He was dozing in his backyard with his sons asleep on either side—one on each arm—when the quality of shadow shifted. He cracked open an eye. A woman he’d never seen before stood over him. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Nice hat.”
“Thanks, keeps the sun off. Who are you supposed to be this time?”
“You can’t tell? Thought I’d try a familiar face from the movies to make you comfortable. Might’ve got the nose wrong. And who are you today?”
“Today… to them I am Gordon Holland.”
“Nice trick.”
“I learned it from you. From your secret government agency.”
“And we have learned something from you. The clay tablets from your last treasure-hunting trip to the ruins of Baphometropolis. Have you read them?”
No. He never did.
“We did, and translated them. They mention the Shrine of the Microcosmos. Heard of it?”
He hadn’t.
“You find artifacts of entire dead civilizations, but you’re just scratching the surface. There are also artifacts of reality. The agency has known about this one for some time, but hasn’t had a place to start before now. If you’re interested, I encoded the map in today’s newspaper.”
He sat up to say he didn’t get the newspaper—who the hell gets a newspaper anymore?—but she was gone. The sun was low, and in his eyes. Arms asleep from being lain on. Was she a dream?
But when he shook the children awake and opened the front door he found their mother standing on the stoop, holding a rubber-banded Daily Times. “This was on your lawn,” she said, handing it over. “Who the hell gets a newspaper anymore?”
“Goodbye, sons. You’ll have to take them for the next few weeks. I’ve got a work trip coming up.” Already unfolding the paper and scanning for clues.
“Another ‘expedition’? Well, don’t expect me to loan you any money. You’re already late on last month’s support.”
He saw something promising in the horoscope, applied basic numerology, and counted every—checked the date—fifth word. No, the result was gibberish.
“Listen to me, Gordon. The social worker’s saying some alarming things—”
He counted out primes. Still nothing.
“— If you don’t make more effort, you’re going to lose your visitations.”
Tried the Fibonacci sequence. Ah!
“You won’t ever see your kids.”
Finally. Something interesting.
A plane ticket in another name and what little cash he had left over from his last acquisitions got him to the other side of the world. On the flight, he read and reread the paper, trying to shield its contents from the people around him, who did a poor job of pretending to ignore him. So far he had decoded a bunch of nonsense about rods, cords, cables, and leagues: from what he could remember, there were twelve cubits to a rod, ten of those to a cord, six of those to a cable, and thirty cables to a league, and this was all based on a “gur,” which was a standardized cube filled with either barley, wheat, water, or oil, and differed in their specific gravities. Unless the source tablet was dated to after the adoption of the royal-gur, which was yet another ratio.
There were also cardinal directions, but if they were based on celestial markers, he’d have to account for the wobble in the Earth’s axis, which pointed to different polestar after millennia. And the starting point was an entire ruined city; were these measurements from its center, or one of its gates, or—?
This much deposited him and a rented Renault Juvaquatre in several square miles of wasteland somewhere along the Saudi border, and all he had to narrow it down were a few more cryptic lines: “Seek seashells in the desert” and “The Star of Marduk guide you.”
Out of the car with luggage and map, into a harsh salt landscape that reflected the white sun and hurt his eyes to look in any direction for too long. The broad-brimmed hat failed to completely shade his face. His luggage contained molding wax, octopus vellum, and a clean shirt. He took three steps away from the Renault and instantly lost sight of it behind dunes that merged perfectly with the sky. A small breeze erased his footprints, and he cast no shadow.
Without shadow, there was no tracking the sun, and without the motion of the sun, there was no sense of passing time. He tried one direction, then another. Where was the car? Around the next corner, or the next…
There was an imperfection ripple in the stark white canvas of the ground. He picked it up and brushed dust off the calcified spiral of a paper nautilus, placed here by a Cambrian ocean 500 MYA, or by the Flood 5,000 years ago, or by the Devil just yesterday, depending on one’s cosmology. It seemed such a strange, delicate thing to find in an otherwise signpost-devoid space. Because it was what one does when finding a seashell, he put it to his ear.
Dissolve to a tableau as featureless as a fluorescent office cubicle. In the middle distance, a steel desk, a swivel chair, a potted plant.
“Mr. Holland?” said the man seated there.
