“No! No! No! This close. This close and you say it would be better. You think it would be better that after all this time—all this time—that it would be better if it were not used for good. After all the evil and dirty hands that have been on it how can you say that it is not the time for clean and good hands to be on it. Now!” She sermonized.
I thought.
Clean, good.
I was not so persuaded for I knew the state of my morality.
“Is our quest for it any different, any better, or any worse than all the other quests?” I asked her.
She answered, “Yes, and not in means or in methods only, but also in motivation. That is the basis, that is the bedrock of why our quest is different from all the other quests that have preceded us. Ours is the noble and righteous quest.”
“Noble and righteous motivation?” I asked.
“Certainly, our motivation is good. We will bring the power of good up from the Deep’s dark. Think of it. It will be the power of good and that power will be in my hands—our hands,” she said.
“Power,” I said.
She repeated, “Power.”
25
Water is meaningless except for the meaningless fact that water is the current that carries all life on Earth. The lithosphere is just dead rock. The atmosphere is just atomized vapors. The hydrosphere is the realm of life.
On the surface, where the spheres meet, water is transparent and the character of it is innocent. I sat upon the coral head in the shallow tidal pool with my feet dangling in the ava—the cut that fell to the deep. Clear, innocent, and warm—the water baptized me in its simplicity and I was at peace. Then my mind wandered into water’s pressure charts. Sitting here the water pressure was meaningless. Then the changes began. At thirty-three feet, the pressure was the air pressure plus the equivalent of another atmosphere of air pressure and that reality was constant in its increase until the bottom.
At thirty-five thousand feet the pressure was sixteen thousand pounds per square inch—an increase of one thousand times in pressure.
It, the water, was not clear, warm, and innocent. It, the water, was black, cold, and evil. It, the water, had at the bottom lost its fluidity and was a syrup at below-freezing temperatures. But, there the world was most organized. For entropy was reduced to a zero state and what had been was, what had been is, and what had been was to be. There was no confusion, no randomness, and no chaos.
As I was resting there a great leviathan cruised beneath my hanging feet and another, Manta, entered the water. The small air bubbles were always expanding in volume and always decreasing in density until they exploded at the demarcation of the spheres.
Then I did the math. An air bubble with a one-inch diameter at thirty-five thousand feet—one thousand atmospheres—would have a diameter of one thousand inches on the surface as it expired with only one-thousandth the density of its origin in the Deep.
Manta, the lesser of the leviathans, swam in the shallow deep as the greater of the leviathans descended downward.
Upon the belly of the Deep a blob of jellyfish, Cyanea capillata, at 0.077 inches was ascending upward on its single life’s journey from the Deep to the shallow. With each pulse of its bell the blob would, without growing, ever increase in size until at the surface what had been an almost invisible blob would be a seventy-seven inch Lion Mane jellyfish with two hundred thirty feet of invisible tentacles inlaid with billions of deadly poisonous stinging cells. Upon the surface, it would float, glide, drift mindless—but not at the mercy of time and tide.
26
They that go down to the sea in ships; that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For He commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They mount up to heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out of their distress.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.
When and where I grew up it was required that the Bible in the King James Version be memorized. It was not so much a requirement as it was the practiced way of life. I do not know how but I know why Psalm 107: verse 23 to verse 29 was recalled. It was my prayer.
The shipworms had in silence reduced the slaver to digestive by-products. The iron-eating bacteria was reducing the U-Boat to a rust stain in silence. In silence, the jelly blob of life was trekking. The more we toiled, the more we labored, the more we worked; the more we became evermore wordless. Words were no longer the agents of our communication and for the most part were little more than an archaic artifact of our petrified past. Words had a past which had purification and we were seeking a purified future.
But the more silent we became; the more the Deep gave voice.
Manta threw out a question. It was as if a well-spring had been tapped. “Has anyone else noticed the restlessness of the island spirits?”
I was thinking it but the Deacon said it. “Island spirits?”
Manta retorted boldly but calmly, “Yes, island spirits.”
The island environment had been less calm then usual but the season was changing.
The Deacon commented, “It is just the change of season. Island spirits have nothing to do with what is happening.”
Then Manta added what he knew. “Yeah, how can you argue against hygrometers, thermometers, and seismometers? They put black numbers on white charts and so each day we have a new truth. Right, Deacon?”
The Deacon was put off by this slap. Then he said, “Truth or no, that is not the point. The point is there ain’t no living spirit in the water or in the air on this island. And, there ain’t no spirit living between or among the three elements. The air is changing because of the migration of the direct rays of the sun, the water is counter-current because of the seasonal change of the Antarctic Circum-Polar Current, and the land is heaving because of deep-water seismic activity. It ain’t truth but it is fact by the numbers.”
“What lies between the numbers?” Manta asked.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end.
I was praying.
“Do you think that we can get this dive completed before the season’s change? We are coming close to the end of the good weather,” John Henry said.
“The easy dive weather is about over but you can dive in any weather, it just may not be easy diving,” Manta answered.
“I agree. We may not get optimum dive conditions but the dive can be accomplished. Also, other than weather there is time. If we do not get to it first, somebody may just stumble upon it and blunder into our plans. It may end up on a fireplace mantle, as a spittoon, a meaningless gift, or an evil icon. This dive has to be weatherproof and it can be made so.” The Deacon declared his opinion.
For He commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
I prayed.
Just then there was a low bass rumble that seemed to push the already high tide higher.
John Henry looked over her left shoulder and a wave had piled on top of another wave and was breaking over the coral reef.
Then she spoke. “I don’t know which of you has the correct understanding grasp of all of this or any of this, but come what may, there are going to be impediments that are within us, large and small, and impediments outside of us, large and small, that we have no insight into and never will see until it is before us in our adventure. That higher-than-normal breaker was the last event consequence in a series of unknown sequences. In what we are about to do, that is what we must be concerned with in order to be successful. We will never know the before and must not be concerned with the after. The moment, each moment, is our only concern. Each moment has to be our objective. The tides will be less, the tides will be greater—it matters not.”