Against the Day (99 page)

Root Tubsmith had discovered this much this from nosing around
in the

lower spaces of the vessel, despite signs posted in all major
tongues warning of the dire fate awaiting any who trespassed. He found
shellroomstobe and

giant powder magazines fore and aft, not to mention, several
decks up, located symmetrically about the ship, some very curious
circular
cabins,
which seemed intended for gunturrets—kept retracted to just
below the main deck for the moment but ready, if needed, to be raised
hydraulically to operating height, and their twelveinch barrels, stored far
below, brought up by hoist and fitted in a matter of minutes.

The shelter deck proved to be
concealing a magazine full of torpedoes. Lighter decks topside were designed to
fold upward and in other intricately hinged directions, to become armorplating
and casemates for the smallercaliber guns. At the same time, the
Stupendica
was
also able somehow to collapse, as she lost her upper decks, into classic
battleship profile, till she was crouching upon the sea with no more freeboard
than necessary, wide and low and looking for a fight. Deckhands were
intensively drilled in the rapid rigging of stages, over the lifelines and onto
which they were to leap, when ordered, nimbly as aerial artistes, and begin
swiftly to paint the ship’s sides in “dazzle” camouflage the colors of sea,
sky, and storm cloud, in twoshaded false dihedrals to look like ships’ prows,
or running at angles close to the slopes of the waves, eventually to fade into
and out of invisibility as the patterns tangled with and untangled from the
clutter of whitecaps. “Something out there, Fangsley, I can
feel it.
”
“Can’t make much out, sir
. . . .
” “Oh? Well what the bloody hell’s
that then?” “Ah. Appears to be a torpedo, actually, and headed straight for
midships too.” “I can see that, you idiot, I know what a torpedo looks
like—” at which point the interesting exchange is abruptly curtailed.

As Kit and Root
descended ladder by ladder into the
engine spaces of the
Stupendica,
they found the ship deeper than they
had imagined, and much less horizontally disposed. Faces turned to watch them.
Eyes bright as the flames inside the furnaces blinked open and shut. The boys
were sweating torrents before they got below the waterline. Down at the bottom
of the ship, men worked skids full of coal across the deck to be dumped in
piles in front of the boilers. Pulses of Hellcolored light lit up the blackened
bodies of the stokers each time the firedoors were opened.

 
From what Root had been able to learn earlier, the passenger
liner
Stupendica,
this peaceful expression of highbourgeois luxury, had
been constructed in Trieste, at the Austrian Lloyd Arsenale. At the same time,
in parallel, also in Trieste at the neighboring Stabilimento Tecnico, the
Austrian navy had

apparently been building their
dreadnought
Emperor Maximilian.
At some point in the construction
schedule, the two projects. . . it was difficult for any of Root’s sources to
convey
. . .
merged.
How? At
whose behest? No one was quite sure of much, except that one day there was only
the single ship. But in which shipyard? Different witnesses recalled different
yards, others swore she was no longer “in” either, simply appearing unforeseen
one morning off the Promontorio, fresh from some deadofnight christening, not a
soul visible on deck, silent, tall, surrounded by a haze of somehow defective
light.

“This is beginning to sound like a
sea story,” opined an American stoker named O. I. C. Bodine, who lounged
against a bulkhead drinking some horrible fermented potato mash as prelude to
going off watch and into sleep. “Four shafts, see. Even the
Mauretania
’s
happy with three. Not a
civilian arrangement here. These are cruising turbines. Uhoh, here comes
Gerhardt—
Zu befehl, Herr Hauptheitzer!
”

The Chief Stoker exploded into a
spectacular exhibition of cursing. “Easily upset,” confided O.I.C. “Terrible
mouth on the man. Just now thought he saw the telegraph look like it was about
to move. Imagine what he’s like when it
does
move. But we should always
look for the good in everybody.”

   
“So
he’s a decent sort at heart.”

   
“Hell
no, try pulling liberty with him. He’s even worse ashore.”

