by Steven Welch
Jules popped up out of the top hatch tower of the Aquaboggin and shouted something extremely rude in French. Elise heard a splash and ran up the little ladder to see what had happened.
She watched a trail of bubbles move away from the ship’s port side.
He was fast for an old man.
*
The water was clear and blue, a gorgeous aquamarine dressed in sheets of soft sunlight.
Jules Valiance swam as quickly as he could and that was fast indeed. His heart began to pound, and he silently berated himself for his reefers and wine before using a calming technique he had gleaned from Indian fakirs that allowed him to slow the rate of his pulse. There was a time when he could feign death, or at the very least, extreme ennui, but now it was all he could do just to keep from having a coronary incident.
He could taste dust in his mouthpiece. It had sat for ten years, just like he had. He hoped that the rubber hadn’t dried out.
Something large and dark swam up from beneath and surged past him.
One of the beastly Orcanum, an adult male. The creature swam off, then stopped, turned, and watched Jules.
Jules swam on. He would cross the Orcanum problem if it became one.
A flooded stone village lay below him. The flood caused by the arrival of Earth’s ocean had devastated this place. It was deep here, several hundred feet, but the rooftops of the flooded city were of all heights. He swam over a tall monument, a statue, a hut half buried in silt.
The Orcanum kept pace and distance, watching.
There. Jules saw a hill top into which were carved stone dwellings. The crest of the hill was a ruined temple, bone white in the crystalline waters. The beeping transmitters of Les Scaphandriers were there, fifty feet below the surface.
The merman was in his path without warning.
“You are quick for such a big fellow,” thought Jules.
Jules tried to swim around but the Orcanum male put its massive hands out to stop him.
Jules treaded water for a moment. They stared at each other. Jules tried sign language. The Orcanum didn’t move.
Jules pulled his dive knife out and showed it threateningly to the creature. The Orcanum opened its mouth wide and displayed a set of teeth that made the knife look positively puny.
“Fine,” thought Jules.
He whipped the rubber duck out of his vest and gave it a squeeze. The duck squeaked loudly, farted bubbles, and shot up to the surface.
The Orcanum chased after the duck.
Jules swam as hard and as fast as he could toward the transponders. The rubber duck ploy almost always worked, but it never worked for very long, unless the creature in question was particularly dim.
The beeps grew louder in his helmet. He looked about, scanning the sandy floor of the hilltop temple.
There. A rusted metal lockbox. He swooped down, grabbed the box, and made for the surface.
Or, he would have made for the surface if the Orcanum hadn’t appeared above him. The thing grabbed Jules by the helmet and started tossing him about. Jules could hear the water sloshing around as he was shoved and pulled.
“Merde,” he thought and spit out his mouthpiece.
Bubbles exploded up and confused the Orcanum. Jules had taken a deep breath. He swam back in the direction of the sub, ascending as he went.
There was a time when Jules Valiance could hold his breath for nearly seven minutes. Twenty minutes if deep free-diving. This was not that time. His lungs burned.
He felt a powerful hand on his foot. He kicked away his flipper and was free. The Orcanum swam hard then and was on Jules before the old man had a chance to think.
The brute had him by the shoulders but Jules could still move his hands. He pulled a circular tab on the bottom of his vest and a white cloud burst out, enveloping them. The Orcanum squeezed. Jules thought that his shoulders were going to snap. Then, the strength was sapped out of the hands and Jules was free. He popped up, spluttering for air just as his lungs were about to give out.
The sub was only a few meters away. He was away from the milky water. The Orcanum bobbed up behind him, face down and air-hole up, unconscious.
Elise helped Jules up the side ladder and onto the narrow deck of the Aquaboggin.
“An anesthetic cloud designed for shark attack,” Jules said, struggling for breath, “good enough for our friend there.”
“Will he be ok?”
