FSF, September 2008

by Spilogale Authors

  "What?” she said, drawing in her feet out of fear that they would touch something.

  "Turn on the searchlight,” he said.

  When she did, she gasped.

  They were surrounded by glass towers. Not solid glass, but intricate meshworks of spun filaments that glinted silver and azure in the beam of Osaji's light. As the searchlight touched the nearest ones, they seemed to ignite in a cascade, as if conducting the light from one glass strand to the next, till the entire landscape around them glowed. Latticework turrets towered over them, gazebos and arcades of glistering mesh lay below. In the distance, some were broken and toppled, but the ones nearby looked perfectly preserved. It was like a city of hoarfrost, magnified to the size of monuments.

  As her light played over the intricate structures, Osaji could not help the impression that it was a sort of architecture, created by design. But what strange intelligence would have built a monument down here, in a lightless gulf where no one would ever see it?

  Even Jack at her side, after an initial exhalation of astonishment, was awed into silence. He slowly swam forward, and Osaji followed, drawn to touch, to be in the tracery sculpture, to see it from every angle.

  They glided through arches that dwarfed them, down a tube woven of glowing geometric webs, and looked up from inside an open spiral that towered into the black water sky. They swam along lacework corridors, into honeycomb spheres of overlapping glass threads. Nowhere was there any sign of life. Not a thing moved but themselves.

  In a glowing, cathedral-like space they found three hexagonal glass pillars, of uneven heights, whose surfaces were inscribed with patterns like worm tracks. Jack swam around the cluster of stelae, then said what Osaji was thinking: “Do you suppose it's writing?"

  "I don't know. We ought to record it."

  All thought of cutting the mooring line was gone now. It had been a stroke of the most astonishing luck that it had caught just here. They swam back toward it, chilled and eager to fetch some recording devices.

  When they emerged into the womb of the ark and stripped off their diving gear, the awe that had held them in silence broke, and Jack let out a whoop of exhilaration. “Holy crap, that was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Who do you think they were?"

  He was leaping to the assumption that Osaji had tried cautiously to suppress. “It did not look natural,” she admitted. “But it might have been a coral or something similar."

  "Great big humping underwater spiders,” Jack speculated. “But spiders that could read and write. Where's the camera?"

  Osaji was rubbing her feet, which were the color and temperature of oysters. “We ought to warm up before going back. If one of us could heat some soup, the other will find the camera."

  They were about to split up when the ark gave a shudder and moved. The cable was slipping. “No!” Jack shouted at it. “Don't give way!"

  It was too late. There was a jerk, then suddenly the ark was rising, floating free again.

  Jack let out a stream of profanity more heartfelt than any Osaji had heard from him. “Can't we drop an anchor?” he said. Osaji leaped to draw in the line, but long before they managed to attach an anchor to it, they both knew their chance was gone. The ark had floated on, and they were left with nothing but their memory of what they had seen.

  * * * *

  That evening Osaji came down from the control pod, where she had been studying the sonar readings to see if they had recorded evidence of the glass city, to find Jack and Mota together in the kitchen.

  "Mota!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here?"

  "Hello, dear,” Mota said brightly. “Do you remember Yamada?"

  Osaji felt embarrassed that Jack had seen Mota so confused, and was about to usher her back to her vac when he stopped her. “We've been having an interesting conversation. How come you've been hiding away this charming lady?"

  Mota giggled like a girl.

  Osaji stared at Jack, suspicious that he was mocking both Mota and her.

  "She's been telling me about one round when a man named Sabo transferred from her ark to another one,” Jack said, then turned to Mota. “So what happened next?"

  She looked confused. “Oh, nothing in particular."

  It was like most of Mota's stories these days; they trailed off into pointlessness. Osaji stirred restlessly, wanting to get Mota away.

  "I see,” Jack said. “Well, more power to Sabo. I say that's how a man ought to act."

  Mota beamed at him fondly. He leaned over and whispered to Osaji, “Who the hell is Yamada?"

