Chasm Page 8

  “Topology,” I suggested. Bolton wasn’t there, so it had to be me.

  He grimaced at the word.

  “Insides,” I interpreted. “True insides. And … the other thing.”

  There had been a time, as a child, when I had read about a girl turning tennis balls inside-out – without touching them (as if that made any difference). They had inverted, impossibly, with a popping sound, the story had said. It had been non-fiction, supposedly; a manifestation of real supernature. The impression it had left upon me had been deep, and persistent. The event itself – the tennis ball business – had probably never happened, but that didn’t matter after a while. The topological limits of reality mattered. There was a vivid cognitive reference point now. A series of words had been complicated in being vividly illustrated. Topology, naturally, but also dimensionality, boundary – reality. The walls were not where they appeared to be.

  “Yes, insides,” Scruggs said, seizing upon the word like a drowning man at a rope. “It’s about what’s inside what – false prisons. You’re right about that … Symns.” And then: “Thank you.” It was a penance for him to say that, so excessive that it disturbed me. Would he have thanked a flagrant minion of Satan for a vocabulary item? A thick sediment of suspicion still coated his gaze, as he looked into my eyes, his face radiant with liberated insight. His fight with me had been shelved, with a definitiveness that I found hard to absorb.

  “The mind is in the brain, but the brain is in the soul,” he said, re-energized – once again rapt.

  “That’s not it, though, is it?” I nudged. “That’s not really what it was about.”

  Frazer trampled my response. He wasn’t going to leave me alone with this, as he had with Bolton. Bolton was missing, strongly presumed dead.

  “You think that means anything?” he demanded.

  “Which part?”

  “Any of it. Fucking metaphysics in general.”

  “Self-denial of the soul,” Scruggs commented, as if airing a detached analysis, defiantly and coldly abusive. “It’s a fascinating thing to see.”

  “You aren’t seeing anything.”

  I wondered if they were going to physically attack each other, but instead it ended there – nowhere. At least, the first phase did. There was a second installment still to come.

  §28 — Zodh had kept himself out of it. He’d been working.

  The deck of the Pythoness was coated in a synthetic material with a vaguely rubbery texture. It had been designed to provide optimum grip for our feet – approaching gentle adhesion. Particularly when trodden upon with bare feet, produced a sensation of ghostly stickiness that had been initially disconcerting.

  It also contributed to temperature control, adjusting albedo in response to the intensity of light. Now, with the sun heavily filtered by the clouds, the color had deepened to a rich green.

  Zodh had found a large can of black paint among the stores, along with a surprisingly delicate brush. With this equipment he had covered something like a third of the deck in a massive swirl-thickened diagram, intricately annotated with words, numbers, and figures. Vortical cores of spiral intensity span out into meandering, interconnected threads. The basic pattern – easily extracted from the dense web of detail – was instantly recognizable. The green phosphorescence had been drawing the same thing, during the night of the storm. Before that, it had been hidden in the guidelines for a card game. The oracle Zodh had tried and failed to teach Bolton and Scruggs, a week before, was now a static image, baked in the Pacific stove.

  “What are you doing?” Scruggs asked, drawn into the labyrinth. He peered at the illustration, where the coiling threads of abstraction converged upon a representational image. It was a human figure, minimalized to a few crude lines, falling. “Is that Bobby?” he asked.

  Zodh nodded. “Crossing,” he noted, gravely. Then, lightening suddenly: “Look. Lent it to him.” He was pointing to the only part of the figure captured with even nominal representational fidelity – a T-shirt, bearing the legible logo ‘89’. “Gone now.”

  “Goddamn you to Hell,” Scruggs exploded. “What the fuck?”

  Zodh smiled. “Us,” he whispered, at the edge of audibility. “Goddamn us, all way down.” He pointed at another figure, more peripheral, its head wreathed in some mad halo, that might have been black fire, or thorns. “All the way down,” he repeated. “Into the bottomless pit.”

