by Ian Watson
The Jonah Kit
Ian Watson
To Jessica
ich spreche von euerm nicht,
ich spreche vom ende der eulen.
ich spreche von butt und wal…
ich spreche nicht mehr von euch,
planern der spurlosen tat…
ich spreche von dem was nicht spricht,
von den sprachlosen zeugen…
i do not speak of what’s yours,
i speak of the end of owls,
i speak of turbot and whale…
i don’t speak of you any more,
planners of vanishing actions…
i speak of that without speech,
of the unspeaking witnesses…
—Hans Magnus Enzensberger (translated by Michael Hamburger)
One
He swims across a mountain range. The razorback peaks rise abruptly from the bottom ooze, enclosing dank zig-zagging canyons in any one of which a great cunning Ten-Arms might be skulking with its ripping suckers and arms tough as steel…
But why mention steel?
Smooth and rigid, Steel encloses empty spaces resembling intestines, stomachs and lungs, which aren’t any of these things since they never respond to the world about them by the slightest shape-changing.
Steel hasn’t anything to do with Ten-Arms. Unless there’s a Steel he hasn’t come across yet, that can writhe and twist and change its shape! Tough as steel is… a metaphor. A way of knowing.
What a weak, unsound way!
He compares his mental model of a Ten-Arms reaching up to wrap suckers round his forehead—a painful memory, this!—with one of a Steel cruising a deep trench: a pregnant Steel, with a dozen steel foetuses upright in womb pods along her back. (Curiously rigid and lifeless, though, her little ones—for all that there’s a tiny heart tick present in each of them…!)
The complex sound-pictures grate against each other; there’s no correspondence.
So why is it in him, this metaphor urge?
On the fringes of his consciousness exists a blur, a foggy wall that he’s familiar with the existence of, but baffled by its nature. It isn’t memory as he understands memory; still, it has something of memory about it; for the hundredth time his mind claws at this fog…
… till he feels fingers (which he doesn’t possess) touching the clammy steel of an enormous tank, inside which he is somehow also present, as a prisoner… These fingers slide along like blind worms till they’re too numb to feel. They freeze and fall off one by one, till there never were any fingers, and there’s only a crawling sensation of lampreys on his skin—finger-parasites wavering as he swims, rasping ulcers in his hide with their stinging, slobber mouths…
• • •
He circles the mountain peaks, waist muscles contracting, tail rising and falling, flukes pivoting on the upstroke and the down in a sensual forward thrust—his whole body copulating with these waters as he swims, thrusting himself again and again into a pliable yielding softness that parts for him, and parts; his penis itself staying inert, recessed—irrelevant to this grand intercourse with the medium of his existence.
Yet his copulatory thrust carries within it the weak echo of an earlier sensation—hint of a time when his tail blades were forked far wider apart than now; when the underside of his body squirmed upon the soft warmth of some other clinging, shifting being; and all along his spine was bitter cold; and it was black dark everywhere… A residue of strange joy, and fear, clings to him, lamprey-like…
He searches peaks and canyons far below, building himself an exact sound model of the crags and depths, the water density gradients, deep scattering layers of crustaceans, jellyfish, siphonophores, that billow out around the mountains in faint veils. A percussion of croaks, drummings and grunts stipples his echo map too, from other small food beasts making noises.
Finally, he raises his head to eye the sky-barrier undulating right and left.
Monotonous rubbery contortions, rippling…
His eyesight’s such a poor weak partial thing—it casts so little light on what he hears; hardly tells him anything at all.
Yet there’s a queer sense of miracle in seeing this bending luminous web—this thing of light… no nagging ghosts cling to it. It seems freshly created for him every moment.
He surely pays it more attention than it deserves—for what’s a sky, but just a place to gulp air, and blow? Yet he cannot shake his delight in its visibility. He could hear well enough—with perfect pitch—even before he came into the sea… But light is new.
Came into?
But he must always have swum the seas—else his great body would have crushed itself to death!
