Fathom

The deep-sea coral cities were a cacophony of sound and movement. The humming and mumbling and purrs of laughter. The faint tingle of so much life, packed so close together. Electric pulses. We feel you, we feel you, the throb­bing told Ceph while she drifted and weaved through the coral structures, the always arrhythmic dance of the architecture.

She barely acknowledged the teeming of her neighbors and their busy activities. Her nine minds were occupied with calculating the results of her findings. No matter how she organized the data, these results meant trouble. She stared blankly at the activity around her — a swish, a flutter, a sway — not seeing any of it.

There was nothing wrong with her visual acuity. The eyes of her kind were like those of a peacock mantis shrimp. Sixteen color receptors could detect six types of polarized light. She often prided herself on her keen perception, and this sensitiv­ity was essential for her to communicate with her siblings or consorts, to detect the subtle shifts in chromatophore pigments and polarization patterns on their skin.

Still, there was an urgency plaguing her that even she couldn’t express with her intricate visual language. Maybe it was because, she glanced now at the showy mating ritual of firework jellies, no one felt the currents of time in the cities. So much of life was just eat, mate, laugh.

She heard a mournful hoot — a predator warning — but paid it no mind. Ceph could afford to be oblivious to the cares and concerns of those around her; no creature of the depths would dare hunt her kind.

Fins flashed. Silt settling.

Ceph spread all her arms wide, allowing the cool atmos­phere to fill her webbing, then snapped her body shut to lift herself above the fray. She let the giggles of schoolfish bubbling their exhilaration buoy her briefly, and tasted their thrill of escape. Below her, polyps bloomed in time with their own desires, stretching and yawning, each an open mouth singing feeeeeed.

This was life in the city. Constant as the currents.

Until the currents change, the chaotic patterns on her skin expressed while she billowed majestically out into the open sea.

Ceph found her sisters watching an argument of lights overhead, following the luminescent display of lanternfish with vague disinterest. She gently brushed an arm along each of them one by one to signal her presence.

Hi, Ceph. Hi. Ane and Ceria pulsed distractedly at the place where Ceph touched their skin. They were tending to Mone, who was at a difficult stage in their transformation from sister to male. The natural hormonal process was making Mone’s forehead bulge in a way most women found attractive. Their arms were changing shape as well. Instead of the perfect symmetry of eight, two were growing larger and stronger as the other six receded. It was painful, as all changes are, but Mone was excited for their new role; the hormones wouldn’t have begun to flood their body if they hadn’t felt their purpose so intensely.

Hey, sis. Mone communicated, along with a taste of their aches.

Ceph settled between her sisters Cnida and Zoa. The argu­ment overhead culminated in one lanternfish belching luminescent ink and swimming off. Zoa giggled.

The fuck happened to your arm? Cnida’s skin flared in greeting.

Urchin spine. Ceph replied, filtering the nutrients from the clouds of organic debris drifting down from above, ignor­ing her unresponsive arm. Had research to do in the seafloor flats, must’ve fallen asleep …

And you let a filthy urchin nuzzle up to you out there? Cnida scoffed. Why are you even spending all that time rolling around in that wasteland?

Ceph hid her numbed limb, but her coloring couldn’t con­ceal her vague irritation. You know why —

Cnida unfurled all eight arms to cut her off, then prickled her skin to mock her. Oh right. Your “science.”

Ceph puffed herself full of indignation in a threat display.

The snow is rich today, the pulsing patterns of Ane’s skin announced, casually changing the subject.

Maybe a hint of whale corpse perfectly brined, Ceria agreed.

Although Ceph and her sisters were genetically clones, she sometimes wondered how they were even related. She had most in common with Zoa — at least they were both propelled by a kind of curiosity. The others were satisfied to sit there and let nourishment snow down on them.

Ceph! Zoa blushed and twined her arms around and around Ceph’s, blithely unaware of her sister’s billowing mood. Listen!

Ceph deflated some and listened. There! She heard it. The faint echoes of a whale rider screaming their stories.

Zoa and Ceph often discussed how it was possible for the whale riders to know about all the stories they sang. They must lead wild, exciting lives traveling all parts of the seas. Ceph received the stories like reporting: news from the big blue making its way to the depths. Zoa devoured the sagas like snow from above; pure entertainment. Cnida, of course, dismissed the whole art form, convinced that whoever the whale riders were, they had to be making it all up. No one could actually believe the nonsense they were spreading.

