Rolling in the Deep (5 page)

“You’re right,” said Sunnie. “Come on, everyone. Let’s get back on the ship.” She turned and swam away, trusting the others to follow her. They did. Obedience was drilled into them as part of their training: a mermaid who couldn’t listen to instructions was a mermaid who was putting everyone around her in danger.

Jessica lagged at the back of the group, glancing down as she swam, trying to figure out why it seemed like she could see further than she should have been able to. The ocean gave her no answer, and then Sunnie was there at the bottom of the rope ladder, ready to help Jessica climb, and the mysterious lightness of the water was forgotten.

Night found the
Atargatis
alive with lights and motion. Interns manned the stations on the deck, watching as Dr. Hale’s underwater soundings came back and gradually coalesced into a map of the sea floor. Alexandra had dropped two more probes before retreating to the well-lit confines of the main cabin. Both probes were on half-mile wires, and would descend to the absolute limits of their tolerance before they began reeling themselves back in. If there were any alarms, the interns would be able to handle them.

The rest of the scientists were already in the cabin when Alexandra arrived, as were Anne and Kevin, lurking and waiting for something interesting to happen. Alexandra barely noticed that he was filming. The cameraman had become such a constant that he didn’t seem to matter anymore.

Dr. Sonja Weinstein squinted through her microscope and said, “It’s definitely blood.”

“It was definitely blood five minutes ago,” said Jonny. “Now you’re just rubbing it in.”

“You’re just upset that it wasn’t algae,” said Sonja. “Learn to lose gracefully.” She lifted her head from the scope and turned to make a note on her clipboard.

“Since you’re all making off with samples from
my
deep water probe, I think I’m the one who should be giving notes about losing gracefully,” said Alexandra. “Is there anything interesting about the blood? Apart from it having been collected from the bottom of the bathypelagic zone? We know there are fish down there. This isn’t setting any new scientific records.”

“It’s definitely fish blood; I won’t be able to tell what kind without full genetic sequencing, which is a little much for one random sample,” said Sonja. “If Imagine wants to pay for it, we can do it when we get back to shore, but I don’t have that sort of equipment aboard. I’ll be dropping my microphones in the morning. If there are whales or other cetaceans around here, I can pick up their calls and we can start winnowing down the list of things they’re likely to be hunting for in these waters.”

“Science: it’s really more of an art sometimes,” said Jill, without looking up from her map. This one was hand-drawn, and covered with notations in her small, fine hand. “Imagine’s going to want that genetic sequence and you know it. Anything that might prove that mermaids are real, marketable, and ready to turn a profit.”

“Aren’t you the cynical one?” Anton was reading a book on fish found in the Mariana Trench: as was usually his practice while reading, he kept his eyes glued to the page as he spoke. “Look, whatever the blood came from, it’s a good sign. Means there’s lots of life around here. Lots of life means lots of protein traces for me to play with, and lots of algae for Jonny, and lots of fish for Peter, and maybe even whales for Sonja. We already knew we were going to find chemicals for Alexandra and a seafloor for Jill. Let’s just be happy that none of us are wasting our time on this three-hour tour, all right?”

“You’re so smart,” said Jonny, blowing him a kiss.

“Damn straight,” said Anton, and turned the page.

The mass spectrometer beeped, signaling that it had finished analyzing its current sample. Alexandra was aware of everyone’s eyes on her as she got up and crossed to the machine. Everyone wanted to make the first breakthrough. Everyone wanted the prize, even when that prize was currently just a little more airtime in a lousy documentary on a channel mostly famed for terrible movies about giant spiders. Science was competitive because it was full of scientists.

“All right, let’s see,” said Alexandra. “I’m showing low levels of industrial pollutants—that’s good—and high levels of methane, sulfur, and diffuse proteins. Both plankton and nekton. We’re looking at a living ocean, ladies and gentlemen. Hooray for us.”

“A living ocean that we have already managed to injure,” said Sonja. “I’m so proud of us.”

“The ocean will injure us right back if we let it,” said Peter. Anne jumped. They had been on the ship for more than a week, and she wasn’t sure she had ever heard his voice before. It was low, pleasant, and oddly intense, like he was getting ready to pronounce doom on the entire voyage. “This is a good boat. It rides high in the water and it seems unsinkable. But this is the ocean. It’s sunk better boats than this one. It’ll sink us all if we’re not careful.”

“I’m pretty sure the correct term is ‘ship,’ Peter,” said Anton. “Nice of you to join the conversation. Did you get a chance to look at the blood Sonja’s got? She says it’s fish blood, and that means it’s your bailiwick.”

Peter turned slowly to face the biomolecular biologist, his eyes seeming to swim behind the thick lenses of his glasses. Anne thought—not for the first time—that of all the scientists on board, he was the one who looked most like he had been hired from a casting agency, and not from a university lab. He was tall, thin, and virtually cadaverous, with thinning hair and skin as pale as the bellies of the fish he studied. Having him stare at you the way he was now staring at Anton had to be like looking into the face of death.

