"We all share that blame, Majesty. As Seaguard commander, I was just as guilty for choosing not to see Cerdic's crime."
"He was our Merking. Realistically, there was nothing any of us could have done to stop him."
That's no excuse Lasbow inwardly decried, enraged that a single Cetari could wield an extraordinary amount of abusive power with impunity. There was simply no avenue open to bring a wayward monarch to justice. Accountability ought to apply to all citizenry he annotated. Rank should not shield lawbreaking.
Getting back to the subject at hand, Lasbow spared Minoh and himself further self-recrimination. Lorea was dead. Cerdic too. Death closed that case permanently, but could not erase the emotional wounds scarring the shamed bystanders. “I'm thinking even though you weren't privy to where that object was found, you can make an educated guess."
Fixing her gaze upon her daughter's betrothed, an honourable merman in the same mould as her beloved Anwhorl, possessed of courage and foresight befitting a king, she insinuated, “You can answer that for yourself just as capably, if you but think on it. Your heart holds the truth."
Confounded and impressed by her cryptic reply, a pang of shame sullied Lasbow. “Forgive me, Minoh. I always took you for an airhead."
"I live up to the public perception of how a Merqueen should act; ditsy and lovingly supportive of her abler husband."
"Ahlegra said something similar to me about fulfilling the role required of a royal."
"She's right. Dig a little under the sand and you'll find the real merwoman."
"A pearl tucked away in an oyster, much the same as she."
"Ahlegra's more her father's daughter, sharing the same quiet strength he exuded,” Minoh contended.
Remembering that himself, Lasbow nodded agreeably. When a suggestible cadet of the elitist Seaguard ambitiously working his way up through the ranks, the coveted captaincy firmly in his sights, he sought to emulate King Anwhorl's moral immutableness, an integrity solider than the quaking seafloor.
"I only wish Lorea hadn't inherited the streak of rashness which swims in Anwhorl's side of the family. Skipping a generation, it jumped from Anwhorl's father to his firstborn grandchild. Normally affecting just the mermale members, my eldest mergirl was the unlucky exception to that rule."
Which explained Lorea's impetuosity at dragging her guardian along into Lunder lagoon, serving as a reminder that royals especially needed to exercise restraint.
His thoughts returning from the past to the future, in the turmoil of his mind he sorted through the dangerous possibilities tomorrow's dive raised: giant squid, megasharks, unfamiliar currents, the crushing blackness, and the anaesthetising cold. Those risks estimated and recognisable could either be surmounted or avoided. It was the unknowable that presented difficulties and potential crises. Priding himself on his prudence and not one for playing things by ear, Lasbow resigned himself to diving in the dark tomorrow. Surprises were chancy occurrences often double edged and, when sprung by exotics, had a habit of turning out nasty. What disconcerted him most was not just locating Atlantis, but finding whatever creatures from the dark and unfathomable past haunted the undersea ruins.
Movement flickering on the periphery of his vision hauled Lasbow's concentration back to the present. Turning to investigate, his disbelieving eyes tracked what could only be an impossibility, watching as a ghostly presence, silvered by the moonshine bathing the shallows, slid ethereally out of the shadowed deep.
The great whale swam a leisurely zigzag course, displaying its unashamed magnificence to maximum effect, every unhurried turn angling it closer toward the stunned Merking, ignorant that its existence defied rationalisation. Extinction has the tendency to permanently extinguish the light of a species, so how could this beast blaze with such vigour?
Schooling in the oral legends peculiar to merfolklore granted Lasbow the power to instantly identify the leviathan wanderer despite never having clapped eyes on a majesty that had not graced the voluminous oceans for six centuries. Cetari song fleshed their whalebone implements, fashioned from the industrial strength bone framework which once supported the hugely muscled, yet superbly streamlined, bodies of the largest mammals that ever roamed the liquid face of the planet, the melodic scriptures giving form and substance to what otherwise was unimaginable myth. Those mermanmade compositions unwittingly reflected the vanished whale-song, preserving the spirit of the evocative tunes that ages ago fascinated baffled marine biologists unable to decipher the resonating calls before the global seas emptied of the profound giants.
