Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (29 page)

Or, rather, when I notice what’s growing
on
the walls. I’m fairly confident I’ve never seen anything with precisely that texture before. It half reminds me (but only half) of the rubbery blades and stipes of kelp. It’s almost the same color as kelp, too, some shade that’s not quite brown, nor green, nor a very dark purple. It also reminds me of tripe. It glimmers wetly, as though it’s sweating, or secreting, mucus. I stop and stare, simultaneously alarmed and amazed and revolted. It
is
revolting, extremely so, this clinging material covering over and obscuring almost everything. I look up and see that it’s also growing on the ceiling. In places, long tendrils of it hang down like dripping vines. Dr. Teasdale, I
want
so badly to describe these things, this waking nightmare, in much greater detail. I want to describe it perfectly. But, as I’ve said, words fail. For that matter, memory fades. And there’s so much more to come.

A few thick drops of the almost colorless mucus drip from the ceiling onto my visor, and I gag reflexively. The sensors in my EVA suit respond by administering a dose of a potent antiemetic. The nausea passes quickly, and I use my left hand to wipe the slime away as best I can.

I follow the corridor, going very slowly because the mist is only getting denser and, as I move farther away from the airlock, I discover that the stuff growing on the walls and ceiling is also sprouting from the deck plates. It’s slippery and squelches beneath my boots. Worse, most of the path lighting is now buried beneath it, and I switch on the magspots built into either side of my helmet. The beams reach only a short distance into the gloom.

“You’re almost there,” Amery says, Amery or the AI speaking with her stolen voice. “Ten yards ahead, the corridor forks. Take the right fork. It leads directly to the transhab module.”

“You want to tell me what’s waiting in there?” I ask, neither expecting, nor actually desiring, an answer.

“Nothing is waiting,” Amery replies. “But there are many things we would have you see. There’s not much time. You should hurry.”

And I do try to walk faster, but, despite the suit’s stabilizing exoskeleton and gyros, almost lose my footing on the slick deck. Where the corridor forks, I go right, as instructed. The habitation module is open, the hatch fully dilated, as though I’m expected. Or maybe it’s been left open for days or months or years. I linger a moment on the threshold. It’s so very dark in there. I call out for Amery. I call out for anyone at all, but this time there’s no answer. I try my comms again, and there’s not even static. I fully comprehend that in all my life I have never been so alone as I am at this moment, and, likely, I never will be again. I know, too, with a sudden and unwavering certainty, that Amery Domico is gone from me forever, and that I’m the only human being aboard
Pilgrimage.

I take three or four steps into the transhab, but stop when something pale and big around as my forearm slithers lazily across the floor directly in front of me. If there was a head, I didn’t see it. Watching as it slides past, I think of pythons, boas, anacondas, though, in truth, it bears only a passing similarity to a snake of any sort.

“You will not be harmed, Merrick,” Amery says from a speaker somewhere in the darkness. The voice is almost reassuring. “You must trust that you will not be harmed, so long as you do as we say.”

“What was that?” I ask. “On the floor just now. What was that?”

“Soon now, you will see,” the voice replies. “We have ten million children. Soon, we will have ten million more. We are pleased that you have come to say goodbye.”

“They want to know what’s happened,” I say, breathing too hard, much too fast, gasping despite the suit’s ministrations. “At Jupiter, what happened to the ship? Where’s the crew? Why is
Pilgrimage
in orbit around Mars?”

I turn my head to the left, and where there were once bunks, I can only make out a great swelling or clot of the kelp-like growth. Its surface swarms with what I briefly mistake for maggots.

“I didn’t
come
to say goodbye,” I whisper. “This is a retrieval mission, Amery. We’ve come to take you…” and I trail off, unable to complete the sentence, too keenly aware of its irrelevance.

“Merrick, are you beginning to see?”

I look away from the not-kelp and the wriggling things that aren’t maggots and take another step into the habitation module.

“No, Amery. I’m not. Help me to see. Please.”

“Close your eyes,” she says, and I do. And when I open them again, I’m lying in bed with her. There’s still an hour or so left before dawn, and we’re lying in bed, naked together beneath the blankets, staring up through the apartment’s skylight. It’s snowing. This is the last night before Amery leaves for Cape Canaveral, the last time I see her, because I’ve refused to be present at the launch or even watch it online. She has her arms around me, and one of the big, ungainly hovers is passing low above our building. I do my best to pretend that its complex array of landing beacons are actually stars.

