Walter Greatshell
Apocalypso
How is it possible for you to have accompanied me all this time without coming to perceive that all the things that have to do with knights-errant appear to be mad, foolish, and chimerical, everything being done by contraries? Not that they are so in reality; it is simply that there are always a lot of enchanters going about among us, changing things and giving them a deceitful appearance, directing them as suits their fancy, depending upon whether they wish to favor or destroy us.
Comedy is not pretty.
PART I
Loveville
CHAPTER ONE
DREADNAUTS
There was no boat. There was no crew. There was only a shared dream, fragile as a bubble in an endless sea. And there was no sea, just ripples of time and space-the bottomless, shoreless reach of eternity.
And Beatles music.
Suspended in the depths like a black thought, the USS No-Name echoed with the murky strains of “Eleanor Rigby.” Within its vast hull, we all listened, everyone equally intent, equally inert, whether whole or in pieces, all motionless as corpses in the smothering dark, embedded like fossils amid the roots of a tree-which was what the boat had become: a single organism of cold flesh and metal, blue limbs intermingled with blue steel, organs with plumbing, sinew with cable, bone with bracing. The flesh persisted, the flesh was permanent-the metal somewhat less so. Water trickled in, pooling blackly in the bilge.
In the airless environment, a creeping patina of blue rust became more evident by the day… at least in the areas where lights still functioned. Nobody cared. There was a short somewhere, many shorts, all neglected, life-support systems ignored and faltering… for there was no life left to support.