The Abyss

by Orson Scott Card

  The fluid covered his face. Monk changed his patter. "Now don't hold your breath, just take it in. Just let yourself take it in. Take it in."

  He still wasn't breathing it. He heard Monk, but they didn't understand. He'd been here before, in the belly of the wave, going down, miles from anybody, worn out, scared, he didn't have any strength left, he couldn't hold his breath anymore but he had to hold it or he'd die. I can't do this, I can't do this. I can't breathe it in, I can't. But his eyes were on Lindsey. She was there. He wasn't out in the ocean. It wasn't going to kill him. He could take this breath. He knew he could, and then he did.

  Immediately his body jerked, spasmed. He rocked back. They grabbed him, held him up.

  "That's perfectly normal," Monk said. He spoke with the voice of command, to keep them calm.

  Lindsey wasn't buying it. "That's normal?" She'd never seen Bud out of control like this, jerking around, panicking. It frightened her to see Bud out of control.

  "Just hold him, it's perfectly normal, it'll pass in a second. It's perfectly normal. We all breathe liquid for nine months, your body will remember."

  It was true. Bud was calming down. Exhaling, he was fine. His arm still jerked upward when he inhaled. He felt like gagging as he breathed in. Again, Lindsey was in front of him. "Watch me. Watch me. Watch me." He did. He kept breathing. With each breath it got easier to take. It was thick, strange, going into his lungs. But not like the seawater had been. Not so cold. Not so harsh. Breathing in and out, it went slower than air, but it was working. He was getting the oxygen.

  Lindsey picked up the F-0 headset lying nearby. "Can you hear me?" she asked.

  He gave her a thumbs-up.

  "Bud, try your keypad."

  He held up his left wrist, started punching keys. With one finger, of course but since that was the way he always typed, he was pretty fast. Lindsey looked over her shoulder at the monitor where his message was appearing.

  FEELS WEIRD

  YOU SHOULD TRY THIS

  She looked back at him, laughed slightly. "I already have."

  He smiled back at her through the tinted fluid. The lights inside the helmet gave it a sick yellowish hue.

  "OK, you ready?" she asked.

  He nodded.

  "Let's go," said Monk.

  They helped him up. The suit was heavy. Jammer and Catfish helped him step backward into the moonpool. Hippy got down into the water with him, got his face close to the mask, and shouted so Bud could hear him through the fluid. "I redid Little Geek's chip the same as Big Geek! It should take you straight there. All you have to do is hang on!"

  Bud nodded. He got it. He knew it.

  Hippy gripped his hand. Bud looked at Jammer, who smiled at him. Encouragement. Good-bye.

  And Lindsey's hand, held out to him. He held her hand for a moment, and even though his thick glove made it impossible to feel more than the gentle pressure of her grip, he felt a kind of warmth rise into him from that touch. More than ever before in his life, he didn't want to leave, didn't want to say good-bye.

  But it had to be done. Bud looked at the others gathered around the edge of the pool and raised his hand. Farewell to all of them. Then he got a grip on the back of Little Geek, started him up, let the ROV pull him down into the pool.

  As it pulled him down and the water closed over his head, he saw his friends blur, grow smaller as he sank away from them. He remembered Lindsey describing what it felt like when she was dying - how she had seen them above her, but they kept getting smaller as she fell backward into death. Is that where I'm falling now? No. I have a job to do before I can die.

  He reached the seafloor, absorbed the impact by flexing his legs, and then walked along toward the edge of the cliff, letting Little Geek help pull him. It was slow going. He got to the edge, stopped, looked back. He could see them coming into the control room. Lindsey sitting down in the window. He lifted his hand. Waved. Then he turned and stepped over the edge of the abyss.

  Little Geek wasn't all that powerful, but it was pulling him straight down now, so gravity was helping. He was passing along the edge of the cliff faster than he had ever moved underwater, at least in a suit, outside. He stayed close to the cliff face so he didn't lose his way, but not so close there'd be a chance of collision. Little Geek knew the way. Just hang on to Little Geek. The lights of Deepcore were gone. No light but what came from Little Geek, the light on the keyboard, the light inside his mask, the dive light he was carrying. None of them reached very far. None of them showed very much. He'd never felt so alone in his life.

