THE DEEPS, by Keith Roberts

Originally published in 1966. Copyright © 1966 by Keith Roberts.

It was bound to happen. For generations, the chain reaction of population explosion had been going on and on. While medical skill grew, while longevity increased nearly beyond belief, humankind everywhere breed and bred and bred. Houses, estates, factories to serve the vast new economies spread and sprawled, twitching out across good land and bad, climbing mountains, suffocating rivers. Town touched town, touched town; the pink octopus tentacles of houses grew and thickened as the machines graded and scraped and hammered. Green belts and parks vanished, fields were swallowed overnight. Here and there voices were raised; the voices of economists, scientists, philosophers, even at last theologians. But they were swamped in the great universal cry.

Give us room… The shout went up night and day from a hundred million throats, the slogan blared from loudspeakers, blazed from hoardings as political parties jockeyed for power. Increasingly, room was what they promised. Room for more houses, more estates, room to rear new families that cried in their turn for room and still more room…

All over the world countrysides vanished, eaten. Wars flared as nations bit at each other’s borders, but still the Cities grew. The huge estates were searched, forced to yield their last acres, their secret gardens. And all for nothing, it seemed, because still the cry heard for room. Skyscrapers soared, fifty stories, seventy, a hundred, and it was not enough. The Cities bulged outward, noisy with music and the sound of human life. A hundred yards thick they were and blaring with light, complex with stack on twinkling stack of avenues. Raucous, Technicolored, sleepless. Everywhere, they reached the sea.

And they could not stop. The pressure, the need for room, pushed them out again. The houses sank like silver bells into blueness and quiet, and at last there was room enough.

* * * *

Mary Franklin sat in the living area of her bungalow, knitting quiet for once in her lap, and tried to watch the telscreen at the other side of the room. Across her line of sight Jen passed scuttling, bare feet scuffing the carpet, the straps of her lung flapping round her shoulders. Across and back, then across again, frantic now, going to a party at the Belmonts on the other side of town, and late. Mary raised her eyes to heaven, represented temporarily by a curved steel shell. She concentrated on the screen where a demonstrator, in vivid colour, divulged to her audience the inner secrets of a variant of crawfish mayonnaise. Jen yelped something inaudible from the bedroom, thumped the wall. (Why…?) She padded across again and back. Mary raised her voice suddenly.

“Jen…?”

Thump. Mumble.

“Jen!”

“Mummy, I can’t find my…” Indistinguishable.

“Jen, you’re not to be late. No more than nine, understand?”

“Yes…”

“And for land’s sake child, put something on…”

“Yes, Mummy…” That in a high voice, wearily. And almost instantly the roar of the sealock. Mary got up in quick rage, walked halfway to the radio gear, changed her mind, went back to her chair. Jen, she knew well enough, would conveniently have forgotten her phone-leads.

She kicked the channel switch irritably in passing; the picture on the wallscreen jumped and altered. The set began to disgorge a Western; Mary lay back, eyes nearly shut, half her mind in the ancient film and half on the blueness overhead. The endless blue.

Jen, defiantly bare, hung twenty feet above the hemispherical roof of her home. Bubbles from her breathing rose in a series of shimmering, dimly seen sickles to the Surface overhead. As always, the sea had made her forget her compulsion to hurry; she began to paddle slowly, feet in their long fins catching and driving back wedges of water. As she moved she looked below her, at the lines of domes with their neat, almost suburban gardens of waving weed. She saw the misty squares of their windows, the brighter greeny-blue globes of the streetlighting swung from thin wires above the ocean bed. Warnings were hung on long streamers of wires for swimmers; there were well-marked lanes, corresponding to the streets of the city complexes Jen barely remembered, but many people ignored them. And most of the children. Technically she was out of bounds now, gliding along like this only a few feet from Surface.

Visibility was good tonight; onshore winds could kick up a smother that lasted for days, but there had been nearly a week of calm. Jen could make out through the almost haze-free water the faint shimmer where the engineers, her father among them, were working on the new extension to the theatre and civic centre. When it was finished, the installation would be the pride of Settlement Eighty, the town its inhabitants called Oceanville. There were a dozen other Oceanvilles scattered up and down this one stretch of coast, hundreds possibly in all the seas of the world. She shivered slightly although the water was not cold.