How can you two listen to that dreck? Cnida signaled, and punctuated her remark by deploying her neurotoxin on a cutthroat eel she felt had invaded her space.

The eel’s body seized and spasmed and tied itself into involuntary knots.

How can you make even a stonefish seem cuddly? Ceph retorted.

Cnida snorted bubbles of amusement, while Zoa cleared the chemical cloud with a spiraling of her body. The eel regained its senses enough to squirm out of reach.

They sometimes joked that Zoa had three kind hearts and Cnida none at all.

Cnida flashed a mocking array of colors at her sisters, teasing them for their misguided compassion.

To shut her up, Ceph’s slithered her arm close to her sister’s gill cavity to feign choking her, but Cnida laughed out a propulsion of bubbles and ducked away. Ceph’s spiky sister might be heartless, but she did have a sense of humor.

Come on, Zoa called to Ceph and pulled her up into the murk, lifting them higher so they could catch the sonar swells of the distant whale rider’s song.

 

Venus’s flower basket blooms in the deep.

She weaves herself of sea-glass fibres

as young dreamers sleep.

 

If the currents favor fortune, as currents often do,

then into her heart, will come a lucky two.

Young crustaceans adrift,

slip between the slender slits …

 

Inside her heart, the shrimp bows to his bride.

They tend to their basket, and the basket provides.

The basket feeds and nurtures,

until they’re trapped inside.

 

It is there they raise a family

it is there they feed and grow

it is there they release their babies

to find a glass house of their own.

 

Where they in turn will live forever

in an intricate vase of lace.

But who could ever want escape

from such a delicate embrace?

 

Zoa twirled and danced and sent out a bubble net of applause at the end of the song, even though it would never carry as far as the distant whale rider. Wasn’t that romantic? Zoa’s skin patterns fluttered like her accelerated heart rate.

Ceph’s coloring was more muted. Was that romantic?

Zoa kept swirling in her mesmerizing dance. The faint cilia along her arms crackled, bioluminescent nodes shimmer­ing at the ends of the filaments.

The sight was so lovely that Ceph had to turn away. Ceph had a reputation for her elegant and precise dance — no mimic octopus alive could ever capture her essence — but the open­ness and expression of Zoa’s movements, the longing and ache, was transmitted to all creatures who saw it.

I WANT THAT. Zoa flung her arms open wide with such force that her dance sent superheated shock waves in eight directions. Ceph busied herself with calculating the distance the pressure waves might travel, so as not to get lost in the chemicals her sister was releasing, maybe unintentionally.

WHAT do you want? Ceph flashed, even though she could taste what her sister meant. A deep dark love. You want to be shrimp trapped for the rest of your life?

No. Zoa was twirling so fast now, thrashing. I WANT TO BE THE BASKET! She came to an abrupt stop, her arms fanned out in an expansive gesture as she released another blast of endorphins and chromatic flares. Ceph gasped, stunned. Like the other creatures that had been lured close by the movement and light and chemicals. The firework jellies and squid and nearly imperceptible zooplankton; they all floated, immobile. They’d been overpowered by the release of Zoa’s emotion. Intoxicating, and somehow more dangerous than the girls’ defensive neurotoxins.

Still dizzy, Ceph threaded her arms around her spent and drifting sister. She pulled Zoa in close. Maybe Cnida was right, Ceph let a taste seep out to her sister. We shouldn’t be listening to those stories.

The sisters chided Ceph when she returned Zoa’s listless form to their care. Cnida blasted Ceph back with a jet of superheated ire before descending to tend to Zoa. Ceph accepted the blast; the brief searing shook her out of the lingering mesmer of Zoa’s dance. She watched them fuss over Zoa, then fanned wide before propelling herself away.

Sure, Zoa had told them all before of her desire, her wish to find the right guy and incubate a brood. But they never really took her seriously; Ceph, at least, never took her sister seriously.

Mone was the one who was going to go out there and carry their genetic material into the next generations. Ane and Ceria were eager for it. They would be the aunties who would raise and care for the young, just as their father’s sisters had cared for the six of them. They’d never met their father, and the aunties left when the sisters were old enough to care for each other, to attend to their father’s new brood soon ready to hatch, as their culture and custom expected.

