28
Tanner poured himself a glass of whiskey and fell back
against the pillows. Finally he was going to get a good
night’s sleep on a good bed. Between setting up the
Chicxulub office, the arrangements to get the bathyscaphe
and Hennessy and Dantec to Mexico, the time spent on the
freighter, the agonizing hours trying to figure out what was
going on inside the bathyscaphe and all the worry
afterward, it seemed like it had been months since he had
had a decent night’s sleep.
He sipped his whiskey. The key, he told himself, was not
to think about it. The key was to relax. It was all over now.
The press conference was done. The next stages of the
operation had not yet begun.
His personal phone rang. He looked at it. If it was his
wife, her name would come up. No name came up. Which
meant it could be President Small or maybe Terry, Tim, and
Tom. They were the only ones who had his number, except
for Dantec. And Dantec was dead.
“Hello?” he said.
“William Tanner?” said a mellifluous voice. “I have a few
questions for you about Dr. Hennessy’s death.”
“How did you get this number?” asked Tanner. “This is a
private number.”
The man ignored him. “Was there really no sign of
instability before the descent? Didn’t DredgerCorp’s safety
procedures fail you in this case? Or should I say failed
Hennessy and the late Mr. Dantec?”
Tanner clicked off. After a few seconds, the phone rang
again.
“Hello!” said Tanner.
“Please don’t hang up, Mr. Tanner. There are important
ethical issues at—”
He disconnected. He turned the telephone all the way off,
left it sitting on his bedside table. If Small or the Colonel
wanted to get in touch, they’d have to contact him by vid.
He took a big sip, felt the whiskey burn down his throat.
He tried to relax, to empty his mind, to let himself go. He
could relax now, he told himself. The phone was off; the
door was locked. Finally, he could relax.
But he couldn’t relax. His head was throbbing and
something was gnawing at him.
He got up and swallowed three sleeping pills, washing
them down with whiskey. He stared at his face for a long
moment in the mirror and then climbed back into the bed.
The problem was that he agreed with the reporter. There
were ethical issues at stake, things that had been done
that, despite everything else he had done at DredgerCorp
over the years, he was having difficulty living with.
He’d been on operations where people had died before.
He’d even been on operations when they’d died as a direct
result of choices he had made. Not to mention the trauma
of the moon skirmishes, where everyone had done terrible
things and where on more than one occasion he’d felt less
than human. But these two had died and he still didn’t
understand why. Was it because instead of corpses that he
could see and make sense of, all he had were brief,
staticky images? Did he just need a little more finality? Or
was it more than that?
There had been no sign of instability in Hennessy before
the descent. He ran over their interactions in his head
again. In his mind, if anybody had been in danger of
becoming unstable, it was Dantec. Was it possible that
Dantec had snapped first and that had made Hennessy
snap?
The whiskey and the sleeping pills were finally starting to
take effect. Things had begun to blur. Maybe there would
be answers when they brought the bathyscaphe back to the
surface, he thought. Maybe that would explain everything.
He was startled awake by the telephone ringing. He groped
it off the nightstand and looked at the display.
The name that came up was Dantec.
His heart leapt into his throat and he was suddenly wide
awake. Dantec was dead; he couldn’t be the one calling.
He stared at the display: it still read Dantec.
He sat up in bed, put his feet on the floor. “Hello?” he
said, facing the wall. “Who is this?”
But there was only static on the other end of the line.
He waited, feeling like he might pass out. “Dantec,” he
said tentatively. “Are you alive?”
He stayed with the receiver pressed to his ear, listening.
At some point he realized there wasn’t even static. The
phone wasn’t even turned on.
He put the phone back on the nightstand. Immediately,
even though it wasn’t on, it rang again. Dantec’s name
came up on the display.
“Hello?” Tanner said.
There was only silence.
He put the phone back down again. When it rang this
time, he just stayed there, watching it ring. It’s off, he tried to
tell himself. It can’t be ringing. But the damned thing kept
ringing.
Aren’t you going to answer it? said a voice from behind
him, a voice he recognized.
