None Noted

You are taught to name it and let it go.

That is the first year. Not the breathing, not the ascent tables, not the cold. The naming. Tannis had me on a shot line at forty meters for six days doing nothing else, and every time I came up she asked me what I had heard, and I would tell her, and she would say and until I stopped.

Four headings. Of the water, which is current and thermocline and the sea talking to itself. Of the works, which is us, hulls and pumps and chain. Of the city, which is the drowned part, settling and corroding and letting go. Ambient, which is the heading for everything that will not go under the other three and which you use once and then never mention again.

You name it. Then you put it down. A diver who carries a sound is a diver who is thinking about a sound, and a diver who is thinking about a sound is not counting her gas.

Hold at one fortyThe order comes down the wire in Tarel's voice, flattened by the water into something with no person in it, and then the wire goes quiet, and I have the ocean.

Of the worksThe flotilla changing its mind. Pumps that run all day going off in sequence, north to south, which means power is being taken somewhere else. The skybridges folding, which is a sound like a very long spine. Chain, a great deal of chain, faster than I have heard chain.

Of the cityNothing new. The tower at my back is warm. It has always been warm. You feel it in the shoulder blades and you never mention it above the line.

Of the waterThe thermocline has come up eleven meters since yesterday and I resent it, because it means the cold layer is where I am and not where it should be.

AmbientThe undertone. Present. It is always present. That is the whole of the entry and it has been the whole of the entry every dive of my life.

The first lance goes off above me and I lose the left ear for two seconds.

There is no word for it and Tannis would not accept that as an answer, so: of the works, discharge, magnetic, at range, and it arrives in the sinuses before it arrives anywhere else, and the water goes bitter afterward, which is the salt coming apart.

Second. Third. Fourth is different because the fourth is answered.

I want to put down how a warship sounds from underneath, because I do not think anyone has written it and I am probably going to be asked.

A ship under power is a heartbeat you can hear from a kilometer off. Screws, and the shaft, and a hull working, all of it regular, all of it the same regular, and it comes through the water as a pressure against the front of the chest. That is not a metaphor. It is a physical pressure. You lean into it slightly, the way you lean into wind.

The pressure stops being regular.

Then it stops being one thing. It becomes several things at slightly different times, which is what a hull does when the frames go and the compartments are no longer agreeing with one another about what shape the ship is.

Then there is a long low sound that is not percussive and not sharp and that goes on for eleven seconds, and it is the only sound I have ever heard in the water that I have not been able to put a heading on immediately, and I put it under of the works because it is a ship, and I want to be honest that I put it there because it was the only place it would go and not because it belonged.

Then the displacement wave gets to me and puts me into the tower hard enough that the gauge casing cracks.

Then the seabed takes it, which you feel in the sternum and in the teeth.

Then nothing.

I hung there in the nothing for some time with my hands flat on a warm wall and I catalogued.

Of the worksFour hundred people.

That is not a sound. I know that is not a sound. It is not a thing you can hear and I did not hear it. But it went into the catalogue at that moment under that heading in my own voice, and it went in the way the other entries went in, and I put it down the way you put down the other entries.

That is the discipline. That is what the discipline is for and that is what the discipline costs and Tannis never once pretended otherwise. She said, in the sixth year, that the day I could not do it any more would be the day I came off the roster, and that she hoped it came late, and that it comes for everyone.

I was very calm. That goes under the works as well, if we are being complete about it. I was extremely calm and I have been thinking since about what that means about me and I have not reached anything.

Three of us on the bow section. I take the keel line.

Of the cityThe two towers are complaining. The wreck has put a load into foundations that were never designed for it and they are letting me know about it in a register I have not heard before, which I put down as new and will hear again.

Of the worksMy own regulator, and Osk's, forty meters off, and the survey drone which is not working properly and which I would like on the record as not having worked properly on any dive this month.

Of the waterFine. Cold. Ordinary.

AmbientThe undertone.

And here I stop, because the entry will not close.

The undertone is ambient. It is the definitional ambient. It has no direction. That is why it goes under that heading and why the heading exists. You do not turn your head toward it because there is nothing to turn toward. Every Deepborn who has ever lived has put it under ambient and gone on with her dive.

At the bow it has a direction.

It is below. Below the sediment, below the wreck, below the foundations, below any part of the drowned city, and it is not one continuous note, it has a shape in time, and the shape repeats.

I hold still. Holding still is the trade. I have been able to hold still since I was fifteen and it is the only thing about me that Tannis ever praised without qualifying it.

The interval shortens.

I hold still for a long count and the interval shortens again, and I understand that the variable is me, that the thing changes when I attend to it, and I try to file that and it does not file, because there is no heading in the catalogue for a sound that responds.

I ascend on the tables. Correctly. A Deepborn does not panic and I did not panic and my stops were clean.

One thing, which I am recording only because the manual asks for anomalies of any kind and I would rather look foolish than be found later to have left something out.

On the ascent I went up the wrong side of the second tower.

Not dangerous. It cost me two minutes. But I had planned the dive on the north face and briefed it on the north face and I came up the south, and I did not decide to change it, and there was no current to speak of. I noticed at forty meters. I corrected. I have dived that tower nine times.

I have put it down to the wreck being where the wreck now is, which changes what the approach looks like, and to a poor night's sleep.

Topside is where you stop being able to hear anything. That is not a complaint about the world above the line, it is the plain fact of it, and it is why the Surfaceborn call us superstitious and why we do not argue with them. They live in the blind part. You cannot explain a colour to a man in a room with no light in it and it would be cruel to try.

I sat on the gantry with the sun on me and my hair drying stiff and I ate, and Osk sat down beside me and neither of us said anything about the eleven-second sound, and I have since learned that he also has not written it down.

I have thought about the box.

There is a box on that form for exactly this and it is there because someone before me thought it would matter, and I have filled it in truthfully on every dive of my career, and I have written in it that the drone was faulty and that a hatch had moved and that the visibility was poor, and nobody has ever read a word of it.

I left it blank because there is no heading. I want that to be the reason. I am aware there is another reason, which is that a Second Tier who writes it changed when I listened to it in the anomalies box of a routine wreck assessment is a Second Tier who is spoken to kindly by people with more years than her and then quietly kept at eighty meters for a season.

Both of those are true. I do not know the ratio and I am not going to pretend to.

The undertone is ambient. It has always been ambient. I put it under ambient and I put it down, because that is the discipline, and the discipline is what keeps us alive down there, and I would like someone to explain to me, in a way that I can use, what a diver is supposed to do on the day the discipline is the thing that is wrong.