Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  There was always someone on TV calling for shows to be banned or movies to be banned or skin flicks to be banned, all on the grounds that they provoked violence and decay in society. If they asked around a few homicide cops who’d worked serials, it wouldn’t be Schwarzenegger pictures they wanted out of circulation. Larry wasn’t the only one who wished St John the Divine had taken that vacation somewhere less vulcanological than Patmos, and had stayed off the opiates while he was at it. He figured a lot of dead women had wished as much too, once upon a time.

  Nagging fear of cataclysm was part of the way of life in California. You didn’t think about it much – or rather you tried not to think about it much – but inside you knew the possibilities. That little voice of concern was always yabbering away at the back; just that you couldn’t always hear him while you had so many other things to get wound up about. It worked like a personal stress gauge: if you found yourself worrying about The Big One, the rest of your life had to be running pretty smooth.

  But with that voice always yabbering away inside people’s heads, Larry feared that people didn’t just grow used to the possibility of cataclysm; maybe they grew used to the whole idea. So when 1999 came along, they thought they had something to be genuinely afraid of.

  ‘“Things fall apart,”’ as Sophie put it, quoting that Irish poet she liked. ‘“The centre cannot hold.” All that stuff. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”’

  The shit is hitting the fan.

  This is an APB. All units in the Bethlehem area: be on the lookout for a rough beast with a slouching gait.

  1999 Syndrome took plain old Things Are Getting Worse and changed it into Things Are Getting Worse Because The End Is Nigh. Crime used to be seen as instances of antisocial behaviour, sins against society. But now there was this resigned attitude at large that it was indicative of a greater, inexorable process of decay. Each crime now had to Mean Something, each new atrocity held up as the next marker on our descent into uncharted depths of stygia.

  And everything was a fuckin’ omen.

  Everything.

  War breaking out in some far-flung country was an omen. Peace in a different country was an omen too. Flood was an omen. Drought was an omen. Mass murder was an omen. Mass suicide was an omen. Births were omens. Deaths were omens. Oppression, emancipation, invasion, liberation: all fuckin’ omens. In short, stuff that had been going on regularly down the years and centuries was now, suddenly, in 1999, darkly and profoundly portentous.

  Bullshit.

  The vicious circle of self-fulfilling prophecy was turning like a wash-tub on spin. You whipped people into a frenzy by telling them the end of the world was nigh, then you pointed at the frenzied folks and said, ‘Look, everyone’s gone crazy, the end of the world must be nigh.’

  Sophie’s poem, the Irish guy. She’d read that to him one night when they were talking about all this, few weeks back after the news ran with Luther St John and his prophecy or prediction or whatever. They’d talked about this millennial panic crap lots of times, in fact. Jesus, these days who didn’t? Poem was written way back at the other end of this century, she told him, after our last collective bout of cataclysmic heeby-jeebies. This stuff, this end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it stuff, had all happened before. It was normal. It was natural, even. Individually, you get nervous about anything new: new job, new house, new city, new date. With a new century, everybody gets nervous about the same thing at the same time. It infected the cultural consciousness, Sophie said. Zeitgeist was the German word for it. Happened to an extent after WW2.The whole country, maybe the whole world, has occasion to think ‘Where do we go from here? What happens now?’, and a lot of folks get scared because they don’t know, can’t see, can’t imagine.

  Larry, of all people, knew how that felt.

  But 1999 wasn’t just the end of any century, it was the end of the twentieth century. Not only was that the end of a whole millennium, but it was also the end of a century that had a conceit of itself like none before it. No previous century could possibly have had such a confidence in its own modernity, with a widespread tendency to view all the previous ages of man as steps on the road towards this apotheosis. Us citizens of C-Twenty thought we were the cat’s pyjamas, basically.

  Science had never advanced at such a furious pace, far less had that pace ever accelerated at such a breathless rate, and no civilisation had ever become so intoxicated by the capabilities of its technology. Certainly every era must have taken pride in its achievements and liked to measure its progress against the culture and learning of its hundred-year predecessors, but surely none had indulged such a sense of climax.

