It was the closest we’d been since the night she’d left me, in the hospital here.
“If that’s what you want,” she said, “then all right, for what we once were, for what happened last time.” Then she let go of my hands and stepped back. “If you’re going to be here, then at least help me stow this crap,” she said.
—–—
The sub was stationed over the broken rim of the Great Darkness, seemingly perched on great legs of blue-white spotlights, as insubstantial as my own. The Always Sea was deepening here, sloping down the submerged flanks of the volcano that was Blackstone Mountain. Staring out the wide, transparent ports of the sub, I could see several shreeliala gathered at the rim of the Great Darkness below us, with the rounded, woven structures of the shreeliala’s Blackstone Village (our name for it, not theirs) receding away into the green-blue distance toward where its seaweed-draped outskirts met the human buildings of Undersea Port.
On the rim of the Great Darkness, a great and wide forest of blue-black kelp undulated in the slow currents of the Always Sea. The shreeliala were gathered above the canopy of kelp, and I could see the bubbling forms of shreeliala speech as they spoke amongst themselves. The words of the shreeliala language are essentially shaped water-and-air-bubble structures (which is why they resort to English when out of the water), as much visual as audible. The scientists studying their language are still trying to discern the grammar and construction and putting together a dictionary, but I doubt that any human is ever going to be able to “speak” or understand shreeliala without mechanical help.
Smelling cinnamon, I spoke aloud. “I wonder what they’re saying?” Hasalalo, aboard the sub with us, peered over my shoulder to the scene below.
“They’re not pleased that this is happening,” it said. “Many of us, especially those of bones-of-stone, weren’t pleased with the Green Council’s decision. They say it is bones-of-air stupidity to permit this.” A long finger stroked the marking on its skull, reflexively.
“They’re not going to try to stop us, are they?” Mikhail asked from his console. Mikhail’s finger hovered above the com button. On the screen in front of him, we could see Avariel in the dive chamber, with Patrick helping her fit on the last of her gear.
Hasalalo’s eyes widened. “They don’t think they’ll have to. The Lights-in-Water will do that for them.”
Mikhail laughed at that, and his finger moved away from the com. “The Lights-in-Water haven’t met Avariel. That woman’s got a nasty mean streak for people who get in her way.” He chuckled again, then glanced at me. The chuckle died.
“Is that what you think?” I asked Hasalalo. “The Lights-in-Water will stop Avariel?”
It looked at me placidly. The bubbler gurgled and spat water. “They stopped you.”
Movement. A flash of brilliance accompanied the pain. Then nothing until I woke up in the hospital. “It was a rockfall that stopped me. I got too close to the edge and hit something unstable,” I told it.
“I wonder,” Hasalalo answered, “what truth was buried inside those rocks that took your legs?”
I started to answer it, but Avariel’s voice came over the com and the holoscreens lit up around the compartment. “Going live,” she said, her voice muffled through the rebreather. “Do you have the feed, Mikhail?”
“Got it,” Mikhail answered. “Everything looks good here.”
“Fine. I’m going down, then. Wish me luck.”
Luck, I whispered under my breath. “No luck needed,” Mikhail told her. “You got this. Piece of cake.”
The image on the holoscreens bounced and swirled, then filled with bubbles as the dive hatch filled with water and opened for her. Avariel swam out into the haze of the sub’s lights, the view on the screen swaying dizzily as she looked up and the camera on her mask picked up the sub above her. Our lights overloaded the camera until it dimmed, then opened up again as she glanced over at the shreeliala gathered at the lips of the canyon, watching her and speaking to each other in a rush of half-glimpsed water shapes. Behind us, we heard Patrick clamber up the metal ladder into our chamber and settle down by the com unit.
“Hey, Avariel, you’re green across the board here,” Patrick said. “Ready?”
She looked down, and we saw the blue-black below that the sub’s light could not penetrate. Her arm came into view, laden with her dive watch and depth instrumentation. “Everything looks green here, too,” she said. “Patrick, Mikhail, I’m heading down.”
I tried not to feel insulted by the lack of any reference to me.
On the screens, we watched the water around her slowly darken and the readout from her depth gauge climb just as slowly. She stayed near the edge of the canyon wall, as we had both done the last time, but not—I noted—as closely as I had clung to it. As the sub’s light faded, she switched on the mask’s headlamps, and we could occasionally catch glimpses of the jagged, volcanic rock of the lava tube that was the Great Darkness, adorned with Venusian kelp and the creatures who lived there amongst the rocks and vegetation.
I remembered that much myself: the walls of the Great Darkness had been alive in front of me. I saw anglerworms dangling their fish-shaped heads outward into the water, enticing the snaggle-mouthed puffers to come close enough to be speared by the poisoned lance of their tongues. I watched a wave of green painters undulate past me, the inky dye from their bodies leaving swirling trails of purple as they passed. Snorting shells, with their long spires and carapaces swirled with brilliant blues, yellows, and reds belched air as they made their way along the ledges of the Great Darkness. The shallow waters of the Always Sea teemed with life, everywhere. There were species unseen by any human to be discovered everywhere we looked and we could have spent days cataloging and describing them, but Avariel was intent only on going down into the blackness …
Down, and down. I knew that Avariel would be starting to feel the pressure building against her flexible suit, which would be hardening against the weight of the water. The suit she wore was a hybrid: self-contained and powered only by Avariel’s legs, but also a miniature “vessel” that would allow her to reach depths that an individual diver would not be able to reach. Because for religious reasons, the shreeliala had refused to allow us to probe the Great Darkness with remote-controlled vehicles, we had no idea of the actual depth of the lava tube though indirect estimates suggested that it was no more than eight hundred meters.
The hissing of the rebreather would be loud in her ears, and the canyon wall she followed down became stripped of the kelp, which needed the faint, cloud-shielded sunlight that was mostly nonexistent below seventy-five to one hundred meters. Instead, the rocks were dotted with the gray-white tubes of puff-worms and the lacy, swollen cells of prison-crabs, laden with the bones of the fish they’d snagged with their long, prehensile tails.
“I’m at 210 meters,” Avariel said, her voice becoming distorted in pitch as the rebreather added more helium and neon to the air she was breathing. I knew why she mentioned it: that’s where I’d had my accident, where she’d been forced to abandon the quest the last time. She was well away from the canyon wall now, the lights on her mask illuminating only dark, empty water. She wasn’t going to repeat my “mistake.”
The dive meter display showed 280 meters when it happened.
“There’s something …” they heard Avariel say. “Coming up from below. Lights …” In the viewscreen, the camera swayed as she looked down, and we saw a swarm of firefly lights, green and cold, swirling below like a flock of phosphorescent birds, and rising, rising as they grew larger. “I can feel them …”