“Dad!”
“You don’t.”
“I wasn’t… I am aware of that, Dad, and if at some point Cern and I decide to have children, we will have a discussion about the lottery. Personally I don’t think we should have any different rights than everyone else on this ship,” she said, slamming her notebook shut. The sound it created was less than satisfying. When she looked up, her father was glaring.
“Maybe so, but that’s the way it is,” he said coolly.
“Can we talk about something else?” she pleaded. It never ceased to amaze her how easily she could slip back into adolescence when she was with her father. Mrakas nodded, and seemed to relax.
“There is something else. I need you to do me a favor,” he said. Before she could respond, he continued. “I need you to get your mother.”
“We sent out an emergency recall message to all the research domes. She ignored it.”
“I need you to do it.”
“Dad, if you want to see her, just call her. I’m sure she’ll come,” she said, a lump rising in her throat. Mrakas shook his head, and from the look on his face immediately regretted it.
“That’s not what I mean. She knows what condition I’m in, I’ve spoken to her enough. That’s all fine. I need you to go out there and put her on a transport. Her and all her research. She’s close to something. Something important. Something that can’t be destroyed or lost. She needs to be here. She’s going to fight you, but you need to do whatever it takes to bring her here. Am I clear?” he asked, gripping her forearm. She nodded. “You need to act quickly. Pop isn’t going to wait.”
She wondered if he meant that both ways.
Proctor Jills had long ago commandeered her father’s office, which was fine with Ralla. It would have been unprecedented for someone of her tenure to have an office of that size. After some shuffling around, she got one conveniently close to both her cabin and the Council Chambers. There was no doubt in her mind that at some point in the far past it had been a closet. An actual closet for one of the staterooms that made up this part of the ship. Those staterooms were gone, split into smaller rooms, but this closet had remained as someone’s idea of a reasonable space. Oddly, she liked it.
It was lined with wood veneer, giving it a certain warmth that much of the Uni lacked. The desk half filled the tiny space. Above it were shelves, the highest of which she could only reach by standing on the desk. The other wall was open, but her desk left no room for another table, or even chairs. So she used what little empty space there was to spread out papers, or to lie down when her back ached from too much sitting. Out of nowhere, the thought occurred to her that if Thom lay with his head against one wall, his feet would touch the other.
She wrote a short mail to her mother, as a final plea, but deleted it. Instead, she logged into her terminal and accessed the part of the system only Councilmembers could view. After searching for a few moments, she got the info she was looking for, and headed out.
If there was a time to appear sober, this was it, and Thom was failing miserably. He wasn’t sure what she had said, but he was sure the entire bar had gone silent to hear her say more. She stood at the end of the bar, fuming. Her eyes were wide, her nostrils were flaring, her fists were clenched… actually, she looked kind of silly. He put down the drink in his hand, and wobbled to his feet.
“Ralla, I have toomorrrrow…”
“Forget it,” she spat, and stormed out. He thought better of following her, and thought better of not finishing his drink.
As Ralla entered, she noticed Cern smiling at the waitress, politely declining another refill of water. As she moved aside, he saw Ralla and waved to her. Ralla dropped into the chair, slammed her notebook on the table, and sat with her eyes closed, soaking in several deep breaths. Cern said nothing, but she could feel him waiting patiently for her to finish her mini-meditation. When she did and her eyes opened, he smiled patiently. Ralla composed herself and returned the smile.
“I’m sorry. I’m so late.”
“It’s OK, I know you’re busy. From the look on your face, I get the feeling I need to punch someone.”
“No, no. Someone just really let me down when I needed them. Again.”
Cern nodded, not really understanding.
“Are we still on for dinner tonight?”
“I’m not sure. I’m just so busy.”
“OK, OK. I don’t mean to push. I just hardly get to see you anymore.”
“I know.”
“Maybe there’s something I can help with?” he asked.
“No. It’s OK. Look, I don’t really want to talk about it. Thank you, though. Thanks,” she smiled, and reached across the table, taking his hands in hers.
“Dinner, then?”
“Can we have lunch before we figure out dinner?”
They were sitting on the terrace, overlooking the Garden, in one of the few restaurants with such a view. There was a breeze, which made the soggy air more tolerable. She closed her eyes and let the smells and the light wash over her. Calming her. For that moment, the biggest decision pressing upon her was what to order for lunch. For a moment, she was alone in the breeze. In the air. Soaring around the Garden. Wind fanning her face. Exhaling. Exhaling. Exhaling. Then slowly she was aware of the sounds of utensils on plates. Of glasses clinking. Of background chatter. Of the seat below her, the table under her arms. Of Thom’s hands in hers.
Cern’s hands! She opened her eyes with such jolt she was sure her hands flinched. Cern didn’t seem to have noticed, reading the menu between his outstretched arms. She let his hands go, and opened her own menu.
