64
“I knew you were coming,” said Harmon. “I just knew.” He
was, Altman noted, sweating profusely. His responses
were disconnected, his voice zigzagging back and forth
between being affectless and flat and a panic-stricken roar.
He was clearly not in his right mind.
“Actually, I called you and told you I was coming,” said
Altman.
“No!” Harmon said, his voice rising. “You didn’t tell me! I
knew!”
“Calm down,” said Altman. “How do you know I’m the
one?”
“You’re the only one who has come,” said Harmon,
speaking with a calm simplicity. “It has to be you because
you’re the only one. Everyone else is dead.”
Altman slowly nodded. He might be able to play
Harmon’s belief in the Marker to his advantage, he
realized. He wanted Harmon to believe whatever he had to
believe to allow Altman to do what he needed to do.
“I came here,” said Harmon. “This is the first place that I
came and then, when I saw that they couldn’t come near
me, I understood why. The Marker wanted me here. I used
to mistrust the Marker, but I was wrong. The Marker is
protecting me. The Marker loves me.”
“And me,” said Altman.
“And you,” Harmon agreed. He reached out and took
Altman’s arm. His hand was feverish, burning hot. “Do you
believe?” he asked.
Altman shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Why not.”
“And have you understood my message?” he asked. He
looked at Altman expectantly, clearly waiting.
“Message received,” Altman finally said.
Harmon smiled.
“I asked you to gather some information,” said Altman.
“Do you have it?”
Harmon gestured to a holoscreen.
There was a series of holofiles, some of which Altman
had seen and some that he had not. There were vid images
of the interior of the first bathyscaphe, taken after the
bathyscaphe had been brought up. He had seen bits of it
before, first in the intercepted vid from Hennesey and then
later, from the outside, through the window. As the camera
taking the images scanned slowly, he recognized the
scrawlings in blood as symbols from the Marker. But, he
also realized, they were not in the same order or sequence
as they appeared on the Marker. What he’d seen before as
a symptom of madness now actually struck him as
rudimentary calculations and seemed to contain a glimmer
of sense.
In addition, there were analyses of the Marker ’s structure
and density, hundreds of dissections of its transmissions,
speculations, unproven theories. There was information
about the different genetic codes that Showalter and Guthe
had read into the signal and the Marker. There were, in the
end, more files than he could read—even more files than he
could skim. Thousands and thousands of pages and
images and hours and hours of vids. What was important
and what wasn’t? What was he going to do? How was he to
start?
Harmon was crouched on the deck beside his chair,
staring at the Marker. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
asked Harmon.
“No,” said Altman.
“It’s good,” said Harmon. “It loves us, I can tell. I touched it
and when I touched it, I felt its love.”
“You felt something?” said Altman.
“I felt its love!” insisted Harmon, shouting now,
apoplectic. “It loves us! Touch it and you’ll see!”
Altman shook his head. “Touch it! Touch it!” Harmon was
still screaming. And so Altman, not knowing how else to
calm him, stood up, walked across the chamber, and did.
It was not love he felt, but something different, something
that was not a feeling at all. At first it was as if he was
experiencing all the hallucinations he had had at once, as if
he was experiencing all the experiences any of the others
had had, all laid over one another. Most of it interfered with
itself, created a kind of blinding static that blotted itself out,
but beyond that, and in spite of it, he could see something
he hadn’t seen before. He could see that the hallucinations
were not a function of the Marker but of something else that
stood in opposition to it, of something that was ingrained in
his own brain. The hallucinations had been trying to protect
them, but they had failed: the process had begun. Now all
he could do was try to satisfy the Marker enough that the
process would stop but not do enough to lead to full-fledged
Convergence.
And then, suddenly, something cleared and he could see
past the hallucinations to glimpse the Marker itself. It was
as if it were changing the structure of his brain, reworking
connections, rewiring circuits, to make him understand.
Suddenly he felt he could see the structure of the Marker
from the inside, and in a way that gave him a complex
appreciation of it. It filled his head and set it aflame, and
then it poured out through the cracks in his skull and took
him with it.
When he came conscious, Harmon was over him, stroking
his head, a beatific smile on his face.
“You see?” he said when he noticed that Altman’s eyes
were open. “You see?”