  "Her brother. My great-uncle,” Osaji said.

  "Bit of a scapegrace, I take it?"

  Osaji nodded. “He was her favorite sibling."

  "I'm honored to be him,” he said, and rose to fetch a bottle from a cupboard. “In view of the occasion, I think we ought to have some wine."

  "It's too soon,” Osaji warned him. “It will taste awful."

  "Then it should suit me nicely,” he said, and broke the seal. She watched him pour some into a glass. He smelled it and winced, then took a mouthful and downed it. He grimaced, then glared at the glass resentfully.

  "It is vile, true?” Osaji said.

  "On the contrary,” he said. “It's a belligerent little vintage with a sarcastic attitude. I like it very much.” He took another swig.

  Osaji took down a glass and held it out. Jack poured her a glassful, and she took a sip. It was vinegary and revolting.

  "Care for some?” Jack asked Mota.

  "Oh, don't give it to her,” Osaji said.

  "She wants some. An adventurous spirit, I see,” he said, and poured her a tiny amount. She sipped, and made a sour face. Jack laughed. “You're never going to trust me again now, are you?"

  "You're always playing jokes on me,” Mota said with mock severity.

  "Come on, Mota, this man is a bad influence,” Osaji said, rising.

  "Bring her back soon. I'll turn her into a lush yet."

  "Not with that wine,” Osaji said.

  When she had gotten Mota safely back to her vac, Osaji returned to the kitchen. Jack was studying the sonar printouts she had brought down from the control pod. They showed next to nothing. The glass structures had been too fragile and airy to give a clear return.

  "I'd think I had imagined the whole thing, if you hadn't seen it too,” Jack said.

  "Even if we ever get back, no one will believe us."

  They continued drinking the wine in silence.

  Osaji felt as if a vast weight of sadness were hanging above her, pressing inward, making it hard to breathe. “Jack,” she said, “we ought to make an effort to remember. Think of those people, or whatever they were, who built the city. They created all that, and now they are forgotten, so forgotten it's as if they never existed. And now we don't even have any proof we saw the city they made. We owe it to them to remember, to make them real. It's the least we can do."

  He gave a slight, bitter smile. “As if we mattered ourselves."

  She saw what he meant. They were next to forgotten as well. The farther they traveled from home, the less they would be remembered. No doubt they were already given up for lost; soon they would drift farther and farther into the night, until all trace of their existence disappeared. Nothing would remain in the end.

  "If everyone has forgotten us, do you suppose we'll still exist?” Osaji said.

  He stirred restlessly. “You don't have enough to forget. Try living a life like mine. You'll know then, memory's a disease."

  He was silent a while, and she thought he was going to say no more, but he went on, “If those city builders thought they'd be remembered, they were crazy. Forgetting is what nature does best. The universe is a huge forgetting machine. It erases information no matter how hard we try to hang onto it. How could it be any different? What if the memory of everything that ever happened still existed? The universe would be clogged with information, so packed with it we couldn't move. We'd be paralyzed, because every m
oment we ever lived would still be with us. It would be hell."

  Osaji thought of Mota, in whom memory was the most evanescent thing of all. Already Osaji existed only fleetingly for Mota, and Jack was not even a separate person, only the shadow of the long-dead Yamada. And soon Mota, then all of them, would arrive at the ultimate forgetting toward which they were traveling. They were all swimming temporarily in a sea of darkness, and then they would be gone.

  The sadness pressed in, crushing her. Her eyes were tightly closed, but seawater was leaking from them anyway. It was for the lost city, for poor Divernon, for Mota, and for herself, the most futile of them all.

  Jack reached across the table and took her hand. “Don't listen to me, kid. I don't think I'm going to forget you. Not a chance."

  She clutched his hand as if he were the only thing that made her real.

