Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas

  —Yes, said his host. I think you are very far from home indeed. Does that cause you sorrow?

  —Among other things.

  —If it causes you sorrow, I grieve for your grief, because we are companions now.

  —You are very kind, said McCulloch to his host.

  The lobster asked McCulloch if he was ready to begin their journey; and when McCulloch indicated that he was, his host serenely kicked itself free of the ledge with a single powerful stroke of its tail. For an instant it hung suspended; then it glided toward the sandy bottom as gracefully as though it were floating through air. When it landed, it was with all its many legs poised delicately en pointe, and it stood that way, motionless, a long moment.

  Then it suddenly set out with great haste over the ocean floor, running so light-footedly that it scarcely raised a puff of sand wherever it touched down. More than once it ran right across some bottom-grubbing creature, some slug or scallop, without appearing to disturb it at all. McCulloch thought the lobster was capering in sheer exuberance, after its long internment in the cave; but some growing sense of awareness of his companion’s mind told him after a time that this was no casual frolic, that the lobster was not in fact dancing but fleeing.

  —Is there an enemy? McCulloch asked.

  —Yes. Above.

  The lobster’s antennae stabbed upward at a sharp angle, and McCulloch, seeing through the other’s eyes, perceived now a large looming cylindrical shape swimming in slow circles near the upper border of their range of vision. It might have been a shark, or even a whale. McCulloch felt deceived and betrayed; for the lobster had told this was an invertebrate world, and surely that creature above him—

  —No, said the lobster, without slowing its manic sprint. That animal has no shell of the sort you described within its body. It is only a bag of flesh. But it is very dangerous.

  —How will we escape it?

  —We will not escape it.

  The lobster sounded calm, but whether it was the calm of fatalism or mere expressionlessness, McCulloch could not say: the lobster had been calm even in the first moments of McCulloch’s arrival in its mind, which must surely have been alarming and even terrifying to it.

  It had begun to move now in ever-widening circles. This seemed not so much an evasive tactic as a ritualistic one, now, a dance indeed. A farewell to life? The swimming creature had descended until it was only a few lobster lengths above them, and McCulloch had a clear view of it. No, not a fish or a shark or any type of vertebrate at all, he realized, but an animal of a kind wholly unfamiliar to him, a kind of enormous wormlike thing whose meaty yellow body was reinforced externally by some sort of chitinous struts running its entire length. Fleshy vanelike fins rippled along its sides, but their purpose seemed to be more one of guidance than propulsion, for it appeared to move by guzzling in great quantities of water and expelling them through an anal siphon. Its mouth was vast, with a row of dim little green eyes ringing the scarlet lips. When the creature yawned, it revealed itself to be toothless, but capable of swallowing the lobster easily at a gulp.

  Looking upward into that yawning mouth, McCulloch had a sudden image of himself elsewhere, spread-eagled under an inverted pyramid of shining machinery as the countdown reached its final moments, as the technicians made ready to—

  —to hurl him—

  —to hurl him forward in time—

  Yes. An experiment. Definitely an experiment. He could remember it now. Bleier, Caldwell, Rodrigues, Mortenson. And all the others. Gathered around him, faces tight, forced smiles. The lights. The colors. The bizarre coils of equipment. And the volunteer. The volunteer. First human subject to be sent forward in time. The various rabbits and mice of the previous experiments, though they had apparently survived the round trip unharmed, had not been capable of delivering much of a report on their adventures. “I’m smarter than any rabbit,” McCulloch had said. “Send me. I’ll tell you what it’s like up there.” The volunteer. All that was coming back to him in great swatches now, as he crouched here within the mind of something much like a lobster, waiting for a vast yawning predator to pounce. The project, the controversies, his coworkers, the debate over risking a human mind under the machine, the drawing of lots. McCulloch had not been the only volunteer. He was just the lucky one. “Here you go, Jim-boy. A hundred years down the time line.”

