46
He watched from the bathyscaphe as the robotic units
finished threading the Marker in cables. There it lay before
him, bound and trussed, but somehow still imposing
despite its metal net. This is the cause of my problems, he
thought. And now my problems are only going to get
worse.
He watched from five meters above it as the larger cable,
the one running curved up into the darkness and to the ship
above, grew taut. The MROVs had dug around the base,
but there was no telling if it would come up. In a way, he
hoped it wouldn’t. He held his breath. The Marker sagged
lower in the net, and for a moment he thought the net would
not hold. It creaked and swayed slowly in the darkness, and
they came up with a large grating sound, oddly distorted by
the water, and began to rise.
He followed it up, relaying messages and corrections to
a series of submarines, which, in turn, relayed them upward
and to the surface. At first the Marker twisted as it rose, the
water naturally channeling around the two spirals of the
Marker and making it turn, creating an invisible whirlpool in
its wake. It could, Altman realized, soon become a
problem, tangling the cables, so he slowed the towing down
to a snail’s pace and it stopped. After a while, it was
moving regularly, ascending slowly but straight upward.
This is it, thought Altman.
Slowly it rose through the darkness. Only once they were
halfway to the surface did he realize he hadn’t experienced
any hallucinations. His head, for the first time in months,
didn’t ache. He checked the readings, found that the signal
had stopped broadcasting around the time it began to rise.
Maybe we’ve disconnected it, he thought. Perhaps we’re
doing something right, perhaps this was what we were
supposed to do. Maybe it was transmitting so that we
would find it and bring it to the surface. Maybe that was its
purpose.
For a moment he felt reassured, and then unanswered
questions began to assail him. If that were really the case,
then why would there have been any hallucinations at all?
And why would they affect people most strongly when they
were close to the Marker itself? It’s almost as if it wants to
keep us at a distance. And what do the dead’s warnings of
Convergence have to do with any of it?
Maybe we’ve done something right, he thought, or
maybe we’ve done something very wrong.
Soon they would get close to the surface, and the Marker
would be drawn onto the freighter itself. Already the water
had changed, the darkness receding, and he could see the
Marker more clearly than he’d ever seen it before. In the
light, it was even more impressive, covered with symbols
and laterally striated by dark lines cut into the rock. He still
could see no evidence of joints or cracks. It still seemed
like it was formed out of a single large rock.
When the station was five hundred meters above them,
Markoff ordered the ascent stopped.
“What’s wrong?” asked Altman over the audio channel.
“This wasn’t how it was planned.”
“Thank you for your help to this point, Mr. Altman,” said
Markoff. “A deepwater craft is no longer required. Return to
the submarine bay.”
“What? I think I’ll stay here, Markoff, if you don’t mind,”
said Altman.
There was silence for a long moment and then the
vidscreen crackled into life. He saw Markoff’s face.
“You’ve been an asset to me to this point. Now you risk
becoming expendable.”
“What’s going on?” Altman asked.
“That is none of your concern,” said Markoff.
He opened his mouth and then closed it again. Markoff,
he knew, was capable of having the bathyscaphe
torpedoed. Perhaps it was time to flee, dive deep and
head for somewhere safe.
As if he could read Altman’s mind, Markoff added, “Do
you need something tangible to convince you to behave?
Your girlfriend?”
For a moment, he hesitated. In a way, he had already lost
Ada to the Marker, to her desire to be one of them. It was
just a matter of time before he lost her completely.
All the same, he still loved her and couldn’t live with her
being dead because of him. With a sigh, he cut the signal
and began to head for the surface, leaving behind the
Marker, hanging in its gigantic metal net. On the way up, he
passed a trio of submarines dragging a new cable. It led
back, he could see, to the gigantic below-water chamber of
the floating compound, the chamber that had been off-limits
to everybody except for Markoff’s inner circle ever since
they’d arrived. What Markoff had planned, Altman had no
idea.
