by John Shirley
He waited for her to say, Oh, call me Sofia. But she didn’t. She merely nodded, just faintly.
Ryan cleared his throat. “You are well aware of the driving forces behind Rapture—its philosophy, its plan. The Great Chain…”
“Yes, but I can’t claim to completely understand your … operative philosophy. I am of course attracted by the possibilities of a new society that has no … no interference from the outside world. A self-sustaining colony that might rediscover human possibilities—the possibility of a society free from the warmongering of the upper world…”
“I understand you were in Hiroshima when…”
“I was in a sheltered, outlying place. But yes. People I sometimes worked with were burnt to shadows on the walls of their homes.” Her eyes held a flat horror at the memory. “If the modern world were a patient in my care…” She shook her head. “I would diagnose it suicidal.”
“Yes. Hiroshima, Nagasaki—they were a large part of the reason we built Rapture. I suspected you might understand our imperative, after seeing what happened there, firsthand. I’m certain the surface world will commit nuclear suicide in time, Dr. Lamb. One generation, two, three—it will happen—and when it does, Rapture will be safe, here below. Self-sufficient and thriving. Rapture is deliverance.”
She tapped her cigarette ash into the brass floor ashtray beside her chair, nodding eagerly now. “That is the great appeal for me. Deliverance. A new chance to … to remake society into something innately good! Everyone has a duty to the world, Mr. Ryan—and we’ve lost all that, up above, in all the grubbing chaos of that perverse civilization…”
Ryan frowned, not exactly understanding her. But before he could ask her to elucidate, she went on:
“And I was gratified to hear that everyone has equal opportunity here! Including women, presumably?” She glanced at him questioningly. “In ordinary society the male hierarchy crushes our dreams. They see a woman with a spark”—she crushed her cigarette out angrily in the ashtray—“and they crush it out! ‘Lady doctors,’ as they call them, are sometimes tolerated. But … real advancement for a woman in the field? No.”
“Oh yes, I see…” Ryan thoughtfully stroked his mustache with the ball of his thumb. Theoretically everyone in Rapture started on an equal footing—and anyone could rise to the top with hard work, enterprise, talent, ruthless dedication to the simple, liberating power of free enterprise. Even women.
He’d invited Sofia Lamb to Rapture because she’d graduated at the top of her class. She was said to have written brilliant theses—which Ryan hadn’t had time to read—and to have shown a fearlessness in psychiatric experimentation. Scientific fearlessness was axiomatic to Rapture.
“You can compete with the rest of us here,” Ryan said firmly, as much to convince himself as her. “But of course your initial work would be to evaluate Rapture, help us develop a means of preparing the public for the future. More pressingly, some residents may be developing psychological problems—little, ah, personal difficulties that bubble up from isolation down here. Your first task will be to diagnose those problems and suggest a solution.”
“Oh, of course, that is quite understood. But later—if I want to develop my own … institute, here in Rapture?”
“Ah yes. That would be splendid. Why shouldn’t people have a psychiatric doctor to consult with? A whole institute for self-exploration.”
“Or perhaps for redefining the self,” she murmured. She stood. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to be shown my quarters. The trip here has been—a lot to absorb. I need to change, rest a bit—and I’ll need a full tour of Rapture. I’ll start my diagnosis right away—this evening.”
“Good! I’ll have Chief Sullivan send over his files about … problem people. The little malcontents cropping up—the complainers, and so on. You can start with those.”
Neptune’s Bounty, Rapture
1950
Brigid Tenenbaum was walking down the chilly dock toward the water, thinking that perhaps she might get some fresh fish for dissection. If they were iced, she could extract their genetic material with some hope it might be intact. She didn’t have a definite contract with Sinclair Solutions anymore, but she could still use their lab after-hours, since she had the door combination. The tale of her attempt to extract semen from one of the submariners with a large syringe had gotten her dropped, unreasonably she felt, from Sinclair’s research labs. Certainly, she’d used bad judgment in implying she wanted something else from the man’s evil-smelling genitals. Perhaps she’d thrust the needle into his gonad rather too vigorously. But for him to run screaming from the lab, naked from the waist down, with a syringe dangling from his groin, trailing blood and shrieking, “The crazy bitch put a spike in my goddamn nuts!” seemed like an overreaction.
