Undersea (2 page)

“Maybe so,
Miss
Gattley, but he isn’t here,” Council Junior Larr said, tipping his gaunt face forward and resting his bony elbows on the conference table. “Perhaps we should take this time to adjourn for the day? Proctor?”

“Agreed, Mr. Larr,” Jills replied. Ralla could feel herself flushing red. The white and beige conference room emptied, each Council member passing her without a glance as they left. She walked around the long black glass table and stepped onto the patio overlooking the Yard.

The Yard was a smaller, squarer version of the Basket. The floor here, though, was alive with greenery: grass, bushes, flowers. Blossoming trees grew around the edges. Enormous vines climbed the aligned hulls of the ships and yachts that made the interior walls. The foliage had gotten so dense, it was nearly impossible to see the ships behind them. In the park below, children were playing under the watchful eye of an adult, though they were all small from Ralla’s height. Ralla took note of several cabins, visible from this vantage, that weren't tending their vines. She wondered if their neighbors had noticed the shabbiness.

The Council Chambers were near the ceiling. The picosun, though still bright, wasn’t overly so thanks to a ring of filters built around it like a lamp shade, shielding the upper ships from too much light. She smoothed out some imagined creases in her delicate and elaborately decorated green frock, and sighed.

It was a short walk to her father’s cabin. The lushly carpeted corridor curved gently to mask its extensive length. Just this section, primarily for the Council members and their staff, would take 25 minutes to walk from end to end, and that didn’t even cover the entire Yard, or the bow where the bridge was. Aft of the Yard was the Garden, and of course the Basket. She had never walked from one end of the ship to the other in one stretch, but had heard some people did it for fun. Then there were the annual races, one of which was a lap around the entire ship. She couldn’t imagine how people could do that.

She entered her father’s cabin without knocking. As she expected, he was standing at the balcony, his burly frame backlit by the picosun’s radiance.

“Get back into bed!” she said with a mixture of annoyance and insistence. If he was startled by her entrance, he didn’t show it.

The cabin wasn’t overly elaborate, at least compared to some of the other Council members’ rooms she had seen. The large bed took up most of one wall, and draperies hung from the others. The floor was wood, something she had never seen anywhere else on the ship. She strode across it, not noticing. Mrakas Gattley turned at his daughter’s approach.

“You nag like your mother.”

“What a surprise,” she reached quickly for his arm, but grasped it gently. With his weight off the balcony railing, he seemed to wither. He shuffled towards the bed, and half fell into it with a stifled cough. “I told the Council that if they didn’t listen to me, I was going to drag you to the next meeting.”

“I’m sure that went over well. I don't suppose Larr had anything to say about that?

“No, of course not,” she said with a smile.

“Well, not much we can do about it now,” he pushed himself up to lean against the soft brown headboard. “If it comes to it, you’ll just have to go public with what you know.”

“I don’t think that will force the Council’s hand.”

“You’re probably right, but if they won’t listen, we’re at a dead end,” he said. Ralla sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. She smoothed out more smoothness in her frock. “I know you don’t like it when I talk that way. It’s easy for me. I know it’s hard for you, and I’ll be more careful.”

“You’re not dead yet.”

“True. But it seems I might as well be,” Mrakas said, taking his daughter’s small hand in his bulky ones. “You’ll get my seat when I go, and I’m sure you’ll win in the next election. You’ll still be a Council Junior, but at least they’ll have to listen to you. Next week you can visit the mining dome, and poke around to see what you can find out. Until then... come on, I know that look. Let's put on an old vid and get our minds off all this.”

III

Thom Vargas had a moment to smile as he flew though the air. Landing hard on the gangway deck, he slid face first into the thin glass separating the gangway from the precipitous drop to the floor of the Basket. Olly, tall, bald, and less than a year older than Thom, landed a moment later, squishing Thom even further into the glass.

