ReVISIONS (7 page)

You'd never know it to watch him work.

When you're six hundred feet down—well below the twilight zone, in the bathypelagic or “deep water” zone—your perception shifts. Nothing as arcane as the chemical balance in your brain changing, although there's some of that, too. No, it's more the realization, slowly sinking into your brain, that there's not damn-all between you and dying but a duraplas shield and some canned oxy-blend.

You realize that, really process the concept, and you're okay. If you can't, you get the screamin' meemies and they cart you Topside where you spend the rest of your life on solid dirt, carefully looking anywhere but oceanward.

Not everyone's cut out to be an aquanaut. No shame to it. Even now, only about a third of the applicants make it into training, and more than half of them dry out before graduation.

The shuttle docks outside with the faint bump-suck noise of a solid seal. Lights on my board match the one on the wall as they cycle from amber to green and the door slides open with an oily hiss.

I don't have to be here for this, but I always am. Call it a benefit of rank, to take the fun stuff with the boring. “Welcome home, boys and girls. Please show your tickets, next station stop Site Fourteen.”

Fourteen, for the thirteen tries before it. First through third were qualified successes: nobody died when the hardware failed. Fourth left bodies floating in a pressurized can: irretrievable. Five and seven were mothballed after the regions became unexpectedly unstable. Nine was a chemical misfire: four more memorials floating out at sea. You can see them on sat photos: orange markers rising and falling with the waves, never moving from the graves they mark.

Robinechec checks ID through the scanner, like there's some way unauthorized bodies could make it this far, while the arrivals step through a full body scanner one at a time. He nods. Everyone's clean.

Clean's a good word for it. The Gate room is sparse, the sole console fitted with a clear plastic cover for emergencies. In case we have to hose down the room for some reason, or—God forbid—there's a lock breach. Despite regulations, we try to keep it homey, anyway. There's a ficus tree in one corner, under a battery-powered grow light, and a welcome mat on the floor when you come through the scanner and another one that says “come again” in bright pink letters when you leave by the Slide.

You take your humor where you can, I suppose.

“Hey, Martin. You coming down with us?”

I shake my head in regret. “Not this time, Kim. Chosen People and higher, only.”

She laughs like it was a joke. Until now, nobody without Secret clearances got past us. Even the construction geeks running the prefab plas shields into place got screened like they were having tea and footsie with the President. I'm just the guardian at the gate. But what a gate! What an unbelievable dream of a gate.

Forty years ago, Kennedy promised that we'd reclaim the seas. It's taken longer than we thought, but Fourteen's the next giant step toward making that promise come true. It still awes me that I'm part of it.

The five newcomers enter the chute and strap themselves in with a minimum of fuss, low-voiced conversations continuing without a break. Kim's got fourteen slides down to Site Fourteen, the others no fewer than six. It's like taking the subway to work for them, I think. Means to an end.

Used to be a submersible would take you into the depths on its own power. That ended with Site Eleven, and the first Slide, back in the '80s, putting the Goddard engine to uses its creator never dreamed of. Safer this way—even if something goes wrong, we can pull them back from up here. Safe as houses. Hell, one of the dive-boys went down on a dura sled a year or two ago, testing out one of the Navy's new equalizer headsets that are supposed to protect your eardrums in a high-speed drop. Headset didn't work all that great, but our dive-boy was grinning even while the medics fussed around him after retrieval. Said it was like taking the wildest, longest pool-slide in the world.

We haven't been able to do anything about the slow climb back up, though. Yet. Rumor has it the brain-kids at NEREUS' think tank are working on a way to pull the nitrogen buildup out faster. Cutting the decompression day out of shift rotation will make a lot of people happy, for damn sure. We get more fights break out in deco than we do anywhere else.

“Yo, you with us?” Gordon, who usually runs the board when I'm not poking my nose in, is impatient to reclaim his post. Standing aside gives him the right to yank my chain. “Let's get this show on the road, boss.”