“Of course. He’ll be back up and terrorizing divers in just a few minutes. His breathing hole is at the surface, so he will be fine, if nauseated for days. He was protecting this treasure, for some reason, a reason that we must deduce.”
He presented the metal box to Elise. There was an ornate emblem on the top of the box.
“That logo is the insignia of Les Scaphandriers, designed originally by a hermit from Cassis and then re-imagined by Man Ray during an absinthe epiphany. The transponders of my team are in this box. Another puzzle to be solved.”
And that’s when the big fishing net fell over them.
Elise let out a little scream and Jules pulled and tugged but the net enveloped them. It grew tighter as those who had tossed it cinched in the ropes.
“We are waylaid!” Jules shouted. He had a knife in his hand and began to cut the net.
“Stop! You’ll ruin our only net, you fool,” a voice shouted. It was the skinny old Asian man in the faded Scaphandrier wetsuit. There was a hand-rolled cigarette drooping from his lips. He ran up to Jules and poked a finger at him.
“Put the knife away.”
Jules looked gob smacked.
“North? North McAllister?”
The skinny old man glared at Jules and puffed his cigarette.
The other three stepped forward and onto the deck of the sub, dropping the net lines.
One, the Guyanese mystery known as Three John, was a towering black man dressed in old jeans and a tight sweater. There was a stovetop hat on his bald head and three pale scars across the left side of his face. The second was short and stumpy, a dumpling of a man with shocking red hair and a shotgun resting in the crook of his arm. The initiated called him Private Splatter, but only as a joke. The third was Zuzu, a tall blonde woman dressed in a Scaphandrier issue jogging suit, the pant legs cut away as was the top at the shoulders, revealing strong muscles, a dive knife strapped to her thigh, and tan dark as burnished copper. She didn’t look like someone you should trifle with, thought Elise. None of them did, really.
“Mon Dieu,” said Jules Valiance, “Les dead Scaphandrier.”
“World killer,” said Private Splatter as he shoved the business end of the shotgun into Jules’s face.
Elise kicked the man in the shins. That was a bold move, and ultimately a bad one, as the stumpy man flinched, the shotgun blasted the air next to Jules’s head, Private Splatter fell backwards into the ocean, and a hole was ripped in the net. The sound of shotgun pellets peppering a tin wall nearby could have been heard if the gun blast hadn’t deafened them.
The party stopped and hundreds of heads, human and not, turned in the direction of the shotgun blast.
Jules put his hands in the air. Elise moved in front of him, her ears buzzing. The dumpling man held his shin and cursed.
“She’s brave, but an idiot. Could have killed somebody,” tall Three John said.
“You’re an idiot, and who had the gun?” Elise answered in a low, angry voice.
The crowd turned away and resumed the party, the noise bubbling up again into a proper froth.
“Can we lower our hands and discuss the situation as rational human beings?”
Private Splatter slipped the shotgun into a back holster and made a face like he’d just eaten a rotten egg.
“Rational, he says.”
Three John stared at Jules.
“Rational? From the man who convinced Farrah Fawcett to dive with snapping sea turtles for a Christmas postcard? From the fool who walked the Nile underwater? Backwards? From the maniac who couldn’t keep his da
mned hands off of the cherub that destroyed the world?”
“Rational is another word for boring,” North McAllister mumbled through a smoke cloud. Zuzu caught McAllister’s eye and smiled.
They stared silently at each other for a long moment. Jules clicked the latch on the treasure box and it opened to reveal four silver watches. The timepieces of Les Scaphandriers.
“It was fortuitous that I found these buried under the sea in a little chest,” Jules said, “and that their signal can last for so long, but to what point is this? Why did you bury your watches?”
“We buried them at sea along with the memory of Les Scaphandriers to wash the blood of the world from our hands,” Three John said.
Elise watched Jules closely. Anger flashed in his eyes for a moment and then she saw a sadness so profound that her heart skipped. The old man bit his lip and turned his face. His grip on the treasure chest weakened. Elise grabbed the box before it fell from his hands and she held it close.