“Don't come back. You hear, you bastards? Ever. If you do I'll lock you myself,” said the proprietor of Waves. Clearly stronger than he looked, he glared down at them from the entrance of his bar. Behind him, two other young men looked on, using every bit of their willpower not to break out in laughter. “OK, you two as well. Get out!”

The two other men mocked a look of innocence as they made their way out to the gangway. Thom stood, looked over the railing at the drop, and laughed.

“Can’t say I understand what
his
problem is,” Thom said, his voice rather slurred.

“Back to The Landing?”

“Lead on, Hett,” he said to his bearded friend. Yullsin, the diminutive fourth member, had succumbed to the giggles. The boys made their way along the gangway. Barely wide enough for three of them, Yullsin followed a step behind. More than once they had to go single file to let someone pass. Each time they received dirty looks.

“They’re just jealous,” Thom said.

“What,” Olly asked. “That they’re sober and we’re not?”

“Exactly,” he answered with a grin.

They leaned against the walls of the elevator, and fell out when the doors opened at B1, one level below the floor of the Basket. Some light from the picosun far above trickled through clear panels and open grates placed in the ceiling of the corridor.

Featureless metallic corridors continued ahead and behind, branching off into countless side corridors as far as the eye could see. Light fixtures tucked in with various pipes along the walls played tricks on Thom's blurred eyes, seeming to get closer and closer together as they disappeared into the distance. The crew staggered down the hall, slipping on the moist floor, and entered a hatch with a hand-painted sign above that read “The Landing.” Inside, the lighting was better, the floor drier, and the dozen or so patrons smiled knowingly as the boys made their entrance. The bartender placed four drinks on the bar.

“No puking inside this time, OK?” he said jovially.

“No promises!” Thom said as a salute, downing the drink in one gulp. An older man at the bar looked over with a scowl.

“Don’t you boys have to be in school?”

“School?” Olly said after downing his drink. “How old do we look to you? Even Yully finished school four years ago.”

“Then this is the best thing you can think of to spend your money on?”

“Umm, yeah!” Olly said, raising his empty glass to the bartender. Thom smiled, but didn’t seem as enthused. The old man noticed, and nodded stoically at him.

At night, as it were, the ship slept. The picosuns automatically dimmed, their color cooling to mimic the blue cast of moonlight. There was some life, though. Cleaning crews made their rounds. Floors were buffed, lightbulbs changed—all the daily, or in this case nightly, activities to keep entropy at bay and the aging ship in fully working order. As every school kid knew, there were 16,950 windows facing the Basket alone. Those that weren’t personal cabins (most of the higher ones) were washed from the deck with powerful jets of seawater and cleaner.

Take, for example, the section of the ship that was once called the
Ocean Voyager III
. Its starboard side, all 12 levels from waterline to weather deck, from stern to roughly the bow, now occupied one of the center positions in the port side wall of the Basket, bordered on the bow by the similarly sized
SeaWinds
and on the stern by the smaller
Sea Spirit II
. Underneath the
Voyager III
rested a
Contentent
-class tanker whose name no one remembered, and above were four personal yachts that had changed names too many times to count. Where one ship ended and another began was difficult to determine, as so many welds, patches, paints, and repairs had been done over the years that it all blended into one hodgepodge of a wall. And that was just the middle of one wall. The
Voyager III
, being one of the larger former ships, could fit end to end four times along the wall of the Basket where it now lay, and nearly two times port to starboard.

The interiors were mostly intact, though families and/or shop owners had taken down non-structural walls over the years to create larger spaces. Carpets had mainly given way to the bare deckplates.

On the far side of these ships was a maze of corridors, trams, and elevators designed to keep people and goods moving from the Garden or docks to storage areas or shops. The widest of these, known simply as Port Street and S Street depending on what side of the ship one was on, were the longest open areas on the ship, running unimpeded from just shy of the bow to just ahead of the engine bays. Only late at night were these thoroughfares not busy with tram, cart, dolly, and person traffic.