All of a sudden, it was like the
entire Black Gang was having a violent paroxysm. The telegraph from the bridge
started tolling like all the cathedrals of Hell on a particularly important feast
day. Cruising turbines were lit off, oil and steam pressures began to rise, the
Oberhauptheitzer, having produced from somewhere a Mannlicher eightshot pistol,
brandished it at the steampressure gauges in high irritation, as if to shoot
them if they did not provide the correct readings. Cries of
“
Dampf mehr!
”
were
heard from several directions. Kit looked around for the nearest ladder to the
open air, but all had become manytongued confusion. He found his head seized by
a gigantic bituminous hand, which propelled him rapidly through the fierce
spasms of light and the ungodly steel clangor toward the bunkers at the side of
the ship, out of which men were loading coal on to skids to be dragged to the
boiler furnaces.

“Sure,” Kit muttered, “all you had to
do was ask.” For what seemed hours then, he made the same trip back and forth,
gradually losing his shirt and singlet, being insulted in languages he did not
speak but understood. Everything ached. He thought he might have lost part of
his hearing.

 
All hell likewise had broken loose topside. As if syntonic
wireless messages, traveling through the Æther, might be subject to influences
we remain at

present ignorant ~off, or perhaps, owing to the unnaturally
shaky quality of presentday “reality,” the receivers in the ship’s Marconi room
were picking up traffic from somewhere else not quite “in” the world, more like
from a continuum lateral to it. . . around midafternoon the
Stupendica
had
received a message in
cipher, to the effect that British and German battle groups were engaged off
the Moroccan coast, and that a state of general European war should be presumed
in effect.

Anxious voices out of megaphones
hitherto unnoticed began calling the crew to general quarters. Hydraulics
engaged, as entire decks began ponderously to slide, fold, and rotate, and
passengers found themselves, often lethally, in the way of this booming and
shrieking steel metamorphosis. Bells, gongs, bos’n’s pipes, steam sirens added
to the cacophony. Stewards threw off their white livery to reveal dark blue
AustroHungarian naval uniforms, and started shouting orders at the civilians
who moments ago had been ordering them around, and who now mostly were
wandering the passageways disoriented and increasingly fearful. “Right full
rudder!” the Captain cried, and throughout the gigantic vessel, as the helm
responded and the ship began to heel sharply over, approaching ever closer to
her design maximum of nine degrees, hundreds of small inconveniences commenced,
as bottles of perfume went sliding off the tops of vanity tables, wineglasses
in the dining saloon tipped over and soaked the table linen, dance partners who
would rather have kept an appropriate distance lurched into one another,
causing foot injuries and couture damage, assorted objects in the crew’s spaces
fell from channel bars serving as shelves next to upper bunks in a shower of
pipes, tobaccopouches, playingcards, pocket flasks, vulgar souvenirs of exotic
ports of call, descending now and then onto officers’ heads—“All ahead full!”
as forgotten coffee cups reappeared only to shatter on the steel decks,
forgotten sandwiches and pastries to which entropy had been typically unkind
made themselves known amid multilingual expressions of distaste, clouds of dust
and soot descended from overheads throughout the vessel, and the roach
population, newborns, nymphs, and grizzled oldtimers alike, imagining some
global calamity, ran where they might at the highest speeds available to them
given the general uproar.

Dally was sent rolling out of her bunk
and onto the deck, as, a second later, was Bria, landing right on top of her,
exclaiming,
“
Porca miseria!
What’s
this, then?”

   
Cici
came running in. “It must be Pop, going crazy again!”

“Yeah, blame it on the magician,”
remarked the elder Zombini, draped in the doorway, “it’s the old
LinertoBattleship Effect. Everybody all right in here?”

Strangely, it was Kit Dally was worrying about.

