by Неизвестный
At this juncture, the operator slaps Jay with a maddening forty-second hiatus, every second of it an awl pricking on his nerves.
96% probability. Sorry.
“Arrrrgh!” Jay lets out a primal shout as he bangs on the console. A kick sends his briefcase flying across the floor. Down here, where the sheer weight of all that water above him will show no mercy, his emotional tempest is only as significant as the last struggles of a see-through shrimp in the beak of a giant squid. It is unheard, unfelt, cut off from the rest of humanity with almost theological absoluteness.
Any last words Mr Peterson? For your loved ones?
The prostrate figure on the cold floor snickers to itself. The emergency operator’s absurdity hits breaking point when the next message drops very shortly after on the forehead of this despairing wreckage of a man.
Need someone to pray with? Got priests of every religion here. Well at least major faiths.
There is no way to know exactly how much sand is left in his hourglass. To passively wait for the ocean to squash him like a tomato is perhaps as agonizing as the actual coup de grâce. Quivering, Jay stands up. He takes a few steps back, wondering if he should just sprint ahead, crash through the window and reach for the constellations of glowing fishes in a final act of hot-blooded defiance against Destiny. Wondering, that is, until he begins to doubt the feasibility of this course of action, given that the glass is strong enough to withstand the water pressure outside. Naturally the next two questions to unfold before his inquisitive intellect are:
“How can this glass be so sturdy anyway? No, wait a minute ... How does the capsule itself hold up?”
He has been focusing too much on the gloom and doom, and giving too little thought to that which has kept him alive thus far. Jay flips the pages of his memory back to the moment when he first saw the Vertical Transport Capsule at the surface depot. Did it look like an old-fashioned bathysphere, a giant, jet-black crustacean of sorts seemingly carved out of a solid ball of unyielding titanium alloy?
No, it did not.
Instead it looked sleek and lithe, reminiscent of an aluminium soda can.
Jay can swear on a stack of Bibles, furthermore, that some seventy percent of the capsule’s elegant exterior was (and still is) in full contact with the seawater.
Instantly electrified by a streak of hope, Jay wipes the sweat off his eyelids. He knocks on the walls. CLONK. CLONK. CLONK.
The capsule’s metallic structure sounds hollow in many parts. If what the emergency operator asserted is true, it would follow that he should look like a cockroach in a rubbish compactor right now.
Jay proceeds to examine the capsule window up close. From a certain angle he can see that the glass consists of multiple layers. He vaguely remembers passages of required reading in science and technology from a long time ago – accounts of how Lek Soo Hock’s exciting breakthrough compelled bathyscaphe manufacturers to abandon steel-reinforced glass and switch to counter-implosion portholes. In such fixtures, the internal temperature of the glazing is strictly regulated by means of isothermal technology, which prevents steam condensation and ensures perfect visual clarity at all times.
There is one way to find out. Although isothermals can deal with sudden fluctuations in temperature, surely some signs are discernible if one is sharp enough.
Driven by this possibility, Jay turns to his briefcase, opens it, and pulls out a thermos. He hates to waste delicious lemon tea, but he needs ice. As he holds a handful of ice cubes against the centre of the window, he can see droplets of a lucid liquid forming briefly within one of the outermost laminas, and then disappearing without a trace.
It is no hallucination. There are spaces in the glass. More importantly, there is steam in them, circulating and carefully controlled.
By now Jay has become sufficiently composed to sit down and sip at his teeth-tingling tea. He takes time to ruminate over Lek Soo Hock’s unconventionality, the towkay epithet, the aide in a panda outfit, MACIPS Corporation’s years of winning international awards for its exceptional operational excellence, hints of gloating in the emergency operator’s messages, and even the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding timing of every stage of the calamity he is presently stuck in. It cannot be any clearer now that there is a description missing from the inscribed plaque facing him.
Lek Soo Hock, inventor, entrepreneur, philanthropist ... prankster.