  He typed.

  CANT SEE YOU

  Lindsey's voice came right back to him. "We're right here with you, Bud." Her voice went softer. She had turned away from the mike. "What's his depth?" Then she came back strong - somebody'd answered her. It would be Hippy, monitoring the information coming up the F-0 from Little Geek. "Your depth is thirty-two hundred feet," said Lindsey. "You're doing fine."

  The light suddenly shone on something bright, metal. The wreckage of the Explorer's crane. Of course it was still hanging here, like a forty-ton yo-yo at the end of the umbilical.

  GOOD DEEL ON

  SLIGHTLY USED

  CRANE

  Up in Deepcore, they laughed. It felt good to know Bud felt like joking. The depth meter kept on counting down.

  "Forty-eight hundred feet," said Hippy. He'd been watching for it.

  "Forty-eight hundred feet," echoed Monk. "It's official."

  Lindsey spoke into the mike. "Bud, according to Monk here, you just set a record for the deepest suit dive. Bet you didn't think you'd be doing this when you got up this morning, huh?"

  CALL GUINESS

  Hippy read off the meter. "One mile down, still grinnin'."

  The cliff rushed by. Bud hardly felt like he was falling anymore. It was the cliff wall that moved, not him. He was absolutely still, right at the center of the world, and it was all coming by on a conveyer belt.

  The next threshold was eighty-five hundred feet. Monk knew it was time. "Ask him about pressure effects. Tremors, vision problems, euphoria."

  Lindsey spoke into the mike. "Ensign Monk wants to know how you feel."

  COLD

  She answered with teasing derision. "Baby."

  HN HANDDS SHAKING

  Monk covered the mike. "It's starting. It hits the nervous system first."

  "Keep talking, Lindsey," said One Night. "Just let him hear your voice."

  "What's his depth?" Lindsey asked.

  "Eighty-nine hundred feet."

  "OK, Bud, your depth is eighty-nine hundred feet," Lindsey said into the mike.

  One Night looked at her with impatience, covered the mike. "No, talk to him." Didn't this woman know anything? Wasn't she married to him? Doesn't she know how to talk?

  Lindsey got the idea. But she was suddenly shy. She had an audience around her. This wasn't a private conversation. Hell, she didn't talk to him that easily when they were alone. So she did what she could do. She joked. "OK, Bud, uh, you're being graded on spelling as well as sentence structure, so concentrate there, OK?"

  Only it wasn't a joke. Nobody was laughing, least of all her. Lindsey had to keep Bud's attention, keep his mind engaged. She was the only one who could do it, but she could only do it if she talked about something that he cared about. Even if that meant exposing something in front of the others. Even if it meant laying herself out for a complete examination of her soul.

  "Bud, there's some . . . there's some things I need to say. It's hard for me, you know. It's not easy being a cast-iron bitch. It takes discipline and years of training. A lot of people don't appreciate that." It was still a joke, yes, but it was also true. And saying the truth about herself, admitting weakness, even when she was making it sound like a joke that broke something inside her, it twisted something that had been blocking a passageway. Emotion welled up. She didn't have any practice dealing with this. She didn't even know the name of what she was feeling. It just came out of
her as crying, so that her voice was distorted with it.

  But she went on, because she wasn't thinking about the people around her in the control room anymore. She was thinking of the man on the other end of the F-0 line, the man breathing fluid down there deeper than anybody'd ever gone before, the man who needed more than anything else to hear the words she was saying.

  "But it wasn't all bad, I know that. Do you remember that bike trip? We rode the Honda up through Oregon?" She laughed a little. "It took me a week to get my hair untangled, but I've never been happier. It was the most . . . free I've ever felt." God, he'd begged her for this so many times. Why did she have to wait to do it till he was on the other end of an invisible thread? "Jesus, I'm sorry I can't tell you these things to your face. It's pitiful. I have to wait till you're alone in the dark, freezing, and there's ten thousand feet of water between us. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm rambling."