They’d never met their mother, obviously. The women of their kind died soon after their babies emerged from their egg capsules. Which was why it had always been incomprehen­sible to Ceph that her sister would choose that fate, to cut her adult life so short. With their neurotoxin defenses and superior intelligence, Ceph’s kind of seafolk had nothing to fear in the deep. Like sponges and tube worms, they had nearly immea­surable lifespans. They could easily live three hundred years before turning to sea-foam.

Ceph knew there must be many women willing to make that sacrifice — the evolution and longevity of their kind depended on it. But how could Zoa be one of them? She recalled the taste of her sister’s longing, the sweet stinging overwhelming the senses. For Ceph, the idea of motherhood had always been a cold calculus, and the result of her math­ematics had deemed the proposition not worth it. Yet Zoa’s dance described emotions Ceph had never considered. And even though Ceph still didn’t feel them, she knew now. They were powerful.

A bright lure on an anglerfish’s hook, Ceph scoffed. So dangerous.

These thoughts plagued her as she returned to the out­skirts of the cities to make her readings of the currents. These petty squabbles with her sisters, concern for future genera­tions, weren’t separate from her work. They fed into the torrent of what she knew but had been unable to express. If she couldn’t even get her actual genetic clones to understand what was threatening their kind, how could she convince any creature of the deep?

The noise of the anemones faded as Ceph drifted away from the coral cities. The flashy colors favored by the deep-sea denizens muted into the murk of the seabed mudflats. Her nine minds were still active, still working out a problem with contours she couldn’t quite see. She had the sense of a bubble. An image of a bubble.

Then the bubble popped.

Ceph grew rigid. Halted her momentum. She was so visibly disturbed by the premonition that if anyone noticed her aggressively defensive posture and spiked skin texture, they might’ve mistaken her for Cnida.

Ceph arrived at the site she had been returning to each waking cycle. An unassuming spot on the aged seabed, an empty plain of mud. It appeared barren and unchanged com­pared to the coral cities, but Ceph knew it was merely sparsely populated. Nowhere in the deep was truly lifeless.

She greeted a mud-dweller with a flickering at the tip of her arm. Partly out of habit, partly because she knew him to be an ambush predator with endless patience but not that great of a memory. Acknowledging him with a polite A fine one to you, Mr. Mud-dweller, would go a long way to avoiding awkward misunderstandings if he hadn’t recognized her and thought he could be sly. The mud-dweller acknowledged her greeting by shuffling farther away on his primordial feet.

Truth was, none of the sea-mud scurriers appreciated having seafolk from the city coming there, disrupting their com­munity. Ceph tried to explain that the results of her research would have consequences for everyone in the deep, listed the reasons why she couldn’t conduct her observations from the city, but the local population wasn’t sympathetic. It was only through conversations with some crab grandmas that she had arrived at an uneasy agreement with them. Ceph didn’t have a shared language with the cantankerous old ladies. Yet she could understand their aggressive body language well enough having grown up with Cnida, a native speaker of fuck you, to appreciate their concerns. She respected them and vowed not to release any chemicals or do any fancy flashing while con­ducting her experiments in their homes.

The locals largely left her alone while she was doing her fieldwork. But now that the results were becoming clearer, the patterns practically burned on her skin as she obsessed over them, she knew she’d have to learn a better way to com­municate her findings. She watched a flapjack octopus sift through the mud for worms; he’d adapted to jet away from danger, but if what she discovered about the currents was correct, there would be no escaping this.

The feeling had finally returned to Ceph’s urchin-numbed limb, but the rest of her was still a bit dazed from Zoa’s out­burst. Filling herself with all the oxygen she could wrest from the salts, she allowed the pressure of the deep to squeeze her comfortably, center her, hold her together. Her minds needed to be clear and her wits sharp for her ritual experiments.

She located her seafloor marker — the locals had stopped sabotaging it after their agreement — and launched herself up into the current.

There, propelled by the ancient coursing of the current, she danced.

The sciences of seafolk were interdisciplinary. Most creatures from the deep were naturally chemists, though Ceph’s exemplary taste and sensitivity were assets in her work. Through her skin, she collected chemical and temperature readings. Each prescribed motion of her precise dance marked the duration of her ride through the current.

She let all the information surge through her. Built a conception of the world, the distances traveled. Compiled the tastes and temperatures into overlapping indices. Then with a final flourish, dropped from the current, exhausted, but not done.

