SEVEN: THE REMEMBRANCE OF ARCHIE MCLEOD
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
―Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
But wait! Aren't we forgetting something? I know we're just on the verge of something big and exciting – bigger and excitinger, even, since the events of the Red Chapel were big and exciting enough – but we mustn't leave out important details just because we want to rush on ahead. We've forgotten Archie and Maxie, and what they did while I was hiding. And we've forgotten that burning question: how did Archie come to meet us there?
I'll let him field that one, as I let Maxie answer the questions about him. It'll be good for both of us to have a bit of a break. Yesterday's marathon writing session has left me more tired than normal today, and as for you – well, you'd probably welcome the chance to get out of my head for a bit. I don't blame you. The decoration in here is very idiosyncratic.
First, however, let's talk about what they did. Let's go back a few days, back to the Red Chapel – traumatic enough the first time around, you might say, but needs must. This time, however, we'll ignore me. This time, we'll watch our two ghosts, standing and staring as the girl Avice storms out, Edie at her side, the Orb under her arm. We hear her footsteps on the stairs – and then she's gone.
Back in the Chapel, awash in a hot light that they could barely feel, Archie and Maxie looked at each other.
“Well,” said Maxie, dim with fatigue. “You did it. Congratulations.”
“Don't give me that,” snapped Archie. “I don't want any of your irony.”
“I'm not being ironic.” Maxie hesitated, uncertainty hovering over his features. In the distance, the rock groaned in pain.
“You got something to say?”
He shook his head.
“No. No, never mind.” He looked towards the stairs. “I should find her. Apologise.”
“Is that it?” asked Archie, as Maxie walked away. “No thanks for saving the bloody world? Not even a 'hello'?”
Maxie kept walking, and Archie followed, eyes flashing again with that fearsome glare.
“Are you not even curious?” he asked. “It's been five hundred years and you're―”
“Archie, there is a time and place for everything, but not now and not here,” said Maxie, without looking around. “I have wondered, yes, if others might have – lasted. And I want to know how and why y― but as I said, not now. Not now. I've betrayed her.”
Archie's loud, yes, but that doesn't mean he isn't perceptive. He must have known what was going through Maxie's head then: the nameless trainer who had died facing Tide; the fact that I could see and hear ghosts; the terror of what he had almost been. All these thoughts and more were visible to him, overlapping like murals drawn on serried sheets of glass, and when he saw them, his rage shrank a little. No one knows Maxie like he does. Not when they were alive, and not now.
“Yeah,” he said, but there was no malice in it. “Yeah, I see that.”
So began the search. They argued, on and off, as they made the rounds of the city – Museum, academy, my father's quarters. It took them a long time to find that one. Maxie, of course, had never been there, and they had to spy on the sergeants to figure out where it was.
But as we know, they never found me. Lights-on found them sitting by the statues in Long Hill Atrium, exhausted; when you're all thoughts and no body, a night of high passions like that is especially fatiguing. They had been silent for a long time by then. It seemed that they couldn't open their mouths without starting to fight.
“She can see us,” said Archie at last. “What about that.”
“That's part of why I'm loath to lose her,” replied Maxie. “Have you ever found anyone who can see you?”
Archie shook his head.
“It's been terribly lonely,” said Maxie.
“It's hell,” said Archie, with the assurance of one who knows. “This is it. This is our punishment.”
“Perhaps.” Maxie didn't sound convinced. He never was, really. Everyone seems to explain the afterlife in their own unique way. Maybe that's all it is: a long metaphor, mangled in the interpretation. It wouldn't be the only thing.
“They talk about Tethys a lot, out there,” said Archie. “I've never been. I had a hunch you were here.”
“I thought I was alone,” said Maxie, and Archie lowered his head a little, abashed.
“I got an itch,” he went on, after a while. “And I thought – but I hoped you wouldn't be. By the time I got here, though, I was certain.”
“You felt it too?”
“Toothache of the soul,” agreed Archie. “Just like when Kyogre appeared.”
There was another long, slow pause. The first of the shops took up its shutters with a metallic whirr.
“Archie,” said Maxie.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
It didn't last. You don't overcome the habits of a lifetime (and longer) in a single night, and though Archie didn't leave, he wasn't exactly supportive. Maxie kept saying that he wanted to apologise, haunting the docks in the hope of catching me fleeing the city. Archie trailed along in his wake, suggesting loudly that there was no point, that if I didn't want to speak to him then I wasn't going to, no matter how much he complained.
Yet he stayed. I think he wanted to be punished, really – to come all that way, to save Tethys and find his ancient nemesis, and yet to be denied his redemption by missing the one person who could have spoken to him. Living with the long-dead, you become a bit more familiar with guilt than you're really comfortable with, and I can tell you now that people find some really terrible ways to deal with it. They rationalise it away into something so intangible that they end up repeating their mistakes; they wind it around themselves and make their penitence a macabre performance; they detach themselves from it and refuse to feel anything at all … I could go on, but honestly, it would be a bit disheartening. Today is bright and sunny, and there are glass eelektross suckered onto the side of the Museum. Do you know those? You might not, if you're reading this in the future, on solid land. They're a kind of – well, a kind of eelektross, not as big as the others, that live near the surface and ride on bigger fish, eating their parasites. I'm looking at one now, basking in the sun a few yards from my window. It flashes like an infinity of rainbows.
