Not much comes down from the cortex any more. Low-level impulses flicker in from the parietal and occipital lobes. The motor strip hums in the background. Occasionally, Broca’s area mutters to itself. The rest is mostly dead and dark, worn smooth by a sluggish black ocean cold as antifreeze. All that’s left is pure reptile.
It pushes on, blind and unthinking, oblivious to the weight of four hundred liquid atmospheres. It eats whatever it can find. Desalinators and recyclers keep it hydrated. Sometimes, old mammalian skin grows sticky with secreted residues; newer skin, laid on top, opens pores to the ocean and washes everything clean with aliquots of distilled seawater.
The reptile never wonders about the signal in its head that keeps it pointing the right way. It doesn’t know where it’s headed, or why. It only knows, with pure brute instinct, how to get there.
It’s dying, of course, but slowly. It wouldn’t care much about that even if it knew.
Now something is tapping on its insides. Infinitesimal, precisely spaced shock waves are marching in from somewhere ahead and drumming against the machinery in its chest.
The reptile doesn’t recognize the sound. It’s not the intermittent grumble of conshelf and seabed pushing against each other. It’s not the low-frequency ATOC pulses that echo dimly past en route to the Bering. It’s a pinging noise—metallic, Broca’s area murmurs, although it doesn’t know what that means.
Abruptly, the sound intensifies.
The reptile is blinded by sudden starbursts. It tries to blink, a vestigial act from a time it doesn’t remember. The caps on its eyes darken automatically. The pupils beneath, hamstrung by the speed of reflex, squeeze to pinpoints a few seconds later.
A copper beacon glares out from the darkness ahead—too coarse, too steady, far brighter than the bioluminescent embers that sometimes light the way. Those, at least, are dim enough to see by; the reptile’s augmented eyes can boost even the faint twinkle of deepwater fish and turn it into something resembling twilight. But this new light turns the rest of the world stark black. Light is never this bright, not since—
From the cortex, a shiver of recognition.
It floats motionless, hesitating. It’s almost aware of faint urgent voices from somewhere nearby. But it’s been following the same course for as long it can remember, and that course points only one way.
It sinks to the bottom, stirring a muddy cloud as it touches down. It crawls forward along the ocean floor.
The beacon shines down from several meters above the seabed. At closer range it resolves into a string of smaller lights stretched in an arc, like photophores on the flank of some enormous fish.
Broca sends down more noise: Sodium floods. The reptile burrows on through the water, panning its face from side to side.
And freezes, suddenly fearful. Something huge looms behind the lights, bloating gray against black. It hangs above the seabed like a great smooth boulder, impossibly buoyant, encircled by lights at its equator. Striated filaments connect it to the bottom.
Something else, changes.
It takes a moment for the reptile to realize what’s happened: the drumming against its chest has stopped. It glances nervously from shadow to light, light to shadow.
“You are approaching Linke Station, Aleutian Geothermal Array. We’re glad you’ve come back.”
The reptile shoots back into the darkness, mud billowing behind it. It retreats a good twenty meters before a dim realization sinks in.
Broca’s area knows those sounds. It doesn’t understand them—Broca’s never much good at anything but mimicry—but it has heard something like them before. The reptile feels an unaccustomed twitch. It’s been a long time since curiosity was any use.
It turns and faces back from where it fled. Distance has smeared the lights into a diffuse, dull glow. A faint staccato rhythm vibrates in its chest.
The reptile edges back towards the beacon. One light divides again into many; that dim, ominous outline still lurks behind them.
Once more the rhythm falls silent at the reptile’s approach. The strange object looms overhead in its girdle of light. It’s smooth in some places, pockmarked in others. Precise rows of circular bumps, sharp-angled protuberances appear at closer range.
“You are approaching Linke Station, Aleutian Geothermal Array. We’re glad you’ve come back.”
The reptile flinches, but stays on course this time.
“We can’t get a definite ID from your sonar profile.” The sound fills the ocean. “You might be Deborah Linden. Deborah Linden. Please respond if you are Deborah Linden.”
Deborah Linden. That brings memory: something with four familiar limbs, but standing upright, moving against gravity and bright light and making strange harsh sounds—
—laughter—
“Please respond—”
It shakes its head, not knowing why.
“—if you are Deborah Linden.”
Judy Caraco, says something else, very close.
“Deborah Linden. If you can’t speak, please wave your arms.”
The lights overhead cast a bright scalloped circle on the ocean floor. There on the mud rests a box, large enough to crawl into. Two green pinpoints sparkle from a panel on one of its sides.
“Please enter the emergency shelter beneath the station. It contains food and medical facilities.”
One end of the box gapes open; delicate jointed things can be seen folded up inside, hiding in shadow.
“Everything is automatic. Enter the shelter and you’ll be all right. A rescue team is on the way.”
Automatic. That noise, too, sticks out from the others. Automatic almost means something. It has personal relevance.
The reptile looks back up at the thing that’s hanging overhead like, like,
—like a fist—
like a fist. The underside of the sphere is a cool shadowy refuge; the equatorial lights can’t reach all the way around its convex surface. In the overlapping shadows on the south pole, something shimmers enticingly.
The reptile pushes up off the bottom, raising another cloud.
“Deborah Linden. The station is locked for your own protection.”
It glides into the cone of shadow beneath the object and sees a bright shiny disk a meter across, facing down, held inside a circular rim. The reptile looks up into it.
Something looks back.
Startled, the reptile twists down and away. The disk writhes in the sudden turbulence.
A bubble. That’s all it is. A pocket of gas, trapped underneath the
—airlock.
The reptile stops. It knows that word. It even understands it, somehow. Broca’s not alone any more, something else is reaching out from the temporal lobe and tapping in. Something up there actually knows what Broca is talking about.
“Please enter the emergency shelter beneath the station—”
Still nervous, the reptile returns to the airlock. The air pocket shines silver in the reflected light. A black wraith moves into view within it, almost featureless except for two empty white spaces where eyes should be. It reaches out to meet the reptile’s outstretched hand. Two sets of fingertips touch, fuse, disappear. One arm is grafted onto its own reflection at the wrist. Fingers, on the other side of the looking glass, touch metal.
“—locked for your own protection. Deborah Linden.”
It pulls back its hand, fascinated. Inside, forgotten parts are stirring. Other parts, more familiar, try to send them away. The wraith floats overhead, empty and untroubled.