Ajax Penumbra 1969

  It is darkness of a kind and quality that he has never experienced. The floor of the tube is smooth under his tires; it feels like he is racing indoors, across a basketball court or a bank lobby. There is, every few seconds, a dull whump as he crosses one of the tube’s seams: the places where the huge metal segments have been joined together and sealed against the bay.

  The bay is out there. Up there. How deep is it? Penumbra has no idea. It might be ten feet; it might be a hundred. The air has changed. It is cold and damp, thick with the smell of trapped exhaust. He wonders if there is enough oxygen down here, really? What if the work crews have not yet prepared it for human traffic? What if he and Corvina swoon halfway through? What if no one finds them until morning?

  Corvina is racing ahead. The lantern’s spark bobs and dips on his handlebars and casts a crazy shadow behind him, a dark avatar that dances and leaps across the floor of the tube.

  Penumbra cries out: “Slow down!”—but Corvina doesn’t hear him, or he can’t understand, or he won’t listen. Penumbra sucks in a lungful of heavy air and cries again: “Could you please—ah.” He gives up. Corvina’s shadow recedes; the spark grows smaller. The darkness clamps down.

  Penumbra comes to a halt, his chest heaving. He rests on the handlebars, which he can feel but not see. Corvina’s lantern shrinks to nothing.

  He is a man unaccustomed to anger but he feels it now. Corvina! He is, Penumbra realizes, not the man to follow into a terrifying subterranean tunnel. He is capable, yes, and commanding—but he has no patience for anyone who cannot keep up.

  Well.

  He cannot stand here forever.

  Penumbra pedals slowly forward, testing. It is all darkness ahead, a pure blank void—but, of course, there are no obstacles. Nothing stands in his way. He feels the bicycle’s front wheel rise, realizes he is climbing the curve of the tube; he jerks the handlebars, allows gravity pull him back down. This can work. He simply has to go by feel, let the curves do their work. He simply has to keep pedaling. He can close his eyes. There is nothing that can hurt him here.

  He loses track of time. The whole universe contracts into the almost philosophical darkness of the tube, the curve of its space-time that he tracks with his legs, not with his eyes. Perhaps he will emerge and find that ten years have passed. Fifty. He smiles at that, and does the math, counting the years in time with the pedals: 2017 … 2018 … 2019. How will this city look in the twenty-first century? Maybe those Yerba Buena Gardens will finally have a plant or—

  Corvina cries out. “Ajax! Is that you?”

  Penumbra comes to a skidding stop. “Where are you?”

  “Here, here.” His voice cries bleakly out of the darkness nearby; Penumbra can almost see him, a dark outline against the deeper darkness of the tube. Corvina appears to be sitting on the ground. “I need help, I need … it’s too dark, Ajax. I lost the lantern.”

  Penumbra lays his bicycle gently on the floor of the tube and shuffles toward the sound of Corvina’s voice. “I am coming,” he says. “Hold out your hands.”

  His fingers brush something in the darkness, and a hand clamps tight around his wrist—strong, shaking, slippery with sweat.

  “You are fine, Marcus.” He hoists him up, or tries to; Corvina nearly tips him over. The sheer mass of him! Penumbra grunts and heaves, and the clerk rises. “You are just fine.”

  They walk together for a long time, Penumbra leading Corvina by the hand. The clerk says nothing, just follows, his breath slowing down, evening out. His fingers are thick and meaty but very soft.

  Finally: fiat lux. There is a fuzzy suggestion of light that becomes a pinprick, then a dot. The faster they walk, the faster it grows, so they walk very fast indeed, until they are running, and somewhere in the process Corvina drops Penumbra’s hand and charges ahead.

  At the end, the tube rises again, and when they emerge into the light of the Embarcadero worksite, Corvina is himself again. He betrays no sign of his ordeal in the darkness.

  “The ship will be nearby,” he says crisply. Taking command again.

  The tube opens into a cavernous space lit with bulbs in cages, a festive string of them hanging from the rough-hewn ceiling. The space is supported by a frame of dark girders, and in places, a concrete perimeter is rising. Water pools on the ground in puddles too wide to leap across, so they walk straight through. It fills Penumbra’s shoes.