“Not today,” the man who was occasionally Gordon Holland said into the receiver. The stranger wore gold, wire-rimmed glasses and had dark hair swept back from a widow’s peak. “Didn’t I see you on the plane?”
“I don’t believe we’ve yet had the pleasure. An introduction: Rutherby, representing various financial interests, all with vested claims against you and your… business attempts.”
“Ah, so you’re after a piece of the treasure, too?”
“The amount levied against your legal entity is substantial, though hardly what I’d classify as treasure. Your ex-wife, for example—” he turned a page in his ledger “— seeks backpay and other recompense. Your landlord, likewise, and there are several outstanding tax actions.”
Faint roaring like distant waves. “Look, bub, whoever you are, and whatever you want, I don’t think you have any jurisdiction out here, but you’ll have to track me down if you’re gonna get anything out of me.”
“Please deposit another coin for more time,” Rutherby said.
“Excuse you?”
“These long-distances can be quite costly, you know.”
“How’d you get this connection in the first place?” Crescendo of rushing water.
“Why, Mr. Holland, you can’t outrun the echo in your head.”
Disconnect.
The ocean sound, like the sunlight, seemed to come from every direction at once. He put the nautilus in his pocket and stumbled on, desperate for a body of water. Coming around a dune he saw, instead, a machine, a single oiljack thumping away. People rushed toward him from a cluster of shacks. A plywood sign on the rooftops bore the Shell Oil Company logo.
Seashells in the desert, he thought, just as the lead roustabout reached him and, over the machine chuffing, screamed, “WE ARE DUTCH.”
He looked at their dark-skinned faces; at the hand painted red-and-yellow grand scallop slapped over sun-faded military insignia on the heavy equipment; at the giant hose pumping crude into a tanker truck labeled “MILK” in big block letters; at their old bolt-action rifles, and said, agreeably, “Whatever! You folks have any water?”
The oiljack clamor and the language barrier were insurmountable for casual conversation, but the roustabouts asked through much gesturing: Where is your team? Why are you out here by yourself? Are you an idiot?
And he let it be known with emphatic pointing: Yes, I work alone, for I embody the spirit of independent man and with my own two hands will I remake the physical world as I see fit.
Met, in turn, with disbelieving head-shaking, eye-rolling, hand-washing, fate of fools thrown up to God.
“Say.” He pointed at the ground-penetrating radar trailer-hitched to the back of a Toyota Tacoma. “That thing work?”
One bill from his thinning sheaf of 50s got them to turn it on and drive Zamboni search patterns across the dry seabed until the radar return showed a big empty space beneath them. “Borrow a shovel?” Mimed digging. When they looked blankly, he peeled off another 50. They gave him a stick of dynamite.
He made a hole in the ground.
They used a winch to lower him into a subterranean chamber, where he walked around by lantern light, examining chisel marks of hand-hewn stonework. Familiar ritual architecture that he recognized from other Akkadian temples, and there was enough art on the walls here to fund the entire trip, with some left over.
He pressed molding wax into the carvings to take an impression, flattened sheets of octopus vellum against the rock paintings so the chromatophores could imitate the pigment, then peeled everything off and laid it flat.
This was his prize—he never took artifacts from archaeological sites, merely made copies and licensed the designs to arts and craft emporia and hobby shops. Corporate lobby plaster casts of cuneiform tablets. Egyptian-patterned prints for Reno casinos. Thousands of years of history in a million suburban living rooms that no one bothered to read. Treasure maps hiding in plain sight.
He wasn’t the first here: a doorway had been blasted open to another chamber. Who, and when? He pushed through the rubble, and found the answer to both questions.
The walls in the second room were marked with constellations, ringed Saturn, the bruised eye of Jupiter, and the cold planets beyond them. Cloister cells were carved in narrow niches, each holding only a sleeping slab and a toilet hole. The priests of an extinct religion had scratched their dreams onto the ceilings above their beds, and what he saw there was worth more than all the oil drilled from this desert.
Other openings stretched farther back into dark tunnels. In the middle of the room, surrounded by a skirt of cobblestone, there rose a basalt island. Upon it, a skeleton dressed in a grey uniform and shrouded in cobwebs knelt before an altar.
