Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  At long last she succeeded in touring the whole vast edifice by the right route, avoiding all pitfalls and evils whilst consuming the jewels she needed. This time Isbeth took the lead, and I distracted the opposition. As soon as she was translated, out and away, I retraced the circuit and followed her through, on to this submarine level where sharks and squids and other nasty surprises hungered for us. We’d been here quite a while.

  When I came back to myself, after being a shark’s astral lunch and fading out, miracle of miracles I wasn’t far from a total of two powerpoints. Powerpoints on this level were pearls. (Use ‘em up, and replacements appeared elsewhere. Same principle applied to sanctuaries and the essentials of life.) After gulping these down, I didn’t take more than a few hours to find Isbeth. Soon we were safe in a transparent dome filled with fresh air. Safe, for two or three sleeps, supposing we chose to stay put. Seawater was leaking in slowly, but the dome had two habitable levels. Downstairs was ankle deep in water; upstairs was snug.

  We’d made love, in a huge cosy sleeping bag. We were feasting on what we’d found in the dome: honeyed figs, sweet dates, coconuts, and a few trays of sushi. And of course we’d also found oxygen packs, for outside use when we quit the dome. Ours not to reason why. That was the way of it. You never saw things pop into existence; you just came across them – or they came across you. However, we were in a reasoning mood.

  ‘Why, Konrad?’ she asked me.

  ‘Where is a good question too.’

  ‘So is how.’

  Outside, a flotilla of violet angelfish the size of shark fins lazed past towards coral cliffs of pink and gold, where weed wafted and a deadly-looking orange medusa bloomed. Isbeth bit into a fig, fed me the rest of it, then asked:

  ‘Who are we, Konrad? Who are we really?’

  I mumbled, mouth full.

  ‘We can’t be real, you know,’ she said.

  ‘That’s a dangerous assumption.’

  ‘Real people don’t shift in a twinkling of an eye from a castle to underneath the sea. Real people don’t get eaten and find themselves alive again.’

  ‘It’s a dangerous assumption, Isbeth, because if we don’t play everything for real then we’ll slacken off. We shan’t win.’

  ‘Win what?’

  ‘Ourselves. Our stolen selves.’ Yes, that had to be why. In vino Veritas. In addition to the food, we had an amphora of fine wine and a couple of golden goblets.

  Isbeth was dark and slight and wiry, with magical, deep-set eyes and high cheekbones. I was leaner than I’d been originally, but in many respects I think her wire was stronger than my new muscle. I wondered how I could change physically, if I wasn’t real.

  ‘Maybe we’re being tested,’ I said.

  ‘No one’s compelled to strive.’

  ‘We compel ourselves.’

  ‘Yes! Some of us do.’

  ‘Or maybe we’re being trained. Odd sort of training, though.’

  ‘Trained in initiative.’ She grinned. ‘Trained in speed and planning and memory, boldness and caution. Also,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘trained not to fear death.’

  ‘There has to be a fourth level, doesn’t there?’

  ‘Yes – and we’ll get to it!’

  In fact, despite my recent shark debacle, Isbeth had fared less well than I so far in the waterworld. Nothing terminal as yet. With my help, she’d always managed to recharge before she racked up three successive deaths. But she’d fallen victim to a medusa, an octopus, a poisonous urchin, and other fates too. That wasn’t because I let her go ahead into danger. The going seemed tougher. At the same time I was enjoying a run of good luck, or maybe I was developing an instinct. We were still a good team, yet I felt that somehow, in some way, I was pulling ahead.

  She glanced down at the level of water seeping in below.

  ‘Listen, Konrad, if I’m zapped back to the castle I’ll win through here again – fast. Don’t wait for me. Promise to go on ahead. Try to reach the next level.’

  I nodded. I intended to. Anything extra I could learn might help her too. Somewhere, somehow. Even on different levels, we’d still be thinking as a team. Something awaited. Of that I was sure. Knowledge. Reward. Whatever. Something had to await.

  A giant squid squirted its way overhead, its rose and yellow phosphorescent signals flashing incomprehensibly like some flexible control console made of rubber. What long suckery arms it had. What a cruel beak. What big round eyes.

