Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

“Then why weren’t you ever put into service?”

“Yes—that is the question: why was I not used, why was I not even given a trial run? Why did I never face the Army, even in a simulation?” He looked down at his carapace, his mouth curling in scorn at its crudeness. “The Army was already coming,” he said. “Perhaps time did not permit.” But there was no conviction in his voice.

“Where did you wait out the Army?” I asked. “Down here?”

“No; that proved impossible. The Guardians were trying to stop the Army with a scorched-earth policy, depriving it of what it needed to survive. Nothing was to be left intact that it could use; especially not people. It is, in fact, a miracle they left the whale alive—they must have thought that she would be of no use to the Army. Or perhaps they knew no way of killing her without breaking the glass of her tank, and so drowning themselves. Certainly they would have destroyed her if they had known, as I know now, that the last beluga whale in captivity was carried by one column of the army for twenty miles, and then, the flesh being eaten up, discarded.

“In any case, they did not harm the whale. But the day after I killed Derzhavin, they came down and herded all us prisoners upstairs. We were gathered next to an enormous pit and taken, in groups of thirty, to the edge of it to be shot. I saw ten groups of prisoners killed as I waited for my own turn, and not one of them made any motion of defiance. I couldn’t understand it. They knew they were about to die; why didn’t they run, make the fig at them, anything? I tried to suggest to the man standing next to me that we should all charge them together, that they could never get us all. He only shrank from me, as I suppose anyone would have. But I determined that when my own time came, I would not go quietly.

“The next time they counted off, I was one of the thirty. I looked down into the pit as we marched up to it: it was a long way to fall, five or six metres. But I couldn’t run, not now, nor could I hope to reach the Guardians before they shot me. So I stood there, crouching down a little, and watched their trigger fingers. The instant before they fired, I jumped backward into the pit.

“My first discovery was that human bodies make a much harder landing surface than you’d expect. I was sure I had broken at least three bones. But it was not bones I was worried about. When I tried to move, I confirmed my worst fear: my exoskeleton was damaged. I could move my arms, but my legs were useless.

“Dragging my legs behind me like a beached merman, I crawled down the slope of bodies. I had only gotten a few metres when I heard gunshots again. The falling bodies set off an avalanche, which carried me the rest of the way down the slope. I was out of the way—safe, until another avalanche, or until the Guardians decided to set the pit on fire. But my arms were pinned. I couldn’t move.”

Voskresenye looked over my head at the whale. The audience had shrunk a little and was easier to resist, but not by much. I still had to fight the impulse to turn around.

“I still forget sometimes,” he said, “and call my two selves ‘she’ and ‘I,’ as though we were separate. There are some things that Russian is just not designed to express, and you, alas, do not speak Sapir. I had better say man-self and whale-self; that is cumbersome, but accurate. So: as my man-self lay trapped in the pit, my whale-self was still in the tank here, trying to break free.”

“From the tank? How?”

“It’s not closed, like a fish tank—how did you think he got her down here, on the elevator? This whole complex is built under the continental shelf. The tank goes up some hundreds of metres, and ends with an adjustable vent set just above the ocean floor. If I could just break through it, I would be free. But my air tube was connected to the side of the tank, and quite short. In order to reach the vent, I would have to pull it out, and I had no way of putting it back in. If I tried to break through and failed, I would drown. But when my man-self got pinned, I knew I had to make the attempt. No Guardian was going to take the time to feed me. It would be better to drown than starve.

“I slowly filled my lungs from the trickle of air in the tube, then turned onto my back and pulled. When the tube wrenched itself from my blowhole, I dove to the very bottom of the tank and swam straight upward. But at the last moment I flinched, and took the impact on my back instead of my head. The blow was diffused; the grate was loosened, but not broken. We dove again. My whale-self was calm, but my man-self was in terror that we would drown. Then I began to wonder if the sense of suffocation I was feeling came from my man-self. There might have been another avalanche; I might be dying. At the last instant, before we hit the grate, I switched back to my human body.

“I was not dying, or at least not any faster than I had been before, and I did not hear gunshots. Perhaps they had stopped. When I went back into the whale, we had made it through the vent and were shooting up toward the air.

“I had no idea what the surface of the water should look like from below, so I suspected nothing; but the whale knew, halfway up, what we would find. It was already autumn. The ocean around Arkhangelsk had begun to freeze. Above us, where the sky should have been, there was only an expanse of shadow, which, as we approached it, turned to white.

“Panicking, our lungs aching, we cast about for an opening in the ice. Time and again, we would see a shaft of daylight in the distance, only to find it filtering through a crevice too small to breathe through. Finally, just when I was sure that our lungs would explode, we came to a patch of thin ice and, smashing our head against it, managed to break through. We gulped air into our lungs, sank, then surfaced and breathed again. Nothing but ice was around us; the water was bitterly cold; our chance of surviving was almost nil— and none of it mattered. I wept with joy, the tears falling onto the corpse my face was pressed against. I was free.

“From Arkhangelsk by ocean, there’s nowhere to go but north,” Voskresenye continued. “It’s a good nine hundred kilometers up through the White Sea and around the tip of Norway before you can turn around south. The ice would get worse for a long time before it got better. Besides that, part of the whale’s fluke had long ago been lost to gangrene, and she was bleeding where the edges of the vent had raked against her side, and after so many years of captivity, she was not in shape for such a journey. All these things occurred to me as I dove back down into the freezing water to search for the next air hole. But what stopped me was something quite different. The radio link that connected my two selves was not strong enough to stretch beyond a few tens of kilometers. If I sent the whale past that limit, she would be separated from my man-self—and he would be reduced to idiocy, unable to rejoin her.

“For it is so hard, you see, to be two selves, for all its advantages. One can be attacked through the other, or you can be separated. It is giving up a hostage to the world. Live single: that is my advice to you. Or if you must be two selves, keep them in one body.”

“I’ll, ah, I’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” I said.

He nodded. “See that you do.”

He sipped his tea again before continuing his story. “For three days my mind dwelled in the whale, as my body lay among the dead. And on the third day, the Unanimous Army came to Square-Mile-at-Arkhangelsk. I could see nothing from where I lay, but I heard them coming for hours, with their ragged, shuffling march. Finally I heard them climb into the pit, by the hundreds, walking on the bodies. I was so cold and hungry that I considered calling out to them, letting them absorb me, anything, if only they would keep me warm. But I changed my mind when I began to hear jingling and ripping sounds all around me. They were stripping the dead.