I Saw Three Ships (that Passed in the Night), by Tycho McPhee Letts

​This story is part of a 10,000 Dawns Christmas. You can read the other stories and fine more about this author by clicking HERE.

​I Saw Three Ships (that Passed in the Night)
by Tycho McPhee Letts

Once upon an ice age, arctic winter was let loose from its prison at the poles and allowed to creep across the whole of Earth, accompanied by its levelling breath, the frigid North Wind; by its upward-reaching shadow, the unending arctic night; and by homogeneity. For as snow smothered the globe, land and ocean slowly stopped being all that different, became unifyingly solid from surface to substratum. And life continued.

I
A nightly battle was being waged in the atmosphere of Graelyn Scythes’ bedroom, the one casualty her sleep. The snug warmness of several blanket layers against the all-permeating stench of frozen salt; the soothing trickle of Beethoven’s 11th Symphony versus malignant memories of mistakes made in an old home on the other side of the world. A standstill, until the forces of awakeness received reinforcement from the other room of her house. Graelyn gradually noticed, rising between empty beats, the continous bump of something soft against a plane of glass, and she knew that her beloved pet was looking for midnight attention. So the war was won and all the warriors withdrew, save the salty smell.
A minute later, Graelyn walked across the wooden floor in her nightcoat, gaining alertness with each slippered step. She reached the tank before fumbling her glasses on, so when the world came into focus she was greeted by an expectant face, ash grey with peppered spots of silver, whiskers twitching and mouth--wide, toothless, and dopey--opening and closing like an excitedly confused baby. Miss Sparkles the catfish was happy to see her owner.
“What is it, Sparks?” She dipped her hand into the naturally-warmed water and began rubbing smooth, scaly skin along from gills to fin. Miss Sparkles responded by once again tapped her head against the edge of her tank. “Oh,” Graelyn whispered with an understanding exasperation that reached no ears but her own. Sparkles bumped the glass again, then raised her gaping catfish face just above the surface of the water in a very hopeful manner, then puckered in such a way to gently squirt Graelyn’s chin. Graelyn considered her options for a moment and decided that sleep was overrated. “Ok then, time for a walk.”
After putting an outside coat over her nightcoat, Graelyn reached into the water once more to harness a leash around Sparkles’ fins, pulling it tight but comfortably against scale and bone. She reached in farther, grasped the entire toddler-sized creature from its underbelly, and lifted it out into the cool air. Carefully carrying the slippery Miss Sparkles, trying to go quickly to not let too much water drip on the floor, Graelyn unlocked and shoved open her front door.
In an instant, the small home stopped being an independent space and was absorbed into the greater outside--no biting wind, no blinding flurry, just a moment’s influx of pure cold that stole the warmth from every inside inch. It tried to assimilate Graelyn too, burrowed all the way into her lungs and tried to crystallize, but only managed to destroy her final shreds of drowsiness.
With a determined heave, she threw her wonderful catfish through the front door, down towards cold, hard ice. In most other universes, this would kill a catfish (and in most other universes hurting animals was exactly the sort of thing Graelyn Scytheses this age were doing), but Miss Sparkles was an electric catfish, hyper-charged by reality-exclusive evolution. Sparkles curled her whiskers mid-flight into a loop, and when the tips touched they formed a closed circuit, a short circuit that sparked and glowed a warm yellow within milliseconds. When a catfish of another world would be pulverised against a solid surface, Sparkles landed with a small splash into perfectly warmed water.
Graelyn followed, leash in hand, and the midnight walk began.

