digital camera. Here – let me lay down a photo grid.’ He paged through to the camera control display on the LCD, and squares of red light pulsed over the scene outside the sphere. Our cameras coordinated with the flashing grid.
We circled the garden, taking pictures for almost fifteen minutes.
‘Ow,’ Dave said, clutching his stomach.
I barely heard him.
‘Dog poop.’
‘Let’s collect,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ he said.
We moved into position to capture some of the smaller organisms. Somehow, breaking up the fans and bells seemed a sacrilege – but one we would no doubt commit.
I reached into my data glove and extended the manipulator arm, now tipped with a revolving suck tube. This was a special version of a tool used by earlier collectors to draw up specimens. Ours spun a small fan with variable pitch blades to pull water into a transparent acrylic tube.
I nudged the small tube up against a xeno in front of the DSV’s skids and fingered a small trigger. The fan spun. When the xeno crossed a photo detector, the fan cut off before it could squash the sandy blob against a mesh screen. Valves closed and capped the tube, and it rolled out of the way like a spent round in a gun.
Another tube was chambered, and, seconds later, another specimen – a segmented stalk – kinked and slipped neatly into the plastic prison. A third tube, and I had a small sea flower, each petal a separate cell covered with tiny hairs, like an arrangement of sea gooseberries.
Their jewel-like translucence gave me the final clue. These were not made of the tiny-celled tissues found in more familiar organisms. The sub’s golden light warped through thick cellular membranes with a peculiar refraction, like interference between two layers of glass. Lovely, oily little rainbows.
The Sea Messenger had eight pressurized drawers for keeping specimens alive. Recording temperature and pressure for each tube, I ejected them into the drawers.
Samples of ambient seawater were analyzed by a miniature NASA chemical lab, the data stored for transmission on the next uplink. Labs on board the mother ship would soon begin preparing aquarium inoculants.
‘What are you going to do with them?’ Dave asked.
I sucked up another specimen, chambered another tube. ‘They’re wonderful! I’ve never seen anything like them.’
Dave gave another groan. His face was pallid and green in the reflected light from the seafloor.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I feel really weird. I swear I didn’t eat any dessert.’
For a moment, making an effort, I forgot the manipulator arm and the precious specimens and sat up. ‘You look like you’ve got a chill.’ I reached out to touch Dave’s forehead. He batted my hand away.
‘Son of a turtle,’ he said.
‘Goddammit,’ I said, simultaneously, and I was suddenly, irrationally furious, as if a flashbulb of rudeness had gone off in my head. ‘Are you going to screw this up because of something you ate?’
He cringed and clutched his stomach, eyes going blank under another wave of pain. ‘Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain around me, buster,’ he said. ‘Grab your specimens and let’s get out of here. Quick!’ he growled.
I pulled back in my seat, jerked the arm toward the drawers, and spewed the last tubes out, one, two, three, into their receptacles. So many more to collect. But training and humanity beat science.
Dave looked bad. He drew his knees up in the chair.
A pungent, tropical odor filled the sphere. It wasn’t flatulence. It came from Dave’s sweat, from his skin, and it was starting to make me feel ill, too.
Topside was straight Up, eight thousand feet. Three hours minimum.
I took a last look at the Garden of Eden – what Mark McMenamin had called the Garden of Ediacara. Serene, untouched, isolated, downwind from the geyser spew, just as I had seen it in the photos – imagined it in my dreams – my triumph, the highlight of my exploring, perhaps the key to all my research…
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
‘Diddly,’ Dave muttered. His eyes went unfocused, wild, like an animal caught in a cage. He rapped his hand against the smooth inner surface of the sphere with a painful thwonk. The sphere was six inches thick – no risk of cracking it with bare knuckles. ‘It’s too…darned small in here,’ he said. ‘Colder than a witch’s tit,’ he added, eyes steady on mine, as if to receive applause, or criticism, for a dramatic performance.
Clearly not an experienced blasphemer. I stifled a laugh.
‘I can call you Hal, or Henry, can’t I?’ he asked, peppering the honey of sweet reason with sincerity.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Dave, we have to go up now.’
‘I got to ask you.’ He held out his hand, and the fingers twi??hed as if grasping something in the air between us. A little to the left, and he would have been strangling me. ‘I don’t really give a…horse’s patootie…I don’t give a dung heap if you know Owen Montoya. But did he ever give you a phone call?’
‘Yeah, I suppose he did. Dave –’
‘Did he ever tell you what to do with your life?’
This made no sense. ‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Did your Dad ever call you, long after he was dead?’
‘No,’ I said. This shook me, and I started to get really scared. My brother had asked me pretty much the same thing. ‘Why?’
‘Dog poop on them all. All the petty little bosses out there making their petty phone calls and telling me, of all people, what to do. Well, I don’t understand a petty word they’re saying, but they’re making me sick. Don’t you think that’s what it is?’
I didn’t think it was the hi-carb diet. ‘Dave, I can get us back. Just relax and let go of the stick.’
‘You don’t know diddly about this boat.’ He shook his head, flinging stinking drops of sweat against the inside of the pressure sphere.
My mouth hung open. I was on the furry edge of braying like a donkey, this was so utterly ridiculous.
With a dramatic shrug and a twist, Dave wrenched back on the stick. The aft thrusters reversed with a nasty clunk and churned up the silt below. Backwash shredded the delicate little garden. The golden lights glowed like sunset through the rising cloud of silt, and a few sparkling, dirty little jelly balls – xenos and bits of other creatures – exploded in front of the pressure sphere.
‘No! Dave, get a grip.’
‘Piddle on it,’ he said coldly. Then he let out a shriek that nearly burst my eardrums. He flailed, knocked loose the data-glove box – leaving it dangling from its connecting wires – and pushed the stick over hard right. The little sub started to respond, veering, but the autopilot kicked in.
A small female voice announced, ‘Maneuver too extreme. Canceled.’
‘Poop on you!’ Dave screamed. He let go of the stick. His thick-fingered fist struck my cheek and knocked me back. I shielded myself with my arm, and he pounded that a couple of times, then grabbed it with both hands, torquing it like he wanted to break it off and get at the rest of me.
‘Dave, Goddammit, stop!’ I yelled, really frightened now. Should I fight back against my pilot, knock him senseless, possibly kill him?
Did I really know how to surface all by myself?
He let go of my arm and seemed to reconsider. Then, with a last, final grunt, he yanked his control stick out of