Beyond the lights, beyond where the divers floated round the tall steel skeletons, were long sloping stretches where the town buildings petered out and the coral and sand of the inshore waters gave place to the silt of real ocean. There was a graveyard, tiny as yet, where a few bodies lay in their metal cans; beyond again, past grey Junes where the light faded imperceptibly to navy blue and black, were the Deeps. Above anything else Jen liked to go to the new buildings, sit on one of the girders, look down into the vagueness that was the proper sea, bottomless and immense. Just stare, and listen, and wait. She would go there tonight maybe, after the party.

She let herself relax, holding air in her lungs to increase buoyancy. Her body floated upward, legs and arms slack; Surface appeared above her, a faintly luminous upside-down plain. Points of light sparkled where the moon-track refracted into the depths. Jen wagged lazily with her flippers, once, twice; her body broke the Surface and she felt herself lifted by the slight action of the waves.

She looked round. The sea was flatly calm, dark at the horizon, glinting with bluish swirls of phosphorescence round her shoulders and neck. When she looked closely, she could see the organisms that made the light floating in it like grains of brightness. Way off was the orange cloud reflection over the land, where the universal Cities bawled and yammered. Jen lay still, supported by the water. Once she would have pulled her mask aside, breathed in the wet salt of ordinary air. Now she felt no desire to do so. She turned slowly treading water, took a last look at the moon, and dived. Her heel stirred up a momentary flash of light Once below she moved powerfully, stroking with her arms She arrowed down to West Terrace where the Belmonts had their dome. The party would be in full swing already; she was missing good dancing time.

* * * *

Hours later. Mary prodded one of her rare cigarettes from the wall dispenser. She frowned a little, drawing in smoke and letting it dribble from her nostrils She lay back and watched the fumes being sucked toward the ceiling vent The telscreen was off; the last badman had bitten the dust and she had grown tired of watching The bungalow seemed very quiet; the buzz of the air conditioning plant sounded unusually loud, as did the recurring clink-thump of the refrigerator solenoids from the kitchen.

She stood uncertainly, fingered her throat, took a step, paused She went to the alcove by the kitchen that housed the radio link and telephone. Beside the handset the dome metering equipment chuckled faintly Inside the grey housings striped discs spun, needles wavered against their dials. Force of habit made her check the readings. All normal, of course… She touched the phone, pulled at her lip with her teeth, made herself take her hand away. A quarter of an hour, that was nothing. When she was dancing Jen forgot the time. They all did. She would be home in a few minutes, by nine-thirty at the latest. She knew exactly how long to outstay an order… Mary went back to the living area, turned the telscreen on, clicked the channel switch to five. While the set was warming she walked through to David’s cubicle, peered in. He was asleep, hair tousled on the pillow.

Nine-fifty.

Mary got up again, walked to the window in the curved wall. She drew the curtains back, looked across the street at the neighbouring houses visible through the faint residual haze. A little fear stirred somewhere at the back of her mind, throbbed, stilled itself again. She wondered, fear of what? Accidents maybe; they happened, even in the best-run towns. Jack—but it wasn’t that. She laughed at herself quietly, trying to shrug away her fit of nerves.

These late shifts of her husband’s were a curse but there was no help for them; the new building was going ahead fast and as engineering controller for the sector Jack had to be almost constantly on site. She told herself, physically her husband was not far away She could ring him if she had to. How far off was the new complex, a hundred and fifty yards, two hundred? No distance, by terrestrial standards… But here under the sea, just how far was a hundred yards? Could be a lifetime, or an epoch. She grimaced. That was what the fear was about, what the…throb…tried to tell her maybe. That under the sea, patterns and values could change ineradicably.

She sat down, crossed her knees, laid her head against the back of the chair. After a few moments she picked up the abandoned knitting and stared at it. She was making a sweater, though there was no point in the exercise. The domes were air-conditioned and sea temperature only varied a few degrees through the year; nobody needed sweaters down here and the yarn was expensive. It came from Surface and all Surface things were dear. But it was something to do, it kept her hands busy. Above all, it was a link with the past.

