FSF, September 2008

by Spilogale Authors

  One day she came as usual to tend the plants. The protective gear was still in the sac by the orifice, meaning no one was inside. She put on the hat, gloves, and dark glasses to shield her from the full-spectrum light, and entered.

  Even with the goggles on, she squinted against the brilliance inside. The nursery was a sausage-shaped vesicle with long trays of greenery lining each wall, and a tank down the middle. An adjoining sac held the deep, lightless pool where underwater species grew in a chemical broth that mimicked their natural sea-vent habitat.

  She started down the row of greenery, pinching off dead leaves and spraying the plants with nutrient-water. As she parted one thicket of foliage, she noticed something peculiar. On the counter behind the screen of plants stood a row of glass jars full of cloudy liquid. They had not been there when she last tended the plants, she was sure. As she reached out to pick one up, a voice behind her grated, “Don't touch that."

  Jolted, she whirled around. Jack was sitting on the floor behind her, hidden by a tank.

  He raised his hands and said, “Lower your weapon. I surrender."

  She realized she was holding the plant sprayer in front of her like a gun, as if to spritz him with water. Ridiculous as it was, she didn't lower it. “What do you want?” she demanded.

  Stiffly, he got up. “I want a joint and a ticket out of here, for all the good it does me."

  He wasn't wearing any protective gear. She said, “A man should be wearing glasses."

  With a harried look he said, “Don't you ever let up?"

  "But the radiation is dangerous in here!"

  "Don't worry, this is the only room that doesn't seem dim as a dungeon to me."

  He took a step forward. She pointed the sprayer at him, and he stopped. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Look, we can't go on like this. We're the only two damned people in this ship. We've got to call a cease fire."

  Suspicious of this new ploy, she said, “So someone can go on raiding our drugs?"

  "I apologize for that.” He didn't look apologetic, more like desperately irritated at himself. “The thing is—I'm going bugfuddled crazy. I haven't been clean and sober at the same time in about ten years. It doesn't improve me. That's why—” He nodded at the jars behind her plants.

  "What are they?” she said.

  "I'm making wine."

  Osaji said, “You shouldn't keep them here."

  Bitterly sarcastic, he said, “Sorry for polluting your sanctum."

  "No, I mean, they won't ferment properly in the light. They should be somewhere dark and cool."

  He paused. “I knew that.” He came over and gathered the jars off the counter. It seemed like he was about to leave, but he stopped. Then, eyes fixed on something beyond her, he began to talk in a rush, as if he were bleeding words.

  "During the war, I was on a ship called Viper. It was a godless piece of junk, really. We used to joke about it, called it the Vindow Viper. One day they sent us in to take over a communication station owned by an asteroid-mining company. Only it turned out to be a secret military installation. They blew our piece-of-shit cruiser to bits before we had time to wet our pants. Eleven of us managed to escape in space suits, with only a marker buoy to hang to. We waited there for rescue. You know what it's like in space? It's dark, and your body has no weight. There's nothing to smell, or see, or feel. If you kick, nothing happens. It's just yourself all alone, thinking till your brain echoes like the whole universe.

  "We had a big argument while we were waiting for rescue. Some of them thought the oxygen would last longer if we linked our tanks together. I was against it, me and two others. The rest decided to do it, and eventually persuaded everyone but me. It was four days before a ship picked us up. Their oxygen ran out at three and a half. If I'd helped them, I would have died too. I used to think I was the smart one, the lucky one."

  Osaji was so taken aback she forgot to point the sprayer at him.

  "Look,” he said, “I came to this godforsaken planet to shed my self like an old dirty T-shirt into the laundry. I was hunting for a clean break. I wanted to be a new person, but the old person sticks to me like a bad smell. My past is something I stepped in long ago and can't get off my shoe."

  This only made Osaji's own self-pity well up to match his. “You are not the only one trapped here unwillingly. Do you think I do all this work for pleasure? Do you think I want to maintain this ark and wash and dress and feed someone as if I were some kind of appliance? No one would choose this. It is degrading."

