Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “We’re talking about fish?” I asked. “After what you just showed me, those things lying in there, we’re sitting here talking about fucking fish?”

  Dr. McNamara took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yes, Councilor. We’re talking about fish. You see, the anglerfish males begin their lives as autonomous organisms, but when they finally locate a female, which must be an almost impossible task given the environmental conditions involved, they attach themselves to her body with their jaws and become parasitic. In time, they completely fuse with the female’s body, losing much of their skeletal structure, sharing a common circulatory system, becoming, in essence, no more than reproductive organs. The question is, do the males, in some sense, die? They can no longer live free of the host female. They receive all of their nutrients via her bloodstream and – ”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I told her, and looked down at the floor between my feet, starting to think I was going to vomit again.

  “Don’t worry about it, Councilor. We’ll talk again later, when you’re feeling better. There’s no hurry.”

  There’s no hurry.

  But in my dreams, as I make my way across that corpse-strewn crater, my head and lungs and soul filled to bursting with the Fenrir’s music, I am seized by an urgency beyond anything that I’ve ever known before. My feet cannot move quickly enough, and, after a while, I realize that it’s not even Sailor that I’m looking for, not her that I’m navigating this terrible, impossible graveyard to find.

  I have never reached the center.

  I have never reached the center yet.

  Since I was a child, I’ve loved the zeps. When I was four or five, my mothers took me to the Carver Street transfer station, and we watched together as one enormous gray airship docked and another departed. There was even a time when I fantasized that I might someday become a pilot, or an engineer. I read books on general aerodynamics and the development of Martian zeps, technical manuals on hybrid tricyclohydrazine/solar fuel cells and prop configuration and the problems of achieving low-speed lift in a thin CO2-heavy atmosphere. I built plastic models that my mothers had bought for me in Earthgoods shops. And then, at some point, I moved on to other, less-remarkable things. Puberty. Girls. And my mathematics and low-grade psi aptitude scores that eventually led to my seat on the Council. But I still love the zeps, and I love traveling on them. They are elegant things in a world where we have created very little elegance and much ugliness. They drift regally above Mars like strange helium-filled animals, almost like the gigantic floaters that evolved some three hundred and fifty million miles away in the Jovian atmosphere. I’d been praying that the long flight from Hope VII to the military port at the eastern edge of the Claritas Fossae might be some small relief after the horror that Jun’ko’s billygirl had shown me. But first there’d been the nightmare, and now this network mesuinu and her camera eyes and questions I’d agreed to hear.

  “How do you spell ‘anglerfish’?” she asked, scribbling something on a pad she’d pulled from the breast pocket of her brown jacket.

  “What?”

  “Anglerfish. Is it one word or two? I’ve never heard it before.”

  “How the hell would I know? What the fuck difference does it make? You’re doing this on short delay, right?”

  She frowned and wrote something on the pad. It was somehow sickeningly quaint, watching a cyborg with an eight-petabyte recall chip making handwritten notes.

  “Do you think you’ll forget?” I asked and sipped my second bowl of tea. The brandy was strong and better than I’d expected, the steam from the tea filling my head and making Ariadne Vaughn’s questions a little easier to endure.

  She laughed and thumped the pad with one end of her stylus. ‘Oh, that. It’s just an old habit. I don’t think I’ll ever quite get over it.”

  “I don’t know how to spell ‘anglerfish’,” I lied.

  “Jun’ko Valenzuela told me that you were trailing a freighter, that one of her girls said Sailor Li had booked passage on a freighter named Oryoku Maru.”

  “How much did you have to pay her to tell you that?” I asked. “Or did you find that threats were more effective with Jun’ko?”

  “Are there currently any plans to allow civilian press into the containment facilities?”

  “No,” I said, watching her over the rim of my bowl. “The Council’s public affairs office could have told you that.”

  “They did,” she replied. “But I wanted to hear it from you. Now, there are rumors that you physically abused Sailor Li before she left you. Is that true, Councilor?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I sipped at my tea, glaring at her through the steam, trying to grasp the logic behind her seemingly random list of questions. The progression from one topic to another escaped me, and I wondered if something in her head was malfunctioning.