  * * * *

  6. Garden of the Deep

  It was impossible for Osaji to keep Mota and Jack apart in the weeks that followed. Whenever Osaji's back was turned, Mota would creep out looking for him, and when she found him he teased her, told her inappropriate jokes, and fed her the sweet treats that were the only food she really craved. She would sit in the kitchen playing hostess to him, so polite that only Osaji could tell it was play-acting, like a little girl pretending to be an adult. Gradually, Osaji learned to stop resenting it.

  As they traveled, she reduced the ark's cruising depth and pored over the sensor readings in hopes of finding another underwater city. Though they now kept an anchor ready to drop on a moment's notice, she saw no hint of anything but barren rock and rumpled lava on the seafloor.

  Then one day the water temperature shot up. When she discovered it, Osaji consulted the sonar, but the images were fuzzy and hard to interpret. She went to find Jack. “I think a man should check to see what's outside,” she said.

  "Why a man?” he said, to be irritating.

  "Because someone else needs to be inside ready to throw the anchor out."

  They both went down to the hatch pod. Only seconds after he disappeared through the aperture, her radio earpiece started emitting ear-blistering vulgarities.

  "What is it?” she asked.

  There was no answer for several seconds. Then, “There's light out here."

  The thought that there might be erupting lava made her hopeful. Then the more likely explanation occurred to her. “You mean the ark?"

  "Well, yes, it's glowing like gangbusters. But I meant the trees."

  "Trees?"

  "There's a prigging forest out here!"

  "Should one drop the anchor?"

  "Yes! Then get your ass out here. No offense."

  When she emerged from the ark, the sight struck her dumb. The ark hovered over an undulating landscape of dimly glowing lifeforms that covered the seafloor thickly in every direction, till they disappeared on the dark horizon. When she trained the searchlamp on them, the greenish phosphor glow disappeared and the biotic canopy proved to be made up of pinkish fronds gently undulating in the current, attached to tall stalks that looked in every way like tree trunks, except that they were larger than any tree she had seen.

  Osaji and Jack swam down till they were hovering over the fronds, and could see their scale. The central rib of each branch was twenty to thirty feet long, and the splayed-out fern covered an area as wide as Divernon's diameter. Jack reached out to touch the nearest one, and with a violent jerk the whole thing retracted into its tube, leaving behind a cloud of disturbed water. Several adjacent brushtops retracted as well.

  "They are tubeworms!” Osaji said in astonishment. But tubeworms of a size she had never dreamed of.

  "What do they eat?” Jack said, still rattled by the violent reaction he had stimulated.

  "Not us. They are filter feeders. But it would be easy to get pulled down into the tube and crushed."

  "You're telling me."

  They swam down into the space thus cleared. Below the palmlike tops, the tubes were ribbed and hard, and so wide around that Osaji and Jack could not span them with their arms, even by linking hands. The trunks were crusted with orange and yellow growths that looked for all the world like fungus—except when touched, they moved.

  Osaji felt something brush her face, but could see nothing. “Turn off your light a moment,” she said. When Jack complied, they found themselves in a wholly different world. The water under the tubeworm canopy was alive with glowing filaments that outlined segmented bodies, hourglass-shaped bags, lacy things like floating doilies, others like paintbrushes or fringed croissants. It was as if the trees were strung with optic fiber ornaments, or fireflies in formation. When Osaji switched her light on again, they all disappeared. “Jellies!” she said. “The light goes right through them."

  Lower down, there was a dense undergrowth that showed a riot of colors in their lights. There were frilly orchidlike things, huge bushes of feathers, clusters of translucent orange bottles, in one place a fan lazily waving to and fro, stirring the still water. “Look, your spiders!” Osaji called out, training her light on a china-white creature with six spindly legs, picking its way over a thing that looked like a brain.