  Or fifty, or eighty, or a hundred and twenty. They didn’t have really precise trajectory control. They thought he might go as much as a hundred twenty years. But beyond much doubt they had overshot by a few hundred million. Was that within the permissible parameters of error?

  He wondered what would happen to him if his host here were to perish. Would he die also? Would he find himself instantly transferred to some other being of this epoch? Or would he simply be hurled back instead to his own time? He was not ready to go back. He had just begun to observe, to understand, to explore—

  McCulloch’s host had halted its running now, and stood quite still in what was obviously a defensive mode, body cocked and upreared, claws extended, with the huge crusher claw erect and the long narrow cutting claw opening and closing in a steady rhythm. It was a threatening pose, but the swimming thing did not appear to be greatly troubled by it. Did the lobster mean to let itself be swallowed, and then to carve an exit for itself with those awesome weapons, before the alimentary juices could go to work on its armor?

  “You choose your prey foolishly,” said McCulloch’s host to its enemy.

  The swimming creature made a reply that was unintelligible to McCulloch: vague blurry words, the clotted outspew of a feeble intelligence. It continued its unhurried downward spiral.

  “You are warned,” said the lobster. “You are not selecting your victim wisely.”

  Again came a muddled response, sluggish and incoherent, the speech of an entity for whom verbal communication was a heavy, all-but-impossible effort.

  Its enormous mouth gaped. Its fins rippled fiercely as it siphoned itself downward the last few yards to engulf the lobster. McCulloch prepared himself for transition to some new and even more unimaginable state when his host met its death. But suddenly the ocean floor was swarming with lobsters. They must have been arriving from all sides—summoned by his host’s frantic dance, McCulloch wondered?—while McCulloch, intent on the descent of the swimmer, had not noticed. Ten, twenty, possibly fifty of them arrayed themselves now beside McCulloch’s host, and as the swimmer, tail on high, mouth wide, lowered itself like some gigantic suction hose toward them, the lobsters coolly and implacably seized its lips in their claws. Caught and helpless, it began at once to thrash, and from the pores through which it spoke came bleating incoherent cries of dismay and torment.

  There was no mercy for it. It had been warned. It dangled tail upward while the pack of lobsters methodically devoured it from below, pausing occasionally to strip away and discard the rigid rods of chitin that formed its superstructure. Swiftly they reduced it to a faintly visible cloud of shreds oscillating in the water, and then small scavenging creatures came to fall upon those, and there was nothing at all left but the scattered rods of chitin on the sand.

  The entire episode had taken only a few moments: the coming of the predator, the dance of McCulloch’s host, the arrival of the other lobsters, the destruction of the enemy. Now the lobsters were gathered in a sort of convocation about McCulloch’s host, wordlessly manifesting a commonality of spirit, a warmth of fellowship after feasting, that seemed quite comprehensible to McCulloch. For a short while they had been uninhibited savage carnivores consuming convenient meat; now once again they were courteous, refined, cultured—Japanese gentlemen, Oxford dons, gentle Benedictine monks.

  McCulloch studied them closely. They were definitely more like lobsters than like any other creature he had ever seen, very much like lobsters, and yet there were differences. They were larger. How much larger, he could not tell, for he had no real way of judging distance and size in this undersea world; but he supposed they must b
e at least three feet long, and he doubted that lobsters of his time, even the biggest, were anything like that in length. Their bodies were wider than those of lobsters, and their heads were larger. The two largest claws looked like those of the lobsters he remembered, but the ones just behind them seemed more elaborate, as if adapted for more delicate procedures than mere rending of food and stuffing it into the mouth. There was an odd little hump, almost a dome, midway down the lobster’s back—the center of the expanded nervous system, perhaps.

  The lobsters clustered solemnly about McCulloch’s host, and each lightly tapped its claws against those of the adjoining lobster in a sort of handshake, a process that seemed to take quite some time. McCulloch became aware also that a conversation was under way. What they were talking about, he realized, was him.

