Adi had been wrong. It was not winter yet, not quite, and the storm had lasted only fourteen days. Every time they dove the cities and towers had changed. Where the ice had retreated, entire areas were laid to waste, and each year more of the seas stayed trapped under ice.
You could not blame Adi for her caution. Sudden onsets of winter had caught and trapped Fish time and time again, but you could usually read the signs: the permafrost spread its fingers further south, leaving the water-submerged lands frozen out of season, and the currents never lied—blasts of cold water killed as often as they warned, but allowed the Fish to know where to swim and complete their missions safely.
The colony knew of the cold and the snow, but the Fish knew the true meaning of winter. The freezing waters took on a glassy, reflective look moving forward along the city grids, swallowing block after block, turning the waters to solid ice down from the surface and almost to the ground, where water circulation blasted cold currents further ahead; subtle signs of impending glaciation that the Fish learned to recognise as children. Each encroachment sent silent explosions along the currents, forming ice walls several hundreds of feet in height and thousands of miles thick, until the summer came and freed them again, but always shorter summers, and always more ice.
And now, Adi was dead. Ari saw her in the Dream and knew that she had succumbed to her mission. She was in the Dream with him, floating through the depths with the whales and the sharks, spinning through swarms of jellyfish unbitten. He knew she had succumbed to the Dream and merged with it, leaving reality behind for boundless currents and her own freedom.
Mole Councilman Eli Khadivi let himself bask in the tension of the Council, allowing the little give-aways to give, and the tell-tale signs to tell him which way the wind blew.
The Council’s currents were only as complex as its members, and the Castes concerns were all the same, and had been so for a century. The ice would trap them if they didn’t act decisively and in the thin tremor of panic he saw the opening he needed to support his own agenda.
He cleared his voice. “Councilmen, Councilwomen. I declare this 62nd annual session of the Council of the Divine Undertaking open. As you all know we are nearing completion of the network. As such, the first item on the agenda will be fuel and supplies for the caves.”
The Divine Undertaking was ready to embrace them, the network of connecting caves and tunnels was to become the final resting place of a repentant humanity, and the sum of the knowledge it had preserved once the ice covered the world. But he needed to deal with the Fish, they all needed to deal with the Fish, or none of it would matter.
A man raised his hand.
“Yes, Councilman Samadeh, I assume the Bees would have their word as to our supplies, where do we stand?”
The Bees workload had doubled with the Divine Undertaking. Providing food for the colony was an arduous task with every shorter spring, but the Divine Undertaking was a leviathan that required agricultural Bees and labourer Beasts to produce more stock, and engineering Ants to build more storage units and recycle more fuel than the colony had ever needed.
They had grown unaccustomed to the caves after these few centuries on the mountain walls, fields and open seas. They knew they would have to go back to their troglodytic existence, Hades demanded it, but unlike the Moles, they didn’t all embrace the future with equal glee.
“Thank you, Head of Council Khadivi,” said Samadeh, and looked around the room at the other Caste members assembled for the session. Only the Fish were absent. “As you all know, we have prepared for the coming of Hades with due diligence and hard labour, and within the next few days, with the help of the Ants we will have managed to complete all the major storage units and rehabilitated the old plantation caves. We are prepared for Hell, Head of Council.”
“Yes,” broke in a young Ant councilwoman. “The fuel supplies the Fish managed to salvage were more potent than we expected after all these years.”
“Yes,” agreed a Beast councilman, a diminutive fellow in spite of his Caste’s name. “Yes they did well, several perished but they did well.”
“My fellow friends and colleagues,” Khadivi said, “our efforts will not be in vain, none of ours, the Blank Book of Scriptures says so, and so it will be.” He paused for effect and added, “But I fear that, in spite of their recent success, the Fish may have outlived their usefulness.”
“Again, Khadivi?” sighed the Beast councilman.
