Fantasy The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  My hands found someone.

  Edward! I’d found Edward! He’d pulled me to safety with the rope.

  But where had the rope come from?

  And why, when I should feel the neoprene of Edward’s diveskin, was I feeling cloth that tore in my hands, cloth long rotted by the sea?

  I clutched at my savior, but he was slipping away. Clothing parted in my fingers. My hand came up against something solid in the midst of the shredding cloth, and I wrapped it in my fingers, squeezing it tight.

  Then the silt cloud dropped behind me. The Coolidge stretched up toward daylight, toward the mooring line at the bow. I checked my gauges. To rise now would mean death. But I didn’t have enough air to make all the decompression stops. I wouldn’t even make the first one, unless—

  Edward’s sled was where we’d left it on the promenade. I switched it on, gave it full throttle, and allowed it to carry me the length of the bow toward the coral garden and the first deco stop. There I paused, checked my air gauge, checked my watch. There wasn’t enough time. There wasn’t enough air.

  I was a dead man.

  A moment later, he came out of the sunlight, trailing a pony bottle, his arm still in that silly sling. Gunter.

  While I decompressed, Gunter went down and brought out Edward. Hanging there, waiting for my friend’s body, hoping for a miracle but knowing the sea rarely permits miracles, I examined the object in my hand. It was a name tag.

  Euart.

  He and Covill had used a rope to pull members of the 43rd Infantry to safety. The ship had listed so badly to port that it was impossible to cross the steep deck and reach the lifeboats. Without their heroic actions, many men would have gone down with the ship. Covill escaped, but Euart had gone back after something.

  It would take me six months of research and phone calls, but I eventually located Warren Covill. He was old, but still alive. He remembered those days on the Coolidge like they were yesterday. He confirmed what I had already guessed. I know why Euart went back.

  Army mess officer Captain Elwood Euart had kept a cat in his kitchen to keep the ship free of mice. A Siamese cat.

  Edward, when Gunter brought him up, looked at peace. I wondered if he’d found his father. I wonder if they’re both out there somewhere, haunting the South Pacific—or perhaps the Outer Banks.

  In the folklore of many seafaring countries, those who drown depart their bodies and commend their souls to the sea, where they live forever, drifting with the tides, carried by the currents, the upsurges, and the swells. Is Edward there somewhere, relieved of the crippling weight of land and a physical body? Do he and his father enjoy the sea together as they did when he was young, before the accident and the guilt and the lies that Edward made of his life?

  I can’t be sure.

  But I do know this.

  What Edward said was true. There are ghosts in the depths of the seas. And once you’ve learned to see one, you eventually see them all.

  I don’t do freelance underwater photography anymore. I’ve taken a permanent job for a yachting magazine where I spend my time on the surface, shooting sailboat races and charter boat ads with lovely ladies in bikinis. Even there, though, I see the occasional ghost, perched on the rail of a passing merchant vessel, waiting on a pier, awash and alone in the surf. They’re easily avoided. But the ghosts below the surface are all too real for me.

  And far too insistent that I join them.

  for Dietmar Trommeshauser, 1955– 1998

  THE MOULD OF FORM

  ROSEMARY EDGHILL

  Art thou aught else but place, degree and form Creating awe and fear in other men?

  —William Shakespeare, Henry V

  I GROW AS TIRED as any man of hearing it said that one cannot know what those years were like unless one lived them, for such words make mock of that learning which is the mark of civilization and the adornment of an English gentleman, but even I must admit that in this case it is true, for only those who lived through those years of madness, hope, and possibility can understand how we thought in those days, as if all the world had been washed, new and there had been no Adam’s Fall to mar us. It has been said that since the Restoration, there is no sin save bad form, and I think perhaps that is true as well. When the appearance of virtue is all that one retains then appearance matters.

