Lights in the Deep (40 page)

We both spotted our target at the same time.

I could see why the kids might have liked the spot. In addition to the bizarre beauty of the Antlers, there was a shallow series of depressions surrounding the base—each just big enough to settle a sub down into. Cozy. Private.

I saw the top of a single sub, just barely poking up over the rock and sand.

I asked Dan to hang back while I pinged them with the short-range sonar. When I got no answer I motored right up to the edge of the depression, turned my exterior lights on extra-bright and aimed them down through the half-sphere pilot’s canopy.

I blushed and looked away.

Then I flashed my lights repeatedly until the two occupants inside got the hint and scrambled to get their clothes on. One of them—a girl, I think, though not Jenna—dropped into the driver’s seat and flipped a few switches until my short-range radio scratched and coughed at me.

“Hate to ruin your make-out,” I said.

“Who are you?” came the girl’s tense voice. Too young, I thought.

“Not your father, if it makes any difference,” I said.

“How did you get here?”

“Same as you.”

A boy’s head poked into view. He took the radio mic from the girl.

“Get out of here, this is our place,” he said, his young voice cracking with annoyance. I was tempted to tell him to shove his blue balls up his ass, then remembered myself when I’d been that young, coughed quietly into my arm while I steadied my temper, and tried diplomacy.

“I swear,” I said. “I won’t tell a soul about this little noogie nook. I just want to get my daughter back alive. Jenna Leighton is her name. She’s about your age.”

“Jenna?” said the girl.

“You know her?”

“I know her name. She’s part of the Glimmer Club.”

The boy tried to shush her, and take the mic away. “That’s a secret!”

“Who cares now?” the girl said. “We’re busted anyway.”

“What’s the Glimmer Club?” I said.

The girl chewed her lip for a moment.

“Please,” I said. “It could be life or death.”

“It’s probably easiest if I just show you,” she said. “Give me a few minutes to warm up our blades. I’ll tell you what I can once we’re under way.”

• • •

Jenna was six when Lucille went to live on Deepwater 8. At the time, it had seemed reasonable. A chance for my wife to get away from her routine at home, be around some people neither of us had seen in awhile, and get the wind back into her sails. It certainly wouldn’t be any worse than it had been, with all the bickering and chronic insomnia. The doc had said it would do Lucille some good, so we packed her off and waved goodbye.

On Jenna’s bunk wall there was an LCD picture frame that cycled through images, as a night light. I originally loaded it with cartoon characters, but once she swore off
Chloe and Joey
I let her choose her own photos from the station’s substantial digital library.

I was surprised to see her assemble a collection of sunrises, sunsets, and other images of the sun—a thing she’d never seen. At night, I sometimes stood in the hatchway to the absurdly small family lavatory and watched Jenna lying in her blankets, eyes glazed and staring at the images as they gently shuffled past.

“What are you thinking about?” I once asked.

“How come it didn’t burn you up?” she said.

“What?”

“Teacher told us the sun is a big giant ball of fire.”

“That’s true.”

“Then why didn’t it burn everyone up?”

“It’s too far away for that.”

“How far?”

“Millions of miles.”

“Oh.”

A few more images blended from one to the next, in silence.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?” I said, stroking Jenna’s forehead.

“Am I ever going to get to see the sun? For real?”

I stopped stroking. It was a hell of a good question. One I wasn’t sure I was qualified to know the answer to. Differences between the orbital speed of the mirror cloud and Earth’s orbital velocity, combined with dispersion from the light pressure of the solar wind, would get Earth out from behind the death shadow eventually. How long this would take, or if it could happen before the last of us gave out—a few thousand remaining, from a population of over ten
billion
—was a matter of debate.

“Maybe,” I said. “The surface is a giant glacier now. We can’t even go up to look at the sky anymore because the ice has closed over the equator and it’s too thick for our submarines to get through. If the sun comes back, things will melt. But it will probably take a long, long time.”

Jenna turned in her bunk and stared at me, her eyes piercing as they always were when she was thinking.

“Why did the aliens do it?”

I sighed. That was the best question of all.