The point is, why ruin a day like this with an anatomy of guilty tragedies? I know we're not at a particularly jolly point in the history, but let's not beat ourselves over the head with it. It turned out all right in the end.
We've seen what happened next. Hanging around the docks (and putting up with Archie) paid off. Maxie found me, and just about managed to persuade me. I never stopped to explain what I was doing to Francine – think about it; how could I? It had taken me long enough to tell my family. Instead, I just left. You'd be surprised how effective that is. For a moment, she was too surprised to even wonder where I was going, and then she'd lost me in the crowd of red hoods.
I'm sure you know my destination, dear reader. There was only one place I could go, only one place where I might be able to both escape the city and figure out a way to save the world, and it was the Museum. The maintenance passages were busy with search parties, but the sergeants were moving in groups and made so much noise that I could hear them coming from miles away; keeping out of their way and finding alternate routes took me a long time, but I'm fairly sure they never even managed to see me. It seems to me now that they really didn't know that much about finding fugitives. Apart from members of my family, people don't do a whole lot of disappearing in Tethys.
At the Museum airlock, I hesitated. Stay in there and my memory would die. That meant the city authorities, yes – but also my friends, my family. I could do without the attention of one, but the other I'd have preferred to keep.
“Avice?” asked Maxie, catching up. “What is it?”
I glared at him, and he raised his hands in surrender.
“We'll wait,” he decided. “Don't rush on our account, only, ah, I don't know how long we'll be undisturbed.”
“Shut up, Maxie,” said Archie.
“Thanks,” I said, though it must be said, I could have said it with a little more gratitude. “I just – I have an idea.”
I took off my name badge and turned it over in my hands.
AVICE AMRIT DOL' TETHYS, it said to me.
“Remember me to them,” I replied, and tossed it back down the corridor, the white enamel flashing in the mingled light of the ghosts. I looked back for a moment, and felt the weight of all those untold tonnes of steel and air shiver through my bones. “Goodbye,” I said, to my city, to my home, to my name lying there on the floor, and I went through the airlock.
They never found it. I mean the badge, obviously. I left it to anchor my name to Tethys, to keep my memory alive in the face of the Museum – but my family never saw it, and so they forgot. I know who did find it – who suspected where I'd gone; who went there and found it; who brought it, before my memory was cold, back to the CCC and had it copied out so that they could keep my immense and treasonable theft in mind. Who else could it be? It was Virgil. It has always been Virgil.
Strangely, you know, his name is in here somewhere – his real name, that is, the one that we all forgot. They must have put it in here during the time that I was in hiding, when for his heroic attempts to apprehend me they made him a full agent. Sometimes I think about looking for it, but what would I do with it when I had it? I could brandish it in his face as a weapon, I suppose; that seems a bit cruel, though, don't you think? And pointless, too. Revenge is all very well – not always, of course, it's just that sometimes you have to make a stand – but that would be nothing less than petty. And 'petty', I'm determined, is not an adjective I will ever take on myself.
When they put the name in here, the person remains. I've put my person in here, and my name – does it remain? I have heard bits of it, from Virgil and from others, but not the whole story. I wonder if AVICE AMRIT DOL' TETHYS is still there, creeping around the records like my own little ghost. Do the teachers at the academy call out my name when taking registers, before wondering who they're asking for? Does my father sometimes receive a ration card with those four words printed on it, before an employee of the Committee for Errata come to take it away again for pulping? Does Moll, when she lists to herself those she plans to go out with that night, find herself adding 'Avice' to the end?
I like to think so. And on a day like this, when the sun is hot, the breeze is cold and the ice cubes clink in the jug – on a day like this, I think why not just believe? No need to think so, not today. As long as the sun is shining, everything is true that needs to be.
Oh, you should have seen us. I was miserable, naturally, but even then I felt the wonder of it. And now, eighteen months on, I can look back and see it better still.
Imagine it: you're standing in the Tabitha Wentworth Memorial Dome, high above the city, looking out into open ocean. Suddenly, you feel something beneath your feet – some vibration, some faint shudder, as if of an engine starting up; but how can you possibly sense an engine here? You're nowhere near the docks.
There's one good answer to that: neither is the ship.
And then you see it. It fades slowly into view through the murky water to the west, big as a wailord and much more solid. Hundreds of metres away Archie hits a switch, marvelling at how tangible he is in here – and suddenly the shape is punctuated by six great lamps, their light dimmed by the intervening ocean but still bright. They can see it elsewhere now, this enormous, unexpected thing sliding out and up from below the city – can see it through the glass roof of the Grand Staircase, the transparent vault of Founder's Atrium, the tall windows of Long Hill. All over the city, people are stopping and staring, because no one has seen anything like this for nearly five hundred and fifty years: a ship whose geometry is unfamiliar, its flanks still streaked with the remnants of a blue and yellow paint job, its bow dominated by the rusting, salt-pitted hulk of what must once have been a truly colossal drill.