Since then she’d scarcely seen Rapture’s founder. Nor had she been able to get an appointment with the man. There was always an excuse from that snippy Diane McClintock.
Sometimes she wished she were back in the camp, working with her mentor. At least they had real creative freedom.
Brigid sighed and tugged her coat closer around her shoulders. It was always nippy down here, in the strange, underwater docks. A kind of artificial cavern, really, within Rapture, filled with water, where the delivery boats pulled up, loaded with fish and other approved goods brought from the submarine bays. The docks were wooden, the walls and ceiling were metal—the water lapped at the pylons with a strange hollow, echoing whisper.
A constable and a black man who seemed to be a deputy were walking past, both of them looking at her curiously.
She saw a couple of dockworkers in heavy pea jackets, standing on the pier below her, waiting for a small tugboatlike vessel to pull up so they could offload it. They were amusing themselves as they waited, tossing a ball back and forth. She recognized both of the men—she’d seen them under Dr. Suchong’s hands. He’d tried to cure one of them, Stiffy, of a partial paralysis—and the other one …
The other one saw her first. He was a stubby-nosed man with a windburned face—but his red face went white when he saw Tenenbaum. He dropped the ball and clapped both hands to his genitals. “No you don’t, lady, you ain’t getting near ’em!”
He backed away from her, shaking his head. “Uh uh, lady!”
“Don’t be such a fool!” she called out wearily, searching for the right English words. “I am not here for you. I want fresh fish.”
“You’re calling them fish now, are you?” the man demanded, backing away—and falling off the dock into the water. He got up, sputtering, spitting water—it was only four feet deep here.
“Ha, ha, Archie!” the other fisherman called gleefully to him, going to pick up the ball. “You finally got that bath you been avoidin’!”
“Screw you, Stiffy!” Archie called, splashing off toward the approaching boat. “Ahoy there, give me a hand; I’m comin’ aboard!”
“Ah, whatya scared of a skinny little dame for!” Stiffy yelled, laughing.
She approached Stiffy, putting on a professorial, officious manner so that he wouldn’t try to become too familiar.
“You throw the ball—it is very … unusual for you, no?” she asked, staring at his hands. She’d stood by and observed when Suchong had examined him. “Your hands—one paralyzed, the other only half working, this I remember. You carry some things on shoulders, not do so much work with hands.”
“Sure—that’s why they called me Stiffy. I got another kinda Stiffy, lady, if you—”
She gave him her severest frown. “Do not trifle with me! I wish only to know—how you can catch ball now. With fingers that were paralyzed. Dr. Suchong repaired your hands, yes?”
“Suchong? Hell no! Made a lotta excuses. Funniest thing. We had a net fulla fish, see. I was scoopin’ ’em out of the net, sortin’ ’em out—that much I could do, anyhow—and there was some kinda sea slug mixed in with ’em, floppin’ around. Weirdest lookin’ little slug you ever saw! Little bastard bit me on the hand
!” Stiffy chortled. He didn’t seem angry about it at all. “I didn’t even know they could bite! Well, my hands got kinda swole—but when the swelling went down”—he looked at his hands in renewed wonder—“they started to come to life!” He tossed the ball in the air and deftly caught it. “You see that? Before the little bastard bit me, I couldn’t do that, no way, no how!”
“You think it was sea slug that release paralysis?”
“Something in that bite—I could feel it spreading out, like, in my hand!”
“Ach! Indeed!” She peered at his hands. Saw the curious bite marks. “If only I had this creature … You can find another such sea slug?”
“I still got the same one! Chucked it in a bucket of seawater! It was such a crazy-lookin’ little thing I actually thought I could maybe sell it to one of you scientist types. You wanta buy it?”
“Well—perhaps I do.”
Sofia Lamb’s Office
1950
“I guess … I guess I shouldn’t have brought my kids to Rapture. But they told me we had to come together, the whole family, or nothin’ … They said they needed skills with a boiler, I’d be taken care of and make a pile of dough…”
Dr. Sofia Lamb was watching the middle-aged man in the workman’s overalls pacing back and forth in her office, wringing his hands. “Wouldn’t you like to relax on the couch as we work on this, Mr. Glidden?”