Tang of his own urine tells him he has cruised full circle and crossed his tracks. Distinct, too, dissolving faeces of Sweetmeats that passed this way a short while ago. Their drifting flakes of dung trigger a hunger memory of sweet, oily flesh in his mouth… How pungently he can taste this sea world! How tangibly he can click-map it!
• • •
He’d been going to die once, he realizes. But he didn’t die. Instead, he’s here.
Cruising. Copulating with the sea. Mapping this world of waters. Occasionally thrusting himself through the sky’s soft roof to spill out numbers that seem to grow in him spontaneously—forcing out faeces of the mind, before diving deep to safety.
And all the time rasped by ghosts…
Two
“The Nilin boy’s run away,” Professor Kapelka told Katya Tarsky as she entered his office to make her daily report. He said it in such an abrupt, startled chirrup that she felt she had burst in on some private conversation. She glanced round the room, but there was no one else there; then at the cradled telephone. Following the drift of her eyes, Kapelka’s scrawny avian hand made a vague gesture of reaching for the phone, but he didn’t carry the action through, and looked at his watch instead.
“Yes, absconded,” he repeated. “The most I can give our own people to find him is another hour.”
His fingernails scuttled away from the black bakelite instrument, across the mahogany expanse of his desk, and began pecking away at the same spot repetitively. The desk was a Czarist antique from some old mansion or other. It had worm holes in it and Kapelka looked as though he was trying to drum up some long-ago-fumigated, petrified worm from one of them.
“I shall have to notify the Supervisory Committee after that s.. Oh, this could deal a terrible blow to our Project, Katya!”
“But why? If he’s only run off playing truant in the hills, surely it’s only a question of time? The weather’s warm enough. The boy can’t come to harm—”
She gestured indignantly at the outside world.
The Professor’s window faced inland across a scattering of wooden buildings with tall, smoking chimneys, up sloping meadows of dry grass hedged by bamboo thickets and conifer groves that progressively thickened into forest the further inland you went. The first snow had fallen a few days earlier—then melted as the weather warmed again, unseasonably. Several white pockets still gleamed. Probably they wouldn’t melt till next summer. Still, the Weather Bureau said this warm spell might last a week or more.
Her gaze fell short of the forests and meadows, rooting itself upon one particular smoking building of two storeys where the boy was housed. Or, had been housed…
The Research Centre had pre-empted practically the whole sea frontage and harbour of the township of Ozerskiy, displacing the small herring cannery which had been here before. With only one small village further south along the peninsula, and lacking any rail link northward to Korsakov with its shipyards, lumber mills and fur plants, Ozerskiy was a lonely spot, yet drably beautiful too, with its cold clean air, long snowfalls, lashing summer rain.
That hous
e was also where…?
But the thought pained her. The man kept in there wasn’t really Pavel Chirikov at all! The real Pavel had died, mentally. Leaving twin ghosts behind him… One, animating the body in that building in a purely zombi fashion. The other, a mathematical abstraction, that swam a mile down… Neither was the actual Pavel. Any other attitude was madness. (And yet. And yet!)
“No, you see Katya, the attendant has run away too. They stole a boat. Well, a boat has gone… I don’t suppose it’s a coincidence. If we don’t find them ourselves, we’ll have far less freedom in future. We’ll be supervised much more directly—the whole experiment, I imagine…”
“But why should that matter, Professor? The Project is valid! It’s proving itself already, wonderfully!”
Her eyes shone: glossy black stones set in tired, turbid grey pools.
The old man, with the bird-like features of a wizard in a fairy story (which indeed he was to her—a magician who could unpick the maze of a man’s mind) regarded his young assistant sadly. Her crinkly black hair swept back through a whalebone ring that splayed out an unkempt bush down the back of her blue overalls—like the Rusalka of legends, he thought, the drowned girl who became a water spirit—with uncombed, dishevelled hair… yet it wasn’t she who had gone underwater. Once again, he wished he could say out loud to her: “Devushka Rusalka—lady water spirit, why can’t you fall in love again with someone else, and forget, forget…” He knew where she’d been staring; knew which window. Knew that it wasn’t because of the boy’s absence. Yet the nearest he ever really came to voicing that level of intimacy was his constant use of her familiar name, as to a daughter. Besides, when she could perform her job so exhaustively well, and so intuitively, while half-mesmerized by this ghastly passion of hers—wasn’t it silly to intervene and destroy this?