(Edie did a good job, but some things are beyond even a porygon. There just wasn't enough metal to keep the drill in working order.)
Let's live dangerously: let's speculate. Let's say the torpedo-batteries atop the docks ground slowly around on their bases to face the intruder. Let's say that the intercom burst into excitable, terrified life, swamping the operators; let's say that the sergeants poured out of the maintenance passages en masse, crowding up to the windows, running to the battle stations with the little external torpedo-guns. Let's say the corvettes left their defensive patrols and swept in to investigate; let's say the kingdra-riders with their packs of huntail swarmed in close, trying to get as good an idea as they could of what this odd, huge ship actually was; let's say that down at the tower of the docking authorities, the big lights flashed red red blue red, the most basic code in the sailors' handbook: who are you?
Picture that, dear reader. Picture Tethys, the city where nothing can happen, where it is impossible for anything to change – changing.
And it was us that did it. It was us, and for a few glorious minutes we held the eye of the most powerful city-state in the known ocean. Even then I felt the thrill, looking back at pods and girders I had never seen from the outside as we steamed on by, the deck-plate thrumming with the power of those engines. They were old, and patched, but no one knows engines like Edie. The Museum is still as fast now as any ship of its size.
Then it was over. We pulled away to the north, around the bulk of the sunken mountain – Mt. Chimney, I breathed, staring out of the window and thinking to myself that just a couple of nights ago I had actually been inside that thing – and out of sight. Were we followed? I'm not sure. I don't know if the defence corvettes or the kingdra-riders really saw us. Surely if they had come close, we'd have noticed? I didn't know how to work the Museum's sonar array yet, but the rear windows afforded a reasonable view, and I don't think I noticed much in the way of pursuit. We were observed, yes – no ships ever come so close to the inner core of Tethys as we did; in fact, if Archie hadn't been the skilled pilot he was we would probably have smashed into some of the city's supports. It's impossible that we weren't seen. But somehow – maybe because this was the Museum, even if people didn't know it was, and the curse of forgetting lay heavy on it – after we'd put a little distance between us and Tethys, the city no longer seemed to care.
I heard, much later, about what it was like when the Museum left. Now, I've arranged most of this narrative chronologically, but I'm going to leave that one until the time it was told to me. It's … complicated. You'll see. For now, marvel with my younger self: we'd got away, we'd stolen the drowned Museum of the Forgotten, and for the first time in my life I was outside the city of Tethys and its Edicts.
My breath caught, and my momentary excitement evaporated. I was alone now. Above, around, below – no power plants or dormitories, no friends; just cold water and the thousand darting creatures of the deep.
Edie caught my eye from where she was monitoring an electrical display screen of some sort, and flashed up an anxious question mark.
I made myself smile. No need to be nervous, I told myself. I was captain of a stolen ship, but I had piracy in my blood, and a deathless crew no ghost story could match. And besides, the whole world was out there. Waiting for me to see it – and, maybe, to save it.
“It's OK,” I said to her, and nearly believed it. “I'm all right.”
Archie hit a button and swivelled on his chair to face me.
“Well, then,” he said. “Where to, captain?”
It felt especially odd, to have the Prophet subordinate himself to me. I didn't even know why he was here – or how he'd found us, or even really who he was. He'd just appeared in a burst of rage, and now he seemed to have settled in as my navigator.
“Um,” I said, not sure whether I was unsettled or excited, and deciding that I could probably be both at once if I tried hard enough. “How are we doing for food?”
“The aeroponics suite is currently inactive,” answered Maxie, “so there's little enough there; the mycology shed was never designed to be shut off, so there is raw material for the synthesis machine to start producing something that you might mistake for bread, if you'd never seen wheat before.”
“OK, so we need food.” I ignored the attempt at a joke. We were not yet ready to laugh together. “Water?”
“The desalination engines are located in the stern, with the aeroponics suite and the mycology shed. I believe they are still in working order.”
I nodded slowly.
“OK. Edie?”
She fluttered over, bouncy and excitable with everything that had been going on. What's it like, I wonder, to tend to an abandoned ship for five hundred and fifty years and then suddenly have it come to life? Maybe she was proud of her work, or happy to see that everything still functioned. Maybe she was just eager to leave Tethys. I wouldn't blame her.
“I don't know how synthesis machines work,” I said, crouching and scratching her head. “Can you go and get it producing some kind of food?”
She considered this for a moment, head cocked on one side, and emitted a tick.
“Good girl,” I said. “Go on!”
She zoomed away, and I straightened up.
“I've got some fungal crackers in my bag,” I said. “But still, I think we'll need to take on supplies. Archie. You've been … outside. What's our nearest port?”
“We're headed north right now,” he replied. “Which means … yeah, it'll be Cormac's Mourn.”
“Can we get supplies there?”
“If you have something to trade with.”
I did. Silver forks, for one – and the whole wealth of the Museum. Almost everything in there was worth a fortune to the right person.
“I think we can manage that,” I said.
“A'right,” said Archie, and turned back to the controls.
“OK,” I said, slowly. “OK, I'm going to … see how Edie is doing.”