“No, no I can’t, Doc,” Glidden muttered. He sniffled, as if trying not to cry. His eyes were bruised looking from fatigue; his thin lips quivered. His big hands were reddened from his work in the geothermal plant. “I need to get back home. Ya see, my wife, my kids, they’re alone in the new apartment … if you can call it an apartment. A dump is what it is. Lotta shifty characters around there. I feel like the kids ain’t safe in that place … We’re havin’ to share it with another family—there ain’t enough housing in this crazy town. Nothing I can afford, I mean. They said there’d be more housing here … and better pay. I thought it was a road-to-riches thing, like the Comstock Mine … They talked like…” He bit his lip.
She nodded, shifted in her chair, and made a note. She’d heard a similar story from a number of workers she’d interviewed as part of her project for Ryan. “You feel you were … misled about what would happen here?”
“Yeah, I—” Glidden broke off, stopping in the center of the room, staring at her suspiciously. “You … you work for Ryan, right?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking—”
“So no, no I wasn’t, what’d you say, misled.” He licked his lips. “They were straight with me.”
“It’s all right; you can say what you really think,” Sofia said reassuringly. “It’s true that these therapeutic sessions will be summed up in a report—but I’m not naming specific people in my report. It’ll be about the trends…”
“Yeah? How come this ‘therapy’ thing here is free? I wouldn’t-a come except my wife says I’m all tense and like that … but … free? Nothing’s free in Rapture!”
“Really—you can trust me, Mr. Glidden.”
“So you say. But supposin’ I get fired because of this? Maybe they blackball me! So I got no work! And then what? You can’t leave Rapture! You … can’t leave! Not even you, Doc! You think he’ll let you leave if you want to? Naw.”
“Oh, well I…” Her voice trailed off. She hadn’t given much thought to leaving Rapture. There seemed so many possibilities here. But what if she did try to leave? What would Ryan do? She was afraid to find out. “I’m … in the same boat, so to speak, with you, Mr. Glidden.” She smiled. “Or under the same boats.”
He crossed his arms in front of him and shook his head. He wasn’t going to say anything else.
She wrote, Subjects are typical in mistrust of Ryan and feeling of alienation. Social claustrophobia at boiling point for some. Financial status a key factor. Higher incomes show less anxiety … She underlined higher incomes and then said, “You can go, Mr. Glidden. Thanks for coming in.”
She watched Glidden rush from the room, and then she went to her desk, unlocked a drawer, and took out her journal. She usually preferred it to the audio diaries. She sat down and wrote,
If the Rapture experiment fails—as I suspect it will—another social experiment could be carried out in this strange, undersea hothouse. The very conditions that make Rapture explosive—its sequestering from the outside world, its inequities—could be the source for a radical social transformation. It’s something to consider … the danger of even contemplating such a social experiment is enormous, however … I must not let this journal fall into Sullivan’s hands …
Sofia put the pen down and wondered if what she was contemplating was too risky. Politics. Power … An idea that was becoming an idée fixe. Possibly it was sheer madness …
But madness or not—it had been growing like a child within her all the time she’d been in Rapture. She’d been quietly gestating the notion that what Rapture could destroy—men like Glidden—it could also save, if it were guided by a new leader.
She could turn Rapture sharply to the left—from within.
Dangerous thinking. But the idea would not go away. It had a life of its own …
Pumping Station 5
1950
Bill McDonagh was switching on drainage pump 71, to pump out the insulation and ventilation spaces in the walls of the Mermaid Lounge, when Andrew Ryan walked into station 5. Rapture’s visionary genius was smiling but seemed a bit distant, distracted.
“Bill! How about taking a quick inspection walk with me, as we’re both near Little Eden. Or are you handling an emergency?”
“No emergency, Mr. Ryan. Just a bit of an adjustment. There, that’s done it.”
