Spiros leans back and says, “I never thought it would be this boring. Same thing over and over again.”
Maria laughs. “Like chasing Albanian and Italian boat thieves? I have never had such a wonderful time!”
He reaches forward and puts his finger on her hand. “You are my real star,” he says. “You look beautiful. I don’t deserve you. Se latrevo.” Her eyes widen. It’s a very long time since Spiros told her he adored her.
INT. CORFU – SELINA’S HOUSE – EVENING
Sunil is teaching Selina how to make lamb Madras with saffron rice and an aubergine baji. She’s not gifted in the kitchen department. “The onions will burn if you leave the heat that high,” he says.
She shouts, “Malaka!” and pushes him out of the way as she goes through to the living room and flounces herself down in front of the television, which is showing a Greek news channel.
He smiles and rescues the curry.
She shouts, “Sunil! Sunil! Come! Now!”
He wipes his hands and walks through. He can’t understand the fast Greek the news presenter speaks, but he can see the words Universa and EMO on the screen, together with shots of fire trucks.
Selina interprets. “He’s saying that EMO boxes are catching fire or exploding. Several people have died. Hold on – this is several thousand incidents! Universa Studios have just issued a statement saying that they are recalling all EMOs. Wow! A media spokeswoman says it’s a major disaster for Universa.”
He goes back to the kitchen and adds the spices to the onions. Then he starts laughing and gets a bottle of Ino bubbly Greek champagne from the fridge. He’s still laughing as he walks into the sitting room, peeling the foil, and lets the bottle go very loudly pop behind her back. She jumps and shouts, “Don’t do that!” and turns to see him pouring sparkling wine over his head. He grabs her hand and pulls her towards him and bathes both of them in a shower of bubbles. “What about the curry?” she asks, licking the wine off his face. “I turned the cooker off,” Sunil says. “For now.”
EXT. MALIBU CALIFORNIA – DAY
A body floats gently in towards the shore. It’s bloated, and prawns have been nibbling the ears, eyes, and nose. But nothing has touched the ginger hair that floats back and forth in the shallow surf.
EXT. NOVOSIBIRSK SIBERIA – DAY
Danny is wrapped up in a big warm coat as he sits in a park in Russia’s science city. There’s no snow, but the cold grass looks as though it’s been doused in grey paint. A tall man in his early thirties – dark eyebrows, aquiline nose, parka hood up – comes and sits down beside Danny. “Only one target left,” he says. “She lives in Kiev with her second husband and his two children. He doesn’t know she was KGB.”
“So now she’s FSB?”
“Danny, Danny! I’m a programmer. FSB stands for Front Side Bus. I’m predicting some nasty short-circuits in the electricity supply to their apartment.”
Danny stands up. “Don’t hurt the kids,” he says.
Vladimir laughs. “You work for movie business. Now you start having conscience! Very funny.”
Danny walks away across the park. He turns back for a moment, waves and shouts, “Good job! Spasiba!”
MONTAGE – NEWSPAPERS AND VIDEO
Alexandros and Alice are on the front covers of every tabloid, every celeb magazine, and a thousand websites. His almost-black eyes and her green eyes stare into paparazzi lenses. They are parading along carpeted catwalks. They are signing autographs. They are on chat-shows all over the world. The movie has received five Oscar nominations and seven BAFTA nominations.
Lynne Songbird has a whole-page spread in The Scotsman. “The thing is,” she’s quoted as saying, “we’ve done the most advanced technology there is. We have done things so advanced it’s like science fiction. But then we talked to the ordinary good people who watch our movies, and they said ‘We don’t care about 3D. We don’t care about being forced to feel things we don’t feel. We don’t care about super-surround and giga-pixels, whatever they are. What we want is great stories, great acting, and maybe a little love besides.’ ”
INT./EXT. CORFU – SELINA’S HOUSE – NIGHT
Their bags are still packed by the door. They’ve just flown in from Los Angeles via Athens and they’re tired. She looked great at the Oscar ceremony, but she’s not feeling great now.
