by John Shirley
The woman who was ostensibly the owner of Kashmir—Ryan’s partner, really—came hurrying over, trotting around the heroic statue of powerful men lifting the world, beaming at Ryan. Brenda’s high forehead gleamed in the light from the window; her tight, low-cut silvery gown—rather much, Ryan thought, for a woman past thirty—forcing her to take small Geisha-like steps across the carpet. “Andrew!” she gasped, in an absurdly girlish voice. “What else can I get for you?”
“A bottle of our best champagne, if you please.”
“And,” Sullivan said, “bring a, uh…” He noticed Ryan watching him and sighed: “… a glass of water.”
“I’ll see to it personally,” Brenda fluted. “Personally per-son-ally! And then perhaps—the dessert cart!”
“Yes,” Ryan said. “That’ll be splendid; thank you, Brenda…”
He glanced around at the others. The smiles they’d put on for Brenda faded as she walked away—except, as always, Fisher, who seemed in his element in Rapture, still smiling confidently.
Maybe, Ryan thought, I’m imagining all this discontent.
But his reports from Sullivan, and other security sources, suggested that there was discontent at all levels of society—especially in Artemis Suites and “Pauper’s Drop,” both of which were growing dangerously crowded. He’d underestimated how many people were needed for basic maintenance work and hadn’t built enough housing for them. Rapture would soon exceed eighteen thousand souls. Not all of them came equipped with investment funds. He had hoped many of the maintenance and construction workers would earn their way out of their slummy squalor. Find a way to branch out, take a second job, invest—the way he would in their position. The rumors that Frank Fontaine and Sofia Lamb’s followers had been encouraging notions Andrew Ryan regarded as absolutely taboo—such as unions—were getting louder. Fontaine was slippery, however. Finding proof against him for Communist organizing was as hard as finding strong proof he was smuggling.
But Sofia Lamb—he had a plan for her. He’d get her to debate him in public. When Rapture’s better element heard her Marxist sophistry flagrantly blared on the radio, no one would object if she simply … disappeared.
“I was thinking,” Diane said, “that we might have some public performances, me and Sander and a few of them others—” She remembered her new grammar. Cleared her throat. “And a few others, in the park and in the atriums, get people out more. You’ve made all these large, lovely, high-ceilinged spaces for people—but what do they do? They huddle like little gophers in their warrens!”
Ryan found himself yearning for the simpler, less affected company of Jasmine Jolene. Perhaps he could slip away to see her tonight …
“Mr. Ryan?” Karlosky’s thick accent broke in on his thoughts. Smelling of tobacco and too much men’s cologne, Karlosky was standing at his elbow.
Ryan turned briskly to him, hoping this was an excuse to slip away early. “Yes?”
“There is problem in Hephaestus. Sabotage, they say!”
“Sabotage!” Strange that he should be almost pleased to hear of this. But it was just the excuse he needed. He stood. “Do not discommode yourselves,” he told the others. “I’d better go look into this.”
“I’ll come too,” Kinkaide said.
“Not your area of engineering, Anton. I’ll see to it. Ah—perhaps you can escort Diane home for me, after?”
“Oh yes, yes, delighted, surely, I … yes…”
Ryan hurried away with Karlosky, guessing that Bill McDonagh was already dealing with the emergency …
* * *
Bill McDonagh was up to his waist in icy water, wondering how he was going to deal with this emergency. He had sloshed across the valve-control room and found the right wheels to turn, but his numb fingers were losing strength. He only had two out of four shut down. He managed the third and fumbled at the fourth. He should have closed the hatch to the valve room. But if he did, he risked drowning in here. He’d switched on the bailing pumps and hoped the machine could keep up with the inflow till he could get this broken pipe plugged.
Roland Wallace was also wading in through the water, wearing rubber waders up to his armpits and gloves. Wallace pressed close at Bill’s side, reached into the cold water, and helped turn the last two valves. The valve wheels turned gratingly, and it seemed to take forever—but at last the flow was blocked.
The water stopped rushing into the room, and they found their way to the pumps, activated them, waiting for the room to drain—both with chattering teeth.
