by John Shirley
Yours Sincerely, Frank Fontaine.
In fact, he’d sent variations of the same letter with three different deliveries to Rapture.
Standing at the prow of the pitching deck of the trawler, unscrewing the top of his flask, Frank Fontaine asked himself: Am I after fish—or a wild goose? Sure, he always dreamed about a big-paying long con, but this one was threatening to go on indefinitely—and though it was afternoon and supposedly summer, it was cold as a son of a bitch out here. Made a witch’s tit seem like a hot toddy. Was it worth giving up Gorland—becoming Fontaine?
A city under the sea. It was becoming an obsession.
Fontaine looked up at the streaming charcoal-colored clouds, wondered if it was going to storm again. Just being on this damn tub was too much like work.
Talking to the men who picked up the fish for Rapture’s food supply, Fontaine had confirmed that Ryan had indeed built some gigantic underwater habitat, a kind of free-market utopia—and Fontaine knew what happened with utopias. Look at the Soviets—all those fine words about the proletariat had turned into gulags and breadlines. But a “utopia” was pure opportunity for a man like him. When this undersea utopia fell apart, he’d be there, with a whole society to feast on. Long as he didn’t step too hard on Ryan’s toes, he could build up an organization, get away with a pile of loot.
But he had to get down to Rapture first …
The trawler lurched, and so did Fontaine’s stomach.
A small craft was being lowered over the side of the platform ship—a thirty-foot gig. Men descended the ladder and clambered aboard it. When it started motoring toward the trawlers, almost a quarter mile away, it was bristling with men, rifles glinting in their hands.
But he hadn’t come this far to run. He waited as his crew lined up behind him. Peach Wilkins, his first mate, came to the rail. “Doesn’t look good, boss,” Wilkins said as the launch came steadily closer. “What they need all those guns for?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Fontaine said, trying to sound more confident than he felt.
The launch cut through the tossing waves and then came about to ease up against the trawler’s starboard side. A man in early middle age, wearing a top coat, rubber boots and leather gloves, climbed the ladder and swung aboard, followed by two burly, watchful younger men in watch caps and slickers, rifles on straps over their shoulders.
Looking chilly and gray-faced, the older man braced himself on the bucking deck and looked Fontaine up and down. “Name’s Sullivan, chief of security for Ryan Industries. You’re Frank Fontaine. Am I right?”
Fontaine nodded. “That’s me. Owner and operator, Fontaine’s Fisheries.”
“Mr. Ryan’s been watching your operation out here. Seen you build it up, edge out the competition—make a success of it. And you’ve done a good job supplying us. But you’re nosy. You’ve been asking questions about what’s down below—” He hooked a thumb at the sea and grinned unpleasantly. “You even bribed some of our platform workers with booze…”
“I just want to be part of what you’re building down there. I sent several letters—”
“Sure, we got the letters. Mr. Ryan’s read ’em.” Sullivan looked the trawler over. “You got anything left to drink on this boat, besides water?”
Fontaine took out the flask, passed it over. “Help yourself…”
Sullivan opened the flask, drank deeply. He passed it back empty.
“Listen,” Fontaine said. “I’ll do what I have to—anything it takes to make my way … in Rapture.”
Sullivan pursed his lips. “You know—once you go where Mr. Ryan is, you ain’t coming back. You live there; you work there. Maybe you do real good there. But you don’t leave there. There ain’t a whole lot of rules. But that’s one of them. And that takes commitment, Fontaine. You ready for that?”
Fontaine looked out to sea, as if he were thinking, puzzling out some great truth. Then he nodded to himself. There’d been a kid at the orphanage—whenever the nuns asked him if he wanted to please God, the kid had looked at them, all mistylike. The kid had ended up a priest. Fontaine put that simple, misty-eyed belief on his own face. And he said, “All the way, Chief.”
Sullivan gave him a long, close look—and then grunted. “Well—Mr. Ryan liked your letters. And he’s inclined to offer you a place in Rapture. Says you’ve earned it, sticking at your vigil out here. I guess we’re taking a chance on you. Same offer goes for your men.”
“So—when do we go? Down to Rapture, I mean…”
Sullivan chuckled and turned to look at the sea, then nodded to himself. “Right now.”