  “Councilor, did you ever beat your lover?” she asked again and chewed at her lower lip.

  I thought about lying, and then I said, “I hit her.”

  “After she took the mark?”

  “Yes. I hit her after she took the mark.”

  “But no charges were ever filed with the magistrate’s office in Herschel. Why do you think that is?”

  I smiled and set my bowl down on the portal ledge. Vibrations through the wall of the airship sent tiny concentric ripples across the surface of the dark liquid.

  “There have been allegations that the Council saw to it that no charges were filed against you,” the journalist said. “Are you aware of that?”

  “Sailor never brought charges against me because she knew if the case went to trial that I’d confess, and if I were in jail, I couldn’t follow her. And, besides, she didn’t have time left to waste on trials, Ms. Vaughn. The clock was ticking. She had more pressing matters to attend to.”

  “You mean the Fenrir?”

  “No, Ms. Vaughn, I mean making a fortune as a whore in Hope VII.”

  She laughed, the comfortable sort of laugh she might have laughed if we were old, close friends and what I’d just said was no more than a joke. Once, not long after I returned to Herschel City from IHF21, one of the members of the Council’s Board of Review and Advancement told me that she was deeply disturbed at my cynicism, my propensity for hatred, and that I was so quick to judge and anger. I admitted the fault and promised to meditate twice daily towards freeing myself of these shortcomings. I might as well have promised to raise the dead or make Mars safe for the XY chromo crowd. And now, sitting there on the Barsoom XI, facing this woman for whom my life and Sailor’s life and the Fenrir contagion were together no more than a chance for early promotion and a fat bonus from the network snigs, I realized that I cherished my ability to hate. I cherished it as surely as I’d cherished Sailor. As surely as I’d once stood in the shadows of docking zeppelins, joyful and dizzy with the bottomless wonder of childhood.

  I could have killed the smiling bitch then and there, could have slammed her head against the aluminum-epoxy alloy wall of the zep’s cabin until there was nothing left to shatter, and my fingers were slick and sticky with her blood and brains and the yellowish lube and cooling fluids of her ruptured optical and superpalatal implants.

  I could have done it in an instant, with no regrets. But there was still Sailor and the Fenrir’s music, that beckoning anglerfish bioluminescence shining brightly through absolute blackness and cold, leading me to a different and more unthinkable end than the sanctuary of a prison cell.

  “Do you really think you’ll find her?” Ariadne Vaughn asked.

  “If I live long enough,” I replied, turning to the portal again. The sun was beginning to set.

  “There are rumors, Councilor, that you’ve already been infected, that the contagion was passed to you by Sailor.”

  I slowly, noncommittally, nodded my head for her, for everyone at MBS studios and everyone who would soon be seeing this footage, and watched as the western sky turned the color of bruises. I didn’t bother tell
ing her what she already knew, repeating data stored in her pretty patchwork skull, that the viroid can only be contracted directly from specialized delivery glands inside the cloaca of a Fenrir drone. The infected aren’t contagious. She knew that.

  “That’s fifteen,” I said instead, glancing from the portal to my watch, even though it had actually been more like twenty minutes since she’d started asking me questions. “Time’s all up.”

  “Well then, we wish you luck,” she said, mock cheerfully, ending the rambling interview, “and Godspeed in your return to Herschel City.”

  “Bullshit,” I said quickly, before she had a chance to blink the o-feed down. She frowned and shook her head.

  “You know that’s going to be edited out,” she said, returning the pad and stylus to her breast pocket. “You know that, Councilor.”

  “Yeah, I know that. But it felt good, anyway. Now, Ms. Vaughn, you tell me where you think she is,” I said and smiled at the flight attendant as she passed our seats.

  “I assume you’ve had a look at the Oryoku Maru’s route db,” she said, rubbing at her itching nose again. I wondered how long it would be before the acidic slake necessitated reconstructive rhinoplasty, or, if perhaps, it already had. “So you know its last refueling stop before the south polar crossing is at Lowell Station.”

