Chasm Read online

  “So there’s no way to understand it?” It was what I assumed – no, what I wanted – him to be saying, steered mostly by instinct, in the direction of psychological protection. Any other interpretation would have been intolerably intimate. Behind the discussion were burrowing things, and I didn’t want them getting in.

  “That would just help it spread.”

  “Would that be so bad?” I probed, guessing the answer, hoping that – even now – he might still be able to guide the looming conclusion in a different direction.

  “I don’t know why …?” He’d forgotten a piece of the puzzle, perhaps deliberately.

  Even in that blank shard of amnesia was a glimpse of something far better left unglimpsed. Scruggs, too, shuddered slightly.

  “Then there was screaming,” Bolton remembered. “It was me, though, wasn’t it? I was screaming.”

  “No Bobby, you weren’t screaming,” Scruggs said. It sounded as if he was trying to convince himself. “There were no screams. It was quiet. No one heard anything.”

  “No, no, of course, it was quiet.” It was as if he was scolding himself for his own stupidity. “I’d climbed up a long way by then. The boat looked tiny down below. You know, as they always say, like a toy. A small toy. You guys were all up on deck, in a group, mere specks really. I could only just tell who was who, by remembering what you’d been wearing. That’s when I saw it, floating deep down, behind and beneath the boat. It was immense. Not like a whale – it was on a different scale altogether. I thought – I remember thinking – could it be the shadow of the island, cast down into the sea? But the shape wasn’t right for that. There was too much shape, and it was designed for swimming, obviously. It was a sea creature. There was no mistaking it. It had bilateral symmetry, a body plan – a neck, flippers, a tail. The overall size, end-to-end, I guess, was about three city blocks …”

  Given Bolton’s intelligence and education, he had to know how this sounded.

  “So, maybe half a mile long?”

  “I kind of think possibly a little longer,” he murmured, almost inaudibly.

  “So nothing actually imaginable,” I noted. I had to. It would have been unbearably condescending to leave the claim unchecked.

  “‘Imaginable’ …” he repeated after me, turning the pre-negated body of the word over slowly, exploring its convolutions of sense. “It should have been unimaginable.” It was as if he was recalling some ancient principle of reality, abandoned ninety million years ago.

  “I’m not insane,” he said, then, snapping back into defined co-existence with us. His words were carefully enunciated now, soft, slow, and calm. For the first time, it seemed as if talking the phenomenon through might be helping – if only at the most trivial psychological level. “I understand, of course, no animal on this planet has ever been close to that size, so it has to be something else – a communication.”

  “A message?”

  “I’m thinking, some kind of projection.”

  “Of what?”

  Scruggs stood up and left now, silently, with an apologetic glance at Bolton. He couldn’t take anymore. Why should this have been the threshold moment? Was it no more than an arbitrary point, on a continuum of alienation? Or was there something about the idea of a communicative projection that Scruggs found intolerable? If the latter was the case, and I could understand it – even part of it – I knew, then, that some essential clarity would have been reached, about us (if not it), but there was no time.

  “Did you ever read anything about ontology?” Bolton asked me. I was familiar with the word, just a little, but enough to recognize it as a tangential response to my question.

  “Whatology?”

  “Ontology,” he repeated, missing the deflective intent of my query. “It’s the science of being. An investigation into the thingness of things, or perhaps not that – not exactly.”

  “That’s a science, really?” I asked, piling in as much conspicuous skepticism as I could. “Experimental research into pure thingness?” It wasn’t something I’d delved into far, or made any effort to keep up with, and it sounded demanding, in a way I didn’t think we needed. In fact, it struck me as a reckless way to open doors we should be trying to close, and then to triple lock. Even without such concerns, twistedly ‘going meta’ about our predicament seemed likely to further stress capabilities that were already stretched to the outer limits of their tolerance. Nonlinearity led to explosive complexity fast. The last thing we could deal with now – mentally-shattered as we were – was the recursive amplification of difficulty.

  If Bolton picked up on my doubts, which was unlikely, he was nevertheless determined to bypass them.

  “It’s just …” he pushed on. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “About what?” I was in no mood to help him out, even if I could have done.

  “‘About what’,” he mumbled back. “Perhaps that’s it.” It meant nothing to me.

  “This is about the thing under the boat?”

  You’re saying ‘being’ is some kind of Kraken? was the obvious rider, but I restrained myself from attaching it. He had to see the problem already – almost certainly with greater clarity than I did.

  He looked startled, as if he’d given away more than intended. It was a reaction that was impossible to understand. More than anything he’d yet said, it was a sign that he’d lost his grip on the conversation entirely, becoming untethered from the most rudimentary content of his own elaborate discourse.

  “The thing under the boat,” I reminded him, again. The circus animal.

  “We have sonar?” he asked no one in particular. “If there’s anything there, it will show up.”

  The jolt of disconnection might have been annoying, but it wasn’t. Arcane philosophical speculation was taking us nowhere, or at least nowhere good, so this new avenue had to be worth pursuing.

  Stark negative evidence might catalyze something, I thought, as we left for the bridge. The thought of motivated technical tinkering at this point was strangely comforting.

