Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

  “So we use it to convey the word go,” Ortega said.

  Montgomery sighed. “Learning a completely alien language is never as easy as the entertainment vids say it is,” she said. She glanced aft at D’deen. “It took us two years to learn how to communicate with the M’nangat, remember. And they were learning our languages, had access to our computer Net, had some very powerful AIs of their own on-­line, and have had a few thousand years of experience in learning to communicate with aliens. Not only that, we share a lot in common with the M’nangat—­like environment, biochemistry, and emotional content. We’re not going to learn how to discuss physics with cuttlewhales in an afternoon.”

  Nevertheless, the language lessons continued throughout the rest of that afternoon as Walsh continued its slow descent into the Abyss. We had control of the vessel now, and one by one all of the other ship’s systems came back on-­line. We could have stopped the descent, or begun a return to the surface, but Gunny Hancock decided we were best off leaving things exactly as they were. There was no telling what the response from our giant escorts would be if we abruptly powered up and took off.

  We appeared to be at the center of a titanic conclave of the beasts. We could make out the vast and sinuous shadows coming and going out at the farthest limits of our sphere of light, and our AI estimated that there were more than a hundred cuttlewhales in fairly close proximity to the Walsh.

  “What are the pressure limits on the Walsh?” Ortega wanted to know some hours later. “We must be pretty deep by now.”

  “Four hundred sixteen kilometers,” Lloyd said.

  “That’s over thirty-­nine tons per square centimeter,” I said.

  “How much more can we stand?”

  “I don’t think anyone knows,” Hancock said. “Compressed matter is damned tough stuff. The more you squeeze it, the stronger it gets, but without internal spaces caving in.”

  “That doesn’t seem to have helped the Gykr sub,” Lloyd said. “They must have had a compressed matter hull, too, just to go as deep as they did.”

  “Ahh, there are just too many variables to draw any conclusions,” I said. “We can’t assess an alien technology, not from in here, anyway. And we don’t know how badly they were damaged, or what their pressure indices are, or even whether they use the same type of CM that we do.”

  I wasn’t a materials engineer, and didn’t know the details. But I did know that, just as with exotic ices, there were lots of different ways to squeeze atoms together.

  The question now was not so much why the Gykr sub’s hull had failed, as how much deeper we could go before ours failed as well.

  Still, the original idea had been to go into Abyssworld’s extreme depths . . . a voyage of thirty hours to reach Sierra Five, or better than twelve days to go all the way to the bottom of Abyssworld’s ocean, eleven thousand kilometers down. Walsh’s engineering specs must have allowed us pretty good odds of reaching those depths for the idea even to have been considered.

  But then, the Gykrs must have had the same engineering assurances before they’d put their egg-­shaped boat in the water.

  It was not a very encouraging thought.

  As more hours passed, I got to know Gina better. We were about the same age and the same rank—­second class—­and she seemed increasingly worried about her spur-­of-­the-­moment brainstorm that led her to ram the Gykr sub. We regrew a portion of the deck to create a seat big enough for the two of us, side by side, and ended up talking about . . . stuff. Our careers and Navy experiences . . . our families . . . where we’d been and ships to which we’d been assigned . . . anything, in short, except her decision of hours before. I learned that she’d been born and raised in California, that she’d been a military brat with a father in the Navy, a mother in the Marines, and a brother in the High Guard, that she’d been engaged to a guy in a line marriage in Iowa, but broken it off when she’d learned that one of her new husbands was a religious neo-­Ludd and something of a fanatic.

  “That’s the thing,” she told me. “If God gave us hands and minds, why would She give us the capability of changing our environment to suit us, and then turn around and forbid us from doing it?”

  “I don’t think She cares one way or another,” I said. My arm was comfortably around her shoulders now, and I wondered if Doob would have approved of my enjoying the physical proximity of his current love like this.

