Charlie reddened. “Saw
what
? A goddess? Jesus! You think I believe that that was a goddess? A genuine immortal supernatural being of a higher order of existence? Or—what?—some kind of actual alien creature? You want me to believe it was an alien that had been locked up in there all that time? An alien from where? Mars? And who locked it up? Or was it one of King Solomon’s jinn, maybe?”
“Does it really matter which it was?” Mr. Gladstone asked softly. Charlie started to say something; but he choked it back. After a moment he stood. “Listen, I need to go now,” he said. “Mr. Gladstone—Timmo—I’ll catch up with you later, is that all right?” And then he turned and stalked away. But before he left, I saw the look in his eyes.
His eyes. Oh, Charlie. Oh, those eyes. Those frightened, empty eyes.
W
HEN AT LAST THEY DREW NEAR THE WALL OF THE
R
OSS
I
CE
Shelf, the cloud-ceiling’s vast, gray fleece had begun to shred in the wind, opening ragged islands of pale blue sky whose light lent sharper definition to the towering rampart of its rim.
Perched in the little freighter’s prow, Belinda studied the titan. She mentally hefted the dimensions of this exploit. To confront the Shelf was to stand in awe. To go beneath it, as she was soon to do, would be to enter the utterly unknown.
If a couple hundred feet of that ice shelf rose above the waves, its main bulk plunged another thousand beneath them, while the sheet as a whole roofed a vast and undiscovered tract of sea floor that was nearly the size of France. And the
depth
of that sea floor beneath it? It was believed the bottom lay between thirteen and sixteen thousand feet down.
Not that their mission here—hers and her sister’s—lay nearly so deep. Their two submersibles would explore only the upper reaches of the under-sea—perhaps as deep as three hundred fathoms below the ice. There, they would hang (as it were) merely in the stratosphere of that ice-capped abyss.
If the rest of Earth’s oceans were an analogue, this would be the zone thickest with life. But part of her doubted. Could anything at
all
inhabit that freezing darkness?
“Hey Melody,” she called back to her sister, a little aft of her, “so what do ya think we’ll meet down under there?”
“Whoa, I dunno! I just can’t believe we’re actually
here
!” Melody crowed.
“What did you think?” old Earl rumbled. “We couldn’t find fuckin’
Antarctica
?”
The sea, black-and-jade, was littered with minor ice, a kind of loose-knit galaxy of jostling floes and fragments that gonged dully against their steel hull. The ice titan, ten times the height of their conning tower, stretched past sight to either side.
“What’s that?” Melody posed this question just as Belinda was thinking it. Off their bow, perhaps three hundred yards out, something dark and bulky bobbed in the swell—mostly submerged, but breaking surface here and there.
“Isn’t it … a carcass?” In asking, Belinda grew sure it was—something really big, nearly thirty feet long, its mottled hide feebly flashing black and silver in the wan sun.
“Reversing engine,” Earl called. “I wanna get closer. I think that’s a goddam orca. Look at the size of ’im! But hell, he oughta sink if he’s not movin’!”
They all watched it as it slowly rose and fell with the ocean’s pulse, while Earl coaxed the little ship nearer. “I just don’t understand why it’s floatin’,” he complained. “Thing’s dead, it should sink like a rock!”
As they hove nearer, Melody said, “See that? See it? There’s, like, something shiny all over it, an’ all around it too! See it?”
And they did. The dead brute presented something more than the wet sheen of whale-hide: a thin, glossy fabric seemed to envelop the huge carnivore, and the semi-transparent skirts of this fabric billowed on the water’s surface.
“Damn!”
“Whoa!” both women cried at once as Earl, backing engines, began bringing them around its other side. They saw a gaping hole in the orca’s flank, a meaty chasm some fifteen feet across.
As it slid past below their starboard rail, the carnage of that awful wound held them staring.
“What coulda done that?” Earl sounded angry, as if his sense of the possible had been outraged. “A sperm whale? That sucker’s near bit in
half
. Nothin’ attacks orcas, far as I know. A buncha big sharks maybe?”
All three of them stood gazing.
“I dunno,” Melody said. “Buncha sharks big enough and hungry enough to attack him in the first place, why is there so much left of him?”