Ceph sorted and combined the impressions of her journey while she measured the distance back to the seafloor marker. She concentrated on counting the slow return paces. Meticulously unfurled and stretched her arms’ lengths, adjust­ing for seasonal growth. Bubbles caught in the dull cilia on her arms, the silvery beads breaking free and bobbing up into the endless above.

Back at the marker, she made her final calculations — integrated and cross-referenced the data in her memory. There was no mistaking it.

The currents were slowing.

Measurably. In a non-geologic timescale.

This was her life’s work, and she wanted to be wrong.

She went over her data again and again, lining up the vari­ables from each of her fifteen thousand dances through the current. The interconnected compilations of rich data points were even more damning than the simplified summaries. How could this have happened?

It hadn’t been any secret that things had been getting warmer. All the other creatures had taken their own instinctual notice of the rising temperatures and made their subtle adap­tations to adjust. But … the slowing of the currents … who could’ve predicted that? The constant churning of currents was what brought oxygen to the deep. How, the polarized patterns on her skin pulsed with alarm, how can I tell them what this means?

Ceph made note of her surroundings, saw a single sea toad lazily flicking pebbles over his body. Concealing himself with a primitive camouflage. There’s no way to hide from this, her skin signaled in distress. The sea toad continued to bury him­self in pebbles, unable to decipher her flashing patterns. Unaware of the certain doom that awaited him and all life in the deep.

She needed to —

Suddenly a … a … she didn’t have a word for it … A stone-turtle-shark with four blaring bright eyes rose inelegantly over a ridge. The disorienting brightness of it alarmed her, the dumb light cast everything else in a darkness Ceph had never perceived before. She adjusted the filters of her eyes, compen­sating nearly unconsciously for the unfamiliar light source. The thing loomed large over her. What was it?

She tasted it: disgusting. A tang of shark kill and methane stink of organic decay, but not either of those. The hard, unyielding material not coral or stone. She’d never before detected anything this inorganic.

Ceph propelled herself forward into the light. She danced, her precise movements a communication. What are you?

The light did not respond.

She let the cilia on her arms ignite, rippled them in a calm­ing, questioning flutter. What do you want? the rainbow winking of her lights inquired.

The lights stared empty-eyed. Unresponsive.

Ceph was accustomed to fearing nothing in the deep, and yet this scared her. If it was truly alien, maybe it didn’t know to fear her. She released her cloud of neurotoxins as a warning. There was no change in the … predator? It didn’t blink its bright eyes nor writhe and thrash like creatures generally did. She released some more, inadvertently, in her fear at seeing her only defense had no effect.

She retreated from the creature. The lights turned slowly, clumsily to track her.

The poor sea toad had inadvertently gotten a whiff of her toxins and was now dead, the protective pebbles dropping from his body as he began to float. She covered his corpse with her body and assumed the texture and coloration of the seafloor, to hide.

She felt the heat of the light on her skin. The thing was searching for her. She kept her muscles tense and pebbled, concealing the softness of the sea toad pinned beneath her. Ceph felt terrible that her panic caused his death, but she couldn’t control her fear. She tried, anyway, to still the flutter­ing of her three hearts. Shut her eyes and bade her skin not react to the scorching light. She remained flat and rigid against the sea-bottom until she no longer felt the heat of those eyes on her.

As the thing turned its attention from her, she relaxed. Watched as it propelled itself clumsily onward.

Some of the crab grandmas were making their way over to her.

Did you see that? What was that? Ceph let her confusion pulse in her coloring.

The old crabs indicated the body of the sea toad.

They hadn’t seen the thing. They were upset she had violated their agreement and Mr. Mud-dweller suffered because of her care­lessness.

Ceph danced out of reach of their snapping claws.

I’m sorry! she flashed, but her attention was still search­ing the darkness. What was that thing?

A crowd of sea-mud scurriers emerged from their hidey-holes to shake their claws and wag their fins at her. Ceph shrugged off their displeasure and rose above them as she surveyed the direction the inorganic thing had gone. She thought she could discern its mysterious light. It was moving up-current, so not a drifter …

The noise of the crab grandmas’ claws below was dis­orienting. Ceph couldn’t understand why they were so upset. All creatures ended up as snow eventually. Excusing herself to follow the thing, she didn’t wait to see if they would accept her apology.

She kept her body low and flat, tight against the mud and ridges as she followed. Ceph wasn’t sure why she was following the thing; did it have some kind of lure? Or was she propelled by the force of curiosity. No less dangerous, she reminded herself, but she couldn’t resist.

