Chasm Read online

  I didn’t – at that point – expect anything like Philcarius-style full-spectrum insanity to afflict us out here, but what would occupy our time? The question became more intriguing when reversed. Why had a crew been needed at all? Might sheer institutional inertia have accounted for it? That was certainly conceivable. But if one man – even two – had been considered prudent, as security against contingencies, why five? Our redundancy was so extravagant it was impossible to ignore. This was a mission demanding next to nothing from any of us.

  It was a social experiment, even if an accidental one. There would still have been an explosive adundance of time if it had been neatly disintegrated by sleep, but that isn’t what happened. What happened was the other thing.

  §11 — It would have been possible, no doubt, to select five men less inclined to the bonds of mutual companionship, but it would not have been easy. Between each of us, and every other, stood formidable walls of incomprehension, and actually latent antagonism. The only thing we shared was disconnection. Three weeks without Internet had begun, and nobody had yet mentioned it. Clearly, none of my companions were connective types.

  I had to remind myself that these four had worked together before, more than once. The acknowledgement was instantly amusing. They had all, immediately, disappeared almost entirely into themselves. Frazer was lost in the solitude of command, Bolton in his technical calculations, Scruggs in the mysteries of prayer, and Zodh in whatever heathenish horrors seethed secretly in his brain. None had any solid ground for communion with any of his fellows. They were all following separate paths that led only inward. The intimacy with the sea – which they did hold in common – only distanced them further from each other. The Pacific they crossed was not a place of contact, or commercial intercourse, but for each a very different, essentially incommunicable thing. I could already make out the rough outlines. For Frazer it was a challenge, for Bolton an insulator, and for Scruggs a prospect of final redemption. A gradual erosion of motivation gnawed upon all three.

  Zodh was the outlier. Alone among the crew, his sense of purpose was in no obvious way attenuated. If anything, it seemed peculiarly intensified, screwed up to a wild and alien pitch. The behavior through which it manifested itself was initially unintelligible. He spent six-hour blocks of time in swirling motion. The overall tendency of his meanderings was a counter-clockwise circumambulation of The Pythoness, in slow gyrations whose consistency emerged from a turbulence of sub-loops and gestural complexities. He appeared to be in the early stage of some artistic or architectural endeavour, encompassing the entire vessel. At first I suspected he was engaged in a process of measurement, since at certain points he stopped dead in his tracks, as if to mentally digest the completion of some arcane metric unit. Gradually, however, these moments of concentration resolved themselves into the performance of a ritual. “Pits-Drop, Pits-Drop,” he repeated, over and over, exploring the syllables, summoning something through them. After the first hundred micro-cycles of the chant, it had become indistinguishable from a dull headache. I tuned it out, to the best of my ability.

  “Hey, Zodh,” I called out, softly but distinctly, as a test. He ignored me, as I had guessed he would. I let it go. There was time.

  §12 — Do you kill people for a living? asked an unrecognized voice, high-pitched, and sarcastic. Is that what you do? It was jarringly textured, and extravagantly vital – in a way that was only possible for something that had never been alive. The jolt of synthetic animation induced queasiness. Memories are best eaten dead.

  I turned around, automatically, but no one was there. It wasn’t that I had expected there to be, upon even split-second cursory reflection. The absence was a confirmation, rather than a surprise. Almost certainly, it was an auditory phantasm, woven opportunistically into atmospheric noise. Such verbal apparitions were not unfamiliar to me, or even particularly mysterious – voices that were not quite thoughts, but which guided thought, to intolerable destinations. They were advance symptoms of psychological dissociation, and probably no more than an indication of gathering sleep-loss craziness in this case. Still, distractions – I had seen vicariously – could be death-traps. It would be necessary to keep a tight grip on them.

  §13 — Nothing is hazardous without time, without the opportunity for things to happen. In any game, when estimating the menace posed by the enemy, one asks: how much time do they have?

  Who was the enemy here? I wasn’t ready to assume that we lacked one.

  Zodh was attempting to teach Bolton and Scruggs a card game. It was something he’d picked up from fishermen in the Sunda Strait according to the tale he was weaving – in hideously broken English – around the edge of the demonstration. The cards were ‘bets’ or ‘beasts’ (it was hard to tell) lashed together by elementary arithmetic. I tried to get some sense of the rules, while pretending to pay no attention. After perhaps a quarter of an hour of such lurking, the impression I had gathered was only barely compatible with the diversion being a game at all. It appeared to be far less about winning or losing – in any conventional sense – than about something else entirely, and whatever that was, neither Bolton nor Scruggs seemed to have any greater purchase upon it than I did. Zodh was being drawn ever deeper into the cryptic circulation of the cards, but Scruggs and Bolton had been lost along the way. Scruggs gave up first, muttering something I couldn’t catch, and then drifting off, directionlessly. Bolton followed a couple of minutes later. Zodh seemed scarcely to notice.

