Galactic Pot-Healer (14 page)

The heat unit of his suit snapped on; he felt the cold of the sea ebb away from him. And for that he gave thanks.

“Joe Fernwright,” Mali’s voice sounded in his ear. “Did it occur to you that Glimmung might have sent me here, to go below with you as we’re doing,
to kill you?
Glimmung knows the prophecy. Wouldn’t it be reasonable for him to do that? So obvious. Didn’t you think at all of that?”

As a matter of fact he had not. And, thinking it now, he felt the chill of the ocean ease back into its grip around him; the enervating cold plundered his loins, his heart—he felt himself freeze, within, into frightened immobility, like a defenseless minor creature; his fear deprived him of his sense of being human, and of being a man. It was not a man’s fear; it was the fear of a small animal. It shrank him, as if devolving him into ages past; it eradicated the contemporary aspects of his self, his being. God, he thought. I am feeling a fear that is millions of years old.

“On the other hand,” Mali pointed out, “the text which the Kalend showed you might have been a forgery, prepared for your benefit. One single copy for your eyes alone.”

Joe said hoarsely, “How did you know about the Kalend and the new text?”

“Glimmung told me.”

“Then he read what I read. It isn’t a forgery for my benefit. If it was you wouldn’t be here.”

She laughed. And said nothing. And, on and on, they spiraled downward.

“Then I can assume I’m right,” Joe said.

Stark and yellow, the hull of something gleamed and putrified within the focus of his torch. To his right, Mali’s torch lit up another vertebra of it. Huge…like an ark that had been built to contain every living thing—and an ark which had sunk to the bottom of Mare Nostrum. Forever. The ark, he thought, of failure.

“What is it?” he asked Mali.

“A skeleton.”

“Of what?” He thrashed toward it, sweeping out as much of it as possible with his torch. Simultaneously, Mali did the same.

She bobbed close to him, then; he could see her face through the transparent plastic disk of her oxygen mask. When she spoke, her tone was subdued, as if, despite her knowledge and experience, she had not expected to find this here.

“It’s a Glimmung,” she said. “The skeleton of an ancient, archaic, long-dead, forgotten Glimmung; it’s coral-encrusted terribly; it’s been down here, I would say, for a century at least. Good lord.”

“You mean you didn’t know it was here?” he demanded.

“Maybe Glimmung; not me. But—” She hesitated. “I think it’s a Black Glimmung.”

“What’s this?” Joe asked, and his uneasiness burgeoned; it filled him and became, by degrees, overwhelming dread.

“It’s almost impossible to explain,” Mali said. “As with antimatter; you can talk about it but you can’t really imagine what the words mean. There are Glimmungs and there are Black Glimmungs. Always on a one-to-one ratio. Each individual Glimmung has his counterpart, his opaque Doppelgänger. Sooner or later, during his life, he must kill his Black counterpart, or it will kill him.”

“Why?” Joe said.

“Because that’s the way it is. It’s like asking, ‘Why is a stone?’ Do you see? They—
evolved
this way, on this strange parity basis. They are mutually exclusive, antagonistic entities, or, if you prefer, properties. Yes, properties, like chemical combinations. You see, the Black Glimmungs are not precisely alive. And yet they’re not biochemically inert either. They’re like malformed crystals with the form-destroying principle motivating them; tropic specifically as regards their matching Glimmung. And some say that it’s not limited to Glimmungs; some say—” She broke off, staring acutely ahead. “No,” she said. “Not this. Not already; not the first time.”

A decaying hump of flopping fabric mingled with threads of cloth tottered toward them, propelled by the currents of murky water. It had a humanoid look, as if once, long ago, it had held itself erect, had walked on strong legs. Now it bowed from the waist, and its legs dangled as if the bones had been scooped out of them. He stared at it and it came nearer and he continued staring, because it seemed somehow to want to eddy into his vicinity…clumsily, so that its pace was slow. And yet it made progress forward. He made out its face, now.

And felt the world within him disintegrate.

“It’s your corpse,” Mali said. “You must understand; time down here is simply not—”

“It’s blind,” he said. “Its eyes—they’ve—rotted away. Gone. Can it see me?”

“It’s aware of you. It wants—” She hesitated.

“What does it want?” he demanded, snarling at her so that she shuddered.

