A few years from now, in a world similar to ours, there exists a sort of “depression plague” that people refer to simply as “The Grey.”
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Endless Vessel, a science fiction thriller by Charles Soule—publishing with Harper Perennial on June 6.
A few years from now, in a world similar to ours, there exists a sort of “depression plague” that people refer to simply as “The Grey.” No one can predict whom it will afflict, or how, but once infected, there’s no coming back.
A young Hong Kong based scientist, Lily Barnes, is trying to maintain her inner light in an increasingly dark world. The human race is dwindling, and people fighting to push forward are increasingly rare. One day, Lily comes across something that seems to be addressing her directly, calling to her, asking her to follow a path to whatever lies at its end. Is this the Endless Vessel to happiness? She leaves her life behind and sets out through time and space to find out.
HONG KONG.
BIG WAVE BAY.
22°14’27.5″N, 114°14’47.4″E
Fish and barbecue and seaweed on the breeze. The scents of Shek O, a small oceanside village at the far southeast tip of Hong Kong Island; a strip of weekend beach bounded by little clusters of easy restaurants and sunscreen shops. Swimmers bobbing in the waves and, farther out, windsurfers whipping along. A good place, was Lily’s assessment; nice to think good places still existed.
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14 Big Wave Bay Road was a three-story building, once white with black shutters, now grey with shutters a slightly darker shade of grey. Window box aircon units protruded wartily from several windows, shuddering and dripping. Cracks spidered the concrete walls, and vines speckled with orange-red blossoms crawled up one side of the building before curtaining off the roof.
The building was obviously pre-handover, a remnant of Hong Kong’s century and a half as a British colony, an era ended in 1997. Lily was shocked to see something so ancient still standing. Hong Kong constantly, obsessively remade itself. If a building wasn’t historically significant or otherwise notable, it was just a matter of time before it was demolished in favor of a condo tower. It was one of the city’s unwritten laws. But somehow, Number Fourteen remained, standing moderately tall, this anomaly, this anachronism.
A sign to one side of the front door on a tarnished brass plaque: coriander & associates, ltd. Below it, the same symbol Lily had seen on the contract at CarbonGo, an intermeshed tangle of infinity symbols.
Progress, she thought, feeling a little thrill.
The door was unlocked. Lily pushed it open and stepped inside, the sweat chilling on her skin at the transition into air-conditioning. She pulled a thin sweater from her satchel and slipped it on; she always brought layers with her for exactly this purpose. Hong Kong could change from oven to igloo with a single step indoors. She looked around, her eyes adjusting to the interior light.
Most of the ground floor was an open space, and Lily’s first impression was Museum. Her second: Art gallery; third: Charity shop. Finally: This is some truly weird shit. The odors were dust and leather and very old floorboards. Framed items covered the walls, and display tables and glass-domed pedestals stood here and there, their contents confounding, impossible.
The display nearest the door contained what Lily thought at first had to be a flower, inside something like a dusty terrarium. The thing had the correct shape and structure—tiny purple blossoms on green stems clustered together into little balls like dandelion fluff. But if it was a flower, she’d never seen anything like it. It was bizarre. As she stepped closer, the purple flowers shimmered to red, then bright yellow. Lily considered whether it was an LED, electronics, but on closer examination… no. It was definitely a plant, definitely alive. Tiny insects—probably insects; she really had no idea—flitted around the blossoms like gossamer pinprick angels. And all of it under glass.
Lily was no botanist, but she knew plants respired, and it didn’t seem like that would be possible in a sealed terrarium… though “terrarium” suggested earth, and this thing was growing out of soil that looked like a pile of metal shavings. No earth she knew.
The next display was a glass-topped table, its treasures hidden inside—all no less odd. A crystal ball. A strip of thick white cloth with a ragged, rust-tinged hole in it. A long metal rod, cracked along its middle, with a trigger assembly on one end and a strange, deflated sac just below it. Lily could not help but think of testicles—but she had absolutely no idea what the device might do.
