by Mike Ashley
That was the big story as it was being broadcast, but Riba was more interested in what the little newsnets and the independents had to say. Their reporters had rounded on the fact that, for anyone with an Abacand and a half decent recollection of secondary education, you could see that it was clearly impossible to return to Earth within three years when you’d been travelling away from it as fast as possible for thirty. Besides, General Machen, the commander-in-chief of all Solar military and police forces, had issued a statement that morning in Riba’s very paper, warning against action until a thorough and full account of Isol’s journey could be published. And that level of explanation meant there was something very bad going on.
By the time Riba took his seat upon the Byzantium’s viewing deck and observed the tedious rituals of Buck’s Fizz before cast-off and salutes to the captain, he was already planning an in-depth exposé. He would write carefully of what facts he might find and he would argue with meticulous daring for the case of allowing the Forged complete freedom to self-govern – an angle his editor and the paper’s owner were also not averse to because they hoped it would mean that most of the Forged would disappear from Earth.
They were an hour into their flight and had just begun the low-altitude portion of the journey to allow a spot of whale-watching when Riba decided to take himself on a tour of the ship. But after a few minutes he was sure that he was being followed. He thought it might be his contact. He took a few turns that led him into the relative privacy of the luxurious upper deck accommodation corridor and waited. Thirty seconds later a man approached him and Riba’s neck hair stood on end for a second time that day. Not a woman in a green coat holding a leather bag but a man with long blond hair bound back into a queue and dark glasses, his powerful form almost entirely covered by a grey trenchcoat with its collar turned up high.
“Regrettably your investigation must end for the time being,” this young man said without preamble. He took Riba’s hand and arm in the semblance of a casual conversational hold though it effectively prisoned Riba in a vicelike grip. “I have been sent to send you to your contact.” He began to tow Riba along the corridor at a swift pace.
Riba struggled, at first without trying to appear in trouble, but then more violently. He didn’t like changes and he really didn’t care for the strength that so easily overpowered his own.
“Don’t make this difficult,” the man warned him in a low tone and Riba realized that he wasn’t the only one who was nervous.
“You are interfering with the lawful free press!” Riba asserted loudly in the textbook style. He was ignored in the same vein and found himself hauled along the ramp towards the aft gliding decks where wind-hangers and the elegant lines of individual air-yachts were moored by rope to the smooth flanks of the Byzantium.
“Yes, yes,” said the agent. “That’s my job.”
“Help! This man is robbing me!” Riba shouted, but the Byzantium’s crew were busy at distant posts and the few passengers who were within earshot were of the kind who sank deeper in their seats or hurried away, afraid and embarrassed. Within moments both he and his captor were standing on the air deck, nothing in front of them except ten metres of beautifully finished hardwood landing strip and the blustery air over the ocean.
Riba scrabbled with his free hand in his pocket and signalled out with his Abacand, cuing emergency messages he’d had in place for just this awful moment. To his dismay a flat beep informed him that they were all blocked.
“It’s nothing personal,” said the agent, dragging him towards the edge of the launch pad. “And nothing permanent,” he added as he anchored his own feet with miraculous traction and pushed Riba over the side. Riba thought he saw bare feet not boots in that instant, and that the soles of the feet were covered in suckers.
This impression was wiped from his mind by complete terror as Riba understood that he was falling more than a hundred metres towards the unbroken waters of the Atlantic. He heard screaming and felt a searing pain in his throat as the gigantic hull of the Byzantium passed over him. His limbs flailed. He thought of helpless mice he’d held by the tail at pet shows, of Slattery’s high-pitched hamster saying I bet you didn’t ask the mice . . .
Riba turned gently in the airstream and saw the sea rushing to meet him. As he marked the likely spot of his demise he saw something that almost made his heart stop prematurely.
Something was rising up through the water.
A great beast, pale and vast, more massive even than the largest whale – he couldn’t make out its exact shape. There was a centre, solid and near-white, but then there were great reefs and rafts of less tangible matter, tentacles and sheets of flesh that ballooned and snaked about in the surface water. For miles they seemed to reach out, a billion arms . . . He thought he saw a single enormous eye staring up at him and at that instant tried hard to die.
He fell and beneath him the creature suddenly thrashed and convulsed, stirring up a mass of bubbles into a frothing whirlpool where the simple sea waves had been. There was then no more time for thought. Riba met the ocean – not the hard, unyielding density of solid water, but the soft foam of the creature’s ferocious wake.
He felt himself falling still. To his astonishment the water accepted him in a gentle way. It drew him down unharmed into the cold of itself. Thoughts of the creature instantly made him kick and thrash. Riba stared wildly about him, seeing only dim greyness and the leisurely upward race of a trillion bubbles, feeling the pressure of endless water in his ears and against his lungs, just like the man’s hand on his arm – hard and merciless. He was deafened to everything but the sound of his own panic.
Riba made the surface choking and coughing and saw the awful pale hulk of the creature again as the shield of bubbles dissipated around him. Huge arms and fingers of translucent jelly, pocked with pink-edged suckers the size of saucers, reached towards him through the water. He turned and began to swim, hopelessly, but the tentacles were everywhere, some breaking the surface and turning their tips towards him where he saw, with horror, the distinct shapes of primitive pigment patches – yet more eyes.