  “It is not painful to have a McCulloch within one,” his host was explaining. “It came upon me at molting time, and that gave me a moment of difficulty, molting being what it is. But it was only a moment. After that my only concern was for the McCulloch’s comfort.”

  “And it is comfortable now?”

  “It is becoming more comfortable.”

  “When will you show it to us?”

  “Ah, that cannot be done. It has no real existence, and therefore I cannot bring it forth.”

  “What is it, then? A wanderer? A revenant?”

  “A revenant, yes. So I think. And a wanderer. It says it is a human being.”

  “And what is that? Is a human being a kind of McCulloch?”

  “I think a McCulloch is a kind of human being.”

  “Which is a revenant.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “This is an Omen!”

  “Where is its world?”

  “Its world is lost to it.”

  “Yes, definitely an Omen.”

  “It lived on dry land.”

  “It breathed air.”

  “It wore its shell within its body.”

  “What a strange revenant!”

  “What a strange world its world must have been.”

  “It is the former world, would you not say?”

  “So I surely believe. And therefore this is an Omen.”

  “Ah, we shall Molt. We shall Molt.”

  McCulloch was altogether lost. He was not even sure when his own host was the speaker.

  “Is it the time?”

  “We have an Omen, do we not?”

  “The McCulloch surely was sent as a herald.”

  “There is no precedent.”

  “Each Molting, though, is without precedent. We cannot conceive what came before. We cannot imagine what comes after. We learn by learning. The McCulloch is the herald. The McCulloch is the Omen.”

  “I think not. I think it is unreal and unimportant.”

  “Unreal, yes. But not unimportant.”

  “The Time is not at hand. The Molting of the World is not yet due. The human is a wanderer and a revenant, but not a herald and certainly not an Omen.”

  “It comes from the former world.”

  “It says it does. Can we believe that?”

  “It breathed air. In the former world, perhaps there were creatures that breathed air.”

  “It says it breathed air. I think it is neither herald nor Omen, neither wanderer nor revenant. I think it is a myth and a fugue. I think it betokens nothing. It is an accident. It is an interruption.”

  “That is an uncivil attitude. We have much to learn from the McCulloch. And if it is an Omen, we have immediate responsibilities that must be fulfilled.”

  “But how can we be certain of what it is?”

  —May I speak? said McCulloch to his host.

  —Of course.

  —How can I make myself heard?

  —Speak through me.

  “The McCulloch wishes to be heard!”

  “Hear it! Hear it!”

  “Let it speak!”

  McCulloch said, and the host spoke the words aloud for him, “I am a stranger here, and your guest, and so I ask you to forgive me if I give offense, for I have little understanding of your ways. Nor do I know if I am a herald or an Omen. But I tell you in all truth that I am a wanderer, and that I am sent from the former world, where there are many creatures of my kind, who breathe air and live upon the land and carry their—shells—inside their body.”

  “An Omen, certainly,” said several of the lobsters at once. “A herald, beyond doubt.”

  McCulloch continued, “It was our hope to discover something of the worlds that are to come after ours. And therefore I was sent forward—”

  “A herald—certainly a herald!”

  “—to come to you, to go among you, to learn to know you, and then to return to my own people, the air people, the human people, and bring the word of what is to come. But I think that I am not the herald you expect. I carry no message for you. We could not have known that you were here. Out of the former world I bring you the blessing of those that have gone before, however, and when I go back to that world I will bear tidings of your life, of your thought, of your ways—”

  “Then our kind is unknown to your world?”

  McCulloch hesitated. “Creatures somewhat like you do exist in the seas of the former world. But they are smaller and simpler than you, and I think their civilization, if they have one, is not a great one.”

  “You have no discourse with them, then?” one of the lobsters asked.

  “Very little,” he said. A miserable evasion, cowardly, vile.

