Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  He shakes his head and leans back in his chair, as if ready to surrender the game.

  “Complications,” he sighs. “Protocol.”

  “Since when do we acknowledge even the existence of protocol among terrorists?”

  “Since, my dear, no one wants to see these parlor games escalate into all out war. That’s since when. Also, the twins’ PK potential is so far off the goddamn charts – we have no idea what’s going to happen when your agent is activated. I’m not going to have this affair blowing up in my face.”

  Ptolema nods and sends a series of smoke rings towards the ceiling. The third time Ptolema met with the redhead, fifteen minutes before her execution, she’d said, “What Twisby told me, and I quote – more or less, so maybe I should say ‘paraphrase,’ instead – ‘What if Einstein had needed a small push to get him moving? What if, say, Oppenheimer or Fermi had needed a bit more motivation? That’s all this is. Bête and I providing her sister a bit more motivation, so her skills are not wasted among petrified bones and dusty museum drawers. That’s all.’”

  The Commissioner says, “Also, it would be preferable, would it not, if our cryptographers made sense of that message before we dispatched the twin?”

  “Right,” Ptolema says, hardly bothering to hide her sarcasm. “The twin.”

  “Clearly this Thisby person has washed her hands of the girl, the way she’s on the move.”

  “Twisby, Sir. And that may be true. Or it may be true that she’s accomplished her mission, and there’s nothing left to do but wait.”

  The Commissioner mutters, then picks up his knight, and quickly, before he can change his mind, moves it to the king’s second square. Ptolema immediately takes it with her one surviving white knight. She has him in four more moves.

  She’s thought before, and here she thinks again, how much the Commissioner looks like John Tenniel’s interpretation of the White Knight from Through the Looking Glass. The same absurd mustache. The beak of a nose. All he needs is a sway-backed horse and spiked anklets to guard against shark bites. He said “I look for butterflies, that sleep among the wheat…”

  Only, he always plays black. Or maybe only when he pits himself against her.

  “Blast,” he mutters and pours himself another brandy from the decanter on the table. “Blast your arse. You might at least have pretended to be taken off your guard.”

  “Apologies, Sir. Your move.”

  He takes a sip of the brandy. “In your expert estimation, Ptolema, am I both imbecilic and blind? I can see the bloody board.”

  “Neither,” she replies. “A question, though. Have you considered that there’s no code to crack?”

  He looks at her as if she’s the imbecile.

  “I mean,” Ptolema continues, “hasn’t anyone considered the…outside chance…that the message is meant to be taken literally?”

  His expression doesn’t change, and he doesn’t answer her. For a few seconds, the study is so quiet she could hear a mouse fart, were one to choose just then to do so.

  “More a sort of roundabout, cockeyed sort of exposition, Sir. ‘Black Queen white, White Queen black.’ And then the second part, the Trenton transmission, ‘To see themselves, they’re gazing back.’”

  “I know the blasted rhyme, Ptolema.”

  “Of course. But it seems to me everyone’s been so busy assuming it’s the usual cryptic shit we get from the Xer’s, no one’s even paused to – ”

  “This is in your report?” he asks. He drains his glass and watches her.

  “No,” she says. “It isn’t.”

  “Odd, given it appears to have aroused some considerable passion.”

  “It only occurred to me just this morning. I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror, brushing my teeth, and – really, it was the mirror that set me thinking there might – ”

  “You have me in four,” he says. “And I despise futility.”

  “Do you want to hear this, Sir? Because, if you don’t, I’ll shut the fuck up. I know I’m out of line. I don’t have to be told this isn’t my department.”

  “I would have thought, my dear, that in all those centuries you’ve seen come and go, you’d have learned to stand your ground. I have until a quarter of,” and he points at the immense grandfather clock occupying one corner of the study.

  The Commissioner pours himself another drink. And Ptolema tells him what’s on her mind, a hunch that might be nothing more than that, but a hunch that succeeds in explaining almost, but not quite, everything they know. While she speaks, she contemplates the cross-section of a fossil ammonite, its logarithmic spiral, preserved in the polished limestone floor. The spiral echoes across the universe: the arms of the Milky Way; a moth to a flame; the configuration of corneal nerves; the bands of a typhoon; a fractal seahorse tail of a Misiurewicz point.