The air is cool and sweet as they stand outside, fragrant with jasmine and thyme. The moon is up over the hills. Selina, whose name means moon, looks up and yawns. Sunil takes her hand and says, “I quit today.”
“I know,” she says. “Lynne told me. So what are you going to do?”
“We’re not short of money. You’re a great doctor. I’d maybe like to do another Ph.D. I’m a bit worried about your family. If I were just a Brit it wouldn’t matter, but I’m second generation Indian and maybe they’re a bit . . . concerned.”
She hugs him, and says, “Hey, xenophobia is a Greek word. We’ve survived the alien invasions by the Italians, the Turks, and the Crusaders. I think even my mother can cope with you.”
She kisses him on the cheek and goes in to bed.
Sunil walks down the garden in the moonlight. Magnolia bushes gleam a silvery pink and the olive trees dance a shadowy sirtaki in the breeze. He opens the gate to the fenced area where the goats live. They’ve heard him coming, and they’re up and stirring. They come bounding up to him and jump around in delight that he’s here.
“Tell you what, guys,” he says to the goats. “You three are never going on the barbecue. That’s a promise.”
He lies on his back on the still-warm ground and looks up at the moon and the great bright splash of stars as the goats skip gleefully over him and the night scent full of herbs and richness fills his nostrils and suddenly he feels immensely, ecstatically and overwhelmingly human.
CAMERA rises higher and higher over the Corfu hills, looking down at Sunil and the goats, and then the credits start to roll as Greek music swells on the sound track and the house lights brighten in the cinema:
Screenplay
Jim Hawkins
Script Consultants
Gillie Edwards, Ray Cluley
Research
Lesley Ann Hoy
Producer
Catherine Townsend
Director
Dean Conrad
With grateful thanks to The Little Prince, Agios Stefanos NW, Corfu, for the location, the moussakas, and the cold beer.
THE BONELESS ONE
Alec Nevala-Lee
Alec Nevala-Lee was born in 1980 in Castro Valley, California, graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor’s degree in Classics, and worked for several years in finance before becoming a professional writer. His first novel, The Icon Thief, a contemporary thriller set in the New York art world, was published in March. A sequel, City of Exiles, will follow in December. On the science fiction side, his first novelette, “Inversus”, appeared in Analog in 2004. Since then, Analog has accepted for publication five more of his stories. Besides “The Boneless One”, reprinted here, they are: “The Last Resort”, “Kawataro”, “Ernesto”, and the forthcoming “The Voices”. He currently lives with his wife in Oak Park, Illinois.
In the creepy story that follows, he takes us to the infamous Bermuda Triangle (or near it, anyway), to confront a menace much more subtle and much more dangerous than the ones you usually read about encountering there.
I
“Before we go on deck, I should make one thing clear,” Ray Wiley said. “We’re nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle.”
Trip opened his eyes. He had been sleeping comfortably in a haze of wine and good food, rocked by the minor expansions and contractions of the yacht’s hull, and for a moment, looking up at the darkened ceiling, he could not remember where he was. “What time is it?”
“Three in the morning.” Ray rose from the chair beside the bed. “We’re six hundred miles northeast of Antigua.”
As Trip sat up, Ray was already heading for the sta
teroom door. A graying beard, grown over the past year, had softened Ray’s famously intense features, but his blue eyes remained focused and bright, and they caught Trip’s attention at once. If nothing else, it was the first time he had ever been awakened by a billionaire. “Come on,” Ray said. “You’ll want your notebook and camera.”
At the mention of his notebook, Trip glanced automatically at the desk, where he had left his papers before going to bed. It did not look as if Ray had tried to read his notes, but even if he had, he would have found nothing objectionable. Trip’s private notebook, in which he recorded his real thoughts about the yacht’s voyage, was safely tucked into the waistband of his pajamas.