Ten o’clock.

The face of the clock was round and sea-blue, the hands plain white needles. They moved in one-minute jerks; Mary imagined that she could see the tiny quiver that preceded each jump. She stubbed out the cigarette. The party would be long finished now, the dancers dispersed.

Dancers? She shook her head. She could remember the dancing in the Cities, the pulsing rhythms, frenetic jerking. That pattern, like everything else, had changed. She remembered the first time she had heard what they called sea-jazz, the shock it had given her. Jen had a player in her bedroom, it wailed and bumped half the night, but the rhythms, the melodies, were like nothing she had ever heard landside. The music howled and dragged, the beats developed timings that defied notation, had in them something of the slow surge of the tides. It was music for swimming to.

The Belmonts had a dance floor but it was outside, in the sea. Airposts surrounded it, and speaker casings; round them the kids would swirl like pale flakes among the hordes of fish that always seemed to be attracted. “But Mummy,” Jen would say if she protested. “You just don’t gel, you’re not wavy…” It was all part of the new phraseology; the boy down the block, Kev Hartford wasn’t it, he gelled for Jen, he was a wave; but the lad from the airplant, Cy Scheinger who had visited once or twice, was out of favour. He was neapy, a scorp. (Scorpion fish?) The sea, and thoughts of the sea, pervaded their whole lives now even to the language they spoke. Which was natural, and it should be…

Why did we call her Jennifer? Why, of all the names we could have used? The Jennifer was a sea-thing, and accursed…

It was no use. Mary killed the sound from the screen, walked back to the phone, lifted the handset and dialled. She listened to the clicking of the exchange relays, the faint purr-purr at the other end of the line. An age, and the receiver was lifted.

“Ye-es?” The slight coo in the voice, unmistakable even through the surging distortion of the sea. The Belmonts were just a little conscious of their status; Alan Belmont was fisheries manager for the area. Mary licked her lips. “Hello? Hello, Anne, this is Mary. Mary Franklin… What? Yes, fine thank you… Anne…is Jen still at your place by any chance? I told her nine, she’s late, I wondered if…”

Anne Belmont sounded vaguely surprised. “My dear, I shooed them off positively hours ago. Well, an hour… Hold the line…”

Unidentifiable human sounds. Someone calling faintly. The wash…crash…of the sea.

“Hello?”

“Yes…”

“Just before nine,” said the phone. “We sent them all off, there’s no one here now… You say she’s not back?”

“No,” said Mary. “No, she’s not. “ Her knuckles had whitened on the handset.

The phone clucked. “My dear, they’re all the same; ours are hopeless, time means nothing, absolutely nothing… But I’m quite sure you needn’t worry, she’ll be along any moment. Perhaps she’s with that Cy boy, whatever his name is…yes…”

Ice along the spine, moving out like fingers that gripped and clutched. “Thank you,” said Mary. “No, no, of course not. Yes, I’ll let you know… Yes, goodbye Anne…”She laid the handset on its cradle, stood looking at it, not knowing what to do. The sea pushed at the dome gently, slurringly.

A quarter after ten.

Mary stood very still in the middle of the living area, lips pursed. She had called the airworks; Cy was off duty, could not be traced. And two or three neighbours and friends. No Jen. She could not ring Jack at the construction office, not again. Down here you helped your husband, pulled your weight. You didn’t run panicking at every little thing… The trembling had started, in her legs; she rubbed her thighs unconsciously through her dress. She touched the hair pinned into a chignon at the nape of her neck. In front of her, on the sill of the window, a plaster foal pranced, hooves outlined against greenness. The greenness was the sea.

Decision. She pulled at her hair, shook it free round her shoulders. She unsnapped the clasp at her neck, wriggled her dress up over her head. Beneath it she wore the conventional blue leotard of a married woman. She plucked automatically at the high line of the legs, kicked her sandals off, crossed to the equipment locker. She came back with her sea gear, lung, mask and flippers. She dressed quickly, fastening the broad straps round her waist and between her legs, the lighter shoulder harness that held the meter panel across her chest. Habit again made her check the dials, valve air, slap the red cancellator-tab on her shoulder. That was another safety factor; if for any reason air stopped flowing from the pack and that tab was not touched, a built-in radio beacon would arrow town guards down to the wearer.

