Oceanic

by Greg Egan

  After forty minutes of discussion with no clear consensus, Omar said, “I’m releasing him.” He paused for a few seconds, then left the chamber. Lisa squirted wordless, dissatisfied noise, but nobody moved to stop him.

  Omar entered the chamber where Jake was being held and spoke with the Circlers who were standing guard.

  “I don’t agree,” said Tarek. “You’ve come alone to demand this. Who else is with you?”

  Omar and Tarek went together to the other Circlers. Omar said, “I repeat, I’m releasing Jake. If anyone here wants a war, I will be an enemy of the warmongers, so you’d better kill me now.”

  Judah said, “No one’s going to kill you.” He swam with Omar to Jake’s chamber and spoke with the remaining guards. Then all five of them departed, leaving Jake alone.

  Jake circled the chamber nervously a few times, then headed out of the burrow. Azar sent a swarm of scouts after him, but they had no data channel back to the fiber, and Jake was soon out of sight.

  Almost an hour later, a message came through from the scouts; Jake had reached a nearby colony where the scouts could tap into the fiber again. Azar told Rahul their location.

  Rahul said, “He’s safe, he’s with friends. It’s over for now.”

  Azar sat on the flight deck weeping, hiding her tears even from Shelma.

  10

  Launched from a rail gun on Tallulah’s highest mountain, Mologhat 3 spent six seconds plowing through the atmosphere before attaining the freedom of space. Its heat shield glowed brightly as it ascended, but if the Old Passengers’ machines noticed it they found no reason to molest this speck of light as it headed out of harm’s way. When it reached an altitude of a thousand kilometers it fired its own tiny photonic jet, but the radiation was horizontal and highly directional; nothing on Tallulah had a hope of detecting it.

  Jake, Tilly, Rahul, Juhi and a fifth delegate, Santo, swam across the flooded observation deck, looking down on their world for the first time. Azar swam among them, but not as a lizard in anyone’s eyes. Her words would come to them as familiar chemicals, but they could cope with the sight of her as she really was.

  As Azar gazed upon Tallulah, she dared to feel hope. There would be no war, no pogrom, but there was still a daunting task ahead for the millions of Spiral Out who remained. They would need to prepare the Circlers for the truth: for the eventual return of this secret delegation, for trade with the Amalgam, for a galaxy that was not what they’d imagined at all. For a future that didn’t follow their script.

  Jake said, “Do you think we’ll ever meet Shelma again?”

  Azar shrugged; he wouldn’t recognize the gesture immediately, but he’d soon learn. “She once told me that she could choose for herself between solitude and a connection with her people. If she wants to come back, she’ll make those connections as strong as she can.”

  “No one’s ever returned before,” Jake said.

  “Did Spiral In ever really want to?”

  When the moles finally hit pay dirt beneath the ocean floor, their mass spectrometers had detected more than a hundred billion variants of the hoop, and that was only counting the stable forms. The deep rock was more complex than most living systems; no doubt much of that complexity was fixed by the needs of the heating process, but there was still room for countless variations along the way – and room for a new passenger hitching a ride on the hoops as they turned iron and nickel into heat.

  If you had to become deep rock in order to understand it, Shelma had decided, she would become it, and then come back. She’d drag the secrets of the hoops out of the underworld and into the starlight.

  “What if you can’t?” Azar had asked her. “What if you lose your way?”

  “There’s room in there for a whole universe,” Shelma had replied. “If I’m tempted into staying, don’t think of me as dead. Just think of me as an explorer who lived a good life to its end.”

  Jake said, “Tell me more about your world. Tell me about Hanuz.”

  “There’s no need,” Azar replied. She gestured at the departure gate. “If you’re ready, I’ll show it to you.”

  “Just like that?” Jake twitched anxiously.

  “It’s fourteen quadrillion kilometers,” she said. “You won’t be back for three thousand years. You can change your mind and stay, or you can gather your friends and swim it with me. But I’m leaving now. I need to see my family. I need to go home.”