“It wants to talk to you,” she said, then. And became totally silent; now she merely observed, merely saw. And did nothing, in either direction. She did not assist him; she did not assist his corrupted corpse. As if, he thought, she has withdrawn and is not here. I am alone with this
thing
.

“What should I do?” he asked her.

“Not—” She became silent once more, then abruptly said, “Don’t hear what it says.”

“You mean it can speak?” he demanded, appalled. He could accept what he saw; he could retain his sanity when presented with his own dead body. But he could not believe beyond that. It could not be real, not sane; it had to be the mimicry of some aquatic life-form, something which saw him and managed, in a plastic manner, to adopt the semblance of his own shape.

“It will tell you to go away,” Mali said. “To leave this world, this ocean. Leave Heldscalla forever, and Glimmung’s hopes, his project. See: it’s already trying to form words.”

The decayed flesh of the lower face writhed; he saw broken teeth and then, from within the cavity which his mouth had become, noise issued forth. A drumming, as if far off on a heavy ocean cable. Something extending for five hundred miles, something which weighed so much. Something so dense, so hard to maneuver. And yet the thing tried. The drumming continued. And finally, as it bobbed before him, rotating slow motion and rising now, then sinking a little, he distinguished one word. Then another.

“Stay,” it said, and its mouth cavity gaped. Small fish floated in, disappeared, then floated skimmingly back out. “You—must go ahead. Ahead. Lift. Heldscalla.”

“Are you still alive?” he asked it.

Mali said, “Nothing down here is really alive, in the strict sense. Residual amounts…partial changes in a damaged battery.”

“But it’s not yet,” he said. “This is the future.”

“There is no future down here,” Mali said.

“But it hasn’t happened to me yet. I’m alive. I’m facing this ugly thing, this horrible mobile rot. It couldn’t talk to me if I were it.”

“Obviously,” Mali said. “But—the distinction isn’t really complete between the two of you. Some of it is merged in you; some of you remains in it. They are both you; you are both of them. ‘The child is father to the man’; remember? And the man is father to the corpse. But I thought it would say to you to go away. And instead he—it—wants you to remain. That’s what it’s swum up here to tell you. I don’t understand. This can’t be your Black, in the sense that I was explaining it, anyhow. It’s badly decayed but it’s benign, and the Blacks are never benign. Can I ask it something?”

He said nothing. Mali took it as silent assent.

“How did you die?” she asked the corpse.

The exposed jawbone waggled whitely in the currents of water surrounding it as it drummed out its deformed words, its answer. “Glimmung had us killed.”

“‘Us’?” she asked alertly. “How many of us? All of us?”

“Us.” It extended a decomposed arm toward Joe. “We two.” It became silent, then. And, by degrees, drifted away. “But it isn’t so bad. I have a box I’ve made; it helps protect me. I get inside it and put up a barrier where the door—the entrance—is, and very few of the fish, the really dangerous fish, get in.”

“You mean you’re trying to protect your
life?”
Joe said. “But your life is over.” He did not comprehend; it made no sense, and it was eerie and bizarre. The thought of a decayed corpse—his corpse—living this semilife down here, going though the motions of making itself safe…“Improve living standards for the dead,” he said savagely, speaking at large, to neither Mali nor the corrupted body floating before him.

“The curse,” Mali said.

“What?” he said.

“It won’t let you go. It confronts you with your own final self and yet you won’t go away. And then later on when you’re this—” She gestured at the corpse. “You’ll wish you had left. Today, tonight. Tomorrow morning.”

“Stay,” the corpse said to Joe.

“Why?” he said.

“When Heldscalla is raised from the water I will go to sleep. I am waiting to go to sleep; I’m glad you came, at last. I have waited centuries. Until you come here and release me I am caught in the totality of time.” It made an imploring gesture with its right arm and hand, but portions of the hand broke loose and fell away into the murky water; the hand now had only two fingers, and, seeing this, Joe felt physically, substantially sickened. He thought, If I could turn the clock back and not have come here. But the corpse had said the opposite; his coming here meant its—and his—release. My good Jesus, he thought. I’ll be that thing before long; parts of my body will fall off and be snapped up by the dangerous fish. I will have to hide in a box down here at the bottom of the sea, and the fish will eat me piece by piece.