She looked in at David again, satisfied herself he was still sleeping. She walked to the sealock, stopped on the way to see herself in the half-length mirror. She was heavier now, her hips had broadened and there were maybe faint worry lines round her mouth. But her hair was brown and soft; landside she would still be a desirable woman.

She looked round the dome slowly, seeming to see familiar things in a new light that was bright and strange. The bungalow was double-skinned, the inner ceiling finished in octagonal plates of white and pale blue plastic. The half-round shape, dictated by considerations of pressure, had the secondary advantage of enclosing the greatest possible volume of space; deep-pile carpets covered the floors, the furniture was low and streamlined, easy to live with. The telscreen was tucked neatly into an alcove; to each side of it were wall tanks with fish and anemones. Through a half-open door she could see the kitchen. It was miniaturised but well equipped, with plenty of stainless steel like the galley of a ship.

The whole bungalow was as safe as it was functional. In the unlikely event of a fracture in the pressure shell, the second skin would hold the sea while instantaneous warnings were flashed to a central exchange, ensuring help within minutes. Not that anything could or would go wrong of course, the whole system was too carefully worked out for that. People had been living undersea for years now, and fatalities were far fewer than on the overcrowded land.

Mary grimaced, stepped through into the lock and closed the inner hatch. The ceiling lamp came on; she pressed the filler control, heard the hiss as air was expelled through the outlet valves.

She squatted in rising water to work the straps of the flippers over her heels, straightened up. The coolness touched her hips; she pushed her hair back, spat in the mask and rinsed it, pressed the transparent visor onto her face. The plastic was self-adhesive, moulded to her skull contour; it fitted from forehead to chin. She palmed the earphones into place, reached under her arm for her mike leads, flicked the tags onto the magnetic contacts in her throat. The compartment filled, water rising greenly over her head. As the pressure equalised, the outer segment of wall slid aside automatically, letting in the hazy glow of the street lighting. Mary kicked away and floated up from the dome, sensing the old lift as the sea shucked off her weight. Her hair swirled across her eyes gracefully, like fronds of black fern.

She swam slowly across the town. To each side, lines of round-topped buildings marched out of the haze. Some of the houses were still new and bright with their coated steel skins, others had grown a rich waving cover of algae. In the main street the shop windows were brightly lit; the plate-glass ports displayed seafoods set on white dishes garnished with fronds of weed; there were aqualungs and radiophones, Surface ware of all sorts, clothes and books, records, dolls, toys. Here the ocean floor had been cleared to the rock that underlay the sand; overhead were slim arches to which were moored the sledges of out-of-tov/ners, the fish herders and oceanographers whose work took them to lonely domes scattered over the bed of the sea. There were lights on the gantries; each globe hung glaring in greenness, surrounded by a flickering cloud of tiny fish like moths round a terrestrial lamp. Over everything was an air of peace, the dreamy peace of dusk on an ancient, unspoiled Earth.

There were few human swimmers about, but here and there, careering over the roofs of buildings, Mary caught sight of glistening shapes. Dolphins—they had been quick to discover the sea-floor communities and take advantage of them. Many families, in fact, kept one or more of them as semipermanent pets, became very attached to them. Other creatures occasionally troubled the townships—sharks, rays, the odd squid. But the repellents carried by the swimmers in their harness had been developed to a stage where there was little to fear. The town guards could be relied on to harpoon or shoo off any of the big fellows who hung around too close or too long, though in the main there was little to attract predators.

Disposal of garbage was rigidly controlled; locking offal into the sea was about the worst crime in the book, it could result in being sent landside. The “monsters of the deep”, in so far as they existed, tended to avoid the colonies. They disliked the brightness and noise, the bustle, the thud of many vibrations criss-crossing in the water. As Jack never tired of pointing out, life down here was as safe or safer than on land.

