The rugged bed of the channel starts out shallow, barely a fathom deeper than the seabed that surrounds it. It was much deeper once, especially where it begins; but the ooze has filled it thickly, and for some miles it is now hard to tell that any channel at all lies under the rotting trash, under the ancient faded beer cans and the hubcaps red with rust. Slowly, though, some twenty miles down the channel from its head, an indentation becomes apparent — a sort of crooked rut worn by the primordial Hudson River into the ocean floor, a mile wide at the rut’s deepest, five miles wide from edge to edge. This far down — forty fathoms under the surface and some sixty feet below the surrounding ocean bed, between a great wide U of walls — the dark sludge of human waste lies even thicker. The city has not been dumping here for some years, but all the old years’ sewage has not gone away. Every stone in the deepening rut, every pressure-flattened pile of junk on the steadily downward-sloping seabed around the channel, is coated thick and black. Bottom-feeding fish are few here: There is nothing for them to eat. Krill do not live here: The water is too foul to support the microscopic creatures they eat, and even of a summer night the thick olive color of the sea is unchanged.
The channel’s walls begin to grow less and less in height, as if the ocean is growing tired of concealing the scar in its side. Gradually the rut flattens out to a broad shallow depression like a thousand other valleys in the Sea. A whale hanging above the approximate end of the channel, some one hundred thirty miles southeast of New York Harbor, has little to see on looking back up the channel’s length — just an upward-sloping scatter of dark-slimed rocks and mud and scraps of garbage, drab even in the slate-green twilight that is all this bottom ever sees of noon. But looking downward, southward, where its course would run if the channel went any farther— the abyss. Suddenly the thinning muck, and the gentle swellings and dippings of the sea bed, simply stop at the edge of a great steep semicircular cliff, two miles from side to side. And beyond the cliff, beyond the edge of the Continental Shelf, curving away to northeast and southwest — nothing. Nothing anywhere but the vague glow of the ocean’s surface three hundred feet above; and below, beyond the semicircle, the deadly stillness of the great deeps, and a blackness one can hear on the skin like a dirge. Icy cold, and the dark.
“I warn you all,” S’reee said as the eleven gathered Celebrants and Kit hung there, looking down into that darkness at the head of Hudson Canyon. “Remember the length of this dive; take your own breathing needs carefully into consideration, and tell me now if you think you may need more air than our spells will be taking with us. Remember that, at the great pressures in the Below, you’ll need more oxygen than you usually do — and work will make you burn more fuel. If you feel you need to revise the breathing figures on the group spell upward, this is the time to do it. There won’t be a chance later, after we’ve passed the Gates of the Sea. Nor will there be any way to get to the surface quickly enough to breathe if you start running low. At the depths we’ll be working, even a sperm whale would get the bends and die of such an ascent. Are you all sure of your needs? Think carefully.”
No one said anything.
“All right. I remind you also, one more time, of the boundaries on the pressure-protection spell. They’re marked by this area of light around us— which will serve the added purpose of enabling us to see what’s going on around us. If we need to expand the boundaries, that’s easily done. But unless I direct you otherwise, stay inside the light. Beyond the lighted area, there’s some direction for a limited area, but it’s erratic. Don’t depend on it! Otherwise you may find yourself crushed to a pulp.”
Nita glanced at Kit; he gave her an I-don’t-care wave of the tail. Sperm whales were much less bothered by pressure changes than most of the species, and the great depths were part of their hunting grounds. “You be careful!” she sang at him in an undertone. “Don’t get cute down there.”
“Don’t you.”
“Anything else?” S’reee said. “Any questions?”
“Is there time for a fast bite?” Roots said, sounding wistful.
“Surely,” Fang said, easing up beside the beaked whale with that eternal killer-whale smile. “Where should I bite you?”
“Enough, you two. Last chance, my wizards.”
No one sang a note.
“Then forward all,” S’reee said, “and let us take the adventure the Powers send us.”
She glided forward, out into the darkness past the great curved cliff, tilted her nose down, and dived — not straight, but at a forty-five-degree angle roughly parallel to the downward slope of the canyon. The wizard-light advanced with her. Areinnye followed first; then Fang and Iniihwit, with Fluke and Roots close behind. After them came Tlhlki and Aroooon and Hotshot, and Nita, with Kit behind her as rearguard, suspiciously watching the zone of light around them. Only one of the Celebrants did not stay within that boundary, sailing above it, or far to one side, as he pleased — Ed, cruising restlessly close to the canyon walls as the group descended, or pacing them above, a ghost floating in midnight-blue water.
“I don’t like it,” Nita sang, for Kit’s hearing only, as she looked around her.
“What?”
“This.” She swung her tail at the walls — which were towering higher and higher as they cut downward through the Continental Shelf. On the nautical maps in their manuals, the canyon had looked fairly innocent; and a drop of twenty-five feet in a half-mile had seemed gentle. But Nita was finding the reality that rose in ever-steepening battlements around her much more threatening. The channel’s walls at their highest had been about three hundred feet high, comparable to the walls she’d seen in the Grand Canyon on vacation. But these walls were already five or six hundred feet high, growing steadily steeper as the canyon’s angle of descent through the shelf increased. Nita had a neck to crane back, it would already be sore.
As it was, she had something much worse — a whale’s superb sonar sense, which told her exactly how puny she was in comparison to those cliffs— exactly where loose rocks lay on them, ready to be shaken down at the slightest bottom tremor.
Kit looked up around them and sang a note of uncomfortable agreement. “Yeah,” he said. “It gives me the creeps too. It’s too tall—“
No,” Nita said softly. “It’s that this isn’t a place where we’re supposed to be. Something very large happened here once. That’s your specialty; you should be able to feel it.”
“Yeah, I should.” There was a brief pause. “I seem to have been having trouble with that lately. — But you’re right, it’s there. It’s not so much the tallness itself we’re feeling. But what it’s — what it’s a symbol of, I think—“
Nita said nothing for a moment, startled by the idea that Kit had been losing some of his talent at his specialty. There was something that could mean, some warning sign— She couldn’t think what.