I nod and flip the toggle that connects me to the massive plas-and-metal growth half a mile below us. “Site Fourteen, this is Gateway Control. Sending you guys down a care package.”

There's a delay, then the echo-soundbyte of Site Base responding. “Roger that, Gateway.” They used to just ping us, but the brass got a bug up their butt and put a stop to it. Something about having voice check-in at all times. Like someone's going to sneak down there and take over? They've been reading too much Jules Verne. Nobody else has the capabilities, especially after the fiasco with the Chinese program a few years ago. When Jordon Mott snatched up the plans to that underwater breathing apparatus of Henry Fleuss' back in 1878, he knew what he was doing. So did the government, when they bought the patent from Mott's heirs during World War I. But the tech didn't really pay off until the 1950s, when the Cold War kicked into gear and control of the oceans became as much a public relations coup as a military one. Other countries can try and play catch-up, but NEREUS—National Energy Research Endeavor: Underwater Services—made us the kings of the sea.

The door slides open, and Sanderson comes in, beady-eyed and mock-disapproving. Must be shift-end already, if Sandy's come to collect me. I swear, skip a few meals and some people don't know when to stop mothering. She claims it's just her duty as shift psychologist to make sure that the commander's taking care of himself.

Kim gives me a thumbs-up through the plas window, indicating they're ready to go, and I amend my earlier thought.
Royalty
of the sea. Despite her lack of height, she is queen of all she surveys. First draft pick right out of MIT, she's smarter than any four other geek-brains put together, and everyone knows it. Being in her rotation team is considered an honor.

She and I got staggering drunk in a Key West dive one night, Christ, almost a decade ago. Dry-eyed and emotional, she told me she'd never a moment regretted all the things she'd given up—spouse, kids, any kind of so-called normal life. “The ocean's the dream, Martin. And we spend all our days praying we'll never wake from it, y'know?”

We crawled out of the ocean primeval four hundred and fifty million years ago. There are folk who say it's a waste of money better spent elsewhere, that we should look forward rather than back. I look at the sat photos showing a blue planet, and wonder, where the hell else could we go?

“Site Fourteen, they're on their way.” I tap the toggle that opens the Slide. Water rushes up into the tube, gray-green in the Gate room's lighting, and the capsule slips down before I can finish waving good-bye. Two weeks on the ocean floor, then another three days with us. Rotation up here's a month, plus twenty-four in deco.

The last time I was topside, I spent the first two days just staring at the waves. It all looks so different on the surface. Unreal, almost. The reality is all here, in rippling shadows of green and blue and black.

Robinechec resets the hatches, and I scan the boards. Green all the way across. In the aftermath of the Tube's whoosh, the chamber is almost painfully silent.

“You going to stare at that thing all day, or we going to get lunch?”

“Bite me.”

Sanderson bares her teeth, and I offer her my elbow, as though daring her to try. The jumpsuit they make everyone down here wear is bright orange, like the markers. It doesn't look good on anyone, least of all a Scandy blonde like her.

Then again, color coordination's never been our strength. Bright orange safety fabric, the NEREUS trident logo in dark blue, and the Mariner Tech Program patch in foam-green and gold. It's one of the most god-ugly combinations ever invoked. Our names are sewn onto the left lapel, obvious in black, like we don't all know each other too many ways from Sunday. You don't get to work the Gate unless you've done time in the Mariner program, and you don't get picked for Mariner until you've been cleared to work for NEREUS, so there isn't a whole lot of turnover.

In fact, this project's had the same crews almost since the beginning: five years since they sank the pylons for the halfway station. Two years since the first materials went down to lay the foundations. Six months since Site Fourteen was pumped with oxy-blend and opened for business.

Next Wednesday, they're taking her live. Site Fourteen will become NEREUS Station One, corporate-funded scientists and the academics will scramble for their place in the brine, and we'll have taken the next huge step to reclaiming humanity's birthright.