He called out, “Hi there, Fritz!” and stepped forward, then swiftly sank beneath the surface. Not cobblestones—skulls made anonymous by the removal of their faces and stacked a few meters deep, floating on a quicksilver moat, unable to hold his weight.
The sun was setting. The oilriggers shouted down into the hole, “Fool! Where are you? Fool, come back!” and, getting no reply, winched up their cable and departed. They’d never be able to find the narrow opening again in the erased landscape. They did find his car, already salt-corroded, but decided it wasn’t worth stealing.
“And now here I am in Malaysia,” he said to the pilot at the dock. “Because no archaeological misadventure is complete without Nazi ghosts.”
Luzviminda ate lunch while her seaplane refueled. “I think you’re leaving out important bits of the story.” She was sole proprietor and operator of Small World Air Freight Services, whose only asset was the Grumman G-21 Goose tied up alongside them. “You look like you’re 3,000 words into a Lester Dent story.”
Sunburned, suffering from heavy-metal poisoning and infected bite marks, for a minute he couldn’t understand how he’d arrived here. “Let me retrace my steps.”
Struggling in the moat was as useless as swimming in quicksand. His boots touched liquid more viscous than water, which volatilized in his wake. Every motion scraped his skin against rotten teeth until he relaxed into a dead man’s float and, with careful movements, dragged himself across the skulls to the lip of the island. Crawling facedown, facing mortality as every supplicant must.
The altar was empty, but it had a round depression on top where something once rested. He left a circle of silver footprints as he examined it from every side. The German’s mummified face matched the death’s head insignia on his uniform.
The plinth had none of the bureaucratic afterlife accounting common in royal tombs. No tallying of conquests or embalmed cattle. It was six-sided, with a bas-relief on each. On one, the Fall of Babylon itself; on the next, a three-masted sailing ship locked in battle with a tentacled sea monster; then, an oddly proportioned bird flying above a towering mushroom; fourth, a person in a helmet standing on cratered land, a simplified Earth overhead and familiar flag in hand, which must have given the Germans quite a shock. Fifth seemed etched with a full integrated circuit diagram.
The sixth face, if following the same chronology, represented events that had yet to happen with images so abstract that he could hardly recognize anything human among them. And yet, the more he looked, the more grew his sense of unease, despair, and doubt of the survivability of the species. Perhaps that was the most accurate representation of any future: staring at chaos, searching for patterns within it, and projecting an apocalypse upon them.
“Okay, then how’d you get out of there if you’d been abandoned?” The Goose was fueled, ready to go. Her name painted across the side was Ace of Coins and the pinup on the nose wore only a lei, a flower-print sarong, and had obols for eyes.
“Fritz helped!” He held up an open-face silver pocketwatch. “A marvel of German engineering—it still works, once you wind it. The Babylonians were first to divide a circle into 60 degrees. They also associated Jupiter with their main god, Marduk, and Jupiter has a twelve-year orbital period. So I went into the tunnel under their Jupiter carving and at every junction I simply moved the minute hand forward five minutes, and its angle showed me which way to go. Of course, I had to calculate the complement to each angle, because I was leaving instead of —” He saw the look on her face. “I have a head for numbers.”
“So you say, but your numbers don’t add up. Jupiter’s orbit is only 11.86 years. That error compounds. You were making wrong turns.”
“Yet, here I am.”
“Wherever you are, you’re not all there. Babylonians couldn’t have seen the Red Spot before the invention of the telescope. The storm has only existed for a few centuries. And even if you were just following an air current or the Nazis’ footprints, how’d you get from there to here?”
After waiting by the desert highway long enough, he hitched a ride on a produce truck to the nearest building—a tiny shop selling petrol, cigarettes, and what appeared to be a brisk trade in pornographic French and Russian publications. “Telephone?” He mimed making a call.
The man behind the counter rubbed thumb and fingertips together. All he had to pay with, a pocket of Fritz’s Reichsmarks, totaled about 80 cents in face value, but were worth thousands to a collector. The shopkeeper swept them up and pointed him to a corner.
Who did he have to call, all the way out here, on forged papers? Papers. He pulled out the sweat-wrinkled newspaper and dialed the first sequence of numbers he could make out amongst the smudges. It rang.