And at exactly that moment, the crew of the trawler gasped and pointed—seeing a submarine suddenly rise to the surface in a roaring wash of froth just forty yards off the port bow.
7
Sinclair Solutions, Rapture
1948
“So what’s your problem with this Tenenbaum woman?” Chief Sullivan asked. He shifted in the stiff little straight-backed chair across from Sinclair’s desk. Glaringly visible through the big round window behind the desk, a SINCLAIR SOLUTIONS sign glowed in red-gold neon outside, against the indigo backdrop of the sea.
Augustus Sinclair rubbed his clean-shaven chin at that, as if he wasn’t sure of the answer himself. The pharmaceuticals investor was a trim, darkly handsome half-Panamanian in his thirties, with a faint line of mustache. You had to look close to see the mustache wasn’t just penciled in. “Well—she’s been working for us, development, see. Me, I don’t understand exactly what she’s working on—something to do with heredity I gather—but I’m a big booster of science. That’s one reason Andrew asked me down here, I guess. That’s where the money is—new inventions, new drugs. Why, if a man can…”
“We were talking about Brigid Tenenbaum,” Sullivan reminded him. Sinclair had a tendency to rattle on. And it was almost five o’clock. Ryan’s security chief was looking forward to a half bottle of what passed for Scotch in Rapture, which he had stashed in his apartment.
“This Tenenbaum,” Sinclair said, running a finger along the negligible line of his mustache, “she’s a damn peculiar woman and … I just want to make sure that if she’s working for us, she’s not breaking any rules around here. She had her own lab, for a while, financed by a couple of interests around Rapture, and those guys dropped her like a hot potato. See, word got out she used to do experiments on people for this doctor of Hitler’s. Vivisections and—I don’t even want to think about it. Now, we do some human experiments at Sinclair—you got to—but we don’t kill people off. We don’t force ’em. We pay ’em good. If a man’s hair turns orange and he starts acting like a monkey for a week or two, why it doesn’t do him no harm in the long run…”
Sullivan started to laugh—then realized that Sinclair wasn’t joking.
“But Tenenbaum,” Sinclair went on, “she’s taking blood from people by the bucket—and more’n one of them collapsed.”
“You afraid you’re doing something … unethical?” This was a word that didn’t get too much use in Rapture.
Sinclair blinked. “Hm? Unethical? Hell, Chief, I’ve been on the same page as Andrew about altruism, all that stuff, for years. Why do you think I was brought in so early? Worrying about ethics—I don’t do it. I came here to strike it rich; you won’t catch me blowing my last bubble for any other personage—” He jabbed a finger at Sullivan to emphasize the words: “ —plural or singular. I read every issue of Popular Science and Mechanics front to back—I’m a hard charger behind the Rapture science philosophy. But…”
“Yes?”
“Well, there’s some rules here, ain’t there? I just feel like people might get up in arms if we go too far. I’m not sure this Tenenbaum isn’t likely to do that. Or that other fellow, Suchong…”
“We got detention for troublemakers—but they’ve got to be, say, outright murderers. Thieves. Rape. Major smuggling. Stuff like that. We’re strict about watertight integrity—and about leaving Rapture. But ap
art from that…” Sullivan shrugged. “Not much in the way of laws. Fella opened a shop called Rapture Grown Coca the other day. Grows his own coca bushes under some kinda red lights. I’m hearing he makes cocaine from the leaves. Or claims he does. Might be anything in those syringes. Gave me a bit of a turn, seeing the people come out of there—looked like they might get up to any goddamn thing. But Ryan’s all right with it. So I guess taking a bit of extra blood … long as it’s voluntary…” He shrugged. “Isn’t a problem.”
“Yeah. Well I hope it isn’t.” Sinclair shook his head. “My old man was sure we got to do things for the greater good—and what happened? I don’t hold with worrying about anything but number one. Still—I don’t want to get the public up in arms neither. You hear any rumblings like that? People talking … unions? That kind of thing?”
Sullivan had been thinking about his Scotch, but this stopped him. “You heard something, I take it? Mr. Ryan worries constantly about Communist infiltrators.”
