Could Naamah have made this? Could she have distilled it right under the Walrus’s nose without him even realizing it? That seemed too far-fetched. The trial and error required to get this right would have certainly tipped him to something. She didn’t care how oblivious he was.
But even if someone managed to do these things, why would anyone have a need for this compound? It didn’t serve any practical function on the rig, at least none that she could think of.
It was like bringing a flamethrower to the continents. There was absolutely no place for it.
The doctor had her theories, and suspected that the Braided Woman shared her suspicions.
She cursed Naamah under her breath. She met with the woman once about the possible health problems the people here faced with their limited diets. She distinctly recalled warning her about the side effects from a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. It appears that she dismissed the severity of those symptoms, or the neurological effects of the disease on the woman were so severe that it didn’t matter. And what did she gain in the end?
Selfish.
It would take her some time to trace exactly what happened and when, even with Naamah as a starting place. The pressing concern was whether the Walrus knew about it. He might have no idea what risks Naamah forced on him. Convulsions. Dementia. Death. Now she had to tell the Walrus what his wife was doing this whole time.
Well, it wasn’t just what she was doing. Nothing Dr. Gossamer could say would be a greater shock. The Walrus may be unaffected by what his wife was doing with her spare time. The problem was who else Naamah forced to engage in her bloody rituals. Did the Walrus know that he was participating in Naamah’s obsessions, inadvertently or otherwise?
Naamah may have suffered from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a degenerative disorder commonly associated with cannibalism. Coupled with the significant stresses that the platform places on people, the disease could easily account for the woman’s impaired judgment and the severity of her recent actions.
She wouldn’t know until Beatrice recovered the body so she could take samples of Naamah’s brain. Coincidentally enough, Dr. Gossamer wanted to perform an autopsy, though she wasn’t going to tell the Braided Woman that.
If Naamah did suffer from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, then her brain tissue would show signs of pockmarked gaps. And if it turned out that Naamah had the disorder, then the odds were pretty good that whatever gave her the infection had also passed to the Walrus.
“Walter, have you been experiencing any neurological symptoms…”
A crackling came from overhead, interrupting her question.
The noise startled Melia, her head jerked up. “What was that?”
“The intercom.”
“We have an intercom?”
“Only on the surface levels. It was part of the platform’s original systems. It doesn’t connect to the lower pods,” Walter pointed out. He still looked dejected, staring helplessly at the ground.
“So why use it?”
“I don’t know. I never did. Maybe Sycamore doesn’t know that.”
Sycamore Johnston’s voice came through the speaker. It was crackly and high-pitched. “To the people on the Alpine, we know full well that human impulses are flawed and misguided when executed en masse. We know this better than our race did at any other time in history. There is no justice in this, only revenge. There is no equality. The explosion involved dozens of workers in the aftermath of a massive storm. There is no humanity in this, only the ravings of a mob. All of us live in difficult times, storm or otherwise, and we must take responsibility for our actions, and their effect on this world, intended or otherwise. We are occupants on this platform and we are grappling with realities unlike any our species has ever known. But we are not savages. We are not in the dark ages. Rather, we have survived dark times. And we are on the verge of re-claiming the light of our civilization. Our perspective has changed. Our lifestyles have changed. We assume work and responsibilities that threaten our lives on a daily basis, so that the rest of this community can survive. Our sense of community is not vanished. Our lives on this platform are everything we know. This limited opportunity of experience forces us into corners where sometimes we must make choices that we would prefer to avoid, choices such as the one that we have to make now.”
“Can we shut this off?” Walter asked. “I’d do it myself if I could move. Listened to enough of Sycamore for one day.”
The doctor ignored the Walrus’s request. She wanted to hear what Sycamore had to say.
“But our preference means little if we submit ourselves to madness. Madness is what we have if we fail to take personal responsibility for our own actions and our own lives. That sense of responsibility must run deep, as deep as the ocean beneath our very feet, and as deep as the swelling in your heart as you feel sympathy for twin boys that suffered cruel fates at the hands of a man that we once trusted, destined to be eaten alive by a creature that is beyond our skill to reckon. We must know, here and now, that our decisions reflect our commitment to ourselves and as members of humanity. We are representatives to ourselves. This commitment is not easily obtained. No. Do not feign surprise when this commitment proves itself difficult and challenging. Indeed, it represents the great challenge of our time, our grip on our own humanity. We must fight for it. We must struggle for it. And we know all too well that we will falter. But I assure you, the struggle is worthwhile. Do not lose faith! It is a struggle that built up our species for millennia, and we know that once that vision is lost, our species will fall like it has in the so recent past. It falls upon our shoulders to continue that legacy lest we return to the complacency that drove our species off of our own continents, and consign our race to the ages.”
Melia asked, “Do you understand what this is about? Does this have something to do with our food? With what happened to Makrigga?”
“I’m not sure,” the doctor responded. She hoped that it had something to do with the murdered child lying dead in her freezer, something that the Braided Woman wasn’t sharing with her. Maybe Sycamore was trying to keep the population calm while he figured everything out.