On a podium past the table rested what looked like an old pulp magazine. The cover was ragged and torn, the date on the cover November 1947. The title was mostly missing; it read Chronicles of the Laz and then it cut off. The cover image, what remained of it, depicted a rocky red shore and storm-tossed waves and part of what looked like a person in a space suit, but… scaled like chain mail? That was all she could glean from the cover, and she didn’t want to risk opening an eighty-year-old publication lest it crumble in her hands.
Lily moved on to the framed pieces on the wall. She stopped before a photograph of an insubstantial shape shrouded in fog. It was impossible to tell the size of the thing—there was nothing for scale—but it felt both man-made and huge. If ever a thing deserved the term “looming,” it was this angular, irregular object.
Another photo, this time a black-and-white image of a small group having tea around a table set up in a jungle meadow, servants in the background. It felt like a safari outing from the Victorian era: pith helmets, puttees and so on. Not really so unusual. Any British citizen would be familiar with similar images from museums and history books, remnants of the vanished Empire. But Lily had never encountered such an image where one of the subjects looked to be made of solid metal. It was hard to tell due to the monochrome nature of the shot, but Lily Barnes, material sciences engineer, knew her metals, and she would have bet the figure’s weight in gold that it actually was gold.
Mysteries and oddities in all directions. A circus sideshow mysteriously assembled inside a beachfront villa in Shek O.
The next framed item was not a photograph, but a legal document. Very old, the paper browned and mottled, brittle and weathered. Lily bent for a closer look. The document bore a date from about two and a half centuries back. It was numbered 0045 and covered in ornate handwritten script in what seemed like far too many fonts, like the person who had inscribed the thing desperately wanted everyone who saw it to step back and murmur to themselves, Goodness. That there is calligraphy.
It read:
THESE ARE TO CERTIFY THAT EUGENIA GREAVES IS ENTITLED TO ONE SHARE IN THE CAPITAL, OR JOINT STOCK, OF CALDER & CALDER, INCORPORATED, TRANSFERABLE AT THEIR OFFICE ONLY, PERSONALLY, OR BY ATTORNEY.
Then a seal stamped into the parchment, two ornate versions of the letter C, one reversed so it faced the other, embossed into a raised circle of bright blue wax, and more words: WITNESS THE SEAL OF THE COMPANY, THE NINTH DAY OF JULY, 1790.
It was signed by the company’s secretary, someone she thought was named Milton Tenenbaum, if she read the signature correctly.
“May I help you?” someone said from behind her.
Lily turned, caught, irrationally certain she was about to be arrested for her many crimes against CarbonGo. But the person who had spoken was not a black-clad member of the HKPD. It was a tall man, dark-skinned and middle-aged, in an orange suit with a yellow shirt and a bright blue tie. Most would have looked like a clown in such a getup, but this man possessed and occupied it utterly.
“Oh,” Lily said, whipping up a smile. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude. The door was open.”
“Yes, it was,” the man said. “But in order to walk through it, you had to choose it out of all the doors in the entire world. And then you chose again—to enter without knocking. Which suggests two important questions to me. Two very important questions.”
He inclined his head politely.
“Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?”
Lily liked this man.
“I’m Lily Barnes,” she said, holding out her hand.
“I’m Mr. Coriander,” the man said. He shook her hand with a dry grip, a brief clasp and release. “I am in the midst of a busy day, and this is a private place of business. If you don’t mind…”
“Of course,” Lily said. “But wait. I’ve answered your first question. Don’t you want to know the answer to the second?”
Mr. Coriander considered.
“I suppose I do,” he said. “To be honest, my life is full of unanswered questions. Built around them, in a way. It would be nice to have one go in the other direction for once.”
Lily thought this was an entirely bizarre thing to say, but very much in keeping with everything she’d encountered since she stepped through the door of 14 Big Wave Bay.
She was still standing in front of the framed ancient stock certificate and gestured to it.