  OCEANIC

  1

  The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me sink back down again.

  In the bunk above me, my brother Daniel said distinctly, “Do you believe in God?”

  My head was cleared of sleep in an instant, but I didn’t reply straight away. I’d never closed my eyes, but the darkness of the unlit cabin seemed to shift in front of me, grains of phantom light moving like a cloud of disturbed insects.

  “Martin?”

  “I’m awake.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Of course.” Everyone I knew believed in God. Everyone talked about Her, everyone prayed to Her. Daniel most of all. Since he’d joined the Deep Church the previous summer, he prayed every morning for a kilotau before dawn. I’d often wake to find myself aware of him kneeling by the far wall of the cabin, muttering and pounding his chest, before I drifted gratefully back to sleep.

  Our family had always been Transitional, but Daniel was fifteen, old enough to choose for himself. My mother accepted this with diplomatic silence, but my father seemed positively proud of Daniel’s independence and strength of conviction. My own feelings were mixed. I’d grown used to swimming in my older brother’s wake, but I’d never resented it, because he’d always let me in on the view ahead: reading me passages from the books he read himself, teaching me words and phrases from the languages he studied, sketching some of the mathematics I was yet to encounter first-hand. We used to lie awake half the night, talking about the cores of stars or the hierarchy of transfinite numbers. But Daniel had told me nothing about the reasons for his conversion, and his ever-increasing piety. I didn’t know whether to feel hurt by this exclusion, or simply grateful; I could see that being Transitional was like a pale imitation of being Deep Church, but I wasn’t sure that this was such a bad thing if the wages of mediocrity included sleeping until sunrise.

  Daniel said, “Why?”

  I stared up at the underside of his bunk, unsure whether I was really seeing it or just imagining its solidity against the cabin’s ordinary darkness. “Someone must have guided the Angels here from Earth. If Earth’s too far away to see from Covenant … how could anyone find Covenant from Earth, without God’s help?”

  I heard Daniel shift slightly. “Maybe the Angels had better telescopes than us. Or maybe they spread out from Earth in all directions, launching thousands of expeditions without even knowing what they’d find.”

  I laughed. “But they had to come here, to be made flesh again!” Even a less-than-devout ten-year-old knew that much. God prepared Covenant as the place for the Angels to repent their theft of immortality. The Transitionals believed that in a million years we could earn the right to be Angels again; the Deep Church believed that we’d remain flesh until the stars fell from the sky.

  Daniel said, “What makes you so sure that there were ever really Angels? Or that God really sent them Her daughter, Beatrice, to lead them back into the flesh?”

  I pondered this for a while. The only answers I could think of came straight out of the Scriptures, and Daniel had taught me years ago that appeals to authority counted for nothing. Finally, I had to confess: “I don’t know.” I felt foolish, but I was grateful that he was willing to discuss these difficult questions with me. I wanted t
o believe in God for the right reasons, not just because everyone around me did.

  He said, “Archaeologists have shown that we must have arrived about twenty thousand years ago. Before that, there’s no evidence of humans, or any co-ecological plants and animals. That makes the Crossing older than the Scriptures say, but there are some dates that are open to interpretation, and with a bit of poetic license everything can be made to add up. And most biologists think the native microfauna could have formed by itself over millions of years, starting from simple chemicals, but that doesn’t mean God didn’t guide the whole process. Everything’s compatible, really. Science and the Scriptures can both be true.”

  I thought I knew where he was headed, now. “So you’ve worked out a way to use science to prove that God exists?” I felt a surge of pride; my brother was a genius!

  “No.” Daniel was silent for a moment. “The thing is, it works both ways. Whatever’s written in the Scriptures, people can always come up with different explanations for the facts. The ships might have left Earth for some other reason. The Angels might have made bodies for themselves for some other reason. There’s no way to convince a non-believer that the Scriptures are the word of God. It’s all a matter of faith.”

