Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (66 page)

13.

Soft Black Stars

(12/21/2012)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Good and Evil walk into a bar…

Here: At precisely eight hundred ten hours, the directive came down from – it matters not where, but D.C. is a good enough supposition. Effective immediately, cease all evacuation efforts. Additional civilian and military casualties an acceptable loss. Mourn the coming dead
after
zero-zero-thirty of the twenty-first day of December, but blow the goddamn Sedgwick suspension bridge spanning Eggemoggin Reach, blow it this very night, bury it on the muddy bottom of the leprous bay.

Theirs not to reason why…

Finally, all other avenues and efforts and fools’ hopes exhausted, they will follow orders, press the red button, implement Operation Umbilicus. Yes, in fact, until this evening the name has seemed hilarious to more than a few.
Who the hell came up with that one, anyway? Don’t ask me. I just fucking work here.

The writing has been on the wall since August, but no one has wanted to read it. No one wanted to believe it would ever go this far, because we are not goddamn Neanderthals huddling in caves by firelight, trembling at the eyeshine Outside, lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Because we are not savages. Because a shoulder to the wheel, and all our technology, and all our beautiful weapons, and all our careful planning, and brave men can solve any situation, no matter how dire. Isn’t that motherfucker bin Laden dead? Have we not eradicated smallpox? Are we not making the world safe for democracy? Well, are we not? Do we now leave men and women to die deaths more horrific than any ever imagined by Hollywood, the RAND Corporation, science-fiction fucking authors, the alarmists, survivalists, the Book of Revelation, supersecret think tanks, et cetera and et cetera and et cetera?

“Doesn’t seem that way,” replies the Major General with his two stars on his shoulder. One named Wormwood. The other left unchristened.

A sergeant barks orders, and his men cannot allow themselves to think about the consequences; three have gone rabbit since yesterday, and all three were shot as deserters. Not arrested. Shot. The rest will do their job and see to the explosive charges, the dynamite, nitroglycerin – the catalysts before the detonation of the linear shaped charges. The demolition team stands at the ready, and have stood so since dusk. Executioners, who are also saviors, watch the clocks, ticking off the bits and pieces of seconds until the implosion of the suspension bride connecting Little Deer Isle to the mainland. The bridge uniting Deer and Little Deer will be left intact. No one knows why. Theirs is most emphatically not to wonder why. The deities and demi-gods in Washington and the Command Center in Brooksville have those answers, which has to be good enough. Good enough for government work.

Good enough to shove a cork in an apocalypse.

The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter
.

“Buck up, little buckaroo. We’re saving the world tonight.”

“Does anyone believe for a minute this is going to stop…that?” And the corporal points at the glistening sheen smothering the reach, the foulness slick in the Solstice moonlight. “Assholes may as well shoot at an elephant with a BB gun.”

Bows and arrows against the lightning
.

The air is being chopped apart with the noise from the rotors of the vigilant Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks patrolling overhead. Angles of harsh angels and flat surfaces, terrible swift swords. Do not look at the face of god. Padre, say a prayer for me:
We’d circle and we’d circle and we’d circle, she a laughing giggling whirlybird, my final days in company, the devil now has come for me, and helicopters circling the scene, this is the end, my beautiful friend, this is the end, that’s Charlie’s point, except you – you were talking about the end of the world, Lord hold our troops in your loving hands, protect them as they protect us, bless them and their selfless acts they perform for us in our time of need, Sed libera nos a malo hosanna, amen, amen.

“Now, my child, go and sin no more.”

Below the bridge, a lumpy round mass more vasty than Leviathan or ten humpback whales is rising from the slime, slime rising from the slime, the star-fall corruption taking shape. It opens one eye.

On the granite boulders north and south of the bridge, the shamans, the witches, the archimages all have begun their chants and sacrifices. Black books have been opened. The first shockwave is their magic…

T-minus three minutes and counting.

…and the second is the Blacks Hawks’ barrage of armaments, laser-guided AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, Hydra 70 rockets, the
chut-chut-chut
bursts from machine and Gatling guns enough to wake the dearly departed. The thing below the bridge bleeds and howls and surges forward. There is no reckoning the anger in that eye. No reckoning whatsofuckingever. It howls, and now other shapes are rising from the dead waters, answering the call.

“You can’t kill Old Gods with shotguns.”

“You may as well grab a pointy stick.”

Write
that
on the shithouse wall.

T-minus one minute.

T-minus forty-five seconds.

