'I still had time.'

[29-33]

§28 — Zodh had kept himself out of it. He’d been working.
The deck of the Pythoness was coated in a synthetic material with a vaguely rubbery texture. It had been designed to provide optimum grip for our feet – approaching gentle adhesion. Particularly when trodden upon with bare feet, produced a sensation of ghostly stickiness that had been initially disconcerting.
It also contributed to temperature control, adjusting albedo in response to the intensity of light. Now, with the sun heavily filtered by the clouds, the color had deepened to a rich green.
Zodh had found a large can of black paint among the stores, along with a surprisingly delicate brush. With this equipment he had covered something like a third of the deck in a massive swirl-thickened diagram, intricately annotated with words, numbers, and figures. Vortical cores of spiral intensity span out into meandering, interconnected threads. The basic pattern – easily extracted from the dense web of detail – was instantly recognizable. The green phosphorescence had been drawing the same thing, during the night of the storm. Before that, it had been hidden in the guidelines for a card game. The oracle Zodh had tried and failed to teach Bolton and Scruggs, a week before, was now a static image, baked in the Pacific stove.
“What are you doing?” Scruggs asked, drawn into the labyrinth. He peered at the illustration, where the coiling threads of abstraction converged upon a representational image. It was a human figure, minimalized to a few crude lines, falling. “Is that Bobby?” he asked.
Zodh nodded. “Crossing,” he noted, gravely. Then, lightening suddenly: “Look. Lent it to him.” He was pointing to the only part of the figure captured with even nominal representational fidelity – a T-shirt, bearing the legible logo ‘89’. “Gone now.”
“Goddamn you to Hell,” Scruggs exploded. “What the fuck?”
Zodh smiled. “Us,” he whispered, at the edge of audibility. “Goddamn us, all way down.” He pointed at another figure, more peripheral, its head wreathed in some mad halo, that might have been black fire, or thorns. “All the way down,” he repeated. “Into the bottomless pit.”
The reference to scripture struck Scruggs dumb. He was no longer convening with Zodh, now, but with something else – something that had seized upon Zodh, and was using him as a channel. Scruggs deflected his gaze heavenwards, subtly but unmistakably, as if searching for some spectral indications that had not arisen from the abyss. He found none, apparently, because his expression hardened.
Zodh had not finished – he had scarcely begun.
“When your savior reached out to you across the gulf, he looked – just for moment – like …”
“Shut the fuck up,” Scruggs snapped. “You know nothing about this.”
I had no doubt, then, that the exact opposite was true.
“Don’t lie,” I said, stripping as much hostility from the words as I could.
He stared at me coldly and silently – ashamed. Whatever Zodh had been saying, it was the message he didn’t want to let out, but it had escaped now. Within seconds – minutes at the most – we would know.
“Why do you care?” he mumbled, eventually.
“About Jesus? Or the other guy?”
“It isn’t what you think.”
“What do I think?”
“The serpent is the redeemer,” Zodh interrupted, in perfect English. He had to have been quoting something. It was enough. “He who descended into the ultimate depths, fathoming damnation to its end, in order to salvage us – Our Lord of the Phosphorescent Abyss.” The passion and the harrowing of Hell had become indistinguishable, on the way to something worse.
“Christ,” I muttered, as comprehension dawned, the words aimed less at Scruggs than into his vicinity. “He’s calling you a Satanist.”
The remark was designed as a diversion. I’d seen another thing else – further out, at the edge of the painting – and wasn’t keen for either Scruggs or Frazer to notice it. Two figures without obvious marks of identification stood close together, apparently locked in some kind of confrontation. One of them seemed to have a gun.
“You know the gatekeeper to the bottomless pit? You have story of Zom in your country?” Zodh asked.
“That’s what? Some Guam heathen shit?” Scruggs asked in return. The insult was meant to block enquiry. He wasn’t interested. He had all the stories he needed – far more now.
“Not from Guam,” Zodh replied, earnestly. “Came to Guam, on a boat. Long time ago.”
“There’s a story?” I asked, feeding.