  “Oh.”

  “Faith’s the most important thing,” Daniel insisted. “If you don’t have faith, you can be tempted into believing anything at all.”

  I made a noise of assent, trying not to sound too disappointed. I’d expected more from Daniel than the kind of bland assertions that sent me dozing off during sermons at the Transitional church.

  “Do you know what you have to do to get faith?”

  “No.”

  “Ask for it. That’s all. Ask Beatrice to come into your heart and grant you the gift of faith.”

  I protested, “We do that every time we go to church!” I couldn’t believe he’d forgotten the Transitional service already. After the priest placed a drop of seawater on our tongues, to symbolize the blood of Beatrice, we asked for the gifts of faith, hope and love.

  “But have you received it?”

  I’d never thought about that. “I’m not sure.” I believed in God, didn’t I? “I might have.”

  Daniel was amused. “If you had the gift of faith, you’d know.”

  I gazed up into the darkness, troubled. “Do you have to go to the Deep Church, to ask for it properly?”

  “No. Even in the Deep Church, not everyone has invited Beatrice into their hearts. You have to do it the way it says in the Scriptures: ‘like an unborn child again, naked and helpless.’”

  “I was Immersed, wasn’t I?”

  “In a metal bowl, when you were thirty days old. Infant Immersion is a gesture by the parents, an affirmation of their own good intentions. But it’s not enough to save the child.”

  I was feeling very disoriented now. My father, at least, approved of Daniel’s conversion … but now Daniel was trying to tell me that our family’s transactions with God had all been grossly deficient, if not actually counterfeit.

  Daniel said, “Remember what Beatrice told Her followers, the last time She appeared? ‘Unless you are willing to drown in My blood, you will never look upon the face of My Mother.’ So they bound each other hand and foot, and weighted themselves down with rocks.”

  My chest tightened. “And you’ve done that?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Almost a year ago.”

  I was more confused than ever. “Did Ma and Fa go?”

  Daniel laughed. “No! It’s not a public ceremony. Some friends of mine from the Prayer Group helped; someone has to be on deck to haul you up, because it would be arrogant to expect Beatrice to break your bonds and raise you to the surface, like She did with Her followers. But in the water, you’re alone with God.”

  He climbed down from his bunk and crouched by the side of my bed. “Are you ready to give your life to Beatrice, Martin?” His voice sent gray sparks flowing through the darkness.

  I hesitated. “What if I just dive in? And stay under for a while?” I’d been swimming off the boat at night plenty of times, there was nothing to fear from that.

  “No. You have to be weighted down.” His tone made it clear that there could be no compromise on this. “How long can you hold your breath?”

  “Two hundred tau.” That was an exaggeration; two hundred was what I was aiming for.

  “That’s long enough.”

  I didn’t reply. Daniel said, “I’ll pray with you.”

  I climbed out of bed, and we knelt together. Daniel murmured, “Please, Holy Beatrice, grant my brother Martin the courage to accept the precious gift of Your blood.” Then he started praying in what I took to be a foreign language, uttering a rapid stream of harsh syllables unlike anything I’d heard before. I listened apprehensively; I wasn’t sure that I wanted Beatrice to change my mind, and I was afraid that this display of fervor might actually persuade Her.

  I said, “What if I don’t do it?”

  “Then you’ll never see the face of God.”

  I knew what that meant: I’d wander alone in the belly of Death, in darkness, for eternity. And even if the Scriptures weren’t meant to be taken literally on this, the reality behind the metaphor could only be worse. Indescribably worse.

  “But … what about Ma and Fa?” I was more worried about them, because I knew they’d never climb weighted off the side of the boat at Daniel’s behest.

  “That will take time,” he said softly.

  My mind reeled. He was absolutely serious.