Mary doubled back, passing the king-size domes that held the town distillation plant. The per capita consumption of fresh water was fifty percent higher for Sea People than for Terrestrials. Frequent bathing was necessary to remove ingrained salt from the skin; supplying salt-free water was one of the biggest problems of the ocean-floor settlements. Beyond the distillery was the airworks The electrolysers reached halfway to the Surface, each mass of tubes contained in an insulating shell of helium. The current for the oxygen separation came from strategically sited tidal generating Stations up and down the coast. Many domes were already on tap from the plant; eventually they would all avail themselves of the new municipal service, though they would retain their own gear as a fail-safe in case of emergency.

Mary swam round the huge stacks, peering into locked shadows, calling softly through her mask. “Jen…Jen…” The harness pack radiated the word into the water, farther than a human voice could reach in air, but there was no answer. She clung to a steel stay twenty feet above the seabed. Bubbles curled up from her in a shimmering stream as she tried to quiet her breathing. A group of children went by, out late and swimming fast; she heard their chattering, realised with a cold shock how similar it was to the noises of a fish herd in the hydrophones. She shivered Thoughts like that had been plaguing her for months now, maybe years She called urgently, but the child-shoal swerved aside, accelerating and vanishing in the gloom. There was quiet; beside her the great cans vibrated, the sensation more felt than heard. The stay seemed to buzz in her fingers.

She let go quickly, because electrolyser stacks cannot make any sound. She concentrated. That deep, thudding boom Was it her heart, or just fear, or was there something…something else… No, it was gone. Slipped over the edge of perception, into silence. She started to swim again, thoughts churning confusedly. She remembered a conversation she had had with her husband weeks back. They had been lying abed after his shift had done; the house was silent, or as silent as it could get. Just the airplant, buzzing in the dark…

She had spoken to blackness. “Jack,” she said, wondering at herself, “the Deeps. Have you heard what they’ve been saying about them—that they talk?”

“I’ve heard a lot of rubbish.”

She said, “They talk. That’s what the kids say. Jen…she says she’s heard it a…thing, I don’t know what. A calling. Jack, be serious, listen to me…”

“I am serious,” he said. “Completely. Mary, there’s nothing in the Deeps except one hell of a lot of water, at one hell of a pressure. Oh, there could be a slip somewhere, volcanic activity maybe, a long way down, that would send up pressure waves, you might be able to feel them, but that’s all. I’m an engineer. I’ve been working with the sea more years than I want to think about, now take my word, I know. This…thing, it’s a fad with the kids. You get little gangs floating out there waiting for revelations, I’ve seen ’em. I don’t know where it started but it’s just a craze, it’ll die off when something new comes along…”

She was quiet, thinking of all the towns stretching through the warm seas of the world, all along the Continental shelves. The domes were snug and secure, automated; nothing could go wrong. But what if…what if there was an enemy, something more insidious than pressure? Something in people, in me she told herself, or in Jen. Something working outward from the roots of the brain… She said abruptly, “Jack, how can you be so damn sure you’re always right?”

The bed creaked as he moved. “You going Continental on me. Mary?”

She did not answer. His hand reached the contacts on her throat, stroked. “You know what I told you. What we agreed when they put these in. Once down, always down.” He paused. Then, softly, “What’s for us on land?”

She lay remembering the lowness of the roofed City streets, the flaring miles of fluorescent strip, the crushing sense of overcontact. Hive phobia of a crowded planet.

He could play her mind, he always could. “Listen,”he said. “You can still hear it deep down. The roaring. Escalators, pedivators. Traffic. Dancehalls. Wallscreens all yelling, fighting one against another. Buy this. Buy that. Vote for freedom. Use our toothpaste. Don’t copulate… Just remember it, Mary. Markets. Moviehouses. The whole heaped-up, tipped-up jumble we made for ourselves. Is that a thing to go back to? Take the kids to? Well is it?”

No answer. He carried on talking. The old vision. “Down here we’ve got peace. We’ve got security. Well, as much security as people can find anywhere. And more important, we’ve got a democracy. A real practical working democracy, maybe for the first time ever. Down here your neighbour’s house is always open because that’s the way it has to be. We can’t afford to fight each other, the sea takes care of that. And the sea’s forever.