  Well, hell. It wasn’t like we could do anything about it. Walsh’s crew compartment was far too cramped to permit anything even approaching privacy. Right now, Ortega and Montgomery were two meters behind us, deep in a technical conversation about depth, temperature, and pressure on worlds like this one or Europa, while Hancock was wrapped up in a private in-­head exchange with D’deen.

  I played back the conversation of a moment before, and blinked. Gina had referred to God as She.

  I commented on this, and she shrugged. “We were TradGard. Pretty much old school, Goddess and God . . . though the male aspect was usually downplayed to the role of divine consort. The emphasis was on the Divine Feminine.”

  “Traditional Gardnerian?” I nodded. “My family was on the other side of the Great Split,” I admitted. “Reformed Gardnerian. I never really believed, though. Not all of it. Some of the myths were pretty silly. . . .”

  “Myths are just expressions of human psychology given story bodies,” she said. “They’re not supposed to be what we think of as ‘real.’ ”

  “Nine million women burned, hung, or tortured to death as witches during the Middle Ages? No, that’s not real. It’s anti-­church propaganda. The actual number was probably in the tens of thousands, though we’ll never know for sure.”

  “Tens of thousands was still ghastly.”

  “Of course it was. But some modern Wiccans felt the need to compete with the Holocaust of the twentieth century. As if inflating the numbers makes it worse.”

  “So what do you believe?”

  “Well . . . I don’t believe in the Chris­tian hell . . . a loving father who tortures His creations for eternity because they chose to believe the wrong things.”

  “I thought that was the devil.”

  “If God is God, He’s the one responsible, right? Unless you’re into dualism with two gods. And I don’t believe that there’s only one way to salvation . . . or even that we need salvation. We’re responsible for our own shit, our own decisions. That’s the only way that makes any sense at all of a nonsensical universe. . . .”

  Our conversation wandered on. Both of us were inclined toward the reincarnation taught by both of our respective religions, neither of us cared at all for the more organized aspects of those religions. It was interesting, I thought, that Gardenerian Wicca, which had begun centuries ago as a kind of protest against the strictures of organized religion, against the you-­must-­believe-­this-­to-­be-­saved nonsense of the Church, had itself devolved into thou shalts and thou shalt nots.

  Or maybe it had always been that way, even for the Wiccans. Maybe thou shalt not was the central essence of all human religion, and a reflection of human nature. The Ten Commandments were a splendid expression of the social contract—­of how to behave in civilized society—­but they left something to be desired when they were enforced by fear of burning for all eternity. The Witches’ Rede of the Gardnerians and others was gentler: “So long as it harms no one, including yourself, do what you will.”

  But humans being humans, even that simple statement had wandered into debate and schism. The truth of it was, so far as I could tell . . . nothing mattered beyond taking responsibility for your own actions, treating others with respect and kindness, and being the best possible human being you could be, because the gods know that bad human beings have brought more than their fair share of misery, death, and horror down upon our species.

  My thoughts, I realized, had been growing darker and more despondent th
e deeper we drifted into Abyssworld’s deeps. The one thing you can say about organized religion is that, if you believe what they tell you, there’s a certainty to the promise of an afterlife. A paradise with halos and harps . . . the charms of seventy-­two willing virgins . . . the Summerlands of the Wiccans and Spiritualists . . . all of them promise to keep believers in line, made by ­people who didn’t know, not really. If some vital aspect of self or personality did survive death, I suspected that the reality would be very, very different from the myths told to us by our religions.

  This was also, I realized, a piss-­poor time to be thinking about stuff like that. We’d survived this long, but the chances were damned good that the situation was going to change, and soon.

  What in the names of all the gods were the damned cuttlewhales waiting for, anyway? They continued to hover just beyond our hull, following our leisurely descent, watching, as the pressures outside grew greater . . . and greater . . . and inexorably greater. . . .

  The language lesson was continuing, one of the cuttlewhales projecting those weirdly shifting patterns of color and even texture across the empty area around its mouth, our AI responding, repeating the message—­whatever it was—­right back at them. Some of the other cuttlewhales, we could see, were projecting animated patterns across other parts of their bodies as well. Was that part of the same conversation? Or were they engaged in the cuttlewhale equivalent of whispered cross-­conversations in the background?

