FSF, September 2008

by Spilogale Authors

  "Is that bad?” Jack said.

  "There is only one inhabited region on Ben. The Saltese Sea, behind us, beyond the mountains. We are going into the uninhabited waste."

  There was a short silence as Jack absorbed this information. “What's in the uninhabited waste?” he said at last.

  "Rocks, water, darkness. No life.” No seafloor stations, no other arks, no human voices. For the next round, perhaps for every round after that, until their ark died.

  "Send out a distress call,” Jack said.

  Osaji reached for the low-frequency radio, and spoke into it. “This is the ark Divernon. Can anybody hear me?” They waited. Only the hiss of an empty channel came back. Osaji spoke again. “This is Divernon. We have been swept through the mountains on the edge of the Saltese Sea. If you can hear us, please answer."

  Only silence.

  The empty hiss grew oppressive; Osaji switched it off.

  "There's got to be something we can do,” Jack said.

  Trying to sound calm, Osaji said, “If the ark is not too badly damaged, it should recover. It is a self-sustaining system; it can live for many rounds."

  "You're telling me this is it,” he said. “I'm trapped till I die. In a goddamned underwater balloon along with an invalid and a harpy."

  Osaji gave the grimmest smile in the world. “The outworlder is the lucky one,” she said. “We are the ones trapped with him."

  * * * *

  4. The Wasteland

  Three days later, Jack was still rebelling against their situation. He was a bundle of restless energy. While Osaji unpacked and arranged her quarters comfortably for herself and Mota, he prowled the ark, reading the manuals, trying to find a solution. At first she ignored him; but soon the time came to talk about dividing up the essential tasks of keeping an ark running. Osaji drew up a task wheel and brought it into the kitchen to negotiate the division of labor. It was a familiar routine to her, usually done on the third day of round.

  But the daunting list of jobs made not a dimple in his monomania. All he wanted to talk about was another of his endless schemes.

  "It's not like you don't have engine fuel,” Jack said. “You've got a bagful of waste hydrogen up there."

  "The hydrogen's not waste,” Osaji said. “It is for our fuel cells, to make electricity."

  "Then why not rig an electric motor to some propellers?"

  "Does someone here know how to make an engine and propellers?"

  He gave off a flare of indignation. “I'm not a bleeding mechanic. But damn it, I'd try. It's better than rolling over and taking whatever the lifestream sends you."

  "It is antisocial to make one's personal problems into everyone's problems,” Osaji said.

  "Thank you, Miss Priss,” Jack said acidly. He paced up and down before the kitchen table, two steps one way, two steps back. He was constantly in motion like that. It was like having a trapped animal in your home. “What possessed you Bennites to invent a vehicle without any controls?"

  "An ark isn't a way of getting someplace,” Osaji explained. “It is a place in itself."

  He looked ready to ignite, a small two-legged bag of hydrogen himself. “Thanks, but I want to steer the place I'm in. This ‘wherever you go, there you are’ crap is why you've spent two centuries in the Saltese Sea without ever once having poked your noses out to see the rest of Ben. Wasn't anyone curious? No, you're content in your little bubbles. You've got an entire culture of agoraphobes."

  Irritated at his refusal to focus on the practical demands of their situation, Osaji set a pair of flippers and breather down on the table in front of him. “Here. Anyone who doesn't wish to be here can swim back."

  "Go to hell."

  Osaji had had enough of him. She took back the swim gear, and said, “All right, I am going out."

  "Out? What do you mean?” He followed her into the corridor.

  "Someone has to check the membrane. I should have done it before."

  "Isn't that dangerous?"

  "Yes.” She stopped and turned to him. “It will be a shame if you are left without someone to abuse. Now let me go."

  Above the living quarters, the enormous bladders for air, fuel, and ballast water were swollen, shadowy shapes in the dim glow of the outer membrane. Taking a handful of the tough, fibrous white roots that grew on the inside of the globe surface, Osaji hoisted herself up the outer wall. The roots were wet, and soon her hands and feet were glowing white, covered with luminescent bacteria. The smell was fresh and invigorating, for the air here was rich with oxygen. When she had been a child, it had been a favorite game to climb the globe wall and then throw herself down onto the pillowy bladders below. Then, she had not appreciated the consequences of accidentally puncturing one of the membranes.

