Matagan Harbor is one of the sites of the world, I knew. I’d heard it before, but now I really understood what that meant. It meant that strange regret that you would never be able to see it for the first time again, mixed with a slow-burning hope fuelled by the realization that every time you turned to see it, it had changed again to become something new.
The roar of a tug’s overstrained engine breaking down to cinders and shards as it struggled against the weight of an overbuilt ice-tower from the far south.
The whisper and shush of low waves lapping on shores buried under docks beyond counting.
The play of the morning light on a docking claw sixteen stories high.
The outbursts of arguing street children as they fought over the discarded bycatch of Kanavi crabs, each hard-won shell a little too thick, a little too green, a little too crushed by the weight of its fellows.
Every moment was made of a thousand thousand little things like that, and even at the younger and more dynamic age I was then, that was enough to impress, or at least impress the part of me that wasn’t focused on getting my pipe lit. I’d picked up the bad habit only a few weeks back and my hand wasn’t in practice yet, which was probably what distracted me from oncoming footsteps.
Looking back at it, I’m not sure I would’ve heard them even if I were paying attention.
I finally got the pipe lit – the damned thing seemed to practically eat matches on misty mornings – took a puff and looked up, and up, and up, and up all the way to the face of the person that had appeared in front of me.
It wasn’t a very nice face. There were too many teeth, and the mouth wrapped all the way around the sides of the skull. A mouth meant to take big bites out of something else, below a triplet of eyes that were all staring at me from two feet up. And this was before my back went crooked. Small satchels and purses dangled from it, tied on wherever they didn’t interrupt the movement of limbs.
“Captain?” asked the thing. Its voice was all wrong; too deep for the thinness of its frame. The pipestem buzzed against my teeth at its sound.
“Nah,” I said. “Able-seaman. Captain’ll be back soon.”
It stood there and blinked, and I felt my skin itch. It only ever closed one eye at a time. “Where is the Captain?” it asked.
“Ashore,” I said. “Just arguing with the wharfmaster. Stupid old sod said we came in too heavy, we said the pier looked like that when we got here, he disagreed, so on and so on. Bureaucrats. You know.”
The thing looked at the pier. “It is damaged,” it said. “The moorings are discoupling.”
“Yeah. Wasn’t us. Idiot’s probably been letting the thing slip away into garbage for months, we’re just the lucky ones to get pinned with it.”
It turned its back on me and walked over to the half-cracked chains and pulleys, started to tinker and prod. I couldn’t see the tools in its hands, but I saw sparks fleck and air shimmer with heat. Would’ve liked to get a closer look, but then down the way came the BANG of the wharfmaster’s office door slamming open and out came Captain Fenter, stomping fit to crack cobbles.
“Any luck?” I asked.
He spat. I think there was red in it. “No. No. Not even a little. We can stay docked or pay up for the fix, as far as he’s concerned. I’d like to ask how he thinks a little ten-man fisher could’ve yanked that thing loose, but I know I won’t get an answer any straighter than a corkscrew from the pissant.” He shrugged. “We’re stuck in. Hell of a way to have your first time in Matagan, eh boy? See the sights, breathe the air, choke on the whinging bastards.” He spat again, and then he squinted. “What’s happening over there?”
I followed his gaze. “No idea. Showed up asking for you a minute ago, then got distracted by the breakages. Any idea what he is?”
The thing straightened itself and spun on its heel, making its way to us in four long strides. Its eyes flicked between us. “Captain?”
Fenter didn’t answer right away. I was surprised; surely he’d seen stranger-looking folks than this in Matagan. Hell, I’d been here a couple days and I’D seen stranger-looking folks in Matagan. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”
“Ask for passage.”
“Agreed,” he said. No hesitation. “There are dry quarters belowdecks.”
The thing nodded and stepped aboard. The exchange can’t have been more than six seconds. I wasn’t going to say anything – I was young, but not THAT young – but the captain must’ve seen my face. “I know we aren’t a passenger ship. Wipe that stare off your face, Denkel. Haven’t you ever seen a person from the Terramac before?”
