The Future Fire: 2025.72 fiction cupernicity

[Issue 2025.72]

‘Cupernicity’, B. Morris Allen

[ Danglepods © 2025 Katharine A. Viola ] The center of the universe shifts. When you’re young, it’s all about your principal carer, and food, and bedtime snuggles. As you age, gravity intervenes, and the center moves further away, to cliques and clans and who’s gone furthest into the danglepods. Then you learn about the dark matter carers always try to hide, and the center gets focused, intimate. For me, it was Carsa Ubiye.

I wasn’t the center of her universe, of course. The Fifth Law of Thermodynamics is, ‘For every cool girl that everyone loves, there are a dozen tech girls no one notices.’ Carsa could invent poetry that would rock you like a surface storm. I could fit a new fan in a ventilation duct. She’d never given me a moment’s notice, and I could think of no reason she should.

“Get a hobby,” Dinu said one day at breakfast. He’d been my principal carer since I was out of diapers. He knew me better than I knew myself. That’s what he said.

“I have a hobby,” I mumbled around a mouthful of crushed branfruit.

“Hanging around Carsa Ubiye is not a hobby. It’s an obsession.” I looked down at my branfruit, and shoved another spoonful into my already full mouth. There was no way I could get it all down before he shifted into full lecture mode. But if I skipped it, I’d get a different lecture on waste. And I’d be hungry all day.

“When I was your age,” he continued. Why is it that every lecture from a carer starts with those five words? You’d think that when they were our age, they’d have solved all the world’s problems already. Actually, they did solve a bunch of them.

“When I was your age,” he repeated, probably knowing he’d got off on the wrong foot, but unable to stop himself. “I was climbing up the air vents, risking my life in the surface weather, coming home soaked in seawater and rain.” How many carers encourage their wards to risk their lives? Dinu was pretty cool when he wasn’t being tedious. “You need to take some chances, Nushka. And no, shaving the back of your head so Carsa will notice you is not taking a chance.”

I washed away branfruit with a healthy swig of citraseep. Everyone says I’m too skinny, but it’s not because I don’t eat. “I take chances,” I protested. “Just yesterday, I swapped out a vent regulator without even turning off the power.”

“There’s taking chances, and there’s being cocky,” he said. Sometimes I think Dinu took Plato to heart a little too much and thinks he’s required to speak in mysteries and parables. “Both will get you killed, but one is just stupid.”

“Sure,” I said, and swept the last of the branfruit into my mouth as I stood up. “Got to go.” I admit that last was a little garbled due to fullness of the mouth, but carers have special powers of understanding. Dinu just sighed as he gathered up the dishes.

Outside our cells, the duct was empty. I could feel the floor pulse slowly as the dome contracted, but it was well below tolerances. When the intake fans are working properly, the benthodils don’t need to respire to get access to oxygen, but the domes still have a subdued rhythm. Some people say that’s evidence they’re animals rather than plants. But I say they’re plants, because living in animals would be wrong. Dinu claims that’s rationalization, and that I should pay more attention in biology, that there are fourteen year olds who know more about it than I do. Talk about obsessed.

I wasn’t obsessed with Carsa. Not really. That was just Dinu being protective. To prove it, I decided to head down to work. I still had to straighten out that wonky compressor pump for the desalinator. By the time I passed out of the home cells and through the main branch to the tech dome, I’d completely forgotten that it was Carsa’s day for tech study.

I actually had forgotten, and when I saw her, with that soft brown skin and rich brown eyes, I was so startled that I spoke to her. “Uh, hey, Carsa. I mean, good morning.” And they say Carsa’s the poet.

“Hey.” Those perfect brown eyes swept up and past me, and back down to the mess of tubing on her work bench. I could see she’d mixed up the organic solvent tubes and the ones for strong acids. Probably to her, it was a mass of tentacles representing humanity’s spread into the near galaxy, or something. Any minute now, she’d launch into an impromptu ode that would bring embarrassing tears to my eyes. I turned my gaze back to the floor where it belonged, and shuffled past.

“Hey.” For a poet, Carsa had a surprisingly colloquial conversational voice. “I’m supposed to sort out these tubes. Learn about their properties, etc. Only, they all look the same. Do you know anything about it? You’re good with tech, aren’t you? Nusa?”

There’s nothing quite like the glow that comes from sunlight, when the center of your universe reaches out and grabs you by the gravity, and lets you know you’re noticed. In a trice, I dumped all my metaphors and scurried over to Carsa and the fact that she knew who I was.

“Sure,” I said, as calmly as I could. “It’s Nusha.” I could feel the warmth flowing from her left arm to my right where we both leaned on the table. I left that arm exactly where it was, and used the left to pick up a length of kelp-line. It was awkward, because I’m right handed, but it was worth it. “See this one, how it’s green, and kind of squishy? That’s kelp-line. We harvest it from… some kind of seaweed, where it forms part of the nutrient pathway. It’s got a lining of hydrophobic proteins, so—”

“What’s hydrophobic? I mean, I know, ‘afraid of water’. But what does it mean?”

How can you live inside a giant alien underwater plant (or maybe animal) and not know the basics of how it works? Maybe poets don’t need basic science the way the rest of us do. This stuff ten-year-olds learned, but once I got over the surprise, I launched in.

“Exactly: afraid of water. See, water molecules are highly polar. I mean, they’ve got pretty strong charge gradients between the oxygen and the two hydrogens—”

“Yeah, okay. I’m not actually stupid, you know. H2O, hydrogen bonding, got it.”

And now I’d insulted her. People are tricky, that way. You never know what will set them off. That’s why some people are carers and some stay the hell away from children. I knew which one I’d be. I picked up another tube in my right hand, just to give me something to do.

“Well, see, the hydrophobic coating in this tube repels the water, so the two don’t interact much. So it’s good for polar solvents like acids. But this tube—”

“Is like hydrophilic, right?”

“Well, no.” I winced, and waggled the coralshell tube in my right hand. “It’s got an artificial lining that’s inert. But it’s not hydrophobic, so it’s good for organic solvents like acetone.”

“Got it. So much for logic, then. And they say poetry is an art. It’s got nothing on this science stuff. So how do I tell the two apart?”

“Well.” I was saying that a lot. “There are two ways—memory and feel. Memory is easiest.” And what I recommend for you. “There are only a dozen kinds of common tubing—”

“A dozen!”

“—so you just remember what they’re like. See, this green, squishy, bendy stuff is kelp-line. This,” I waggled the other tube, “rigid pink stuff is coralshell—it’s actually another plant that forms calcium deposits in its xylem—you can see how it’s got kind of a plasticy shine to it, which is the artificial coating. Now, this one,” I put the coralshell down and picked up a length of fine transparent conduit, “is actual plastic. It’s also hydrophobic, and it’s durable, but it’s expensive to make.”

“Yeah, I know. My mother is a plasticizer.”

“You know your mother?” The words were out before I realized quite how rude they were.

“Yeah, she’s like my alternate carer, you know. Weird, huh?”

Weird didn’t begin to cover it. Some people were carers, some weren’t. Being a parent had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t illegal to care for your own children, but most people just… didn’t. People had an affinity for a particular age of child—an age they were best suited to care for, if they wanted to care for children at all. Caring for your own child through its whole life was… I didn’t have a word for it, so I went back to Carsa’s. It was weird.

“I guess,” I said, which is usually safely non-committal. I wasn’t sure what to say next, so I stayed silent.

“Anyway, I’m not going to memorize all this stuff. What’s the other method?”

“What?” I was still wondering what it would be like to have your parents as carers. My mother was a farm tech, and my father had been a sea scout. It made no particular difference to me one way or the other. I’d only met them a couple of times.

“You said there was another way to tell the tubes apart. Feeling. Let’s go with that. I’m pretty good with feelings.” She gave a smile that said she knew exactly what her reputation as a poet was, and undercut it and reinforced it all at the same time. It’s amazing what a smile can tell you when you’re off balance.

“It’s not that kind of feeling,” I said, knowing already that she knew that, and that I was looking like a stiff, humorless tech stereotype, all machine and no heart. She just smiled some more, and I bless her for not kicking me when I was down. “It’s… here.” I shoved the kelp-line into her hand, and I could feel a spark where our fingers touched, despite the damp air of the dome. “Feel that. And feel…” I plucked a glass tube from the pile and dropped it into her other hand, “this one. See how the kelp one is kind of sticky, and the other one is smooth?”

“Well, one is glass. Of course it’s smooth.”

“I don’t mean smooth or rough.” Of course a poet would use language more carefully. “I mean that it doesn’t stick to your hand quite the same. If you get really good at it, you can tell the proper use of the tube just by how it feels in your hand.” Marumo could do it, and he was blind. Or maybe he had to do it that way because he was blind.

“Hmm.” She weighed the two tubes in her hands, then dumped them back on the table. I winced at the clatter of precious glass, even though these were old tubes well past their service life. “That sounds like even more work. Memorization it is. If I can remember two hundred stanzas of ‘Arrival on Searest’, I can handle a dozen kinds of tubing.”

We spent the rest of her half shift talking about tubing and which kinds were used for what. I completely forgot about the desalinator pump, but I didn’t care. What was clean water, when I had pure joy pumping through my veins? When Carsa took off at the end of her shift, I was still so happy I skipped lunch and sat at my bench just pretending to repack the pump bearings.

