Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Larry said. ‘I’ll follow you up in a minute. Just gonna take a little look-see. I’ll hold on to these pictures, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘They’re yours,’ said Janie, with a dismissive wave, her hand then moving up to cover her mouth and nose as she began a hasty retreat.

  Larry explored the remainder of the boat. The sleeping cabins were along a narrow corridor from the galley, with stairs to a sub-level at the near end. He had a brief glance into each one. Clothes and books cluttered the beds and the tight floorspace. They were uniformly messy, but ramshackle messy rather than ransacked messy. He thought of the post-burglary look Sophie could effect in their spacious bedroom and imagined it concentrated. These guys were anal by comparison.

  The sub-level housed a shower cubicle on one side, and occupying the majority of the area under the galley was what had to be the boat’s nerve centre. Radar screens – wait a minute, that would be sonar, right? – computers, and all sorts of science-lab shit. There were worktops on all sides supporting glass tubes of stratified sand, charts, printouts, lumps of rock, jars of what looked like mud, and, like guess-who-doesn’t-belong, a carton of UHT milk.

  ‘So, apart from a submarine, anything else missing?’ he asked, emerging back on to the rear deck where Janie was leaning against a side-rail.

  ‘Can’t be sure. We don’t have an inventory; need to wait until someone from CalORI can take a look around, which won’t be pleasant for whoever it is. They were all real close, it seems. Big happy family. But it doesn’t look like anything’s missing. Life-savers are all in place, so no man-overboard scenarios. Sub-aqua equipment accounted for – four sets of tanks and wetsuits.’

  ‘So all that seems to be gone is one submarine and four people.’

  Janie nodded.

  ‘Now, I know I’m a landlubber and all,’ Larry said, ‘but doesn’t it sound a lot like . . .’

  She nodded again. ‘This whole Mary Celeste scenario’s had everybody here freaked out since the trawler captain called it in, but having had time to reflect, and if you’ll forgive the fish reference, I think the abandoned dinner scene could be a red herring. I checked the ship’s log. The last entry says they were taking the sub on a dive, to the slopes of something or other, some undersea location they must have been checking out. The entry isn’t timed, just dated. According to the entries before it, they spent that Sunday doing running repairs, maintenance, odd jobs, ready to get serious again on Monday. Seems possible to me they stuck the plates in the sink, went to bed then got up and made an early start, figuring clean-up duty could wait. That could be morning coffee in those mugs, remember.’

  ‘But the U-boat springs a leak, taking everybody right down the “slopes of whatever” and into the sweet by-and-by?’ Larry offered.

  ‘Works for me. There are variations on the theme. As you can imagine, it’s been a popular discussion topic round here.’

  ‘Keep talkin’. Long as aliens ain’t involved.’

  ‘Okay. First is the “sounds like a great idea after six beers and some brandy” theory. They’re drunk and someone suggests taking the Stella Maris for a midnight spin.’

  ‘Don’t buy it,’ he said. ‘These guys were pros, not teenagers out on Dad’s fishin’ boat.’

  ‘Experience can breed complacency and misplaced confidence, Sergeant. I’ve seen it before. But anyway, it wasn’t my theory.’

  ‘Well forget it. Can you see the coroner’s office telling that to the bereaved families? I can’t. So what other spins did you guys come up with when you “workshopped” this thing?’

  Janie looked like she wanted to take offence, but she couldn’t help smiling. She rolled her eyes. ‘All right, well, there’s the “all a big hoax” theory. It’s some sort of stunt. They took off in the sub, rendezvoused with another boat and are lying low while the world gets interested.’

  Larry just grinned, shaking his head. ‘Next.’

  ‘Just one more. The nineteen ninety-nine theory.’

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Whatever it was, he knew he wasn’t going to like it.

  ‘Suicide pact,’ she said. ‘End-of-the-century psychosis combined with cabin fever after weeks on this little boat, plus maybe a bit of depressurisation trauma. They grow real close and real crazy. A last supper, then . . .’

  Larry glared.

  ‘I mean, it’s not my theory, I’m just . . .’

