Thandie tapped a depth meter.“We’re dropping at around sixty centimeters per second. Well, that’s about right, two kilometers an hour. The Ridge summits are around two and a half kilometers below sea level, and the flank of the mid-Atlantic rise is five kilometers deeper than that. I’m hoping to make it down to around four klicks today-about two hours down.” She sat back and looked at Lily. “So. Welcome to my world.”
“Thanks.”
“We may as well relax.” Thandie rummaged in the provisions bag and produced a thermos. “You want some coffee? We have chocolate. You’re supposed to save it until we’re down in the depths, when it gets pretty cold in here, seven or eight degrees, and you need the sugar rush. What I always say is, fuck it.” She hauled out a slab of chocolate, tore off the wrapper, cracked it and handed Lily a piece.
The two of them sat there, eating their chocolate sociably and drinking coffee, while the smooth descent continued.
“I’m glad we’re doing this,” Thandie said, munching. “We haven’t had a lot of time together, you and me, since all this started. But I feel I know you already. I should tell you the stories Gary has about you, from Barcelona.”
“Go on,” Lily said cautiously.
“Like the time you took on the guard who walked in wearing the ring he stole from you.”
“Yeah. They took stuff off each of us in the first minute, as soon as we were captured. But to tell the truth I was just as pissed at the way he wore my sunglasses all the time.”
Thandie laughed. “And the time you cut off your own hair, rather than let them do it to you.”
“I always wore my hair short anyhow. But I couldn’t bear to have them do that, you know? It was all I had left, of me. So I fought back when they tried to shave me.” Which had earned her beatings, and from Said a threat of violation with a broken Coke bottle. “They gave up in the end and let me do it myself.”
“And,” Thandie said, “the time Gary said you dug him out of the worst pit he fell into. When he had diarrhea, and wasn’t allowed out to the john. It wasn’t the illness, he said, it was the shame in front of the others.”
And so Lily had lifted her faded T-shirt, dropped her shorts and shat in the corner, just as Gary had. “My finest hour,” she said.
“Well, it worked, you were a true friend,” Thandie murmured. “You know, I don’t know if I could have stood it. Not the captivity, but the fact of not being able to do anything.”
Lily shut up, as she had developed a habit of doing when people pronounced how they would react in situations they could know nothing of.
Thandie said, “I have to do things. I’m an agent, you know? The frustration would drive me crazy.”
“Everybody feels like that. We all missed our lives, our families, our careers-”
“Yeah, but I got it in spades,” Thandie said ruefully. “Lucky for me I had the smarts to pursue an academic career, where you can be your own boss, though you’re continually fighting for sponsors and contracts and equipment funding. But even so I always seem to spot that limb and head right out on it.”
“Like your theories about the source of the flood water.”
“Yeah.” Thandie grinned, but her eyes were unfocused as she thought about it.
Lily knew that Thandie was getting her share of fame, or notoriety, through her outlandish hypotheses about the true source of the flooding and its likely rise-and everyone knew she hoped to get a book deal out of it. That was her true dream, it seemed, to transcend her profession, even the science, and become famous: to be the Thandie Jones, a media figure, a modern Jacques Cousteau. But to do that, of course, she needed to validate her theories with some hard data. Which was why she was down here now, spending Nathan Lammockson’s money.
However it seemed to Lily that Thandie hadn’t thought it through much further than that. After all, if she was right, if the sea-level rise really was going to become much worse than the consensus of experts was predicting, what would it mean for the world? Thandie was clearly ferociously intelligent. But it was possible she lacked some deeper qualities of imagination. Empathy, perhaps.
Maybe Thandie detected Lily’s reservations about her. They ran out of conversation, and much of the descent passed in silence.
So they dropped into the sea, the dive’s events unfolding relentlessly, the light outside deepening through shades of blue to black. As the air grew steadily colder condensation formed on the walls, making Thandie fret over the effect on her computer screens. It turned out a dehumidifier was faulty. After a time Lily pulled on her Russian fur hat.
At a kilometer down there was an ominous creaking. Lily imagined the small, cramped gondola being crushed like a meringue in a clenched fist. Thandie told her not to worry; it was just the external instrument mounts settling into place as they contracted with the cold.
More than two kilometers down, Thandie’s sonar revealed the shape of the submerged mountains of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
She had Lily direct the bathyscaphe toward the mountain slope. Powerful quartz arc-light lamps fixed to the gondola’s exterior picked out the slope, and they studied the TV image and peered through the small, murky Plexiglas window. Lily saw a featureless surface covered in some kind of ooze, a mess of mud, sand and rock. She could see only a few meters in either direction; there was no sense of the scale of the undersea mountain they cautiously skirted. Thandie powered up her radar system, and tested it out on the mountain slope. It returned bright, clear echoes, embedded in which, Lily understood, there was a wealth of data on the deeper structure of the rocks.
When they got close enough a kind of handler arm implanted small charges in the mud. After the Trieste was safely away, these would be detonated to generate seismic signals, another way to probe the rock’s deep interior. Fish and crabs and worms swam by, disturbed by the arm. They were ordinary-looking creatures, but pale, adapted for the dark and the thousand-atmosphere pressures of this deep. Thandie quoted names like echiuroid worm and ethusa and bassogigas. It was an unprepossessing sight, a deep-sea fauna unremarkable to nonspecialist eyes.
Thandie had Lily sail the Trieste away from the slope so she could direct the radar to peer down the mid-Atlantic rise to the deeper floor. As soon as she did so the radar stopped returning clean echoes. The data display was flickering, jumbled.
“Shit.” Thandie ran through a quick diagnostic. “Everything seems OK.” She bounced a quick test pulse off the mountain; the echo came back clean. “But when I send the pulse downwards…” She shook her head. “If I take the results seriously, the sea floor down there is shattered. Broken up. Some kind of subsidence maybe.” The bathyscaphe shuddered. Thandie grabbed the arms of her chair. “Now what?”
Lily hurriedly checked through her own data displays, running through possible scenarios: an implosion of a flotation tank, a propeller failing. All her indicators were fine. “But we’re rising,” she said.
“What?” Thandie leaned over to see. “We’re heavier than the water, we can’t be.”
Lily said nothing; she just pointed to the depth gauge, which had gone into reverse. And she had started to feel queasy. She quickly checked the craft’s stability. Trieste was spinning. “Spinning, and rising,” she said. “It’s like we’re caught in some kind of updraft.” She glanced out of the thick window. By the boat’s lights she saw turbulence, muddy swirls.
“I knew it,” Thandie breathed.
“What?”
“It’s a fountain. Straight from the mantle reservoirs, coming up through some kind of shattered terrain.”
Lily said, “Tell me what we’re seeing.”
“Water, Lily. Water bubbling up from the interior of the Earth. I think this is the source of the flooding, the sea-level rise. My God, Lily. I’ve been down here a dozen times. We’ve found some direct evidence before, seeps, changes in salinity, but nothing as dramatic as this. You found it on your very first dive!”