Altman pushed him away and stood, stalking quickly over
to the monitor. He began to type frantically, sketching a
structure out as well. His hands were moving faster than his
brain, working on different bits and pieces of it all at once,
flipping from holofile to holofile and back again. He was, he
realized with a shock, recording the basic rudiments for a
blueprint of a new Marker. It was sloppy and skew. There
were a lot of unanswered questions, a lot of mysteries to be
sorted out, but that was definitely what he was doing.
“What is it?” Harmon was asking from behind him.
“What’s going on?”
“I’ve figured it out,” Altman answered. “I thought I’d figured
it out before, but I was still struggling to understand what it
meant. Now I know.”
He worked awhile longer; how long he couldn’t say. His
head was spinning, his fingers aching. When he had
finished, he turned to Harmon.
“I need your help,” he said.
“What is it?”
“I need you to help me translate what I have here, best as
you can, and feed the signal back to the Marker.”
At first Harmon just stared and then he slowly sat down,
took a closer look. He went through it, slowly. Suddenly he
glanced up at Altman, the first coherent look he’d given
since Altman had entered.
“This is the Marker,” he said, awe in his voice. “You
understood it, just as she asked you to do.”
Altman nodded.
“You want me to transmit to the Marker the image of
itself?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Altman.
“Marker be praised,” said Harmon. And then he added,
“Altman be praised.”
It made his skin crawl to hear Harmon say his name like
that, but he bit his tongue, said nothing. What he had done
was far from complete, would require years and years more
work, but hopefully it would be enough right now to stop the
process of Convergence.
It took a few hours more, and a few attempts to transmit
in different ways, before something connected. The Marker
sent out a short, intense burst of energy, and then, as
suddenly as it had begun broadcasting, it fell silent.
“What’s wrong with it?” asked Harmon.
“It’s resting,” said Altman. “We’ve done what it wanted us
to do. We’ve saved the world.”
65
After it was over, he sat there for a long time, thinking. Why
did the Marker want to be reproduced? What effect would it
have? What did it mean? And if the hallucinations, the
visions, weren’t from the Marker but were opposed to it,
where were they from? Which of the two was on their side?
He still didn’t trust it. No, what he had felt when he
touched the Marker was not love but nothing—total
absolute indifference to the human race. They were a
means to an end. What that end was, he wasn’t certain, but
felt, more than ever, that for the Marker they were
expendable, a necessary step on the way to something
else. When the new Marker was constructed—and he had
no doubt that that was what the Marker intended—what
would happen then? He had stopped the Convergence, but
perhaps by doing so he had jump-started a discovery that
would lead humanity to an even worse fate.
Then again, another part of him responded, what if
you’re wrong? What if you’re being paranoid? Or what if
the love Harmon had felt was his own feelings, his own
emotions mirrored back to him: his own religious love for
the Marker being reflected as the Marker ’s love for him?
What if the indifference Altman sensed was not something
inherent to the Marker, but something integral to himself,
reflected back?
He sat there thinking, thinking, but getting nowhere. What
was he going to do now? Now that he’d given the Marker
what it wanted, had he inadvertently made things worse for
humanity?
“We’ll have to go,” he said to Harmon. “The Marker wants
us to leave.”
“How do you know?”
“It told me,” said Altman.
Harmon nodded. He went to the Marker and touched his
lips to it. He was no longer paranoid, no longer jumpy, no
doubt because the Marker had stopped broadcasting. But
he was still a believer.
“Where are we going?” Harmon asked.
“To the control room,” said Altman. “I have something to
take care of, and then we can leave.”
He didn’t know what he expected—maybe that when the
Marker stopped broadcasting the creatures would lose
power, would collapse, even fall apart. But it wasn’t like
that. When they left the Marker chamber and went down the
hall and opened the door at the far end, it was to find the
strange spiderlike creature still there, still waiting for him. It
was a little slower maybe, a little more listless, but it was
still there, still eager to kill them both.
Seeing that only strengthened his commitment to do what
he planned.
They opened the door and saw it, and the creature’s
back began to bristle. Altman grabbed Harmon, pulled
them both behind the doorframe. The strange conical
projections it cast from its back whipped down the hall and
past them, whunking into the walls.
He stuck his head back out and waited for what it would
do next. All three heads, he saw, were loose now, scurrying
toward them.
He thumbed on the plasma cutter.
“You might want to stay back,” he said to Harmon, and
then stepped into the doorway.
