The Abyss

by Orson Scott Card

  Only I didn't always know it. When I married her I thought she loved me. Why didn't I know it then? Why didn't I know what was coming and run away?

  He took off his cap, leaned against an overhead brace. Breathed deep a couple of times. This wasn't a time to start feeling sorry for himself. Nor was it a good idea to leave things like this with Lindsey. They were going to be in Deepcore together for weeks. They'd have to get along, like it or not. He had to get her to lighten up. He had to smooth things out between them well enough that they could make it through several weeks together. Teasing didn't work, so he'd play it straight.

  He followed her, found her checking out the drill room, making sure everything had been stored properly so they could resume drilling without having to go back to Galveston for supplies. No joking this time. "You'll need a place to sleep. We'll get there in a few hours, you'll want to rest."

  It was true. She was tired - the pressure chamber wasn't exactly restful, since she was too worried about everything to sleep.

  "My room," he said. "I won't be in there."

  She took it for what it was - a peace offering. "Sure. Thanks."

  "You can check out everything else when you get up. I'll have somebody wake you when it looks like we're nearly there, OK?"

  She nodded. He led the way, opened the door to the only private stateroom on the rig. Rank had its privileges. The room wasn't much, but at least he could get off by himself.

  As she walked in, his hand on the door was about level with her eyes. She noticed he was wearing the massive titanium wedding band she'd bought him. That was part of why they were so good together at first. A lot of guys she knew at MIT would know that titanium was the toughest metal, that it symbolized something that would really last. Bud knew that, too but the ring also looked right on his hand. He was as strong as the titanium. She could count on him. If that's all the ring meant, then it told the truth. He had never let her down. He'd been there every time, no matter what. But the ring also was supposed to say that she would be just as faithful. Well, that was before she knew that she just wasn't cut out for marriage. You had to give up too much of yourself.

  Except that wasn't it at all, was it? What drove her crazy about Bud wasn't that he demanded so much from her, but rather that he demanded so much from himself, gave so much to her, and she could never, never deserve it.

  "It's kind of messy, but I guarantee it's the only bunk that won't be occupied." Bud was gathering up his dirty clothes off the bed, cleaning up so the room would be good for her. It's what he always did - saw what she'd need, took care of her. Like knowing she was tired before she realized it herself. Giving her his bunk, cleaning it up. "You can grab a couple hours rest before we get there."

  No! He wasn't really giving her anything. He was manipulating her now just like always. Even wearing that damn ring, trying to make her ashamed of her broken promise. "What are you still wearing that for?" she demanded.

  He looked down at the ring as if he'd forgotten it was there. "I don't know. Divorce ain't final. Forgot to take it off." He looked kind of embarrassed to have been caught wearing it.

  "I haven't worn mine in months," she said. She didn't mean to hurt him - it just occurred to her. But it was good for him to hear it, so he'd know that she didn't feel that way anymore.

  But of course he took it wrong. "Yeah, well, what's-his-name wouldn't like it. The Suit." He pretended he was joking, but it wasn't funny.

  Was he still jealous? "Do you always have to call him that? The Suit? It makes you sound like such a hick. His name is Michael."

  "So how is Michael, then? Mr. Brooks Brothers? Mr. BMW?" When she didn't laugh or smile or answer at all, a new possibility occurred to him. "You still seeing him?"

  You mean are we still humping away, as you no doubt call it? "No, I haven't seen him in a few weeks."

  He smiled. He loved hearing it. "I'm terribly sorry. What happened?" He was snatching at this like a drowning man grabbing a lifebuoy.

  "Why are you doing this, huh? Why? This is this is none of your business, it's not a part of your life anymore."

  She was arranging things a little so she could lie on the bed - pulling up the covers. He came up behind her, leaned over her, echoing her movements like a shadow, like they were dancing. He was kidding with her. He also wasn't kidding. "I'll tell you what happened. You woke up one morning in those satin sheets. You rolled over and there was this good-looking guy. Well-groomed, expensive watch on. And you realized, this guy never makes me laugh."