  She had come this way because, despite her bravado in front of Jack, she was afraid to go out. The main orifice to the outside was at the bottom of the ark, and normally she would have used it. But there were emergency entry pores scattered throughout, and one of them was close to the part of the membrane she most needed to inspect.

  It was odd; she had never been afraid of the outside before. In fact, she had relished escaping from the close confines of the ark, and always volunteered for wet work. But back home in the Saltese Sea, she had known exactly what lay outside. All the landmarks were mapped, the waters familiar. Here, her rational mind knew from the sensors that nothing was different, but the animal-instinct part of her brain didn't care.

  She squeezed out the aperture like a slippery melon seed, into the embrace of cold and silence. At first she clung with her back to the tacky surface of the ark, peering into the water. The dark had a different quality here. In the Saltese Sea, you always knew that light and life hovered just beyond the edge of sight. Here, the dark was absolute ruler. Their ark was a mote in an emptiness the size of continents.

  She unhooked the battery-powered searchlight from her belt. For a moment before turning it on, she had to steel herself, not quite knowing what she feared. When at last she shone it out into the water, it revealed nothing. Or, rather, only one thing: the water was extraordinarily clear. No suspended sediments lit the beam, since this was lifeless water. She aimed it up next, out of irrational fear that ice would be hanging over them, but again the beam disappeared. At last she shone it down. Nothing was visible. A hundred meters below them lay the rugged seafloor terrain of pillow lavas and tumbled boulders, but the beam did not reach so far.

  Relieved, she pushed away from the ark to scan its surface. It was easy to see where Divernon had collided with the cliff, since a patch had been scraped clean of the luminous bacteria that made the rest of the craft glow white. She swam in close to run her hand across the surface, smoothing new bacteria onto the injured spot so it would heal. Then she slowly skimmed the circumference of the sphere, checking for scorches and barren spots, till she came to rest on the top, looking out on her world.

  In its way, Divernon was alive, like a giant cell: a lipid membrane full of organelles designed to feed on the dissolved salts and carbon dioxide of the sea, and process them into amino acids and hydrocarbons to release again. It was part of the metabolic chain that would slowly, over the centuries, turn Ben's sea into a living ocean. The ark was a giant fertilizer, a life-creator, an indispensable part of the Great Work. But out here there was no Great Work. Isolated from its fellows, Divernon was a lost soul.

  Why had no ark ever ventured out here before? Now that her irritation had washed away, the thought flowed into her that Jack was right. For so many generations Bennites had been content to pursue their rounds, following the currents in an ever-renewing cycle. They had never pushed beyond the boundaries of the familiar, out into the places without names.

  Suddenly, Osaji ached with homesickness for the familiar floatabout cycle. If they had left Golconda as usual, just now they would be coming to the Swirl, a spot where the great current eddied, bringing many arks together. It was always a festive time; people visited from ark to ark, exc
hanging gifts and sometimes moving to find more compatible crewmates. The arks were gaily decorated, full of music, and there was lighthearted romance and water dancing.

  The cold began to seep into her joints, so she kicked off to view the ark from below. As she dove down along the flank of the great globe, the feeling of something looming in the blackness behind her grew, so when she reached bottom she abandoned her inspection and wormed into the aperture as quickly as she could.

  She brought a bulb of warm soup for Mota's lunch. When she entered Mota's vacuole, she noticed the stuffy, rank smell of age. She increased the ventilation. The rhythmic expansion and contraction of the air vessels made it sound like the room was breathing.

  "Lunch, Mota!” she said in a cheerful tone.

  Mota had taken all the clothes from one of the wall pockets, and was busy refolding everything and putting it back. She had done it at least ten times before, and with every repetition the clothes got a little more disordered. She looked up from her work and said anxiously, “Saji, where were you? I waited and waited. I thought something had happened to you!"

