Of course I said I should be with her for the birth; as usual she read my real feelings and told me not to be a stupid bloody martyr. Even when too enormous to turn over in bed, Janine was kind-hearted and full of humour. The business took a very long time: for me, eleven hours in a grey waiting-room redolent with stale coffee and disinfectant, her last eleven hours. I had never seen a professionally comforting nurse sound so grim as the young one who let it slip that there was some question as to whether even the baby should be kept on life-support.
Before too many more years, I suppose, our tragedy will be seen to fit into the classical pattern of excessive ’em field exposure during pregnancy, with its supposed pathogenic effects on tissue and especially young tissue. Miscarriage, for example, or infant leukaemia, or foetal abnormalities.
I was not shown Sara for some time. (I was not shown Janine at all.) Perhaps her soft bones had been twisted into some insupportable shape by the difficult birth, and later she relaxed as babies do into normality, or mostly so. No one explained to me the stitches on either side of her throat. I wish that first nurse had not looked so sick.
I will admit that Sara is excessively plain.
***
Watching her work with clumsy fingers at her Undersea Quest game reminds me that I have, in a way, visited the transatlantic home of Deepnet. The demonstration disk for their SHOGGOTH high-resolution graphics design system is one long computerised special effect, a tour of the Innsmouth streets as though you were floating effortlessly along them.
Dominated by the vast squat blocks of the Deepnet complex, it appears as a place of strange contrasts. The stylised images of buildings feature one or two old-fashioned gambrel roofs, and a variety of antique brick and stone houses stand out quaintly from the sea of new development. To show the versatility of the 3-D software, several fanciful touches have been added. One of the monolithic factory structures is, like an Escher print, re-entrant and geometrically impossible; and I am fairly sure that the physical Innsmouth does not include a 250-foot pyramid in its central square, least of all one which slowly but inarguably rotates.
As with all software from these makers, there is something oddly addictive about the SHOGGOTH presentation. Perhaps it is a matter of light and shadow. Instead of whizzing you crudely through the simulated streets in video-game fashion, the ingenious programming team chose to unveil their creation at a lazy pace which, aided by a greenish wavering in the image, gives the subtle illusion of motion underwater.
“Rapture of the deep” was always Janine’s phrase for when I lost myself in the depths of the computer terminal. It was a joke, but one which went sour on me when I looked back and thought of how little time we’d had together, how much of it I’d spent hacking out program code, enraptured.
Items notably not included in the SHOGGOTH demonstration are the jokey legends about Deepnet which surface from time to time in the trade papers. It was Computer Weekly which tried to make an amusing paragraph of the story that from their main development facility there runs a forty-five-inch cable of multichannel fibre-optic linkages which enters the nearby Manuxet estuary, heading seaward towards Devil Reef, and never again emerges. The rival paper Computing had a running joke about inbred local workers, bulgy-eyed from endless hours at the VDU, who toil in the depths of the complex and likewise fail to emerge, or not at any rate during daylight.
I reserve my judgement on this gossip. Things very nearly as unlikely are said about DEC and IBM, or any clannish company.
All the same, there is a proverb about straws in the wind...
***
My suspicions weigh very heavily on me, like the pressure of deep water.
But am I suffering from insight or from insanity? Patterns which connect up too many things can be suspect (and here I remember that VDU radiation has also been claimed to induce brain tumours or suicidal depression). I freely admit that I do not possess anything like statistically reliable evidence. If I had more friends, I might be able to offer more examples than those of Janine, and of Jo Pennick, Helen Weir, and certain unknowns at a school near my Berkshire home.
I have spoken of Janine. The others came later.
We contract programmers lead a nomadic life, drifting from company to company, isolated from the permanent staff who resent our skills and high fees. Sometimes we exchange shop-talk in bars (we mostly drink too much). And so I came to hear...