  There are signs of life and work: cast-off gloves, paper cups, a rogue safety helmet. The helmet is white plastic, with the BART logo printed in blue across the brow. Penumbra picks it up, gives it a shake, sets it on his head. “What do you think?”

  Corvina snorts. “You’re the skinniest sandhog in the city.”

  More than a hundred years ago, the William Gray was scuttled and buried under a pile of rubble. Drowned and crushed. The mast snapped long ago; the sails and rigging decomposed. All that remained was the ship’s hull, and that only barely, like a soda can crumpled in a trash heap.

  Then the BART crew came tunneling through the heap. Penumbra has seen fossils preserved in stone, great slabs split apart to show an ancient beast in cross section; this is precisely how the William Gray looks now. Its shape is dark but distinct in the wall of the tunnel. Here in the city’s second subbasement, a shadow of the ship still remains.

  It is, once again, a moment of triumph that fades quickly into defeat. Penumbra had imagined something like a shipwreck, the kind he has seen in a Jacques Cousteau film. He had imagined some sort of space they could penetrate and explore, but that seems foolish now. Their quarry is not archaeological but geological. It is a fossil, through and through.

  “Here,” Corvina calls. Penumbra snaps out of his gloomy reverie. The clerk has found two shovels elsewhere in the worksite. He tosses one lightly to Penumbra, who slips and drops it.

  “Marcus, it is not—”

  “I see a ship,” Corvina declares. “I see this city’s first bookstore. Surely, Ajax, there is something to discover here.”

  “You share my gift, Marcus,” Penumbra says dryly.

  “What gift?”

  “Mr. Al-Asmari called it that. ‘The willingness to entertain absurd ideas.’ ”

  Corvina snorts. “I don’t entertain ideas,” he says. “I work for them.” He slides his shovel’s blade into the tunnel’s wall and begins to dig.

  An hour passes. Maybe more. They dig deeper into the remains of the ship, throwing shovelfuls of dirt and silt and decomposed wood over their heads, making a dank pile behind them. Penumbra’s shovel slices through clots of soft matter that are, he suspects, the sad remains of books. They are dark and sodden, rotted and ruined, but he can see the suggestions of spines.

  Black muck spatters and soaks his shirt and pants. The deeper they go, the worse the smell—a century of rot, finally released. Penumbra’s arms are burning, his feet are soaked, and he can tell that even Corvina is tiring, when—

  TONK.

  His shovel hits something that is not soft and ruined. He pulls it back, swings again.

  TONK.

  “Marcus, I think perhaps …,” he begins to say, but the clerk is already there, swinging with his own shovel. They trace the edge of the hard, TONKing shape, then excavate around it, until Corvina is able to use his shovel as a lever. He gives a sharp grunt; a small metal trunk pops out of the hole, lands on the bottom of the tunnel with a wet thud, balances on its end, and falls over.

  Penumbra and Corvina stare at each other, wide-eyed.

  The trunk is heavily corroded, its surface boiling with rusty warts and green-brown streaks, but it seems to be intact. There is a supremely fat padlock holding the lid tight.

  “Stand back,” Corvina says. He lifts his shovel high and brings it down like a wrathful bolt. The fat old padlock does not so much break as crumble, with what seems, to Penumbra, something like relief.

  Later, they hike up through the worksite, Corvina carrying the chest. The Embarcadero night watchman spots them from the other side of the gian
t hole in the ground. He shouts: “You! Hey! What are you doing there?”

  “Don’t stop,” Corvina whispers. There is a line of orange cones just ahead, and beyond them, the sidewalk, where couples in coats and scarves hustle past, none sparing a glance for the gulch to their side. Behind them, the dark wall of the Embarcadero freeway blots out the sky, and on both of its decks, cars whiz through the night, honking and squealing. The light and noise is like a balm after the tunnel below.

  Penumbra turns toward the watchman and taps his helmet. “Just finishing some work! You know how it is. Festina lente!” With that, they are past the cones, onto the sidewalk, and free.

  The craft of fortune is theirs.

  A Million Random Digits

  This time, Mo really does chase them out. The longhairs mutter and moan, but he insists: “There is a lovely bookstore just up the street. The lights might be doused, but don’t let that fool you … keep knocking. Ask for Lawrence.”

