“Little tragedy of life,” the robot said. “Billions of them, unnoticed, every day. Except that God notices, at least according to my pamphlet.”
“But I see what you mean,” Joe said. “About worry. Concern; that’s closer to it. I felt it concerned me. It did concern me. Caritas. Or in the Greek—“ He could not remember the word.
“Can we go below, now?” Mali asked.
“Yes,” Joe said. Obviously she did not understand. But, oddly, the robot did. Strange, Joe thought. Why does it understand when she doesn’t? Maybe caritas is a factor of intelligence, he reflected. Maybe we’ve always been wrong: caritas is not a feeling but a high form of cerebral activity, an ability to perceive something in the environment—to notice and, as the robot had put it, to worry. Cognition, he realized; that’s what it is. It isn’t a case of feeling versus thinking: cognition is cognition.
Aloud he said, “Can I have a copy of your pamphlet?”
“Ten cents, please,” the robot said, holding out the pamphlet.
Joe fished out a cardboard dime and handed it to the robot. To Mali he said, “Now let’s go below.”
11
The robot touched a switch; a wall locker opened its sliding door and Joe saw, within, complete sets of diving gear: oxygen masks, pedal flippers, plastic skinsuits, waterproof light sources, weights, pry bars, crossbows, oxygen and helium tanks—everything. Including many assorted items of equipment which he could not identify.
“In view of your lack of experience in deep-sea diving,” the robot said, “I would suggest you descend by spherical prolepsis chamber. But, if you want to suit up—“ It shrugged. “I have no control over that; the decision is yours.”
“I’ve had sufficient experience,” Mali said briskly. She began bringing equipment out of the locker; presently she had a formidable heap stacked neatly before her. “Get out what I got out,” she instructed Joe. “Put the segments of the suit on in the order I’m putting them on, and in the same way.”
They suited up and then, led by Willis, they made their way to the staging chamber proper.
“Some time,” the robot said as it unscrewed the great plug-valve in the floor of the chamber, “I intend to write a pamphlet on deep-sea diving. There is a basic assumption that the chthonic world is in the ground—you find this in every religion. But in actuality it’s in the ocean. The ocean—“ It dragged the huge plug away. “—is the actual primordial world, out of which every living thing came a billion years ago. On your planet, Mr. Fernwright, this error is found in many religions—for instance, the Greek goddess Demeter and her daughter Kore—they come up from the earth.”
Mali said to Joe, “There is attached to your belt an emergency device in case of failure in the oxygen circuit of your rig. If you lose your air, if the conduit loosens or bursts or the tanks run dry, activate the hypo plunger of the belt unit.” She pointed to the one mounted on her own belt. “It swiftly drops metabolic processes so that your need for oxygen is minimal; little enough so that you can easily float to the surface before you suffer any brain damage or experience any other lasting physiological effect from the curtailed oxygen supply. When you float to the surface you will of course be unconscious, but your mask is designed to let in air automatically; it will respond to the altered condition, the presence of outside air. And then I’ll be up to steer you back here.”
“’I must be gone,’ “Joe quoted, trying to remember how it went. “ ‘There is a grave where daffodil and lily wave.’”
The robot said, “ ‘And I would please the hapless faun, buried under the sleepy ground.’ A favorite of mine. Yeats, I believe. Do you think, Mr. Sir, that you are descending into a grave? That what stands before you is death? That to descend is to die? Answer in twenty-five words or less.”
“I know what the Kalend told me,” Joe said somberly. “What I find in Heldscalla will cause me to kill Glimmung. So it is into death that I’m going; maybe not my death, but someone else’s. To permanently halt the raising of Heldscalla.” Grimly, the words flowed within his mind, always at the surface. Always available. They would not sink out of sight for a long, long time. Perhaps, he thought, never. The stigma is upon me and I will carry it the rest of my life.
“I will give you a lucky charm,” the robot said; again it rummaged within its chest pocket. It presently brought out a tiny packet, which it handed to Joe. “A token which represents the purity and sublimity of Amalita. A symbol, so to speak.”
“And it’ll ward off evil influences?” Joe asked.
The robot said, “You must say, ‘Willis, will it ward—‘
“Willis,” Joe said, “will this charm help us down there?”
After a pause the robot said, “No.”
“Then why did you give it to him?” Mali asked caustically. “To—“ The robot hesitated. “Never mind.” It seemed, then, to retract into itself; it became silent. Distantly inert.
“I’m going to lash us up in tandem,” Mali said to Joe as she attached a cable from her belt to his. “This will give us twenty feet of free line. That should be enough. I can’t risk getting separated from you; that might be the last we’d see of you.”
The robot wordlessly handed Joe a plastic carton.
“What for?” Joe said.
“You probably will find a broken pot or two down there. And you’ll want to bring the shards up.”
Stalking catlike to the aperture in the floor of the staging chamber, Mali said, “Let’s go.” She snapped on her heliumpowered torch, glanced briefly at Joe, and then dived out of sight. The twenty-foot cable attached to him stretched taut, pulled him; it walked him to the aperture, propelling him, and then, his mind blank of any real thoughts, he dived, too. Passively.
The light of the staging chamber faded out above him. He snapped on his own torch and allowed himself to be tugged along, down and down; the water became utterly black, except for the vague, seemingly half-real quadrant illuminated by his torch. And, below him, Mali’s torch glowed, like the phosphorescent light of an exceedingly deep sea-fish.
“Are you okay?” Mali’s voice sounded in his ear; it startled him and then he realized that a two-way intercom connected them.
“Yes,” he said.
Various fish floated past him, incurious and pompous; they gawked at him and traveled on, disappearing into the void surrounding his illuminated path.
“That windbag robot,” Mali said scathingly. “My god; we must have conversed with it for twenty minutes.”
But, Joe thought, we are here, now. Within the waters of Mare Nostrum, spiraling down and down.
I wonder, he thought, how many theologically inclined robots there are in the universe. Perhaps Willis was the only one . . . put there by Glimmung to talk at extended length, thus interfering with the attempt to go below the surface.
The heat unit of his suit snapped on; he felt the cold of the sea ebb away from him. And for that he gave thanks.
“Joe Fernwright,” Mali’s voice sounded in his ear. “Did it occur to you that Glimmung might have sent me here, to go below with you as we’re doing, to kill you? Glimmung knows the prophecy. Wouldn’t it be reasonable for him to do that? So obvious. Didn’t you think at all of that?”
As a matter of fact he had not. And, thinking it now, he felt the chill of the ocean ease back into its grip around him; the enervating cold plundered his loins, his heart—he felt himself freeze, within, into frightened immobility, like a defenseless minor creature; his fear deprived him of his sense of being human, and of being a man. It was not a man’s fear; it was the fear of a small animal. It shrank him, as if devolving him into ages past; it eradicated the contemporary aspects of his self, his being. God, he thought. I am feeling a fear that is millions of years old.
“On the other hand,” Mali pointed out, “the text which the Kalend showed you might have been a forgery, prepared for your benefit. One single copy for your eyes alone.”
Joe said hoarsely, “How did you know about the Kalend and the new text?”
“Glimmung told me.”
“Then he read what I read. It isn’t a forgery for my benefit. If it was you wouldn’t be here.”
She laughed. And said nothing. And, on and on, they spiraled downward.
“Then I can assume I’m right,” Joe said.
Stark and yellow, the hull of something gleamed and putrifled within the focus of his torch. To his right, Mali’s torch lit up another vertebra of it. Huge . . . like an ark that had been built to contain every living thing—and an ark which had sunk to the bottom of Mare Nostrum. Forever. The ark, he thought, of failure.