This was nonsense. I will not, Juan thought, listen to a flea.
(But who else will ever tell you the truth?)
The speech ended, and all cheered. Then they were discharged.
Juan was among the first belowdecks. The steel steps rang underfoot and filled the passageway with echoes. He ran to his post by the shell-racks and waited.
Hours passed.
The great motors started up and filled the ship with their world-shaking throb. Then they died down into silence again. Time passed. They started again, died again, started again. The ship was moving. The gunners put on their headsets and bent over their guns, making fine adjustments. But again, nothing happened.
Sometime much later, Juan found himself wondering when the battle would finally begin. Nothing could be worse than the waiting for it.
(Why, this is it, darling child, this is it!) cried the flea. (There are three stages to a battle: First you're bored. Then you're terrified. Then you're dead. Each is necessary, and they must all come in the proper order.)
"Stop digging in your ear," the Dutchman grumbled. "It is very annoying to look at."
(Don't mind him!) sang the flea. (His hemorrhoids are in bloom.)
Alarms sounded. Again, the gunners bent over their guns. Again, nothing happened.
"Little flea," Juan whispered, quietly so nobody would overhear, "what is going on?"
(I'll tell you) said the tiny voice. (The mighty crescent of the Armada continues steaming steadily northward. Ahead, blocking the Channel, is an array of English ships. They are outnumbered. Numerous though they are, they seem pathetically small and few by contrast with the Spanish forces.)
Good, Juan thought.
More alarms rang. Several seamen raced through the gunroom, were cursed at angrily, and were gone. There was a change in the sound and tempo of the engines. Outside, enormous noises, one after another. Whumph. Whumph. Whumph. Explosions.
The ship had changed course.
"Flea!" Juan whispered urgently.
(The left flank of the crescent has swept into a minefield only the English knew was there. Three ironclads have gone up in flames. They list and careen, no longer under rational control—two of the captains are dead and the third gone mad. I defy anyone to tell which is the piloted ship. All up and down the crescent, the ironclads are breaking formation to avoid the mines and the burning warships. The confusion spreads. Now ships are veering to evade the veering ships. Oh, I wish I could show you the mathematics for this! Such splendid catastrophic geometries! Such flowers of fractal disarray!)
It was still quiet in the gun-room. "When are we going to shoot some Englishmen?" a gunnerboy asked. "Shut your mouth!" his gunner snapped back.
(Now this is lovely! Smoke sprouts from the English ships. But unlike the smoke of honest cannons, which appears in white puffs like cotton, these fly up in a steep arc, unnaturally fast, scratching thin white lines into the sky.)
The gunners were leaning into their headsets again, asking questions of the spotters, casting puzzled looks at one another. One raised his hand in a high arc and brought it down again, as steeply. Chuckles went up and down the line.
"What is it?" Juan asked, aware that he was only one of many demanding the same knowledge of their masters.
"The English," said the Dutchman, face red with merriment, "fire off their guns very high, almost straight up. You know ballistics, boy? No, of course not. Up high fast means back down fast." He made the same hand-gesture his brother up the line had, like a leaping porpoise. "It means no distance. They shoot off their guns and they don't hit us."
A screaming filled the air.
They hadn't even fired their first cannonade.
That much Juan was sure of, and nothing more. All he knew was that one moment he stood by the cannon, ready to snatch a shell from the racks on the bulkhead, and the next he lay bleeding on the deck. There was smoke everywhere. It was difficult to see, there was so much. And flames.
What happened, he tried to say. But he could not hear his own voice. His ears rang as if all the world were a bell and his head had been used for the clapper. Dimly, he could make out a dull rhythmical pounding underfoot. A horrible scorched smell filled his nose. Looking up, he saw blue sky where none should be. The iron decks of the Cor Mariae had been torn open by some great explosion. Which explained why there was so much twisted metal about, so many mangled machines.
So many corpses.
Little flea, Juan thought, tell me what happened. The flea did not answer. But out of the chaos of noise and reverberation, clear as nothing else was, came a familiar, hateful voice. "No, no, no, sweet idiot, don't seek for me within yourself— war is strictly an external phenomenon!"
He turned his head toward the voice.
The Scourge of Humanity sat straddling a gun that had survived intact, shrieking and giggling and kicking his feet. "Yes!" he cried. "Oh, my dear fellow! You should have seen, you should simply have seen it! The English rockets rained down upon the fleet long before it got within cannon range. They fell and missed and fell and missed and fell and missed, as profligate as rain. But their numbers were so great they could not always miss, and where they hit, they exploded— magnificent explosions!—leaving great jagged holes in the ironclads and strewing the ocean surface with corpses. Now the English have come in range and are bombarding the disabled ships."
"But we are defenseless," Juan objected. Something exploded far away within the ship, and the deck tilted wildly. Briefly the pounding ceased. Then it began again, louder than before. "Why bombard us? It makes no sense."
"It makes manifest sense. It is not enough merely to kill the enemy," the Father of Filth explained. "They must first be stripped of any slightest pretense to either dignity or decency.