He caught the first with the blade as it leaped at him,
separating the head from its tendrils. The head, still
grimacing, bounced and richoted off the wall and he
crushed it with his foot. The second he caught with an
upward thrust as it scurried along the ceiling just above the
doorframe. Then he had to step back and press against the
wall again as the creature slung more barbs at him.
The last, he had to pry off Harmon’s neck. It had gotten
past him somehow, he didn’t know how. He didn’t even
know it had attached itself to Harmon, and wouldn’t have
known if Harmon hadn’t grabbed him from behind and
shook him. He’d turned, saw Harmon going purple, thought
Not this again, and sliced the thing in half, somehow
managing not to take Harmon’s face off along with it.
Harmon coughed, rubbed his throat. “Altman be praised,”
he suggested in a hoarse whisper.
“Stop saying that,” said Altman. “Altman doesn’t want to
be praised.”
He glanced again around the door frame. The creature
was moving forward now, its spearlike legs rattling down
the hall and coming toward them. He put his finger to his
lips, warning Harmon to be quiet, then flattened himself
against the wall.
He heard it coming, the tapping of each leg a kind of
complex, echoing rhythm that suddenly made it difficult for
him to tell exactly how close it really was. He heard it pause
at the doorframe. He kept expecting it to sidle through, but
for some reason it didn’t. Instead, it turned around and
started back the other way.
Shit, thought Altman, so much for ambushes. And
rushed around the door frame and after it.
It spun around, surprisingly quick despite its many legs.
He sheared off the one nearest to him, then threw himself to
the floor as its back bristled and it spat its barbs. He sliced
off another leg on the same side, almost lost his foot as it
stabbed one of its remaining legs down. Another swipe and
it crashed to one side, disabled. He dismembered it,
careful this time not to cut into the yellow and black tumor.
He went back for Harmon and they continued down the
hall. They passed the laboratory doors and saw that they
were open. Inside the second one, two of the creatures with
scythes turned about in circles, performing a strange
dance, as if the Marker, before falling silent, had sent them
a message that they could not interpret and now they were
caught in some kind of glitch, forced to perform the same
motion again and again. Not knowing what else to do,
Altman moved quietly past. If they noticed him, they didn’t
show it.
Instead of going through the next hall and into the
submarine bay, they took the side passage and cut up and
back, toward the command center. There were two more of
the scythers, these directly in the hall, same lost
movements, blocking the way. But as soon as he touched
one with the plasma cutter, both of them attacked. Harmon
turned and, wailing, fled back down the hall. Altman cut the
legs out from under one, but couldn’t get the weapon
around before the other on was him, its scythes wrapped
around him and drawing him in, its mouth pressed to his
neck and tearing at it, making a moaning sound, the neck
burning as well from whatever fluid the dead mouth was
secreting. He cut into its chest and through its torso and its
legs fell off but the top half of it continued to cling. The other
one, legless and all, had dragged itself forward by its
scythes and was trying to climb up his legs. He tried to pull
the head of the first away, tried to drag it off his neck, but
couldn’t. The cutter was still trapped.
He held down the button and brought it up, carving slowly
through the creature’s torso then over to the side to cut off
one of the scythes. From here he could shake it off, then
stomp both it and its companion out of existence.
He stumbled back down the hall until he found Harmon.
“Come on,” he said tiredly. “Let’s go.”
He didn’t have authorization to open the command center
door, but Harmon did. The command center was clear,
empty inside, perhaps because the Marker was there just
above it. He went over to the console, found what he was
looking for.
He entered the sequence in, found himself locked out. He
entered it in again.
OVERRIDE? Y/N the holoscreen asked him.
Y.
ENTER AUTHORIZATION CODE.
“Harmon,” he asked. “Do you have an authorization
code?”
“Why?” said Harmon. “What do you want it for?”
“I don’t want it,” said Altman. “The Marker does.”
After a brief pause, Harmon gave the code to him. He
entered it.
Immediately an alarm started to sound.
FLOODING SEQUENCE WILL BEGIN IN 10:00. CANCEL
SEQUENCE Y/N?
“What did you do?” shouted Harmon.
N.
The countdown began. SEQUENCE CAN BE CANCELED AT
ANY TIME BY PRESSING N.
Harmon was screaming behind him. “What are you
doing?” he was shouting over and over again.
Altman grabbed him and shook him. “I’m sinking it,” he
said.
Harmon had a hurt look on his face, seemed ready to
melt into tears. “Why?” he asked.
“To protect the Marker,” lied Altman. “It was down there
for a reason, to keep it safe. And to kill these creatures. I
promise you, Harmon, this is what needs to happen.”