A profound calm descends upon Jay Peterson, who feels as if he is a volunteer at an illusionist’s performance ... locked inside a coffin-like box, yet unequivocally certain that he will never truly be sawn in two. Smouldering with no small displeasure, he slouches over the keyboard in the aggravating dimness.
Nice try Mr Panda. Almost got me. Now may I please have lights back? Hate to be late for interview.
A full minute of Charilaus silence passes. As abruptly as they had first turned unstable, the in-capsule lights return to full strength, a veritable Orpheus out of Hades.
Grrrr.
Figured it out already? Standing ovation to you.
The text is signed: Towkay Lek.
A couple of heartbeats later, the console spits out an afterthought:
You are hired.
Ng Kum Hoon. Born in Singapore. Somniloquist, translator, bilingual (Chinese/English) writer and independent multidisciplinary researcher. Winner of two Golden Point Awards and five other literary awards/ prizes.
Captain Bells and the Sovereign State of Discordia
by J Y Yang
We had been watching him.
For a man of such strange temperament, he kept a disappointingly regular schedule. Mondays and Tuesdays were spent instructing children and young men in the way of the machine arts. Thursdays he spent at a coffee house playing Chinese checkers with whoever happened to be there. On Fridays he visited the godowns, conducting his own private affairs.
He was the captain of the splendid airship that lorded over the mouth of the river. Immense, intricate and incredibly luridly decked out, it was a marvel in both engineering magnificence and impressively bad taste.
It was also, according to its captain, an independent country counting all four of its crew members as citizens, a nation-state entity with its own jurisdiction and its own constitution, answerable to no laws except its own. He had christened it the S.S. Discordia – the Sovereign State of Discordia.
This, as you can imagine, was problematic for our employer, Lord Louis IV, servant of the Royal Empire of Albion and Lord Overseer – as the title went – to the Malayan Colonies.
Naturally, as any sensible royal would have done, Lord Louis called upon the services of my partner and me. Our first meeting was by the docks. Market stalls clustered around the upper port like lichen patches on a branch, marinating in air heavy with salt and spice and the dusty smell of beans and lentils (five cents a kilo, eighteen for four). I sauntered through the heat and noise in the shade of my parasol, dressed to suit the pretence that I was a lady of some noble birth. I found my quarry – ludicrous in his ever-present goggles, striped breeches and oversized frock coat, perched on a stool beside a shop selling brass food heating dragons and other cunning mechanical devices for the kitchen – trying to find chords to a bawdry coolie’s song on his sopranitimo ukelele.
“Is it not excessively hot to be wearing a frock coat?” I asked, by way of starting a conversation.
“Miserably! I would dress like you do, my lady, but then I’d have no place to put William.” To demonstrate, he held his tiny instrument aloft, then slipped it into an inside pocket of his coat where it was well hidden under the bulk of the garment.
“Do you see?” He retrieved the instrument from the pocket and strummed it, as if to prove that it still worked.
I suppressed a genuine laugh, for the ukulele was the most unexpected instrument I had seen in a long time.
He had flipped up the lenses on his goggles, and porcelain-blue were eyes squinting at me.
“I presume that you are the hunter Lord Louis has
sent after me, yes?”
I drew myself straighter at the challenge, wondering at the curiosity that had surfaced in his expression, sudden and lucid.
“And what if I am?”
“Then I should formally introduce myself!” He leapt to his feet. “I am Captain Godfrey Francis Wolfram Bellamy, President and Prime Minister of the Sovereign State of Discordia. You may call me Captain Bells, for short.” He bowed, deep and ridiculous, his outstretched arm holding the teacup ukulele aloft. Still bent over at the waist, he looked up at me and asked, “To whom do I owe the pleasure?”
“You may call me Lady Admira,” I told him, adopting a title I had no right to.
He took my proffered hand and kissed it. “My pleasure, Lady Admira.”
