Chapter Eighteen.

"Motive power restored," the AI said. "Pilot has control of the vessel."

"Gunny?" Lloyd asked. "What should I do?"

"Nothing," he replied. "Nothing at all."

"They haven't made any hostile moves," Montgomery pointed out. "It's like they're just watching us."

"They may be confused about us," I suggested. "Or curious. I've been wondering if they know the difference between us and the Gykr. The fact that we were fighting may have startled them."

If something the size of a small starship could be said to be startled.

"C'mon, Doc," Hancock said. "You're telling us they can't tell the difference between a human and an overgrown flea?"

"Well . . . think about it," I said. "The cuttlewhales we saw on the ice were . . . what? Maybe two hundred meters long?"

"About that," Montgomery said.

"So if we and the Gykr are both one percent of a cuttlewhale's length . . . if we were the cuttlewhale, to us the human and the Gykr both would be just this tall." I held up my thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart. "We don't know how good their eyes are. Maybe at that scale, we both look the same."

"I don't buy it," Hancock told me. "Gucks have six or eight legs, depending on how you count appendages, and they stand on their heads."

"When you look at a bug, do you bother to count the legs?" Montgomery asked. "I think Doc's right. And if their eyes see at infrared wavelengths, they wouldn't see the same level of fine detail we do."

"Besides," I said, "what they're looking at now are two deep submersibles, and they're not all that different from one another-an egg shape and a cigar. I-"

A high-pitched squeal sounded through the compartment, and all of us looked up at the overhead, our hearts suddenly hammering. "Jesus!" Lloyd said.

The sound continued, growing slowly deeper, rougher . . . punctuated by a loud, sharp pop.

"Is the hull failing?" I asked.

"N-no," Lloyd said after a moment. "No. We're okay, I think. The sound . . . it's coming from the Guck sub. We're hearing the sound transmitted through the water."

We all stared at the other submarine.

The implosion came with startling suddenness. In one instant, the Gykr vessel was egg-shaped. In the next, it was a perfect sphere, and the noise of its collapse was like a cannon's shot. Walsh rocked heavily as the surrounding water rebounded.

Swiftly, the Gykr vessel, what was left of it, began to outpace us, falling into the depths.

"No air bubbles?" Ortega said. "I would have thought-"

"The pressure probably pushed all the air into solution in the water," I said. "Like nitrogen in the blood when a diver is under enough pressure."

"I wonder how many Gykrs were on board," Lloyd said.

"We saw eight or ten scramble on board when Haldane came in overhead," Hancock said. "Must have been a damned tight fit, though. I wouldn't have thought the habitable space on board was much more than what we have here on the Walsh."

"They have a communal, gregarious culture," Ortega observed. "They might not mind being packed in like sardines."

"No reaction from our friends out there," Hancock observed. "Bring the light up a little more, would you, Lloyd?"

As the light intensified, we could see more details in the surrounding titans.

It was hard to tell how far away they were. They were so big that scale was tough to judge. We could switch on the sonar, of course, but we all remembered the apparent reaction of the cuttlewhales when we'd put sonar transponders into the ocean earlier.

They were quiescent at the moment, but we really, really didn't want to make them angry.

"Hey," I said, noticing something odd. "Look at that close one to port. Look at its mouth."

"I see it," Montgomery said. "Dr. Murdock's reports suggested chromataphore communications. That's why they named them after terrestrial cuttlefish."

When the creature closed its mouth and stretched its eyestalks and the forest of tentacles around the outside of its head wide, it revealed a ring of flat, pale skin encircling the puckered central opening. The skin there was stretched taut and had a complex, mottled look to it-gray-green markings against a paler gray. And those markings were . . . changing, creating a writhing, shifting series of patterns, one flowing into the next in pulsing waves.

"Do you think it's trying to communicate with us?" Lloyd asked.

"More likely it's talking with the others," Hancock said. He grimaced. "Something along the lines of, 'Hey, fellas . . . is it good to eat?' "

"Can you make anything of it, D'deen?" Ortega asked.

NO. WE HAVE NEVER VISITED THIS WORLD, NOR ENCOUNTERED THESE CREATURES BEFORE, REMEMBER. HOWEVER, WE DO KNOW OF NUMEROUS SAPIENT SPECIES THAT USE SIMILAR METHODS FOR COMMUNICATING AMONG THEMSELVES. SOME OF THESE METHODS ARE QUITE SOPHISTICATED, AND CAPABLE OF TRANSMITTING A GREAT DEAL OF DATA IN A SHORT PERIOD OF TIME.

"Do you think you could figure out what they're saying?"

HOW? WE HAVE NO STARTING POINT, NO COMMON UNDERSTANDING.

"It's not like we can point to a chair and have them tell us their name for it," I pointed out.

"If they're intelligent," Ortega said, "they would know that."

"Hey, Gina?" I said.