  Ptolema talks.

  The clock rings the hour, and he doesn’t interrupt her. As she goes on, his expression changes from skepticism to disbelief to the very last thing she ever expected to see him show, something she’d wager her left hand is fear.

  12.

  Thunder Perfect Mind/Judas as a Moth

  (undated)

  Estrid Noble sits naked and alone on the wet concrete floor of the small room that, though it is a small room, seems to stretch on forever in all directions. Forever and forever and forever. The towering, rumbling Waxen Men have all two gone, but she couldn’t say how long since they left her, were she to say anything at all. Which she won’t. There is no light in the room save the miserly flicker glow of a naked twenty-five-watt bulb. One of the Waxen Men bumped his head against the dangling fixture on his way out. He snarled obscenities, not noticing and, surely, not caring how he’d set the light to swinging pell-mell so that it became the arm of a luminous pendulum. It sways from side to side, pushing at the four murky corners of the room that is surely much too small to have four murky corners. The shadows are indignant and push right back. The light is a bully. And, if that’s so, the darkness is a counter-bully. Or, it is the other way round. Or, such a black-and-white dualism cannot even exist here. But this is where they left her, sick of her again – sick of, they say, her bullshit, and so they left her in this room where the walls seem to stretch on forever. Estrid, her back pressed against freezing, slippery ceramic tiles and mildewed grout. Once upon a time, back before the ghosts of all these imprisoned lunatics, those walls were white as snow, white as the uniforms of the Waxen Men who dragged her howling from Room 66 and left her here. First, they took her clothes and turned the spigots on her, water so cold it would freeze a polar bear in its tracks.

  A line, a white line, a long white line…

  Her honey-colored eyes do the math, calculating angles, the dilapidated geometry of the inside of this cube, the velocity and acceleration vectors of that swinging bulb. Before anyone knew she was insane, she was called a prodigy, carrying the burden of π to 67,393 digits, NaN x 10-4 around in her booming, insomniac skull. In this place, hospital, institutional blue, asylum (which does not mean sanctuary), neither the doctors nor the nurses nor the Waxen Men will take mercy and give her paper to put the numbers on. She has to keep them all in her head. This she will learn to do forever more.

  Four walls that once were white. You can only scrub so much shit, mold, and, yes, even blood off four walls. Probably, she believes, it has been a thousand years since these walls were genuinely clean. They will never be clean again, for so befouled is their soul, the soul of the walls of this dripping room. A tenth circle of the Inferno. Or an annex to a lesser circle. It is cold as the Arctic here, and she shivers. Hence, it might be the antechamber of the Ninth Circle, possibly the foyer. Obscure they went through dreary shades, that led along the waste dominions of the dead.

  Xibalba be. A unillumined path through the stars. Six calamitous houses: Dark House, Cold House, Jaguar, Bat, Razor, and Hot House.

  She lies down, feels anxiety descending, a person who loses a name (for all the Waxen Men will c
all her is 66). Now, right cheek, right shoulder, right side come to rest against the smooth concrete, she stares across that grey manufactured plain towards the faraway door, locked, like Hell, against her escape. Like Hell, no one escapes. No one. She recalls snow and knows all too well that this is the sort of plain that ought to be smothered under a blizzard.

  “Tell me, when was the war over?” I asked.

  “The war is not over,” he answered. “Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”

  Not only me. The world is mad, and the we of I, the wee of eye, we will fight in unknown wars.

  A line, a white line, a long white line…

  Through the window of her room, the glass trapped behind a screen of steel diamonds, every winter she watches the snow. It brings more comfort than any of the pills or injections or the sizzling, sparking electrodes to her temples.

  This is Hell, and her mother is the Queen of Heaven who damned her.

  The Waxen Men are only devils.

  The snow is redemption, eternally out of reach.

  A line, a white line, a long white line…

  In this room, no snow, just rain to set her to shivering, teeth to clattering, the uncrystallized water from the spigots. Uncrystallizable.

