by Martha Wells
Her precious oceans were becoming deserts. Canadian salmon were all but gone. North Sea cod was as extinct as the pliosaur. The shell food upon the rocks was dissolving to debris. Great coral reefs from Australia to Asia, the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands and Antilles were mostly a cemetery of exhumed white bones now, patchily buried beneath six feet of seaweed. One in three of all the creatures in the oceans was dying. Corpses blanketed the ocean floor in the way that dust and ash sand-duned the crematoria. If any human foot could walk where there were once great cities of colourful coral antlers and waving banners, the ruins would crumble like sandcastles bleached by the sun’s relentless heat and aridity.
With vapours and gases, the monumental depths and vast glittering surfaces of the seas and oceans had been carbonated and acidified. Those great masses of life, the megatons of photo plankton, that were responsible for producing half of the biosphere, had slowed their engines; great green factories poisoned by man, the blundering chemist. The colossal leafy lungs in the Amazon produced the other half of the atmosphere. But the trees burned while the sea bleached.
Momentarily paralysed by the range of her thoughts, Cleo imagined the epochal destruction man had stimulated and brought to the fetid shores around it, where it lay stinking. That old trespasser that had created us a long time ago, accidentally, unthinkingly, beneath the grey and furious waves. The great visitor had always existed beneath the surfaces of the world, never upon them.
As her mother had taught her, as her mother had been taught by her mother, and so on, and as Cleo had reported to all of the scientific journals that no longer even replied to her submissions, all life evolved from the tiny organic scraps of an impact against the planet, when something tunnelled through space, 535 million years gone. As a subspecies of it, we had recently grown to a multitude of treacherous usurpers. She had no doubt now that it would finish the destruction initiated by the burning of coal on an industrial scale. Mankind had obliviously but fastidiously spent his last two hundred years waking an angry parent.
But Cleo had long ago decided to see out the end while close to her beloved coves: near the shoreline where her family had been finding the signs for generations, and where she too had found her own first signifier. Portents that all should have been studying; signs obscured within the incremental collapse of civilisation. New voices now sang through the wind, rain, and relentless tides, and in the dreams that required a lifetime of interpretation. But every shriek in her dreams foretold that far greater horrors were yet to be endured.
And yet, who had listened to a seventy-five-year-old woman, fighting her own last stand against dementia, a local eccentric whose mother committed suicide in an asylum? But as Cleo ambled round supermarkets and the seaside attractions of this insignificant little bay in the southwest of England, she had told the few who would listen to her that something too terrible for any to fully comprehend, let alone believe in, existed. And that it had been stirring for many years.
Out there, under the world, but also within life as we know it.
Eventually Cleo found the strength to break from her inertia, a blank listlessness suddenly interspersed with racing thoughts, to turn off the media service. The darkness of the room intensified and thickened the heat about her chair.
***
That night Cleo dreamed of polyps, tens of thousands of blue gelid forms rising from the seabed, growing and trailing their jellied rags until the water of the bay resembled a pond dimpled and thickened by frog spawn. Among them many elderly men and women stood upright, submerged to their chests, as they raised their withered arms to a night sky unfamiliar to any she had seen before. A canopy of darkness wreathed by distant whitish vapour trails that appeared wet, or webbed, and that glistened like dew-drenched spider webs. The people wore white hospital gowns, tied at the neck, and they laughed or cried with happiness as if witnessing a miracle. One or two called out for help. She recognised her dead mother among them.
When the surface of the water became a vast, rubbery carpet, that rose and slopped nauseously in the swell, reaching unto the distant horizon, the thousands of grey and white heads of the elderly people began to call out a name in unison.
Issuing the scream of a frightened child, Cleo broke from sleep.
***
In the early morning it was cooler and she began the short walk to Broadsands Beach with the intention of walking over the headland to see Elberry Cove. She had inspected and protected the sea grass in the cove during her forty years of marine conservation work for the Environment Agency. Too old to dive now, but she still visited the cove on foot to monitor something else.
Cleo wasn’t supposed to leave her home unsupervised. Yolanda, the nurse and carer who came to her home three times each day, wasn’t due for another two hours, but by then it would be too hot to go outside.
Cleo returned home prematurely; she’d left the house without dressing properly. Halfway down Broadsands Road, as she passed beneath Brunel’s abandoned viaducts, those stone Leviathans that still bestrode each dawn, she’d realised that she was only wearing a nightshirt and her underwear. She shuffled home to dress fully before someone saw her in the street and called an ambulance. By the coatrack in the hall she saw a notice that she couldn’t remember making, reminding her to take her medication as soon as she came downstairs each morning.
Finally dressed and medicated, she stood upon the great seawall at Broadsands. Five a.m. and the sun was rising and turning the bay a heartbreaking blue, while polishing the sky with a piercing silver light that would boil brains within hours.
Cleo lingered on the shore to watch an unusual formation of great crested and black-necked grebes upon the sand below. So strange again was their number and positioning. She fumbled for the camera about her neck and found it missing because she had forgotten to bring it with her, and not for the first time.