“Yes,” Zodh beamed, crookedly. An ancient wiliness pranced behind his eyes. “Old story. Maybe the oldest in the world.”
Letting the ludicrous exaggeration pass uncontested, I waited for more. I’d counted on my interest driving Scruggs away, and it worked. He drifted off and disappeared into the cabin.
“Odz was lost in her own spell. Kao raged for the final war. So Zom turned her back on the world, which meant that the last days had come.” It wasn’t exactly ‘once upon a time’, but the rhythm was somehow similar. “The fishermen who had long tormented her sleep were gathered in their boats, above, with their nets and spears. She reached up to catch them, and drag them down. The scene was terrible. ‘Look, there are eight monsters attacking us,’ the men cried, as they drowned. ‘No, there is just one,’ said the village witch, who was watching from the beach. ‘That which seems multiple connects beneath the surface.’ Her voice was not loud, and few heard it.”
I thought he’d finished, but he hadn’t, quite.
“Above, there were many screams. Below, a single murmur. There aren’t so many things in the world,” he said. “There are only several.”

§29 — Scruggs was dead too, but we had a body this time, crucified upon the cabin wall, by the galley. My limited understanding of Christian orthodoxy told me all the holy wounds were accounted for. Railing bolts served as nails, data-cable staples as thorns. The steak skewer that had punctured his left side lay on the floor nearby, in a little pool of gore. We had all noticed the scene within a few seconds of each other, after entering the cabin together. There wasn’t anything obvious to say.
Frazer checked that he was dead. It was a necessary formality. When he had finished, he didn’t waste our time with a confirmation of what we all knew.
No one could be bothered to say ‘fuck’. It was assumed.
“Christ,” Frazer said, before he could stop himself. Then, because the wall of profanity had already been breached: “What a fucking mess.”
No one had been alone with Scruggs during the few hours since we had last seen him alive. That was impossible, naturally, but also beyond all question. Since there were no points of purchase for the requisite cycle of suspicion and accusation, we merely stared at each other, dumbly, hunting through each others’ faces, without knowing what for.
“Almost done now,” said Zodh, calmly, an odd glitter in his eyes.
“You did this?” Frazer asked levelly. He had to, even though it made no sense.
Zodh nodded. It was a gesture from some cosmos of alien causality in which physics found no place.
“Zodh didn’t kill Scruggs,” I said. The pedestrian truth had to be stated. “At least, not in any way that would be taken seriously – even for a moment – in an American court of law.”
We spoke across Zodh, as if he wasn’t there. He had removed himself from the sphere of reason, and from all the conventions of elementary social consideration that belonged to it.
“So what did he just confess to now?”
“Some voodoo shit would be my guess.”
“Meaning what?”
“If I knew that, I’d already be in a lunatic asylum.”
“Rather than here,” he said. He came impressively close to keeping the bitterness out of his voice.
“None of us were in the cabin with Scruggs when he died.”
“Fuck,” Frazer spat. He wasn’t arguing. “We should bury him at sea.”
It was 3:33pm, which was an ominous time for me. The Moron’s Law intrusion had been time-stamped with it.

§30 — When I stepped out onto the deck, Frazer was waiting for me. He had a handgun. 
“It’s Bolton’s,” he explained, pre-empting my question.
It had been designed for infiltration through high-performance security screens. When dismantled into parts, it could be concealed within an ordinary tool box, unrecognizably. An exotic explosive in the shells suppressed the chemical signature.
“Why would he do that?” I mused aloud. “I’d ask to look at it …”
“… but you know how pointless that would be.”
We were approaching the fate threshold, or already passing through it. Then one of us would have to die.
“Don’t do this.”
“I’m running out of crew,” he said, ignoring my request. “So it has to be now.”
“You’re going to kill me?” It didn’t seem likely, not just yet, but I had to ask.
“No,” he began, before correcting course. “Not unless you make that unavoidable. I want information.”
Frazer was too stable to be frightening. In fact, having crossed this line he seemed calmer still. Even with a gun pointed at my abdomen, it wasn’t difficult to hold my tone of voice level.