"Yes?"

"Could you set up the lights on the outside of our hull to kind of . . . I don't know, repeat back those patterns?"

"Why?" Hancock asked. "We won't know what we're saying."

"It might be interesting to see what they do," I suggested.

"Yeah . . . like poking one with a stick." Hancock considered the idea for a moment. "Okay. Can you do it, Lloyd?"

"Sure, Gunny. I'm turning over all light control on the port side of the Walsh to the AI. It can analyze the patterns and reflect them back."

"Do it."

It took a few moments to set the system up, but after a moment, the AI said, "We are displaying the patterns of color on the hull now, with a one-tenth second delay."

Essentially, each square centimeter of Walsh's surface contained a layer of solid-state nanobots that could generate varying amounts of light, and the AI, using quantum electric effects through the compressed-matter hull, could control them like individual pixels on a display screen. Other external nano registered incoming light and transmitted data to the AI, effectively giving it all-round vision. Our AI could see the pattern shifts in the encircling cuttlewhales, and return the sentiments.

The response was instantaneous. All of the cuttlewhales became agitated, their tentacles and eyestalks lashing about in apparent reaction to our message, and several drew back into the shadows.

"It would appear," Montgomery said, "that we have established communications. They certainly seem to have gotten the message."

"A message, at any rate," Ortega added. "I wonder what the hell we just said?"

The nearest cuttlewhale was signaling again, but its message was different now, a slow and rhythmic pulse beginning at the center and spreading outward. Very slowly, the patterns became more complex, interweaving twists and turns of moving color.

"Maybe we could send pictures," Hancock suggested. "You know . . . animated images."

"Maybe eventually," Montgomery said. "But we're not just separated from them by language. Doc is right. Things that we know well-a chair, for instance-would be meaningless to them. We show them an animation of a man walking, along with the word . . . but that wouldn't mean a thing to creatures that swim or crawl."

"So we use it to convey the word go," Ortega said.

Montgomery sighed. "Learning a completely alien language is never as easy as the entertainment vids say it is," she said. She glanced aft at D'deen. "It took us two years to learn how to communicate with the M'nangat, remember. And they were learning our languages, had access to our computer Net, had some very powerful AIs of their own on-line, and have had a few thousand years of experience in learning to communicate with aliens. Not only that, we share a lot in common with the M'nangat-like environment, biochemistry, and emotional content. We're not going to learn how to discuss physics with cuttlewhales in an afternoon."

Nevertheless, the language lessons continued throughout the rest of that afternoon as Walsh continued its slow descent into the Abyss. We had control of the vessel now, and one by one all of the other ship's systems came back on-line. We could have stopped the descent, or begun a return to the surface, but Gunny Hancock decided we were best off leaving things exactly as they were. There was no telling what the response from our giant escorts would be if we abruptly powered up and took off.

We appeared to be at the center of a titanic conclave of the beasts. We could make out the vast and sinuous shadows coming and going out at the farthest limits of our sphere of light, and our AI estimated that there were more than a hundred cuttlewhales in fairly close proximity to the Walsh.

"What are the pressure limits on the Walsh?" Ortega wanted to know some hours later. "We must be pretty deep by now."

"Four hundred sixteen kilometers," Lloyd said.

"That's over thirty-nine tons per square centimeter," I said.

"How much more can we stand?"

"I don't think anyone knows," Hancock said. "Compressed matter is damned tough stuff. The more you squeeze it, the stronger it gets, but without internal spaces caving in."

"That doesn't seem to have helped the Gykr sub," Lloyd said. "They must have had a compressed matter hull, too, just to go as deep as they did."

"Ahh, there are just too many variables to draw any conclusions," I said. "We can't assess an alien technology, not from in here, anyway. And we don't know how badly they were damaged, or what their pressure indices are, or even whether they use the same type of CM that we do."

I wasn't a materials engineer, and didn't know the details. But I did know that, just as with exotic ices, there were lots of different ways to squeeze atoms together.

The question now was not so much why the Gykr sub's hull had failed, as how much deeper we could go before ours failed as well.

Still, the original idea had been to go into Abyssworld's extreme depths . . . a voyage of thirty hours to reach Sierra Five, or better than twelve days to go all the way to the bottom of Abyssworld's ocean, eleven thousand kilometers down. Walsh's engineering specs must have allowed us pretty good odds of reaching those depths for the idea even to have been considered.

But then, the Gykrs must have had the same engineering assurances before they'd put their egg-shaped boat in the water.

It was not a very encouraging thought.

