Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “We’ve got these tiny sheets or layers or wrappings of cells in our brains,” Dudley said. “Each layer, each epithelium, is the thickness of only one cell. Same as rock formations in the earth. It’s all electrical circuitry, of course, in our heads. And you can whip your head around real fast, and for a second—or for one cell’s-width fraction of a second—you can see things that used to be on the landscape you’re looking at—trees where now there are none, or buffalo, or Indians, or dinosaurs—but then your brain rights itself and the electricity flows back into its proper epithelial linings.

  “You can see forward, too,” he explained. “The residues of all things that ever happened—the memories of them—rest out on the land hundreds of layers deep—cell memories out there like the husks of autumn locusts. You can turn your head too quick in the other direction and sometimes gather enough data to understand what will happen in the future. But that,” he said to Wallis, “is of no use to you or me.

  “Now about hypercerebreality, and deep craniality,” Dudley said—he was murmuring, almost crooning—“the electronics in your wiring can orbit round and round in your skullcap—that’s the horizontal powers within you, the ones that permit you to walk around on the surface with your usual patterns of speech and locomotion—the ones that keep you from being too much of a numb-nuts—but then there’s this state of deep craniality you can sink into it—a seam, a taproot of electricity that sends you several epithelial layers deep into your own mind. You get below the present,” Dudley said. “What it’s like actually, is a kind of orgasm. You get the root of your mind down into that one cleft and, my word, there’s no telling what you might find.”

  “Where’s Matthew?” Wallis asked.

  “Well,” Dudley said, glancing toward the cabin, “he’s actually nowhere, right now. His power’s off. His electricity’s shut down. He’s brain-dead. Burnt out.” He cleared his throat and was somber, considering a future without Matthew. He’d certainly seen it before. After a while, they just didn’t get better. The miracle of regeneration did not one day occur. The dry casings of insect shells scattered in the wind.

  He turned his attention to Wallis. “It’s getting cold,” he said. “I guess we’d better look at your damn map.”

  Wallis was surprised by the trembling he felt. All winter he had been secure in the crafting, his dreaming of the document; but now as he rose from the stone bench and hurried back to the cabin to retrieve the map for the master, he felt as if he were climbing out of a dark and safe place below, up into the broad light of scrutiny: and it occurred to him for the first time that a work conceived and crafted in the darkness might not fare well under the examination of light.

  He shook off these fears. It was his map, and he believed in it, as he had believed in half a hundred other maps he’d created, and which had found oil.

  He carried it back to the campfire. Dudley and Mel had piled more branches on the coals so that the flames rose and were taller. They spread the map out and pinned it down with small stones.

  Wallis watched as Dudley stared at the map. He saw the forward, expectant lean of Dudley’s shoulders—like a man settling in to a great meal—loosen and dissolve into disappointment, even sorrow. He saw the brightness leave Dudley’s eyes—saw a cloudiness enter them. “It’s wrong,” Dudley said. “It’s just wrong.”

  Wallis felt his blood draining. “What part of it is wrong?” he asked.

  “All of it,” Dudley said, quietly, and by the way he did not rant or rave, Wallis knew that he must be right. Carefully—as one would pick up a dead fish—Dudley lifted the stones from the map, scrolled it up, and placed it in the fire, where it caught quickly, burning in a bright plume of flame that, for all its light, gave no warmth. The map faded then to a charcoal husk, and bits of it broke free and floated upward in sky-fragments.

  “Listen,” Dudley said, “it would have been asking a lot for you to get it right without even ever seeing it. Hell’s sake, boy, I don’t think anyone could be expected to produce a map like that. Everything’s covered up with this nasty old snow,” he said, and Wallis felt sickened by his kindness—realizing, by the degree of that kindness, so unnatural for Old Dudley, how dead wrong the map must have been. He realized too that Old Dudley was scared: that his best geologist was as if in a coma, and his second-best, his only other, had just crapped out spectacularly.

