The Magister (Earthkeep) (8 page)

She returned the Amah's salute and was about to respond orally when a new voice intervened. 

"Commander Maiz trains pilots for undersea vessels, Magister," said Commander Kiang Tung-Po.  "I summoned her because I thought Dr. Egarber might use help.  And because there is plenty of room in the phaeton."

"Of course," Zude responded. 

"Enjoy your trip," Tung-Po smiled brightly.  With a nod to Maiz and the children, and an extended nod to Zude, she returned to Nauru's station.

Jass beamed when he saw Nicola Maiz. 

"Maizie!  Good, you're with us.  Here."  He handed her three microcorders, which she dutifully hung from her shoulders.  "And here."  He added a light meter and stabilizers.  "I've got the holocartridges."

"We'll be in voice contact with you all the way," Tiny Nauru assured them.  She helped Jass through the control room door. 

"Except for the sweep under the destroyer," Tung-Po corrected from Nauru's duty station.  "We lose you for a while there."

"But only minutes," added Nauru, giving Regina a salute and a farewell pat. 

Jass shed all his hologear by
Sojourner’
s central shaft. "At last," he breathed.  "This is a dream come true.  I've been nagging the museum for years to upgrade the holojaunt." 

He began activating the comchannels, running yet again the check sequences and safety procedures.

The phaeton's design was of the simplest and most time-honored of the shapes friendly to water: a marvelously round, double-convex saucer, compact and efficient but without a crowded look.  The upper half was transparent for observation, and its central control shaft cleverly housed not only the crystals that drove it but the vessel's toilet and storage areas.  The control cylinder's outer surfaces were covered with power and disposition panels, monitoring sequence displays, communication and manifest catchments, and biodirectional sensors.  The pod's five seating cups were situated around the phaeton's perimeter, rising and falling in response to their occupants' subtle weight shifts.

Zude sat in the formfit cup, facing outward in what she mentally labeled the aft position of the circular craft.  She spun inward and gave a wink to Regina, who screwed up her face in a mirror of the gesture.

"All systems at ready, doctor, and we are standing by."  Mariner Tiny Nauru's voice filled the phaeton from the control room.  "We'll begin bay fill on your mark."

"Fine," Jass replied.  "Maizie, have we rerouted the duranium conduits in this vessel?"

"Negative, doctor.  Refer to your standard array board.    There."  Jass sighed in relief and smiled broadly. 

"An improvement, hmmm?"  

"Definitely," Jass nodded.

Tiny Nauru's voice summoned them and then faded.  There was some background conversation in the control room.  Zude's heart began to sink even before Tiny's voice resumed. 

"Doctor, Magister Lin-ci Win has asked that you call her."

"What!"

Commander Kiang Tung-Po's voice replaced Tiny's. 

"Doctor, Magister Lin-ci Win wishes to speak with you."

"Patch her through to the comscreen here.  No.  Belay that."

"Magister Win is not waiting now, doctor.  She asks that you call her back at 1400 hours."  A pause.  "That will be in forty  minutes."

Jass muttered an obscenity.  "Hang on one minute, Tung-Po."  He looked around the phaeton, his eyes halting at Zude's.  "Magister, I'd flat-out forgotten.  I'm sorry."

"Nonsense, doctor.  You must speak with Magister Win." 

Zude scanned the devastated faces of the children.  Ria looked even more disappointed than the little ones.  "And your conversation could be a long one." 

"See here," Jass said, "I'll go make the call and the four of you can continue the expedition with Maizie.  She's top of the line as a pilot.  And a great tour guide, too."

Zude read the look on Ria's face and the renewed hope in the eyes of the children. 

"Good!  We can do that.  We'll miss you, doctor," she said to Jass, "but I have no doubt that Lieutenant Commander Maiz can carry on.  Right, Commander?"

Maiz was quick to respond. 

"No problem, Magister.  I'd be honored to be your pilot." 

Regina and Enrique whooped with joy. 

"That settles it."  Jass opened the comchannel.  "Delay launch fill and get me out of here, Tiny." 

Within seconds Jasper Egarber had thrown them all a kiss and disappeared, the phaeton's hatch had been resealed, and the launch bay had begun its transformation from air into ocean.

