Slippage (53 page)

In this aspect of the Bermuda Triangle the water was always Nassau warm. But as he spiraled deeper into the Tongue of the Ocean, pressed to the breasts of the woman-fish, it grew even warmer. Lying out in an August hammock warm. And the intimation of thunder grew louder. Perhaps hundreds of meters above them as they fell into infinite shadow, the great crimson waterfall roared as it spilled its raging body out of that impossible vacuum hole. But the thunder was not from the impossible avalanche of gallons above them. It came from below in the bottomless deep. Lanfear's listening DNA clocked every insinuation, every nuance. And then, when the fragile sack of blood that was his human body should have come unseamed and split, at a depth no surface creature could call home, he began to dissolve.

Dennis Lanfear, hands empty, mind clutching no more than muted memories of the crushed, dead father he had never been privileged to know, began to dissolve in a world of crimson water, a world of red thunder.

He had feared he would die as his father had died, in the jaws of unbearable pounds per square inch, but it was not to be. The self-fulfilling prophecy—will I
outlive the years allotted to my father—he died at fourty-four, will I live to be fifty—the unspoken fear that numbs all men—was eluded.

Dennis Lanfear did not crush under the heel of the deep, he merely dissolved. Molecule by molecule, atom by atom, submicroscopic electrical pulse by invisible swimming flux, he was carried down in the mermaid's arms toward the twin of the booming vacuum hole far above...a quiet yet susurrating void as black and empty of identity as the matrix of a thresher shark's eye. His every instant was culled, harvested, codified...and sucked into the vacuum hole as the guardian of the portal, the watcher of the Bermuda Triangle abyss, who had hauled such cargo uncounted times in her thousand-year existence, released his mortal flesh in its puny diving suit fabricated in 1922 in a city of a nation that had not existed for one-tenth her life-span. She smiled, and swam away in the warm.

And the essence of Lanfear was carried away, into the dead emotionless vacuum eye of an abyss that lived, as the shark lives, only to feed.

The light that came to his skin from the end of the universe was white and pure and bright; but the water around him as he came to the surface of the great lake pool was a chromatic sibling of red and pink and amber that no eye on Earth had ever seen. It registered in that vast and desolate cerebral Sahara within the parietal lobe where nothing can grow. There, in the unfathomable desolation of the primary sensory cortex, whose functions are the Bermuda Triangle of the brain's potential, such hues and shades as composed the gently rippling waters as his throbbing head broke the surface, had meaning and identity. In that alien landscape of the mind, to which no human being had ever retained valid passport, the spectrum was wider, broader, deeper, and sang with a brighter resonance.

The copper diving helmet was gone. Dispensed with. Somewhere behind him in the passage through the thunderingly silent drain of the vacuum hole. Perhaps its atoms had been dispersed in a cloudy shower saturating the life-heavy waters off the Grand Bahama Banks. Perhaps they had been fired away in a narrow-focus stream, like a lightless laser beam, as he was disassembled, broken-down, deconstructed, unbuilt, as his molecules were being transported here—to this place of the lake pool and exquisite diamond-bright light and gently rippling water that seemed heavier than he remembered water to be, seemed able to hold him higher in its totality than he remembered water was able. It was not that he felt lighter, more buoyant, just that the water was more reliable, more fatherly, gentler. He trusted it more than when he had been—

—had been where? Had been in the water beyond Andros Island? Had been in the North Atlantic Ocean? Had been on the planet Earth? Had been in the year and the month and the day on the calendar in his office back at the Sonar station? Had been in his right mind, his right-brain mind? Where he had
been:
that much he knew. Where he was now, what had happened to bring him to this new place, by what impossible transport...he could not
begin
to fathom. The diving suit, too, was gone. Its atoms dispersed at the checkout counter of transmogrification. Stale-dated. Roundfiled. Recycled. Where the hell
am
I?