  Hence the omen-peddlers.

  This was the It century. Time of the biggest, smallest, fastest, slowest, longest, shortest. The conceit of zenith meant that the twentieth century had failed to inherit from its forebears the words ‘so far’. Whatever we achieved, these days, instantly became the defining superlative, which was where the doomsayers came in.

  We had put men on the moon. That was, of course, a fuckin’ omen, as it was some sort of ultimate in travel and exploration. If we had put men on Mars, then that would have been the ultimate in travel and exploration too. If we had only put men in orbit, guess what?

  Then there were the twentieth century’s unprecedented acts of evil, most notably the attempted systematic extermination of an entire race of human beings. Our number must surely be up because, as we approached the end of the millennium, man had never been so base, so without conscience, so inhuman (whatever that meant).

  Except that he had.

  Larry had read all about it, a previous holocaust, near the other end of this same millennium: the Albigensian Crusade. The successful systematic extermination of an entire race of human beings, in this case the Cathars in France. By command of the Church, around a million men, women and children were slaughtered because they were preaching and practising a different version of Christianity, the spread of which had been a threat to the Holy Roman Empire. A long way short of six million, numerically, but given the contemporary population of Europe, proportionally an even greater genocide than we had managed in the supposedly superlative twentieth century.

  Seemed we had forgotten the word ‘since’ as well.

  This self-satisfied century was coming to an end: this time of extremes and ultimates, of unrivalled progress and unparalleled decay, when man had ascended to heights beyond the planet and plumbed depths below mere sin. This age with its arrogant delusions of culmination.

  And the problem with such delusions was that they were incompatible with the concept of succession. So, effectively, the world was supposed to end just because some folks couldn’t imagine what might come next.

  Which was pathetic.

  Larry knew, because he had been there. He and Sophie. Both been there. Thinking there couldn’t be a tomorrow after this.

  A hospital. A gurney. Tubes, lines, fluids, bags, machines. A numb car-ride under streetlights. An empty house. A bedroom. A glass of water. Darkness. There couldn’t be a tomorrow after this.

  But there was.

  The Coast Guard’s office was south along Pacific Drive, a crisply white building that couldn’t have been open more than a few months. From the road it looked like a one-storey deal, but a lower floor extended beneath it on the ocean side, descending to the purpose-built marina that harboured the CG launches. There were dozens of marinas all along the coast, at Venice, Malibu, Long Beach, but even without the signposts Larry would have known that this was the place because it was the only one that didn’t have a fish restaurant on it. He had come past the old Coast Guard premises on the way. It was being reconcreted and turned into another private marina, with a hotel under construction at the back. Larry figured the realty deal must have paid for a large slice of the set-up before him. The location wasn’t as picturesque as its predecessor, but on the other hand, the new offices didn’t look like a canning factory.

  He got out of his car and began wal
king towards the automatic doors. A girl in long blue shorts and a white T-shirt was squatting down in front of the soda machine that stood on a platform walkway running around the building on the right-hand side. She stood up again, Coke can in hand, and fed more quarters into the slot, then turned around. She wore a blue baseball cap with the Coast Guard’s badge on the front, and had a blonde ponytail sticking out neatly through the gap above the adjustment strap.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ she called, smiling, as he approached.

  ‘Huh?’ said Larry, unsure what she was referring to or even whether she was referring it to him.

  She laughed. ‘To drink.’

  ‘Oh right. Coke’s fine. ‘Less you got Mountain Dew.’

  ‘Sure have.’

  She hit the panel and retrieved the can, tossing it to him as he drew near. ‘Larry Freeman, right?’

  Larry ceased reaching for his ID. ‘How’d you guess?’

  ‘I know an unmarked police car when I see one. Nobody under sixty would be driving that thing through choice. Not a new one, anyway.’

  Larry looked back at the frumpy lime four-door. She had a point.