Two of the Black Hawks come apart in the air and trail flaming debris across the Maine night sky and raise fireballs from the haunted forests of Little Deer Isle. Nothing touched the choppers. Nothing at all. They simply came apart.

T-minus…

“I’m tellin’ you, man. You can’t kill fuckin’ Cthulhu with a shotgun. Ain’t you seen
Godzilla?
Ain’t you ever seen
Cloverfield?
”

“Dude, I saw
Aliens
, okay? And guns and nukes worked just fine in
Aliens
.”

“Those ain’t nukes, you stupid fuckin’ hick. Those
ain’t
nukes.”

Rotten waves slop against the shore below the bridge, beneath either shore at either end of the bridge – northeast, southwest. The lantern beams of lighthouses carve white clefts across the battlefield, shooing away any who would dare wander near in these last seconds. Lighthouses that still stand and still shine and fuck all knows how that can be. Because the gods have a flair for the cinematic? Deer Isle Lighthouse. Pumpkin Island Lighthouse. Some that ought not even
be
visible from this vantage point, but the abominations rising from the reach have begun to warp the fabric of the world, triggering a cascade of gravitational lensing, photons deflected by arcseconds. Mirage.

“Jesus Christ. I see around corners.”

T-minus one second.

Boom.

Men and women turn away. Fall to their knees, are knocked flat on their asses by the blast. Cross themselves. Weep and wail and cover their ears as the bridge announces its deafening death throes and tumbles into the slime, concrete and steel and whipping cables slicing apart monsters, if only for a few heartbeats. If only for the time required for them to coalesce again.

But the bridge is down.

And now it’s up to the wards raised by the practitioners of forgotten sorceries, the priestesses who have called out to indifferent heavens, the marshaling of chaotic alchemical elemental Babylonian ninja motherfuckers.

With a little luck and elbow grease, this has only been the
beginning
of the end.

Punchline: But, then, so is every day. (Rimshot/Sting) (Cue laugh track)

14.

Where I End and You Begin

(The Sky Is Falling In) (21/12/12)

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen
.

“Yes, Sixty Six, I am a twin. I have a sister.”

Alice becomes Queen.

Black Queen white, White Queen black.

Adaptation, counter-adaptation, reciprocation, system instability, runaway escalation.

“Twin. It’s not a noun…”

This is not the when and certainly not the where that the woman who calls herself Twisby (whose true name, now it can be told, is Lane Dunham, Ph.D., MD) would have chosen for extraction and reintegration, for the experiment’s endgame terminus. Pretty fucking far from optimal conditions. But she’s been warned by both Karachi and Kathmandu of two Brit assassins who’ve been on their asses since the plane touched down at Munich International. And, much worse still, the subgnosis pipeline is humming fit to burn with a most ominous forecast: Endgame has been triggered prematurely. The suggestion buried in the subconscious abyss of a hyper-suggestible, third-gen schizophrenic X sleeper agent is surfacing three hours ahead of schedule. Three goddamn hours. So, fuck the architects’ itinerary; there isn’t time to reach the Arstagagan safe house in Uppsala. The architects aren’t on the run from bullets. If the trial goes south, they’ll just toss the project back to R and D for turnaround at the next best opportunity. Not that a shitstorm like Deer Isle comes along but maybe once a century. Once a century, at best. The architects have nothing if not the luxury of second, third, and fourth chances. So, this abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Knivsta will have to do. If she tries to make those last sixteen kilometers to Uppsala before retrieving the package, the risk of failure skyrockets to 78%.

“…it’s not a noun.”

Her phone rings as she’s inserting the IV needle into Bête’s forearm, and the twin’s trying not to show how scared she is, but the psychiatrist knows her too, too well not to recognize the fear in her eyes.

“Dream,” the psychiatrist sweetly murmurs, and the twin immediately falls asleep on the bedroll spread out on the dusty floor.

Second ring.

Third ring, and she “answers,” but you do not say
Hello
when the incoming communiqué has all those zeroes and nothing else
but
zeroes. This call from Julia Set riding piggyback through the mundane transmissions of hacked and repurposed communication satellites, you do not say
Hello
; you hold the phone to your ear and you listen.

Mac OS X speaking for whoever is on the other end of the line, a voice filtered or a contingency recorded weeks ago, and here are the words stiffly relayed by “Victoria,” one-way digital instructions – “And we shall play a game of chess?”

In an attic in Stonington, Maine, a shotgun is pressed to Ivoire’s left temple, and the numerical mad woman is about to make love to the trigger.

