I could tell Bags was feeling deprived of his arsenal of sarcastic similes, due to the presence of an actual, teary girl. “I’m going to go change,” he muttered.
Snorri tried to rally us with gambits about science and opportunities. Moira stood firm, with significant moral support from myself. Mutiny was underway when Bags returned sporting a cool-looking white jumpsuit with lots of pockets and an insignia patch on the chest.
“Look,” he said, “scientists wait for half their careers to go for a ride on Alousia.”
A patently unpersuasive argument.
Bags took our measure. “We’re going to breach protocol,” he announced. “Bathroom visits will be allowed.”
“You just said there’s no toilet,” I said.
“There is no toilet on the Alousia. There is a bathroom right through that door. It’s where I changed into the jumpsuit.”
What Bags and Snorri had neglected to tell us was that the actual Alousia was currently sinking downward from its mother-ship, already well on its way to the abyssal plain off of Georges Bank that was our ostensible destination. Our personal destination was next door—the Alousia simulation chamber, a reproduction of the Plutonic Class Submersible Vessel, from which Bags would be remotely operating the thing. Exact adherence to the actual expedition was mandatory in the chamber, from diapers to decompression. An allowance so devilishly transgressive as a bathroom visit would be made only under the mantle of absolute secrecy. No food was allowed, no exceptions (ants), and we could wear the jumpsuits if we wanted to, which we did.
Moira changed into her jumpsuit in the bathroom, while Snorri and I changed up in the conference room. Hers was way too big, but she liked it anyway. She loaded the tubular pen-pockets on her left sleeve with several plastic coffee stirrers. Bags went into the room I’d taken for a TV studio on the other side of the picture window and turned on the array of controls and monitors.
When we joined him in the oversmall room, he explained further that Alousia was an ROV PCSV, and then was obliged to explain even further that the Alousia was a small submarinelike machine—a Plutonic Class Submersible Vessel—and it could be piloted from right here in the submarine pens—it was a Remotely Operated Vessel. On shallow missions, it seated three individuals. But because this was a special hardened military craft, it could travel much deeper in the ocean than the other more publicly-known vessels, like its civilian cousin, Alvin. When Alousia was sent on a dangerous mission, she was usually unoccupied and operated from a station like this, or more typically from a simulation chamber aboard her mothership, which was disguised as a tanker running under various flags of convenience.
The room beyond our conference room was supposedly an exact reproduction of the Alousia—the TV monitors were in place of the vessel’s own portholes, cameras on the vessel itself allowed those in the simulation chamber to see the same thing someone would see from on board. This whole set up here, under the docks, below the Oceanographic Institute, was a secret training facility unknown to the scientists above.
Normally when operating the craft remotely, as Bags was about to do, the crew made every effort to pretend they were actually inside the submersible vessel. That meant they spent hours, sometimes days inside it, mirroring the entire mission. Everything from operating the blurp guns and vacuum hoses, to simulating hours of decompression as the vessel returned to the surface. Bags did not mention whether the remote submariners simulated the bends if they rose too quickly. He also did not mention what sort of missions the Alousia was used for—I was hoping to hear about covert visits to sunken Lemuria and the retrieval of alien artifacts. Nor did Bags, or Snorri, say why blatant security risks such as me and Moira were allowed here at all. I was too savvy to ask, and Moira was too naive, but, as native islanders both, we could sense when to shut up and mind our own businesses.
“I’ve always had time to settle into the spirit of the descent— I’ve never joined a mission already on its way down before,” Bags told us. “It helps the imagination if you can adjust to the dark and time.”
I was finding adjustment difficult due to the fact that the Alousia was a three-seater and Moira refused to sit on anyone’s lap. Snorri got shotgun, Bags, the driver’s seat, and I was wedged into the alleged cargo space next to the rear seat, occupied by Princess Moira. Man is not meant to sit with his knees touching his nose, not to mention doing so however many millions of fathoms underwater we were pretending to sink to. I found it odd to think of water vertically. It had always seemed so thoroughly horizontal. Water likes going downward, I supposed.
