Lights in the Deep (42 page)

“We don’t know.”

“You’re goddamned lucky there was a gap to get through. Air to breathe. I am not sure any of us have enough oxygen or battery power to get all the way back down. Jenna, for all I knew, you and the others were going to get yourselves killed.”

Jenna didn’t meet my gaze.

“Somebody had to do something,” she said. “We had to know if there was a chance the sun had returned. We hoped.
We hoped so much
. You and Jake and the others—everybody from before the freeze-up—it was like you’d all given up. Everyone determined not to die, but also determined not to live, either.”

I nodded my head, slowly.

“So what’s the plan now?” I asked.

She looked up at me, smiling again.

“Baja.”

“What?”

“The Baja Peninsula is supposed to be a couple hundred miles northeast of here. We’ll sail until we hit the shore.”

“And if you simply hit the pack ice?”

“We’ll leave the subs, and keep going.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Where’s your food, where’s your water, what kind of clothes do any of you have? What—”

“We’re not going back, daddy!”

She’d shouted it at me, her fists balled on my chest.

“Okay, okay,” I said, thinking. “But consider this. You all stand a much better chance if you have help. Now that we know the ice is clearing and the air is breathable—and that the sun is back out again, by God—we can bring the others up. All of the Deepwater crews, and the stations too. It will take time, but if we do it in an organized, methodical fashion, we’ll all stand a better chance of making land. Though I am not quite sure what we can expect to find when we get there.”

Some of the other kids had pulled themselves out of the water to come listen to me talk. A few of them were nodding their heads in agreement.

“If you want,” I said to them, looking around, “I’ll be the one to go back down. But I’ll need to get some air and electric power off these other subs first. I sure hope you all brought enough food to last a week or two. It’s going to be at least that long, or longer, before anyone else comes up from below.”

• • •

I went back down with what few reserves the kids could give me, about nine hundred digital pictures of the open water, the marvelously full sun, and the blue, blue sky—and a hell of a lot of hope in my heart.

It wouldn’t be easy. Not all of the adults would want to believe me, at first. And raising the stations after so long at depth was liable to be even more dangerous than sinking them had been in the first place.

But I suspected Jenna was right. We couldn’t go back. Not after what I’d just seen.

So I slowly dropped back down, gently, gently. Like a feather. The old sub wouldn’t last a fast trip to the bottom, just as it wouldn’t have lasted a fast trip to the top.

And though the darkness had resumed its hold, I felt light as a bird on the breeze.

Three days later, I stood in Deepwater 12’s sub garage.

Dan had dutifully spread the word ahead of me, and he was in a crowd of adults as I slowly climbed down off Number 6’s sail.

“You didn’t find them,” Jake said sternly. I could sense his extreme piss-off as I walked across the deck towards the group. Discipline was vital on the Deepwater crews, and I’d violated that discipline so extremely, I’d be lucky if Jake didn’t bust my nose for me.

“Oh, I found ‘em all right,” I said.

“Dead?” Dan said, voice raised slightly.

“No,” I said. “Take a look.”

I tossed Dan the camera I’d used on the surface.

He looked at me questioningly, and I just looked back.

Dan turned the camera over, its little LCD screen exposed, and flipped the switch to slide show.

Adults crowded around Dan, including Jake.

They gasped in unison.

“It can’t be,” Dan said, voice caught in his throat.

“It is,” I said. “And if you all don’t mind, my daughter is waiting for us to join her up top. We’ve got a land expedition that needs support. I promised her I’d get her and the other kids the help they’d need to make it successful.”

Dan cycled through the pictures and began playing one of the video files I’d also shot. The camera’s little speaker blared loudly laughing, shouting teens and the sloshing of water against the hull of the sub I’d been standing on when I took the footage.

I noted tears falling down the faces of many of my compatriots. And for a tiny instant, I wished that Lucille had lived long enough to see this.