I didn't see the two of them exchange glances as I left, but I sensed it. It was difficult not to. There was so much still unsaid between them that the atmosphere felt charged when they were in the same room; besides, they were thinking of me, I know they were – wondering if I was all right, whether this careful calm of mine was feigned – and I could feel it, like a feather drawn slowly across the back of my neck.
“Avice,” said Maxie, and I stopped abruptly.
“What.”
“Are you all right?”
I turned, fast. I may even have actually spun on my heel.
“What do you think? No, I'm not all right. Do you know what I've just done? And why I've done it? It's not for you,” I added quickly. “I'm not picking up where you left off. I'm starting again, starting this bloody quest over from scratch not for you but for me and my – my city …”
Tears started from my eyes, and for a moment I struggled against them, trying to be angrier than I was afraid, but I never did have the self-discipline for that – and so now it seems we have to leave this sunny day outside after all, and talk about sorrow. I hate Tethys now and I hated it then, but, as the girl in the audiovisual recording said, there's no place like home. Maxie stepped forwards to do I don't know what – he must have known I would turn away from him, because whose fault was it that I was here, lost, alone, saddled with the responsibility of fixing his old problems? For whom had I thrown away my life? I pushed him away and it was, as surprised me even then, Archie who came forward – Archie, who I barely knew but who, in his way, already knew me. He stopped Maxie with a look as he approached, and took me by the hand, his fingers as cool and soothing as still water.
“You've not been sleeping, lass,” he said. “For days now, I reckon.” He glanced at Maxie. “Keep her steady,” he said. “I'll be back.”
I let him led me out and down to the captain's cabin – my quarters now, I supposed – and as the tears abated I talked to him, told him everything as I had told my father; he nodded and said yes in the right places until I was exhausted, and then I slept and he left.
Perhaps you'll think it was childish of me. I sort of feel that way myself – I mean, I was nineteen. But then again, maybe I'm being too hard on myself. I had led a life less sheltered than many Tethys children, but still, any life in Tethys is a sheltered one. Something about the city's stasis seeps into you, makes even the most revolutionary child in some way complacent. I had never truly realised how much it would hurt to be torn from my home, especially by the betrayal of someone I had trusted so absolutely. (So naïvely, you might correct me. You wouldn't be wrong.)
In any case, Archie was right, I did need sleep – I'd only got a couple of hours each night when I was in hiding, and my fatigue wasn't making me any more capable of dealing with the situation. So, dear reader, let's leave my younger self to it; it is childish, but I think we can cut her some slack. Besides, like I said, today's not a day for tragedy. It seems to me that for these last few chapters I've just been writing non-stop about how sad and conflicted I was, and it's time I put a stop to it. Life isn't all vanishing aunts and treacherous ghosts – there's witty badinage and interesting exposition too, and so much more than that!
Therefore: back to the story that I opened today's chapter with, back before Maxie found me on the docks. Back to those questions – what were Archie and Maxie doing? And how and why was Archie there to begin with?
When Archie got back to the bridge, Maxie was sitting down, tapping his fingers idly against the desk.
“It's dark out,” he said, without looking up. “I'd forgotten what it looked like. All that water.” He swivelled his chair around. “How is she?”
Archie gave him one of those thunderbolt glares.
“You messed her up,” he answered, sitting in the chair opposite, by the other control bank. “Jesus Christ, Maxie. It's all down to you. D'you get that?”
“Yes, of course. Why do you think I'm trying to make amends?”
Archie shook his head.
“Naw, man, you're not getting it! D'you have any idea what it's like – she's just a kid, for Christ's sake, just a wee girl, and she was desperate to find something in that city she could believe in. And you come along, ancient, practically omniscient, and bang! Hero worship. And then you go an' …” He threw up his hands in exasperation. “You never were good with people, were you?”
Maxie was silent for a while. He sat, if anything, straighter than usual.
“No,” he said. “I suppose I wasn't.”
“I'm not claiming I wasn't a manipulative bastard,” Archie told him. “We both know that's just not true. But I knew what I was doing, and I set my own limits.”
Maxie took off his spectacles, folded them up on the counter and massaged his temples with thumb and middle finger.
“Christ,” he said. “I'd forgotten what it was like. All those years we were apart, and I boiled our time together down to the good days. Now you move back in with me and I remember how much we argued.”
“I'm not mov― wait, hang on, I have.” Archie started. “How 'bout that? D'you know, I barely noticed.”
Maxie smiled. His eyes were still buried beneath his hand.
“Just like old times.”
Archie laughed harshly, like a dog barking, and for a few minutes the only sound was the hum of electricity and the distant thump of the engines.
“Why are you here, Archie?” asked Maxie, putting his glasses back on. “Why did you come back?”
He shrugged.
“I had a hunch. An apocalyptic hunch. And I've just been drifting, Maxie, here and there across the ocean with my sins hanging round my neck. I had time to spare to check out a hunch.”
Maxie nodded slowly.
“Fair enough. I … I'm glad you came back.”
The two of them looked at each other for a moment. I couldn't tell you what they saw in each other's eyes, but it commanded their attention – even if perhaps they wanted to look away.
“Do you remember the spring of 1993?” asked Maxie, his eyes full of sunlight. “That lecturer with the ridiculous hat and the penchant for Tennyson?”