The city was built like a downwards branching corkscrew of oxygen, carved into the surface of the Pacific Ice Sheet by the last lingering pioneers who were thrilled to colonise even farther west. They named it after the most prosperous of the Yukon mining towns. They tamed lone fish that wandered near the surface to provide power. They set up furnished shacks along all the spiralling tunnel-streets, and invited the whole world in.
Graelyn and her fish travelled on incompatible levels of reality, connected by the water-proof, shock-resistant, unmeltable leash. Sparkles looped and leaped in the ground beneath her human anchor’s feet; Graelyn was sort of ungracefully pulled forward, sometimes stumbling to keep up. There were little metal spikes at the bottom of her shoes to ground each step into the ice, and she still wasn’t used to the extra milliseconds they added to a gait.
House after wooden house they passed (some decorated with tinsel and fir branches for the holidays), most dark inside but all billowing with life. The misty condensation formed clouds against the high icicled ceiling, a gravity-defying river of loose water molecules that drifted up towards the opening of the city’s entrance and dispersed under the large transparent dome that shielded the entire tunnel-settlement from being filled in by hail and snow. Another force rumbled in the opposite direction: a distant echoing surface-howl from the ghosts of long-dead waves.
Deeper and deeper, the catfish weaved trails of water like knots around the edge of the narrowing tunnel. She was the primary light source now, tinkling about like a golden whiskered fairy, like a dancing torchflame in an infinite cavern. The surrounding ice was crystal clear down here, so Graelyn could see beneath herself an endless darkness that was either an imperciably giant vanishing point or the place that once been an ocean floor. Like walking on an inverted night sky guided by a scaly star, further and further.
And suddenly they had walked to the absolute end of the city and had only the cold solid sea in front of them. Finally, they both stopped.
A silent salty emptiness
Without borders
Without warmth
Without life.
…
A distant pinprick point said otherwise.
Graelyn squinted to be sure, for such a thing was unknown and unheard of. A gaggle of lights were shining in the far-off depths: a rainbow of bioluminescence glowing all the unearthly shades that humanity never got around to naming: a swimming cloud of colours in its own hazy pocket of liquid: a mass of living pixels escaped from an early 2000s screensaver.
Amid the rusty greens, chilled lavenders, and nebulaic sapphires there were streaks of gold identical to Sparkles’ hide. And sticking out from that gold were rows of tendrilish whiskers, bright as lightbulb filaments, illuminating dark fishy eyes slightly above. Graelyn felt a soft yearning tug of the leash, and knew this school of lights were family. This, evidently, was what her catfish friend had been so excited to see.
The marvellous shape came nearer, passing deep below the city and painting the drab underfloors of houses with splotches of epheresence. Miss Sparkles wagged her fins and tail watching it all, staying close to the space under Graelyn's feet.
The two waited to be bathed in the strange luminosity when the school came directly beneath them, but it never happened. Instead, at the moment of convergence a shadow was cast from something trapped in the ice between and they were momentarily plunged in sudden darkness. Graelyn stared at the heart of this eclipse and saw the most improbable thing of the night: a perfectly unmoving human figure, metres upon hundreds of metres deep embedded in the ice. She saw the shape of each individual silhouette finger and the subtle folds of a long coat projected through the ice, tinged at the edges by glowing patina.
It was over in seconds.
The multi-coloured underwater sun meandered forward to the opposite underwater horizon, briefly extending backwards a small corona of golden fish that wasn’t bright enough to catch that figure’s shadow again. Then night returned, enveloping Graelyn and her pet in empty cold. It would be a while until she took the first step back towards home.

Graelyn returned to that spot the next day, and the next, and the next… She taught herself to use the sort of seismic technology that could detect things deep below the surface, and found nothing. She became a leader and personally oversaw an expedition into those neptunian depths, and still found nothing. She kept searching until the day the city caved in, but it was as if that frozen figure had never existed, or somehow escaped.


II
Snowflakes are similar to universes in that no two are exactly alike; dissimilar in that 10,000 snowflakes are much more manageable than 10,000 universes. Archimedes Von Ahnerabe was getting to grips with his role in the 10,000 Dawns, but he had no way of dealing with well over 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 snowflakes, compressed into a glacier larger than all Earth's land continents put together.
    He could see for miles, yet couldn’t move an inch, for there wasn’t so much as an atom of air between his outermost polymer casing and the ice. His metals limbs were far stronger than anything of the fleshy variety, but couldn’t do squat against the weight of a sea. So he waited, frozen in hope.
    Archimedes had gotten here four hours ago, the result of a last minute escape route from some adventure that was drastic enough that he thought it would be more preferable to be stranded within the ice-ocean of an obscure universe, but not interesting enough you need to hear about it.
If it were almost any other reality, Arch would have been back at Spiral within minutes, sipping hot chocolate on a grassy hill with his best friend Graelyn, but the interdimensional doorways of Dawn didn’t work that great in solid matter. There was simply too much ice in every direction! So he needed to be rescued twice, first from the confines of the open sea and then from the confines of this bubble of existence.
There was a sort of city far above Arch’s head, a twisting tangle of hollow tentacles filled with air and lined to one side with dark structures spaced like suction cups. Earlier, he tried in vain to catch the attention of some potential rescuer up there using his light-up skin -- became not a message in a bottle, but a body in a message -- but after less than minimal success gave up to preserve his ever dwindling power.
Yes, electricity was rather a problem. Cyborgs have twice as many ways to starve to death. It was rather grim thought, but Archimedes had only his mind to keep himself occupied and nobody can entirely choose which avenues of possibility imagination might choose to explore.
It was in a sudden, subtle shift that an event invaded the uneventfulness. Like many who think they’re near-death, Archimedes saw a distant light at the end of a metaphorical tunnel, and it was for him a genuine metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel, a tiny ray of hope shining all the bioluminescent colours that humanity never got around to naming.
You can guess what this incoming mass was composed of, but you’d probably be slightly wrong. As it approached, Arch was pleasantly surprised that each individual coloured node was a living, glowing fish. This thing was busy and beautiful and big. And as it got nearer and nearer, he noticed that each and every fish had something harnessed to their frames: a harness. All the hundreds of organisms that made up this school melting its way through the Pacific, they were tethered and leashed to something in the dead centre!
It was skimming so close beneath Arch now, the area of temporarily melted water ended just metres away. Still, he could not move a motorised muscle. And this near, he saw for the briefest moments the man-made thing that lay at the heart. He saw rows of bolts. He saw sheets of brass. He saw a window, and someone on the other side saw him; it was hard to tell who was more surprised.
Under these many layers of fish there lay a real nautilus of a nucleus, harnessing the power of the animals to travel beyond the reach of any purely human technology. This submarine in a shining sentient shell continued floating forward, but within a minute a clump of fish detached at the back, tied to a smaller vessel. So Arch’s saviour came riding in on an underwater chariot pulled by catfish with skin like the Sun, and he basked in its coming aura.
For the first time in ages, he began feeling the ability to bend his knees, turn his neck, and wiggle his fingers. The fish came close, and he became entirely physically free. He was swimming now! The person inside the tiny vessel gestured at the fish, indicating for Arch to grab on one, so he did. It was soft and slippery.
Into the heart of the school they went, the brass eye of the auroral storm. The submarine structure was surprisingly large, and in all its windows there were people watching Archimedes’ arrival. The vessel docked in a hollow opening and the tethers of its leashes slid from grooves in its hull onto the outside of the larger ship. Archimedes let go of the fish and in three strokes swam to the opening. Once he was inside, doors closed behind and the newly walled room began draining of water.
When the process completed, his rescuer began opening the door of the tiny vessel and he went over to very, very, very profusely thank them. But before he could, a click followed by a voice sounded from behind his back, “Welcome, strangest of strangers, to Project Hyperborea.”
The phrase “snowflakes are a bit like universes in that no two are exactly alike” has a paradox at its core, as the existence of multiple universes precludes the uniqueness of snowflakes. No two universes are exactly alike, but they’re all made from the same history. In an infinite multiverse, the exact same intersections of possibility that create a snowflake that is utterly unique in its own universe occur infinite times. And it happens with more than just snowflakes, of course. When Archimedes turned around to address the welcomer, he was greeted by a face he’d seen many times before in similar contexts in other realities, the face of John Aril.