So, instead, he lectured her:
“Ah, but what is valid in the eyes of military men, and politicians, Katya? Dividends! In terms of war—the problem of the deep submergence submarine, that can roost on its brood of missiles so quietly, a kilometre beneath the waves. How to track it. How to trap it. Even more valid perhaps—since the nuclear war might never be fought, pray God, but the economic war surely must be—control of the wealth of the oceans. The oil wells. The manganese nodules. All the fuel and minerals for the future. He who holds the key to the deep sea-bed holds the future world in his palm. Equally, he who can interfere with another’s control—by the use of a Jonah, or any other means—has a gun to point at other heads. Did you know that the Americans have a plan for ten-kilometre-wide tripods on the deep sea-bed, to listen out for submarines? How many of these dividends is the Project reaping so far? So few, Katya! There are men of hard fact out there. And all over the world men of hard fact are growing frightened these days—at the drying-up wells, at the emptying mines. We have had freedom such as I never dared dream of as a young researcher, up till now. Because ours was truly a creative dream, and the men of hard fact had the sense to see we needed freedom to put our dream to work. But the Committee are asking so many questions lately. How soon, how soon, is their dividend! Before we can put our model into production! How cost-effective is it? How efficient will it be? Oh, all the jargon of capitalism, Katya! Oh yes, as in America, so here! And ours seems to be such a mental experiment,still… Almost, a spiritual dream! So I say to them how we have to test our system out. I explain how much more complex it is than any new aircraft or spacecraft, this spacecraft of ours. I have to put it in these mechanical terms, Katya,” he apologized, noticing the hurt on her face.
He drew breath.
“I even accuse them of loss of nerve. Like the Americans—retreating from Space, when they could have grasped it… They don’t like that, Katya. But now the boy’s disappearance makes a fool of us. How can we control a far-off Jonah when we can’t keep one little boy in check? That is the sum of it. One boy, who is also, remember…” He tailed off, leaving the rest unsaid, and pecked again at his desk.
“I believe we are going to find something wonderful out soon, Professor,” the dark-haired girl affirmed. “Something unexpected. Something awe-inspiring.”
“Ah, but what, Katya? And, as they say to me, how soon?”
Intuition? She could be right, he thought. Her torment—bound up with a passionate joy while she continued believing in their Jonah—kept her on such a knife-edge of insight and empathy as sometimes seemed almost weird, unnatural…
“What is it like down there, for him?” she mused, fiercely, disregarding his question. “Every word we use betrays his experience. How does he tell the difference between the giant squid and the octopus he meets? What music is he singing now, to map them?”
Kapelka shrugged, reasonably.
“He has radar in his head, Katya—a natural radar. He hears the shapes. Well, squids are decapods, aren’t they? So he hears ten-tentacled torpedos. And octopuses look more like sea spiders with their eight limbs. I suppose they sound that way, too. Then there’ll be emotional overtones—or reflexes—because an octopus is just a harmless foodstuff, while a really giant squid can kill him. The octopus echo should have a benign ring to it… Now what’s this about something unexpected?”
Before Katya could answer him, the phone jangled.
“You see,” she smiled, as Kapelka raised the receiver, “they’ve found him, it’s all right.”
Kapelka shook his head as he listened.