  "I've only been gone an hour,” Osaji said, her spirits falling. These reproaches were all she had gotten recently. She knew it would not stop unless she spent every hour of the day in the room. “Come eat your soup.” She set it down on the little table they used to take their meals.

  Mota looked in agitation at the clothing strewn all over the bed. She picked up a sweater she had just folded, shook it out, then put it down again. “Everything is all out of order,” she said.

  It was not the clothes that were out of order; it was something inside of Mota's mind. The behavior was simultaneously so unlike her grandmother and so very like her that Osaji felt trapped between laughter, dread, and impatience. Mota had always had a passion for tidiness; cleaning up after other people had been half her life, a way of expressing the love she couldn't put in words. Now it seemed like the trait was betraying her.

  "I'll help you after lunch,” Osaji said, but suspected that doing the task rather than completing it was what Mota needed.

  A little reluctantly, the old woman came to the table and sat sipping her soup from the bulb. Her features looked stiff, her lips a little apart, stained with soup. Osaji tried to talk about the ark, but it was hard to keep it up alone. She kept fishing for responses and receiving none.

  Suddenly Mota roused and got up restlessly. She started wandering around the room, looking for something in the wall pockets, underneath the bedclothes, in the washvac. After watching a while Osaji said, “What are you looking for?"

  Mota paused as if having to search her mind for an answer. “My hand cream,” she said at last.

  "It's in the washvac, where it always is."

  "Yes, of course.” Mota went in the washvac, saw where it was, but did not pick it up. She came back out and settled in her chair.

  The feeling in Osaji's stomach was much like the homesickness she felt for the Saltese Sea. It was a gnawing feeling that things were wrong, a yearning for a normality that was never coming back. And beneath it all lay buried anger at Mota for letting this confused stranger take over her body. An unworthy feeling.

  "Would you like to go for a walk?” Osaji asked.

  "No thank you, sweetheart."

  "Should I read to you?"

  "If you want to,” Mota said neutrally.

  "I'm asking if you want me to.” Osaji was unable to keep the desperate impatience from her voice. Mota fell silent. Feeling guilty, Osaji said, “Or would you like to take a nap?"

  "Yes, that would be nice."

  Mota had only agreed because it would be the least trouble. Nevertheless, Osaji seized upon it. She was feeling claustrophobic in this room, as if the smell was going to hang onto her forever. When she got up, Mota said anxiously, “Are you leaving?"

  "Yes, I'm going to let you sleep.” She came over and kissed the old woman's hair. Mota took her hand and said, “You're a good girl, Saji."

  Controlling her inner rebellion, Osaji said, “Have a good rest, Mota."

  When she was outside in the corridor, Osaji punched the wall with her fist, but it only yielded pliantly. “I am not a good girl,” she said fiercely under her breath. How could Mota look at her—selfish and angry as she was—and say such a thing? It denied the reality of her resentment, and that diminished her. Her own grandmother, who ought to know her better than anyone in the world, saw not the individual Osaji but that generic thing, a “good girl.” It made her feel like a mannikin, her personality negated.

  * * * *

  They drifted steadily westward, across a rocky plain that seemed to have no end. There was no navigation to do. The automated systems kept the ark at a steady depth and scanned for underwater obstacles, but there were none. Osaji made sure the machines were recording Divernon's speed and direction; after that there was no need to visit the control pod more than once a day, to make sure nothing had changed. Nothing ever did.

  An ark was supposed to work like a symphony, each person playing an indispensable part in the harmonic whole. But Jack made that impossible. He was unpredictable: one day torpid and morose, the next roaming the ark in a restless rage, throwing off sparks. All Osaji's attempts to suggest a useful role for him met a kind of egotistical nihilism.

  "What's the point?” he said. “It only puts off the inevitable. We're going to die out here."

  "We're going to die no matter where we are,” Osaji said.