  The reference to scripture struck Scruggs dumb. He was no longer convening with Zodh, now, but with something else – something that had seized upon Zodh, and was using him as a channel. Scruggs deflected his gaze heavenwards, subtly but unmistakably, as if searching for some spectral indications that had not arisen from the abyss. He found none, apparently, because his expression hardened.

  Zodh had not finished – he had scarcely begun.

  “When your savior reached out to you across the gulf, he looked – just for moment – like …”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Scruggs snapped. “You know nothing about this.”

  I had no doubt, then, that the exact opposite was true.

  “Don’t lie,” I said, stripping as much hostility from the words as I could.

  He stared at me coldly and silently – ashamed. Whatever Zodh had been saying, it was the message he didn’t want to let out, but it had escaped now. Within seconds – minutes at the most – we would know.

  “Why do you care?” he mumbled, eventually.

  “About Jesus? Or the other guy?”

  “It isn’t what you think.”

  “What do I think?”

  “The serpent is the redeemer,” Zodh interrupted, in perfect English. He had to have been quoting something. It was enough. “He who descended into the ultimate depths, fathoming damnation to its end, in order to salvage us – Our Lord of the Phosphorescent Abyss.” The passion and the harrowing of Hell had become indistinguishable, on the way to something worse.

  “Christ,” I muttered, as comprehension dawned, the words aimed less at Scruggs than into his vicinity. “He’s calling you a Satanist.”

  The remark was designed as a diversion. I’d seen another thing else – further out, at the edge of the painting – and wasn’t keen for either Scruggs or Frazer to notice it. Two figures without obvious marks of identification stood close together, apparently locked in some kind of confrontation. One of them seemed to have a gun.

  “You know the gatekeeper to the bottomless pit? You have story of Zom in your country?” Zodh asked.

  “That’s what? Some Guam heathen shit?” Scruggs asked in return. The insult was meant to block enquiry. He wasn’t interested. He had all the stories he needed – far more now.

  “Not from Guam,” Zodh replied, earnestly. “Came to Guam, on a boat. Long time ago.”

  “There’s a story?” I asked, feeding.

  “Yes,” Zodh beamed, crookedly. An ancient wiliness pranced behind his eyes. “Old story. Maybe the oldest in the world.”

  Letting the ludicrous exaggeration pass uncontested, I waited for more. I’d counted on my interest driving Scruggs away, and it worked. He drifted off and disappeared into the cabin.

  “Odz was lost in her own spell. Kao raged for the final war. So Zom turned her back on the world, which meant that the last days had come.” It wasn’t exactly ‘once upon a time’, but the rhythm was somehow similar. “The fishermen who had long tormented her sleep were gathered in their boats, above, with their nets and spears. She reached up to catch them, and drag them down. The scene was terrible. ‘Look, there are eight monsters attacking us,’ the men cried, as they drowned. ‘No, there is just one,’ said the village witch, who was watching from the beach. ‘That which seems multiple connects beneath the surface.’ Her voice was not loud, and few heard it.”

  I thought he’d finished, but he hadn’t, quite.

  “Above, there were many screams. Below, a single murmur. There aren’t so many things in the world,” he said. “There are only several.”

  §2
9 — Scruggs was dead too, but we had a body this time, crucified upon the cabin wall, by the galley. My limited understanding of Christian orthodoxy told me all the holy wounds were accounted for. Railing bolts served as nails, data-cable staples as thorns. The steak skewer that had punctured his left side lay on the floor nearby, in a little pool of gore. We had all noticed the scene within a few seconds of each other, after entering the cabin together. There wasn’t anything obvious to say.

  Frazer checked that he was dead. It was a necessary formality. When he had finished, he didn’t waste our time with a confirmation of what we all knew.

  No one could be bothered to say ‘fuck’. It was assumed.

  “Christ,” Frazer said, before he could stop himself. Then, because the wall of profanity had already been breached: “What a fucking mess.”