He felt the hairs bristle on the back of his neck. Very
slowly, he turned. There was a vague shape in the bed with
him that, as he looked at it, slowly became human. Crude
and awkward features became more and more refined until
it was, at last, Dantec. His skin was very white, almost
bloodless. His lips had turned blue.
“You’re not real,” said Tanner.
Aren’t I? said Dantec. Then why are you seeing me?
“But you died, in the bathyscaphe.”
Are you sure it was me? asked Dantec. Are you sure I
was even in the bathyscaphe?
Tanner hesitated. “Are you still alive?” he asked.
I’m here, aren’t I?
Tanner just shook his head.
Go ahead and touch me, said Dantec. If I’m not real,
you wouldn’t be able to touch me.
Tanner closed his eyes and reached out. At first he felt
only the bed, the blanket. Then he reached a little farther
and felt something different, something that moved,
something alive. “It is you,” said Tanner, smiling. “I can’t
believe it. How did you survive? What are you doing here?”
I’ve come to see you, said Dantec. Can’t a guy stop by
to see an old friend?
“Sure,” said Tanner.
Also. . . .
“What is it, Dantec? You can tell me.”
I hate to ask, Tanner, but I need your help. I need
something from you.
“Anything,” said Tanner. “What’s mine is yours.”
I’m having a hard time breathing, said Dantec. I need
you to share your oxygen tank with me.
“How can I do that?”
Just make a slit in the breathing tube, said Dantec. I’ll
cut mine off a few feet down and then we’ll splice them
together. Then we can both breathe.
“I don’t—” I don’t have a breathing tube, he had started
to say. But then he reached up and felt it; there it was.
I don’t have much longer, said Dantec. Indeed his lips
looked even bluer than they had looked just a few moments
before.
“I need something sharp,” Tanner said. “Where can I find
something sharp?”
There’s a pocketknife in the drawer of the nightstand,
said Dantec.
“How do you know what’s in my nightstand?”
I’m full of surprises, said Dantec, and smiled, his blue
lips stretching and turning white.
Tanner got the pocketknife out and unfolded the biggest
blade. “Where should I cut it?” he asked.
Anywhere, said Dantec, as long as the cut’s long
enough. Remember, make it long.
Tanner nodded. “Ready?” he asked.
Ready, said Dantec.
He made a long horizontal cut, almost cutting the tube
right in half. “All right,” Tanner said, “quickly, hand it to me.”
His voice sounded strange, something wrong with his
vocal cords. He coughed, spat blood. The blanket in front of
him seemed covered in a pink mist. He looked down, saw
that his chest was coursing with rivulets of blood.
You should have left it down there where it was safe, he
heard Dantec say, his voice distant now. You shouldn’t
have tried to understand it.
“Quickly,” he said, holding out his hand. “Dantec?
Understand what?”
But Dantec was nowhere to be seen.
The air kept hissing out of the breathing tube and out into
space. He tried to close the gap with his hand, but it was
too deep—air kept leaking out. His hands were sticky, his
chest, too, the hair on it all matted with blood.
He tried to call out for Dantec again, but something was
wrong with his throat. He could make only a gurgling sound.
He tried to get out of the bed, but everything seemed to be
moving too slowly, as if he were underwater.
Very slowly, he moved one foot and slid it to the edge
and over, letting it fall to the ground. There was only the
other foot to worry about now. And then he would stand up
and go to the mirror and take a good hard look at himself
and try to figure out where he had gone wrong.
29
The boy led the way confidently, despite the darkness. He
had to stop several times, waiting impatiently for Altman
and Ada to catch up.
As they got closer, Chava began chattering away, saying
things difficult for Altman to interpret.
“The bruja, he said, “she was dead but she helped us
anyway. I went to find her and she came with me and spoke
to me, and told me what to do. If she did not come, how
was I to know what to do?”
He looked at Altman, apparently expecting a response.
“I don’t know,” said Altman, slightly out of breath from
tramping through the sand in his shoes.