I knew then, by some quirk of instinct, that the task that had been set for my partner and me was no ordinary one. There was some kind of slyness, a playful craftiness to his manner that intrigued me. I was sure he had some as-yet-undefined agenda.
Over the next two days we had several more cautious encounters, like dogs sizing each other up before battle. Despite the strangeness of my situation I found it rather refreshing to be dealing with my target in this fashion: straightforward, without the false pleasantries that I had become used to through my dealings with the native sons of Albion. And he had a friendly, albeit eccentric demeanour for his part. I was learning more than I could by just following him.
Ying, my partner, was not so enamoured of my methods. “We are wasting time on this simple task,” she said one evening, flicking her hair over her shoulder as we spied on the Discordia from the window of our shophouse. “Our instructions were to eliminate him. Why could you not have simply done that? A well-placed stroke of your short staff would settle it.”
It was an unusual thing for her to say, as she was famously reluctant to harm our targets unless absolutely necessary, and I said as much.
“Not as unusual as your reluctance to complete the job,” she responded tartly. “Was it not you who said the quicker the Empire’s dirty tasks are dispensed with the less trouble there will be? Yet this assignment drags on. One might even think you are enjoying it.”
“My interest in this case is purely professional,” I insisted. I did not want to accuse her of jealousy. It seemed such a petty thing to do.
*
The incident happened on a Friday afternoon, no more than a few weeks after we had become acquainted.
The captain and I met, as had become our custom, at the docks where he usually practised his ukulele in the heat of the midday sun. Ying, with all her misgivings, made sure to tail behind us.
When Bells caught sight of me he tucked the instrument into his coat and stood up, his cheeky grin as pronounced as ever.
“Ah, my lady. Today I go to visit Uncle Lee in his godown, to see what new marvel he has invented over the week. I think you will find it to your liking.”
He skipped off without warning, leaving me to catch up with his schoolboyish gait. I imagined that I could feel Ying’s presence somewhere behind us, hear her graceful deer-like footfall.
Uncle Lee’s godown, as it turned out, was further down the dock, a whitewashed building full of heat and noise and the smell of throat-burningly sour substance. The interior had been restructured to house four giant machines, each twice as tall as a man and blackened through industry, their great wheels, churning at full speed, their functions mysterious. I let Bells lead me through the great room to a small wooden door.
He retrieved two pairs of gloves and boots made of rubber from a cabinet.
“These are for safety’s sake,” he explained. “The air inside picks up stray electrical charges quite easily. We wouldn’t want you to get shocked, would we?”
I put them on with some misgiving – the thick material made me feel hampered, clumsy.
“And you’ll have to leave your short staff and ring here.” This earned him a fierce look, yet he was adamant. “Uncle Lee’s equipment is sensitive. You could cause an explosion.”
Now half convinced he was leading me into a trap, I put aside the weapons which never left me, save for baths and when I was asleep. But I kept with me the vial of nerve poison hidden in its cleverly constructed pouch, well prepared if there were to be trouble.
“This had better be worth my time,” I told him.
“I think it will.” And he pushed the door open.
Beyond was another room – not as high but just as large as the previous. It was stuffed to the brim with workbenches, cabinets, filing shelves, stacks of equipment and papers pasted everywhere. A scientist’s workroom, it seemed. At the far end sat an old man wearing rubber gloves, a massive pair of goggles and a coolie’s singlet. He did not look up when we approached. Presumably this was Uncle Lee busy working on soldering something. The familiarity of that smell and the light’s peculiar quality stirred memories that I had tried, for many years, to suppress. I shuddered.
When he was done the old man held up a single piece of neatly fused copper tubing, the joint blackened by heat. Apparently satisfied with his work, he put the tubing aside and turned his attention to Bells.
Without warning Bells burst into a staccato spate of a Fujian dialect. He retrieved a small metallic object from the depths of his coat and showed it to Uncle Lee, who muttered something and started rummaging in a drawer of his desk. I knew just enough of the language to follow the conversation: the engine part from Bells’ ship was worn out and he needed a new one.