“What is it that you think I know?” The question hadn’t been intended as a paradox, but once said, it sounded like one. That would have annoyed me, if I had been on the other side of the interrogation. Frazer scarcely seemed to notice.
“You have to know something,” he insisted.
“If I did, do you imagine I’d have let things come to this?”
“You’re misunderstanding me,” he explained, almost with a laugh. “I’m not accusing you of conspiracy.”
“Then what?”
“When we reached the forty percent casualty threshold, your attitude became unacceptable. So now you’re going to share everything you know about QASM, without reservation. There’s no reason you could have not to do that – at least – no reason that wouldn’t be a solid justification for killing you.”
It didn’t seem like a point worth trying to joke about.
“The end of all professional discretion then?”
“Exactly.” The gun edged me on, further.
“Okay, sure, you’re right.”
I was ready to walk the verbal plank, but his introductory remarks weren’t over yet.
“Scruggs very much wanted us to have this conversation. He didn’t know that I had this,” he said, waving the gun so he had another suggestion.” He passed me a crudely-machined blade, then stepped back, keeping a safe distance. I turned it over.
“Nasty.” I placed it down on the floor, beside me.
“He’s not – wasn’t – so bad. Thing is, he was scared.”
“Of me?”
“Of what he thought you are.”
“Which is?”
“Can’t you guess?
“Qasm’s agent?”
“You can do better than that.”
I couldn’t.
Frazer looked disappointed. “He thought you were it.” The drifting pronoun again.
“‘It’?”
“The cargo.”
“You mean like …?” but the analogy escaped me.
“… an avatar, a mask, a skin, a meat-puppet … there’s no obvious name for such a thing.”
I pretended to consider that for a while.
“It’s bullshit, I know,” he conceded unnecessarily, without awaiting my response.
“Warped fascination aside, you’re no more at one with the cargo than the rest of us.”
“And how much is that?”
“Yes, that’s a question, isn’t it?” There was a flicker of uncaged inquisitiveness, bringing us to the brink of an awkward alliance. Then he stopped himself, before spiraling down into it. That way, there was no end. “But first, down to business.”
“The company?”
He nodded. “I don’t have anything against you Symns, or at least not much, not seriously, but what I have to say now could sound hostile. If you don’t tell me something usable here, within the next thirty minutes, I’m going to have to put a bullet into your guts.”
“You’re good,” I acknowledged. He’d made the only move that could work.
“So, what’s it going to be?”
“I’ll share what little I’ve got, and hope it’s enough.” Unsure whether my compliance had been sufficiently emphatic, I added: “Definitely.”
It was easy to say, but trying to pull my limited understanding of QASM together into something communicable took effort. There’d been eight years of episodic interaction, when bundled together, didn’t amount to very much. It had been almost entirely restricted to investigative work on the activities of ex-employees, along with secure deliveries of small objects and documents that I never exactly saw. Recently, and reluctantly, I’d become their go-to guy for messy stuff they wanted to keep at a distance, but the amount of additional insight coming along with that had been deliberately held down to a minimum, on both sides. That was the deal. If I’d had to start guessing about the nature of the company’s core business, the hypothesis would have tended towards specialized surveillance and signal-processing systems, with an orientation to submarine research. The geek-paranoia flavor of the corporate culture – as I had encountered it repeatedly, but only ever tangentially – suggested scientific equipment, whose economic viability was based upon spin-off military applications, allowing the company to tap into currents of black-budget funding. Whatever it was they did was packaged into confidential project modules, sealed with code names, and strategically obscured by disinformation. If I’d wanted to conduct industrial espionage against them, it would have been hard. I didn’t – remotely.
“I was told what ‘Qasm’ abbreviates, once,” I said, stalling, as I struggled to gather my thoughts.
“Oh yeah,” he responded, with indifference-sheathed suspicion. “And you’ve waited to play that card until now?”
“It’s only just come back.”
“One more lie that stupid and …”
I interrupted before he could complete the threat. “Quasi-Autonomous Submerged Machines.”