  Bolton arrived at our destination first.

  “It’s been removed,” he said, as I entered. “The entire module has gone.”

  “No one here would have known how to do that – except you.” It had not been meant to sound like an accusation, but – of course – it did. He looked hurt, as if now, at last, receiving the slap I had planned for him earlier.

  “Could it have been pulled out remotely?” I asked, in an attempt to walk-back the thoughtless charge.

  “By the snakes?”

  “They were doing something here last night.”

  Frazer announced his presence with a communicative cough.

  “There’s no sign of the sonar mod,” Bolton explained, turning towards him.

  “Was it ever installed …?”

  Once asked, the sanity of the question was immediately striking. Bolton slapped his forehead theatrically.

  “How could we know?” I asked.

  “We couldn’t. Not with the internal databases fried. Why are you wasting your time with this? Even if we had sonar, the electronics would have been burnt-out by the lightning strike – like everything else.”

  Scruggs had drifted back, too. He hung on the bridge door, smiling aggressively.

  “Clowns,” he said.

  Bolton and I looked at each other. There was nothing to contest.

  “I don’t understand how it could come to this,” said Frazer, struggling to keep the tone of disapproval in check.

  “There’s no such state as ‘understanding’,” Bolton said. “Not really. Von Neuman put it best: In mathematics, you don’t understand things. You just get used to them. You ‘understand’ at the point you’re permitted to stop thinking.”

  Those were the last words I ever heard him say.

  §26 — Bolton disappeared. We had no way of knowing exactly when. He’d spoken inconsequentially to Scruggs, roughly five hours before his absence was noted. Concern was slow to e
scalate.

  Scruggs and Zodh were bonded in asymmetrically-animated conversation. It had the appearance of an interrogation. That was becoming the default communication format on The Pythoness. Frazer was listening attentively at a distance. I was further out still, picking up what I could. Bolton was not in the scene at all, but the discussion was about him.

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’?” Scruggs was asking.

  “Gone away.”

  “There is no ‘away’. We’re on a boat.”

  “See, like this.” Zodh was drawing something in the empty space between them with his fingers. Scruggs adamantly refused to pay attention.

  “What are you saying?” he demanded, as if the digit-whorls were not it. “In simple words.”

  “Simple? In a way simple. In another way not. You see.” More finger work, in a complex repeating pattern. “It’s down. True down.”

  “What does that have to do with Bobby?”

  Zodh suspended the ineffective demonstration. Like everything else on The Pythoness, it was going nowhere.

  We conducted a preliminary search. Then another. It wasn’t easy to know what we were looking for. A final note of some kind, or an unintentional message? Signs of unaccountable damage? Traces of blood? There was nothing. At least, nothing that we could find. He was simply gone.

  “Did any of you notice anything before?” I asked. “Unusual words, or behavior?”

  “Who are you? Sherlock fucking Holmes?” Scruggs bristled. His expression could not have been more venomous if he had personally witnessed me throttling Bolton and dumping his body over the side.

  “What’s your problem?” I snarled back.

  Reluctant to escalate, and unwilling to retreat, he stood his ground, and glared, silently.

  I ran some emergency calculations. If it became necessary to beat Scruggs unconscious, it would complicate things.

  “Back off,” I said.

  He did, a little, but enough.

  On the third search cycle, Frazer found something. There was a hand-print on the containment unit. It appeared suspended, perhaps a half inch from the surface. The detail was exquisite. To describe it as something like a delicate grease mark on a glass screen might suggest smudging, misleadingly, but in every other respect that was the impression.

  “It’s Bobby’s?” Scruggs queried for all of us.

  There was no point asking whether we had a reference copy of his fingerprints. Qasm information security procedures meant we had nothing.

  “Is there anything on this boat only Bolton could have touched?” I asked?

  “Something in his locker?” Scruggs suggested.

  We looked for something that could serve as fingerprint dust, settling eventually on a packet of antiseptic powder from the medical supplied. Frazer extracted a plastic protractor from Bolton’s locker. There was a surreptitious quality to his procedure, and an odd expression accompanying it. At the time, it was easy to overlook. The prints clearly matched. We had all known they would.

  “What do you think he was trying to do?” Scruggs asked.

  “Does it matter?” I wondered aloud.

  “How could it not?” Frazer snapped back.

  Another pointless argument invited us in. No one was tempted by it.

  “It annihilated him?” Scruggs asked.

  “Or something,” I muttered. It was as if I could hear the sharp ‘pop’ – the sound of a tennis ball twisted through a hidden dimension. Still, it might not have been like that. It might not have been like anything much. A stupid accident, suicide, the sea …

  “This thing’s directly killing us now?” Frazer said. His voice was a soft snarl. Whatever fear there might have been swimming through his words was swept away by the disgust.

  “We don’t know that,” I said.

  The phrase was getting tedious, even to me. I needed to have it printed on a T-shirt. Question your conclusions. No one wanted to hear it. Starved of even fragile hypotheticals, there was no enthusiasm for any deeper submergence into unbelief.

  “We need to call this in,” Frazer said.

  “Then we’re going to need a mobile device. You have anything at all like that? A phone? A smart watch?”

