Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Damn.”

  “Come on, Carlo, we need that money.”

  “All right, all right.” The baby was squalling. He collapsed back on the bed. “I’ll do it; don’t pester me.”

  He got up and drank her soup. Stiffly he descended the ladder, ignoring Luisa’s good-byes and warnings, and got back in his boat. He untied it, pushed off, let it float out of the courtyard to the wall of San Giacometta. He stared at the wall.

  Once, he remembered, he had put on his scuba gear and swum down into the church. He had sat down in one of the stone pews in front of the altar, adjusting his weight belts and tank to do so, and had tried to pray through his mouthpiece and the facemask. The silver bubbles of his breath had floated up through the water toward heaven; whether his prayers had gone with them, he had no idea. After a while, feeling somewhat foolish—but not entirely—he had swum out the door. Over it he had noticed an inscription and stopped to read it, facemask centimeters from the stone. Around this Temple Let the Merchant’s Law Be Just, His Weight True, and His Covenants Faithful. It was an admonition to the old usurers of the Rialto, but he could make it his, he thought; the true weight could refer to the diving belts, not to overload his clients and sink them to the bottom…

  The memory passed and he was on the surface again, with a job to do. He took in a deep breath and let it out, put the oars in the oarlocks and started to row.

  Let them have what was under the water. What lived in Venice was still afloat.

  BROWNSVILLE STATION

  – CHRISTOPHER ROWE –

  THE POLITICA DUG through her enormous haversack, complaining nonstop about the amenities on the local she’d taken—been forced to take, she said—to the Tampico station so that she could board the Point a Punto. Somewhere among the files and newspapers that spilled out of her bag, she claimed, was her ticket for the express.

  The Junior Conductor smiled patiently. He would be patient for ninety more seconds, at which point the five minute bell would ring and he would tip a nod to this car’s Porter, young Sandra, who, the Junior Conductor was gratified to remember, had proven herself particularly adept at giving the heave to the unticketed.

  But no. Here it was, the purple ink of the barcode slightly smudged, but its provenance unmistakable. The Junior Conductor took the politica’s ticket and inserted it into the slot on his little silver machine. He turned the crank once, twice, a third time, and the glyphs lit up showing that the woman would be with them all the way through to Key West, the whole rest of the journey.

  With that, the politica underwent an alchemical transformation invisible to any observer but of extreme importance to the Junior Conductor. With that, the woman went from being one of the unticketed to being a Passenger.

  “This way, ma’am,” he said, in the gracious tones of a long-experienced member of the service class. Those tones were a finely distilled draught, containing notes of obsequiousness, superiority, and conspiracy all at once. Oh yes, the Junior Conductor excelled at his job.

  He had started on the locals, but his ambitions had kept him moving from line to line in the city, so that he was as expert as anyone on the great linear metropolis’s innumerable neighborhoods, districts, and regions. Not content to punch commuter tickets on the short run trains, he had worked his way up to the regional expresses, where he served for years, and then was finally recognized and rewarded with the number two position on the Point a Punto, the great Gulf-encircling express itself, the finest, fastest means of conveyance in the most magnificent city in the world.

  Of course, seas and skies alike were too storm-tossed for any means of long-distance travel other than the protected rails. At least if the travel was to be comfortable, the appointments elegant, and the service gracious. And for the passengers who could afford the Point a Punto, such considerations were paramount.

  It was possible, it was theoretically possible, to travel by rail the whole curving length of the city, from Key West to Cancún, keeping only to locals. One quiet night between the Tampa and New Orleans stops, the Junior Conductor had listened as a trio of Porters discussed this very urban legend. They even got to the point of pulling down schedules and station schematics from the staff car’s onboard library, but swiftly overpowered their meager talents at calculation. There were thousands of stations in the linear city, and the Junior Conductor was of the opinion that stories suggesting that there was some Passenger out there who had visited all of them were purest fantasy.

  These days, these halcyon days, there were only seven stations that much concerned the Junior Conductor. Those, of course, were the seven served by the Point a Punto, with the two great terminals at Cancún and Key West, and the five intermediary stops along the route at Tampa, New Orleans, Brownsville, Tampico, and Coatzacoalcos. The Junior Conductor and his wife kept modest apartments at each of the two terminal cities, as both of them travelled extensively for their work, on the rails in his case and as an engineer in service to the Utilities Directorate in hers.

  Thinking of his wife, the Junior Conductor consulted his timepiece. Once the train rolled north out of Tampico he would have his dinner break and, if her duties found her near a telephone, his daily call from his beloved.

  But…

  “Comms are down, Conductor, sorry.” This was a voice crackling over the intercom, carried along hard wires from the radio operator’s station in Engine #2 to the lounge in the staff car. The Junior Conductor was briefly distracted by the incongruity of listening to a voice on a communications device tell him that listening to a voice on a communications device was impossible. Currently impossible, at any rate.

  “This has been happening more and more often,” he said, but he did not hold down the transmit button when he said it. The radio operator on the Point a Punto was new, and might take the remark as criticism of her when it was not meant as such. Not meant as criticism at all, really, because if he were being critical it would have to be of the city’s communications infrastructure, which was the responsibility of the engineers of the Utilities Directorate, and the Junior Conductor would never criticize his wife’s work, any more than he expected that she would criticize his.

