“It was a gift,” the siren replies. “Not without a price, that’s true. But it was a gift, all the same.”
Low waves and foam race up the beach, shimmering in the pale moonlight, and break about the legs of the women who’ve walked out of the sea. The woman holding the child sets her back down on the sand.
“We can’t stay here much longer,” says the siren. “We shouldn’t be here at all.”
“How the fuck was it a gift?” Ellison asks her.
The siren quietly regards her for a moment or two and then replies, “How long had it been since anyone offered you a choice? What about your beloved Signalman? Did he ever give you a choice? No, little killer, he didn’t, because you were merely another asset to him, merely a pawn, another valuable commodity to be exploited until there was nothing valuable left.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Ellison says, but she knows that she’s lying to herself.
“Then how exactly was it? Tell me. I’m listening. Tell me of your loyalty to this man who made you his weapon. Tell me how you love him, even now.”
“I wasn’t ever in love with him,” she says, so there’s another lie.
“I suppose you’re not in love with the heroin, either?” the siren sighs. “I suppose next you’ll tell me that.”
On the beach, the child turns her head and looks towards the cabin, towards Ellison, and there’s a brilliant flash of white eyeshine, as if the moon is trapped somewhere inside the girl’s skull. The siren pulls Ellison away from the window then, and once more she says how they’ve stayed too long, how they shouldn’t have come here at all.
“It was foolish of me,” she says, and the cabin melts away like sugar in hot coffee, and once again Ellison Nicodemo is plunging pell-mell through the lightless and unlightable void, washed in the tumult of voices and memory.
“Zealandia, most likely, from New Caledonia all the way south to the Campbell Plateau. Oh, I know the theosophists and Alhazredians have their hearts set on the South Pacific, but . . . anyway, you’re missing the point here. There’s just not enough water on the planet. Even if you melt every last bit of ice at the poles and all the glaciers, you’re only looking at a sea-level rise of sixty-one meters, max, and sure, that’s gonna ruin tourism in Florida and Hawaii, but it’s a long, long way from Waterworld or the goddamn Noachian Deluge. There’s only about two billion metric tons of water to work with, see, and if you want to submerge the Himalayans, you’d need three times that amount. Do the math. If you really want to flood the globe, it’s not just a matter of raising sea level, but of sinking all those inconvenient continents.”
“Are you going to kill me now?” Ellison asks the siren.
“If I’d only wanted to kill you, I’d have done it six years back, wouldn’t I? If I’d only wanted you dead?”
“That’s all fine and dandy, but the creationists are just gonna fire right back with a bunch of tired-ass pseudoscientific baloney about runaway subduction events and the extra water having come from ‘the fountains of the deep’ and ‘the windows of heaven,’ from huge freaking reservoirs buried in the outer mantle and from some sort of collapsing vapor canopies and—Jesus, why am I telling you this? You’ve read more of that crap than I have. Anyway, I’d imagine if a Great Old One or two wants to play dunk tank with the whole wide world, the mere facts of the hydrosphere probably aren’t gonna stand in the way.”
“I don’t know,” says Ellison, wondering if she’s falling headfirst or feet first or neither. “I don’t understand why you’ve done anything you’ve done.” Not that it was ever her job, trying to understand. All she had to do was be a good tin soldier and follow orders. Usually, all she had to do was show up and let the hound do the rest. Not always, but usually.
The Signalman sits in his office beneath the Erastus Corning Tower and reads aloud from the lab report on the sample of blue goop taken from initial tests with the Nicodemo kid. There’s no one else in the room with him, but it’s an old habit, reading lab reports out loud. It makes them slightly easier to decipher. “The substance,” he reads, “bears numerous traits in common with the cytoplasm and nucleoplasm of living cells, especially those of fungi and animals. Like normal protoplasm, the sample behaves at times like a disordered colloidal solution and at other times like an integrated network, exhibiting distinct fluid and solid phases. But, as already noted on page two, the substance, while undoubtedly alive, completely lacks hydrolyzing enzymes, making it not only unique in known biology, but suggesting an extraterrestrial, and perhaps even extradimensional, origin. In the absence of enzymes . . .” He rubs his eyes and lights a cigarette.
“No, you don’t know yet,” says the siren, “but you will, very soon. We’ve almost reached the bottom.”
Ellison shivers, though she isn’t cold, and she thinks, So there is a bottom, after all, and the siren replies, Of course there is a bottom. You didn’t think I’d let you fall forever, did you?
“How would I know?” Ellison replies.
Meanwhile, the darkness around her seems to be growing thinner—not any less dark, but less palpable somehow. And the cascade of voices and remembrances is rapidly growing fainter, countless moments and thoughts and actions bleeding one into the other, smearing as she nears the end of her descent— There is another shore, you know, upon the other side, where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest, and I’d ask my friends to come and see an octopus’s garden with me . . . But it isn’t a hound. They aren’t hounds
