He rechecked our position, triangulating between the pulses from the mother ship and the transponders on the seafloor, then pushed the stick forward. Two, three, four knots; a gentle glide through the forest, over tube worms and around spewing, roaring geysers.
We passed near enough to look up at a flange thrusting almost six feet from the side of a tall chimney. The bottom of the flange was painted with rippling, silvery pools. Superheated mineral-rich water, refusing to mix with the cooler local fluid, gathered under the flange’s rough surface and reflected our lights.
“I get nervous around these puppies,” Dave said. “Had one almost topple over on me when I was working for NOAA. Just clipped it with a manipulator arm, then, wham.”
“That’s not common, is it?” I asked.
“Not very,” Dave admitted. “But once is enough. Well, shit—I mean, dog poop—on it.”
That just didn’t sound like reliable Dave the Christian man, the steady pilot of NOAA DSVs. I gave him a concerned look, but he was too busy to notice.
We made our way between the long, winding canyon walls, pushing along at half a knot. The vents were behind us now, but woolly bacterial clumps fell all around, flashing in the lights. Bacteria coalesced into floc, carpeting the seafloor or being blown up into the megaplume, where they could be carried for miles, then sprinkle down like fake snow from an old Wal-Mart Christmas tree.
“Looks promising,” Dave said. His arm twitched. The little sub tilted, and he corrected. “Poop.”
“Focus,” I said. The view outside was getting interesting. A thin, viscous silt covered the floor of the canyon. Ideal.
A long, segmented ribbon like a thick blade of grass floated in our lights. “There.” I pointed. Dave had turned the thrusters to reduce our forward motion, and the ribbon greeted us with a frantic, gelatinous shimmy. Then—before I could take charge of the data glove on my side and extend the manipulator arm—the organism tore itself into spinning bits of jelly.
I watched the bits get lost in the floc.
“Sorry,” Dave said.
I was furious, and with little reason. How else could we slow down? How else could we maneuver to pluck this singular and interesting anomaly off the seafloor?
“Some sort of cnidarian?” Dave asked.
“I don’t think so. Let’s rise a bit and descend on the next one with the thrusters up.”
“All right.”
“Just focus, please.”
His lips moved silently. I shifted my eyes from his face to the illuminated field beneath us, then back to his face.
We rose twenty feet and drifted down the narrow canyon. The walls dropped off. We passed a lava column, lonely and rugged. Everything was covered with silt and floc. There was no motion, except for the fall of bacterial snow; still and empty, lost in a billennial quiet.
My hand twitched inside the glove. The manipulator responded with a grinding outward push.
“Careful,” Dave said.
I wanted to tell him screw you, but he was right. Easy does it. Focus.
Dave let rip with a long and heartfelt fart.
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” he muttered.
His stink filled the sphere. It was lush and green, like a jungle, but gassy, like corpse-bloat. I had never really smelled a fart quite like it, to tell the truth, and I wanted to gag.
“I don’t feel very good,” Dave said. “This is nothing like rice and pepper.”
My tickle of anger became a nettlelike scourge. Little sparks of resentment and frustration came and went like stinging fireflies. I could not focus. I glared at Dave, and he shot me a screw-faced look from the corner of his eye that totally grounded me.
We both turned away. We had been homing in before a fight. We couldn’t get up and circle and bristle in the pressure sphere, so we had just glared—then agreed to back down.
Sweat soaked my armpits.
The sub crept over the sea bottom. I took control of the lower bar of lights and fanned them out.
Something big, round, and long came into view, lying horizontal on the seafloor like a toppled ship’s mast. “What in hell is that?” I asked, startled.
Dave practically jerked control of the lights from me, then chuckled. “That is a condominium dropped from heaven. Take a look.”
Clams, boring worms, polychaetes studded the mystery shape like maggots on a corpse.
“It’s a log,” Dave said. “We’re not that far from some big forests, the Olympic Peninsula, Vancouver Island.”
“Right.”
A few tens of meters east, we came across another log. A chain drooling rivers and ponds of orange rust tied the log to at least seven more, all thick with life, all broken loose from a raft who knows how many years or even decades ago. It takes a long time for deep scavengers to move in on such riches, but when they do, organisms gather from miles around to share the feast.
We churned our way east a few more yards, following the rust rivers until they faded into the silt. I lifted the bar and spread the lights again. Dave did not object.
Ahead, dozens of little blobs wobbled on the ooze and sediment like dust bunnies under a kid’s bed. I rotated the entire light bar, flooding the seafloor with daylight glow. “There they are,” I said. Xenos by the dozens cast long shadows. The DSV glided over them, lazy as a well-fed manta. Our lights picked out hundreds more, then thousands, jiggling on the silt. I could barely make out the blurred tracks of their slow, rolling movement.
“Got ’em,” Dave said. “What next?” Everything was fine again. The smell was going away or I was able to ignore it.
I kept moving the lights. Dave gently precessed the submarine.
