The Rosetta Codex

by Richard Paul Russo

  Karimah returned and stood beside him, looking at his face. “What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, knowing that they both knew he was lying. He wiped the tears from his face, put his arms around her and pulled her to him, held her tightly, but it wasn’t enough to ease the deep and painful ache that drove though him, and he wondered if it ever would be.

  SEVEN

  In the early autumn, Cale was returning from a visit to Sidonie in one of the Resurrectionists’ skiffs when he found the way into Marlowe Canal blocked by a makeshift rigging of cables and ropes and patrolled by security launches. Cale pulled in toward the nearest launch and hailed the two-person crew.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  The senior officer came to the aft railing and leaned toward Cale. “There’s a breach in the canal,” she said. “A big whirlpool’s developed, sucking the water underground, and it’s big enough to cause a problem for boats. You’d get pulled right in and end up drowned.”

  Cale stood up in the skiff and tried to see through the ropes and cables, but all he could make out were crowds of people on the banks, watching the water near the Resurrectionists’ building.

  “Where’s all the water going?” he asked. But even as he finished, a rush of panic flooded him as the obvious answer came to him silent and unwanted.

  “Don’t know,” the officer said. “I’ve heard word of some kind of tunnels.”

  Cale felt momentarily paralyzed, then he quickly said, “Thanks,” and pushed off from the launch, dropped to the bench seat, put the motor in gear, and jacked up the throttle. Moments later he pulled in to the nearest dock, squeezing in between two water taxis, banging and scraping both hulls; he locked the motor, tied up the boat, scrambled onto the dock, and ran.

  As he neared the building, the canal bank was so crowded he had to cut over to the street for the final two blocks. He was just about to enter the skin parlor when he saw the Sarakheen standing at the curb. Despite the day’s heat, he was wearing a full body-suit and thin gloves, which hid all evidence of his mek limbs.

  Cale stopped a few paces away and stared at the Sarakheen, who gazed back at him with the same lack of expression his face had held that day he’d been with Blackburn. The silent tension between them seemed to extend for a long time, though Cale felt certain that only seconds passed. “No,” he whispered to himself and broke his gaze from the Sarakheen and ran into the skin parlor.

  Down the hall, barely able to punch the codes to unlock the door, then up the flights of stairs two and three steps at time, crashing out once as he caught a step and lost his footing, banging shins and knees and forearms; then back to his feet and on up to the third floor. One more corridor, then around the corner to the central stairwell. The door was propped open and he could hear shouting coming up from below. Breathing hard, he pulled himself through the door and started down the stairs.

  He expected to meet people coming up, but didn’t. When he reached the main entrance to the Underneath, he saw why—everyone was down here—those who had been above ground when the flooding had begun, and those muddy and wet or otherwise bedraggled who had obviously been below. There were people lying on the floor and others squatting against the walls, a few coughing violently, and still others standing around the main lift shaft. The lift to the level below was just coming up with Benka and Hamzaaz, who were both filthy with mud; Benka’s trousers were split open and blood flowed from a long gash in his leg; Hamzaaz was bleeding from both arms, but she was able to help Benka limp off the lift as it stopped and other people moved forward to help.

  Cicero spotted Cale and stepped in front of him, holding out his arms to block his way.

  “Where is she?” Cale demanded, nearly screaming it.

  “You can’t go down there,” Cicero told him. “All you’ll do is get yourself killed. That place is a death trap right now.”

  “No! We can’t just let them drown.” He tried to shove Cicero aside, but the old man was stronger than he’d expected, and grabbed him by the shoulders, stopping him.

  “Cale, just hold on and listen to me. Listen to me! You can go down to one of the next two levels and help, all right? Help the people coming up. The main lift is the only one working, and none of the rail systems, everything is ladders and steps down there now. Power’s gone below the first level, which means the only lights are the emergency lanterns if anyone can find them. That breach is huge, it’s a torrent pouring in there right now, coming in at the third level. We can’t go below, or there’ll just be more dead. You understand me? Cale? It’s death down there. They’re on their own, and we can’t do anything else to help them. Cale? Cale . . . understand?”