After running madly round and round
in the same tight circle at top speed a number of times, the vessel, as if
getting a grip on itself, finally slowed down, easing back to vertical and
steadying on to a new course southeast by east. From the giant magnetic compass
mounted in the dining saloon for the entertainment of the passengers, the
change of heading soon became generally known. “Where the heck are we going,
then?” Pocket atlases came out of pockets. “Let’s see, if we made that turn
about here . . .” The nearest land ahead of them appeared to be Morocco.

In the
engineering spaces
,
things slowly drifted back to normal, whatever that meant down here. The
telegraph moderated its demands for speed, everybody was told at last to secure
from general quarters, port and starboard shifts resumed. Peacetime again.

When the insults had migrated on to
other targets and Kit had reached a sort of invisibility, “Well, this has all
been mighty educational,” he announced, “and I guess I’ll be getting back up to
my stateroom now, thanks for everything, and you especially, Chief
Oberhauptheitzer, there
. . . .
”

“No, mister, no no—he does not
understand—there are no staterooms, it is no longer the
Stupendica
up
there. That admirable vessel has sailed on to its destiny. Abovedecks now you
will find only His Majesty’s dreadnought,
Emperor Maximilian.
It is true
that for a while the two ships did share a common engine room. A ‘deeper level’
where dualities are resolved. A Chinese sort of situation,
nicht wahr?
”

Kit at first took this all for some
sort of Black Gang jollification, and snuck up the ladders as soon as he could
to have a look. Marine sentries with Mannlichers stood at the hatchway. “I’m a
passenger,” Kit protested. “I’m from America.”

“I’ve heard of it. I’m from Graz
myself. Get back below.”

He tried other ladders, other
hatches. He climbed ventilator shafts and concealed himself in the laundry, but
none of it was good for more than five minutes in a grim, gray military world
stripped of civilian amenities—no women, flower arrangements, dance
orchestras, haute cuisine—though he was grateful for a lungful or two of
fresh air. “No, no, bilgecrab, not for the likes of you. Back to the lower
depths with you, now.”

Kit was given a bunk in the crew’s
quarters, which were squeezed into the cusp of the bow, and O. I. C. Bodine
came around to make sure he was getting along all right. He became the Phantom
of the Lower Decks, learning where to hide when anybody appeared from topside,
working regular stoker shifts otherwise.

    
For
a Teutonic of executive rank, the Captain of this vessel appeared unusually
indecisive, changing his mind every few minutes. For days S.M.S.
Emperor
Maximilian
haunted the coast, running north, then south again, back and
forth, increasingly desperate, as if trying to find the epic seabattle the
Captain continued to believe was in progress
.
. . .
Although the first port of call had been advertised as
Tangier—at the moment, according to scuttlebutt, under the control of
local warlord Mulai Ahmed erRaisuli—the Captain had decided instead to
put in far to the south, at Agadir, Queen of the Iron Coast.

Kit
discovered the reason for this when he noticed a stack of used plates and
dishes from the firstclass dining salon outside one of the empty coal bunkers.
Curious, he stuck his head in and to his surprise discovered a group of hidden
people who’d been living here all along, and most of whom spoke German. It
seemed they were destined for plantation on the Atlantic coast of Morocco as
“colonists” whose presence there would then justify German interest in the
area. For reasons of diplomacy they were being kept sequestered down here in
the engine spaces, and known only to the Captain, among whose orders had been
encrypted a couple of clauses concerning their disposition as shadowcolonials
on call, homesteading though the area was not promising for husbandry, the
coast being as much at the mercy of the wind as its hinterland was at that of
the tribesmen of Sus, who did not take kindly to Europeans in their midst. The
coast was in fact closed to all foreign trade by edict of the young sultan
Abdel
Aziz,
despite
France, Spain, and England having made a deal allowing France the right of
“peaceful penetration” elsewhere in Morocco.

Out
there like a dream, out past the gray, unrelenting march of the rollers, the
colonists would come to imagine they could see at the horizon, even smell on the
wind, the fabled Canaries, which would soon embody their only hope of
deliverance. Many would go crazy and set out in small boats or even swim west,
never to be heard from again.