The Abyss

by Orson Scott Card

  Kretschmer wasn't actually playing tag right now. He was staying silent, engine noise as low as possible. But that also meant he couldn't run, either. If the Montana made that much noise in the water, the enemy - if it was the enemy - would tag them. Or worse. Who could tell what this contact was after? As it was, the Montana might still be invisible to the contact. And if they could stay close enough they might even tag the other guy themselves - get a good identification without being spotted.

  "We can still give him a haircut," said the captain. "Helm, come right two-oh-six niner, down five degrees."

  The navigator didn't like it. The wall of the Cayman Trench wasn't far enough away for him to feel good about this. "Port side one hundred twenty feet narrowing to seventy-five. Sir, we have a proximity warning light."

  "That's too damn close!" said the Exec. "We've got to back off."

  Kretschmer got the message. This was as close to the contact as he was going to get. Was it close enough?

  From back around the corner came Barnes's voice. "Range to contact, two hundred. Contact jinked to bearing two-six-oh and accelerated to - a hundred thirty knots!"

  Kretschmer turned back to look at Barnes. "Nothing goes a hundred and thirty!" Kretschmer wasn't sure whether to be scared at something this strange or disappointed because it couldn't possibly be real.

  In the last few seconds before the contact arrived, a line from an old movie passed through Kretschmer's mind. A child's voice. "They're he-ere." He almost laughed, if there had been a moment to laugh. As the contact neared to within a few hundred yards, the lights dimmed down - not just a flicker, a steady dimming that lasted maybe a full second, maybe longer. The thing hadn't touched them, and yet it was doing something to their power. If the Russians could drain power from a distance, then there was no stopping them. They could sit there and laugh at us when we offered to give them Alaska if they'd just promise not to blow us up.

  The contact passed over them. Still sounding just the same. A smooth thrumming. Incredible that it could move so fast without making more noise.

  What Kretschmer hadn't thought of - what no one had ever thought of because no one had ever thought of a large undersea craft moving at more than a hundred knots was the fact that even though the contact was moving without turbulence, the regular laws of physics still applied to the Montana. When the smooth slipstream of water from the contact passed across the submarine, then what had been dynamically stable, a clean wave, suddenly became chaos. Turbulence. A hundred and thirty knots worth of it. Worse than you'd find in the belly of a wave in a hurricane.

  The Montana was designed to withstand nearby explosions of serious magnitude. But turbulence like this - even if the hull could handle it, the steering mechanism couldn't. It was the equivalent of a jet fighter going into a flat spin. Jiggle that stick all you like, flyboy, you ain't going nowhere.

  The deck lurched sideways under their feet. Just that fast, everybody who had been standing was lying down, some of them dazed from the pain of hitting metal without warning. The Exec shouted what they all knew. "Turbulence! We're in its wake!"

  It didn't matter that it was the Montana that actually caused the turbulence, that the contact was moving on without carrying any of the chaos with it. Around the Montana the water was flowing in crazy, unpredictable, shifting patterns. Sirens were going off everywhere. Warnings. Unstable. Too close to the cliff wall. Loss of control.

  "Helm! All stop!" Kretschmer called. "Full right rudder!" By the book. The guys who wrote the book had never been in turbulence like this. He knew they were moving rapidly, but couldn't begin to guess what direction.

  The helmsman echoed his command, then reported: "Hydraulic failure. Planes are not responding, sir!"

  The turbulence was easing up. That was the good news. The side-scan display had the bad news. The cliff wall and the port bow were about to try to occupy the same space at the same time. Even if they got full control this moment it was too late. The rock was tougher than the sub.

  "Hydraulics restored, sir."

  Maybe they'd make it without impact, thought Kretschmer.

  Then the Montana pranged against the cliff wall. It was a terrible sound - unbreakable metal, breaking. The whole ship flexed; joints in some internal water pipes gave way, and water sprayed into the attack room. This time the crew wasn't tossed around like dice in a cup. This time they were all thrown in one direction. Toward the cliff. A few guys had the bad luck to land wrong, trying to push their heads through a sharp corner, trying to bend their necks in ways that Mother Nature hadn't planned on. The dying had already started.

  "Collision alarm!" Kretschmer clung to the ladder and shouted orders. "Collision alarm! lighten her up, Charlie, lighten her up!"

  The first impact had torn open the outer tube doors. The men in the port torpedo room at the front of the Montana knew it first. The inner hatches popped open like jack-in-the-boxes, only instead of a puppet, what popped out of each door was a two-foot thick column of water. Fire hoses of the gods. The men in the torpedo room who weren't killed by getting crushed between the water and the bulkhead were blinded by spray. But blind or not, somebody got to the exit hatch, somebody slammed it shut, somebody spun the wheel. The torpedo room was sealed off. Everybody inside it was as good as dead. But everybody else had a chance.

  Inside the torpedo room there was a pocket of air. Two men reached it, breathed there for a moment. But the water was so cold it numbed them. The pressure was so great it hurt to breathe. And then, between the cold and the pressure and the shock and the fear, it didn't hurt to breathe anymore because nobody was breathing.