Amery kisses my right cheek, and then her lips brush lightly against my ear. “We could not understand, Merrick, because we were too far and could not remember,” she says, quoting Joseph Conrad. The words roll from her tongue and palate like the spiraling snowflakes tumbling down from that tangerine sky. “We were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign, and no memories.”

Once, Dr. Teasdale, when Amery was sick with the flu, I read her most of
The Heart of Darkness.
She always liked when I read to her. When I came to that passage, she had me press highlight, so that she could return to it later.

“The earth seemed unearthly,” she says, and I blink, dismissing the illusion. I’m standing near the center of the transhab now, and in the stark white light from my helmet I see what I’ve been brought here to see. Around me, the walls leak, and every inch of the module seems alive with organisms too alien for any earthborn vernacular. I’ve spent my adult life describing artifacts and fossil bones, but I will not even attempt to describe the myriad of forms that crawled and skittered, flitted and rolled through the ruins of
Pilgrimage.
I would fail if I did, and I would fail utterly.

“We want you to know we had a choice,” Amery says. “We want you to know that, Merrick. And what is about to happen, when you leave this ship, we want you to know that is also of our choosing.”

I see her, then, all that’s left of her, or all that she’s become. The rough outline of her body, squatting near one of the lower bunks. Her damp skin shimmers, all but indistinguishable from the rubbery substance growing throughout the vessel. Only, no, her skin is not so smooth as that, but pocked with countless oozing pores or lesions. Though the finer features of her face have been obliterated – there is no mouth remaining, no eyes, only a faint ridge that was her nose – I recognize her beyond any shadow of a doubt. She is rooted to that spot, her legs below the knees, her arms below the elbow, simply vanishing into the deck. There is constant, eager movement from inside her distended breasts and belly. And where the cleft of her sex once was…I don’t have the language to describe what I saw there. But she bleeds life from that impossible wound, and I know that she has become a daughter of the oily black cloud that
Pilgrimage
encountered near Ganymede, just as she is mother and father to every living thing trapped within the crucible of that ship, every living thing but me.

“There isn’t any time left,” the voice from the AI says calmly, calmly but sternly. “You must leave now, Merrick. All available resources on this craft have been depleted, and we must seek sanctuary or perish.”

I nod and turn away from her, because I understand as much as I’m ever going to understand, and I’ve seen more than I can bear to remember. I move as fast as I dare across the transhab and along the corridor leading back to the airlock. In less than five minutes, I’m safely strapped into my seat on the taxi again, decoupling and falling back towards
Yastreb-4.
A few hours later, while I’m waiting out my time in decon, Commander Yun tells me that
Pilgrimage
has fired its main engines and broken orbit. In a few moments, it will enter the thin Martian atmosphere and begin to burn. Our AI has plotted a best-guess trajectory, placing the point of impact within the Tharsis Montes, along the flanks of Arsia Mons. He tells me that the exact coordinates, -5.636°S, 241.259°E, correspond to one of the collapsed cavern roofs dotting the flanks of the ancient volcano. The pit named Jeanne, discovered way back in 2007.

“There’s not much chance of anything surviving the descent,” he says. I don’t reply, and I never tell him, nor anyone else aboard the
Yastreb-4,
what I saw during my seventeen minutes on
Pilgrimage.

And there’s no need, Dr. Teasdale, for me to tell you what you already know. Or what your handlers know. Which means, I think, that we’ve reached the end of this confession. Here’s the feather in your cap. May you choke on it.

Outside my hospital window, the rain has stopped. I press the call button and wait on the nurses with their shiny yellow pills and the white pills flecked with grey, their jet sprays and hollow needles filled with nightmares and, sometimes, when I’m very lucky, dreamless sleep.

GALÁPAGOS

The 2009 James Tiptree Award jurors recognized “Galápagos,” placing it on the Honor List “of science fiction and fantasy stories that explore and expand gender roles.” The Tiptree press release said of the story, “A mysterious space disaster, a terrifying alien reproductivity, a story reminiscent of the work of Octavia Butler. There can be no higher praise.” I was pleasantly surprised and very flattered, so thank you Secret Feminist Cabal. In 2013, my novel
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
won the Tiptree outright, and I was just as surprised, all over again. And thank you, Jonathan Strahan.

