Into the Drowning Deep

  Heather hauled on the controls, and her Minnow continued its descent.

  The only real difference between the Challenger Deep and the Mariana Trench was the light. Heather had thought she knew what darkness looked like; had believed the waters of the trench were as dark as it was possible for a place to be. As her submersible slipped below the surface of the Deep, dropping downward at a pace that skirted the line between conservative and ambitious, she realized with slow and dawning wonder that she had never known darkness in her life. Nothing that lived on the surface had.

  Humanity had feared the dark since time immemorial, and yet humanity had never experienced the dark, because it wasn’t until recently—the age of cunning hands and clever machines—that the dark had been anything more than a whispering legend, a rumor of a nightmare. Biologists and the laws of evolution on Earth said humanity had started, like everything else, in the sea. Maybe that explained fearing the dark. An ancestral memory of this sort of all-consuming nothingness would have been enough to terrify anyone.

  The dark pressed around her like it had physical weight, like it accounted for more of the crushing danger of the deeps than the water itself. Her submersible’s lights pierced it like spears, so bright that they seemed unbelievable, yet unable to illuminate more than a few feet on every side. She could have turned on every light she had, lit every emergency signal, and still not done anything to brighten the Challenger Deep. This was where darkness went to live forever, growing deeper and more powerful as the eons passed it by.

  Heather was not claustrophobic—couldn’t be, with her job—but as she looked into the blackness around her, as she felt it pushing down against her skin, her heart stuttered in her chest, becoming heavy and awkward as it tried to get back into rhythm with itself. She took a deep breath, shunting the panic aside. There was no point to it. All it could do when she was this deep was get her killed. Then, with a single sharp, decisive motion, she turned the submersible’s lights off.

  The dark surged in like a living thing, extinguishing the world. It had her surrounded in an instant. Heather’s heart lurched again. She took a deep breath, forcing herself calm, and waited for … what? Not for her eyes to adjust. This wasn’t the tame dark of a city street or a suburban home. It wasn’t even the slightly wild dark of a forest or a secluded beach. Moonlight, starlight, lightning, they were always there, always lighting up some fragment of the world. They were beyond her here. So she wasn’t waiting for her eyes to come to terms with what surrounded them. She was waiting, if anything, for her heart to catch up with the rest of her.

  Slowly the fear subsided, and her heartbeat resumed its normal rhythm, so familiar that she could ignore it. Heather smiled before powering the console lights back on. There were no new messages. Either the Melusine was still waiting for her reply or she had traveled outside of communication range. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t demand that she come back.

  A few flipped switches and her research lights were on, casting a soft red glow. These lights were designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, not frightening the fish. Truly deepwater species found their own ways to make light, or gave up on it completely, consigning it to whatever served as ancestral memory for fish. Down this deep, it seemed like whatever didn’t glow in the dark didn’t have eyes either, like evolution had written off sight as a useless skill.

  (Which begged the question, she sometimes felt, of whether there were senses humanity, blessed as it was with light and air and a relatively pressure-free environment, had given up on as useless. She and Holly got by fine without hearing; the only time they were really inconvenienced was when they had to deal with people who could hear, and who inevitably thought the twins were suffering in some way because they couldn’t. What else might people have given up, and never noticed was missing, since it was virtually impossible to define an absence?)

  She hung there, suspended, while she recovered her bearings, and watched the water around her come alive. It wasn’t the fast, teeming life of the surface. But from time to time something would move in the shadows, a jelly drifting past or a fish coming to investigate her lights. She watched as a long, thin ribbon of something that might have been an eel swam past, too far away for her to get a good look at it, too close for her to avoid the impression of limitless teeth bursting from its cavern of a mouth. The laws of nature were different here.

  Heather took a deep breath and resumed her descent.

  She had been slow before; she was glacial now, turning her submersible in an effort to record everything around her, every scrap of motion and distant, shadowy glimpse of the walls of the Deep. She didn’t want to bring her running lights all the way up until she reached the bottom—and she was going to reach the bottom. This was her Everest, and she was taking her time to make sure she made it all the way. The video feed of her descent would prove it had happened. The video of her ascent would tell the scientists on board where they wanted her to go next, when she went for them and not for herself. This drop, this descent, this was all for her. This had always been for her.

  Being a twin sometimes meant going to extremes to find a way to distinguish herself from her sister, especially since they had so many labels. They weren’t just twins, they were deaf twins, attractive deaf twins, attractive deaf twins with naturally red hair, attractive deaf twins with naturally red hair working in STEM. Sometimes she felt like they were so labeled that they should have collapsed under all the competing expectations. Instead they pressed on, and they found ways to set themselves apart from one another. Holly took the surface of the sea, and she? She got the bottom.

  She was finally taking what was hers.

  The message light on her console blinked. Heather glanced at it, interested.

  ‘HEATHER COME BACK TO SURFACE NOW,’ it said. Apparently, it had taken longer to come through because it was coming through complete. Interesting. The packet rate must have been scrambled by the water.