“Are you going to quote at me? Because I will laugh at you if you do that, appeal to shared memories or no.”
Maxie spoke as if he hadn't heard:
“Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.”
He leaned back in his seat. “Did you ever imagine, Archie, that anything from that lecture would be relevant to us in the future? Let alone three lines from a poem already a hundred and fifty years old when he quoted it.”
Archie hesitated. Whatever he was thinking, he did not, in fact, laugh.
“A'right,” he said, and held out a hand. “Truce, till we fix the planet we broke?”
Maxie shook.
“I couldn't have put it better myself.”
Archie got up and crossed to the main window, looking out into the dark and the blue.
“Hey, Maxie,” he said, fingering the controls. “When was the last time you saw the sky?”
Maxie started half out of his chair, that avid light in his eyes, but this time he regained himself.
“I remember what it looks like,” he replied, settling down again. “Let's wait until Avice gets back.”
Archie grinned in surprise.
“Now you're learning,” he said. “Unbelievable. The old dog has a couple of new tricks in him after all.”
This was what passed between them – between these two strange men, trading weary fragments of the past while I tried to come to terms with my future. There was more too, now that things had thawed a little between them. But, though I now know it too, this story isn't mine to tell. Sometimes it's best to let a man speak for himself.
So! I'm going to find my sunglasses and see if I can enjoy some of this sunlight without going blind. And while I go about that, I leave you in the capable hands of Archie McLeod.
ARCHIE
I don't feel old. I'm going to start with that, I reckon, because that's been at the heart of all the things I've seen and done. It's been Christ knows how long – well, Christ and Maxie, I guess; he was always organised like that, keeping dates and all – and yet I still feel thirty. Nothing since I died counted, you see. It's dead time – literally, even. Time of the dead. Time for sinners.
Because I am a sinner. We all of us are, those who are left. Maxie says it's regret that keeps us here, but what the hell? He's read as much as I have, more even, he must know what being an earthbound spirit means.
Earthbound. Kind of a joke, isn't it? Ain't no earth left now, or there wasn't. We might see some more yet, before the time comes and we have to go. That's my fault – and yeah, I know what Maxie says, about all the ways he could have stopped me, but that's his way, you know. He takes things apart. I keep it simple: who thought it would be a good idea to bring a monster back to life? Who thought he could control Kyogre, wield the ocean like a gun pointed at the head of the planet? Yeah, Archie McLeod.
That's not the kind of thing you get over. I've atoned, maybe, but I won't say to you that I'm over it. Wherever I'm going after this, if there is anywhere to go, I'll be taking it with me. No acquittals in the court of your own conscience.
I'm not sure where Avice wants me to start. I could ask – but no, let's not. To be honest, I don't even see why she has to write this, not now. She's so young, too young for the tasks she sets herself. You're looking at a man with a misspent youth right here, and let me tell you, if I'd let myself live instead of focusing so hard on my pretentious bloody ambition, we'd all be sleeping on dry land tonight.
Or maybe not. The ice caps were on the way out anyway.
But back to me. Like I was saying, I went about my life in all the wrong ways. I wanted to change the whole world in one go, and well, careful what you wish for. Me and Maxie, we should've stayed together. We were a good team – more importantly, a safe team. We'd have stopped each other from going too far. Those early years, at university and afterwards, when we were kicking around Hoenn looking for trouble in the name of eco-activism – they were good years. Sure, we weren't always on the right side of the law, and we did a couple of things that maybe we shouldn't have – kids screw up, you know, and they learn from it – but no one died.
Then we got into that fight in the National Library, and it all went to hell. Probably that was my fault, too. I think I was clicking my pen or something – annoying everyone in the room, I'll bet – and Maxie kept asking me to stop, but every time my attention wandered, I'd start doing it again without thinking, and he'd ask me to stop, and the people around us were coughing pointedly like academics do when they're trying to let you know that they're judging you, and when for the umpteenth time I started clicking it again Maxie got up and slapped the damn pen out of my hand.
Things got a bit rougher after that, and when I was on the verge of whacking Maxie with a dictionary we were asked to leave – asked, that is, by a security man who looked like he could drop kick an ursaring through a plate-glass window. And that was it. Some kid clicks a pen and the world ends. You almost have to laugh.
I didn't go back to our flat that afternoon. I went to my friend Matt's house instead, because I knew he would encourage me to get more angry – incredibly supportive guy, Matt, but not bright; whatever you were doing at the moment, he'd push you further into it – and after a night spent drunk and furious on his sofa, I went round to the flat, packed up and moved out.
That's where that little maxim falls down. Kids screw up, and they learn from it – except when they don't. And I didn't, and Maxie didn't, and we went our separate ways in hatred and somehow we got to the idea that it would be a brilliant idea to bring these bloody great monsters back to life. Like that didn't have DANGER written all over it. I'll give it to Maxie, he picked his lieutenants well. That Tabitha knew we were onto something bad, and he got Courtney on his side. Put a stop to Maxie's plans to raise Groudon, at least for a while. It took him a few hundred years to get round to it again.
