Did it really matter if it was due to my efforts or to Lucy and the cephalopods’? Either way, my parents had been avenged by family. Just the way they would have wanted it.
There was a knock on the door.
I got out of the bunk, walked over, and opened it to find Gayle standing there.
“Sorry to bug you. I meant to give these to you earlier. I thought you might want them.” She held out her hand. In her palm were my parents’ wedding rings.
I swallowed once, then reached out and took them.
“Thank you.”
She nodded, turned on her heel, and went back down the hall without another word.
I stood there for a moment staring at the rings, then I went up on deck and crossed over to the railing.
“Lucy?” I called softly.
A tentacle broke the surface nearby, as if she had been there the whole time, just waiting for me. As it rose up to my level, I reached out and placed Mom’s ring in one of her upraised suckers.
“She’d want you to have this, I think.”
Lucy’s tentacle closed around the gift. Then she brushed my cheek with it gently before retracting it carefully back into the water, and I knew in that moment I’d never see her again.
I looked down at the ring still in my hand, thinking about family—the one we are born into and the one we choose, or that chooses us. I had always been an only child, and never imagined I’d have a sister, let alone one who was a telepathic squid, or an entire ship full of unexpected siblings.
It made me wonder who else the universe might have in store for me—maybe even a woman who I’d someday raise my own family with and in whose arms I’d be content to die entwined. And suddenly, I couldn’t wait to get back to shore to find her.
UNDER PRESSURE
Jody Lynn Nye
In the mirror just underneath the lens-like door to her domicile, Dr. Nadine Charter checked the little light on a spring arched in front of her round face. Angler fish, she thought, sticking her tongue out at her reflection and tasting the salt of the sea. After twelve years of public education and six years of graduate school, she had turned into an angler fish. It was still so new to her, but she liked living in Poseidon a whole lot better than living on land, even a land as lovely as Jamaica.
Out of the corner of one eye, Nadine kept watch on the concave video screen sealed in its watertight case. On the news channel, yet another US senator flailed his arms. The text transcript scrolling up below the image contained the usual inflammatory nonsense about Undersea and its industries being a drain on the taxpayers and polluting the waters off the coast of the United States while blaming it on other entities, like corporations and urban water treatment plants. She caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the big looking glass attached to the wall of her bubble-like domicile and shook her head. She knew it wasn’t so. Undersea, and the city of Poseidon in particular, was running clean. No one here stirred up toxins from the sea bed. She worked in the ecology monitoring station and knew that it was the corporations dumping their mess into the oceans. The bad tastes that sometimes floated in the water gave them clues as to who, but so far, her department hadn’t been able to produce adequate proof as to where the contaminants came from. Nadine and her team kept on the hunt, all the time knowing that the government entities wanted to cut their funding and leave them blind.
Her light summer dress floated around her like the skirt of an anemone, brushing her legs as she swam. She liked to wear something, although after the first day, she had thrown all her bras in the disposer. Never again would she have to worry about gravity pulling her 40D breasts toward the center of the earth. Fat floated, and in a sexy way, too, if she had to mention how God had blessed her, top and bottom. Only land women had to strap themselves up with micro-corsets. Instead of panties, she wore loose bloomers that fastened at the waist with Velcro, and took care of bodily functions by pulling the crotch aside behind a clump of coral. Some of her fellows didn’t bother with any outer garments, and excreted as freely as fish. Those she banned from her lab. Nadine swam up out of her doorway, batting aside the school of yellow-tailed fish that hovered there every morning, waiting for her to emerge. The boldest of them ducked under her hands and mobbed her, trying to get near the forehead light. With a silent laugh that inflated her gills to their maximum, she opened out her arms and stroked back, propelling herself through the water in the direction of her lab. The fish followed her like sheep, held in thrall by the light on her forehead.
My pilot fish, she thought, filled with affection for her charges. We are all denizens of the deep.