This seemed to satisfy the boy. “But she did come. And
she showed us what to do. A circle,” he said, and nodded
at Altman.
“What do you mean, ‘a circle’?” asked Altman.
The boy looked at him; then he stopped and traced
something in the sand. Altman shone the flashlight on it,
saw a circle.
“This is what I mean,” the boy said, and then started
walking again.
Altman shook his head. The boy’s way of thinking was so
different that it was like communicating with someone from
another world.
Suddenly the boy stopped. He made the sign of the
devil’s tail with his intertwined fingers and pointed.
Altman raised the flashlight. There had been a fire there,
its remains half-buried in the sand. He waited for the boy to
move forward, but the boy just stayed where he was. So
Altman stepped around him to take a closer look.
Carefully he pushed the sand aside with his foot. There
were lots of half-burnt pieces of driftwood and char and
ash. Then he realized that some of what he thought had
been driftwood were in fact bones. They were human, or at
least human-sized, but there was something wrong with
them. They were oddly twisted and deformed. There were,
too, leathery bits of something—skin or seaweed, he first
thought, but as he looked closer, he was less sure. The
texture was wrong.
“Do you think fire could have done that to those bones?”
he asked Ada.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He shook his head. Why was it that he kept on running up
against things he didn’t understand? Was it a problem with
him or a problem with the world?
He dug through ash and driftwood and bone until his foot
unearthed the skull. It was blackened throughout, missing
the jawbone. All the teeth were missing, though it seemed
less like they’d fallen out than as if they’d never been there:
the bottom edge of the maxilla was smooth, socketless.
“It looked like a cross between a balloon and a man?”
asked Ada.
Chava nodded.
“How was it sitting?”
Chava thought for a moment and then kneeled in the
sand, hunched over, hands near his sides. “Its arms were
becoming its legs,” he said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“The skin was the same skin, the flesh the same flesh.”
Maybe some sort of hideously deformed man, thought
Altman. There was probably a logical explanation. But if it
was a hideously deformed man, how had he managed to
live for this long?
He suddenly thought of something.
“Where was the balloon?” he asked.
Chava, still hunched, put his hands up by his neck and
waved his fingers.
“How big was it?” asked Ada.
“Very big.”
“Bigger than my arm?” asked Altman. Chava nodded.
“Bigger than my body?” He nodded again. “As big as a
house?” Chava hesitated, then nodded.
“Sometimes it was smaller,” he said, “but in the end, yes,
I believe it was as big as a house.”
“Can you make any sense of this?” Altman asked Ada after
they had walked with the boy back to the edge of the
shantytown and left him there.
“Not any more than you can,” she said.
“You think it really happened?”
“I think something happened,” said Ada. “Whether it was
exactly as Chava says is anybody’s guess. It sounds
impossible. But, then again, a lot of weird things have been
happening lately. I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“What about the others?” asked Altman. “Have they been
telling you the same story?”
“They still won’t talk about it with me,” said Ada. “I don’t
know why.”
“I was really worried about you,” Altman confessed.
“Once the boy started talking, I had to keep going,” she
said. “Any interruption might have spooked him.”
Altman nodded. They walked a little farther, their
footsteps soft in the dust of the road. “You know that guy I
talked to? At the bar?”
“Yes,” she said. “What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
She stopped. “Dead?” she said. “What happened?”
“His throat was slit.”
She grabbed his arm, jerked it until he looked at her.
“You see,” she said, “I told you it was dangerous! And now
somebody’s dead.”
“It’s probably nothing,” he said. “Probably just a
mugging.”
He saw a flicker of hope pass through her eyes, and
quickly fade. “But what if it’s not? You should give this up.
You should stop your game of spying and do the job you
were sent down here to do.”
He didn’t say anything, just tried to tug his arm away.
“Promise me, Michael,” she said. “Promise me.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Look,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. “You were
the one who brought Chava to me. I didn’t ask you to do
that. But every new thing I hear makes it seem stranger and
stranger. I need to figure out what’s going on.”
