Chasm Read online

  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.”