  Finally he seemed to focus on her. “Then for God's sake, give me something to do! If I have to sit around thinking any more, I'm going to start chewing my leg off."

  Suspicious at this change, she said, “What can a spacer do?"

  "I don't know. Teach me, while I still have a few brain cells left alive."

  It came to her then: the job she most wanted rid of. “I can teach the spacer to go outside."

  To her surprise, he blanched. “No, you don't want me out there. I'd just be a drag on you."

  "Our breathers are easier to use than yours. You don't have to carry oxygen; the breather extracts it from the water. And it's not like space. When you kick, something happens."

  "Listen,” he said, “I've got to tell you something. Truth is, I was a complete screwup as a spacer. You see, I couldn't turn off my mind. I couldn't stop thinking of consequences, and caring about them. I couldn't stop seeing the danger, and the stupidity, and the venality, and the faces...."

  He had wandered off again, into some haunted territory of his mind. To pull him back, she said, “There are no faces in the sea. No venality either."

  With a hoarse laugh he said, “Well, that leaves danger and stupidity."

  "Only if you bring them."

  "Shit! Shit! Shit!” he said.

  * * * *

  5. Through Shadow Valley

  The aperture to the outside was located in the floor at the very bottom of the globe. The trick to getting through it was, once suited up, to take a little leap and plunge in feet first, as if jumping into a pool. Osaji had never thought of it as a skill till she watched Jack trying to follow her out. He got stuck halfway, struggling ineptly and letting air escape in big bubbles that rolled up the ark's side. Trying not to laugh, Osaji grasped one flailing ankle and gave a sharp tug, ignoring the curses emanating from her radio earpiece.

  He was awkward and jerky in the water, and she had to make him swim to and fro a while to get the hang of the flippers. Then she took him on a tour of the ark's exterior, showing him the emergency entry pores and the scars of their encounter with the heat plumes and the mountain.

  With Jack beside her, the darkness no longer seemed so oppressive. It gave her the courage to do something she had not contemplated in a long time: gather water samples. They had to be taken at some distance, to avoid contamination from the cloud of organic molecules the ark gave off.

  As soon as they left the sheltering bulge of the ark, they were enveloped in a dark so inky that all direction disappeared. Osaji stripped the covers from the phosphor patches on her suit so Jack could see where she was. She turned back to show him how to do the same, but he had already figured it out.

  Though they swam slowly, the ark soon dwindled to a dim ball behind. It was icy cold. Jack switched on the searchlamp, but the beam just disappeared into water in every direction. They seemed suspended in nothingness.

  Jack muttered, “A dark illimitable ocean without bound, where length, breadth, time and place are lost."

  "What does that mean?” Osaji asked.

  "It's poetry, kid. Damn spooky, that's what it means."

  Osaji took the sampling bottle from the pack at her belt and held it out at arm's length as she swam, releasing the cap. As she was covering it again, something touched her face.

  She gave a startled exclamation, and was suddenly blinded by the light as Jack turned it on her. “What is it?” he said.

  "Turn that off!"

  He did, but li
ght still danced before her dazzled eyes. For a terrifying moment, she couldn't even tell up from down. She blinked until the dim glow of Jack's phosphor patches swam into view. “Can you see the ark?” she said.

  "Right there,” he said, presumably pointing with an invisible arm.

  She saw it then as well, dimly, farther off than it should be. But as she started for it, Jack said, “Hey, where are you going?"

  The photism she had been following vanished, and as she turned, the real Divernon swam into view. If he had not been there to stop her, she might have wandered off, chasing a mirage.

  "Let's go back,” she said, rattled.

  They raced back as fast as they could swim. When they were inside again, he said, “What the hell happened out there?"

  "This swimmer thought she felt a heat tendril."

  "What's that?"

  "A current of warmer water. No one else felt it?"

  "Warm! You've got to be kidding."

  "It must have been an illusion, then."

