by Lavie Tidhar
Yesterday we’d dropped anchor by a shore settlement where they spoke the common tongue with an accent unfamiliar to any of us, though they knew Tyr well and had met salvagers like Mowgai in the past. It had felt odd sitting there in their nasara, the communal space under the great banyan tree, with the fire burning, discussing the world beyond. They spoke of strange sightings on the horizon during the Blood Moon, of submersible machines which haunted still the silent cities of the Down Below, of the time a pod of whales was beached onshore, like sailors seduced to their deaths by the siren call of another time. In their stories the sea was unfathomable, a blank map without borders or compass points. Perhaps they were right. The world was changed, its maps irreversibly redrawn. Who was to say what sailed the seas, or what new life arose from the debris of the old age?
Day 5
I had taken to catnapping in a hammock on the deck. At night, the stars overhead seem so close that all you have to do is reach out a hand and touch them. A river of stars… This is what happened:
A cool night. The ship slowed down, by degrees, and I heard Elle and Bellman talking in low voices. I went to join them at the prow.
“What is it?”
Elle pointed. Choking our forward motion was a sea of weeds. Their fronds moved as though by sentience, stroking the hull of the ship. The ship near stalled. The broken moon was very bright in the sky, and it erased the farther stars. I started—
Something grated against the hull of the Argosy. Poseidon weed. Neptune grass. A single organism made up of countless clones. As an entity it was near immortal, and I thought it must have seen the age of excess rise and fall, seen the Sneylanders’ empire and the Romans before them, seen it all—
“What was that?”
“What was w—” I began to say. The wave came out of nowhere. It rose over the hull and came rushing at me, knocking me off my feet.
“Mai, hold my h—!”
It swept me overboard and my breath caught, and I fell.
Into water as warm as a bath…
The reeds held me like a child.
I felt myself submerging in the water, slowly… The fronds of weeds stroked my face. It felt so peaceful.
I fell…
Day 7
Our location is uncertain, and there is no sight of land. Elle is convinced, however, that an outpost of the Nesoi is nearby. She has been poring for hours over intricate clockwork devices, the nature of which I do not know. The sky is overcast, and a fierce wind is blowing. Mowgai had strapped himself to the mast, like Odysseus. The poor man has nothing left to throw up.
…I fell. Into a world I can’t describe, an ever-shifting chiaroscuro. Alien voices spoke nonsense words. The weeds prodded me, curious. They were trying to understand me, I think, just as I failed to understand them. An ancient organism, living and evolving under the broken moon…
Will you let us pass? I thought.
No reply, but a sort of whispered melody, like the cooing of adults at a child. Then, abruptly, it was over, and I felt hands pulling me, roughly, and I was taken from that warm embrace and—
“Damn it, Mai! Breathe! Breathe!”
I spluttered salt water, took in gasps of air. The moon shone down and I laughed, lying there, drenched, on the deck.
“Are we moving?”
“We…” She looked surprised. “Yes,” she said.
“Good,” I said, and closed my eyes.
Day 8
“There!” Elle says. She points into the darkness. I see nothing, at first. Then a dark shape, eerily illuminated by the moon. A coastal outline, and were those lights, coming into being?
The ship glides toward that floating island. I had never thought to see them. A harbor, opening—I would say natural, but they are not natural, exactly. Coral, engineered to grow a certain way? The island floats upon the sea. Moonlight bathes the scene, reflecting twisted trees, a path, silent figures standing on the shore.
The ship comes to rest and we step out, even Mowgai. I see three figures come toward us. Humanoid, but different… Tall and willowy, like trees, their arms are branches, their fingers leaves. How delicate they are, I think. Only their eyes are comprehensible as fauna, silver-speckled, with a yellow sheen, it’s hard to say if they’re mammals or reptilian—
Welcome.