  I was born James Cruikshank—I have another name now, of a more suitable aspect—in London-town in 16—, when the Old King was a prisoner of his subjects and all men were architects of possibility. Our rulers were men no better than ourselves, and in that we saw the refashioning of the world. That they were as greedy and venal as the nobility we had cast down was something no one saw, for in those days, men lived on dreams.

  The Protector had molded England’s destiny since before I was born. My father had opposed him, King Charles’ man first and last, and labored to the destruction of his entire fortune in hope of a deliverance that could only be years in some distant future, for the King was executed at St. James Palace in ’49, and his heir was but a child. The Sealed Knot unraveled, like all such things of moonshine and phantasie, and my father died in poverty, fled to France to escape the condign punishment of the victors. Meanwhile my mother and I lived upon the charity of a distant cousin, in a cramped unloving house within the Great Smoke itself, and so upon the streets of London-town I supped full at the banquet of futures and possibilities, though circumstance had barred me from my place at the table.

  Yet even in exile and death my father still had his friends, and it was through the sponsorship of one of them that I was given a chance to rise again in the world, for, by what influence I know not; this distant friend secured me a place at Eton.

  In those days, Eton had become a resort of gentlemen, and the children of the New Men mingled here with the oldest blood of England. Friendships made here would lead to preferment later, for good form had made its first triumph over blood when the Old King died, and in the world men had made, the appearance of virtue was more important than its expression.

  The school fees were large, as befit an institution founded by Great Harry, that profligate and luxurious monarch, and my mother was reduced to desperate stratagems to raise them. Her cousins, who grudged us both food and roof, wanted me put to a trade. The London of that day held more work than hands, and I might have found a ready place as a clerk, for I had already my letters and some Latin, but this my mother would not permit, seeing in it the long slow slide into obscurity and extinction. Our name, our blood, was all the world to her now that my father was dead, and in me she saw the opportunity to make his dead bones live again. And so she would see me established at Eton, and then Oxford, upon a path to gentilesse and advancement. Within her plans, I wove plans of my own: to become a partisan and supporter of that great Commonwealth that ushered my father so neatly out of position and life, to join with my peers in that freemasonry of ability that held all English in its giddy thrall.

  In the end, I threw away all her hopes and my own for no more than childish pride.

  The compass of my brief years had introduced me to hardship, to poverty and fear, but never had I imagined the existence that awaited me at school. It was as if I were cast into hell, there in the Long Chamber at the close of day. The strong preyed upon the weak subjecting them to unimaginable tortures while the masters of the school pretended to see nothing. Though I represented my condition as strongly as I could in my few letters home, my mother likewise refused to hear. Schooling was the hallmark of a gentleman, and schooling I must have, though it cost me my soul.

  It is from those hellish days, I think, that my whole hatred of boys stems. For though I was fallen among that company of the bestial and cruel, there were those I hated more: the careless golden souls who walked through chamber and hall as if untouched by their sur­roundings. Prefects and tutors vied for their regard, and cruelties and punishments alike fell lightly upon their oblivious shoulders. Their futures were assured—futures of rank and privilege among men of
learning and dignity. In light of such future satisfaction, the present was a dim and trivial shadow.

  There was one of them, a boy named Peter, whom I hated with a particular rancor, for from the moment I met him, four years into Purgatorial exile, he treated me as his equal, showing me all consideration despite the difference in our estate. With careless ease, he drew me into his charmed circle, the world of barely remembered surety and privilege that I had known in dimmest infancy, and treated me as if I belonged there.

  It was my downfall.

  It did not seem so at first. Peter was just my age, but while I had a Puritan’s face, with a long jaw and heavy coat of black beard which I had begun to shave in my twelfth year, Peter was all golden boyhood, the downy peach fuzz of his skin barely beginning to ripen into coarse manhood. His family had bent supplely with the prevailing political winds, but while many suspected them of Royalist sympathies, they were seen to be ardent supporters of the Commonwealth, and so had weathered the storms of the ’forties and ’fifties with their lands and consequence intact.