But me – look, I take full responsibility. I picked Matt, and Matt, as I said, was a supportive kind of guy. You told him your goals and he'd push to achieve them without stopping to think about what was right or wrong. And I abused him cruelly, I know; I made him worship me. It wasn't hard. I'm a performer, see, and a bloody good one, too. I know how to be magnificent, and Matt lapped it up. I did it all because I knew he would be behind me till the end, urging me on if I ever had doubts about splitting with Maxie and taking on my own goal. And I did have doubts – do you think I wasn't aware, on some level, of what Kyogre is? It's more than mortal, and I knew that, I must've done. In my heart of hearts.
So I made Matt into an audience for the performance of Archie McLeod, and so I killed him. I had Shelly too, of course – now there was a smart one. She could have been to me as Tabitha was to Maxie, but she figured it out just a little too late, and she was just a little too conflicted. It was a good performance, and she bought into it too – not her fault; she got loose from it, but not quick enough. The whole of my organisation fell in love with the myth of Archie McLeod. Have they been mentioned yet? We called ourselves Aqua, in opposition to Maxie's Magmas, or maybe they called themselves Magma in opposition to us. I can't remember now which one came first. Seems pretty apt now, eh?
Well, I've not been reading Avice's book so far, but I'm sure she's mentioned what happened next; there's no point me putting it off any longer. Yeah, I'm your Prophet. I stole the Alcmene and I went to the bottom of the sea, where Kyogre was waiting for the Orb. Or maybe it wasn't there, exactly. Maybe it was on some other plane, out of step with our reality, and the Orb brought it back into alignment. There were texts that implied it was eternal, that when it seemed dead it was in fact outside time … but best not get into that. Given the mess I made of things, you can appreciate that I'd like to keep certain knowledge buried.
When Kyogre woke, it barely even noticed me. It wouldn't have seen me at all if I hadn't had the Orb. A wave snatched it from my hands and brought it down towards the beast – and then it submerged, and we felt the cave quaking as the sea rearranged itself around us. I don't remember anything about how we got out of there. I don't remember much at all until we saw the sky. It looked like night out there – it was just after noon – and there was so much rain hitting the ocean that it looked like it was boiling, as if we'd taken the wrong exit from the cave and come out in hell. You couldn't look up. You'd have been blinded if you were – the rain hit you like rocks. By the time we got under cover, we were bruised all over, and Shelly had a broken nose.
I keep saying we, but I haven't said who. Got to apologise for that. Clarity in writing never was my strong suit. Anyway, there was myself and Shelly, who I think was the one who got me out of there; Maxie, of course, who was shouting about what have you done – hadn't seen him so close since we split in '96 – I remember thinking how much older he looked; and there was the lass …
I don't know her name. No one does. Can you blame me if I think Avice takes on too much? I saw what happens to kids who think they can save the world. It ain't like the movies. When she went down to stop Kyogre in the Cave of Origin, it ended her, just like that. Wiped her out of existence, name and all. I remember she had a raichu, and she joked with us that at least she had the type advantage.
She was working with Steven, towards the end – Steven Stone, that is, the last Champion of Hoenn. A wee bit arrogant for my liking, but I can't say he didn't do a damn sight better than me or Maxie. It's not like he was consciously condescending, but he was always the rich kid, you know? Just never quite occurred to him that things were harder for other people. But I guess that's what we needed in a situation like that. Him and Wallace – Wallace Artois – he was Gym Leader of Sootopolis – they were calm, collected. They knew what to do. Steven got us all over to Sootopolis, called ahead to Wallace, consulted him as the Cave-keeper. I'm surprised now that I ever thought my knowledge was unique. They had all this stuff written down in Sootopolis, waiting in those scrolls for something like this to happen. Wallace explained it all: we had to choose a champion to fight Kyogre. The stuff of legend, right. Heroes and gods. That's the kind of thing we're talking about, and I tried to make it a tool.
I hate how we chose, I really do. I wish I could have gone in her place, but Kyogre never even noticed me. Oh, I could play the part, swagger and swank, but I wasn't really a hero. Nor was Maxie, when it came down to it. And Steven was strong and all, but he didn't have the heart for it; he didn't think about the wee man. But she – that lass had proved herself. She'd fought Aqua almost single-handedly, and she nearly beat us, too. One girl against a small army, and all because it was right, because she saw how we were hurting the people and pokémon we said we were fighting for. Can you see why when she volunteered, none of us could say no? If anyone could do it …
But that was the problem, wasn't it? No one could do it. The Cave exploded. The tide was loosed. Sootopolis drowned, and all I could think was that I should have done more. Maxie was trying to get me to leave with him, I'm told, but I hardly remember hearing him. I can just see that image of the water beneath me, and underneath it white houses, gleaming like dead coral.
Everything's fuzzy after that, but I believe I went in to help. I'm guessing that I drowned. Don't you like it when the punishment fits the crime? It feels right to know that the man who flooded the planet met his death by water.