Before they die, they must be made to perform the unspeakable. Only then, when they have relinquished all claim to humanity, are you truly victorious. For then you have proved beyond question your own moral superiority."
"I must get up," Juan said. There was a weight upon his legs. It was the Dutchman's corpse. Revolted, he pushed it off. He found he could—dizzily, weakly—stand. Astern, the gun-deck slanted into darkness. He thought he could hear water. Forward, the bulkheads had collapsed, so that there was no passage. The upper gun-deck had collapsed into the lower; the blue-skied hole was far out of reach.
His head was beginning to clear now, and with thought came fear. The Cor Mariae was foundering. Soon it would sink. He must make his way to the lifeboats if he wanted to survive.
The pounding continued.
"The only way out is up," the Cloven-Hoofed One said. "But it's too high to jump, you can't scale the walls, and there's no ladder. Do you have the ingenuity to escape? Let's find out! Consider it a test of your native intelligence."
The gun on which the Son of Cruelty sat rose high enough that a man standing atop it, arms extended, could just reach the deck beams. But it was nowhere near the hole, and it weighed far too much to be moved. There was a tool-chest nearby, which he might be able to stand on end. Juan flung open the lid and desperately began to empty it.
"Oh, marvelous! Marvelous! Let all Creation assemble and bow down before the philosopher-ape, the physical embodiment of pure reason and tool-using pinnacle of evolution." Juan turned toward the Angel of Despite. "Fool! Observe the deck."
Juan looked and saw how tilted it was. Even if he could slide the chest up beneath the hole, it would only slide back down again.
Stop, he told himself. Think. What is there at hand that I can use as a tool? He craned about and saw—there!—a coil of rope. And over by the Dutchman was the long-poled swab used to clean the bore between firings. He snatched them both up from the rubble. Now he had it!
(If only that damned pounding would cease!)
He tied one end of the rope about the center of the swab. Then he threw it like a javelin out the hole and onto the deck. The rope played out easily.
When the swab came to rest, he began to slow
ly pull it back. "Catch, you bastard," he muttered.
But it slid easily and without impediment up the sloping deck and over the edge of the hole. He jumped back as it clattered down, to avoid being struck.
He threw it a second time.
Again it did not catch. Again it fell.
His tormentor hooted with laughter. "You lose, you lose, you lose! Dear friend, you are simply too stupid to live!"
Juan took a deep, angry breath, and then caught himself. He was an idiot. He'd been throwing the pole downslope, along the deck. But if he simply turned and flung it over the side, there was an excellent chance his javelin would hook upon the rail.
He shifted position and aimed.
He was about to throw when the pounding underfoot reached a crescendo and a hatch flew open in the deck not twenty feet astern.
Men poured out of the hatchway like damned souls escaping from Hell. Black smoke gushed out with them and filled the gun-deck, making Juan choke and gag. Then the sailors reached him and with fists and rough hands cuffed and shoved him aside. "Wait!" he cried. "I've—"
But they had been through too much and were now too panicked to listen. In a frenzy of fear, the sailors knocked the rope from his hands, snapped the swab, ripped his shirt half off him. They stretched longing arms toward the hole in the deck above. They leaped, though it was patently impossible to jump so high. They clambered up on top of each other, every man trying to scale the others' bodies into daylight.
All in a panic, Juan fought to keep his feet. If he were to fall, he would be trampled to death. There were so many of them! He was spun around, and saw flames shoot up through the hatchway. There would be no more sailors escaping the lower decks now.
The flames licked against a toppled rack of shells. Juan caught his breath in terror.
"Oh, don't be a weakling—join the fray!" the Great Adversary jeered. "Claw your way to freedom! If the shells go up, how many will survive—one? Fight! Perhaps that one will be you!"
Too fearful even to hate himself, Juan found that he had charged into the crush of sailors and was shoving his rivals aside, as mindless as any of them, struggling to climb the bodies of the men before him.
He climbed, and wrestled, and fought with a dreamlike sense of inevitability. The bodies stank of scorched flesh and human fear. He breathed deep of that stench and it filled him with dread and strength and made him impervious to pain. He lost himself in animal terror and scrabbling hands. A fist hit his eye. An elbow smashed him in the face. He lost a tooth. A finger snapped. His mouth filled with blood. And in the middle of this nightmarish struggle he experienced a fleeting instant's clarity and he thought: This must be what eternal damnation is like. Here and now extended forever and without end.
In that same instant he placed a foot upon a sailor's shoulder and the man's arm came twisting around to throw him off and he saw high up on the dark and blistered biceps a pink scar in the shape of a sparrowhawk.
As if by lightning-flash, he stared unbelieving into Gavi-lan's wild and unrecognizing eyes, as terrified as those of the horses now surely dying in the forward hold. Then a surge of blind panic lifted him up and he put all his weight onto the foot and rose into the air, stepping on first his friend's shoulder and then upon his face. Miraculously, he climbed to the top of the writhing heap.
Juan stretched out his arm as high as it would go, toward the jagged deck-edge.
Then the ship lurched again. Black waters came roaring up the gun-deck from below, fast as a locomotive. He felt the human pyramid beneath him totter and sway. It was collapsing! They would none of them be saved! They would all die!