Nicola Maiz, her high white hair occasionally bouncing, spoke smartly into the comchannel with Tiny Nauru.  Zude followed most of the technical language, growing inwardly more and more content with their new pilot's obvious efficiency and comfort in the command chair.

"The Commander is reviewing the mission orders," she told the others, "just to be absolutely sure she understands all we've planned.  And now she's officially laying in our course."

"I could handle the holocorders," said Ria speculatively.  She was examining the equipment Jass had left behind.  "If I knew the kind of shots he wanted of the destroyer."

"Do it," Zude said.  "Use your own judgment and fulfill your old dreams of being a holojournalist."

Ria grinned.  "Then help me, Zude," she said, fumbling with clips on a microcorder.  "He had his cartridges, ah, there, in the subvention belt." 

Minutes later Ria was rigged like a media correspondent, with small cameras, flat and laser, each with a different lens,  stuck to her jacket, light sensors banded to her head, and audio inputs secured to her jaws.  "I'm ready!" she declared.

"We're all ready," said Nicola Maiz.  "Launch bay is filled.  We are cleared for departure. On my say, Mariner Tiny." 

She scanned the phaeton's controls.

"Good wind at your back, sailors!"  "Bon voyage!"  Shouts from the control room.

"Now!" said Lieutenant Commander Nicola Maiz.

It seemed hours before the bay ports were adequately spread apart, days before the saucer crested at its opening, and an eternity before the full diameter of the vessel was able to clear the ejection canal and ease itself into the great South Pacific.  They were on their way.

Vastness immediately drew them all into a deep silence, punctuated only by the soft beeps of Maiz's dampened sensors and her lowering of the phaeton's cabin illumination.  Now her passengers could see the Seadrome behind them, its diminishing lights glistening eerily in their wake. 
Sojourner
spun into the blackness like a brave ember banished from its hearth.

"Wow," breathed Ria, finally, as they released their stasis fields. 

Lieutenant Commander Maiz smoothly shifted the phaeton's direction 90º to the right.  Ria, who had been riding sideways, now found herself moving forward.  They swept into the open ocean, losing more and more of the dim surface illumination as they gradually dropped.

"Commander!"  Zude was sitting upright.  "What are those noises!  There's no animal. . ."

"Interesting, Ma'am, isn't it?  You expect to have the great silence of the deeps.  But it's constantly sounding off."  Maiz glanced at the bathometer.  "Particularly at this depth.  Some of it's our own noise echoing back as we cut the water.  Some of it is just the so-called big groan, the Ocean's residual expression of Her own presence.  Some of it is shore noises — boats, top slaps, currents, tides.  Clicks and whistles and gongs.  Over hundreds of miles.  Maybe even drags and creaks from the destroyer.  All of it amplified for your delight."

Tiny's voice intruded. 

"Looking good, Commander Maiz.  Still on course, bearings on the money.  Do you read 260.3 meters?"

"Affirmative, Mariner.  We're full ahead."

They were settling into the motion of the phaeton now.  For a short time Maiz let Zude control the craft from a remote helm, guiding her carefully as the Magister made minute course or attitude changes and then corrected them, each time with more confidence.  Handling a circular vessel, with pitch that became yaw and yaw that became pitch again, proved far more demanding than Zude had anticipated.  She sat in a dark world, delicately poised between flipping over and tumbling over, every cell in her body ablaze with each small triumph of skill.  Finally she shifted the helm back toward Maiz. 

"That made my day, Commander.  Thank you."

"You'd be a good undersea pilot, Magister," Maiz said as she transferred the helm back to her own station.

As they sailed deeper and deeper into a new world, the darkness outside the vessel seemed complete.  Tiny Nauru spoke at greater intervals.  "On course,
Sojourner
.  At 7.3 and 155."  Or, "At 343 meters, Commander Maiz."  Maiz would confirm briefly.

They paused to examine a pocket of bioluminescence that sparkled like a host of fireflies just beyond the vessel.

"An angel!" Regina said in hushed tones.

"Patches of bacteria," said Maiz.  “They show up now and again."

They sat in silence as the pocket of light floated to the side and upward, soon to be lost in their own wake.  Enrique waved goodbye. 

"Are you all right,
Sojourner
?"  Nauru's voice came through.  "We read your drive at one-third."

"A little sight-seeing, Mariner," Maiz assured the control room.  "We're on our way again."

