Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Well, I'm not sure. What do you think? He… just drifts. His boat holds water, he fishes, alone on the surface of an endless mirror. He slips along on the ocean current. Every so often, although time doesn't mean anything to him, because nothing changes, he sees another boat far off on the horizon. But he never signals or calls out; he just stares, not really knowing what it is. At night he falls asleep and dreams of a whole universe full of intelligent creatures, just like him, only …

… on land?

In hospitals?

All over the world?

Exactly. You guys are brilliant. But because he has never met any other creature …

… except fish …

… except fish …

… and octopuses …

Octopi, you igno-twerp.

Because he has never met any other humans, he doesn't even realize he's alone. He doesn't know the names of the oceans, and he cuts right through the boundaries of territorial waters. It's just liquid to him — deep or shallow, cold or warm.

Does he pick up more children along the way?

Well, sure. Why not? But not right at first. At first, when he draws close enough to solid land to figure out what it is, it scares the daylights out of him. The Hard Places, he calls the islands. He sees right away how incredibly dangerous they are. You can't sail on them; a boat would get completely stuck, or else it would be torn apart as soon as it touched. How you possibly gonna fish in such places? The hook would just lie there on the Hard Stuff, worthless.

He keeps to the wider currents. His eyes, over a long, long time, grow so strong from staring down into deep water searching for fish that he can see shoals even when they are a mile below pitch-blackness. You see, he has nothing else to look at except cloud and wave and the occasional piece of giant kelp. Years go by without even a niast. Slowly, he trains his eyes, learns how to see over the curve of the earth.

Get outta my life.

No, really. And his hearing sharpens too. There are no distractions in his whole world. So even the tiniest sound is worth concentrating on. He gets so that he can track the songs that whales sing to one another. He concentrates until he can hear even the pingings of corals. He can hear noises coming from all over the place. And one day, after several ages, he hears, from a thousand leagues off, and then he sees, long before it becomes visible over the horizon, a very weird thing.

Carrier fleet?

Jet skis?

Jet skis? For crying out softly. You people are hopeless, you know that? Absolutely lost.

A message in a bottle?

Now there we go. Only, not just one little message in one measly bottle. He paddles his reed boat closer, his eyes squinting to focus. He notices the water change temperature, color. These clear-gray flecks accumulate, growing denser until they form a solid swarm bobbing on the sea around him. He picks one up. He has no idea what in the world it is, but he thinks that if he knew what bottles were, this would probably be one. He tries to count all the bottles he can see, using the system he invented for sizing up schools of fish. He loses count at a thousand million glass bottles, each bobbing upright, congregating into the still spot at the center of the swirling ocean.

He's in the Sargasso Sea!

Now how did you know that?

I saw it on a map.

It's okay, sweetheart. I was just asking. Anyway, that's where he is. A sea inside the sea: the drainage point for the entire watery pinwheel. They all collect here, bottles from every port of call in this half of the hemisphere: messages launched from West Africa and Spain, the Canaries, Azores, Madeiras, Iceland, the mouth of the Senegal; notes from Paramaribo, Port of Spain, San Juan; letters pitched without hope from the Keys and the Carolinas, dropped in secret into bays by Baltimore, Brooklyn, and Boston, or lofted off the sides of ocean liners …

… crippled subs …

… downed private planes …

Each of a billion flasks has been swept up through the loop for a few cycles. Some have been circling for decades. Some spell out emergencies that have been over for centuries, and others come from as late as that morning. Centripetal force sucks them all into the Sargasso center. All this glass — smoky, green, gray, turquoise, sky-blue, magically transparent — just floats motionless. It's an elephants' graveyard of SOSs.

He opens one up and looks at the slip of paper inside. Of course, he doesn't know how to read, and he sure wouldn't know any of these foreign languages. But he's got a lot of time. Slowly, he teaches himself.

Impossible.

Who you calling impossible? I tell you, he's got a lot of time. He works on the first message until the words come out, "Tulip smiling wobbly Friday evaporation." He thinks, Nope; that can't be it, and he starts again. He keeps working until the message reads, "Come help me." He tries a second bottle, and this one says, "Come feed me." Bleeding on Barbados. Grounded in Greenland.

Each scroll of paper carries its own miniature map. X marks the spot. He figures it out: the globe is packed full of other creatures, exactly like him, only in trouble. Through these notes, he learns about human society. And he sees that he is nothing more than this one lone figure in a tiny, open boat, looking out over this expanse of bottles spreading across the sea. More requests than even a god could read in a lifetime.

He thinks that maybe the best thing to do would be to sink the whole herd of help messages. One by one, fill them up with water, unread. Send them to safety on the ocean bed, where they can wait until the day when they might be answered. But there are too many, even for that.

He decides to follow one of the maps. His eyes and ears, grown superpowerful on emptiness, point the way. He matches up the languages he has learned to read with the distant, background chirpings he always assumed came from some kind of land bird. The map and the sounds and the sight of land beyond the horizon take the Leech up close to a continent where something big is coming down. He picks it out of the air, this feeling of awful expectation such as he has felt nowhere else along the whole continuous ocean coast.

The Leech pulls up a safe distance from shore, trying to figure out what huge, silent shake-up is under way. Every petty principality in this patchwork landmass, every inhabitant from emperor to crook seems to be running around, trying to beat the clock. The people of the continent themselves haven't figured out what's up. Something's unfolding, although so slowly that it is still lost in myth.

Everywhere on the continent, children are chucking these bottles into rivers, where they wash down to the sea. The Leech can hear it all from his anchorage offshore. He can hear the noises banging around villages and cities. He hears people counting down the days, waiting for something that seems to get nearer with each delay. He sees the signs and wonders springing up like weeds. He watches packs of outlaws, soldiers, scholars, and peasants cut swaths in all directions.

Everybody is terrified of waking to the news they hope for most. Castle walls sprout all over. From the scorched western plains all the way up to the frozen fjords, dancing manias break out. In some provinces, everyone under twelve gets caught up, dancing for weeks until dropping. From off the coast, it's obvious: the entire continent is scared, something fierce. Inflation, unemployment, the Plague. Things are so bad that entire countries take to outrageous remedies. Boys become bishops. Whole towns are entrusted to their youngest residents.

On the extreme corner point of this continent, the Leech makes out another abused, deformed child who has built a lookout tower from which he can stare out across the sea, looking for a way to escape.