Christ, I get butterflies in my stomach just thinking about it, like the day before Christmas and your birthday and first day of school all rolled into one shivering ball of anticipation. I don't believe in any particular god, but if I did, I'd have to believe she/he/it would be smiling in pride.

“You good?” I ask Robinechec.

“Get the hell out of here, boss.”

“I'll take that as a yes.” Gordon steps forward as unobtrusively as he can, willing me gone already. I get the feeling they're handing control of me over to Sandy: one uptight commander, roger that and good riddance. “All right, you have the Gate. Try not to let any merfolk storm us, okay?” It's an old joke and they don't do it any favors by pretending to laugh.

Unlike the Gate room, the rest of the station's surprisingly comfortable. The walls are cream colored, and there's carpeting underfoot, a soothing brown-and-cream pattern that reminds us of soil, not sea. Or so the psych specs claim. There are more potted plants, and everyone's got something green and growing in their quarters; letting a plant die on your rotation is considered a pretty nasty insult to the person on the next shift, so we've developed intense green thumbs.

The dining room is midway on the station, with work space on one end of the elongated oval, and living quarters on the other. Down below, there's Control, where the techs spend their days poring over data coming in, sending data out. The Gate room and Slide are part of the working area, looking from the outside like strange growths on the otherwise sleek construction. Pundits who pointed out that the plans looked a lot like a flying saucer were missing the point—it wasn't science fiction becoming science; science fiction had stolen the basics from us.

The dining room is a cave, there's no other way to put it. But it's a cave with a view: half the room has a clear wall to the outside, and half is taken up with monitors on a 24/7 feed to the outside world. Everyone's watching the monitors, most of which are currently tuned to one news feed. We've got 148 channels and we still end up watching CNN more often than not. Even people who won't crack open a newspaper when they're Topside devour the news down here. So much for Casel's theory of learned inertia.

A moderate-sized giant squid floats by the dura window, briefly illuminated in the floodlights they installed to give us an actual external view: only the newbies bother to look.

The noise in here is astonishing. Seventy-two bodies serve on the Gate, and all of them seem to be having lunch at the same time. Whoever said the sea was silent never spent time here.

“Yo, Martin!” Leggo calls my name as he sees us, but whatever else he says is lost in the din. He tries to yell again, but his tablemates, still listening to the talking head reporting the latest movements from the African front, take offense. Leggo rolls his eyes, makes a silent come-hither motion with his arm. I shake my head, point toward the salad bar, then tap my watch.

“You still pissed at him?”

“Nah.” And I wasn't. Much. So what if he'd managed to snag a date with Gretchen, who was only the most delectable hotshot to ever come down the Slide? He was too good a tech manager to begrudge a little nookie. When Leggo was happy, my techs were happy. When my techs were happy, Gateway hummed. Anyway, she dumped him a week later, and got tapped for a Topside position in Houston a couple of months after that. “There are some calculations on the OTEC expansion they want finished before next shift comes on.”

“You're not the only brain down here, pal. Let someone else carry some of the workload.” She's said it before, as friend and as psychologist. I just shrug. So I obsess. Every Mariner worth their patch does the same. This is our baby. Our dream.

“I promise I'll chew five times for every bite,” I tell her seriously, and am rewarded with a long-suffering sigh.

“I should put you on report,” she says, also not for the first time. “It's the only way I can make sure you'll get downtime.”

I make a rude gesture, and escape before she has time to reply.

 

The taco salad is crisp, crunchy, and colorful. It also tastes like different flavors of desalinated water, but you can't have everything. I put the empty dish on the tray on the floor, shove it with my foot until it's out of the way. I'll drop it off in the recycling bin later, when I get up.

We don't have real offices here, just prefabricated half-wall cubicles you have to back out of, but the illusion of privacy is everything. The carpeting is thicker here than in the hallways, so our chairs slide over it without squeaking, and it absorbs conversations that are held at a low pitch. If you yell, everyone on-shift hears you.