“So we’ve got unity, and drive. Right now maybe you reckon there’s a lot of us but I say we’re still villages, settlements. We’re dependent on Surface, we still buy down supplies. But it won’t always be like that. I can see whole nations and tribes of us scattered over the oceans, everywhere in the world. Right down into the Deeps. We’ll be independent. We’ll draw everything we need straight out of the sea: Gold, tin, lead, copper, uranium, you name it you’ll find it’s right here in the sea. Billions of tons of it, waiting to be used. In a small way we’ve started already. The land’s old, burned out. Let the Continentals keep it…” He chuckled. “Tell you what, we’ll pop up one day, in a thousand years maybe, for a little trade. Find they’ve gone. All of them. Blown each other apart, starved, lit out for the planets, anywhere. We wouldn’t know. If the whole world burned up, how should we tell? We shouldn’t care…”

She was making patterns in blackness, drawing on the pillow with one finger. Biting her lip. He touched her hair; his hand found the pendant warmth of a breast and she moved irritably, twisting away from him. “I was thinking,” she said, “about the kids. All the kids we’ve got down here—”

“All the kids,” he said tiredly. “Mary, all the kids have changed. Adapted to their surroundings, now that’s the most natural thing. We d be having to worry if it wasn’t happening. This environment, after all it’s alien. Outside racial experience. In a sense this life of ours is being lived on a new planet. We must expect new skills, new adaptations, and they’ll show in the children quicker because the children have known nothing else. That’s the way it has to be, that way’s right. This has taken a long time coming out in you, Mary, can’t you see what’s happening?”

“I can,” she said bitterly. “Can you?”

“Mary, listen here a minute…”

She felt that obscurely he was still hedging. His mind maybe would automatically reject anything that could not be measured and calibrated. She wanted to scream; the confidence, the know-how, suddenly it all seemed so much smugness. The sea was infinite, from it could come an infinity of fears. She said, “We all…they say we all came from the sea. Well, couldn’t we…regress, you know, sort of slip back…”

He clicked on the bedside light. “Mary, do you have any clear idea what you’re saying?”

She nodded vigorously, trying to make him understand. “I thought it all through, Jack. I mean about birds losing their wings and seals—didn’t seals go back into the sea, degenerate somehow? And now us, the children, they…swim like fish, more and more like fish…”

“But hell,” he said, “Mary, do you know how long a thing like that takes? A biological degeneration? How many millions of… Oh look, Mary, look here. A million years. That’s how long we’ve been around, give or take a few thousand. And that’s nothing, nothing at all. It isn’t…that.” He snapped his fingers. “You’re thinking on the fine scale, the historical scale. All that time, that million years, wasn’t enough for us to lose our little toes. Look, the Earth’s a day old. Took twenty-four hours to evolve, go through all the cycles of life and get to us. You know what we are, what all our history is? The last tick of the clock… That’s how long evolution takes, it’s a very big thing…”

But it was no use, she’d heard it all before. “Maybe it won’t be like that this time,” she said. “We…evolved that quick, at the end. Maybe we’ll go back now just as fast…”

“It isn’t anything to do with it,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

She said desperately, “We were so smart, Jack, getting out like this, living in the sea. Making a new world. But maybe…couldn’t that somehow be what the sea really wanted, all along? What we were meant to do? Oh, I know this sounds crazy but believe me when I see the kids…Jen slipped the other day, in the kitchen. When she tried to get up, I think she tried to turn like she was swimming—she forgot she was in air… And David, he swims just like a little shrimp… When I see things like that I think Oh, I don’t know what I think sometimes—maybe we’re not…pioneers at all This thing about the Deeps, they say they call, pull… Maybe we’re just sort of being sucked back, that’s where we belong…”

He was angry, finally “All right. So this craziness is all true. We’ve got a racial memory in our brains; in our nervous systems. We remember the beginnings of life all those years back, so many years we can’t even count the thousands. Well then, we’re home already, Mary. Right where we are, this is where life started. In the shallows, swilling in the sunlight Not in the Deeps. It moved down there, same time some of it spread onto land. There’s nothing can call us from there. We don’t belong there, never did.”