“You have to stop the countdown,” said Harmon.
“No,” said Altman.
“Then I’ll stop it,” said Harmon.
“No,” said Altman, holding the plasma cutter up near his
face. “You’re coming with me. Either that or I’ll kill you.”
The pressure inside the station had already started to shift.
There was a trickle of water in the corridor as he entered,
the process starting slowly, nothing that couldn’t be
reversed. The system, he knew, would not commit fully until
the full ten minutes had passed.
At first Harmon was in a rage, and then overcome with
tears, which slowly reduced to sniffles and then petered out
entirely. Altman thought for a moment he’d have to kill him,
but finally he allowed himself to be coaxed, prodded along.
Altman looked at his chronometer. “We don’t have much
time,” he said. “I don’t know what creatures are still alive on
the decks above or how long it’d take me to kill them. We’ll
have to go out the submarine bay.”
“I didn’t know there was still a submarine there,” said
Harmon.
“There isn’t,” said Altman.
“Then how—”
“We’re going to swim,” said Altman. “I’ll flood the bay and
open the doors. As soon as they open, swim out as quickly
as you can and make for the surface. There’s a rope. If you
see it, follow it up. It’ll lead you to the boat platform. I’ve left
a boat moored there. I’ll be right behind you.”
Eyes wide, Harmon nodded.
They moved out. Altman took the lead, stayed on watch.
Nothing. There must be more of the creatures in the facility,
but he wasn’t seeing them. He kept expecting them to
crash their way out through a vent or to hear a door slide
open behind him and find one suddenly looming over him,
but no, nothing. That was almost worse than if there was
something. It kept him tense, expectant, a coiled spring of
energy that never could release itself.
By the time they reached the door of the submarine bay,
there were two minutes left. The water was up to their
knees in the corridor and when he tried to open the bay
doors, they wouldn’t respond. He threw the override and
forced the doors open enough that they could slip through,
the water from the hall pouring in along with them.
He tried to shut the door, but couldn’t get it shut. As long
as it wasn’t shut, he wouldn’t be able to flood the chamber.
He called for Harmon to help him, but the man just stood
there, motionless, staring down over the edge of the
catwalk. Altman finally had to yell at him, threaten him.
Together, with Altman working the manual controls and
Harmon pushing the door along, they forced it shut.
“Swim higher in the chamber as the water rises,” Altman
said. “Keep your head above it until you get to the ceiling,
then, once it starts to cover you, dive down and swim out
the bottom. Got it?”
Harmon didn’t respond.
Altman slapped him. “Got it?” he yelled.
Harmon nodded.
They began to flood the chamber. At first Harmon just
stood there, watching the cold water rise, swirling up
around his legs, and for a moment Altman just expected
him to stand there, watching, not moving, and drown. But
when the water reached his chest, he suddenly took a deep
gasping breath and began to paddle.
“Remember,” called Altman, floating now himself. “Up to
the ceiling and then down and out the bottom and then all
the way up to the surface. But not too fast.”
He tried to keep his breathing slow, measured. The
water all around him was swirling and foamy, and it was
some effort to keep above it. He watched Harmon, but he
seemed to be doing all right now. Twice he disappeared
beneath the surface, but he reappeared again almost
immediately.
And then Altman’s head grazed the ceiling. He looked up
at it and grabbed on to the grating there, holding still,
breathing slowly in and out until the water covered his face.
He dived, stroking back to the controls, and opened the
bay floor. Harmon was already down there, he saw,
knocking against the metal of the floor, trying to get out. As
soon as the floor split, he was through it and gone. Altman
quickly followed.
· · ·
The water was much darker than it had been earlier. He
struck through it blindly, trying to go straight out, and then
turned and started to rise too soon, striking the underside
of the bay. He swam out farther and then made for the
surface.
It wasn’t as hard as going down, but it was difficult. The
temptation was to go too quickly, which would have left him
cramped and shivering and probably killed him. So, he
went up slowly, all the while aware of the way his air was
running out, his heart beating slower and slower. By the
time he finally broke the surface, his lungs felt like they were
on fire. There was a sliver of moon, just enough to see by.
He looked around, saw the ghost of the boat platform, but
no sign of Harmon. He spun his head around but didn’t see
him.
“Harmon!” he called as loud as he could.