Until last year, she had never seen more than two or three grebes fishing together at this spot. She spotted twenty that morning, but all on the shore. Below the seawall, a white debris of gulls also littered the sand, though in their hundreds. They watched the sea disconsolately. None took flight or called out.
Where the beach huts once stood, a viewing platform had been erected by the council for the imminent solar eclipse, and that too was festooned with sea birds, also engaged in an uneasy silence and a motionless peering at the horizon.
As usual with each recent summer, a great green skirt of Himanthalia elongata, or thongweed, coated the beach like unsightly, wet wool and was piled at the water’s edge. It floated upon and entirely concealed the surface of the sea for a good fifty metres offshore. Within the broad blanket of immobile weed that appeared to have suffocated the very tide, she caught sight of a vast barrel jellyfish, stranded. Other large whitish discs of barrel and moon jellyfish became visible along the shore, resembling unsightly blisters poking through the diseased pelt on some large animal’s back. Beneath the weed she imagined the great white tendrils coiled about the impenetrable green fronds of the weed.
There had been a time when the waters of the bay resembled those of the Mediterranean. The officers in Nelson’s navy had settled the area because it had reminded them of Gibraltar.
Cleo pondered the hundreds of thousands of spectators who would soon flock to Torbay to watch the coming cosmic event. She believed they were destined to see a sight that the subdued birds, who were too afraid to fish, already anticipated.
Cleo moved as quickly as she could—which was not very fast, her progress interrupted by frequent stops to catch her breath—up the coastal path and across the common to reach Elberry Cove. She now had just under an hour before the heat would be unbearable. Power shortages had rationed the air conditioning so her apartment wouldn’t be much cooler, but her thoughts were enough of a convoluted and troubling mess without the sun’s heat lighting a fire under them.
As she walked the coastal path and along the cliffs, with the defunct fishing port of Brixham visible ahead, from the s
ea a familiar hot wind picked up and rustled the trees circling the common. Cleo struggled with her balance and wayward hair, but believed she had just heard those trees call a name.
From the beach behind her, as the wind struck the shore, the gulls broke their unnerving silence and cried out in alarm. They took flight and Cleo turned to catch sight of a great squadron of dry wings beating a passage inland, away from the bay where they had once felt safe.
About her on the coastal path, the long, gnarled trunks of the pines, the sweet beech and larch trees, who had all slowly bowed away from the direction of the sea for decades, suggested to her again that they were now striving to uproot and flee the rooty moorings that anchored them so perilously close to the weed-choked Torbay waters. Across the last decade, from Dorset to Cornwall, to her eyes, the leafy heads of the remaining trees on the cliffs and open shores had all taken on an aspect either of flight or fearful supplication. Or perhaps their decrepit posture was simply a cowed, despairing acknowledgement of the endgame that restlessly built out there, deep down.
Few had noticed how these trees leaned, or they had attributed the slant to the wind. Most had lost the ability to understand what the natural world was whispering. But not all. Ever restless with the sea’s winds, or motionless and sullen in the summer heat, she believed the trees of the bay had known only a tense expectation of what neared the shore, something felt but unseen. Right here, she was sure, was an apprehension that now shuddered the natural world.
Cleo had learned to identify the earth’s signs, just as her great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother had done before her. And she supposed the trees would soon thrash their last in the coming storms, and crash beneath the great carapaces of turbulent seawater that were destined to rise even higher than the levels reached in the last three decades. At the end, as it rose, she guessed that the trees would shriek out that name too, and in a deafening chorus of panic, before they all fell silent forever. As we must too. She knew it. She had lived through the coming as she slept. Sometimes now, the sights even flickered into chaotic life within her wide-open eyes.
The name, the younger trees sheltered in Marriage Wood called it now too. She could hear them from the distance. The older members of the woodlands hushed them. And as she rounded the headland and descended the hill to Elberry Cove, Cleo heard the name’s susurration arise from the very water. And not for the first time either. In the retreating pull of the surf across a myriad of pebbles that all rolled together, she often heard that name now. In the slap and hiss of the sluggish waves upon the baked shoreline were syllables, even the odd consonant, as well as the breathy, rushing spaces between each part of that dreadful signifier.
No one had seen the face of God and it remained ineffable, but Cleo believed she knew its name now, and in the many languages of the trees, the birds, the sea, and also from the strange tongues of her dreams. Her mother had once told her that it was only a matter of time before she would hear that name everywhere and in living things. That she would become a receiver.
When she first heard the calling of that name she was sure, as were her doctors, that the voices were the beginnings of the family taint; the early onset of the bedlam in her bloodline, a hereditary taint of dementia that remained strong after four generations of daughters were all declared insane in their respective eras. Mercifully, Cleo was childless and the curse would end in her; she would never have willingly inflicted what she knew to be coming upon a child.
Most days, she struggled to recall her dead husband’s face, or even when he died, but Cleo still refused to believe a hereditary illness was transmitting such a name into her thoughts. She believed instead that the disease that slowly shrivelled her brain created a susceptibility to the natural transmissions from the earth. Messages that only a disordered sixth sense could detect.