  He checked his timepiece again. Given that a conversation with his wife was not in the offing, he was now somewhere between twelve and fifteen minutes ahead of schedule in his break. He could find a seat in the canteen and eat his seaweed salad early, but that might affect his digestion. He wandered to the other side of the empty lounge—the Junior Conductor’s habit was to intentionally schedule crew breaks so that he took his alone—and tidied the stack of printouts in the output basket attached to the teletype.

  He idly studied the headlines, ignoring national and international events in favor of city news. All the local headlines were about the City Council Session scheduled to take place in Key West at the weekend. He wondered if the politica who had boarded at Tampico was bound for the meeting. She was certainly not a councilor herself, traveling as she was without an entourage, but she might well be an advisor to one, or perhaps a lobbyist for some faction or another bent on influencing policy.

  “None of my business,” murmured the Junior Conductor, and turned to the sports section.

  ON THE APPROACH to Brownsville, while the Junior Conductor was making his habitual final walk through the passenger cars, Porter Sandra found him and told him there was a flash message from Engine #1. He frowned and took the little tightly rolled cylinder of onion-skin paper she handed over.

  It read, simply, “SB-JX2-6.”

  He did not, of course, have to consult the handbook of transportation codes he kept in his breast pocket to know what this meant. An unscheduled six hour stop in Brownsville.

  He turned the paper over, but it was blank on the back, and so he called Sandra back from her retreat down the train. “This was all? There wasn’t a second message?”

  Sandra shook her head. “No, sir. The radio operator brought that back herself by hand, said to give it to you quick, but that was
all.”

  The radio operator had left Engine #2? Even more mysterious than what the message was missing, which was the three-character reason for the unscheduled stop.

  Unscheduled stops were troublesome. Unscheduled stops without clear and actionable reasons were delays.

  The Junior Conductor, of course, remembered the long ago days before he obtained his current position of authority, remembered being like young Sandra there, who would expect no more information than was given on the flash message. There was an unscheduled stop, well, there were protocols for such and they would be followed. The whys of such things were no concern of Porters or even Passengers.

  But Junior Conductors, now, the whys were very much within their areas of concern.

  He began making his way toward the Engines.

  THE SENIOR CONDUCTOR was standing at the doorway between the first car and Engine #2. A stout old man who rarely left his elevated desk in this forward car except to sound the all aboard in the terminal stations, he, following tradition, left the day-to-day running of the train to the Junior Conductor. Their relationship was good. The Senior Conductor no longer bothered to hide the fact that most of the paperwork he worked at behind his desk consisted of applications for retirement communities in the Antarctic mountains.

  “They won’t let me in, J.C.,” said the old man, his eyes wide. “I’ve been riding the rails”—for sixty odd years, the Junior Conductor filled in mentally—“for sixty odd years, and I’ve never heard of a Senior Conductor being kept out of the Engines.”

  The Junior Conductor consulted his timepiece. Seven minutes until deceleration began, then another twenty before full stop in Brownsville Station.

  “Perhaps they’re under orders, sir,” he said, trying to settle his superior down, even though he was deeply worried by what the old man had said. “I’ll just see if I can find out what’s going on. If you don’t mind?”

  “No, no not at all, J.C.,” said the Senior Conductor and moved back to his desk. “Never heard of such is all.”

  Three sharp knocks on the intercar door brought no response, so the Junior Conductor plucked the handset off the telephone mounted on the wall and pulled the lever, hard. He heard the ring in the earpiece, yes, but also through the door in Engine #2, where a similar handset was set above the radio operator’s station.

  No one answered.

  He pulled the lever again, twice this time, to similar result.

  The code for an intratrain communications failure, the Junior Conductor remembered, was IT-P42-4. He remembered, too, the protocol for such incidents.

  He turned the dial on the telephone once to the right, and pulled the lever again.

  A voice answered even before the ring completed.

  “PtP Engineer, go.” The voice was ragged, so much so that the Junior Conductor almost didn’t recognize it.

  “Sir, this is the Junior Conductor, following procedure in contacting Engine #1 when—”

  “J.C.,” the Engineer interrupted. “I need to keep this headset clear in case comms come back up from Brownsville.” There was a click, and then the hiss of a dead line.

  The Junior Conductor had automatically opened his mouth to reply and now let it hang open in shock. Then he became conscious of how foolish he must look and promptly pursed his lips in consideration. The Engineer, of course, was the absolute master of the train and could, as he had just demonstrated, choose to share or not share whatever information he wished. But there was such a thing as protocol. There was such a thing as procedure.

  “What did the Old Man say?” asked the Senior Conductor. The Senior Conductor had come up from the Porter Corps and still lapsed into their jargon upon occasion. The Engineer of a train was always “the Old Man,” despite gender or age, even when, as was the present case, the Old Man might be decades younger than the speaker.