  Quickly she tapped, ‘Too deep for swift ascent. Finishing mapping pass. Surfacing on schedule,’ and pressed SEND. Let them yell when she got back to the ship. There was no way she was cutting this mission short for anything but a natural disaster. She turned her eyes back to the viewing window, easing herself farther downward.

  The natural disaster swam toward her with a sinuous rippling motion, cutting through the water like it possessed no resistance at all. Heather took her hands off the controls, eyes going wide and chest going tight. When she signed up for this mission, it had been with her eyes on the Challenger Deep, not because she’d believed, for even an instant, that she was going to find anything.

  The mermaid was the size of a small thresher shark or an adult human, swimming with the up-and-down thrust of a dolphin or a person in a mermaid costume. For one dizzy moment Heather’s brain seized on that idea, turning it around and trying to present it as the solution. Imagine had paid professional mermaids to accompany the first voyage to the Mariana Trench. They could have done it again. They could have …

  No. Science, logic, reality, they all said no. The mermaid wasn’t wearing any protective gear. Its hips were too narrow to belong to an adult human, much less be shrouded by a pressure suit to keep it from being crushed. It couldn’t be a person in a costume. No matter how much her mind wanted it to be, it simply. Wasn’t. Possible.

  It was long and lean, narrow boned, more like a fish than a mammal. It had fleshy buttocks, but only in comparison to the lean outline of its hominid back, the almost fleshless curve of its long eel’s tail; it could sit, she was sure of that, assuming the classical pose of Andersen’s Little Mermaid on her rock. A primate pelvis, then, or something that mimicked a primate pelvis, for whatever strange evolutionary reason.

  Its face was something like a viperfish’s and something like a mummified ape’s and something like the shadows that sometimes chased her through her dreams. Its eyes were wide and round and fixed on the submersible, set above a mouth that seemed too full of teeth to be possible. A cloud of fi
lmy “hair” surrounded its head, the individual strands somehow too thick, each of them glowing at the end with bioluminescent light.

  It slowed a few feet from the submersible, the question of those primate-like hips answered as it flipped to hover upright in the water, long arms making smooth circling motions to keep it stable. Its hands were webbed, almost like fins that had been accessorized with opposable thumbs.

  It was looking at her.

  Heather swallowed, staring into the mermaid’s eyes. She wasn’t scared. She should have been—she knew that much—but in the moment all she could feel was numb shock slowly giving way to wonder. They were real. They were real. The Melusine had come to the Mariana Trench to find mermaids, to answer the question of what had happened to the Atargatis once and for all, and now here was a mermaid, looking at her. Right at her. Belatedly she realized that if the mermaid was looking at her, and she was looking at the mermaid, that she’d done it: she had made first contact. She was going to go down in history as the person who, after centuries of legends and fairy tales, had gone to the bottom of the sea and proven that mermaids were real. Mermaids existed.

  More of them were coming. Her throat got tight as movement in the water around her resolved into more approaching mermaids, all roughly the same size as the one hanging suspended in the water in front of her.

  Seen like this, she could start to find the differences between them. All were gray, fish colored, but some had white stripes on their tails while others had black stripes interspersed with bands of paler gray. A natural variance? Some sort of deepwater cosmetic? Or a sign of age and maturity, appearing and changing as they grew? Humans didn’t have those sorts of marks, but many other mammals did, as did many fish. Were they fish or mammals? They had no breasts, only a slight curve to their chests that could, at a distance and in shadow, be taken for cleavage; they seemed to have little to no body fat. They must have been eating constantly, never slowing their pursuit of calories. It was the only way they could possibly survive in waters that were so deep, and so cold, and so unforgiving.

  The message light was flashing again. Heather didn’t look at the screen. She had more important things to worry about.

  I wish I were a biologist, she thought. She would have been able to understand more about what she was seeing, if she’d been a biologist. But then, maybe it was best that she wasn’t. She could look at them and just see mermaids, rather than trying to pick them apart with her eyes. The cameras were still transmitting. The biologists back on the ship would have plenty to work with by the time she made it back.

  The first mermaid swam closer, eyes fixed on Heather. She held her breath, not daring to move as the mermaid reached out and pressed one hand against the viewing dome. With its fingers spread, it was even more apparent how delicate they were, how finely boned. The webs connecting them were almost as thick as the fingers, reinforcing the impression that the mermaid’s hands had started their existence as fins.

  Then the mermaid pulled back its other arm and punched the window.

  Heather jumped. It was a reflex; she couldn’t help herself. She stared as the mermaid pulled back and punched again. It was a small show of hostility. It wouldn’t have mattered … but there were so many of them, and more were coming all the time.

  ‘No,’ Heather signed, heedless of the fact that the mermaid couldn’t possibly understand. Her skin felt too tight, her heart hammering again, this time driven by perfectly reasonable fear. The mermaids could survive down here. The mermaids were designed to survive down here, crafted into perfect denizens of the deep by millions of years of evolution. They were alien, yes, but they were aliens of Earth, clearly cousins to the viperfish and eels that moved through these unforgiving depths.