47
As soon as he had left the bathyscaphe, he made for the
chamber that he knew would house the Marker. Centrally
located and the biggest of the below-water chambers, it
had four ways in. But three of those ways, he discovered,
had been welded closed, permanently sealed. The fourth,
the main entrance, already had two guards stationed in
front of it. He tried to bluff his way in.
“I’m supposed to be in there,” he said. “To bring the
Marker up.”
“Do you have a pass?” asked one guard.
“Nobody gets in without a pass,” said the other.
“I left my pass back in my room,” he said. “I don’t want to
be late. I’ll bring it back and show it to you later?”
“No pass, no entrance,” said the guard.
Another man, a scientist, sidled past him, flashing his
pass, and was nodded through. Altman watched as the
doors slid open, but saw only an airlock on the other side.
The man stood there waiting, and the door slid shut.
“Please,” said Altman. “I need to—”
“We already told you,” said the first guard. “No pass, no
entrance. Now move along or I’ll have you thrown in the
brig.”
He went back down the corridor. He couldn’t get in, but
maybe he could at least get some idea of what was
happening. He went from lab to lab, trying doors until he
found one that also had a window facing toward the
chamber.
Looking out, he saw the Marker hovering just below the
chamber, being slowly drawn up and in. But he couldn’t see
into the chamber itself. Something had been done to render
the glass semiopaque. He could see vague shapes and the
sense of movement and then, as they began to reel it in, the
shadowy rising shape of the Marker, but little more.
“You see,” said Field, “we knew you would come around to
the truth.”
Altman hadn’t come around. He still thought that Field
and his believers were insane, but saw no point in telling
Field that. The Marker had been in the station less than
twenty-four hours, but ever since the Marker had been
raised and secured, the whole feel of the station had
changed. Even before he’d entered the submarine bay, a
series of researchers had been declared inessential and
had been shipped back to the DredgerCorp land
compound, which rumor had it was serving now less as a
research facility and more as a holding tank for scientists
for whom Markoff had no use but whom he didn’t want to
release into the larger world. Ada had been among them,
which meant he hadn’t gotten a chance to see her and
make sure she was okay. Altman suspected he, too, might
have been among them if the bathyscaphe had arrived
slightly earlier. As it was, he’d been told to pack his things,
that he’d be among a batch of researchers to be shipped
out early the next morning.
“I need a favor,” he claimed, his hand on the chunk of
Marker that he carried in his pocket. “There’s something
the Marker wants from me. I have to see it.”
Field’s face fell. “It’s being guarded,” he said. “It’s very
hard to see it.”
“You said the other evening that some of the believers
were in Markoff’s inner circle.”
“Yes,” said Field, “that’s true. But—”
“It’s important,” said Altman. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”
He took the chunk out of his pocket and showed it to Field.
“This is a piece of it,” he said. “It needs to be returned.”
Field reached out and very gently touched it. “Can I hold
it?” he asked, his voice filled with awe. Altman handed it to
him. He took it delicately in both hands, like he was holding
a newborn child, his face lit up with a joy it frightened
Altman to see. He crooned to it, a soft chant, something
that Altman couldn’t make out, and then reluctantly handed
it back. He knelt before Altman.
“Stand up,” said Altman. “And not a word to anybody
about what I plan to do.”
But Field refused to stand. “Thank you for choosing me,”
he said, his head bowed. “I will do all I can to help you make
the Marker whole again.”
Around three in the morning, a knock came at his door. It
was Field, and another man with him wearing the black
garb of one of Markoff’s inner circle. He was carrying a
package under his arm. Altman vaguely recognized him.
“This is Henry Harmon,” Field said. “Mr. Harmon, Michael
Altman.”
“I know who he is,” said Harmon dryly. “You’re sure this is
absolutely necessary?”
Altman nodded. Harmon tossed him the package. He
tore it open, saw an outfit identical to Harmon’s own. “Put
that on,” he said.
Altman stared at it. “How’s this going to help?” he asked.
“Won’t they recognize me, in any case?”
“Maybe,” said Harmon, “but they won’t try to stop us. They
won’t question the pass as long as you have the uniform. If
we have trouble, it’ll be afterward, which is a risk I’ll have to
take.”