Click of a connection. A small voice buzzed at him. “What’s that?” he said. “Hold on, I’ll try to improve the signal.” Searched his pockets again, fitted the nautilus shell around the earpiece, and pressed it to his auricle. “Who’s there?”
“Recall department.” The voice, now much clearer, sounded somewhere behind him. He turned. The counter was still there, only now the shelving stretched back to the vanishing point. The overhead light was as large and far away as a harvest moon, and shed its light only in a small circle directly around them.
Sounded like a woman, looked like a department store mannequin putting on spare parts: dental mirror eyes, snake scale fingernails, raw flayed corset that hung limply till she turned her back: “Do me up?”
He fastened the whalebone across her spine. Her breasts pulled back taut, her rib spars showed through. “Can you help me?” he asked. “I need to find where to go.”
“Pick a world, any world.”
He searched the mix-match shelves, found a battered copy of Axis and Allies board game. “Hey, I used to play this as a kid.”
“Imagine that.” Smile of spare teeth in the wrong sockets. Her hair was coils of electric wire standing in all directions, occasionally crackling with blue lightning. She dumped the board out and its pieces clattered on the floor. Something about her reminded him of childhood boogeymen: a substitute teacher, perhaps, or his orthodontist. “Where to start?”
He gave her the metal totenkopf badges pulled off Fritz’s clothing. She shook them in her fist and cast the bones upon the world map. They scattered across Mesopotamian desert, Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Malaysia, Java Sea, South Pacific. “What’s that mean?”
She read the inscrutable, upturned runes. Sonderstab F, a secret German unit sent by Hitler to Iraq in 1941, fled the British by traveling south from Baghdad to escape by sea, possibly aboard U-183, part of the “Gruppe Monsun” Indian Ocean submarine patrol based out of Penang. Reported sunk in the Java Sea.
“Guess I’m going to Malaysia,” he said.
Taking her teeth out, one-by-one. “Thank you for calling. Goodbye.”
He turned a page in his passport and became a different person. “Octopus vellum can copy any currency, but the raw stuff is worth more than any denomination you can fit in it. Emergency use only.”
“The microcosmos—” Luzviminda said.
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Linnaeus originally classified microcosmus as the kraken: Corpus variis heterogeneis tectum. ‘A body covered with various heterogeneous other bits.’ Now it’s the name of a sea squirt species.”
“That doesn’t sound like what was in the shrine. See here—” He showed a flat rectangle of red sealing wax.
“It’s backwards.”
“It’s an impression off the wall carvings. Comes off reversed, like a printing press. It says: ‘Incense traders from Iram of the Pillars brought a glass globe—the size of a skull but containing all the world—from the Wabar craters and thereafter built for it a house, where it gives unto their priests visions and dreams. And were it to be awakened, the microcosmos would reveal all that is, and ever was, and ever shall be, but can be used only once and then rendered useless as a bauble.'”
“Says all that.”
“Yes.”
“Right there.”
“Correct.”
“In English? Thousands of years before the language was invented? And Iram is a mistake, a mistranslation of the Aram region of Syria. And the Wabar craters were formed by meteorites witnessed passing over Riyadh in 1863. It’s clearly a hoax.”
He showed her more vellum copied from the cloisters, pictures of Coca-Cola bottles and the Eiffel Tower. “What if the orb gave them prophetic dreams—a priest could have carved these words without understanding. To him, he’s just methodically replicating meaningless symbols. Meaningless until I came along. The microcosmos could have sown these images as a trap. Any rational person would think it’s a fake and dismiss the value of what’s inside the temple.”
“I admit that is… not disprovable. But the Monsoon Group wasn’t formed until 1942. It wouldn’t have been around to rescue Brandenburg commandos with secret treasure.”
“That’s not how I remember war history. I plan to search every sunken submarine if I have to.” He made a business proposition.
“No. I have a job already.”
“What happened to good old-fashioned sense of adventure?”
“World wars happened. Empires broke up, and their colonial holdings got tired of entitled twats trampling all over their backyards. But if it’s shipwrecks you want, I run cargo to the Sailing Forest. You could start there. They’ve been searching that area for decades.”
“For what?”
“The vanishing island.”
