‘You can’t just do a scan and declare a piece of ocean safe,’ Heather signed. ‘You know that. Things move in the water. Just because there isn’t a shark right now doesn’t mean there won’t be a shark later. I know my job. I’ll be safe.’
‘I still don’t like it.’
‘I know.’ Heather caught her sister’s hands, effectively silencing them both. It would have been phenomenally rude to do to a stranger, but this had been part of their communication since childhood. She met Holly’s eyes, smiled, and waited.
Seconds ticked by. Finally Holly smiled back, leaned in, and kissed her cheek.
Heather let go of her hands. ‘I’ll bring back your samples,’ she signed, and turned and walked away, neither saying nor waiting for goodbye.
Holly stayed where she was. Sometimes she felt like she was still in middle school, standing in the hall, watching her sister go. They had gone to a private school for deaf children and their family members; Hallie had attended with them, part of the small cadre of hearing children who flocked through the halls like strange birds, mouths moving in a parody of communication. But up until the day the swim team had held tryouts, it had always been Holly and Heather, Heather and Holly, the Wilson twins against the world. And then Heather had been called to the water, and Holly had remained on the shore, dry and waiting for her sister to come home.
Holly sighed, turning to walk out of the room. She could help Heather get ready. She couldn’t watch her go. Some things were just too much to ask.
The launching station for the Minnow was built into its own cubby. Heather had signed on late in the construction process, and part of what had landed her the job was the fact that her submersible was the correct size for the launch already designed for the Melusine. She had required no adjustments or revisions to their plan. She was grateful for that. Too many places didn’t want to hire her, claiming her lack of hearing was a liability that would put an unfair burden on their insurance. Never mind that she traveled with a submersible designed to her parameters, signaling all alarms and issues with flashing lights and pressure changes in the fabric of her seat; they were uncomfortable about the idea of working with a deaf woman, and while the Americans with Disabilities Act made it harder for them to refuse her employment, it didn’t make it impossible. There would always be lawyers who specialized in keeping the disabled out of the workforce, especially when the jobs they wanted to do—the jobs they were trained to do—were difficult or dangerous or otherwise complex.
But the Melusine had been built around the idea of a Minnow, and Heather had a Minnow. More, Heather had one of only three privately owned Minnows in the world rated for depths like those in the Mariana Trench. All the others came with steeper fees and more difficult operators. All she needed was a place to dock and permission to descend.
The three engineers responsible for maintaining the launch and monitoring the Minnow gave her the thumbs-up. They had learned some basic sign for when she wasn’t in the submersible; once she was inside, they would be able to communicate via the translator overlay on her control panel. A flashing light would alert her to any messages, and they’d type whatever they needed her to know. It was a simple, reasonably elegant solution. More than once she’d had an engineer tell her, in halting ASL, that it was better than the verbal way; they didn’t need to worry about distracting her during a complicated maneuver, and distance never led to distortion. In the soundless depths, she was perfectly at home.
Heather offered them an amiable nod and walked to the open hatch of her Minnow. It was more manhole than door, barely wide enough for her to wiggle through. Earlier versions had been even tighter, requiring her to go without eating or drinking for a full twenty-four hours before the trip. That had been … less than ideal. Blacking out from hunger while hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea was a good way to wind up a statistic, one more name on the long list of lives the water had claimed as its due.
She grasped the bar above the hatch and slid, feet-first, into the comforting snugness of her pod. There was room inside for one person, and she was small enough that she did most of the minor maintenance herself; finding an engineer who could get through the entrance was virtually impossible. Anything more complex was either done by machine or required cracking the hull, a maneuver that would put the Minnow into dry dock for up to six months. Heather had become extremely skilled at keeping her systems up and running. The last time she’d been grounded for six months, she’d driven everyone around her out of their mind with her fussing. No one wanted that to happen again.
Settling into the seat, she locked her feet into position, bare heels flush to the metal of the pedals, and fastened the four-point harness that would keep her from being knocked around during her descent, before beginning the slow, methodical process of checking and verifying that all systems were working as well as the technicians thought they were. A single red light would have been enough to abort the descent. Anxious as she was to get to work, she was even more anxious to stay alive.
As each switch was flipped, toggle was pressed, and button was pushed, the associated light came on, deep blue and steady. She pulled the submersible’s keyboard over and tapped out, ‘All systems clear down here. Up there?’
‘No problems: showing good to go,’ was the reply. ‘Ready for launch?’
‘Absolutely.’ She added a smiley face. It was unprofessional, but without tone of voice to tell the techs what she was feeling, she needed to take her shades of meaning where she could find them.
‘Sealing the hatch.’
She couldn’t hear the clang as her submersible’s hatch came down—although she’d been told by Hallie that it was remarkably loud, a clang that echoed through the entire room—but she could feel the air change around her. The Minnow was being pressurized to sea level, and would stay there throughout her descent, saving her from the need to worry about the bends when she surfaced. She knew how to control for decompression sickness, but it was better if it could be avoided. The pressurization would also make her hull more difficult to puncture. She was a fully inflated sphere dropping into the darkness, and anything that wanted to get to her was going to have a fight on its hands.
