My suit spun slowly, and I saw the elevator again, still attached to the thread, climbing away above me as I fell, growing smaller by the second. Then there was an almost subliminal flash of motion as the elevator which had been riding the thread below flashed by, still climbing at normal ascent speed, and an instant later an explosion almost as bright and quick as one of the nuke flashes.
When the flash had gone, there was nothing left at all — not even thread.
FOUR
Sky Haussmann was three when he saw the light.
Years later, in adulthood, that day would be his first clear memory: the earliest that he could clearly anchor to a time and a place and know to be something from the real world, rather than some phantasm which had transgressed the hazy border between a child’s reality and its dreams.
He had been banished to the nursery by his parents. He had disobeyed them by visiting the dolphinarium: the dark, dank, forbidden place in the belly of the great ship Santiago. But it was Constanza who had really led him astray; she who had taken him through the warren of train tunnels, walkways, ramps and stair-wells to reach the place where the dolphins were hidden. Constanza was only two or three years older than Sky, but in his eyes she was almost fully grown; supremely wise in the ways of the adults. Everyone said Constanza was a genius; that one day — perhaps when the Flotilla was nearing the end of its long, slow crossing — she would become the Captain. It was said half in jest but half in seriousness as well. Sky wondered if she would make him her second-in-command when that day came, the two of them sitting together in the control room he had still never visited. It was not such a ridiculous idea: the adults also kept telling him that he was an unusually clever child as well; even Constanza was sometimes surprised at the things he came out with. But for all Constanza’s cleverness, Sky would later remind himself, she was not infallible. She had known how to reach the dolphinarium without anyone seeing them, but she had not quite known how to get them back unseen.
It had been worth it, though.
‘The grown-ups don’t like them,’ Constanza had said, when they had reached the side of the tank which held the dolphins. ‘They’d rather they didn’t exist at all.’
They stood on drainage grilles slick with spilled water. The tank was a high-sided glass enclosure bathed in sickly blue light, reaching away for tens of metres into the darkness of the hold. Sky peered into the gloom. The dolphins were purposeful grey shapes somewhere in the turquoise distance, their outlines constantly breaking up and reforming in the liquid play of light. They looked less like animals than things carved from soap; slippery and not quite real.
Sky had pressed his hand against the glass. ‘Why don’t they like them?’
Constanza’s reply was measured. ‘Something’s not quite right with them, Sky. These aren’t the same dolphins the ship had when it left Mercury. These are the grandchildren, or the great-grandchildren — I’m not sure which. They’ve never known anything except this tank, and nor have their parents.’
‘I’ve never known anything except this ship.’
‘But you’re not a dolphin; you weren’t expecting oceans to swim in.’ Constanza had paused because one of the animals was swimming towards them. It had left its companions at the far end of the tank, huddled around what looked like a set of television screens showing different pictures. Now that it emerged into the volume of clear water immediately beyond the glass, it assumed a presence it had lacked a moment earlier; suddenly it was a large, potentially dangerous thing of muscle and bone, rather than something bordering on translucence. Sky had seen photos of dolphins in the nursery, and there was something not quite right about this creature: a network of surgically fine lines encased its skull, and there were geometric bumps and ridges around its eyes; evidence of hard metal and ceramic things buried just below the dolphin’s flesh.
‘Hello,’ Sky said, tapping the glass.
‘That’s Sleek,’ Constanza said. ‘I think so, anyway. Sleek’s one of the oldest ones.’
The dolphin looked at him, the sly curve of its jaw making the scrutiny appear both benign and demented. Then it whiplashed around so that it was face-on to him and Sky felt the glass reverberate with unheard vibration. Something formed in the water in front of Sleek, sketched in arcs of transient bubbles. At first the trails of bubbles were random — like an artist’s preliminary brush-strokes — but then they became more structured and deliberate, Sleek’s head jerking animatedly as if the creature was in the throes of electrocution. The display lasted for only a handful of seconds, but what the dolphin was shaping was unmistakably a face, rendered three-dimensionally. The form lacked any fine details, but Sky knew that it was more than just a suggestion that his subconscious was creating from a few random bubble-trails. It was too symmetric and well-proportioned for that. There was emotion there as well, though it was almost certainly horror or fear.
Sleek, his work done, departed with a contemptuous flick of his tail.
‘They hate us as well,’ Constanza said. ‘But you can’t really blame them for that, can you?’
‘Why did Sleek do that? How?’
‘There are machines in Sleek’s melon — that bump between its eyes. They’re implanted when they’re babies. The melon’s what they normally make sound with, but the machines let them focus the sound more precisely, so they can draw with bubbles. And there are little things in the water — micro-organisms — which light up when the sound hits them. The people who made the dolphins wanted to be able to communicate with them.’
‘You’d have thought the dolphins would be grateful.’
‘Maybe they would be — if they didn’t keep having to have operations. And if they had somewhere else to swim other than this horrible place.’
‘Yes, but when we reach Journey’s End…’
Constanza looked at him with sad eyes. ‘It’ll be too late, Sky. For these ones, anyway. They won’t be alive then. We’ll even be grown-up; our parents old or dead.’
The dolphin came back with another, slightly smaller companion and the two of them began to draw something in the water. It looked like a man being pulled apart by sharks, but Sky turned away before he could be certain.
Constanza continued, ‘And they’re too far gone anyway, Sky.’
Sky turned back to the tank. ‘I still like them. They’re still beautiful. Even Sleek.’
‘They’re bad, Sky. Psychotic, that’s the word my father uses.’ She said it with not-quite-convincing hesitation, as if slightly ashamed of her own fluency.
‘I don’t care. I’ll come back and see them again.’ He tapped the glass and spoke much louder. ‘I’ll come back, Sleek. I like you.’
Constanza, though she was only slightly taller than him, patted Sky maternally on the shoulder. ‘It won’t make any difference.’
‘I’ll still come.’
The promise, as much to himself as to Constanza, had been sincere. He did want to understand the dolphins, to communicate with them and in some way alleviate their misery. He imagined the bright, wide oceans of Journey’s End — Clown, his friend in the nursery, had told him that there would be oceans — and imagined the dolphins suddenly freed from this dark, dismal place. He pictured them swimming with people; creating joyous sound-pictures in the water; the memory of the time aboard the Santiago fading like a claustrophobic dream.
‘C’mon,’ Constanza said. ‘We’d better be going, Sky.’
‘You’ll bring me back, won’t you?’
‘Of course, if that’s what you want.’
And they had left the dolphinarium and commenced the intricate return trip, the two of them working their way through the Santiago’s dark interstices; children trying to find their way through an enchanted forest. Once or twice they passed adults, but Constanza’s demeanour was so confident that they were never questioned — not until they were well within the small part of the ship which Sky considered familiar territory.
It was there that his father had found them.
Titus Haussmann was a stern but kindly figure amongst the Santiago’s living; a man whose authority had been earned through respect rather than fear. He towered over the two of them, but Sky felt no real anger emanate