Moira wondered to us whether a dog had ever been onboard and found it a shame they weren’t allowed. She further wondered whether any dogs had ever seen the bottom of the ocean. Laika, I told her, was a Russian dog who’d been in outer space before either of us had even been born. We hoped he’d had a window seat. Our own windows were TV screens and in the hour that I sat there courting deep vein thrombosis, they showed an utterly bland static, which turned out to be a perfect representation of what water looked like underwater.
One of the more disappointing things about the whole trip is that we did not thunk onto the seabed at the end of our descent. I like that scene in submarine movies with all the rivets apop and the crew reduced to pure primate terror. The underwater is on TV almost every night. Coral reefs, sharks, squid, shipwrecks—it’s just aboil with action. As it turns out, just past the continental shelf, it’s more PBS pledge-break territory. More boring than even the shipless surface. Bags actually suggested I make a donation to the Oceanographic Institute.
The abyssal plain, Bags told us, is a desert. Snorri added that the Arctic is a desert. Moira countered that the Gobi, for instance, was a desert chiefly due to its lack of water, and that deserts were not the kind of place where she could throw a snowball or drown the moment she opened her mouth. Bags unhelpfully reminded her that her lungs would be too compacted to breathe enough water to drown, and that her whole body would just squish in seconds anyway. Not that she could get out and walk around, he added. The ground wasn’t actually ground—it was more like a porridge of snow and dandruff. He said that we should just shut up for a second and watch the portholes.
I couldn’t be certain I was seeing anything but water and more water, but Moira and Snorri both said they could see the marine snow. Bags said it was from little pieces of dead fish and even tinier pieces of stuff like krill and less apparent creatures. They die and whatever minerals their body once contained continued to sink until it settled into the silt down here. The silt was the realm of the holothurian—rarely observed, gooey, eyeless (and limbless and everything elseless) creatures that resembled nothing from the surface yet outnumbered all the ants and worms of the world combined. He said that they were like the vast herds of mites that grazed our skin, snuffling up the dead cells. This was a cruel thing to tell tightly packed people.
We were deep, I was told. Deep down over an invisible cliff on an invisible plain that contained nothing sightworthy in the first place. Yet we were homing in on a gray smirch that was just becoming evident through the collodial haze.
“I don’t need to tell you three that what you are seeing is absolutely confidential and not to leave the submergence vessel,” Bags warned.
Moira and I looked at each other. I think we had both reached the conclusion that the only secret we could perceive was that the underwater was much more boring than TV documentaries had led us to believe.
“That’s it, it’s definitely her.” said Snorri.
“The transponder is still going strong,” said Bags.
Throughout our descent, Bags and Snorri had been telling Moira and I about whalefalls. Whales, according to Snorri, die all the time. Bags had added that instead of disintegrating into slowly sinking biological confetti like the marine snow, dead whales just sank right down and settled into the silt before they really began to rot. He said there was a secret map at the Institute marking the locations of hundreds of whale corpses, or w
halefalls.
“Why’s it secret?” asked Moira.
“Everything we do is secret—national security. Anyway, who wants to have to explain why you’re monitoring rotting whale corpses?”
I remained unenlightened. “But, why, anyway?”
“So that they won’t be disturbed.”
“But why monitor them?”
“Ah, a whalefall is like an oasis here in the pelagic wastes.
They take over a hundred years to decay and communities with hundreds of different species—some unique from fall to fall— form around them.”
“Why?” asked Moira. I recalled that Snorri had dubbed this a scientific mission and imagined Moira’s re-creation of the rotting corpse for a school science fair. She was still too young and bloody-minded to be girly about decomposition. I hoped her school custodian ordered enough bleach for the coming year.
Bags told her, “They’re the only thing to eat for miles around. By the time the carcass is entirely consumed, several generations of lots of different kinds of creatures have passed. The whalefall is the only home they’ll ever know. It’s like they’re on a spaceship that’s going to take centuries to get to another solar system, and it’s only the great-grandkids of the original colonists that get to arrive at their destination.”