  No one had been alone with Scruggs during the few hours since we had last seen him alive. That was impossible, naturally, but also beyond all question. Since there were no points of purchase for the requisite cycle of suspicion and accusation, we merely stared at each other, dumbly, hunting through each others’ faces, without knowing what for.

  “Almost done now,” said Zodh, calmly, an odd glitter in his eyes.

  “You did this?” Frazer asked levelly. He had to, even though it made no sense.

  Zodh nodded. It was a gesture from some cosmos of alien causality in which physics found no place.

  “Zodh didn’t kill Scruggs,” I said. The pedestrian truth had to be stated. “At least, not in any way that would be taken seriously – even for a moment – in an American court of law.”

  We spoke across Zodh, as if he wasn’t there. He had removed himself from the sphere of reason, and from all the conventions of elementary social consideration that belonged to it.

  “So what did he just confess to now?”

  “Some voodoo shit would be my guess.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “If I knew that, I’d already be in a lunatic asylum.”

  “Rather than here,” he said. He came impressively close to keeping the bitterness out of his voice.

  “None of us were in the cabin with Scruggs when he died.”

  “Fuck,” Frazer spat. He wasn’t arguing. “We should bury him at sea.”

  It was 3:33pm, which was an ominous time for me. The Moron’s Law intrusion had been time-stamped with it.

  §30 — When I stepped out onto the deck, Frazer was waiting for me. He had a handgun.

  “It’s Bolton’s,” he explained, pre-empting my question.

  It had been designed for infiltration through high-performance security screens. When dismantled into parts, it could be concealed within an ordinary tool box, unrecognizably. An exotic explosive in the shells suppressed the chemical signature.

  “Why would he do that?” I mused aloud. “I’d ask to look at it …”

  “… but you know how pointless that would be.”

  We were approaching the fate threshold, or already passing through it. Then one of us would have to die.

  “Don’t do this.”

  “I’m running out of crew,” he said, ignoring my request. “So it has to be now.”

  “You’re going to kill me?” It didn’t seem likely, not just yet, but I had to ask.

  “No,” he began, before correcting course. “Not unless you make that unavoidable. I want information.”

  Frazer was too stable to be frightening. In fact, having crossed this line he seemed calmer still. Even with a gun pointed at my abdomen, it wasn’t difficult to hold my tone of voice level.

  “What is it that you think I know?” The question hadn’t been intended as a paradox, but once said, it sounded like one. That would have annoyed me, if I had been on the other side of the interrogation. Frazer scarcely seemed to notice.

  “You have to know something,” he insisted.

  “If I did, do you imagine I’d have let things come to this?”

  “You’re misunderstanding me,” he explained, almost with a laugh. “I’m not accusing you of conspiracy.”

  “Then what?”

  “When we reached the forty percent casualty threshold, your attitude became unacceptable. So now you’re going to share everything you know about QASM, without reservation. There’s no reason you could have not to do that – at least – no reason that wouldn’t be a solid justification for killing you.”

  It didn’t seem like a point worth trying to joke about.

  “The end of all professional discretion then?”

  “Exactly.” The gun edged me on, further.

  “Okay, sure, you’re right.”

  I was ready to walk the verbal plank, but his introductory remarks weren’t over yet. “Scruggs very much wanted us to have this conversation. He didn’t know that I had this,” he said, waving the gun so he had another suggestion.” He passed me a crudely-machined blade, then stepped back, keeping a safe distance. I turned it over.

  “Nasty.” I placed it down on the floor, beside me.

  “He’s not – wasn’t – so bad. Thing is, he was scared.”

  “Of me?”

  “Of what he thought you are.”

  “Which is?”

  “Can’t you guess?

  “Qasm’s agent?”

  “You can do better than that.”

  I couldn’t.

  Frazer looked disappointed. “He thought you were it.” The drifting pronoun again.

  “‘It’?”

  “The cargo.”