“You see the tool marks where they tore the pipes out?” Wallace asked, pointing. His voice was raised to be heard over the grinding and sucking sounds of the pumps.
Bill nodded, rubbing the feeling back into his hands. The broken coolant pipe was jutting out, the metal ragged at the ends, the harsh angle and the marks on the wall suggesting strong force. “You got no argument from me, mate. Sabotage!”
The floodwater had almost pumped out when Bill saw the package taped to the ceiling vent.
“What the hell is that, Roland!”
“What—oh! I don’t know! But it’s got some kind of clock on it…”
“Jay-sus! It’s a bomb! Get out!”
Wallace threw the bolt, opened the metal door—and they stepped through not a split second before a whoomf sound came from behind them, with a flash and a sharp smell of gunpowder.
“Fuck!” Bill sputtered. He peered through the smoky air, back through the open door, and saw a blackened mark on the vent where the bomb had gone off but no other appreciable damage. Instead, the room was littered with what looked like large pieces of confetti, which were starting to stick to the wet floor and walls.
Coughing from the acrid smoke, he stepped in, scooped up some of the confetti, and hurried back out.
There were words on the strips of paper. Printed in large black letters on one was
RAPTURE OPPRESSORS
And on another was
BE WARNED
They were all like that, one phrase or the other. “Be warned, Rapture oppressors,” he said, looking over the slips of paper.
“A bomb with nothing but paper in it?” Wallace said, puzzled, scratching his head.
Bill remembered hearing as a kid about the old anarchist bombers active from the late nineteenth century. Mad bombers they’d called them. But confetti wasn’t their style. “Just a way to get our attention,” he suggested. “A little sabotage, yeah? A bit of a bomb, but not enough to make people go all out to find the bombers. Like it says—a warning, innit?”
“But the implication is that a bigger bomb will come,” Wallace pointed out. “Otherwise, why a bomb at all?”
“God’s truth, that. Think they’re oppressed, do they? That supposed to tell us what they want? Bloody vague, I call it.”
“What’s vague?” Ryan asked, hurrying in. “What’s happened?”
“Here, Mr. Ryan—you oughtn’t to be here!” Bill said. “There could be another bomb!”
“A bomb!”
Wallace shrugged. “More like a firecracker, sir. Spreading confetti—with some kind of political warning on it. Not much damage.”
Bill handed him the slips of paper. And watched Ryan’s face go red, his hands trembling.
“So it’s begun!” Ryan sputtered. “Communist organizers! Probably that Lamb woman’s followers…”
“Could be,” Bill said. “Or mebbe someone who wants us to think that’s what’s going on here…”
Ryan looked at him sharply, crumpling the paper up in his fist. “Meaning what, exactly, Bill?”
“Dunno, guv. But…” He hesitated, knowing Ryan’s mixed feelings about Frank Fontaine. Ryan seemed to like Fontaine. Didn’t seem to want to bring him down. “Someone like Fontaine might use this political muck to shift power around in Rapture…”
Ryan looked doubtful. “Someone, yes—but Fontaine?”
Wallace cleared his throat. “Rapture does have its vulnerabilities, Mr. Ryan. Doctors can be ki
nd of expensive here. Fontaine could point that out. Sanitation, even oxygen—all charged for here.”
Ryan looked at him with narrowed eyes. “What of it? I built this place. Ryan Industries owns most of it. People have to purchase property, compete their way to comfort, here!”
Wallace gulped but went bravely on. “Sure, Mr. Ryan, but—people working for most merchants here aren’t getting paid much. There’s no minimum wage so it’s kind of hard to earn enough to save and, uh…”
“The resourceful will earn! We have possibilities here others don’t have—no restriction on science, no interference from the superstitious control systems people call religion! These malcontents have no case! And I must say, Wallace, I’m surprised to hear these Communist ideas from you…”
Wallace looked genuinely alarmed at that. Bill hastily put in, “I think all he’s saying, guv, is that the appearance of unfairness gives these Commie blokes a chance to get their snouts in. So we’ve got to be on the watch for ’em.”