Trip climbed out of bed, pulling on his jeans and parka. Glancing at the berths on the opposite bulkhead, he saw that the men with whom he shared the cabin were gone. “Did Ellis and Gary—”
“They’re on deck,” Ray said. “Hurry up. You’ll understand when we get there.”
Trip slid on a pair of deck shoes and slung a camera around his neck. As he followed Ray to the salon, he became aware of a murmur beneath his feet, the barely perceptible vibration of the yacht’s engine, trembling in counterpoint to the waves outside. Upstairs, the lights in the salon had been turned down. As they headed for the companionway, Trip saw Stavros, the yacht’s captain and first engineer, seated at the internal steering station, his broad face underlit by the glowing console.
On the deck of the Lancet, the night was cold and windless. Two men in matching parkas were standing in the cockpit, looking into the void of the North Atlantic. One was Ellis Harvey, the yacht’s marine biologist, a headlamp illuminating his weathered, intelligent features; the other was Gary Baker, a postdoctoral student in microbiology, his pale face framed by glasses and a tidy goatee.
When Ellis saw Ray, he frowned. It was no secret that the two older scientists were not on the best of terms. “We’re going on a night dive,” Ellis said. “Do we need a third set of gear?”
“I’ll pass,” Trip said. He was not fond of the water. “What’s this all about?”
Gary pointed along the centerline of the sloop. “Dead ahead. You see it?”
Trip turned to look. For a long moment, he saw nothing but the ocean, visible only where it gave back the yacht’s rippling lights. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he noticed a brighter area of water. At first, he thought it was an optical illusion, an effort by his brain to insert something of visual interest into an otherwise featureless expanse. It was only the hard line of the sternpost, silhouetted against the glow, that finally told him that it was real.
“Lights.” Trip glanced around at the others. “Something is glowing in the water.”
Ray seemed proud of the sight, as if he had personally conjured up the apparition for Trip’s benefit. “Gary saw it a few minutes ago, when he took over the night watch. We’re still trying to figure out what it is.”
“It’s too widespread to be artificial,” Ellis said. “It looks like a natural phenomenon. A luminescent microbe, perhaps—”
Trip was barely listening. In the absence of landmarks, it was hard to determine the distance of the light, which was faint and bluish green, but it seemed at least a mile away. It was neither constant nor uniform, but had patches of greater or lesser brightness, which flickered in a regular pattern. Initially, he thought that the twinkling was caused by the motion of the waves, but as they drew closer, he saw that the lights themselves were pulsing in unison. “It’s synchronized. Is that natural?”
“I don’t know,” Ray said. He grinned broadly. “That’s what we’re here to find out.”
Trip heard a note of hunger in the billionaire’s voice. For the past two years, he knew, the Lancet, under Ray’s funding and guidance, had been using the latest technology to sample the incredible genetic diversity of life in the ocean, with the unspoken goal of finding genes and microbes with commercial potential. So far, the voyage had been relatively uneventful, but if the glow in the distance turned out to be an unknown form of microscopic life, it could prove to be very lucrative indeed.
When Trip tried to ask Ray about this, though, he received only a grunt in response, which was not surprising. It was no secret that Ray was having second thoughts about the article that Trip was here to write. In the three days since his arrival, Trip had already noticed a number of conflicts simmering beneath the surface of the voyage, and Ray, as if sensing this, had been avoiding him. At this rate, Trip thought, his week aboard the Lancet would end without so much as an interview.
The sloop pressed onward, the foam breaking in tendrils across its prow. Trip stood between Ray and Ellis, caught in their unfriendly silence, as Gary removed wetsuits and cylinders from a scuba locker, securing glow sticks to the tanks with zip ties. Before long, the yacht was at the edge of the illuminated region, the light visible in the water against the hull. When Ray used the cockpit phone to tell Stavros to cut the engines, the vibration beneath the deck ceased at once.
As the yacht drifted freely, surrounded on all sides by the glow, Trip got a better look at the light. At close range, it resolved itself into countless discrete nodules of brightness, seemingly without heat, but unmistakably alive.
