They reached into Deepcore with ten thousand tendrils, touched and penetrated the bodies of the human beings watching there. Down in the city, they had explored Bud's body, discovered in it the dangers of decompression. Then they made simple but profound changes in every cell of his body - the changes they were making now in the people gathered in the control room. The tendrils were invisible, but their touch was not unfelt this time - there was momentary pain, a deep unease as their bodies were changed from the root outward. Yet there was also perfect trust and joy as the builders whispered silently into their minds.
The light from the builders' bodies got brighter and brighter, until they - we - couldn't see at all in that direction. But even when we could no longer see them, we knew we had been changed, though we did not yet understand the physical transformation. We were not the same people who had gone down into the sea days or weeks before. We had grown together, we had grown in understanding - we had grown up.
Deepcore began to move.
Not under its own power. It was like a stiff undersea wind began to blow and picked us and lifted us out over the chasm. We had no fear of falling, though, because directly under us was the most incredible structure we had ever seen. A vast convex surface, but not a smooth one - it was formed of organic-looking strands and tissues, ridges and arches, all alive with light and color. Around the edges of it rose eight enormous spires, twisting, spiraling. It was the center of the NTI city, the place that Bud had visited. Normally it wouldn't rise from the seabed until it was time to set out into space, searching for other worlds to colonize. It was the builders' ark - like Noah's ark, and the ark of the covenant, and the ark of bulrushes that carried Moses to safety on the Nile, it held what was most precious to them, everything they'd need to start again in another place. It contained the core of their memory, the heart of all that they valued about themselves. That's what the city was, and all its structures - their collective memory, their library, their cemetery, their home, the single immortal soul that they all shared.
The builders knew that Bud's word alone might be disregarded. The wave had shown their power; Bud had explained what they expected humanity to do. Now they had to show themselves, unmistakable proof that there really were builders living in the depths of the ocean.
The ark rose up, lifting Deepcore with it, straight to the surface. As it rose it also picked up the Explorer and lifted it out of the water and the Navy destroyer Albany, and several other ships. The water rushed off the top of the ark like a circular Niagara, flowing out to the edges. And there they rested, high and dry, the ships all dwarfed by the spires of memory that ringed the ark.
For the second time, we opened the lockout hatch of trimodule-C. This time, though, it didn't lead into the frozen water of the deep. This time it was air, with a stiff drop down to the hard dry surface of the ark. Catfish went first, but soon we all joined him, standing there in daylight, released at last from the darkness of the bottom of the sea.
"We should be dead," said Lindsey. "We didn't decompress."
"Our blood oughta be fizzin' like a warm shook-up Coke," said Catfish.
"They must've done something to us," said Hippy.
"Oh, yes," said Lindsey. "I think you could say that."
Done something to us? We have all been touched by them, and changed in more ways than I can name. Those of us who stayed with them have been changed the most of all. They can take us from our atmosphere into the deep and back again without harm to our bodies. We can breathe in their underwater city without equipment of any kind. But these are commonplace miracles to us now. The one that always astonishes me is the gift of memory. They've taught us how to sense the difference between our own thoughts and the ones they give to us; we can understand their speech. And they've given us the memories of the people that they scanned, the living and the dead. I've been filled with them, I've lived out their lives from the inside, I've known all their desires, all their fears Barnes and Kretschmer from the Montana, Russian sailors who drowned in the storm, the crewmen who died on Deepcore, and all the ones who lived, as well. I have been Bud as he slipped down the cliff, I have been Lindsey as she drowned, I have felt their love for each other, and they have seen every secret in my heart. One Night, Jammer, Catfish, Hippy, Sonny - I know them as no other human beings have ever known each other, and they know me. And I hold within me the members of my team - Wilhite, Schoenick, Coffey. Men that I thought I knew, thought I loved before. I know them even better now, and though some of the memories are bitter - the hatred Schoenick and Coffey felt for me when they believed that I betrayed them; the agony of Coffey's death in madness yet still I can say that knowing them is better than remaining strangers.
Not everyone wanted to receive these memories. Schoenick refused - he only wanted to get away. Sonny wanted to go home to his family. But all the rest of us who spent those days together in Deepcore are still together, we pass back and forth between the world of air and the deep city of the builders at the bottom of the sea. The builders have changed us, because they had to have ambassadors between our worlds, but they won't change any others - they want humanity to remain human, as much as possible. And you don't want to go through all that we've experienced. Sometimes I wake up so full of other men's and women's dreams that I have to struggle to remember who I am. Sometimes the dead are so present in me that I feel possessed by other people's souls.
And yet I wouldn't lose those memories even if I could. They are alive in me; I wouldn't wish them dead again. I wouldn't wish them lost to me, because I have learned from them what it means to be alive and human, I've learned why it is that people do the things we do, I've learned how other lives are from the inside. And now I've tried to pass it on to you. Not in the purity with which the builders share memory - that isn't the human way. Still, in these pages I've done my best to give you those memories that will show you what we did and why we did it, we who were down there when builders and humans met and changed each other for all time.