It required a six-hour flight in the Goose. He sat up front at first, but Luz quickly made him move to the cargo area because of his smell. He had a view of endless ocean as they finally circled a cluster of forested islets. At the edge of the visible world, a multi-tiered white cruise liner melted into the horizon.
The Ace of Coins touched down in the water and taxied up to the trees. The islands bobbed like a pontoon bridge. Canvas stretched across the higher branches, hiding tree houses. Lower down were kitchen gardens, chicken coops, children paddling around in their own sapling coracles. These were floating forests, made buoyant by thick mats of tangled roots. A group of people hauled on a line and the whole thing tacked away from the wind.
He couldn’t understand a single word anyone said. Looked at Luz, who said, “I don’t work for you, remember? You want to talk to them, you do it their way.” She called to a sailor, “Iokua!” Jerked her thumb at her foreign passenger.
Iokua had long greying hair, corded muscles from throwing fishing nets, patterned everywhere with overlapping tattooed triangles. He offered them a bottle.
The man so-called Gordon accepted, and took a drink. Something clinked against his teeth. The bottle contained a snail, its shell patterned with the same triangles as Iokua’s tattoos.
“You have to finish it,” Luz said. “Its venom is psychoactive and makes your brain more receptive to the local language patterns.”
He let the snail fall upon his tongue, then bit through the shell to the swollen meat, which burst in his mouth like a water balloon. There came a painful buzzing in his head. He screwed his eyes shut and pressed the heels of his hands against his temples, hard, until he heard a click.
“Ah, Mr. Holland again, hello. You look unwell.”
“What do you want, Rutherby?” he asked without releasing the pressure on his forehead.
The lawyer said, “I must inform you that several deadlines have passed, and further actions have been filed against you. An inquiry for use of false papers, trespassing at restricted excavations, and passing counterfeit money. All of your business assets are being seized.”
“I’m on the other side of the world. Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“Yes, we know where you are. You can’t outrun past mistakes, Mr. Holland. They tend to catch up with you.”
“You’ll get money over my dead body!”
“Indeed, it would be significantly easier to extract what’s due from your estate. Did you think you’d be buried with your bank account? Surrounded by embalmed accomplishments? In that way, my role is quite similar to yours, extracting scintillae of value locked in the monuments of otherwise worthless cadavers.”
“Didn’t realize you were my nemesis.”
“Do you know what that word means? It is retribution, often divine, for past actions. A balancing of accounts, a restoration of equilibrium, not an arbitrary antagonist with a personal vendetta. It is getting what you deserve.”
The man who was not—according to his papers—Gordon Holland vomited. Rutherby dissolved.
“Side effects may include nausea,” Iokua said.
It’d worked! Now he could understand what they were saying about the distant cruise ship: wasteful, leaking oil, noisy, scaring away the fish, dumping sewage and trash, unwanted tourists coming by smallboat to gawk at the forest. That night, he and Luz watched its lights like a new constellation. Behind them, the forest sailors were cooking over a fire. Their voices carried.
He said, “I can’t understand them anymore. I need another snail.”
“The snail doesn’t do anything. Soon as you started puking, they all switched to English. It’s a prank they play on outsiders.”
Sure enough, soon as they stepped into the ring of firelight, the words morphed language in midsentence. He must need to be within eyesight for his brain to pick up the translation, he thought. Surely not all the inhabitants of this self-contained, diminutive world were working so hard just to fool him?
In whatever tongue, they told campfire stories about Kanaloa, Akkorokamui, and the French Polynesian kraken of prosperity. They sang a chanty for Te Wheke, their home island, that sank below the sea generations ago, and now they sailed in never-ending circles, waiting for it to return.
“Why are they so sure it’s coming back?”
“Because that’s the story of every displaced people: the return home. It’s the hero’s journey with mass protagonist.”
They drank from more bottles—without snails—and he found the words to offer Luz another, more intimate proposition. “I could tell you’re working under a lot of delusions,” she said. “Didn’t think self-delusion was one of them.”
He got unsteadily to his feet. There were two important questions when facing an unknown culture: “Where’s the toilet?”
Iokua waved toward the interior. “There’s a hole in the ground.”