Mrs. Pennick was a heavy user of Deepword 2.2, in the same condition and for much the same reasons as Janine. She died of complications soon after giving birth to her Peter. With Ms. Weir it was the Deepcalc 1.14 spreadsheet, a daughter called Rose, and unexplained suicide a month or so later. The unknowns remain unknown and I have no real right to guess at their software heritage. But a dreadful conviction washes over me whenever I see (as so frequently I do) these young children of the VDU age, who presumably have parents or a parent somewhere, and who strongly resemble the unrelated Sara and Peter and Rose. Very strongly indeed.
The polite word, I am told, is “exophthalmic.”
I only advance a hypothesis. I dare not commit myself to admitting belief. Even the ’em research is still very far from being conclusive. But suppose, just suppose... That little seaport in Massachusetts has long had an odd reputation, it seems. The term “in-breeding” was often used of its staring natives. Could this conceivably have been a result of deliberate policy?
Deepnet, says a typical publicity flyer which comes to hand. Time for your business to move out from the shallows. Take your computer projections below the surface, with software that goes a little deeper. Software from by the sea...
Taking a hint from the eerie underwater imagery of so many Deepnet products (even their word processor’s title screen is decorated with stylised waves), I find “in-breeding” shifting in my mind’s eye to “breeding,” and again to “breeding back,” and I remember that all life arose in the sea. I also remember, unwillingly, the stitches that closed what might conceivably have been slits to left and right of the hours-old Sara’s throat.
Very cautiously I allow myself to admit that the ’em radiation pattern of a computer display must depend in part on the program driving that display; and to acknowledge that research into this radiation and its biological impact goes back thirty years; and to wonder whether, for twelve years or more, software from a certain source might not intentionally have had certain effects on pregnant users. Are the children of Innsmouth growing up all around us?
Deepnet. Great new applications from the old, established market leader. Software for the new generation. Talk to us on Internet at [email protected].
One last niggling point concerns my daughter’s Undersea Quest, a best-selling computer game which has won many awards for excitement untainted with violence. Players learn to progress not by attacking but by co-operating with the huge, friendly and vaguely frog-like creatures which populate the game world. It is all very ecologically sound. A full virtual-reality version is promised before long.
Something in the watery glimmer of its graphics made me hunt out the instruction leaflet and look up the makers’ name. PSP: Pelagic Software Products, a wholly owned subsidiary of Deepnet Communications, Inc. Here is their message to the new generation.
At this point in my speculations I was struck with a vivid image of Janine telling me with her usual twinkle that I am just a thoughtless, sexist beast. Fancy imagining all these terrible consequences for pregnant women, “the weaker vessel,” while giving hardly a thought to my own very much longer hours working with Deepnet development software. Twelve years now, at least. Might there not be accumulated effects in my body, my brain?
I am terribly frightened that I may already know the answer to that question. In a few years, when the time comes, when her time comes, it will perhaps destroy me unless I first destroy myself. My hands and forehead are unpleasantly damp as I type these final sentences into the edit screen of Deepword 6.01.
Deepnet. Bringing together the best of t
he old and new generations. The software family that rides the tide of tomorrow.
Breeding, and in-breeding. These insights come in a single hot moment. Turning to look again at Sara, I see those big protruding eyes fixed raptly on the screen, and her broad face tinged a soft, delicate green by its light. Overwhelmingly I can imagine the salt-sea smell of her, and I love her and I want her.
TO SEE THE SEA
by MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
WHEN THE BUS reached the top of the hill that finally brought the ocean into view, Susan turned to me and grinned.
“I can see the sea!” she said, sounding about four years old. I smiled back and put my arm round her shoulders, and we turned to look out of the window. Beyond the slight reflection of our own faces the view consisted of a narrow strip of light grey cloud, above a wide expanse of dark grey sea. The sea came up to meet a craggy beach, which was also grey.