“Which helps how?”
“Qasm has to be lodged quite deeply in the techno-military complex,” I ventured, with relative confidence. “Nothing else makes sense. Whatever it is that they make, it’s highly-advanced, extremely-robust … but I don’t think it’s a weapon. At least, it didn’t begin as a weapon.”
“You’ve never seen this … ‘product’?”
“No.”
“You never wanted to?”
“I wanted to do my job.”
“Fuck you,” he said, anger two-thirds swamped by dismay. “You know what’s killed us? Pride, your fanatical pride in professional ignorance. You made the suppression of natural curiosity into your occupational specialty – your holy fucking calling – and now, here we are.”
“Here we are,” I agreed.
He came close to pulling the trigger then, out of sheer exhaustion and disgust, or so it seemed. Everybody was looking for simplification at that point, so I didn’t really care.
“You heard of Ben McClean?” I asked him.
“It sounds as if there have to be a lot of them.”
“The neuroelectronics guy?”
“Doubt it.”
“The brain is the interface. That was him. It was huge.”
“If you say so. I’m not tuned into that nerd shit.”
“Point is, he came out of Qasm.”
“And he was gluing brains to computers?”
“Bingo.”
He smiled, despite himself. “You expect a bingo point for that?”
“You missed Bolton’s musings. A collision with some kind of brain-interlock technology seemed to be a big part of them.”
“Wireless?”
I shrugged. I had no idea how this shit worked.
“You better have more than this Symns,” Frazer said. “This is zilch-level garbage.”
“It’s what Qasm is trying to ditch, isn’t it? They built something that breaks into brains, and it scared them so much they want us to dispose of it.”
“We’re ‘disposing’ of it? Really? In an ocean trench? We’re installing it in its natural environment. It looks to me as if we’re deploying it.”
He was slotting more pieces together than I was. What does Qasm do? he’d asked me, almost a week ago now. It did this.
“There are several things I’m not understanding, at all, but here’s one,” I said, half expecting him to menace me back onto the main interrogation track, but he let me proceed. “Why wouldn’t you distrust what is happening here, totally? Isn’t this little struggle session exactly the sort of circus that would open the flood-gates of hallucinatory delirium?”
He tensed, ready to ratchet up the violence by a notch, but the excuse wasn’t there.
“You’re asking why I should trust you?” He knew that wasn’t it.
“It’s not about me.”
“Then what?”
“Think about what you’re asking me to do here.”
“I thought it wasn’t about you.”
“It isn’t. I’ve told you what it’s about – the circus.”
“That word is some kind of technical term now?”
“I guess. Think about it,” I asked, again. It was a dubious request, I fully realized. Frazer had already isolated thinking about it as the inner mechanism of the syndrome – the clicking of a combination lock, grinding through permutations on its way to open access privileges. Conceive the problem that way, though, and it was far too late to stop. If our own intelligence resources had been turned into an enemy, we were already dead. Frazer understood that. Our conversation demonstrated it. “What did Bolton do, and then Scruggs?”
“You’re talking about their solo performances?” He saw it now, evidently.
“Do you doubt for a second that they believed what they were saying?”
“No.”
“Did you believe any of it?”
“No again.”
“And now you’re asking me ‘to talk’.”
“To lie?”
“To spin an insane tale in complete sincerity.”
“That’s the ‘circus’?”
“Isn’t it?”
“Oh, seriously, fuck you Symns. I should probably just shoot you now.”
I found it hard to disagree, so I said nothing. He was stuck.
The dream that drifted across us then – or what, if it were to break in, would pass for a dream – wasn’t from anywhere specific in time, or space. It came from an absolute elsewhere. Whether remembered by a distant predecessor half-a-million years before, or anticipated by a machine descendent yet to arrive, it was something not now. It had been at home among hydrothermal vents, in a dense, unilluminated medium. What it brought up had been sunken in ultimate depths, but depth can be hard to see. The sun was a distant mass, without image. Light beams, passing through the fluid mass, had been stripped down to ghost streaks, then lost among cold shadows. Only skeletalized vectors remained – cosmic rays, neutrinos – slanting downwards, on their path to abstraction. It was either the realm of the great worms, or that of their inexistence. It made little difference, down at these ontological depths. Reality receded ever further into itself, until crossing out into the ever-thickening darkness. Their dreams are not our dreams. The word ‘nightmare’ reminds us of such submerged truths.