  Penumbra clears the wide desk, and Corvina deposits their haul, the contents of the chest: seven volumes, each dry and intact, each wrapped in a swaddling of calfskin. Mo is agog. They are all agog. One by one, they unwrap the treasures.

  “Madrigal!” Mo exclaims. Then, even louder: “Brito! He was one of the first generation!”

  One of the books is bound in leather, twin to the book on the desk, but where that one has a Roman numeral five on the spine, this volume is numbered one. Mo turns it over in his hands. “The first logbook,” he breathes. “This is the record of our earliest customers. It’s rumored that Mark Twain was among them. Now we’ll know for sure.”

  Corvina unwraps one of the last remaining volumes, and wordlessly, he passes it to Penumbra. It is dull gray, discolored in spots, like a caterpillar evicted from its chrysalis. The cover, in unadorned caps, says TECHNE TYCHEON. Penumbra opens the book to show its first page.

  It is a jumble of phrases lined up in rows and columns. Each one seems to be just a fragment: THE GREAT RIVER, BRANCHING AND MERGING; ROAR OF A TYRANT LION; THERE ARE NO WALLS WITHOUT BRICKS; YOUR DEAD GRANDFATHER’S LAUGHING SKULL …

  He flips to the next page—more of the same. THE PRINCE WAS A LIZARD ALL ALONG. Picks a random page in the middle of the book—even more. YOUR TEETH FALLING OUT, ONE BY ONE. Each page is a rough grid, and each space in the grid contains some fragment, some image.

  It is incomprehensible.

  This book of prophecy, Penumbra realizes, is elaborately encrypted. His heart sinks. He has seen volumes like this before; Occult Lit 337 was devoted to Codes and Ciphers. Now, looking at the Tycheon, he sees homework. He sees years of painstaking labor.

  Mo smiles encouragingly. “If there is a code, it can be cracked, Mr. Penumbra. Perhaps I can interest Mr. Fedorov in the task….”

  Penumbra’s head snaps up. “Wait—what do you mean?”

  “He is our most skilled code-breaker,” Mo explains. “He has made quick work of previous volumes, and with luck—”

  “But I intend to take this book back to Galvanic.” Penumbra’s words hang in the air. Corvina extends a hand, settles it firmly on the Tycheon’s cover.

  “Mr. Penumbra, this book belongs to us,” Mo says. “It belonged to us on the day the William Gray sank. This small matter of a century-long entombment does not change that fact.”

  Penumbra shakes his head. “You are welcome to the others, but I was able to fund this undertaking only because of my employer’s interest in this book. It belongs in our library, where scholars will make sense of it. It cannot stay here. This—” He gestures in a wide circle. “—this is just a bookstore.”

  Mo’s face flashes at that, but before he can reply, and to Penumbra’s surprise, Corvina interjects. “Mo. Ajax is right. He paid for this. If we’d been able to fund it ourselves—well, we couldn’t.” He pulls his hand back, and Penumbra snatches up the Tycheon.

  Mo’s eyes flash. “Look around, Mr. Penumbra. This is not just a bookstore.” He turns and retreats into the tall shelves. Penumbra hears the door—the one marked MO—open and shut.

  He takes the Peninsula Commute again and makes his way through Palo Alto to Claude’s redwood-shadowed home. Inside, on the green carpet, where one pizza box once lay, three are now stacked. Penumbra is beginning to get a sense for the rhythm of his former roommate’s life.

  “I have come to say good-bye,” he says, sitting cross-legged. The gray cat nuzzles his knee.

  Claude frowns. “Already? Well. I’m glad you visited, buddy. What happened with that ship?”

  From inside a fat manila envelope, Penumbra produces the Tycheon. “Our quest to find the William Gray was successful.”

  “You found it! Holy shit!”

  Penumbra allows a smile. “We did, thanks in part to your guidance. And we found this book within. But now I must decide what to do with it.”

  “You’re not taking it back to Galvanic?”

  “I may, or—ah.” Penumbra sighs, long and loud. “I just do not know, Claude.”

  “Is it valuable? What’s it about, anyway? Demons?”