He kicked up, trying to pull himself as far out of the water
as he could. Even then, he wouldn’t have seen it, if it hadn’t
been for the way a dip caught the platform and showed him
the head floating on the other side.
He swam to the platform, climbed the ladder up onto it,
and stumbled along the swaying platform to its far side. The
facility now had started to settle strangely, listing in the
water. There was the roar of water rushing into it, or maybe
the roar was from something else, the whole structure
creaking, too, as the change in buoyancy shifted its weight,
putting pressure on girders and links.
“Harmon!” he called again.
But the man didn’t hear him, perhaps couldn’t hear him
over the noise. Altman dived in, swam to him, touched him.
“Harmon,” he said, “come on!”
He was confused and seemed dizzy, in a state of shock.
Altman slapped him, pulled him toward the platform. He got
him swimming again, though somewhat lethargically, and
had to practically drag him up onto the platform once they
arrived.
The platform was already listing, half submerged in
water, being dragged down by the sinking dome. He pulled
Harmon over to the boat and dumped him in, and fell in
himself. Then the dome behind them creaked noticeably
lower and the platform was underwater, the mooring rope
between it and the boat stretched taut, the boat listing hard
to one side, threatening to turn over. His fingers shaking, he
picked at the knot, but the pressure had tightened it too
much for him to loosen it. His eyes cast desperately around
for a knife but he didn’t see one. There was an anchor,
though, and he grabbed it up and began striking the
mooring with it as hard as he could, trying to break it free.
The boat tipped farther, very close to taking on water.
“Get to the far side of the boat!” he cried at Harmon, but
couldn’t look around to see if he did. He kept hitting the
mooring with hard, smashing blows.
Suddenly the boat bobbed back and threw him to the
boards. It was only after scrambling up again with the
anchor that he realized the mooring and rope were gone,
that he had succeeded.
The boat began to swirl. There was a sucking sound as
the facility began to go down now in earnest. He leapt into
the driver’s seat and started the craft, throwing the throttle
down hard. The boat leapt forward, but it was heading
wrong, directly toward the dome: he corrected it, but there
was still something wrong. They were caught in a vortex,
some sort of whirlpool that the facility was creating as it
went down.
Instead of forcing the rudder against it, he turned and
followed it, trying to edge carefully free. The last dome
slipped all the way under and was gone. He felt the drag on
the rudder but kept it steady, trying not to look to the side,
trying not to panic. For an instant he felt the boat resisting
him, threatening either to turn and plunge downward or to
flip over, but then suddenly they were free.
He sped away, looking back over his shoulder. The
inside of the compound, the little he could see of it through
the waves, was flashing and sparking, the electrical
systems and generator still in the process of shorting out.
He had just a glimpse of it and then it was gone. He took
the boat in a long curve then headed back toward
Chicxulub.
He was just thinking he should check on Harmon when he
realized that he was standing there behind him. He turned
and was struck in the side of the head by the anchor,
knocked out of his seat.
“You were lying, Altman,” Harmon said. “The Marker
didn’t want to be sunk. You don’t love the Marker, you hate
it.”
No, he tried to say, no. But nothing came out.
He saw Harmon bend over him. He roughly took hold of
Altman’s hands, put them together, began to tie them.
“I thought you were my friend,” said Harmon. “I thought
you were a believer. But if you were really a believer, why
don’t you have one of these?” He touched the Marker
pendant hanging from his neck. “I shouldn’t have trusted
you.”
I saved you, Altman tried to say. I could have left you to
die, but I saved your life.
“Now I’m going to get some real help,” said Harmon, and
he stood and took the controls.
Altman lay there, eyes glazed. A warm fluid was puddling
up against his cheek and his mouth. It was only when he
tried to swallow that he realized it was blood. It took him
another minute to realize it was his own.
Okay, he thought. I’ve been in worse situations. He tried
to move his hands, but couldn’t feel them. It was as if his
body had become disconnected from his head. I’ll just rest
a moment, he told himself. I’ll just lie here and then, in a
moment, I’ll wriggle free of these ropes.
His vision started to go dim, and then slowly faded away.
He listened to the sound of the engine, then that slowly left
him, too. He lay there, feeling the movement of the boat
through the waves. After a while, it seemed to come only
from a distance. A while longer and even that was lost. He
lay in the boat, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling
nothing. The whole world had dissolved around him. He
tried as long as he could to focus on the taste of blood in
his mouth. But soon he couldn’t hold on to even that.
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