Regina and Enrique, still side by side, let Maiz guide them as they manipulated far-reaching search lights that pierced the blackness around them. 

Nicola Maiz spoke into the comfield.  "44.8 atmospheres and approaching the trench."

Ria sat upright.  "The trench?  How far?"  She began adjusting her holocorder equipment. 

"Less than a minute. We'll circle above the edge so you can see what we'll be going down into."

Zude was alert now, peering into the tunnel that Regina and Enrique were making with the lights.  Maiz leveled the phaeton and added more beams from the ship's full perimeter until the whole ocean on all sides of them was illuminated. 

"We'll keep those lights pointing downward, Reggie," she said, urging Enrique's joystick forward with her finger.  She kicked back the pod's advancing motion to half impulse.  "What looks like the bottom of the ocean should be coming up any moment now."  She divided her attention between the bathometer and the height soundings of the vessel's belly sensors.

Ria saw it first.  "There!" she pointed. 

Dimly emerging below and in front of them was a change in the ocean's texture.  It looked to Zude like the ocean floor below them was bisected by a straight line.  Just beyond them lay the edge of a cliff. 

Both children bent and craned.  Maiz swung the phaeton out and over the precipice.  Ria and the children shifted to keep the cliff in view.

"It's huge," said Ria.  "Can you take us back and over the edge again?  So I can get the approach?"  She altered the holocorder's settings.

"Done," said Maiz, upping impulse power and spinning easily into a wide arc over the chasm below and back toward the cliff top.  She ducked the phaeton until it was closer to the floor, easing it back into a slow approach to the drop-off.

"Good," Ria muttered, stretching the holocorder to the edge of the pod's transparent upper half.

"We are at the trench and rigged for diving," Maiz reported, "in explore pattern alpha two, preparatory to our vertical descent." 

Thirty seconds later, after confirmations from the Seadrome, she said, "Beginning vertical descent."

No one in the pod spoke as Maiz eased the phaeton across the cliff's edge, letting it sink gradually into the deeps. 

Reggie held Enrique's hand, her eyes only half as big as his.  Ria lay supine in her passenger cup, holocorder poised at the disappearing cliff's edge above them.  Then she sat up to focus upon the smooth rock wall that was rising past them even as it plummeted for miles beneath them.

"Great Gifts of the Goddess!" she muttered, closing off the microcorder.  "If only I could be outside, showing how we look as we go down!"

Precisely, thought Zude, and in an instant, as if from 50 meters away, she saw exactly how they looked: a silver saucer, outlined against a gray-blue wall and surrounded by a hazy aura, drifting aimlessly down into a measureless abyss.  The image disappeared as quickly as it had come.  Zude blinked.  She was back in the pod again.

Ria panned over the nondescript ocean around them in an ambience shot.  "It's already clear to me," she observed, "that our most dramatic display of the destroyer will be from beneath it.  Shooting up toward the surface."

"The feeling is totally different from that angle," Maiz agreed.

"Mami, you're glad we came?" Regina was grinning.

Ria reached out and touched her daughter's cheek.  "I am, precious.  Just like you are."

The phaeton sank straight down in the silence, occasionally moving out to avoid protuberances or shelves that jutted from the cliff, only to smooth herself back into the sheer vertical drop. 

Tiny Nauru's voice from the control room shook their reverie.  "Report,
Sojourner
.  Are you at 389.2?"

"Affirmative, Mariner. The destroyer is inferior by 100 meters.  We have just passed the Holiness Fissure and expect to sight the ship in another two minutes."  Maiz continued to control the helm, moving her hand over the steering orbs with practiced subtleness.

Regina was on Zude's lap now.  "Why is Tiny's voice so funny?"

"Because it's bouncing off a ricochet trough," Zude answered.  "Jass explained that, preshi.  Remember?  How the trench wall blocks the sound?"

"What's that!" Enrique pointed at the wall beyond them.

Maiz paused the phaeton, letting her hover gently at the level of Enrique's interest.  "Magister, bring a light to this, if you would."

Zude obliged.  The beam struck a fluttering strand that seemed to explode and disappear, taking with it Zude's light.  Now the shaft of light that Zude controlled was cut off clean a few feet from the ship.  Zude moved the beam away from the wall, and the shadowy strand reappeared.  So did the full shaft of light.  "Amazing," she breathed, experimenting again and again with her beam, always with the same effect.