  "Spare me the philosophy. Come on: how long before we run out of food and fuel?"

  Puzzled by the question, she said, “Never."

  "We can't restock out here."

  "We don't need to, except for luxuries. The ark is self-sustaining."

  "That's impossible. You would have invented a perpetual motion machine if that were so."

  "The ark is not a machine,” she protested. “It is not a closed system at all; it's an open one, based on autopoiesis. It's in a state of dynamic equilibrium with the sea. It exchanges chemicals in a chain, a process, that builds up complex molecules from simple ones."

  "That's not possible. Not without fuel. The laws of thermodynamics are against it."

  "Life violates thermodynamics all the time."

  "Until it dies."

  Back to that again. “All right, the ark will eventually die,” Osaji admitted. “But not until after we do. Unless we don't maintain it. We are part of the system."

  Even that failed to rouse any sense of responsibility in him. There was no alternative: Osaji had to try to do it all herself. And so her days became a numbing rush from one task to the next, never pausing to rest, always dragging her aching body on.

  One day, she went to the clinic to get some sleeping medicine for Mota and found the drug supply ransacked. At first she stood staring at the pilfered wall pockets, unable to believe what she saw. Then her outrage boiled over.

  She found Jack in the exercise vac, where he often spent time uselessly lifting weights. He was working the bench press with an aggressive intensity when she came in. She stood over him till he put the weights on their rack and sat up. “If it isn't the Guppy Girl,” he said.

  "It is impossible not to notice that the drugs are missing,” she said.

  "Oh yeah?"

  She waited for him to look guilty, or excuse himself. He did neither. “Such egotism is...” she searched for a truly damning word, “antisocial. How can a man put his own temporary pleasure over the legitimate needs of others? What if one of us gets injured, or ill? You have robbed us of lifesaving cures that—"

  "Oh, put a cork in it,” Jack said.

  Osaji's indignation exceeded her eloquence then. “You are an animal!” she cried. “You have stolen from my grandmother!"

  Slowly, he stood up. He had no shirt on, and though he was short and wiry, his muscles were hard like knotted ropes. She took a step backward, for the first time realizing that he could easily overpower her. Fear urged her to flee, but anger made her stand her ground. �
��You see that tube there?” She pointed to the corridor outside. “On this side of it is yours, on the other side is mine. Don't cross it. If I catch you on my side, I swear I'll do you harm."

  She turned and fled then. Stopping in the kitchen, she found a sharp knife. Feeling a little safer, she went to Mota's vac and found the old lady dozing peacefully. Osaji settled down, knife in hand, guarding the aperture.

  Never had she faced such a situation. There were always personality conflicts in arks, but the social pressure kept them hidden. But here, for the first time in her life, Osaji was not part of a larger community. She was an independent being who needed to protect herself and her grandmother as best she could. Fingering the knife hilt, she hated Jack for making her into that most contemptible of all things, an egotist.

  * * * *

  She saw little of Jack in the time that followed. At first, she longed for him to overdose and drop dead, so she could push his body out into the sea and live the rest of her life in peace. But gradually, she began to realize that he had at least been a kind of twisted distraction.

  Her days came to revolve around Mota's constant needs for feeding, cleaning, and protection, and her other duties suffered. Immersed in age and infirmity day after day, Osaji herself began to feel dead and shriveled. She slept more than ever before, and woke with aching joints. When she hobbled to the mirror in the morning, she half expected to see white hair.

  There was no one day when Mota took a turn for the worse, just a long series of imperceptible declines. It was not so much her hearing and sight failing as her will to hear or see. With her other senses went something Osaji could only describe as her sense of pleasure. No food tasted appealing to Mota, no sensation brought comfort, no activity brought content. Osaji could work until she was exhausted trying to satisfy her, all in vain. Mota's capacity for enjoyment was gone.

  Osaji's only refuge was in the hydroponic nursery. Looking after the plants was a chore she actually liked. It took very little effort, but she lavished time on it anyway, because in the nursery she could pretend she wasn't on Divernon, or even on Ben.