“It was sampled from the bathypelagic zone, and the probe gave off no light or sound,” he said, words slow and measured, like he was talking to a very small child. “Marine mammals are attracted to light and sound, as much as to movement. Whatever the probe brushed up against was almost certainly some sort of deep-sea fish or cephalopod. The fact that it did not come up with a tentacle wrapped around it leads me to believe that it did not encounter a squid, which means fish or deep-sea octopus become our most likely candidates. Given the number of fish in the bathypelagic versus the number of octopodes, it stands to reason that the sample is from a fish. Logic stated from the start that it would fall to me. By allowing the rest of you to exhaust your interest in the matter before I begin, I guarantee myself a calm, measured period of study, rather than the circus you have all been putting on for your own amusement.”

The rest of the scientists blinked at him. Anne and Kevin did the same, briefly united with the research team by their own bewilderment. A few of the interns who had been moving around the edges of the room backed up and made their way out to the deck, where it was less likely that an old ichthyologist was about to start stabbing people with scalpels.

Then Peter smiled, revealing surprisingly large, horsey teeth, and said, “Besides, I wanted to finish reading my book before I begin unsnarling the mysteries of the deep.”

A few of the others laughed, some of the tension going out of the room. Sonja slid off of her stool and stepped aside as the older scientist put his book aside, rose from his seat, and walked over to take his first look at the sample.

Everything was quiet. Finally, Peter raised his head, a slight frown on his face. “I think I will ask about that genetic sequencing after all.”

“Why is that?” asked Anne.

He turned to face her, and consequentially the camera. He didn’t seem to notice it; all his attention was on the young woman. “It’s difficult to tell species from simply looking at blood. There’s too much variance even within a single type of animal—deducing that something comes from a fish as opposed to a mammal is often the most we can do under such primitive conditions. I am thus not in any way criticizing Dr. Weinstein’s work when I say that she is wrong.”

Sonja Weinstein frowned but didn’t say anything. Anne frowned, and
did
say something. “Are you saying that it’s not fish blood, Doctor?” She stressed his title ever so subtly. The camera would pick that up, and the audience at home would be reminded of his credentials.

“I am saying that it has many qualities in common with fish blood, and that further examination may find that I am being a foolish old man, and that it simply comes from a species of fish that has some documented aberration from the rest of its kind. But I do not recognize some of the qualities of this blood; they match up to no species or clade that I can call to mind. There are aspects that seem more mammalian than piscean. Without further information, I can’t say much more than that.”

Anne wanted to kiss the old geezer. He had spoken so clearly, and with such obvious regret for what he was saying, that the audience was going to eat him up with a spoon. She kept her face composed as she leaned forward and asked, earnestly, “Are you saying that this blood comes from a creature unknown to science?”

Peter Harris sighed. “I am afraid, my dear, that there is a chance I am saying precisely that.”

Captain Seghers liked to run a tight ship, and more, liked to know at all times that things were functioning properly on all fronts. The
Atargatis
was mostly booked for private cruises and the occasional scientific expedition, none of which had been as large or involved as many moving parts as the Imagine documentary. They had dealt with as many people, yes, but always in pursuit of a single goal, and never isolated to different decks.

She mentally ran down the list of tasks ahead of her. Check to be sure that the scientists were obeying safety protocols. Check to be sure that the camera and support people weren’t disabling in-cabin smoke detectors or overloading electrical systems in an effort to suck a little more productivity out of the already-laboring generator. Check to be sure that the mermaids were remaining on their designated decks, and not sneaking into the water when not given approval by the crew. It was a constant parade of little tasks, none of them insignificant enough to ignore, all of them inconvenient enough to become a trial.

David walked along the balcony of the lower deck with a crewman whose name—Billy? Bobby?—had never seemed important enough to learn, since he had only been hired on for this voyage, and wasn’t working out. He was slow to respond to the captain’s orders, apparently due to her gender, and he had refused to learn more than the bare minimum of ASL required by his contract. David had long since come to see this as a sign of someone who wasn’t intending to stay with the ship after that first contract was up, and if short-time crew weren’t willing to do him the courtesy of learning how to communicate, he wasn’t going to do
them
the courtesy of learning their names.

The man tapped him on the shoulder. David turned. The man was saying something, speaking with the exaggerated care of someone who really had no idea how to speak to the Deaf. Normally, that would have been all right, but it was dark on the deck, and not even the world’s best lip-reader could have decoded what the man was trying to say. David shook his head.

‘See, if you could sign, this wouldn’t be an issue,’ he signed.

The man looked at him blankly.

For his part, Bobby was coming to regret signing on with the
Atargatis
more than he could have guessed when they were still sitting safely at port. It had seemed like an awesome way to make a little scratch and pick up some spoilers about a big TV production at the same time. Spoilers were worth bank if you were the only one who had them.

He hadn’t considered the physical labor involved, or what it meant when the requirements for the job were entirely things like “how much can you lift” and “how much do you sleep.” The captain was a real ball-buster who didn’t seem to understand that men needed time to themselves once in a while, and she didn’t allow fraternization between crew members. Since all the chicks in the crew were long-timers, they weren’t willing to risk their jobs for a bit of fun—not even when he assured them that he was
very
fun. Worse, the captain also forbade fraternization with the passengers. What an ugly word that was. “Fraternization.” Made it sound like some stupid college rush party, and not the most fun men and women could possibly have together.