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“So that’s it,” Frazer said eventually.
“Not much to look at,” Scruggs added, perhaps as a dry joke.
I carefully examined the faces of my four companions, one by one, trying to extract what I could about their initial responses to our task. No one was transparently thrilled, but beyond that it was difficult to say. Frazer looked quietly determined, folded into himself, in a way I already suspected was typical. He was adapting to a situation that was not, in the slightest degree, responsive to any of our wishes. Scruggs might have been silently praying, his lips moving, scarcely perceptibly. Other than that, he seemed calm enough, or at least accepting. Zodh was smiling cryptically, unreadable.
It fell upon Bolton to represent everyone’s doubts.
“What do you think is in there?” he asked. He wasn’t making any effort to hide his disquiet.
“Do you care?” answered Frazer. In less than a day, he’d already passed surreptitiouly into a miniature occult circle. It was now his unreflective instinct to preserve the integrity of the unknown against encroachment. I would have smiled, if I had thought – even for a moment – that he might not notice.
“Sure I care,” Bolton responded irritably. “It could be anything. I mean, if it isn’t hazardous, why is it locked away from us like this? No one said …”
“This is the job,” Frazer interrupted. “If you have problems with it, you’ve still got …” he looked at his watch “… an hour and seventeen minutes in which to quit. Bale out now, and you might avoid being sued for breach of contract.”
Bolton scowled, but said nothing. Like the rest of the crew, he was being paid enough to cover a lot of unhappiness.
Frazer passed me a strange sideways glance. Silencing Bolton didn’t mean he had no questions of his own, and they’d be back. His support had been strictly tactical.
The silent communication didn’t compromise my gratitude. One step at a time was alright with me. It had to be.
§07 — We set out into calm, miserable weather. The wind was no more than a breeze, but its icy teeth were wounding. Chill mist, tending to drizzle that never quite fell, deepened the elusiveness of a dull gray sky. According to all primitive intuition, we were heading on a meaningless course into formless infinity. Our prospects were awesome in their uninterrupted obscurity.
For an hour or so we stood, each apart, scattered along the guardrail. No one spoke.
The coast behind us gradually receded into invisibility.
The steady thrum of the engine smoothed further, as it withdrew into the subliminal constancy of an auditory ground-state. Like insects, we were now hearing it through our feet.
Eventually Bolton broke the silence.
“So it begins,” he said. His tone of voice, in its dull vacancy, was a sonic translation of the sky-shades. ‘Leaden’ perhaps, with heavy vagueness muffling an encroaching blackness. It alluded to storms, rather than announcing one. Still, there would be a storm.
“Thy Will be done,” Scruggs added, speaking into the nebulous oblivion. “On Earth as it is in Heaven.” It was hard to know which seemed more distant. ‘Limbo’ had never meant anything to me before. Now it was palpable.
“Zommoddybpskhattao,” Zodh contributed, solemnly. Each alien syllable was slowly and precisely intoned. His gaze was rigidly locked onto the horizon, where he was seeing something nobody else did. “Zommo,” he repeated, with still deeper, languid sonorousness. “You open the Old Way. You close Great Gates of Sleep.”
“What the fuck?” Bolton mumbled, softly, aghast at what his simple remark had avalanched into, as it passed like a stray wave down the relay chain.
Scruggs edged towards him – and away from Zodh – back along the guardrail. They exchanged glances, wordlessly communicating some message I was unable to interpret and didn’t want to guess at.
Frazer had already left, I now noticed. I’d missed him slip away. How much of this had he caught?
His absence spoke – if elliptically.
“No complex stuff,” he had said. I came close to laughing at that now.
Was he on drugs? howled some nagging, hallucinated jester. It doesn’t matter, because he will be soon enough. Backstage a clown chorus snickered in appreciation. Since Full-Stop had crashed, the mind smurfs had become noisier, but they would be easy enough to ignore. The cold was already killing them, I suspected. The ocean would finish it.
