The Abyss

by Orson Scott Card

  Lindsey saw only the patterns of light on the equipment in front of her. She turned slowly, still completely unafraid - and saw before her a machine. Was it what she had seen before? The body of it was smooth, slightly arched, like a leaping fish - but it was no fish. At the front there was an opening like the front of a jet engine - but it was no engine. Inside was a circle with bright points radiating outward, like a child's drawing of the sun; it was spinning. Light danced inside it.

  Then it turned sideways. Its shell - or skin, or body - was transparent, like perfect crystal glass. Colors shone in patterns on the skin as it moved, as if it were reflecting some outward source of light. But there was no light except what came from inside the thing. Structures of different colors, glowing, connecting inside like in a machine - or was it a biological system? She couldn't tell, nor could she guess what its purpose was.

  But it was beautiful. She marveled at its perfect grace.

  She admires it. She wants to know and understand it. When she sees without fear, then she can love.

  The builders remembered this thought, because they knew it was important. Fear was the great controller of human beings. Fear was bringing them to the brink of war. Fear drove them away from each other, kept most of them from risking anything in their lives. There was good evolutionary reason for fear to be so strong in them - they could die, not just in the body, but in the memory as well. Of course they feared death. If we died so completely, we would fear it, too.

  But with the fear removed, the true self remained behind. Lindsey was filled with eagerness to see more, to understand all. She was ready.

  Still, the builders were careful. The sight of a builder in her natural shape had frightened Jammer. And Lindsey had a particular affinity for machines. So the builder Lindsey would meet would be inside a glider, not in her natural shape. Again, it would be like a machine, but this time a machine filled with intelligence.

  The porter was reluctant to leave, sensing that Lindsey desired him to stay - though it received this information more from the builders than from Lindsey herself, It drifted backward, then rose up out of sight.

  Lindsey's gaze followed the porter as it disappeared. Then she saw a sight that took her breath away - a large, smooth shape rising upward slowly from below. It was bright with inner light, its surface smooth and perfect, its shape gracefully undulant. Interior lights moved and danced within it. It was the light of life, of thought, of memory. It was transparent, its walls so perfectly clear that they were almost invisible. There was no building material known that could be so transparent and yet so strong that it could hold such a structure without twisting or shattering.

  No architect or engineer could have designed this thing. It had no place in the natural order of the Earth. She knew at once that this was the work of a stranger, a newcomer - but not an interloper. Not an intruder. It would not interfere with her or any other human, if it could help it. It lived in the deepest part of the sea, where human beings could never go. There was no enmity between humanity and these things. These people.

  How did she know this? She had no idea - but she was certain of it. It was beyond question. Like the way she knew that she could reach out her hand and touch it. It was a dangerous, unreasonable thing to do yet she had no doubt that she could do it. And she wanted to, with all her heart. It would be unbearable to see such beauty and leave it untouched.

  So she laid her hand against its winglike arch as it slowly rotated over her. The surface was smooth and hard - it did not yield under her fingers. And yet it glided by under her hand utterly without friction - she saw it moving, yet could not feel its motion.

  What are you? Who built you? Who is inside you? And then a desire she remembered from childhood, the desire that had kept her with her father, forsaking all the other attractions of youth: Teach me how to make such things.

  Plenty of time for that, she thought. There's no hurry. Now that we've met, there's plenty of time. You can tell me all your memories. Voyages across the endless abyss of space, the hot flaring light of suns, the exquisite relief of sinking down again into the cool deeps of a new sea, there to begin again. You are builders, I know that builders like me, only far older and more experienced. Our bodies are so utterly different that we can only meet here, in this difficult place; but our minds are not so unlike that we can't communicate.

  I wish that you would speak to me.

  Then she remembered her camera. The ROV's video wasn't working, of course, with the power down, but she had an underwater camera that was purely mechanical. She could take a picture, she could show the others; then they'd know that these creatures were nothing to fear. She fumbled with the settings - hurry, hurry, it's leaving.

  As the glider sank down into the canyon, she finally got set for a picture. But just as she was ready to click the shutter, the small porter darted past her from behind, startling her. She completely missed the shot of the glider. Well, at least she could take a picture of this one, though it refused to hold still, zigzagging down the canyon. She got one shot, only a second before it disappeared.

  My God, we're not alone down here, she thought. We've come down so far that almost nothing lives here, only to find out that even farther down, at the bottom of this trench, there live the most beautiful creatures with the most perfect machines on this earth.

  The lights came back up. The communications systems sputtered back to life. Little Geek woke up and arose from the seafloor, stirring up silt. And there was Catfish, coming around the flank of the rig, looking for her.

  "You better not say you missed that," Lindsey said.

  Catfish was baffled. "Missed what?"

  Never mind. She knew now. She had a picture. They would see.

  It was only partly a success. They had spoken to Lindsey, and she had understood. The problem was that she didn't know they had spoken. Because they communicated by directly manipulating memory and emotion at a chemical and electrical level, the builders' messages entered Lindsey's brain exactly the way her own thoughts and feelings did. So she thought their messages were her own ideas. She trusted them, believed them, but thought it was intuition, deduction, something inside herself.