  “Very little,” said the Junior Conductor. “I’m afraid I have nothing to report, sir. I’m going to send a Porter up here to act as a runner in case anything… in case anything develops. You’ll send them back to find me if it does, yes?”

  “Oh, yes, of course, of course,” said the Senior Conductor, relaxing back onto his high stool. He seemed much relieved that his number two had taken charge, however precarious the situation and however much in the dark they were about exactly what that situation was.

  The car lurched as the train braked hard. The Senior Conductor grabbed for the safety bar set into the wall next to his desk but missed and went tumbling. As for the Junior Conductor, years of instinct and experience served him by allowing him to keep his feet, if barely. He rushed over to his senior and was aghast to see blood flowing freely from the man’s scalp.

  “Eh, I’m all right,” said the Senior Conductor, but his eyes were unfocused and he didn’t try to stand when the Junior Conductor offered his arm. “Just going to sit here a moment.”

  The train was still braking. This was nothing like the scheduled deceleration, this was a full emergency stop, something the Junior Conductor had only experienced in training on an express and only a bare handful of times at that. The Passenger cars would be chaos. He had to get back there, help the Porters.

  As he fumbled with the door though, the Point a Punto at last came to a screeching, stuttering, shaking halt. For a bare instant, the only thing that prevented full silence from reigning was the sound of steam escaping somewhere out in the tunnel.

  Then the overhead speakers whined at an ear-splitting pitch, words lost somewhere in the noise. There was static, and then a voice.

  “Attention all passengers. If you are seated, please remain so. If you are not seated, please find the nearest unoccupied seat and take it at once. Do not attempt to return to your assigned seat. Attention all crew. Enact emergency protocol WX-PT9-9.”

  The running lights in the car flashed off for a fraction of a second, and when they came back up, they were tinted amber.

  “I don’t know that one,” the Senior Conductor mumbled. “I don’t know WX-PT… did he say nine? Was it nine? What is that one, J.C.?”

  The Junior Conductor shook his head. He, shockingly, did not know the code either. He dug into his breast pocket for the booklet of regulations and codes, cursed as the tiny print seemed to swim before his eyes, and thumbed rapidly through the pages.

  He blinked when he found the code, narrowed his eyes, and read it a second time.

  “Well, J.C.?” asked the Senior Conductor.

  “WX-PT9-9, sir,” said the Junior Conductor. “It means, ‘flooded tunnel ahead.’”

  THE SENIOR TECHNICIAN pushed her way through waist-deep water in the #6 utility access tunnel. Here, the water was rising slowly and steadily, an incredible and unheard of problem, of course, but at least it wasn’t the torrential inflow they’d heard about from crews farther east before comms had failed.

  She tried to wrap her head around the scope of what was happening and couldn’t. The implications were of wide spread, simultaneous systemic failures across at least a half-dozen infrastructural elements, all of which had multiple built-in backups and redundancies. The Senior Technician was 54 years old and had been an employee of the Utilities Directorate for the entire three and half decades of her working life, and she’d never heard of flooding on the scale they were witnessing now.

  And it had happened so fast.

  The railways timepiece her husband had given her on their wedding night vibrated on its chain around her neck. She had set it that morning to remind of her of when he would be arriving in Brownsville aboard the Point a Punto, planning to surprise him with a rare mid-week visit. The last information she had indicated that the train had stopped sixty miles short of the station, and for that, she was thankful.

  She had little else to be thankful for.

  Givens, her apprentice, came wading out of a side tunnel. He was writing as he walked, slashing marks on a whiteboard with a grease pencil and cursing.

  “Subsector pumps?” she asked him.

  He looked u
p at her, startled for a moment, then said, “Working at one hundred percent capacity and one hundred twenty percent rated efficiency. Just like all the other pumps we’ve checked.”

  This was one of the many maddening things about the situation. The pumping systems were working spectacularly well. There was simply too much water, coming in too fast, for them to keep up with the flows. If there had been breakdowns or blockages, she would have had something to do, something to fix.

  Fixing things was her way. Early in life, the Senior Technician had realized that social norms and she did not necessarily integrate as smoothly as the toothed wheels in the gearboxes of the toys she habitually took apart and reassembled. This might have proved an insurmountable difficulty had she been interested in politics or the media or any of the other career streams open to someone of her parentage and social class. As things had developed, however, the greatest social difficulty the Senior Technician had ever faced—prior to meeting her husband and rather unexpectedly falling in romantic love—was that of convincing her parents and peers that it did not reflect poorly on them that she chose the route of trade schools and service sector employment over what was expected of her.

  Her mother, though, a woman not entirely comfortable in her place but very much someone who had negotiated a peaceful settlement with life, had ultimately formulated a sort of motto for the Senior Technician’s life which had satisfied everyone. “The lesser embarrassment is that you excel at something we don’t understand than if you did poorly at something we do.”

  Her parents had long since retired to the Mountains of the Moon. The family circulated a round-robin letter to all members that the Senior Technician dutifully read and added to, careful to keep her contributions to a series of banalities about married life and leisure time, and free of any talk of pumps or wiring bundles or sewage mains, or, her particular speciality, means of performing stress tests on poured concrete structures.