  YU LWAYS DID

  TALKK TOO MUCH

  She nodded. It was true. But it was also a joke. She could hear his voice saying it. Tenderly, softly. His way of saying, It's OK. I know all this. But I'm glad to hear you say it.

  "Comin' up on the big ten thou," said Hippy.

  "Bottom's still a mile and a half down," said One Night.

  His dive light imploded. It startled him, but it was OK. He still had Little Geek's floodlight.

  "Twelve thousand feet," said Hippy. "Jesus, I don't believe he's doing this." He sounded excited. Like he was watching Evel Knievel. Like it was a stunt.

  It was more than Lindsey could deal with. She covered the mike. "Please," she said. "Shut up, what's wrong with you?" Then she turned back. "Bud, how're you doing?"

  No answer.

  "Bud?"

  SIB; JAQ SFDJS I CAN'T

  "He's losing it," said Monk. "Talk to him. Keep him with us."

  "Bud, it's the pressure. All right, you have to listen to my voice. You have to try - concentrate, all right? Just listen to my voice."

  YR GOINGG A WAY

  "Signal's fading," said One Night.

  "No. No, Bud, I'm not going away. I'm right here."

  "Kill everything we don't need," said Hippy. "Catfish, knock out those exterior lights. Come on, now! Go, go!" He sounded like Bud. That's the way Bud gave orders. Everybody understood somebody had to do the job. Somebody had to be Bud up here, if they were going to stay in contact with Bud down there. The lights went out, inside Deepcore and out. They saw each other only by the light from the digital monitors.

  "Run it through the digital processor," said One Night, "cook it as much as you can."

  "I'm right here with you, Bud. Bud, this is Lindsey, please, I'm right here with you." It was more of a test pattern than a message. But he had to hear her. Had to hear her voice.

  "Seventeen thousand feet," said Hippy.

  "Good Christ Almighty," said Catfish. "This is insane." Three miles down. Bud was going down there where he was probably going to get squished to death, just to save some NTIs that you couldn't talk to anyway. For all anybody knew the NTIs lived fifty miles away. Bud was gonna die for what?

  Lindsey was losing it - they could see that. "I'm not getting anything," she said, but her voice was small and weak, like a child about to cry. Nobody'd ever seen her like that. Lindsey never acted like that. It was getting to them, having her be so damn human.

  Bud was shaking violently, like palsy. His eyes kept rolling back in his head, he was having a hard time staying conscious. He tried to type a message but he couldn't. He kept seeing sparks, flashes of visions. Mini-hallucinations. He knew why, knew it was the synapses in his brain misfiring as the cells of his body got distorted, distended by the pressure. But knowing why didn't mean he could stop it.

  He felt a massive jolt in his arm, a deafening pop as a shockwave hit him; the lights went out; the canyon wall disappeared. It took him a moment to figure it out. Little Geek's pressure hull had imploded.

  Up in Deepcore, they understood it immediately. All the information coming to Hippy's monitor went dead. "Whoa whoa whoa!" he said, slapping the machine, twisting dials. "Come on, oh no!"

  "Little Geek just folded," said One Night.

  It was dark. Pitch black. Bud couldn't see the cliff, all he could see was the dim glow of the keyboard on his wrist. The cliff face was irregular. He could hit something. He was going so fast now. He had to see.

  Magnesium flare. Have one somewhere. Here. How do I - got it.

  It blinded him, coming out of the dark like that. There was the wall, but - he couldn't see it very well. Too bright. He let go of Little Geek - the ROV was useless now. He was free-falling like a skydiver without a chute, half-blind, out of control.

  His foot hit a ledge. He rebounded from the wall, tumbled on down, hit again and rolled along the cliff. Little Geek was rolling with him, dead but now dangerous. But he couldn't get control of himself, couldn't reach out and grab it, couldn't tell which way was up or down, he must be falling down but as he rolled over and over, flashes of rock alternating with false visions, lights, voices in his head, he couldn't even tell which way he was falling. He held on to the flare and tried to get hold of himself, tried to remember where he was and what he was doing there.

