Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

by Catherine Asaro

  “But you tried to say hello,” she said. “When you were on the space station. You told them you were there. You tried to make friends. They must be really mean, to take the sun away after all you did. The aliens . . . are bullies.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. I’d thought the same thing more than once.

  “Maybe they are,” I said. “But there’s not much we could do about it when they came, and there’s not much we can do about it now, other than what we are doing. We’ve figured out how to live on the sea floor where it’s still warm, and where the aliens can’t get to us. We’ll keep on finding a way to live here—as long as it takes.”

  I was a bit surprised by the emotion I put into the last few words. Jenna watched me.

  I leaned in and kissed her cheek.

  “Come on, it’s time to sleep. We both have to be up early tomorrow.”

  “Okay Daddy,” she said, smiling slightly. “I wish Mama could give me a kiss goodnight too.”

  “You and me both,” I said.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is Mama going to be alright?”

  I paused, letting my breath out slowly.

  “I sure hope so,” I said, settling into the lower bunk beneath my daughter’s—a bunk originally built for two, which felt conspicuously empty.

  * * *

  The clubhouse was actually a restored segment of Deepwater 3, long abandoned since the early days of the freeze-up.

  Each of the Deepwater stations were built as sectional rings—large titanium cylinders joined at their ends to form spoked hexagons and octagons. Deepwater 3 had been stripped and sat derelict since a decompression accident killed half her crew. We’d taken what could be taken, and left the hulk to the elements.

  The kids had really busted their butts getting it livable again.

  I admired their chutzpah as I motored alongside the revived segment, its portholes gleaming softly with light. They’d re-rigged a smaller, cobbled-together heat engine to take advantage of the exhaust from the nearby hydrothermal vents, and I was able to mate the docking collar on my sub with the collar on the section as easy as you please.

  The girl and boy from the other station didn’t stick around to watch. They took me and Dan just far enough for us to see the distant light from the once-dead station, then fled. I didn’t ask their names, but I didn’t have to. I’d promised them anonymity in exchange for their help, and was eager to get onboard and find out what might have happened to my daughter. So far as I knew, I was the first adult to even hear about this place.

  Only, nobody was home.

  Dan hung around outside, giving Deepwater 3 a once-over with his lights and sonar, while I slowly went through the reactivated section.

  It was a scene from a fantasy world.

  They’d used cutting torches to rip out all the bulkheads, leaving only a few, thick support spars intact. The deck had been buried in soft, white, dry sand and the concave ceiling had been painted an almost surreal sky blue. Indirect lights made the ceiling glow, while a huge heat lamp had been welded into the ceiling at one end, glaring down across the “beach” with a mild humming sound. Makeshift beach chairs, beach blankets, and other furniture were positioned here and there, as the kids had seen fit.

  Several stand-alone LCD screens had been wired into the walls, with horseshoes of disturbed sand surrounding them. I carefully approached one of the LCDs—my moist suit picking up sand on my feet and legs. Cycling through the LCD’s drive I discovered many dozens of movies and television programs. Informational relics from before the aliens came. Videos about flying, and surfing, hiking, camping, and lots and lots of nature shows.

  I went to two more LCD screens, and found similar content.

  I walked to the middle of the section—realizing that I hadn’t stood in a space that unconfined and open since before we’d all gone below—and used my mobile radio to call for Dan.

  He hooked up at the docking collar on the opposite end of the section, and came in under the “sun,” stopping short and whistling softly.

  “Can you believe this?” I said.

  Like me, Dan was an oldster from the astronaut days. Though he’d never had any children, nor even a girlfriend, since his wife had died in the mad rush to get to sea when the mirror cloud made life impossible on the surface.

  “They’ve been busy,” Dan said. “Is there anyone else here?”

  “Not a soul,” I said. “Though it looks like they left in a hurry.”

  “How can you figure?”

  “Lights were left on.”

  I looked around the room again, noting how many teenagers might fit into the space, and the countless prints in the sand, the somewhat disheveled nature of the blankets.

  “Frankie and Annette, eat your hearts out,” I said.

  Dan grunted and smiled. “I was at party or two like that, back in flight school.”

  “Me too,” I admitted. “But something tells me they didn’t just come here to get laid. Look at what they’ve been watching.”

  “Porn?” Dan said.

  “No . . . yes. But not the kind you think.”

  I flipped on the LCDs and started them up playing whatever video was queued in memory. Instantly, the space was filled with the sound of crashing waves, rock music, images of people sky-diving and hang-gliding, aerial sweeps of the Klondike, the Sahara, all shot on clear days. Very few clouds in the sky. It was non-stop sunshine from screen to screen to screen.

  Dan wasn’t smiling anymore. He stared at the heat lamp in the ceiling, and the false sky, and then back at the sand.

  “You ever go to church when you were a kid?” Dan asked me.

  “Not really. Dad was an atheist, and mom a lapsed Catholic.”

  “I went to church when I was a kid. Baptist, then Episcopal, then Lutheran. My dad was a spiritual shopper. Anyway, wherever we went, certain things were always the same. The pulpit, the huge bible open to a given scripture, the wooden pews. But more than that, they all felt a certain way. They had a vibe. You didn’t have to get the doctrine to understand what the building was meant for.”