Stumbling over roots, soon lost in lush trees. Second question: Where are your dead? Every sapling was planted in a decomposing corpse—no room for graveyards—and the islands floated on a raft of skeletons like the thin ice skulls he’d fallen through at the Shrine. Alone in the dark, he tripped over a hard object.
It was a metal hatch. He opened it, and went down.
“Fritz! Didn’t think I’d see you again so soon. Got something of yours.” He tucked the silver watch into the breast pocket of the powdery cadaver curled up on a bunk. The ancient submarine, lit only by dim red bulbs, was buried up to its conning tower in the island’s roots. He moved through the narrow compartments, gathering up papers, maps, journals. Apart from Fritz, there were no other bodies.
“Anybody here speak German?” he demanded, coming back up, waving the papers in the firelight.
“We translated those a long time ago,” said Iokua. “The bigger forests are each built on the backs of two or three German and Japanese boats.”
Luz said, “After the war, after Te Wheke submerged, they salvaged any wreck they could find. Inspired by the Abraham Crijnssen, a Dutch minesweeper that disguised itself as a tropical island to avoid Japanese patrols, they’re building an entirely new nation off the literal wreckage of defeated colonial powers.”
“Mostly cargo subs, full of uranium oxide and gold,” said Iokua. “We run their diesels with biofuel to generate electricity, and we sail to other low-lying communities threatened by sea rise. Use our seasteading experience to help future-proof their own islands.”
“Where’s the treasure now?”
“Reconstruction and reclamation is expensive.” Iokua shrugged. “The gold’s all gone. That sub was empty, anyway.” He picked a paper. “This is its last record: ‘Cargo offloaded at uncharted island, coordinates 16°32’24.0″S 159°01’48.0″E. Pass through the blue rings beyond the stars.’ There’s no island at that location, though.”
“What made Te Wheke sink, originally? Volcanic activity? Tsunami?”
“Legend says shockwaves from a mighty sea battle drove it underwater.”
“What will bring it back up?”
“Elders would’ve said human sacrifice. More likely, in modern times, underwater nuclear testing will call up anything from the deep.”
A storm woke him from his sleep in a single guesthouse. The island heeled at an acute angle. Tree branches were being pulled off by howling wind, sails torn loose and tossed around like scraps of paper. He saw Iokua running between the listing treehouses, and Luzviminda rushing to untie the Ace of Coins before it was dragged under. The Sailing Forest crawled up the face of a 10-meter wave like a bug up a garden wall.
And down again into the trough. Seawater swamped the island, reaching all the way up to his open doorway. Through the rain, a light. He thought it was the moon, but it was too low. Then he thought it was the sunrise, but the light was too cold.
Lightning showed him—the sharp white prow of the cruise ship bearing directly down on them. They struck, the forest splintered. The cruise ship’s keel scraped against the submarines. Several decks above the treetops, he saw people along the cruise ship’s rail, and a man with gold spectacles shouted through a bullhorn: “Mr. Holland! We would like a word!”
His tree, ripped from its roots, fell into the water. The little treehouse broke loose and floated away like an empty crate. The entire island was gone. The cruise ship continued on for a short while, then rolled over on its side to show the wound in its belly, and began to drown.
He shut the door to keep most of the water out and fell asleep to the rocking of the waves, until sunlight and stillness woke him again. During the night, the house had come down on somewhere solid.
A knock at the door.
There was Iokua, who broke out into a grin. “You’re alive! Up for an adventure?”
The house had landed well above the highwater line of a strange landscape: rocky hills covered in barnacles and seashells, a carpet of sea stars inching back to the nearest tidepool. The higher ground was dark with waterlogged trees, draped with kelp. Stormbirds mobbed the shore to feast on stranded sea life. Geysers and waterspouts sprayed mist over them as they went uphill through the deadwood. Halfway up, he heard something. “Does that sound like a robot to you?”
Iokua cocked his head. “The seagulls?”
“No, damn, it’s a megaphone.” He turned around to go back, but the path they’d been following had vanished behind them. Hills rippled into new shapes, trees moved sideways, fissures opened up in the ground. He slipped and fell and cut his hands, gashed his knees.
The distorted voice was leading a call-and-response catechism. He was certain a crowd shouted his name, sounding like the roar of surf in a rock hollow. The tide was rising. They were getting closer.