  ‘I’m Janie Rodriguez.’ She held out a hand, which Larry gripped firmly. He noticed the wedding band on her other one, which explained why the least Hispanic-looking woman on the coast had a name like that. She looked mid-twenties, barely five feet but all of it bursting with energy. Must be the sunshine and the ocean. Larry figured there was a film crew shooting a Wrigley’s commercial round the corner wondering where she had disappeared to. ‘Been expecting you,’ she continued. ‘You’re here about the Mary Celeste. Let me show you.’

  Janie led him along the walkway a few yards and around the corner to the front, stopping where the platform looked down on the boats in the marina. They both rested their elbows on the rail and leaned forward. Larry opened his can and took a long drink, a light sea breeze playing on his face, sun glinting up off the water and drawing squiggly patterns on the underside of the walkway’s wooden canopy. Janie had one foot on the base of the railing, and Larry realised she was looking at him.

  ‘What are you smiling about, Officer?’ she asked.

  ‘Just thinking,’ he said. ‘This beats working for a living.’

  ‘Well, ‘fraid we gotta do that too. That’s the boat in question down there.’

  ‘You mean the big one that don’t say “Coast Guard” on the sides?’

  ‘That’s correct, Officer. Scientific research vessel the Gazes Also, out of the Californian Oceanographic Research Institute right here in Santa Monica.’

  ‘What’s that all about?’

  ‘From what I gather they were conducting a study of the sub-oceanic topography. Undersea landscapes, in layman’s terms. There’s mountain ranges bigger than the Himalayas down there, and trenches deeper than the Grand Canyon.’

  ‘The Gazes Also, huh? Cute name for that sort of work.’

  Janie squinted against the sun and turned to look at Larry, who had moved further along the walkway.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ she said. ‘We come across so many dumb names for boats, you stop wondering what they’re referring to. Most of the time it’s probably someone’s wife. Or their dog. What’s cute about this one?’

  ‘It’s Nietzsche,’ Larry told her, turning away again to stare at the vessel, the name etched on the bows and the life-savers. ‘“When you gaze into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”.’

  ‘Jesus, they got cops quoting Nietzsche now?’ Janie said with a wry smile, nudging up the peak of her cap with her Coke can. ‘What, you gotta answer on philosophy for the sergeant’s exam these days?’

  ‘No, I read it on my cereal box this morning. It’s a thought for the day deal. If I’d had Cheerios instead of corn flakes I’d never have known – Cheerios are still running their Gems of Kierkegaard series.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Larry thought the boat looked somehow humbled tied up in dock. Manacled here, where it didn’t belong, balefully lifeless, humiliated by its captivity.

  Janie finished her soda and arced it practisedly into a trashcan nearby.

  ‘Okay, here’s the scene,’ she said. ‘The Gazes Also failed to respond to radio contact from CalORI last Monday morning.’

  ‘The research institute?’

  ‘That’s right. So they reported it to us. It’s no blue-light thing. Happens now and again – maybe a power problem or damage to transmission equipment. So first of all we tried a relay off vessels in the area of its last reported co-ordinates. Still incommunicado. Then we got in touch with a trawler that was pretty close by and requested from the captain that he make a detour and check it out. He radioed back Monday evening sounding real spooked. The boat’s there, all right, it’s drifted a little, but he’s found it. First he tries to radio again, but still no reply. When he gets close enough he calls over his loud-hailer. Still nada. Eventually his boat ties up alongside and he boards.’

  ‘And nobody’s home?’

  ‘Yeah, but that ain’t what spooked him. Come on, I’ll show you.’

  Janie led Larry down a gangway to the boardwalk that skirted the water. She traded greetings with two guys tying up a launch as they walked past. They wore the same get-up, even the baseball caps. Larry understood what Bannon meant about the shorts. One of those guys really should have been told he didn’t have the knees for joining the Coast Guard.