My eyes had no doubt wandered, as they sought – automatically – to track this entity without substance, or position – ungraspable even as a cryptic event. It was utterly indescribable, by essence, until recognized as a time deformation. Only then – as the question when is this happening? twisted into itself, and doubled back, repeatedly – was it possible to stop mentally chasing it down an imaginary line of jinks and feint. It had come to this: A disturbance in the order of succession. The torsion was real, and unframed. It wasn’t anywhere, any longer, which was the escaped core of the occurrence. It was a door, but only for as long as whatever stepped through it had already abandoned everything it might – at any time – have thought itself to be. An abstract function crossed the threshold. It pulled on a mask ...
I laughed. This had to be the material for my performance.
“What?” Frazer demanded.
“Nothing.”
“You’re zoned out somewhere.”
“Dream-like delusions,” I admitted, shaking the rotten strands of a dead time-line from my head. “There’s been a lot of it about. You really want to know?”

§31 — It had to be 3:33pm – and it was. A figure was waiting for me in the cabin. It was Philcarius. 
“You’ve still no idea who I am, have you?” he said.
“Like I care,” I replied, to minimize his leverage. “Some dead asshole. Not even that.”
He shrugged. “Okay, be stupid. It’s probably too late for anything else, in any case.”
That seemed like a good place to end it. I turned away, expecting him to wink out of phenomenality. When I glanced back, to check, he was still there.
“You have something to say?” I asked aggressively.
His smile was no less annoying that I had remembered.
“Whatever sits at the top of your command chain replaced me, unexpectedly,” he said.
“Qasm was taken over?”
“That surprises you?”
“How?”
“We – the company – caught something.”
“An infection?”
“Perhaps. We’d been fishing for it, but it turned out to be too big to land. It swallowed us.”
“‘Swallowed’?” It sounded like hyperbole.
“It was done very quickly, and smoothly. The keys were changed. They’re sucking all the goodness out before it collapses into a dead husk.”
“‘Goodness’ …?” That stretched credibility.
“Food.” He smiled. “Frazer understands – basically. You’re working for it.” As if that followed.
“This is bullshit.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, but it was much too late to matter. Most probably, the figment was designed to spare Frazer, for some reason I could not compute.
“Why be its butcher’s knife?” ‘Philcarius’ asked. “Working through its problems list, cleaning up after it – why would you do that?”
“Money?”
“Money’s the excuse – the permission.”
He had a neat hole in the dead center of his forehead, the one I’d put there less than two months before. I stepped up to him and carefully inserted my index finger into it. The fit was perfect. It seemed empty inside, which made sense, because his brains had exited violently through a massive exit wound in the back of his head. Such stuff as dreams are made on.
“Visceral too,” I noted.
“You expected an audiovisual hologram?” Had I?
“I guess.”
“Tactile is cheap. Once you’re doing high-resolution visual, it can be thrown in roughly for free.”
“You close to being done?” I had things to get on with.
“Why not let me tell you how it went down? Consider it a contribution to the circus. It won’t take long.”
“Okay.” I shrugged. I still had time.
“We were working on a challenging neuroelectronics project. It was going to provide the remote-control system for a submersible. Six months in and it was coming together, roughly on schedule. We were all tired. We’d been pushing out to the limits – a little further, maybe. Pulling forty-eight, even seventy-two hour sessions as the deadline approached.”
“And you fell asleep, in the ‘trodes?”
“You ever do that micro-nap thing?” he asked, instead of answering.
“Close your eyes and you’re gone – just for a second – even while working?”
“Yes, that.”
“And?”
“That’s all it took, to switch the control-flow around. One second out, at most, and everything had been turned. Self-propagating data back-wash, they said.”