  Last thoughts. I'm dying I'm dying. A whole life flashes in front of your eyes. Only you can't even be sure it's your own life, you don't remember any of this stuff actually happening to you, nothing in your whole life ever mattered compared to right this moment, needing to get a breath, needing to get warm, nice strong hands to pull you out of this water, to make this moment not be happening anymore, and then you hang on to one of those memories, one of those places in your brain where you knew you'd never die. You hold onto that feeling of immortality until you don't fear death anymore because there's nothing left of you to feel.

  In the attack room, the navigator was still getting readings from the rest of the ship. "The port torpedo room is flooding!"

  Kretschmer knew there was no time for anything subtle. The hull's integrity was gone. They were taking on water. They had only so much compressed air to use for flotation. At this depth, the water pressure was so great that it took ten times as much air pressure to expel the water in the flotation tanks, while the jolt of impact had loosened every seam and hatch, so that every moment they stayed this deep meant that water would burst through another barrier, crushing the air behind it, costing them what little buoyancy was left. They had to get to the surface now, where the pressure was less, before anything else broke open, before they took on any more water.

  "Blow all tanks! Blow all tanks!"

  "Blowing main tanks!"

  "Blow everything!"

  It wasn't working. The main forward tanks wouldn't blow - they were ruptured. They were too deep to use the auxiliary pumps, even if there'd been time. "All back full!" Kretschmer shouted, but the helmsman knew his job - with the Montana tilting so sharply downward, running the screws at full force backward would help the boat rise up toward the surface. But the boat wouldn't go. There was too much water on board, too little low-pressure air. The Russian Mike-class sub that bought it in the Norwegian Sea in April 1989 made it to the surface for a while, saved some lives. The Montana wouldn't.

  Kretschmer and the Exec looked at each other for a moment. No time to say, Sorry, you were right, I should have got the hell out of there, I should have believed the speed the sonar was reporting, should have thought of the turbulence. No time to do anything but their duty. "We're losing her. Launch the buoy."

  The Exec opened the box and pushed the button. Everyone in the attack room knew wh
at it meant. During the whole seventy-day mission, even the Navy doesn't know where its boomers are - the captain makes up his own course, within certain broad guidelines. If the Montana went down without making contact at the end, it would probably never be found. So you only launched the buoy to mark your final position. It would rise to the surface and broadcast your location in one coded burst. It wasn't a cry for help. It was the marker for the Montana's grave.

  The helmsman was calling out the depth readings. Sixteen hundred feet. Seventeen hundred. Despite the noise of spraying water, the groaning of injured or terrified men, Kretschmer heard - or thought he could hear - the popping of each of the hatchways as the water, now at fifty atmospheres of pressure, burst through, probing ever deeper into the ship. Maybe the Russians had it better when that earlier sub went down in the Pacific. One burst and they were crushed into pulp. We're getting it pop by pop, and we have time to know we're dying, time to drown or freeze to death or feel ourselves getting crushed or battered to death. Time to savor the last terrible moments of life.

  Before the aft tanks ruptured, they provided enough buoyancy to make the sub slope sharply downward toward the bow. Barnes found a toe-hold on the equipment that had once been to his left, and now was below him. With the bow sonar dome smashed in the first impact, his sonar equipment was useless now but he could reach the planesman's yoke, maybe do something to help. Where was the planesman? Didn't matter. Barnes struggled to get control, to right the ship, but how? The only way to bring the sub back to level was to flood the aft section to balance the bow. Either that or hit bottom. Then they might level out, if they hit bottom. But where was the bottom in the Cayman Trench? It was an old submariner's joke that this was the asshole of the Earth. A sub goes in here like a suppository, it ain't never coming out.

  Barnes heard the captain give the order, saw the Exec launch the emergency buoy. They were giving up. Not Barnes. His hands were working so hard that his arms and shoulders ached with the exertion, but his brain was hardly connected to it anymore. It was the craziest thing. He knew he was going to die, his body was working to the breaking point trying to do what couldn't be done, and yet he was thinking about something so far away that it might have happened to somebody else. But no, that wasn't it. This was happening to somebody else. The real Barnes wasn't here.

  The real Barnes was back in Gaffney, South Carolina, in a big old ramshackle white house on Floyd Baker Boulevard, where Deena had her T-shirt up with Junior sucking his brains out and making milk bubbles all white against the mahogany brown of his face, the deep chocolate brown of her breast. He saw that picture clear in his mind, and if he just looked up a little, turned his head, there'd be Deena's mama in the kitchen, dropping gobs of batter into the oil in the frying pan, backing away and muttering her nastiest blessings when the oil spat back and stung her. Outside, the sound of kids yelling and fighting each other in the shade of the trees, as if the day wasn't hot enough already.

  Last spring Barnes came this close to losing all of it, and he knew it. You stay there in Gaffney, he told Deena on the phone. I'm only in port a couple of days. You just stay there. And all the time he's talking, there's Moter's sister, her hand on his waist, her fingers scooping down into his pants, finding the crease of his buttocks, sliding along the sweat. Don't come down this time, he says. But then he hangs up the phone and Moter's sister gives him a kiss like her tongue's a hook and he's a wide-mouth bass. This can't be happening to me, he says to himself. And then he says, That's right. This can't be happening to me. It's somebody else. And he blows off like Moter's sister wasn't even there, just says No thanks goodbye and gets him a bus ticket and five hours later there he is in that living room of that big old white house and Deena's telling him she's so glad he came home, look at your papa, Junior, he just couldn't stay away from you.