“You’re in a good mood.” Those carers, they’re sharp. In fact, I was so buoyant that even a half-shift washing dishes in the refectory hadn’t dampened my spirits.

“I’m so hungry I could eat dinner!” I told Dinu. The older they are, the dryer they like their humor.

“Lucky me.” He gestured to fully loaded table in the middle of our kitchen cell. “I happen to have one ready.”

“What’s the occasion?” There were steamed seagrass stalks, refried beans, crunchy chestnut tubers, gleanberry juice—all my favorites, in fact. I peered up at Dinu suspiciously. He just smiled, and I never let a little paranoia get in the way of a good meal.

I let it go until I was starting to get comfortably full—that point when you could stop eating, but you don’t really have to. We talked about inconsequentials—the weather on the surface, whether the last expedition to the sea spire archipelago might have found a location that could withstand winter storms, the status of the cetacid migration, whether pelagomeres were real things, or just transient concentrations of sweeter water. He knew what I was doing, though. I could see by the glint in his eyes that he enjoyed it. He even let me off with a description of my morning ‘doing tubing inventory’.

Finally, as I was clearing away the main dishes to make room for candied pegflower, I launched my attack.

“Great meal, Din. Really excellent. I loved that seagrass—was that a touch of citraseep?” I dropped the dishes into the soak tub to show nonchalance.

“Just a touch,” he agreed. “Brings out the salt.” That right there was a giveaway. Dinu loves to talk about food as much as I love to eat it. An answer that short was as good as waving a signal flag. I looked down at the back of his balding head, with the one side slightly longer where he never got it quite right with the clippers and wouldn’t let me fix it. I could see where the top of his left ear was a little crumpled from years of wearing that lopsided diving mask with its rigid air hose. ‘Before I found you and realized what life was for,’ he usually said, to make me blush.

Suddenly, I didn’t want to play the game any more, no matter how we both enjoyed it. I just leaned over and hugged him from behind, hard, like a cephalid hugs its babies, but knows it will lose them to the current.

“Hey!” he said after a while. “Those bony elbows of yours are going to stab right through my shoulders.” He sniffed a bit and wiped his face with his napkin.

“No more than you deserve,” I said, and kissed him on his bald spot, where I know it feels funny, but he won’t wipe it off anyway. “Now,” I said, sitting back down across the table from him. “Tell me what’s up.”

He smiled and used his napkin again. “You’re good kid, Nushka. Considering. All in all. I mean, despite the many flaws. Reasonably good, anyway. Could have been worse. I think.”

I just smiled back. “Better than you deserve, old man. Now, spit it out.” I waved at what was left of the fancy dinner and snagged another pegflower. I let its sweet-sharp flavor dissolve across my tongue.

I could see him toying with the idea of teasing me some more, drawing it out. But then he ran his hand gently over the back of his head, and sentiment won out. Those old ones just don’t have the stamina.

“I got to thinking about this morning,” he said slowly.

“I have a hobby,” I said by reflex, though Dinu wasn’t one to harp on a topic, not really.

“Not that. I got to thinking about the things I did when I was young.” He’d told me plenty of stories. They sounded risky and foolish, mostly. “And I was talking with Juana, down in the laundry.” It was our day for washing privileges. “I guess I’d forgotten how much things have changed. When I was a boy, all this,” he waved a hand at the cell around us, “was new. Newish, anyway. We’d only been living in the benthodils for a generation. I knew people who came in on the colony ship, who’d actually been in orbit, before…” Before the shuttles ran out of fuel, or crashed, or took off in ridiculous, doomed attempts at interstellar travel.

“You did?” He’d never talked about it. The colonists’ arrival seemed distant, part of the ancient history we’d learned in school—a dry story of alien signals and generation ships and disappointment. It had never occurred to me to think of those original settlers as real people—people one could meet and talk to.

“Not well. But my carer knew his father, who’d been an astrogator for the arkship. I got to meet him once or twice.” He drifted off into silence, and I let him remember, all of a sudden seeing another side to this warm, loving man who’d given up a job as sea scout to take care of a whiny young girl.

“Anyway,” he said at last. “That’s not the point. The point is that in those days, in my day, we still spent a lot more time outside. We’d only just learned about the benthodils, that we could actually live inside them. My carer was already your age when someone first climbed down one of the vent stacks and found a space like this.” He waved at the cell again, with its grey spots of air absorbers where the benth drew in oxygen to be re-emitted at the exhaust stacks as NO2.

I wondered what it had been like for that first explorer, with the rush of wind coming down the intake stack, and back up the exhaust stack, and with the dome rising and flattening on the seabed, drawing air past the valves. Would it have been better to be sucked down the intake, or risk being blown out the exhaust, spit out like a seed into the storms of the surface.

“Where did they live?” I asked, though I knew the answer well enough. They hadn’t, mostly. They’d died in droves, drowned in storms, or starved on the arkship, with its ecosystem sabotaged by diehard colonists intent on limiting the options. They’d died hard at the hands of an angry mob.

“In the shuttles, mostly. Floating on the surface at first, until the first big storm. On the seafloor after that. It was hard.” He had tears in his eyes again, and they weren’t the good kind. “It doesn’t matter. It does, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The point is, when I was young, we all knew more about the surface. The outside. We went outside—to scout, to harvest from the shuttles, to look for food. I realized this morning that you don’t have that. That you’ve never actually been outside. I think you should.”

“But… But why?” This wasn’t at all the happy surprise I’d expected. “What’s out there but wind and water?”

“And rock.” A sad smile played across his lips. “And a whole lot of ocean. There’s a whole world out there, Nushka. Literally.”

“But I don’t need it! We’ve got everything we need right here. I mean, there are the farms, and all, but the farmers deal with that. And they don’t even go to the surface. There are ports at seabed level. The ocean is right here!” I was starting to panic a little. The thought of being outside the dome was frightening—exposed to the elements, to vicious winds, water everywhere, with no shielding, no protection, with the sun burning holes in the cloud—it was barbaric.

“Look at it this way, Nush. When you’re working on a pump, you don’t want to know just the tubing, do you? You need to understand the compressor, the valves, the power supply, the… all the other parts.” Dinu wouldn’t know a compressor from an alternator.

“I could be a specialist.” It sounded weak even to me.

“The point is, the domes are only part of the ecosystem. You need to have a look at the larger picture, at least once. For one thing,” and here he leaned forward, bait in hand, “you’ve never seen the stack lids. They’re pretty sophisticated machines, you know. Only experts get to work on them.”

I knew it. Being a stack tech was top of the heap, and not just in altitude. The stacks had to let air in or out, keep water out, and survive the vicious, changing winds, the typhoons, the waterspouts. The benths had natural mechanisms, of course, but they were more leak tolerant than humans were. The stack lids had to be durable, effective, and, most of all, not harm the benths. Since the benths kept growing and changing, that meant constant adjustment.

I licked my lips. Dinu really did know me well. He’d known that a chance to see the lids in operation was a treat I couldn’t turn down, no matter what it meant in exposure to wild nature. It was so tempting I even excused his attempt at bribery. It had worked.

“I’ll do it,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure what it was. If it meant seeing the lids, it was worth it.

I hadn’t given Dinu enough credit. When he woke me up early the next day, we scarfed down a good breakfast, did our cleanup, and packed a hefty sack of cold lunch. Naturally, I got to carry it.

“Do you good,” he said. “Pretend it’s spare parts.” Which it sort of was, I guess.

We wandered out of the cells and made our way to the main dome. There was a long spiral ramp carved into the outer rim, curling up to outgrowths we used for storage and farming and observation. We climbed past those, well up toward the ceiling, where I’d never been before. The dome’s rhythm was more evident here, a claustrophobic flattening and rise of the ceiling above, clear evidence that, plant or animal, the benth was breathing. I shuddered to think what it must have been like before the fans, when instead of this vestigial pumping, the whole dome rose and fell, with vast surges of air filling and emptying the cells we now lived in. Now, the fans continuously brought in and circulated fresh air, and flushed the old air out, in a carefully synchronized pattern across all the parts of the dome.

Near the top, a catwalk ran out across the open space below, and the dome dropped low enough at times that Dinu could have reached up and touched it. He didn’t, but I could see where others had scraped their initials in smooth lines across the dome’s thickly grained inner surface.

“Hello,” he said while I was gawking. “How are you, Srinar? Thanks for doing this.”

“For an old explorer?” the other man asked. “Any time.” He was older than Dinu—maybe seventy five, with tight-curled grey hair and a nose so sharp it could have cut glass. “Is this her?”

“Watch it with that ‘old’ talk, Srin. Nusha, meet my old friend, Srinar. He’ll be our guide today.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Srinar. I appreciate your taking the time.”

The old man turned back to Dinu. “I thought you were the one raising her, Din. Where did all this politeness come from?”

Dinu turned and winked at me. “I think they’re putting it in the food these days. Doesn’t taste quite like it did when we were kids.”

“Hey, if politeness is the cost of flavor, bring it on. Remember when all we had to eat was bull kelp?” The oldsters nattered on for a while about how hard the old days had been. Doesn’t matter how old or young they are; the old days were always harder, and a whole lot better.