That little mistake, perhaps confusion, was what did it. Cern had been a beautiful companion for years, but with that one jolt, she knew it was over. Ralla still wasn’t sure what she felt towards Thom, but she knew what she didn’t feel towards Cern. Food was ordered on autopilot. She didn’t listen as Cern spoke about his day, about his father’s increasingly vocal desire for him to take over the family business. In other words, the same conversation they’d had yesterday and all the other yesterdays. But now she didn’t care. Suddenly she couldn’t be done with lunch fast enough. Ralla knew there was nothing he had done wrong, nothing specific, but any residual feelings she’d had for him drained away over marinated fish and vegetables.
More than anything she just wanted to be free of it all. Of him. Of their relationship. To be on her own. Maybe Thom, maybe not. But for now, free. Her life had progressed to someplace new with the Council, much as the ship itself had moved to a new stage with the coming war. Even so, this was going to hurt. Better fast than slow; she owed him that at least. She waited till they’d finished their food.
“Cern, I can’t do dinner tonight.”
“Tomorrow, then,” he said, obviously not getting it.
“No, Cern. I think we’re done.”
“Huh?” he replied, taking a moment to register what she had said. “What? Are you serious?”
“Yes. Please, I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you, but... I need to be on my own.”
“You’re breaking up with me? Here?”
It occurred to her suddenly they were still at the restaurant. She’d been so focused on what to say, she hadn’t really considered where she was saying it.
“But we’re so perfect for each other,” he continued. “I’ve always taken care of you. My family thinks of you as one of their own. Have you discussed this with your father?”
Exactly the wrong thing to say at exactly the wrong time. This was getting out of hand.
“Cern, I’m sorry. You’re not what I need anymore.”
With that, she left. On her way back to her cabin, emotions swirled. Sad, partially, more than she had expected to me. Unhappy she’d had to hurt Cern. Remorseful at throwing away so many years with someone who had never mistreated her. Had always cared after her.
By the time she reached her cabin, though, the melancholy was obscured by the invigorating relief of freedom. Hope, for
the first time in a long time. It felt like she was shedding off the last hook holding her to her former life. The life of being someone’s daughter, of being someone who needed to be taken care of.
And as that thought occurred to her, she realized what she needed to do next.
III
Somewhere into the first hour, Thom stopped apologizing. The apologies started the instant he opened his cabin door and saw her standing there, the afternoon after their little one-sided spat in the bar. He continued apologizing the next morning when they met at the bay. It was as lopsided a conversation as their last: him pleading forgiveness, her offering nothing but cool, detached instruction in reply. As she sat in silence in the back of the transport, his mea culpa finally came to a quick halt. The trip was over a day and a half, and if she wasn’t going to forgive him for having fun on his first real day off in months, then so be it. What was worse was that she seemed distracted as much as pissed. Well, whatever. He called up a vid on the computer, sent the audio to some headphones, and leaned back in the cockpit chair. It was going to be a long trip... for some.
There was a strict quiet-running rule in effect for the entire fleet, so they had to proceed at partial power and spend time moving between different thermal layers, occasionally zig-zagging to throw off any potential followers. Full speed, in a straight line, the trip wouldn’t have taken more than sixteen hours. Knowing that somehow made the long and winding trek that much more unbearable. Despite her current attitude, Thom knew the trip was important, even if the explicit reason behind it was a mystery. Heading out alone to some research station in the middle of nowhere, even if the Pop fleet seemed to be halfway around the planet, was not something that she would do on a whim.
By mid-afternoon on their second day, they started seeing light in the murky distance. Less than an hour later, they were almost blinded by it. The official name of their destination was Ocean Research Station 24, but to those who worked there it was called Vertigo or Verti. It was built 22 years earlier, and if its existence hadn’t been classified, it would have been considered quite a technological marvel for the citizens of the Uni to be proud of. It was perched atop the Grengen Crevasse, a near bottomless gash in the sea floor that ran north-south for nearly a quarter of the hemisphere. Vertigo was above the deepest part, straddling the east and west cliff faces. Like a giant glass slug, it formed a bridge across one of the deepest depths of the planet.
It was mostly a metal framework, a hump-backed, flat-bottomed, tube that arched over the Crevasse. Most of the floor was, thankfully, standard metal deckplates. The designers, though, apparently oblivious or psychologically deviant—Thom couldn’t decide which—had built several areas where the floor was the same transparent permiglass as the walls and ceiling. Staring past your feet into the seemingly infinite void was something that only amused a certain sort of person.
The station was fairly narrow, and not that long given its location. The Grengen got wider as it meandered south, but this point was close to its narrowest. It probably wouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to walk from one end of the station to the other, and maybe 30 seconds from side to side. It was blindingly bright in the otherwise black surroundings, casting long shadows on the sea floor on either side, but the light vanished in the long black darkness below.
“Yep, creepy,” Thom said aloud. Ralla had leaned into the cockpit a moment before to watch the approach.
“Yep,” she replied.
There were two small bays at either end of the station where the arches of the frame lanced out and buried themselves deep into the bedrock. Thom threaded his way between them, looking out along the bottom of the station. It wasn’t far before the station continued, but the sea floor didn’t.
The pool wasn’t much larger than the transport itself. Calling it a bay was a bit of a stretch, as there was no crane, no real support equipment. It was open to the rest of the station. From the cockpit of the sub as it floated on the surface of the pool, he could look down the length of the station. If it weren’t for the low stack of orangey-yellow buildings in the middle, he could have seen the pool at the other end.