“Some rumors from our maintenance guys. Heard ’em talking about that place the workers have made up for themselves, down below. Not much more than a shacktown. Who knows what goes on down there?”
Sullivan pulled a paper and pencil from his coat. “Got any names for me?”
Sinclair opened a desk drawer, took out a pint bottle. “A few. Care for a drink, Chief? It’s that time of day. This is from my own Sinclair Spirits distillery. Very good, if I do say so myself…”
“Augustus, you’re a man after my own heart. You pour; I’ll write…”
Lower Wharf, Neptune’s Bounty
1949
Andrew Ryan had an odd feeling as he looked up at the sign that read, FONTAINE’S FISHERIES. He and Chief Sullivan watched two burly workmen on stepladders hanging it from the ceiling of the lower wharf area. Ryan didn’t believe in omens, in anything supernatural. But there was something about that fisheries sign that bothered him. Frank Fontaine had installed an office, a conveyor belt for fish, big freezers for long-term storage down below. Nothing unexpected.
But the feeling of vague dread returned every time Ryan looked at the neon sign—and it seemed to increase, becoming an inner shudder, as the neon sign was switched on. A nice-looking sign, really, with FONTAINE’S in electric-blue neon, FISHERIES in glowing yellow, under a neon fish shining against the wooden backdrop.
“Seen enough of Neptune’s Bounty, boss?” Sullivan asked, glancing at his pocket watch. It was cold in here—they could see their breath—and they’d been inspecting new businesses for hours, trying to get a sense of what was taking root in Rapture.
Ryan heard a splash of water on the pylons nearby and glanced over to see a small tugboat-style vessel pulling up at the wharf, the smoke from its engine sucking into vents on the low ceiling. The lower wharf was an interior space designed to look exterior, with shallow water around the jutting wooden dock and the occasional boat from neighboring chambers where fish and other goods were off-loaded. Another peculiarity of Rapture—a boat that wasn’t a submarine, putting around deep under the surface of the sea.
“Mr. Ryan, how are you sir?”
Ryan turned back to Fontaine’s Fisheries to see Frank Fontaine standing at the open door, hands in pockets, dressed in a yellow overcoat and three-piece tailored suit, black shoes decked out in spats, bald head shining in the blue light from his sign—Fontaine’s own name glowing over his head. Stepping out beside him, smoking a cigarette and squinting past the smoke, was the thuggish bodyguard Fontaine had brought in recently—Reggie something. Reggie was looking at Sullivan with a kind of smirking contempt.
Ryan nodded politely. “Fontaine. You seem to be settling in, all right. I like the fisheries’ sign. Neon brightens Rapture up.”
Fontaine nodded, glancing up at the sign. “Sure. Just like the forty-deuce. I help you, Mr. Ryan? I was just about to check on my fishing sub…”
“Ah, yes. The fishing subs—I like to keep tabs on them myself.”
“That right? Got you worried?” Fontaine’s tone was cool, a little mockery behind the respect.
“Rapture leaks enough,” Ryan said, wryly. “We don’t want too much coming in—or too much slipping out. Nobody comes or goes without our authorization.”
“For a place that likes to keep the rules down, Rapture’s sure got a lot of ’em,” Reggie muttered.
“We’ve got only as many rules as we need,” Ryan said. “No robbery. And nobody leaves Rapture—or brings in stuff we don’t want here. No outside product or religion—no Bibles, ‘holy’ books of any kind. Luxury goods—we’re going to make our own, soon’s we can. No letters, no correspondence with the outside world. Secrecy is our protection.”
“I couldn’t miss the contraband rules.” Fontaine chuckled. “Being as you posted them in my office, in big black letters. Or your man there did.”
Sullivan grunted to himself.
“I think you understand me,” Ryan said, carefully keeping his tone civil. “The fisheries could be a weak link…” Ryan hesitated, choosing his words carefully. Fontaine was a forceful entrepreneur, and Ryan liked that. He’d even outbid Ryan Enterprises for some shop space. All in the spirit of Rapture. But Ryan needed to let Fontaine know where the boundaries were. “The only thing a fisherman should bring to Rapture is fish.”
Fontaine winked—flashing a smile. “We have no trouble identifying what’s fish and what isn’t, Mr. Ryan. There’s the smell. The scales.”