  We couldn’t possibly know.

  “Any progress, AI?” I asked, using my in-­head link with the sub.

  “I am not certain that you would call it progress,” the AI replied. “However, we do seem to have found common ground with the cuttlewhales in mathematics, which has led to a further commonality within physics. I am proceeding along lines of inquiry suggested by these aspects of shared worldview.”

  Well, one plus two equals three whether you’re a surface dweller or hundreds of kilometers underwater . . . at least for certain values of three. But how useful is that, really, in a conversation? It’s all well and good to claim that mathematics is the one, true universal language, but how the hell can you take a2 + b2 = c2 and use it to get across the concept of “Good morning,” or, more to the point in this situation perhaps, “Please don’t eat me”?

  Gina was staring at those monstrous shapes hovering outside. “Are they really made of ice, Doc?”

  “They sure are. Turns out you can crystallize water in a lot of different ways. It just takes a lot of pressure . . . and sometimes a lot of cold.”

  “Only sometimes?”

  “Yeah. Ice VI forms at just three below zero, Celsius. But you need 1.1 giga-­Pascals of pressure to do it. That’s over ten tons per square centimeter.” I glanced at the dark water outside. “That’s about what we’re experiencing now.”

  “So why isn’t there ice out there now?”

  “Probably too warm. AI? What’s the ambient water temperature?”

  “Outside temperature is at two degrees Celsius.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “See? It’s still too warm. This planet’s ocean gets warmed from two directions. The middle of dayside, at the surface, is close to boiling. And way down deep, a lot of heat must come up from the rocky core, either through volcanic vents, or else heat is generated by radiation emitted by uranium inside the rock. There may be some tide-­flexing, too, just like in Europa, as Abyssworld goes around its sun.”

  “How were they surviving up on the ice, then? Without exploding, I mean?”

  I chuckled. “Some of us have already discussed that. They certainly don’t live very long up there. And . . . we’ve been discussing the possibility that they were . . . manufactured somehow. Maybe as probes to explore the surface.”

  “Like machines?”

  “Organic machines.” I thought about the phrase, and amended it. Organic in chemistry meant carbon-­based, which the cuttlewhales decidedly were not. “Non-­carbon-­based organic machines. Damn, we don’t have the right language to describe this. Call them not-­life-­as-­we-­know it, and let it go at that. Artificial not-­life-­as-­we-­know-­it.”

  “Artificial?” Lloyd shivered. “Made by what?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s an awfully big world down here. Plenty of room for all sorts of surprises.”

  “Maybe. It’s an awfully empty world from what I’ve seen so far.”

  “Really?” I looked at the looming monstrosities outside. “Looks kind of crowded to me.”

  She punched me in the arm. “You know what I mean!”

  “Sure. On Earth, you know, the deep oceanic abyss is like a desert. Unless you happen to find a hot oceanic vent on the seafloor—­those can have astounding ecologies growing up around them—­there’s very little food . . . nothing but a thin drizzle of organics sifting down from the surface and the occasional carcass of a whale or some other sea creature too big to get devoured on the way down. When the Trieste made the first dive to the Challenger Deep, Piccard and Walsh saw a new species of shrimp . . . and what they thought was a small flounder. Scientists are still arguing over whether they saw a fish or a sea cucumber.”

  “Walsh . . . as in the guy our sub is named for?”

  “The same. Lieutenant Don Walsh, U.S. Navy . . . and a Swiss scientist and engineer, Jacques Piccard. They reached the deepest point in Earth’s ocean in January of 1960.”

  “They must have been brave men.”

  “Yeah. Big-­time. They made that dive just to prove it could be done. At around nine thousand meters, they heard a loud crack inside their pressure chamber, like a gunshot, but nothing appeared to be wrong so they continued their descent. Turned out a viewing window had cracked, which they didn’t know until they’d been on the bottom for twenty minutes. They . . . ah . . . decided to cut their visit sort at that point. They were that close to being killed.”