Earl snorted. “
Is
there?” He’d reduced their speed but kept them under way, and as the carcass fell astern, their wake set it rocking, and its great wound tilted up more fully into the light.
“Jesus!”
“Jeez Louise!”
“Holy shit!”
The dead giant showed itself to be all but hollowed out, emptied clear up to the spine.
A silence fell on them as the corpse receded, till Melody said, “What a way to go! Gotta make you nervous, right, sis? That killer’s a lot bigger’n our pods. Let’s hope at least he took the edge off its appetite, whatever hit him.”
The huge corpse kept drawing their eyes back as it fell astern, until the Shelf, towering nearer and nearer, commanded their attention. Its wall was becoming their world, occluding half the sky and stretching past sight to either side, with an icy breath coming off it like an invisible tidal wave. Scanning it was giving Belinda a crick in the neck.
“Okay, my dears!” Earl called them back to the wheel. “I’m gonna hang out here outside this loose stuff shoulderin’ around. You stay online all the way down, all the way under, an’ all the way back. All the
way
you keep talkin’ to me. An’ soon as you come back topside, you fire your flare-gun down, even if you got me in sight. Don’t be stingy—hang a bunch up there where we can’t miss ’em.
And—
main point here!—don’t go down more’n a hundred meters beneath the shelf! I’m not kiddin’ here!”
“Lighten up!”—touchy young Melody.
“Hey! This cold water’s full of microlife, kid! There’s a big food-base here! I mean, whaddya gotta see besides a hollowed-out orca to make ya pay attention? Far as I’m concerned, we don’ know
what-
all’s down under this shelf!”
Melody didn’t like old men sermonizing. “What’s your problem? So it had to be sharks or another killer! Of course we’re gonna pay attention, but it doesn’t mean we gotta freak out.”
Earl looked hard at her, and then at Belinda. “Okay. Fine. From this point on, we’re all assumin’ that all your strong lights’ll drive off anything big enough to threaten ya.”
The women gazed back at him stoically.
“All right,” Earl sighed. “Jest humor an old man an’ pleeze keep in mind that you, in point of
fact
, like I said, don’t fuckin’ know
what-all
lives down there.”
“Thanks, Earl,” Belinda blurted, anxious to forestall further blowback from her kid sister. “You’re right. There’s a lot of plankton in these waters, and that’s a huge food-base. We
don’t
know what we might find, and we
will
stay alert.”
“Yeah yeah,” said the old man, refusing reassurance. “Hey, don’ mind me! Mount up an’ dive.”
Their little subs were steel-and-glass bullets sixteen feet long, with bubble-cabs and every kind of camera God ever made mounted on the hulls. The women strapped in and sealed their hatches, switched on their blazing coronas, and dove.
The black sea surged through their shells of light, a silt of algae and microlife streaming up like smoke all around them as they plunged.
Down and down the Shelf’s wall they dove: it was a vast, fissured bulwark, a colossal rampart thrust out against the Deep. Both women were rapt as they sank, filled with an identical wonder to see the wide spill of their own radiance plunging down the craggy rim of the titan….
Until, seven hundred feet down, the flood of their light suddenly and awesomely blossomed out into the perfect blackness under the ice-sheet’s floor, and they beheld the awesome ceiling that—endless above them from here on in—would roof their explorations like the lid of a colossal tomb.
They turned in under-shelf and leveled off beneath her.
* * *
The Shelf’s underside was, on the grand scale, roughly evened by its endless belly-slide off the Antarctic slope, but was also colossally trenched and scored by the cruel terrain it had crossed.
The women had each other’s cockpits on display, and Earl shared both at his own screen topside. They all traded a look—an identical ecstasy of discovery. It bound them into a single awareness for that moment, as the two women moved untethered—free as thought—beneath the icy ceiling of a wholly undiscovered under-sea.
“It’s like flying upside down,” Belinda said. “Across a continent of solid ice!”
Those cracks, chasms, and valleys in the under-sheet made giant shadows of their floodlights, and the darkness in them seemed to seethe. Within its murk—far too deep for their lights to touch—it seemed that huge things hovered, gazing, brooding on the passage of their tiny, radiant vessels.