  Finally, finally she lost it. No more pretending to be calm, no more lowered voice. "That's it, Bud, that's it. Aren't you clever, Jesus you're clever! You know you should start your own talk show or something, Ask Dr. Bud, advice to the lovelorn from three hundred fathoms!"

  He raised his hands in surrender, backed away, backed out of the room. Hey, it was just a joke. Ease up. No offense.

  Bullshit. "Thank you," she said, with mock politeness. "Thank you."

  As soon as he closed the door, she turned the wheel to seal it shut. Then she went back to the bed, sat down, gave a quiet, contained, careful little scream. What the hell kind of idiot was he? Michael made her laugh all the time, what did Bud think? She didn't love Bud because he made her laugh, she loved him because he was the one man she could be serious with, the one man she could work with, not like Michael, who thought a woman should give him a good strong tickle every night and otherwise be entertaining and decorative. And when Michael did talk about business it was always very stupid, uninteresting business, which he thought was so important. She finally broke up with him because he made her laugh all the time but mostly when he wasn't there.

  She snapped off the light. She could still see from the floodlights outside Deepcore, letting a dim bluish light in through the porthole. It was a sad kind of almost-darkness.

  Even now Bud didn't make her laugh. Even when he tried to talk her into coming back to him or to punish her because she wouldn't, all these stupid, pointless refusals to recognize that it was over. Even that didn't make her laugh. It just made her sad. Made her almost wish that she was somebody else, somebody who was just dumb enough to fall for all his manipulative little well-meant kindnesses. Any other woman in the world would think he was the perfect husband.

  So of course he married me, the poor schmuck.

  She idly reached for a bottle of aftershave sitting on the little bedside table. Same brand. He never changed brands of anything. She opened it. Sniffed. It was him. It made her a little dizzy, just for a moment, as if he were right there in the room with her, just out of sight behind her on the bed, reaching out - he'd touch her in just a moment, pull the shirt from her shoulders, hook a hand around her waist and slide her back, pull her close. . . .

  She closed the bottle and set it back down, angry at herself. "Shit," she whispered. I'm not fifteen years old. I never was fifteen. I'm not going to distort my life because I still have a meaningless crush on my husband. Ex-husband. Almost-ex-husband.

  Bud went straight from her room - his room - to the head. Why did he do that? He wasn't teasing her, no matter what he thought at the time. When it came to Lindsey he just didn't have the same kind of self-control he had in other situations. He ended up baiting her, goading her until she got mad, just like at the end, just like before she moved out. What, did he have to prove to himself again that it was really over? Well fine, the point was made, now I know it's over, and I'm damned if I'm going to wear the ring another minute, not with her here for the next few weeks, looking at the ring and laughing at him for wearing it.

  He could hardly get it off his finger - it hadn't been off since she first slid it on. But it came free, eventually - he gladly would've taken half the skin off with it. Then he flung it down into the blue chemical water of the toilet. Let it wind up on the bottom of the ocean where it belongs.

  He got maybe two steps away from the head and stopped. He couldn't do it. It was wrong, he hated himself for it, but he couldn't, just let th
e thing get flushed away. Even if the ring meant nothing to her, even if she mocked him for it, it still meant something to him. Three years with Lindsey, they were real even if they were over, and the ring was part of that, part of the best times.

  So he opened the door and went back in, knelt down beside the toilet, plunged his hand into the chemicals, and fished around till he got the ring. He didn't think to rinse it off first, just pushed it back onto his left ring finger.

  Then he looked at his right hand. Blue up to the wrist. And the color looked like it was sticking, it wasn't draining away with the water. Now if that wasn't brilliant. I not only have the ring on my left hand to make me look ridiculous, but my right hand has been dyed blue. Permanently dyed blue - they'd all been warned that the liquid waste disposal chemicals don't wash off. He'd probably die with one blue hand. "How did that happen to poor Virgil Brigman?" "Oh, you know old Virgil, couldn't keep his hands out of toilets. That's where he found his wedding band, you know."

  "Oh, shit," he whispered, and he meant it.