  “Yes,” I told her. “I know that. But I don’t think Sailor will go that far. I think she’ll get off before Lowell. I’m guessing Bosporos.”

  “Then you’re guessing wrong, Councilor.”

  “And just what the hell makes you think that?” I asked. Ariadne Vaughn cocked her head ever so slightly to one side, raised her left eyebrow, and I imagined her rehearsing this moment in front of mirrors and prompts and vidloops, working to get that ah-see-this-is-what-I-know-that-you-don’t expression just exactly fucking right. I began to suspect there were other cameras planted in the cabin, that we were still being pixed for MBS. “There’s nothing in Lowell. There hasn’t been since the war.”

  “We have some reliable contacts in the manifest dep and hanger crews down there,” she replied, leaning back in her seat, either putting distance between us or playing out another part of the pantomime. “The last couple of years, Fenrir cultists have been moving in, occupying the old federal complex and some of the adjacent buildings. All the company people stay away from the place, of course, but they’ve seen some things. Some of them even think it’s a temple.”

  There was an excited prickling at the back of my neck, a dull but hopeful flutter deep in my chest and stomach, but I did my best not to give anything away. The journalist knew too much already. She certainly didn’t need me giving her more. “That’s interesting” I said. “But the Council has a complete catalog of possible temple locations, as does the MCDC, and there’s nothing in either of them about Lowell.”

  “Which means what, Councilor? That the Council’s omniscient now? That it’s infallible? That the MCDC never fucks shit up? I think we both know that none of those things are true.”

  As she talked, I tried to recall what little I knew about Lowell Crater. It was an old settlement, one of the first, but a couple of fusion warheads dropped from orbit just after the start of the war had all but destroyed it. When the dust settled, after treaties had been signed and the plagues had finally burned themselves out, the Transit Authority had decided what was left at Lowell would make a good last stop before the South Pole. And that’s about all that I could recall, and none of it suggested that the Fenrir would choose Lowell as a temple site.

  “Assuming you’re not just yanking this out of your ass, Ms. Vaughn, why hasn’t MBS released this information? Why hasn’t the TA already filed disclosure reports with the MCDC and Offworld Control?”

  “Ask them,” she said, staring up at the ceiling of the cabin now. Maybe that’s where they hid the other cameras, I thought, not caring how paranoid I’d become. “My guess,” she continued, “they’re afraid the military’s gonna come sweeping in to clear the place out, and they’ll lose a base they can’t afford to lose, the economy being what it is. It’d cost them a fortune to relocate.”

  “And what about the network?”

  “The network?” she asked, looking at me again. “Well, we just want to be sure of our sources. No sense broadcasting stories that might cause a panic and have severe pecuniary consequences, if there’s a chance it’s all just something dreamed up by a few bored mechs stuck in some shithole at the bottom of the world. MBS will release the story, when we’re ready. Maybe you’ll be a part of it, Councilor, before this thing is done.”

  And then she stood up, thanked me for my time, and walked back to her assigned seat nearer the front of the passenger cabin. I sat alone, silently repeating all the things she’d said, hearing her voice in my head – But they’ve seen some things. Some of them even think it’s a temple. Outside the airship’s protective womb, night was quickly claiming the high plains of the Sun, and I could just make out the irregular red-orange silhouette of Phobos rising – or so it seemed that illusion of ascension – above the western horizon.

  It took me another two weeks to reach Lowell. The commercial airships don’t run that far south, and I deplaned at Holden (noting that Ariadne Vaughn did not) and then spent four days trying to find someone willing to transport me the two thousand-plus kilometers south and west to Bosporos City. From there, I hoped to buy a nook on the TA line the rest of the way down to Lowell.