  ‘Let’s pretend we didn’t have this conversation,’ he said in a low, bassy near-whisper.

  She held up her hands. ‘You got it.’

  ‘We’ll just stick with the basics. You figure they took off in the sub – let’s stay with that and not dream up any crazy reasons why they took off in the sub, other than they were doing their jobs. You know where the boat was found, so you know where the sub would have set off from. Any chance we can recover this thing?’

  Janie laughed drily. ‘Boat was somewhere around Fieberling Guyot. That’s a kind of sub-oceanic mountain.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So the sea-bed, the foot of that mountain, is about fifteen thousand feet down. If the Stella Maris lost power or hit a turbidity current, Jesus.’ She grimaced, looking away. ‘It would implode on the way down. Crushed like a beer can.’

  ‘What’s a turbidity current?’

  ‘It’s kind of like an underwater landslide.’

  ‘Okay. Okay. But effectively, you’re saying if we take out the spook factor for a moment, we’re looking at a bunch of folks who didn’t do the washing-up one night, then went out in the morning and had a real bad day on the job.’

  ‘In short, yeah.’

  ‘Well let’s go with that first and see how far the facts carry it. I’ll need to speak to someone from this CalORI place. First one over there to dry their eyes, get them to gimme a call.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  ‘Meantime, I’d appreciate it if we could keep a tight lid on this thing regards the media. If they ask, all we got here is a tragic accident at sea, okay? I don’t want them knowing anything about coffee cups and dinner plates. I’ve already heard the half-assed theories your buddies produced. I don’t want to find out what the tabloids’ imaginations can dream up using the same material. The families will have enough to deal with without reading any X-Files crap about their lost loved ones.’

  four

  Maria thought the e-mail would set her off crying again. That was one of the countless symptoms of her grief – you never knew what trivial or unlikely thing was going to trigger another painfully cherished memory, bring back a part of what was lost for just long enough to remind you of what you were missing. Strangely, it was never the obvious ones, like the sight of their empty desks or the growing piles of unopened letters. Maybe that was because you knew to put up your guard at those times, so it was the sucker punches that got you, the ones you didn’t see coming.

  Like this e-mail. Soon as she saw who it was from, some part of her that hadn’t kept up with current affairs was telling her to look over her shoulder in case Coop or Taylor saw, as it would only give them more ammunition for their dumb jokes.

  What she wouldn’t give now to be hit with both barrels.

  The message was from Jerry Blake in the Lebanon, following up on something that had seemed the most exciting thing in the world to her this time last week. It seemed death liked to come along every so often and remind you how little value or purpose anything really had as long as it was ultimately in charge. That the message was to do with archaeology – dead people, dead civilisations – seemed to underline that in red pen.

  Maria’s interest in the Minoan empire was very much an extra-curricular pursuit, hence the jibes from Coop and Taylor when she was indulging it on ‘company time’, but it was an understandable fascination for a seismologist. The Minoans’ native Crete had been ground-zero during the most destructive seismological disaster known to man, and in studying it she had become intrigued by the ancient civilisation. Unfortunately, resear
ch and evidence were thin on the ground, partly due to the effects of the aforementioned disaster, and partly due to the Minoans having been ‘rediscovered’ by archaeology only at the beginning of the century. Further obscuring this lost culture was the fact that the only surviving documents were written in two as-yet indecipherable script forms, known as Linear A and Linear B. The latter had been identified as a very primitive form of Greek, but the former, although having contributed words to Linear B, seemed to be a different language altogether. So although the archaeologists possessed artefacts that gave clues as to the make-up of the Minoan civilisation, they were without any first-hand depictions of what life in it was like.

  Until Jerry Blake excavated a site just outside Beirut last year, discovered when developers were clearing the ruins of a bombed-out apartment block. A number of scrolls were sealed inside an earthenware jar, written in an early form of Hebrew that instantly dated them from around 1500 BC The anticipated biblo-archaeological feeding frenzy failed to ensue after the first cursory translations of text fragments revealed them to be first-person accounts of events not in the Holy Land, but in ‘Kaftor’, the contemporary name for Crete.

