Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Give the devil her due,” Johnson says.

  “Goddamn right.”

  “You best spool and close it down now, Ahmed. I’m not kidding. I’m the one who’ll catch fuck and back if you get the ordinances on us.”

  “My friend, you ought to see this. I wish you could appreciate – ”

  “C’mon, Ahmed.”

  Ahmed’s fingers are dancing over the keys fast as a screw from a ten-penny whore, but Johnson’s been counting and Ahmed’s gone over the eight-second mark. Johnson might as well be a gust of wind seven miles away.

  Ahmed calls out the moves, tongue almost as fast as his fingers.

  “42.cxd4+ exd4 43.Kd3 Kb4 44…” and he trails off.

  “Okay,” Johnson says, getting up, crossing the cabin while Ahmed is still too caught up in the twin’s mythical corporate game of chess to see him coming. “I try to play nice, and you know that.” Johnson presses the downlink key, and the screen goes a solid wash of amber light. He braces himself for the full fury of Ahmed thwarted. The man’s brown eyes are all at once choked with anger.

  “You don’t do that, Ahmed,” Johnson warns. “You don’t even think it. How many teeth you got left you can afford to lose?”

  And there’s a good argument. The fire in Ahmed’s eyes begins to flicker out, and he sits staring at the monitor.

  “I was getting close,” he says disconsolately.

  “Yeah, you were. Getting close to buying the whole barge a pudgy good fine.” And Johnson pulls the cover down over the cabin’s wall unit. Then he goes back to his bunk.

  “You think they don’t want us to think she was never real?” asks Ahmed.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Johnson asks back, even though he knows the answer perfectly well. This is their own game of chess, the one the two men play every few days. Huge sea-wood fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam. Isn’t that the way it goes? “What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do?”

  “They, you idiot. They.”

  “Don’t call me an idiot, Ahmed. I don’t like it when you call me an idiot.”

  “You think I am a lunatic.”

  Johnson rubs his eyes. He didn’t know, until this moment, how tired he was.

  “I think you need another route to time displacement, that’s all. This ain’t healthy. In fact, this is dangerous, cutting into the feeds like that. And Jesus, I’m tired of telling you this. How many times have I told you that?”

  “She was a genius,” Ahmed says, almost whispering. “But that does not mean someone could not have interceded before she reached middlegame.”

  “Your book says someone did. A whole several someones, if I recall.”

  Ahmed has two books, actually. Two genuine analog books from back before: A Field Guide to Eastern Butterflies and The White Queen.

  “I mean to say…” but then it’s as if he forgets what he’s saying, loses his train of thought before the sentence is hardly begun.

  “I know what you mean to say, Ahmed. Don’t let it eat at you. I know what you mean, so don’t worry.”

  “Here is the day,” says Ahmed, and this time he actually is whispering, and Johnson almost doesn’t catch the words. Also, just as he says it, the Argyle Shoestring takes a rogue wave across her bow and rocks to port, so there’s another distraction. But Here is the day, that’s a folk hand-me-down, a scribble in the margin of paranoia, what some believe were the last words from the twin before the sky went black and the night came crashing down so, so long ago. Read that bit as you will, literally or figuratively.

  “Right, well,” Johnson tells his cabin mate. “This is what I’ve heard.”

  And then Johnson turns back to the porthole glass and watches the sun sinking over the Massachusetts horizon while Ahmed goes to his trunk to get the plastic chess set.

  4.

  Black Ships Seen Last Year South of Heaven

  (Dublin, 13/10/2012)

  As an American colleague of Ptolema’s has said to her on several occasions, There is late, and then there is not fucking coming, so give it up and go home. She’s sitting alone picking over the sad remnants of her €7.50 plate of smoked cod and chips. Her mouth tastes of beer, malt vinegar, and fried fish. She pokes at the rind of a lemon slice with her fork, then her eyes wander once more to the tall windows facing out onto Upper O’Connell Street. No sign of either the anonymous redhead nor black braids. She knows their names, of course, all of it right there in the dossier, and, sure, they know that she knows, but this is how the game is played. She stops stabbing at the lemon slice and pushes the plate away. Late was an hour ago.

  Maybe, maybe, she thinks, I should ditch them both. They’re playing me, or they think they are. It’s all a goddamn puppet show for the X. It’s never much of anything else, now is it?

