46

He watched from the bathyscaphe as the robotic units finished threading the Marker in cables. There it lay before him, bound and trussed, but somehow still imposing despite its metal net. This is the cause of my problems, he thought. And now my problems are only going to get worse.

He watched from five meters above it as the larger cable, the one running curved up into the darkness and to the ship above, grew taut. The MROVs had dug around the base, but there was no telling if it would come up. In a way, he hoped it wouldn’t. He held his breath. The Marker sagged lower in the net, and for a moment he thought the net would not hold. It creaked and swayed slowly in the darkness, and they came up with a large grating sound, oddly distorted by the water, and began to rise.

He followed it up, relaying messages and corrections to a series of submarines, which, in turn, relayed them upward and to the surface. At first the Marker twisted as it rose, the water naturally channeling around the two spirals of the Marker and making it turn, creating an invisible whirlpool in its wake. It could, Altman realized, soon become a problem, tangling the cables, so he slowed the towing down to a snail’s pace and it stopped. After a while, it was moving regularly, ascending slowly but straight upward.

This is it, thought Altman.

Slowly it rose through the darkness. Only once they were halfway to the surface did he realize he hadn’t experienced any hallucinations. His head, for the first time in months, didn’t ache. He checked the readings, found that the signal had stopped broadcasting around the time it began to rise.

Maybe we’ve disconnected it, he thought. Perhaps we’re doing something right, perhaps this was what we were supposed to do. Maybe it was transmitting so that we would find it and bring it to the surface. Maybe that was its purpose.

For a moment he felt reassured, and then unanswered questions began to assail him. If that were really the case, then why would there have been any hallucinations at all? And why would they affect people most strongly when they were close to the Marker itself? It’s almost as if it wants to keep us at a distance. And what do the dead’s warnings of Convergence have to do with any of it?

Maybe we’ve done something right, he thought, or maybe we’ve done something very wrong.

Soon they would get close to the surface, and the Marker would be drawn onto the freighter itself. Already the water had changed, the darkness receding, and he could see the Marker more clearly than he’d ever seen it before. In the light, it was even more impressive, covered with symbols and laterally striated by dark lines cut into the rock. He still could see no evidence of joints or cracks. It still seemed like it was formed out of a single large rock.

When the station was five hundred meters above them, Markoff ordered the ascent stopped.

“What’s wrong?” asked Altman over the audio channel. “This wasn’t how it was planned.”

“Thank you for your help to this point, Mr. Altman,” said Markoff. “A deepwater craft is no longer required. Return to the submarine bay.”

“What? I think I’ll stay here, Markoff, if you don’t mind,” said Altman.

There was silence for a long moment and then the vidscreen crackled into life. He saw Markoff’s face.

“You’ve been an asset to me to this point. Now you risk becoming expendable.”

“What’s going on?” Altman asked.

“That is none of your concern,” said Markoff.

He opened his mouth and then closed it again. Markoff, he knew, was capable of having the bathyscaphe torpedoed. Perhaps it was time to flee, dive deep and head for somewhere safe.

As if he could read Altman’s mind, Markoff added, “Do you need something tangible to convince you to behave? Your girlfriend?”

For a moment, he hesitated. In a way, he had already lost Ada to the Marker, to her desire to be one of them. It was just a matter of time before he lost her completely.

All the same, he still loved her and couldn’t live with her being dead because of him. With a sigh, he cut the signal and began to head for the surface, leaving behind the Marker, hanging in its gigantic metal net. On the way up, he passed a trio of submarines dragging a new cable. It led back, he could see, to the gigantic below-water chamber of the floating compound, the chamber that had been off-limits to everybody except for Markoff’s inner circle ever since they’d arrived. What Markoff had planned, Altman had no idea.