“We gotta hurry. He’ll be the death of me if he catches up.” Ah, a cave that hadn’t been there before. They crawled into tunnels coated with pink slime, quickly losing the sunlight, feeling their way along ground that skittered and slithered over the backs of their hands.
He saw a glimmer ahead. For a moment, was afraid they’d been found, but the light was the wrong color, and it rippled like starlight when he moved toward it. Found an angler fish stranded in a rock pool. He hooked a finger through the gills and lifted it overhead.
Once their eyes adjusted, they saw the ground crawling with kraits, horseshoe crabs, jellyfish, and thousands of shrimp, all moving down the tunnel. They followed, hoping to find the sea. The angler fish suffocated in less than a minute, but the algae in its head continued to glow long enough to guide them as they squeezed through slowly constricting tunnels.
There was more light up ahead and they stepped out among the stars—hundreds of blue and white pinpoints embedded in a black abyss stretching in all directions. Shallow water splashed his boots. The ground in front of them was a reflecting pond. The stars were glowworms, fireflies, fungus.
Iokua pointed across the universe to where a pile of round stones sat on a reef, but said, “Wait! Don’t go in the water.” Pale creatures pulsed just below the surface. “Those are blue ringed octopodes.”
Blue rings. Past the stars. “What’s their main predator?”
“Moray eels.”
“Help me look for one.”
After sorting carefully through the venomous sea snakes, they found a single moray, released it into the water, and followed right behind. The octopi scattered away, clearing their path to the spheres.
“What are these?” he asked. “Pearls?” Dozens, each the size of a futbol.
“Worlds.”
Under the top layer of milky white spheres, he found a single ink-black one. He touched it. All his hair stood up like a Van de Graaf generator.
“Here we are at last!” said the amplified voice coming down the tunnel. Gold and glass glinted in the starlight. A mob of shadows blacked out the underground constellations. “And the man himself who showed the way.”
“Me?”
“You what?” Iokua asked.
“Indeed, Mr. Holland. After these gentlemen and others and ladies seized the last of your assets, they had a fine time puzzling together all the pieces you left in your artifactories, warehouses, self-storage lockers, home office, and safe-deposit boxes. Quite a mystery you constructed, even pulling in elements from your childhood. The Nazi connection was a nice plot twist.”
“I?”
“Who are you talking to?”
“It was a riddle perfectly constructed to lure in all the antiquarians and process servers hounding you, gathering them into one place. What better treasure with which to bait the trap than a complete picture of the past? With it, anyone can cherry-pick their own version of events. See, everyone, he holds all of history in his hands!”
Looked down at it. “My—?”
“That is the final relic. Seeded with the same pressure, temperature, and radiation constants present at the beginning of our universe. When the energies within are activated, you can watch the fate of the universe unfold from Big Bang to heat death. What use, then, is archaeology? We’ll have all the answers. What use, then, is a man like you?”
The ground groaned and rumpled with another earthquake, throwing Rutherby and the entire historical society into the water. Iokua broke the spell by shaking his shoulders. “Run!” The chamber was collapsing like a deflated balloon. The people thrashing between stars screamed as blue ring poison entered their veins.
Iokua paused only long enough to pick up one of the white stones, and dove through a fold in the wall. He followed, slipped down a chute slick with the juices of unnumbered and enormous polypi, which spat them out into the ocean. Te Wheke, the sunken land risen again, arched above and around them, covered in sponges of millennial growth and height. Two of its arms formed a cove, two others coiled around the cruise ship like a whale’s carcass. The rest probed the portholes to pull out thrashing bodies and brought each to its parrot-beak mouth. To reach the middle staterooms, the creature cracked the ship exactly the way one would break open a lobster dinner.
Treading water, he shouted, “This is your island?”
“I guess the elders were right—it rose up to feed off the abundance. And like a mimic octopus, it changes texture and color of its skin to match lava rock or coral, and camouflages itself with pieces of vegetation.”
Te Wheke lifted the ship halves out of the water and shook them. Debris fell all around. He lost sight of Iokua. Something heavy landed almost on top of him, pushing him underwater. He came back up in a sputter of saltwater and climbed onto it.