“Nobody knows,” I said. “Some people think the aliens live a long, long time, and that they came to Earth and did this once or twice before.”

“But why block out the sunshine? Especially since it killed people?”

“Maybe the aliens didn’t know it would kill people. Last time the Earth froze over like it’s frozen now, there were no people on the Earth, so the aliens might not have known better.”

“But you tried to say hello,” she said. “When you were on the space station. You told them you were there. You tried to make friends. They must be really mean, to take the sun away after all you did. The aliens…are bullies.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I’d thought the same thing more than once.

“Maybe they are,” I said. “But there’s not much we could do about it when they came, and there’s not much we can do about it now, other than what we are doing. We’ve figured out how to live on the sea floor where it’s still warm, and where the aliens can’t get to us. We’ll keep on finding a way to live here—as long as it takes.”

I was a bit surprised by the emotion I put into the last few words. Jenna watched me.

I leaned in and kissed her cheek.

“Come on, it’s time to sleep. We both have to be up early tomorrow.”

“Okay Daddy,” she said, smiling slightly. “I wish Mama could give me a kiss goodnight too.”

“You and me both,” I said.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Is Mama going to be alright?”

I paused, letting my breath out slowly.

“I sure hope so,” I said, settling into the lower bunk beneath my daughter’s—a bunk originally built for two, which felt conspicuously empty.

• • •

The clubhouse was actually a restored segment of Deepwater 3, long abandoned since the early days of the freeze-up.

Each of the Deepwater stations were built as sectional rings—large titanium cylinders joined at their ends to form spoked hexagons and octagons. Deepwater 3 had been stripped and sat derelict since a decompression accident killed half her crew. We’d taken what could be taken, and left the hulk to the elements.

The kids had really busted their butts getting it livable again.

I admired their chutzpah as I motored alongside the revived segment, its portholes gleaming softly with light. They’d re-rigged a smaller, cobbled-together heat engine to take advantage of the exhaust from the nearby hydrothermal vents, and I was able to mate the docking collar on my sub with the collar on the section as easy as you please.

The girl and boy from the other station didn’t stick around to watch. They took me and Dan just far enough for us to see the distant light from the once-dead station, then fled. I didn’t ask their names, but I didn’t have to. I’d promised them anonymity in exchange for their help, and was eager to get onboard and find out what might have happened to my daughter. So far as I knew, I was the first adult to even hear about this place.

Only, nobody was home.

Dan hung around outside, giving Deepwater 3 a once-over with his lights and sonar, while I slowly went through the reactivated section.

It was a scene from a fantasy world.

They’d used cutting torches to rip out all the bulkheads, leaving only a few, thick support spars intact. The deck had been buried in soft, white, dry sand and the concave ceiling had been painted an almost surreal sky blue. Indirect lights made the ceiling glow, while a huge heat lamp had been welded into the ceiling at one end, glaring down across the “beach” with a mild humming sound. Makeshift beach chairs, beach blankets, and other furniture were positioned here and there, as the kids had seen fit.

Several stand-alone LCD screens had been wired into the walls, with horseshoes of disturbed sand surrounding them. I carefully approached one of the LCDs—my moist suit picking up sand on my feet and legs. Cycling through the LCD’s drive I discovered many dozens of movies and television programs. Informational relics from before the aliens came. Videos about flying, and surfing, hiking, camping, and lots and lots of nature shows.

I went to two more LCD screens, and found similar content.

I walked to the middle of the section—realizing that I hadn’t stood in a space that unconfined and open since before we’d all gone below—and used my mobile radio to call for Dan.

He hooked up at the docking collar on the opposite end of the section, and came in under the “sun”, stopping short and whistling softly.

“Can you believe this?” I said.

Like me, Dan was an oldster from the astronaut days. Though he’d never had any children, nor even a girlfriend, since his wife had died in the mad rush to get to sea when the mirror cloud made life impossible on the surface.

“They’ve been busy,” Dan said. “Is there anyone else here?”

“Not a soul,” I said. “Though it looks like they left in a hurry.”