  Humans aren't used to receiving others' thoughts directly, the builders told each other. They can't taste the flavor that tells us when a thought comes from someone else. So how can they possibly recognize someone else's mental voice inside their heads? Worse, how can they distinguish between their own thoughts and those we give them? We told her to be at peace. We told her where we come from, who we are, what we do. But she decided for herself that our works were beautiful, that she wanted us to teach her. Yet if she knew that some of her thoughts came from us, she'd be unable to tell where our messages left off and her own desires began.

  And they discovered other things about her, too. They could take away her fear, but that wasn't the only barrier between one human being and another. From her memories they could see the countless times in her life when she had separated herself from other people, not from fear, but because of her intense concentration on the things she cared about. Human beings were capable of deliberately not knowing each other, shutting others out and cutting them off; and she didn't see this as a tragic loss, a bitter loneliness. She saw it as a necessity, the only way to concentrate on her work, to accomplish anything.

  So it won't be enough for us to remove fear, even if we could do that in the open air, where these humans live.

  Then there's no hope of changing them. We might as well begin our preparations to leave, and let them destroy each other. It isn't our fault they would have done it eventually, since they refuse to belong to each other.

  No. We can't dismiss them all so easily. We've still seen only a few of them. Unlike us, their utterly separate memories mean that each person is different from others; knowing one or even a hundred doesn't mean we know them all.

  We have time. We can watch. We can see what they do, see if there's some hope for them. But we'll surely be di
sappointed.

  Chapter 11

  Crazy People

  Lindsey told them what happened, all that she saw. Then, when the film was developed, it was there in the picture, just like she said. She had caught it.

  Unfortunately, it looked like a little squiggle of light surrounded by pitch black.

  Bud teased her about it, of course. "Great shot, Lins."

  "What did you do?" asked Sonny. "You drop your dive light?"

  It was too far away to see clearly - what did they expect, a studio-quality portrait, with a pretty painted background? Go ahead, tease me. I still got the picture. "Come on, you guys, come on. Now that's the small one, the smaller one, right here. You can see how it's kind of zigging around."

  "Yeah," said Bud. "Whatever it is."

  Maybe he wasn't teasing. Maybe he really didn't believe she saw anything. "I'm telling you what it is. You're just not hearing. There's something down there. Something - not us."

  She looked around at them. Nobody was buying it. Not that they were calling her a liar. Or crazy. Not yet.

  "You could be more... specific?" said Catfish.

  Bud tried to answer - with a joke, of course. "Something that zigs."

  But Lindsey wasn't going to stand for that. Bud was not going to handle this by making it a joke. It was real, and he was going to have to deal with the reality. She barely let him finish what he was saying. "Not us," she insisted. "Not human. Get it? Something nonhuman, but intelligent."

  They looked around at each other. Hippy was smiling. Because he liked the idea? Or because he thought she was crazy?

  "A non-terrestrial intelligence," Lindsey said.

  Oh, Hippy was loving it. "A Non-Terrestrial Intelligence," he said. "NTIs. Oh, man, that's better than UFOs. Oh, but that works too. Underwater Flying Objects."

  Catfish finally got it. "Are we talkin' little space friends here?"

  "Hell yeah!" said Hippy. "Hot rods of the gods! Right, Lins? No, no, really! It could be NTIs. The CIA's known about them forever. They abduct people all the time, man. There was once - "

  The more Hippy said, the stupider he made it all sound.

  "Hippy, do me a favor," said Lindsey. "Stay off my side."

  Bud wasn't laughing anymore. He touched her arm, drew her aside. "Will you step into my office, please."

  She followed him. Hoping that this meant he was about to take this seriously.

  He was. He was downright grim. "Jesus, Lins - "

  She didn't want him to humor her, or lecture her, or handle her. She wanted him to hear her. "Bud, come on, something really important is happening here."

  But he wasn't accepting it. "I'm trying to keep this situation under control, and I can't allow you to cause this kind of hysteria - "

  "Who's hysterical? Nobody's hysterical!"

  "Shh," he whispered.

  He was right. She was getting agitated. He wouldn't listen if she didn't stay calm. So she forced herself to take a deep breath, relax a little.

  When he saw she was listening, he said, "All I'm saying is when you're hanging on by your fingernails, you don't go waving your arms around."

  She knew that. She knew that Bud was the best at keeping people calm, getting them to work smoothly together. But this time, just this once, he needed to stop being responsible for creating everybody else's reality and let somebody else change reality for him. "Look, I saw something!" she said. "I'm not going to go back in there and say I didn't see it when I did. I'm sorry. Please."

  He turned his head, then faced her again, squinting at her the way he did when he was trying not to be angry. "You are the most stubborn woman I ever knew."

