by John Shirley
Sullivan led the way to the bathysphere that would take them down the shaft of water, a kind of specialized elevator, into Rapture herself …
“After you, sir,” Sullivan said.
Mouth dry with excitement, hands gently trembling, Ryan climbed into the bathysphere, the first transport in the Rapture Metro. The others followed and took their places in the small craft, knees nearly touching. It was a bit crowded, but it didn’t matter. The air crackled with anticipation.
Too bad the bathysphere’s television screen was blank at the moment; in time it would show a short film, “Welcome to Rapture,” for those permitted secret immigration to the new undersea colony.
Down they went, bubbles in the water-filled shaft streaming past them. The bathysphere’s cable creaked, but the ride was comfortable. “Runs smooth as silk, this,” Bill chuckled.
Then they’d arrived at the first vantage, the lounge from which they’d view the city of Rapture. The bathysphere opened almost soundlessly.
They climbed out of the bathysphere, and Ryan clapped Bill on the shoulder. “Bill—you’ve been down here a lot more than I have. You’d know the best view. Lead the way!”
Simon Wales didn’t seem pleased at that—but Bill had a great deal to do with the internal structure of Rapture. “Got ’er guts ’n’ garters in me hands,” he’d said once. And Ryan simply liked Bill McDonagh better than Wales. Though his genius was undeniable, there was something subtly unstable about the glum, spade-bearded man—as if Simon Wales were always a heartbeat from a shout that never quite burst free.
Bill grinned and made a sweeping “right this way” gesture. They struck off toward the big picture window to one side, where blue-and-green tinted light rippled across the floor …
Ryan stepped up to the window and gazed out at Rapture. The marvel rose up before them, seeming almost a natural outgrowth of this aquatic world, as much a part of the planet as the Himalayas. Electrically illuminated canyons of steel and glass gleamed; art deco towers soared; sunken buildings stood sturdily, dry inside; watertight skyscrapers reared without a sky in sight to scrape. The lines of Rapture’s magnificent architecture seemed to rocket toward the reticulating surface of the sea, some distance above, where light and shadow played tag. A school of golden-tailed fish swam by the window like a flock of birds, glittering as they passed. A raft of sea lions gamboled by up above, silhouettes near the surface.
Base lights streamed colored rays up the sides of the building—subtle reds and greens and purples attiring the towering edifices in a royal splendor. It was as impressive as the Grand Canyon or the Swiss Alps—but it was the work of man. It took Ryan’s breath away to look on it.
“Of course, it’s not quite finished—but you see what man’s will can do,” Ryan said, his voice catching with emotion. In the distance, down the “street” crisscrossed with glass tunnels, an electric sign rippled with the gay life of an undersea Times Square: RYAN ENTERPRISES. The first of many electric signs that would shine within the cold, dark sea. Billboards, neon signs, all the trappings of a truly free market would be found here, both inside and outside, a shining declaration of liberty and unrestrained enterprise.
“It’s a wonder, is Rapture,” Bill said, huskily. “One of the wonders of the world!” Adding with a touch of regret: “Pity most of the world won’t know…”
“Oh, in time, they will,” Ryan assured him. “All who survive the destruction of the upper world—they will know Rapture! One day it will be the capital city of all civilization.”
“You’ve done it, sir!” Greavy declared, his voice trembling with an emotion he rarely showed.
Wales glanced at Greavy. “We’ve done it, all of us,” he said, irritated.
“Oh, it’s not quite fully realized, Greavy—but it is alive,” Ryan said glowingly. “A new world—where men and women will stand up on their own two feet in the glory of competition. They will empower themselves with struggle!”
Bill said, “But what about populating this miracle? Got to fill up all those buildings, guv…” So far, only a relatively few people lived in Rapture, mostly maintenance workers, engineers, some security.
Ryan nodded and took a folded paper from his coat pocket. “I’ve brought something along I wanted to share with you.” He unfolded the paper and read aloud to them. “Letter of recruitment.” He cleared his throat and went on,
“Tired of taxes? Tired of bullying governments, business regulations, unions, people expecting a handout from you? Want a new start? Do you have a skill, an ambition to be a pioneer? If you’re receiving this notice, you’ve already been considered and selected to fill out an application for a life in Rapture. This amazing new enterprise will require emigration. But it will cost you nothing except sweat and determination to come and take part in a new world. If our vetting team has done its job, you are not a trade unionist; you are a believer in free enterprise, competition, and carving your own path through the wilderness of the world. There is room for up to twenty thousand pioneers to thrive in this new society. We ask that you show this letter to no one, whatever your decision. If you’re interested…”
Ryan shrugged and folded the letter. “Just one of our recruiting tools, discreetly distributed. An early draft … Of course, Rapture’s not quite ready for the bulk of its population.”
“Has Prentice Mill made any progress on his Express?” Ryan asked, turning to Wales.
Wales grunted. “Oh, that he has. Two stations completed, a good deal of rail laid down. He’s down in Sinclair Deluxe, supervising construction.” He sniffed and drew a pipe from his coat and then stuck it in his teeth but didn’t light it. “Complains he needs more workers, of course. They all do.”