On the other side of the Streets was a ring of even more ships, still mostly intact from their former lives. These more or less matched up in terms of size to their inward counterparts, but while the inward former-vessels were predominantly housing, the outer ships held storage, manufacturing, and all the machinery needed to keep nearly 200,000 people breathing, eating, drinking, and not living in their own filth.

If you knew where to look, or were on one of the maintenance teams assigned to the area, you could get through one of these ships, and exit the other side. This was one of the few places where you could see the sophisticated superstructure of the
Universalis
. Mostly you’d just find ballast tanks, watertight bulkheads, and the triple-redundant cells between the ultra-hard carbon-composite exterior hull and the still-watertight hulls of the outer ring of ships. But in a few places, for access and maintenance purposes, you could see the extensive latticework that held the hull to the hulls and the ships to the ship that made the buoyant city possible and a home for so many, so far beneath the surface.

The lights were off in Thom’s cabin, but enough leaked through the porthole past his dirty towel curtain to let him know that it was barely dawn. His mouth tasted like his body felt. Rolling over and standing up in one motion, he paused with a knee on the bed, one foot on the floor, and his hands bracing the opposite wall of his cabin. Eyes closed, he took a breath, then entered the head. Not much larger than the toilet that occupied its center, he was able to do his morning business, brush his teeth, and shower all at the same time. None were done well.

Thom removed the towel from the porthole, dried himself off, and dressed slowly in his gray-blue uniform. There were orange-red patches on the left elbow and right knee. The brown bottom-most button on the shirt didn’t match the other clear ones.

The Garden was by far the largest space on the ship, though it was hard to tell by looking at it. More than double the size of the Basket (itself half again as large as the Yard), the Garden was exactly what its name implied. Row upon row, tier upon tier, hanging garden from hanging garden, every cubic inch of the Garden was maximized to take advantage of the three picosuns that lit the space. A semi-permanent haze imparted a softness to everything. The plants that could thrive in just water were housed in clear containers so they could be placed over something else. Mirrors were used to give light to plants tucked away underneath overhangs. Fruit vines covered every wire and support. It was bright, hot, humid, and had more co-mingling smells than any nose could deal with.

The only pedestrian walkway ran the length of the Garden in the shape of an “I.” Recessed as to take up as little growing space as possible, it was covered by an open grate intertwined with vines. Along here, dozens of shops and restaurants offered produce from farms in the Garden, or from any of the small personal gardens maintained throughout the ship. There were also stalls selling the fish that Thom’s employers (or one of their competitors) had caught earlier that morning. The hectic floor was in constant gridded shadow from the grate and the vines.

Four gigantic locks, one each at the corners of the “I,” were designed to keep the Garden’s weather in and the ship’s weather out. This time of morning, they were temporarily kept open, as the traffic was so continuous that the door wouldn’t have time to open and close anyway.

The tram ride from his cabin took its usual ten minutes, and Thom stood in the lock looking out over the part of the garden he could see, and promptly sneezed like he normally did. Then it was down the ramp, out of the bright light, for the five-minute walk to breakfast.

The restaurant’s patio was empty, an eddy of calmness in the constant stream of pedestrians. He seated himself with his back to the wall of the restaurant, looking out at the people passing by. It wasn’t long before an older, overweight man brought out a plate of smoked fish and fruit, placed it in front of Thom, and slumped into the chair beside him. He looked to be a little more than twice Thom’s age. He watched the flow of the crowd with sunken and puffy eyes and flushed jowls. Thom’s own brown eyes were puffy, though not from age.

“I think I’m gonna try to get out of the fishing corps,” Thom said, breaking the silence they both seemed to enjoy while he ate.

“Yeah?” the older man said non-committal. His voice sounded like he needed to cough.

“This guy at the bar last night...” Thom said, taking a bite out of a green piece of fruit. At this comment, the older man turned to look at Thom. “I don’t know. It’s not like he said anything, but he did, you know?”

“No.”

“I suppose not.”

“It’s a good job. You’re outside.”

“I know. Look, I know it’s not like there's a lot of jobs, but maybe something that’s just a little different. I’m not trying to be Captain or anything.”