  Finally, I paid a platinum prospector half of what was left in my accounts to make the trip. She grumbled endlessly about pirates and dust sinks, about the wear and mileage the trip would put on her rusted-out crawler. But it was likely more money than she’d see in the next three or four years cracking rocks and tagging cores, and we only broke down once, when the aft sediment filter clogged and the engine overheated. I had a narrow, filthy bunk behind the Laskar coils, and spent much of the trip asleep or watching the monotonous terrain roll by outside the windows. To the east, there were occasional, brief glimpses of shadowed canyonlands which I knew lead down to the wide, empty expanse of the Argyre Planitia laid out almost six klicks below the surrounding plains. I considered the possibility that it might be the corpse-strewn crater from my dreams, this monstrous wound carved deep into the face of Mars almost four thousand million years ago during the incessant bombardments of the Noachian Age, when the solar system was still young and hot and violent.

  That thought only made the nightmares worse, of course. I considered asking the prospector to find another route, one not so near the canyons, but I knew she’d only laugh her bitter laugh, start in on dust sinks again, and tell me to go to hell. So I didn’t say anything. Instead, I lay listening to the stones being ground to powder beneath the crawler’s treads, to the wind battering itself against the hull, to the old-womanish wheeze of the failing Laskar coils, trying not to remember the thing Mikaela had shown me beneath Hope VII or what I might yet find in the ruins of Lowell. I slept, and I dreamed.

  And on the final afternoon before we reached Bosporos City, dreaming, I made my way at last to the center of the crater. There was a desperate, lightless crawl through the mummified intestines of some leviathan while the Fenrir’s pipes and strings and drums pounded at my senses. My ears and nose were bleeding when I emerged through a gaping tear in the creature’s gut and stood, half-blind, blinking up at towering ebony spires and soaring arches and stairways that seemed to reach almost all the way to the stars. The music poured from this black city, gushed from every window and open doorway, and I sank to my knees and cried.

  “You weren’t ever meant to come here,” Sailor said, and I realized she was standing over me. “You weren’t invited.”

  “I can’t do this shit anymore,” I sobbed, for once not caring if she saw my weakness. “I can’t.”

  “You never should have started.”

  My tears turned to crystal and fell with a sound like wind chimes. My heart turned to cut glass in my chest.

  “Is this what you
were looking for?” I asked her, gazing up at the spires and arches, hating that cruel, singing architecture, even as my soul begged it to open up and swallow me alive.

  “No. This is only a dream, Dorry,” she said, speaking to me as she might a child. “You made this place. You’ve been building it all your life.”

  “No. That’s not true,” I replied, though I understood perfectly well that it was, that it must be. The distance across the corpse-littered crater was only half the diameter of my own damnation, nothing more.

  “If I let you see, will you go back?” she asked. “Will you go back and forget me?” She was speaking very softly, but I had no trouble hearing her over the wind and the music and the wheezing Laskar coils. I must have answered, must have said yes, because she took my hand in hers, and the black city before us collapsed and dissolved, taking the music with it, and I stood, instead, on a low platform in what I at first mistook for a room. But then I saw the fleshy, pulsing walls, the purple-green interlace of veins and capillaries, the massive supporting ribs or ridges, blacker than the vanished city, dividing that place into seven unequal crescent chambers. I stood somewhere within a living thing, within something that dwarfed even the fallen giants from the crater.

  And each of the crescent chambers contained the remains of a single gray pilgrim, their bodies metamorphosed over months or years or decades to serve the needs of this incomplete, demonic biology. They were each no more than appendages now, human beings become coalesced obligate parasites or symbiotes, their glinting, chitinous bodies all but lost in a labyrinth of mucosal membranes, buried by the array of connective tissues and tubes that sprouted from them like cancerous umbilical cords.

  Anglerfish. Is it one word or two?

  And there, half buried in the chamber walls, was what remained of Sailor, just enough left of her face that I could be sure it was her. Something oily and red and viscous that wasn’t blood leaked from the hole that had been her mouth, from the wreck of her lips and teeth, her mouth become only one more point of exit or entry for the restless, palpitating cords connecting her with this enormous organism. Her eyes opened partway, those atrophied slits parting to reveal bright, wet orbs like pools of night, and the fat, segmented tube emerging from the gap of her thighs began to quiver violently.