  There would not be time to train a third. Dudley cut a glance at Mel, a look that implied he thought she might somehow be responsible.

  “Maybe you should look farther in,” he said. “When spring comes. Maybe you should cross the river.”

  Mel moved in close to comfort Wallis—she put her arm around him and said nothing—but Wallis needed no comfort, for there had been no ego in the drafting of the map, only pure and unfettered falling. He was unhappy, even sickened and amazed at how he had let himself believe so deeply in a thing that was so wrong, but there was no pain, and only the dullest sense of loss. Old Dudley and Mel were taking it far harder than he was.

  Mel didn’t see how he could stand to do it again. To her, this seemed as it would to pass through the long winter and come to the edge of spring only to turn around and head all the way back through winter. She twined her hand in his as if to hold him back.

  There was a movement and a sound beyond the cast of firelight, back toward the cabin. At first their eyes wouldn’t focus, and when they did their minds couldn’t connect with what their eyes were telling them. Wallis believed it was a black wolf crawling across the snow, and Mel believed it was a black bear, groggy from having just come out of hibernation. Old Dudley believed it was nothing of this earth but instead some manifestation of all his fears that had swelled up out of the earth like a crocus bulb and was now creeping across the snow toward him, seeking retribution—crawling slowly as if injured, but coming for him with unstoppable resolve. He screamed.

  Matthew reached the edge of the orange light and lay there for a moment, breathing hard. His black hair was tangled but glossy, and his face had a sheen of sweat from the effort of pulling himself across the snow, but he looked younger, ten or fifteen years younger; and, having rested, he began crawling toward them once more, pulling himself across the crust of snow as if he had lost all use of his legs. He left behind him a yellow stream of incontinence so bright that it glowed orange green—so strong that they could smell it—and it was Old Dudley, not Mel, who went to comfort him, and gathered him in and brought him to the fire, where they saw now that their perception of his youth had been an illusion, and that if anything he looked ten or fifteen years older.

  Matthew looked at Mel with great fondness, lying on his back with his head cradled in Dudley’s lap. The reek of him was substantial. Matthew looked over at Wallis, smiled at him, then at Mel—at the two of them sitting so close together—and understood that he had been gone a long time. Mel blinked, reached out, took his hand—hers pale and long, slender; his dark and big and swollen and scarred from all the years of working with rock—and they stayed like that for a long time, Dudley, Mel, and Matthew linked as if in a chain, with Wallis sitting slightly outside of and unconnected to them. The ashes of his black map, the charcoal husk of it, stirred faintly as the coals shifted, and the fire grew lower, and the stars brighter, the night colder; and after a long while of just staring at Mel and smiling—not so much caring that he had lost her, but simply made happy by the sight of her—Matthew faded out again, as did Old Dudley—like two horses in harness—and Wallis and Mel lifted Matthew like a sack of dead weight and carried him back to the cabin, changed him into clean clothes, washed up, then went to bed themselves, leaving Dudley asleep by the dying fire.

  The night cooled quickly, and though Dudley was warm in his parka, the soft snow into which he had settled froze hard in the night, so that by daylight it had him clutched as if in talons, and he woke up shouting, struggling to pull free—believing that the fur on his parka was a wolf, or wolves, who had him pinned, and that they were attacking h
im. And on the far side of the river, the real wolves heard him, and began answering with their own howls, a sound that echoed throughout the valley. And in his bed, Matthew’s eyes fluttered, then blinked open, and with what little warmth was left in his cooling brain he considered the maps that lay ahead of him: considered future descents, future wrestlings with subterranean angels. A part of him missed Mel and was lonely for the immensity of that loss—but the loss had begun so long ago, and been compounded then daily, that this final loss in many ways seemed like only one more day’s worth rather than the sum of all that had ever been.

