Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (67 page)

APPENDIX

8. 

[
les Anglaise
Remix]

Bury Magnets. Swallow the Rapture.

(17 Vrishika, 2152)

She sits on a bench in the main observation tier of the
Nautilus-IV
, her eyes on the wide bay window set into the belly of the station, the icy spiral of the Martian northern pole filling her view.
She
being the White Woman. La femme albinos.
Ca-ng bái de. Blancanieves
. More appellations hung on her than all the words for God, some say. But if she has a true name – and doesn’t everyone? – it is her secret and hers alone. A scrap of knowledge forever lost to humanity. So, her blue eyes are fixed on the Planum Boreum four-hundred kilometers below, yes, but her mind is on the Egyptian – Ancient of Days, El Judío Errante, Kundry, Ptolema – she has many “names,” as well. The Sino LDTC ferrying her is now less than eight sols out. The Egyptian racing towards her. An unforeseen inconvenience. In no way at all a calamity, no, but still an unfortunate occurrence to force the White Woman’s hand. It tries her patience, and patience has been the key for so long that she cannot even recall a time before she learned that lesson.

In less than eight sols, the transfer vessel will dock, and they will speak for the first time in…

How long has it been?

She answers the question aloud, “One hundred and thirty-nine years.”

“Truly?” asks Babbit. “As long as all that?”

When she arrived on the station two months ago, Babbit was assigned the task of seeing to her every need. As has been her wish, he hardly ever leaves her side. The company of anyone is a balm for her sometimes crippling monophobia. A medicine better than any she has ever been prescribed. It doesn’t matter that this tall, thin, towheaded man is only mostly human. Many times, she’s resorted to and relied upon the companionship of splices. Besides, Babbit’s fast borrow capabilities saved her the trouble of telling him all the tales he needs to know to carry on useful conversations. And there will be much less fuss when she orders his death, before her flight back to Earth. Easy come, easy go.

“You’ve never been to Manhattan,” she says.

“Ma’am, it was lost before I was born.”

“Of course,” she replies, and the White Woman holds up her right hand, absentmindedly running fingertips along the window, tracing the serpentine furrow on the Chasma Boreale. It seems almost as long as her long life, and almost as aimless.
Possessed of direction,
she thinks,
is not to be possessed of purpose.

“Anyway,” she says to Babbit, “we were in Manhattan. I’d only just returned from Sweden. It was that long ago. Almost all the way back at the start.”

“As long as all that,” he says again.

“I can’t begin to understand what she hopes to accomplish, coming here, chasing after me this way.”

“Nor can I, Ma’am.”

“The vessel may be armed. It would be like her, a preemptive strike, sacrificing the whole station and everyone aboard if she believes doing so would accomplish her ends.”

“Zealots are extremely dangerous people,” says Babbit.

“It can’t be that she hopes to
reason
with me. She cannot entertain the notion that she and I have ever shared in common a concept of Reason.”

“True believers, I mean,” Babbit says.

“I know what you meant.”

“Of course, Ma’am.”

“Maybe she only wishes to bear witness,” the White Woman says. “To be present when my king’s knight takes her remaining bishop.”

Babbit clear his throat. “I expect the Captain will have anticipated the possibility of an attack,” he says, then clears his throat once more.

She laughs. “He has done nothing of the sort. There has been no alert, no preparation to intercept or shield. He is sitting and waiting, like a small and frightened animal cowering in the underbrush.”

“I was only supposing,” admits Babbit.

The White Woman pulls her hand back from the window, and she seems to stare at it for a few seconds. As if in wonder, maybe. Or as if, perhaps, it’s been soiled somehow. Then she turns her head and watches Babbit. He lowers his head; he never meets her gaze.

“I have considered holding off on the launch until she boards,” she says to him. “Until she is that near.”

“Then you’ve made your decision? To make the drop, I mean.”

“I made that decision before I left Xichang. It was only ever a question of when.”

“And now you have decided when?”

No one on the
Nautilus-IV,
no one back on Earth, no one in the scattered, hardscrabble colonies below, none of them know why she is here. Few enough know that she
is
here. She was listed on no passenger manifest. They do not know she’s ready to call the Egyptian’s gambit and move her king’s knight. To cast a stone on the still waters. Not one of them knows the nature of her cargo. No one but Babbit, and he won’t talk.