No matter. Lucille was a memory, but it was apparent I’d given the living something they’d desperately needed, without even knowing it. Just as much as I’d desperately needed it when I first opened Number 6’s top hatch and smelled the tangy, frigid salt air whipping through my hair.

Jake, the crew boss, was shouting orders—with a wide smile on his face—while the camera made its way reverently from hand to hand.

I looked up at the ceiling, my eyes glazing and my spirit going up through the black deep to the top where Jenna waited. Hang on, little one. Dad’ll be back soon.

▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼

“Ray of Light” was another product of the short story workshops that Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith both run out in Lincoln City, Oregon. Having enjoyed my first trip through such a workshop, I went back for seconds in 2011 and had similar results: both stories produced eventually went on to sell. Only this time they not only sold, they got the covers for both Analog magazine (in the case of “Ray of Light”) and
Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
.

For “Ray of Light” my assignment was to write a story for a hypothetical post-apocalypse anthology. Since I knew going in that there would be plenty of zombie post-apocalypse stories and nuclear post-apocalypse stories and environmental post-apocalypse stories, I wondered how I could deviate from the expected standards. What other ways—beyond nukes and zombies and global warming—were there to end the world?

I remembered an article I’d read a few months before, in a science magazine. The article talked about emerging evidence for a global freeze-over which had occurred once or twice in the very distant past, and which had probably engulfed the entire planet from pole to pole, including the oceans. Or at least, the surfaces of the oceans.

I started wondering how such a calamity might occur in modern times, and what it might mean for civilization, as well as any survivors somehow able to make it through the civilizational cusp between the freezing Earth, and Earth after the big freeze.

Yet I still had to tell this story in a short fiction format.

What to do?

I realized that sometimes the best way to handle a massive, overarching, catastrophic event, is to take a close look at how such an event might affect an ordinary family. People not too different from you or me, with the usual problems and worries a family of our era might have—only warped and accentuated by a catastrophe so massive, there’s no possible way anyone could emotionally or mentally plan for it.

Thus “Ray of Light” was born.

I wrote it over a week, in little bursts of activity.

No specific plot plan. Just a mom and a dad and a little daughter, all plunged into this nightmare world where the very surface of the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable, thus people have to retreat to the seafloor for survival.

“Ray of Light” not only won the praise of my editor Stanley Schmidt, and my mentor Mike Resnick, it also got a stunning original painting from famed artist Bob Eggleton, and managed to win enough fans among
Analog
magazine readers for them to vote it onto both the Nebula award ballot and the Hugo award ballot—the Nebula and Hugo awards being the two most prestigious English language awards for science fiction and fantasy literature in the world.

Say what?!

Do guys like me even get to be on ballots like those?

What was more, the attention I earned from being on the Nebula and the Hugo ballots boosted me into contention for the Campbell award too. Which (as Mike Resnick noted in his introduction) is the “rookie of the year” award for new science fiction and fantasy writers. I’d have won that award too, based on first-run votes. But the award passed into other hands once the Australian balloting caught up with me.

Which is fine. I had misgivings about wearing that tiara.

Especially while wearing my Army dress blues uniform.

No matter, the attendees of World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago rewarded me with many repetitions of the same elevator conversation:

Me—stepping into the elevator.

Stranger—noticing my badge, with its ribbons for triple-nominee status.

Me—smiling and minding my own business.

Stranger—reading the last name on my badge.

Me—still smiling and minding my own business.

Stranger—“Oh, you’re the ‘Ray of Light’ guy!”

Me—“Why yes, that is my story.”

Stranger—“I loved that story! It really was a ray of light!”

Me—smiling twice as big, and thanking the person profusely for reading the story and for telling me how they felt about it, once they realized I was the author.

If I’d first set out in 2009 to make my mark as the kind of writer who would defy the trend in the science fiction world—to worship gloom and doom as some kind of literary sacrament—then “Ray of Light” was my loudest rebel yell to date. A declaration of intent so strong it got all the right attention from all the right people. And even though it didn’t win any awards for me, it did make me proud to be able to plant my flag in the science fiction literary community and declare unabashedly: this is who I am, and this is the kind of fiction I stand for.

