In her mind she kept replaying the stark image of the reef sticking out of the sea of vile waste. She imagined a myriad dirty parasites crawling all over their host.
The reef resembled nothing she’d seen in Bucharest, yet the stench of the drains and the random patterns of the street were an inextricable part of her new experience of the city.
She hauled her body out of bed, sensing it must be quite late in the morning. The tap in the bathroom at the end of the hall dribbled cold brown water, which only reminded her of her dream.
Downstairs the assistant manager watched her walk across the foyer, place her key on the desk counter and head for the exit. As she opened the door to the street she heard him pick up the phone and mutter a few words in a thick accent. She felt like an outsider, unable even to understand the language.
***
By day her brother’s apartment building looked unremarkable. The gouts of trash littering the stairway offered no clues. She pushed open his door and stepped inside.
The apartment had been devastated, not by artillery, it seemed, for the walls and floors were intact, but by routine wreckers, obviously agents of the Securitate running amuck as they launched the counterrevolution; on the wall they had daubed in black paint the single word TRAITOR. Every item of furniture had been smashed. Even the three pieces of the bathroom suite had received sledgehammer blows. The bath had been holed, the toilet and washbasin had large chunks knocked out of them. She twisted one of the taps. Pipes groaned and water the same colour as her dream splashed her hand. She withdrew it instantly and wiped it on her trousers, shuddering. But she noticed, as it continued to run, that the brown disappeared and the water was soon clear. She switched off the tap, slightly encouraged.
Investigating the remaining rooms, she was surprised by the size of her brother’s apartment. She wondered how he had come to live so well.
The headboard of his bed had been reduced to splinters but the base was still functional. She fetched the split mattress from the front room and placed it good-side-up on the bed. Maybe, if she could find sheets and a blanket, she wouldn’t have to go back to the hotel.
She worked for two hours or more, piling rubbish in the corridor outside the apartment and salvaging what sticks offurniture she could. She tried removing some of the filth from the kitchen wall with tap water and rags from under the cleft sink. Driven by a determination to save what she could of her old life in the city, tenuous though she believed the link with her brother to be, she rubbed and scraped at the walls. Soon exhaustion calmed her efforts and she realised no progress would be made without proper materials. There was also the graffiti in the front room which she was determined to remove. Her brother was a patriot. She had no doubt he was out demonstrating at the moment his building was overrun. Though they had never been close, she felt a rush of protective love for him. Let him be safe, she prayed, as her mind conjured images of him lying crushed under masonry, dumped in a mass grave with another man’s foot in his face, or crumpled at the base of a deeply-scratched wall riddled with bullets, like the dead tyrant.
She left the flat to look for cleaning materials and to get some fresh air. She tried not to feel intimidated by the streets. She thought her personal efforts to eradicate the Securitate should strengthen her. Taking a new route which she hoped would lead to shops—there were none near the hotel—she jumped once when a car backfired in a neighbouring street.
The gloomy overcast of the morning had thinned only slightly. Nevertheless, when she turned into the boulevard it seemed brighter. For the middle of the afternoon the pavements were eerily quiet. The buildings were more modern and while they were less grim in their aspect, they were certainly more banal. She passed a row of elaborate fountains and stopped dead in her tracks.
Her heart, after missing a beat, thumped like a triphammer. Her mouth dried up and sweat sprang out on her hairline.
In front of her was the filthy sea of her dream and, shimmering, the reef.
She felt faint. Fear pooled in her mouth. Her skin prickled.
The mirage vanished, to be replaced by the New People’s Palace, separated from her by an expanse of false marble. She recognised the Palace, Ceausescu’s last folly, from television pictures filmed during its construction. This whole end of the city had been systematically razed and redeveloped as New Bucharest. She remembered now, the new buildings she’d passed were apartments for Securitate agents. It had been claimed that secret tunnels linked both the Palace and the new apartments to the existing tunnels under the city.
