Killing Time

CHAPTER 12

As soon as the vessel was completely submerged, a series of powerful lights on her hull's exterior came on, offering an extraordinary view of the coastal Atlantic depths as we turned north along the line of the continent. What I saw outside, however, was not an idyllic scene of aquatic wonder such as childhood stories might have led me to expect but rather a horrifying expanse of brown water filled with human and animal waste, all of it endlessly roiled but never cleansed by the steady pulse of the offshore currents. Sometimes the trapped filth was identifiable — great stretches of medical waste and the detritus of livestock husbandry were particularly disturbing — but for the most part it all blended into one indistinguishable mass that I, left alone to watch and ponder, found utterly disheartening. I knew, of course, that in the years since the '07 financial crash, environmental cleanups had been deemed unaffordable luxuries in most countries; nevertheless, to be presented with this sort of firsthand evidence was shocking.

After what seemed a very long time, I was escorted to my quarters not by Larissa Tressalian (who I assumed had joined her mysteriously stricken brother) but by the curious little man called Dr. Leon Tarbell. Alone among the crew, the "documents expert" Tarbell was unknown to me by either sight or reputation, a fact that made him all the more intriguing; for he was certainly treated as an equal by the others and behaved entirely as such.

"Do you enjoy the decor?" Tarbell asked pleasantly as we walked down the carved wooden staircase to the ship's lower deck. His accent was hard to pinpoint, and his manner was equally ambiguous: though clearly friendly, he seemed to enjoy my lingering uneasiness. He pulled out a pack of the new, smokeless, and supposedly "safe" cigarettes that the American tobacco industry, after a generation of pressure and lawsuits by a combination of East Asian nations, had recently started to market and offered me one. I declined, and as he lit his he said, "It is not to my taste, this particular area. I prefer the modern. Minimalist, athletic — sexual."

"Some might simply say 'ugly,' " I offered quickly, before bothering to consider whether Tarbell might take offense.

But he only laughed. "True! It can be very ugly. But ugly" — his fiery eyes grew even more agitated—"with sexuality!"

I would soon learn that the entire world, to Tarbell, was divided between people and things that were not "sexual" and those that had "sexuality!" Though a simple formula, it seemed as valid as any and a good deal more amusing than most, given the way he made his pronouncements with near-comic vigor; so I laughed along with him, relaxing a bit as we arrived at the door to what were to be my quarters.

Inside was a small stateroom that recalled images I'd seen of early-twentieth-century transatlantic ocean liners. The temperature was well above the forty-five degrees of the corridor, creating a welcoming atmosphere that was complemented by more wood paneling, a small, porthole-shaped transparent section in the hull that could be chemically tinted at the touch of a nearby button, finely crafted glass light shades, and marble-and-ceramic sanitary facilities that appeared to be genuine antiques. It was even more unlike the very high tech nose area of the ship than were the corridors, a fact that caused my confusion to spike once more.

"Past and future, side by side," Tarbell said with a nod. "You could say that time does not exist aboard this vessel. Such is Malcolm!"

I turned my thoughts to my host. "Is he all right?"

Tarbell nodded confidently. "They pass, these attacks."

"But what's wrong with him?"

"I am not entirely comfortable speaking about such things. Perhaps he will tell you. Or perhaps Larissa." Tarbell gave me his demonic grin. "She has fastened her eye on you — lucky man. A woman of rare brilliance, beauty — and sexuality!" As he barked the last word, he clapped a hand on my shoulder. "Yes, you will join our little company, I think!" Turning to go he added, "You will find everything you need — even fresh clothes. We dine forward, in one-half hour. Malcolm tells me that you enjoy vodka — come soon, and I will share my private stock!"

It was evident that these people already knew almost everything about me, from the size and preferred style of my clothing (there was nothing in the closet of my quarters that I could not or would not have worn) to my taste in liquor. I didn't wonder how they had attained such knowledge, any more than I wondered about the cost of building the ship on which we were traveling. Malcolm and Larissa Tressalian's father, Stephen, whose satellite system had made the modern Internet possible, had been one of the wealthiest men in the world. He'd also been a leader of the group of information technocrats who, during the '07 crisis, had put up their collective private and corporate assets to guarantee the solvency of the American government, just as the financier J. P. Morgan and his associates had done a century earlier. Tressalian and his allies had then used this timely support as a club with which to beat Washington into dropping any and all attempts to regulate information commerce, thus dealing the deathblow to, among other things, the already wounded concept of personal privacy.

There would have been few things beyond the reach of such a man's heirs, yet that fact alone did not explain the most urgent questions at hand, which I grappled with yet again as I washed and changed for dinner: What exactly were these people up to, and why had they decided, in Larissa's phrase, that they needed me?

In twenty minutes I was headed back toward the nose of the ship, determined this time to get answers that were more than cryptic.