Over the last few weeks, her deep brown skin had stopped puckering as her system became used to seawater, and her eyes never teared any more. Except for a few vestiges that the surgeons and geneticists had not yet been able to adapt for undersea life, she had become merfolk. Nadine couldn’t go back and live on the land even if she had wanted to, but she didn’t want to. She couldn’t picture living dry any more. She had left pain and isolation behind.
Years ago, she had seen the merfolk who came back to the surface to visit, to see family or to attend conferences, with the tall hydration collar around their necks, pulling the tank of seawater along behind them as though it was an oxygen tank for visitors to Undersea. The change made to them was partially genetic, partially cosmetic. The alteration to her DNA pulled her partway back to the tadpole stage of embryonic development that so many species on Earth went through in gestation, when fetuses literally breathed water. The surgeons wouldn’t remove her lungs, even though she didn’t need to use them, because of the concentration of healthy blood vessels in them her system needed to carry oxygen, but over time her grandchildren and great-grandchildren would begin to breed true, selecting for the implanted genes.
The denizens of Undersea who had come to welcome her six weeks before had fitted her with a forehead light and introduced themselves, all in sign. As a child, she had been diagnosed as profoundly deaf. On land, her disability hampered her. Under water, her ability to communicate with her hands and face was an advantage over those newcomers who had relied on sound. Her new friends embraced her and took her home, down to Poseidon. Nadine had fallen instantly in love with all of them, and with her new city. Even she didn’t understand the fierce protectiveness she felt toward it. If she could have cradled her city and all the creatures swimming near it in her arms, she would have. Anything she could do to defend it and make it prosper, she would do.
Glowing spires, silver domes, golden bubbles and opalescent clusters, every shape except square and flat, the rooftops of Poseidon ranging from just thirty to well over a hundred meters deep spread out below her. Land cities, even their skyscrapers, were basically two dimensional. Here, cities were for those who traveled in all three dimensions. Poseidon had been built at the edge of the continental shelf of North America off South Carolina. The widely-spaced dwellings and other buildings were tethered by strong but thin cables to the cliff and to the sea bed below. Huge cables ran up tall cliffs behind the last scattering of buildings, as Poseidon shared the fruits of its clean-running, electricity-generating turbines with the land-dwellers. The water was spectacularly clear considering that thousands of people already lived there. The few that were abroad this early waved; those out of the city’s lighting were careful to keep their gestures within the range of their headlamps so she could see them. People just seemed nicer Undersea. Probably because everyone who was there wanted to be there, had been through hell and literal high water, not to mention all the physical alterations. They were united in being determined to make the largest of the Atlantic’s underwater cities work.
The biggest and most profound mental leap Nadine had to make was with regard to boundaries. She had grown up on a relatively peaceful street in Kingston, but gang turf lay close by. Straying into the wrong neighborhood could be fatal. Now if she avoided sharks and lionfish, or descending too fast into the dark deeps, there was nowhere she couldn’t go. She lived in thr
ee dimensions, now, like space travelers, only she wasn’t tethered to air tanks or fearful of freezing to death in their environment. If she took it very slow and easy so her body adjusted to the depths, she could see wonders invisible to ordinary divers. When she was a girl, she had often fantasized about being a mermaid. She’d achieved that dream, and it was as wonderful as she thought it was going to be. Freedom felt glorious.
Undersea colonies communicated with each other via technology sealed inside watertight cases that protected the components against the seawater as well as the pressure. Even the phones, exclusively used for texting and video calls, were good to almost 12,000 meters, though the people using them weren’t. Poseidon, in spite of being founded sixty miles off shore from the founder’s home city, was the newest of the settlements. A couple of her new friends waved to her with both hands from a hundred meters down, near the cultivated oyster beds on a shelf outcropping over which flowed a fast current. Nadine beamed and waved back. They signed to her to come down to pass the time of day. She started to swim down, but before she had descended more than fifty meters, twin pangs erupted in her chest. She gulped to drive the pain away. The lungs that would be vestigial in future generations were an actual impediment to her in the here and now. The rest of her body had been adapted to deep sea living, but it would take a while—if ever—for her old breathing apparatus to get with the program. Instead, she tipped them a cheery salute and kicked up toward her office. Later on, when she more leisure.