A hand reached down from above to seize his wrist, and he was hauled free.
Sobbing with relief, Juan let himself be lifted up. Below him he heard the waters slam over the sailors, and their wailing cries of horror as they were crushed, broken, swept away. Dangling within that sure grip, he found himself laughing with hysterical relief. He looked up gratefully at his savior.
The Evil One smiled down on him.
Effortlessly, he held Juan over the churning waters and the drowning sailors below.
"It's been so much fun, old man. But now I'm afraid it's over. Here is your third and final lesson: History is simply life with all the bits any sane person might care to experience left out."
"Why?" Juan asked, weeping in despair. "Why must I die? What have I done that I must suffer so?"
"Done? Why should you have to do anything in order to suffer? A friend of mine wanted to understand history," the Unholy Goat said. "Your suffering was all to satisfy his curiosity, nothing more. Now it's over. I've put on my little puppet-show, and it's time I withdrew my hand from your bung-hole. But first... Can I tell you a secret?" He placed his lips next to Juan's ear, and whispered, "You don't exist. You never did."
He let Juan fall.
Juan hit the iron-cold water as hard as if it had been granite. With humiliation, he realized that all that the Opponent had said was true. Even as he thrashed and struggled for life, he felt his identity—his being—his self—slipping away.
He choked, panicked, and in a flurry of bubbles and despair was again Faust.
It was daylight—a new day.
He staggered from the room, bloodless and drawn. He was not sure how much time had passed. One day? Four? Anxious faces turned up toward him from every desk and cubicle.
"It is over," he said. "England is victorious."
In that instant the telegraph began to chatter. The operator tore off his headset and flung it high into the air. "Victory!" he screamed.
Everywhere the staff was cheering.
Lambart Jenkins seized the man nearest him, and crushed Wagner in a hug. Then he climbed atop his desk and shouted at the top of his lungs, "Huzzah for England! Huzzah for Sandwich! Huzzah for Foster!"
But Faust was already out the door.
So haggard was he, and so poorly dressed, that he was not recognized. He watched, unmolested, as the great news spread through the capital. The factories emptied out into the streets. Constellations of bonfires were built upon every hilltop and commons, wherever there was space for them. Troops of boys ran with flaming faggots down every street. Stilt-walkers strode through the crowds. Women exposed their breasts. Impromptu processions with bearded men dressed in black standing atop wagons and waving slide rules, impersonated him with widely varying degrees of success.
Faust was now the most popular man in London.
The thought disgusted him.
* * *
THE ABORTION
Gretchen sat in an empty room. Dust motes swirled about her in the cool light that bounced from the whitewashed walls.
Silence filled her.
After a time, she lit a cigarette.
Father's health was failing. Mother had lost so much of herself in tending to his decline that, in her letters, she no longer even attempted to disguise the empty sense of despair she felt. So much of her life was bound up in her husband that she could see no point to an existence that did not include his presence. When Gretchen was a child, her mother had often told her a stoty about an ogre who could not be killed because he had hidden his heart inside an egg at the center of an old oak tree, and who died when the tree was struck by lightning. Father was the oak in which her mother's heart was kept. She might not live beyond his collapse. Even if she did, it was certain she would never again play an active role in the business.
When Father died, as he someday must, everything Gretchen had built would come crashing in on her. She had taken care to complicate the legal situation as much as possible, but on one point the law was explicit: If she didn't have a male guardian overseeing her, the courts would have to appoint one.
Wulf was the most likely candidate.
Not that he had the character needed to run Reinhardt Industries. He had not even had the courage to confront Gretchen in person when he attempted to blackmail her. He had simply placed the photos in an envelope and left it on her desk for
her to discover. Gretchen had felt no compunction whatever at having him beaten and his house burned down to ensure the negatives were destroyed.
Nor had he the brains. She had come to his bedside with flowers and soup which she told him had been made with her own hands. (It was a white lie; Abelard had made it, of course.) Then she sat by him and reminisced about their childhoods together, laughing at the funny parts, holding his hand when remembering those who had died. Wolfchen, she had called him then, little wolf, the same as when they were young. By the time she left, he was baffled as to whether he was in the hospital by her doing or not.
A man that simple would be a disaster trying to run a major corporation.
But for all his flaws, Gretchen would not fire him. With the slow dwindling of her family, she had come more and more to cherish what fragments of it remained. Anyway, better the wolf in the fold than lurking outside in the dark. She liked having him where she could keep an eye on him. She liked being able to appoint his secretarial staff. If only every threat to her could be so easily handled!
The world was full of intangible enemies.
Even Aunt Penniger, silly and foolish woman that she was, sensed this new darkness. Just last Sunday, at dinner, she had said, "Have you noticed how everyone holds the same opinions nowadays? It's as if they're all afraid to disagree. Do they think that if they stand out, something will happen to them? I suppose they must."
"I imagine," Gretchen said, "it's these new notions that are about. Anarchy and labor-unionism—whoever heard of such things? Nobody is satisfied with his station anymore and those who are in consequence insist on holding on to what they've got with both hands. No wonder there's unrest."
Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick Page 22