At first she was very angry. She started walking, fast,
staying out in front of him and wouldn’t look back. He
followed her, calling her name. Gradually she slowed down
a little, finally let him take her hand, but still wouldn’t look at
him. He pulled her close and held her while she tried to
push him away, very gradually giving in.
“You don’t love me enough to do this for me,” she tried.
“I do love you,” he said. “That’s not what this is about.”
She pouted. Finally she put her arms around his neck. “I
don’t want to lose you, Michael,” she said.
“You won’t lose me,” he said. “I promise.”
They walked slowly down the street. They passed an open
door, a makeshift wooden sign hanging over it reading BAR
DE PRIMERA CATEGORÍA, another sign beside it, this one
cardboard, reading BEBIDAS, MUY BARATAS.
They were already twenty feet past when Altman stopped
and doubled back.
“Where are you going now?” asked Ada.
“I need a drink,” he said. “I need to raise a glass to
Hammond.”
He pushed open the door. The patrons, all locals, looked
up, fell immediately silent. He went up to the counter, which
consisted of a stack of old crates, and ordered a beer for
himself, one for Ada.
When the beers came, he looked around for a place to
sit. There was nowhere. All the tables were full and people
were leaning against the wall. He paid the bartender and
then carried their drinks outside.
They sat on the edge of the dusty street before the
makeshift bar, in the light coming through the half-open
door, backs against the rickety wall, and drank their beers.
“It worries me,” he said, putting his beer down.
“What?”
“This,” he said. “All of it. The things going on in Chicxulub,
the pulse, the submarine, the stories you’re hearing, the
dreams everyone has been having, the thing we just saw on
the beach. I think we’re in trouble.”
“You and I?”
“Everybody,” he said. “Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”
“All the more reason to leave it alone,” she mumbled.
He ignored her. He groped for his beer but suddenly
couldn’t find it. He turned and looked for it, but it was gone.
He turned on the flashlight and shone it into the shadows
on the edge of the building, a little farther away from the
door. There was a man there, his shirt and clothes filthy. He
was obviously very drunk. He was holding Altman’s bottle to
his lips, rapidly emptying it.
“That drunk just took my beer,” he said to Ada, a little
astonished.
The man finished the beer, smacked his lips, and tossed
the bottle off into the darkness. Then he looked at them,
squinting into the beam of the flashlight.
Altman lowered it a little bit. The man held out his hand,
snapped his fingers.
Altman grinned. “I think he wants your beer, too,” he said.
Ada spoke to him softly in Spanish and the man nodded.
She held out her beer and the man took it eagerly and
upended it, quickly downed it. He tossed the bottle away
then leaned back against the wall.
“Hello,” said Altman.
The man carefully smoothed his filthy shirt. “Mucho
gusto,” he said. His accent and cadence were surprisingly
formal. He redirected his gaze toward Ada, inclined his
head slightly. “Encantado,” he said.
“We’ve met before,” said Ada. “You’ve told me your
stories. Don’t you remember?”
The man looked at her with his watery eyes but did not
answer. After a long moment, he leaned his head back
against the wall and closed his eyes. He stayed like that for
long enough that Altman wondered if he hadn’t fallen
asleep.
Suddenly he asked in Spanish, “What are your names?”
“Michael Altman,” said Altman. “This is my girlfriend, Ada
Cortez. What is your name?”
The man ignored the question. “Thank you for the drinks,”
he said, his Spanish excessively polite. He turned to Ada.
“Cortez, a good, vigorous Spanish name, but not one my
people care for, for reasons that you must know. We have a
very long memory. You must not hold it against us.”
Ada nodded.
“Ada, from Hebrew, meaning ‘adornment.’ It is a lovely
name for a woman as beautiful as you. Centuries ago, it
was the name of the daughter of a notorious and handsome
club-footed poet. And, a century or more later, the name,
too, of a book by a famous writer.”
“How do you know this?” asked Ada.
“Names were a hobby of mine,” the man said. “Before
drinking became my only hobby.”