We stand onshore. Do we follow them inland? There are many stories told of the floating Isles of the Nesoi. The coral gleams in strands of rich and ethereal colors. It is alive, the whole island is alive—a clonal colony like the Poseidon weed but, unlike that entity, it is more animal than plant. The islands are hermaphrodites, they reproduce out on the open sea. The Nesoi are captains… some say, polyps.
Do we follow? Their arms move as though underwater, their eyes gleam so strangely. And somehow we are no longer standing on the shore, but following the path into the Mimsy, the coral flowers undulate around us, the porous ground breathes and the pools are warm, and a smell I can’t identify washes over us, the very air perfumed as by some alien scent. Deeper and deeper into the island we go.
Day—
…and I awoke and found me here, on the cold hills—
…back on board the Argosy. How long we’d dwelt in the Mimsy it was impossible to tell. The timekeeping instruments Elle had consulted all disagreed with each other. It was as though we had been in a pleasant, years-long dream, yet woken up from it with only an instant having passed. Had we dwelt on the island, or was it just an illusion? I’d seen things, a sort of technology, I think, of the kind they had only begun to develop in the final decades of the old age, a sort of bioinformatics or biorobotics interface. I’d seen the jubjub birds and heard, in the distance, the call of the frumious bandersnatch…
“What was that?” I said.
“The Nesoi,” Elle said, simply.
As I try to remember it the details fade, but I had learned something there, something important, if only I could remember it! A warning, I think, of my journey’s ultimate end. Some words come back to me as we set sail again, under the new moon. Not all history must needs be remembered.
I wonder what it means.
Day 3 (redux)
Elle squints at the horizon, her face uneasy. All seems peaceful. The shore is empty of any and all human habitation. We are somewhere off the coast of Francia, I think. The surface of the sea is almost preternaturally calm. There are no birds in the sky.
“What is it?” I say.
“A storm.”
I almost laugh. But Mowgai, standing with her, wears a troubled expression.
“What… sort of storm?” I say. He has his salvager face on, I think, uneasily. It is something that turns warm, compassionate Mowgai into a cold, efficient machine, something that can survive in the old parts of the world.
“The instruments picked up a submarine explosion an hour ago, nor’-nor’-west.”
“An explosion?”
“Perhaps a better word is an eruption,” Mowgai says.
“I don’t understand.”
“The instruments are picking up a large heavy body, moving rapidly, against the current.”
“Moving in our direction, Mai.”
“But—”
I see then how fleeting the Argosy’s movement is on the calm sea, how we’re heading to shore, how Bellman and the crew attempt to stir us in a pattern, like traces of lying eights, of infinity.
“It’s all right,” Elle says, “we’re on course to shore and if we’re right, it will only hit in twenty-three min—”
This is when things go rapidly wrong.
The first indication that something is wrong is when a dark mountain rises out of the seawater straight ahead, between us and the shore. Its slopes are a glossy black and the water roils around it. Then a giant appendage snakes from the thing and makes for the ship, and for just a moment, I see something, two bright orbs of light, open in the cliff-face vista of the creature, and I think, with sudden horror—they’re eyes.
Then the tentacle hits, the term
inal pad smashing into the masts, and the rest of the long shape follows, and overhead I see carpal suckers opening and closing. The manus slams into the deck and shatters wood like kindling, and I lose my balance and fall, and roll, along the broken deck toward the railings.
“Mai!”
But Mowgai’s even more helpless than me, trapped on his back, his exoskeleton moving helplessly, the way the mahi-mahi had, when was it? When we’d set out, when we’d had such high hopes of success… I see Elle and Bellman swept aside as the giant thing comes rising once again above us, I see its beak—what is it, where did it come from, the sea is full of such unnamed things, had it evolved or was it wrought to semblance of a life by machine science? The age of excess was so very, very good at the science of killing…
I crawl for Mowgai. I almost reach him, my hand grasps his, I pull—
The mountain rises above the Argosy, two giant eyes like sleepy moons look down, tentacular clubs rise all about the ship—a nightmare of sailors in story and song all down the ages—hadn’t Pliny the Elder written of such a thing? But why am I thinking of Pliny the Elder, I wonder, in a daze—the ship is sinking, the ocean all around us, but I don’t let go of Mowgai’s hand, and together, together we are pushed on the waves, until inhuman voices wake us as we dr—
Day—
These are the last words I shall write in this diary. We are stranded on the coast of Francia. The Argosy lies broken on the shore. It washed up onto the debris line in bits and pieces. Of the crew, two are missing, but Elle is unharmed, and Bellman escaped with just a broken arm. Mowgai and I are bruised, yet well enough to travel.