Bolton and Scruggs left the deck together, exchanging a few awkward words.
Zodh pushed further into his raptures.
I watched for a while, but eventually my attention was vacuumed back out to the empty horizon. It fused into hazed memories of other journeys, associated intimately through nothing but their common indefiniteness. None of them had been anything in themselves, or at least anything that could be recalled, other than cloudy allusions to alternative voyages, each fading into its own immemorability. They had been dreams, probably, or stories encountered long ago. Muffled echoes – vividly indistinct – returned from some freezing fogbank of forgetting.
Out there, somewhere, was recall. It would all come back, in its own time, or not. It made no difference. Ahead of us lay a pre-set course towards some absolute annihilation of purpose. We were getting rid of something. When it was done, we still wouldn’t know what it had been.
Something over 5,000 nautical miles away, West South-West, our destination simmered in the distant tropics. The lazy curve of our route had been plotted to miss out everything in between. The cargo was to be released into the Challenger Deep, where the Mariana Trench lurched down into its nethermost extremity. It came to its end in the Western Pacific, 210 miles South-West of Guam.
§08 — No one said much. On the one topic worthy of discussion there was nothing to be said. Already, it seemed, the crew had come to think of me as an additional layer of shielding, strategically placed between them and the object of their morbid fascination. They understood that I had not been set among them to clarify their near-term fate, but far more nearly the opposite. If they had questions about what lay in store for them, I would be the last one to hear them.
The distance made observation easier. The boat was too small for them to withdraw themselves from my attention without continuous effort. They were bottled specimens, within convenient visual and auditory range. There was no need to expend energy pursuing them. Like a spider – or something far less common but still spider-like – it was sufficient to quietly wait for my prey to appear. Even if time was to be an enemy (of unknown potency), space was on my side.
Scruggs, who had already singled himself out by the intensity of his aversion to my presence, was also the easiest to catch. When he stumbled upon me, his pride kept him from the path of immediate retreat. He wanted to communicate his defiance and animosity, along with his refusal to acknowledge any right on my part to a piece of the boat’s limited space. This territorial obstinacy continually lured him into the dissection-zone.
Perhaps, initially, he imagined I would shift out of his way, randomly displaced by discomfort. Instead, I smiled emptily at him, before returning to what I pretended were consuming private thoughts. That was a torment to him, and he handled it badly. He fed me every day.
It was difficult not to admire him, however distantly. He’d pulled himself out of a trajectory that had touched the edge of a black-hole. If not quite a breakage of fate, it looked much the same from outside. He was human gristle that the world had been forced to spit out.
Scruggs was inseparable from his King James Bible, a grim, leather-bound volume that had been pored over – or pawed through – to the edge of disintegration. On the rare occasions when it wasn’t in his hands, he kept it in a black canvas pouch that seemed to have been specially designed for the purpose. He spent a lot of time praying. His religiosity wasn’t quite exhibitionistic, but it was so entirely lacking in inhibitory self-consciousness that it might as well have been. It was to whatever he’d found in this book that he owed his difference from zero. There wa
s no way he could hide his gratitude for that. There was something mustily glorious about it – a fragment of grim seventeenth century piety re-animated as a twenty-first century sport of nature.
“Steer us, each day, closer to the course of your Will, Lord,” he mumbled softly. “Help us to bind more tightly the evil in our hearts. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit that glides across the great water, shelter these wretched sinners from the storm of your wrath …”
He stared at me intently as he said this, and much else like it. I smiled back.
After a couple of days had passed, I took it up a notch.
“Scruggy,” I said as he passed, knowing the stupid nickname would annoy him.
“Scruggs,” he shot back, automatically.
“You have a moment?”
“No.” But he’d paused, instinctively.
“I was hoping to borrow your Bible – just for an hour or two – if you’re not looking at it right now.”
His arrested stroll transitioned into full paralysis.
I had been tweaking the barbed hook for thirty minutes or so, before deploying it. For a few seconds, I indulged myself in smug recognition of its genius. Once it had sunk in, the inter-angled acuities made it impossible to wriggle from, without it digging in further from another direction.