“We can still save the world,” Jules said. His voice was a whisper.
“Look around you, Jules Valiance,” Three John said, “do you have a bucket big enough to carry the ocean?”
Jules straightened.
“Nothing is impossible.”
“I once believed that.”
“Because it’s true.”
Elise saw something strange then. Jules Valiance was not a tall man in her estimation, but he stepped back from the group, turned to face them, and seemed to grow. She had seen defeat in his eyes and fear. She had seen sadness. Now she saw something else. It wasn’t anger exactly, or pride. When she thought back on it, she believed that she saw the fires of imagination in his eyes, and when he spoke he seemed to be a taller man than before with a voice that rang like the bells of Notre Dame.
“To rise from bed with a song and a hope, to boldly go under there and beyond, always with a smile, a laugh, and a dream. We sail so that all may profit from our explorations. We dream so that children may grow up to be us. We seek so that others are inspired to fly,” he said. He paused for the briefest of moments and North McAllister continued.
“We laugh loudly at quiet parties because someone must.”
Zuzu stepped forward then.
“We go unafraid to the worlds below and between with song, fantasy, and wine by our side,” she said in that thick German accent.
“We learn from our deaths and return with stories of love from the grave,” said Private Splatter.
Three John held up his hand. They all turned to him and it was quiet for a long moment. Then, Three John doffed his tall top hat and said,
“We are Les Scaphandriers, The Astonishing Aquanauts, and we dive into the deep, into the dark, into the mysteries and puzzles that God has left for us to solve.”
“We are Les Scaphandriers,” concluded Jules Valiance, “and we are impossible.”
Jules went to Three John then and smiled.
“My friend, the code of Les Scaphandriers is a wee verbose and leaves out some important bits. Perhaps we should revise it. Who’s to say? But I sailed here, to this world beyond ours, and found you somehow. If this is not impossible, then I do not know the meaning of the word.”
“Les Scaphandriers were many things,” Zuzu said, “but rational human beings? Not so much. This is Jules Valiance. He is our only hope, and he has returned. Now, this will be an adventure. Today is a time for celebration, for beer, vigorous love-making, and extreme violence. Rational? To hell with rational.”
Jules beamed and leaped over to Zuzu, embracing her in a bear hug. She resisted, then smiled, then hugged back. Old McAllister smiled so wide that his wrinkly face might split. Splatter continued to simmer but showed no immediate sign that he was ready to start shooting.
Three John stepped forward and offered his hand. Jules took it.
“Zuzu is correct, my friends. Les Scaphandriers are many things,” he said, “and dead is not among them.”
Elise felt awkward and dropped back into the sub.
She went to the cold locker and stared at the colorless carcass of her friend.
Jules had his team again.
She was alone.
If this was as good as her life was going to get she was not sure how she would survive.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
AT THE PEAK OF EBON
THERE WERE HEATED discussions over coffee and smokes.
There was also joyous dancing to the Wandering Haven bands, the sea monkeys with drums and the grim humans with lively guitars.
It was quite a strange party, and it was non-stop.
Elise watched Les Scaphandriers argue and joke and she even saw Jules slip away to kiss Zuzu that evening under the amber glow of the yellow moons. She was not surprised when she punched him. She was also not surprised but seriously grossed out when Zuzu picked him up and kissed him back.
Elise was “la petit Scaphandrier.” They were kind to her and brought her food and drink. Three John pretended to be impressed by her adventures in Paris, her survival at the Eiffel Tower, and her courage at the Nursery. Private Splatter mumbled a compliment about her kicking prowess. North McAllister offered to introduce her to some of the orphan children of the island, humans and Orcanum alike, who played and survived on the East side near the water pumps and green houses.
It was all well meaning, and it was nothing to Elise.