She was quivering a little, looking at the pillow, seeing the texture of it. Every strand in the weave of the cloth. “I wanted to stay human,” she said. “That was all. Just to stay human, and the kids…”

He touched her. “You’re human,” he said “You’re all right.”

She wouldn’t look at him. “I think,” she said, “I think now…I’d take the Cities. Jack…”

He didn’t answer, and she knew the expression on his face without looking. Something inside her seemed to twist and become cold. He would do anything for her maybe, except that. He would not go landside, not now. The empires, the herds and tribes of the sea, they were in his brain, they called too. The dream was too strong, he couldn’t let it go. He pushed the clothes back and swung his legs off the bed. She heard the little swish as he picked up a robe. “Mary,” he said, “why don’t you get a little checkup? You’re run down, it’s my fault I should have realised… Too much time on your own, you don’t get about. Not any more. Maybe you should have a trip landside. Go and see your folks. Tell you what—I’ll get a couple of days leave, we’ll have a run up to Seventy-five, take the kids, how’s that? They’ve got the new theatre up there, whole pile of junk. Sound okay?”

She didn’t answer. “I’ll have a talk with Jen,” she said. “I’ll do it tomorrow. This is silliness, it can be stopped…”

He walked out, turned on a light. Started tinkering in the kitchen. He brought her back coffee laced with rum. She pulled a bedjacket over her shoulders, sat drinking, hands gripped round the warmth of the cup. Feeling the trembling still deep in her body, hearing the buzz of the airplant, imagining the silly, silly meters checking and recording Pressure, humidity, oxy-level, all the things that didn’t matter. While Jack sat and watched her, smoked and smiled and did not understand.

* * * *

Mary swam the length of the town again, moving slowly, watching to right and left the domes nestling in shadow, their windows like square bright eyes. The sea was darker now; in the real world above, the moon was setting. Surface was just visible as a greyish sheen; tall weed fronds were silhouetted against it, leaning majestically to the current like trees bowed by an endless wind. The tide was setting out, toward the Deeps.

After that talk with her husband, her restlessness had become worse. Quite suddenly it seemed the whole furnishing of the dome was oppressive, stultifying. The curtains had come down, the glinting blue fabric with its faint interlapping tidal patterns had been put away. Mary had hung new yellow cloth, sun-yellow, printed with designs of buds and flowering trees. She had banished the spiny amber-spotted shells and the urchin lamps, Jen’s untidy collection of sea bed fossils, even the cushion covers on which she herself had once worked swirling Minoan patterns of weed and octopi. In their places were landside things, figurines of horses and kittens, panting china dogs. Creatures long vanished now but that reminded her of Earth and the way humans lived once on a time.

Every ornament, every yard of cloth, had had to be bought from Surface; the cost had been enormous but once started Mary had seemed unable to stop. Jack had raised his eyebrows but said nothing; Jen had protested more noisily.

Things had reached crisis pitch the day Mary found, in the wall tank in Jen’s room, a piece of old human skull, coral-crusted, put there as a home for crabs. She had slapped her daughter for that, a thing she had never done before, and emptied tank and contents through the lock. Jen had fled squalling, into the sea, and not come home for hours. After that Mary spent a week scraping the whole top of the dome, polishing away the velvet coat of sea-growth till the plastic-covered panels gleamed like new; but it seemed the more she did, the more she tried to banish the presence of the sea from her home, the more the sea invaded. At night, lying quiet, she imagined she could feel the slow push of the wave force against the bungalow, tilting it this way and that, slow, slow, this way…then that…

She drove herself across to West Terrace, built slightly higher than the rest of town on a curving ridge of rock. Nearly to the Belmonts’ dome and back, calling all the way. Jen was not in town; or if she was, she refused to answer. Mary’s face was wet now inside the mask and her lungs were labouring. Thoughts tumbled in her mind. Nitrogen narcosis…no longer possible, the lungs delivered an oxy-helium mix. Oxygen intoxication then, the thing they used to call rapture of the depths; that could make you throw your mask off, breathe water and die. But it was nearly unheard of. Low down on Mary’s back, and on Jen’s, were other contacts. They led to cells deep in the body that metered the blood itself, tasting it for oxy-content. The lungs were self-compensating. Pack failure? Crazy, the gulp-bottle on Jen’s belt would give her twenty minutes’ breathing. And the beacon, there was the beacon. But beacons could go out…

