Dorn glided to the command console. Bobbing alongside Yeager, he said, “I can take the con now, if you don’t mind.”
Yeager made an exaggerated bow. “You’re welcome to it!”
Deirdre heard herself say, “Do we have to leave right away?”
All three men turned toward her.
Surprised at her own reaction, Deirdre asked, “Can’t we stay at this level, at least for a little bit?”
“Why?” Yeager demanded.
Glancing at her sensor screens, Deirdre replied, “To say good-bye.”
DEPARTURE
Several of Leviathan’s flagella members were quivering with the anticipation of dissociating. We are too high, Leviathan realized, too close to the cold abyss above. If we go higher we will dissociate involuntarily.
But the alien was still rising, still climbing upward. How high will it go?
“It’s sending another message,” Deirdre said, staring at the flickering images on her central screen. The computer was washing out the colors and slowing down the rapidly blinking drawings.
“Leveling off,” said Dorn, with something like the old strength in his voice.
“We can’t stay here for long,” Yeager warned.
“Why not?” Corvus snapped as he tucked the DBS circlets back into their container bin.
Yeager scowled at him. “We’ll run out of supplies. We’re only fitted out for four days—”
“And we’ve only been here for less than three,” Corvus countered, pointing at the mission time line chart.
“And damned near killed ourselves,” Yeager snapped.
Dorn raised his human hand. “I’m feeling much better now that we’re up at a lower pressure.”
“I’m not,” Yeager growled. “I say we get the hell out of here as fast as we can. Take our data and go home!”
“So we take our winnings and leave the game?” Corvus challenged.
Yeager gave him a tight smile. “You gotta know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em.”
The human side of Dorn’s face frowned. “What does that mean?”
Deirdre said, “The leviathan’s trying to tell us something. Look.”
The alien understands! Leviathan thought. The strange hard-shelled creature stopped its ascent and hovered in the chill waters, still far from the normal realm of the Kin but at least it wasn’t heading farther into the cold abyss above.
It understands.
“What’s it trying to tell us?” Corvus asked, hovering beside Deirdre in the perfluorocarbon liquid.
The computer-slowed imagery showed the leviathan rising. At least it seemed to be rising past the tiny shapes and dots sprinkled across the picture displayed on its flank.
“Those must be fish and other smaller creatures,” Deirdre said, pointing. “And that stream of dots, maybe that represents the organic particles flowing downward.”
“Maybe.” Corvus nodded uncertainly.
“And there’s the leviathan himself.” Deirdre pointed. “And us, alongside him.”
“Both rising.”
“Yes.”
Abruptly, the image of the leviathan began breaking apart. Deirdre and Corvus watched as the creature’s image disassembled into hundreds of separate pieces.
“It’s going to dissociate again?” she wondered.
Corvus shook his head. “It just did that a day and a half ago, when we first came down to this level.”
“That was deeper than we are now.”
“But now it’s saying that it’s going to break up again? Does that make sense?”
Deirdre thought she understood. “Maybe it’s saying that it can’t stay up at this level without breaking up! It’s telling us that it’s got to go back to its own level.”
“And we’ve got to go back to ours,” Yeager insisted.
Deirdre stared at the screen. The leviathan was still flashing the same imagery. It’s so huge! she thought. Like a mountain floating loose in the ocean. But it’s got to return to its own place. And Max is right, we’ve got to return to ours.
Reluctantly, she reached out to the touch screen and began drawing a farewell message.
Holding its members together with sheer willpower, Leviathan saw that the alien was signaling again.
It showed the image of Leviathan itself, diving downward until it disappeared past the lower edge of the image. And the alien, rising upward until it too disappeared from view.
The message was clear. The alien was leaving, returning to its own realm in the cold abyss above, leaving Leviathan to return to the Kin and the Symmetry.
But then the picture changed. It showed the alien returning, with more round little hard-shelled spheres just like itself, all of them swimming amid the Kin down where the Symmetry prevailed.
Leviathan understood the alien’s message. It must leave now, but it will return—with more of its kind.
Leviathan duplicated the alien’s message along its own flank, to show that it understood. You will return, Leviathan acknowledged. And we will be here waiting for you.
“It’s repeating our message,” Deirdre told the others. “It understands what we’re trying to say.”
“Maybe,” Yeager said. “Maybe it’s just mimicking what you drew.”
Deirdre shook her head. “I don’t think so, Max. It understands us.”
Dorn called out, “Increasing buoyancy. Heading for the surface.”
Corvus stood beside Deirdre and slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Heading for home,” he murmured.
Deirdre nodded, her eyes on the sensor screens watching the enormous leviathan swim in a brief circle, then bend its broad back and plunge downward, deep into the depths of the globe-girdling ocean, heading back to its own domain.
“Good-bye,” she whispered, surprised at how sad she was, how downcast she felt to be leaving the magnificent creature. “We’ll come back,” she said, knowing it was a promise she was making to herself as much as the leviathan. “We’ll come back.”
As
“Broaching surface in thirty seconds,” Dorn announced.
