From the Deep, the Music Rises
Ana is alone in the Deep when she hears the music. It’s a pop song of longing for Old Terra, barely audible. She whips her head around, the lights of her exo-suit pushing ineffectually into the dark. There’s nothing. No one.
For the first time in weeks, the first time since she’s been working alone, she unmutes her comms.
“Keep music off the line,” she demands. “I’m trying to work.”
There’s a long pause, longer even than it takes for the comms to cut through the Deep’s time dilation.
“There’s nothing on the line.” Kelv’s voice is tense. It’s been a frequent intrusion on her long silence, both here and on the surface. He still sets a third place at their table, talks into Ana’s wordlessness. The music plays on behind his words, soft and insistent. Ana recognizes the songs only through impromptu acapella. Through Prin.
“Forget it,” she sets to work. Space and time work strangely in the Deep, its rules a puzzle for physicists, xenobiologists. Ana operates on instinct, using the small changes in pressure and temperature to avoid the displacement of a Leviathan, or the body-wracking presence of warp fish.
The music plays on, this time a song about youth, drugs and the lure of the unknown. Ana finds what she’s looking for, the swaying lattices of netweed, their pods heavy with Deep Pearls and their ultra-valuable exotic matter.
“Maybe...you should come back up,” Kelv says. Ana doesn’t respond. If she comes up, he’ll tell management she’s cracking, and they’ll make her take on a new partner. Never again.
She moves deliberately, watching for deadly tangles of netweed. She’s always been good at her job, always been able to hyper-focus, even when her comms had been full of Prin’s singing, high-pitched, crystal-sharp. Now she struggles, her hands shake.
A new song starts. She fumbles, drops a Pearl, its luminescent surface falling slowly, just out of reach. She almost lunges for it, then catches herself. A half-meter further and she’d have been caught in the netweed, pulled down and down into the darkest depths. The memory of Prin comes unbidden, her struggling body yanked down—
Ana’s desperate to avoid the memory, but the music. Won’t. Stop. It’s “Drawn Back 2U,” the song Prin had been singing at the last. Ana swallows back vomit, imagines letting herself be taken.
Something is with her. The hairs on her arms stand straight. She freezes. Just in time. A school of Rippers swims past, eyeless, needle-toothed, their motion-sensing ridges fluttering in the current.
“Ana, your heart rate’s spiking,” Kelv says, urgent. Ana has no choice but to stay silent. The Rippers pass within a meter of her. Kelv’s voice grows more panicked.
Finally the school disappears into the depths. “Rippers,” she whispers. “Gone now.”
She’s alone. The music drifts up to her. She returns to her harvest, but Kelv’s still speaking, his voice cracking: “Come up, Ana. Please, come up. I can’t lose you, too.”
His words are barely audible against the fragile notes rising from the Deep, calling her down, urging her to join them. Her silence stretches.
The music will always be there, waiting, calling to her. Beckoning.
“I’m coming up,” Ana says at last. She follows Kelv’s voice to the surface.
© 2020 Izzy Wasserstein
About the Author
Izzy Wasserstein is a queer, trans woman who teaches writing and literature at a midwestern university and writes poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Apex Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere. She shares a home with her spouse, Nora E. Derrington, and their animal companions. She’s an enthusiastic member of the 2017 class of Clarion West.