Something cold and powerful snaked around his legs and bound them tight. He opened his mouth but was pulled under. His last sensations were of cold water, cold strength in flesh that wasn’t remotely like any flesh he knew. His last impression was of stealthy and nimble fingers making a thorough attempt to pick his pockets.
When he woke Riba found himself lying on solid ground. It was so unexpected that he gave a start and discovered that, all things considered, he didn’t feel that bad. His skin was sore from salt water abrasion and he felt battered but he was able to move to hands and knees and then climb to his feet with almost ordinary ease. His solid ground turned out to be a long white sanded beach, fringed by tall palm trees which stretched up to the sky and out over the baby blue shallows of a small lagoon. Not four metres away from him he could see the rivulet of a fresh water stream cutting a shallow groove through wet sand to the sea. He moved towards this and bent down for a cautious handful. In moments he was on his hands and knees, drinking and splashing.
He impressed himself with his resourceful skills as he remembered to take off his clothing and rinse it out, spread it to dry on the sand, clean off the salt on his skin and then move quickly into some shade. The day was hot and the sand even hotter. A few flies came and gathered around his wet skin and then left him alone. It was only as he took a rest and began to notice more of his surroundings that it occurred to him to wonder where he was and how he had got there.
A search of his clothes proved what he already suspected – his Abacand was gone. Now he had cause to wish he had taken up the subdermal kind of machine, but he had never fancied a permanent link to the digital world until this moment. Its loss made him feel twice as naked and a thousand times more vulnerable.
The giant squid thing must have taken it before abandoning him here. Riba didn’t like to think of it as a thing, but without a name or a clade to place it in
he couldn’t help thinking of it that way. Of him. Of her. Whatever.
Riba sat back and tried to think. What had the blond man promised? Ah yes, this was not personal and not forever. So he had some hope of returning to his old life after all, even if he was the subject of a peculiar kidnapping as it was beginning to seem.
Riba waited impatiently for his clothes to dry so that he could make a full inspection of what he guessed might be an island. He hoped that even without the Abacand he might remember some of the very clever survival skills he’d so often admired in documentaries and that maybe he would outfox his captors and figure out where they were holding him before they picked him up again. Even so, could the squid have carried him all the way from near Ireland to the Caribbean? Squid had prodigious powers of speed and agility in the water and it had been a mighty monster but, even with the potential of extra powers from engines and the like, it was no quick journey.
He set off on his reconnaissance at an eager pace which soon became more cautious. The sandy lagoon rim gave way to rocky headlands which required a lot of effort and patience to climb over. Soon he was very hungry and very tired. He took another drink from one of the many rivulets escaping to the sea and lay down in the shade beneath two palm trees for a rest.
When he woke it was late afternoon. He found a green stick and went digging for clams in the sand. Within an hour or so he had collected a reasonable plateful – enough for a paella – and he had also, pleased with his cunning, decided that if he couldn’t get them out alive he would get them out roasted and hot after baking them in a fire.
There followed a most trying several hours. There was no dry wood. There was no dry tinder. Stupidly he had been travelling without a magnifying glass. After two hours of failed efforts at making fire he gave up and, one by one, began to fling the shellfish back into the sea. Halfheartedly he tried to crack one in his teeth but his teeth would have cracked first.
Riba wrote in his head, “Without his tools to help him Man loses the evolutionary arms race to a humble mussel.” But it was hard to laugh.
A moment or two later he began to hear unmistakable sounds of the progress of something inside the woods that backed on to the sand. Too tired to feel very afraid just yet Riba turned to watch, thinking of pigs or deer.
To his complete surprise what emerged from between the palm trees was a man with white hair and a thick white beard. He wore a rather severe suit and a high white collar tied up with a white cravat. All the white things stood out clearly against the darkness of the forest and the indigo of the sky behind him. What interested Riba most about him however, was not his clothing, or his cane, with which he had parted the last fronds of green before emerging, but the fact that in his other hand he was holding what looked like a china plate with something on it.
The old man waved his stick at Riba in a friendly way. “Hello there,” he called out. “You must be Arnau Riba. A tricky man to find it seems. Don’t trouble yourself so much, dear fellow. Here, I’ve brought you a sandwich.”
Riba would remember for the rest of his life the taste of that sandwich – it was cheese and pickle – and the way it felt to eat it, so salty and tangy and indescribably wholesome as he stood and studied the face of this peculiar stranger. The eyes beamed at him. The tweed suit – he did not know how to explain the mirage of colours in that lovely wool or how prickly and hot it seemed, or how it sat upon the cotton shirt beneath the thick beard or how the sandwich and the man both merged into a curious saving grace that was quite ridiculous to him in the same instant that it was perfect.
“Forgive me,” said the man with another smile, “I have you at a disadvantage. I am Jules Verne, the Right Hand of Pelagic Bathysaur Island Iukina. At your service.”
Riba stared at him, eyes bulging, cheeks bulging, chewing. He thought about asking the obvious questions – who?, why?, what? – but took another bite instead. It seemed likely that answers would appear in time and they were less important right now than eating.