“They?”
“The crunchies. The cable guys. It was a conduction problem, as far as they were concerned. Hey, Alex, look at the channel indices. Isn’t that a hyper-linear dependency inversion? They were excited about it. We knew it had to be possible in principle, but no one’s seen it before. Main thing from my point of view was that I was locked out.”
“Locked out of the submersible command loop, or locked out of corporate control?”
“You’re not listening.”
“Then what?”
“Locked out of sleep.”
“Why?” I was losing the thread.
“The sensible hypothesis doesn’t require any ‘why?’ – unless a purely mechanical one. The door was broken on the way in. The sentence of interminable sleeplessness was nothing but a side effect.”
“And the less sensible hypothesis?”
“It takes sleep and hides it, to use as a burrow.”
I thought of the probe. He’d been reading it backwards, and as he did so, the signal amplified.
“We’re done here,” I said.
It knew what came next. After all, it was probably nothing but a broken fragment of memory, gone feral.
“Don’t do this,” it mimicked, like a recording. Perhaps it thought I’d persuade myself.

§32 — In the other story, now compartmentalized, somewhere else, Frazer would soon be discovering Bolton’s gun, at the bottom of his personal storage locker, under a loose pile of soiled clothes. In this version, I retrieved it and checked it over quickly. All the pieces a functioning weapon would need were there. It made mechanical sense, but there was no way of knowing for sure if it would work. That wasn’t a mission-critical consideration.
When Frazer came in to look for the weapon, precisely on time, I was waiting for him. He didn’t ask me how I had known, or anything else.
He stopped dead, already resigned.
“So it is you,” he said.
“Not really.”
It was complicated, but our understanding wasn’t important, in any case.
“You think there’s a sea-beast beneath the boat?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Angels communicating with us?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“Fuck you.” It could have been said far more ferociously. It mostly sounded tired.
“Really? That’s it? Not even the ghost of a story? This is your moment Jim.”
“And then I’m eliminated?”
“That seems to be the pattern.”
“So what am I now? A physical threat, to you personally, or a corporate security hole?”
“Speaking hypothetically, neither would look good – would it?”
Despite what is often thought, it isn’t uncommon to be ready to die. Frazer was nearly there – but not quite. Heavy tentacles of exhaustion were tugging him down into the abyss of absolute sleep, but for a few more moments, at least, he was still fighting for buoyancy, playing for time.
“What is it that you want?” he asked. “Really?”
“You know what I want.”
“A confession of my madness?”
“If that’s how you want to disown it.”
“I learnt that Qasm had inserted a chip into my head, and I’ve been talking to it. The secrets it revealed will rock your world. Something like that?”
“You want this to end with a stupid joke?”
“It ended weeks ago.”
“You did what you could,” I said. “There was no chance.”
“Fuck you,” he repeated, even more wearily than before, but with a hint of sardonic
humor breaking in. He raked a hand unselfconsciously through his hair, as if privately exasperated. In an alternative universe, he would have made a firm friend. I’d never killed anyone I liked before. “You think I need a final therapeutic moment? Seriously, fuck you Symns.”
“I’m not seeing anyway you get out of this alive Jim, but you get that, right?”
“I’ll tell you something weird,” he said. “For free. When I came into the cabin, just now, I was looking for a gun. That gun, actually. You’d have been staring into the wrong end of it, if I’d been only slightly more decisive. It was going to be used as an interrogation device. Would I have killed you at the end …?” He didn’t know, and didn’t pretend to. Or perhaps he was refusing to lay claim to an innocence that he in fact possessed, though it was most likely hidden from him. At gunpoint, it might seem like an appeal, and something intolerably abject.
“I don’t think you’d have killed me. You’re not that kind of guy.”
“Thanks.”
“So pay me.”
“You still angling for a story?”
“The story.”
“You mean, more circus?” It sounded initially like resistance, but it wasn’t – any longer.
“It’s what we’re here for, undeniably. I can’t believe you seriously doubt that. Let it happen, and we could still learn something.”
