Sailing to Byzantium Read online

  That was all right. Anything to be away from that wild crashing surf. It was much more peaceful out here. He could rest, catch his breath, get his equilibrium. And all the while that powerful tentacle towed him steadily seaward. He could still hear the voices of his friends onshore, but they were as faint as the cries of distant seabirds now, and when he looked back he saw only tiny dots, like excited ants, moving along the beach. McCulloch waved at them. “See you some other time,” he called. “I didn’t want to come out of the water yet anyway.” Better here. Much much better. Peaceful. Warm. Like the womb. And that tentacle around his wrist: so reassuring, so steady.

  —Friend human McCulloch? Friend human McCulloch?

  —This is where I belong. Isn’t it?

  —Yes. This is where you belong. You are one of us, friend human McCulloch. You are one of us.

  Gradually the turbulence subsided, and he found himself regaining his balance. He was still within the lobster; the whole horde of lobsters was gathered around him, thousands upon thousands of them, a gentle solicitous community, and right in front of him was the largest octopus imaginable, a creature that must have been fifteen or twenty feet in diameter, with tentacles that extended an implausible distance on all sides. Somehow he did not find the sight frightening.

  “He is recovered now,” his host announced.

  —What happened to me? McCulloch asked.

  —Your people called you again. But you did not want to make your homefaring, and you resisted them. And when we understood that you wanted to remain, the god aided you, and you broke free of their pull.

  —The god?

  His host indicated the great octopus.

  —There.

  It did not seem at all improbable to McCulloch now. The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus. He still could feel the mighty telepathic output of the vast creature, but though it had lost none of its power it no longer caused him discomfort; it was like the roaring thunder of some great waterfall, to which one becomes accustomed, and which, in time, one begins to love. The octopus sat motionless, its immense yellow eyes trained on McCulloch, its scarlet mantle rippling gently, its tentacles weaving in intricate patterns. McCulloch thought of an octopus he had once seen when he was diving in the West Indies: a small shy scuttling thing, hurrying to slither behind a gnarled coral head. He felt chastened and awed by this evidence of the magnifications wrought by the eons. A hundred million years? Half a billion? The numbers were without meaning. But that span of years had produced this creature. He sensed a serene intelligence of incomprehensible depth, benign, tranquil, all-penetrating: a god indeed. Yes. Truly a god. Why not?

  The great cephalopod was partly sheltered by an overhanging wall of rock. Clustered about it were dozens of the scorpion-things, motionless, poised: plainly a guard force. Overhead swam a whole army of the big squids, doubtless guardians also, and for once the presence of those creatures did not trigger any emotion in the lobsters, as if they regarded squids in the service of the god as acceptable ones. The scene left McCulloch dazed with awe. He had never felt farther from home.

  —The god would speak with you, said his host.

  —What shall I say?

  —Listen, first.

  McCulloch’s lobster moved forward until it stood virtually beneath the octopus’s huge beak. From the octopus, then, came an outpouring of words that McCulloch did not immediately comprehend, but which, after a moment, he understood to be some kind of benediction that enfolded his soul like a warm blanket. And gradually he perceived that he was being spoken to.

  “Can you tell us why you have come all this way, human McCulloch?”

  “It was an error. They didn’t mean to send me so far—only a hundred years or less, that was all we were trying to cross. But it was our first attempt. We didn’t really know what we were doing. And I suppose I wound up halfway across time—a hundred million years, two hundred, maybe a billion—who knows?”

  “It is a great distance. Do you feel no fear?”

  “At the beginning I did. But not any longer. This world is alien to me, but not frightening.”

  “Do you prefer it to your own?”

  “I don’t understand,” McCulloch said.

  “Your people summoned you. You refused to go. You appealed to us for aid, and we aided you in resisting your homecalling, because it was what you seemed to require from us.”

  “I’m—not ready to go home yet,” he said. “There’s so much I haven’t seen yet, and that I want to see. I want to see everything. I’ll never have an opportunity like this again. Perhaps no one ever will. Besides, I have services to perform here. I’m the herald; I bring the Omen; I’m part of this pilgrimage. I think I ought to stay until the rites have been performed. I want to stay until then.”

  “Those rites will not be performed,” said the octopus quietly.

  “Not performed?”

  “You are not the herald. You carry no Omen. The Time is not at hand.”

  McCulloch did not know what to reply. Confusion swirled within him. No Omen? Not the Time?

  —It is so, said the host. We were in error. The god has shown us that we came to our conclusion too quickly. The Time of the Molting may be near, but it is not yet upon us. You have many of the outer signs of a herald, but there is no Omen upon you. You are merely a visitor. An accident.

  McCulloch was assailed by a startlingly keen pang of disappointment. It was absurd; but for a time he had been the central figure in some apocalyptic ritual of immense significance, or at least had been thought to be, and all that suddenly was gone from him, and he felt strangely diminished, irrelevant, bereft of his bewildering grandeur. A visitor. An accident.

  —In that case I feel great shame and sorrow, he said. To have caused so much trouble for you. To have sent you off on this pointless pilgrimage.