I looked around. The catwalk ended at a rickety looking structure hanging from the vent above. It was an open cage, for the most part, with the bars just close enough together to provide footing, if you were careful. A slim ladder rose up and into the vent, which was a good five meters across. I could feel the air sweeping past me and up the vent, and I could hear the whirr of an exhaust fan not too far above. A thick bundle of cables ran down one side of the ladder, some thick and insulated, some thinner and gathered in bunches of thinly covered white.

“Power,” said Srinar from beside me, pointing at the insulated black cables. “Guess what the others are?” He pointed at the white.

For a moment, I was flummoxed. But then it came to me. “It must be light.”

He clapped me on the back. “Definitely not yours, Din. You were never that quick. Let’s get on the way before her real carer realizes she’s missing.” He told me, as we climbed the ladder, how the white cables were drawn from kilometers of optic fiber cannibalized from the defunct arkship and brought down in the shuttles, or in droptanks. It had solved the practical and nutritional problems of living in the dark internal spaces of the benths, and even allowed for limited dry farming.

“We’ll be in trouble when the fiber’s all gone,” he said. He seemed indefatigable as he climbed, while my arms were already burning with the effort. “We’ve already salvaged from all the crashed shuttles we can reach.” He stopped, seemingly to let me rest, since he clearly didn’t need it, and I did. “What do you think we’ll do when the fiber runs out?”

I used the excuse of gasping for air as a chance to think. Below me, Dinu didn’t seem that much better off. I recalled now, vaguely, that light was gathered in condensers and fed into the glass fibers. Without those… “Mirrors?” I guessed.

Srinar looked down at me with what seemed like genuine respect. “Mirrors indeed, young lady. When we can’t mend the fibers any more, we’ll melt them down into curved mirrors and aim them back and forth down the vent. We’ve already got some models running in Ridgecrest’s #12 vent.” His casual mention of another dome was another reminder of just how insular my thinking had been. I knew about other domes, of course. Humanity was spread across a half-dozen domes on the sea plain between the sub-surface mountains and the nearby abyss. “Still a couple of problems to work out, of course. Stabilizing the mirrors, for one. Maybe you’ll have some ideas on that.”

The amazing thing was that he didn’t sound patronizing at all, though clearly he meant to be. What could a teenager have to offer that these techs hadn’t already thought of?

We stopped after about a hundred meters, on a little platform on the side of the vent. The roof of it was all wire mesh, above which was the roar of the first exhaust fan. It didn’t feel like I was being sucked up into the rotors, and I was a little disappointed.

Srinar smiled as we waited for Dinu to clamber up on the platform. “Not quite as scary as anticipated, eh?” he yelled in my ear.

I shrugged, and he turned away to climb up the ladder a little further. Just below the fan housing, it dipped slightly into the wall of the vent. The housing was a little thinner here as well, offering a narrow space we could climb through. It was wider than it looked. Even with my pack on, I had no trouble getting through. At the top, there was another platform, so that even though the ladder slanted back, there was no risk of falling into the fan. On this side, too, I could feel the pressure of the air a bit more—a comforting gentle hand on my back.

We climbed endlessly, it seemed, past fan after fan, and the occasional rest platform midway between.

“It’s quietest here,” Srinar said as the three of us shared a sip of water from my pack. “Easier to talk.”

I had little to say and left the oldsters to their reminiscing. The vent was nowhere near as frightening as I’d imagined but just as fascinating. There wasn’t actually that much to it—just the ladders and platforms, the bundles of cable running up and down, and the fans and their housing. But it all worked, and I realized as never before just how reliant we all were on these fragile strands connecting us to the light and power I’d taken so much for granted.

I left the cables well alone, but I longed to peek into the housing of the fans, or to climb out on the narrow, rail-less struts that held the blades in place and provided maintenance ways. At the third fan, there had been a faint squeak, like a bearing beginning to stick. I had pointed it out to Srinar at the next waypoint, more as a question than anything else. He’d surprised me by immediately climbing back down, his wiry arms still not tired.

“Didn’t hear it,” he said when he returned. But he’d gone over to a broad conduit I’d assumed was electric. He’d opened a little box beside it, taken out a wax pencil and a bit of paper, sealed his note into a little ball that looked like the fat end of a strand of bull kelp, and dropped it into the tube. “They’ll take a look this afternoon, sort it out by tomorrow. Best to catch these things early.” He’d said no more, but I’d caught Dinu smiling broadly at me, like he was proud, and I realized I was proud too. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe I’d been helpful. I burned to tell someone about it, but the only person likely to be interested was Dinu, and he was already here. I knew he’d let me tell him about it anyway.

Finally, after what seemed like hours of climbing, but was still only mid-morning, we neared the top. Here, the stack had narrowed to only three meters, and I felt I could almost reach all the way across it. The pressure of the exhaust was stronger now, not enough to float on, but enough to think about, to throw my balance off just enough. Dinu was in the lead now, with Srinar below, ready to grab an ankle if one of us fell, perhaps, or just to watch as we vanished into the fan blades below.

There was a change in the quality of the sound at the next midstation. I listened as we waited for Srinar to vault up onto the platform.

“It’s the sea, isn’t it?” It was exciting to think about the waves crashing against the vent wall behind us, with just a meter or so of stack to keep away the ocean and all its fury.

“It is indeed,” the old man said.

Dinu tilted his head to the side. “Sounds like a calm day.”

Srinar slapped him on the back. “Still a little explorer in you yet. Dead calm today. Supposed to be that way for a few days, then a big blow. May have to batten down a bit, in fact.” I remembered now that they closed the vents entirely sometimes and just let the air go stale. It all seemed much more real here, inside the vent itself, with the top not far above. I wondered now, at how ignorant I’d been about the things that sustained us all. I’d have to admit it to Dinu, and he’d be insufferable about it. It was worth it, though, and the best was yet to come.

There were little bunks set around the edge of the vent, stacked three high in places, with thin railings to keep sleepers from rolling out.

“Staging point for explorers,” Dinu explained. “I spent many a night here, waiting for the wind to die down.” It brought home to me again just how different his life had been, how he’d traded daily risk for a calm life as a carer in the dome far below. It seemed almost stifling to me, in a way it never had before. “Ready?”

I nodded, though internally I was unsure.

The top was magical. Frightening, terrifying even, but magical nonetheless. The stack lid was a marvel of precision engineering, with baffles and catches and solenoids and slatted vents and spillways. It fit the stack tightly, thanks to a compressible rubber seal that Srinar said would have to be replaced in just twenty years’ time, if all went well.

The ladder ended in a circular catwalk just below the cap, and I could see no good way up through it, barring the vents that connected to actuators and pistons. What I could see was the sky—a mass of fuzzy grey that Dinu called ‘cloud’, giving shape to a word that had never been more than a syllable in the history books before. It was oddly enervating, looking up into what seemed like infinity; no comforting dome above, no sense of benthodilic respiration reassuring me that all was well with the world.

“This way,” said Srinar from behind me, as he swung open a door I’d barely noticed. It was a massive thing, with flexible seals all around the edge, but tiny and simple compared to the lid above. Beyond it was… nothing.

I found myself on my knees, fingers white against the wire floor of the platform, chest tight and heaving.

“It’s alright,” came Dinu’s voice, his hands gentle against my back. “You’re fine.”

“I was falling,” I gasped, “into emptiness.”

“You’re alright now,” he said. “I’ve got you.” I’ve never been more comforted by such simple words. Dinu was here, and he had me, and I was safe. I burst out crying, my face firmly buried against his legs, while he rubbed my back and stroked my hair. And then I remembered that Srinar was there, and I cried again from sheer embarrassment.

Eventually, I quieted.

“Recall the first time I came up here,” Srinar said, matter of factly. “Cried like a baby and had to go all the way back down. Took me three tries ’fore I looked out the door.”

“Me too,” said Dinu. “Two tries. But then I was always tougher than you.” I listened to their lying banter, and my heart filled with love for them both, until I was afraid I might cry again. At last, I sat up, eyes carefully averted from the ghastly void beyond the door and looked out on the comforting darkness of the vent shaft.

“How many times did it really take?” I asked Srinar when I could speak again.

“Twice,” he admitted.

“Uh huh.”

“No really. I really did have to go back down the first time. Scared the jeebers out of me. Not Din here, of course. He bounced right out the door as soon as it opened. Always had more guts than brains, our Din.”

“I was scared out of my mind,” Din insisted. “But there was this older boy I wanted to impress.” Another piece of the puzzle fell into place then—the way they looked at each other, the way they acted. Not old friends at all, or not just that, but old lovers as well.

“Damned if you didn’t do it, too,” said Srinar. “Of course, it would have worked better if you hadn’t puked over the side.”

“Almost went over, too, if you hadn’t caught me,” said Dinu. “Well worth it.” The two men smiled at each other, and I could almost feel the history between them, the unspoken years of love and anger, disillusionment and reconciliation. Was Srinar why Dinu had turned away from the outside, or was I the reason they’d split? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know more, and I turned my face back toward the door.

It wasn’t as frightening this time, with Srinar between me and the emptiness, and Dinu beside me, one hand on my leg, holding me in place should gravity suddenly fail. We sat and looked at it for a long time, and gradually, with casual shifts and turns, I found that Srinar had moved out of the way, and the path was clear before me. He’d done it so subtly that I hadn’t even realized it was happening. Dinu as well had moved away from me, and it underlined how in tune these two were now and had been.