He looked across the crimson lake and saw ships.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of ships. Boats, craft, vessels of all sizes and periods and origins. Arab dhows and Gallic currachs, Greek triremes and balsa-wood PT boats, Canton delta lorcha and lateen-sailed Portuguese trawlers. Whalers, warships, feluccas and frigates; hydrofoils, hagboats, pinnaces and Pechili junks. Siamese lug-sails, brigantines, galeasses, Hanseatic League cogs, sixty-oared papyrus galleys, Norse
drakkars
and dragon-prowed Viking longships called the Oseberg ship. Barques, yawls, packet boats, cigarettes, freighters, cabin cruisers, sampans, windjammers and luxury liners; Turkish tchektirme, Greek sacoleva, Venetian trabaccoli, Levantine caïque, and the German U-1065 pigboat alleged to have been sunk by R.A.F. Mosquitos in the Kattegat. Sailing ships that were little more than rough-hewn logs lashed into the shape of a raft with lianas, and twin-hulled catamarans of titanium and PVC pipe. The lake pool, harbor of last resort, Sargasso of lost ships, was filled with the oceangoing detritus of ten thousand years.

Yet it was hardly jammed. It seemed endless in its capacity to hold the castaways of the shipping lanes, but the lake was spacious and only dotted with a shape here, a bobbing four-masted brigantine there. Dennis Lanfear, treading water, turned slowly, looking and looking, amazed at the bizarre optical illusion made by a storehouse overflowing...that remained capacious and expectant.

He turned and turned...and saw the city.

It rose from the very edge of the lake pool. Slanting up as softly blue and gray as psalms ascending to Heaven, it was massive, enthralling, breathtaking in the complexity of its segmented faces. Walls so high they dizzyingly ran to a sky that could not be seen in the misty upper reaches. Walls that abutted at right angles—yet formed no central square. Walls that seemed ancient, yet downy with the breath of first birth. The cave dwellings of the Anasazi, the prehistorical hive dwellings of slope-browed pre-men, the filing cabinets for gothamites gone eternally condo...this was the City indeed, the City supreme. It towered over the harbor, and at first Lanfear saw no hint of human movement.

But as he stroked toward the quay, toward the low lip of polished blue-gray stone that would allow him to climb up to the walkway fronting the Great Walls, he saw one small figure, just one. No, there was a second person. Man or woman, he could not be sure...either of them.

He breast-stroked through the lovely crimson water, softly lapping at the stones of the quay, and paddled in to shelter. He pulled himself along till he reached something like a hemp cargo net hanging into the water, anchored out of sight on the walkway above. He pulled himself up, and stood, dripping heavy pink moisture, dwarfed by the immensity of the cyclopean walls that slanted away above him. He craned to see the sky, even to see a ceiling, but all was mist and the reborn antiquity of structures ageless and ever new.

He marveled that, if he were indeed somewhere beneath the Bermuda Triangle, in some impossible sub-oceanic world that could exist in defiance of the rigors of physics and plate tectonics and magma certainties, then this subterranean edifice was certainly the most colossal structure ever built on the planet. A holy sunken cathedral built by gods.

He stood there dripping pink, thick water, sanctifying himself in the first moment of true religion he had ever known.

And one of the two figures who had been walking beside the quay came toward him, and it was a man in his very late thirties or early forties, wearing a gray chambray shirt and casual chino slacks. He was a pleasant-looking man, and he walked toward Dennis Lanfear and, as he drew near, he smiled and said, "Dennis? Is that you, son?"

Dennis Lanfear came back from abstract visions of the City of God, the holy sunken cathedral, and looked at the man. Then he stared at the man. Then he
saw
the man.

Then he
knew
the man.

He had not seen his father since he had been ten months old. Now he was just over forty. He was older than the man in front of him, but he knew the face from his mother's photographs—the picnic at Crystal Beach, the wedding, the shot of him leaning against the Packard, the snapshot on the dock when he came back from the War. Dennis Lanfear stared into, and knew, the smile of his father dead four decades; the loving face of George DeVore Lanfear, come to beam upon, and pridefully acknowledge, the son he had never been allowed to see grow to manhood.