“How can you figure?”

“Lights were left on.”

I looked around the room again, noting how many teenagers might fit into the space, and the countless prints in the sand, the somewhat disheveled nature of the blankets.

“Frankie and Annette, eat your hearts out,” I said.

Dan grunted and smiled. “I was at party or two like that, back in flight school.”

“Me too,” I admitted. “But something tells me they didn’t just come here to get laid. Look at what they’ve been watching.”

“Porn?” Dan said.

“No…yes. But not the kind you think.”

I flipped on the LCDs and started them up playing whatever video was queued in memory. Instantly, the space was filled with the sound of crashing waves, rock music, images of people sky-diving and hang-gliding, aerial sweeps of the Klondike, the Sahara, all shot on clear days. Very few clouds in the sky. It was non-stop
sunshine
from screen to screen to screen.

Dan wasn’t smiling anymore. He stared at the heat lamp in the ceiling, and the false sky, and then back at the sand.

“You ever go to church when you were a kid?” Dan asked me.

“Not really. Dad was an atheist, and mom a lapsed Catholic.”

“I went to church when I was a kid. Baptist, then Episcopal, then Lutheran. My dad was a spiritual shopper. Anyway, wherever we went, certain things were always the same. The pulpit, the huge bible open to a given scripture, the wooden pews. But more than that, they all
felt
a certain way. They had a vibe. You didn’t have to get the doctrine to understand what the building was meant for.”

“What does this have to do with anything, Dan?” I said, getting exasperated.

“Look around, man,” Dan said, holding his arms wide. “This is a house of worship.”

I stared at everything, not comprehending. Then, suddenly, it hit me.

“The club isn’t a club.”

“What?”

“The Glimmer Club. That’s what she called it. She said many of the younger teens and a few of the older ones had started it up a couple of years ago. Not every kid was a member, but most of the other kids heard rumors. To be a member, you had to swear total secrecy.”

My father had tended to consider all religions nuts, but he’d reserved special ire for the ones he called cults: the cracked up fringe groups with the truly dangerous beliefs. He’d pointed to Jonestown as a textbook example of what could go wrong when people let belief get out of hand.

I experienced a quick chill down my spine.

“They’re not coming back,” I said.

“Where would they go?” Dan asked.

But I was already running across the sand to the hatch for my sub.

• • •

Jenna was ten years old when her mother committed suicide.

Neither of us was there when it happened of course. Lucille had moved around from station to station for her last several months, until the separate crew bosses on each of the stations got fed up with her behavior. Ultimately she put herself into a sea lock without a suit on, and flooded the lock before anyone could stop her. By the time they got the lock dry and could bring her out, she was gone. And I was left trying to explain all of this to Jenna, who cried for 48 hours straight, then slept an additional day in complete physical and emotional exhaustion.

For me, it was painful—but in a detached kind of way. Lucille and I had been coming apart for years. The docs mutually agreed that sunlight deprivation may have been part of the problem. It had happened with several others, all of whom had had to seek light therapy to try to compensate for their depression. In Lucille’s case, the light therapy hadn’t worked. In fact, nothing had seemed to brake her long, gradual decline into despair. I’d kept hoping Jenna—a mother’s instinctive selflessness for the sake of her child—would pull Lucille through. But in hindsight it was clear Jenna had actually made things worse.

These thoughts I kept strictly to myself in the weeks and months that followed Lucille’s departure from the living world. I poured myself into my role as Daddy and held Jenna through many a sad night when the bad dreams and missing Mommy got her and there was nobody for Jenna to turn to but me. Eventually the nightmares stopped and Jenna started to get back to her old self—something I was so pleased about I had a difficult time expressing it in words.

For Jenna’s 12th birthday I gave her a computer pad I’d squirreled away before committing to the deep. My daughter had been going nuts decorating half the station with chalk drawings—our supply of paper having long since been exhausted. The pad was an artist’s model, with several different styli and programs for Jenna to use. It liberated her from the limited medium of diatoms-on-metal, and fairly soon all of the LCDs in our little family compartment were alive with her digital paintings.