It was the kind of lifeboat that automatically inflates when it touches saltwater. He twisted the small electric motor, skipped away from the island. The giant sea creature lifted its head out of the water and fixed a single eye on him, its W-shaped pupil like black lightning. Jets of water and ink shot into the air. Rotting trees tumbled loose from its back. The microcosmos had given the creature mad dreams for decades. Hungry for them, it surged in pursuit.
The lifeboat bucked violently over the waves. He was nearly thrown from his seat on one rough comedown, and the wet orb slipped from his fingers, striking the hard plastic floorboards. Something inside it broke and began to fill with light.
The sea monster filled the sky and the ocean, its arms curling in from both sides, cavernous mouth opening to swallow gallons of water and create a whirlpool that sucked the boat backwards. He took his hand off the throttle. The universe rolling around his feet had awakened. Was evolving. He had only the one chance. He snatched it up, brought it right close to his face, and watched the world go by.
When it was over, the seas were calm. The dream was over. With nothing to chase, Te Wheke returned to deep ocean chasms and undisturbed sleep. The orb was dull brown, burned out like a lightbulb.
No cruise ship, no other lifeboats. No islands or forests. The world of yesterday now covered over by a flat liquid mirror. For a while, he drifted aimlessly, then was aware of an engine, a shadow, and the Ace of Coins landed nearby. Luz stuck her head out. “Lost?”
“Look what I found.”
She didn’t look impressed.
Another engine sound, and Iokua drew up in his own lifeboat. “Hey, adventure man, you made it! What’s that?”
“The microcosmos. Want it?”
“Naw, I’ve got my own.” Iokua held up the white egg he’d taken. Through its semi-membrane, they could see tentacles and bulbous eyes. “It’ll hatch into another wheke, grow into a new world we can live on. No matter how high the water rises, we’ll always float higher. We’ll cultivate hundreds, thousands. An archipelago, a pan-oceanic continent to house other flood victims.”
“All from one egg?”
“The fact that it’s fertilized means there’s more than one microcosmus.”
“I saw the forest as I was flying over,” Luz said. “They’re less than a mile that way, rescuing cruise ship survivors. I’m going to pick up supplies for them at the depot. You want to go with him, or fly out with me?” The nose art pinup had been repainted—her coins were gone.
The man who, according to the world in his lap, didn’t matter if he was Gordon Holland or not, tossed the useless orb overboard and got into the Goose.
He sat alone in the cargo area once more while Luzviminda piloted. A woman appeared in the window’s reflection. There she was again, wearing the face of a long-forgotten starlet. “Sitrep.”
He told her everything.
She said, “What did you see inside of it?”
“Nothing interesting. I was looking for myself, but it all went by too fast to make any sense, and the scale was so wide that I was too small to find.”
“With proper optics we could have made some use of it. Still, at least you neutralized it rather than let someone else get their hands on it.”
“Don’t think I would’ve believed what it showed, even if I had seen my future.”
“Why not?”
“Free will. Two-fisted heroism. The irrepressible spirit of man.”
“If you don’t believe the stars have any effect on your actions, then neither do you think your actions have any effect on the stars.”
At the same time, she was seated next to Luz in the cockpit, and made her a business proposition. “We employ the insane and the dead.”
“Neither.”
“Eventually. Meantime, interested in some contract work? As the islands become self-sufficient, they’ll need little from you or anyone else.”
They shook on it, emitting a flash of light as when two fissile elements make contact.
Aft, he asked, “Where’d it come from?”
“Every paradigm shift leaves behind fossils,” she answered. “Keep telling the story that you’re the hero of. You’ll end up just fine.” A pat on the shoulder. There, there.
He turned his head, and she was gone. Looked forward—no one there, either. A sense of satisfaction, because in his mind he was still necessary. He was the only person alive who knew the end of the world, even if that knowledge was too big to fit entirely into something the size of his skull. He put his head against the glass and watched the far below waves until the engine rumble lulled him back to sleep.
 |
Josh Pearce has published more than 200 stories, reviews, and poems in a wide variety of magazines, including Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots, Locus, Nature, On Spec, Seize the Press, Weird Horror, and elsewhere. Find more of his writing at fictionaljosh.com. |