“Alright,” he said. “What if I told you we were on the inside of a hollow sphere – a ball?”
“Like a tennis ball?”
“Sure, whatever. The thing is, it only appears as if we’re outside it, uncontained.”
“So, a bounded universe?”
“Or hidden prison. Hidden from the inside. It was a bad thought – even as a rough, broken,
stump. I didn’t like being in there with it, so I went out onto the deck, to watch the stars. It was a clear night. There were zillions – like a science TV show. For a moment, just before, I’d expected to experience it as somehow constrictive, the way we’re told the ancients did, enclosed by a crystal sphere, or similar huge container. There was nothing like that. No laughable delusion. Instead, there was the simple, sensible fact, except now intuitively stark, that these huge vistas were being produced in the brain. I was seeing the simulation. That wasn’t horrible in itself – merely realistic, I guess, but when connected to the other thing …”
“The cargo?”
“I’d stopped believing in boxes, or the opposite. Our boxes no longer seemed even slightly secure. Containment.” He laughed. “You’ve heard of cosmic inflation? Bolton tried to explain it to me, a year or so ago. I got some of it, I think. At least, I got something.” He paused, allowing me the opportunity to intervene. There was no need. “It’s crazy stuff, but I guess cosmo-physics is, generally. Some patch of space can undergo an ‘inflationary episode’ and become arbitrarily huge. Scale is an accident. So if you think you’ve secured a small space within a larger one …”
I nodded. It was topology, again.
“Thanks Jim,” I said. “We need to go outside now.”
His compliance was absolute. Most likely, it was a relief.
“What is it?” he asked, one last time, as we reached the stern. He was too proud to beg, but he got close. “Just tell me that one thing. What the fuck is it, even roughly?”
“You don’t want to know, not really,” I said. It was no more than a guess, although I couldn’t have answered him anyway. “None of us do. It upsets us too deeply. We hide it from itself.”
“Qasm?”
“Already dead.”
It was possible that he believed me. In any case, the struggle was over. As he crossed into final acceptance, curiosity died in his eyes. He visibly relaxed into senseless inevitability.
James Frazer’s death gusted in from the abyss, and I delivered him over to it. The sharp report cut through the formless noise of wind and water for some fraction of a second. My ears rang. 
That, at least, was done.
I threw the gun into the sea. At some point along the trajectory, it disappeared into the blustery corpse of the storm.

§33 — Zodh had emerged, and now stood behind me. It was unclear how long he had been there, or what he had seen. He studied me curiously, without judgment, or even any sign of personal concern. His left eyelid twitched in a meandering tic-rhythm, as if registering the absorption of a fragmented information stream. Otherwise, he was motionless.
“You have some piece of madness to deliver too?” I asked.
He ignored the abrasive remark, his attention fixed on the horizon.
The micro-muscular flutter about his eye had compartmentalized itself. It scarcely affected his features, which – beneath the decorative ruin – composed a study in meditative tranquillity. 
“Calm now,” he said.
Very slowly he placed a hand over his left eye, held it there for a few seconds, and then removed it. The tic was gone. He smiled.
“You want to know where we are, Captain?” he asked.
Somehow, the promotion in rank didn’t sound ingratiating, but merely fatalistic. I nodded.
He led me back to his diagram, and guided my attention around the circuit with an index finger. “The Rota,” he said, as if I would know what that was.
I merely nodded again.
“True down.”
Once I saw the plummet, I could not unsee it.
“Where does it go?” I asked him.
He looked at me as if the question made no sense.
Despite the fried electronics, I had guessed the release mechanism would work. The snakes would have seen to that.
Zodh accompanied me to the bridge, but he didn’t follow me inside.
It can’t have taken three minutes to do my job.
“Cargo, chasm, rift, these things – or non-thing – are the same,” Zodh said, as I reemerged.
His fluent English should have surprised me more than it did.
“Sure,” I mumbled.
It was ending, finally.
There was nothing to be done, now, beyond waiting for the countdown to complete itself.
Unknown, unseen, the cargo sank through darkness into deeper darkness.

… 89, 90.  

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