  “One hard bump . . .”

  “Exactly.”

  She sat up suddenly, and pointed. “Elliot . . . is that one getting closer?”

  I looked in the indicated direction. One of the monsters was slowly edging closer, approaching us directly from the bow.

  “I think—­” I started to say.

  “Out of my way, damn it!” As I stood up, the twin seat dwindled to her single pilot’s chair once again. I stepped behind her and called up my chair, slipping into it.

  “Everybody take your seats!” I called. “We may have to maneuver!”

  Montgomery stared at the approaching mass of tentacles and puckered mouth. “God in heaven . . .”

  I didn’t think God had very much to do with this thing. That mouth was opening, the tentacles spreading wide as six weirdly stalked eyes twisted inward to keep us in sight.

  I again wondered about those eyes. What wavelengths did they see? Were they, in fact, capable of infrared vision? Infrared radiation was absorbed by seawater almost immediately—­after a few centimeters, in fact, and IR wouldn’t do the creature that much good.

  But if it saw into the visible spectrum . . . why? If the things had evolved—­or been created—­down here in these lightless depths, what could possibly explain the fact of eyes that would be blind in all but the top hundred meters or so of the ocean?

  Babbling. I was babbling in my mind, a kind of stream-­of-­consciousness monologue as I tried to control my rising terror. The mouth was wide open now, and only a few tens of meters distant. With a lurch, the Walsh jerked backward away from that yawning maw, then twisted hard to port, fighting for altitude and speed. Her flanks flared out, creating lift. We were rising, flying through the water and gaining height!

  The pursuing cuttlewhale was now directly astern and below us . . . but so close that I could see eyes and tentacles extending out to all sides, reaching past us . . . enveloping us . . .

  “Give it full throttle!” Hancock ordered.

/>   “It’s sucking down water!” Lloyd cried. “We’re caught in the current!”

  And then a shadow passed across the Walsh, and things grew very, very dark indeed. . . .

  Chapter Nineteen

  There was a savage jolt, and the interior lights came up. I was expecting to see the interior of the cuttlewhale’s gullet, but the interior surface of its mouth or throat or whatever it was that was enclosing us was pressed so closely around our vessel that no light at all was escaping from the external nano, and no images were being returned. Outside the Walsh, once again, there was nothing to be seen but a complete and utterly impenetrable blackness.

  It had happened so quickly that no one had been able to respond. Ortega gave a low, quavering moan. Montgomery sobbed. Hancock swore.

  “Holy fucking Christ!”

  NOT CHRIST, D’deen wrote. BUT JONAH.

  “What the hell do you guys know about Jonah?” I asked.

  HE IS A CHARACTER, AS WELL AS THE NAME OF A BOOK, WITHIN THE COLLECTION YOU CALL THE BIBLE, the M’nangat said. A STORY SPEAKING OF THE NECESSITY OF OBEYING GOD’S WILL, AND POSSIBLY, TOO, ACCORDING TO LATER WRITINGS, IT IS AN ALLEGORY FOR A MESSIAH WHO RISES FROM THE DEAD AFTER THREE DAYS.

  “No, I mean how do you know about all of that?”

  HUMAN RELIGION DEFINES THE PSYCHOLOGY OF YOUR SPECIES, ELLIOT. HOW COULD WE HOPE TO LEARN ABOUT HUMANKIND WITHOUT CLOSELY STUDYING YOUR MYRIAD RELIGIOUS BELIEFS?

  That brought me up short. Human religion isn’t exactly something that might inspire confidence in an extraterrestrial observer. Thousands of years of wars, murders, massacres, torture, persecutions, forced conversions, witch hunts, even the doctrine of hell itself, promising torture throughout all eternity for any who did not believe . . . and all in the name of a loving God Who wants the very best for His ­people. Surely there was a better representative of Humanity than our religion?