Mini-subs passed between the buildings here and there, containing visitors from the surface. Almost all of them represented non-governmental organizations, but several came from corporations and government departments, looking to negotiate with the city’s founder, Fin Ferrar, hoping to make exceptions to the fierce environmental policies that he had established in the territory claimed for the colony. A woman with bright-red lipstick peered out of a round porthole. Nadine gave her a big smile and a wave as she swam by. As the sub passed, Nadine tasted bitter residue in the seawater and spat it out in disgust. Despite Fin’s regulations, pollutants were increasing instead of decreasing.
She passed between a couple of pillars dotted with tiny pearly blue lights marking the edge of the university research campus. Her pale green lab module was the unit farthest to the south. Through the domed ceiling, she saw her lab assistant, Norbert, a tall, skinny white man with a hollow chest and a swirl of shoulder-length black hair, already hovering at the computer. The blue glow of the screen shone all around him.
She shoved her coterie of fish away from the flexible gasket that served as a door and wriggled down to join him. When Fin had taken her on a tour of Poseidon, she had laughed at the screens on the windows. Water was everywhere, right? The Undersea humans needed a fresh flow to breathe, but the fish got in the way of everything, like pigeons. If you didn’t want them investigating your experiments, you needed to shut the fish outside. They bumped their noses against the walls and the roof, then swam off looking for someone else to bother.
She tapped Norbert on the shoulder. He palmed the water to turn toward her, and gave her a grin.
“How are the readings this morning?” she signed.
“Still getting that anomaly,” he replied. He took her by the wrist and drew her to the console. She floated on her tummy while he brought up the graphs. “Phthalates, more than seven parts per billion. I don’t know where the pollutants are leaching from, but every factory and waste system within twenty miles of the shore has pled not guilty.”
Nadine peered at the readings, her brow wrinkling with dismay. There was nowhere left on the crowded continents to dump dangerous wastes. The cost of disposing of toxic materials had rocketed higher over the last few decades, eating deeply into the profits, and executive salaries, of many of the largest corporations.
The ecology monitoring office had been one of Fin’s pet projects when Poseidon was designed. With the population of Undersea growing every day, he was determined not to let the oceans get as polluted as the overcrowded continents. Nadine was proud to be a part of it. Their major problem was that over the millennia, human beings had gotten used to throwing all their garbage into the ocean. Out of sight, out of mind, right? But the traces were nine times higher than they should have been, endangering the Poseidon region as well as anyone who swam or ate seafood from this part of the ocean.
She expelled a jet of water from her mouth and set both hands moving in a vigorous retort. “I call BS. I’ll send Lukas with the microsub to get readings from the corporations’ output conduits to measure against those trace elements.”
“Lukas is topside,” Norbert gestured. “His niece is getting married.”
Nadine mimed slapping herself in the forehead. “I forgot. I’ll go. I haven’t got any meetings until tomorrow.”
“Can’t it wait until he gets back?”
Nadine dithered a moment. “Let me call Fin.”
“No!” The videophone screen filled with the sight of the CEO’s hands when she asked the question. “It can’t wait. National Geographic and the networks are sending teams of interviewers to tour Poseidon for an Earth Day documentary. ”
Norbert opened his mouth and lifted his hands to protest, but a wave from Fin cut him off.
“I know that sounds petty to the extreme,” the CEO signed, pointing off into the far distance, “but we could use good press. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of being accused of perpetrating a boondoggle on the treasury. We’re still a decade from being profitable. We’ve got the assistant under-secretary paying us a visit day after tomorrow. He can cut off a significant amount of our funding, money we need to continue working on infrastructure. And where the US attacks, Cuba and Mexico aren’t far behind. I’m sorry you’re short-handed, but we need proof that the spill isn’t coming from one of our factories.” The hands receded, and the founder’s handsome, angular face appeared, looking resigned and sheepish.