  A couple of days later Isbeth got zapped, and I couldn’t do a thing to help. She’d already died twice over and reassembled nearby; she absolutely had to recharge. She dived between two great slabs of rock for a power pearl lying exposed on silver sand. Those weren’t rocks. They were the two half-shells of a clam larger than any we’d ever seen before. The shells clashed shut on Isbeth. Bubbles gushed from her ruptured tank and face-mask. I watched her exposed feet thrashing in dream-mode. She was still trying to grab that pearl, to pop it in her mouth, give her the zoom to haul herself up out of the clam. She failed. She vanished.

  Grief.

  Fury.

  As the clam began cranking itself open again I dived, snatched the pearl, and thrust myself up and out before the creature was ready to spring shut again.

  I found a couple of fellows I knew resting in the next refuge dome. Ivan Koschenko and his black partner Barney Randall. Barney wasn’t too welcoming.

  ‘Three of us in one place is like bait, man! We’re gonna attract a giant octopus to crack us open.’

  Barney nursed a particular hatred of octopuses; they seemed to have a special affinity for him.

  ‘My Isbeth’s been zapped,’ I told them.

  ‘Let him stay here an hour or so,’ said Ivan.

  So I stayed. So we talked. Not about Isbeth. What was there to say? She wasn’t dead. She was back in Ghoul Castle.

  Ivan talked about the surface of the sea.

  ‘What’s up there? Why don’t we ever swim straight up and take a look?’

  ‘You’d never get there,’ said Barney. ‘A fucking big shark would tear you to ribbons, out in the open.’

  ‘I’m interested in whether there is a surface.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘it’s our curiosity that’s being tested, and so far we haven’t shown enough curiosity.’

  ‘Don’t get much chance, do we?’ snapped Barney. He kept looking out at the submarine landscape in case some menace was creeping close. ‘When we get caught and go fuzzy–’

  ‘Dreammode,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. That’s unnatural. I think we’re all models, in a big machine. I don’t mean like tin soldiers, not that kinda model. I don’t know what I mean. I’ve been robbed of how to know.’

  ‘We’ll find out on level four,’ I assured him.

  You’ll have noted how I started our story halfway through – just the way we had all been started up in the ruins, halfway through our lives with no idea what went before. Now we leap forward a bit, just as I leapt forward soon after that – to the fourth level.

  And the fourth level was a starship. I knew right away what a starship was. This wasn’t any old starship. It was an interstellar luxury palace, a ritz of a starship patronized by high society, a snobbish, intriguing, catty, star-hopping aristocracy of lords and ladies with whom etiquette was of the utmost importance. Life on board the Empire Topaz was an intricate dance of manners, and woe betide you if you stubbed a toe. Deadly as any shark bite, such a gaffe could wreck your status and destroy you. Here, a slap in the face or a snub was death. Dreammode was the hot melting flush of embarrassment. Powerpoints weren’t jewels or pearls this time; we had to collect favours from ladies. Asking one of those fine ladies in the ballroom of the ET such a question as, ‘Where are we really? What are you really?’ merited a stinging rebuke… zap.

  Oh, but I got myself deeply involved in all this maze of politeness and innuendo, flirtation and character assassination, and jockeying for status. Perhaps too deeply. What other option was there, unles
s you merely wanted to stay on the sidelines as some sort of feeble junior midshipman? Besides, the Empire Topaz did have its favourable aspects. I was falling in love with the Lady Zania.

  Weeks later I turned a corner on B-Deck and came face to face with…

  ‘Isbeth!’

  ‘Konrad. I just got here. I raced through the castle. The underwater level took longer.’

  I hustled Isbeth along to a safe cabin where we shouldn’t be bothered for a while by partying ladies or scheming beaux, and I filled her in on all that I’d learned. Most of what I’d learned.

  When I’d done, she said, ‘So now we’re being taught etiquette the hard way. Etiquette is the final gloss on a professional soldier, I seem to recall! Perhaps we’re soldiers, you and I. Officer material. These different levels are the ways we’re being taught. Or selected and ranked. Our minds are linked in some type of computer.’

