I was thinking clearly enough to see the implications of having to “get to the stairs.” The stairs had led up to the deck—but now they led down, into the ocean depths. Above us, there was nothing but the machine deck and the boat’s unbreachable hull.
“I can’t swim,” I said, flatly.
Emily Marchant looked at me as if I were insane.
“I mean it,” I said. “I can’t swim.”
“You have to,” she said. “It’s not hard.”
My reflexive response was to change the subject. “Where’s everyone else gone to?” I asked. The boat lurched more violently as I spoke, and the little girl reached out to me for support. I took my hand away from the wall and clasped both of her hands in mine.
“Mama Janine put me to bed,” Emily said. “Then she went back to the party. Everyone was at the party. There’s only us, Mister Mortimer. We have to get out. No one will come, Mister Mortimer.”
Like me, Emily Marchant had been raised contented and well adjusted, and she was as wise and level-headed as any eight year old in all the world. Her IT and her suitskin were both tuned to compensate for panic, but she was not immune to fear. Fear, like pain, is universally recognized to be necessary and healthy, in moderation.She was free to feel fear, if not sheer, stark, paralyzing terror. So was I. No one will come, Mister Mortimer, she had said, packing all the tragedy of the moment into those few, almost dispassionate, words. She was afraid, as I was—and we had every reason to be afraid.
Everyone but the two of us had been on deck at the party—all twenty-six of them. Whatever impossibility had flipped Genesisonto her back had thrown every last one of them into the sea: the impossibly warm and impossibly violent sea.
Ten
I scrambled to my feet. While I held Emily fast in my right hand I put out my left to steady myself against the upside-down wall. The water was knee-deep and still rising—not very quickly, but inexorably. The upturned boat was rocking from side to side, but it also seemed to be trying to spin around. I could hear the rumble of waves breaking on the outside of the hull. The noise wasn’t loud, but I knew that the hull must be muffling the sound.
“My name’s Emily, Mister Mortimer,” the little girl told me. “I’m frightened.”
I resisted the temptation to say So am I.Somewhere in the corridor, I knew, there were lockers containing emergency equipment: not merely life jackets but “survival pods,” whose shells were self-inflating plastic life rafts. There was light enough to find them, if I could only adjust my mind to the fact that everything was upside down. Once we had one, we still had to get it out, and I still couldn’t swim—but how hard could it be, if I could get into a life jacket?
“This way,” I said, as soon as I had figured out which way the emergency locker was. Unsurprisingly, it was in the logical place, next to the stairs, which now descended into angry darkness. I marveled at my being able to speak so soberly and marveled even more that I no longer felt seasick. My body had been shocked back to sanity, if not to normality.
As we moved along the corridor, I couldn’t shake the horror of the thought that Emily Marchant’s entire familymight have been wiped out at a single stroke and that she might now be that rarest of all rare beings, an orphan.It was barely imaginable. What possible catastrophe, I wondered, could have done that? And what other atrocities must that same catastrophe have perpetrated?
“Do you have any idea what happened, Emily?” I asked, as I wrestled with the handle of the locker. It was easy enough to turn it the “wrong” way, but not so easy to drag the door open against the increasing pressure of the water.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Are we going to die?” The word toohung unspoken at the end of the sentence. She was only eight, but she understood the implications of the fact that everyone else had been on deck when the boat flipped over, defying every precaution taken by its careful designers.
“No,” I told her. “If we can just get these life jackets on and take this pod with us….”
“It’s very big,” she said, dubiously—but I knew that if it had been designed to be carried up the stairs it would certainly go down them.
Despite the rocking of the boat, I contrived to get one of the life jackets over Emily’s shoulders. “Don’t pull it yet,” I said, showing her where the ring pull was but firmly setting her hand away from it. “We have to get clear of the boat first. You have to swim as hard as you can— thatway. Understand? Swim as hard as you can, and don’t pull until you’re sure you’re no longer under the boat. Then you’ll pop up to the surface. I’ll bring the life-raft pod.”
“I’ve been a good girl,” she told me, with just a hint of bleakness in her awful sobriety. “I’ve never told a lie.”
It couldn’t have been literally true, but I knew exactly what she meant. She was eight years old and she had every right to expect to live till she was eight hundred. She didn’t deserveto die. It wasn’t fair that she should. It wasn’t fair that she should lose her parents either but one misfortune didn’t license the other. I knew full well that fairness didn’t really come into it, and I expect she knew it too, even if my fellow historians and social commentators were wrong about the abolition of the primary artifices of childhood. I knew in my heart, though, that what she said was right, and that insofar as the imperious laws of nature ruled her observation irrelevant, the universewas wrong. It wasn’tfair. She hadbeen a good girl. If she died, it would be a monstrous injustice.
Perhaps it was merely a kind of psychological defense mechanism that helped me to displace my own mortal anxieties, but the horror running through me was exclusively focused on her. At that moment, her plight—not ourplight, but hers—seemed to be the only thing that mattered. It was as if her dignified protest and her placid courage somehow contained the essence of New Human existence, the purest product of progress.
Perhaps it was only my cowardly mind’s refusal to contemplate anything else, but the only thing I could think of while I tried to figure out what to do was the awfulness of what Emily Marchant was saying. As that awfulness possessed me it was magnified a thousandfold, and it seemed to me that in her lone and tiny voice there was a much greater voice speaking for multitudes: for all the human children that had ever died before achieving maturity; all the goodchildren who had died without ever having the chance to deserve to die.
“I can’t hold your hand, Emily,” I told her, as my own life jacket settled itself snugly about my torso. “It would make it too difficult for us to get away.”
“You’re the one who can’t swim,” she reminded me.
“I’ll be all right,” I assured her. “If you see the life-raft pack before you see me, the trigger’s here.Okay?”
“Okay,” she said. We were both looking down into the hole in what had once been the ceiling of the corridor.
“Don’t try to hold on to the ladder,” I advised her. “Just dive, as deep as you can. Then go sideways, until you can’t hold your breath any more. Then pull the ring. It’ll carry you up to the surface. I’ll be right behind you.” I was talking as much for my own benefit as hers. As she said, I was the one whose knowledge of swimming was purely theoretical. I was the one who would have to improvise.
She didn’t move. She was paralyzed by apprehension.
“I don’t think any more water can get in,” she said, with a slight tremor in her voice, “but there’s only so much air. If we stay here too long, we’ll suffocate.”
She was trying to convince herself. She was eight years old and hoped to live to be eight hundred, and she was absolutely right. The air wouldn’t last forever. Hours maybe, but not forever.