  They got there. One Night spotted the steep downslope that led to the edge of the Cayman Trench just about the moment McBride reported that the Explorer's sonar had located them at the exact spot.

  Bud was at the controls. He sent Hippy to wake Lindsey up while he got One Night to drop the tow cables, turn around, and survey the landing site to make sure it was generally smooth and clear - no rock outcroppings that might tear into a module somewhere, no slope that might make her rest unsteady. Lindsey was there by the time he was ready to let Deepcore set down. Like a spacecraft landing on a barren planet, the rig settled into the bottom ooze.

  One Night brought Flatbed back under Deepcore, then rose up into the moonpool.

  Bud expected they'd take some time for sleep before they went out to start work at the sub. He was wrong. The SEALS didn't intend to make entry into the Montana a solo effort. They intended to use all of Deepcore's support facilities the ROVs, Flatbed, both Cabs. And not just hardware. Coffey immediately had all the trained divers in the sub bay and made them study the layout of the ground around the sub and the plans of the sub inside, getting them ready for the operation.

  Bud stood there, listening, fascinated at first, but more and more frustrated as time went on. What Coffey was forgetting was that the very people who were trained divers were the same crew that kept Deepcore running and therefore the ones who had been up for hours, tending Deepcore as Flatbed led her through the darkness. The only rested people on Deepcore were the drillers, and they were useless on this job. Coffey would have to wait.

  "I just want to go through a couple of high points one last time," said Coffey. He laid out the computer-composite scan of the area where the sub was, with the exact location marked and the contours shown in dark lines. "All right, this is us, sitting right on the edge of the Cayman Trench. This is the Montana, three hundred meters away, seventy meters below us. We think she slid down the wall and is now lodged on this outcropping."

  In the meantime, Wilhite was going around giving everybody little plastic badges to clip on. One Night looked at hers. There wasn't a picture, so it wasn't I.D. "This tells us how much radiation we get?"

  That was the first time most of the crew had thought about the fact that this was a nuclear sub. Nuclear weapons, nuclear engine. If it got really crashed up, bad stuff would come out. "Whoa," said Hippy. "I'm not going in no radiation, no way."

  Catfish was contemptuous. "Hippy, you pussy."

  "What good is the money if six months later your dick drops off?" Hippy was walking away.

  Coffey thought he could solve this by explaining it rationally to them. That'd work with most of them but then most of them weren't worried about it. Hippy was, and Bud knew that Hippy didn't connect with rationality. Still, he sat tight while Coffey did his best. "We'll take readings as we go. If the reactor's breached or the warheads have released radioactive debris, we'll back off. Simple."

  "Oh, great!" said Hippy. He understood, intellectually, but what did that matter? He still had the fear, gonad-level fear, and he wasn't going to move until that was gone. Coffey didn't know how to get past that. Bud did.

  "OK, Hippy's not going," Bud announced. "McWhirter, you can run Little Geek." Bud patted the top of the smaller of the two ROVs.

  That did it. Bud knew how Hippy felt about Little Geek and McWhirter. Hippy was right back in the group, bitching. "Goddammit! You know that McWhirter can't run an ROV worth shit." Only then did he remember that McWhirter might not share his opinion. "No offense," said Hippy.

  McWhirter knew Hippy well enough not to take him seriously. Besides, McWhirter was only marginally qualified with ROVs. The only thing Hippy loved better than Big Geek and Little Geek was Beany. Hippy was back with the program. "I'll go," he said.

  Catfish was with him. He rumpled Hippy's hair. "What a guy," he said.

  It was a good moment. Coffey killed it. He turned on his military voice and shut them all down. "On the dive, you do absolutely nothing without direct orders from me, and you follow my instructions without discussion. Is that clear? All right, I want everyone finished prep and ready to get wet in fifteen minutes."

  It was about the worst thing Coffey could have done for morale and loyalty. Just the fact that he thought that speech was necessary was insulting to the crew. How did he think they had stayed alive all these years together if they didn't know that you don't screw around underwater and you obey your leader's orders instantly? Bud could see how it hit them - Catfish was pissed, Jammer was contemptuous, Hippy hung his head like he was being chewed out - the worst mood you could get any of them into.

