“Not outside of a Jules Verne book, anyway.” Luke’s laughter held a glass-snap edge.
“Right, and then we’ve had that current ring the last week or so. Every possible disturbance you could encounter, we’ve been facing it lately,” Al said. “If I didn’t know any better I’d almost think…”
She trailed off, not saying the words. But Luke was thinking the same thing.
It’s as if something is trying to stop us from reaching the Trieste.
6.
“THEY SHOULD’VE INSTALLED A RADIO in this thing,” said Al, “or a CD player or something.” She blew a raspberry. “They sunk a trillion bucks into this operation. A radio’s gonna bankrupt ’em?
“They spent hand over fist,” she went on. “Nobody had ever tried building anything like the Trieste before. Space shuttles, sure, but in space you’re dealing with an absence of pressure. You can put on a suit, step out, float around. Try and do that down here and…”
“Flesh pâté.”
“Bingo. They had to bring the station down in sections. Lots of trial and error, lots of problems. Dropped them with heavy weights, collected them with robotic dive craft. Every section came down encased in a protective shell, with a seam of foam sandwiched between. They got slotted together, riveted by the pressure-resistant robo-divers, foamed, then the shell was cracked away. The station was designed in the principles of orb physics; the egg was the designer’s blueprint. Push on the sides of an egg, right, and it’ll break. But if you press on the top and bottom, it’s nearly unbreakable. A miracle of nature, or so they tell me.
“Plus the material the station’s made out of… it’s metal but not metal. Some kind of high-tech, ultra-state-of-the-art polymer core—it allows the tunnels to flex and bend and … bubble, I guess you could say? Instead of cracking under pressure, the material will expand the way rubber does. The water can warp it, but it won’t burst through.
“Anyway, once the pieces of the station were all slotted together, someone had to go in and open it all up from the inside. There was this membrane linking each section that had to be cut and foamed simultaneously; if it sprung even one leak, the whole structure would flatten. Otto Railsback—that was the name of the guy. Wee scrap of a thing. A single man did the whole job. You want to talk about a real hero? I brought Otto down. He was the first man inside. I attached to the entry port, cracked the hatch, then he went inside.”
“So what happened?” asked Luke, now fascinated.
“Well… I remember the smell that came out at first,” Al said. “My family ran a ranch in Colorado. There was this cave system where I lived, Cave of the Winds. The main part was a tourist trap—drunk dudes wandering around with miner’s helmets, calling themselves spelunkers. But the whole thing sprawled twenty miles underground. You could enter it through a vent in the forest floor about a mile from my home. Just a dark cut into the rocks, right? I went down there one day, alone. I was thirteen, fourteen. Thought I was a badass. I had a flashlight and a sack lunch.
“Predictably, I got lost. Thought I knew where I was going. Didn’t. It got so deep and twisty that if it weren’t for gravity, I wouldn’t have known up from down. My flashlight went on the fritz. I sat in the dark with the rocks dripping around me.” She paused, wrapped in the memory. “That darkness had weight, Doc. As a kid, it seemed hostile—like it wanted to keep me right where I was. And I was scared for practical reasons, too. I could’ve missed a step, slid down a shaft, and busted a leg. I’d have died down there. But I’d gotten into it, right? I had to get out. So I just listened. The dripping water helped. I figured it had to be trickling down, so I just had to follow it up. It was way past my curfew when I reached the cut. My dad skinned my ass raw.”
She sipped water from a silver pouch that reminded Luke of a Capri Sun drink.
“Anyway… the smell in that cave was the same as what came out of the Trieste. This overwhelming reek of darkness. A raw mineral smell; it had presence, an aliveness, like in Cave of the Winds. It freaked me out—no good reason; just that old childish worry—but Otto went right in. He sealed the compartments, made the Trieste truly safe for habitation. After that, others came down to set up the gennies, the air purifiers. But Otto was the guy who got it all rolling. He was the only one who died in the Trieste, too.”
“Jesus. How?”
“He just never came back out,” said Al. “I waited and waited, but when he didn’t show up they told me to resurface. I couldn’t get inside, anyway. But surface diagnostics indicated the station was safe to enter, meaning Otto had completed his task. When the electrical team came down, they found him curled up in the animal quarantine. Dead. Embolism. He just finished his job, then laid down in the dark and died.”
The only one who died, Luke thought, except for Westlake.
“It’s all self-contained,” Al said. “Electricity, air, waste removal. Food and water are brought down as needed. A perfect little microsystem that thumbs its nose at the laws of physics.”
Luke barely heard her. He was still dwelling on Otto Railsback, who’d crawled diligently through the tunnels with his foam gun until he reached his own end.
7.
THERE IS A SPECIFIC DEPTH you’ll hit where the soul finds it impossible to harmonize with its surroundings.
It’s not the darkness. A man is acquainted with it by then—as acquainted as he can ever be. It’s not the vast silence or the emptiness or the absence of any life-forms he can draw warmth or certainty from.
It’s not the pressure. It’s not even the fear of death that constantly nibbles at the edge of his mind.
It’s the sense of unreality. This out-of-body feeling that you’ve stepped away from the path your species has always tread. Things become dreamlike, inessential. Your mind, seeking solace in the familiar, retreats to those things you understand, but those things become so much harder to grasp.
Memories degrade. You remember parts of people, but you surrender their wholes. Abby could crack an egg with one hand. It was a quirky skill Luke remembered wishing he had. He could still recall the sight of her doing it and the yearning that he could do it, too. But the more essential parts of her were already failing him.
The water wasn’t the same down here.
Water is what runs out of our kitchen taps or a playground drinking fountain. It fills bathtubs and pools and yes, of course, the ocean—but at a certain depth, water becomes a barrier from all you remember, all you think you know.
You’re trapped within it, a plaything of it.
Focus erodes. Your thoughts mutate. The pressure.
The pressure.
The soul can’t cope with that. It shouldn’t be expected to.
Humans weren’t built for this. There’s a reason nothing lives down here.
Or nothing should.
8.
LUKE WAS UNAWARE of the exact point when it began to snow.
Marine snow, according to Al. The detritus of animal and plant life that had died miles above. It fell steadily through each zone of the ocean, down and down, shredding into flakes, leached of pigment until it became bone white. A snow of death.