‘Pressure is steady,’ came the message. ‘Are you ready to drop?’
‘Ready,’ she replied.
‘Launch in five … four … three … two …’
The one was never transmitted. It was assumed. Heather braced herself, hands on the sticks that would control her depth and orientation, and felt the shock run though the Minnow as the Melusine released the connecting cables. For a single dizzying moment she was sinking like the lifeless thing she was. Then she pushed down with both feet, triggering the exterior lights, and the water came alive around her. She pulled back on the sticks, stopping her descent, leveling out, and hung there, suspended no more than ten feet below the Melusine’s hull.
It was easy to forget how big the ship was when she was aboard it. She tilted the submersible, letting her lights play along the bottom of the Melusine. A few fish swam there, exploring the limits of their world. No mermaids, of course.
She snorted. “No mermaids, of course” would probably be the epitaph for this mission. Most people assumed the Atargatis video was a hoax. Heather knew better—everyone who worked for Imagine knew better—but she had spoken to evolutionary biologists, had read all Dr. Toth’s papers on the subject, and had come to her own conclusions. Yes, mermaids were real. That didn’t mean they were going to be caught twice in the same spot. For them to have gone undetected for so long, they had to be migratory, and they had to be cautious. Imagine wasn’t going to find mermaids. They’d be lucky to find anything.
That was fine by her. She was being paid to dive and explore one of the remotest, least documented spots in the world, all in pursuit of something that wasn’t going to be there, which meant she couldn’t be blamed when she failed to find it. She was going to find something else instead: she was going to find the bottom of the Challenge
r Deep. She was going to do what no one else had ever done, or even really dreamed of doing, and she was going to do it as a one-woman diver with a disability.
This would change the world. Maybe not in the big, flashy way Imagine wanted, but it would be enough for her, and for every deaf girl with a dream who came after her.
Heather pushed down on the sticks and dropped into the dark.
CHAPTER 11
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 2, 2022
Tory steered the RIB to a stop. The Melusine was a speck on the horizon, so far away that it was impossible to guess at her size; she could have been a tugboat or an aircraft carrier, or even a toy, waiting to be picked up and carried away by some unseen child. There was nothing else. No land, not even the hint that land might exist somewhere beyond the water. The world could have flooded completely and left them none the wiser.
“Luis?” she asked.
“On it.” He began unclasping cases, revealing their waterproofed contents. He was a blur of motion as he assembled his microphones and clipped them to small drone systems.
Tory, meanwhile, braced her back against the controls and opened her laptop. Less water resistant than the microphones, but protected by as many layers of shielding and plastic as technology could manage, it would continue to work as long as she didn’t actually drop it into the water. “I’ll have the software up in a minute,” she said. “You’re clear to do your drops anytime.”
Dr. Toth leaned back against her seat and watched them. “The two of you make me tired just looking at you,” she commented mildly. “Kids are great, but holy shit, am I glad I’m not one anymore.”
Tory glanced up for a heartbeat—long enough to see that Dr. Toth was serious—before returning her attention to the screen, saying, “We only have the RIB for a few hours, and even if we had it longer, there’d be no guarantee the weather would stay good enough to let us get our readings. We have to move fast.”
“Besides, science should feel urgent every once in a while,” said Luis. “It makes up for the parts that drag on and on.” He dropped a microphone over the side. “You know, half the time we’re saving the world in slow motion, but days like this, we get the chance to run.”
“That doesn’t make it any less tiring to watch.” Dr. Toth stretched, turning her face toward the sun. “It’s a beautiful day. The ocean isn’t going anywhere.”
“Truer words,” muttered Tory, and kept typing.
Luis frowned. “Except it is. The ocean we have today isn’t the ocean we had ten years ago, and it’s definitely not the ocean we’re going to have ten years from now. Pollution, global climate change, nuclear runoff …”
“You know what I like about the ocean we do have?” asked Dr. Toth. “The part where we’ve dumped so much crap into it that it would be justified in becoming something out of a horror movie, and yet the horror movie it’s giving us isn’t related to any of those things. Not really.”
“What do you mean?” asked Tory.
“I mean if the mermaids are real—and they are—and if the mermaids are smart enough to be watching us—which they also are—they don’t have anything to do with humans. They evolved on their own. They stayed in their own environment until we started sending ships into their living room. To them, we’re the myths. We’re the monsters. We appear out of nowhere, we’ve probably snagged more than a few of them in fishing nets and trawler rigs, and half the things we have on us at any given time are going to be incomprehensible to a preindustrial society with no concept of manufacturing. They aren’t our fault. We didn’t mutate some flatworm into a murderous new form, and we didn’t melt a glacier that freed a prehistoric predator. They exist because they exist. That’s nice.” Dr. Toth smirked. “I’m so used to humans being responsible for everything that it’s a pleasant change when we didn’t do it.”
“Humans are the worst,” deadpanned Luis.
“You said it, not me,” said Dr. Toth. “What are you kids doing?”