He turned back to Altman. “Michael, the name of the
archangel on God’s right hand. Are you a religious man,
Michael?”
“No,” said Altman. “I am not.”
“Then we shall refer to you not as Michael but as Altman.
The name Altman, it is German, is it not?”
“Yes,” said Altman. “But I’m from the North American
sector.”
“You do not have a German face,” the man said. “I hope it
does not offend you that I say this. What places are there in
you?”
“I’m a mongrel,” said Altman evasively. “A mix of
everything.”
“I can see from your face that you are one of us as well,”
said the drunk. “The devil thinks he knows you, but he does
not know all of you.”
“My mother was part Indian,” Altman admitted. “I don’t
know what tribe.”
“I would say she was of our tribe,” said the drunk.
“I don’t know,” said Altman.
“What?” said Ada. “Your mother was part Indian? You’ve
never told me that before.”
“She didn’t like to talk about it,” said Altman. “I don’t know
why. I don’t think about it often.”
“You are here for a reason,” the man said.
“I came here with Ada,” said Altman.
“That may very well be,” said the man. “But that is not the
reason.”
“And what is the reason?”
The man smiled. “Your name,” he said. “Altman. Alt
meaning ‘old,’ mann, with two n’s, meaning ‘man.’ You are
not an old man. You are a young man. Can you explain this
to me?”
“It’s just a name,” said Altman.
“You understand the importance of a name only once you
have lost yours. As I have.” He leaned his head back
against the wall, closed his eyes.
“There is perhaps another meaning,” he said. Alt could
mean ‘ancient,’ but that is not so different from ‘old.’ Altman
might be an ‘old man’ or an ‘old servant’ or, if I am not
taking too many liberties, a ‘wise man.’ ” He opened his
eyes again, gave Altman an intense stare, his eyes
glittering in the crosslight from the flash beam. “Which one
shall it be for you?”
They sat in silence. Again, Altman thought the drunk had
fallen asleep.
“Ready to go?” he asked Ada.
“If you buy me another drink,” said the drunk quietly. “I will
tell you what I know.”
“About what?” asked Altman.
“About the thing you have been asking of all over the
town.” He crossed his fingers. “About the tail of the devil.”
Here we are, said the old man, sipping his drink, living on
the edge of the place where the devil dug down to hell,
leaving only his tail behind. Perhaps you do not believe
this to be true, he said. You, Altman, are no believer. But I
have come to tell you that it is we, it is you and I and the
other Yucatec Maya, who have been called to watch over
the devil and to drive him back to hell whenever he
appears.
This is not the only body burned on the beach. My
father told me of others. He had not seen them and his
grandfather had not seen them, and his great-grandfather
had not seen them, but perhaps his great-greatgrandfather
had. Or if not him, some ancestor before.
There is a clock ticking within the devil’s tail, a clock that
measures the hour in its own way and judges us
accordingly. When the hour is ready, the devil’s tail
awakens. Its curse sends our dead back onto our shores
and into our heads. We destroy the messengers on the
shores, and plead with those in our heads to put the tail
back asleep, we are not ready to listen to it.
We do not talk of this with strangers. But you are only
partly a stranger, so perhaps it is not wrong to talk to you.
And I myself have become a man with no name, so it no
longer matters what I do or whom I tell. For how can I be
punished if I do not have a name? When I heard your
name and in it heard that you were a wise man, I told
myself I would speak.
I saw the creature with my own eyes. Had I a name and
children, I would tell my name to them, and have them
memorize it, just as my father had me do, so that they
could tell their own children, and their children’s children.
Such is the way we learn and understand. Such is the way
we remember.
I saw the creature with my own eyes. It was like a man
but it was not a man. Where a man would have had
separate legs and arms, its legs had joined with its arms
and there was no parting them. Where a man would have
a face, this creature had a hole. Where a man would have
a cage of ribs to frame him, the ribs of this creature’s back
had opened and curled upon themselves in a scroll.
Where a man has lungs that obey him and keep the
same shape and form, the creature had lungs that kept
swelling and swelling, rising from its back like nothing so
much as an inflating balloon.