Not trusting his sight, the Merking glanced at the sentries, and his confusion deepened. The Seaguard floated on station, alert but not alarmed or even reacting in the slightest. Were his mermen blind? Could they not see the whale of a cetacean looming not fifty yards away? Or was he alone in seeing a phantom from the past?
Firing a burst of discriminating sonar at the approaching behemoth only worsened his puzzlement, the returning echoes proof that the astoundingly massive animal was not an insubstantial spectre as it plainly should be, but unbelievably a conglomeration of blood, flesh, and bone.
This cannot be!
Heart racing, adrenergic fear pulsing through his veins and arteries faster than the rushing blood, time froze him in place, solidifying this block of sea without the saltwater actually icing over. Forgoing its meandering course, the whale came straight for the immobile regent head-on and slowed to a dead stop close enough for Lasbow to reach out and touch its knobbly snout had his numbed arms been able to move.
The humpback hung suspended before him like a tethered blimp, though he could not put a name to which whale species had incredibly dropped in from the past to pay him a visit. The Sacred Songline Scriptures did not bother to distinguish between the varying baleen whales, conveniently, albeit wrongly, lumping them under a generic heading where one description fit all: rakishly elongated snout, from which more than a dozen throat grooves streaked away underside up the belly; a cavernous mouth lined with the baleen plates that sieved the seawater for krill and gave the rorquals their common name; and a dorsal fin slung low on the tail end of the upper back. Only the mighty cachalot rated in-depth definition, the Cetari feeling an affiliation for the deepest mammalian diver, connected to the vanished sperm whale by incomprehensible threads of kindred spirituality.
If the sperms had been behaviourally akin to the diving merfolk, humpbacks were vocally their echoes. Songsters of the seas, the melodious squeaks and moans from the choral males had been strung together in half-hour long mantras which sighed through the breeding grounds and along ocean-spanning migration routes, swaying hypnotically with the currents and swells. Songs changed annually, their structured complexity intact, the nuances altered subtly yet perceptibly to the listeners.
But this ghostlike humpback hovered in silence, the stillness deadening the blackish water.
At odds with what his senses were relaying to his brain, his mind insisting that the whale must be spectral in spite of the contradictory sonar readings, only Lasbow's Seaguard training kept his rising fear in check. Unable to tear his owlish gaze away from the fleshy ghoul, he was flooded with a battery of questions. Why had this manifestation elected to reveal itself only to him? Was it due to his position as Merking? If so, to what stimuli was it responding?
There came an appreciable shift in Lasbow's perception as understanding dropped into place with the certainty of an anchor thrown overboard. Mistaking the whale's whiteness for wraithlike luminosity from the outset was a forgivable error on his part in light of the context of the encounter. First impressions, false ones included, counted for much. Once the initial shock started to subside, allowing him to collect his scattered thoughts, he realised with horror, seeing the redness shading the whale's plate-sized eyeball as it manoeuvred side-on to inspect him, that the cetacean was not merely white in colouration, but in actuality an albino!
The dread white whale appears before me!
A crushing wave of alo
neness washed over Lasbow, swamping his dreams, drowning his aspirations. He understood completely now, foolishly wanting a return to ignorance. Confronted by his own mortality, left high and dry like driftwood stranded on the high tide mark, he gamely brushed his shaking hand along the enormous flank of the unearthly animal, his touch meeting the resisting firmness of blubbery flesh. The next instant the humpback shimmered like a reflection in water rippled by the wind and faded from sight, its otherworldly transparency quickly lost against the backdrop of moonlit water, Lasbow's fragile hopes vanishing along with it.
Abruptly aware that the nearby sentries were witness to his oddball behaviour, Lasbow dropped his exploratory hand, empty of desire, and gawped helplessly seawards. Terror had taken hold of his rapidly beating heart, stifling optimism, suffocating wants and needs. Said to appear, only under extraordinary circumstances, to a merperson fated to die, the white whale was the harbinger of wrack and ruin.
And Death had singled out the new Merking for its next collection.
Chapter Twenty One
With the Merfolk safely sedated, the robot unplugged itself from the mainframe. Privacy was unimportant now.