I didn’t worry about that. Before me was infinity—an endless plain of grey cloud and a dark, ruffled surface that must be ocean.

It wasn’t really infinite, of course. Even in my stunned state, I knew that, knew that that boundary must be the horizon, that the world was round, and big, but not unlimited. I crept my slow way to the door, and I could hear the two men muttering behind me, keeping up a pretense of normality, though I knew with every grateful nerve that Dinu must be poised to grab me, to pull me into the safety of his embrace if there should be a need.

The air was different up here, I realized after the initial shock had worn off. It was more… lifeful. Fresh. I’d never realized before just how stale the air below must be, how many times it had been rebreathed, no matter how well we circulated the air. This was what air should be.

It took me an hour to get out the door, and even then I went no further. There was a narrow balcony, and a thin railing with occasional gaps. From one of them, I could see the top rungs of a ladder leading down.

“Down there are the solar cells,” Srinar said. “They’re plastered all around the north side of the stack. Keeps the sun on them during the day.”

“Not at night?” asked Dinu.

“Smart ass.”

“There are no other stacks,” I pointed out.

“Not that you can see,” said Srinar. “This is the westernmost stack of our dome, looking out over the trench. If you went out around the balcony, you’d see our three other stacks to the east, and Ridgecrest’s in the distance. Seamount to the south, Holiday to the north. Can’t see the rest. Might catch Holiday if you lean forward and look right.”

I swallowed. “I might leave that for another day.”

He laughed and slapped me on the back, sending me sliding as much as a centimeter toward the edge. Dinu’s hand on my shoulder kept me safe, and I reached up to give it a squeeze.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“I think so.” I scooted back inside and waited until Srinar had closed the door before I stood up. The tower had a slight sway to it, and I shuddered to think what it might be like in a storm, though likely the door wouldn’t be open then. “Is it always so quiet up here?”

Srinar shook his head. “Depends. Crew of explorers left yesterday, back tomorrow. Routine inspection of the lid last week. They’ll have been checking out your squeaky fan while we were up here. Otherwise, not much call to come up here, and not much interest.”

“Thanks,” I said, and offered my hand. “I hadn’t expected…” I gestured vaguely. “This.”

He shook my hand. “No one does. Some hate it. Some can’t get enough.” He nodded toward Dinu. “Some can.”

We headed back down. At the surface point, Srinar pointed out another massive exit on the far side of the stack.

“Keep the submersibles out there,” he noted. “Lashed to the side, under the surface. Easier than the old days.”

“Remember trying to get aboard?” Dinu asked. “Let alone enter?” They laughed and shook their heads and headed down.

The trip back was uneventful. We said our goodbyes, and I thanked Srinar whole-heartedly. I couldn’t help but notice how long the men hugged, and I felt confident we’d be seeing him again.

The universe had shifted again. It took a couple of days to get back into the swing of my habits, and I was less than attentive on my duty shifts in the farms and the hospital the refectory. It was on the second complaint about overflowing servings of mashed potatoes and not enough seagrass that the line steward told me to shape up or go home. Going home meant a double shift tomorrow, so I tried to focus.

It was hard. Everything was different now, as if that brief glimpse of the surface had changed my vision. And perhaps it had. My perception was deeper now, it felt, like I had hold of a secret others didn’t share. I could feel now the weight of the water above, above the dome. It didn’t feel oppressive; it felt like a comforting, protective blanket, keeping us safe from the storms, keeping us anchored.

I wondered again, but more urgently, about the path we’d taken, the tacit deal we’d struck with the benthodils. The fans, the lid, the cables—it was all so intrusive, so presumptuous, that I wondered whether it was wise, was right.

“It’s symbiotic,” Dinu assured me that night. “Commensal at worst. We’re not…”

Parasites, I thought. The word we never said.

“We make sure the benths get the oxygen they need, because we need it too. We exhaust the NO2, because we can’t breathe it either. We do a fair amount of damage to the cilia on the floor surfaces, but in our waste rooms, we feed it, and the benths benefit. Our waste even provides the trace metals and minerals they need, that they’d have trouble getting elsewhere. In fact, we’re not sure where they got them before. Most of the benths have sub-pods over the edge of the trench, and we suspect the waters are richer in minerals down there.”

“The danglepods.”

“That’s right. We don’t know a lot about them, really. Our submersibles can’t go that deep, and we’ve never had a reason to explore.”

I smirked.

“Oh, we know the kids go down there,” he smiled. “We’ve all done it. That’s in the risky but not stupid category. There are human gates down there to keep you going too far. And below that, it’s complicated—the benths have all sorts of valves and channels to keep the pressure back. But the fluid that comes back up is rich in metals.” He frowned, but refused to say more, and we moved on to the latest news from other domes.

Little did either of us know how closely linked those topics were, nor that the shifts in the universe were picking up their fearsome pace.

“They’re all dead.” Srinar shook in Dinu’s arms, while I stood by helpless, a jug of gleanberry juice futile in my hands, as if the flavor of fruit could stave off the loss of an entire dome.

“What happened?” I asked, unable to stop myself. All we knew was that Holiday had collapsed and that debris and bodies were strewn across the surface.

Dinu frowned at me above Srinar’s head and jerked his head for me to leave, but the older man answered, and I stayed.

“They’re not sure yet. Pressure void at the base of the dome, they think. Something like that. Water coming in, forced everything up through the vents.” He shuddered. “Through the fans.”

It would have ruined the rotor blades. I tried to focus on that, on the machinery, rather than the bodies they’d ruined, the flesh that I hoped had no longer been alive.

“I’m sorry, Sri,” said Dinu. “You had a kid there, didn’t you?” It seemed all sorts of parents knew their children. It made me wonder a little bit what was wrong with me and mine. Anything was better to think about than Holiday.

“Daughter.” Srinar leaned back, away from comfort. “Never really knew her, but I know she was there. So that’s my contribution to the gene pool gone.” He gave a grimace that stretched his tired face into a grim caricature of mirth.

Dinu took Srinar’s hands, squeezed them. “It’s not your genes we care about,” he said, and stopped, trying to find the fine line between comforting and callous.

“We’re going to have to salvage the fiber,” Srinar said. “Someone’s going to have to go in there, pull it all out.” His hands shook above the table. “And the cable. The lid; we’ll need that. Whatever’s left of it.”

“I’ll go,” I said, surprising all of us.

“Yeah, good,” said Srinar. “Thanks.” Dinu only smiled. It was a ludicrous idea to begin with, and we all knew it. But I wanted to do something, to respond, to help.

“I will.” When Dinu spoke, it wasn’t with the tentative, tremulous determination of a teen, but with the quiet confidence of an expert.

This, Srinar took seriously. “Hey, no. I didn’t mean that, Din. That’s not why I came. I just…”

“I know.” Dinu squeezed his hands again. “I know. But they’ll need people. You know that. A diver who understands machinery. There aren’t as many these days. It’s been… Things have been good.” Until now.

“We’ll see,” said Srinar. But we all knew it would happen. Divers and techs didn’t mix that much. Another thing I hadn’t realized I knew, hadn’t realized might be a problem. Another shift in my center of gravity and worry.

[ Stack Lids © 2025 Katharine A. Viola ] They held a memorial service, of course. Something to acknowledge disaster, to pretend it was over. There were speeches, music, poems. Carsa read something new and everybody cried. It covered everything from the bravery of our ancestors’ gamble on a seeming alien communication, to the computers’ inability to decipher it while the humans slept, and the shock of finding a ‘habitable’ word with no land at all, their excitement at finding the domes, and the homes we’d made of them since. She made it all seem logical—brave rather than frantic, proud rather than desperate. She talked about how Holiday had been named after Survival Day—the day when the hapless colonists had finally been sure they would live, would go on even without land, or aliens of any kind. She seemed subdued, from my place in the crowd, her eyes shiny in the bright light of the main dome, but her movements slow and uncertain. It made me want to reach out and hold her, help her cry, but I didn’t.

I thought once that she saw me, sought me out in the crowd. Noticed me at least, held my gaze. It made my heart leap, and I looked away, ashamed to feel such joy amid such pain. I left before the ceremony ended, hid myself in the farms until my nerves had calmed.

The salvage mission fell in place faster than I had thought. “Got to get it all before it corrodes,” Srinar said. He’d moved into our cells, to keep me company in theory, but in practice so that he wouldn’t be alone. He’d been hit hard by the collapse, not because of his daughter so much as because his faith in technology had been shattered. He couldn’t stand to see the fans, he’d told me. “Every time I climb by one, I think of her, the water surging up, pushing her through the blades.”

“The rotor would have been fouled by then,” I said. It was a discussion we’d had before. It seemed to comfort him to hear it.

“Yeah. Of course. Foul.”

I knew what he meant.

Dinu was two days gone. Submersibles and divers from Ridgecrest and Seamount and other domes were working night and day, towing flotsam north and south. The air in the dome was getting foul, with the fans not working half the time to allow material to be lowered down the stack. The benth had noticed, and the dome was starting to flex. The huge breaths made valves open and close in the stacks, complicating things further. There was even talk of opening a vast door into the main dome, with all the nightmares of sealing and pressure and airlocks that that would entail. I’d talked about the problems with my tech supervisor, and they seemed insurmountable and risky. Tolerance for risk was low in all the domes.