Ellis leaned over the wire railing that encircled the deck. “Ray, this is no microbe.”
“Let’s get a closer look, then,” Ray said. As Trip began taking pictures, the two older men suited up for the dive, then climbed over the railing. As they slid into the water, Trip briefly saw them outlined against the glow, which illuminated them from underneath like a magic lantern. Within seconds, they were gone.
Gary was standing beside him. “If you like, you could try the observation chamber.”
“Good idea,” Trip said, lowering his camera. The chamber was contained in a false nose at the forefront of the yacht, two meters below the waterline. Going over to the entry tube, which was bolted to the sternpost, Trip glanced back at Gary, who gave him a nod of encouragement, and climbed inside.
It was twenty feet down. When he reached the final rung, he found himself in a tiny room lined with a foam mattress, the ceiling too low to stand. It smelled of mildew and rust. He spread himself prone on the floor, his nose inches from the largest of five portholes, and looked out at the ocean.
It took him a while to understand what he was seeing. In the water outside, clusters of glowing particles were passing through the sea. There were dozens of such formations, some drifting at random, others bunching and splaying their radial arms to go sailing serenely past the windows.
Trip forgot about his camera, caught up in the strangeness of the sight. At first, he felt surrounded by otherworldly creatures, like something out of a dream. Only when one of the shapes drifted close by the nearest porthole, almost pressing itself against the glass, did he finally recognize it for what it was.
The sloop was surrounded by hundreds of octopuses. As his eyes grew used to the darkness, he saw that every octopus had two rows of luminous cells running along each of its eight arms. The light from each node, which was bluish green, was not strong, but taken together, they caused the water to be as brightly lit as a crowded highway on a winter’s night.
When fully extended, the octopuses were the size of bicycle wheels, their bodies pink, verging on coral. As Trip switched on his camera, gelatinous eyes peered through the water at his own face. He was about to snap a picture when he heard the clang of footsteps overhead. Someone was climbing down the ladder.
“Mind if I join you?” The voice took him by surprise. Turning, he saw a pair of feminine legs enter his field of vision. When the woman had descended all the way, he saw that it was Meg, the ship’s stewardess and deckhand.
“Not at all,” Trip said, unsure of how to react. Meg was trim but shapely, with short dark hair and a patrician nose. From the moment of their first meeting, she had struck him as the sort of young woman who is perfectly aware of the power that she possesses, as well as the fact that it will not last forever. Among other things, although t
he relationship was not openly acknowledged, everyone on the yacht knew that Meg spent most of her nights in Ray Wiley’s stateroom.
“I came to see what all the excitement was about,” Meg said, spreading herself across the mattress pad. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.” Trip turned back to the window. They lay side by side, not speaking, as the lights drifted past them in glowing bands. He gradually became aware that Meg’s leg was pressing pleasantly against his own.
A moment later, a diver appeared in the circle of sea disclosed by the largest porthole. It was Ray. As he passed the observation chamber, he turned toward the window, the beam of his flashlight slicing through the water. Through the mask, it was hard to see his face, but his eyes seemed fixed on theirs.
At his side, Trip felt Meg stiffen. Rolling onto her back, she took hold of the nearest rung and went up the ladder without a word. Trip did not move. He remained eye to eye with the diver on the other side of the window, the octopuses forgotten, until Ray finally turned and swam away.
The following morning, when Trip went on deck, he found Ray standing in the dive cockpit with Ellis and Gary. An awning had been erected over the aft deck, shielding it from the sun, but it was still hot enough for the men to strip down to shorts and sandals as they took a sample of seawater, a ritual performed once a day, every two hundred miles, as the Lancet circled the globe.
In the water around the yacht swam countless octopuses, their luminescence muted in the daylight. Ellis leaned over the railing. “What’s the line in Tennyson? Vast and unnumbered polypi—”
“Unnumbered and enormous polypi,” Trip said, glad to put his liberal education to some use. “Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 Page 95