  She finishes the dregs of her second pint of the evening and briefly considers ordering a third Guinness. But her head’s already a hint of cloudy, and it’s not completely beyond reason to suppose that the pair, or one or the other of them, might yet turn up. So, no more alcohol. When she gets back to the hotel, she’ll turn to the bottle of Connemara and let the whiskey do its job good and proper.

  Enough is goddamn enough, she thinks. No one can blame me for canceling on a tête-à-tête that’s never coming. I’ll call Barrymore and lay it all out, start to finish, and, if I’m lucky, he’ll tell me to take the next plane the fuck out of Ireland. She leaves a generous tip, then abandons the warm sanctuary of the restaurant and steps out into the raw and windy night. Before crossing the bridge, she stands at the edge of Aston Quay, watching the dark waters of the peaty Liffey sliding past on their way to the sea. She folds up the collar of her coat and winds her scarf more tightly about her face. This wind’ll strip the skin right off your bones, and here it’s not even November. The freezing air smells like the river. It smells like the algae clinging to the constricting stone channel through which the river flows. On the opposite shore, Eden Quay is a garish spray of neon signs.

  Ptolema isn’t aware the redhead is standing only a couple of feet away until the woman speaks. “I’d say I’m sorry about that,” she says. “Only I’m not, and I’m not in the mood for lies, if you catch my drift.”

  “You might have let me know.” Ptolema unwinds the scarf from her face, so her voice won’t be muffled by wool.

  “Might have, but I did not. Bury the past. Move on. Keep on truckin’. Here we are now, and now we can conduct our business beyond the attentions of any we desire not to know our business.”

  The redhead has dropped the phony accent, so at least there’s that.

  “You think I don’t have other problems besides you?” Ptolema asks her. “You think you’re at the very fucking top of my list of priorities?”

  “I do,” the woman says, and she lights a cigarette. She exhales smoke and the fog of her breath. “At the very tippy top, or near enough. I thought you wanted me to drop all the deceits, Miss P.”

  “So, we’re going to stand out here in the cold and have this conversation? I’m going to placate you and freeze my ass off because you’re afraid someone might overhear us in a fish-and-chips shop?”

  “If you actually want to hear whatever it is I have to say. I know you Y sorts. I know if there’s one of you, then there’s two, and I know if there’s two, there’s four. I’m keen to your exponential support protocol.”

  “Our what? You just fucking made that up.”

  The redhead takes another drag on her cigarette and shrugs.

  “Are you here to listen, or are you here to talk, Miss P?”

  Ptolema takes a Punt Éireannach from a pocket and tosses it into the Liffey, a shiny red deer cast in nickel and copper for goddesses forgotten or goddesses who never were.

  That there, that’s not me – I go where I please – I walk through walls, I float down the Liffey…In a little while, I’ll be gone. I’ll be gone. I’ll be gone. Must then my fortune be�
��wake by the trumpet’s sound…and see the flaming skies. I’ll be gone.

  Her random thoughts, that come and go, talking of Michelangelo.

  O O O O That Shakespeherian rag.

  “Fine,” Ptolema tells the redhead. “Twisby and the twin, the twin named Bête.”

  “You don’t like what I got to say, if you think I’m bullshittin’ you, you got orders don’t you? Terminate. Terminate, with extreme prejudice, just like Jerry Ziesmer tells Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. That’s how it is, I know.”

  Ptolema chews at her chapped lower lip, smothering impatience.

  “And we shall play a game of chess?” The woman asks her and laughs.

  “No more games. No more stalling.”

  “But your tape, Miss P. Your creepy child’s voice from out the ether. Is it not commanding that we do just that?”

  Ptolema wonders how many years or centuries the coin will lie lost among the rocks and silt on the river bed. After even she’s dead. Long after this crisis has come and gone and is only an ugly shred of occult history. The X would build an entire equation around the consequences of her having tossed a punt into the river.

  “Twisby and the twin,” she says and leaves no room in her voice for any more nonsense from the redhead.

  “As you like it,” she replies. “Yeah, I saw ’em both. I talked with ’em both, but that’s the part you already know, and fuck all if I dare waste your precious time.”