“I’m going to go down to the workshop,” I told Srinar. “Help clean the salvage.” It was hard, simple, tedious work, but I wasn’t quite qualified to do more. “You be alright here?”

I was headed out the door when he said, “Wait.”

I turned back, surprised. I didn’t like to leave him alone, but I couldn’t stand to sit in the cells, idle while even the benth breathed around us.

“I might have something for you,” he said. He glanced back to the room he shared with Dinu, but he didn’t rise, didn’t go get some piece of tech or flotsam he thought I’d like

“I don’t know if Dinu would like it,” he said. “But… things are what they are. And you’re old enough.”

I was sitting down by now, looking nervously across the table, trying to search out Srinar’s eyes. Dinu wouldn’t like it. Was that exciting? Frightening? I wasn’t sure.

“He told me to take risks,” I said, and found I’d decided. Exciting and frightening all at once, but more of the former.

“Well, this is the mother of all risks.”

I waited.

“Here’s the thing,” he said at last. “They’re worried about the downstacks. They’re shriveling.”

I hadn’t heard that. It seemed impossible. I’d been down in them myself, no more than a year ago. “But…”

“They can’t use the submersibles. They’re pretty makeshift. Even down at this level, on the shelf, it’s a risk. And they’re all busy.”

“But—”

He kept on going. “They sent one out over the edge anyway, down to the first danglepod.” He looked like he wanted to spit at the risk to good machinery. “It’s all fine down to there, but they said that down below, there’s something off. The stack is thinner, maybe. Discolored.”

I’d been down a downstack, the narrow chutes the benths used to anchor themselves in place along the seawall where they liked to cluster. Not to the danglepod. Nobody really went down there; no one I knew anyway, but we all said we did. The downstacks weren’t anything like the vent stacks, really. They were long columns, but where the vent stacks were huge and solid, the downstacks were no more than a couple of meters wide, with squishy, spongy, scary sides, and stiff, blocky ribs that sometimes merged in complex central structures that were hard to squeeze by. The sides were lined with tubes full of slow moving liquid, and I recalled something about waste, or maybe deep sea nutrients.

“Maybe it’s the copper,” I said. “Verdigris,” though it made no sense. The benthodils had a copper-based venal fluid, but there was copper at all levels of the sea. There was no need to seek it out below, nor any reason it would suddenly escape and oxidize.

“No.” He’d become less tolerant, angrier with the world and all its failures.

“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say, or why he was telling me.

“They need someone to go down there.”

“Uh huh.” Sure. They’d want to go check it out, make sure whatever had happened to Holiday didn’t happen to us.

Srinar looked up at me, looked me in the eye. “They need someone small. Someone who knows machines.”

Sometimes the universe shifts and you roll with it. Other times, you fight it with every fiber of your being. I wanted Dinu. I knew what Srinar was saying now, much as I tried not to admit it, and I wanted Dinu to protect me from it, wanted to hide my face in my carer’s chest like a little girl and wait until it went away. I wanted him to make the decision for me, to say ‘No, she can’t. She’s just a child.’

But Dinu wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a child, and for all he was angry, Srinar wouldn’t ask unless he thought he had to. So I said yes. And cried myself to sleep that night, telling myself this was what it meant to be an adult. I was wrong.

It wasn’t just me, of course. There were others—Marcu, two years older than me, already legally an adult, tall, but skinnier even than I was; Varna, two years younger than me, short but a little chubby, and working hard to convince her carer that she’d be fine, that she could suck in her gut for hours if need be. Marcu was in training as a scout, though I wondered what good all his orienteering and underwater skills would be in the tight, directed, confines of a downstack. Varna was a bio-phys student, and ready at a moment’s notice to tell all and sundry how smart she was. She kept going on about how it was the opportunity of a lifetime, how nobody’d ever gone down a downstack before, and how much we’d learn. I could see that Marcu, preselected as the leader of our little expedition, had already tuned her out.

They had packed a pack for me, and I’d delayed us for an hour by insisting on unpacking and repacking it myself. I didn’t change anything. The pack had been put together by Simonian, my techspace supervisor, and she’d thought of everything. She stood up for me against the Council rep, though, a man named Velasquez, who was visibly frightened, and fretted that any moment our dome might collapse.

Finally, Marcu turned to him, and with surprising firmness, said “Mr. Velasquez. If the dome collapses we’ll all die. The three of us,” he motioned to Varna and me, “will die first. And worst. We want to live. We want you to live. And the best way to do that is to be prepared. If Nusha thinks she needs to check that pack, she needs to. I repacked my own twice last night.” My respect for him went up several notches. I couldn’t think of another teen who’d have been so self-possessed. Even Carsa and her cool crew sometimes folded under pressure. I tried not to think about Carsa, her brown eyes, her sparkling words.

I needn’t have worried. When we got to the danglepod, she was there, waiting. “Marcu,” she said, from her comfortable position in one of the pod’s oval chambers.

“Cars,” he said, with a tone of long suffering.

It had never occurred to me, somehow, that Carsa had friends beyond her clique and sad hangers-on like me. The unlikeliness of it made me forget the sheer wonder of the danglepod and Varna’s incessant natter behind me as she went on about pressure adaptation and the cleverness of the valves we’d just forced our way through, and how the slime that coated them, and now us, was probably a sealant. Irritatingly, very little of it had gotten on Marcu, and apparently none at all on Carsa. She looked as beautiful as ever and even more confident.

She and Marcu stared at each other, while all the time Varna kept talking. Finally, Carsa relented.

“Thought you might need company,” she said. The seduction in her tone nearly broke my heart.

“I’ve got company,” he said. “Both smarter and more attractive than you. Go home.” I was as startled by his comments as by his ability to resist Carsa’s beauty. We’d established within the first few minutes of the team that I liked girls, Marcu liked boys, and Varna liked science.

“Too late for that,” Carsa said, though I couldn’t see why. “Besides, this is historic, right?” By then even Varna had caught up, and she launched right into an explanation of just why it was historic that we explore the mysteries of the downstack, and why she was the right person for it. “So you need someone to tell the story. The real story. Not…” she tilted her head at Varna, who went on about pressure differentials and atmospheric gradients. “Besides, I’m not going back.” She took on a look of intense stubbornness that I recognized from long hours watching her across the refectory.

Apparently Marcu had seen it as well. He shrugged, and said, “Up to you. But you follow instructions, or I tie you up and leave you in the stack somewhere? Got it?” He was so skinny that the threat seemed barely credible, but apparently Carsa knew his looks as well, because she only nodded.

“Now that the formalities are out of the way, how about a snack? You look like you’ve earned it.” I wiped slime from my hair self-consciously as she opened a bag and handed out sandwiches and a gourd of gleanberry juice. “And while you’re eating, you can tell me all about yourselves. If you’re going to be immortalized, you’ll want me to get it right.”

Marcu didn’t say a thing, but we heard a lot about Varna. To give her credit, it was impressive, and she didn’t seem subtle enough to lie. If only half of it was accurate, it was a lot, and I wondered why I hadn’t heard her name before. Until I realized I had.

“…Initially discovered by Dinu Efanic, of course,” with a nod at me. “Though he didn’t realize the importance of the growth rings around the distal ramae, and I had to…”

Of course. Fourteen year olds who knew more about biology than I did. I had to laugh at how badly he’d understated his case. In another fourteen years, I still wouldn’t know as much as Varna did now.

“And what about you?” asked Carsa turning to me. “Nusha, right?” I blushed, and then, since I couldn’t sink right through the pod and vanish, would have blushed about blushing if it were possible. “What’s your job? Marcu’s here to deal with surprises and make decisions. Varna’s here because apparently no one knows more about benthodils than she does.”

“Five people do,” interjected Varna, “but two of them are too old, and the others are all too big.” Even Varna had had to do her gut-sucking once or twice, but I was confident her indomitable curiosity would see her through.

“So what do you do?” Carsa continued. “What’s a tech doing down here where there’s no tech.”

I waited for Marcu to tell her, but he stayed silent, focused on the remains of his sandwich, which involved shreds of red kelp.

“I… In case. I mean…” I looked to Marcu again, but he just nodded, showing no interest in rescuing me.

“What she means,” said the precocious and accurate Varna, “is that if we find there’s a biological problem we can’t solve,” she made it sound unlikely, “Nusha’s here to think about whether we could use tech instead.” Which, she made clear, would certainly be a second or third-rate solution.

Carsa didn’t press me further, but happily, Marcu had finished his sandwich and moved us on. I was so busy mentally kicking myself for my stupid awkwardness that I missed the first part of Marcu’s warnings.

“…so from here it’s all conjecture, okay? We think the downstack gets tighter, and we think there are more danglepods. We’ll spend an hour or so in each, on the theory that they are pressure valves or something like it. It will give us time to acclimate, but it’s all unknown. If you have any problems—breathing difficulties, hallucinations, dizziness,—anything at all, you tell me. Understood?” He looked around the circle until we’d each nodded. “Obviously, there’s risk. If the downstack is deteriorating, there may be leakage, and if there’s water, it’ll be under pressure. We could drown, the stack could split, we don’t know.”

Even Varna kept quiet. I guessed we really didn’t know.

“If any of that happens, keep calm. The worst thing you can do is panic. I know, it doesn’t sound useful. But it is. You don’t have to panic. And if you do, you can stop. You’ll still be frightened, your heart will race, you’ll want to breathe heavily. But you can still think. Do that, and the panic will take care of itself. It works.”