  Computer. Yes, I knew what that meant. Yes, this starship had a computer guide her and run her systems.

  ‘The computer could know the real situation, Konrad. We need to reach the computer. That’ll be the last initiative test. The recognition of ourselves.’

  I felt sad. I’d been wasting time flirting, spinning in the social whirlpool whist trying to keep my footing and advance, when I could have thought this out for myself.

  ‘Starship,’ she repeated to herself. ‘Soldiers. Computers. We’re coming across more clues, aren’t we? Here’s another enclosed world with its own layout and rules and limitations. We’re going to raid the computer, you and I, ask it some questions. Even if it is only a simulation of itself.’

  ‘What was that you said? Simulation?’

  ‘Well, a computer on board this ship can’t be any more real than the ship itself. But it may contain authentic data. It may interface.’

  ‘Could we be “simulations” too?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. Probably it would be more economical to use real people and put their bodies in stasis while their brains were linked cybernetically.’

  ‘Stasis. Cybernetically.’

  There came a soft knock on the cabin door. We both froze but the knock was repeated impatiently. I had little choice but to open the door.

  The Lady Zania stood there.

  ‘Madam.’ I sketched a bow and made the usual hand flurries. ‘Utterly delighted! How ever did you find me?’

  She stared past me at Isbeth, jealous fury in her eyes.

  ‘My Lady, may I present an old acquaintance, by name Isbeth Anndaughter? Isbeth Anndaughter, here is the Lady Zania.’

  With miraculous cool and skill and charm, Isbeth rose to the occasion and bailed me out. Herself too. I don’t imagine that Zania was fooled, but an awkward moment which could have toppled headlong into deadly rivalry, vengeance, and disgrace ended instead with Zania linking arms with Isbeth to lead her to the B-Deck salon, while I escorted both my ladies. A certain barbed pique was still the undertow to Zania’s repartee, but Isbeth simply wouldn’t let Zania manoeuvre her into hostility. Isbeth adopted a wonderfully disarming flattering frivolity.

  And so we partied and danced and made new acquaintances and tasted gourmet canapés and drank champagne and fenced with words. Zania made sure that she introduced Isbeth to all the most dangerous lords and ladies, yet Isbeth hardly faltered. I could sense the strain in my long-time partner, for here were human sharks as smooth and sleek as any sea predator, but far more ingenious. Here were dowager octopuses and young, entangling medusae. Here were old lords like crusty clams who invited being tickled then snapped shut.

  It seemed to take days to disentangle ourselves from the repercussions of that reception on B-Deck, which led on to other revels, to casinos and boudoirs and I forget what else. Eventually Isbeth and I pretended to slip away for separate trysts. Together again, alone at last, we fled the passenger section for the starker corridors of crew territory to hunt for the computer room.

  Isbeth forbore to discuss, archly or otherwise, my previous entanglement with Zania; nor was I eager to allude to it. We had other fish to fry.

  ‘We’re in an imperial starship on its way to war,’ I argued. ‘Strip away all the sophistication of this particular ship, Empire Topaz, and underneath is a killing weapon filled with racks of sleeping soldiers being fed with false worlds to train ’em for all contingencies.’

  ‘Including courtesy? In case we need to be courteous to the hostile aliens at our destination? In case we need to be diplomats as well as marines? Thus you shall learn the correct way to kiss an alien’s hand?’

  ‘Not aliens, no it can’t be that. Humans. This is Empire Topaz. We’ll be coming up against powerful colonists who have rebelled against the empire.’

  She laughed, a shade sarcastically.

  ‘It was you who first mentioned soldiers, Isbeth.’

  ‘So I did.’

  * * *

  Her fingers danced over the keyboard as if with a mind of their own, interrogating. Who is Isbeth Anndaughter? Who is Konrad Digby? Self-Diagnosis? State of System?

  On the green screen a single repeated word scrolled.

  CYBERFUGUE

  CYBERFUGUE

  CYBERFUGUE

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘Let’s try to find out.’ And she typed, Define.

  Nothing.

  Define: Fugue.