“But it’s not going anywhere,” said Moira.
“It’s traveling through time,” said Snorri.
“The great-grand shrimp and worms and crabs and such, they hope they can find yet another whalefall and move on to that one, before their lines die out. Whole species moved across oceans of water and time this way,” said Bags.
“Gross.”
“No! It’s beautiful—it’s evolution, it’s the mystery of life and it could be answer to the sustainability of the human species.
“Imagine these whalefalls as models of undersea arcologies for our own species. Even if humanity is reduced to a few underwater colonies, they could imitate the whalefalls and use their limited resources and dwindling technology to build just one more arcology that would sustain them for just enough time to allow the next generations to build the next arcology. If they built it from resources that would somehow sustain them, the way the worms both live in and live off of the whale skeletons, they could potentially move across the oceans and eventually repopulate the continents.”
“What happened to the continents?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Nukes. Plague.”
“You’re certain about this?”
“Sir, I am a Christian American. Of course there’s an apocalypse. And sooner than later.”
Hell, bring it on, I thought. My chief worry about the apocalypse was that it was going to happen a few days after I died, and I’d miss the whole thing.
“Like Atlantis?” asked Moira.
“Atlantis was a big city,” said Snorri, “above ground. This whole nonsense about it being underwater is a recent invention.”
“Well, even if the whalefalls don’t help humanity survive, it’s nice to know that there will be something going on after the nuclear winter and photosynthesis has had its run,” said Bags.
“Like the black smokers!” said Moira. “We saw a movie about them in school! Is this the ship?”
“No, this one’s too covert. That was the other one. But Alousia’s been to see the thermal vents too. Hold on, now, things are going to get a bit tricky.”
We were maneuvering to hover over the whalefall.
“There’s red grass!” said Moira.
“Tube worms,” said Bags.
From out of the turbid murk, Alousia’s spotlights showed our first vivid glimpse of color. The tube worms formed a pelt over a vaguely whale-shaped mound. It seemed each cilium was swaying and waving to the other, like congregants in a chapel awash in fellowship. The worms clung along the ordered pews of the vertebrae and fluttered like tells from the vaulting ribs.
Long-limbed pale crabs cruised the crowd as deacons passing the plate, while clouds of ghostly shrimp fluttered among them all. Bags angled the spotlight to bore through the biotic squall we stirred up, illuminating the sacristy within the cyclopean skull. Eels leered back lidlessly, mouths agape, priests interrupted mid-scandal.
Undoubtedly, it was another hellmouth, another vagina dentata, another bear trap, more than a slight hint at the illimitable horrors that await whatever’s left of our selves after our mortal suffering concludes. The whalefall, the thermal vents, the sulfur seeps, each a case of a man coming too close to guessing at the sublime, as if passion plays and deathbed scenes were not enough to sate his need to take his torch and descend, descend to stand in the fringed cloacal gateway and peer through the keyhole.
Yet there was a harmony here at the alpha and omega. The creatures were the landscape. The rude redness of the undulating worms was hypnotic; the eels and crabs seemed enthralled, swaying in a rhythm too gentle and supporting to be trusted. I noticed Moira and I were rocking slightly in sympathy.
“It will stay like this for years,” said Bags, mollified.
Snorri broke a timeless, queasy quietness: “This isn’t the picture you showed me.”
“That picture was from last year,” said Bags.
“There’s no flesh left at all.”
“Just tiny shreds of gristle, but there’s lots of tissue and oil that leeches from the bones.”
“I could see the rune in the picture from last year.”
“Let’s see it again,” said Bags. He moused around his laptop a bit and the Alouisa’s portholes became a storm of visual static before they showed a new scene of carnivores harrowing the carcass. Our deep submergence vehicle was also a time machine. It was a year earlier, according to Bags, a much more violent stage in the whalefall’s afterlife. Shadows of sharks passed over a field of much longer, more active grass.