Mary doubled, swerving under the rigging of the street lamps. Across to where she could see the divers working on the new building complex. The bodies hung round the curving ribs, tiny with distance, silver as fish under the glare of the lamps; below, the windows of the construction office just showed in the gloom. Soon she would call Jack, she would have to… She felt the fear again, like a coldness round her heart. There was only one place she had not been. She began to swim purposefully away from the town and its lights, towards the Deeps.

Just beyond the domes the sea bed fell away in a series of troughs, miles long and wide. Unseen, their contours could still appal the mind. This was the frontier, the last frontier maybe on the planet. She passed over the graveyard, trying not to see the frail crosses sticking up from the silt, name tags fluttering in the current like grey leaves. Out to where the last light faded, and beyond…

She was in a void, bottomless, pit-black. Above her a vagueness that was just one shade less dark than darkness itself. Not light; some trailing ghost maybe, that light had left behind it. Mary drove deeper, hopelessly, feeling pressure begin to squeeze her body like cold hands. She was panting, though there was no sound of it in her ears; her breathing alone could not activate the throat mike. She called again; her voice was a vibrating thread, nearly lost in immensity.

And there was something, a blemish in the gulf. Tiny, nearly invisible, its shape so vague it mocked the retinas. Mary swam, hair flowing; there was a longness, a paleness, like a body caught and floating on some denser stratum of the sea. Deep down, far below…

“Jen!”

Mary kicked out, desperate now, her movements losing smoothness and coordination. Fighting the pressure was like butting at a wall; she imagined her whole body shrinking, condensing, becoming tiny as a fish.

“JEN!”

She’d reached the thing, she was stretching for it with her hands, when it moved. Eeled away, rolled… She saw the bright cloud of breathing suddenly released, the fins threshing. Heard her daughter chuckling in her earphones.

Fear turned to anger. Mary arced in the water. “Jen, get back this instant…” She grabbed again and the girl eluded her, quick as a fish. “Mummy, listen…” The voice bubbled through the sea. “It’s loud tonight, listen…”

She listened, straining. Found herself not breathing. It was impossible; no outside sound could come through her blocked ears. Nonetheless, it came. There, and again… A thudding, but not a thudding. Some pressure, like a concussion against the brain. Immeasurably slow and powerful and somehow ancient… Pulsing with her heart, fading, swelling back to touch her body. Earthquake or volcano, she had no idea. Nor did she care. Somehow it was sufficient that the sensation, the not-sound, was there. This was something immemorial, eternal. The true, dark, jet-blue voice of the sea…

Woman and girl hung a little apart, bodies vaguely glowing motes against a hugeness of water. Mary felt she could lie all night, not speaking, just soaking in the strangeness that seemed to fill her by rich stages from feet to head. Hearing rhythms that were not rhythms, that blended and crossed, melding each into each like the sounds of the sea-jazz. Soothing, calming, somehow warm…

She could hear Jen calling but the voice was unimportant, remote. It was only when the girl swam to her, grabbed her shoulders and pointed at the gauges between her breasts that she withdrew from the half-trance. The thing below still called and thudded; Mary turned reluctantly, found Jen’s hand in her own. She let herself float, Jen kicking slowly and laughing again delightedly, chuckling into her earphones. Their hair, swirling, touched and mingled;

Mary looked back and down and knew suddenly her inner battle was over.

The sound, the thing she had heard or felt, there was no fear in it just a promise, weird and huge. The Sea People would go on now, pushing their domes lower and lower into night, fighting pressure and cold until all the seas of all the world were truly full; and the future, whatever it might be, would care for itself. Maybe one day the technicians would make a miracle and then they would flood the domes and the sea would be theirs to breathe. She tried to imagine Jen with the bright feathers of gills floating from her neck. She tightened her grip on her daughter’s hand and allowed herself to be towed, softly, through the darkness.