Samples, Cells, and Stiffs. That was the litany Rahel had created to remind Paval, and herself, of their goals for this dive. As a mnemonic, it wasn’t the most brilliant creation, but it seemed to serve its purpose. When she asked Paval what he was going down for while Jynn piloted them the last hundred meters to their dive site, her apprentice held up his hand and ticked off three fingers without even pausing to think.
“Water samples to screen for contaminants. Cell samples from both breeding polyps and new medusae, but no eggs, no live larvae, and no live medusae. Any dead jellies—larvae or medusae—I might find floating around.” He grinned at her then, in that irritatingly youthful way that made him look ten years younger than he probably was. “At least I’ll be able to fit my corpses into a specimen jar.”
Rahel pulled her mask down to cover her unamused scowl. “That falls into the category of ‘something I’ll deal with when I get to it.’ ”
Dropping their speed, Jynn mated the boat so gently with the water that their sudden entrance into the rhythms of the Odarkan seemed almost magical to Rahel. She hadn’t realized how much she missed the heavy swaying of a boat on the breast of the water, how separated Sadena’s code of zero impact required each person to be from the living world surrounding them.
On the wake of that thought, a fierce specter of dilemma swelled inside her. Could humans learn to love a world they weren’t allowed to touch? Could humans touch a world and not disrupt the thing they claimed to cherish? Rahel had a feeling the answer sat somewhere between the Greens’ radical separatism, Noah’s Ark’s respectful intervention, and Feles Sadena’s sanitized exploitation. Yet still outside the reach of the everyday human. It wasn’t a happy thought just before this kind of sampling dive.
“OK, Junior, let’s go.”
Leaving Paval to settle his mask and pick up his gear, Rahel slipped over the side into water warmer than she’d expected. A pleased but startled shiver rippled just beneath the surface of her diving suit. The sea closed its gentle grip around her as if to soothe her fears, and suddenly her horizon became a disc of glass from elbow-to-elbow, a steady platter with her in the middle and the sky all around bobbing and dipping in every direction. She blinked on the BCD control in the upper comer of her mask, and melted below the surface on the drag of her equipment belt and body weights.
As usual, Rahel’s first underwater breath took a touch of bravery and a lot of faith. It was one thing to know that diving gear would keep you safe in an ocean environment, another thing to truly believe it. Her first breath hitched up short, and she had to forcefully clear her lungs and make herself breathe more deeply the second time around. It only partly worked. She felt the dissatisfied tightness in her lungs that said she still hadn’t filled them completely, and had to adjust her perceptions yet again to breathe what felt like a huge, languid sigh against her mask. This time her body relaxed a little with the flush of oxygenated air. Rahel tried to set a flag in her brain to remind her that even breathing couldn’t be taken for granted down here in the stellar jellies’ realm. Even that much thought threw her off rhythm, though, and forced her to pattern her breathing again.
Sunlight glanced brightly off the surface far above her. It bleached the sky gray-white, and blurred all sign of Jynn’s skate except for a dark, broken outline where the resting craft met the water. Below, beetle-green stretched as deep as the brightness would allow, then a silent, shifting mat of shadow formed a floor on which the sunlight pooled. The first ripple of light across that surface brought a smile to Rahel’s face: movement. She blinked again on her BCD, and let its functions draw her slowly downward.
“This is incredible!”
The sound of Paval’s voice in her left ear made her glance unconsciously over that shoulder. A shimmer of reflective flatworms exploded silently away from her sudden movement. Rahel relaxed to face her own subjective forward again, reminding herself with a sting of annoyance that hearing her apprentice through a suit comm told her nothing about where he was in relation to her.
“Be careful.” That seemed a safe admonition, regardless of what he was doing. A jelly—half-unseen amongst the rest of the translucent mass below her—brushed languidly against her flipper, then furled away into the jumble of others. She pulled her knees up to give it more room.
“Don’t worry—you’re clear.” Paval could apparently see her, though. He laughed as the jellies tumbled in a slow motion tangle, swelling and shrinking on dreamy puffs of motion. “Besides, their nematocysts can’t penetrate most human skin. With these suits on, there’s almost no chance they’ll sting either of us.”
“It’s not us I’m worried about.” Rahel sculled in a circle until she found her apprentice hovering far ahead on her right, his hands barely stirring the water above pearlescent bells wider across than he stood tall. The jellies rippled like a second surface in response to his soft movements. “I don’t want you tearing any tentacles or floats on your way down. Push through them gently.”
Paval nodded, his expression unreadable through his mask at such a distance. “I’ll be careful.” He sounded a tiny bit chastened, though. “I’ll be another twenty straight down. Call me if you need me.” And he melted into the mat of jellies before she could comment further on his handling.
Samples, Cells, and Stiffs, she reminded herself. There was still a lot of work to do. Tucking her knees against her chest, she wrapped her arms around the backs of her thighs and blinked the BCD to take her lower.
Jellyfish membrane oozed across her feet, her back, her shoulders. They were warm, like the water, and nearly as fluid, flowing away from her slow passage the way bubbles slipped around a falling stone. Flashes of silent, cold-bright lightning formed their only response to Rahel’s brushes with their bodies. In their gentle liquid world, this must have been the same as startled cries. She felt obscurely guilty for disturbing them. Even acknowledging that they hadn’t enough nervous system to truly notice or care didn’t make her feel any better.
The kiss of their fragile bodies lifted, drifted upward, and Rahel was suddenly beneath them. Tentacles floated around her in tangles and clouds. A long, lace-like ruffle marked the center of each delicate creature, and ghostly colors flickered up the crinkled edges almost in time with her breathing. The net of sparks that laced their bells whenever they jostled against each other made it easy to understand why tourists paid so much to watch them rise and feed every night. Absently watching little swarms of aquatic insects dart from ruffle to ruffle, Rahel wondered how many tourists had ever tried to imagine the subtlety of organisms with skin but one cell thick, much less what that said about the complexity of the rest of their world. All she could picture was Feles Sadena offering gratis dinners to anyone who found the concept of Darwinian hierarchy too stressful for patrician comfort.
Sunlight filtered past the gossamer flotilla, mottled abstract patterns across the yellow-and-black panels of Rahel’s skinsuit. Jellyfish thoughts reflected. There couldn’t have been more than thirty of the creatures, drifting with their aimless jellyfish whims, yet they made a raft nearly forty meters at its widest. Uncounted ruffles and threads of tissue sifted through the darkness below them. Tipping herself horizontal, Rahel flashed the beam of her handlamp through the water below as she worked a string of water sample bottles off her equipment belt.