Elle will not go farther. She is determined to rebuild the Argosy and sail her back to Tyr. “I built her with my own two hands and I will rebuild her again if it kills me,” she says. I have half a mind to suspect she intends to sail back via the Isles of the Nesoi. There is a coral-like quality about her, sometimes, a new, faraway look in her eyes… I wish I could join her, for in truth, the lure of those mysterious islands calls to me, also, and their spell lies heavy on my mind.
Not so Mowgai, to whom the Nesoi are but another trap awaiting the unwary traveler. He, in turn, is fascinated by the monster that attacked us. He speaks of “militarized Octopus giganteus,” and “biomech kaiju,” and “Level III Boojums,” and draws diagrams in the sand I and the others do our best to ignore. I think he, too, has fallen under the spell of the sea, but his dreams are of hunting a Snark—whatever it may be.
My own path lies elsewhere. I am haunted by images of the buried vault under New Atlantis, and of a memory that isn’t mine. Not all history must needs be remembered, the Nesoi told me, yet I think they’re wrong. It is my task to remember and to tell. It is the telling of our stories which makes us human.
Mowgai will come with me. The others remain. At dawn, tomorrow, we set off into the wilderness. Yurop lies ahead of us, thick with foliage, a world as wild and unexplored as an alien planet. We shall have to traverse this land—this Land—until we reach the ocean that lies on the other side of this continent. What awaits us, I do not know. I shall hug Elle good-bye, and hope we meet again. I am leaving this salt-stained notebook as a record, however jumbled, of our sea voyage. If you find it, know this: My name is Mai. I have lived upon this Land for five-and-thirty years. And I am going to the New Atlantis.
VII. La Ville Lumière
“Humans,” Bill said, “should have gone extinct.”
It wasn’t a very nice thing to say, but then Bill wasn’t a very nice… person.
We were standing high on top of the hill that was once called Montmartre, and all below us the city of lights was swaddled in jungle.
Hunter drones flew in formation over a wrought-iron tower jutting at an odd angle from the ground. The city was still alive with light. Clouds of fireflies rose through the foliage and from on high the city looked aflame with festive luminescence. In the glow of the setting sun, Bill’s metal body shone. His joints creaked when he moved and streaks of rust covered his chest like scars, but he was surprisingly agile and infinitely resourceful: By his own account, he had survived on his own in La Ville Lumière for centuries.
Bill was the first humanoid robot I’d ever met. Having encountered him, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to meet another.
Bill took a long draw on a stick of rolled paper stuffed with leaves, which he had set on fire at one end. He drew smoke and blew it out in perfect rings into the sky. Beside me Mowgai coughed, but Bill ignored him.
“After a meal, there’s nothing like a good cigar,” he said.
He was sexless, of course, but that is not to say without gender. There was something of the men of old about Bill, however he might protest. He was a creature of the age of excess, and with all the arrogance that came with it.
“We survived,” I said. “And now we live in harmony with the Land. We no longer upset the ecology of the planet the way we—”
He shook his head. “For how long?” he demanded. “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
He looked pretty satisfied with himself as he said it, as much as a robot can be said to look satisfied.
“Where is that from?” Mowgai said.
“From a very old, holy book,” Bill said. He turned and glared at us—I want to say, accusingly. “Sooner or later you will be fruitful and multiply again, and fill the Earth. You’ve nearly destroyed it once. You should not be allowed to do it again.”
