“It must have been automatic. They must have needed to save power and kept everything off.”
“Look!” Kisha pointed. Three bright lights bobbed through the darkness, heading for the dome. “The whales!”
“Sure,” Jai said, “they always come back from their run about now.”
“But… but they won’t be able to drop their load. No one will come outside to unharness them if the dome’s locked down.”
He shrugged and turned back. “I’m more interested in getting there,” he said.
That suited her. She needed to find Jonathan. “Can you raise anybody yet?”
A high, tense laughter escaped his lips. “I was trying. All the systems just blinked out.” He must have heard the sharp tone in his voice. More calmly, he said, “They’re coming back.”
She frowned and returned to the porthole. The three bobbing lights were almost at the dome now. Surely they’d be confused. She racked her brain for an answer. Whale trainers and handlers talked to their charges via a translator that made haunting, high sounds audible from hundreds of feet away. The whales heard better than humans. Sonar. At harvest time, the whales came all the way up to the shift-station, bumping against the rope, while nervous humans tied cargo nets to specially made plastic harnesses. So surely there was a way to call the whales here.
Before she could ask, Jai said, “The tests on the dome are complete. A girder fell on three of the lungs, and they can’t open. Diagnostics suggest they might work okay if we get the weight off of them.” He called her over to the terminal, pointing. An exterior camera showed a mess of metal fallen to the sea floor, leaning against the dome, crushing the left bank of sea-lungs. “Here.” Jai drew a circle around a spot a few meters away from the oblong bellows of the lungs where a metal spike had skewered an antenna. “This is probably what ruined their voice communication. No way to tell from here whether or not they got a mayday out.”
“But won’t the other cities come look, anyway?” she asked. “We’ll be quiet, and that will be wrong.”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any information about the seaquake. It could have damaged other domes, as well.”
“We have to do something,” she said. “We might be the only people on the outside of the dome.”
“I don’t even know how to get there,” he said.
She walked over to the storage cabinet and opened the door. Racks of air bottles sat neatly stacked, ready for the next shift, and the next, and the next. They were replenished once a week, and this was only midweek.
He grimaced. “I don’t want to leave you alone. Can your broken fin get you all the way there?”
She hadn’t even thought of that. “Maybe there’s more here.”
“People bring their own gear.”
“What about the whales? Can we call them here?”
His eyes widened. “Probably. They come for harvest. But I don’t know anything about whale handling.”
She grinned. “I do.” She glanced out the porthole. “They’re still there. Any idea where we can find a translator?”
He shrugged, then pointed toward the cabinet full of air bottles. “In there?”
Kisha bent down and looked on the bottom shelf. It was empty. “They’re small. In a drawer?” She began pulling open drawers and cubbies, glancing outside every few minutes to make sure the three lights still hovered around the dome.
Nothing.
She looked out again. No lights. Just the diffuse sunlight that penetrated down here, fifty meters below the sea surface. At least it wasn’t night above them in the world of air and sun. Had the whales gone? How far would the sounds go? “Give me a boost?”
Jai came over and helped her balance with her feet on the bottom shelf. She felt around on the top of the cabinet. There! Something. She hooked her hand around a leather strap and pulled. “We found it,” she breathed, looking down at a round ball the exact right size to hold in her fist, encased in a glassoleum shell to keep it safe from water. Four little blue plastic levers protruded slightly on one side. Four times four commands. But the easy ones were just one lever. Come had to be basic. She knew what to do. It had been in one of her books. She even sang it to Jonathan. One to come and two to wait, three to lift and four to lower. There was more, there was a whole damned language, but she didn’t know it.
Were there even any whales to call? She glanced back out the porthole. The three lights once more hovered above the brilliantly lit city. She breathed a sigh of relief. “They must have just been around the other side.” Now what? “OK. I’ve got to go outside. The sound will only travel well through water.” She reached for a new air bottle.
She smiled as Jai reached past her and grabbed a fresh air bottle for himself.
Ten minutes later, she and Jai clung to the rope just above the shift-station. She thumbed the first lever and a clear, mournful whale song filled the water. A shiver touched her spine. As beautiful as the sound was, she knew humans only heard part of it, and that badly, filtered by bubble-helmets. Yet the smallest portion was beautiful enough that she and Jai reached for each other’s hands.
She let go of the rope, so Jai held on for both of them. They kept their silence, and her own breathing seemed loud and intrusive against the whale-song.
The lights of the three whales didn’t seem to be getting any nearer. Was there something else she should do? Whale training was more than just pushing a button or everyone could do it. Her prep classes had been psychology and some of her reading talked about building a bond with the whales.
“We might have to go to them.” She tried an experimental swoop with her damaged fin. Her right thigh protested. Some piece of her safety training ran in the back of her mind. She turned off the translator for a moment. It seemed sacrilegious to talk over it. “Aren’t there emergency sleds? The kind you’d use if I got hurt in the beds and couldn’t swim and you came for me?”
“And they’re motorized!” Jai grinned. “How come I didn’t know you were so brilliant before?”
How should she take that comment? It didn’t matter. Getting to Jonathan mattered. She followed Jai up-rope to a glassoleum bubble dotted with emergency symbols. Directions for opening the bubble were painted on the shell. Jai pulled a lever and water and air began changing places just like in the locks, the tempo of the exchange exact so that no pressure differences were introduced.
The sled was a simple backboard cupped to hold the injured worker, straps, an air tube and spare helmet, and handholds. She was strapped in moments later, feeling foolish but grateful for any way to get to Jonathan.
She clutched the translator to her as they traveled, excruciatingly slowly, toward the brilliant light of Downbelow Dome, their own small find me light illuminating just a few feet of water in front of them. She lay down in the sled, keeping it as aerodynamic as possible, while Jai trailed his long body behind her and the sled. Every once in a while, she heard the swish of his fins behind her as he added his strength to the tiny motor. The sea floor spun by slowly, seven meters or so below them, rocky and full of waving sea-trees and sponges specially adapted to use the human-provided light to grow unusually large at this depth.
As they came closer, the whales’ dark bodies and lighter bellies began to resolve below the harness lights. When the sled was halfway there, she flipped on the come lever again, watching the whales for any sign they heard her. The translator ball in her hand glowed a soft orange. Proximity?
One of the lights began to grow bigger. A whale was coming toward them. She wanted to crow in relief, but held her tongue, listening. The translator would surely tell her what the whales were saying. If they said anything.