Recradling the receiver, he said sadly:
“They’re out in the Strait by now. There’s a fog coming up over the water! This idiot weather! Of course, they’ll run out of fuel… But they could drift half-way to Japan before the fog lifts. So I’ll have to call the Coastguard. Which means that everybody knows. Save your surprises till later, Katya. Come and make your report this evening. Maybe you can bring some joy…”
Three
Overtaken by uncertainty, confusion, fright, he blows a spout of oily foam from his single nostril and lies on the surface gasping air—his model of the mountains below him blurring as he wallows idiotically in spume, haunted by touches he can’t have felt, by a body he never owned, by notions of noises conveying urgent meanings by way of mouth… Isolated and inefficient, the troughs of ocean toss him then for minute after minute.
He knows his own body well—the flex of his jaws, the waft of flukes, how the melon of his great brow walls in its flexible maze of valves and passages allow with waxy oil. Yet it’s as though he’s only steersman in a vast Steel made of flesh!
A nightmare image of this steersman attacks him now. A cunning Eight-Arms, such as nests on the rock ledges of the cliffs below, is nesting in his mind—its tentacles playing tricks with his thoughts, its suckers operating them one by one; with its sharp beak ready to peck a hole in his melon wall and empty him out, if his thoughts think back too far…
Inside his neck, behind his neck, somewhere—where he can’t ever see it or hear it, but only feel its tentacles, and its beak, tickling him first, then scratching, then ripping sadistically—lives this Eight-Arms. Once a day it wakes up, gorged on “numbers”, and bullies him.
He cruises in pandemonium, burst-pulsing chaotically, loading his melon with ill-structured mush from the waves, almost the echo of a cry of distress; and just while he is acting in this most senseless way the beak begins to peck at him. The itch starts urging him.
Eight-Arms in his mind was woken. In its slumber it was counting out numbers of the suckers that clung to his thoughts while he mapped the sea-floor, and Steels, in the click-pulse way of his kind.
While it sleeps, he can forget about it. It disappears below the surface. Only the lampreys of memory sting him then. But now he has to communicate his itch, to send it to sleep again. He has to void its meal of numbers in the air above the waters.
So he rolls about in the ocean troughs, gathering himself, then humping his body higher, his eyes squint out myopically above the fretted, spray-torn waste his roof of rubber light is, from above; and the Eight-Arms i
nside him presents numbers that he can send—a set of clicks dispersing uselessly into the empty air… But he doesn’t question this, as he pulses. The need is too urgent.
In another hour he’ll hear clicks inside his head, in his neck, somewhere. With Eight-Arms’ help he’ll understand them. Then Eight-Arms can go to sleep again, counting in his sleep… and he’ll be free for another day.
Between now and that moment, though, the panic fear that a blow might strike him from the air! The flight to safety—!
He hyperoxygenates the haemoglobin in his blood, the myoglobin in his muscles—then lobtails abruptly, flipping his flukes high above the surface and standing on his brow in the sea for a brief moment before diving deep.
• • •
What is this blow he fears?
A fist of steel, delivered from the air…
And a “fist” is fingers coiled up in a ball to break his bones and stave his skull in. Fingers are small Steels standing erect inside a Mother Steel…
But this solves nothing; this is still mysterious. How can he explain it to his own kind? They hear him clicking at the air. They hear the foreign clicking in his head. He has been naive enough to ask their help. To pulse questions at them. About this; and the ghosts on the fringes of his consciousness.
Their own messages are sagas of action against the Great Ten-Arms of the Sea, praise songs of bulls, laments at the death of females in labour, love-songs; then, increasingly abstract and hard for him to grasp, those idea maps culminating in the Star Glyphs, the High Philosophy of his kind.
At first he provoked sympathy, condolences for a sickness; once, aversion and flight; now latterly, a piercing, mounting interest.
Perhaps they can help him after all.
• • •
He plunges, and only realizes his error as cliffs race up to meet him. Jagged, eroded crags pen him in, amongst them. Yet his dive seems inevitable, he cannot turn back. Downward he goes, the pressure collapsing his lungs against pliable ribs, his heartbeat slowing and the blood flow cutting off from most of his organs. As his temperature falls, the oil in his brow congeals to a harder wax, weighing him down and becoming an even finer echo screen.