I shrugged. “Sorry, captain. Can’t say I have. Name rings a bell, though.” Something about machines. Strange devices. “Handy with tools, are they?” I guessed.
“You could say that,” said the captain. “You could say that.” He knelt down on the pier and examined the moorings. “Only things that leave the Terramac are its people and its machines, Denkel. And the people only leave to learn more about machines. I’d guess this one came to look at the harbour mechanisms. Might be he wants to look at something smaller for a change” He shrugged. “No sense asking.”
“We’re taking a stranger onboard and we aren’t even asking what he wants?”
The captain tossed the mooring-chain back to the dock. “Yes we damned well are. For one thing, he just got us out of here. Go get the others from whatever hole they’re hiding in and be quick about it; we’re pushing off by noon.”
The chain was whole again. And without a single seam.
I didn’t know much about the Terramac. By the time we were a week out from shore, I didn’t know much more, but at least I was knowledgably ignorant. Not that the passenger had been any help on that account. I’d been friendly as anything, first day out. Helped him settle in his corner – a little nook on the lower deck that had played host to last voyage’s mouldiest sack of potatoes before we cleared them out. Not that he needed much settling. No possessions besides what he carried in those little bags and the big rucksack on his back, and he refused to remove either of them.
“Sure you don’t need anything else?” I asked. “A light, at least? It’s dim down here.”
“Can see.” And it was hard to argue that, with those three eyes shining in the dark like a cat’s.
“Suit yourself.” I hesitated for a moment as he settled himself down, then gave in to curiosity. “What was it like, the Terramac?”
He looked up at me. “Do not understand.” Already one hand was reaching into a pocket, pulling out some small bit of something fibrous.
“Where you’re from. What’s it like?”
He clicked his teeth – a quick, skittering sound that would’ve been at home coming from a rat. “Am here.”
“No, the Terramac. What is the Terramac like?”
A somewhat larger thing had been taken from the rucksack; it looked like a screwdriver descended from sixteen generations of inbreeding. “The Terramac is here.”
I looked around the deck. Everything looked as it ever was, except for the eight-foot spindleshanks in the corner. “I don’t understand.”
Clickclickclick. “Yes.”
From then on I saved my friendliness for those it wasn’t wasted on. Don’t get me wrong, as far as the ship went he was worth a year-long spell in a drydock on his lonesome, but he wasn’t quite personable.
“They all like that?” I asked the captain one night as we hauled out the deep-lines.
“Pretty much,” he said. A hook nicked at his jacket, and he swore furiously before turning back to the spools. “It’s a matter of time. You want to talk to one of them, Denkel, you keep your words in the here-and-now. They don’t handle tomorrows and yesterdays very well. It’s all about now, now, now.”
“Sounds like a child ready to walk.”
“A child with teeth that could gut bull cattle in a bite, and a brain that’s retrofitted half the ship as an exercise. Mind your mouth, Denkel. Because I’m not doing it for you, and I don’t want to have to scrape you off my ship.”
I grumbled, I’ll admit, but I couldn’t deny that. The spools might have been brand-new if I hadn’t seen them being patched up myself. The thing from the Terramac had even fabricated a depth sensor out of apparent thin air, instantly obsoleting the carefully-measured series of knots I’d left along the length of the deep-lines some weeks earlier. Two thousand, it read in spiralling metal wheels, like a misplaced combination lock. One thousand nine hundred. One thousand seven hundred fifty.
Time spun away under the wire. One thousand six hundred. I pulled, and men hauled fat and writhing ‘Gan glow-eels off the hooks one at a time, armed with barbed mitts to grip slimy flesh and mail-covered forearms to ward away grasping needle-teeth. One thousand five hundred twenty. The deck was covered with pulsing, dim-lit fluids leaking from ruptured glands, drizzling eerie light into the sea. One thousand four hundred.
It was my life, and it was a good one.
One thousand three hundred.
Thud.
I almost fell over before the captain’s hand seized my elbow. “A snag?”