  The difference between his family’s fortunes and my own did not escape me, and I hated Peter all the more for it. But once he was seen to take an interest in me, the worst of my torments stopped, so simple self-preservation entailed smiling prudence, to follow Peter and his golden lads wherever Fortune led me.

  You will find it odd, perhaps, that under his influence I became even more zealously Puritan than I had been before, for Peter was the living opposite of that vengeful, joyless philosophy. But my envious hatred, all the more ardent for its secrecy, was vexed to madness by his careless innocence, though at the time, it seemed to me only that I thought more clearly than ever before. The Old King and his favorites, those golden children of decadence and privilege, all had been swept away by the cruel modern winds of change that brought with them fierce possibility and clear-eyed rationalism. Just as there would be no more of ghosts and mummery at the Lord’s Table, so our lives would not be guided by the dead hand of ancient kings, nor our destinies by blood and birthright. I saw explicitly what I had only dimly sensed before: that this new world, bright and hard and ruthless as steel, held a place for me that the old one never had.

  But to claim it, I still must climb the ladder out of this hell, a ladder made out of favors and friendships, and of smiling, always smiling, when my heart turned to a crucible of vitriol within my bosom.

  I have said that my family was impoverished, my mother little better than a pauper. Despite this she managed to send me small gifts of money from time to time; small money and pawnable trinkets. With these maintained a foothold upon the society of Peter’s set, though I was hard-pressed to repay even so simple a courtesy as a round of drinks at the corner alehouse. As for the young gentleman’s other vices—whoring, gambling, hunting—they were as far beyond my reach as the mountains of the moon.

  Peter affected to see none of this. At this remove, it is hard for me to say whether that indifference came from malice or a genuine greatness of heart, but I will tell you this: the damage they invoke is all one, and so I despised him all the more for flaunting what I did not and could not have as if I might ever attain it. To withstand such blandishments forever would tax the fortitude of a sinless angel, and I was not made of such celestial stuff.

  As I said, my mother did what she could for me financially, but in my fifth year at Eton, she died at last. Of grief, of melancholy—or of starvation and pneumonia at the delectable fountainhead of her cousin’s charity, there is no man living who can say. But in her dying, a small legacy came to me, and in that moment of unexpected largesse I was at last able to seem what I truly wished to be—an independent gentleman of rank, a full member of that gilded company surrounding my insensible patron. With funds beyond the bare necessity at last at my disposal, I entered fully into the pleasures of the idle scholar. Gaming was forbidden by the rules of the school, but then, so were most of our diversions. The need for secrecy, for misdirection and confusion, gave our pleasures an added spice.

  At first, it truly seemed that God had favored my commission. I wagered and won, increasing my wealth. I had a strong head for drink, and a cool head for cards. The combination was felicitous, and I won handily. What I should have seen as a warning, I saw instead as an opportunity, and in seizing it, doomed myself entirely.

  Perhaps the sun of Peter’s countenance began to shine less brightly on me then. I began to have to work for that regard which I had heretofore unthinkingly accepted as a beggar’s alms, to compete for my place where once I was assured it as of right. But to return once more to the outer darkness of an unsponsored life was unthinkable: those incubi who had withheld their blows when I entered this charmed circle of fellowship awaited me avidly should I be thrust from it, and I feared them with the sincerity with which I feared death and the pains of hell. Triumph and fear and a new coat of green velvet trimmed with modest gold lace made me reckless; I plotted my victories without regard for my standing among these charitable peers, badgering them into wagers that were heartless in their rapaciousness.

  And when at last my luck began to fail, I saw what armor my temporary wealth had granted me, making tender a skin which had once been armored against the harshest blows of Fate. Having once been raised to the heights, I could not bear to acknowledge my poverty and return to my former place.

  And so I began to cheat at cards.

