Only, nobody was home.
Dan hung around outside, giving Deepwater 3 a once-over with his lights and sonar, while I slowly went through the reactivated section.
It was a scene from a fantasy world.
They’d used cutting torches to rip out all the bulkheads, leaving only a few, thick support spars intact. The deck had been buried in soft, white, dry sand and the concave ceiling had been painted an almost surreal sky blue. Indirect lights made the ceiling glow, while a huge heat lamp had been welded into the ceiling at one end, glaring down across the “beach” with a mild humming sound. Makeshift beach chairs, beach blankets, and other furniture were positioned here and there, as the kids had seen fit.
Several stand-alone LCD screens had been wired into the walls, with horseshoes of disturbed sand surrounding them. I carefully approached one of the LCDs—my moist suit picking up sand on my feet and legs. Cycling through the LCD’s drive I discovered many dozens of movies and television programs. Informational relics from before the aliens came. Videos about flying, and surfing, hiking, camping, and lots and lots of nature shows.
I went to two more LCD screens, and found similar content.
I walked to the middle of the section—realizing that I hadn’t stood in a space that unconfined and open since before we’d all gone below—and used my mobile radio to call for Dan.
He hooked up at the docking collar on the opposite end of the section, and came in under the “sun,” stopping short and whistling softly.
“Can you believe this?” I said.
Like me, Dan was an oldster from the astronaut days. Though he’d never had any children, nor even a girlfriend, since his wife had died in the mad rush to get to sea when the mirror cloud made life impossible on the surface.
“They’ve been busy,” Dan said. “Is there anyone else here?”
“Not a soul,” I said. “Though it looks like they left in a hurry.”
“How can you figure?”
“Lights were left on.”
I looked around the room again, noting how many teenagers might fit into the space, and the countless prints in the sand, the somewhat disheveled nature of the blankets.
“Frankie and Annette, eat your hearts out,” I said.
Dan grunted and smiled. “I was at party or two like that, back in flight school.”
“Me too,” I admitted. “But something tells me they didn’t just come here to get laid. Look at what they’ve been watching.”
“Porn?” Dan said.
“No… yes. But not the kind you think.”
I flipped on the LCDs and started them up playing whatever video was queued in memory. Instantly, the space was filled with the sound of crashing waves, rock music, images of people sky-diving and hang-gliding, aerial sweeps of the Klondike, the Sahara, all shot on clear days. Very few clouds in the sky. It was non-stop sunshine from screen to screen to screen.
Dan wasn’t smiling anymore. He stared at the heat lamp in the ceiling, and the false sky, and then back at the sand.
“You ever go to church when you were a kid?” Dan asked me.
“Not really. Dad was an atheist, and mom a lapsed Catholic.”
“I went to church when I was a kid. Baptist, then Episcopal, then Lutheran. My dad was a spiritual shopper. Anyway, wherever we went, certain things were always the same. The pulpit, the huge bible open to a given scripture, the wooden pews. But more than that, they all felt a certain way. They had a vibe. You didn’t have to get the doctrine to understand what the building was meant for.”
“What does this have to do with anything, Dan?” I said, getting exasperated.
“Look around, man,” Dan said, holding his arms wide. “This is a house of worship.”
I stared at everything, not comprehending. Then, suddenly, it hit me.
“The club isn’t a club.”
“What?”
“The Glimmer Club. That’s what she called it. She said many of the younger teens and a few of the older ones had started it up a couple of years ago. Not every kid was a member, but most of the other kids heard rumors. To be a member, you had to swear total secrecy.”
My father had tended to consider all religions nuts, but he’d reserved special ire for the ones he called cults: the cracked up fringe groups with the truly dangerous beliefs. He’d pointed to Jonestown as a textbook example of what could go wrong when people let belief get out of hand.
I experienced a quick chill down my spine.
“They’re not coming back,” I said.
“Where would they go?” Dan asked.
But I was already running across the sand to the hatch for my sub.
Jenna was ten years old when her mother committed suicide.
Neither of us was there when it happened of course. Lucille had moved around from station to station for her last several months, until the separate crew bosses on each of the stations got fed up with her behavior. Ultimately she put herself into a sea lock without a suit on, and flooded the lock before anyone could stop her. By the time they got the lock dry and could bring her out, she was gone. And I was left trying to explain all of this to Jenna, who cried for 48 hours straight, then slept an additional day in complete physical and emotional exhaustion.
For me, it was painful—but in a detached kind of way. Lucille and I had been coming apart for years. The docs mutually agreed that sunlight deprivation may have been part of the problem. It had happened with several others, all of whom had had to seek light therapy to try to compensate for their depression. In Lucille’s case, the light therapy hadn’t worked. In fact, nothing had seemed to brake her long, gradual decline into despair. I’d kept hoping Jenna—a mother’s instinctive selflessness for the sake of her child—would pull Lucille through. But in hindsight it was clear Jenna had actually made things worse.
These thoughts I kept strictly to myself in the weeks and months that followed Lucille’s departure from the living world. I poured myself into my role as Daddy and held Jenna through many a sad night when the bad dreams and missing Mommy got her and there was nobody for Jenna to turn to but me. Eventually the nightmares stopped and Jenna started to get back to her old self—something I was so pleased about I had a difficult time expressing it in words.
For Jenna’s 12th birthday I gave her a computer pad I’d squirreled away before committing to the deep. My daughter had been going nuts decorating half the station with chalk drawings—our supply of paper having long since been exhausted. The pad was an artist’s model, with several different styli and programs for Jenna to use. It liberated her from the limited medium of diatoms-on-metal, and fairly soon all of the LCDs in our little family compartment were alive with her digital paintings.
It was impressive stuff. She threw herself into it unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Vistas and landscapes, stars and planets, and people. Lots of people. Lots of filtered representations of Lucille, usually sad. I dutifully recorded it all onto the family portable drive where I hoped, perhaps one day, if humanity made it out of this hole alive, Jenna’s work might find a wider audience. She’d certainly won over many of the other people on Deepwater 12, and was even getting some nice feedback from some of the other stations as well.
In retrospect, I probably should have seen the obvious.
All of Jenna’s art—with rare exception—had one thematic element in common.