Пол Андерсон: Orbit 1

But it was no use, she had heard it all before. “Maybe it won’t be like that this time,” she said. “We. . evolved that quick, at the end. Maybe we’ll go back now just as fast…”

“It isn’t anything to do with it,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

She said desperately, “We were so smart, Jack, getting out like this, living in the sea. Making a new world. But maybe. . couldn’t that somehow be what the sea really wanted, all along? What we were meant to do? Oh, I know this sounds crazy but believe me when I see the kids. . Jen slipped the other day, in the kitchen. When she tried to get up, I think she tried to turn like she was swimming — she forgot she was in air. . And David, he swims just like a little shrimp. . When I see things like that I think. . Oh, I don’t know what I think sometimes — maybe we’re not. . pioneers at all. This thing about the Deeps, they say they call, pull. . Maybe we’re just sort of being sucked back, that’s where we belong..”

He was angry, finally. “All right. So this craziness is all true. We’ve got a racial memory in our brains, in our nervous systems. We remember the beginnings of life all those years back, so many years we can’t even count the thousands. Well, then, we’re home already, Mary. Right where we are, this is where life started. In the shallows, swilling in the sunlight. Not in the Deeps. It moved down there, same time some of it spread onto land. There’s nothing can call us from there. We don’t belong there, never did.”

She was quivering a little, looking at the pillow, seeing the texture of it. Every strand in the weave of the cloth. “I wanted to stay human,” she said. “That was all. Just to stay human, and the kids. .”

He touched her. “You’re human. You’re all right.”

She wouldn’t look at him. “I think,” she said, “I think now… I’d take the Cities. Jack. .”

He did not answer, and she knew the expression on his face without looking. Something inside her seemed to twist and become cold. He would do anything for her maybe, except that. He would not go landside, not now. The empires, the herds and tribes of the sea, they were in his brain, they called too. The dream was too strong, he could not let it go.

He pushed the clothes back and swung his legs off the bed. She heard the little swish as he picked up a robe. “Mary,” he said, “why don’t you get a little checkup. You’re rundown, it’s my fault, I should have realized. . Too much time on your own, you don’t get about. Not any more. Maybe you should have a trip landside. Go and see your folks. Tell you what — I’ll get a couple of days leave, we’ll have a run up to Seventy-five, take the kids, how’s that? They’ve got the new theater up there, whole pile of junk. Sound okay?”

She did not answer. “I’ll have a talk with Jen,” she said. “I’ll do it tomorrow. This is silliness, it can be stopped. .” He walked out, turned on a light. Started tinkering in the kitchen. He brought her back coffee laced with rum. She pulled a bedjacket over her shoulders, sat drinking, hands gripped round the warmth of the cup. Feeling the trembling still deep in her body, hearing the buzz of the airplant, imagining the silly, silly meters checking and recording. Pressure, humidity, oxy-level, all the things that did not matter. While Jack sat and watched her, smoked and smiled and did not understand..

Mary swam the length of the town again, moving slowly, watching to right and left at the domes nestling in shadow, their windows like square bright eyes. The sea was darker now; in the real world above, the moon was setting. Surface was just visible as a grayish sheen; tall weed fronds were silhouetted against it, leaning majestically to the current like trees bowed by an endless wind. The tide was setting out, toward the Deeps.

After that talk with her husband, her restlessness had become worse. Quite suddenly it seemed the whole furnishing of the dome was oppressive, stultifying. The curtains had come down, the glinting blue fabric with its faint interlapping tidal patterns had been put away. Mary had hung new yellow cloth, sun-yellow, printed with designs of buds and flowering trees. She had banished the spiny amber-spotted shells and the urchin lamps, Jen’s untidy collection of sea bed fossils, even the cushion covers on which she herself had once worked swirling Minoan patterns of weed and octopi. In their places were landside things, figurines of horses and kittens, panting china dogs. Creatures long vanished now but that reminded her of Earth and the way humans lived once on a time.

Every ornament, every yard of cloth, had had to be bought from Surface; the cost had been enormous but once started Mary had seemed unable to stop. Jack had raised his eyebrows but said nothing; Jen had protested more noisily.

Things had reached crisis pitch the day Mary found, in the wall tank in Jen’s room, a piece of old human skull, coral-crusted, put there as a home for crabs. She had slapped her daughter for that, a thing she had never done before, and emptied tank and contents through the lock. Jen had fled squalling, into the sea, and not to come home for hours. After that Mary spent a week scraping the whole top of the dome, polishing away the velvet coat of sea-growth till the plastic-covered panels gleamed like new; but it seemed the more she did, the more she tried to banish the presence of the sea from her home, the more the sea invaded. At night, lying quiet, she imagined she could feel the slow push of the wave force against the bungalow, tilting it this way and that, slow, slow, this way…then that. .

She drove herself across to West Terrace, built slightly higher than the rest of town on a curving ridge of rock. Nearly to the Belmonts’ dome and back, calling all the way. Jen was not in town; or if she was, she refused to answer. Mary’s face was wet now inside the mask and her lungs were laboring. Thoughts tumbled in her mind. Nitrogen narcosis, the thing they used to call rapture of the depths… no longer possible, the lungs delivered an oxy-helium mix. Oxygen intoxication, then; that could make you throw your mask off, breathe water and die. But it was nearly unheard-of. Low down on Mary’s back, and on Jen’s, were other contacts. They led to cells deep in the body that metered the blood itself, tasting it for oxy-content. The lungs were self-compensating. Pack failure? Crazy, the gulp-bottle on Jen’s belt would give her twenty minutes’ breathing. And the beacon, there was the beacon. But beacons could go out. .

Mary doubled, swerving under the rigging of the street lamps. Across to where she could see the divers working on the new building complex. The bodies hung round the curving ribs, tiny with distance, silver as fish under the glare of the lamps; below, the windows of the construction office just showed in the gloom. Soon she would call Jack, she would have to. . She felt the fear again, like a coldness round her heart. There was only one place she had not been. She began to swim purposefully away from the town and its lights, toward the Deeps.

Just beyond the domes the sea bed fell away in a series of troughs, miles long and wide. Unseen, their contours could still appal the mind. This was the frontier, the last frontier maybe on the planet. She passed over the graveyard, trying not to see the frail crosses sticking up from the silt, name tags fluttering in the current like gray leaves. Out to where the last light faded, and beyond…

She was in a void, bottomless, pit-black. Above her a vagueness that was just one shade less dark than darkness itself. Not light; some trailing ghost maybe, that light had left behind it. Mary drove deeper, hopelessly, feeling pressure begin to squeeze her body like cold hands. She was panting, though there was no sound of it in her ears; her breathing alone could not activate the throat mike. She called again; her voice was a vibrating thread, nearly lost in immensity.