Greg Bear: Vitals

‘They also serve who sit and wait,’ Dave said, adjusting the sub’s trim. Motors whined starboard. ‘Sometimes we play chess.’

‘I hate chess,’ I confessed. ‘Time is precious and should be put to constructive use.’

Dave grinned. ‘Nadia warned me.’

Nadia Evans, the number one sub driver on the Sea Messenger, was sick in her bunk topside. A rich, creamy pudding past its prime had made eight of our crew very unhappy. Nadia had planned to take me on this dive, but a deep submersible, lacking a toilet, is no place for the shits.

Best to keep focused on where we were going and what we might see. Dropping into Planet Extreme. Eternal darkness and incredible pressure.

Still more than a mile below, at irregular intervals along the network of spreading trenches, massive underwater geysers spewed roiling plumes of superheated water, toxic sulfides, and deep-crust bacteria. Minerals in the flow accreted to erect chimneys around the geysers. Some of the chimneys stood as tall as industrial smokestacks and grew broad horizontal fans like tree fungi. Sulfurous outflow fizzed through cracks and pores everywhere. Magma squeezed out of deeper cracks like black, grainy toothpaste, snapping like reptiles in combat. Close by, at depth, through the hydrophone, you could hear the vents hissing and roaring. Wags had named one huge chimney ‘Godzilla.’

Gargantuan Earth music.

Down there, the water is saturated with the deep’s chemical equivalent of sunshine. Hydrogen sulfide soup feeds specialized bacteria, which in turn prop up an isolated food chain. Tube worms crest old lava flows and gather around the vents in sociable forests, like long, skinny, red-tipped penises. Royal little white crabs mosey through the waving stalks as if they have all the time there is. Long, lazy, rat-tail fish – deep-water vultures with big curious eyes – pause like question marks, waiting for death to drop their small ration of dinner.

I shivered. DSV pilots believe the cold keeps you alert. Dave coughed and took a swig of bottled water, then returned the bottle to the cup holder. Nadia had been much more entertaining: witty, pretty, and eager to explain her deep-diving baby.

The little sphere, just over two meters wide, filled with reassuring sounds: the ping of a directional signal every few seconds, hollow little beeps from transponders dropped months before, another ping from sonar, steady ticking, the sigh and whine of pumps and click of solenoids.

I rolled on my butt and bent the couch back into a seat, then doubled over to pull up my slippers – thick knitted booties, actually, with rubber soles. I stared between my knees at a shimmer of air trapped in the sub’s frame below the sphere. The silvery wobble had been many times larger just forty minutes ago.

Two thousand feet. The outside pressure was now sixty atmospheres, 840 pounds per square inch. Nadia had described it as a Really Large Guy pogo-sticking all over your head. Inside, at one atmosphere, we could not feel it. The sphere distributed the pressure evenly. No bends, no tremors, no rapture of the deep. Shirtsleeve travel, almost. We wouldn’t even need to spend time in a chamber when we surfaced.

The sub carried a load of steel bars, ballast to be dropped when we wanted to switch to near-neutral buoyancy. Dave would turn on the altimeter at about a hundred feet above the seafloor and let the ingots rip like little bombs. Sometimes the DSV held on to a few, staying a little heavy, and pointed her thrusters down to hover like a helicopter. A little lighter, and she could ‘float,’ aiming the thrusters up to avoid raising silt.

An hour into the dive. Twenty-seven hundred feet. The sphere was getting colder and time was definitely speeding up.

‘When did you meet Owen Montoya?’ Dave asked.

‘A few weeks ago,’ I said. Montoya was a fascinating topic around the office water cooler: the elusive rich guy who employed everyone on the Sea Messenger.

‘He must approve of what you’re doing,’ Dave said.

‘How’s that?’

‘Dr Mauritz used to have top pick for these dives.’ Stanley Mauritz was the Sea Messenger’s chief oceanographer and director of research, on loan to the ship from the Scripps Institution in exchange for Montoya’s support of student research. ‘But you’ve had three in a row.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. The researchers on board Sea Messenger fought for equipment and resources just like scientists everywhere.

‘Nadia’s trying to keep the peace,’ Dave added after a pause.

‘Sorry to upset the balance.’

Dave shrugged. ‘I stay out of it. Let’s do our check.’

We used our separate turquoise monitor screens to examine different shipboard systems, focusing first on air. Mary’s Triumph maintained an oxygen-enriched atmosphere at near sea-level pressure.

Dave raised his mike and clicked the switch. ‘Mary to Messenger. We’re at one thousand meters. Systems check okay.’

The hollow voice of Jason, our shipboard dive master and controller, came back a few seconds later. ‘Read you, Mary.’

‘What’s going on between Nadia and Max?’ Dave asked with a leer. Max was science liaison for the ship. Rumors of their involvement had circulated for weeks. ‘Any hot and heavy?’

The question seemed out of character. ‘Nothing, at the moment,’ I guessed. ‘She’s probably spending most of her time in the head.’

‘What’s Max got that I haven’t?’ Dave asked, and winked.

Max was twenty-seven years old, self-confident without being cocky, handsome, but smart and pleasant to talk to. His specialty was Vestimentiferans – tube worms. Dave was not in Max’s league, and neither was I, if it came right down to it.

‘Enough about women,’ I suggested with a sour look. ‘I’m just getting over a divorce.’

‘Poor baby,’ Dave said. ‘No women, no chess. That leaves philosophy. Explain Kant or Hegel, choose one.’

I chuckled.

‘We’ve got lots of time,’ Dave said, and put on a little boy’s puzzled frown. ‘It’s either read or play chess or get to know each other.’ He fiddled with the touch pad mounted at the end of the couch arm and once again punched up the atmosphere readout. ‘Damn, is the pressure changing? It shouldn’t be. My gut’s giving me fits.’

I cringed.

Four thousand feet.

‘I met Owen just once,’ Dave said. Everyone in Montoya’s employ called him Owen, or Owen Montoya, never Mr Montoya, and never ‘sir.’ ‘His people trust me to keep his expensive toy from getting snagged, but when he shook my hand, he didn’t know who I was. He must meet a lot of people.’

I nodded. Montoya seemed to enjoy his privacy. Best not to divulge too much to the hired help. Still, I felt a small tug of pride that I had spent so many hours with this powerful and wealthy man, and had been told we were simpatico.

I had met all sorts of people rich and superrich on my quest for funding. Montoya had been the best of a mixed lot, and the only one who outright owned an oceanographic research ship and DSV.

He was a whole lot more likable than Song Wu, the sixty-year-old Chinese nightclub owner who had insisted I try his favorite youth enhancer – serpent-bladder extract diluted in rice wine. That had been an experience, sitting in his living room, six hundred feet above Hong Kong, watching Mr Song squeeze a little sac of the oily green liquid into a glass while I tried to keep up a conversation with his sixteen-year-old Thai mistress. Mr Song refused to spend a single square-holed penny until I gave snake gall a fair shake.

All the while, a withered feng shui expert in a gray-silk suit had danced around the huge apartment, whirling a cheap gold-painted cardboard dial over the marble floor tiles, babbling about balancing the forces of past and future.