Dennis stood silent, the pain swelling up from his stomach to his chest and into his eyes. As his father embraced him, he began to cry. His father's arms went around him, the tough, corded arms that had worked so diligently until death in the auto assembly plant; and that strength bound Dennis as securely as had the arms of the mermaid who had brought him here, beyond midnight, to the sunken cathedral.

"Where are you? Who am I? What is this place?"

His father sat with him in one of the great rooms of the submerged city. They had eaten, they had talked endlessly, they had swapped stories of the past before Dennis had been born, and of the world since George DeVore Lanfear had died. They had caught up. They were father and son. And now was the moment of explanations, and of decisions about the future...because the journey was only half the destination.

"Atlantis," his father said gently. "You're in Atlantis."

Dennis shook his head in pleasant, startled incredulity. "The legend?" he said. "The great sunken continent, Plato, Minoan Crete, all that...is that what you mean?"

"Welcome to Mars," his father said, grinning widely.
 

"You said Atlantis."
 

"Welcome to Atlantis."
 

"I, I don't seem to..."

"The Atlanteans went to Mars, son. You were brought here the way millions of others have been brought here, for thousands of years, because you got too near one of the drains. Our recycling system. Hadn't you noticed the red water?"

"I—I—" He stopped. He held his head comically, and waggled it back and forth. "I'm not up to this, dad. You've given me too much to—"

"All right, more slowly, then. The Atlanteans absolutely commanded time and space, just as the tall tales tell. They looked ahead, and they saw what was coming, what the human race was heading toward becoming, and they left. They went to Mars."

"But there's no life on Mars, we can see that from the probes we've sent. It's desolate, unlivable. Are you telling me that we're
under
Mars?"

"Exactly. But not the Mars that hangs in the night sky of Earth's telescopes. They, the ones who will build the ships, they'll never reach Mars. Whatever red planet in their sky that they land upon...whatever it's called...it will
not
be
Mars. Command of time and space, remember? Come on, tell me you remember, don't fall behind."

Dennis laughed, a mild amusement. "I remember."

"Excellent. It's almost as if either one of us is smart enough to understand this. What it is, son, is that even if the human race reaches 'Mars' it won't be
this
place. To
some
Mars, perhaps; but never to
this
Mars, this Atlantis, to which we fled. In fairness, they left the legend. Just to tantalize. It was a debt they felt, a debt we still feel. An even break, if you get what I mean. If the world changes—it hasn't, has it?—"

Dennis sighed and shook his head.

"Ah. Well, then...if the world
does
change, and people change, and the legend draws them to us, we'll take them in. We took
you
in, didn't we?" Dennis smiled. "But not otherwise.

"Otherwise...they'll have to shoulder their own destiny. If we could do it, why shouldn't they? We all come from the same egg."

He stared at his father, knowing all was not as it seemed.

The explanations were shimmering, insubstantial, missed a beat here and there.

His father looked at him with unbent affection, and said gently, "And I? Am I your father? Well, perhaps and perhaps not exactly. But I'll do. I am—really and truly—one of the many possible men your father would have become, had he been accorded the chance. I'm a good chance at your father."

"Am I dead?"

"Ah.
That
question. You ask it a little less quickly than most of the cargo she brings us. But... yes,
that
question again."
 

"Am I? Am I dead?"

"Not an important consideration. Probably not. But maybe you are. So what? Does it really matter a hoot in hell? Live, dead, you're in a warm place with wonderful things happening. We've got the opportunity denied us back where you came from, the opportunity to get to know each other. Isn't that something you've always wanted? Haven't you always cried in your heart that we never got to talk about everything that mattered?"

"Yes. But—"

His father spread his hands and gave him that spiffy smile. "Buts keep coming, Dennis. They never stop. And let me tell you a thing: even if you knew someone you loved, like your father, for instance, knew he was dying, and you sat by his bedside for six months before he passed on, and you said everything you'd ever wanted to say, tied off all the loose ends, made all the little wry observations, shared every experience you'd ever had, the both of you...and you got said every last thing there was to say, about love and family and how much you'd miss me...I promise you that the moment I'd closed my eyes and gone away, you'd think of something you left out, something desperate to be said, and you'd rue the moment for the rest of your life.