  The dumbest thing about it was that Coffey didn't seem to be dumb in general. He handled his own guys great. He should've known better. Bud couldn't figure why he'd done it - surely Coffey wasn't one of those military guys who had to strut all the time. Maybe it annoyed Coffey that Bud had got Hippy back into line. Or maybe it worried him to see that the divers could be marginally bonkers like Hippy, so they needed to be teased into doing stuff. Maybe it bothered him to be depending on people who weren't right-down-the-line disciplined military types. Whatever the reason, it wasn't a very good one. It told Bud that Coffey had bad judgment. He didn't like sending his crew out under the orders of a man with bad judgment.

  Still, they were going to do the job. This wasn't the time for Bud to do anything openly that might undermine Coffey's authority. Perry had a few guys helping him load Little Geek and its control boxes into Cab Three. "Let's get suited up," Bud said. It was his way of saying, It's OK, let's do the job, who cares what he thinks.

  But he made a point of getting Coffey alone, by the dive platform where the SEAL leader was doing the last of his own prep. Bud didn't like this whole dive right now. The timing was bad, morale was bad, and Coffey wasn't too good himself. If something went wrong, nobody was going to be sharp enough to deal with it.

  "Look, it's three A.M.," Bud said. He was choosing his words carefully, making sure he didn't sound threatening, making it sound like a suggestion. The kind of suggestion that a commander could take without losing face. Bud's dad had been a non-com - he'd watched him handle officers like this all the time. The smart officers listened. "These guys are running on bad coffee and about four hours of sleep. Maybe you could think about cutting them some slack."

  Coffey didn't even look at him. "I can't afford slack."

  Pure military bullshit. Didn't the guy have a brain? "Hey, you come on my rig, you don't talk to me, you start ordering my people around, it's not going to work." No, that didn't sound right. Sounded like Bud was ticked off because he was losing authority, and that wasn't the problem. He tried to explain what he really meant: "You gotta know how to handle these people. We've got a certain way of doing things here."

  "Right now I'm not interested in your way of doing things. Just get your team ready to dive." Coffey walked off, leaving Bud to stand there burning.

  He ate it. Just swallowed it down. No point in ar
guing now. They were going, and so the best thing for Bud to do was make sure he was sharp, everybody was sharp, no open quarrels, everything going smooth. He walked back to the locker area and sat down, started pulling on his boots.

  Finler was sitting next to him. Looking at him. What're you looking at?

  "Bud. You know your hand is blue?"

  That was Finler. Always trying to be helpful. Probably walked up to double amputees and said, Hey, you know you got no legs? Bud looked at him. "Will you shut up and get your gear on?" He meant to say it funny, but it wasn't funny, it was mean. So he said, "Please." So Finler would know it was OK.

  If I wasn't tired, if I wasn't pissed off at Coffey, I wouldn't have talked like that to Finler. Looks like handling people badly is contagious.

  Monk was also a little bothered by the way Coffey had dealt with the civilians, though not for the same reasons as Bud. It was Coffey himself that Monk was worried about. Not that Monk had time to stop and think about anything - but then, part of being a SEAL was the ability to do about ten things at once, purely by habit, so your mind could be on the most important thing. So Monk busied his hands draining the Deep Suit fluid breathing system, which he had been testing, while his mind was busy thinking back over the way Coffey had just offended the entire civilian crew of Deepcore.

  In his time in the service Monk had known officers who antagonized everybody they talked to - but Coffey wasn't one of them. Coffey was a master of MCT. They had a trainer who taught them the MCT principle, which was that when you were on a mission, all you say to civilians is the Minimum Correct Thing. For most SEALS that meant shutting up most of the time, because it was too hard to figure out what the correct thing was in time to say it. But Coffey always seemed to know. Till now. And that worried Monk. Coffey didn't make mistakes like that. Maybe it was the tension of being on an assignment that no SEALS had ever had before. Maybe Coffey had some reason for antagonizing the civilians. Or maybe Coffey wasn't completely healthy.