  I wandered over and squatted down in what had been Scruggs’ place. Zodh didn’t notice that, either. I hadn’t expected to extract significant pattern from the cards, and I didn’t. It was impossible, nevertheless, to miss the fact that something was there. It was an abstract engine. Some kind of sub-decimal fusion process drove flakes of fate around a central three-phase circuit, in a turbular cascade.

  After perhaps twenty minutes, Zodh looked up, at and through me.

  “Storm coming,” he said, without discernible affect.

  §14 — Mid-afternoon on the third day, with nothing obvious to do, it occurred to me that it would make sense to try and catch up on missed sleep. No one would miss me, or anybody else. It wasn’t that I felt particularly tired, even after a succession of nights that had seemed completely sleepless. The feeling of detachment had persisted, toppling over at times into an impression of general unreality, but there was still no suggestion whatsoever of an inclination to unconsciousness.

  I went below deck, took off my shoes, clambered up into my bunk, and lay on my back. Closing my eyes shut down far less awareness than it was meant to. Indeterminate thoughts ground like restless gears. After perhaps fifteen minutes I gave up, climbed down from the bunk, put my shoes on, and went back outside.

  It was a little after half-past three in the afternoon, local time. The sea and sky were still, bleak, and indistinct. Our distance from the destination had to be shrinking steadily, but there was no corresponding intuition. Motion had resolved itself into a changeless condition, without any frame of reference. The Pacific was the closest thing to a terrestrial image of endlessness, a vastness released – reluctantly – from some small fraction of the horizon. There was nothing to compare it to. It defied estimation even relative to itself.

  Contemplation of the unbounded sea and sky was unsettling after a while. Each was interrupted only by the other, in a shimmering remoteness of uncertain definition. The continuous flight of the horizon from apprehension – into a line at once attractive and intangible – was psychologically exhausting. When exposed to those untrammeled magnitudes for too long, the mind ached from over-stretch.

  The cargo containment unit called silently, so I went to it. There was at least one absolute non-event in the universe. It was absorbing beyond all reason.

  After some time, the door opened and closed behind me. It was Bolton.

  “The Captain sent me,” he said.

  I nodded, uninterestedly.

  “He wanted to know what you were doi
ng.”

  This deserved less than a nod. It was pointless irritation.

  “There’s a camera.” He pointed to the mechanical eye in the corner. “It feeds to the local core, in the bridge. You’ve been standing here for over an hour, just staring at it.”

  “At what?”

  “At …” He broke off, and looked again, long enough to remember there was nothing to see.

  The absence pulled at him, until he turned away.

  From certain, very specific angles, the merest hint of reflectivity swam up out of the blackness, hinting remotely at shadows. Perhaps he could catch some cryptic trace of his drowned image, cast down into the gulf of obliteration. It was unlikely, though. The scraps of escaping light had been chewed into abstraction by some buried turbular agitation.

  “So what are you doing here?” he pressed.

  “Watching over it. Doing my job.”

  “You’re expecting it to move?” It was probably intended as a humorous remark. “I don’t like it,” he added, in a smaller voice.

  “This?” I asked unnecessarily, with a minimalistic gesture into the encapsulating void. “What’s not to like?” Then, with a little less flippancy: “It’s a box.”

  “I guess.” He turned to go, pausing at the hatch. “You’re staying here?”

  “For a while.”

  §15 — Each night was the same. Descent into unconsciousness was impossible. I was trapped at the surface of awareness, as if by some stubborn positive buoyancy. With each downward struggle the imposition of sentience seemed – if anything – to intensify.

  The sleeplessness of previous nights had long ceased to be dismissable as an aberration. It was the way things were now – an architectural component of out shrunken world.

  After an hour or so I abandoned the pointless trial and climbed out of my berth, as quietly as possible. The consideration was unnecessary. Nobody was sleeping.

  Only Zodh still lay in his bunk. He was fully dressed and uncovered, flat on his back, with his eyes wide open. His lips, I thought, were breathlessly animated. If some whisper was emerging, however, I could not hear any of it. Rather than hallucinate random utterances into the sonic vacancy, I turned away, to look around the cabin.

  Bolton and Scruggs sat side by side on the horseshoe, as if positioned for a conversation that was not taking place. Their exhaustion was so palpable it seemed to sit beside, and between them.

  Frazer came in from outside. He looked a lot worse than I felt. Even in the gloom of the cabin it was easy to see that his eyes were bloodshot, and recessed among dark rings, as if sunk deep into folds of heavy bruising.

  “You look like crap,” I told him.

  He squinted at me grumpily.

  “Just one more week,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he grunted. “If the weather doesn’t deteriorate any further. Coffee ready?”

  Like everything else on The Pythoness, caffeine provision was an automated function. We’d set the allocation schedule within hours of setting out, and had since found no pressing reason to change it. To seize upon the option to re-set the coffee machine as a chance to assert our residual autonomy would have been too degrading to bear.

  “Do you know what we have in the medical locker?” I asked him. “You think there might be something in there for sleep prevention?”