Reggie laughed softly.
Ryan cleared his throat. “We’re all individuals here, Fontaine. But we’re also part of the Great Chain of industry … The Great Chain unites us when we struggle in our own interest. If anyone breaks that chain by bringing in contraband, that’s a weak link. Even ideas can be contraband…”
Fontaine smiled. “The most dangerous kind, Mr. Ryan.”
“I do wish you luck, and a prosperous business,” Ryan said.
“Might feel more like I’m part of things if you invited me to join the Rapture Council,” Fontaine said mildly, lighting a cigar with a gold lighter. “Care for a smoke?”
“No. Thank you.” Ryan examined the cigar. “I presume that is a Rapture-made cigar?”
“Naturally.” Fontaine raised the cigar for Ryan to see.
Ryan smiled noncommittally. “You perhaps have the impression the council is some grand, powerful organization. It’s a very loose commission to oversee enterprise, keep a bit of an eye on things without interfering. Time consuming, to be honest.” Ryan wasn’t enthusiastic about bringing the glib, forceful Fontaine into the Rapture Council. He liked competition, but not breathing down his neck. “But ah—I’ll take your request under advisement.”
“Then we’re in good shape!” Fontaine said, blowing blue cigar smoke in the air.
The man seemed relaxed, certain of himself, unworried. And maybe there was something in his eyes that Ryan recognized. A hint, a flicker that suggested Fontaine’s willingness to do whatever he had to do … to get what he wanted.
Olympus Heights
1949
“Mr. Ryan likes to talk about choices,” Elaine was saying. “And I keep wondering if we made the right one, coming to Rapture in the first place.”
“We did, love,” Bill said, glancing around the comfortable flat with some satisfaction. He patted her pregnant tummy absently with his left hand, his right around her shoulders. They sat gazing out at the sea from their viewing alcove.
Before opening day, Ryan had purchased a great many furnishings wholesale and warehoused them in the undersea city, selling them at a profit to Rapture entrepreneurs. He’d brought in raw materials too, and a modest manufacturing base had sprung up.
Elaine’s tastes didn’t run to the rococo excess found in so much of Rapture. She had chosen simple lines, craftsman-style furnishings: curving dark wood, polished redwood tables, silver-framed mirrors. A smiling portrait of Bill—his mustache curling up, his russet hair starting to recede—hung over their shark-leather living room sofa. Mate
rials found in the undersea environs around Rapture were being increasingly used in furnishings—locally mined metals, many-hued corals for tabletops and counters, glass from deep-sea sands, even beams and brass from sunken ships.
The curving window of the viewing alcove, the glass arching over them sectioned by frames of Ryanium alloy, looked out on a deep channel between towering buildings. An uneven dull-blue light prevailed through the watery space; the new, glowing sign across the way, seeming to ripple in the funhouse lens of the water, read:
FUN IN FORT FROLIC!
ALWAYS A GRAND FLOOR SHOW AT FLEET HALL!
“I don’t mind the smell of Rapture,” Elaine said. “It’s kind of like the laundry room of the building I grew up in. Kind of homey. Some of it.”
“We’re working on that smell, love,” Bill put in. “The sulfur smell too.”
“And I don’t mind so much not seeing my family. But Bill—when I think of raising a child here…” She put her hand over his, on her swollen belly. “That’s when I worry. What will the schools be like? And living without churches, without God … And what will the child learn of the world up above? Just the hateful things Ryan says about it? And—will she … if it’s a she … will she really never get to see the sky?”
“Oh in time she will, love—in time. Someday, when Mr. Ryan thinks it’s safe, the city will be built higher up, above the waves. And we’ll come and go freely, Bob’s your uncle. But that’s a generation off, at least. It’s a dangerous world out there. Bloody atom bombs, innit?”
“I don’t know, Bill. When we went to dinner in Athena’s Glory, with him and his friends—Well, Mr. Ryan ranted a good deal, don’t you think? On and on about the world above and how we have to accept our choice and rejoice in it. And to be stuck in Rapture with … well some of the people here, like that Steinman. He kept touching my face, talking about how it was ‘so close, so close and yet’! What did he mean?”