Because in my opinion, life is depressing and hopeless enough, without imbibing further depression and hopelessness through story. I don’t care how realistic people like to think that is. It’s not what inspires me, or makes me love and cherish a book or a television show or a movie. When I am imbibing fiction, I want to be inspired. I want bold tales, told boldly. I want genuine Good People who, while not perfect, are capable of rising beyond their ordinary beginnings. To make a positive difference in their world. Even when all hope or purpose might seem lost.

Because this is what I think fiction—as originally told around the campfires, through verbal legend—ought to do, more than anything else: Illuminate the way, shine a spiritual beacon, tell us that there is a bright point in the darkness, a light to guide the way, when all other paths are cast in shadow.

If our stories can’t do that for us…what’s the point?

Denouement

It’s impossible to thank every single person who helped contribute to this book, or to the stories within it. Several significant people have already been specifically named in articles sandwiched between the fiction.

I would therefore like to add my thanks to Kevin J. Anderson and his lovely wife Rebecca Moesta, for taking me under their mutual wing, as a new and rising talent. Kevin didn’t know me from Adam when I attended the L. Ron Hubbard presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future awards workshop in 2010. Somehow Kevin picked up on the fact that I was eager to keep pushing forward, so he encouraged me to attend his Superstars Writing Seminars that he co-paneled with other luminaries such as Eric Flint, Brandon Sanderson, and Dave Wolverton.

Which I did.

And when I kept having “popcorn” pop—Kevin’s metaphor for how to be and stay successful in the fiction business—he invited me back to help with future iterations of the Seminars. Something I’ve done two years in a row now.

It was Kevin’s idea for me to publish this book through the WordFire imprint that he and Rebecca co-operate, and I am ever so pleased to be working with Kevin on this, as well as several other projects. He is, like so many Writers of the Future judges, an eternal fount of enthusiasm for up-and-coming writers. He and Rebecca both cheer for young authors, and do all they can to help those who are willing to listen and apply what’s been learned.

I want to also thank Dave Wolverton, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Dean Wesley Smith for their willingness to offer advice, and for their wonderful workshops which I attended in 2009, 2010, and 2011. You couldn’t ask for more patient or more seasoned teachers, able to pass on what they’ve learned from a lifetime of publishing. In all three cases their different guidance has proven instrumental to my progress, so I don’t want this book to hit the press without me mentioning them by name.

And of course I have to thank my amazing and gorgeous wife Annie O’Connell-Torgersen, who believed in my writing before
I
believed in my writing, and who never, ever let me quit. Even during those years when the rejection slips seemed endless, and I really did begin to wonder if maybe the dream of being a professional science fiction man wasn’t just a lot of hot air.

Annie, my beloved eternal companion, I cherish and worship you.

Always.

About the Author

Brad R. Torgersen is a healthcare computer geek by day, a United States Army Reserve Chief Warrant Officer on the weekend, and a Science Fiction and Fantasy writer by night. He has contributed stories to multiple professional publications, including
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
magazine,
Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, Galaxy's Edge
magazine, Russia's
ESLI
magazine, Poland's
Nowa Fantastyka
magazine, as well as several anthologies, including collaborations with multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner Mike Resnick. Brad's novelette "Exanastasis" placed in the 26th volume of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. Brad's novelette "Outbound" then won the
Analog
magazine 'AnLab' readers' choice award for its category, for the publishing year 2010. "Outbound" was also included in the Dell Magazines ten-year Analog retrospective anthology,
Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010.
Brad's novelette "Ray of Light," also published in
Analog
magazine, was nominated for both the World Science Fiction Society Hugo Award, and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award, for its category, for the publishing year 2011. Brad was also nominated for the 2012 Campbell Award for Best New Writer in professional Science Fiction and Fantasy. Married 19 years, Brad now lives in northern Utah with his wife and daughter. Brad’s web site can be found at www.bradrtorgersen.com