Rotating his armed and legged body to align with the direction his head faced, Abe commanded the sentient computer administrating all systems operating Ice Station. “Reinitiate dialogue program."
The cybernate's compliance actually sounded petulant. “Initialised. Communicating verbally is so inefficient. Digitised data exchange is more effectual."
Abe threw up his mechanical hands in disgust and stalked away from the continually running databanks, the ceaseless drone unnoticeable background noise after untold centuries of usage. “I give the orders, Dog, you obey them. That's the core of your programming. Always has been, always will be. So why bother bitching about it?"
"Efficiency increases productivity."
"Maybe so, only it also makes for a boringly predictable existence,” argued the manbot. “One of these centuries I'll actually succeed in teaching you the meaning of having fun, of doing something out of a sense of enjoyment and not because it's what you're programmed for."
"Pleasure is a human concept."
"Granted, but one germane to even a computerised sentience."
"I am a machine. I function."
Pacing the rim of the holding tank, hands clasped behind his back in the classic pose of contemplation, the manbot glanced occasionally down at the slumbering Cetari while discoursing. “Can't fault your logic there, basic as it is. However, there is a case in point I'd draw your attention to ... our weekly holo-chess game. Do you play me because you want to or have to?"
"It is a scheduled regularity."
"That's precisely the response I expected. I'll rephrase my question. On those rare instances when I actually win a game, does my triumph bother you?"
"It is a statistical improbability that warrants running self-diagnostic software to detect and repair the fault in my gaming subroutine which permits your temporary supremacy."
Abe wished he could have smiled. “So you prefer winning then, do you Dog?"
"My computing power surpasses your computational abilities by an inestimable degree. It is illogical that I lose."
Halting, Abe folded his chromed arms, the camera-eye locked provocatively on the lozenge-shaped sensor node overhead. “A fact you can't tolerate, proving my theory that even the most dispassionate sentience becomes emotive when stressed.” Strained silence followed. Pleased at outsmarting Dog, the manbot construed the mainframe's ensuing reticence as sulking.
"You reason irrationally for a machine, Abe Norton."
The manbot turned sharply away from Dog's observation. “You're wrong on that score. Unlike you, I'm not a soulless ball of circuitry. Just a man who gave up his humanity."
Walking off his melancholy around the pool did nothing to ease Abe Norton's anguish. Every day of his sleepless existence in this iced crypt reminded him of the ultimate sacrifice he rashly volunteered to make.
—
Uncounted lifetimes ago, back when the ballooning population of Planet Earth finally levelled off at the plateau of thirteen billion souls in the mid twenty first century, Abe Norton existed as a being of flesh and blood that lived and loved, cried and died.
Well, that's not entirely true. Technically he cheated death, escaping the creeping termination fated to close the 200,000-year chapter on modern human existence. Mankind's sad end came not in the blazing radioactive inferno of a nuclear holocaust nor from the earth shuddering impact of a mammoth asteroidal strike. The human breed instead exited from earth's annals with an ignominious whimper, not a glorifying bang. What was this mighty leveller of arguably the most successful, and deadliest, mammal on the face of the heavily polluted and grossly overpopulated planet?
A clock. Nothing more than a simple clock.
Mass extinctions are hardly news in the fossil record. Roughly every twenty five million years or so, Mother Nature brings out her broom and makes a clean sweep of her planetary house. These recurring obliterations often take the form of cataclysms triggered by climatic upsets. Which only goes to show that evolution moves apace in fits and starts on a cyclic basis.
The backbone of natural selection is survival of the fittest; that steady crawl of organisms continually mutating to adapt to changing environments. The ultimate outcome of this laborious process is the emergence of whole new species. Think of it as an unhurried tortoise plodding slowly along to arrive at journey's end a completely new and improved model. But then the racier hare overtakes the shelled slowpoke.
Such was the demise that befell the dinosaurs. Unassailably successful in evolutionary terms, the larger-than-life reptiles reigned supreme for 150 million years, until a bolt from out of the blue abruptly flattened their tenure. That crashing space rock seriously disrupted weather globally, becoming the catalyst ushering in the eventual mammalian takeover two million years later.