Wincing, I prised my hand loose from the cable. “At one-three.”
He gave it a tug and swore. “A good one, too. Spit on a shitheap. Well, it’s the saw for this one.” Seeing my stifled protest – the line was near-new, and not cheap – he grinned humorlessly. “Unless you want to make the trip down there yourself? It’s a pretty paddle, in the dark to say no more or less. Maybe you’ll make friends with some of the ‘Gans that slipped the lines – the big ones with fight in them. Or maybe you’ll get lucky and run across a Redbrow. I’ve seen them out here before, y’know, and the blood and guts sure get their attention as good as a flag-and-salute. Ah, they’re lovely. From a distance, of course. Which you wouldn’t be at, wearing that little tin soldier suit we’ve got. Which is rated for four hundred foot at most.”
He stared down at the line, and the smile slid away. “So, are you doing this?”
“Yes,” said the thing from the Terramac, and we both jumped. Its footsteps were still feather-soft, even on the hollow rip-rap surface of the deck.
“Yes what?” I asked.
It blinked at me. I hated when it did that. Nothing should be able to stare at you that hard with one eye shut. “Descending,” it said, and with that it shrugged off its rucksack. It was the first time I’d seen it without the ungainly bundle, and it seemed half-shrunken without it.
Captain Fenter looked as if he would’ve liked to argue the point, then he shrugged. “It’s your life,” he said.
“Yes,” said the thing from the Terramac. The suit had been procured from its cabinet ahead of time, it seemed, and it was being carefully wrapped around limbs nearly twice the size of those it had been designed for.
“You know how deep it is?”
“Yes. The suit is modified.” And it was being modified further as I watched, as the thing from the Terramac dragged bits and pieces out of its discarded pack and clipped them to the diving suit, stretched here, pulled there, pinched that.
“You’re armed?”
“Yes,” he said. A small pole was unscrewed at one end, and telescoped itself into a spear only a little shorter than I was. He popped open a small capsule with its teeth and spat out the lid, then drank.
“What’s that?” I asked.
The thing from the Terramac coughed, choked, gasped, and spat. Thick purple leaked from his lips and puddled on his toes. Through the wheezes I could barely make out the hint of that damned clicking. Then it rushed to the rail, slipped over, and was gone.
The water bubbled.
“Captain?”
“Yeah?”
“How much did that suit cost?”
His face wrinkled in calculation. “Good kala-husk in the helmet, came all the way from the Sill. Maybe…. Quarter of the boat.”
I stared down at the green glow on the black water. “Y’reckon the repair work’ll make up for it?”
Captain Fenter’s fist was almost friendly against the back of my head.
*
-The black is total there is no light. There is a great pressure to left that is a possible predator (Redbrow).
-There is a light in left pocket that is being used.
-There is a Redbrow to left it is surprised. There is a spear in left hand.
-A spear is used a Redbrow retreats. There is receding pressure to left.
-The lungs are full of fluid not air. This is good it prevents internal disruption via gas pressures. Air at depth is a hazard.
-There is a line that is going deeper there is tension there is something snared in its far end. It is very far away so there is faster movement now. Descending.
The Terramac is empty.
-There is pale light in the dark from two eyes. They are round and large. They are within a body without a skull.
-There is communication. Low-pitched soundwaves, regular. Hum/murmur rather than a whisper; they carry within the water. Language is relatively straightforward albeit dependant upon bodily movements for clarity that are unusable without species-specific morphology.
-There is a being that is trapped within a cable. There is a cutting implement in left right pocket on right arm.
-There is a being that is free from a cable. Being expresses gratitude, fascination with object. Being respects implement in left hand and skills to fashion implement.
-There is a being that expresses interest in an implement’s manufacture. Information is transmitted.
-Biological distress is occurring. Too deep. There is movement upwards.
The Terramac is empty.
-There is a metal shell at a surface.
-There is a light.
-There are two beings peering over a metal shell’s rim they are bipedal land-movers metal shell is their conveyance.
