Chasm Read online

  “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.