  It was true, and at this moment she regretted it. All their time together she'd been stubborn over everything. Even the things that didn't matter. So that now, when it was important, he didn't think she was insisting on this because it was absolutely true. He thought she was insisting on it because she was Lindsey, because she insisted on having her way in everything. For the first time she realized the price she paid for so rarely being willing to bend. She didn't know how to make him see the difference. Except to admit the truth. "Yes, I am," she said. "But I need you to believe me right now."

  She could see it in his face he'd never heard her talk like that before. He'd never heard her say she needed anything. He wanted to believe her. And she knew that it wasn't easy, either. A smudge of light on a photograph - what proof was that? None at all - unless he believed what she told him about where the camera was pointed when she took the picture. Unless he believed that she actually saw what she said she saw, touched the thing, the creature, the person. It all came down to whether he had faith in her.

  "Now come on," she said, "look at me, come on. Am I stressed out? Do I have any symptoms of pressure sickness, any tremors, slurred speech?"

  He thought about it. He sounded almost defeated when he answered. "No."

  "No," she echoed. "Bud, this is me, Lindsey. OK? You know me better than anybody in the world." She didn't know how to make it any plainer. She was begging. And he knew it. He was looking at her with his eyes soft and caring, like so many times back when things were still good between them. He wanted to give her what she asked for. He'd have to believe her now. "Now watch my lips. I saw these things. I touched one of them."

  But that wasn't all, that wasn't enough to explain what it meant, what it was like. "And it wasn't some clunky steel can like we would build. It glided. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Oh, God, I wish you'd been there."

  It was the first time it dawned on her that this was true. She really did wish he'd been there, and not just because then he would believe her. It was because she knew that he would have felt the same things she did. He would have loved it, the way she did. "It was a machine. It was a machine, but it was alive. Like a... dance of light." He would have understood all this if he'd been there. Because there really were moments when they saw as if from the same eyes.

  "Please, you have to trust me," she said. And maybe he would have. Except that she suddenly realized that it wasn't just what she saw that she wanted him to trust. It was what she knew about it. How did she know that the creature was good, that she was safe, that there was no danger? How could she be so certain of that? "I don't think they mean us any harm, I don't know how I know that."

  He squinted, looked away, twisted his head. She'd gone too far, expecting him to trust her conclusions as well as what she actually saw. But it was just as true. Just as true and much more important. "It's just a feeling," she said.

  She'd lost him. "Jesus," he said. He pinched the bridge of his nose. She knew what it meant - he was going to say no. He was going to refuse. It hurt like he was stabbing her. "Am I supposed to go on a feeling?" he said. "How can I go on a feeling? You think Coffey's going to go on a feeling?"

  She didn't understand her own reaction. Why does it hurt so bad, that he doubts me? If I wasn't the one who saw it, I wouldn't believe me either. I'm asking him to do for me something that I don't think I'd do for him or anybody else. But that doesn't change anything. Just because I wouldn't be trusting enough to do this doesn't mean that he can't. Bud is a better person. I've always known that. Bud's better than anybody. That's why if he doesn't trust me, nobody will.

  "We all see what we want to see," she said. "Coffey looks and he sees Russians, he sees hate and fear. You have to look with better eyes than that." She smiled at him. She tried to put all her need, all her feelings right there on her face, in her voice, so he'd see, so he'd know. She tried to show him everything. And he understood her. She could see it in his face. He knew how much she needed him to accept this. "Please," she said.

  Bud could hardly bear it, having her talk like that, look like that. She had never been so open, so vulnerable; he had never loved her more than he did right then, never wanted more to give her what she wanted. But even if he could change his own beliefs, what could he do about it? He had a crew that was depending on him. He had to deal with Coff
ey. If he suddenly started believing stories about space creatures in the Cayman Trench, he'd lose his credibility with everybody. He'd lose his ability to lead. And that meant that there'd be nobody to hold all this together, keep them all alive and stable till, somehow, they got out of this.

  "I can't, Lins," he said.

  It was the worst thing he'd ever done to her. She put everything on the table, and he was shoving it away. She held her smile, but he knew she was wounded. She would never come to him like this again, if he refused now. But he couldn't jeopardize everybody else out of love for Lindsey.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I can't right now."

  He turned away, left the room, hating himself, but knowing he'd done the right thing.

  She stood there after he was gone. She'd never felt so lonely in her life. It wouldn't matter if anyone else believed her - Hippy, Catfish, Sonny, what did they matter? It was Bud's faith she needed. And when she didn't have that, she had nothing.

  Coffey wasn't surprised by what Lindsey saw. If an intruder had come once, it was to be expected that it would come again.

  Of course, the conclusions she had reached were absurd. He was glad to see that no one else took them seriously, either. The woman was a good engineer - her jury-rigged life support for Deepcore had been quick and thorough. But that didn't mean she was automatically a reliable witness. She was under stress. She saw something strange. She got a picture, and the more Coffey looked at it, the more he realized that it had to be something from outside Deepcore. If she'd taken a picture of any of the light sources on the rig, then part of the rig would be showing in the picture. So when she said she took the picture when the intruder was heading down into the canyon, he believed her.