  There were official tapes across the rails either side of the gangplank that led on to the Gazes Also. Janie ducked under, catching her cap on the yellow plastic strips as she did so. She pulled her ponytail free of the hat and gripped it by the skip. Larry stepped wide-legged over the tapes and climbed aboard. She beckoned him to follow her down some steps into the cabins below deck. He folded up his sunglasses into his shirt pocket and descended.

  ‘This is pretty much as was,’ she said, indicating the galley. ‘The trawler captain swears he touched nothing and I believe him. These guys can get very superstitious and I think he wanted off this boat as fast as his legs would carry him.’

  Larry looked around him. The stale smell and the sound of flies had made his stomach go rigid as he came down those stairs, a reflex conditioned by years of forced entries into locked buildings where the occupants were in no condition for greeting visitors, and frequently in no condition for open-casket funerals either. But there were no such unfortunates here. The stale smell came from the sink, where dinner plates and cutlery lay submerged under a murky fluid that looked eight parts water to one part food detritus and one part resultant scum. There was a ring of the greeny-brown matter a couple of inches above the fluid, evidencing days of gradual evaporation. Dead flies floated amid the surface flotsam, reminding Larry of birds caught in an oil slick. The live flies were concentrated around the small, compact dinner table, flanked by an upholstered bench against the wall and lightweight chairs opposite. On the table there were coffee mugs and plastic tumblers on top of place mats around a brandy bottle and a basket of brittle-looking lumps of bread, dotted liberally with flies and mould. Two of the tumblers and one of the coffee mugs lay upturned, their contents having dried on the wooden surface to leave contour lines, like hills on a map. The other three still had at least an inch of coffee in each.

  ‘We flew a guy out on the seaplane to pilot this thing back. It was more than three hundred miles out. Just got back last night.’ Janie picked up some photographs from on top of the microwave oven on a worktop by the sink, handing them to Larry. ‘He took these before moving the boat anywhere.’

  Larry flicked through them. The pictures showed scenes of the galley, mostly identical except that all the cups and mugs were upright, there was no spillage on the table and the water-level in the sink was higher.

  ‘It was in case things got choppy on the way home. He wanted to capture the full impact of the scene as upon discovery. As you can see, the trip home was pretty smooth. The spook-factor hasn’t depleted much.’

  ‘Jesus,�
� Larry breathed.

  Janie pointed above the microwave to a shelf supporting a ghetto-blaster.

  ‘CD player was still switched on too, with a disc in it. The Sex Pistols, for what it’s worth. You just imagine being that trawler guy. I mean, you’re seeing this here in the Coast Guard marina. He found all this shit floating in the middle of the Pacific.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  Janie frowned. Larry could tell that seeing the scene one more time wasn’t helping her make any more sense of it.

  ‘Civilised little Sunday dinner at sea,’ she said. ‘Coffee, conversation, music and a digestif of brandy. Then they vanish before the coffee’s even cold. Just disappear without trace.’

  Terrific, Larry thought. A latter-day Mary Celeste. An abandoned boat in the middle of the ocean. Disappearing scientists. No doubt another fucking omen.

  ‘Nothing disappears without trace,’ he stated. ‘If you vanish in a puff of smoke, you’re still gonna leave a carbon stain on the ceiling. So, you got any theories what happened here, or do you figure the aliens just beamed ‘em all up to go meet Elvis?’

  Janie arched her brow. ‘Well, if the aliens took them, they would have needed room in their flying saucer for a submarine, because that’s missing too.’

  Larry’s eyes widened involuntarily. He thought Bannon had just thrown it in as a figure of speech.

  ‘A submarine?’

  ‘Yes indeed. CalORI told us about it when we said we were sending someone out to pilot the boat home. I mean, keep your pants on, it wasn’t Polaris. Still, a real smart craft, from what I’m told. The Stella Maris, it was called. It could go pretty deep, depending on how long the crew could face in decom afterwards. Look, do you mind if we get back on deck? Two more minutes and this smell’s gonna make me puke.’