I wanted to ask how he could be so sure, but I was worried the answer might be even more frightening than my fears. In an odd way, it was reassuring. Dinu might be out doing salvage, but I had his replacement right here with me. And I had myself. Both Dinu and now Marcu seemed to think that was enough.

Marcu turned, and with a soft-edged prybar, pushed open the rim of the greyish plate of flexible mat beneath his feet. Air rushed through the gap, and he stepped closer to the rim, working his prybar to the side, widening the gap until, suddenly, the valve gave way, and he slid through to the stack below.

We’d done this once before and had a sense of the drill. Marcu kept his arms out as he found his footing below, and as soon as he started moving, Varna had scooted into his place, so that between them, they kept the valve open. The air from below smelled moist and incongruously spicy.

“Clear,” came Marcu’s voice, and his arms slid out of sight. As he climbed down the stack, Varna slid through the gap, and I scooted into place.

“History in the making,” said Carsa from where she squatted beside me. “And they say you can’t get anywhere sitting on your ass.” She winked.

Below me, I could now see Varna squeezing her way past a tangle of stiff, cord-like membranes. It was a tight fit, and I winced as the cords fetched up under her small breasts, but she shoved past without complaint. She glanced up as I slid my feet down to brace against the wall of the stack. “It’s the hips that are the problem,” she said, and indeed I could see that her hips were wedged in the narrow tube. But the fat over them was forgiving, and she squeezed them past. I looked up in my turn, and wondered how Carsa, with her older, more womanly figure would fare.

She saw me looking, and just shrugged. “Art,” was all she said, which I took to mean that whatever price she paid for her poetry was worth it.

As she passed through the valve, Carsa let it slap closed behind her, and the cool wind from below stopped. Without even the dim light that had come through the danglepod’s transparent vesicles, the stack was an even more mysterious place, with dark shadows thrown by headlights making monsters out of the complex profusion of ribs and struts and tubules that surrounded us.

“This is why no one’s gone further,” Marcu said below me. “It’s dense, and gets denser.”

“It’s the pressure,” said Varna, and even Marcu listened. “The stack is under increasing pressure so it gets narrower and needs more internal bracing. It’s bound to the trench on one side, but exposed on the other. We’re not actually sure why it’s here at all, but analysis of the xylem flows suggests that the trench is the source of rare metals and minerals the benthodils thrive on. No one knows why they’re there.”

We absorbed that as we acclimated to the tight space.

“The geologists say there’s no good reason there should be any greater concentration of metals in the trench than up on the seashelf,” said Carsa above me.

I hadn’t exactly forgotten about her; I was acutely aware of the way her calf pressed against my arm. But I hadn’t expected her to contribute. It felt like I was the only one who didn’t have something useful to say. I opened my mouth, but nothing came to mind, and I let it shut again.

“Don’t worry,” came a whisper and a squeeze on the shoulder. “You’ll have your chance.” I hoped I would, but it made me feel better.

The next hours were a clammy, awkward series of squeezes, drops, and climbs. I dreaded the return even more than the continued descent, but Marcu assured us that going up would be easier and hardly more tiring. When we stopped to rest, our sweat cooled quickly, and I realized that the temperature of the water in the trench outside must be much cooler than up on the broad, relatively shallow seashelf.

Thinking of all that water was a mistake, but no matter how I tried to ignore it, it was too late.

“Um, Marcu?”

“Yes?” came the muffled voice from below me.

“I, um.… You remember we talked about how… um…” I could feel myself blushing and thanked fate for the harsh lighting.

“Yes?” He seemed distracted, and I wondered how to broach the topic without actually saying the words.

“I…”

“She needs to urinate or defecate,” said Varna helpfully, and I tried to pretend no one had hear her. Above me, I could hear Carsa giggling. We’d talked about it, of course, planned for it. We’d know the stack would be tight, and that the trip would be long. We had a plan. It just wasn’t a good one.

“Ah. Right.” He’d seemed confident when he broached the topic, antiseptically, in the clean space of the main dome. Now, he seemed as embarrassed as I was. “Hang on. If you can, I mean.” I closed my eyes. Bad to worse. “I think there’s some sort of side chamber here, with a floor. You can use that.” The floor was key, so that we wouldn’t have to climb with pee dripping down all over us. My pee.

It was just as awful as I’d thought it would be. They all waited, below and above me, while I crammed myself into what Varna had deemed a ‘burgeoning vesicle’, maybe a danglepod in the forming. I peeled my pants and underwear down my legs, and squatted. I could hear the breathing around me, and knew this would never work. I’d have to give it up, and then climb for another hour in torment, until it was really unbearable, and then suffer the humiliation of asking for another stop, and then—

And then the irrepressible Varna launched into a loud lecture about how danglepods might form, and why there would be a benefit to the downstack from multiple air pressure locks, but how the pods might in fact be safety locks in case of water intrusion. And Carsa interrupted to say there was a song about how something similar had happened on the arkship, and sang it right off, and Varna kept talking, and at last, with blessed release, I could pee. It didn’t disperse into waiting cilia like it did in the normal waste cells, but I managed to dress again without getting much on me, and we all kept going. When we stopped half an hour later for Carsa to do the same (and more, from the smell), I interrupted my whistling to lean down toward Varna and whisper “I owe you one.” She kept talking about how the valves in the xylem weren’t the same as those in the danglepods, but she winked at me, and I went back to my whistling, content that beneath all that obsessive science, there was an actual person, and a nice one at that.

The stack kept getting tighter as we went, with more bracing and less spacing, as Carsa put it, mocking her own status as ‘official bard’. She had the most trouble. The rest of us had been chosen in part for our small size. Carsa wasn’t big, but she was bigger than we were. It was surprisingly dry. I had somehow expected that this far down water would seep in. Varna pointed out that if water were seeping in, it would likely be through a hole in the stack and we’d all be dead. She went on about it at some length, punctuated by grunts as we worked our way down. I tried to hold on to that warm feeling I’d had earlier.

It was cold, though. Unaccustomed exercise kept us warm, for the most part, but when we stopped to rest, the sweat would begin to dry, and I began to get chilly. Eventually, Marcu told us we could break out the thin jackets we’d brought along for the purpose. None of them fit very well, and they reeked of must and disuse.

“Shipwear,” Marcu said. “Not much call for them in the domes, and they’re useless outside.” In the water, he meant, but it was warm enough on the surface that they weren’t needed there either. My jacket still had a stick-on label that read “Rodriguez”, and I wondered who she’d been.

“Comp tech,” said Carsa.

“What?” Had I wondered aloud?

“Nala Rodriguez. Comp-tech third class. Died in the food riots, Year 5 After Landing.” She saw my look of astonishment and shrugged. “Bards have to know this stuff.”

I felt a little dejected as we renewed our climb down. Marcu was a confident scout, evidently skilled despite his age. Varna knew all there was to know about benthodil biology. And now even Carsa, dilettante extraordinaire, had not only talent, but a store of knowledge to go with it. Whereas I hadn’t found anything I could apply my mechanical skills to.

I looked again at the space we were climbing through. The internal struts and supports consisted mainly of thick, slightly spongy webs of dull white fiber. They’d be easy to cut through, except that Varna had opined that they were essential to the downstack structure. Every now and then, there were valves of the same fiber, but sheathed in a hard, stiff material that Varna called ‘woody’. We worked our way down by wriggling around curves and angles, sometimes dropping straight down, but mostly worming our way down in shapes a contortionist would envy.

There was no way we were getting machines down here. Nothing of a practical size, anyway. And even if we could, I didn’t have the faintest idea what we’d need. A pump? A fan? Some sort of bracing or a water lock? Even the parts wouldn’t fit where we’d gone. Although, if we cut up the pieces cleverly enough, and then reassembled…

I was well into design of a pretty clever segmented rotor blade when Varna grabbed my foot from below.

“Hey!” she said. “That’s a head full of facts you’re stepping on.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. Past Varna, I could see Marcu, mostly obscured by webs of white fiber. He was poised above what I thought might be another danglepod. About time, too. We’d been climbing all day, and my arms and legs ached from constant motion.

“What’s up below?” Carsa called from above me. I looked up at her, and she winked. She was fonder of wordplay than I’d realized, though perhaps that was to be expected in a poet.

“I’m not sure,” said Marcu after a pause. “Might be a leak.”

The walls of the narrow downstack seemed to press in on me. What had been a comforting support suddenly felt constricting, tight, and I tried not to calculate what the pressure outside must be.

“Not possible,” said Varna confidently. “A leak at this pressure would collapse the tube all the way to the next set of valves, or even the next danglepod up.”

“Well, it’s wet down here,” said Marcu. “It’s coming from somewhere.”

“Let me see!” Varna’s excitement was tangible, and she writhed from side to side trying to find a way down past Marcu.

“Half an hour,” I blurted.

“What?” asked Carsa as bodies rearranged themselves below me.

“Half an hour since we passed the last valve,” I said reluctantly. “Just FYI.” I tried to sound casual. It would probably take us twice that to climb back up. My arms complained preemptively.

There was room below me, though, and I slithered my way down to the danglepod. There was a sheen of water along the base of the vesicles, almost a small pool at the lowest points. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.