“The Express is its own business,” Ryan pointed out. “Let him get busy and hire more workers himself. Those who are finished working on the outer shell can start on the rail.”
He turned to gaze out the window at Rapture again. Who knew how long it would take to grow—this almighty expression of his will that could continue proliferating in steel and glass and copper and Ryanium, long after Andrew Ryan himself had passed away …
PART TWO
The Second Age of Rapture
I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. Any man who tells you different either has his hand in your pocket, or a pistol to your neck.
—Andrew Ryan
6
Apollo Square, Rapture
1948
Standing on the stage with Ryan, Bill McDonagh exulted in Ryan’s speech as it boomed through Apollo Square. Rapture rose in sturdy magnificence around them.
“To build a city at the bottom of the sea! Insanity! But look around you, my friends!” Andrew Ryan’s voice boomed, with only a little feedback squeal. Wearing a caramel-colored double-breasted suit, his freshly barbered hair slicked back, Ryan seemed to emanate personality from the podium. Bill could feel Ryan there, to his left—and the almost frighteningly deep conviction in his tone kept his listeners riveted. The crowd of more than two thousand seemed a bit stunned by their surroundings when they’d first come. Now Bill could see them nodding, the pride shining from their faces, as Ryan told them they were a unique people in a unique place—each one of them with a chance to make their own destiny within the walls of Rapture. Those at the front were mostly the moneyed patricians, eccentrics, and pioneering professionals Ryan had recruited. The determined blue-collar types milled at the back of the crowd.
Hands clasped in front of him, Bill stood to Ryan’s right and as close to Elaine as propriety allowed. Beside Bill and Elaine stood Greavy, Sullivan, Simon and Daniel Wales, Prentice Mill, Sander Cohen, and Ryan’s new “personal assistant,” the statuesque beauty Diane McClintock. She loo
ked like she fancied herself a queen. Bill had heard she was originally some cigarette girl Ryan had picked up—and now she was putting on airs.
Under the bunting-swathed stage overlooking the square, a tape recorder took down Ryan’s speech. He planned to record all his speeches and put edited sections of them out as “inspirational talks” on public address throughout Rapture.
“But where else,” Ryan demanded, “could we be free from the clutching hands of parasites?” His deep voice resonated in the gleaming windows looking out to the shadowy, light-shafted depths of the sea. Bill nudged Elaine and nodded toward the windows as a school of large fish swam up to the glass. The fish seemed to be taking in the speech, ogling Ryan as if awestruck. She hid a smile behind her hand. Bill wanted to take that hand and kiss it, draw his new fiancée away from this pensive crowd, up to the privacy of his apartment in Olympus Heights—celebrate the culmination of so much hard work with another sort of climax. But he had to be satisfied with winking at her, as Ryan went portentously on: “Where else could we build an economy that they would not try to control, a society that they would not try to destroy? It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea! It was impossible to build it anywhere else!”
“Hear hear!” Greavy said, leading a patter of applause.
“The ant society misunderstands the nature of true cooperation!” Ryan boomed. “True cooperation is enlightened self-interest, not grubbing parasitism! True cooperation is not based on the bloodsucking that the parasites call ‘taxation’! True cooperation is people working together—each for their own profit! A man’s self-interest is at the root of all that he accomplishes! But there is something more powerful than each of us: a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. It is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. The Great Chain may sound mystical…” Ryan shook his head contemptuously. “It is not! Some would imagine the hand of their so-called God behind every mystery! The best of human nature, the laws of natural selection—such is the power behind the Great Chain, not God! We need no gods or kings in Rapture! Only man! Here, man and woman will be rewarded with the sweat of their brows. Here, without interference, we will prove that society can order itself with unfettered competition, with unfettered free enterprise—with unfettered research! I have scientists in Rapture working on new discoveries that will astound you—and the persecution of the small-minded is all that kept those discoveries from happening till now. Science will advance without the oversight of pompous tyrants who would impose their personal view of ‘morality’ on us.” He cleared his throat and smiled, his tone becoming friendly, fatherly. “And now, in celebration of the opening day of Rapture—a song performed by Sander Cohen, written by Miss Anna Culpepper…” Anna Culpepper was an unfinished English major, a naïve but ambitious young woman whom Ryan had recruited out of her third year in college and who fancied herself a lyricist.
Wearing a tux, the impish performer stepped up to the microphone. Bill winced. Cohen got on his nerves.
From somewhere canned music played, and Cohen sang along.