The driver showed no sign of throwing caution to the winds and abandoning his self-imposed speed limit of thirty miles an hour, and so we settled ourselves down to wait. The ride had already involved two hours of slow meandering down deserted country lanes. Another thirty minutes wouldn’t kill us.
We could at least now see what we had come for, and as we gazed benignly out of the window I could feel both of us relax. True, the sea didn’t look quite as enticing as it might at, say, Bondi Beach, and the end of October was possibly not the best time to be here, but it was better than nothing. It was better than London.
In the four months Susan and I had been living together, life had been far from sweet. We both worked at the same communications company, an organisation run on panic and belligerence. It ought to have been an exciting job, but every day at the office was like wading through knee-high mud in a wasteland of petty grievances and incompetence. Every task the company undertook was botched and flawed: even the car park was a disaster. Built in the shape of a wedge, it meant that anyone at the far end had to get all those parked between them and the exit to come and move their cars before they could leave. About once a fortnight our car wouldn’t start, despite regular visits to the world’s least conveniently situated garage.
The flat we had moved into was beautiful, but prey to similar niggling problems. The boiler, which went out twice a day, was situated below the kitchen, so we had no hot water to wash up with. Lightbulbs in the flat went at forty-minute intervals, each turning out to be some bizarre Somalian make which was unavailable in local stores. The old twonk who lived underneath us managed to combine a hardness of hearing that required his television to play at rock concert volume with a sensitivity that led him to shout up through the floor if we so much as breathed after eleven o’clock.
Up until Thursday, we’d been planning to spend the weekend at home, as we usually did. By the time the working week had ended we were too tired to consider packing bags, checking tyre pressures and hauling ourselves out of town. Perversely, the very fact that the car had packed up again on Friday evening had probably provided the impetus for us to make the trip. It had just been one thing too many, one additional pebble of grief on a beach that seemed to stretch off in all directions.
“Fuck it,” Susan had snarled, when we finally made it back home. “Let’s get out of town.” The next morning we arose, brows furrowed, each grabbed a change of clothes, a toothbrush and a book, and stomped off to the tube station. And now, after brief periods on most of the trains that British Rail had to offer, we were there. Or nearly there, anyway.
As the bus clattered its elderly way down the coast, it passed a sign for Dawton, now allegedly only eight miles away. Judging by the state of the signpost, the village’s whereabouts were of only cursory interest to the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. The name was printed in black on an arrow that must once have been white, but was now grey and streaked with old rain tracks. It looked as though no one had bothered to clean it for a while.
Virtually all of the minor annoyances which had been plaguing our every day were trivial in themselves. It was simply their volume and relentlessness which was getting us down. The result was a state of constant flinching, in which neither of us were fully ourselves. The paradoxical advantage of this was that we were getting to know each other very quickly, seeing sides of each other that would normally sit in obeisance for years. We found ourselves opening up to each other, blurting secrets as we struggled to find a new equilibrium.
One of these secrets, divulged very late one night when we were both rather tired and emotional, had involved Susan’s mother. I already knew that her mother had carved her name in Susan’s psyche by leaving her father when Susan was five, and by never bothering to get in touch again. A need for security was amongst the reasons that Susan had fallen into the clutches of her ridiculous ex-boyfriend. Before her mother had gone, however, it transpired that she had managed to instil a different kind of fear in her daughter.
In 1955, ten years before Susan was born and five before she married, Geraldine Stanbury went on a holiday. She was gone three weeks, touring around European ports with a couple of friends from college. On their return, the ship, which was called the Aldwinkle, was hugging the coast of England against a storm when a disaster occurred. The underside of the ship’s hull was punctured and then ripped apart by an unexpected rock formation, and the boat went down. By an enormous stroke of good fortune an area within the ship remained airtight, and all three hundred and ten passengers and crew were able to hole up there until help arrived the next morning. In the end, not a single person was lost, which perhaps accounts for the fact that the wreck of the Aldwinkle has failed to become a well-known part of English disaster lore.
