"Stay," it said, and its mouth cavity gaped. Small fish floated in, disappeared, then floated skimmingly back out. "You—must go ahead. Ahead. Lift. Heldscalla."
"Are you still alive?" he asked it.
Mali said, "Nothing down here is really alive, in the strict sense. Residual amounts... partial changes in a damaged battery."
"But it's not yet," he said. "This is the future."
"There is no future down here," Mali said.
"But it hasn't happened to me yet. I'm alive. I'm facing this ugly thing, this horrible mobile rot. It couldn't talk to me if I were it."
"Obviously," Mali said. "But—the distinction isn't really complete between the two of you. Some of it is merged in you; some of you remains in it. They are both you; you are both of them. ‘The child is father to the man'; remember? And the man is father to the corpse. But I thought it would say to you to go away. And instead he—it—wants you to remain. That's what it's swum up here to tell you. I don't understand. This can't be your Black, in the sense that I was explaining it, anyhow. It's badly decayed but it's benign, and the Blacks are never benign. Can I ask it something?"
He said nothing. Mali took it as silent assent.
"How did you die?" she asked the corpse.
The exposed jawbone waggled whitely in the currents of water surrounding it as it drummed out its deformed words, its answer. "Glimmung had us killed."
"'Us'?" she asked alertly. "How many of us? All of us?"
"Us." It extended a decomposed arm toward Joe. "We two." It became silent, then. And, by degrees, drifted away. "But it isn't so bad. I have a box I've made; it helps protect me. I get inside it and put up a barrier where the door—the entrance—is, and very few of the fish, the really dangerous fish, get in."
"You mean you're trying to protect your life?" Joe said. "But your life is over." He did not comprehend; it made no sense, and it was eerie and bizarre. The thought of a decayed corpse—his corpse—living this semilife down here, going though the motions of making itself safe... "Improve living standards for the dead," he said savagely, speaking at large, to neither Mali nor the corrupted body floating before him.
"The curse," Mali said.
"What?" he said.
"It won't let you go. It confronts you with your own final self and yet you won't go away. And then later on when you're this—" She gestured at the corpse. "You'll wish you had left. Today, tonight. Tomorrow morning."
"Stay," the corpse said to Joe.
"Why?" he said.
"When Heldscalla is raised from the water I will go to sleep. I am waiting to go to sleep; I'm glad you came, at last. I have waited centuries. Until you come here and release me I am caught in the totality of time." It made an imploring gesture with its right arm and hand, but portions of the hand broke loose and fell away into the murky water; the hand now had only two fingers, and, seeing this, Joe felt physically, substantially sickened. He thought, If I could turn the clock back and not have come here. But the corpse had said the opposite; his coming here meant its—and his—release. My good Jesus, he thought. I'll be that thing before long; parts of my body will fall off and be snapped up by the dangerous fish. I will have to hide in a box down here at the bottom of the sea, and the fish will eat me piece by piece.
Or maybe it's not true, he thought. Maybe this is not my corpse; how many people are confronted by their own corpse—a corpse talking beseechingly? The Kalends, he thought. But that made no sense because—contrary to Mali's expectations—it had urged him to stay, urged him to begin his job of pot-healing.
Glimmung, he thought. This is a phantasm projected by him, a warped, a deranged hook, to gaff me. Obviously.
He said to the bobbing, lingering corpse, "Well, thanks for your advice. I'll take it under advisement."
"Is my corpse here, too?" Mali demanded.
No answer. Joe's physical remnants had floated away. Did I say the wrong thing? Joe asked himself. But ye gods; what are you supposed to say to your own corpse? I said I'd think its advice over; what more can it ask? He felt strangely angry, not frightened any longer or horrified, just the mundane boiling inside him of irritability. Pressure like this—it was unfair. He had been told that he must go ahead with his part of the project. And then he thought of the curse.
"Death," he said to Mali as they bobbed close to each other. "Death and sin are connected. That means that if the cathedral is cursed then we also—"
"I'm going back up." She rose, drifting upward above him, her legs moving expertly. "I don't want to find myself too close to the dredging operation." She pointed.
He turned his body in that direction.
An enormous, silent instrument, a construct which he did not recognize, lay far to their right. He heard its activity now, the dull, low throbbing. Its sound had been there all this time; but, he estimated, in the form of a twenty cycles per second churning at the lower limit of audibility. Perhaps he had felt it as a vibration; perhaps he still felt it that way now. "What is it?" he asked her, and started in that direction; it fascinated him.
"A caprix scoop," Mali said. "Ionian caprix, the element with the greatest atomic weight currently in use. Replacing the older rexeroid scoops that you used to see."
"Is the entire cathedral going to be raised by the scoop?" he asked Mali, who, unwillingly, flapped and dove beside him, following his course in a reluctant, halting manner.
"Only the base," Mali said.
"The rest is being cut into blocks?"
"Everything but the base, which is a solid slab of Deneb three agate. If it were sawed into blocks it would be unable to support the superstructure. Hence the scoop." She hung back. "It's not safe to go so close. Anyhow you've seen caprix scoops and shovels in operation before; you know the principle they utilize. The fulcrum is passed back and forth among the four rims of the scoop. Now please! Let's go back up to the surface. I find it very exacting down here. Damn it; it's dangerous so near the dredging."
"Are all the blocks cut?" he asked.
"Oh god," Mali said wearily. "No, not all. Only an initial few. The scoop is not yet lifting the base; it's merely inserting itself in place."
"What will the ascent rate be?" he asked.
"That hasn't been decided. Look—we're not ready for that; you're talking about ascent rate while we're still involved in getting the scoop in place. This isn't your field; you have no knowledge about dredging. The scoop is moving horizontally at the rate of six inches per twenty-six-hour day, which is virtually not moving at all."
He said, "There's something you don't want me to see."
"Paranoia," Mali said.
Flashing his bifocal light-source to the right of the scoop he made out something, a dense and opaque mass that soared up high, becoming a triangle of planes past which fish swam and onto which barnacles and bivalves and a host of unipodular mollusks and Crustacea clung. And, next to it, where the scoop slowly worked, an identical shape: Heldscalla.
"That's what you didn't want me to see," he said to Mali.
Two cathedrals.
12
"One of them," he said, "is black. The Black Cathedral."
"Not the one they're dredging," Mali said.
"Is he sure?" Joe said. "Could he make such a mistake?" It would kill Glimmung; he knew that intuitively. It would be the end of everything. And of them all. Merely knowing that it existed, and seeing it—he felt the sting of death; ice settled over his heart and remained there. Hopelessly he flashed his torch about, here and there. As if trying to find—and failing to find—a way out.