Ambient

The gold does not arrive as light. It arrives as everyone on the deck turning at the same moment, which I feel through the plating before I understand it, and then as a change in the air pressure against my face that is not wind and that I have no heading for.

Then I look east, and it is beautiful, and I will leave the describing of it to the Surfaceborn, who have the vocabulary and who are already doing it around me, loudly, in the way of people who have never had to hold still.

Ninety-three seconds. I do not count them. My body counts them and hands me the number afterward the way it hands me a gas figure.

Then it goes out, and the undertone goes with it, and I put my hand on the rail because the deck has moved.

The deck has not moved.

I am going to be asked, so: there was no shock and no sound. What there was: the jaw, the inner ear, the wrist bones, the sternum. The four places. Every one of them arrives at the same instant at a state I have no word for, and the nearest I can get is the moment in a room when a machine you did not know was running switches off, except that I have had this machine running in me since before I could walk, and so has my mother and Tannis and every Deepborn who ever went down, and it has just stopped, and the four places where I live are empty.

Not quiet. Quiet is a value. This is the absence of the instrument.

I sat down on the plating. I am told I sat for some time.

The forty-seven go down within the same minute, all across the flotilla, and two of them are in the water.

The Compact got both of them out. That is an entry. Not because it changes anything. Because it was fast and it was well done and it was done by people who had been given no warning of any kind, and somebody should write that somewhere.

The ones who live will not remember it. They will remember a clarity and a homecoming and then a gap, and the gap will be worse than the thing was, because the thing at least had a shape.

Tarel's orders come over radio, actual radio, crackling, routed by hand. Secure the platforms. Check the fallen. Light the manual beacons. Prepare for a long night.

Not one of those orders requires a god to carry out. I have thought about that since and I have decided it is the most frightening thing anyone said out loud that night, and that Tarel knew it when she said it, and that she said it anyway in the flattest voice she has, which is how that woman does mercy.

Nobody sends me. The protocols are suspended, the monitoring is dark, the chain of command is occupied with the living. I go down on a biofilter and a lamp and a mechanical gauge I read with my own eyes, the way the first of us did it, and the ocean does not care which.

I go to the bow. I turn the lamp off. I hold still.

I run the catalogue.

Of the waterPresent. Current at the expected set, a little slack. Thermocline down eleven meters, back where it belongs, which I resent less than I expected to.

Of the worksPresent, and fewer. My regulator. My own heartbeat, which counts, and which Tannis made me learn to file so that I would stop mistaking it for something else. Nothing from the flotilla. The pumps are hand-run now and hand-run is quiet.

Of the cityPresent. The two towers still complaining about the wreck, in the register I logged as new and said I would hear again. The wall at my back is cold. That is not an entry. That is the absence of an entry. Fourteen years of a warmth nobody could account for, and the account is closed.

Ambient

I ran it again.

That is an entry too. I ran the whole catalogue again, in order, in full, the way Tannis had me do it on the shot line for six days, and I did not skip and I did not hurry, and I came to the fourth heading and there was nothing to put under it.

I have never in my life completed this catalogue. Nobody has. The fourth heading is the one you cannot close. It is the heading that exists because the world has more in it than three headings can hold, and I have been putting one entry under it since I was fourteen years old and so has every diver in the history of the Compact.

It is empty. The catalogue is complete.

I hung in the dark at ninety meters with a finished list and I found that I was crying, which is a stupid thing to do in a biofilter, and I could not at the time have told you what for.

Not for Sakala. I never trusted it and I said so in a room where saying so was not welcome.

Not for the golden one. She was not mine and I never once felt her.

For the fourth heading. For the fact that the world used to have more in it than could be filed, and that I had spent my whole working life being trained to put that excess down and walk away from it, and that the training was the trade and the trade was my life, and that now there is nothing to put down.

I checked the towers. All nine that I have positional data on. Every one of them is where I left it.

They will not move again. Whatever was rearranging the drowned city in the dark between dives has stopped, and the buildings are buildings, and my memory of where they are is now the only map anyone needs, and it agrees with itself for the first time in nine years.

I am putting that down as a certainty because I am certain of it. I have never been more certain of anything in my life.

I came up slow, on the tables, correctly.

On the gantry a child was crying. One of the Tide Orphans, five or six, standing in the middle of a walkway in the way children stand when the adults have stopped explaining things. A woman I do not know picked her up. Not quickly. She finished coiling the line she was working on, and set it down where it would not foul, and then she picked the child up and put her on her hip and carried on with her morning with a child on her hip.

I watched that from the ladder with my mask still on and I have not been able to stop thinking about it and I do not have anything to add to it.

Tarel read it in front of me, which she has never done.

She asked me one question, which was whether I would put my name to the last paragraph. I said I would. She said that was going to make life difficult for a number of people and that I should expect to be asked to soften it and that she would prefer I did not.

Then she folded it and put it in the drawer where she puts the things she is not ready to distribute, and I understood that I had written the definitive account of the most significant night in the history of the Glass Coast, and that it was correct, and complete, and honestly witnessed, and that it would sit in a drawer.

I go down most days now. There is no reason to and no one stops me.

I hold still at ninety and I run the catalogue and I get to the fourth heading and there is nothing, and I come up.

Tannis, who is eighty-one and has not been in the water in eleven years, asked me why I keep doing it when I already know what I will find. I told her I was checking.

She said that was a very old-fashioned thing to say, and that she was glad somebody was, and then she asked me what I had heard, and I told her, and she said and, and I said there was nothing else, and she waited, the way she waited on the shot line when I was fourteen, and I sat there for a long time trying to find something to give her.

Of the waterPresent.

Of the worksPresent.

Of the cityPresent.

AmbientNone.