  They had a quiet breakfast. Matthew watched her often, as a visitor to a foreign country might watch the dining habits of a native. Several times Mel thought of what she wanted to say, but by the sleepy, dumbfounded way he was watching her, she didn’t think it would matter: she would have to wait until his brain warmed fully. If she decided to ever speak of it at all.

  She felt a huge weight of loss—almost as if he, or she, or both of them, had died—but there was also an incredible lightness and freedom, a giddiness. She had given up the wolves, and her old lover, and now she found herself wondering if there were anything else she could give up.

  Old Dudley stared at his coffee. He wasn’t concerned about Wallis’s map not finding oil—he had known that there wouldn’t be any, had simply turned Wallis loose into the rank wild valley as a lesson in wildcatting—to give Wallis a taste of what it had been like for Dudley when he had started out earlier in the century—back when nothing had been known about anything—but Dudley was morose at how spectacularly wrong the map had been. Dudley did not consider the failure to be Wallis’s, but rather his own, for having picked Wallis in the first place.

  By noon Old Dudley and Matthew were gone. Matthew still did not have the strength to stand for long periods of time, so Dudley pulled him across the snow in a child’s sled, as if Matthew were some overgrown sauvant or prodigy. They stopped off at the mercantile to say good-bye to Helen—they lingered for only an hour—and then purchased an old snowmobile from Artie, one that hadn’t been run in years. They were able to get it started after much effort, and it ran rough, but got them up and over the summit and out of the valley before nightfall, though the exhaust gave them both a headache; and to Matthew, as he rode behind Dudley, arms clutched around his waist, head bobbing weakly, the sound of the machine was as if a saw were ripping his brain open—and so sustained was their voyage, and the ceaseless roar of the machine, that he became convinced that that was what was happening, and that Old Dudley was running the controls, and he was puzzled as to why Old Dudley did not turn the machine off.

  Back at the cabin, Mel and Wallis opened all the windows to let the south winds sweep through the cabin. The curtains blew steadily, and they shed their clothes and made love in a patch of sun on their rumpled bed, and whiled away the rest of the afternoon just lounging there, shifting or rotating around the bed, adjusting themselves occasionally to follow the clockwise rotation, the slant of that yellow warmth, and to bathe in those warm winds all through the rest of the lengthening afternoon. At dusk they rose without dressing, fixed supper, then loved again, and went to sleep early. They slept hard into the next day, with a feeling as sure and satisfying as if they had been constructing something real and physical and visible.

  BOOK TWO

  An Earlier Beginning

  Intimations of a Fiery Aeon

  We are searching for a beginning. We have followed down the succession of formations to what seems a foundation; but we perceive this must rest on something which already existed; it cannot be the beginning. It is an ocean-born mass of sediments. The ocean preceded the sediments. Something for the ocean to rest on preceded the ocean; what was that? Not something born of ocean. What existed before ocean and ocean sediments?

  The deepest rocks are hard and crystalline. We have concluded that their condition has probably resulted largely from the action of pressure and heat. So the resulting state of the materials would be extremely different from that of the original sediments. This is called metamorphism.

  An important point is the evidence of ancient heat universally extended. I do not suppose the metamorphism of the rocks has taken place at the surface. The heat engaged seems to have been interior heat. It was shut in and retained for ages by overlaying masses of strata.

  That the heat was internal is evinced by many proofs of the continued existence of internal heat. You will recall the phenomena of geysers and hot springs. You will remember that lavas from volcanoes come from some heated interior. Your thoughts will again glance over the thousands of square miles of surface covered by lavas which issued through fissures in the Age preceding the present. You will be vividly impressed with the conviction that intense heat exists within the earth; and since all heat tends to waste away, you will conclude that the earth’s surface temperature was much higher some millions of years ago than it is at present. The wastage of the earth’s heat is proved by actual observation. Science has measured the amount of heat which arrives on the earth annually—that is, the amount on each square yard—and has also measured the amount which escapes annually. It is thus shown that the wastage exceeds the receipts. The earth is growing cold. This great fact is established by experiment, by observation on the escape of heat from within, and by the records of an ancient higher temperature than now exists at the surface.