The Melusine (1898)

1.

In this blistering, midsummer month of bloatflies and thunder without so much as a drop of rain, the traveling show rolls into the great smoky burg spread out at the foot of the Chippewan Mountains. By some legerdemain unknown to the people of the city, the carnival’s prairie schooners and Bollée carriages declare its name in letters five-stories high – Othniel Z. Bracken’s Transportable Marvels – shaped from out of nothing but the billowing clouds of red dust raised by those rolling broad steel and vulcanized rims. The traveling show arrives at midday, as if to spite the high white eye of the summer sun glinting off tin roofs and factory windows and the acetate-aluminum envelopes of the zeppelins moored at Arapahoe Station. “Only mad dogs and Englishmen,” as the saying goes, but apparently also this rattling, clanking hullabaloo of steam organs and barkers and pounding bass drums.

And the townspeople, confused and taken off their guard, peer from the sweltering shadows of their homes, from shop windows, from all those places where shade offers some negligible shelter from the July sky. They gaze in wonder, annoyance, or simple, speechless bafflement at this unexpected parade spilling along East Evens Avenue, led by an assortment of automaton mastodons, living elephants and rhinoceri, and a dozen white and prancing Percherons with braided manes. There are twirling, somersaulting women on the horses’ backs, scantily clad after the fashion of Arabian harem girls; from the distance of only a few feet, it’s difficult to tell if these acrobats are mechanical or the real thing.

Soon, there is an impromptu assortment of street urchins and drunkards trailing alongside the parade, coming as near as they dare to wheels and stamping hooves and stomping brass feet, and clowns with gaudy faces toss candy and squibs from the wagons, delighting the ragged children and frustrating the drunks, who might have wished for just a little more than sweets. And a man in a long black duster, his face half as red as ripe cherries, stands on a wooden platform mounted precariously atop one of the schooners. He bellows a command through a shining silver speaking-trumpet, and at once a flock of clockwork doves erupts from some hidden recess to flutter and cavort beneath the merciless sun.

“A long, long way have we come!” he shouts, the trumpet magnifying his voice until it can be plainly heard even above the noise of the parade and the clatter of the ironworks two streets over. “From the Cossack-haunted steppes of Siberia to the deadly forests of French Equatorial Africa, from the celestial palaces of the Qing Dynasty to the farthest wild shores of both polar climes, we arrive, bearing the perplexing fruits of all our intrepid journeys!”

The barker pauses, taking a breath or pausing for effect or both, and from his high perch he watches the peering, upturned faces, the thousand flavors of skepticism and dismay, anticipation and surprise. The clockwork doves circle him again, then suddenly retreat into whatever cage released them a few moments before.

“Yes! It’s true!” he continues, wielding the trumpet the way, two decades earlier, before the Great Depredations, a buffalo hunter would have wielded his Spencer repeating spark rifle. “In these very wagons, the treasures of the wide, wide world, the secrets of the globe that have so entertained crowned pates and bewildered men of science and philosophy! Here, presented for each and every one among you to look upon and draw your own conclusions!”

And now, there is a hesitant smattering of applause, a handful of wolf whistles and catcalls, and the barker leans out over the railing of his platform, risking a dreadful tumble (or so it surely seems).

“And lest any there among ye lot think us mere profiteers and scalawags,” he bellows through the speaking trumpet, “unscrupulous purveyors of humbuggery or chicanery, let me please assure you otherwise! A
small
return, yes, yes, astonishments for a most nominal and reasonable fee,
only
to cover our not-inconsiderable expenses in wending our way about the fearsome world.
But,
by the sacred horns of Moses,
not one copper more!
” And at this, on cue, or by providence, one of the elephants splinters the already cacophonous air with a trumpeting of her own. There is laughter from the crowd, and the tension breaks, and some of the onlookers’ hesitant skepticism dissolves. The barker grins his wide grin, knowing half the battle’s as good as won (and making a mental note to reward that particular elephant later on), and he sets the silver megaphone against his lips again.