“Yes, again?” came another annoyed sigh from the table. “This is not the first time you bring up the Fish and their quirks, but they have their uses Eli, as you well know. Will you Moles ever let bygones be bygones? After all this time?”
A few other voices rose in protest, but they were few.
Khadivi continued, “My fellow councilfolk, you should know me better than this, and you know that my only concern has always and only been for the survival of this colony, of what is left of our humanity, all of us.
“But we must consider the fate of these poor degenerates, if we are to prosper in the warm embrace of the Cave. Would these sad creatures, hopelessly addicted to the freedom of the waters, find peace in the bowels of the earth?
“Those ‘dreams’ of which they speak, which we naively believed to be Neptune manifested, those dreams, which inevitably, inexorably lead every Fish over the cliff, are nothing more than madness, insanity brought about by their arrogance and vanity. Did we ever really believe that they heard the whales? The Fish thought themselves Neptune’s chosen and are paying the price of blasphemy.”
“They are paying the price of our survival, Councilman,” someone said.
It was true that when the rising waters had drowned civilisation and pushed them inexorably higher into the mountains, the Fish brought food from the sea to complement the meagre meals Bees would scrounge from the caves. Until able-bodied males and females started dying, children were born with deformities, and they realised that they could no longer depend on the sea for sustenance.
The Bees became more adept at sustaining food for the community, and the Ants’ steady labour at perfecting remnants of Hermes’ gifts allowed the Fish to go deeper and stay longer underwater. Through their alliance the colony made leaps and survived the brunt of Neptune’s anger, but it was the Moles who had paid, the Moles who had toiled, bled, and died, at the hands of the ruling Fish. It was the Moles who dug the caves, who had built the houses for the colony. The Moles had been shackled into building the Divine Undertaking, and it was the Moles who had overthrown the Fish a hundred years earlier. It was the Moles whom Hades had called.
Centuries as slaves. All the other Castes seemed to have forgotten but he would not, and neither would the Fish.
“Yes!” a female voice jested slyly. “Perhaps if Moles didn’t have so many wives there would be room for a few Fish!”
A few smirks followed, but the councilman saw an overture where the others saw snide.
“Polygamy,” Khadivi snapped, “is the legacy of our slavery, when our women were forced into chained pregnancies. Do you wish to see the same happen to you?”
The sudden doubt on her face egged him on.
“Shall we pay the price of their survival? The Moles are not angry anymore, but we have not forgotten the whip of the Fish. Do you trust them not to turn on you? Do you trust the madness they leak? The sea calls them, my friends, relentlessly. If we take the heralds of Neptune with us, they will rage and we will perish.
“No, my friends, no.
“They have brought this colony to the brink once before, we cannot allow them to do so again. When Hell freezes over, when Neptune closes his scaly fist upon land and sea, the fate of the Fish must be sealed.”
The Fish quarters lay at the bottom of each settlement along the coast, looking up towards the higher echelons on the mountainside where the Moles and the priesthood resided. Bells rang the hour, and the ending of the Council meeting. Ari thanked his mother for the bread and looked up towards the glinting windo
ws of the Mole district.
His mind was elsewhere. The Dream was stronger since their last mission; laughter mingled with submarine harmonics, and somewhere, Adi giggled at imaginary mermaids. He closed his eyes to get a hold of his senses, wrestling with reality; the table, food and room giving way to dolphins glowing a sickly green around him...
The bread dropped from his hand and he came to, shaken violently by his father.
His mother burst into focus suddenly, tears dampening her cheek. “Even awake, now...wide awake, now!” Her hands clung to her apron and rolled into fists. She was biting her lip, shaking.
How long had he been gone? No more than a few seconds surely.
Jonah rested a hand on her shoulder, and wiped a droplet of blood pearling on her lower lip. “I’ve turned out alright,” he said.
“No, no you haven’t, none of you. You don’t hear yourselves at night, or maybe you do, maybe you’re all together somewhere, but I hear you, loud and clear. The sounds you make...they’re not human, Jonah! They’re not...”
