“Death,” he said to Mali as they bobbed close to each other. “Death and sin are connected. That means that if the cathedral is cursed then we also—“
“I’m going back up.” She rose, drifting upward above him, her legs moving expertly. “I don’t want to find myself too close to the dredging operation.” She pointed.
He turned his body in that direction.
An enormous, silent instrument, a construct which he did not recognize, lay far to their right. He heard its activity now, the dull, low throbbing. Its sound had been there all this time; but, he estimated, in the form of a twenty cycles per second churning at the lower limit of audibility. Perhaps he had felt it as a vibration; perhaps he still felt it that way now. “What is it?” he asked her, and started in that direction; it fascinated him.
“A caprix scoop,” Mali said. “Ionian caprix, the element with the greatest atomic weight currently in use. Replacing the older rexeroid scoops that you used to see.”
“Is the entire cathedral going to be raised by the scoop?” he asked Mali, who, unwillingly, flapped and dove beside him, following his course in a reluctant, halting manner.
“Only the base,” Mali said.
“The rest is being cut into blocks?”
“Everything but the base, which is a solid slab of Deneb three agate. If it were sawed into blocks it would be unable to support the superstructure. Hence the scoop.” She hung back. “It’s not safe to go so close. Anyhow you’ve seen caprix scoops and shovels in operation before; you know the principle they utilize. The fulcrum is passed back and forth among the four rims of the scoop. Now please! Let’s go back up to the surface. I find it very exacting down here. Damn it; it’s dangerous so near the dredging.”
“Are all the blocks cut?” he asked.
“Oh god,” Mali said wearily. “No, not all. Only an initial few. The scoop is not yet lifting the base; it’s merely inserting itself in place.”
“What will the ascent rate be?” he asked.
“That hasn’t been decided. Look—we’re not ready for that; you’re talking about ascent rate while we’re still involved in getting the scoop in place. This isn’t your field; you have no knowledge about dredging. The scoop is moving horizontally at the rate of six inches per twenty-six-hour day, which is virtually not moving at all.”
He said, “There’s something you don’t want me to see.”
“Paranoia,” Mali said.
Flashing his bifocal light-source to the right of the scoop he made out something, a dense and opaque mass that soared up high, becoming a triangle of planes past which fish swam and onto which barnacles and bivalves and a host of unipodular mollusks and Crustacea clung. And, next to it, where the scoop slowly worked, an identical shape: Heldscalla.
“That’s what you didn’t want me to see,” he said to Mali.
Two cathedrals.
12
“One of them,” he said, “is black. The Black Cathedral.”
“Not the one they’re dredging,” Mali said.
“Is he sure?” Joe said. “Could he make such a mistake?” It would kill Glimmung; he knew that intuitively. It would be the end of everything. And of them all. Merely knowing that it existed, and seeing it—he felt the sting of death; ice settled over his heart and remained there. Hopelessly he flashed his torch about, here and there. As if trying to find—and failing to find—a way out.
“You now know,” Mali said, “why I wanted to go back up.”
He said, “I’ll go up with you.” He did not want to remain here any longer. Like Mali, he yearned for the surface, for the world above water. That world contained nothing like this . . . and, he thought, it never should. That was never intended. “Let’s go,” he said to Mali, and swam upward; with each passing second he was farther up from these blackchilled depths and all that they held. “Give me your hand.” He turned, reached back for her . . .
And then he saw it. Saw the pot. In the rays of his torch.
“What’s wrong?” Mali said in alarm; he had ceased rising.
“I have to go back,” he said.
“Don’t let it draw you down! That’s the terrible thing it does; its valence works on you. Climb.” She tore her hand away from his and, kicking vigorously, ascended past him, toward the surface above. Her legs kicked as if she were trying to shake loose some binding substance, something which mired her down here.
“You go on up,” Joe said. He sank, lower and lower, his eyes never leaving the pot. And steadily he focused his torch on it. It had coral around it, but, for the most part, it remained uncovered. As if, he thought, it was here waiting for me. Trying to ensnare me, the best possible way . . . through the thing I love most.
Mali hesitated above him, then reluctantly descended until she was parallel with him. “What—“ she began, and then she, too, saw the pot; she gasped.
“It’s a volute krater,” Joe said. “Very large.” Already he could distinguish colors emanating from it toward him, the colors which bound him more firmly to this spot than all the cords and seaweed, all the other snares. He sank. And sank some more.
“What can you tell about it?” Mali asked. They had almost reached the pot; Joe’s arms extended themselves as if acting on their own will. “Is it—“
“Not earthenware,” Joe said. “It’s been fired past five hundred degrees centigrade. It may even have been fired at a temperature as high as twelve hundred and fifty degrees. There’s a great deal of vitrification over and above the glaze.” Now he touched it. Carefully he tugged at it. But the coral held it tight. “Stoneware,” he decided. “Not porcelain; it’s not translucent. The white of the glaze makes me think—as a guess—that it’s a stannic oxide compound. If so it would then be a majolica ceramic piece. Tin-enameling, it’s generally called. Like the Delft ceramic offerings.” He rubbed the surface of the pot. “From the feel, I’d say it’s sgraffitoware, with a lead glaze. See? The pattern has been incised through the slip, disclosing the body color beneath. As I say, this is a volute krater . . . but with it here we can probably expect to find psykters and amphoras as well; it’s just a question of removing the coral deposits and seeing what’s below.”
“Is it a good pot?” Mali asked. “I mean, to me it looks unique; I think it’s terribly pretty. But in your expert opinion—“
“It’s superb,” he said, simply. “The red glaze is probably from reduced copper; it passed through a reducing atmosphere in the kiln. And ferrous iron. Look at the black. And the yellow, of course, is obtained from antimony. Which produces an excellent yellow.” The color of glaze, he reflected, which attracts me the most. The yellows, the blues. I will never change.
He thought, It’s almost as if someone put this here for me to find. He rubbed the surface, on and on, appreciating it by tactile sense-impressions, rather than sight. Cupric oxide blues, he said to himself. This pot has everything but that. Did Glimmung have this put here? he asked himself.
To Mali he said, “Has coral been removed from this? Recently? It seems strange it wasn’t completely covered.”
For a time Mali poked about the pot, examining its surface and that of the coral holding it from below. As she did so he studied the design on the pot. A complex and ornate scene, more ornate even than the istoriato style of Urbino. What did the scene show? He studied it, pondering. Not all of the design was visible. And yet—he was accustomed to filling in missing segments removed from pottery pieces. What does this tell? he asked himself. A story, but of what? He peered.
“I don’t like the amount of black on it,” Mali said, all at once. “Anything black down here undermines my sense of security.” She floated away from the pot, her examination over. “Now can we go back up?” she asked. Her tension had become even greater; it grew with each tick of the clock. “I’m not going to stay down here and extinguish my life voluntarily for one damn dumb pot. Pots just aren’t that important.”
Joe said, “What did your examination show?”
“Coral has been stripped from it within the last six months.” She broke a section of coral away, revealing more of the pot. “I can finish the job in a few minutes, when I have my tools.”
Now he saw more of the design. The first panel showed a man seated alone in a bleak and empty room. The next, an intersystem spacecraft of commercial design. The third showed a man—evidently the same man—fishing; it showed him lifting a huge black fish from the water. That was where the black glaze which Mali objected to came in: the enormous fish. The next panel he could not see. Coral blocked his view. But something came after the lifting up of the giant black fish. Lifting the fish was not the end. There was at least one more panel and perhaps two.