  “This was after you met Ivoire.”

  “You know that, too. Yeah, it was after, down at Kehoe’s pub, but you also already know that. So, fast forward. Total cunt of a day, so mostly I was just wanting to get drunk, but I have friends who hang out there, so I was hoping to see them. Two birds, one stone. But that night, none of them showed, which was a bummer – ”

  “I’m not here to discuss your social life. Twisby and the twin.”

  “Jesus fuck, lady. I’m getting to them, okay?”

  The October wind is a wailing phantom through the bare limbs of the few skinny trees lined up along the quay. Ptolema shivers at the sound, though she knows perfectly well there’s nothing the least bit ominous about it. There’s nothing at work but her exasperation, exhaustion, and imagination. Nothing but the reports and rumors from Maine. That, and this Twisby person and the twins to set her nerves on edge.

  A red deer on a coin.

  Cervus elaphus scoticus.

  Deer Isle.

  Odocoileus virginianus.

  Barrymore warned her not to let it get inside her head, that miasma, the muddling aura that surrounds every last agent of the X. But Ptolema knows it’s exactly what she’s done. The redhead is talking; Ptolema curses and wonders how much she’s missed in the lapse.

  “…not the same shade as mine, but more like an auburn. Tied back. She wasn’t drinking anything, and she hardly said one word the whole time. It was mostly the twin, mostly this Bête girl said what was said. It wasn’t all that much, mind you, but it was enough. Frankly, more than I wanted to hear, seeing as how Ivoire and I were already close enough to friends. Well, as close as you get to making friends these days, right?”

  Ptolema quit smoking nearly fifteen years ago, but she almost asks the redhead for a cigarette. She’s still shivering and tries to stop. It’s a sign of weakness, and you never let an Xer see that kind of shit. They drink it up like nectar.

  “I can’t recite it word for word, but the gist of it was Bête knows it was someone on our side made her sister sick, someone on our side set up this whole masquerade about her sister having been kidnapped. Put it in Ivoire’s head – brainwashing, menticide, thought reform, hypnosis, don’t ask me – that she’d lend her not inconsiderable talents to the cause and march off to that unholy fucking shitstorm in Maine, or else her sister would be tortured, raped, ravaged, tagged and bagged, whatever. That it was the X sending Ivy the goods.”

  “The drugs?” Ptolema asks her, and the redhead nods.

  “Ivoire, she told me it was just Vicodin at first, but that wasn’t enough. The pain was way beyond vikes, you know. And, from what she said, it was like whoever was in back of this operation, like they knew that, which is when the oxy started coming, instead.”

  “But Ivoire’s never seen who delivers the packages?”

  “Nope. They just show up. Sitting on a fence post with her name written neatly on the brown-paper wrapping. Or tucked into a knothole in a tree she just happens to pass. Shit like that. Happenstance. But every time she’s running low, the deliveries show up like clockwork. Tick tock.”

  “And now it’s heroin.”

  “Yeah. Not as if she had any say in that. She told me when they cut off the oxy, she scoured the whole goddamned island, top to bottom. But after the looting and the fires, wasn’t nothing left. Piddley-shit, one-whore place only had, what? Two chemists to start with. Fuck it.”

  Ptolema rubs her hands together. The gloves aren’t helping at all. If the cold bothers the redhead, she’s doing a good job of pretending it doesn’t.

  “And her sister knows all of this? Bête?”

  “Miss P, I’m pretty certain that’s what I just said. We’ve…they’ve…got her buyin’ into that whole utilitarian, greater-good crapola. Hook, line, sinker. There’s her sister out there, her fucking lover, sick as a dog and probably dying, and now she’s a junkie, and there’s hardly ever a moment she doesn’t seem terrified about what’s happening to Bête, but Bête, this Twisby woman has her full fucking cooperation, wrapped around her pinkie finger. Nothing’s going too far.”

  Ptolema stops rubbing her hands together – it’s pointless anyway – and she says, “This can’t be the first time you’ve seen them pull this level of shit on someone.” The redhead is quiet. She doesn’t answer the question that, to be fair, wasn’t really a question. She doesn’t say whether she has or hasn’t seen this sort of shit before. Which, Ptolema knows, means that of course she has. It’s de rigueur, business as usual in the trenches of a war that’s never had honor or a code of conduct or a Geneva Convention and never fucking will.