There was a metallic clang as stairs were pushed against the hull, serving as egress and to secure the sub to the station. Ralla was already at the door, and Thom could see as he left the cockpit a look of disappointment on her face as she looked out from the open hatch. Thom stepped out and watched a young tech offering a hand to Ralla as she stepped down to the deck. Whoever she was expecting to see, it wasn’t this guy. She uttered a question that Thom couldn’t hear, and immediately headed towards the buildings with a purpose. Thom nodded at the technician, who gave him a blank stare and said nothing.
All of that purpose that Ralla exuded, Thom himself completely lacked. He had nowhere to be and nothing to do.
“Got a place to eat around here?”
The tech pointed towards the buildings.
“Thanks. Wouldn’t have guessed that.”
The lab was a square building in the exact center of the station, with an open space in the middle that could almost be called a courtyard. Instead of grass or benches, the space had a permiglass floor surrounding an elaborate rig of winches and whirring boxes at the very center. The lab was open to the courtyard on all sides, and techs came and went from different areas of the lab, some checking the rig, others carrying samples in large vials.
The young woman who had led her in from the door—Ralla wasn’t sure of her position—pointed across the courtyard to a long table packed with equipment tucked into the far corner. There was one person in the center of this table, hunched over a microscope, back to the world, surrounded by esoteric equipment that seemed almost comically, stereotypically “scientific” to Ralla, like set dressings from a bad science fiction vid.
Ralla kept her head up as she strode across the courtyard, doing her best not to look down. She couldn’t help herself when she got to the center. From below the rig a thin filament dropped down from the station far into the distance. Farther than she could see, which somehow made the whole thing worse. She fought back a wave of nausea and kept going.
“Hi, mom.”
The figure remained hunched over the microscope, and for a second Ralla wasn’t sure if the other woman had heard her. Finally, her mother spun in her chair and opened her arms wide. They embraced, and for a moment Ralla felt safe and relaxed.
“Give me just a second to finish up some notes,” she said, turning back around and scribbling on a notepad. Ralla stood awkwardly behind her mother while the rest of the lab continued at a seemingly frenetic pace. “You know, I only got word you were coming this morning. Why the surprise visit?” Ralla’s mother asked, still hunched over her notes.
“Dad asked me to come.”
“Did he?” The question sounded almost rhetorical.
“Mom, can we go somewhere and talk?”
“We can talk here, sweetie; my people are far too busy to care about what we’re talking about.”
“That’s the thing mom: why aren’t you packing up? We have to get away from here. There’s a war going on and you’re defenseless out here.”
“Nope, that’s not it. Try again.”
“Huh?”
“That’s not why you’re here,” she said to her notepad. Ralla made a face at her back.
“I’m here because Dad asked me to come get you.”
“Has he gotten worse?”
“Yes, but…”
“Well OK, then,” the older woman turned. Her long gray hair was tied back in a ponytail, which seemed to move on its own. “Sweetie, I made peace with your father’s illness a long time ago. I made peace with your father long before that. This is where I need to be. You can’t imagine how important our work is here.”
“Actually, that is why Dad asked me to come get you. Because what you’re doing is so important. He wants you to be safe.”
“Sweetie, don't worry your head about this,” her mom said. Each time she said “Sweetie,” Ralla
got a little more annoyed. “You don't understand, we can’t do this work on the Universalis. If your father is having a fit of nostalgia and wants to see me again, that’s sweet. But it’s also selfish. I need to be here, and he should know that.”
“No, mom...”
“I’m sorry you came all this way, but we’re not leaving. I’ll be taking a break for supper, if you want to join me in the Mess. Always good to see you, Sweetie. It’s been too long. But I need to get back to work. I’m sorry.” And with that, Ralla’s mother buried her face in her microscope, leaving Ralla standing very alone in the crowded and busy lab.
“You want a drink?” the bartender asked Thom. After the briefest of pauses, he shook his head.
“Yes, but just some water, please.” The bartender put the glass of water on Thom’s tray, and he made his way to a table in the middle of the low-ceilinged common area. He noticed on the wall opposite the entrance a sign that read “MESS” in big letters, then “Leave it like you found it” painted carefully in red underneath. Thom hadn’t gotten more than two bites into his sandwich before he saw Ralla enter. She also got a tray of food, but ordered two tall, though skinny, glasses of beer from the bartender. As she sat down across from him, he could tell her mood had clearly not improved since arrival. She seemed more annoyed than anything.
“Well, cheers, Thom. This has been a complete waste of time,” she said after depositing one of the glasses on Thom’s tray. They hoisted their glasses, but Thom took just a sip while Ralla downed the whole glass. After a moment’s hesitation he put his glass on her tray. She angrily bit into her sandwich. Thom thought better of asking her what was going on.
“So, what is it they do here? I’d never heard of this place before yesterday.”
Between bites, Ralla answered.
“It’s an ocean research station, though that much I’m sure you figured out. What they’re testing is the water from the surface, water at this level, which is roughly the depth the Uni cruises at, and from several different depths below, all the way down to the bottom.”
Undersea Page 11