  —No blame attaches to you, said the host. We acted of our free choice, after considering the evidence.

  “Nor was the pilgrimage pointless,” the octopus declared. “There are no pointless pilgrimages. And this one will continue.”

  “But if there’s no Omen—if this is not the Time—”

  “There are other needs to consider,” replied the octopus, “and other observances to carry out. We must visit the dry place ourselves, from time to time, so that we may prepare ourselves for the world that is to succeed ours, for it will be very different from ours. It is time now for such a visit, and well past time. And also we must bring you to the dry place, for only there can we properly make you one of us.”

  “I don’t understand,” said McCulloch.

  “You have asked to stay among us; and if you stay, you must become one of us, for your sake, and for ours. And that can best be done at the dry place. It is not necessary that you understand that now, human McCulloch.”

  —Make no further reply, said McCulloch’s host. The god has spoken. We must proceed.

  Shortly the lobsters resumed their march, chanting as before, though in a more subdued way, and, so it seemed to McCulloch, singing a different melody. From the context of his conversation with it, McCulloch had supposed that the octopus now would accompany them, which puzzled him, for the huge unwieldy creature did not seem capable of any extensive journey. That proved to be the case: the octopus did not go along, though the vast booming resonances of its mental output followed the procession for what must have been hundreds of miles.

  Once more the line was a single one, with McCulloch’s host at the end of the file. A short while after departure it said:

  —I am glad, friend human McCulloch, that you chose to continue with us. I would be sorry to lose you now.

  —Do you mean that? Isn’t it an inconvenience for you, to carry me around inside your mind?

  —I have grown quite accustomed to it. You are part of me, friend human McCulloch. We are part of one another. At the place of the dry land we will celebrate our sharing of this body.


  —I was lucky, said McCulloch, to have landed like this in a mind that would make me welcome.

  —Any of us would have made you welcome, responded the host.

  McCulloch pondered that. Was it merely a courteous turn of phrase, or did the lobster mean him to take the answer literally? Most likely the latter: the host’s words seemed always to have only a single level of meaning, a straightforwardly literal one. So any of the lobsters would have taken him in uncomplainingly? Perhaps so. They appeared to be virtually interchangeable beings, without distinctive individual personalities, without names, even. The host had remained silent when McCulloch had asked him its name, and had not seemed to understand what kind of a label McCulloch’s own name was. So powerful was their sense of community, then, that they must have little sense of private identity. He had never cared much for that sort of hive mentality, where he had observed it in human society. But here it seemed not only appropriate but admirable.

  —How much longer will it be, McCulloch asked, before we reach the place of dry land?

  —Long.

  —Can you tell me where it is?

  —It is in the place where the world grows narrower, said the host.

  McCulloch had realized, the moment he asked the question, that it was meaningless: what useful answer could the lobster possibly give? The old continents were gone and their names long forgotten. But the answer he had received was meaningless, too: where, on a round planet, is the place where the world grows narrower? He wondered what sort of geography the lobsters understood. If I live among them a hundred years, he thought, I will probably just begin to comprehend what their perceptions are like.

  Where the world grows narrower. All right. Possibly the place of the dry land was some surviving outcropping of the former world, the summit of Mount Everest, perhaps, Kilimanjaro, whatever. Or perhaps not: perhaps even those peaks had been ground down by time, and new ones had arisen—one of them, at least, tall enough to rise above the universal expanse of sea. It was folly to suppose that any shred at all of his world remained accessible: it was all down there beneath tons of water and millions of years of sediments, the old continents buried, hidden, rearranged by time like pieces scattered about a board.

  The pulsations of the octopus’s mind could no longer be felt. As the lobsters went tirelessly onward, moving always in that lithe skipping stride of theirs and never halting to rest or to feed, the terrain rose for a time and then began to dip again, slightly at first and then more than slightly. They entered into waters that were deeper and significantly darker, and somewhat cooler as well. In this somber zone, where vision seemed all but useless, the pilgrims grew silent for long spells for the first time, neither chanting nor speaking to one another, and McCulloch’s host, who had become increasingly quiet, disappeared once more into its impenetrable inner domain and rarely emerged.

  In the gloom and darkness there began to appear a strange red glow off to the left, as though someone had left a lantern hanging midway between the ocean floor and the surface of the sea. The lobsters, when that mysterious light came into view, at once changed the direction of their line of march to go veering off to the right; but at the same time they resumed their chanting, and kept one eye trained on the glowing place as they walked.

  The water felt warmer here. A zone of unusual heat was spreading outward from the glow. And the taste of the water, and what McCulloch persisted in thinking of as its smell, were peculiar, with a harsh choking salty flavor. Brimstone? Ashes?

  McCulloch realized that what he was seeing was an undersea volcano, belching forth a stream of red-hot lava that was turning the sea into a boiling bubbling caldron. The sight stirred him oddly. He felt that he was looking into the pulsing ancient care of the world, the primordial flame, the geological link that bound the otherwise vanished former worlds to this one. There awakened in him a powerful tide of awe, and a baffling unfocused yearning that he might have termed homesickness, except that it was not, for he was no longer sure where his true home lay.