A few years passed before I got myself back together – at least. Might've been more. People were just starting to rebuild back then. New Mauville had been sealed off to create a safe haven. The old Aqua base, too – most of my crew survived, if you can credit it. They were all right in Mossdeep, as well, at least on the west half of the island. But the rest of Hoenn was just shot to hell. I travelled for years to see it all, catching rides on ships when I could and walking along the seabed when I couldn't. I made it my business to find out the extent of what I'd done to the country, to stencil it into my brain with a pen of fire. There didn't seem to be anything else to do. Whatever this afterlife was supposed to be, I turned it into a personal Tartarus. Counting the skeletons floating up among the rafters of the government halls. Watching pieces of the Trainers' School caught in the currents flowing down old Rustboro streets. Walking among the desecrated graves of Mt. Pyre, the only ghost where there used to be thousands.
Maybe to you this world looks alive, but it's nothing compared to the old one. There are new things now, true – those sableye that have learned to dive for pearls, or the mawile who use their horn-jaws as floats and snorkels – and yeah, they've got a beauty to them, how they've survived, and yeah, there's been some incredible advances in maritime technology … yet in the end, what's left, really? Scrabbling around for a few extra years of life in the corners of some ocean. I wanted to realign humankind and nature, but not like this. Not like this.
Well; I've changed things around now, haven't I? Or rather, we have – or no, no; Avice has. Avice did it, and we assisted. I hope that's enough. I don't know what else I could have done.
It's why I stayed. When Maxie started putting together that plan, I knew – I could feel it in my chest, like a broken heart. I had to see if I was right – and if I wasn't, who cared? Tethys was the one place I'd never been. Somehow I'd always thought that it wasn't my territory. I'd made my own hell; Maxie had made his. Didn't need to blame myself for that city, at least. And anyway, I thought, if Maxie too had lingered after death – I didn't know if I could face him, not when he'd tried to stop me and I'd refused to listen. I could only go there when I had ammunition to use against him, and his fool plan was what I needed to give myself a little confidence. And then, when I got here …
There was Avice.
How could I have left then? She could see me. Half my torture over with, just like that. And I didn't dare leave Maxie with her, either, not after how he used that trainer. Never quite knew how to say it to her – I knew it would come out condescending – and then afterwards, it turned out I had other reasons to stay. It's not that I wanted to put all of that on Avice's head, but Christ! To undo what we never dreamed could be undone. That was an opportunity I just couldn't pass up.
And I hope, I hope, I'd pray if I knew what to pray to, that in taking it I have done enough.
AVICE
And here I am again! It is lovely out there, dear reader. I hope your day is treating you well, too. Now …
Archie. I'd hoped that by now― well, I guess now that things are coming to an end, all the ghosts are concerned. At times like this, with the future breathing down your neck, it's difficult to keep the past out of your hair. Still, I think – I think I'd better finish up early today. Not only because I'm tired after the long session yesterday, but because we could do with seeing a little more of one another, all of us. We don't have much time. I don't want them to spend it alone with their fear.
For now, let's conclude my brief detour into sadness. I woke, feeling much better; it had been one of those thunderbolt moods that strike you with incredible force and leave you oddly refreshed afterwards. So, I thought, I might be forgotten? Very well: I'd come back, bringing sun and shore in my wake, and we'd see if they could still forget me after that. I didn't know what to do? All right: I had two world experts on pokémon, gods and changing the face of the earth with me; we could figure something out. I'd manage. I was Avice Amrit dol' Tethys; I always managed.
First things first, though. I was no longer a citizen, for better or worse, and that meant I was going to get rid of that uniform and its ridiculous hood before I did anything else. I went down into the hold and rifled through the clothing racks, looking for something as different to city wear as I could find. There was a blue dress I liked (sky-blue, I'd say now, but back then the phrase was meaningless to me), and I smiled: perfect. The people of Tethys wore red, and their enemies the pirates, for reasons lost to history at that time, wore blue. I was definitely more pirate than citizen now. I changed, hung up my Tethys clothes on a spare hanger, and pushed them in at the back of the rack. Excellent. Gone. I rocked for a moment on the heels of new shoes, wondering how they'd been made so springy, then made for the stairs. On the way, though, I remembered something, and paused. In the pocket of my uniform …
I went back and pulled out a silver disc, stamped with writhing tentacles and a sideways mouth.
“Let thy will be done, O monstrous, O mighty,” I murmured, and slipped the cord of my old Tooth token around my neck. If I was to follow in my mother's footsteps, I might as well do it under the aegis of the patron deity of pirates.
Feeling suddenly light (which may, in retrospect, have had something to do with the springy shoes), I half-skipped back to the stairs and down the corridor to see where Edie was. Her synthesis machine – decidedly noisier and more unstable-looking than the ones in Tethys – was easy enough to find, but couldn't figure out where she was until her head appeared on the screen of the computer. I asked if she was doing all right, and her face was replaced temporarily by a thumbs up. After that, I left her to it. I'm a bit better with computers now, but back then I wasn't even entirely sure what they were for, let alone what I could do to assist a porygon2 who was currently inside one.
“Back to the bridge, then,” I said to myself, for no reason other than that it seemed fun to hear the sound of my voice. “Back to the bridge.”
I made quite an entrance, if I do say so myself. It had been centuries since either Archie or Maxie had seen anyone dressed in the clothes of their time – and well, let's be honest: a Tethys uniform isn't exactly flattering. That dress is probably responsible for most of my vanity; seriously, dear reader, I'm not sure I'd ever have discovered how good I look if I hadn't abandoned my uniform.