-There are bipeds they are being helpful.
*
It was a long, long time before the thing from the Terramac surfaced again. We’d have moved on an hour beforehand if the deep-line hadn’t come up loose – cut clean with a single stroke.
He weighed surprisingly little as we swung him aboard. Weighed less still as it heaved up purple froth from its mouth, choked and gargled its way back into air.
“There is air,” it managed, and clicked between gasps. “There is air.”
It felt alright then, it did. Watching Captain Fenter slap him on the back as he shook and shivered. Call it perverse, call it spiteful, but it was good to know that the thing could feel aches and twinges like all of us could, no matter how hard it was to read. Good to know there’s flesh and blood behind those three eyes.
Flesh and blood maybe, but it might as well have been steel. The next night the cable jammed at one-six. The same cable, even. And before it was even finished echoing, there he was, crawling into the diving suit again, tweaking it a little more again. Like it’d never happened at all.
Of course, for him, I guess it might as well not have.
*
-The black is total there is no light.
-The lungs are full of fluid not air. This is good it prevents internal disruption via gas pressures. Air at depth is a hazard.
-There is a line that is going deeper there is tension there is something snared in its far end. It is very far away so there is faster movement now. Descending.
The Terramac is empty.
-There are many lights from many eyes in many bodies without skulls without skeletons. There is communication at a low pitch, to let the water carry it far. Language is relatively straightforward. They are clutching the line.
-There is communication from many beings: they clutch the line so that movement may occur and communication continue. They admire implements. There are implements in all pockets, all pockets are shown.
-There is beckoning from many beings.
-Descent.
The Terramac is empty.
*
It was deeper down. I guess. It made sense that it’d take him longer to get it clear. I guess.
But six hours longer? That’s a bit much. I guess.
Well, he did come back up. Coughing, sputtering. A bit less than last time, and a different colour: green. I wonder how he manages to find the time to work on these things if he can’t remember that he might need them; inspiration from the ocean maybe?
“They just tinker,” said the captain. “Put them near birds and they’ll tinker with models until they’ve got fake flying machines. Put them near cranes and they’ll tinker you things that can practically hook the damned sky. Put them near boats, and well, they’ll make diving suits that can take them down a thousand-and-a-half feet without a hitch.” He scratched his nose as he watched the cables run. “Sort of like that little lizard….the one that hides itself…what’s the name…”
I watched the depth gauge scroll, wondering what it was like to have half a mile of water between you and life. “Gecko?”
“No….no….starts with a, uh….C.”
“Crocodile?”
“Nah. Chameleon! That’s it. See, you put ‘em near a thing, and they change colour to blend with it. They take their surroundings and make it a part of them. Same thing. Sort of.” He waved a hand. “You get what I mean.”
I didn’t, but a choking, coughing noise distracted me, followed by the line running rigid.
Captain Fenter sighed as he locked in his own spool. “What’s it at?”
I checked. “Two-thirty.”
“Well,” he mused as the thing from the Terramac began to slip on the (much altered) suit, “at least one of us can’t get sick of this.”
*
-The black is total there is no light. There is a village, a center of activity. There is a forge around a vent in the ocean floor that smokes black heat. Temperature goes from near-freezing to blast-furnace within a span of inches.
-There is ingenuity in devices, in pumps and levers and pistons. Rough nature of underwater worksmanship is partially solvable via creating vacuum chambers and crafting within them for maximum control and precision.
-There are improvements given to beings, disseminate. Improvements are obtained by eating improved one, all feeders are improved.
-There are thanks from beings. Token is given.
-Biological distress is occurring: breath-in-water is scant. Ascending.
The Terramac is empty.
*
“Are you sure there’s nothing going on here?” I asked as the winch ground down at three-zero.
“What d’you mean?” asked the captain.
“Once a night. Once a NIGHT. That’s not coincidence anymore. What the bottomless blue bitch is doing this?”