The psychiatrist drops the phone and it skitters across the floor. Bête’s eyelids flutter with the illusion of REM sleep. The portable electroencephalograph converts impulses from the low-density electrode array attached to the twin’s scalp, cheeks, and forehead to a tidy display of spike and wave discharges. The IV drips, and the psychiatrist fills a syringe and injects Bête with 0.125 cc’s of triazolam. A single, bright crimson bead leaks from her skin. The psychiatrist pops the yellow lid on a mobile automated external defibrillator and powers it up. Just in case. Just in fucking case.

Alice castles. Bête seizes.

“It’s not a noun…”

“…it’s a verb.”

Black Queen white, White Queen black
.

Six months in the field, and it ends here. Redaction commencing. The EEG beeps, and the sound seems almost deafening inside the empty warehouse. The psychiatrist pulls back the plunger of a second hypo and draws five cc’s of diazepam. But precious seconds pass, and the twin doesn’t seize after all. By now, Sixty Six has done her job and done it well, no matter how far ahead of schedule. A soul is careening along the predetermined, nonesuch, ethereal nowhere highway between two continents, simultaneously crossing the Atlantic and an unnamable dreamtime gulf.

“…it’s a verb.”

The psychiatrist leans close and whispers in Bête’s left ear, “Checkmate, love. You’re home now. Wake up.”

“…a verb.”

And the twin opens her blue eyes.

“You can hear me?” the psychiatrist asks, her voice shuddering with relief. “Bête?”

“Ivoire…” the twin croaks,
her
voice raw and groggy.

“Ivoire?” the psychiatrist asks. 

“Bête.”

The psychiatrist brushes sweaty bangs away from the twin’s face. “Now, now…full name, love.”

Only a heartbeat’s hesitation, and the twin replies. “Lizbeth Elle…Lizbeth Elle.”

“And surname, please?”

Lizbeth Elle coughs, and the psychiatrist wipes at her forehead again.

“Margeride. Lizbeth Elle Margeride.”

The psychiatrist laughs softly, a nervous, relieved laugh. “Good and Evil walk into a bar…” she begins.

“But, then, so is every day,” answers Lizbeth Elle Margeride. “So is every fucking day.” The twin smiles for the psychiatrist; Elle opens her left hand to reveal a vial of liquid from Penobscot, a pearly vial that glows like sickly, trapped fireflies.

15.

ἀποκαλύπτω

(1/5/2013)

Here’s the scene: The G-line crosstown local, rattling along the underground throat connecting Queens and Brooklyn. Ptolema sits near the rear of the subway car. She isn’t quite alone. There’s a black kid at the opposite end, plugged into his iPod and oblivious to all else. There’s an elderly Hispanic woman, her purse clutched close to her chest. A man whom Ptolema has taken for either Greek or Turkish sits across from the old woman, reading the
Times
. So, four, only four, and she can live with four. She shuts her laptop and returns it to its carrying case, then stares at the blackness beyond the train’s window, which, unfortunately, means staring into her own reflection, which unkindly stares back at her. The negotiations in Albany didn’t go well, too many concessions when she can’t understand why they’ve made any at all. Moreover, the cover story that would attribute the Deer Isle Incident to a reactor meltdown aboard a
Seawolf
-class nuclear submarine, to the ensuing explosion and quarantine, is just short of absurd. Perhaps the wipes were potent enough no one much, military or civilian, Y or X, quite remembers the events of the twenty-first of December, but she seriously doubts the Navy patrol, the US Army, and one collapsed bridge is going to keep that secret a secret forever. Fortunately, everyone was too busy freaking out over Maine to even broach the subject of “Twisby’s” twinning experiment. There isn’t the least sense of vindication knowing that the theory Ptolema passed along to the Commissioner more than three weeks ago, the theory he then handed up to the Council, appears to have been correct. Lucky fucking guess. Intuition come too late to intervene.

Reflected in the safety glass, her eyes look every bit as ancient as they are, every bit as weathered as her spirit. At the meeting, no one dared use her name. Only the Egyptian, two words to signify and summarize all the ages of an inexplicably long life. She lowers her head, hiding from the window, too much there to despise. Maybe she’ll shut her eyes and try to sleep. Maybe she’ll be lucky, and there will be no dreams.

Maybe pigs will fly.

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” says the white-haired woman standing in the aisle, the woman who definitely
wasn’t
there only a minute and a half before. She’s wearing a cream-colored Gore-Tex parka, ragged jeans, black wraparound sunglasses. Cheap sunglasses. There’s a polished, cross-sectioned ammonite on a silver chain around her neck. She glances towards the other three passengers, nods, then turns back to Ptolema. The albino, the twin who is not now and never
was
a twin, the cipher, the Black Queen who is the White Queen, and vice versa.