  Cale nodded, stupefied and suddenly weak, all energy leaking out of him, leaving him deadened and incapable of movement. He felt dizzy and dropped to one knee, head bent down. He understood, and he knew Cicero was right, and he was overwhelmed by despair. Breathing was suddenly difficult, as if his lungs had forgotten what to do. His eyes wanted to close, his entire body trying to shut down. Then he found a new reserve of strength somewhere and got back to his feet, looking directly at Cicero.

  “Let me go help.”

  Cicero studied him, then nodded and said, “All right . . . all right. Be careful.”

  Cale hurried to the lift as it was headed back down and jumped onto the platform. It descended with intolerable slowness. When it finally reached the lower level and stopped, he hurried across the room to the nearest shaft and started down the ladder.

  As he emerged from the dark vertical passage into the lamp-lit second level, he could hear the roar of the water below. Cicero was right. Loud and powerful like the cataracts upriver, where Terrel had taken him once. Five people sat on cots and stools near the two main shafts leading to the lower levels, watching the openings and waiting. They looked up as he crossed the chamber, and one of them, a woman named Jax, gestured for him to sit beside her on her cot.

  He went first to the shafts and looked down into them. Bright lanterns had been lowered on ropes; they hung just above the streams of water that rushed out from the side passages and poured down the shafts to the lower levels. The lanterns were a hope, he thought, beacons guiding any survivors up to the top and safety.

  He sat next to Jax and she handed him a water flask. Cale thanked her and drank, then handed the flask to the next person.

  “Yes,” Jax said, raising her voice to be heard above the water’s roar. “She’s down there. All we can do is wait.”

  Cale nodded, not quite knowing why, and turned to the nearest of the shafts, fixing his gaze on the light coming up from the lanterns, listening to the rushing flood. He waited.

  Two hours later they heard a strangled, choking cry from one of the shafts. Cale and Jax hurried to it and looked down. Far below, partially lit by the lamps, a figure clung to the ladder, deluged by the torrent of water.

  “We’re right here!” Jax called down to the motionless figure. “You haven’t got far!”

  There was no reply from the person below, nor was there any movement. Arms and legs appeared to be wrapped tightly around the rungs, as though afraid to let go.

  “Can you keep climbing?” Jax called.

  Still no reply.

  “Shit,” Jax muttered. “Whoever it is probably can’t make it any farther. We’re going to have to go get them.”

  “I’ll do it,” Cale yelled.

  Jax nodded once and didn’t argue. She knew why he was volunteering.

  First they tied a rope under Cale’s arms so he wouldn’t fall to his own death, then Jax gave him the end of another rope to tie around the person below. “Now go,” she said. “I don’t want to lose them. Not when they’re so close.”

  Cale climbed onto the ladder and descended through the shaft. The light below hurt his eyes so he kept his focus on the rungs of the ladder before him. He passed through the collection of lamps and stepped down and into the torrent, clinging tightly to the ladder. Th
e force of the water emerging from the side passage was stronger than he expected and nearly knocked him from the ladder, but he hung on and took it slowly and carefully, one hand at a time, one foot at a time.

  As he went lower, the force of the water shifted direction and became all downward, pouring over him, making it difficult to see anything. He continued to descend, trying to keep the figure below him in sight. It was either taking longer than he’d thought to reach the person, or his sense of time was distorted.

  Then suddenly he was there, his boots just two rungs above the person’s head. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was a woman. He took one more step down.

  “I’m here!” he shouted over the rush of water.

  The woman looked up, and Cale’s heart collapsed. It wasn’t Karimah.

  Her name was Dirdre, and her face was overwhelmed with exhaustion and panic as she managed to choke out, “Help me.”

