Schneider wasn't finished. As the creatures covered him, he pushed against them, fended off their claws, tried to get out from under, but they were strong and blandly determined, clamping tight and digging in. Soon I could barely see him. When there was no more elbow room at the table, the next crab came for me.
It was a challenge to move-I was almost completely inert and could forgive the crabs for mistaking me for a drowned corpse. Propped stiffly in the far corner of the compartment, hair swaying like moss, I was even in the semifetal posture of the dead.
The crab's extraordinarily long, bony pincers, each one a grasping six-foot tong thick as my arm, stretched out and took hold of my hair and left hand. It pinched hard as tinsnips, but I felt no pain. Nor was I numb-my body registered every nuance of the injury, yet it was a clinical, detached analysis. It did not "hurt." There is no way to describe it except perhaps to say my body was a country under siege, and I its queen. I felt a certain stewardship, but that was it. The stolid-faced crustacean began pulling me toward its mouth to feed. Others were coming as well.
With glacial speed I began to move. Far more agile than I, the crab anchored its legs and improved its grip-I wasn't going anywhere. Reaching for a place to lodge the deadwood of my right hand, I encountered one of the hot-water bottles and clutched it to me like a toddler with a security blanket. It was still warm, the chemical heating element still circulating. By taking it, I surrendered to the crab, and was drawn head-first to its bristly mandibles.
Taking the bag's drain valve in my teeth, I tore it open and squeezed with all the strength I could still muster, inhaling the hot water. There was no conscious plan in this, but rather some sort of physical compulsion, like an infant suckling milk-what had been my mind was subsumed to a larger but less-civilized intelligence spreading throughout my body. Though the water was scalding, the little of me that was left had no veto power over this ruthless new master, which registered it as a good thing. I did not stop drinking even when I felt organs rupturing inside me.
I was Gumby. That was what this was about. The freakish world was my toyland, my flesh, mutable clay. If it didn't hurt, why not play?
As I kept drinking, I could feel the heat circulating. My belly became distended in a way that would have been agonizing to a living person, but I could feel myself softening up, growing more limber every second. My Maenad mind quickened.
The crab was fussily chewing a snipped-off hank of my hair with some scalp attached. I had only felt it as a tug and a cold spot behind my ear. With an abrupt jerk I broke free, inadvertently taking one of its claws with me. The crab didn't seem at all troubled by the damage or disappointed by my escape, and I felt a rush of mutual understanding: We were both privy to a perfect peace unknown to higher forms of life.
Fully aware that the cold would soon immobilize me again, I arthritically clambered out and atop the vehicle. A number of crabs were in the way, but I jabbed at them with the severed claw to drive them back.
Standing on that overturned hulk, with its wheels cartoon ishly splayed outward, I did stop and stare at the surrounding seabed, my flight arrested.
It was solid crabs, covering every square foot of ocean floor, their legions receding into the murk. Surrounding the tank were layers, drifts of them, piling up ten deep. Around the front, two heaps seemed particularly busy-as I watched, a face surged up from the living mass, crab claws dragging down lips and eyelids, giving the features an exaggerated expression of gaping terror. It was Lowenthal. His one remaining eye looked at me, and I had an electric sense of contact, of his voice saying, Go. Then a claw penetrated his mouth and wrenched at his tongue. They pulled him down.
Shedding the heavy bulletproof vest, I kicked off for the surface.
There were fires above, casting the broken ice in fluorescent candy colors, but the heat did not radiate through the water. Coming up underneath the floating wrack, I found it already frozen together. I had no buoyancy, no air in my lungs, and had to keep treading water every second or I would drop to the bottom. The crabs were content to wait, I knew.
Working my way up between jumbled slabs, I punched through glassy new ice, shattering my knuckles but opening a sharp-edged hole I could cling to. My hair and face froze instantly on contact with the air-air that was seventy or eighty degrees colder than the water. Not far away, I could see flames and smoke coiling into the midnight sky. I boosted myself up on the ice and ran for it.