  When they turned around at last, Jack swam ahead, with Osaji lighting the way. She barely saw the thing that came arrowing out of the darkness at him. It hit him in the chest and drove him backward through the water so fast that Osaji lost him for a moment. With panic pounding in her ears, she swept her light around and saw him, seemingly impaled on a tubeworm trunk with a thrashing, snakelike body attached to his chest. She churned through the water toward him, and with no weapon but her light, she gave the creature a blow. It did not let go or cease whipping its paddle-shaped tail. Jack now had ahold of it and was trying to pull it away, a maneuver that would almost surely tear his suit. She grasped the paddletail near the front and squeezed with all her strength. It took what seemed like minutes, but the creature finally went limp and let go. She shone her light on it. It had no head, just a giant sucker where a mouth should be. With an exclamation of revulsion, she threw it away and it floated downward into the blackness.

  "Is your suit all right?” she said, inspecting the place where the paddletail had attached. To make sure, she took some repair goo from her utility belt and smeared it on.

  "Never mind the suit. What about me?” Jack said irritably.

  "Are you all right?"

  "Some wear and tear, thanks for asking."

  "Let's get back."

  They could see the ark through the branches above, like a bright full moon. Its bioluminescent bacteria were thriving in this nutrient-rich water. When they were inside, she inspected the bruise on Jack's chest but determined that no ribs were broken. “We need to be more careful,” she said.

  "You have a way with understatement,” he answered.

  * * * *

  They spent three days documenting the new world they had discovered before floating on. At first they stayed outside a great deal as they floated, anxious not to miss anything; then Jack figured out how to rig a camera on the outside of the ark so they could watch from the comfort of the control pod. Osaji marveled that she had never thought of such a thing—but then, in the Saltese Sea there was nothing to see outside and no light to see it by anyway. Everything there was focused inward.

  The underwater woodland of tube worms slowly gave way to a wide plain of sea grass. They sat atop the ark and watched the glowing prairie undulate in the currents, while their light beams picked out raylike creatures circling in the updrafts above. One day there was a shower of mineral particles. Pebble-sized bits pattered around them like raindrops, and soon a mist of smaller ash descended. It was what was fertilizing this oasis of life.

  Eventually the land began to rise and they saw the first of the smoker chimneys belching out thick clouds of steam and dissolved minerals from deep within the planet's crust. Here, a spiny red growth dominated the ecosystem, like a branched bottle brush the size of a tower. In the sediment below the spine trees grew bloo
ming fields of small tubeworms like chrysanthemums and daisies, and enigmatic things shaped like mesh stockings. They saw many more of the whiplike paddletails, always swimming upstream in the direction opposite to the one the ark was floating. Occasionally, some of the brainless things would attach to the downstream side of the ark, their tails still paddling frantically as if to push the ark against the current. Then Osaji and Jack would have to go outside and weed the ark.

  What they never saw, though they looked all the time, was any evidence of the species that had built the glass city.

  "I don't get this,” Jack said. “We find a city with no life, and life with no city."

  Osaji wanted to be outside all the time now. The ark's interior seemed drab and claustrophobic, and she rushed through her duties there to get into the water again.

  They were moored on the edge of a mazy badlands of extinct smokers, their sides streaked like candles with brightly colored deposits of copper, sulphur, and iron, when the accident happened. Osaji was preparing to go outside when she bustled into Mota's vac and found the old lady lying on the floor, conscious but unable to speak. Panicky, Osaji knelt beside her. “Mota, what happened?"

  Mota only looked up with round, watery eyes. Her mouth worked; nothing came out but a thin line of saliva. It filled Osaji with horror to see her grandmother so robbed of humanity. She jumped up and raced out to find Jack.

  When they tried to move Mota to the bed, she groaned in pain, her eyes wild and staring. “She's probably broken something,” Jack said.

  "What can we do?” Osaji said.

  "Not a lot,” Jack said grimly. “Make her comfortable. Wait here, I'll be right back."

  He disappeared. Osaji sat on the floor holding Mota's hand. Mota gripped back, hanging on as if a strong current were sweeping her from the world. “We'll try to do something for you, Mota,” Osaji said. “Just relax, don't worry."

  Jack came back with a little sack of pills. “Here, see if she can swallow this,” he said.