Tenenbaum’s—as if her peculiar aloofness had been installed in her creation.
“Come on, Mr. Bubbles!” the Little Sister fluted, calling to the Big Daddy. “Come on, or we’ll miss the angels!” The towering mock of a deep-sea diver lumbered after her, moaning…
“Oh Christ,” Bill muttered.
A dark-haired Little Sister skipped past them.
“Mascha!” Sophie called out.
The Gatherer stopped, blinking, mouth open in an O, to look at Sophie for a long, puzzled moment. Then she said, “What is
Then the little girl danced away. The Big Daddy gave out its long, mournful groan and clumped after her. The floor shook with the creature’s going.
“Oh God, Bill,” Elaine said, hugging Sophie to her. “Was that—?”
“No,” he said quickly. “I’m sure it wasn’t her.” He doubted she believed the lie.
Bill was just grateful that Sophie hadn’t seen what was left of her friend Mascha sticking a syringe in a dead body, drawing out the pulsing red effluvium of living ADAM. A sickening sight. It seemed to belong to Rapture the way giant pink elephants belonged to hallucinating drunks.
The public address chose that moment to inform them,
And Bill noticed that Ryan was staring down at Sophie…
Feeling weary, deeply weary, yet restless too, Andrew Ryan poured himself a martini from the silver shaker and settled back in his easy chair at the picture window, gazing out over the shimmering skyline of the submerged city.
A couple of squid rippled by, outlined against the glow—and then were gone. The neon signs for Rapture businesses were flickering, threatening to go out. Some of the lights supposed to shine up from the bases of the buildings were dark. But most of the lights still worked. The city of Rapture continued to glow.
The city itself was showing signs of new life. There were the new Circus of Values machines, expected to raise a great deal of revenue. There were the Gatherer’s Gardens too. Scientists were working on machines that could raise man from the dead, if he hadn’t been dead long, and restore him to life. Sure, the population of Rapture was depleted, but when he completed his control of ADAM and the splicers, and rid the city of the rebels, he could build Rapture up anew.
He sipped the martini, put it on the end table beside the tape recorder, and then pressed Record for his audio diary. History must have its due.
“On my walk today I had an encounter with a pair of them… he, a lumbering palooka in a foul-smelling diving suit, and she, an unwashed moppet in a filthy pink smock. Her pallor was off, green and morbid, and there was a rather unpleasant aspect to her demeanor, as if she were in an altogether different place than the rest of us. I understand the need for such creatures; I just wish I could make them more presentable.” He chuckled to himself at that, took a sip of his martini, and made another diary entry: “Could I have made mistakes? One does not build cities if one is guided by doubt. But can one govern in absolute certainty? I know that my beliefs have elevated me, just as I know that the things I have rejected would have destroyed me.” On one of the buildings outside, a light flickered and went out. He sighed. “But the city… it is collapsing before my…” He hesitated. Not able to finish the thought. It was unbearable. “Have I become so convinced by my own beliefs that I have stopped seeing the truth? But Atlas is out there, and he aims to destroy me—to question is to surrender. I will not surrender.”
A letter arrived in the pneumatic tube: Ryan heard the distinctive swish of its arrival. He got wearily up, fetched the message back to his easy chair.
Grunting as he sat, he fumbled it open. He was losing some dexterity in his fingers.
He unfolded the letter—and recognized Diane McClintock’s handwriting:
Dear Andrei:
Andrei Rianofski, Andrew Ryan, Mr. Ryan; the lover, the Tycoon, the Tyrant: just three of the many sides of you. I saw only the cold side recently—first you didn’t show up for New Year’s Eve, and I had to face rogue splicers without you. Then you didn’t show up when I was recovering from the surgery. You stood me up again in Fort Frolic. You had “a meeting”! So I decided to go home. Tried to go the short route. Apollo Square was blocked off, taken over by the rebels. But I was a bit drunk, and angry, and I wanted to confront them for the damage they’d done me. Maybe I wanted them to kill me and just get it over with. A woman tried to escape—to get past Ryan’s guards keeping the rebels in Apollo Square, and one of your pet splicers pointed his finger at her and she burst into flames! I had heard about Atlas. But it occurred to me I only had your side of it. So I thought they were either going to kill me—or explain themselves to me. And I bribed a guard at the gate into letting me through.
Conditions are terrible in Apollo Square, and Artemis. The crowding, the squalor. They say it was almost as bad before the revolution. They say it was your doing—your neglect! Graffiti is painted on the walls: “Atlas Lives!” What do I really know about Atlas? And at last someone took me to meet him. They know I’m your mistress, or was, but they have learned to trust me. Atlas was surprisingly humble. I asked him if he would lead the people in some kind of uprising against you. He said, “I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. These people will liberate themselves.” Isn’t that strange—it’s almost like something you would say! But when he said it —I understood. It meant something. It went right to the heart of me, Andrei! I thought you were a great man. I was wrong. Atlas is a great man. And I will serve him; I will struggle beside him, fighting all you represent! I’m going on a raid tomorrow to get weapons and food. I will learn to fight, Andrei. You abandoned me—now I have left you. I have left you for Atlas—and the revolution!
Ryan folded the paper up and tore it into small bits. He let the shreds of paper flutter to the floor, picked up his martini—and suddenly lost control of himself, throwing the glass so that it smashed on the big picture window, fragments of wet, broken glass sliding down over the glowing spires of the city…
20
“There was meant to be a maintenance team here instead of me,” Bill groused as he bent to examine the cracks in the curved metal wall of the maintenance runoff tunnel. “They had some git of a splicer, was going to creep up the walls and fix the leaks they couldn’t reach. Don’t know what became of the buggers…”
Karlosky grunted. “I think I see your maintenance team.”
Bill stood up, walked over to Karlofsky—together they looked through a window into the mailroom of Jet Postal. The shadowy, indirectly lit room was scattered with undelivered mail. And with bodies—several bodies,