“Now I have decided when,” she tells him, and the White Woman shuts her blue eyes and pictures the vial in its plasma-lock cradle, hidden inside a shipment of hardware and foodstuffs bound for Sharonov. The kinetic gravity bomb will detonate at five hundred feet, and the contents of the vial will be aerosolized. The sky will rain corruption, and the corruption will take root in the dome’s cisterns and reservoirs.

Wormwood.

Apsinthion
.

… and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch…

“Ma’am,” says Babbit, not daring to raise his head. “You are certain you will obtain the desired results? There are evacuation protocols, environmental containment procedures – ”

…the waters became wormwood…

“Babbit, I have never in all my life been certain. Which is the point.”

She turns back to the window and can almost feel the wild katabatic winds scouring the glaciers and canyons. The White Woman pulls her robes more tightly about herself. She’s glad that Babbit is with her. She wants to ask him if he might take for granted that she has never loved, if no one has ever been dear to her. But she doesn’t.

Instead, she says again, “Which is the point.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he says. “Of course.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I do not write in a vacuum, and I should note the more important influences that played a role in my conception and execution of
Black Helicopters
: T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
; Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There
; the works of Charles Hoy Fort; more books on chess than would be practical to list, but notably Martin Gardner’s examination of the “chess problem” in
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There
; Twain’s
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
; David Bowie’s
Outside
; Poe’s
Haunted
, Funcom’s
The Secret World
; J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci’s
Fringe
; Grant Morrison’s
The Invisibles
; Current 93’s
Black Ships Ate the Sky
and
Soft Black Stars
; James Joyce’s
Ulysses
; the music of Radiohead; various works on chaos theory, astronomy, and quantum physics, including Kip S. Thorne’s
Black Holes and Space Time: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy
, John Briggs and F. David Peat’s
Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness
, and P. J. E. Peebles’
Principles of Physical Cosmology
; Leigh Van Valen and others biologists’ writings on the Red Queen’s Hypothesis; and Edward Gorey’s
The Other Statue
. Very special thanks to Denise L. Davis (Brown University) for the French translation in the eighth section (“Bury Magnets. Swallow the Rapture. [17 Vrishika, 2152]”), to my comrade in virtual arms and conspiracy, Vic Ruiz, and to my niece, Sonoye Murphy. The paleontological exploits, misadventures, and disappointments of the “twins” mentioned in the text are my own, a sharp jab of autobiography.

BLACK HELICOPTERS

Jonathan Strahan said, upon beginning
Black Helicopters,
“This story opens like Radiohead doing a cover version of a Pogues song about a John le Carré novel.”
Black Helicopters
has received some wonderful reviews, but somehow that remark pleased me more than any of them. I do, by the way, consider
Black Helicopters
– like
The Dry Salvages
before it – a novel,
not
a novella. At approximately twenty-six thousand words, it’s almost as long as
Of Mice and Men
(29,160 words) and
Animal Farm
(29,966 words), and it’s about the same length as
The Old Man and the Sea
(26,610 words). Frankly, I dislike the term
novella,
though it’s hardly as silly as
novelette.
But then, as a taxonomist I was always a “lumper,” never a “splitter.” Nonetheless,
Black Helicopters
was nominated for the 2014 Locus and World Fantasy awards in the best novella categories. It was written over the course of thirteen days during December 2012.

Epilogue

Atlantis

12 August 2010

Publication History

Original publication dates appear first, followed in parentheses by the year each story was written. Most of the stories have been reprinted multiple times since their initial appearance. First reprint publication history is included for those stories first published in
Sirenia Digest.

The author wishes to note that the text for each of these stories, as it appears in this collection, will differ, often significantly, from the originally published texts. In some cases, stories were revised for each reprinting (and some have been reprinted numerous times). No story is ever finished. There’s only the moment when I force myself to stop and provisionally type THE END.

The stories in this volume were written at the Kirkwood School Lofts, 138 Kirkwood Road NE #2, Atlanta, Ga. (2004); 1193 Mansfield Avenue NE, Atlanta, Ga. (2004-2008); and in Providence, R.I. (2008-2014). The stories in Volume One were written at “Burt’s Bohemian Bear Garden,” #5 1619 16th Avenue S., Birmingham, Ala. (1993-1994); the Carriage House, 279 1/2 Meigs Street, Athens, Ga. (1994-1997); #303 Liberty House, 2301 1st Avenue N., Birmingham, Ala. (1997-2001); #302 Liberty House, 2301 1st Avenue N., Birmingham, Ala. (2001-2002); and the Kirkwood School Lofts, 138 Kirkwood Road NE #2, Atlanta, Ga. (2002-2004)