“I hate it,” Nadine said, feeling her face get hot in spite of the cool water flowing over it. “They’re wrong. No one down here is using phthalates in anything. They’re too damned toxic.”
“Then, who is?” Fin asked.
Norbert dragged a split screen onto the scope and filled it with short data files.
“Technically,” he said, “they were outlawed in US manufacture six years ago, but a number of foreign corps probably still use them. Close to the east coast, I’ve got nine. Two of them are Chinese-owned. One, Nin Suliao, makes reusable grocery bags. Sounds ecologically friendly, but their pliability gave away the fact that they were using phthalates as a softener. They built a concrete storage unit about thirty nautical miles north, then got the hell fined out of them for using toxic chemicals a couple years ago.”
Nadine tapped herself on the nose.
“I bet they sprang a leak.”
“Go check it out,” Fin said, his forehead wrinkling. “Bring me back proof. We can be heroes for pointing out an ecological crisis, and get brownie points from the US government at the same time.”
* * *
Nadine signed out the hand-sub that her team shared with three other departments, hung a boom-stick and an underwater pistol crosswise over her shoulders in case of sharks, packed a lunch, and set out. It shouldn’t take her more than three hours to find the supposedly abandoned storage unit.
As a newcomer, Nadine was eager for a chance to swim out into the far reaches of her underwater community and take a look around. The center of the city had the highest concentration of round-edged dwellings, but it was on the outskirts where things got really interesting. Experimental farms had been sprouting up almost every week. One of her new friends, Mehit from Indonesia, had been working on breeding a high-protein sea fruit hybrid. The purplish bulbs looked pretty unappetizing, but tasted like a cross between mangoes and breadfruit. Nadine had a chunk of sea fruit in her lunch, along with slabs of fresh fish and a kind of hardtack. Mehit kept inviting Nadine to come out and see it, but Nadine’s wor
kload so far had prevented her taking a day to wander. To have an assignment to go sightseeing along the north track was a blessing.
She grasped the curved bars on either side of the hand-sub, switched it on, and let the bullet-shaped engine pull her out toward the north of Poseidon. The bubbles that flowed back from it along her body tickled.
As she left the last of the dwellings behind, ghostly-colored coral reefs loomed up out of the gloom. Along with her headlamp, she carried a hundred-megawatt spotlight and a digital video camera to capture evidence, if she found any, of the source of the pollution. In her experience, and that of the techs that had come before her, no corporation was willing to put out money for repairs or adjustments without ample proof. Sample jars in a sack bumped against her back, exciting the curiosity of her fish friends. Brilliant-colored sea creatures appeared for a split second in the light of her headlamp, then whisked away into the dimness.
Outside of Poseidon proper, the ocean was almost dark. It took a few minutes before the wary urban child inside Nadine got past the idea that something scary was waiting out there to eat her. A GPS/sonar feature in the hand-sub warned her away from the rippling, jagged continental rock wall that loomed up on her left hand. She veered right, into a bank of sea ferns waving in the strong current. They tickled. Shadows of fish and eels nipped in and out of crevices deceptive in size. Some of those openings were small enough that only a clownfish could hide in there, but others were big enough for a four-bedroom house with a two-car garage.
The water on her lips now tasted distinctly different than it did in her home or her lab: bad, like chemistry-set explosion bad. The rush of the continental current along the sea wall carried a higher concentration of the pollutants than she had detected in town. She stopped the sub to tie a microfiber filter over her mouth and gills. That would slow her own breathing a little, but it would protect her from the leaking particulates. She couldn’t do anything to protect her coterie of fish. She turned and waved wildly at the school of yellow-stripes.
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