Or maybe it’s not true, he thought. Maybe this is not my corpse; how many people are confronted by their own corpse—a corpse talking beseechingly? The Kalends, he thought. But that made no sense because—contrary to Mali’s expectations—it had urged him to stay, urged him to begin his job of pot-healing.

Glimmung, he thought. This is a phantasm projected by him, a warped, a deranged hook, to gaff me. Obviously.

He said to the bobbing, lingering corpse, “Well, thanks for your advice. I’ll take it under advisement.”

“Is my corpse here, too?” Mali demanded.

No answer. Joe’s physical remnants had floated away. Did I say the wrong thing? Joe asked himself. But ye gods; what are you supposed to say to your own corpse? I said I’d think its advice over; what more can it ask? He felt strangely angry, not frightened any longer or horrified, just the mundane
boiling inside him of irritability. Pressure like this—it was unfair. He had been told that he
must
go ahead with his part of the project. And then he thought of the curse.

“Death,” he said to Mali as they bobbed close to each other. “Death and sin are connected. That means that if the cathedral is cursed then we also—”

“I’m going back up.” She rose, drifting upward above him, her legs moving expertly. “I don’t want to find myself too close to the dredging operation.” She pointed.

He turned his body in that direction.

An enormous, silent instrument, a construct which he did not recognize, lay far to their right. He heard its activity now, the dull, low throbbing. Its sound had been there all this time; but, he estimated, in the form of a twenty cycles per second churning at the lower limit of audibility. Perhaps he had felt it as a vibration; perhaps he still felt it that way now. “What is it?” he asked her, and started in that direction; it fascinated him.

“A caprix scoop,” Mali said. “Ionian caprix, the element with the greatest atomic weight currently in use. Replacing the older rexeroid scoops that you used to see.”

“Is the entire cathedral going to be raised by the scoop?” he asked Mali, who, unwillingly, flapped and dove beside him, following his course in a reluctant, halting manner.

“Only the base,” Mali said.

“The rest is being cut into blocks?”

“Everything but the base, which is a solid slab of Deneb three agate. If it were sawed into blocks it would be unable to support the superstructure. Hence the scoop.” She hung back. “It’s not safe to go so close. Anyhow you’ve seen caprix scoops and shovels in operation before; you know the principle they utilize. The fulcrum is passed back and forth among the four rims of the scoop. Now please! Let’s go back up to the surface. I find it very exacting down here. Damn it; it’s dangerous so near the dredging.”

“Are all the blocks cut?” he asked.

“Oh god,” Mali said wearily. “No, not all. Only an initial few. The scoop is not yet lifting the base; it’s merely inserting itself in place.”

“What will the ascent rate be?” he asked.

“That hasn’t been decided. Look—we’re not ready for that; you’re talking about ascent rate while we’re still involved in getting the scoop in place. This isn’t your field; you have no knowledge about dredging. The scoop is moving horizontally at the rate of six inches per twenty-six-hour day, which is virtually not moving at all.”

He said, “There’s something you don’t want me to see.”

“Paranoia,” Mali said.

Flashing his bifocal light-source to the right of the scoop he made out something, a dense and opaque mass that soared up high, becoming a triangle of planes past which fish swam and onto which barnacles and bivalves and a host of unipodular mollusks and Crustacea clung. And, next to it, where the scoop slowly worked, an identical shape: Heldscalla.

“That’s what you didn’t want me to see,” he said to Mali.

Two cathedrals.

“One of them,” he said, “is black. The Black Cathedral.”

“Not the one they’re dredging,” Mali said.

“Is he sure?” Joe said. “Could he make such a mistake?” It would kill Glimmung; he knew that intuitively. It would be the end of everything. And of them all. Merely knowing that it existed, and seeing it—he felt the sting of death; ice settled over his heart and remained there. Hopelessly he flashed his torch about, here and there. As if trying to find—and failing to find—a way out.

“You now know,” Mali said, “why I wanted to go back up.”

He said, “I’ll go up with you.” He did not want to remain here any longer. Like Mali, he yearned for the surface, for the world above water. That world contained nothing like this…and, he thought, it never should. That was never intended. “Let’s go,” he said to Mali, and swam upward; with each passing second he was farther up from these black-chilled depths and all that they held. “Give me your hand.” He turned, reached back for her…