She looked at the Palace again. And screamed. It had changed back into the reef. The foul stench made her retch. She spewed bile into the sea lapping at her feet and scampered back from it.
But there was only false marble beneath her feet, discoloured by her involuntary disgust. The Palace, with its massive frontage, crenellated windows and deep-set archways bore a striking resemblance to the reef, as if she’d unknowingly modelled the dreamed edifice on this gleaming monstrosity.
She tore herself away to go in search of disinfectant and cloths. She settled instead for a bucket of thin white paint and a thick brush. As she set to work on the kitchen walls she was troubled by thoughts of the Palace and its inversion, the reef. She worried about the new apartment buildings and most of all the drains; the tunnels...
If Hell were to revisit the Earth its denizens would come crawling up through the tunnels.
She dipped the brush and drew a broad swathe across the wall. Cover-up, she thought anxiously. But what she was doing felt more honest than that. A diseased branch had been severed and she was painting the stump to protect it. Maybe her brother would come back and be grateful for her efforts. For now, though, she was concerned on a practical level with making the apartment habitable. Though she could go back to Belgrade whenever she liked, she felt tied to Bucharest. She had come home. The only family she had in the world was here. Somewhere. She dipped the brush and stroked the wall. Dipped and stroked.
In the front room she obliterated the insult, traitor. But when she stood back the word was still legible, so she slapped on several more layers. She stretched into corners and crouched down to the floor. Suddenly she stopped brushing. Something had caught her eye; a slanting graffito near the bottom of the wall. She rubbed away a smudge of dirt that had been obscuring it and read, Daniela. 20363. Her heart jumped and she wasn’t sure which emotion had kicked it. Love for her almost unknown brother, or fright at seeing her identity starkly represented on the wall? Had he scribbled it distracted by fear and excitement as the revolution gripped the city? Maybe he feared for her safety. Or was it, as it appeared, some kind of accusation or condemnation? Maybe the filth who had insulted her brother had intended to come after her next, not knowing she had fled the country a year before. But why would they write her name and number on the wall? And how would they even know of the number branded on her left shoulder?
It had to be her brother, desperate to help, unable to contact her. He would have seen the number when they were tiny children in Orphanage Number Six. Before they got separated. How he had committed the number to memory when so young was a mystery to her. But clearly he had. Tears stung her eyes as she wondered what their parents might have been like. They must have suffered and died so young. She had never known their names, nor seen their likeness, yet had always carried a dull ache for them which occasionally flared up, like a recurrent ulcer.
The terrible weight of self-pity now descended on her. No parents throughout her youth, no affection from the institutions that had raised her; and now no brother to share her grief. She left the brush in the paint and slunk into the bedroom where she curled up tightly on the cold, damp mattress.
***
The Deep Ones. The Old Ones.
The tunnels, the tunnels...
She couldn’t clear her mind of anxiety before sleep stole from the darkest shadows of the room to claim her.
The reef stood proud of the stinking sea. The air shimmered but
the reef stood firm as rock.
Her eye was hurting. She poked a finger and rubbed it, but the irritation didn’t go away. She blinked furiously in an attempt to wash away the irritant. It failed to work. She noticed glints of light on the reef and wondered what on earth could have produced them. Maybe, if she had been right about the origin of the reef, it was infested with flies and the winter sun was catching in their wings.
She rubbed her eye again. There was a speck in it, something tiny and black. The sun flashed on another set of wings, dazzling her.
Still half-asleep, she rubbed her eyes. They felt sore, as if they had been bathed in salt water. Something bright shone into them. She pressed her fingers into them again, feeling them yield horribly, and rubbed hard.
Then she realised where the light was coming from and, shielding her eyes, opened them. A narrow shaft of sunlight had sneaked in through the back window and fell across Daniela’s face. She rolled on to her side away from the window. Her head was full of the reef, the flies crawling over it, and the sea of filth, but the sun warmed the back of her neck pleasantly and the horrific pictures lost some of their impact.