  I heard him stand and walk over to the ladder. He climbed a few rungs and opened the hatch. Enough starlight came in to give shape to his arms and shoulders, but as he turned to me I still couldn’t make out his face. “Come on, Martin!” he whispered. “The longer you put it off, the harder it gets.” The hushed urgency of his voice was familiar: generous and conspiratorial, nothing like an adult’s impatience. He might almost have been daring me to join him in a midnight raid on the pantry – not because he really needed a collaborator, but because he honestly didn’t want me to miss out on the excitement, or the spoils.

  I suppose I was more afraid of damnation than drowning, and I’d always trusted Daniel to warn me of the dangers ahead. But this time I wasn’t entirely convinced that he was right, so I must have been driven by something more than fear, and blind trust.

  Maybe it came down to the fact that he was offering to make me his equal in this. I was ten years old, and I ached to become something more than I was; to reach, not my parents’ burdensome adulthood, but the halfway point, full of freedom and secrets, that Daniel had reached. I wanted to be as strong, as fast, as quick-witted and widely-read as he was. Becoming as certain of God would not have been my first choice, but there wasn’t much point hoping for divine intervention to grant me anything else.

  I followed him up onto the deck.

  He took cord, and a knife, and four spare weights of the kind we used on our nets from the toolbox. He threaded the weights onto the cord, then I took off my shorts and sat naked on the deck while he knotted a figure-eight around my ankles. I raised my feet experimentally; the weights didn’t seem all that heavy. But in the water, I knew, they’d be more than enough to counteract my body’s slight buoyancy.

  “Martin? Hold out your hands.”

  Suddenly I was crying. With my arms free, at least I could swim against the tug of the weights. But if my hands were tied, I’d be helpless.

  Daniel crouched down and met my eyes. “Ssh. It’s all right.”

  I hated myself. I could feel my face contorted into the mask of a blubbering infant.

  “Are you afraid?”

  I nodded.

  Daniel smiled reassuringly. “You know why? You know who’s doing that? Death doesn’t want Beatrice to have you. He wants you for himself. So he’s here on this boat, putting fear into your heart, because he knows he’s almost lost you.”

  I saw something move in the shadows
behind the toolbox, something slithering into the darkness. If we went back down to the cabin now, would Death follow us? To wait for Daniel to fall asleep? If I’d turned my back on Beatrice, who could I ask to send Death away?

  I stared at the deck, tears of shame dripping from my cheeks. I held out my arms, wrists together.

  When my hands were tied – not palm-to-palm as I’d expected, but in separate loops joined by a short bridge – Daniel unwound a long stretch of rope from the winch at the rear of the boat, and coiled it on the deck. I didn’t want to think about how long it was, but I knew I’d never dived to that depth. He took the blunt hook at the end of the rope, slipped it over my arms, then screwed it closed to form an unbroken ring. Then he checked again that the cord around my wrists was neither so tight as to burn me, nor so loose as to let me slip. As he did this, I saw something creep over his face: some kind of doubt or fear of his own. He said, “Hang onto the hook. Just in case. Don’t let go, no matter what. Okay?” He whispered something to Beatrice, then looked up at me, confident again.

  He helped me to stand and shuffle over to the guard rail, just to one side of the winch. Then he picked me up under the arms and lifted me over, resting my feet on the outer hull. The deck was inert, a mineralized endoshell, but behind the guard rails the hull was palpably alive: slick with protective secretions, glowing softly. My toes curled uselessly against the lubricated skin; I had no purchase at all. The hull was supporting some of my weight, but Daniel’s arms would tire eventually. If I wanted to back out, I’d have to do it quickly.

  A warm breeze was blowing. I looked around, at the flat horizon, at the blaze of stars, at the faint silver light off the water. Daniel recited: “Holy Beatrice, I am ready to die to this world. Let me drown in Your blood, that I might be redeemed, and look upon the face of Your Mother.”

  I repeated the words, trying hard to mean them.

  “Holy Beatrice, I offer You my life. All I do now, I do for You. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of faith. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of hope. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of love.”