“For, indeed, it is to the
betterment
and general
erudition
of all mankind – even savages in their mud huts and wigwams – that the men and women of Othniel Z. Bracken’s Transportable Marvels have devoted themselves!” And though, at this point, he knows it’s unnecessary, the barker adds the customary, “Come one! Come all! Come and see! Come and be
astounded!
” Then the agreeable elephant raises her trunk and lets out a blast that would have shamed even the troops of Jehoshuah during his blaring seven-day march about the walls of ill-fated Jericho. The animal’s cry echoes down the slatternly, riveted canyon of thoroughfares and alleyways. Below the chandeliered ceiling of the Grand Chagrin, the dancers and sporting girls stop flirting and fanning themselves. In basements and backrooms, rapscallions and reprobates pause at their games of
crapaud
and poker, at the cutting of purse strings and throats. The air thrums and crackles, transformed, as if by the sizzling tendrils of an electrical storm. The choking, obscuring cloud of red dust streams out behind the wagons and automobiles.

And the barker, almost whispering through his trumpet, ends his soliloquy with a tipping of his tall black top hat, a bow, and, finally, a single, pregnant word – “Miracles.” – and the show rolls on, triumphant, through the smoky, industrious city.

2.

At the southernmost edge of the city, just before the crooked, tumbledown shacks of Collier’s Row, in the lee of the towering gob piles stripped of their lustrous anthracitic treasures, the carnival has unfolded across the dusty, disused cavalry training grounds. Like an inconceivable bird fashioned all of canvas and tent poles, the show has spread itself wide, unfurling beneath the vast western sky. And by dusk, there are what seems veritable miles of Chinese lanterns and gas lamps and Edison carbon-filament bulbs strung gaily, gaudily, here and yon. You might think, spying down upon the city from the windy crevice of Genessee Pass or Kittredge Point, that the very stars of Heaven had been lured down to Earth to light these delirious festivities. All those who can have come, and the air is filled with laughter and conversation, and it smells of sawdust and confections, incense and the exotic dung of at least a hundred species of animals.

Here are aisle after aisle of flapping, painted broadsides depicting the most fearsome and obscene and unlikely beings. And a gigantic, revolving iron wheel crafted by G. W. G. Ferris & Co. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; just one thin Liberty dime buys a ten-minute ride in its rocking, colorful gondolas. There’s a musical carousel fitted with all manner of saddled clockwork beasts – horses, humped camels, giraffes, a pair of snarling iguanodons, roaring lions, and even an ostrich. All around the cavalry grounds, there are fire-eaters and fakirs, tattooed women and a legion of wind-up Roman Praetorians, unicyclists and jugglers and a trio of sword-swallowing Malays not content with swords, but, contrarily, busy swallowing Nantucket harpoons and living rattlesnakes (headfirst, naturally). And rising lofty and somehow yet more unreal above all this orchestrated madness and phantasmagoria stands the great main tent, a red, white, and blue octagon fringed with golden tassels and the twinkle of ten thousand artificial fireflies.

Her name is Cala – Cala Monroe Weatherall – this tall, freckled, straw-haired woman who has come alone to answer the barker’s battle cry, and, also, a more urgent, secret calling. All day, every day but Sundays, she sees to the production of valves at Jackson-Merritt Manufacturing, steel valves designed and tooled to the most exacting specifications for such august clients as the Colorado and Northern Kansas Railway, the new Colorado Central Railroad, and the Front Range and West Coast divisions of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt. Cala Weatherall is a learned woman of industry and science, a rationalist and an engineer with a hard-earned diploma on her office wall, received a decade earlier from the Missouri School of Mines and Metalliferous Arts. Unmarried and generally disinterested in such flitting, womanly pursuits as matrimony and men, hers is a life of math and precision, of slide rules and difference engines, logarithms and trigonometric functions. She does her small (and well-paid) part to keep the trains running and the zeppelins aloft, and she sees no shame or sin in the pride she feels at her modest accomplishments in an arena still dominated by men.

But, this night is not any usual night for Miss Cala Weatherall, who rarely spares even the strayest thought for such oddities and amusements as those offered up by Othniel Z. Bracken’s Transportable Marvels. Any other night, if asked, she might have laughed or snorted and dismissed the whole, seedy affair as only so much brummagem, silly distractions best left to those
without
the responsibilities she shoulders every single day, excepting Sundays (and even then, she usually works from her room at Jane Smithson’s boarding house on the lower end of Downing Street). Last night, however, and for each of the three proceeding nights, she’s had a dream, a dream so vivid and bizarre that she might almost name it a nightmare. But Cala doesn’t have nightmares, and, for that matter, she only rarely ever remembers her dreams upon waking. But
this
dream, this dream spoke of the imminent coming of a traveling show, and of many, many other things, besides. Though she sets no store in the fashionable delusions of spiritualism, mysticism, and theosophy promulgated by the likes of Madame Helena Blavatsky and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – charlatans and liars and fools, every one – she
has
had this dream, this dream that was
almost
a nightmare, if there had not been such beauty and longing to it. And so, uneasy and reluctant, embarrassed at herself, she has come to the old cavalry training grounds, to the traveling show, to face this rutting coincidence and be done with it, once and for always.