A triangular silence had fallen between them, the women below and the man above. A long silence while, as one, they watched the glacial terrain slide past overhead.
Melody found her voice. “We’re fifty clicks in and two hundred meters beneath its belly. It’s just … stupendous …”
Endlessly their light-spheres swept the scarred terrain above them. It seemed to both the pilots and their friend up in the freighter that they all saw what Melody was the first to articulate: “Up in those dark canyons don’t you see, like, things
moving
? I mean, like
big
things?”
“Yes.” Belinda and Earl said it almost together.
The three of them fell silent. The silty dark they moved through had a smoky, granular texture, sluggishly billowing around them. As they advanced, their lights woke a furtive sparkle throughout that vast turbidity—pyrites, perhaps, in the sediment that the ice titan had ground down off the continent.
“What’s that?” asked Melody. “Belinda—come alongside me up here!”
The sisters’ subs hung together under … what exactly was it? Affixed to the ice above them was a long shape, a shape bigger than both their craft combined. Even in the wash of their lights there was a vagueness to it, created, they realized, by a kind of taut, shiny bandage that bound it to the shelf’s underside.
Melody’s voice sounded hushed to her sister: “Stuff’s half transparent. It’s like … webbing. It’s like that stuff on the orca.”
“Yeah … I see it. Let’s check it out.”
“Roger that.”
”Holy shit. Is that …?”
“Another
whale
…”
“A fuckin’ sperm whale, full grown! Thing’s sixty feet long! You
readin’
this, Earl?”
“Fuckin-A I am!” A hoarseness to his voice. “Pull back outta there now!”
The women traded a glance. “Just a bit longer,” Belinda said.
The women hung below it, edging along the giant’s flank. Though the webbing reflected much of their light, its translucence confirmed, mummied within it, the blunt, squared-off head of a sperm whale.
Hanging some fifty fathoms apart, each sister could see the other’s craft nosing its light-beam up against that giant pinioned to its icy tomb. In their beams’ convergence, it seemed some colossal spider’s prey. It struck them both that whatever had bound this brute could take both their craft at once.
Then, within its milky bindings, the whale
stirred
. Were they really seeing this? Yes. Tremors, faint but distinct, rippled across its bulk.
It couldn’t be the whale itself moving. The great buttress of its head was shrunken, corded tight against its mighty skull. Even through its gauzy sarcophagus they could see the huge beast was dead. This movement was the stirring of something
inside
it.
“We gotta look closer,” said Melody. “This is just too incredible! Imagine the
predator
that did this!”
“I am! I am!” Belinda barked, her urgency crackling in Melody’s headphones. “And we gotta fall way
back
from this, right now! I mean it, Mel!”
But neither of them made the least motion to retreat. The whale, enshrouded as it was, exerted an eerie magnetism. The bulge and tremor of its underside riveted them with awe.
“Goddamn you crazy broads! Pull way back and head topside, right now! Right the fuck back topside
now
!”
Earl was screeching a little there at the end, but neither one of the women seemed to hear him. And as he saw them onscreen gazing upward through their convergent light-beams, Earl himself had to agree that those tremors in the corpse were enthralling.
And then the huge carcass’s underside erupted: two great crooked branchlike legs covered with cruel thorns thrust out of the belly, fiercely flexing, and began to tear the carcass asunder in such a smoky storm of exploded tissue that the water around it became a cloud of blindness that enveloped both their vessels. In this murk, the shock waves of some mighty motion seized and shook both craft, and they never clearly saw what it was that erupted from the exploded giant and sped away, to leave them rocking in the blood-smoky deeps.
It seemed a long time they hung there in that fog of torn tissue, beyond awe. When they found one another’s faces on their screens, they saw identical astonishment. And in their shared disbelief they realized that a new amazement lay not very far ahead of them.
It was a great column of much paler water, of water through which
light
fell. It meant that just ahead of them there was, had to be, a fracture in the Shelf that roofed them.
Steeling themselves, they approached it: a fissure of light that clove the murky deep.
They entered it, this fissure, full two hundred meters wide, and began a slow ascent into the growing brightness. And at length, they surfaced under a pallid, frost-white sky. Floating on that surface side by side, Belinda said, “Talk topside?”
“Roger that.”