“The paradox of our city
is the freedom of the chain,
the chain that holds youuuu
to meeeee,
a chain that oh so strangely, so very strangely,
Sets me at lib-er-tyyyy—
As the blue world scintillates
outside our gates,
and the fish gyrate and the lovely, lovely ocean awaits…”
It was a sluggish number, taking a long time to reach its chorus, and Bill lost interest, letting his attention wander to the majesty of Apollo Square, Rapture’s “Grand Central Station” …
Rapture’s architecture and design was a fusion of the style of the World’s Fair of 1934—an event that had a great impact on Andrew Ryan—and the industrial grandiosity of “The Art of the Great Chain.” To either side of the stage, heroic statues of electroplated bronze, forty feet high—the elongated forms of sleek, muscular, idealized men—stretched their arms toward the heights as if straining for godhood. To Bill they looked a bit like giant hood ornaments, but he’d never say as much to Ryan, who loved that sort of art. Bill had been a trifle taken aback the first time he’d seen a towering statue of Ryan, like the one at the other end of the big room—there were many about Rapture, the figures looming magisterially, seeming to embody an iron determination. In Apollo Square, relief images of lines of men—cheerfully pulling chains—decorated the walls. Everywhere was art decoratif trimming, often shaped like rays of light emanating from glistening knobs, intricate borders evoking both the industrial scale of the modern world and the temples of Babylon and Egypt.
As the song droned on, Bill felt suddenly giddy, riding an inner rush of amazement at what he’d helped build. The Waleses had created the look and feel of Rapture, but he and Greavy had built its flesh, its bones, its inner workings—and Ryan was its animating “soul.” They’d done it with the help of all those men who’d labored in the tunnels, under the sea—who’d risked their lives in the completed, watertight sections of Rapture, levels built from Hephaestus to Olympus Heights. Rapture was a reality: a small city, three miles to a side so far, rising from the depths to tower over the deep seabed.
Rapture. They’d really done it! Oh, there weren’t enough maintenance workers, there were still more heating ducts to be put in, still pipe to be laid in some levels. So far, only three of the five geothermal turbines were running in Hephaestus. Slow seepage was a problem in some areas. But Rapture was real: a man had conceived it, funded it at gigantic cost— spending the kind of money that small countries spent every year—and saw it through to completion. It was breathtaking.
He looked over at Sullivan, who always seemed gloomy, worried. Rumors were still rampant about G-men sniffing around in New York, wondering if Ryan was dodging taxation on some new project.
Some of the faces in the crowd seemed pinched with a vague anxiety of their own, were staring restlessly around at their strange new habitat. A lot of Rapture’s people were high-tone types, moneyed or formerly moneyed nobs who’d become disaffected with society. They’d come here looking for a new start and liking the fact that a wealthy man like Ryan had offered them one.
Bill hoped it was all worth it. So much was sacrificed down here. Like the time he’d seen three men boiled alive setting up the geothermal central heating. The volcanically heated water in the feed pipes had been released at too high a pressure—something he’d tried to warn Wallace about—and the pressure burst a pipe joint. Superheated water gushed to fill a room in seconds. Barely got out in time himself. Wallace should have known better after that close call the first day in the domes. Bill had felt those deaths hard—he’d watched the men die through a port, and the sight had given him nightmares for a week.
That first accident, though, in the dome tunnel, had cemented Bill’s relationship with Ryan. He had saved Andrew Ryan’s life—and Ryan had rewarded him with a nice raise, for one thing.
But he wondered if money really meant the same thing down here. Initially most of the inhabitants of Rapture were required to change their money for Rapture dollars, some percentage kept by Ryan to pay for maintenance services. And what would happen to a man when his Rapture dollars ran out? People couldn’t wire out for money—or even send letters out of Rapture. Did they really understand how sealed off from the outside world they were?
The song ended, and Elaine reached over, giving Bill’s hand a discreet squeeze. Long as Elaine was there, Bill was happy. It didn’t matter where they were.
He had helped build something glorious, something unprecedented. Sure, Rapture was untried, was a glaringly new idea. A gigantic experiment. But they’d planned Rapture down to the last detail. How badly could it go wrong?
The North Atlantic
1948
A raw morning on the North Atlantic.
Broken light slanted fitfully through silver-gray clouds. Wind snapped the tops off waves, smacking packets of saltwater into the men manning the decks of the six Fontaine’s Fisheries trawlers. The man who now called himself Fontaine had invested some of his own cash, and somewhat to his surprise he’d made a success of Fontaine’s Fisheries, selling tons of fish to Ryan’s project—and to Reykjavík. Cold comfort, so to speak.
Frank Fontaine—formerly Frank Gorland—could see the peculiar little tower rising tantalizingly from the waves, a quarter mile off. Beyond it were two ships, one of them the platform ship with its winches and hoists. Slabs of ice still floated about the trawler, brightly white against the green-blue water.
The object was to get from up here—to down there—to get safely into the city marked by that anomalous lighthouse. The first time Rapture’s buyers had come to his trawlers to purchase fish, he’d given them a letter to take down to Ryan.
To the Overseer of the Undersea Colony: The commerce between us has made me aware of your enterprise, & I have inferred something of its heroic scope. I have always yearned to be a frontiersman, & an appreciation for the mysteries of the deep draws me to offer you my services. I have a plan for harvesting fish underwater using modified submarines. Up above, this idea is dismissed as “crackpot.” I hope that you, clearly a forward thinker, will be more open-minded to this innovation in enterprise. Accordingly, I request your permission to relocate to your colony and develop my subaquatic fishery.