“Why?” he managed eventually.
“Why read the Bible?” The distorted echo could only have been maddening.
He glowered, arms folded across his chest defensively. Yet beneath the infuriation I could see something else – the thing I was counting on – obliging him, crushingly, to share the Word.
“The abyss,” I said, and then, as if in painstaking explanation to an idiot: “I want to see what it says about the abyss.”
He pulled out the book. “This is a King James,” he said. “It never uses the word.”
“It isn’t the word that matters.”
“‘The deep’, ‘the bottomless pit’, ‘the abode of demons’ …” he guessed. “That’s what you’re after?”
Was the ambivalence deliberate? If so, it was impressive. His face betrayed no guile.
“What I’m after?” I repeated, as a test.
“What you’re looking for.” The displacement clarified nothing. “Why do you care?”
“About what’s in there?” I gestured towards the book, tugging again on the initial request – twisting the hook still deeper into the neuralgic zone of his conflicted possessiveness. “You don’t think it has anything to tell us about where we’re going?”
“You don’t care about what’s in here,” he snapped, succumbing to his hostility.
“About what’s inside?” Tugging again, slowly.
“It’s not ‘inside’.”
“You think I disagree?”
He turned to leave, dazed with vague rage.
“Come on Scuggs,” I asked, again. “The book. Just for an hour.”
He froze once more, turned back, twisting on the line. He couldn’t lend it to me. He couldn’t not.
“It’s okay,” I said, letting it go. “Later.”
Weeks stretched ahead. He had nowhere to flee.
§09 — A blind spot is a hole in perception that conceals itself. It’s the thing you don’t see. The cargo – the thought of the cargo – was like that. It was perfectly hidden, in every normal respect. Yet in some other and excessive dimension it loomed. It was impossible to contemplate directly, and perhaps even indirectly, but it overshadowed everything. Oppressively close, yet absolutely elsewhere, it intimately engaged with us, on terms that were not ours. It enveloped our thoughts, and words, even our movements. We were caught in its absolutely ungraspable proximity, as if in a subtle web.
It had not occurred to me that it could be anything we might understand. That was a pre-emptive defense mechanism, I had already begun to recognize. Otherwise, the tantalization would have been intolerable, consuming all thought, without remainder. None of my crewmates were as well protected. It sucked upon them.
I had brought nothing to read, and could no longer understand why. How had I thought I was going to divert myself? It was already hard to remember. Even if there was more time to kill than I could have expected, that had already been plenty – 350 hours or so by any reasonable guess. It wasn’t going to conveniently compress itself.
Still, there were threads of recollection to tug at. Guarding the cargo was to have been the time sink. I had assumed it would be a serious matter – requiring continuous vigilance, even something akin to patrolling, or aggressive reconaissance, although of a subtle variety. Deliberate diversion hadn’t been a consideration. It would have been like taking a fat beach-holiday novel to a competitive chess match – but then, the match had in some still indefinite sense been cancelled. There was a gaping, unexpected hole, which the containment unit echoed unilluminously.
Spare time wasn’t anything familiar, professionally speaking. I had become habituated to continuous acceleration, to an extent that I only now clearly acknowledged. Up to this point, there had always been a little more complexity in a little less time. Full-Stop, the last job, had been especially difficult. There had been too many moving parts, and too many players. It had begun smoothly enough, but it had ended with crawling about in the dark, knives, gunfire, and screaming. It had also involved a boat, though it had not set out to sea. By the end, it had been a floating morgue. Under such conditions, and beyond very strict limits, redundancy was slackness to be excised. I had been unprepared for our new micro-universe, where superfluity was enthroned, without challenge.
Bolton had tilted the other way. He had brought three substantial volumes with him on our voyage. The first was a densely-technical analysis of memristor architecture, the second a somewhat more discursive – but still imposingly-mathematical – introduction to holographic universe cosmology. His third book was of far greater obvious relevance to our undertaking. He lent it to me without reluctance, perhaps anticipating a modestly informed conversation in the days ahead.