  “It is most certainly valuable, but as to its contents … let us just say that if there are demons, they were well hidden. Look for yourself.” He flips it open, shows Claude the pages of disconnected phrases. “It is encrypted. Inscrutable.”

  Claude’s eyes flick across the fragments in quick saccades. “This is a code?”

  Penumbra nods. “Very clearly so. I have seen books like this before, at Galvanic. I took a course—”

  “Have you considered that it might just be random?”

  “I do not think it is a book of nonsense, Claude. It would not have survived this long if there were not some sense to it—some value.”

  “Oh! You think something has to have sense to have value? Buddy … did I ever show you the RAND book?”

  “You did not.”

  Claude hops up and walks to one of the far piles. He digs deep, casting thick volumes aside, throwing them across the carpet. Penumbra sees an SDS-940 Technical Operating Manual. He sees a slim pamphlet titled RFC 1: Host Software.

  “Here!” Claude unearths a fat book with a dark cover and plops it down on the carpet between them. The title is set in a calm serif.

  A Million Random Digits

  with 100,000 Normal Deviates

  “This used to be the most valuable book in this room,” Claude declares. “RAND—the think tank, you know?—they published it in, let’s see—” He heaves the book open, finds its copyright page. “—1946. New computers can generate their own random numbers … well, pseudo-random, technically … but back at Galvanic, when I needed random numbers, I copied them out of this.” He flops the book open to an interior page, which is nothing but numbers in a grid, like bricks in a wall. He flips to another page. It is just the same—and also, apparently, completely different.

  Penumbra traces a finger down the page. “But why? What requires this much randomness?”

  “The Monte Carlo method,” Claude explains. “One of the linchpins of modern science. It’s the cosmic casino, buddy. How to explain it … let’s see. Sometimes, you’re stuck with a system too complicated to model completely. I mean, this guy—” He pats his home-brew computer on the side. “—is powerful, but not that powerful. So, instead of calculating the whole system, top to bottom, you pick some random points … you place some bets. And it’s just like a casino: if you place enough bets, the randomness evens out. You see the shape of the system underneath.”

  “For what might this method be used?”

  “Everything!” Claude exclaims. “Climate models … economic projections … nuclear physics.” He pauses, and his face goes hard. “Buddy. They used this book to make the bomb.”

  Penumbra chews on that. “And you believe the Tycheon might have similar applications.”

  “I don’t know. If you think of the brain as a kind of system—no way can you model the whole thing. So maybe your book provides the random points. Instead of point X, Y, Z inside a ur
anium core, it’s—” He glances down at the book, reads one of the fragments there. “—‘the Crown of the False King’ inside a human brain.” He pauses. “Ha. That makes me think of my boss. See? Randomness can be productive.” Claude pauses, struck by a thought. Suddenly, his eyes are merry. “I never told you this, but I found the matching algorithm.”

  Penumbra frowns, confused. “Which—?”

  “The algorithm that matched us at Galvanic—the great computerized process, remember? I was digging around in the basement, and I found the cards with the source code. You want to know how it worked?”

  “How?”

  “It was random.”

  “Random,” Penumbra repeats.

  “Completely random.”

  “The computer did not know we both had so many books?”

  Claude shakes his head. “I think the math department got lazy. I’m pretty sure the president never had a clue. I mean, it was completely random.”

  Penumbra laughs at that—a single great, barking guffaw. Claude smiles, and then he laughs, too, and soon they are laughing together on the green shag carpet, with the fuzzy gray cat yowling along.

  Climbers

  He stands before Langston Armitage on the top floor of the library and delivers the Techne Tycheon. The old frog unwraps his treasure slowly, eyes wide and devouring. Penumbra narrates the book’s recovery. He explains its probable use, as a kind of random prompt for fortune-telling, like tarot cards or the I Ching.

  “Well done, my boy, well done,” Armitage croaks, effusive. “Books of randomness … this might necessitate a new course offering. The number would have to be random, of course … different each year. Say, English 389. Is that random? No, I don’t think so. In any case.” He sets the book to one side. “Did you hear that Lemire died? It was his old wound, the one that never healed. From the Mongolian expedition. It finally killed him. My point is, his post is open. He was a Senior Acquisitions Officer, my boy.”