  “What does this have to do with anything, Dan?” I said, getting exasperated.

  “Look around, man,” Dan said, holding his arms wide. “This is a house of worship.”

  I stared at everything, not comprehending. Then, suddenly, it hit me.

  “The club isn’t a club.”

  “What?”

  “The Glimmer Club. That’s what she called it. She said many of the younger teens and a few of the older ones had started it up a couple of years ago. Not every kid was a member, but most of the other kids heard rumors. To be a member, you had to swear total secrecy.”

  My father had tended to consider all religions nuts, but he’d reserved special ire for the ones he called cults: the cracked up fringe groups with the truly dangerous beliefs. He’d pointed to Jonestown as a textbook example of what could go wrong when people let belief get out of hand.

  I experienced a quick chill down my spine.

  “They’re not coming back,” I said.

  “Where would they go?” Dan asked.

  But I was already running across the sand to the hatch for my sub.

  * * *

  Jenna was ten years old when her mother committed suicide.

  Neither of us was there when it happened of course. Lucille had moved around from station to station for her last several months, until the separate crew bosses on each of the stations got fed up with her behavior. Ultimately she put herself into a sea lock without a suit on, and flooded the lock before anyone could stop her. By the time they got the lock dry and could bring her out, she was gone. And I was left trying to explain all of this to Jenna, who cried for 48 hours straight, then slept an additional day in complete physical and emotional exhaustion.

  For me, it was painful—but in a detached kind of way. Lucille and I had been coming apart for years. The docs mutually agreed that sunlight deprivation
may have been part of the problem. It had happened with several others, all of whom had had to seek light therapy to try to compensate for their depression. In Lucille’s case, the light therapy hadn’t worked. In fact, nothing had seemed to brake her long, gradual decline into despair. I’d kept hoping Jenna—a mother’s instinctive selflessness for the sake of her child—would pull Lucille through. But in hindsight it was clear Jenna had actually made things worse.

  These thoughts I kept strictly to myself in the weeks and months that followed Lucille’s departure from the living world. I poured myself into my role as Daddy and held Jenna through many a sad night when the bad dreams and missing Mommy got her and there was nobody for Jenna to turn to but me. Eventually the nightmares stopped and Jenna started to get back to her old self—something I was so pleased about I had a difficult time expressing it in words.

  For Jenna’s 12th birthday I gave her a computer pad I’d squirreled away before committing to the deep. My daughter had been going nuts decorating half the station with chalk drawings—our supply of paper having long since been exhausted. The pad was an artist’s model, with several different styli and programs for Jenna to use. It liberated her from the limited medium of diatoms-on-metal, and fairly soon all of the LCDs in our little family compartment were alive with her digital paintings.

  It was impressive stuff. She threw herself into it unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Vistas and landscapes, stars and planets, and people. Lots of people. Lots of filtered representations of Lucille, usually sad. I dutifully recorded it all onto the family portable drive where I hoped, perhaps one day, if humanity made it out of this hole alive, Jenna’s work might find a wider audience. She’d certainly won over many of the other people on Deepwater 12, and was even getting some nice feedback from some of the other stations as well.

  In retrospect, I probably should have seen the obvious.

  All of Jenna’s art—with rare exception—had one thematic element in common.

  It all featured the sun. In one form or another. Sometimes as the focus of the work, but more often as merely an element.

  All kids do it, right? The ubiquitous yellow ball in the crayon sky, with yellow lines sprouting out of it? Only, Jenna’s suns were warmer, more varied in hue and color. They became characters in their own right. When she discovered how to use the animation software on the pad, she went whole-hog building breathtaking sequences of the sun rising, the sun setting; people and families frolicking beneath our benevolent yellow dwarf star called Sol.

  If ever the aliens who’d taken our star from us entered Jenna’s mind, it didn’t show up in her work. But then, few of us thought of the aliens in any real sense anymore. They’d come, and so far as we knew, they’d gone. Dealing with the repercussions of their single, apocalyptic action had become far, far more important to all of us than dealing with the aliens themselves.

  I remembered this as Number 6 creaked and groaned around me, the pressure warning lights letting me know that I was coming up too quickly—risking structural damage if I didn’t bleed off pressure differences between the inside and the outside of the sub.

  Dan wasn’t with me. I’d convinced him to go back and let the others know about the Glimmer Club, and what the kids had done with Deepwater 3 behind our backs. He’d also been tasked with explaining why I’d disobeyed direct orders from a crew boss, risking my life and the old sub to chase a wild hair through the vast, dark ocean.

  I couldn’t be sure I was right. All I had to go on was a short conversation I’d had with Jenna on her 15th birthday, just a few months earlier.

  At that age she spent most of her time with the other teens on the station, as teenagers throughout history have always been prone to do. Old me had stopped being the focus of her attention right about the time she’d hit puberty.

  Which was why that particular conversation stood out.

  “Dad,” she said, “Does anyone ever go check anymore?”

  “On what?”

  “On the surface. Up top.”