  In despair, Cale worked his way down along the ladder until they were both clinging to the same rungs. The pouring water made everything slow and difficult, but he managed to loop the rope tightly around her, under her arms, then looped the extra length at the end down under her crotch and back up to the first loop. It took him another long minute to securely tie off the rope, then he tugged once at it. The rope became taut, but Dirdre wouldn’t move; he pried her hand from the ladder and helped her make the first step. Finally she started to climb on her own. When she was several rungs above him, he tugged at his own rope, the slack was taken up, and he followed behind her.

  The ascent seemed to take even longer than the climb down, and he could barely bring himself to follow Dirdre. He wanted to turn around and continue down to search for Karimah; but now that he was here with the water pouring over him and draining his strength, he understood with complete certainty that everything Cicero had said was true—descending any farther would be certain death. He hated himself for understanding that. Karimah, if by any chance she was still alive somewhere down below him, was on her own. That realization filled him with such despair that he could barely find the will to keep climbing.

  But he did; they both kept climbing, and at some point Cale noticed that Dirdre was no longer on the ladder above him, and he realized they’d made it. Two more rungs, then he fell back into the chamber and lay on the floor, looking up at Jax, who crouched beside him.

  “I’m sorry, Cale,” she whispered. She took his hand in both of hers and squeezed. “You did good, and I’m sorry.”

  Some hours later he found he could no longer wait with the others, and on shaky legs slowly made his way up out of the Underneath. When he reached the main basement, Cicero convinced him to take a hot shower and get something to eat. Cale nodded, but he had something else to do first.

  He emerged from the central stairwell on the third floor, then staggered down the two flights of stairs to the skin parlor and went straight for the front door. But when he stumbled out into the street, the Sarakheen was gone.

  The whirlpool disappeared once the Underneath was completely flooded up to canal level and there was nowhere else for the water to go. Marlowe Canal was opened to boat traffic once more, and on the outside everything returned to normal.

  Divers were hired to find and repair the breach, then pumping equipment was brought in, installed, and started. The water level in the Underneath began to slowly drop.

  During the second day, Tico’s body was found in the glass-paneled chamber, and later that night the body of a woman named Sarantina was discovered in one of the ladder shafts, trapped under a hatch blocked shut by a collapsed wall.

  In the early morning of the third day, they brought Karimah’s body up from one of the deepest accessible chambers. Hands shaking and legs so weak he could barely stay on his feet, Cale helped three others carry her body up the shafts, the lift, then up the central stairway. He repeatedly glanced away and then looked back at her, convinced each time that he would discover it was someone else they carried, which would leave him with some infinitely small and infinitely irrational hope that she was still alive. It was never anyone but Karimah, however; there was never any real hope. Finally they brought her to the third floor, where he laid her out on the sleeping mat in their room. The others withdrew, leaving him alone with her.

  He sat hunched up beside her, helpless and numb. Coherent thought was impossible; random words and images, bits of recalled sound and odors, scattered around his seemingly hollow mind. With one ear turned toward her, he listened intently for a word from her purple-gray lips, a whisper, some hint of breath. Nothing. He stared at the bruised and bloated face, attempting to superimpose over the pale flesh an image of Karimah alive—her eyes open, her mouth turned up in a wry smile, her skin flushed with color as he lay with her on the pallet in their private cell in the Underneath. But he could not maintain that image, it kept breaking apart, and it was her inanimate and unchanging face that stared relentlessly back at him. He knew, finally, that she was dead, and that she would never speak to him again.

  With Cicero’s help, Cale placed her cloth-shrouded body in the bottom of the skiff, then started the motor and pushed away from the dock. Overhead, the sun was a hot, blurred disk of pale orange, smeared out and discolored by a thick haze. Staring at the obscured sun, Cale was overcome by a peculiar sensation that he was doing something wrong. He should be taking her body not in this motorized boat, but in a canoe, taking her home with his own physical efforts. Then, as he moved out into the Grand Canal, the feeling intensified, until it became an urgent demand. He swung the skiff around and headed back toward the south.