“That’s it!” Wallace said quickly. “Just—on the … on the watch.”
Ryan gave Wallace a long, slow, silent appraisal. Then he looked back at the remnants of the message bomb. “We’ll watch all right. I’ll put Sullivan on this. With all speed. Right now—let us find a safer place for a convocation…”
“For a—right, guv. For one of those. Out this way, sir…”
Bill had told himself, for his family’s sake, that everything was going to work out. But he could no longer ignore the stunningly obvious:
Rapture was cracking at the seams.
12
Artemis Suites
1955
“I was working in the lighthouse today,” Sam said glumly. Sam Lutz was tired. His back ached as he sat beside his wife and watched their daughter play beside the family bunk beds.
Sam and Mariska Lutz were sitting on their bottom bunk in the crowded number 6 of Artemis Suites—a “suite” intended for a few people, but which the Lutzes shared with nine other families. They ignored the argument and bustle and jostling from the rest of the apartment and watched Mascha playing on the floor by the bunk with two stiff little dolls Sam had made for her from scrap wood. One of the dolls was a boy, one a girl, and little Mascha—a pale black-haired child, with flashing black eyes like her mother—was making them dance together. “La, la-la la, the rapture of Rapture, your heart it will capture, oh la, la-la la-a-a!” she sang, her reedy voice providing the music for the dance. Some song she’d heard piped over the public address in one of the atriums.
“It was good you could get the work, Sam,” Mariska said as she watched Mascha. Her diction was good—she’d taught English in Prague—but her accent was thick. They’d met when Sam was stationed in Eastern Europe after World War Two. Circumstances had made it almost impossible for her to marry him and go back to the States—but in ’48 they were approached by a recruiter from Rapture looking for Atlantic Express laborers. It was a way out of the wreckage that was left after the war. A way out of the U.S. Army.
Only Rapture wasn’t an out. He felt trapped here. The work had finished up, and Sam got laid off. And he’d been summarily informed he wasn’t allowed to leave the underwater colony. There was beauty in Rapture, sure—but people like Sam didn’t have much chance to appreciate it. It was like Sofia Lamb said: most people here were like the backstairs servants in a palace.
“Yeah, I needed the work, sure,” Sam admitted. “But it was just two days’ worth. Not enough to get us out of here. Need enough to get our own place in Sinclair Deluxe, at least.”
“There are some rooms they don’t use behind Fighting McDonagh’s—Elaine told me about them. Maybe they would let us have them cheap! The McDonaghs are nice.”
He grunted. “Maybe, but … not sure I’d want the girl there. McDonagh’s night manager hires out those rooms to women from Pauper’s Drop … desperate women, if you know what I mean…”
“And is it so much better here?”
“No.” Then realizing that gloom could be catching, he smiled and patted her hand, leaning close to whisper, “Some day I’ll take you home to Colorado. You’d like Colorado…”
“Maybe someday.” She twined her fingers with his, looking nervously around. “Best not to speak of such, here. We have food and shelter now…”
Sam snorted. He looked at the other people shuffling back and forth in the close, malodorous suite. And all the other rooms and suites in the Artemis building were just as crowded, just as prone to tension.
Little Toby Griggs appeared to be arguing with big, chunky Babcock again. Something odd about those two. It was as if in a moment they’d transform into two cats arching their backs and hissing. Then Babcock turned and walked away between the bunk beds. Griggs followed …
There were two rows of bunk beds in what should have been the living room. Seven more against the two long walls in the bedroom. Junk piled in the corner. Not enough storage. He hoped the toilet wasn’t plugged up again. Smelled like it might be.
And someone had been putting graffiti on the walls. Ryan doesn’t own us! it said. Become the body of the Lamb! That would have to come down before the constables saw it.
“Oh, if you were up in the lighthouse,” Mariska said suddenly, “you saw the sky! That must have been nice!” Her eyes were wide at the thought of seeing the sky again.