She kept on taking the pills, or some of them, and never uttered her family’s theories to any of her doctors. But her ancestors had all claimed that the name was first heard in the fossils of this very bay. Her own experiences began in this cove too, though not in fossils, but at the edge of the sea grass pasture.
In the woodland that divided the cove from the drought-resistant maize crop that grew on the old golf course, Cleo began scratching about the paths and undergrowth until she found the tracks that she sought.
The ‘ambulances’ had definitely made recent deliveries at high tide. Tyre tracks, the thinner tracks of the barrows, and the parallel furrows of the gurney wheels had carved the pebbles apart on the shore. They led Cleo to a disturbance of dry leaves upon the red clay of the wood that embraced the cove. Here was more evidence of a commotion; a procession, no less, of those who had tried to quickly adapt to a future world that they had also dreamed of. Some had wished to change for a creator whom they had worshipped in secret for years. And a few of their number had already gone beneath the waves for good.
Cleo wondered if some of them actually survived out there in the colder water, beyond the weed, or if their drowned and contorted carcasses were now buried among the bent and mournful trees of the woods.
The sea grew deep quickly in the cove. A bank of pebbles dropped to a smooth, red sand. About thirty metres out, at a depth of six metres, eighty hectares of sea grass still thrived. One of the largest surviving underwater meadows in the British Isles. Until she was too old to dive, she spent hundreds of hours in that pasture. Down there she would scour the marine flora with torch and camera, watching the thick, lustrous grass move in the currents. She took a thousand samples across three decades and discovered nothing untoward amongst those fronds. But she still asked herself now: from where did that stone come? A dolmen that stood sixty metres out, hidden on the seafloor where the sun’s light barely reached.
During one of her last dives, before she was retired, she caught sight of a large, black silhouette at a distance, at the end of her torch’s reach. Where the currents caused by the slipway and the reef made it unsafe to swim, something had been deposited. Five years ago she had found that effigy and she believed it had remained in place, buried in the waters of the cove.
Once her fear and panic had crashed, she had realised the object was stationary; a rock formation. Drifting out another ten metres, a risky business as the tide was turning and she was not at her fittest when pushing seventy-two in the spring of 2050, she had been able to see more of the rock that reared from the underwater gloom like a saurian head. To her enduring astonishment, Cleo had found herself approaching what suggested the presence of a large black chess piece—a knight, no less—upon the seafloor. Emerging from those great, preserved grasslands was an installation, clearly man-made, though crudely, and casting an onyx gaze over the seabed around itself.
The object suggested a monument, or underwater marker, even an idol. It may just have been pitched over the side of a boat in transit. But whatever its purpose, she eventually found evidence of a congregation, and one never illumined by a marine biologist’s lamp. Those responsible for the sculpture existed on land, and in the village of Churston Ferris.
The thought prompted her to plan another visit to the Kudas who lived in the village. And soon, when she had regained the stamina to walk that far, so that she could determine whether they had made the most recent and final leap beneath the waves from this cove. They had seemed due the last time she had looked in on them.
It was getting too late and too hot to move around. Cleo took a pained look upon the water and marvelled again, as she always did, at what had been hidden for so long, right here.
Time was running out; the eclipse was mere weeks away. The sun was turning up its murdering heat. There was no sign of autumn, and she doubted she’d see another one of those anyway.
***
Cleo sat alone and still in her living room, with the blinds drawn across the balcony doors. The media service was silent and blank. Exhausted and wondering if she would ever reach the end of her drive again, a familiar agitation spread through Cleo’s body
as her antipsychotic medication cycle neared its end. A palsy quivered her hands and feet.
Yolanda medicated her until she was calm, while stroking her hair. Yolanda was a former refugee from Portugal who worked as a carer for a few of the multitude of dementia sufferers in the bay. She’d arrived minutes after Cleo returned from the cove.
Reclining on the sofa, while Yolanda busied herself with the preparations of a midday meal, Cleo’s attention drifted to the portraits of her forebears: Amelia Anning, Mary Anning, Olive Harvey, and her mother, Judith Harvey. She smiled and wiped at the tears that immediately filled her eyes.
As you were, so am I.
Around their pictures were the polished madrepores that her mother had passed down. Upon the walls, pressed weeds hung, mounted and framed by Cleo’s great-grandmother, Mary Anning.
After making significant contributions to marine botany and earth science, Cleo’s forebears all died raving. Once Cleo began to hear the natural world issuing that name, five years ago, and building quickly to a veritable din inside her head, she took measures to prevent a repeat of her ancestors’ fates with the psychotropic salves that most of her forebears had been without. So many pills had subsequently been swallowed to dampen the shrieks and the visions. Her mother, Judith, had chosen to eschew the antipsychotic medication. As a result of what her mind was being required to contain and process, Judith had been one day shy of her sixtieth birthday when she took her own life.
Looking at the family portraits never failed to encourage Cleo to ponder the futility of her conservation work in a world that could not reach consensus. A world incapable of saving itself because of a species that could not conceive of its insignificance upon the earth, let alone the earth’s insignificance in the cosmos. The women of her family had all endured this Damascene moment too, though haplessly. They had changed no minds but their own either.