  He tied up at the small dock near Sidonie’s apartment, against the bank so Karimah’s body could rest in the shade. Walking along the dock, he felt a sense of relief at seeing Sidonie’s canoe. He hurried along the street and up the stairs of her building, and stood breathing hard before her door. He hesitated, afraid she wasn’t in, not wanting to take the canoe without asking her, but knowing he would do it if he had to. Finally he knocked.

  Sidonie came to the door and smiled when she saw him, but the smile transformed almost immediately as she looked into his eyes.

  “What’s happened, Cale?”

  She tried to lead him inside, but he shook his head, opening and closing his mouth like a dying fish. Then, quite suddenly and almost peacefully, the tension in his throat disappeared, and he began to speak.

  She put her hand to his cheek, gently brushed his skin, and listened.

  Cale paddled the canoe through the midday heat, hardly aware of his surroundings, of the other boats in the water around him. The water’s surface was shiny and choppy from the boat traffic, and the air smelled of oil and old fish, grilling meat and rotting vegetation. Someone called out to him from one of the large commercial cargo boats just before it nearly swamped him, and he heard the laughter of others who were watching from shore.

  Once he left the Grand Canal, as each new channel became narrower and quieter than the previous, he felt a growing relief, along with a curious sense of peace. He never looked at the shrouded body laid out at his feet, but he was constantly aware of its presence, aware of where he was headed and why. His arms grew tired and he would occasionally rest, gliding slowly along the water, coasting to a stop, and he would sit motionless in the canoe, surveying the water and the banks on either side of him, searching for something he would know only if he saw it. But the sense of recognition never came, and he would dip the paddle into the water and resume his progress.

  Sometime in the late afternoon he approached the stone bridge at the lagoon’s entrance, and passed beneath it. After taking several strong, deep strokes, he let the canoe drift across the lagoon, now watching Karimah’s shrouded body as if he expected to see some movement or other change as she neared her mother and father. The canoe slowed, until it was hardly moving forward at all. He sat with the paddle across his thighs, water dripping slowly from the blade, and listened to the quiet sounds around him—the flutter of wings; the gentle slap o
f webbed feet from a waddling duck; a high-pitched clicking within the trees; a faint splash from somewhere behind him.

  The canoe bumped against the small barge, then gradually swung around. Cale grabbed the barge and pulled the canoe along it until he was up against the dock. He sat there for a long time without moving, then climbed out and tied up. He left her in the canoe and entered the trees.

  When he came around the side of the building, he saw Rusk and Zaida in the garden harvesting long, green striped vegetables, picking them from the tall, gangly plants and placing them in a woven basket. Zaida looked up first, puzzled, then straightened and put her closed hand up to her mouth when she saw Cale’s face and realized he was alone. Rusk looked at Zaida, then at Cale, then turned back to his wife and put his arms around her, pulling her tight against him.

  In the morning, they buried her just beyond the far boundary of the garden, beneath a young spider tree. The whole family was there, the family Cale had met weeks earlier. Except for Cale, all of them wept at one time or another, hard or soft, but all strangely quiet. Cale waited for his own tears, but they never came.

  When the last of the dirt was spread over her, Rusk and Zaida asked him to stay with them for the day, for the night if he wanted. They seemed to understand when he said he couldn’t, or were so overwhelmed with their own grief that it didn’t matter. He said goodbye to them and returned to the lagoon.

  Cale sat in the empty canoe for a time, staring at the clean dark waters, studying the reflections of the hazy sky and the dark spider trees, and his own reflection rippling slightly as the canoe rocked gently beside the dock. He picked up the paddle, plunged it into the water, and pulled.

  EIGHT

  He spent the following days on the waterways of Morningstar, paddling the canoe from one canal to another, stepping on land only to relieve himself and refill his water flask. He bought cheap food from boat vendors, and large quantities of even cheaper beer; but he found that the alcoholic haze did nothing to ease the grief, and discovered he preferred the sober numbness that otherwise enveloped him.