  McCulloch shivered. He imagined himself crying out, “We eat them!” and the water turning black with their shocked outbursts and saw them instantly falling upon him, swiftly and efficiently slicing him to scraps with their claws. Through his mind ran monstrous images of lobsters in tanks, lobsters boiling alive, lobsters smothered in rich sauces, lobsters shelled, lobsters minced, lobsters rendered into bisques—he could not halt the torrent of dreadful visions. Such was our discourse with your ancestors. Such was our mode of interspecies communication. He felt himself drowning in guilt and shame and fear.

  The spasm passed. The lobsters had not stirred. They continued to regard him with patience: impassive, unmoving, remote. McCulloch wondered if all that had passed through his mind just then had been transmitted to his host. Very likely; the host earlier had seemed to have access to all of his thoughts, though McCulloch did not have the same entrée to the host’s. And if the host knew, did all the others? What then, what then?

  Perhaps they did not even care. Lobsters, he recalled, were said to be callous cannibals, who might attack one another in the very tanks where they were awaiting their turns in the chef’s pot. It was hard to view these detached and aloof beings, these dons, these monks, as having that sort of ferocity: but yet he had seen them go to work on that swimming mouth-creature without any show of embarrassment, and perhaps some atavistic echo of their ancestors’ appetites lingered in them, so that they would think it only natural that McCullochs and other humans had fed on such things as lobsters. Why should they be shocked? Perhaps they thought that humans fed on humans, too. It was all in the former world, was it not? And in any event it was foolish to fear that they would exact some revenge on him for Lobster Thermidor, no matter how appalled they might be. He wasn’t here. He was nothing more than a figment, a revenant, a wanderer, a set of intrusive neural networks within their companion’s brain. The worst they could do to him, he supposed, was to exorcise him, and send him back to the former world.

  Even so, he could not entirely shake the guilt and the shame. Or the fear.

  Bleier said, “Of course, you aren’t the only one who’s going to be in jeopardy when we throw the switch. There’s your host to consider. One entire human ego slamming into his mind out of nowhere like a brick falling off a building—what’s it going to do to him?”

  “Flip him out, is my guess,” said Jake Ybarra. “You’ll land on him and he’ll announce he’s Napoleon, or Joan of Arc, and they’ll hustle him off to the neare
st asylum. Are you prepared for the possibility, Jim, that you’re going to spend your entire time in the future sitting in a loony bin undergoing therapy?”

  “Or exorcism,” Mortenson suggested. “If there’s been some kind of reversion to barbarism. Christ, you might even get your host burned at the stake!”

  “I don’t think so,” McCulloch said quietly. “I’m a lot more optimistic than you guys. I don’t expect to land in a world of witch doctors and mumbo jumbo, and I don’t expect to find myself in a place that locks people up in Bedlam because they suddenly start acting a little strange. The chances are that I am going to unsettle my host when I enter him, but that he’ll simply get two sanity-stabilizer pills from his medicine chest and take them with a glass of water and feel better in five minutes. And then I’ll explain what’s happening to him.”

  “More than likely, no explanations will be necessary,” said Maggie Caldwell. “By the time you arrive, time travel will have been a going proposition for three or four generations, after all. Having a traveler from the past turn up in your head will be old stuff to them. Your host will probably know exactly what’s going on from the moment you hit him.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Bleier said. He looked across the laboratory to Rodrigues. “What’s the count, Bob?”

  “T minus eighteen minutes.”

  “I’m not worried about a thing,” McCulloch said.

  Caldwell took his hand in hers. “Neither am I, Jim.”

  “Then why is your hand so cold?” he asked.

  “So I’m a little worried,” she said.

  McCulloch grinned. “So am I. A little. Only a little.”

  “You’re human, Jim. No one’s ever done this before.”

  “It’ll be a can of corn!” Ybarra said.

  Bleier looked at him blankly. “What the hell does that mean, Jake?”

  Ybarra said, “Archaic twentieth-century slang. It means it’s going to be a lot easier than we think.”

  “I told you,” said McCulloch, “I’m not worried.”

  “I’m still worried about the impact on the host,” said Bleier.