Cradle (38 page)

Carol stood at the table for several minutes. Eventually she played an entire verse
of ‘Silent Night’ without making a single mistake. Carol smiled, pleased with herself,
and relaxed momentarily. During this interlude the great organ in the distance (which
she had heard briefly when she had entered the room and could now pinpoint as being
somewhere in the upper reaches of the cathedral area) suddenly began to play. Carol
felt goose-pimples rise on her arms, partially due to the beauty of the music and
partially because it reminded her again of what a bizarre world she had entered.
What is that organ playing?
she thought to herself,
it sounds like an overture
. She listened for a few seconds.
Why… that’s an introduction. To ‘Silent Night’! It’s very creative
.

The organ sound was joined by several others, each emanating from somewhere in the
ceiling. All the instruments together played a complex version of the ‘Silent Night’
that Carol had so painstakingly pounded out on the writing table a few moments before.
The beautiful music swelled throughout the cathedral. Carol looked up and then closed
her eyes. She spun her body around and around in a little dance. When she opened her
eyes again, each of them confronted what appeared to be a tiny optical instrument
no more than an inch away. Carol froze in terror.

The thing had noiselessly come up behind her while she was playing music at the writing
table and had waited patiently, while deploying its appendages, until she was ready
to turn around. It was about her height now and the closest part of the translucent
main body was only an arm’s length away. As Carol stood there motionless, barely daring
to breathe, five or six of the thing’s attachments came forward to touch her. A small
digging instrument scraped some skin off her bare shoulder. The sword cut off some
of her hair. A tiny cord attached to one of the long rods wrapped around her wrist.
A set of bristles the size of the head of a toothbrush travelled across her chest,
tickling her nipples through her bathing suit and crossing over the camera that was
draped around her neck. She was experiencing so many feelings simultaneously that
she had lost track of all the stimuli. Carol closed her eyes and tried to concentrate
on something else. She felt a needle prick her forehead.

It was over very fast, less than a minute altogether. The thing retracted its appendages,
backed up a couple of feet, and stood there, observing her from a distance. Carol
waited. After another twenty seconds, the attachments were stowed, as they had been
when the thing had gone after Troy, and it left the room.

Carol listened for sounds. It was totally quiet again. She backed up from the writing
table and tried to organize her thoughts. After about a minute, the purple and gold
wall panels began to move to the side on their own accord. They folded upon themselves
and formed small stacks. Then the corridors around the music room collapsed and automatically
organized their partitions into neat piles. Carol found herself standing in one huge
room under the cathedral ceilings. In the distance her weird antagonist with the flailing
appendages passed through a side door about twenty-five yards away and disappeared
quickly from view.

She looked around. There was no sign of Troy. The walls were creamy white and nondescript,
somewhat boring after the coloured panels in the earlier rooms. There were two doors,
opposite each other in the middle of the room. Except for the musical instruments,
which now seemed completely out of place clustered together at one end of such a vast
room, the only other object she could see was a small piece of carpet against the
wall to the left. In front of her against the far wall, about fifty yards away, there
was what appeared to be a large window on the ocean. Even from a distance she could
see and identify some of the fish swimming by.

At first Carol hurried toward the window. When she was about halfway there and level
with the doors, she stopped a few seconds and took a few photographs of the rather
bland room. Curiously, the small carpet was not where she remembered it. It had somehow
been moved while she was walking. She approached the carpet very slowly. Her weird
experiences since she and Troy had been sucked out of the ocean had made Carol understandably
wary. As she drew closer, she saw that the flat object lying on the floor was definitely
not a carpet. From above she could see an intricate internal design, like a complex
network of sophisticated electronic chips. There were strange whorls and geometric
patterns on its surface; they had no specific meaning to Carol but they reminded her
of the fractal designs Dr. Dale had shown her one night in his apartment. The symmetries
of the object were readily apparent. In fact, each of the four quadrants of the carpet
was identical.

It was about six feet long, three feet wide, and two inches thick. The dominant colour
was slate grey, although there were some significant colour variations. Some of the
larger individual components must have been colour-coded according to some master
plan. Carol could identify groupings of similar elements in red, yellow, blue, and
white within the design. The overall harmony of the colours was striking, suggesting
that some effort had been made by the designers to include aesthetic considerations.

Carol bent down on her knees beside the carpet and studied it more intently. Its surface
was densely packed. The closer she looked, the more detail she found.
Extraordinary
, she thought.
But what in the world is it? And how did it move? Or could I possibly have imagined
it?
She put her hand on the exposed top surface. She felt a soft tingle, like a gentle
electric shock. She slid one hand under the edge and lifted slightly. It was heavy.
She removed her hand.

Her desire to escape from this strange world now overruled her curiosity. Carol took
a photograph of the carpet from the top and started walking away in the direction
of the window. After several strides, she turned quickly to her left to look at the
carpet one more time. It had moved again and was still even with her in the room.
Carol continued walking toward the window, now watching the carpet out of the corner
of her eye. When she had walked another ten feet, her peripheral vision saw it arch
up quickly along a line through its centre, pulling the rear of its body in a forward
direction. Half a second later the front end of the carpet scooted forward and the
centre fell flat against the floor again. This manoeuvre was repeated six or eight
times in rapid succession as the carpet zipped up to a position even with Carol in
the room.

Despite her situation, Carol laughed. She was still full of adrenaline and tense,
but there was definitely something humorous about a multicoloured carpet that could
crawl like an inchworm. ‘Ha,’ Carol said out loud, ‘I caught you. Now you owe me an
explanation.’