So it was that I stood there on the surface of the builders' ark when Lindsey saw Bud stride out of the mouthlike portal in a ridge along the surface of the ark. He dropped his helmet, yelled, waved. Lindsey started toward him, then stopped a few feet away. They had said things to each other at the verge of death would they still be true in daylight, in safety?
He smiled at her, and took the last few steps to close the gap. She touched him, lightly, a caress and a confirmation - is he real? Is he mine? Then, sure of each other, they laughed.
"Hello, Brigman," Lindsey said.
"Hello, Mrs. Brigman," he answered.
Two candles, always separate, but living always in each other's light.
Afterword
James Cameron
A novel based on a screenplay? The term seems precious in our jaded business.
There are screenplays based on novels, certainly. Our vampiric industry drains much of its unholy creative sustenance from pure literature.
And there are novelizations of screenplays. The studios encourage these literary endeavors.
The pages provide filler behind the covers, and the imperative is to display those flashy covers at supermarkets and newsstands throughout the land.
In the critical days before a film's release, the ubiquitous paperbacks create interest, promote title recognition, increase market penetration, and in general add to the potential box office gross on opening weekend.
The fact that someone might actually read these novelizations seem to be of little concern.
Well, people do read them.
I read them.
More to the point, I have read certain novelizations of my own films and found them to be cursory, mediocre, often inaccurate, and sometimes downright reprehensible.
I determined that there would be no novelization of this film.
There would be a novel.
I sought out Orson Scott Card with little knowledge of his award-winning status and current esteem as an SF writer. I remembere
d his earlier short stories as works of stunning human compassion and sensitivity coupled with an assured style. I hoped he might be a writer who would not be seduced by the hardware, who would tell the story in human terms.
I was not disappointed.
Somehow, while being steadfastly true to the film, Scott managed to weave in his beautiful elaborations and illuminations . . . never altering dialogue, only adding to it . . . never contradicting the intent or tone of a scene, but instead adding a fourth dimension of clarity and emotion.
His intricately worked-out city of the builders and the rationale for their behavior goes far beyond the enigmatic images of the film, in ways that can only be explored in the written word.
Film into novel.
A new form.
The book illuminates the film and vice versa, symbiotic partners in a single, multi-faceted dramatic work.
Scott worked from videotapes of the film as the editing progressed, constantly updating his manuscript as scenes were changed, added, or deleted. And yet despite his great sense of responsibility to the film, he was never enslaved by it. His early chapters capture the characters perfectly and give them great emotional credibility and yet the incidents are entirely his own creation. Perhaps these chapters were his way of making the characters his own, giving himself the necessary creative credential to tell another writer's story in his own words.
I can only speculate as to Scott's thought processes in this creative matrix.
I found the resultant manuscript to be a fascinating refraction of the story, from which I gained valuable insight into the film as my own work progressed.
An interesting ellipse in the creative process: I gave the respective chapters on the characters' childhoods to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Ed Harris before filming began. They accepted Scott's interpretation as plausible backstory and incorporated it into their preparation for the film.
In these ways, the novel has fed into the film, just as the film has nourished the novel.
The collaboration has been satisfying.
The resultant book is a damn good read, and should be read as a book not as a roadmap to a movie. It has its own life.
But don't forget . . . you still have to see it to believe it.
- James Cameron
Spring 1989
Afterword
Orson Scott Card
My agent, Barbara Bova, called me and said, "Pocket Books has approached me about you doing a novelization."
"Barbara," I said, "you know I don't do novelizations."
Then she mentioned that the director was James Cameron.
I knew who he was. Director of Terminator and Aliens. Films that could have been run-of-the-mill sci-fi - but weren't, because the filmmaker had taken the time and trouble to create real characters. And now I was being offered a chance to write a narrative adaptation of Cameron's newest film.
"Send me the script," I said.
"First you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement," said Barbara.
Ah, Hollywood. The non-disclosure agreement forbade me to show the script to any unauthorized person or even to let said unauthorized person's shadow fall across the script; furthermore I was enjoined not to speak about the story in the presence of unauthorized persons, or to think about the screenplay while using a public restroom; if I violated these rules, I would immediately be fired, would have to give back any money they had already paid me, and would be tattooed on the forehead with the letters F-I-N-K.
I signed it. The script arrived. I skimmed through it.
The story was wonderful - just what I'd expect from Cameron. While there were plenty of special-effects wonders and virtually non-stop action, the heart of the story was the relationship between two real human beings, Bud and Lindsey Brigman.