To see themselves, they’re gazing back
.

“See,” says the albino, taking the seat on Ptolema’s right, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. But, right off, he was hit with a class-action suit for failure to file an environmental impact statement.”

“I’ve heard it,” Ptolema tells her. “Probably before you were born.”

The albino pretends to look disappointed. “Damn it. I was afraid of that.”

“Bête,” Ptolema says, whispering as softly as a falling leaf. “Ivoire. Lizbeth Elle. The Ivory Beast. What am I supposed to call you?”

“Elle’s fine,” the albino says. “But you can speak up. It’s not like they can hear us. Hell, they can’t even see me, unless the mojo coming out of Harlem these days isn’t what it used to be.”

“Do I talk, Elle?” asks Ptolema. “Or do I listen?”

“Some of both, though that wasn’t my decision. Anyway, we don’t have too long before the next station, so, you know. Choose your words wisely.”

“Still a lot of unanswered questions, Elle. A lot of people in your own organization pissed off for being left out of the loop regarding Dr. Dunham’s enterprise.”

“Too bad there isn’t ever going to be time for all those answers.”

“You’re not sick.”

“Nope,” Elle replies and smiles. “Crazy lady with a shotgun back in Stonington, she was good enough to dispatch that malignancy.”

“I don’t get the elaborate cloak-and-dagger, dog-and-pony show,” Ptolema says, watching both their reflections now. “The bread crumbs. The informants. The meetings in Dublin. No one ever had to know shit about what you fuckers were up to.”

“You’d have to ask Twisby about that,” sighs Elle. “I didn’t even know myself. That is, during the procedure, so far as I knew, every bit of it was gospel. We were two. The we of I and all that. Quietness is wholeness at the center of stillness, et cetera, blah, blah, blah.”

“Both personae were real? Both were corporeal?”

“Abracadabra.”

“The particle and the wave.”

“Exactly. But we’re almost out of time, like I said. And I suspect your people are already busy running every imaginable computer simulation to determine every imaginable outcome to all these ripples. That is, if they’re not too busy with the shoggoths.”

“The what?”

“Oh, right. Sorry. The girl who killed me, that’s what she called that nasty crap kept crawling out of the bay. Shoggoths.”

“You and Deer Isle,” Ptolema says. “We don’t think that was a coincidence. We don’t think it was only a happy, convenient coincidence. We think – ”

“ – a lot of crazy shit, and only time will tell. Maybe Twisby built herself the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Or, it may be I’m the
Anti
-Christ. Shiva. Maitreya. Take your pick. Or only a trial run, a dress rehearsal for the
Big
Show, so nobody of consequence. Nothing at all but a nerdy girl who wants to go back to her stones and bones.”

“That would be a waste,” Ptolema says.

What if Einstein had needed a small push to get him moving? What if, say, Oppenheimer or Fermi had needed a bit more motivation?

Waste is the only evil
.

“Okay,” Elle says. “My turn.” She digs a thumb and index finger into a pocket of her jeans and pulls out a single 45-caliber cartridge. It gleams dully beneath the subway car’s fluorescent lights. “This was meant for you.”

Ptolema gazes down at the bullet.

“Then why am I still alive?”

“Ripples,” says Elle Margeride. “I think it’s about time I began making a few of my own. Twisby’s a sweetheart, and she means well, but she’s also the one went and made a queen out of a pawn. She needs to start taking that into account.”

And then Elle slips the cartridge into Ptolema’s hand and stands up.

“Is this the last time we’ll meet?” Ptolema asks, trying not to think about how heavy the bullet feels.

Elle shrugs. “We’ll know if it happens, maybe about a trillion dominoes from now.”

Ptolema tastes metal, and she licks her dry lips. “There are people looking for you and Dr. Dunham. You know that, right? They catch up with you, they won’t be merciful. You’ve made an impression.”

“Introduced a new variable,” says Elle, and she pokes a finger at the bridge of her cheap sunglasses.

“One last question?”

“One last question.”

Ptolema sits up straighter, glancing at the bullet and then back to the albino.

“Do you miss her? Your sister? Your lover? If both of you
were
real – ”

But then Lizbeth Elise Margeride is gone, as unceremoniously as she appeared, and, once again, there are but four other people in the car. Ptolema shuts her eyes and leans her head back and tries to concentrate on nothing but the throb of steel wheels on the rails.

∞