Water drained from my every orifice and flash-froze as I moved, so that I shed icicles with every step. My flesh was crystallizing, cracking, splitting open at the joints. As I ran I encountered bits of scrap and a charred torso, finally coming in range of the fire's warmth. Its source was the blackened shell of a hovercraft, a giant crucible guttering in a pool of meltwater, and I sloshed up to it with arms outspread.
I don't know how long I stood there. It might have been minutes or it might have been hours. Eyes closed against the withering heat, I could feel the ice glaze dissolve and the tissues of my body become pliable, alive. Not alive in the ordinary sense, which was as a mysterious entity separate from my mind, with its hidden anatomy and dimly recognized processes, but alive like a very familiar landscape whose every feature was known to me and whose every part I could not only inspect from afar but also inhabit at will with my mind's eye.
I could ply the rivers and tributaries of my new Xombie structure and explore the deep, meandering wounds made by shrapnel. I could close the wounds and seal them, just as easily as sealing my lips. I could even pucker my tissues around bits of scrap, squeezing them from one muscle to another until they emerged from bloodless slits in my side and plopped into the water.
I reached up and touched the implant, sunk in rigid bone. I could actually taste the metal screws and test the grip of their threads in my skull. The distant echo of my old sense of wonder wafted by like music in a passing car. Then I flexed my forehead. With a crack, the implant popped loose into my hand. It gleamed in the firelight, and I let it fall.
The sea was littered with wreckage. Here and there, Xombies wandered like lost children at a fairground, fast succumbing to the cold. I was neither afraid nor empathetic, and they were equally indifferent to me. But something did stir me-a riotous sound far across the ice. It rang in my head like the voices of long-dead loved ones, nearly forgotten. It was unbearably sweet and sad. Beckoning.
It was people. Miles away, Utik's people were leaving Thule, a caravan of buses, snowmobiles, and dogsleds streaming north as Valhalla burned. The ones left behind were too busy fighting to stop them, and I could sense both the eager flight of the Inuit and the hatred and misery of those in the domes. This knowledge came through all my pores, as if my entire body had become an antenna attuned to the signals of fragile humanity. I could feel them, and they were all I could feel: a heartbreaking symphony in the vacuum, a kaleidoscopic concert of destruction, and I ached to liberate every one of them from the hideous threat that hung over them-the parasite of time. I had no choice: They were all there was of me, each one a jarringly vivid light in the vast emptiness of eternity, yet here they were at the whims of dismal mortality like candles set afloat in the night sea, to drift and fizzle out. No. They had to be saved. I had the power to save them. To preserve them, as I used to preserve delicate flowers in my memory book.
Lulu.
I stopped.
Lulu. Hurry.
It was the sound of the wind, playing my name. I couldn't tell if it was one voice or many, but it reverberated in the sinews of my dead blue heart like a benevolent god. It knew me, knew me in a way I no longer knew myself, reminding me of what I most desperately wanted to remember: who I was. The Voice was not calling me to Thule, but back in the direction of the boat.
The boat-I had almost forgotten about it. Not to mention the guys in it. Out of sight out of mind had become the way of things now. Remembering those men was a shock, like finding valuables long thought lost, living heirlooms held in hock. They were mine!
; Torn, I looked off toward the flickering chaos of Valhalla, miles away. The complex was so large, the distance was deceiving-some part of me knew I could never make it that far, that I would set like concrete before I was even halfway there, but it was very difficult to sever my attention from those warring throngs and run the opposite way. Equivocation was foreign to my new nature. It wanted to just go. Running against the current, I went for the sub.
Following serpentine power cables across the ice, I felt myself freezing again, but found I could hoard more heat than before-my skin had toughened tremendously, creating a layer of insulation, and the soles of my feet were armored in callus. Things inside me were restructuring and streamlining as well. Even with that, I didn't have long, but the boat wasn't far, and I could move very fast. I still wasn't breathing-or rather, I was breathing through my whole body. Absorbing. Filtering. I felt tireless and light, as if the world was rolling beneath me while I was harnessed to a fixed point in the sky.
