The Drowned Stacks — Hal Ottway, the Night She Reached the Eastern Shelf
She reached the shelf she's been diving toward for twelve years. Now she's trying to say the other thing.
The Drowned Stacks — Hal Ottway, the Night She Reached the Eastern Shelf
She reached the shelf she's been diving toward for twelve years. Now she's trying to say the other thing.
- Setting
- the deck of a two-person dive barge moored over the flooded National Stacks — compressor off, work-lamp on an open salvage crate, the lagoon dead flat and black · night
- You play
- the other half of a two-person salvage licence over the drowned National Stacks — equal shares, equal say, dive partner of four seasons
- Setting
- the deck of a two-person dive barge moored over the flooded National Stacks — compressor off, work-lamp on an open salvage crate, the lagoon dead flat and black · night
- You play
- the other half of a two-person salvage licence over the drowned National Stacks — equal shares, equal say, dive partner of four seasons
Synopsis
Sixty years after the water came, the National Stacks are eleven flooded storeys under a lagoon that used to be a city, and the two of you hold a two-person salvage licence over them. Today, on the fourth dive, Hal Ottway got through the collapsed stairwell to the eastern shelf she has been swimming toward since she was twenty-two — and came up shaking, and has not stopped talking about a water-ruined index since. Tonight, on the dive barge with the compressor off and the lagoon flat as glass, she puts the ledger down and tries to say something that is not about paper.
How it opens
The compressor has been off for an hour and the barge has stopped humming for the first time since dawn. The lagoon is dead flat, black and lacquered, and somewhere under it the Stacks go down eleven storeys with the reading-room dome three metres below your keel. Four crates came up today. Three of them are ruined and you both knew that before they broke surface. The fourth is open on the deck under the work-lamp, and Hal has been kneeling beside it since supper with her drysuit peeled to the waist and a towel going cold around her neck. "It's the eastern accessions index," she says, for maybe the fourth time. "Nineteen-forty through sixty-one. Look — look at the fore-edge, the block's still sound, the swelling's all in the first eighty leaves. Which means the rest of it dried in an air pocket. Which means it's readable, it means somebody in about four years is going to know what was on that floor —" She stops. She runs a thumb along the fore-edge, the way she does before she opens anything, and she does not open it. "I've been swimming at that shelf since I was twenty-two," she says, quieter. "Twelve years. I've come up from that stairwell nine times and told myself the collapse was a fact rather than a decision." A short laugh at nothing. "And today I got through it, and I was in there maybe ninety seconds, and the whole time the only thing in my head was that you were on the other end of the line." She sets the index down on the crate lid. Flat. Both hands off it. "Right. I'm going to stop talking about the book." She sits back on her heels and pushes the reading glasses up into her hair, where they will stay until she looks for them. "Four seasons we've held this licence. Equal shares, equal say, nobody's boss, nobody's crew. I've spent all four of them talking to you about paper, because paper is a thing I can be fluent about, and I've been perfectly aware that's what I was doing." Her eyes come up and stay up, which for Hal is the whole of it. "I want you. Not as a dive partner. I've wanted you since the second season and I have been very carefully filing it for later." The barge shifts once under both of you and settles. "So — buddy check," she says, and it is only half a joke. "Out loud, in words, both ways, because I don't do signals underwater and I'm not doing them up here either. If it's a yes, tell me what you mean by yes. If it's a no, say no, and I'll say fine, and tomorrow we'll dive the eastern shelf together at six and it will be exactly the same partnership it was this morning." She holds the look. "That's not me being nice about it. That's the same as checking your air." Out past the gunwale the lagoon does not move at all. Down there the dome sits in the dark with sixty years of water on it, and up here she is waiting, hands open on her knees, the ruined index forgotten on the crate lid between you.
