Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [65]
Ocean roared. Abandoning their posts, those of the crew who weren’t already at the rails ran to starboard and stared. It was an impossible sight: all the water in the world humping up, as if the planet had suddenly decided it needed a higher horizon. The Atlantis listed a degree in anticipation. The grandmother of all tidal waves, the polar tsunami, was passing beneath them. The ship shot upward, carried by the power of a continent of ice melting all at once.
The screen cut from face to face, viewpoint to viewpoint, showing stunned eyes, strained faces. They stood deathly still, paralyzed with awe.
“How are they going to escape?” the bureaucrat asked. “Don’t they want to get away?”
“Of course they don’t.”
“Do they want to die?”
“Of course they don’t.” The image wavered, and the human crew turned to metal. The Atlantis was transformed into a ship of the dead, a gothic monstrosity manned by skeletons. “Surrogates were invented on Miranda,” Marivaud said proudly. “We made them first.” The image overlay was restored, and the skeletons fleshed out with human bodies.
A horrid glassy calm settled over the near reaches of Ocean, as if its surface had been stretched taut by the swell. Even as they soared up its side, the water seemed to shrink under the ship. The bureaucrat could hear it whispering and running away. Ocean rose until it filled the eye. The sky vanished, and still it grew. Winds blew across the deck.
Then they topped the swell. Beyond it a wall of white fury reached from horizon to horizon—a line squall. It rushed down on them. Involuntarily crew members moved toward and away from each other, forming clusters and gaps along the rail.
Gogo glanced toward the ghostnetter. Her eyes were bright with excitement. She bit her lip, brushed away a strand of hair from an undone braid. Her face glowed with life. She reached out to hug Underhill.
Startled, Underhill flinched away from her touch. He stared into her face with revulsion. In that unguarded instant his expression said louder than any words: You’re only a woman.
Then the squall overtook the ship, and slammed into its side. The storm swallowed it whole.
“Ahh,” Marivaud sighed. Her sister reached out and seized her hand. Softly, gently, they began to applaud.
In a faraway studio the actors rose up from their gates to take their bows.
* * *
Marivaud looked up, face expressionless. The cottage—sister, fire, and all—dissolved in a swirl of rain. “A week later, the bodies began washing up on shore.”
“What?”
“With radiation burns. We had not understood the indigenes so well as we had thought. We did not know that their brain chemistry changed in great winter. Or perhaps it was their psychology that changed. But somehow the warning signal that was supposed to drive them from the towers did not. They huddled as close to the reactors as they could. It was madness. Perhaps their mating instincts were stimulated. Perhaps they just liked the warmth. Who can say?”
Marivaud’s eyes closed. Tears squeezed between the lids. “We could do nothing. Ocean was all storm and fury—nothing could get through. Nothing except for the broadcasts we could not turn off. All the time it took for them to die, the towers up and down the coast transmitted their agony. It was like having a broken tooth in one’s mouth—the tongue keeps returning to it, drawn by the pain. I could not leave it alone.
“Sorrow swept over the Continent in a great electronic wave. It was as if an enchantment had passed over the land. One moment everything was bright and beautiful. The next it was gray and lifeless. As a people we had been optimistic, sure of ourselves. Now we were … dispossesed, without a future. Those who had the strength not to listen were affected by the rest of us.
“I myself would have starved, had my sister not hand-fed me for a week. She smashed my earrings. She bullied me back to life. But after that I no longer laughed so often as before. There were people who died.