“Yes. I only had a few seconds to look at it. They had us busy fixing the entry bathysphere. We had to bowse up three hundred yards of steel spool and set it in place. Not easy with just three of us and only a hand-cranked winch. And it was cold up in that lighthouse shaft. It’s winter on the surface. I remember crossing this ocean in a troopship this time of year—cold as hell and the waves higher than the ship, all of us seasick.” He made a mental effort to force memories of the war out of his mind. It was helped by Toby Griggs and Babcock arguing loudly on the other side of the bunks. He tried to ignore them—you had to screen most people out, in these conditions, if you wanted to stay sane.
“Did you hear anything up there in the lighthouse?” she asked. “I mean—maybe ships passing or gulls or…”
“You know what I heard up there? Icebergs! We heard one of them banging on the lighthouse—boom! Big ol’ clangin’, echoing sound! What a noise!”
“I’d like to go up and look sometime,” she said wistfully. “If they allowed it…”
“Oh Jesus. I’m sorry I brought you down here. They made it sound so good…”
She kissed him on the cheek. Her lips seemed deliciously soft to him, after dealing with cold, hard metal all day. “Miluji tě!” she whispered. Czech for “I love you.”
“Me too, kid!” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders. She was a small woman, nestling easily against him.
Around the crowded bunk room, people muttered and argued and bitched in three, maybe four different languages: the singsong of Chinese, the bubbling flow of Spanish, and especially the sarcastic brassiness of Brooklyn English.
“Whadya doin’ with ya boots under my bunk over heah? I look like I got room for your shit under my bunk fa cryin’ out loud?”
“Someone fucking stole the last of my scented fucking soap! You know how hard it is to get that shit? It’s probably you, Morry…”
“The fuck it was!”
“Somebody got into my lockbox! I had my last EVE hypo in there and it’s gone!”
“Whatya talkin’ about, you’re the one stole my plasmids! I had a New Skills I was gonna inject for the job tomorrow!”
Frightened by the shouting, Mascha came to sit with her back against her dad’s legs. She made the little dolls clack together, singing loudly to drown out the sound of all those heated voices. “La, la-la la, the rapture of Rapture, your heart it will capture, oh la, la-la la-a-a!”
Someone in the far corner shouted, but Sam couldn’t make out what they said. He caught a flash, heard a crackle, smelled ozone—a shout of pain and a flare of blue light.
A ball of fire sizzled across the
room, between the bunks, and charred the wall on the left.
“Mama! Daddy!” Mascha whimpered, climbing up on the bed behind them to peek over her mother’s shoulder. “What is it?”
“Someone’s messing with those plasmids!” Mariska whispered, her voice choked with fear. “They’re way over there, little one, on the other side of the room—we’ll be safe here.”
“Stay at the bunk,” Sam told her firmly. Mariska tried to hold him back, but he pulled away. He had to know what was going on. If they were throwing fireballs, the whole place could catch—plenty of flammables in Artemis. They were a ways from the doors to the suite and could surely burn alive before they got out. A mighty peculiar way to die considering they were deep underwater. But he’d heard of men burning alive in submarines in the war.
He moved carefully to steal a look around the corner of the Ming family’s double bunk and saw the two men quarrelling in the far corner of the room near the row of circular blue-lit ports looking out into the sea.
“Just get outta my face or the next one’ll toast you, Griggs!” Babcock shouted, jabbing an angry finger at the smaller man. Babcock was a tall man with fat cheeks and patchy hair, greasy coveralls. He had one of the odd skin reactions people got from plasmid use, this one on his scalp, making an ugly mesh of red welts. Part of his hair had fallen out around it.
Toby Griggs was squared off with him—a puny, fox-faced fellow, hair slicked back; he had a tart way of talking and a lively sense of humor. Sam had always kind of liked Toby for his spunk. Toby worked as a salesman in one of the shops off Fort Frolic and still had his wrinkly green-and-black-checked suit on.
“Back off or I’ll electrocute you, Babcock!” Toby crowed as energy crackled between the fingers of his raised right hand. “I’ll strap you in the electric chair standin’ up!”
Sam wasn’t surprised that Toby had spent his paycheck on a plasmid from Fontaine Futuristics—Toby had been talking about how a good plasmid could be an equalizer. He was a little guy and didn’t like to be bullied.