“Condensation,” said Varna as Carsa slipped down beside me. “Probably just condensation, due to the cold. I’ve noticed that the outer wall of the stack occasionally has a slight dew on it. Most of it is probably reabsorbed, but some must make its way down here and collect. Because of the woody surface of the valve covers, the uptake efficiency is low. Above, there must be enough evaporation to take care of it. At these depths, the low temperature limits the absorption capacity of the air, so it collects in these pools. Nothing to worry about.”

“Maybe,” said Marcu, but it was clear he was sceptical. I was on his side. “We’ll stop here for the night, in any case.”

The prospect seemed less appealing as I considered the possibility of death by compression just past what now seemed like flimsy valve plates. My muscles looked forward to it, though.

“We’ll sweep the water out of this vesicle,” he pointed at one toward the outer, sea-ward side of the pod, “and see whether it collects again by morning. We’ll sleep in the others.” There were five good-sized vesicles, counting the one he’d selected, and half a dozen smaller ones.

There was enough room in the vesicles to lie down away from the water, if you were small and curled up right. I chose one of the wall-ward vesicles and arranged myself with my feet toward the wall.

Carsa, with her greater height, took some time arranging herself, and ended up with her head and shoulders out in the central stack, almost peering into mine.

“Sorry,” she said. “Best I can do if I don’t want to sleep with wet legs. And I don’t.”

We lay there for a while, quietly. In the vesicle two to my right, I could hear Marcu’s easy breathing. He was probably already asleep. Across the way, Varna was twitching and mumbling in her sleep. “But Sa-ara-a,” it might have been. It was comforting that even a child genius sounded like just a child when she whined.

“So what’s your story?” Carsa’s whisper interrupted my musing.

“What?” I was apparently doomed to respond to her every comment with monosyllabic surprise.

“Who are you? What do you do for fun? Who are your carers? Where do you hang out? All I know is that you’re a techie. As official bard, I need to know more.”

I heard the sneer in her voice as she said ‘techie’. I heard a sneer, anyway, whether she intended it or not. All day I’d been flattering myself that she liked me, that she’d noticed me before, just as I’d noticed her. And now she was classing me as just another tech nerd. Not special, not worthy of notice, let alone regard.

“I’m tired,” I said and realized I was, that disappointment had drained me of energy, and I really did prefer to sleep than talk to Carsa. Just this morning, I’d have called that impossible.

“Okay,” she said.

I was just falling asleep when she said “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.” I was too drowsy to respond, but I wrapped a feeling of self-righteous satisfaction around me, and slipped over the border into sleep.

I knew it was morning from the noise Marcu made rousing us and from the painful cramp in my legs. The good news was that I hadn’t rolled into the water in the night. Apparently Varna hadn’t been so lucky.

“Good thing I took a sample last night,” she said, patting a pocket of her vest. “Before any contamination from my pants.” Bless her heart; she was more worried about science than discomfort.

“It’s dark,” was my contribution. Carsa was already surging up the stack to find some private spot to pee.

“We must be near the aphotic zone,” said Varna. “Possibly near the bottom of the dysphotic.”

“The what?” Condemned forever to be the expedition’s straight guy. Maybe that was why I was along.

“It’s dark,” said Marcu. “That’s what she means. Aphotic means no light penetrates. Dysphotic means not much light, though it varies. The domes are in the euphotic zone, so we get pretty good sunlight. Over the edge of the shelf, and you’re in the dysphotic. We don’t go far into that; pressure’s too high.”

“Thanks for reminding me.” I looked out. The seaward walls of the vesicle were clear, almost like the new plastic they were making from kelp. “It’s like a window.”

“No contaminants,” said Varna. “No sediment. The water’s clearer and cleaner down here, where it’s not swirled around so much by wind. And maybe the pressure has something to do with it. Stiffer structure, maybe.” She made a motion as if to poke the outer wall, but Marcu stopped her.

“Let’s just take it slow, shall we? I’m still worried about seepage.” In the vesicle we’d tried to mop out, a centimeter or so of water had gathered overnight. “I know,” he said, placating Varna. “Impossible. Still. We’ll all take care of our necessaries, then turn the lights out for a while. Let our eyes adjust.” He winced. “Should have done that first. I want to get a look down the outside of the stack, if we can.”

It took a while for all of us to get our business done. I was the last, and I had to climb a fair ways up to find a clean vesicle to use. All the others had their lights out when I got back, and they covered their eyes until I turned mine off.

“See anything?” I asked.

“No,” said Marcu. He and the others were crouched at the outer edges of the seaward vesicles doing their best to look down.

“There was a very nice specimen of melucigaferus spinex,” said Varna. “It’s an anglerfish, though really it’s more of a cephalopod with jointed legs. It’s got a light that it dangles from below its body to attract prey. Then it pulls the light back in and grabs them.”

“It’s like midnight on the surface,” said Carsa, “with constellations dancing across the sky.”

I tried to think of something tech-oriented to say, just to fit my role, but nothing came to me.

All the good spots were taken, so there was no point trying to help the rest look down. I slid into a small vesicle to the left and squatted there, feet on either side of the little pool. The vesicle was apparently just forming, and it afforded only a look down at about a 30° angle from the horizontal, but the outer wall was exceptionally clear.

“Hey, Varna, I see your mucilagorous!” It was a faint but steady light in the darkness off to the left, faintly greenish in color, though that could have been the water. It cut off suddenly, and I wondered whether it had caught something. What an unpleasant surprise that would be—to go investigating a yummy looking light, and then find yourself in a cage of arms and mouth. I shuddered.

The light came back. As pessimists will, I suddenly saw the other side. How disappointing, to be sure of a nice meal and have it slip through your hands. On the whole, though, I decided, I was on the side of the prey. Eating another creature. Metalicigus could just eat kelp like the rest of us.

The light went off again. Either this prey fish was particularly stupid, or there was a school of them down there taking turns being foolish.

The light came on again. This was one unlucky angler, and a persistent one at that. An unpleasant thought came to me. “Hey Varna! How much does the mustaglivizer eat?”

“Can’t see enough,” said Marcu. “After a half hour, our eyes should be fully adjusted. There’s just not enough light down here.” He checked his watch, a rare piece of oldtech that I ached to get hold of. “And it’s late morning. It won’t get better.”

There was a sudden glow, and my distance vision disappeared, replaced by a dim-lit view of nothing in particular. There were a couple of quick swishes as smaller fish disappeared from the sudden cone of light shining from Marcu’s vesicle.

“Lights on, everyone,” he called. “Shine them down the stalk as best you can.”

My light was useless in here. I crawled out of my vesicle, feeling the ache as my calves uncramped after squatting for so long. I went into the larger vesicle next door, and leaned above Marcu to shine my light down as best I could. From the vesicle next door, I could see the glow of Carsa and Varna’s lights.

“See anything?” I asked. He was silent for a long time. “Anything?” I prompted.

“I’m not sure,” he said slowly, voice grave.

“It looks to me like the downstack has withered,” said Varna. “From a point about ten meters down, though the initial point of atrophy may be considerably further down.”

“Maybe it’s still growing,” suggested Carsa. “Maybe you’ve got it backward.” She didn’t sound like she believed it herself.

“We’ve seen sidestalks growing,” Varna replied. “The benthodils use them as stabilizers and attachments, growing radially outward from the domes. They look quite different from this. Also, we’ve seen sidestalks damaged by careless use of machinery, in the early days. Reports suggested that they withered in a similar fashion, losing their smooth outer surface as internal pressure is relaxed. They become rugose and ridged as the surface collapses, and they begin to suffer structural weaknesses and flaws. Since the advent of humans, we’ve also seen a shrinkage of a different type of side root that we think seeks out nutrients. It’s theorized that the human presence supplies the missing nutrients in our waste. That shrinkage looks similar to what we seem to see here.”

“Enough,” said Marcu. There was a tone in his voice I hadn’t heard before, something that felt almost angry. Or, I realized, afraid. “Are you sure?”

“No,” she said calmly, as if she hadn’t just described the sum of our fears. “There is insufficient light. The pattern of shadows suggests withering, but perhaps the stalk is simply tapering normally. If this is the last danglepod in the chain, perhaps there’s a difference in development that we haven’t predicted.”

“More light,” said Marcu. “We need more light.” He checked the watch again, a compact device with a dim face and a black strap that held it on his wrist. “It’s almost noon. We’ll wait another half hour to get as much sunlight as we can.” He lowered his voice and muttered, “I doubt it will be enough.”

I was frightened now for sure. For all we knew, the valves below the danglepod were about to cave in, and all that water was about to squeeze us up the tangle of the downstalk, to emerge in the down as flesh puree. But how much worse was it to be unsure? Probably, we and the entire dome were close to death. But maybe, just maybe, we were all fine, and life would go as always.

“Plan for the worst,” I mumbled. If the valves were going to give in, we’d have to brace them. What could we bring down that would help? For that matter, what did I have in my pack that we could use as an emergency measure, before we even reported back? Calipers, measuring tape, some expansion struts, extra bulbs, ohmeter, batteries…

“I can make light!” I almost yelled it in Marcu’s ear. I would have danced with excitement but for my fear of disturbing the valves.

“What?” Finally, it was someone else’s turn to be incoherent.