How can this be? It is not the same creature that my
father told me of and made me memorize, but another.
Bodies do not do what this creature did. And when it
breathed air in, the air it breathed out was not the same.
The air had been bled of its life and become noxious and
stinking, and choking.
There are rituals associated with the appearance of the
devil or his minions, ways of driving the devil out. There
are forgotten languages that can be spoken and that are
remembered in time of need, that the dead come whisper
in our ears. This time it was a boy who led us, a boy who
understood what he was doing almost not at all. There are
dances and measured steps that one can take to contain
the darkness. Each stage of the dance is a stage of the
development of life and as we dance the development of
life, the creature becomes caught in them and becomes
vulnerable. When it is tight in the trap, then we destroy it.
But there is one thing that I saw about this creature that I
would not put in the stories, that I would not tell to my
children, did I have them, and for this reason I could not
bring myself to dance with the others. One thing I saw that
I cannot make fit with the stories I have heard and which I
can only drive away by telling it to you. There, on what
would be its arm—were it human—was a tattoo. It was a
tattoo I had seen before, in a bar a few weeks before, on
the arm of a sailor sitting at the bar beside me. In his cups
he showed me his tattoo, the image of a woman riding on
a wave, the sun cupped in her hand, the workmanship
very fine. The next day he was gone, shipped out, and
then his tattoo reappeared on the creature that we burned
on the beach.
Now tell me this, Altman. Tell me this, wise man, if that
is what you are and not an old servant instead. Was the
tattoo there because the creature, through a power known
only to itself, had stolen it? Or was the tattoo there
because the creature had not always been a creature?
Was the tattoo there because the creature had once been
a man?
On the way home, his arm wrapped protectively around
Ada’s shoulders, both of them silent, he felt like there was
too much moving around in his head, too much to consider.
He tried to tell himself that he didn’t believe the old man’s
story, that it was simply a fantasy, but he had seen the
remains. He simultaneously couldn’t believe and couldn’t
not believe, which made him feel like he was carrying a
whole heavy indecipherable world in his head. He needed
to do something. To forget about this entirely or do
something.
Back at the house, after he got ready for bed and was
waiting for Ada to come out of the bathroom, he switched
on the newsfeed and set it for voice. Nothing interesting.
Trade negotiations between the Scandinavian sector and
the Russian sector. DAM announcing that it had developed
and patented a new genetically modified wheat that was
even better than the previous genetically modified wheat,
and that it would soon be available for purchase. Problems
with drug smugglers a hundred miles down the coast: a
brief vid of a drifting empty boat, its deck slick with blood.
The death of William Tanner, manager for DredgerCorp
Chicxulub, formerly known as Ecodyne.
“Go back,” he said.
The holo flipped back to the drug dealer story, opened it
up.
“No,” he said. “One later.”
William Tanner, manager for DredgerCorp Chicxulub,
formerly known as Ecodyne, was found dead this morning,
an apparent suicide. According to local police, his body
was discovered at nine thirty this morning with its throat
slit, after Tanner failed to report to work at the
DredgerCorp facility. A knife was found in his right hand.
The police have not yet stated whether this knife was the
instrument he used to kill himself. Though it is unusual for
someone to commit suicide by slitting their own throat, it
is not unheard of. Said Sergeant Ramos, “Though there is
every indication that Mr. Tanner committed suicide, we
cannot yet rule out the possibility of homicide.” There has
been a marked rise in suicide in Chicxulub and environs
over the last several weeks, including—
“Off,” he said.
The feed stopped. He sat heavily on the bed. One more
thing to hold suspended in his head: Could be murder,
could be suicide. He couldn’t tell Ada about it, not so soon
after their fight, not so soon after Hammond’s death. It
would just make her try to stop him. It’s not that I’m lying to
her, he told himself. I’m just trying to protect her. Ada
climbed in beside him and he kissed her, feeling guilty the
whole time. Then he turned off the light and braced himself
for the nightmares to begin.
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