But was I the one to write the novelization? I could handle the characters - but there's a lot more to a novelization than that. I had already seen the problem when I reviewed Willow. Let me paraphrase some passages from that review:
"The dilemma of the film novelist is that the story already exists. Somebody else wrote it. The novelist is, therefore, merely a translator. Not a translator from one language to another, however he is translating from one medium to another, and the sad truth is that it's damned hard to do it well.
"You know the problem, because you've seen it time after time going the other way. A good movie generally contains as much story as a long novelet or a short novella. So to translate a novel to the screen means leaving out a lot of stuff - including the entire inner life of the characters. Working in reverse, the novelist finds he must fill up a novel's-worth of pages with only a novelet's-worth of story. Yet he cannot fill it with his own invention - he must, like any good translator, slavishly try to reproduce someone else's world, characters, and events. Worse yet, few novelizers get to see the final cut of the movie - their manuscript must be turned in while the film is still being filmed.
"Can a novelization ever be a really good novel, in novelistic terms? I imagine that it would be possible if the filmmaker had enough respect for the written word to bring the novelist into his confidence and make him a collaborator. But when has any science fiction or fantasy filmmaker ever shown any evidence of knowing how to read a whole book? There are a few. John Boorman, James Cameron. Maybe some others I've missed. But to most of them, the novelization is exactly as important as the board game, the T-shirts, the action figures, and the coloring books."
How important was the novelization of this film to James Cameron? How much access would I have to the set and to the film itself? How much freedom would he give me to make the book partly my own, to flesh out the story, invent and rationalize in the areas that the film did not fully develop? If I didn't believe that I could make the novelization utterly faithful to the movie as filmed and yet at the same time make it a novel to be proud of, then I wasn't interested.
Cameron called me. His answers to my questions were reassuring. As I had suspected, he loved books as well as movies, and this time he was determined that the book would be as effective in its way as the movie. Furthermore, he wanted the book to include facts and explanations that were impossible to put into the movie.
His research on the film had been extraordinary - all of that information was going to be available to me. I was grateful, since I knew nothing about deep-sea diving and had no desire to spend months duplicating his research. I would also have access to the set during the filming, and we envisioned many meetings between Jim and me as I wrote chapters and he read and responded to them.
Everything sounded right. I wanted to do it, partly because the story was so good that I wanted to play around in it for a while, and partly because I wanted to see if a novelization could be as valid a work of art as the film itself. Jim made both goals seem possible.
There were potential barriers. The first was an exclusivity clause in my contract with TOR Books; but Tom Doherty, the founder and publisher, was kind enough to allow me to proceed for no other reason than the fact that I wanted to.
The second barrier was scheduling. Pocket Books, the publisher of the novelization, wanted the finished manuscript in September 1988. Since filming would barely be under way at that time, it was an absurd date for the kind of work I wanted to do. How could I be at all specific in my writing, if I didn't know exactly how the actors were going to interpret the dialogue, or how they would move through the set, or what the mood was at any moment in the film? Novelizers who work from the screenplay alone either have to remain vague about physical details, or, in being specific, they will inevitably contradict the film at a thousand points. It was vital both to Jim and to me that the novel be quite specific and yet utterly faithful to the film. So if we couldn't get a due date later than the end of filming, there was no point in proceeding.
Pocket pushed the date back to December. A contract was written. I signed.
For long months, nothing happened. Then, late in August, I got a call from Christa, Jim's secretary. Could I come
down to Gaffney, South Carolina? It was time to start.
Why Gaffney? The Earl Owensby Studios were built on the site of an unfinished nuclear reactor. The huge containment tower was watertight - exactly what was needed for the underwater filming. It was important to Jim that the light be just right - which meant working in forty feet of water instead of the normal ten feet.
I got down to Gaffney and began to realize exactly what working on this film meant to the cast and crew. First of all, Gaffney isn't exactly a city. It's barely a town. Now, I live in the Carolinas myself, by choice, because I love these small towns and the people who live in them. But for people used to L.A., Gaffney could very quickly start to feel like limbo, if not hell itself. It was a half-hour drive from the studio to the freeway, and another half-hour after that to get to Spartanburg, the nearest town with a mall or a moviehouse.
What impressed me even more, however, was the fact that everybody in the cast was going underwater. Forty feet is no joke - more than once Jim, the actors, and the camera operators were working so deep and so long that they had to spend time decompressing. And while a few effects were done using stuntpeople - Bud's tumble down the wall, for instance - most of the time when you see Bud or Lindsey or Catfish out there in the water, it really is Ed Harris or Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio or Leo Burmester. Ed Harris had to sit there while his helmet filled with fluid, holding his breath while seeming not to, during some pretty long takes. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio really was dragged along underwater, without breathing gear, during long takes. Of course, the process was made as safe as possible - divers with breathing gear were always just out of frame. But as I imagined myself doing some of the things these actors did, I realized that being in this film required raw physical courage.
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