Susan’s mother told her this story often when she was a child, laying great stress on what it had been like to be trapped under the water, not knowing whether help would come. As Susan told me this, sitting tensely on the rug in our flat, I was temporarily shocked out of drunkenness, and sat up to hold her hand. A couple of weeks previously we had come close to a small argument over where to take the holiday we had been looking forward to. Having been raised in a coastal town I love the sea, and had suggested St. Augustine, on the Florida coast. Susan had demurred, in an evasive way, and suggested somewhere more inland. The reasons for this now seemed more clear.
After Mrs. Stanbury had left, the story of her near death continued to prey on her daughter’s mind, though in different ways. As she’d grown up, questions had occurred to her. Like why, for example, there had not been a light showing at that point in the coast, when dangerous rocks were under the water. And why no one in the nearby village had raised an alarm until the following morning. The ship had gone down within easy view of the shore: was it really possible that no one had seen its distress? And if someone had seen, what on earth could have compelled them to keep silent until it should have been too late?
The village in question was that of Dawton, a negligible hamlet on the west coast of England. As I held Susan that night, trying to keep her warm against the bewilderment which years of asking the same questions had formed, I suggested that we should visit the village some time, to exorcise the ghosts it held for her. For of course no one could have seen the ship in distress, or an alarm would have been raised. And lighthouses sometimes fail.
When we got up for work the next morning, both more than a little hungover, such a trip seemed less important. In the next couple of weeks, however, during which we had two further nights on which the hardships of the day drove us to spend the evening in the pub, where we could not be contacted, the idea was mentioned again. It was a time for clearing out, in both our lives. One of the ways in which we were battling against the avalanche of trivia which still sometimes threatened to engulf us was by sorting out the things we could, by seeking to tidy away elements of our past which might have detrimental effects on our future together.
And so on the Friday when Susan finally demanded we get out of town, I suggested a pilgrimage to Dawton, and she agreed.
***
&nb
sp; As the archaic bus drew closer to the village I noticed that Susan grew a little more tense. I was about to make a joke, about something, I’m not sure what, when she spoke.
“It’s very quiet out here.”
It was. We hadn’t passed a car in the last ten or fifteen minutes. That was no great surprise: as the afternoon grew darker the weather looked set to change for the worse, and judging from its size on the map, there would be little to draw people to Dawton unless they happened to live there. I said as much.
“Yes, but still.”
I was about to ask her what she meant when I noticed a disused farm building by the side of the road. On its one remaining wall someone had painted a large swastika in black paint. Wincing, I pointed it out to Susan, and we shook our heads as middle-class liberals will when confronted with the forces of unreason.
“Hang on though,” she said, after a moment. “Isn’t it the wrong way round?” She was right, and I laughed. “Christ,” she said. “To be that stupid, to do something so mindless, and still to get it wrong...”
Then a flock of seagulls wheeling just outside the window attracted our attention. They were scraggy and unattractive birds, and fluttered close to the window in a disorganised but vaguely threatening way. As we watched, however, I was trying to work out what the swastika reminded me of, and trying to puzzle out why someone should have come all this way to paint it. We were still two miles from Dawton. It seemed a long way to come to daub on a disused wall, and unlikely that such a small coastal town should be racked with racial tension.
Ten minutes later the bus rounded a final bend, and the village of Dawton was in sight. I turned and raised my eyebrows at Susan. She was staring intently ahead. Sighing, I started to extricate our bag from beneath the seat. I hoped Susan wasn’t building too much on this sleepy village. I don’t know what I was expecting the weekend to bring: a night at a drab bed and breakfast, probably, with a quiet stroll down the front before dinner. I imagined that Susan would want to look out across the sea, to try to imagine the place where her mother had nearly lost her life, and that would be it. The next day we would return to London. To hope for anything more, for a kiss that would heal all childhood wounds, would be asking a little too much.
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