  This was a far graver offense than the trespasses against the law of the land which I had heretofore blithely committed. This was a transgression against Good Form itself, that hallowed and unspoken code by which a gentleman of England lived. Even poverty might be carried off with a certain elan, debt and lawlessness managed with insouciant grace, so long as one feigned obliviousness to one’s humble estate—so long as one demanded with each unspoken word to be accorded the rights and privileges of a gentleman.

  But I was no gentleman, if only in my heart, and so I cheated at cards.

  At first I hoped only to halt the slow exsanguination of my assets, to blunt the worst of my luck. But in the months since I had come into my mother’s legacy, some intangible line of credit had run dry, and what I had once received as a gift, I now must pay for. But I was without coin of any sort—not the Commonwealth’s gold angels, not wit and style, and not the forbearance of Peter’s friends. I had outstayed my welcome, and I was made to feel it. But still I could not bear to return to what I once was. I became more predatory in my gamesmanship, more reckless in my cardsharping.

  And at last I was discovered.

  It was a night like any other. We gamed, defiant of curfew, in a corner of the public rooms of a High Street tavern. I had added luck to the mechanic’s skill, and I was emboldened to feel pleased with my success, until Peter’s hand fell lightly upon my wrist and I stared into his merciless eyes. In that moment, I felt—not shame, but a vast groveling betrayal of self, the yearning to accept any punishment, any disparagement, if only this moment could never have come. Gladly would I embrace my tormentors, renounce my place, vanish into the vast unwashed obscurity of the proletariat, meekly accept all I had raged against, all I had hoped for, if I could unmake the journey that had led to this moment. It was weakness, cowardice, and I, who had been a coward a thousand times over in my life, despised myself most of all for the despairing love I felt in the instant of its forfeiture.

  “Bad form, Cruikshank,” Peter said coolly, regarding the cards that spilled from my sleeve.

  If demons had slain me in that moment, if the earth had opened beneath my feet and I had toppled into the fiery Pit, I would have been no more dead to him than I became in that moment. He withdrew his hand, the secreted cards dropped from my sleeve to the table, and my life was over. In moments I sat alone at an empty table, nearly swooning, and all around the tavern I could hear the venomous whispers growing: Cheat . . . cheater . . . bad form . . . bad form . . . .

  When I came to my senses once more, I found myself walking through the fields outside of town, long a
fter the locking of the school gates. I wondered if, by any faint merciful forbearance, I would be able to brazen out the scandal, knowing in my heart that it was impossible. When I returned to my lodgings in the morning, there were bailiffs outside my door to prevent my entry, my possessions forfeit to those I had preyed upon. Though technically I was still enrolled, Eton, like every public school, has a morals clause in its charter. I had forfeited my right to be called a man of good Christian character, and my remaining tenure within these hallowed precincts could be compassed in hours.

  I left my lodging and began to walk vaguely in the direction of my cousins’ house. Why, I do not know; there was no possibility that they would take me in once more, and in truth, I had become so much a Puritan in my sojourn at school that the thought of accepting their charity was repugnant to me for more than ordinary reasons. Still, I walked, drinking nothing on my way but Adam’s ale, and as I did my spirits began to revive. In the new world that men had made of the conceit of kings, surely there would be a place for me. I would go to the City. I had yet a few coins in my pockets, and by the deployment of those wicked skills that Peter had so disparaged I could gain myself a stake to go on with. I might yet win through, now beholden to no man’s favor.

  But as I walked, a distant roaring came to my ears, as of a thousand voices raised in cheering, and I began to see curious sights along the road. The closer I came to London, the more people I encountered, and every man seemed privy to some great secret that had eluded me, for most of them were roaring drunk. Though after watching a few of them ride by me insensibly, I did attempt to attract the attention of the travelers so as to gain their news, I had no luck until at last I encountered a solitary man wheeling a barrow, upon which were piled what seemed to be all his worldly possessions.