  Cooling off! That disclosure puts our minds in a new attitude toward the world’s history. We have to contemplate the earth as a cooling globe. That points our thoughts backward, along a progress of cooling. That summons us to consider what conditions of the world must have been passed in the progress of cooling. By all the evidence that progressive cooling has been a fact.

  This is the way reasoning leads us: Following the course of cooling backward, we arrive at a time such that water could not have existed on the earth. All the water of the earth must have been vapor or gas suspended in the atmosphere. At a time when no ocean had existed, no ocean-sediments had been deposited. All those rocks which have resulted from marine sedimentation were yet non-existent. The earth had probably a solid surface of some kind; but to emit heat sufficient to hold all the water of the world in an uncondensed state, the temperature of the surface must have been high—perhaps a glowing temperature.

  We should distinguish between vapor and gas. Gas is dry, like atmospheric air—like the cloud of steam condensed in the air after escaping from the boiler. There may be mineral vapors as well as igneous vapors. Most mineral vapors must be intensely heated. We may call such a vapor “fire mist.” If the earth were vaporized by heat, to what limits in space would the vapor extend? We must think of that. If the earth was ever a fire-mist globe, its dimensions were vastly greater than at present. But now our world has shrunk to its final irrevocable being.

  There is another thought to be mentioned here. The earth is only one of a system of worlds. There is good reason for believing that any remote origin which we can establish for the earth must represent the remote origin of the other planets. In saying they are one system, I refer to their common motions and patterns about one sun: the common elliptic form of their orbits; the fact that all move from west to east; that all revolve nearly in one plane; that, so far as ascertained, they all rotate on their axes; from west to east; that the forms and movements of all, and of all the satellites, are conformed to one set of laws, and that all we know of other planets points to a fundamental correspondence and identity between them. So many patterns are unable to be altered, only discovered.

  This conclusion vastly enlarges our field. We must think of each of the planets heated up to a fire-mist condition. It is easier to think the sun also heated to such condition, since he is at present not so far removed from it as the planets. Now, when all these bodies were in that heated condition which maintained them in a fire-mist state, the whole space of the solar system must have been filled with fire mist. These particles—some of which may even have been solid—would have w
eight smaller than imagination can conceive. So the mist particles were practically suspended in space and required no gaseous support.

  The cooling history can be traced no farther back. Such, probably, was its beginning. I am perfectly prepared to admit that matter may have entered existence as a fire mist. However it originated, the temperature implied in fire mist is as inherently probable as any lower or higher temperature. Temperatures are merely circumstances. Whatever temperature prevails anywhere, things adjust themselves to it, and that is natural.

  From this point a natural process of cooling brings to pass all the events in our system’s physical history—all the events in our world’s history. We are proposing to show this, and trace our evolution in its general outlines. Now you shrink back and exclaim “Evolution?—Fate! Atheism!” That, my dear friend, shows your total ignorance of the nature of evolution.

  Be calm. God was in the beginning, is now, and ever will be. God originated; God controls; God is in the midst of his works. Suppose we call the fire mist the absolute beginning; there are certainly three things which are not fire mist, and require explanation infinitely more than a fire-mist condition of matter. Without these three things, there would never be a cooling history. These things are: 1. Matter—regardless of its condition. 2. Force—and that in its various forms. 3. Method—or everything would be plunged in chaos, and forever remain there. These things imply Power, Intelligence, Self-determination. Where self-determination is present, there is Personality. While the origination of Matter, Force, and Method remains, there is still need of a Creator. These three things originated, were the world to run down like a clock, we should be compelled in reason to ascribe its whole cycle of changes to the primordial activity of a Creative Being. For myself, this conclusion is infinitely short of satisfactory, as I shall explain in due time. But even this is a theistic view of the origin of the world.