The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

Analog has accepted for publication five more of his stories. Besides “The Boneless One,” reprinted here, they are: “The Last Resort,” “Kawataro,” “Ernesto,” and the forthcoming “The Voices.” He currently lives with his wife in Oak Park, Illinois.

In the creepy story that follows, he takes us to the infamous Bermuda Triangle (or near it, anyway), to confront a menace much more subtle and much more dangerous than the ones you usually read about encountering there.

I

“Before we go on deck, I should make one thing clear,” Ray Wiley said. “We’re nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle.”

Trip opened his eyes. He had been sleeping comfortably in a haze of wine and good food, rocked by the minor expansions and contractions of the yacht’s hull, and for a moment, looking up at the darkened ceiling, he could not remember where he was. “What time is it?”

“Three in the morning.” Ray rose from the chair beside the bed. “We’re six hundred miles northeast of Antigua.”

As Trip sat up, Ray was already heading for the stateroom door. A graying beard, grown over the past year, had softened Ray’s famously intense features, but his blue eyes remained focused and bright, and they caught Trip’s attention at once. If nothing else, it was the first time he had ever been awakened by a billionaire. “Come on,” Ray said. “You’ll want your notebook and camera.”

At the mention of his notebook, Trip glanced automatically at the desk, where he had left his papers before going to bed. It did not look as if Ray had tried to read his notes, but even if he had, he would have found nothing objectionable. Trip’s private notebook, in which he recorded his real thoughts about the yacht’s voyage, was safely tucked into the waistband of his pajamas.

Trip climbed out of bed, pulling on his jeans and parka. Glancing at the berths on the opposite bulkhead, he saw that the men with whom he shared the cabin were gone. “Did Ellis and Gary—”

“They’re on deck,” Ray said. “Hurry up. You’ll understand when we get there.”

Trip slid on a pair of deck shoes and slung a camera around his neck. As he followed Ray to the salon, he became aware of a murmur beneath his feet, the barely perceptible vibration of the yacht’s engine, trembling in counterpoint to the waves outside. Upstairs, the lights in the salon had been turned down. As they headed for the companionway, Trip saw Stavros, the yacht’s captain and first engineer, seated at the internal steering station, his broad face underlit by the glowing console.

On the deck of the Lancet, the night was cold and windless. Two men in matching parkas were standing in the cockpit, looking into the void of the North Atlantic. One was Ellis Harvey, the yacht’s marine biologist, a headlamp illuminating his weathered, intelligent features; the other was Gary Baker, a postdoctoral student in microbiology, his pale face framed by glasses and a tidy goatee.

When Ellis saw Ray, he frowned. It was no secret that the two older scientists were not on the best of terms. “We’re going on a night dive,” Ellis said. “Do we need a third set of gear?”

“I’ll pass,” Trip said. He was not fond of the water. “What’s this all about?”

Gary pointed along the centerline of the sloop. “Dead ahead. You see it?”

Trip turned to look. For a long moment, he saw nothing but the ocean, visible only where it gave back the yacht’s rippling lights. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he noticed a brighter area of water. At first, he thought it was an optical illusion, an effort by his brain to insert something of visual interest into an otherwise featureless expanse. It was only the hard line of the stempost, silhouetted against the glow, that finally told him that it was real.

“Lights.” Trip glanced around at the others. “Something is glowing in the water.”

Ray seemed proud of the sight, as if he had personally conjured up the apparition for Trip’s benefit. “Gary saw it a few minutes ago, when he took over the night watch. We’re still trying to figure out what it is.”

“It’s too widespread to be artificial,” Ellis said. “It looks like a natural phenomenon. A luminescent microbe, perhaps—”

Trip was barely listening. In the absence of landmarks, it was hard to determine the distance of the light, which was faint and bluish green, but it seemed at least a mile away. It was neither constant nor uniform, but had patches of greater or lesser brightness, which flickered in a regular pattern. Initially, he thought that the twinkling was caused by the motion of the waves, but as they drew closer, he saw that the lights themselves were pulsing in unison. “It’s synchronized. Is that natural?”

“I don’t know,” Ray said. He grinned broadly. “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

Trip heard a note of hunger in the billionaire’s voice. For the past two years, he knew, the Lancet, under Ray’s funding and guidance, had been using the latest technology to sample the incredible genetic diversity of life in the ocean, with the unspoken goal of finding genes and microbes with commercial potential. So far, the voyage had been relatively uneventful, but if the glow in the distance turned out to be an unknown form of microscopic life, it could prove to be very lucrative indeed.

When Trip tried to ask Ray about this, though, he received only a grunt in response, which was not surprising. It was no secret that Ray was having second thoughts about the article that Trip was here to write. In the three days since his arrival, Trip had already noticed a number of conflicts simmering beneath the surface of the voyage, and Ray, as if sensing this, had been avoiding him. At this rate, Trip thought, his week aboard the Lancet would end without so much as an interview.

The sloop pressed onward, the foam breaking in tendrils across its prow. Trip stood between Ray and Ellis, caught in their unfriendly silence, as Gary removed wetsuits and cylinders from a scuba locker, securing glow sticks to the tanks with zip ties. Before long, the yacht was at the edge of the illuminated region, the light visible in the water against the hull. When Ray used the cockpit phone to tell Stavros to cut the engines, the vibration beneath the deck ceased at once.

As the yacht drifted freely, surrounded on all sides by the glow, Trip got a better look at the light. At close range, it resolved itself into countless discrete nodules of brightness, seemingly without heat, but unmistakably alive.

Ellis leaned over the wire railing that encircled the deck. “Ray, this is no microbe.”

“Let’s get a closer look, then,” Ray said. As Trip began taking pictures, the two older men suited up for the dive, then climbed over the railing. As they slid into the water, Trip briefly saw them outlined against the glow, which illuminated them from underneath like a magic lantern. Within seconds, they were gone.

Gary was standing beside him. “If you like, you could try the observation chamber.”

“Good idea,” Trip said, lowering his camera. The chamber was contained in a false nose at the forefront of the yacht, two meters below the waterline. Going over to the entry tube, which was bolted to the stempost, Trip glanced back at Gary, who gave him a nod of encouragement, and climbed inside.

It was twenty feet down. When he reached the final rung, he found himself in a tiny room lined with a foam mattress, the ceiling too low to stand. It smelled of mildew and rust. He spread himself prone on the floor, his nose inches from the largest of five portholes, and looked out at the ocean.

It took him a while to understand what he was seeing. In the water outside, clusters of glowing particles were passing through the sea. There were dozens of such formations, some drifting at random, others bunching and splaying their radial arms to go sailing serenely past the windows.

Trip forgot about his camera, caught up in the strangeness of the sight. At first, he felt surrounded by otherworldly creatures, like something out of a dream. Only when one of the shapes drifted close by the nearest porthole, almost pressing itself against the glass, did he finally recognize it for what it was.

The sloop was surrounded by hundreds of octopuses. As his eyes grew used to the darkness, he saw that every octopus had two rows of luminous cells running along each of its eight arms. The light from each node, which was bluish green, was not strong, but taken together, they caused the water to be as brightly lit as a crowded highway on a winter’s night.

When fully extended, the octopuses were the size of bicycle wheels, their bodies pink, verging on coral. As Trip switched on his camera, gelatinous eyes peered through the water at his own face. He was about to snap a