“Surely every species has a right to live,” I said. “Even humans.”
“Right? Living isn’t a right,” Bill said. “It’s a responsibility.”
He was an old robot, and there was no arguing with him. Below us, giraffes moved gently through Place Pigalle, and a herd of elephants was framed against the dying sun in the distance. In the trees by the ruins of the old church where we stood, small, silver monkeys chattered to each other excitedly.
“Ah, Paree!” Bill said, and he drew, contentedly, on his cigar.
We’d crossed the wildlands of Francia on foot. From the coast our journey was slow, hot, and bothersome. Hordes of mosquitoes plagued our every step. Snakes slithered underfoot. Branches and vines blocked our way and we resorted to hacking through the foliage with bush knives. All my muscles ached, and Mowgai’s exoskeleton struggled in the confines of the jungle, moving sluggishly with dirt clogging up its delicate joints, or where it snagged on an extended vine—it was as though the very flora were actively working against us.
In all this time we did not see human habitation, though now and then we’d come across the remnants of the old age, buried in the mulch of the forest: rooftops and glass bottles and rusted machines, and stone walls that still stood, unexpectedly, in what once might have been a farmhouse or a town, but was now overtaken with vegetation.
I knew Francia was much like the rest of the world now was. It was incredible how quickly humanity’s footsteps on the planet could be erased. Homes and buildings meant to last forever were wiped away like chalk, and in their place came other species, fungi, birds, cherry trees, wolves.
It was the wolves we heard, at night, howling in the distance. Once we came upon a bear in a clearing, but it merely snorted at us. Once we saw an anthill and gave it a wide berth. It was Mowgai, with his salvager’s senses, who found a path for us which led at last out of the thicket and onto the remnants of an old highway.
When the Romans at last abandoned their colony of Britannia, they had left behind their roads. Centuries later, those ancient highways still remained, etched into the land, still traversed by a people who knew nothing of their vanished builders. This Francian highway was much the same, and it made it easier for us to travel.
We ate gathered berries, fruit, nuts on our way. Mowgai set traps, reluctantly, and for the first time in years I was forced to eat meat. We caught birds, a wild rabbit, squirrels. As we traversed the road,
we came upon the remnants of old towns, some remarkably well preserved. I was enchanted by the sight of medieval cathedrals and brutalist office buildings, still surviving, choked by vines and inhabited by wildlife. In one town we came at last upon a vast, majestic river, and the remnants of an old pier. I remembered the old maps of this territory. This must be the Sequana, or Seine, and I knew that if we followed it, it could take us all the way to the coast which faced the New Atlantis.
We stood on the remnants of an old pier and saw, in the undergrowth, a curious sight. Amid the carcasses of drowned, ruined boats were several canoes moored against the bank, dugouts made of oak, with crude-fashioned sails. Mowgai and I exchanged glances, for this was the first sign we had seen of the presence of human beings in this wilderness. As we came closer, however, we saw clearly the signs of a battle. Two of the canoes had been set on fire and their sails were blackened rags flapping in the wind. There were traces of old blood on the pier, dark patches that had soaked into the stone. We moved cautiously, and it was then that we found the corpses.
There were three of them, two men and a woman. The woman and one of the men had been shot in the back with crude-looking arrows. The second man, however, had suffered a different, crueler fate. His feet and hands bound with thick rope, he had been moored to an ancient metal hook set into the stones, then tossed just beyond the pier into the water. He must have lain there, half-submerged, for hours, trying to crawl away, drowning by degrees. When we pulled him out, we saw that some creature in the water had been dining on his face. The corpse was white, all his blood had spilled into the water.
I was sick into the river. Mowgai, grim-faced, moved about the scene, examining the other two who had died there. When I recovered enough, I joined him. I felt ill. Such things were no longer possible, surely. We had evolved, as a species, beyond this kind of needless killing, beyond war.