The book was an introduction to hydrothermal vent eco-systems – what it called ‘dark ecologies’. It wasn’t especially impenetrable – easy reading for Bolton, I guessed – so I was able to partially digest its contents over the few hours of the loan. Life without light was the theme. Since the topic wasn’t anything I had turned my mind to before, it was enlightening from the start. Anaerobic bacteria were the constructors. In the absence of sunlight, the extremophile-based ecologies of the ocean depths fueled themselves by extracting usable energy from heat, methane, and sulfur compounds through chemosynthesis. This produced the foundations of a food-chain. Insofar as terrestrial biology was concerned, this was the Old Road. The sun was nothing to the denizens of the abyss except a geochemical legacy, and a distant invisible mass. It would have been dream fuel, if there had still been dreams.
“Active hydrothermal vents are thought to exist on some of the gas giant moons,” Bolton said. “On Jupiter’s Europa, probably, and Saturn’s Enceladus. There have even been scientific speculations that ancient hydrothermal vents once existed on Mars.”
“This place we’re going?” I asked Bolton. “It has this night life?”
“Sure,” he replied. “A long way down. It’s not as if we’re going to see any of this stuff.”
“No,” I agreed. “But it’s there.”
§10 — The Pythoness was so highly automated it was basically a robot. There wasn’t much for any of us to do. Frazer was the only one of us to be badly affected by that, initially, and in any obvious way. He drifted around the vessel in a state of unsuppressed agitation, his senses straining for anything that could absorb his attention. Every half hour or so he re-visited the bridge, scrupulously checked the computer monitors, tried to find some point of insertion for expert human judgment, and failed. Then he returned to the deck to prowl around moodily, intermittently gazing out into the gray confusion of sea and sky. His sense of frustrated obligation was palpable.
The t
hree others appeared undisturbed by the inescapable idleness, which worried me more. What The Pythoness was inflicting upon us – the basic thing here – was time glut. If it wasn’t a mistake, it was worse. To leave the crew so unoccupied was an invitation to chaos. Eventually, this compulsory liberation from the constraints of practical routine would turn into something.
For an hour or so I amused myself with thoughts of pointless duties and diversions that could be invented, and wondered – but only vaguely, and momentarily – whether it was something I should try to throw myself into. The idea was deeply unrealistic. Even were I capable of inventing plausible tasks to mop up everyone’s time, I had no authority to impose them. Frazer alone could do that. Besides, it was already far too late to begin now. The situation was set.
Directionless self-entertainment would be no real substitute for a sense of purpose, not for long. The Pythoness was a time bomb. She was far too self-contained, but it didn’t end there. Whatever she could not do herself, could be done instead remotely, from the Port Sidon Qasm facility. The final abolition of our practical relevance took the form of the ‘snakes’. Qasm had decided upon the name, which made enough sense to stick with. There were two. Each was an extendable tele-control cable with a multifunctional tool-head. One would have been plenty, but pairing them was another example of redundant design. There was one located on the port side of the upper bridge, another on the starboard side, but either was capable of reaching any place on the boat. We didn’t see much of them, for the first few days.
“Nihilism is nothing but too much time,” Brad Miller had said, as Full-Stop was going south. “When people without enough to do begin to look for something – that’s when the problems begin.” That was roughly 36-hours before he was tortured to death in a sound-proofed San Francisco basement by Robert Philcarius – ‘The Entertainer’ – whose Morons’ Law anarchist hacker-cult had trojaned itself into the Qasm servers ‘for kicks’. It was another two days before I found the body, and by then it had begun to smell bad. “Full-Stop for Brad,” the clowns had laughed. Eight of the Morons died – three very horribly – before it was clear there was nothing behind the prank. The outcome was “acceptable” in Qasm’s estimation. After that, it no longer felt as if I was being over-paid.