  In the smaller field of Minoan archaeology, however, the find was nothing short of explosive. Questions – and arguments – had already arisen over whether the scrolls might themselves be a translation of original Minoan documents, or whether their author had command of both languages. This issue had important ramifications for the authenticity of what the texts depicted and, Jerry predicted, would be the bloody battleground for many archaeological bust-ups. It was inevitable that the scrolls would largely contradict certain established theories about Minoan life, so the scholars who adhered to those theories would have to defend their academic reputations by discrediting the reliability of the new accounts.

  Which was where Maria came in.

  Contrary to Coop’s relentless innuendo, Maria had never met Jerry Blake – their relationship was purely electronic, her Internet research forays having led to regular correspondence with him on the subject of the Minoans. This had made her one of the first to know about the Beirut find, and initially Jerry had promised to keep her updated about whatever secrets the scrolls yielded, as and when the translations were sufficiently coherent. However, when those translations revealed that the texts included what purported to be a first-hand description of the destruction of Thera and its cataclysmic aftermath, her involvement became rather less passive. Jerry recruited her to assess the veracity of the scrolls’ account from a seismological point of view, because if that part sounded like bullshit then it would cast serious doubts over the credibility of the rest.

  From all she’d seen so far, Maria was satisfied that if whoever penned these scrolls wasn’t around when Thera went bang, then he sure as hell knew a man who was. All that he described, even the most fantastic-sounding phenomena, was seismologically and vulcanologically authentic. Events that even Jerry had assumed to be ‘the narrator laying it on pretty thick’ were not only scientifically explicable, but highly unlikely to have been inspired by anything other than direct witness. From the preceding years of earthquakes and lesser eruptions to the insanity of Thera’s last hours, this chronicler was talking about things he simply wouldn’t have known to make up.

  The eruptions had begun long before dawn, heralded as ever by the night’s tremors, spewing forth pumice upon the waters and blackness into the air, confounding we who thought there could not be so much ash in the world as had already smothered the life from our lands on Kaftor. Those fleeing in boats from Tira’s shores found their eyes and skin begin to burn, as if their bodies had been flayed and vinegar poured upon the wounds. Their throats and noses became choked with this searing vapour, which ate through flesh and smelt of death and decay.

  Upon the stricken island, the mountain’s heat had crazed the very winds of the air. Men and beasts, even trees, were lifted bodily from the earth, drawn into the rage of debris and flame that filled the skies, there to be torn apart as by a thousand spears in flight.

  Then the sea itself began to boil.

  The waters in the bay convulsed in frenzy, rising as if to escape the earth, falling back in fearsome swoops, like carrion fowl in fiercest dispute. The waves had no purpose or direction, only the wildest agitation. Those boats in the bay were smashed like tinder by this violence. The stout beams of hulls that had traversed all the seas of the world were shattered like baked clay.

  Neither were all the vessels spared that had reached the open sea. Though there was no wind for their sails, they began to speed back towards land, all together, faster than ever they had ridden the waves before. It was as though time had turned upon itself as the boats’ journeys were reversed, unknown forces drawing them irresistibly into the bubbling cauldron where they met their end, disappearing beneath the waters as though swallowed whole.

  From the mouth of the mountain, a vast pillar of steam violated the skies, punching through the heavens and beyond in a white, unbroken shaft, reaching in the blink of an eye higher than all the mountains of the world piled one atop the next.

  Then in one moment, one single moment, Tira, our neighbour, our sister, was torn from the earth.

  Obliterated.

  Even on a hillside in Kaftor I was thrown to the ground as the air was shaken by the greatest sound any man had ever heard. There was a dark shape on the horizon, expanding into the sky and in all directions about itself, a great cloud with fire flashing through it like the jagged barbs of lightning, and all the while the sound continued to boom and rumble, as though the air was crashing upon us in waves. An island. A country. Lands and farms on its back, towns and villages. Ports, woodlands, fields. All turned to flame and dust and stone in one terrible instant.

