The boat’s outboard motor, coated in thick blue latex paint, is an antique, so old it has no computer.
The dark water looks the same in every direction, so he steers by GPS and compass with his non-Akemi phone. He finds himself doubting that the green numbers on the tiny screen have some relationship to the world, that he’s not circling aimlessly in a waste of sea.
Akemi told him there’s enough fuel to get where he’s going, and to correct for drift once he’s there. She went away again before he could ask if there’s enough for him to get back to shore, but that’s okay, it’s fitting that he commit himself and let the future take form on the water.
Sometime in the small hours there’s a basso thrumming and then a glaring constellation of red and white lights emerges high overhead from the dark, probably a tanker, passing so close he feels the vibration of its engines, the loom of its mass, and then it’s gone, its wake lifting the boat, subsiding.
56
Axis Mundi
So this is death, Thales thinks.
Not a thought one expects to have.
In the event, death is a yacht running through heavy seas in a black squall, the marbled foam sliding over the water as the sails vibrate and crack.
He stands at the prow, rain coursing down his forehead. But is it rain, or just a symbol of rain? Wet, in any case, and freezing, and pounding down.
Thales clasps the railing as the yacht starts its descent down a hill-sized swell.
He wonders what would happen if he fell over the side. The sea is bleak, immense, unresting, cold … He wonders if it has any substance but words.
The rail under my hand is an illusion, he thinks, like the water running down my face, but the rail feels solid, and the water cold; apparently his knowledge gives him neither comfort nor sway.
The yacht’s speed is exhilarating, almost sickening.
Behind him, yellow light glows in the fogged windows of the cabin.
A rain-slick brass wheel opens the cabin door. The cabin is warm; water streams from his slicker, but beneath it his clothes are dry. He tells himself to be grateful for these comforts—it could have been any kind of a hell.
The cabin is the interior of the mountain house, in essence, but smaller now, perhaps because there’s less room at sea.
Akemi is at the computer, the archaic one his mother would never replace. The monitor shows evening on a tropical beach—grey skies, the dark mass of jungle, water frothing over pebbles. It’s the view from Kern’s earpiece, Kern being Akemi’s friend, or paladin, or pawn.
The computer was connected to the net, for a little while, but now the connection is gone, and Kern’s phone is their only window on the world.
“I’d like to know more,” he hears Kern say, almost in a whisper. “Where I’m going. What it is that I’m supposed to do. This all seems … conjectural.” His voice is measured, precise, at odds with his history, which Akemi says is violent, and threadbare.
The camera feed becomes a jumble of wet jungle and sky, then frames Kern’s face. He looks mestizo, and underneath all the sweat and sun damage is about Thales’ age. He’d be forgettable-looking were it not for the remnants of a hipster haircut and a lean muscularity Thales associates with professional cyclists and boxers. Feeling passes over his face like weather—a touching vulnerability gives way to remoteness and then the light must have shifted because he suddenly looks older, and entirely cold, as though an ancient killer had appeared behind his eyes. Finally Kern sighs, looking disgusted and young again, and puts the earpiece back on.
The ship creaks, the rain drums and the computer’s speakers bring the hiss and crash of other waves. Thales asks, “Why won’t you talk to him?”
“He knows enough to keep going forward. I don’t want to distract him, or get into a debate. Also, he was right. It is all a little conjectural.”
His mother’s books shift on their shelves as the yacht reaches a trough, starts ascending.
“So where are we going?”
For a moment he sees himself through her eyes, feels her decide she has to tell him something.
“Irina worked it all out before she died. Well, not Irina, exactly, but we’re not exactly us.”
Which makes us … what? he wonders, but says, “I always thought of her as the magician.”
“The magician, then. So, the old man you saw in the videos? That’s Cromwell. He made a deal with the big AI, the surgeon’s boss—the mathematician, she called it. Irina got caught up in the middle.”
“I think I met the mathematician,” Thales says. “He was unexpectedly kind. I think he might have identified with me.”
“I hope you didn’t get too attached.”
“Not especially.” (Though what, if anything, is he attached to?)
“That’s good, because the magician intends to kill it.”
“With what possible weapon?”
“With Irina, the real one, though she doesn’t know it yet. The problem is, the mathematician is cautious, and justifiably so—it disconnected itself from the net until all this works itself out. I have to get Kern to physically reconnect the mathematician’s hardware to the net so Irina can do her thing.”
“If he can get close enough to fiddle with the hardware, why bother attacking over a network? Just get Kern to smash it with a rock.”
“We have to get something from the mathematician before it dies. Something unique. If Kern just smashes the hardware, it’s lost for good.”
He wonders what the magician values so highly, but has the sense Akemi isn’t ready to talk. He says, “All right, but so what? We aren’t in the world anymore. The magician was nice but I’ve never met this Irina. It sounds like we’re caught in the middle of a power struggle between a plutocrat, a computer program and a total stranger. What’s it to me?”
“For one thing, we owe the magician, and she and Irina are more or less the same person, except the magician was better informed. She didn’t have to do anything, but she did her best for us.”
“Her best for us, or her best to use us?”
“Remember at the end, when the city was dying? She sought me out and gave me all the happiness she could. I’m guessing she did the same for you. Maybe that means something to you, or maybe it doesn’t. I guess you have to decide for yourself.”
He feels petty and ungrateful, and at the same time like his objections stand. To change the subject he says, “Where are you sending Kern?”
“First to sea, to meet some ships, and then to the axis of the world.”
57
Vaguely Cetacean
Kern checks his GPS, is still within meters of where he’s supposed to be. The sun must be coming up, as there’s now enough light to see the grey swell. He tries to keep a good watch but the fog and rain are always the same and his mind wanders.
Akemi’d said the ships ran silent, like black ghosts on the water. The rain hisses on the sea’s curvature.