  Still, she went to check the ark's temperature records. They were disappointingly flat. She had to tamp down the tiny updraft of hope that it had been a hint of geothermal activity. Another rift zone would mean a site for colonization—an energy source for life.

  She couldn't entirely suppress the thought. The currents here were robust. They had to be driven by something. Just the possibility was like an infusion of energy. She felt buoyant and excited as she went to check on Mota, like the little girl she had once been, running to tell her grandmother of some discovery.

  Mota roused from an open-eyed doze and smiled sweetly when Osaji told her what had just happened. “That's nice, dear,” she said. Stiffly, she rose from her chair, and Osaji saw that the back of her dress was soaked.

  "Mota, you've wet yourself,” she said, shocked.

  "No, I haven't,” Mota said, turning so Osaji couldn't see it.

  "Here, I'll help you change.” Osaji tried to make her voice neutral.

  "No, no,” Mota said, “don't worry. I can do it myself.” She stood looking around uncertainly, as if she had never seen the room before. Silently, Osaji went to the wall pocket and found some dry clothes. She felt irrationally humiliated by this new infirmity. It was so unlike Mota.

  Mota took a long time changing clothes in the washvac. Osaji sat at the table, all at once too enervated to move. Her bubble of high spirits was leaking air, and she was sinking into stagnant water again.

  * * * *

  The trip outside revived Jack's fund of hare-brained schemes. “What if we were to rig a really big antenna?” he said. “Maybe we could generate a low-frequency signal that could penetrate all this water and ice."

  Osaji was skeptical that any length of antenna would help them, but it did no harm to try. So she helped him string floats on a braided carbon-steel mooring line and paid it out into the water. Before long Divernon was trailing a long tail of wire.

  It did not improve their communications. The radio still hissed white noise. But the antenna did succeed in an unexpected way.

  As the current carried them inexorably westward, the seafloor landscape became more rugged. The sonar showed the hunched shoulders of hills below them, concealed by inky water. Then one day the bottom dropped out of the world.

  On a routine check of the control pod, Osaji was startled to see no sonar reading at all. Going back to check the record, she found that the soundings had stopped only two hours before. When a diagnostic turned up no problem with the equipment, she came to the only plausible conclusion: they had been swept over the edge of an underwater chasm. The ark was caught in a gentle eddy, and as it floated backward her conjecture was confirmed, for the sonar picked up the edge of fluted organ-pipe cliffs dropping away into darkness so deep the signal could not reach the bottom.

  By then, she and Jack were both watching the screen, mesmerized. “What should we do?” Osaji asked. It was the first navigation decision they had had to make.

  "What are the options?” Jack said.

  "We could go down, or stay at our present depth. If we stay, we'll probably pick up the westward current again. If we drop down...."

  "Yes?” he prompted when she failed to continue.

  "Well, there is no telling. There might be no current down there. Then we would just come up again. There might be a current that would sweep us some place we don't want to be."

  "As opposed to now?” Jack said ironically.

  "That is a point."

  Often, decisions like this took hours, because everyone was afraid to be first to voice an opinion, and they talked until a consensus emerged without anyone having to say it aloud. But Jack suffered no inhibitions about expressing himself. “I say go for it. Take the plunge,” he said. “What good are we doing out here if we don't take time to see the sights?"

  She smiled at him, because she agreed.

  He stared at her open-mouthed till she said, “Is something wrong?"

  "I don't think I've ever seen you smile before,” he said.

  That made her feel self-conscious, so she turned to the controls and input the sequence of commands that would take them downward.

  As soon as they dropped below the edge of the cliff, they lost their current. They were close enough to the cliff that the side-sounding sonar could show an image of the stately columns of basalt plunging into unknowable depths below. Osaji pushed back her chair and rose.

  "Where are you going?” Jack said.

  "It will take a long time to sink,” she said. “We have to adjust to the pressure as we go down. It could be hours."

  He couldn't tear himself from the screens, so she left him there, watching.