“We must remember that humanity is not the easy path. It has never been. But our very presence here, aboard the Alpine, is a testament to more than a vague and undefined human ability, but our own true ability to endure and to survive the harshest and cruelest of conditions this planet can devise. We must remember that even isolated as we are, we do not achieve this survival instinct completely alone. We will always have each other, as companions, as a community, as brethren and as good neighbors1 towards each other. We must look to each other to assist those in need. We must simultaneously have justice in compensation for the bare, gruesome and reckless behavior of an errant member of this community, a man who relishes in inviting death to our doors, a man who took his humanity for granted, who considered this platform unassailable. The occupants aboard this platform represent an Arsenal of Humanity, ready, armed and equipped to fight complacency and neglect and injustice. We are ready to protect this platform, and the people that live within its metal barriers. It is our home. It is our fortress. We are still a modern and civilized people. And so we shall act!”
The doctor rolled her eyes. At that point, she shared the Walrus’s annoyance with Sycamore’s speech. Annoyance probably wasn’t the right word. What she saw coming out of the Walrus was nothing short of seething hatred.
Melia still looked hopeful that Sycamore would provide some clue about what happened to Makrigga. Beatrice, on the other hand, appeared to know exactly what Sycamore was talking about.
“Today, we executed Hani Katharda. We threw him overboard so that his body would sink into the Atlantic Ocean. The man was a villain among us. He was a man who debased our entire community with his amorality, and abused our sense of self by appealing to the worst that we had to offer. And recently, he inflicted unspeakable terrors the likes of which we have not experienced in decades. The man was a plague. Now
we are rid of him! At last, we can recover and grow, become the community that we always strived for.”
“What did all of that mean?”
“Who cares? He just talk, talk, talks,” Melia said.
“It means that Hani is just a scapegoat,” the doctor offered. “Sycamore is using him, not just for the mishap on the derrick, but for the decades of frustration, the endless water, the intolerable isolation and the periods of starvation. The people on this platform endure with their mouths shut and hands open, relying entirely on Sycamore Johnston’s generosity. They lack the will to fend for their own lives, the wherewithal to protect their own families. They don’t have any qualms about lashing out at one of the few men willing to survive on his own terms. Sycamore is offering him up as a sacrificial lamb.”
“My whole investigation was pointless,” Beatrice said.
“I don’t think so. You still did a good service to the Alpine. Sycamore might not have said that on the intercom, but we know it. Besides, you don’t need recognition to know that you did the right thing.”
Nevertheless, Beatrice looked guilty.
It made the doctor wonder what the Braided Woman wasn’t telling her.
The doctor put the thick paperback book she was reading face down on the table. She knew that this would only put a new crease in the spine, but from the looks of the thing, no one would notice one new crease. It was a small miracle that the book survived this long to begin with. It was a pulpy sort of novel about men and women riding on horseback through the woods. She often wondered how bad things could possibly be when you were around so many trees. The characters' problems never seemed as bad as the author suggested. Even so, she liked reading about them.
She owned a dozen or so books. Most of them were volumes on medicine and biology, including one edition on field medicine and chemical burns. She couldn't stand reading those things. She dealt with that stuff all day long. At best, she accepted the utility of keeping the material on hand for reference and posterity. She certainly wouldn't read the reference books in her leisure time.
It had been a long day. For her and everyone else on the platform. The hours in the clinic were finally showing. Her head didn't feel so good, but she couldn't talk herself into using the platform's small supply of ibuprofen for herself. Other people with serious injuries would need those painkillers. Her pod, just a few doors down from the clinic itself, was small, like every other pod in the place. And even here she couldn't escape that tedious whirring sound from the vents. She wasn't sure why that had to even be on up here. She told herself that, one day, Sycamore Johnston himself would walk into her clinic asking for something, and while she had him drugged up on morphine, she would get him to turn off the vents.
That day would be a victorious day for herself and everyone else on the platform. Stale air be damned.
In the meantime, she opened the tiny porthole window in her pod. She could at least drown out the drone with an ocean breeze. The porthole was the small privilege afforded to her as the platform’s doctor. The powers that be wanted her to have easy access to the clinic. That meant she had one of the pods that were above water. For all the good it did her, it made her world feel even smaller than it actually was.
Even worse was that her pod looked like a broom closet for the clinic itself. All of the equipment and supplies that she couldn't keep in the clinic found its way into her pod. She even slept on a spare hospital bed. Well. It wasn't really a spare bed. She just never bothered to roll the thing the twenty feet from her pod to the clinic. After all, who would notice? The doctor? She could guarantee that she had the doctor's approval.
Meanwhile, the platform's entire cache of medicines, gauze, surgical supplies, everything the place accumulated over the years was kept in teetering piles in her pod, at least everything that didn't need refrigeration. Even some of the smaller machinery that she didn't use on a regular basis was in there. The equipment was too precious to throw away, but if it interfered with her daily routine, then she had to keep it somewhere else.
She sat in her pod as she let exhaustion creep over her. Motes of dust settled in the air, swirled up by the sudden gusts of wind from the porthole. If this was going to be a storage closet for medical supplies, then she would need to clean the place once in awhile. She let the salt air fill her lungs.