III
Aril was emotionally dead to begin with, there’s absolutely no doubt about that. It’d been confirmed by the head dimensional physicist, the sub-atomic nuclear welder, and all the 45 other people within a cubic kilometre radius. Aril had brought a small, specialised crew into frozen depths beyond civilisation, and they didn’t need to be the super-geniuses to realise something was very wrong with their boss announcing a 12 day break for Christmas.
He’d practically given up, shutting down all operations for nearly two weeks.
There were, in retrospect, very little scientific benefits to coming down here other than the total isolation, and that could instead be considered a detriment. The surrounding fishy lights were at first quite soothing, but eventually became just another monotonous feature of the confined space. And no wifi! All these factors wouldn’t mean as much if the Project was going well, but there hadn’t been any breakthroughs in years, so it was all quite horrible for mental health.
What Aril needed was just a single pebble to send ripples through his stagnant pond, something impossible, more impossible than a time-travelling ghost, and life gave him a reality-travelling cyborg.
Although he was the last to be informed, Aril was the first and only person to greet the newcomer. In a single welcome, he took in the stranger’s smooth artificial skin and single wedjat-ish eye. And the stranger said with a wave, “Hi, Mr. Aril! Wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“You still have the advantage over me. I’ve got no idea who you are.”
    “Archimedes,” the word cordially echoed with potential across the room, “I’m a...  traveller. Thank you so much for picking me up from that dilemma.”
    “Well Archimedes the traveller, I think there’s much we can discu-”
A line of crackling blue light slashed through the air directly behind Archimedes’ back, forming two rectangles of electricity that parted like elevator doors to reveal the space between reality, and a young woman.
    “Oh there you are Arch, we’ve been trying to find you for ages!”
    “And I’ve been waiting for ages! You wouldn’t believe what I’ve just been through. It’s been, actually, kinda deja vu. Thanks again,” he said to Aril, “and bye.”
    The cyborg stepped through the doorway, his trenchcoat still dripping ocean salt, and the portal fizzed into nothing.
    It was over before it could begin. That was it? Damn unsatisfying, but... in an invigorating, inspirational way.
When Aril walked into the next room over, where his employees were eagerly waiting to see the impossible frozen man, they were at first disappointed to see that the stranger had vanished, but with a single sentence Aril surprised them all and revealed that things were once again as they should be. “Christmas is cancelled, we’ve got work to do.”
​
Once upon an ice age, arctic winter engulfed the Earth, at first accompanied by its most unpleasant attributes. But as the snow fell on, the nicer aspects of the arctic started to show through, among them shimmering aurora, reincarnated in piscine form, and potentiality. The potentiality for cities to be built atop solid water, for a snowflake to tumble into a snowball. The smallest actions echo farther in utter desolation. Life continued, for now.