Carol certainly did not expect a reply to her comment. Nevertheless, after just a
short delay, the behaviour of the carpet was altered. First it began to generate small
wave pulses along its surface, with four or five crests from front to back. After
smartly reversing the direction of motion of the waves several times, the carpet’s
next trick was to keep its front end fixed on the floor, as if there were suction
cups holding it down, and raise its back side entirely off the floor. In that mode
it was about six feet tall. It seemed to be looking at Carol.

She was flabbergasted. ‘Well, I asked for it,’ she said out loud, still amused by
the antics of the carpet. Now it seemed to be motioning for her to go toward the window.
I have lost my mind
, she thought to herself.
Completely. Troy was right. Maybe we’re dead
. The carpet arched over on the floor and began to scamper toward the window, tumbling
in somersaults like a slinky toy. Carol followed.
This is nuts
, she thought as she watched the carpet move somehow through the window and into the
ocean.
And Alice thought she was in Wonderland
.

The carpet was playing in the water, dodging fish as they swam by in schools and teasing
a sea urchin stuck fast against the reef. At length it came back into the room and
stood upright. A little water dripped on the floor when the carpet set in motion a
series of fast simultaneous waves, both latitudinal and longitudinal, that effectively
shook the residual liquid from its surface. It then faced Carol and clearly beckoned
for her to go through the window into the ocean.

‘Look here, flat guy,’ she said, chuckling to herself as she tried to figure out what
to say.
Now I know I’m insane
, she thought in a flash.
I’m standing here talking to a carpet. Next thing I know it will talk back
. ‘Now I’m not stupid,’ she continued. ‘I recognize that you’re trying to get me to
go into the ocean. But there are a few things that you don’t—’

The carpet interrupted the conversation by going quickly through the window into the
ocean again. It performed a couple of flips and came back into the room with Carol.
Once more it shook itself and then stood rigidly, upright as before, as if to say,
‘See, it’s easy.’

‘As I was saying,’ Carol began again, ‘I have perhaps gone crazy, but I’m willing
to trust that I can indeed go through that window in some magical way. My problem
is that there is water out there. I can’t breathe in water. Without my diving gear,
which I left somewhere in this labyrinth, I will die.’

The carpet didn’t move. Carol repeated her statement using elaborate hand gestures
to make her key points. Then she fell silent. After a short wait the carpet began
to move about actively. It then approached her carefully and amazingly stretched itself
out in all directions so that it was almost double its original size. Carol hardly
reacted. At this point she was almost incapable of being astonished again. Even by
an elastic carpet that pulled its two top sides together, over her head, to form a
cone.

Carol backed away a couple of steps from the now giant carpet. ‘Oh ho,’ she said,
‘I think I understand. You are going to form an air pocket for me so that I can breathe.’
She stood still for a moment, thinking and shaking her head. ‘Why not,’ she said at
last, ‘it’s no weirder than anything else that’s happened.’

With the carpet hovering over and around her head, Carol closed her eyes and walked
directly toward the window. She took a deep breath when she felt a soft plastic touch
on different parts of her body. Suddenly the water was all around her except for the
small air pocket from the neck up. It was hard for Carol to keep her diving discipline,
but she managed to equalize the pressure every six to eight feet during her ascent.
She took one final breath and zoomed up to the surface. The carpet peeled off in the
last foot before she broke water.

The
Florida Queen
was about fifty yards away. ‘Nick,’ she shouted with all her might, ‘Nick, over here.’
She swam furiously toward the boat. A wave broke over her head. The boat was again
visible, she could see a figure in profile. He was looking over the side of the boat.
‘Nick,’ Carol cried again when she had gathered her strength. This time he heard her
and turned around. She waved her arms.

Nick had followed Carol and Troy on the monitor right after their initial descent,
when they were still directly under the boat searching for the fissure. But he had
quickly tired of watching them swim around in circles and had returned to his deck
chair to read his novel. Afterward he had walked over to the screen several more times
to look for them and had seen nothing; Carol and Troy had already left to investigate
the area under the overhang.

Nick had checked the monitor again after he had finished
Madame Bovary
. He had been a little surprised to discover that the fissure was again clearly visible
underneath the
Florida Queen
. He assumed that he must have been correct, that it had just been a case of bad lighting,
since with the sun directly overhead, the hole in the reef looked much smaller to
him than it had two days before. He had then busied himself about the boat until his
wrist alarm went off, indicating that Carol and Troy had about five more minutes of
air remaining.

Nick walked over and looked at the images being taken by the ocean telescope and placed
in realtime on the screen. There was no sign of Carol and Troy under the boat. Nick
started becoming restive.
I hope they’re paying attention
, he thought. He realized that they had been gone from view for a long time and that
he had never seen them actually explore the fissure, their primary goal. A creeping
disquiet began to spread through him as the clock continued to run out.

There’s only one explanation
, he thought, fighting against the negative ideas that were filtering into his mind.
They have been gone a long time, so they must have found something interesting at
the overhang. Or somewhere else
. For just a moment Nick imagined that Carol and Troy had found a lode of treasure,
full of objects that looked like the strange trident they had retrieved on Thursday.

The second hand seemed to be racing on his watch. It was now one minute until they
would run out of air. Nick nervously checked the monitor again. Nothing. He felt his
heart speed up.
They must be in the red
, he thought.
Even if they have carefully conserved the air, they must be in the red
. Nick worried for a second about a gauge failure, but he quickly remembered checking
both of them himself when he arrived at the boat that morning.
Besides, it’s terribly unlikely they would both fail
… so
there must be trouble
.

Another minute passed and Nick realized that he had not formulated a plan of what
to do if they failed to appear. His mind raced swiftly through his options. There
were two distinctly different action patterns he could follow. He could put on his
diving gear and go look for them along the trench between the fissure and the overhang.
Or he could assume that, in their excitement, Carol and Troy had simply neglected
to check their air gauges regularly and as a result had been forced to surface wherever
they were when they ran out of air.