  I have mingled my drink with weeping,

  And my days are like a shadow.

  “You have no one to blame but yourself,” said Mother. “You’re not sick, you’re lazy. You just want the attention. You’re not sick, but you can damn well be treated as if you are. See how you like that. I’ve had enough, you hear me?”

  So Estrid has her room and the dayroom, never outside, never anything but the glimpse of snow outside, the shower when she’s filthy or when the Waxen Men, like Mother, have had too much of her bullshit.

  For my days vanish like smoke.

  I am like an owl in the desert

  Among the ruins.

  A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove.

  My God, man. There’s bears on it.

  Are there? Three bears? A wolf in a red riding hood?

  I know numbers, but the walls are high, and I can’t climb over.

  Estrid Noble lies on the concrete floor, and she lies in snow softly drifting down from a leaden winter sky. Both are true, a particle and a wave. That, or, instead, the flawed observer, her, the mad-woman observer, an emergent, second-order consequence, madness and quantum, madness disbanding paradox. I don’t know what I mean, Mother. I don’t know what I mean, anymore. Has she believed there is no escape, when she can go to the snow globe of her unconscious where the Waxen Men cannot follow?

  However, lying in the snow, there is blood in the sky mixed with the snow, and she reaches for the shotgun at her side, and she feels the magic welling up within her, which means this cannot be then, then consigned to a dustbin of her past, and so this must be now.

  She sits up in the small room where the Waxen Men have left her.

  She sits up in the snow, where the Waxen Men do not know she can go, which means they cannot stop her and cannot find her when she’s here.

  She sits up in the small room, realizing someone is watching her from the shadows. Someone indistinct to the left of the door, tucked into that corner, only half revealed when the bulb’s glow happens to swing that way.

  The someone is another woman, white as a ghost, blue eyes, hair same as the snow.

  “I know you,” Estrid says, and the pale woman says, “I know you, too.”

  “How did you find me here?” Estrid asks.

  “It wasn’t hard. You split your head wide open. You let me in.”

  “They don’t let anyone in.”

  “How could they have stopped me?”

  Estrid has no answer for that question, but the shotgun feels very good in her hands. At such close range, this is no job for the Kalashnikov, her favorite engine. No. So, her finger’s on the trigger of the gasoline-powered, 28 gauge Remington 1100; this close, she couldn’t miss if she tried.

  “Sixty Six,” the pale woman says, the albino whose name is Ivoire. Okay, not her name – because the Waxen Men and X stole all their names – but the sole name that anyone knows to call her. “Sixty Six, I would ask you who wants me dead, who’s making you do this, but you wouldn’t tell me. I know you’d never tell me. You can’t.”

  “Where are we really?” Estrid asks Ivoire. “Ivoire, when are we really?”

  “Don’t you usually call me Ivy?” the albino asks. “When you bother to call me anything at all? Why are we so formal now?”

  The air is bruised with questions.

  “Star fall, phone call, no one gets out of here alive,” Estrid whispers, hating the way she whimpers like a rabbit in a snare. Isn’t she the one holding the shotgun? Doesn’t she have the upper hand?

  “Your poor spirit,” Ivoire sighs. “Shattered, piled up with equations, snippets of song, memories broken apart like twigs. Aren’t you tired of being used?”

  Estrid lies on the concrete floor, and she holds the barrel of the Remington beneath Ivoire’s chin. She blinks, and wishes, just once, the Waxen Men had forgotten to lock her in with the grout and the dirty wet tiles. The light swings, and Ivoire’s blue eyes twinkle, a flash before the light swings away again, a flash like a falling star plummeting, screaming as it tumbles towards Penobscot Bay.

  “I know your secret,” she says to Ivoire, and Estrid smiles a vicious Cheshire grin. It’s all she has, the secret and the shotgun. If I’d had the shotgun then, I’d have lain low the Waxen Men. If I’d had the gun then…

  “But you didn’t, Sixty Six,” says the voice from what is momentarily only darkness. “There in the showers, you were naked and helpless. You didn’t have anything at all but a dream of snow.”