“You've changed,” said Maxie, taking off his spectacles and putting them back on again in surprise. “You look. Er.”
“He means you look good,” said Archie. “I always thought those Magma uniforms were ugly as sin,” he went on, with a sly look at Maxie. “Now blue – aye, there's a colour. That's Aqua colours, that is. One thing we had going for us: clothes produced by an actual designer, instead of a bad draughtsman with a thing about hoods.”
“They were very practical back when there was still sunlight,” said Maxie, giving him a frosty look. “Protected you from sunburn, shielded your eyes―”
“Cut off all your peripheral vision, made you look like a right kno―”
“If you're done fighting, boys?” I asked, and they fell silent. “Thanks.” I stepped closer to them. “We're going the right way for this Cormac place, right?”
“Yeah,” said Archie. “Northeast of Mt. Chimney. Where those hills were, north of the desert.”
“OK, whatever. Where do we start looking for ways to undo the making over?”
There was a long silence.
“Well?” I asked – and, unexpectedly, Archie burst out laughing.
“So you're all right, then,” he said. “Glad to see it, lass. I thought you must be something special to have got yourself tangled up in a plan that bold, but it was hard to see what exactly when you were upset.” He held out a hand. “Shall we start with the introductions, before we leap into trying to save the human race? Archie McLeod – loser, ghost, and apparently the Prophet.”
I might have been taken aback, had my spirit been lower than they were. But I was well rested and ready to roll with any abrupt change of conversation; I took his hand and shook it without batting an eyelid.
“Avice Amrit dol' Tethys,” I replied. “Former Legal Apprentice and the Founder's dupe.”
Maxie winced.
“Really?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I answered, coming perilously close to anger and steering myself away at the last moment. “Why are you here, Archie?”
“I'll tell you in a minute,” he said. “Right now …” He shot a meaningful look at Maxie, who cleared his throat.
“Er-hem. Avice, if you wouldn't mind – I think you may need these.”
He handed me a pair of spectacles with smoked-glass lenses, which I turned over in my hands with some confusion.
“What're these for?”
“They're called sunglasses, lass,” said Archie. “You've been down there twenty-odd years. What do you think coming up here would do to you?”
He gestured at the window, and for the first time I saw that the water was no longer blue-black, but green, and that above us …
I put on the sunglasses.
“Show me,” I commanded, and Archie grinned. He must have been looking forward to this. It's not everyday you show someone the sky for the very first time.
“My pleasure,” he said, and twisted a handle.
You'll laugh at me, dear reader – it really wasn't much, not by today's standards. It wasn't the sun. But as the Museum broke the surface and the sound of rain on metal made its way indoors and the great dizzying grey-white expanse of the sky shot up around us on all sides, flooding in at the window like – like light, real light, a kind that I had never known – as all that happened, I stood, and stared, and drank it in with eyes that ached even through the sunglasses, tender as if they had never before been opened.
It feels to me now like it was only an instant later that I was out on the upper deck, tasting fresh air for the first time, amazed at how cold and crisp and flavoursome it was in my nose and mouth. I must have physically walked out – indeed, I must have got Maxie to show me the way out, because I didn't know it before then – but I have no memory of it at all. In my mind, all these sensations are mingled in one drawn-out moment of ecstasy: the cold force of raindrops on skin; the teeth of wind dragged knifelike across limbs that know no breeze; the flat alien light of a cloud-grey sky; the chill whistle of moving air and its frost in the lungs when sucked in deep; the smell of salt and oil; the flight of distant birds known only from pictures; and through it all, irresistible even when it seared my deep-weak eyes, that strange bright splotch in the midst of the clouds that some deep, primal instinct told me shrouded the sun.
I went back in quickly. My eyes hurt; it would take me a long time to adjust. But I had seen the sky, and at that moment any last doubts I had were blown away. You couldn't see the sky and not know that there was something deeply, horribly wrong with my city – with all the cities, rooted down there in the gloom like great blind clams.
As I sit here and look out, I fall backwards in time: so I sat then, so I looked. The blinds were down but not closed, just like today; the only difference is the sunglasses, and my clothes. And there's the weather too; what was then wet and grey is tonight marbled with sunset.
This was what I dreamed of then, my eyes on the clouds, and more. This is, dear reader, what I struggled for.
There isn't always a happy ending. And maybe there won't be one for my present self – who knows what will happen when I get back to Tethys, after all? But there was one for the Avice of two years ago, who dreamed of the sun and got it, and maybe, if we're lucky, there's one for my drowned world as well. Are there fields where you are, dear reader? Are there trees? I don't know how long it will take for the waters to recede. I don't know if I'll live to see it. If I don't – if I am dead when you read this – then please, for my sake, dear reader, go outside and taste the air for both of us. Touch a tree. Listen to the birds.
That's today, I think. Perfect weather; perfect sunset – and now, a perfect end to the day's work, quitting just before it gets tedious. I'm off to call the ghosts together. We'll sit up there on the deck until the stars are out, and longer. We'll talk, and, perhaps better still, be silent.
Goodnight, dear reader. Goodnight.