  In the end, it took three days. As they descended, the water temperature slowly rose one degree, and Osaji's hopes rose with it. When the sonar finally picked up the bottom, they both sat watching the screen intently while the detail improved scan by scan. What it showed was only another tumbled slope of boulders leading down to a rumpled seafloor. “Look at the edges of the rocks,” Osaji said, pointing at the screen. “They are sharp, not eroded. That means this area could be geologically active."

  But they saw nothing else in any way remarkable.

  They did pick up a new current, sweeping them slowly north along the line of the cliffs. The next day, the side sonar picked up another trace opposite them—the other side of the canyon, closing in fast. As the gorge became narrower, the current sped up, and Osaji began to fear that the gap would become too narrow for them to pass.

  "What should we do?” she said.

  "Ride it out, I guess,” Jack said, his eyes glued to the monitors. “Like whitewater ballooning. Yee-ha."

  Soon the giant cliffs were marching by, close on either side. For a moment the sonars showed nothing but rock in every direction—they were being swept around a curve. A gap appeared ahead. They were heading toward it.

  Then all motion seemed to stop. The cliffs were behind them. They had entered onto the floor of a dark, hidden valley.

  * * * *

  At first it seemed that they had just exchanged one lightless wasteland for another. Day by day they traveled northwest, their rocky surroundings unchanged. But there was a difference: as if they had passed a wall severing them forever from home.

  Even Mota seemed to be drifting into another world Osaji could not enter, or imagine. As her memory failed, the old woman lost her ability to detect a sequence of events, to tell the before from the after; and with sequence gone, time itself disappeared. At first her own confusion frightened her, and she asked constantly what time it was, as if to force her experiences into order. But as she grew accustomed to it, she learned to exist in a bath of time where all the past was present simultaneously. She began to confuse Osaji with long-dead people from her childhood. Whenever it happened, Osaji corrected her more sharply than she should have; but she couldn't help it. The reaction came from deep down, like the reflex to breathe, or defend her life—except it was her individuality she was defen
ding. As Mota's failing senses saw her less and less distinctly, Osaji felt like she was disappearing, turning invisible as water.

  She was in Mota's vac when a shudder and a jerk went through the ark. “Did you feel that?” she said.

  "What, dear?"

  Osaji was very attuned to Divernon's motions by now, and knew something was amiss. There was a faint rushing sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. She sprinted up to the control pod, arriving only moments before Jack did. “You felt it,” she said, forgetting to be polite.

  "Damn straight I did."

  Osaji's biggest fear, that they had collided with something, turned out not to be true. Divernon had come to a sudden halt in mid-stream. The sound she heard was water flowing past the membrane.

  "The antenna!” Jack said.

  Osaji had forgotten all about it. She saw now what he meant: one or more of the floats must have come loose and allowed the line to sink. They had been dragging a line along the seafloor, and now it was caught on something.

  "We should have brought it in long ago,” Osaji said, reproaching herself for irresponsibility. “Now we will lose a good mooring cable. We will have to cut it away."

  "Well, maybe we can salvage part of it,” Jack said.

  "Do you think someone would be willing to go out there to cut it?"

  "Not by myself,” Jack said. “I'd go with you."

  They planned it out carefully this time, since there would be more risk than their last job had entailed. The combination of tether and current had brought Divernon down closer to the bottom than it ought to be, and as soon as it was freed it would float up. They needed to be sure not to lose it.

  The water was noticeably warmer to Osaji. It was, of course, just as black. Lit by their headlamps, the mooring cable stretched taut, a straight line leading diagonally downward, punctuated by floats every few yards. They set out, swimming along it. The farther they went before cutting it, the more of it they would be able to salvage.

  The ark disappeared into the darkness behind them. Osaji noticed that she could now see the narrow beam of light from her headlamp; there was something dissolved in the water. For some reason, she did not want to get close to the bottom. The thought of monstrous rock shapes below her, hidden since the beginning of eternity, filled her with dread. She was about to suggest that they had come far enough and should cut the cable when Jack said, “What's that?"