So, this is how she finds herself outside the sideshow tent, heavy canvas painted in a garish riot of blues and greens, whites and greys, as though some impossible Artesian well leading all the way to the sea has sprung up, suddenly from this very spot. Above the entrance is a wooden placard that reads
Poseidon’s Abyss Revealed!
In her dream, there was this selfsame tent, or one near enough to raise goose bumps on her arms. And there was a placard, too, though she is not able to recollect the lettering she saw there. She pays her fifteen cents to the black man outside the tent flap – the “talker” in his scuffed-up bowler and red suspenders, busy enticing the crowd with promises of the mysteries that lie within, the
arcanum arcanorum
of the Seven Seas and any number of lakes, fjords, fens, wells, bogs, rivers, and the most desolate of great dismal swamps. Another man pushes open the flap for her, and a stream of cool air rushes out into the muggy summer night. Air so cold and damp it seems to seep forth and wrap itself about her, air that smells of low-tide along an Oregonian shore or icy slime dredged from the supposedly lifeless bottom of the Atlantic.

“Good evening, Miss,” the second man – an Oriental – says, beckoning her inside. And then he winks and adds in a conspiratorial whisper, “She’ll be glad to see you’ve come.”

Cala Weatherall almost turns back then, at the man’s peculiar confidence and, too, at the memory of that chill, dank smell from her dream. But now there’s someone very close behind her, pushing, hurrying her forward, some other rube who’s paid his money and is chomping at the bit to look upon whatever hoaxes and half truths the carnies keep hidden in this place.

“Please, sir,” she grumbles. “No shoving,
please,
” but then she’s inside the tent, and when Cala Weatherall glances over her left shoulder, the fellow’s attention has already been seized by a desiccated “Feejee mermaid,” and by the dim gaslight she can read the plaque mounted below the pathetic, shriveled thing – “Formerly of PHINEAS T. BARNUM’S AMERICAN MUSEUM, prior to that Grand Institution’s DESTRUCTION on the night 8 October 1871, a CASUALTY of the GREAT CHICAGO and PESHTIGO FIRESTORM, following this Earth’s COLLISION with parts of the Comet BIELA.” And for a moment, Cala Weatherall forgets the dream and her trepidations, and she almost steps over to explain to the man that this purported “mermaid” is no more than the upper portion of a monkey sewn onto the rear portions of a fish, the seams concealed, no doubt, with putty or papier-mâché. And, while she’s at it, also inform him that no reputable scientist anywhere accepts that the terrible fires in Chicago and Peshtigo were in any way connected, one to the other, much less the result of a collision with any ethereal object.

But then she hears a loud splash, and turning about, squinting into the gloom of the tent, through murk interrupted only by the unsteady light of the gas jets, her eyes fall upon a tremendous, roughly rectilinear slab of white marble. Stepping nearer, she sees that its surface is inscribed with all manner of pictogrammes or hieroglyphics. This time, the accompanying plaque reads, “IRREFUTABLE PROOF of the ANCIENT & SUBMERGED realm of LOST LEMURIA, dredged by BRAVE SEAMEN off the coast of PERU, from a depth of more than 2100 FATHOMS!” Cala shakes her head ruefully, noting that the glyphs are a nonsensical hodge-podge, vaguely resembling something Egyptian, and that the chisel marks appear quite fresh. There is certainly no evidence that this stone was ever long subjected to the rigors of the sea’s abyssopelagic plains or hadopelagic trenches. She laughs to herself and
at
herself, laughing at having paid good, hard-earned coin and to have come this far, suckered in with all the others. The anxiety borne of her dreams, and the coincidence of the traveling show’s arrival, and the existence of this sideshow tent begin to release their hold upon her, and she laughs again, louder than before, and shakes her head at the blatant forgery.