As more hours passed, I got to know Gina better. We were about the same age and the same rank-second class-and she seemed increasingly worried about her spur-of-the-moment brainstorm that led her to ram the Gykr sub. We regrew a portion of the deck to create a seat big enough for the two of us, side by side, and ended up talking about . . . stuff. Our careers and Navy experiences . . . our families . . . where we'd been and ships to which we'd been assigned . . . anything, in short, except her decision of hours before. I learned that she'd been born and raised in California, that she'd been a military brat with a father in the Navy, a mother in the Marines, and a brother in the High Guard, that she'd been engaged to a guy in a line marriage in Iowa, but broken it off when she'd learned that one of her new husbands was a religious neo-Ludd and something of a fanatic.

"That's the thing," she told me. "If God gave us hands and minds, why would She give us the capability of changing our environment to suit us, and then turn around and forbid us from doing it?"

"I don't think She cares one way or another," I said. My arm was comfortably around her shoulders now, and I wondered if Doob would have approved of my enjoying the physical proximity of his current love like this.

Well, hell. It wasn't like we could do anything about it. Walsh's crew compartment was far too cramped to permit anything even approaching privacy. Right now, Ortega and Montgomery were two meters behind us, deep in a technical conversation about depth, temperature, and pressure on worlds like this one or Europa, while Hancock was wrapped up in a private in-head exchange with D'deen.

I played back the conversation of a moment before, and blinked. Gina had referred to God as She.

I commented on this, and she shrugged. "We were TradGard. Pretty much old school, Goddess and God . . . though the male aspect was usually downplayed to the role of divine consort. The emphasis was on the Divine Feminine."

"Traditional Gardnerian?" I nodded. "My family was on the other side of the Great Split," I admitted. "Reformed Gardnerian. I never really believed, though. Not all of it. Some of the myths were pretty silly. . . ."

"Myths are just expressions of human psychology given story bodies," she said. "They're not supposed to be what we think of as 'real.' "

"Nine million women burned, hung, or tortured to death as witches during the Middle Ages? No, that's not real. It's anti-church propaganda. The actual number was probably in the tens of thousands, though we'll never know for sure."

"Tens of thousands was still ghastly."

"Of course it was. But some modern Wiccans felt the need to compete with the Holocaust of the twentieth century. As if inflating the numbers makes it worse."

"So what do you believe?"

"Well . . . I don't believe in the Christian hell . . . a loving father who tortures His creations for eternity because they chose to believe the wrong things."

"I thought that was the devil."

"If God is God, He's the one responsible, right? Unless you're into dualism with two gods. And I don't believe that there's only one way to salvation . . . or even that we need salvation. We're responsible for our own shit, our own decisions. That's the only way that makes any sense at all of a nonsensical universe. . . ."

Our conversation wandered on. Both of us were inclined toward the reincarnation taught by both of our respective religions, neither of us cared at all for the more organized aspects of those religions. It was interesting, I thought, that Gardenerian Wicca, which had begun centuries ago as a kind of protest against the strictures of organized religion, against the you-must-believe-this-to-be-saved nonsense of the Church, had itself devolved into thou shalts and thou shalt nots.

Or maybe it had always been that way, even for the Wiccans. Maybe thou shalt not was the central essence of all human religion, and a reflection of human nature. The Ten Commandments were a splendid expression of the social contract-of how to behave in civilized society-but they left something to be desired when they were enforced by fear of burning for all eternity. The Witches' Rede of the Gardnerians and others was gentler: "So long as it harms no one, including yourself, do what you will."

But humans being humans, even that simple statement had wandered into debate and schism. The truth of it was, so far as I could tell . . . nothing mattered beyond taking responsibility for your own actions, treating others with respect and kindness, and being the best possible human being you could be, because the gods know that bad human beings have brought more than their fair share of misery, death, and horror down upon our species.

My thoughts, I realized, had been growing darker and more despondent the deeper we drifted into Abyssworld's deeps. The one thing you can say about organized religion is that, if you believe what they tell you, there's a certainty to the promise of an afterlife. A paradise with halos and harps . . . the charms of seventy-two willing virgins . . . the Summerlands of the Wiccans and Spiritualists . . . all of them promise to keep believers in line, made by people who didn't know, not really. If some vital aspect of self or personality did survive death, I suspected that the reality would be very, very different from the myths told to us by our religions.

This was also, I realized, a piss-poor time to be thinking about stuff like that. We'd survived this long, but the chances were damned good that the situation was going to change, and soon.

What in the names of all the gods were the damned cuttlewhales waiting for, anyway? They continued to hover just beyond our hull, following our leisurely descent, watching, as the pressures outside grew greater . . . and greater . . . and inexorably greater. . . .

The language lesson was continuing, one of the cuttlewhales projecting those weirdly shifting patterns of color and even texture across the empty area around its mouth, our AI responding, repeating the message-whatever it was-right back at them. Some of the other cuttlewhales, we could see, were projecting animated patterns across other parts of their bodies as well. Was that part of the same conversation? Or were they engaged in the cuttlewhale equivalent of whispered cross-conversations in the background?

We couldn't possibly know.

"Any progress, AI?" I asked, using my in-head link with the sub.