Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

The mist ducts tended to fog the room, so the doctors wore aprons and goggles and long yellow gloves.

Stenstrom had a better grasp of psychology than that.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, not bothering with how are you or hello .

“Sorry, chief.”

“My fault. We should have ordered you to quit for the day. It’s not like we were running late.” His laugh was a goofy bird squawk that sounded fake the first time you heard it, but he was just a geek — desk belly, pale, with his fingers constantly in his hair or at his nose. “Seriously,” he said. “Anything at all.”

“Someone to read to me. Someone pretty.”

“She can be friendly, too, if you like.”

I would have thought he’d be too embarrassed. I was surprised to find I was myself. Maybe I’d spent too much time alone out there.

My next thought was of my marriage vows. Guilt arrived late, but my first reaction was the honest one. I was basically a cripple here, and the idea of being manipulated did not excite me at all. I’d much rather masturbate, caressed and tumbled by the sea, alone with favorite memories of my wife.

“Someone to read,” I repeated.

Stenstrom nodded. “What do you like, oceanography and biology, right?” Standing up, he patted the table rather than jarring me. “I’ll have someone come in.”

It was awfully cynical, but I couldn’t help but think that he was improving at trying to make himself my friend.

I contacted Andrea days ahead of the schedule we’d set, despite an earlier decision not to worry her. Stenstrom was right. I needed friendly, female attention, and I didn’t have to tell her that I’d been hurt.

She wasn’t home, even though it was dinnertime. Brent answered and said she was substituting at the community college. That made me angry. I didn’t understand why she’d bother with such a low-paying job, especially since she must be incredibly busy, settling into the new house, helping the boys adjust to new schools — but of course Andrea enjoyed teaching, and maybe the fact that we were rich didn’t seem real to her yet.

Maybe it was good I’d missed her. Our exchanges had not been going well and I might have said something stupid. Maybe communicating over such a distance, through typed words alone, was impossible.

The boys didn’t think so. During my recuperation, they peppered me with messages full of abbreviations and icons that my computer and I puzzled over. They were obviously spending more time online than they had with me around, learning new languages and modes of thought. I was pleased that they remained excited about my accomplishments, but Roberto seemed overly attached to a new interactive he’d discovered, and Brent confessed — maybe bragged? — that he had been caught in two stim sites. I admonished them both to finish their schoolwork as soon as possible each day, put the keyboard away and get outside. Go play in the mud, I said.

Returning to the ocean was unspeakably good, but my days grew more complicated as I coordinated with surface traffic, massive barges that probed the quiet dark with fat, long, phallic drills, blundering through ancient beds of sediment, polluting vast stretches of water with their shrieking as they powered down into the detritus and carbonate. New voices sprang out of my cheekbone, crowding my skull — and four new mods had come through surgery and would join me soon.

This was ultimately what I’d signed on for. I took close note of each shift’s accomplishments, but the joy it gave me was purely intellectual, and I clocked out with the surface crews rather than working overtime.

The best part of each day was making my way to and from my shelter, by myself, letting the currents and whim dictate my course, always discovering new beauty, new peace.

I think I knew what was happening back home.

Most of Brent’s chatter washed over me like a familiar, soothing tide: “Club VR opened a new place downtown and I got to virt Gladiator and I could have done it twice except Uncle Mark is a bracket colon equal sign.”

The computer had grown better at recognizing icons, but Brent used so many. This one meant flathead , I guessed, or chicken neck or whatever. What concerned me was his tone. Brent had once directed this same mean jealousy at me.

“Who is Uncle Mark?” I croaked, the elongated fingers of my hand tightening into a ball.

I hit the Send button with a fist.

“What the hell’s going on!” I shouted, six hours later when I finally got Andrea online. “After all I’m doing for you …”

Her response was immediate: “You did it for yourself.”

I stared at the shape of the computer as if it were another squid, my thoughts layered and conflicting.

“For the fame,” she continued. “The adventure.”

“For the money, Andrea! I’m doing it for the money!”

“Would you have let them cut you up if they were going to turn you into a desk, Carlos? You did it for the chance to finally be a fish.”

Its prow into the wind and waves, the barge lowered two turbines on cables, one off of each side. Just hoisting the house-sized cylinders from the deck and hitting the water had taken two slow, exacting hours. The descent itself required five more. During snags and rest breaks, I inspected the squat towers that would cradle the turbines, darting under and around their angled beams, even though we’d already completed our structural tests.

But there was no escaping my thoughts.

Leaving now — quitting now — would be crazy. Reverse surgery and rehab would take almost a quarter of the time left in my contract, and I’d forfeit everything but the signing bonus. We’d lose the home, our future, and find ourselves back in the city scrambling for wages…. And I would never work for Aro Corp. again in any capacity. Even their competitors would have no reason to rely on me, a hard truth that always led me back to the same worry:

Can I ever trust her again ?

The weather had been cooperating, but even nineteen-ton hunks of metal will act like sails in deep currents, and close to sundown we realized there had been a miscalculation. Some pendulum swinging had been accounted for — it was a drop of four hundred feet — but instead of a near-simultaneous mounting, we had a double miss.

Each elevator platform had jets which I could use for final adjustments, but they weren’t powerful enough to muscle the turbines twenty meters against the current.

“We’re twenty east,” I said. “Let’s elevate forty. Bring ’em back up.”

The nearest turbine was a smooth sculpture caught in a web of cables that led upward as far as my sonar reached. ROVs, remote operated vehicles, scooted about or hovered patiently nearby. And when I switched briefly to my fuzzy, nearsighted normal vision, the busy sea became busier, shot through with the ROVs’ beams of light. All of this generated surprisingly little noise: the whirring of ROV props, the harp vibrations of the current against the cables.

The first explosion sounded like God had slapped the surface, a bass thunder that reached me an instant after the VLF net surged with voices.

“Was that the engine?”

“Fire! Fire!”

“Number two crane’s lost all exterior cables—”

The last bit of information I personally witnessed as the turbine sagged in its web. If it fell, it would roll into the cradle tower and ruin weeks of hard labor.

I swam closer, thinking I might use the platform jets to keep it afloat or ease it to the bottom, but two ROVs tumbled into my path as their operators lost contact. I kicked left. One struck my scarred shoulder and numbed my arm.