  "He can still make it," Monk said. Little Geek was only taking him straight down, anyway. If he stayed alert, Brigman could still find Big Geek and the warhead. But only if he stayed alert. And that was up to Lindsey, if they had any hope of it at all. He looked at her, motioned toward the mike.

  She understood. She also understood that she shouldn't need to have Monk prompting her, that she should know when to speak, know how to fill his ears with her voice. But she didn't know how or when to do it. She'd never tried; the whole labor of her life had been to avoid such public intimacy. So she did need Monk's prompting, and she was grateful for it, and glad that he was kind enough not to show that he despised her for not knowing how to do it all herself. She always tried to know how to do it all herself. "I know how alone you feel. Alone in all that cold blackness. But I'm there in the dark with you, Bud. You're not alone."

  Bud heard one voice come clearly out of all the others. A voice that didn't sound like a memory of a time when he was twelve or twenty or nine years old. Lindsey's voice.

  "You remember that time, you were pretty drunk, you probably don't remember. But the power went out at that little apartment we had on Orange Street, and we were staring at that one little candle, and I said something really dumb like that candle is me, like every one of us is out there alone in the dark in this life."

  Bud saw a candle dancing in the wind of her breath. Saw her eyes angry behind it, daring him to deny it, daring him not to.

  Her voice went on. "And you just lit up another candle and put it beside mine and you said, No. See, that's me, that's me, and we stared at the two candles, and then we - well if you remember any of it, I'm sure you remember the next part." But what she was thinking of wasn't the lovemaking. She was thinking of the divorce papers. She was thinking of how she made a careful, intellectual calculation about their relationship, how it wasn't good for either of them. What did it matter whether it was always comfortable or easy or pleasant or fun? Just the fact that they had each other at all, that was good, that was so precious and rare and yet she had decided to end it, break it off. She tried to remember why. Because she didn't need him, that's why. She was self-contained, she was complete in herself. Only that was a lie, from the very start it was a lie and she knew it, she filed those papers because she was so afraid of needing him because she didn't believe, she really didn't believe that he would always be there. She was afraid that someday she'd look for him and he'd be gone. Only she knew now and should have known before that with Virgil Brigman there wasn't any taking back, there wasn't any changing his mind. When he said, That candle's me, he meant it forever. He wasn't her father, she wasn't her mother. It didn't have to be like that, two empty people living together in an empty house. She could let herself belong to him because he had alread
y, completely, forever given himself to her. She was not going to leave him. There would be no divorce. If he came back from this, it would be forever. She'd grown up that much, at least, during these hours on the edge of death. "Bud," she said, "there are two candles in the dark. I'm with you. I'll always be with you, Bud, I promise that."

  The flare began to fade. The light dimmed. A single pinpoint moving down the cliff. But he saw that single light, he stared at it. It spoke to him with Lindsey's voice. He was sure of that Lindsey's voice, and she was telling him that she would always be with him. It was a dream. He had dreamed of this before. Only the voice seemed to be coming out of a tinny speaker right by his ear. He saw the light again, and he remembered what it was. A magnesium flare. He was going down the wall of a cliff, looking for Big Geek and a nuclear warhead. And Lindsey was going to be with him forever. That's what was real. That's what he could count on.

  Lindsey was emotionally spent, yet still quivering with fear. Bud wasn't answering. She knew she wanted to be with him forever, and he might not even have heard her, he might already be dead never having heard that from her.

  Catfish reached out and gently took the microphone from her hands and draped a friendly, comforting arm across her shoulders. "How you doin', partner? Still with us?" Had to get him to answer. "Come-back, you talk to us, Buddy-boy."

  Catfish was a good man, Lindsey knew it, but it was her job to talk to Bud, it was her voice he was listening for. So she took back the microphone, tried to keep the fear out of her voice. It was easier with Catfish's arm around her. She wasn't among strangers here. They'd heard her saying things that she'd never even dared to say in bed alone with Bud - things she'd never even dared to say to herself. Yet, laid bare as she was before them, they didn't think any less of her. Catfish's friendly embrace told her that maybe they even liked her for it. So she was able to speak again. "Bud? Talk to me, Bud. Now come on, you hanging in there? You have to talk to me, Bud. I need to know if you're OK!"