Bonfires were strewn all over the sea. Approaching the dome, I expected to find it burning, too, or flat as a jellyfish washed up on the beach, but it was still only half-deflated, a lopsided souffle. The lights were off, and it appeared deserted. I had no impression of human life, inside or out. The Voice was silent. Other than me, there was not even a Xombie to be seen, and I had an overwhelming desire just to lie down and join the scenery. I had already forgotten why I was here.
My feet frozen clubs, I slowed to a hobble, entering the towering breach made by the truck. The canopy was noisily tearing itself to shreds in the wind. It was dark inside, the grass crunchy. There were bodies everywhere, stiff with cold as indeed I soon would be, waiting for spring. But something vast was stirring in the emptiness, causing the grassy tundra to heave like a waking leviathan. It was the submarine. The submarine was moving.
I couldn't see it in the near-total darkness, but I could find it easily enough by the escalating biblical cacophony of ice splitting open and volcanic jets of air blasting from every fissure, as well as water boiling up, rising like the tide, to spread in glassy waves across the field. I could feel these things happen as if they were somehow an extension of myself.
With the water lapping over my feet, the Voice said, Follow, and I waded forward into the icy wash, struggling against atrophy. What did it want from me?
Then I paused, sensing something rushing up in the dark, bright as a torch in my consciousness, all teeth and fury. Not a Fury, however. My fading reflexes were too slow to ward it off. A lithe, coarse-haired body slammed into mine, fangs sinking deep into my neck. I spun like a rag doll from the impact but kept my footing, grappling with the creature. Its strength was much greater than my own.
It was Don, the mandrill. And somewhere nearby I could hear a strained whisper urging him on: "Get 'em, Don old boy. Go get 'em. That's a good boy." It was Sandoval, lying half-dead. Don had been protecting him.
The ape was going to tear me apart. There was simply no way I could stop it. He would tear me to bits, and I would never reach the sub. I tried gamely to push on in the hope that he would give up, but he ripped into me even more savagely, an engine of pure wrath. I had no feeling at all about him except an excruciating dreamlike sense of being held back, prevented from attaining my one vital goal.
Then suddenly there was a violent upheaval, and I broke free. That Voice, achingly familiar, spoke to me again: Go, Lulu. Hurry. While ya still can.
It was him, Mr. Cowper, risen to do battle with Don.
He and the baboon were locked in brute combat, wreathed in briny spray that gathered on them like scales and shattered with each blow. I hardly registered the fight-it was Cowper that had my attention, not as my father (I was immune to any such sentiment) but as a walking contradiction. He was neither a neutral presence like me nor shiningly mortal like Sandoval, yet both states coexisted within him, resonating something arresting and perverse: what Langhorne had called Homo perrenius. Only then did I grasp the utter paradox of that. The fleeting aura of life-so delicate that it could not be contained except in fragments of memory-clung to him along with his tattered robes, ennobling and elevating him to an exalted somethingness from which I was barred. Though dead, he had no reason to yearn for mankind. He was whole.
Hurry…
The baboon was gaining the upper hand-Cowper was nearly as frozen as I was, no match against that warm-blooded dervish. It broke his clutching fingers, ripped out his throat, all but tore his head off; but he maintained his grip, granting me time to escape. I moved away as quickly as I could, followed by the sounds of rending flesh and bone, sprinting across the water just as I used to do as a little girl, when rain made lawns into lakes and it was possible to walk on water if you just ran fast enough.
Then I did something very human: I went back for him.
In a few long, loping strides I was upon them, seizing the animal's head under my arm and bending it backward as Cowper and I pinned its body between us. At that moment I felt vibrantly a part of the creature, warm and alive and full of feeling, squeezing it tighter and tighter in an ecstatic desire to merge. Leathery black paws flayed my face as the thrill reached a frenzied peak, then its neck snapped, and the beast went limp. All those overwhelming feelings died with it, leaving a vast hollow gulf in the center of things, across which Cowper and I regarded one another.
In that look, he made clear to me the price of being real: Mortal man's sorrows mercifully die with him, and a Xombie feels no grief. Cowper had no relief on either count. Happiness is a transient feature of youth and purpose-it is pain that accrues over time, tempered only by the ultimate refuge of death. What he had done to me in life was only one of countless sins that would follow him into eternity, forever replenished and compounded by the futility of his existence. Cowper was haunted; he could never escape himself. All he wanted was oblivion. I stepped forward and took his mangled head in my hands.