That night, as the party continued to rage lit by torches and candles and the light of three moons, she sat on the deck of the Aquaboggin and stared off over the sea and to the black horizon.
She hated everyone and most of all herself.
Then, a moment later, she felt a sense of love and loss so strong that she cried.
Then, angry at her weakness, she bit her lip until she bled and the crying stopped and her vision grew sharp once more.
Then the cycle would repeat.
A cool breeze blew in from the sea. She wore her Scaphandrier gear. It was comfortable. Her old clothing from the Girl’s Garden was stuffed into her backpack, unwashed, and it stank of filth and the fall of Paris.
Her blond hair tickled her face in the breeze and she pushed it back into a ponytail.
Fish and other things jumped near her in the water and loudly in the distance beyond her sight. Here were two worlds forced to live as one. Earth drained of life, and that life forced upon Orcanum until she had overflowed. Billions were dead. Elise had not spoken a word since sunset but she had listened. Glowing portholes had opened all over this beautiful place and the oceans of Earth had surged in, a Biblical deluge that brought whales and sharks and all manner of creatures, even people who had been trapped in the vortex. The Orcanum, though oceanic, breathed air and lived most of their lives on land. They had lost countless lives. The survivors here on Wandering Haven did not know if there were others. It was a world without technology, no telephones or radios or electricity. As far as they knew, they were the last Humans and Orcanum in the universe.
Les Scaphandriers argued theories and conspiracies and bizarre possibilities all day and into the evening, but Elise understood little of it and finally began to tune their chatter out, like radio noise in another language. She had finally escaped to the deck of the sub. It was nice and quiet there.
A little glowing squid popped up out of the water and accidentally landed on the deck next to her. It was the size of her hand, brilliant blue with shining eyes and flailing tentacles desperate to get back to the water.
Are you from this world or mine?
She gently lifted it up by the mantle and dropped the tiny squid back into the water where it jetted off like a fiery rocket, leaving a cloud of sparkling, phosphorescent ink in its wake.
So beautiful.
Dad would love this place. He told me of worlds just like it, in his stories at bedtime, in those long car-rides or whenever we were just bored. Dad told me of these people, this place, this adventure.
How?
He gave her a blanket that kept her alive for
ten years during the end of the world.
He told her of Jules Valiance.
How had he known?
Was she special somehow? There were books she had grown fond of where a single child or adult was designated as the chosen one, a special force, a savior. Was she the chosen one? She had slept for ten years and not aged. She was on a wild adventure into another world and it seemed as if anything was possible.
But she had no powers. She couldn’t fly or lift heavy things or read minds like in the comic books.
Her Dad had told her so much of this and yet he had been so wrong.
It wasn’t lovely or funny or innocent. It was death and sadness and it smelled bad.
Her Dad was the best man she had ever known, and he had been so stupid.
She loved him and she hated him and then she felt something like a hand come up from her soul and grip her heart so tightly that she couldn’t breath.
Elise had built such thick walls to keep everything away, a dam against her feelings, that when they broke at that moment she thought that her life was slipping, rushing, tearing away, like the ocean under the pull of the vortex, like her Dad’s life at the beach.
There is that moment when you cry so hard that it feels as if your soul is being torn from you through your face. You can be so hurt, so overwhelmed, that a part of you, a special and irreplaceable part of you, feels like it’s being murdered.
This was that moment for Elise.
She collapsed and fell asleep, alone on the deck and, in her mind, alone in the universe.
*
The ship’s sails were embroidered fabrics as tall as the sky, suspended from masts of adamantine steel, and you could see her approach from a dozen leagues away.
The hull was glass forged in the heart of a distant star, tinted green from the life absorbed when in those far away fires the sands of Earth and the waters of Orcanum were wed, and laced with the living technologies of worlds they had reaped.
And those sails, stitched from embroidered cloth that told the story of all creation when laid end to end, those billowing curtains draped and swaddled and protected the ship from time and space and injury of all kinds.