“I can make it brighter. Temporarily. If I hook all the lights together and tie in the recorder, I can make the light much brighter. For a moment. It will burn out the bulb and deplete all the batteries we’ve got, but it will be…” I calculated quickly, “about five times as bright. We should see…” another calculation. “Maybe twice as far.”

“Do it.”

There was no uncertainty in his voice. Nor had there been in mine, while I was thinking. But had I calculated correctly? Maybe there was a decimal out of place? Was it twice as far, or 1.2 times?

“Don’t worry,” Marcu said, laying a hand on my arm is if my doubts were spelled out clearly on my face. “I trust you.”

I worked as quickly as I could. I wanted to make the most of whatever sunlight we had. While I picked through my pack, Marcu organized the others to mop out our ‘dry’ vesicle again, to give me as good a place as we had to work in.

The result looked ugly at best, an ungainly contraption of wires and bulbs and connections and an awkward master ‘switch’ that was just two wires capped with plastic. I wired in the last headlight by touch, my hands moving more surely than I’d expected, once the others couldn’t see me. Not one of them had voiced a doubt or suggested it might not be wise to risk all our lights in one shot. I’d set aside a pair of bulbs for the return climb, but it was possible the wiring of the headlights would be fried by my ugly creation, and we’d have to make our way back by feel.

“Okay,” I said at last, stretching my back without letting go my wires. “It’s done. If you’re still sure.”

“I’m sure,” said Marcu.

“Tech genius to the rescue,” said Carsa. “Saves dome single-handed.”

It felt good, even from her. I didn’t point out that even if it worked, we weren’t saved at all. We might just be getting a closer look at death.

“Okay, folks. To your places,” said Marcu.

While I worked, they’d planned out how to best use the light—where they would sit, where each would look, who would close their eyes to guard against any flash, who would keep their eyes open. My task was simple; touch two wires together, and be right.

I stood over Marcu, his head pressed as close to the clear vesicle wall as he could get it. Down to my left, I could see the light of that patient, elusive anglerfish, just winking out.

“Ready?”

“Ready.” “Ready,” came two voices from the next vesicle.

“Ready,” said Marcu below me. “Do it.”

I did it. There was a bright light, lasting for about a second, and then a pop and the light went out. In the darkness it left behind, I could feel the blood still draining from my face.

“Tell me…” I whispered. “Tell me you saw that.” I let my shaking legs lower me to the floor, put down my bastard flashlight, heedless of the wires.

“I did,” said Marcu. He sounded worried. “It does look like withering. Pretty clear. You did a good job with that light, Nusha. Now we know for sure the downstalk’s in trouble.” A practical problem, he seemed to say. Solvable.

“Fuck the light,” I said viciously. “Fuck the stalk, for that matter. Did you see that?” I could hear the others moving out of their vesicle. “Any of you? Tell me you saw it. Tell me!”

“Saw what?” asked Marcu. I could almost see his worried expression, superimposed on the complex purple flashes indelibly marked on my eyes in the darkness.

“Saw that!” I said, pointing out and down, to where a light was probably even now slowly winking on and off, a light that was definitely not an anglerfish. “Saw a huge fucking starship!” A thing of spires and circles and beautiful, impractical curves that no human hand had ever touched.

“I saw it,” said Varna stoutly. “Sort of.” She looked at me shamefaced, and I shriveled in my chair. She was doing her best, but it wasn’t good enough. The Council was interested in critical, existential matters, not the inventions of teenage girls.

“I was looking down,” Marcu had told them, and gone on to describe the withering of the downstalk in careful, clinical detail.

“Me too,” Carsa had said, and done the same with bigger, fancier words. “But it could have been,” she’d added. “I was looking more to the right.”

They all had been. Only Varna, who’d had her eyes covered at first, had caught a glimpse of what might have been a starship, or might have been an unusual coral formation. “Though corals don’t usually form at such depth, we know relatively little about the biology of this world. It might have been a coral-like formation. I was focused on the downstalk.” And she’d told them scientifically how we were all going to die. “But it could have been a starship too.”

Nobody believed me. And why should they? The most useless member of the expedition, the most tech-oriented, a certified nerd and loner. Backed up by the maybe of the youngest member. Even Dinu wasn’t sure of me.

“It’s the pressure,” he had said. “Nitrogen dissolved in the blood, low oxygen, poor ventilation down in the stack. It happens to explorers too, when they go too deep for too long. Sometimes they see things, hear things. Happened to me, once.”

“You think I was hallucinating.” Et tu, Dinu. “Or just making things up?” I couldn’t keep the bitter tinge from my voice. “Seeing what I wanted to see? Because when I risked my life going down the stack for you all, what I was really thinking was, ‘Hey, what if there’s an alien spaceship down here?’”

He’d tried to backtrack, but I hadn’t bought it. And now here we were in front of the Council, and out of respect for Dinu, they’d listened to my story again. I’d seen from the start that they didn’t believe it.

Finally, they brought the session to a close. I was glad of it. I’d had all the humiliation I could take for the day.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Councilor Lewis. “Let’s say there is a giant alien starship down there, as Ms. Aratyan suggests. It’s exciting. It’s fascinating, even. But it doesn’t help. We can’t get to it. It can’t help us. We need to focus on the dome, on why the downstalk is withering, and how, and what it means. After the loss of Holiday, we could be next. Once the withering reaches the dangledpod you all found, those valves could fail, and the next, and the next, and that’s the end. That’s the problem we need to deal with. Not… whatever else might be down there.” Nothing at all, he meant. I could see it in his eyes, no matter how he tried to cushion the blow.

The worst of it all was they were right. What good was a starship? Even one that still worked? Even an alien starship with a winking light wouldn’t save us if it was at a greater depth than we could master—the very depth that seemed to be systematically crushing our downstalk and our lives along with it.

If only they had believed me, I could have turned away, given more to my report on engineering than bare facts and dry figures. Instead, I turned inward and left the hard work of salvation to others.

“I found a reason for you to be right,” said Varna. She’d come pestering me almost every day since we’d come back. I was meant to think she had latched onto me as a big sister, but I was certain Carsa and Marcu were behind it. I wanted to sneer at the idea that they cared, but it was too much trouble.

We were sitting on the catwalk to the upstack, high above the dome. It was a long way down. I’ll be among the first out the stack when downstack ruptures. It was too much trouble to care.

“See, most of the benthodils we know of are in shallow water, along the continental shelf. They call it that, even though it’s underwater.”

“You’re an endless spring of useless information.”

“I know. But just along here, where we settled, the benthodils also send downstacks crawling down the edge of the trench. They don’t do that elsewhere!”

“Whoopee. Lucky us. Chose just the wrong place to live.” And it was true the Council had sent out explorers to check other domes, to search out others without the same flaws.

“Yes, but don’t you see? Why are these different? The others send out a fan of sidestalks. Only here, only these benthodils have very sparse fans and long downstalks. Why?”

“You tell me.” I knew it was rude, but if there were ever a girl who wouldn’t notice, it was Varna.

“Because they use those fans to sift nutrients out of the sea,” she said, excited. “Rare elements. And ours don’t do that! Why?” She could barely contain her excitement, almost bouncing on the catwalk, and I wondered whether it would be better to hold her in or push her off. “Because they’re getting those elements elsewhere!”

“Genius,” I said coldly. “Pure genius.”

“It is,” she insisted. “Because where do you think they might get those rare elements?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t care. As long as they weren’t… Light finally dawned. “Wait. Are you saying…”

“Yes! From your spaceship!” She did get up now, to dance around the catwalk. “Don’t you see?” She came back to sit right next to me and grab my arm. “This explains it all. Why downstalks look like regular stalks. They are. They’re just repurposed. I’m not sure why they’re not more like sidestalks, but I’ll figure it out. See, the benthodils are taking advantage of the ship, and the water leaching elements out of it. But then humans came, see, and our waste provides all the elements they need. So the downstalks aren’t needed anymore, and they’re withering away. It all fits!”

It did. There was a moment of beauty where a sense of peace and satisfaction settled over me. I was right! I’d always been right, even when I began to doubt myself. I was right, and they were wrong. There was a ship down there! And…

“And we’re all still going to die,” I said.

“That’s right,” Varna agreed placidly. “But it’s all explained.” She seemed quite happy about it. And suddenly I was too. Because if it could be explained, it could be solved. And I could solve it.

“Varna,” I said, grabbing her by the head and kissing it soundly. “You are the genius to end all geniuses. I love you!” I hugged her close. “But now I have to go to work.” There was so much to do—planning, designing, building. “Come on!”

“Do you?” she asked as we got up.

“Do I what?” Bulkheads and struts and pressure locks and waste treatment systems filled my mind. What to do first? How could I help?

“You know. Feel…”

I looked down at her, saw for perhaps the first time what she really was—a brilliant, lonely girl, isolated by her genius. She talked because she could, and because she didn’t know what else to do. And she was far more alone than I’d ever been.

“Varna,” I said, gathering her close. “You talk more than anyone I’ve ever met, and I only understand a quarter of it. But I love you, little one, like a sister.” I pushed her back so that I could look into her glistening eyes. “You and me, Varna. We’re friends. Best friends.” I kissed her on the head.

“And when I someday build that submersible and go find my spaceship, you’re coming with me. You and a pair of earplugs.” I hugged her again, and then we went off to the workshops to grab the universe by the ears and re-center it right around us.

[Issue 2025.72]

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