  More mermaids moved toward the submersible. Somehow she had made the transition from “curiosity” into “danger,” and now they were on the attack. Unable to think of what else to do, Heather hit the button that would activate the submersible’s external lights—all of them. They flashed on, and the water around her lit up like midday in comparison to the absolute blackness of only a moment before. The mermaids recoiled as Heather gawked, unable to move her hands in her shock.

  Mermaids surrounded her on all sides. Hundreds of mermaids, more than should have been possible, more than the Challenger Deep could possibly have sustained. There was no way, there was just no way, and yet there they were, thin arms thrown up to shield saucer eyes. Then, as she watched, they lowered their arms and looked at her. It was difficult to ascribe human emotions to their inhuman faces, and yet it was impossible to look at them and not see hatred in their eyes.

  Heather grabbed the controls and began to ascend.

  Ascent, like descent, was meant to be controlled, managed as carefully as possible to avoid decompression and the damage that could come with reducing the pressure on the hull too quickly. There wasn’t time to worry about that now. She hauled and the submersible responded, climbing through the water ten times faster than the safety protocols allowed. The message light was still flashing, and she kept ignoring it; there was no time to worry about what the mission control team was trying to say, and she didn’t have the time to type a response even if she’d wanted to. She needed to focus.

  Motion out of the corner of her eye told her she was being pursued: the mermaids, far from being put off by the light and motion, were chasing her. They cut through the water seemingly without effort, moving fast enough to make her throat go dry. She needed to keep going. She needed to—

  The impact came from the left, hard enough to rock the submersible sideways in the water. Heather barely had time to steady herself before she was hit again, this time from the right, the blow shaking the entire pod hard enough that her stabilizers flashed red, begging for her immediate attention. She was shooting upward at an unsafe speed, and still she was being hit from all sides, and still the mermaids were all around her.

  According to the depth gauge on her control panel, she was more than two hundred meters below the surface. Too deep for her to survive if something broke through the wall of her pod. Too far for her to swim; even if she ejected, she’d never make it to the surface. The deepest a human could hope to dive and come up with a chance of survival was about seventy meters, and she wasn’t going to reach that for—she spared a glance at the meter. For another forty-five seconds, and that was pushing her engines in a way she didn’t like and didn’t trust.

  Forty-five seconds was nothing on land. In the air and sunlight, where the pressure was negligible, it was nothing. Here, hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea, forty-five seconds was an eternity.

  The impacts continued, coming from every side, slamming into her with a regularity that jarred her bones and rattled her teeth in their sockets. She kept her hands on the controls, trying to ignore the lights flashing all around her, more with every impact, like the submersible itself was screaming. The alarms she’d never heard were going off, she knew that much, and part of her wondered, with an academic detachment that she recognized as shock, how hearing people could stand it. It was bad enough to have the submersible shuddering around her and the lights threatening to blind her: if there had been another sensory input on top of all that, she might have snapped, no longer able to cope with what was happening. Sometimes isolation was the only armor she had.

  Messages scrolled across the screen too fast for her to read. Every member of the monitoring team seemed to be typing at once, and she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that her sisters were there too, slamming their hands down on the keys, trying desperately to connect.

  I’m so sorry, she thought. I’m so, so sorry.

  The impacts stopped.

  The lack of shaking was as stunning as its beginning had been. Heather’s eyes widened, her lips parting as she dared to take a shaky breath. The mermaids were marine predators. They must have attacked because she had wandered into their territory; they were trying to defend themselves against something unknown and potentially da
ngerous. When she had fled rather than attacking back, she had shown she wasn’t a threat. They must have stopped following her as soon as she’d passed outside the waters they considered “theirs.”

  With a trembling hand, she reached for the keyboard, and tapped out, ‘I’m OK. I’m on my way back up. I’ll be there s’

  The impact from above was enough to drive the submersible more than ten meters down before Heather had fully registered that she’d been hit. The engines strained. The alarms she couldn’t hear screamed. The hit came again, harder this time, and with a profound shudder, the submersible’s systems stopped fighting.

  The lights went out.

  The water outside was so dark that for a few seconds, Heather could see nothing at all. Only blackness. Her heart was pounding so hard that she was starting to feel sick, like her cause of death was going to be heart attack, and not asphyxiation.

  The submersible was sinking. I’m going to see the bottom of the Challenger Deep after all, she thought dizzily. Her bones would rest there. She closed her eyes. God, Holly, I’m so sorry.

  People always said twins were connected, that they could feel each other’s thoughts across great distances. Heather had usually dismissed those claims as bullshit and hocus-pocus, but now she found herself wishing she could believe. She didn’t want to go without telling Holly she’d miss her. More, she didn’t want to go alone. She’d come into the world as part of a pair. She shouldn’t be leaving it solo.

  Opening her eyes, she fumbled for the control panel and began flipping switches, trying to find the combination to restart the engines and give herself a second chance. She knew it existed. If her engines weren’t physically damaged—if they’d just been overwhelmed by conflicting signals and the surrounding pressure—they could be rebooted. She could get out of this. It would be a funny story in a few years. That time she’d almost drowned in the Mariana Trench. That time she’d almost been killed by mermaids. They would laugh and laugh and never stop laughing. They would. They would.