  Outside the window of the attic where they sleep, demons are marching out of the sea. Outside the attic window, hardly anyone is left to scream at the sight.

  “Tell me the secret,” Ivoire urges her, though she doesn’t sound the least bit desperate to know. There is no hint of urgency in her voice. “Then we’ll both know. If I’m about to die, where’s the harm in my knowing?”

  “I am now, and I am then,” Estrid whispers.

  The light shows Ivoire’s face, and Estrid thinks she looks a little sad, like whatever’s coming is something she doesn’t want to arrive.

  “A particle and a wave. You are the paradox, Sixty Six. Free and a prisoner. At now and at then. I know.”

  Well, I went down in the valley,

  You know I did over there ever stay.

  You know I stayed right there all day.

  “A broken record, that’s you,” says Ivoire. Estrid tightens her grip on the trigger, and she stares up into the bloody snow falling all around her. “And the paradoxical fruitcake, two places and two times at once, if only in your mind.”

  “Not like you,” Estrid says. “Maybe I’m a metaphor, but not you.”

  “Is that your secret, Sixty Six,” and now, ah, now the woman in the corner of the shower room looks nervous. Dread, that’s the word for her expression.

  “Twin,” Estrid growls.

  “Yes, Sixty Six, I am a twin. I have a sister.”

  In five seconds, Estrid Noble will squeeze the trigger and spatter Ivy’s brains across the attic wall. That’s already happened.

  “Twin,” says Sixty Six. “It’s not a noun. It’s a verb.”

  She grits her teeth and closes her eyes and fires two rounds. Someone has told her this will save the world. One instant. One action. A butterfly flaps its wings.

  13.

  Soft Black Stars

  (12/21/2012)

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Good and Evil walk into a bar…

  Here: At precisely eight hundred ten hours, the directive came down from – it matters not where, but D.C. is a good enough supposition. Effective immediately, cease all evacuation efforts. Additional civilian and military casualties an acceptable loss. Mourn the coming dead after zero-zero-thirty of the t
wenty-first day of December, but blow the goddamn Sedgwick suspension bridge spanning Eggemoggin Reach, blow it this very night, bury it on the muddy bottom of the leprous bay.

  Theirs not to reason why…

  Finally, all other avenues and efforts and fools’ hopes exhausted, they will follow orders, press the red button, implement Operation Umbilicus. Yes, in fact, until this evening the name has seemed hilarious to more than a few. Who the hell came up with that one, anyway? Don’t ask me. I just fucking work here.

  The writing has been on the wall since August, but no one has wanted to read it. No one wanted to believe it would ever go this far, because we are not goddamn Neanderthals huddling in caves by firelight, trembling at the eyeshine Outside, lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Because we are not savages. Because a shoulder to the wheel, and all our technology, and all our beautiful weapons, and all our careful planning, and brave men can solve any situation, no matter how dire. Isn’t that motherfucker bin Laden dead? Have we not eradicated smallpox? Are we not making the world safe for democracy? Well, are we not? Do we now leave men and women to die deaths more horrific than any ever imagined by Hollywood, the RAND Corporation, science-fiction fucking authors, the alarmists, survivalists, the Book of Revelation, supersecret think tanks, et cetera and et cetera and et cetera?

  “Doesn’t seem that way,” replies the Major General with his two stars on his shoulder. One named Wormwood. The other left unchristened.

  A sergeant barks orders, and his men cannot allow themselves to think about the consequences; three have gone rabbit since yesterday, and all three were shot as deserters. Not arrested. Shot. The rest will do their job and see to the explosive charges, the dynamite, nitroglycerin – the catalysts before the detonation of the linear shaped charges. The demolition team stands at the ready, and have stood so since dusk. Executioners, who are also saviors, watch the clocks, ticking off the bits and pieces of seconds until the implosion of the suspension bride connecting Little Deer Isle to the mainland. The bridge uniting Deer and Little Deer will be left intact. No one knows why. Theirs is most emphatically not to wonder why. The deities and demi-gods in Washington and the Command Center in Brooksville have those answers, which has to be good enough. Good enough for government work.