  “Go on,” Ptolema says.

  “That sounds an awful lot like an order to me,” says the redhead.

  Now, Ptolema rubs her eyes. They feel as if they’re turning to ice. “I didn’t mean it to.”

  “You watch that tone, then. Where was I?”

  “Twisby appears to be controlling Bête, and somehow they’re both controlling Ivoire.”

  “Right, so at first the Bête twin, she was all puffed up, pleased with herself and these sick machinations, pure, undiluted braggadocio. But then she mentions someone called Sixty Six, apparently another good lil’ factotum shipped off to the Pine Tree State. That was about the first time Twisby perked up. Shot Bête this ugly stare, reproach, you know. Disapproval. But not like it was a secret that Bête shouldn’t have let slip. More like Twisby is carrying a beef of some sort with this Sixty Six. More like that. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Ptolema stops rubbing her eyes. She’s afraid they might shatter if she keeps it up, the way a rose dipped in liquid nitrogen shatters when struck against a hard surface.

  “You know who this Sixty Six character is?” she asks the redhead.

  “I got some intel. Not a lot, ’cause her profile is buried in lockdown. But I fished up some tidbits. She was deployed shortly before Ivy. They met afterwards. Sixty Six’s not much older than the twins. Twenty-ish, so about the same age as the twins. She spent some time in a mental hospital in upstate New York. Her parents had her committed when she was just a kid. But the X sprung her.”

  “You know why?”

  The redhead looks annoyed and flicks the butt of her cigarette at the river. A trail of embers follows it down.

  “How the hell would I know a thing like that? I’m sure there was some reason deemed sufficient and necessary to keep everything moving smoothly.”

  “Okay, so Twisby doesn’t like Sixty Six.”

  “Not if that glare meant anything. But after she
gave Thing Number Two that nasty look, Bête’s whole demeanor changed. You’d have thought someone flipped a light switch in her soul. So, right off, seems to me Twisby has Bête on a short tether. But, as I said, this twin gets all twitchy, flinching, not half so talkative. Went virtually autistic, then and there. I’m not ashamed to admit, gave me the willies even more than I had them already. That’s when the taciturn Doc Twisby begin speaking directly – ”

  “Doc? Twisby’s a doctor?”

  The redhead mumbles something Ptolema can’t make out over the wind.

  “I strongly dislike being interrupted,” the redhead says, and she fishes another cigarette from a pocket and lights it. “Almost as much as I dislike taking orders.”

  Ptolema apologizes.

  “I figured that much out just watchin’ her, yeah. But afterwards I tapped a contact of mine at Cal State, and yes, she is a doctor. Neurology. Biopsych. Oxford and Yale alumnus. High profile in the APA. But then, plop, she drops off the academic radar, only to pop up on another radar. Three years, she was cryptologic, No Such Agency, Never Say Anything, black ops, clandestine research feces had her bouncing back and forth between the NSA and Homeland Security and OSIR. Mostly OSIR. Some highly weird goings-on, from what I was told. She – ”

  “How did your contact learn anything at all? If ‘Twisby’ is only her alias – ”

  “Two strikes, lady. Three, you’re out, and I’ll take my chances with your wrath.”

  This time, Ptolema doesn’t bother apologizing. The redhead continues.

  “As I was saying, if you will please fucking recall, Madam Doc Twisby was up to something unpleasant with covert funding from these various sources, shadow phenomenology bushwa, way above top secret. I’m guessing, obviously, some manner of next-gen weaponizing.”

  “It’s better if you refrain from guessing,” Ptolema says. The lights across the Liffey have her thinking of a carnival now. The redhead is silent long enough that Ptolema begins to believe she’s not going to get anything else out of her.

  “We…they…pulled her. Not sure when, but, near as I can suss, no one in Washington raised a hand to prevent her departure. Even for the X, that’s kind of ballsy, dipping into TPTB with such complete confidence. Which sets me thinking there’s an arrangement in place, tit for tat, an exchange of information in the offing. Naturally, those fucks in the States won’t get anything but a stingy fraction of whatever comes of Twisby’s mouse in a maze experiment. Whether or not they know this, bugger all if I can tell you.”