Travis had his arms and knees up in an instinctive protective posture before he even registered that someone was attacking him. He was rained on with blows in the dark. He was bent over double. The sounds were a cone of heavy breathing, grunts, clothing rubbing and fists thudding into his ribs and shoulders and cracking his face and head.

Travis drove himself into the man, getting his arms around his waist, moving towards the wall. But the angle was bad and Travis’s head hit the wall along with the man’s ribs. Travis went down, but he took the man with him. Travis saw him as his face came close to the emergency lighting. It was Gerry.

Gerry was on top of Travis while Travis was still dazed from the wall. Gerry frantically grabbed around Travis’s waist and groin and Travis felt him retrieve the gun. Then only the metal of the gun reflected enough light to be seen, so it seemed a free-floating gun was pointed at his head.

“She’s my wife!” Gerry said. “She’s my wife! I’ll kill him!”

He trembled violently, got up and fell back against the wall. For so many years he’d kept that ball of red violence hidden inside him, and now he had let it come up, he wanted it unleashed, he wanted satisfaction only blood could bring. When he came for the gun and found Travis there first, he knew why. He knew Travis wanted the blood that was his. The rage commanded his actions.

Travis could make out the gun as Gerry lowered it. He understood that even the right to defend the woman he loved was not his.

“OK,” Travis said. “You’ll kill him.”

Gerry couldn’t respond. He tried to wrestle back down the rage, tried to calm his breathing.

“How did you know about the gun?” Travis asked.

“I found it,” Gerry said at last. “I was looking for something for Vera.”

Travis came next to Gerry, both their backs against the wall.

“We’re going to kill Golding,” Travis said. “That’s why I came for the gun. You’ve got three hours. Then I need it back.”

Seven bullets, Travis thought. How many would they have to kill in the end?

It was a short walk back to the piano lounge. He approached Corrina and Darren. He wanted to stop time then, forget Golding and just stroke his babies. He got closer and saw that Darren was crying into his mother’s shoulder. Time didn’t stop quite; it slowed. It felt like a long journey to get to his family. Then he was next to Corrina, and Darren was turned to him, Travis’s arm heavy across Darren’s back.

“Don’t, Daddy,” Darren said. ”Don’t, Daddy.”

“Don’t what honey?”

“Don’t leave me, Daddy.”

Time stopped.

48

 

It was a plague upon them and they wondered why. A bacterial infection passed within hours through all Adam Melville’s group, and they were all sick. First they became weak and cramped. Then, unable to move, they vomited and shit themselves in the solarium. It was a nightmare within the nightmare.

They rolled on the floor and moaned in agony, feeling a depth of depression and lowness few had experienced before. They could not focus on anything outside themselves and their pain. The sickness felt like a path to death, and many wished for that, but it did not come.

Adam felt a burning shame that he could not control his body, and show strength to his followers. He wondered that all those around him could live through this same pain. He began to see a great fireball in the center of his pain, and then visions began to spin across the flame, so quickly that he could not grasp them, only feel something.

He was grasping at these images, seeing them in familiar computer guises. He felt his point-of-view spinning in some computer data-space, with encrypted information he could see but not decode fast enough as it spun by. The data spun around his head like a cyclone. He felt he was going mad.

Hours went by, and the sickness of his mind was so great he no longer felt the sickness of his body. He lost touch with his body altogether. His brain broke into fragments, and they each spoke with different voices, over each other and unintelligible.

Hours went by, and then others began slowly to regain control of themselves.

As the flashing lights left their eyes, they saw themselves and their place, and they wept, and others began to emerge from their sickness. The cramps continued, they all cringed with the pain in turns, but they were no longer isolated within themselves. They began speaking again to their neighbors on the floor, whether they were part of their group they’d come on board with or strangers they’d come to know in the Theater or since leaving the Theater.

Adam finally stumbled to his feet, as filthy as the floor.

The visions were gone. The voices were gone, and his brain was coming back into a whole. The floor was sturdy and the room was solid again around them.

He looked around and cried at the pain he saw in these people trying to be good. He dried his eyes quickly.

“All of you who can walk, follow me,” Adam said.

They helped each other, ten of them in that first group, following Adam, who carried a woman himself. Adam took them down a difficult dark flight of stairs into a hall, down the hall and to the spa. There were windows and the grey light came from outside. Adam led them through the change rooms, and to the great pool.

He stood beside the statue of Poseidon at the edge of the pool. He jumped in. From his fouled bathrobe and clothes came a diffuse cloud of his own mess.

The others followed him into the pool. All the while Adam tried so hard to focus on his people, he could not stop his mind from reaching back into his memories, searching for the visions, the voices, the data, to review them again in this new sobriety.

They took more down to the pool. Some stripped out of their outer garments and washed themselves in their underwear. Others threw out all their clothes and took bathrobes. The pool got dirtier and the people got cleaner. Over the next hours, the bug ran its course and the last of the group became able to stand and make the trip to the pool. Adam’s mind began to find fragments of the things he’d seen and felt during his sickness. Biblical quotes and references, fitting together as lines of a computer program.

The dead face of the man he had shot kept appearing too, haunting him.

Over those hours of walking and carrying the sick, as ideas coalesced in Adam’s mind, the unintelligible sickness visions began to have some meaning. Themes and directions emerged. Central to it all was Suffering.

He wondered if he should tell his people about the voices. They would think he were mad. But how could he make them believe if he didn’t tell them? What would he tell them? He didn’t understand himself, he felt a veil of reality melting away but couldn’t quite see what was behind it.

As they returned, they abandoned their room under the solarium glass, and took the adjoining restaurant. There was no joy in the change in their personal cleanliness or the cleanliness of their room. The pain was too powerful. The tears and wailing flowed.

Adam stood in the restaurant, his massive body bent strangely, but his face strong.

“I remember a joke.”

He tried to smile, to calm himself.

“Its weakness is that it’s not very funny, as a joke. Some young fish are swimming in the ocean when an older fish swims by. ‘Morning boys,’ he says. ‘How’s the water?’

“One of the young fish turns to the other and says, ‘What’s water?’”

Adam looked around.

“Yeah, nobody ever laughs at that one, but I like it.”

Slowly, they sat themselves up and comported themselves like people.

“God is in everything,” Adam said. “Hundreds of years from now, people will look at every event on this ship and wonder what God meant by it.”