Catherine Asaro - Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

And we did, after a fashion.

I explained this as best as I could to my daughter.

She grew very sad. A tiny, perplexed frown on her face.

“I don’t want to watch Chloe and Joey anymore,” she said softly.

Lucille’s fork clattered onto the floor and she fled the compartment, sobbing.

Number 6’s electronics, air circulator, and propulsion motor blended into a single, complaining whine as I pushed the old sub through the eternal darkness along the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally I passed one of the black smokers—chimneys made of minerals deposited by the expulsion of superheated water from along the tectonic ridge. The water flowed like ink from the tops of the smokers. Tube worms, white crabs and other life shied away from my lights.

I was watching for the tell-tale smoker formation that Jenna had told me about. It was a gargantuan one, multiple chimneys sprouting into something the kids had dubbed the Gak’s Antlers. Dan McDermott had joined the search and was 200 yards behind me, his own lights arrayed in a wide pattern, looking.

We both spotted our target at the same time.

I could see why the kids might have liked the spot. In addition to the bizarre beauty of the Antlers, there was a shallow series of depressions surrounding the base—each just big enough to settle a sub down into. Cozy. Private.

I saw the top of a single sub, just barely poking up over the rock and sand.

I asked Dan to hang back while I pinged them with the short-range sonar. When I got no answer I motored right up to the edge of the depression, turned my exterior lights on extra-bright and aimed them down through the half-sphere pilot’s canopy.

I blushed and looked away.

Then I flashed my lights repeatedly until the two occupants inside got the hint and scrambled to get their clothes on. One of them—a girl, I think, though not Jenna—dropped into the driver’s seat and flipped a few switches until my short-range radio scratched and coughed at me.

“Hate to ruin your make-out,” I said.

“Who are you?” came the girl’s tense voice. Too young, I thought.

“Not your father, if it makes any difference,” I said.

“How did you get here?”

“Same as you.”

A boy’s head poked into view. He took the radio mic from the girl.

“Get out of here, this is our place,” he said, his young voice cracking with annoyance. I was tempted to tell him to shove his blue balls up his ass, then remembered myself when I’d been that young, coughed quietly into my arm while I steadied my temper, and tried diplomacy.

“I swear,” I said. “I won’t tell a soul about this little noogie nook. I just want to get my daughter back alive. Jenna Leighton is her name. She’s about your age.”

“Jenna?” said the girl.

“You know her?”

“I know her name. She’s part of the Glimmer Club.”

The boy tried to shush her, and take the mic away. “That’s a secret!”

“Who cares now?” the girl said. “We’re busted anyway.”

“What’s the Glimmer Club?” I said.

The girl chewed her lip for a moment.

“Please,” I said. “It could be life or death.”

“It’s probably easiest if I just show you,” she said. “Give me a few minutes to warm up our blades. I’ll tell you what I can once we’re under way.”

Jenna was six when Lucille went to live on Deepwater 8. At the time, it had seemed reasonable. A chance for my wife to get away from her routine at home, be around some people neither of us had seen in awhile, and get the wind back into her sails. It certainly wouldn’t be any worse than it had been, with all the bickering and chronic insomnia. The doc had said it would do Lucille some good, so we packed her off and waved goodbye.

On Jenna’s bunk wall there was an LCD picture frame that cycled through images, as a night light. I originally loaded it with cartoon characters, but once she swore off Chloe and Joey I let her choose her own photos from the station’s substantial digital library.

I was surprised to see her assemble a collection of sunrises, sunsets, and other images of the sun—a thing she’d never seen. At night, I sometimes stood in the hatchway to the absurdly small family lavatory and watched Jenna lying in her blankets, eyes glazed and staring at the images as they gently shuffled past.

“What are you thinking about?” I once asked.

“How come it didn’t burn you up?” she said.

“What?”

“Teacher told us the sun is a big giant ball of fire.”

“That’s true.”

“Then why didn’t it burn everyone up?”

“It’s too far away for that.”

“How far?”

“Millions of miles.”

“Oh.”

A few more images blended from one to the next, in silence.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?” I said, stroking Jenna’s forehead.

“Am I ever going to get to see the sun? For real?”

I stopped stroking. It was a hell of a good question. One I wasn’t sure I was qualified to know the answer to. Differences between the orbital speed of the mirror cloud and Earth’s orbital velocity, combined with dispersion from the light pressure of the solar wind, would get Earth out from behind the death shadow eventually. How long this would take, or if it could happen before the last of us gave out—a few thousand remaining, from a population of over ten billion —was a matter of debate.

“Maybe,” I said. “The surface is a giant glacier now. We can’t even go up to look at the sky anymore because the ice has closed over the equator and it’s too thick for our submarines to get through. If the sun comes back, things will melt. But it will probably take a long, long time.”

Jenna turned in her bunk and stared at me, her eyes piercing as they always were when she was thinking.

“Why did the aliens do it?”

I sighed. That was the best question of all.

“Nobody knows,” I said. “Some people think the aliens live a long, long time, and that they came to Earth and did this once or twice before.”

“But why block out the sunshine? Especially since it killed people?”

“Maybe the aliens didn’t know it would kill people. Last time the Earth froze over like it’s frozen now, there were no people on the Earth, so the aliens might not have known better.”

“But you tried to say hello,” she said. “When you were on the space station. You told them you were there. You tried to make friends. They must be really mean, to take the sun away after all you did. The aliens… are bullies.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I’d thought the same thing more than once.

“Maybe they are,” I said. “But there’s not much we could do about it when they came, and there’s not much we can do about it now, other than what we are doing. We’ve figured out how to live on the sea floor where it’s still warm, and where the aliens can’t get to us. We’ll keep on finding a way to live here—as long as it takes.”

I was a bit surprised by the emotion I put into the last few words. Jenna watched me.

I leaned in and kissed her cheek.

“Come on, it’s time to sleep. We both have to be up early tomorrow.”

“Okay Daddy,” she said, smiling slightly. “I wish Mama could give me a kiss goodnight too.”

“You and me both,” I said.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Is Mama going to be alright?”

I paused, letting my breath out slowly.

“I sure hope so,” I said, settling into the lower bunk beneath my daughter’s—a bunk originally built for two, which felt conspicuously empty.

The clubhouse was actually a restored segment of Deepwater 3, long abandoned since the early days of the freeze-up.