Soon they were strolling along the concourse of Little Eden Plaza, walking past the gracious façade of the Pearl Hotel. People ambled by, couples arm in arm, shoppers with bags. Ryan seemed pleased by this evidence of thriving commerce. Some of the shoppers nodded shyly to Mr. Ryan. One rather matronly woman asked for his autograph, which he patiently provided before he and Bill hurried on.
“Anything you’re particularly concerned with, ’round here, Mr. Ryan?” Bill asked as they walked past the Plaza Hedone apartments.
“There’s talk of chemical leakage, and we had some kind of complaints at a shop in the area, so I thought I’d look into both at once. I don’t care much for complaints, but I like to know what’s going on and had some free time…”
They came to a corner that was covered with what appeared to be a thick green-black chemical leaking from a seam in a bulkhead. It smelled of petroleum and solvents. “There it is, Bill—were you aware of it?”
“I am, sir. That’s why I was adjusting the valves in station five. Trying to cut back on flushing so I could reduce this ’ere toxic overflow. There’s a factory upstream, you might say, or anyway upstairs from ’ere, turns out new signs and the like. Augustus Sinclair owns the place, what I remember. They use a lot of chemicals, dump them in the outpipes—but they corrode the pipes, and the solvents work their way out to the sidewalk. What might be worse, the rest of it gets dumped outta Rapture, Mr. Ryan—I checked on it. These chemicals, they go out into the ocean and down current—could be they’ll get all mixed up with the fish down there. We could end up eatin’ these chemicals when we eat those fish.”
Ryan was looking at him with arched eyebrows. “Really, Bill—how ridiculously alarmist! Why, the ocean is vast. We couldn’t possibly pollute it! It would all be diluted.”
“Right enough, sir, but some of it accumulates, what with currents and eddies, and if we create enough of a mess—”
“Bill—forget it. We’ve got sufficient concerns right here inside Rapture. We’ll have to replace those pipes with something stronger, and we’ll charge Augustus for it…”
Bill gave it one more try. “Just thought it’d be better if he’d use chemicals that wasn’t so corrosive, guv. Could be done, I reckon, if—”
Ryan laughed softly. “
Bill! Listen to yourself! You’ll ask me to regulate industrial waste, next! Why, old Will Clark, up in Montana, created a wasteland around his mines and refineries, and did anyone suffer?” He cleared his throat, seeming to recollect something. “Well—perhaps some did, yes. But the world of commerce is restless; it’s like a hungry child that keeps growing and never quite grows up—it becomes a giant, Bill, and people must get out of its way or be stepped on by its ten-league boots! Oh, I’ll look into stronger drainage pipes outside factories, to prevent a mess on the sidewalk. Ryan Industries will bill Rapture, and Rapture will bill the factories. Come along, Bill, this way—ah! Here’s the other problem…”
They’d come to a shop in Little Eden Plaza called Gravenstein’s Green Groceries. Across the “street”—more of a wide passageway—and a little ways down was another, larger business called Shep’s ShopMart.
Reeking garbage of all sorts was piled up high in the gutter around Gravenstein’s. Bill shook his head, seeing every kind of garbage imaginable, most of it decaying. The fish heads were especially pungent. Shep’s, by contrast, looked immaculate. A small man in a grocer’s apron rushed out of Gravenstein’s as they approached; he had a hatchet face and flaplike ears, intense brown eyes, curly brown hair. “Mr. Ryan!” he shouted, wringing his hands as he ran up to them. “You came! I must’ve sent a hundred requests, and here you are at last!”
Ryan frowned. He didn’t respond well to implied criticism. “Well? Why have you let all this trash pile up here? That’s hardly in the spirit of the Great Chain…”
“Me letting it pile up? I didn’t! He did! Shep did it! I will pay any reasonable price for trash pickup but he—!” Gravenstein pointed across the street at the big man stepping out of Shep’s. Gordon Shep wore a big blue suit, his swag belly straining out of the jacket; he had a jowly face, an unpleasant gold-toothed grin, and an enormous cigar in his hand. Seeing Gravenstein pointing at him accusingly, Shep crossed the street, shaking his head disparagingly, and managing a good deal of swagger despite the obesity.