  —Yes, said the host. It is a mountain on fire. We think it is a part of the older of the two former worlds that has endured both of the Moltings. It is a very sacred place.

  —An object of pilgrimage? McCulloch asked.

  —Only to those who wish to end their lives. The fire devours all who approach it.

  —In my world we had many such fiery mountains, McCulloch said. They often did great destruction.

  —How strange your world must have been!

  —It was very beautiful, said McCulloch.

  —Surely. But strange. The dry land, the fire in the air—the sun, I mean—the airbreathing creatures—yes, strange, very strange. I can scarcely believe it really existed.

  —There are times, now, when I begin to feel the same way, McCulloch said.

  The volcano receded in the distance; its warmth could no longer be felt; the water was dark again, and cold, and growing colder, and McCulloch could no longer detect any trace of that sulphurous aroma. It seemed to him that they were moving now down an endless incline, where scarcely any creatures dwelled.

  And then he realized that the marchers ahead had halted, and were drawn up in a long row as they had been when they came to the place where the octopus held its court. Another god? No. There was only blackness ahead.

  —Where are we? he asked.

  —It is the shore of the great abyss.

  Indeed what lay before them looked like the Pit itself: lightless, without landmark, an empty landscape. McCulloch understood now that they had been marching all this while across some sunken continent’s coastal plain, and at last they had come to—what?—the graveyard where one of Earth’s lost oceans lay buried in ocean?

  —Is it possible to continue? he asked.

  —Of course, said the host. But now we must swim.

  Already the lobsters before them were kicking off from shore with vigorous strokes of their tails and vanishing into the open sea beyond. A moment later McCulloch’s host joined them. Almost at once there was no sense of a bottom beneath them—only a dark and infinitely deep void. Swimming across this, McCulloch thought, is like falling through time—an endless descent and no safety net.

  The lobsters, he knew, were not true swimming creatures: like the lobsters of his own era they were bottom-dwellers, who walked to get where they needed to go. But they could never cross this abyss that way, and so they were swimming now, moving steadily by flexing their huge abdominal muscles and their tails. Was it terrifying to them to be setting forth into a place without landmarks like this? His host remained utterly calm, as though this were no more than an afternoon stroll.

  McCulloch lost what little perception of the passage of time that he had had. Heave, stroke, forward, heave, stroke, forward, that was all, endless repetition. Out of the depths there occasionally came an upwelling of cold water, like a dull, heavy river miraculously flowing upward through air, and in that strange surging from below rose a fountain of nourishment, tiny transparent struggling creatures and even smaller flecks of some substance that must have been edible, for the lobsters, without missing a stroke, sucked in all they could hold. And swam on and on. McCulloch had a sense of being involved in a trek of epic magnitude, a once-in-many-generations thing that would be legendary long after.

  Enemies roved this open sea: the free-swimming creatures that had evolved out of God only knew which kinds of worms or slugs to become the contemporary equivalents of sharks and whales. Now and again one of these huge beasts dived through the horde of lobsters, harvesting it at will. But they could eat only so much; and the survivors kept going onward.

  Until at last—months, years later?—the far shore came into view; the ocean floor, long invisible, reared up beneath them and afforded support; the swimmers at last put their legs down on the solid bottom, and with something that sounded much like gratitude in their voices began once again to chant in unison as they ascended the rising flank of a new continent.

  The first rays of th
e sun, when they came into view an unknown span of time later, struck McCulloch with an astonishing, overwhelming impact. He perceived them first as a pale-greenish glow resting in the upper levels of the sea just ahead, striking downward like illuminated wands; he did not then know what he was seeing, but the sight engendered wonder in him all the same, and later, when that radiance diminished and was gone and in a short while returned, he understood that the pilgrims were coming up out of the sea. So they had reached their goal: the still point of the turning world, the one remaining unsubmerged scrap of the former Earth.

  —Yes, said the host. This is it.

  In that same instant McCulloch felt another tug from the past: a summons dizzying in its inoperative impact. He thought he could hear Maggie Caldwell’s voice crying across the time winds: “Jim, Jim, come back to us!” And Bleier, grouchy, angered, muttering, “For Christ’s sake, McCulloch, stop holding on up there! This is getting expensive!” Was it all his imagination, that fantasy of hands on his wrists, familiar faces hovering before his eyes?

  “Leave me alone,” he said. “I’m still not ready.”

  “Will you ever he?” That was Maggie. “Jim, you’ll be marooned. You’ll be stranded there if you don’t let us pull you back now.”

  “I may be marooned already,” he said, and brushed the voices out of his mind with surprising ease.

  He returned his attention to his companions and saw that they had halted their trek a little way short of that zone of light that now was but a quick scramble ahead of them. Their linear formation was broken once again. Some of the lobsters, marching blindly forward, were piling up in confused-looking heaps in the shallows, forming mounds fifteen or twenty lobsters deep. Many of the others had begun a bizarre convulsive dance: a wild twitchy cavorting, rearing up on their back legs, waving their claws about, flicking their antennae in frantic circles.