“Yes, Mr Riba,” said Verne cordially, taking a deep, satisfied breath. “You are upon a living island afloat on the breast of the Atlantic. Me, in fact. And as such you are my guest. Welcome. I hope that you will forgive the delay in my locating you, but my eyes and ears, the flies, are easily diverted, and by the time they had told me of your whereabouts and I had made the journey, you were no longer at the location they remembered. A fly’s memory, you know, is a strange and marvellous . . . ah –” Verne glanced down at the empty plate as Riba took the second half of the sandwich. Verne looked down, gently brushed off a few crumbs on to the sand. “I wonder if the crabs here will enjoy bread? No doubt they will. The water on this side is also very good of course, but many more refreshments are available a short journey away at the Club. I hope you feel able to manage a short walk?”
Riba, feeling the first hit of sugars arriving in his bloodstream had concluded, by the time that Verne began to speak of flies, that if the man were really a Hand – a physically human component of a greater human composite being – then he could be as dotty as he liked so long as there really were more sandwiches. Riba found it hard to believe in Forged like this one; that is, he had known intellectually that they existed, but he had never really thought about them in any practical fashion. He could not bring himself to quite believe that what he had stood on, sheltered on and been thwarted and restored by was a single being and not a volcanic atoll. But it made sense – there were no islands like this anywhere near the airship’s course.
To the old man’s question about walking he simply nodded. The old man smiled and turned, beating back stubborn bits of jungle with his walking stick as they retraced his steps. In less than two hundred metres Riba found himself standing on a hard dirt road. A small battery-powered car was parked there, looking neat and very red against the darkening green of the jungle. As the sun went down, and Riba sat feeling the roll of precision suspension carry him silently through the deep blue twilight, his surprise began to turn to curiosity.
His astonishment was completed when they rolled up towards the soft yellow lights of a large hut built on stilts. An expansive verandah ran all the way around it and the steps down to the car were lit with the twinkle of many small citronella candles to greet their arrival. Walking up and on to the smooth boards Riba felt a rush of gratitude for civilization in general. As he turned in through the doorway he saw a large room panelled in dark wood and furnished with the most beautiful and expensive furniture he had ever seen. At the heart of the room a fire burned within a stone bowl and near this fire a group of chairs were drawn close, each different, and each supporting a different figure with the exception of a tall wing chair which he assumed was Verne’s.
A soft breeze blew in at their backs as Verne ushered him forward. As they approached Riba saw one of the others stand up and draw another chair forward to place within the circle next to the empty seat. This man then turned and came to greet them. He wore a well-cut suit, like a uniform, and carried a cap beneath his arm. Like Verne he had white hair and a white beard, but by contrast this man’s beard was clipped neatly short and his hair was a great length that fell around his shoulders. Dark walnut skin crinkled around brown eyes as he held Riba with his gaze.
“Arnau Riba, I am a longtime admirer of your feature articles, if not your methods of investigation. I regret you found your introduction to the ocean so traumatic.” He held out his hand and Riba took it, shook it, felt its strength and resilience as he wondered at the choice of words. He must mean Riba’s fall.
“Permit me to introduce you,” Verne said, putting the sandwich plate aside. “This is my good friend Captain Nemo, Hand of Bathysaur Nautilus Kalu.”
“Nemo?” Riba repeated, finding the name ringing bells in his head. Then he began to understand. He stared at the merry smile of the man whose hand he still held. He saw the great eye of the huge tentacled monster that had churned the ocean up beneath him. It was only with the greatest willpower that he managed to keep a sembla
nce of cool.
“No doubt you are wondering at our choice of Hands, Mr Riba,” Nemo said. “Those who meet us often remark upon it and perhaps, to a person not as keenly aware of their intellectual and imaginitive forbears as ourselves, it must seem strange. Jules Verne was a Frenchman of the nineteenth century, one of the first great science fiction writers. He also lived in a time of great change and his studies of engineering and the natural world gave rise to stories of great adventure and the heights of invention to which human minds might aspire. Kalu and I see ourselves as the literal conclusion of the work of Verne and his contemporaries including the architect of your hometown, Barcelona – the incomparable Antoni Gaudi. In our physical forms you may witness the work of millions of scientists and artists, designers and engineers inspired by the works of these great minds. In our minds we hope you will discover the same unbridled imagination, and in our hearts the same abiding wonder, curiosity and love of the Earth and all her works. It is why we are here, Mr Riba, and it is also why you are here.”
Riba looked from one of the old men to the other. “Jules Verne, the island’s voice. I see. But Captain Nemo?”
“Why,” said the captain, continuing in their peculiar and elegant way of speaking, “this is both by way of an homage and a small joke in one. Captain Nemo is Verne’s most well-known hero. Like myself, Nemo is a scientist-explorer. He is also the captain of a submarine, named Nautilus, which is mistaken for a giant sea-monster when it sinks ships bent on acts of war. I myself am a Nautilus Class Forged, created to investigate and protect all the life of the oceans, in particular its greatest depths and, like Nemo himself, I seek peace.”