His moustache bristled as he watched the thing from the Terramac dive – a perfect straight-arrow into the water, as usual. “Well, it isn’t him. To have some sort of dastardly scheme, you need to be able to scheme. Plan. That’s sort of fucking essential there, isn’t it, you whiny bastard?”
I spread my hands. “Hey, just saying. But this isn’t right. No problems around here ever before, right?”
“Right,” he muttered. “Nothing down there. Just deep and empty.”
“So there’s nothing down there.”
“I just said that.”
“So something’s going on here.”
Smack.
*
-It is bright in the black. Light shines from captive cages; phosphorescent liquids from deepsea life within seal containers, vacuum-tight.
-A city roils at the black smokers; chambers upon chambers, halls that smith, halls that smelt, halls that build. Substances bubble from pits in the floor of the world into waiting calderas. There are halls of manufacture. There is industry.
-Requests for plans are being asked for by many beings with large eyes in bodies without skulls. They are given. Requests for thoughts are asked. They are given. Those given are eaten. All feeders are given.
-There are limits. Fatigue poisons fill limbs, cloud the head. Breath becomes laborious. Ascending.
The Terramac is empty.
*
The spools creaked in their holsters in the light of dawn as Captain Fenter prodded at them listlessly. “Right. What’s it say again?”
I looked at the little gauge I was holding. “Four thousand three hundred.”
He sighed.
“When’d it happen?”
“Hard to say. I woke up when I heard the noise.”
“We reeled those up real tight last night.”
The captain said nothing.
“Tied them off and everything.”
Possibly the most evil curse I have ever heard to this day escaped his lips, softly, like a lover’s name.
“Something’s going on here, isn’t it.”
He didn’t say a word as he looked to the deck. The diving suit’s cage was wide open.
*
-The blackness glows. Civilization rumbles against the seamounts and crags, long low halls, deep burrows, towering spires. Carved hollowed chiseled built.
-There is a center. There is movement to the center. There are thousands of beings. There are thousands of large eyes in thousands of bodies without skulls.
-There is proclamation from beings. There is admiration. There is congratulation.
-There is explanation from beings. There are ten thousand young. There are two living. There are plans, thoughts, implements. There are ten thousand living. There are ten thousand learning. There are ten thousand ten thousand young living feeding learning.
-There is gratitude beyond measure from beings. There is the promise of
‘memory’
forever.
-The feeders hold the knowing of plans thoughts implements. They hold
‘memory’
-Of this and gratitude for it for as
‘long’
As there is feeders and learners.
-Remembered for
‘ever’
‘forever’
‘remembered’
-There is hope. There is explanation of hope. Hope is for what the future may
-‘Future’ ‘may’ Future may
-The Terramac is empty.
The Terramac is empty.
-The Terramac is
-empty.
-Hope for
everevereverververevereverevereverevereverevereverevereveverevereverevereverevereverever
-There is a weapon in right left pocket that uses air at depth. It is used.
-There is a spear in right hand. It is used.
-There is a weapon in left right left leg pocket that uses heat to sear. It is used.
-There is a weapon in mouth. It is used.
The Terramac is
*
The lines went slack around noon. We waited until sundown.
Still don’t know what happened there. I pulled myself together and signed on for a dull old cargo freighter, on a long voyage with good pay and no excitement.
But Captain Fenter, he never did go to sea again his whole life. Sold his boat, sold his equipment, bought a little place in Matagan, died not ten years later. Without saltwater they can wither like that, the old ones.
He never did get the price of that suit back.
*
That is the oldest-eaten tale of our city, the tale of how it came to be, the tale of how our few became many.
We have many older, but this one is special.
It would not be if not for those not like us, those who came from far above to show us light and unwater and thought.
It was a stranger to us in life, but it taught us well. It was a stranger to us in death, and gave up nothing to the feeders. Our sorrows were many as our minds were empty.
We have older tales, of regret. Our stranger taught us these new tales, of hope.
It did not know what hope was.
It killed to not find what hope was.
This is not how we are. But it is how the stranger was, and that is how it must be.
And one day, we will come above, and we will feed our thanks to its kin.