She reflected on the preceding day’s whitewashing and wondered just what she hoped to achieve in Bucharest. Although it didn’t feel like it, the city had changed irrevocably. The tyrants were dead— she’d seen their bullet-riddled bodies on television—and the country was free of their grip for the first time in twenty-four years. The sun moved from her neck over her head and struck the wall, revealing a patch of damp fungus. She had to carry on, she realised. The city was her home. Belgrade had just been a stop-over. The sun crept towards the floor, picking out loose splinters from the floorboards. She thought briefly about her long-dead parents. The sun prised open a gap between two uneven floorboards and caught in something shiny trapped beneath the floor. Daniela watched curiously. As the sun fell a little deeper into the hole in the floor it glittered for a second then struck square and reflected into her face.
She uncurled her body and crawled on to the floor. Pulling one floorboard up to allow her hand entry, she reached in and grasped a plastic wallet. She eased it out through the gap and laid it on the floor.
Daniela’s heart thudded. Her head buzzed with questions. She felt almost as if she were holding her lost brother’s hand and he began speaking to her.
In the plastic folder were two photographs, a map of Bucharest with lines traced in ballpoint along particular streets and linking each other, and two letters addressed to her brother and signed Daniela.
She assumed her brother had formed some kind of an attachment to a woman who happened to bear her name. Until she began to read the first letter. Then it became clear that the letter purported to be from her, thanking him for writing. She was well and living in Constanta, the letter said. Employed in a fabrics factory, she earned sufficient money to keep her comfortable and was a member of the local Party.
The second letter added that she remembered her childhood with great fondness but was now so happy in Constanta that she didn’t intend to visit Bucharest.
Obviously her brother had been taken in by the story and had asked to see her. They had put him off. She hadn’t been to Constanta since her adolescence, when she was briefly transferred to an orphanage in the Black Sea port. The postmarks on the envelopes, however, dated them to the very recent past.
The letters upset her. The map she could only guess at. But the photographs. Where one might have expected to find treasured snapshots of beloved parents, Daniela found official-issue portraits of the executed dictator and his wife, both in blooming health.
As she stared at the tyrant’s ever-youthful grin and his wife’s peaceful, oval face, her stomach slowly tied itself into a knot.
Reluctantly her mind began to work, recalling the graffito, TRAITOR, from the front room, and completing simple equations of logic. She shouldn’t have assumed that the word had been written by agents of the Securitate.
***
She walked through familiar streets and felt that at every window, even those boarded up, someone was watching her.
She had now remembered what the TV reporters had said at the time of the revolution. It had been revealed that many Romanian orphans were placed in special institutions where they were taught to honour and obey their country’s leaders from the earliest possible age: as soon as they could recognise a simple photograph. They grew to love Nicolae and Elena as surrogate parents and their transformation into Ceausescus crack personal bodyguard—“the blackshirts”—was merely the next step.
The last street turned into the boulevard and the new apartment buildings shone.
They became the most loyal and ruthless of all Securitate factions. So the TV reporters had claimed. And she knew better now than to doubt their revelations—TRAITOR. The family photographs of his adoptive parents. Her name and orphan’s number scribbled on the wall.
The Palace gleamed beyond the fountains, sunlight glinting off the hundreds of windows. Her eye hurt. A speck intruded on her vision. She blinked, but kept walking, her head becoming gassy.
On television in Belgrade she had seen still video images of the Ceausescus lying bullet-riddled at the base of the wall.
She heard a soft throbbing noise.
The tunnels, the tunnels...
After the trial, the Ceausescus had been led outside by guards, and followed by the ad hoc team of observers and judges who had presided. The man with the television camera was at the back and still in the corridor when the shots rang out. Thus, he could only film the bodies, not the execution.
Or: a bit of connivance and make-up and the whole thing was a hoax.