  He regarded me quizzically. “How is sleep prevention in any way the problem we have?” But he was already getting it. If we were going to be imprisoned in sleeplessness, it made sense to sharpen the condition. That would mean taking a dubious journey to its end, but our choices in that regard were – in any case – brutally constrained.

  “It has to be worth a look, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, okay,” he agreed, without further resistance.

  We pulled out the medicine chest and emptied it, methodically, onto the floor. Bandages went into one pile, surgical instruments into another. When the first stage was complete, and the pharmaceuticals had been isolated, we returned everything else to the chest, in tolerable order.

  Sorting out the drugs was only a little more complicated. Everything was neatly labeled.

  “Is this what we want?” Frazer asked, after only a few seconds of sieving.

  It only took a quick look. I nodded. There were three packets, each containing two foil and bubble-sealed sheets of 24 capsules. It was called Zommodrine.

  “What the hell is that?” he muttered. I had never heard of the substance before, either. The label included a warning not to consume more than three tablets within any 24-hour period, noting the additional risks for those with high blood-pressure or heart conditions, and then, in large, dramatically emphasized type: prolonged sleep deprivation can produce a range of serious physical and psychological effects. This was totally our stuff.

  “We should dish it out,” I suggested.

  He was less sure. “Do we know what we’re doing?” he asked.

  I ignored the absurd question and went to fetch a cup of water. Dosage instructions were hazy, so I popped two of the plastic blisters, downing the green-and-black caps.

  “I’ve got stuff to do,” I said.

  §16 — A few hours later Frazer stepped in to the machine room. His pupils were fully-dilated, which had to be the zommodrine.

  “How did I guess you’d be here?” The sarcasm was grating, pointlessly abusive.

  “It’s not a large boat.”

  He stared – just for a moment – into the compact nothingness. The he pulled a scrap of yellow carbon-copy paper from his pocket, and held it up.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not.”

  “‘Laboratory waste’,” he recited from the manifest by memory, as he waved it at me. “What the fuck is that?”

  “You ask too many questions,” I said. “It’s annoying you.”

  “You’re not interested?” There was a hard edge to the question, which glinted with more unrefined hostility than I had noticed before.

  “We’ve done that.”

  “You think?” He paused, just for a second. “Why are you here, Symns? Really?”

  “Talking to you now?”

  “On this boat.”

  I thought about it, again. “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Why are any of us here?”

  “Bolton is a serene nihilist,” he responded, at a tangent. “He fills his free time with equations, endlessly reformulating zero. I wouldn’t call that ‘prayer’ – not usually – but I will now. Scruggs prays, every spare moment, the old way. Even Zodh prays – almost ceaselessly – to whatever hoodoo hideousnesses he thinks might be noticing. And then there’s you. … You come here.”

  The machine room was a quiet place to be alone in, but I didn’t want to help him make his point.

  “So what do you pray to, Frazer?” I asked, instead.

  We stood together, staring at the near-perfect patch of blackness, as if before a self-concealing shrine to negative existence.

  “Do you want to open it?” he asked, eventually.

  “You mean, force it open?”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to me, unless at the most subliminal level. It had simply seemed impossible. It was impossible.

  “Christ, no.”

  “We could ditch it now,” he suggested, with an eagerness rooted more in brain-stem chemistry than reflection. The idea was – of course – instantly appealing, but only for that half-second of mental inertia, before the cognitive machinery re-engaged practicalities. Then it reverted to transparent senselessness.

  “Two problems,” I said. “Start with mechanics. The release control has a GPS lock. Activation permission is rigidly location-dependent. So we don’t really get to the second problem, although it goes a lot deeper. The company thinks this thing – whatever the fuck it is – belongs in an ocean trench. I can only assume they have good reasons for that. …”

  “Why did this become our problem?” Frazer asked. Even his c
urrent state of profound psychological erosion had failed to subvert his inner toughness – still expressed through his frame and bearing – so it was disappointing to see him now switching to a tack this pathetic. Countless hours of decompression could only have taught him patience, but to be caged in an enforced vacation among unexorcized command responsibilities was different. The absence of any opportunity for action was a torture for him. It had brought him this low, if only momentarily. He had arrived at his moral nadir.

  I stared at him coldly. “It is our problem.”

  There was simply no denying it, and he didn’t try.

  After permitting him a few more seconds of silent submission to reality, I continued: “Unless we get this boat to the right coordinates, there’s no separating ourselves from whatever that thing is.”

  He was struggling to pull himself together against the undertow of sleep starvation. Crucially, he was ashamed, even though he would never be able to admit it. Seeing his spiritual collapse arrested, I permitted myself a thin smile.

  “How confident are you that there’s anything inside at all?” he asked, after a while.

  This was a new twist. There was a grain of coarse genius to the question. If he was testing me, it was merely cunning, but I heard something else. He was exploring an inner horizon.

  “Why would Qasm pay us to do nothing?” I parried, fully confident he wouldn’t know, or even try to guess.

  “Why would they do any of this shit?”

  He was back. I smiled sympathetically. “We’ll think about it, okay?”