  That's right, can't stay away. Not like my papa who blew mama off the second her ass didn't look cute in tight jeans no more. Not like Deena's papa who drunk himself into the Oakland Cemetery before she was six years old and never put one dime's worth of dinner on the kitchen table. Nobody there even to show me what a papa was, I'm going to have to make it up as I go along, but I'll be there, that's who I am, I won't be no filling-station self-serve pump to every twitching ass that goes by like half these guys, I'm going home on leave, my boy's going to know my face and my voice and when he gets older he'll know all about what a papa does 'cause I'll still be there, doing it. Not lying in the cemetery so pickled up with booze that they don't even have to embalm me.

  And sure as hell not in a tin can lying on the bottom of the Cayman Trench.

  He got his wish. The Montana didn't make that terrible free-fall miles down to the bottom of the Cayman Trench. It ran onto a rock outcropping maybe sixteen hundred feet deep. Slammed down on it like a football getting spiked in the end zone. Only the Montana didn't bounce. It crumpled, it tore, and then it rolled like a log down the canyon wall until it came to rest on a narrow ledge at twenty-one hundred feet. A huge bubble of air belched out of it. The last gasp of the Montana.

  Long before it reached the ledge, the crew was dead. The freezing water squirted right through the sub from bow to stern. The men that weren't killed by repeated impacts as the sub rolled down the canyon wall either died by drowning or froze in the water as they sucked desperately at the last of the air - air under so much pressure that breathing it in was like inhaling fire.

  Only they didn't die completely dead, not at first, anyway. The human body doesn't switch itself off that fast. Especially at deep-ocean temperatures. Everything just slows down in the cold. You're dying, sure, but the breakdown of cells in your brain gets slowed down enough that for a while - an hour maybe, or ten minutes, or two hours, or thirty seconds - you're hanging there in the water, unconscious, your heart stopped, your lungs not doing any more of the old in-and-out, but your brain's still alive, your thoughts are still hanging there, your memories are still locked away in that time-release safe, waiting for death to lock them up for good.

  That was how the crew was, some of them, anyway, when the builders came to look at the sub. The glider whose wake had destroyed the Montana made it home almost as soon as the Montana stopped its descent on the ledge of the canyon wall. It took only moments for the city to realize that the builder inside was mostly dead. They found and swallowed her memories, and so learned about the new satellite and what she had meant to do about it. Then they tasted the glider's much more primitive memories to make sure the job had been carried out. They learned that it had. They also learned about the near collision with the Montana.

  The city was so near, the builders so quick, that when they got to the Montana there was still life, still memory locked in the brains of the near-frozen men. All were beyond reviving, but the builders wouldn't have tried to revive them anyway. To them, all that was necessary was to preserve the memories of the dead and build them into the city. They were doing for the crew of the Montana exactly what they would do for each other.

  The only difference was that they hardly knew how to begin trying to comprehend human memory. It was stored differently, organized strangely. They passed through the Montana like archaeologists trying to salvage strange new writings from a long-buried civilization, only they couldn't even be sure which artifacts were writing and which were garbage. So they took a record of everything - electrical and chemical patterns, and where each cell of each brain was in relation to all the others. Though twenty-one hundred feet was quite shallow to them, as dangerous as it is for us to climb a four-mile mountain without oxygen, they persisted.

  They worked with unimaginable speed at the molecular level - they were as quick as blood, as quick as chemistry. Each builder would enfold the head of a newly-dead man inside her own body, and then reach into the brain with microscopically small fluid tentacles, probing like slender fingers between and around and into the cells of the brain. Yet they did this delicate operation, not with one or two or five fingers at a time, but with ten thousand
fingers; they did it by reflex, no more noticing or planning the movement of each tendril than we notice the individual sensations carried by each neuron from our retinas. They got a perfect three-dimensional image of the human brain at a molecular level as easily as we memorize a melody after hearing it only once. Long before they could suffer irreversible damage from the low pressure at the shallow depth of twenty-one hundred feet, they had finished their work and dropped back down into the trench, down to the depths where they were comfortable, back to the city. Not one builder was injured.

  Even if some had died, though, it would have been worth the attempt. They knew that if they gathered enough information, then perhaps they could decode it, compare it to the information they'd already collected, and eventually learn how to taste our memories the way they tasted each others' - pure and strong and clear. If they succeeded, they would know us better than we knew each other. They would see our lives from the inside out, see all that we had seen, exactly as we saw it. And, knowing us at last, they could then discover how to stop us from destroying the Earth.

  Not for our sakes. For their own. If they could not stop us, they would be forced to abandon this world. And their life cycle on this world wasn't half complete, none of the cities was finished yet. They would be a failed colony, with nothing to do but return to their mother world empty-handed, in shame. It would be worse than death.