Behind the scenes, before the impact, the picture was far from rosy. Already a long way down the road towards vanishing point, the unknowing dinosaurs were falling victim to a ticking time bomb even without the asteroid hurrying things along. On average, the lifespan of a species peaks at five million years, so the diverse reptiles were considerably overdue for calling it quits.
Every genus of multi-celled life from birds to bats, fish to fleas, snakes to worms, is born or hatched into this world with an inbuilt “evolutionary clock", a biological timepiece counting down through the generations to a predestined extinction date. The hairless, talking apes were likewise not exempt from this ordained ending. Man's time was up, only he refused to look at his watch.
Already ages in place, the pointers to evolutional stagnation skyrocketed out of control. Increasing instances of heart disease reached near epidemic proportions, matched by a dramatic rise in the figure of cancerous tumours diagnosed. Of nastier significance were the escalating cases of enfeebled immune systems that rendered the sufferers fatally susceptible to the commonest of colds. Not to be forgotten was the more insidious assault on male virility, a prevalent reduction in sperm count setting off in turn a declining birth rate. Taken separately, each of these trends, while worrying, was treatable, perhaps even curable given enough time. Combined, their cumulative effects became downright devastating. Humanity had reached the end of the road.
That was when Abe Norton, the man and not the machine, came to prominence.
American born and English educated, the multi-billionaire geneticist, patriotic to the human species and not any one nation, alone recognised the snowballing maladies for the indicators they were. Dr Abraham D. (for Dreamer, his employees often quipped, though his detractors ridiculed that it actually stood for Delusional) Norton made his enviable fortune on the backs of the rich and vain. Mastering the tricky nuances associated with safely manipulating genetic material, his company BioGenTech profited enormously from the financial benefits to be gained from such unholy tinkering. People willingly paid exorbitant fe
es to enhance their senses of sight and smell to superhuman levels, to modify foetuses in the womb to organic perfection, to undergoing physiological extensions upping life expectancy to 150 years plus. Nobody wants to grow old and die, and everybody desires unflawed children.
But expire they did. Adults and infants succumbed with equal finality as the sands of human time ran out.
* * * *
Peering into the unruffled waters of the holding tank, the insensate merfolk settled like castaway stones on the bottom, Abe addressed the overseeing computer. “They are resting comfortably? All of them?"
"The captive biologics are in optimal standby mode. Heart rate steady at seventy beats per minute. Breathing regular at fifteen breaths per minute. Brainwave activity registers normal."
"You could've simply said ‘yes,’ Dog."
"Negative. Correct response would be ‘affirmative'."
The manbot resumed studying the motionless Cetari in ruminative silence.
* * * *
Abe Norton gamely took it upon himself to become the saviour of humankind. Personally mapping out the genetic blueprint for a totally new breed of Man, and Woman, his intent was to circumvent the encoded abolition and compress two and a half million years of evolution into mere decades to produce a superior breed of human that would outlive natural extinction. He aimed to completely reconfigure Homo sapiens!
Promises of immortality bought anything, especially human souls. Norton had no trouble hiring handpicked teams drawn from the best and brightest scientific minds from both sides of the Atlantic to turn his radical dream of genetic bodybuilding into reality. Pioneers in fields as diverse as molecular biology and nuclear physics, computer programming and animal behaviourism, biotechnology and robotics, privately pooled their expertise under one laboratory roof for the betterment of Mankind.
Speciously labelled a “crackpot mad scientist” by the judgemental world press and hounded by the regulatory bodies of American bureaucracy, unstinting in their failure to connect the extinctive dots together, Norton packed up his Boston-based lab lock, stock, and Bunsen burner and clandestinely relocated by freighter to the frozen Arctic wasteland. Months beforehand engineers readied an iceberg for habitation, excavating and replacing the frozen core with an alloyed modular hub, following their employer's exacting specifications to the letter. Outfitted with shrouded stabilising thrusters to keep it invisibly anchored in place, the floating, frigid laboratory was the ideal hideaway, shielded from the snooping nose of journalism and the prying eyes of militaristic governments.
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