  Maria had thrilled as she read each of the passages, sent to her at tantalisingly random intervals as Jerry’s translation team made their unsteady progress. This narrator, whoever he had been, was describing a devastating caldera eruption, which fitted exactly the theories that had been hypothesised about Thera’s destruction. More than that, the description actually divulged something further about the nature of the eruption than extant knowledge had been able to suggest. It indicated that the final explosion had been caused by the collapse of a giant magma chamber, as had happened at Krakatoa. The ‘boiling of the sea’ and the spontaneous retreat of the boats would have been created by billions of tons of seawater flooding into the chamber. Then, when that enormous body of water met an equally enormous supply of molten magma and turned instantly to steam, there suddenly wouldn’t have been room for it all.

  Hence, bang. Or more accurately, the biggest bang ever seen or heard on the planet.

  But that – unprecedentedly destructive as it was – had been only the start. The real action would have got going about forty minutes later, when the largest seismic waves in history, or indeed prehistory, encountered the first thing in their path: Kaftor.

  The last message she’d got from Jerry had been about two weeks ago to say that he was almost ready to send her ‘the money shot’, as he called it, mocking her ravenous impatience to see the passages depicting the flood. Ever since then she’d been scanning her e-mail for his name each morning before being disappointed and having to get on with what she was actually paid for.

  Now, finally, it was here, and it didn’t seem to matter. She sat staring at the blue and white envelope icon through tear-welling eyes, lacking the will even to move the mouse and open it. She didn’t want to know what it contained. She’d far rather have two thirty-year-old adolescents standing behind her making dumb jokes about it instead.

  Jesus.

  It hurt. It hurt so much.

  Maria knew there were some at CalORI who hadn’t accepted it yet, who were holding out for a happy ending. Dreaming up crazy scenarios, torturing themselves with a desperate hope that had no greater foundation than the fact that no bodies had been found. She appreciated the tempting succour it offered, but appreciated also that t
hat way madness lay. Like signing up to join the mothers of the disappeared.

  Sandra Biscane’s death last year had forced her to understand that terrible things do happen, that your worst fears do get realised, and the big question marks still hanging over that dreadful episode had made her that bit more ready to accept further tragedy. But she wasn’t going to let her imagination run paranoid until all the facts were out in the open, any more than she was going to torment herself chasing the mirages of merest possibility.

  Whatever had happened to them, it happened three hundred miles out in the world’s biggest ocean. There would be no bodies. Only an endless absence.

  No more Mitch, no more Cody, no more Coop, no more Taylor. No more all-night work-ins with longnecks and pizza. No more lunch-time two-on-two in the parking lot. No more discussions, no more arguments, no more falling-outs, no more making ups. No more dumb jokes.

  Ironically, there had been a sense of impending doom in the air for a while before it happened, although this was hardly the outcome everyone had been afraid of. Nonetheless, there had been a pervasive feeling of time running out. That wasn’t hindsight putting a spin on it, and it wasn’t some stupid 1999 thing either. There had been a precariousness about the St John business from day one, and it had intensified in recent weeks. Maria hadn’t been involved in the project herself, being four months into her own team’s current study when it began, but it was CalORI’s biggest undertaking in years, so it had infected the mood of the whole place.

  Time running out. Or, more accurately, money running out. They were all just waiting for the financial plug to be pulled on the whole deal, and every day it didn’t happen was a bonus.

  Backing for ocean geological research tended to come from three main sources: oil companies, oil companies, and occasionally, if you were real lucky, oil companies. Coop and Cody had found stuff twelve layers down in sediment cores that dated more recently than the last known government cash, and with a vision as wide as Gingrich’s (about two molecules; three tops) looking out from the public purse, that was unlikely to change. The government wouldn’t spend two bits on any kind of research that didn’t have a projected military or industrial application. It was as though they had decided we already know all the avenues the human race might ever need to go down; no time for the frivolities of the road less travelled-by. Jesus, girl, you might discover somethin’ we can’t monopolise, process, package and sell. And if we can’t blow folks up with it, what in the hell are we s’posed to do with it?