“We’ve been over this before; they’re just dreams, Zohar, just dreams.”
She looked at Ari, spat some blood into her apron, and walked to the window, facing out to the cliff. “One night, the two of you, the two of you were...synchronised. You all were. Every single one of you in every house! The Moles came down with the Priests. No one could wake you. Some Moles even suggested killing you. I left the house. I wandered to the edge.” She was visibly shaking, illuminated by the pale light breaking through the clouds. “There were things down there, Jonah. Not the whales, you’ve shown me those, they spit water. Other things. Strange things. Glowing things. Circling each other until the sun came up. I stayed and watched them spin for hours; made myself sick! I only turned back when they left. When I got home the noises had stopped, you were breathing normally again, both of you, all of you!”
“The scriptures are full of stranger occurrences my soul, they’re just dreams...” He threw his son a look.
Ari smiled at his mother reassuringly. “It’s fine, Mother, truly.” But as he said so the dolphins flickered back into focus. They floated in suspended animation, staring at him silently, and exploded into particles of ice, ripping his mother apart.
When Ari entered the conference room, the tables were laid with maps, marking cities along the usual Fish routes north. The room was full of high-ranking Moles, representatives of the Priesthood and leaders of Fish communities along the coast. The air was heavy with whispers and mistrust; perhaps it was the cigar smoke making eyes squint, but Ari thought otherwise.
His father was leaning over a map, arguing with a Mole councilman, and a silent Priest. “With all due respect, Councilman, we could not have accomplished this mission six months ago. The chances of success were slim then and they are nil now.”
“Is there something the Fish can’t do, Jonah?” the councilman laughed, slamming a companionable hand on Jonah’s back.
“I appreciate the jest, Councilman, and the trust, I do. But most of these cities are caught in the glaciers; everything north of the 49th parallel, in fact, is solid ice from sea to sky, and has been so for years. Even if we could make it that far, hoping some river ways are still navigable and some landmasses are still uncovered, we would need three months to complete this mission, with relays, a network of them.” He ruffled his hair and pointed to several spots on the map. “Here around Beirut, Heraklion, and possibly Ragusa. We don’t have the human capacity to support an operation of this size. Hauling equipment for transport and relay stations will slow us down significantly. Time is against us, winter will be on us before we can return, and we’d be too busy to keep track of encroachments in the permafrost.”
“How much of a delay?”
Jonah paused for thought, cupping his chin and frowning. “We can cover roughly six hundred and fifty kilometres a day in a group, with the extra load, maybe half that, and we would spend half days installing the relay stations. It would be almost twenty days to Central Europe, longer on the way back if the trip is fruitful, which it won’t be, Councilman.”
The councilman’s voice turned to syrup. “How about a...‘hit and run’, I believe was the old term. Well how about a hit and swim to the glaciers, we have several seismic charges which the Divine Undertaking will not require, free as much land and town as you can, salvage what you can, and swim back? Three weeks travel time is within reason this time of year, isn’t it?”
Jonah shook his head. “Impossible sir, the glaciers are too high and too thick. We could wreak significant damage, here...” He scanned the map for a few seconds. “...and here maybe, around Hannover if we can swim that far, but the repercussions sir. Thousands of tons of ice is a lot of pressure, it could cause giant waves, it will bring down water temperature, just enough to allow the glacier to spread faster rather than crumble, it would collapse and solidify farther in a matter of seconds; we’d be trapped under and in, there would be no coming back. A hundred years ago, even fifty, maybe. Today...”
“It is settled then, avoid the deep north, and focus your efforts on these two regions, you-”
“Would need six times the men we have sir.”
Khadivi’s grin told Ari that his father had fallen right into it. “And you will have them! The Council would never ask the Fish to risk their lives on a suicide mission, nor would we make this unusual request if the Divine Undertaking didn’t demand it, and not without significant involvement by the Council.”