The speck increased in size and the throb became a buzz in the ear. The Palace shimmered. The tunnels were quiet.
By the time the speck had grown into a helicopter and Daniela had worked out who was coming home, she had already begun to run across the dried-up sea of filth to the gleaming reef. As they climbed out of the machine on to the roof of the People’s Palace, haggard and dishevelled but alive, Daniela reached the ground floor and started beating a tattoo on the first door she came to. Attracted and repelled, terrified and awed in equal measure, she demanded at the top of her voice to be let in. The lord was back in his house and life, and death, could begin again.
MOTHER HYDRA
DEEPNET
by DAVID LANGFORD
IT WAS DURING the winter of 1990 that I pieced together ten years’ hints, and almost wished I had not probed so deep. A shocking discovery about the world can be equally dismaying as a revelation of oneself. Perhaps committing these rough notes to disk will help clear my thoughts and even save me from the next step which seems so burningly inevitable.
My daughter...
The secret I think I know is centred on that small American port which I have never visited, although my late wife Janine once had an aunt there, or a cousin. (Too many years have slipped past for me to remember her every casual aside, though I very much wish I could.) All the same, the name is familiar enough in the industry, even though many software users never consciously note it. The title screen of every version of the Deepword word processor flashes up, just for a subliminal instant amid its wavy graphics, a copyright credit to Deepnet Communications, Inc. of Innsmouth, MA.
I am using version 6.01 now. For all my new-found misgivings, I am used to its smooth, tranquil operation. We claim the industry is fast-moving and “at the cutting edge,” but secretly most of my programming colleagues are creatures of tradition and ritual. Learn different keystrokes in order to make use of a far better program and save much precious time? There is no time for that.
Now I regret not taking time to listen to Janine when she talked about once visiting her small-town relative. Her image wavers in the seas of memory, somehow edited from liveliness to the stiff features of my one surviving picture (she always photographed badly). Her words... she made a humorous thing of it, but I was far away, thinking in program code. A derelict coas
tal town amid salt marshes, its few inhabitants straight out of Cold Comfort Farm, no doubt inbred for gnarled generations: “Arrr,” she quoted, “I mind you do be a furriner in they durned high heels of Babylon, heh heh... Something like that.” If she had lived, it might have ceased to be a joke.
The publicity brochure prattles on about how empty houses filled when prosperity and the software industry came to Innsmouth in the early days of the small-computer boom. New freeways threaded the marsh. Through the ’70s and ’80s Deepnet grew into an amorphous multi-national whose tentacles extend everywhere. Those yokels and genetic casualties now only survive in the traditional humour of our trade newspapers; or so we all thought.
I pause here. Sara is telling me, in the thick, laboured voice I have learned to understand, that she wants to play a game on my back-up computer. With her tenth birthday almost in sight, she will have to have her own machine soon. Janine wanted more children, but Sara is all I have. I love her very much.
Nevertheless I wish she reminded me even remotely of Janine, who was beautiful.
When the secret history of these times is properly written, I suspect that Janine should have a footnote of her own as one of the earliest recorded victims. Now and only now we are beginning to be told that pregnant women should beware of electromagnetic radiation, and in particular should stay well clear of computer VDUs. Beneath the world’s rippling surface there is always some unsuspected horror, lurking as did thalidomide.
In those days of innocence, when the equipment was slower, cruder and doubtless lacking any screen against electromagnetic leakage, Janine and I were not well off. Her income from technical authorship was too important to us, and she stuck to the keyboard until almost the very end of her pregnancy. Worse, she was just a little short-sighted (which gave her grey eyes a fine faraway look), and liked to work up close to the VDU.
The software she used through those final months was Deepword 1.6.
I prefer not to compute just how many hours of that time we really shared. When I’d logged up my own overtime, Janine and I would all too often sit with vision blurred and mouths silenced by the sheer weight of fatigue, as though far underwater.
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