Ceph observed that the creature had come to a stop at the edge of a cloudy lake. The dense, super-salty brine rippled up from somewhere deeper than the seafloor and accumulated in vast pools along the seabed. Corpses of crabs and hagfish littered the white barite shores giving the place an eerie stillness, punctuated only by jets of methane gas breaking through the layer of the lake.

The thing’s bright eyes scanned the surroundings. As she watched, Ceph made her body rough as the mussel shells lining the brine pool.

This is where it lives?

The thing shot upward, ascending into the endless above.

Ceph’s sisters reacted to the panic pulsing on their sister’s skin.

What happened? Ane mimicked Ceph’s alarm.

Zoa had recovered some and was listlessly feeding on snow. Ceph? You okay? she signaled in concern.

Ceph undulated and thrashed above them, using her dance to communicate what she’d seen. Since she didn’t understand what she’d witnessed, her awkward and clumsy gestures were incoherent.

She looks like that eel I zapped, Cnida sniped, apprais­ing her sister’s flailing.

I’ll handle this, Mone announced, unfurling. They had grown larger in their transformation. Even in her urgency and frustration, Ceph noted that it wouldn’t be long before her sister was one of the guys.

Mone ascended to face her. You need to calm down, sis.

Then Ceph felt a sluggishness in her arms, and a clouding of her minds. Her skin prickled in outrage, tiny raised dots of red. NO! she blazed and she spiraled to disperse the chemicals. Mone was emitting a sedative that male bodies secreted to calm women. Don’t you ever try to calm me like that again, Mone. Her skin still prickled. I’m your sister!

Crabs, you sound like Cnida, Mone chastised as they nestled back down with the sisters, but the flush of pride was clear on their skin. Mone would soon be fully male, the new chemical production was proof.

Ceph felt sick to her stomachs. Was it a side effect of the sedative? Or the uncomfortable reminder that male bodies could produce a chemical that could render her weak while her own neurotoxin had no effect on those of her kind, of any sex.

Ceph, Zoa stroked her arms along Ceph’s to comfort her. The prickles on Ceph’s skin faded. Ceph, what did you see?

Ceph gave her an approximate taste of what she’d witnessed, the tangy shark kill and inorganic stink. I don’t know, her dull coloring admitted.

 

The ones from Above

have arrived to the deep.

Seep out their presence

in the toxins and stink.

 

They’ve constructed a bubble

of plastic and pain,

blood metals and trouble …

And not one whiff of shame.

 

The ones from Above? The feathery fins around Ceph’s earholes perked up. A whale rider was singing about the thing she’d seen ascend to incomprehensible shallows. The whale riders know what it was.

You think that’s true? Zoa prodded Ceph, who was now throbbing in contemplation. That thing you saw was from The Above?

Don’t be ridiculous, Cnida flared. There’s nothing up there. The Above lacks any of the requirements to sustain Life.

How do you know? Zoa argued.

Basic science, Cnida countered, and counted off the reasons on her arms. Nothing can survive for long past the surface boundary where hydrogen and oxygen molecules fail to form covalent bonds. It’s the chemical substance vital for all known forms of life! She exhaled impatient bubbles. Crabs, Zoa, newly spawned guppies know this.

You’ve never been up there. Zoa folded her arms under herself in a petulant and pouty gesture.

NO ONE has ever been up there! Cnida extended all her arms out to full length. The lack of pressure would tear your body apart!

Ceph followed their conversation with only one of her eyes and half of her minds. She was committing the whale rider verse to memory when something caught her other eye. Lanternfish arguing again. Darting and flashing.

Cnida was partly right. None of the seafolk from the deep had ever gone Above, never even passed the twilight zone. Ascend too far and their bodies would distort and lose their form. It was uncomfortable. Pushing into shallower unknown clines could possibly dismantle their muscles on a molecular level. Prematurely pull them apart into sea-foam. They needed the pressure of the deep to hold them together.

But other creatures of the deep had passed beyond, crea­tures that she and her sisters were quick to dismiss because they were, well, fish.

Lanternfish traversed the depths up to the surface to feed and spawn.

Ceph unfurled and left her squabbling sisters below. She was suddenly enthralled by the conversations of vertebrates, which had never much interested her before. She flashed her questions at some specks of light, to get some information about what exactly was up there.

And considered how she might go about being able to see for herself.