He put it on and they set off.
Field followed them, but Harmon turned briefly, shook his
head, and Field, a look of disappointment on his face,
disappeared.
He checked his chronometer. “There are four guards
total, two at the door outside the chamber and two inside,
all armed. We’re lucky: the two guards inside are with us,
though that’s far from being generally known. The two
outside, though, aren’t. Shift changes in about fifteen
minutes and all bets are off. If we stay longer than ten,
chances are good that one of the guards will get curious
and place a call to check on our authorization.
Understood?”
“Yes,” said Altman.
“Here’s your pass,” he said. “It’s not the best, but the
guards outside should only glance at it. The men inside will
go with whatever I say.”
Harmon was right. The guards outside the room seemed
hardly surprised that someone was coming to see the
Marker in the middle of the night. They looked at Harmon
then glanced at both passes and waved them in. The
guards inside didn’t even bother with that, withdrawing
discreetly to the other side of the room as soon as they
entered.
There it was. A series of catwalks had been built up
along the walls to make it easy to get a close look at any
part of it. Massive and towering, it dominated the whole
chamber. Seeing it out of the water, he got a fuller sense of
its bulk and strangeness. It was like nothing he had ever
seen, a kind of impossible object that was nevertheless
there. A power seemed to emanate from it. It was
dangerous.
At the same time, he felt his scientific impulses kicking
in. It was amazing, and he genuinely wanted to study it. A
piece of extremely advanced technology, something
predating humanity.
He took out his holopod and began to vid it.
“What are you doing?” whispered Harmon. “Nobody is
allowed to vid it.”
“That’s what I came for,” he said.
“But it’s not allowed.”
Altman shrugged once, then ignored him. Either Harmon
would stop him or he wouldn’t. He filmed the whole structure
at first, then ran the lens in close-up over the sides closest
to him. As he did so, he tried to spot the place where the
piece of rock he had in his pocket was from, but couldn’t
find it.
He felt like he’d only just begun when Harmon grabbed
his arm. “We’ve got to go,” he whispered.
Altman nodded. He slipped the holopod back into his
pocket and headed for the door, Harmon pulling him along.
Harmon nodded once to the guards on the inside and they
resumed their stations. The guards on the outside he
saluted.
“Why do you need a vid of it?” asked Harmon as they
walked away. “I have half a mind to turn you in.”
“It’s important,” said Altman. “Trust me. You’ll see.”
Five minutes later, he was back in his room, hastily
packing. The hunk of rock he kept on his person. He
backed up his holopod onto a memory stick, which he hid
in the lining of his jacket, just in case. And then he lay down
on the bed and waited.
But sleep wouldn’t come. Every time he closed his eyes,
he would see the Marker there, towering above him. It was
powerful, it was dangerous, it wanted something from them.
Why did Ada worship it? To worship it would be just to put
yourself even more fully at its mercy. And it was not the sort
of thing, Altman felt, to grant mercy.
Soon, in an hour or two, a knock would come at the door
and he’d be escorted to the launch and sent back to the
land compound. He stared up into the darkness, thinking.
Once there, he could forget all about this, pretend like the
Marker was no longer his problem and let Markoff do with it
what he would while he went back to his life. Or he could
figure out a way to smuggle out the vid that he’d taken of
the Marker, make it available to the general public, and try
to make the Marker a matter of international scientific
inquiry rather than a toy for the military.
The first possibility would mean safety, a chance to lead
a more or less normal life. Probably he could patch up his
relationship with Ada. Maybe with time, miles away from
the Marker, separated from the hallucinations of her
mother, she would begin to come to her senses. She would
stop thinking about it, would regain her sanity. Everything
could turn out okay. That is, assuming nothing went wrong
with the Marker.
The second might mean danger, even death. Markoff
and his goons wouldn’t hesitate to kill both him and Ada if
they became, as Markoff liked to say, expendable.
He already knew which one he would take. He’d never
been the sort to take the safe route. Now all he had to do
was figure out how to get the news out.
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