Jonah looked at Khadivi as if the man had grown a fin. “Sir? It’s all deep north; it’s not a question of where so much as when.” Jonah did not like losing, and his face froze as he grappled for arguments to throw off the wrench he had wedged for himself. “We are grateful for your help, but your men aren’t trained. There is a reason why Fish pass the tradition down, one generation after another. We would need weeks to train your recruits, and that’s barely enough for them to use their equipment, and handle the storage units, sir.
“With all due respect, we are talking about months underwater!” His fist slammed down on the map, and momentarily quieted the buzz of distrust and suspicion bouncing from wall to wall. “Your men, even very well intended, don’t have a mind for the depths; they would slow us down further, they’re a hindrance, sir, you should know that.”
“Didn’t you say that you would need relay points along a network, Jonah? That you would be too busy to monitor changes in currents, sudden encroachments of permafrost, marine life, and threats of such nature?”
Jonah stood nonplussed. “Well yes sir, except the last bit, sir, we can handle those, but-”
“It is agreed then, that with enough manpower the mission can be accomplished before the winter, yes? Our men will serve at your command as relays, to monitor submarine activity, and maintain open communication with the Council. If, for any reason, we were to believe your mission could end in failure or death, we would pull back, and wait out the winter. If you have any reason to believe they cannot complete such simple tasks after three weeks of your expert training, we’d be the first to call the operation off. After all, what are a few more years to Hades?”
He turned to Ari’s father, but Jonah was staring out the window, his eyes blank and unfocused. Khadivi, looking firmly away from him, smiled and said: “Agreed, Jonah?”
Jonah didn’t respond. Everyone in the room had stopped talking, and stared desperately at him, the Fish leaders intimately aware of what was happening, not daring to intervene. All the Fish Dream Fish Dreams, everyone knew by now, Fish, Mole, Priest, Beast, Ant, and Bee. Everyone understood, but none would speak of it. Jonah’s last inkling of pride meant that he could not ask the councilman to repeat himself; whatever the councilman’s intentions, whichever conditions had been laid out, Jonah had no other choice but to acquiesce if he wanted his honour safe before his life. But even then, the Moles could coerce him into doing exactly what they wanted.
“Agreed? Jonah?”
His eyes shifted bac
k to reality and he looked around, catching the other Fish’s eyes, and knew he had lost. “Yes sir. Agreed sir. Of course sir.” Embarrassment and shame tinted his voice. “In the name of the Divine Undertaking all Men must labour, and all Men must sacrifice.”
Ben Golkar knew he would pass out eventually, but he would never get used to sleeping underwater.
As a child, he had always envied them, but he would never get used to any of it. Ever. He was a Bee; and the Fish...well, they were freakish.
Regulating oxygen levels to induce prolonged bouts of rest was unnatural, decidedly unnatural, so was tying yourself to cliff walls and inside shallow caves, and the way the Fish let themselves get carried away into sleep, oblivious to their surroundings, and the way they sometimes hummed.
How could they? People went missing every other night...
They were all tied along submarine cliffs in small clusters spread over several hundred meters. Some had chosen to break away a little, for whatever privacy the open ocean could offer, but even in the dark you never felt alone, there were creatures down there that could sense you, even when you couldn’t see them.
Huge things tore each other apart out there...
He couldn’t be the only non-Fish still awake. “Einat,” he whispered on the colony’s frequency. “Einat, you up?”
Ben sensed something large passing in front of him, the pressure of water displacement against the cliff, a sudden warmth as the dark waters went black
On the other end of the line Einat, on the cusp of sleep, responded. “...Ben? Ben? What do you...”
Einat fell asleep instants before she would have heard a hungry blare gnawing Ben short.
“How many did we lose last night?” Jonah asked his son.
“Fish or recruits?”
“Recruits.”
“Seven...”
Fish Dream on land, and Fish Dream in water. As the weeks passed, installing markers, trackers, and cables, along the way west before heading north, Ari’s dreams grew deeper.
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