“I’m setting up a microphone array to get an auditory snapshot of the area, and Victoria’s getting her software online so that she can pick it apart,” said Luis.
“We think the mermaids communicate verbally, in addition to signing,” said Tory. “We know that they’re mimics.”
“How do we know that?” asked Dr. Toth.
Tory paused. Dr. Toth’s tone and attitude were familiar: she’d seen them from dozens of professors. But sometimes those professors were trying to guide her to an obvious conclusion, while other times they didn’t care about her results; they just wanted to keep her running in circles so that they wouldn’t have to do any actual work.
Dr. Toth wasn’t responsible for her final grade. Tory took a breath and said, “Mr. Blackwell recruited us for this voyage because of the focus of my research. How much do you know about sonar mapping?”
“It can be used to get a topographic picture of something we can’t see, like the inside of a cave or the bottom of an undersea cavern.”
“Well, what I do is biological sonar mapping. I record the sounds of living things and pick them apart to learn more about the creatures that made them. I can identify every known species of kingfisher by call, and while I’m not an ornithologist, I’ve been able to supply recordings to actual ornithologists that may help them prove certain species aren’t extinct after all.” Tory returned her eyes to her screen, typing as she continued, “Think of Times Square. Someone who did ambient noise recordings there would get so much more than they’d be expecting. Not just cars and trucks and buses, but the subway underground, and the planes overhead, and the voices. Thousands of people, hundreds of languages. People singing, screaming, laughing. Music. Recorded advertisements. Police loudspeakers. There’d be so much. But if you have good software and a lot of patience, all that information turns into archeology.”
Tory had started speeding up halfway through her speech, words tumbling over each other in her excitement. “How many languages are there? How similar are they? Figure that out and you know how far people have come to be in this place. Languages that evolve in similar places tend to have similar sounds; you can get an idea of how widespread the species as a whole is from how dissimilar the words are. Look at the ambient noise. Is it bouncing off high structures? Is it coming from different levels? You can even learn things about the biology of the people you’re listening to. Labored breath, sounds of pain, crying … There’s so much. Unsnarling an afternoon in Times Square could be the work of years. The coral reefs are the Times Square of the ocean. So many species, so many sounds, so many things to untangle and learn.”
“We’re a long way from the coral reefs now,” said Dr. Toth.
“I know. The Challenger Deep is more like setting a microphone array in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa and waiting to see what the wind brings you. I have days and days of essentially dead air. The water moves, the fish swim by—I can hear those too, once I know the water in an area well enough—but mostly, things are quiet. It’s just that when they’re not quiet, they’re a lot noisier than they ought to be. The water down there rings.”
“You think you’ve been eavesdropping on the mermaids.”
“Yes, and I think they’ve been eavesdropping on the world.” Tory glanced up again. “A pod of whales comes through in December; we hear that same pod singing half a mile down in June. Note for note, the same whales. How? We know they aren’t here anymore. Echoes don’t last that long. A boat goes by, we hear its engines from the same level. And on and on and on. The mermaids steal sounds. Why, we don’t know. But the thing that got us a spot on the Melusine was the Atargatis.”
Dr. Toth frowned. “How’s that?”
“We found a recording of the Atargatis engines,” said Luis. He threw three more microphones into the water. They floated for a moment before their weight dragged them below the surface. He hit a button. A brief cascade of bubbles appeared as the engines attached to the microphone shafts whirred to life, driving them d
eeper. “As in, we found a recording that claimed the Atargatis engines were in the Mariana Trench, right now, operating at full power.”
“They mimic,” said Tory. “Why, we don’t know. Maybe it’s a hunting strategy. Maybe it’s part of their mating rituals. Maybe they enjoy making different sounds with their mouths. Dolphins play.”
Dr. Toth said nothing, her face stony and her eyes unreadable.
“It doesn’t really matter,” said Tory, once she was sure Dr. Toth wasn’t going to contradict her. “We know they’re here, because there’s nothing else that could explain what I’ve already recorded. Now we need to figure out if that’s part of how they communicate.”
“What do you think?” asked Dr. Toth.
“I think they’re smart enough to have a language, and I think we need to figure out how it works. Dr. Wilson can handle the visual component. I’ve got the sound.”
“Hence my part of the plan,” said Luis, throwing three more microphones into the water. He pitched these farther out, driving them downward at an angle. “I get her the best possible auditory snapshot of the area, she pulls it apart and uses it to tell us how these things work. It’s like hyperspace modeling, but with living organisms, and it’s going to win us every prize in the book. They’re going to need to invent new medals just to tell us how awesome we are.”
“I see,” said Dr. Toth, and finally unlocked her own valise. It opened like a gleaming stainless steel and glass flower, tubes attached to small drones gleaming in the sunlight. Both Tory and Luis turned to look, unable to suppress their curiosity. Dr. Toth smothered a smile. Science was all about curiosity. It was a world where the kids who touched hot stoves and poked sticks down mysterious holes in their backyards could get better tools, protective gear, and bigger holes to poke at. Asking scientists not to look into an open box was like asking cats not to saunter through an open door. It simply wasn’t practical.