With his finger on the screen, Snorri traced the rune that showed the whale was indeed his council’s. “Rustled.”
I was looking for the branded rune when I saw that the grass was not the waving mat of red fingers from before. It was a gorgon’s head of hagfish. I lurched forward and hit every button and switch I could come into contact with, while yelling, “What’s that!?”
“Hold steady!” hissed Bags as he changed the porthole screens back to the present decompositional garden scene we’d been watching. “What was that about?”
“I felt something,” I said.
Moira somehow sensed my need for her complicity. “Maybe a colossal squid.”
“Nothing out the windows,” said Snorri.
Just because we were playing aquanauts, sitting in a closet watching a year-old movie about a rotting whale, didn’t mean I was going to abide hagfish. They have no business imposing themselves on my existence. They are not going to be on my ark; they are not in my book. I have unicorns in my brain and their only job is to roam the forests and clomp through the shallows, stomping and spearing any thought of hagfish into paste.
“Anyway, that was from when I visited it last summer,” said Bags. He turned back and gave me a nasty stare. “We’ll stick to the present, so there won’t be any more disturbances.”
“Show me the antenna,” said Snorri.
Bags said he was reversing his slurp guns and shovelfuls of sediment were blown off the furry skeleton. We could see a strand of cable there in the silt.
“Antenna?” I asked.
Snorri said something in Finlindian about Estonindians so obscene, it didn’t need translation. “That was ours. The Estonindians are boat thieves and whale rustlers. You’re all witnesses.”
“Why’s there an antenna?” I asked.
“It’s not retrievable; it’s too big and heavy for us to pull it up ourselves,” said Bags.
“We don’t need it anyway. I just need to bring back documentation,” said Snorri.
I tried asking Moira: “Antenna?”
“Somebody killed the whale?” she said. “Was it Waldena? Did she harpoon it?”
“Just to watch it
die,” said Snorri.
“Why?”
“High seas piracy. Ecological delusion. I needed to come check on this, but I wanted you all to see it, too. Waldena has gone too far. Probably hag rode it to its grave. I don’t even know this poor whale’s name—the prototype team kept shoddy records.”
“Snorri, what the hell are you talking about?” I asked.
“This whale here—this carcass—was part of the prototype pod. Orange, Moira, you can keep a secret, right? I would not have brought you down here, otherwise. This is serious; you cannot tell anyone.”
I crossed my heart, a gesture lost on Snorri. Moira didn’t even respond. She was wise enough to know that she wasn’t supposed to keep secrets about what happened when weird old men got her alone.
“A few years ago, our whaling councils—this is supposed to be a joint-venture between Finlindian and Estonindian governments—began to fund research into cetacean-borne telecommunication. With help from Mr. Bagsadarian here and his office, and especially Alouisa, we identified a small pod of whales that were regular travelers on these waters. These are wild whales, but we branded them like our own pods, so we could identify them.
“That group is what you Americans would call humpbacks. I think they were a bad choice—many of them are already monitored, and they’re sort of easy targets. They are master vocalists though, and that is why their species was chosen first, because of their propensity and talent for long-distance communication.
“After we marked them and defined their territory, we installed antennae in some of the strongest of the whales.”
“Why?” I asked, “So they can listen to the game?”
“Do not be clever, Orange, this is a serious enterprise as well as an opportunity for you. But you are right. The antennae are for reception—telephone reception. We’ve developed a way for ordinary cell phones to work out on the open ocean—no satellites, no dishes, just your own pocket phone. The only restriction is that one has to be within range of the whales carrying the antennae. We call that the Whale Network, and it works, well, swimmingly so far. For the actual Whale Network, the one we’re monitoring now with Honeypaws and the Hammer Maiden, we are using semi-domesticated belugas, which are more tractable and much easier to breed. Once we finish field-testing it this summer, we’ll go into production mode and sow the northern waters with augmented belugas carrying antennae and repeaters. The belugas are much smaller and so are the actual antennae, which resemble. . . oh what do you call them? Yardsticks.
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