Beneath that panel, packed in clear fluid, was a ridged layer of goo, a bit too gray to be mozzarella. Dashes of brownish glass perforated the goo in neat parallel rows.
"I'm not supposed to open it up like this," Ray had said. "But fuck 'em. It's not as though the blighter's photosensitive."
"So what are those little brown bits?"
"Indium tin oxide over glass. Semiconductor."
"Jesus. And it's working right now?"
"Even as we speak."
"Jesus," Joel had said again. And then: "I wonder how you program something like this."
Ray had snorted at that. "You don't. You teach it. Learns through positive reinforcement, like a bloody baby."
A sudden, smooth shift in momentum. Joel pulled back to the present; the lifter was hanging stable, five meters over the waves. Right on target. Nothing but empty ocean on the surface, of course; Beebe's transponder was thirty meters straight down. Shallow enough to home in on, too deep to be a navigational hazard. Or to serve as a midwater hitching post for charter boats hunting Channer's legendary sea monsters.
The cheese printed out a word on the 'scaphe's tactical board: Launch?
Joel's finger wavered over the OK key, then came down. Docking latches clanked open; the lifter reeled Joel Kita and his cargo down to the water. Sunlight squinted through viewports for a few seconds as the 'scaphe swung in its harness. A wavetop batted at the forward port.
The world jerked once, slewed sideways, and turned green.
Joel opened the ballast tanks and looked back over his shoulder. "Going down, folks. Your last glimpse of sunlight. Enjoy it while you can."
"Thanks," said Fischer.
Nobody else moved.
Crush
Pre-adapted.
Even now, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, Fischer doesn't know what Scanlon meant by that.
He doesn't feel pre-adapted, not if that means he's supposed to be at home here. Nobody even talked to him on the way down. Nobody talked much to anyone else, either, but when they didn't talk to Fisher it seemed especially personal. And one of them, Brander— it's hard to tell with the eyecaps and all, but Fischer thinks Brander keeps looking at him, like they know each other from somewhere. Brander looks mean.
Everything's out in the open down here; pipes and cable bundles and ventilation ducts are all tacked onto the bulkheads in plain sight. He saw it on the vids before he came down, but those somehow left the impression of a brighter place, full of light and mirrors. The wall he's facing now, for instance; there should be a mirror there. But it's just a gray metal bulkhead with a greasy, unfinished sheen to it.
Fischer shifts his weight from one foot to the other. At one end of the lounge Lubin leans against a library pedestal, his capped eyes pointed at them with blank disinterest. Lubin's said only one thing to them in the five minutes they've been here:
"Clarke's still outside. She's coming in."
Something clanks under the floor. Water and nitrox mix, gurgling, nearby. The sound of a hatch swinging open, movement from below.
She climbs up into the lounge, droplets beading across her shoulders. Her diveskin paints her black below the neck, a skinny silhouette, almost sexless. Her hood is undone; blond hair, plastered against her skull, frames a face paler than Fischer's ever seen. Her mouth is a wide thin line. Her eyes, capped like his own, are blank white ovals in a child's face.
She looks around at them: Brander, Nakata, Caraco, Fischer. They look back, waiting. There's something in Nakata's face, Fischer thinks, something like recognition, but Lenie Clarke doesn't seem to notice. She doesn't seem to notice any of them, really.
She shrugs. "I'm changing the sodium on number two. A couple of you could come along, I guess."
She doesn't seem exactly human. There is something familiar about her, though.
What do you think, Shadow? Do I know her?
But Shadow isn't talking.
There's a street where none of the buildings have windows. The streetlamps shine down with a sick coppery light on masses of giant clams and big ropy brownish things emerging from mucous-gray cylinders (tube worms, he remembers: Riftia fuckinghugeous, or something). Natural chimneys rise here and there above the invertebrate multitudes, pillars of basalt and silicon and crystallized sulfur. Every time Fischer visits the Throat, he thinks of really bad acne.
Lenie Clarke leads them on a flight down Main Street: Fischer, Caraco, a couple of cargo squids on remote. The generators lean up over them on both sides. A dark curtain billows across the road directly ahead, and it sparkles. A school of small fish darts around the edges of the streaming cloud.
"That's the problem," Lenie buzzes. She looks back at Fischer and Caraco. "Mud plume. Too big to redirect."
They've come past eight generators so far. That leaves six up ahead, drowning in silt. Double shift, even if they call out Lubin and Brander.
He hopes they don't have to. Not Brander, anyway.
Lenie fins off towards the plume. The squids whine softly behind, dragging their tools. Fischer steels himself to follow.
"Shouldn't we check thermal?" Caraco calls out. "I mean, what if it's hot?"
He was wondering that himself, actually. He's been wondering about such things ever since he overheard Caraco and Nakata comparing rumors from the Mendocino fracture. Nakata heard it was a really old minisub, with Plexiglas ports. Caraco heard they were thermoacrylate. Nakata said it got wedged inside the center of the rift zone. Caraco said no, it was just cruising over the seabed and a smoker blew up under it.
They agreed on how fast the viewports melted, though. Even the skeletons went to ash. Which didn't make much difference anyway, since every bone in every body had already been smashed by the ambient pressure.
Caraco makes a lot of sense, in Fischer's opinion, but Lenie Clarke doesn't even answer. She just fins off into that black sparkly cloud and disappears. At the spot she disappears the mud glows suddenly, a phosphorescent wake. The fish swarm towards it.
"She doesn't even care, sometimes," Fischer buzzes softly. "Like, whether she lives or dies…"
Caraco looks at him for a moment, then kicks off towards the plume.
Clarke's voice buzzes out of the cloud. "Not much time."
Caraco dives into the roiling wall with a splash of light. A knot of fish— a couple of them are a fair size now, Fischer sees— swirl in her wake.
Go on, Shadow says.
Something moves.
He spins around. For a moment there's only Main Street, fading in distance.
Then something big and black and…and lopsided appears from behind one of the generators.
"Jeez." Fischer's legs move of their own volition. "They're coming!" he tries to yell. The vocoder scales it down to a croak.
Stupid. Stupid. They warned us, the sparkles bring in the little fish and the little fish bring in the big fish and if we don't watch it we just get in the way.
The plume is right in front of him now, a wall of sediment, a river on the bottom of the ocean. He dives in. Something nips lightly at his calf.
Everything goes black, with occasional sparkles. He turns his headlight on; the flowing mud swallows the beam half a meter from his face.
But Clarke can see it, somehow: "Turn it off."
"I can't see—"
"Good. Maybe they won't either."
He kills the light. In the darkness he gropes the gas billy from its sheath on his leg.