  “We used to send people all the time, but the thicker the ice got—-especially when the equator closed over—the less point there seemed to be in it. So I don’t think anyone has tried in several years.”

  “Why not? We can’t just give up, can we? I mean, why are we doing any of this if people aren’t going to ever go back to the surface?”

  She had a good point. I am afraid I hemmed and hawed my way through that one, leaving her with a perplexed and somewhat unhappy expression on her face. If any of her friends had gotten better answers from their parents, I never found out. Though I now suspected that our big failure as adults had been our inability to imagine that our children wouldn’t be satisfied to just scratch out a living on the ocean floor.

  We who’d been through the freeze-out from the surface, we’d seen the destruction and the death brought by the forever night. We felt fortunate to be where we were. Alive.

  But our kids? For them, the ice layer on the surface had become a thing of myth. An impenetrable but invisible bogey monster, forever warned about, but never seen nor experienced. For the Glimmer Club, I suspect, it got to the point where they wondered if all of the adults weren’t crazy, or conspiring in a plot. How did anyone really know that the surface was frozen over? That aliens had blocked the sun?

  To blindly accept a fundamental social truth upon which everyone agrees, is just part of what makes us human.

  But in every era, however dark or desperate, there have also always been hopeful questioners.

  * * *

  I’d not slept for almost two days, and knew it when I caught myself slumped at the controls, chin in my chest; the sub’s primitive autopilot beeping plaintively at me.

  Sonar pings still didn’t show me any subs.

  But they hadn’t shown me the underside of the ice sheet yet, either.

  I used the sub’s computer to run some calculations—based on the last known measurements to have been taken on the ice sheet’s thickness. I used these to double check where I thought I was, versus what the instruments were telling me, and sat back to ponder.

  Assuming the Glimmer Club had ascended as a group, without significant deviation—because the subs only have so much air and battery life to go around—I’d expected to spot them by now. Or at least hear them. Several quick pauses to capture and analyze ambient water noise had yielded depressing silence. Not even the cry of whales filled the sea anymore, because the whales and other sea mammals had all died out together.

  If the aliens had had no regard for human sapience, what about the other intelligent creatures who had once called the Earth home?

  If ever the oceans re-opened and humans reclaimed the planet, we’d find it an awfully empty place.

  Exhausted, I kept going up.

  * * *

  Sonar pingbacks brought me awake the second time. There. A single object, roughly about the size of a sub. It was drifting ever so lazily back towards the bottom.

  I spent a few minutes echo-locating, and when I did, my blood ran cold. There was a big crack in the pilot’s canopy and the top hatch was hanging open. Dreading what I might find, I pointed my lights into the canopy and examined the interior of the little sub, down its entire length. If I’d expected to see bodies, I was relieved to see only emptiness. Trained from birth to salvage, they’d stripped the sub and continued on.

  Wherever that happened to be.

  Additional sonar pings sent back nothing. The ocean was silent in all directions, as black and lonely as space had ever been. On instinct alone, I resumed the long voyage to the ice.

  * * *

  The gentle rocking of the sub wasn’t what woke me.

  It was the occasional thumping against the hull.

  I sat straight up, almost ripping my headset off in the process My neck and back hurt, and my hands were unsteady as I grasped the controls.

  No telling how long I’d been out that time. I scanned the control board and the autopilot seemed satisfied.
When I saw that the depth gauge read zero, I had to tap the screen a few times. Something had to be wrong. The knocking on the hull suggested I’d found the lower boundary of the ice sheet, where the sea water grudgingly turned to sludge. I’d never actually been up this high since the oceans closed over, so maybe the equipment was wonky this close to the frozen crust?

  I hit my lights, but just a few of them because I didn’t have all the battery life left in the world.

  It took me at least a minute to figure out what I was seeing.

  A lapping line of water sloshed halfway up the canopy.

  Had I drifted into an air pocket on the underside of the ice?

  Scanning upward with the lights revealed nothing but blackness.

  But wait, not black blackness. There was a distinct hint of color in the void.

  I slowly reached a hand down and flicked the lights off, letting the gentle rocking of the boat and the knocking of the hull fill my ears. The blackness was pinpricked with white dots, and there was a gloaming light in the very far distance. Only, gloaming wasn’t the right word. The light slowly but perceptibly began to grow in strength, and the blackness overhead began to graduate from obsidian, to purple, and finally flared into dark blue at the far, far horizon.

  No!

  My hands were shaking badly. I almost couldn’t hit the switch to extend the sub’s single, disused radio aerial. A tiny motor whined somewhere behind me, and I waited until the motor stopped before I gently rested my headset back onto my scalp, a gentle hiss of static filling my ears.

  I depressed the SEND button on the sub’s control stick.

  “This is Max Leighton speaking for Deepwater 12, the United States. If anyone can hear and understand this broadcast, please respond.”

  The static crackled lifelessly.

  It was a vain hope. My signal couldn’t go too far. But I had to try.

  “I say again, this is Thomas Leighton speaking—”

  “Daddy?”

  My breath caught in my throat. It had been a single word, broken by crackling interference. But it was probably the most beautiful word I’d ever heard spoken in my entire life.