
He grimaced at the word.
“Insides,” I interpreted. “True insides. And … the other thing.”
There had been a time, as a child, when I had read about a girl turning tennis balls inside-out – without touching them (as if that made any difference). They had inverted, impossibly, with a popping sound, the story had said. It had been non-fiction, supposedly; a manifestation of real supernature. The impression it had left upon me had been deep, and persistent. The event itself – the tennis ball business – had probably never happened, but that didn’t matter after a while. The topological limits of reality mattered. There was a vivid cognitive reference point now. A series of words had been complicated in being vividly illustrated. Topology, naturally, but also dimensionality, boundary – reality. The walls were not where they appeared to be.
“Yes, insides,” Scruggs said, seizing upon the word like a drowning man at a rope. “It’s about what’s inside what – false prisons. You’re right about that … Symns.” And then: “Thank you.” It was a penance for him to say that, so excessive that it disturbed me. Would he have thanked a flagrant minion of Satan for a vocabulary item? A thick sediment of suspicion still coated his gaze, as he looked into my eyes, his face radiant with liberated insight. His fight with me had been shelved, with a definitiveness that I found hard to absorb.
“The mind is in the brain, but the brain is in the soul,” he said, re-energized – once again rapt.
“That’s not it, though, is it?” I nudged. “That’s not really what it was about.”
Frazer trampled my response. He wasn’t going to leave me alone with this, as he had with Bolton. Bolton was missing, strongly presumed dead.
“You think that means anything?” he demanded.
“Which part?”
“Any of it. Fucking metaphysics in general.”
“Self-denial of the soul,” Scruggs commented, as if airing a detached analysis, defiantly and coldly abusive. “It’s a fascinating thing to see.”
“You aren’t seeing anything.”
I wondered if they were going to physically attack each other, but instead it ended there – nowhere. At least, the first phase did.
There was a second installment still to come.
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