  “You mean like …?” but the analogy escaped me.

  “… an avatar, a mask, a skin, a meat-puppet … there’s no obvious name for such a thing.”

  I pretended to consider that for a while.

  “It’s bullshit, I know,” he conceded unnecessarily, without awaiting my response. “Warped fascination aside, you’re no more at one with the cargo than the rest of us.”

  “And how much is that?”

  “Yes, that’s a question, isn’t it?” There was a flicker of uncaged inquisitiveness, bringing us to the brink of an awkward alliance. Then he stopped himself, before spiraling down into it. That way, there was no end. “But first, down to business.”

  “The company?”

  He nodded. “I don’t have anything against you Symns, or at least not much, not seriously, but what I have to say now could sound hostile. If you don’t tell me something usable here, within the next thirty minutes, I’m going to have to put a bullet into your guts.”

  “You’re good,” I acknowledged. He’d made the only move that could work.

  “So, what’s it going to be?”

  “I’ll share what little I’ve got, and hope it’s enough.” Unsure whether my compliance had been sufficiently emphatic, I added: “Definitely.”

  It was easy to say, but trying to pull my limited understanding of QASM together into something communicable took effort. There’d been eight years of episodic interaction, when bundled together, didn’t amount to very much. It had been almost entirely restricted to investigative work on the activities of ex-employees, along with secure deliveries of small objects and documents that I never exactly saw. Recently, and reluctantly, I’d become their go-to guy for messy stuff they wanted to keep at a distance, but the amount of additional insight coming along with that had been deliberately held down to a minimum, on both sides. That was the deal. If I’d had to start guessing about the nature of the company’s core business, the hypothesis would have tended towards specialized surveillance and signal-processing systems, with an orientation to submarine research. The geek-paranoia flavor of the corporate culture – as I had encountered it repeatedly, but only ever tangentially – suggested scientific equipment, whose economic viability was based upon spin-off military applications, allowing the company to tap into currents of black-budget funding. Whatever it was they did was packaged into confidential project modules, sealed with code names, and strategically obscured by disinformation. If I’d wanted to conduct industrial espion
age against them, it would have been hard. I didn’t – remotely.

  “I was told what ‘Qasm’ abbreviates, once,” I said, stalling, as I struggled to gather my thoughts.

  “Oh yeah,” he responded, with indifference-sheathed suspicion. “And you’ve waited to play that card until now?”

  “It’s only just come back.”

  “One more lie that stupid and …”

  I interrupted before he could complete the threat. “Quasi-Autonomous Submerged Machines.”

  “Which helps how?”

  “Qasm has to be lodged quite deeply in the techno-military complex,” I ventured, with relative confidence. “Nothing else makes sense. Whatever it is that they make, it’s highly-advanced, extremely-robust … but I don’t think it’s a weapon. At least, it didn’t begin as a weapon.”

  “You’ve never seen this … ‘product’?”

  “No.”

  “You never wanted to?”

  “I wanted to do my job.”

  “Fuck you,” he said, anger two-thirds swamped by dismay. “You know what’s killed us? Pride, your fanatical pride in professional ignorance. You made the suppression of natural curiosity into your occupational specialty – your holy fucking calling – and now, here we are.”

  “Here we are,” I agreed.

  He came close to pulling the trigger then, out of sheer exhaustion and disgust, or so it seemed. Everybody was looking for simplification at that point, so I didn’t really care.

  “You heard of Ben McClean?” I asked him.

  “It sounds as if there have to be a lot of them.”

  “The neuroelectronics guy?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “The brain is the interface. That was him. It was huge.”

  “If you say so. I’m not tuned into that nerd shit.”

  “Point is, he came out of Qasm.”

  “And he was gluing brains to computers?”

  “Bingo.”

  He smiled, despite himself. “You expect a bingo point for that?”

  “You missed Bolton’s musings. A collision with some kind of brain-interlock technology seemed to be a big part of them.”