Uncle Lee passed Bells a fresh metallic object and Bells held it up to inspect it, clearly pleased.
“Who is that?” Uncle Lee asked, gesturing at me.
“My friend,” Bells explained. “She wants to see the, uh ...” His limited grasp of the language failed him then and he pointed to a large cabinet to our left. “That.” Uncle Lee looked at the cabinet then back at me. “Is she with the Empire?”
“Of course not,” he said at once. More interesting than his ease at dissembling was the question of why he would choose to lie. Most curious, I thought.
Still the old man, apparently satisfied with this answer, nodded.
The inside of the cabinet revealed a device of a design that I had never seen before. It was a large brass box decorated with no less than nine Chinese dragons and a set of depressible keys, each engraved with a different letter of the alphabet. Uncle Lee plugged a plate coated with some sort of matte material into a slot in the side of the device.
“Hit something,” he said to me, pointing to the keys.
Very cautiously, I tapped out with gloved fingers: The nights of Constantinopole ... With every letter I could hear gears moving on the inside of the box. A transmissible-code device, perhaps?
Uncle Lee pulled a lever next to the set of keys and the device made a long, whining mechanical noise. He pulled out the plate from the slot and showed it to me. The matte surface looked blank – this was no punch-machine, then.
Uncle Lee put the unmarked plate into another slot – this one lower than the first – and depressed an ornate red button. Something clanked inside – tchak! tchak! – and the device spat out a narrow spool of paper. Uncle Lee tore it off and handed it to me.
“‘The nights of Constantinople’,” I read aloud. The plate had remembered my words but not mechanically. I guessed that the device used a chemical or magnetic medium, much like the oracle machines that studied numbers and told the future, and whose existence was considered one of the Empire’s most deeply hidden secrets.
Uncle Lee put the plate back into the first slot. “Hit something again,” he instructed.
I tapped out "are cold and lonely," because I did not know what else I wanted to say.
Uncle Lee repeated the process, taking the plate out, putting it into the printing slot and pressing the red button. The device whirred, spoke and spat out another piece of paper. the nights of Constantinople are cold and lonely.
I gave Bells a dangerous look. “This is a transmissible-code device,” I said, in
English. Even this was a lie, for the machine was more than a simple transmissible-code device – in function it was frightfully similar to the great machines whose existence was so jealously guarded by the Empire. Incorporate it with an abacus shelf and it could rival an oracle machine. “This is illegal.”
Bells flipped up the lenses of his goggles. “Then this will be our little secret.” He winked at me, and it was a wink both devilish and elegant.
There was a clatter of activity at the door and two children came running in – a boy and a girl, no more than a few years apart. Their arms full of the matte recording plates.
“Ye-ye,” the boy exclaimed then exploded into a litany of complaints about his sister and how she was ordering him around when they went to get the materials.
“Did you get all the plates?” Uncle Lee asked. His tone was sharp, but his eyes were full of fondness as he looked upon his grandchildren.
“We did,” said the boy. The children unloaded their burdens onto the worktable.
The girl gave me a glance. She was, as the elder of the two, perhaps eleven or twelve, on the cusp of womanhood. From the bright curiosity in her eyes I could see her privately forming questions about me.
“Come, my lady,” Bells said, gently taking me by the elbow – a liberty that would have earned him a broken nose under other circumstances. “The Lees are a very busy family.”
I let him guide me outside.
When we were back in the sunlight I disengaged myself from his grasp. “You should not have shown me this.”
He tilted his head. “Did you not like it? Was it not marvellous?”
That was hardly the point. “Did you teach them to build the transmissible-code machine?”
He seemed almost offended by the implication.
“Of course not! The Lees have been inventors and innovators for many generations. I myself did not know how to build a transmissible-code machine. They had to teach me.”