  “What do you think I am, a Chinese teenager?”

  “So nothing?”

  “Of course nothing. The contract specified nothing.” He took a bitter delight in this detail.

  “How about Scruggs?”

  “Does he seem like the smart watch type to you?” Frazer said, cutting across him.

  “So it’s just between us,” I concluded. The remark was intended to be upsetting.

  §27 — Scruggs tumbled down into the cabin, scarcely keeping his physical balance. His mental balance had not been sustained so well.

  “We’re going to be okay,” he said. “We’re saved.” His features were animated by a kind of rapture. “I met it.”

  “‘It’ being?” I asked, before Frazer could.

  “An angel,” Scruggs replied. His confidence – without declining by the slightest degree in inner luminosity – stumbled before our incomprehension. “Or something.”

  “I’m betting on ‘something’,” Frazer grunted, before pulling himself back, wearily, from mere dismissal. “Did it speak?”

  “It told me everything.”

  “And the main point of this ‘everything’ was?”

  “It’s hard to remember, exactly,” Scruggs admitted, his voice twisted in frustration. “The message was huge, you know, beyond libraries, like whole cities of meaning, planet minds. The voice was like … a song.”

  “That’s useful,” said Frazer drily. “Maybe you could hum it for us?”

  “I’m being serious,” Scruggs protested, as if the opposite possibility were in any way the problem. “I’ve never been more serious. Not ever. This …” he made some wild, world-encompassing gesture with his right hand “… is nothing in comparison. Nothing at all. It’s trash and lies. Seen through the eyes of an angel, it’s lost being. Confusion …”

  “Roughly, what did it say?” I asked him.

  He glared at me, his features suddenly petrified. If it had only been the two of us, his response would have been to close like a cliff-face – but everyone was listening. This was his one chance, and he knew it.

  “The Lord fathoms the abyss for our sakes.”

  “Christ.” Frazer rolled his eyes upwards.

  “Don’t mock this,” Scruggs said. “Don’t mock what you don’t understand. If you refuse his helping hand, you’re not getting out. He wants to rescue us.”

  “There’s new information?” I asked. Protocol would be to debrief Scruggs, methodically – and privately. There was no opportunity for anything like that under current conditions. There was no escape from the circus. If it went fast, it was just possible that Frazer’s abrasiveness wouldn’t grind it away.

  Scruggs needed no prompting.

  “Death,” he said. “That’s what Bobby saw beneath the boat. His death.”

  “The angels told you that?” Frazer sneered. He’d had enough. Madness had swallowed the boat, and right now Scruggs incarnated the fact. He was an opportunistic target, too exposed to neglect.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Scruggs persisted, ignoring the jab. “Look at it.”

  “Bobby’s death had flippers?”

  “It isn’t literal.”

  “No, it isn’t. Not remotely. What it is, is bullshit.”

  Scruggs took a step backwards, as if physically jolted by the savagery of Frazer’s derision. There was a woundedness to his stance, expression, and voice now. Despite that, he still wasn’t prepared to stop.

  “You have to see it,” he pleaded.

  “See what?” I asked. I wanted to know.

  Scruggs stared at me, his features twisted by a mixture of gratitude and loathing.

  “Go on,” I urged him. “It could be important.”

  “Of course it’s important,” he almost yelled. “It’s the only impor
tant thing. It’s written.”

  “It?”

  “Everything. The library isn’t in this world. This world is in the library, and the library is in The Book. We were told, and refused to believe. Now it’s too late. You have to see that,” he repeated.

  Frazer had been restraining himself, his face rigid with infuriation. Now the psychological bulkhead burst.

  “How does this shit help us?” he snarled. “At all?”

  He was staring at me, rather than at Scruggs. It made sense from his perspective. Without my intervention, he wouldn’t have been hearing any of this. He wanted his crew back. That was his problem though, not mine. He didn’t need his crew. That was the point he was insistently missing. They were all useless to him, and had been since the moment we set out. We hadn’t even needed the snakes, but if any action were required, they could manage it perfectly well. Scruggs’ theocosmic visions were as relevant to the success of our mission as anything he might say, or do.

  “Why not let him continue?” I suggested. “We don’t know where significant information is going to come from. It’s not as if we’re pressed for time.”

  Frazer’s fury was still cresting, but he had nothing to say.

  Scruggs hated doing this, I could tell. He was not far from the brink of tears – and he was not the weepy type. His head was tilted slightly downwards, and averted, as he squirmed upon the hook of social judgment. Still, despite all of that, he was driven to speak.

  “Everything we could need to know is in The Book,” he said. “That’s the point. It’s all there. We only have to search for it, in the right place.”

  “What do we need to know?” I asked him.

  At first, it seemed as if the question had caught him by surprise.

  “This is The Fall,” he said eventually. “The descent never ended.”

  “So it’s all there, in The Good Book,” Frazer glossed, letting his sarcasm off the leash. “That’s excellent to know, because for a while back there I was beginning to think we might actually be facing a difficult problem.”

  “It’s not about the message, not really,” Scruggs said. I had never seen anyone so visibly wracked by frustration. “It’s about … about …”