The boat was sinking, the flower bed splitting open, and dirt trickling down the fissures as gigantic blocks of ice upended, shedding their thin skin of turf. The broad sailplanes, oriented vertically, slowly carved downward into the boiling swell until all that was left above was the bridge, the very top of the sail, where I had spent so much quiet time. Plumes of air shot upward like the spout of a sounding whale as the free-flooding compartments topped off. Almost gone.
I ripped Mr. Cowper's head off.
Tucking it under my arm like a football, I scrambled up and down bucking slabs to the far end of the last iceberg just as the highest point of the submarine vanished in swirling eddies. Mum's extinct voice spoke in my ear, Come on in, sillybean, the water's fine. The ice was closing again with a tumultuous racket, and any second it would swallow me up or grind me to paste between porcelain walls. Far away in the dark, I could hear Sandoval screaming as Cowper's body found him. Untroubled, I stood up straight and let myself fall forward into the menacing surf.
Gone. The boat was gone. My body slipped downward through roiling bubbles, down into that dark where something told me I belonged. Then my free hand chanced upon the rim of the bridge cockpit and grabbed hold. The sub had stopped descending-it could go no deeper here without scraping bottom. Suddenly the giant propeller, the screw, began to turn. Though hundreds of feet away, I could plainly hear its swish-swish as it started to push the enormous bulk in my hand. The submarine began to move forward, pulling me along with it.
Feeling the current like a breeze, I slipped my stiff legs into the cockpit, then braced myself in that little space-a rajah in his elephant howdah-with Cowper's head on my lap. I could very nearly reach up and caress the slowly passing ceiling of ice, while beneath me I straddled a vast tube of warm air and light and unsuspecting humanity. I dreamed I could see myself down there among them, the living me, innocent of time, just celebrating our escape. I was a ghost, but I did not believe enough in my own existence to feel shortchanged. In that way I was content to fade…
Lulu.
That Voice again. It was not Cowper this time
-or at least not him alone. Finally, as I leaned over the edge of the bridge, I fully understood the Voice and the collective will it represented.
There in the ocean gloom at the base of the sail I saw them: so many of the guys I had known in life, minus just a few, and many more I didn't know. All of them were wrapped around the fairwater by the cord that had been threaded through their bones, like early seafarers lashed down before a gale. Even Julian was there, clinging tight as a starfish. All my Xombies.
I remembered Utik telling me of ancient Netsilik shamans who fearlessly dove to the bottom of the sea to force favors from the goddess Nuliajuk. Only I didn't think this goddess would cooperate, and the scouring sea would pluck us off, one by one, until we were reduced to our hardy elements: individual Maenad microbes, dispersed by the currents. That was the closest we could come to death. Yes, for all practical purposes, this was death. The fellows had chosen wisely.
I closed my hardening eyelids and bid it come.
EPILOGUE
Dead? Obviously not, or I couldn't be writing this now. In limbo was more like it. Limbo-I always thought that was a corny word. What about purgatory? Too religious. And terms like "netherworld" and "stasis" smack of cheap science fiction.
No, I was under a spell-I like that. That's what it felt like: an enchanted sleep. My body was a beautifully preserved relic, completely inanimate, yet I hovered around it like a half-awake roving eye, blearily taking stock of the surroundings. I missed a lot; there were big gaps in my awareness, and I wasn't absolutely certain any part of it was real.
For instance, how did I get into the submarine? It took me a while to realize that's where I was, then I couldn't make sense of it. I was in the wardroom, laid out inside the long glass case that usually held an inscribed silver platter with the boat's King-Neptune-themed crest. They had dressed me in a modest nightgown and had put a satin pillow under my blue head. A tube from my neck carried blood the color of Concord grape juice to a spigot outside the case, where Dr. Langhorne appeared regularly to collect a bag, while the stern portrait of Admiral Rickover seemed to stare down disapprovingly from above.
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