The people on this platform would be better off if Sycamore fanned the ocean air into the lower levels. Then maybe they wouldn't have to listen to that monotonous drone their entire lives. If she had an algae ration for every time someone complained about that noise, maybe she wouldn't be concerned about this sudden food crisis.
She proposed simply opening all of the hatchways, but when Sycamore let her try, she discovered that the maze of corridors was so convoluted that the surface winds just created a messy vortex in the upper two levels. The place wasn't equipped for that kind of natural flow of air. She learned that this was actually by design. After the continents were poisoned, the corridors were arranged to restrict the flow of noxious fumes to the lower levels. Unless she planned on killing everyone in the lower levels from the accumulation of carbon dioxide, they were stuck with the vents as they were.
Just because everyone else had to suffer didn't mean that she needed to breathe the same stale air.
She rested her chin on the bottom of the porthole. In many ways, fresh air was still the best medicine she could prescribe.
A grey cooler sat in the corner like a jug of sour milk. The doctor looked glumly at it. It had bothered her from the moment that one twin showed up. She knelt in front of it and placed her hands on the heavy rounded fabric.
The lid opened with a dull clack.
Inside was a pile of mud and water with small water plants. It was a microcosm of a swamp ecosystem. She didn't see any movement in the dirt. Maybe there wasn't anything living in there. She waited. There was a slight nudge in some of the mud, as though something displaced the thick, wet soil. The cooler wasn't empty after all. There were still leeches inside.
So Naamah didn't steal all of them. That was some relief. How they got into Vector’s hands. That was still a mystery.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HANI KATHARDA
EPILOGUE – TWENTY YEARS AGO
Twenty years ago, Hani Katharda raised a plastic jug, filled with a watery stew, over the stern. The mixture was a faint pink with bits of particulates suspended inside. Some of the contents carelessly spilled over the edge with each undulation in the waves. A stainless steel ladle rested in his left hand, its edges showing signs of rust, its sheen faded from years of use. He dipped the ladle into the bucket. The sleeves of his plastic raincoat were spattered with the pink liquid. When he pulled the ladle out of the bucket, he spilled some of the pink mixture onto himself, soaking his pants.
Hani smiled. All of the effort that went into making the chum and more of it ended up on him than in the ocean.
He held the ladle over the side of the boat and dumped its contents into the ocean. For a moment, he could see the mixture disperse into the surrounding water, but only for a moment. The oarsmen kept the boat moving. The bright cloud from the mixture was quickly indistinguishable from the rest of the ocean.
The lapping from the waves broke the silence around the platform. Each crest sprayed salt water into the boat. Hani poured another ladle of chum over the stern.
A fleck of bone stuck to the sleeve of his raincoat, about half the length of his pinky. It was thin, like a wood splinter. Hani noticed the piece and dropped the ladle into the bucket. More of the pink liquid splashed onto the deck. He picked the bit of bone matter off his sleeve and took a closer look at it. A thick strand of blood still clung to the bone. It hadn’t diluted into the chum mixture. Maybe there was some fat or marrow that kept the blood in place. More likely, it was a vein that kept it there.
He brought the bone closer to his mouth and tasted it. The strand of red dangled from his lip, and he pulled the strand into his mouth with his tongue. He let
out a short, self-satisfied laugh.
They were heading east, directly into the sunrise. A man with broad shoulders and a pair of heavy steel oars sat towards the bow, heaving with each pull. Each exhale left condensation in the air. Hani was not breathing as heavily, of course, since he wasn’t doing the hard labor. Backlit as the man was by the sun, Hani could only make out his silhouette. He didn’t need to see him clearly to feel how closely Sycamore Johnston scrutinized his every move.
Beyond the massive hulk of the platform, halfway to the horizon, there was a small fishing vessel. Even at this distance, Hani could see movement on board as they raised the sails and the boat changed directions with the wind. Good. That meant they spotted something. The chum was doing its job. No one expected him to hunt the creatures that he brought to the platform, as long he succeeded in attracting them to the Alpine’s waters in the first place. He wondered how long this would be his responsibility.
“It’s working,” Sycamore Johnston said. He squint his eyes as he tried to spot what triggered all the movement aboard the fishing vessel. The effort broke Sycamore’s rhythm with the oars, dragging on the current starboard side. The boat made a slow clockwise rotation and Sycamore struggled to get the boat back on its original course.
“It is. I told you. This would bring in many large fish.”
“Many families will be grateful.”
The process seemed obvious. The answer was in the blood. It was what attracted the sharks. Some species could detect the slightest trace from miles away. They were incredible. And there was plenty of blood on the platform. Hani knew that it was his job to make sure that not a single drop of blood was spilled in vain. He had seen so much life wasted. These people. They lived with each other. They knew each other. They worked with each other. Some of them loved each other. And then, when life on the platform deteriorated, they turned on each other. He blamed the Walrus. It was his job to keep them safe. Instead, that idiot let his people kill each other over some scraps of food. He let them die while he promised fish they never caught and an algae crop that never came. And then the bodies rotted until they were bloated corpses. Others withered away to nothing. It was such a waste of life. But not anymore.
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