  FUGUE: A PERIOD OF MEMORY LOSS WHEN AN INDIVIDUAL VANISHES FROM NORMAL HAUNTS ALSO: A THEME TAKEN UP AND REPEATED REPEATEDLY.

  What is level five? she typed.

  RADIOACTIVE RUINS.

  She turned to me, stunned. ‘So if we… graduate from here… we’re back in the ruins. There’s no other reality! No genuine reality!’

  ‘Maybe we’re all dead. Maybe this is hell. Or purgatory.’

  ‘Huh. Not so long ago you thought we were on an interstellar battleship, being groomed for command.’

  ‘So did you. Almost.’

  ‘Something has gone wrong, that’s what. Whatever controls us is in a fugue. A cyberfugue. It’s looping these scenarios it imprints on us, it’s recycling them. The true purpose has been lost.’

  ‘Are you remembering more of yourself, Isbeth?’

  She shook her head. She said, ‘Maybe the purpose of these scenarios isn’t to train us at all. It’s just to occupy us during a huge spaceflight lasting years and years. It’s to keep us stimulated so that our minds don’t atrophy.’

  ‘When we arrive,’ I asked, ‘we’ll be restored to ourselves?’

  ‘Unless the system really is in cyberfugue. Unless we’re locked in, with no way out. Unless that’s what the computer’s telling us – or rather this simulation, this model here. I’m inclined to believe that’s so. I’m going to try and over ride the program. Crash it.’

  The periscopes showed ruins. The external Geiger counters chattered like crazy.

  We had woken up weak as kittens. It took days to recover, days of supping special nutrient soups fed us by machine.

  We remembered the war, and the automated underground shelter, enormous in its extent, with five levels one below the other, fully stocked for all supposed future needs. Down on level four, the ‘swimming pools’: the algae tanks for our descendants to grow slopfood when the larder got empty. Deepest of all, the nuclear-fusion plant. Enough space for a generation or two to rattle around in. Then it would get a bit more crowded.

  We remembered the way our metabolisms had been slowed, how our brains had been linked electronically, how our memories had been suppressed, how we would be given games to play during the next few time-warped centuries… until the Earth was habitable once again, or until the machinery was forced to wake us anyway, prematurely; in which case we would have to breed in here and raise kids and they would have to raise kids in turn. Until.

  Optimistically, we could sleep through the whole process of the healing of the Earth. A hundred years, three hundred, five hundred. Fifty men and fifty women, the gene pool to rebuild some sort of human civilization or existence.
/>   The computer in the Empire Topaz had told the truth. The fifth level was ruins – the ruined, radioactive planet. Without any mutants running about; nothing could survive up there.

  And Isbeth, who was a computer whiz, had crashed our survival program. She had woken us all up. No way could we be put back to sleep, in stasis.

  Elapsed time: fifteen years. Too soon, far too soon. A century too soon, three centuries too soon.

  Isbeth and I agreed that we must blame the machines, otherwise her life might be in danger, and mine too, since I’d helped her.

  But if the machines could go so badly wrong chronologically, in what other respects might our sanctuary turn sour? What else might malfunction in the endless years ahead?

  If only we were back aboard the Empire Topaz. Or in Ghoul Castle. Anywhere else.

  What a fine environment for despair, for insanity. It was hardly surprising when Barney Randall killed himself. He cut his own throat. I saw him with the knife against his neck. He was down at the end of a corridor. No one else was about but me. I dashed down the corridor towards him shouting, ‘No!’ But he just grinned then sliced a second, bloody grin below that grin.

  Without hesitating I raced for help. No, let’s be honest, I ran away so as to have witnesses. Otherwise someone might say that I’d killed him myself. I came back with two Hispanic men – Martinez and Cruz, engineers – and a woman doctor, Sandra Macdonald.

  ‘Where’s the body, then, eh?’ demanded Cruz. ‘Where’s that body?’

  ‘Someone must have… removed it.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Macdonald. ‘Where’s the blood?’

  The floor was spotless.

  ‘But it was here!’

  ‘Don’t you try to spook us!’ snarled Martinez.