Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

We breathed against dark, distant roaring for a few moments.

“At least we’re doing something,” I said at last. “Maybe we’re not doing it for all the enlightened reasons we should be, but at least we’re cleaning up. That’s something.”

“Not enough,” she said. “We threw shit at something for centuries. How can a few prayers and sacrifices make it just go away and leave us alone? If it even exists. And if it does have any more brains than a flatworm. I guess you get the gods you deserve.”

I tried to think of something to say, some twig of false reassurance. But, as usual, I wasn’t fast enough. Anne picked herself up first:

“At least we’ve learned a little humility. And who knows? Maybe the gods will answer our prayers before Jess grows up…”

They didn’t. The experts tell us now that our supplications are on indefinite hold. We’re praying to something that shrouds the whole planet, after all. It takes time for such a huge system to assimilate new information, more time to react. The clouds don’t live by human clocks. We swarm like bacteria to them, doubling our numbers in an instant. How fast the response, from our microbial perspective? How long before the knee jerks? The experts mumble jargon among themselves and guess: decades. Maybe fifty years. This monster advancing on us now is answering a summons from the last century.

The sky screams down to fight with ghosts. It doesn’t see me. If it sees anything at all, it is only the afterimage of some insulting sore, decades old, that needs to be disinfected. I lean against the wind. Murky chaos sweeps across something I used to call property. The house recedes behind me. I don’t dare look but I know it must be kilometers away, and somehow I’m paralysed. This blind seething medusa claws its way towards me and its face covers the whole sky; how can I not look?

“Jessica…”

I can see her from the corner of my eye. With enormous effort, I move my head a little and she comes into focus. She is looking at the heavens, but her expression is not terrified or awed or even curious.

Slowly, smooth as an oiled machine, she lowers her eyes to earth and switches off the receiver. It hardly matters any more. The thunder is continuous, the wind is an incessant roar, the first hailstones are pelting down on us. If we stay out here we’ll be dead in two hours. Doesn’t she know it? Is this some sort of test, am I supposed to prove my love for her by facing down God like this?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe now’s the time. Maybe—

Jessica puts her hand on my knee. “Come on,” she says, like a parent. “Let’s go inside.”

I am remembering the last time I saw Anne. I have no choice; the moment traps me when I’m not looking, embeds me in a cross-section of time stopped dead when the lightning hit ten meters behind her:

The world is a flat mosaic in blinding black-and-white, strobe-lit, motionless. Sheets of gray water are suspended in the act of slamming the earth. Anne is just out of reach, head down, her determination as clear as a Kodalith snapshot in perfect focus: she is damn well going to make it to safety and she doesn’t care what gets in her way. And then the lightning implodes into darkness, the world jerks back into motion with a sound like Hiroshima and the stench of burning electricity, but my eyes are shut tight, still fixed on that receding instant. There is sudden pain, small fingernails gouging the flesh of my palm, and I know that Jessica has not closed her eyes, that she knows more of this moment than I can bear to. I pray, for the only time in my life I pray to the sky please let me be mistaken take someone else take me take the whole fucking city only please give her back I’m sorry I didn’t believe…

Forty or fifty years from now, according to some, it might hear that. Too late for Anne. Too late even for me.

It’s still out there. Just passing through, it drums its fingers on the ground and all our reinforced talismans can barely keep it out. Even here, in this underground sanctum, the walls are shaking.

It doesn’t scare me any more.

There was another time, long ago, when I wasn’t afraid. Back then the shapes in the sky were friendly; snow-covered mountains, magical kingdoms, once I even saw Anne up there. But now I only see something malign and hideous, ancient, something slow to anger and impossible to appease. In the thousands of years we spent watching the clouds, after all the visions and portents we read there, never once did we see the thing that was really looking back.

We see it now.

I wonder which epitaphs they’ll be reading tomorrow. What city is about to be shattered by impossible tornados, how many will die in this fresh onslaught of hailstones and broken glass? I don’t know. I don’t even care. That surprises me. Just a few days ago, I think it would have mattered. Now, even the realization that we are spared barely moves me to indifference.

Jess, how can you sleep through this? The wind tries to uproot us, bits of God’s brain bash themselves against our shelter, and somehow you can just curl up in the corner and block it out. You’re so much older than I am, Jess; you learned not to care years ago. Barely any of you shines out any more. Even the glimpses I catch only seem like old photographs, vague reminders of what you used to be. Do I really love you as much as I tell myself?

Maybe all I love is my own nostalgia.

I gave you a start, at least. I gave you a few soft years before things fell apart. But then the world split in two, and the part I can live in keeps shrinking. You slip so easily between both worlds; your whole generation is amphibious. Not mine. There’s nothing left I can offer you, you don’t need me at all. Before long I’d have dragged you down with me.

I won’t let that happen. You’re half Anne, after all.

The maelstrom covers the sound of my final ascent. I wonder what Anne would think of me now. She’d disapprove, I guess. She was too much of a fighter to ever give up. I don’t think she had a suicidal thought in her whole life.

And suddenly, climbing the stairs, I realize that I can ask her right now if I want to. Anne is watching me from a far dark corner of the room, through weathered adolescent eyes opened to mere slits. Is she going to call me back? Is she going to berate me for giving in, say that she loves me? I hesitate. I open my mouth.

But she closes her eyes without a word.

“I hate you.”

A four-year-old girl. A room as barren as a fishbowl.

“I hate you.”

Little fists, clenching: one of the cameras, set to motion-cap, zoomed on them automatically. Two others watched the adults, mother, father on opposite sides of the room. The machines watched the players: half a world away, Stavros watched the machines.

“I hate you I hate you I HATE you!”

The girl was screaming now, her face contorted in anger and anguish. There were tears at the edge of her eyes but they stayed there, never falling. Her parents shifted like nervous animals, scared of the anger, used to the outbursts but far from comfortable with them.

At least this time she was using words. Usually she just howled.

She leaned against the blanked window, fists pounding. The window took her assault like hard white rubber, denting slightly, then rebounding. One of the few things in the room that bounced back when she struck out; one less thing to break.

“Jeannie, hush…” Her mother reached out a hand. Her father, as usual, stood back, a mixture of anger and resentment and confusion on his face.

Stavros frowned. A veritable pillar of paralysis, that man .

And then: They don’t deserve her .