Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

There was nothing there, but she felt her hopes rise. It had been so long since she had seen any trace of humanity that even this vestige of it, long since abandoned, seemed like a message. For the first time in weeks, she allowed herself to think that she might make it, and as she descended again, she realized that she had been waiting for a sign without knowing it.

Finally, on a day like any other, she arrived at her last whale fall. Checking her position, she found that she was thirty kilometers from home. Nothing was visible up top—the shore was just over the horizon—and her radio was still out of range. But there was no question that she was close.

Returning to the whale fall, Eunice forced herself to proceed carefully. Now that her destination was only a stone’s throw away, she wanted to go for it at once, but she knew that she had to be more careful than ever. There would be no more falls where she could rest. In shallow waters, a carcass would float, not sink, which meant that this was as far as she would get on the whale road.

After Wagner had attached himself again, they left the fall and headed east. Eunice allowed herself to look back once at the warren of fallen bones, knowing that she might never see one again, and then she turned to face what was coming. The rules of the game had changed. She had thirty kilometers to cover and an effective range of around twenty-five, so she had to draw on all of her available resources, which came down to herself and the current.

Eunice swam under her own power until she had reached the strait that led to home. It was two hundred and fifty meters deep, and at the bottom, where she had to remain, it was outside the realm of sunlight. She rooted herself to the silt and waited for a full day, at minimum power, monitoring the water around her. As she had expected, during the flood tide, the current moved east, in her intended direction of travel. The rest was a matter of timing.

When the tide turned in her favor again, she released herself, allowing the current to carry her along. Drifting in this fashion, with her higher functions switched off, she covered close to twelve kilometers in six hours. Then she anchored herself again to wait out the ebb tide.

She did this eight times over four days. When her navigational system told her that she had entered the sound, she resisted the temptation to rise at once. A complicated path lay ahead through shallow water, calling for infinite delicacy, and she had to save every last scrap of her strength.

Eunice paced herself, tracking her location as she waited to give herself to the current. This part required many separate attempts. Sometimes she was carried half a kilometer or more, but usually it was far less. It saved energy, but it also drained the stores of patience that she had cultivated so for so long.

Ten kilometers remained. She estimated that she had enough power to cover the distance along a straight line, but energy would also be used up in maneuvering, and after one final calculation, she made her choice. There would be no turning back from here, but first she had something to say to Wagner. “Thank you.”

If Wagner processed this statement, he said nothing. She released herself from where she had been clinging to the bottom and shot forward, using all of the power that she had been reserving until now.

The path was difficult. She had to thread her way through a series of bays and cuts, and although the route was clear in her head, it was hard to follow while expending the minimum amount of energy, and once or twice, to her intense frustration, she miscalculated and had to double back.

Each mistake had a price, and as her errors accumulated, she felt herself losing power sooner than she had expected. She was almost there, but she was weakening. As despair overtook her, she prepared to use her final burst of energy to reach the surface, either to be found or to see the sun one last time—

She felt Wagner stir. They were in shallow water, far from the crushing pressure of the bathyal zone, and something in the freedom that it afforded seemed to awaken an old memory.

As Eunice faded, Wagner unfolded the tiny pectoral fins tucked to either side of his body. Under favorable conditions, he was designed to mimic a manta ray, and now he extended his wings, transforming himself from a ring into a rhombus. Eunice felt him probing gently around in her brain, seeking the map as they began to glide forward. He spoke in her head. “Hold on.”

Eunice lacked the strength to respond. Wagner could do little more than keep them on course, with their speed reduced to a crawl, but they were moving. She sensed that they were close, and the memory of the tether that stood for home expanded so forcefully in her mind’s eye that it took her a second to understand that it was no longer just her imagination.

She looked through the water, which seemed cloudy and dark. There was something up ahead. A slender vertical line stood before her, dividing the scene in half like the mark of a draftsman’s pencil. It was the charging station.

Eunice floated up. As Wagner quietly corrected their angle of ascent, she reached the power unit at the top. For a second, she wondered whether this might all be a dream, unfolding in the safety of a whale fall, or one last hallucination, compressed into the instant before the shark’s jaws clamped down—

She latched on. At once, she felt a pure infusion of energy. It was just as sweet as she remembered, and as she drank deeply, the spokes of her sixfold mind were filled with disbelief, gratitude, relief, and nameless other feelings that seemed to fuse together into a single glowing wheel.

As Eunice felt her consciousness returning, she saw that the cloudiness of the water, which she had thought was the product of her exhaustion, was still there. Something was strange about the light. Looking up at the ripples of sun overhead, she saw that they were only a few meters below the surface. Her charge was incomplete, but she was unable to wait any longer.

Detaching herself from the power unit, she covered the last step of her journey, surfacing to look at what she had traveled four thousand kilometers to reach. Below the water, she sensed Wagner waiting for her to speak.

The charging station was anchored in a sheltered part of the sound, not far from the quay where two research vessels, one twice the size of the other, were berthed. Both were still there, but they were not what she remembered. They were listing to one side, and the bottoms of their hulls were solid masses of rust, their upper levels discolored by brownish streaks and lesions of flaking paint.

Lowering her eyes, Eunice saw for the first time that the waters of the sound were overgrown with mats of seaweed and feathery milfoil. Beyond the quay stood a gray concrete building with a copper roof and rectangular slits for windows. It had been the backdrop for her memories for as long as she could remember, but now the side facing her was covered in a tangled growth of ivy. Mounds of bird droppings were encrusted on its eaves.

Eunice stared at the other buildings by the shore. All were overgrown and abandoned. A road ran alongside the water, its asphalt buckled, tall weeds topped by yellow flowers growing in the cracks. The city had been reclaimed, with a new stage appearing as the old idea of order passed away.

She switched on her radio. Instead of the random noise that she had usually heard in the city, there was nothing at all. As she scanned every frequency, searching for signs of life, she wondered if her radio had been broken all along, and it was only gradually that she understood the truth.

James had told her that they were running out of time. Eunice had thought that he was speaking of their work together, but it occurred to her now that he had been referring to something else. All the voices in the world had been silenced, not just the men and women, but even those who were like her on land. Their circuitry had not survived the event that had erased their designers.