“I’m curious about this company, actually. Calder & Calder. Can you tell me anything about it?”
Mr. Coriander stepped up next to her, peering at the document as if he’d never seen it before.
“I’m sorry, no,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s just decoration. Came with the building.”
“I see,” Lily said. “This used to be their office a long time ago. They were a shipping company active in the 1800s.”
“Fascinating,” Mr. Coriander said, not sounding particularly fascinated.
“You work for Coriander & Associates, Ltd.?” Lily asked, realizing the stupidity of her question as soon as she asked it.
Coriander looked at her. His face betrayed nothing, but his eyes… they had taken on a certain gleam.
“I should think it would be obvious that I do,” he answered. “All my life, in fact.”
“Well, you might be interested to know that Calder & Calder had offices all over the world, in major ports. Every single one is now occupied by you guys. Coriander & Associates. And you really don’t know anything about them?”
The shine in Coriander’s eyes sharpened.
“May I ask you a question, my dear?” he said. Ordinarily the familiarity would bother Lily, but the “dear” fit this man the same way as the orange suit. He meant nothing by it.
“Sure,” she said.
“Have you, by chance, encountered something amazing?” Coriander asked. “Did something happen to you that should not have happened, and now you can’t let it go until you understand how and why it could have come to pass? And you found little hints or clues that ultimately led you here?”
Coriander was smiling. Lily did not know him. She was not in a position to trust him, and the stakes were high. And yet…
Her eyes flickered past the odd man toward the weird objects displayed in the room, this space pregnant with impossibility. She’d examined at most a tenth, each more bizarre than the last.
She slipped her satchel from her shoulder and set it gently down on the nearest glass-topped table. From within, she pulled out Danny Chang’s miracle carbon scrubber, its case still open, its inner workings still smashed and unsalvageable. Of course she’d stolen it from the office. Of course she had. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Lily presented the device to Mr. Coriander, rotating it, showcasing all its alien glory.
“This device could solve the climate change crisis,” she said. “I work in that field. I’m an engineer. The technology here is decades beyond where we currently are. Maybe a century. It’s… broken now, but I’ve seen it work. It’s real. I have no idea where it came from, and I need to find who built it.”
Mr. Coriander raised an eyebrow. His body language shifted. He now seemed delicately tensed, focused, readying his faculties like someone about to perform brain surgery, or wrestle a crocodile into submission.
“May I?” he said, gesturing at the device.
“Be my guest,” she said. “You can’t bang it up any worse.” For at least a minute, Coriander gently examined the scrubber, moving its components aside with his fingertips, lifting out broken bits and holding them up close to his eye, squinting. He oohed and aahed over certain elements that seemed to mean a great deal to him.
He replaced a tiny coil of sponge wire back in the case, then looked at Lily and crooked a finger at her.
“Come with me, if you please.”
Coriander led the way toward the back of the room across squeaking floorboards, then disappeared through an open door. Lily followed him into a small, immaculate office space furnished completely in antiques. Fountain pens and inkwells and leatherbound ledgers and a worn, brutally carpentered wooden desk that could have stopped a charging rhino. Coriander stood behind it, dialing a number on a rotary phone. It looked ancient, a vulval pink plastic confection Lily guessed was from the 1970s or ’80s.
He held the handset to his ear, waited a moment, then spoke.
“It’s me,” he said. “I believe we may have another Intercession.”
He paused.
“Yes,” he said. “Just get here.”
Mr. Coriander hung up the telephone, took a deep breath, then released it. He looked up at Lily, smiled, a broad, warm grin, and Lily realized how much she missed expressions of genuine happiness, how rarely she saw them in this world even among people who had thus far evaded the Grey.
He walked across his office, stopping right in front of her. He took both of her hands in his, clasping them with a warmth and intimacy that was not warranted but she could not deny.
“Ms. Barnes,” Coriander said, “welcome to the Wonder Path.”
Excerpted from The Endless Vessel, copyright © 2023 by Charles Soule.
