The ocean is a woman and it is dreaming, dreaming, Ekaterina thinks as she holds the hardsuit’s arm open, ready to clip a sample. Twenty-seven meters down and she plods through amber fronds and thick pale stalks, careful not to step on the shelled creatures burbling around her booted feet, spitting mist. A sporing day. Some of the bulbous fronds are fruiting and it’s her job to collect the samples, but it’s so much easier to sleep. She can almost sleep standing now.
Ekaterina hasn’t felt right since she got here.
She shouldn’t be able to smell anything inside the hardsuit, but it smells like petrichor: green grass and wet earth and rain. Like home. Ekaterina had been so ready to leave Earth, so desperate to get away from all her failures that she sold herself to some exobiotic conglomerate, came all the way out to this alien ocean where so many other scientists wouldn’t go. She didn’t even study marine life. Apparently, when you’re desperate, even an entomologist will do.
The hardsuit shudders, old technology struggling to do its best in the not-quite-water, and Ekaterina rotates the arm cuff to loosen it. Liquid shimmers off the cuff in a viscous aura and she smiles, wonders what it tastes like. It would be easier to sleep if she could get out of the hardsuit, feel the ocean on her skin, as slick as glass. Ekaterina is desperately lonely. So is the ocean, she thinks, full of life but totally alone, as unaware of her as she is of the bacteria in her intestine. Dreaming, dreaming, and she can’t tell what the ocean is dreaming about, but she can feel things she’s not supposed to feel, the rippling fray of sporing stalks, an amber gentleness like fingers touching everywhere and … “Kat? Are you asleep?”
Oki’s voice cuts through, and spores disperse. “No,” she says. Which is true.
“Are you still getting stalk tissue from 667?”
“Yes.” She opens and closes her fist a few times, something her mother used to do when a word was stuck on the tip of her tongue. The hardsuit runs smooth as she rolls back the bulbous stalk and scrapes for spores, tells herself it’s just like tobiko, would taste just like the bright orange pops of roe on her tongue. Twenty-seven meters down and she wants to burst out of the hardsuit, leave it like a carapace and tumble through the stalks. That’s crazy.
Even when she’s asleep, she knows that’s crazy.
At dinner, she says it out loud. “I want to apply for a transfer.”
“That’s not a thing.” Oki’s mouth is full, her chopsticks flying in and out of frame. They’re having noodles with sesame and kelp over in Oki’s bubble because Nimura likes to cook. “Nobody transfers. Transfer to where?”
“I don’t know,” Ekaterina says, and pushes at her protein slab. She’d just assumed there were other bubbles she could work from, in different parts of the ocean. She’d pictured them like little clusters of marbles, from above, embedded in the seafloor. It was hard to get people planetside, harder to get them to stay. There must be bubbles not currently in use.
“Okay,” Oki says, and swallows. She’s five hundred meters to Ekaterina’s west, five meters into a stalk forest. Oki has dinner by video call with all the teams on a rotating schedule. It’s supposed to help morale. “Did something happen?”
Amber cilia everywhere, like fingers under her skin. “It’s just hard,” Ekaterina says. “Not seeing anyone.”
“This doesn’t count?” Oki waves the chopsticks, kelp in her teeth. She’s a small, square woman in her fifties, strong hands, chopped black hair. Nimura stalks back and forth behind her, rail thin with her hair buzzed neatly to her perfect scalp, mumbling into a data recorder. She puts an absent hand on Oki’s shoulder, squeezes, and Oki squeezes back. “No, of course. This doesn’t count. But most people come here for the solitude at first. Maybe you’ve had too much of it.”
“Maybe.” They’ve been down for three years, much longer than Ekaterina. Oki manages the bubbles, most with two or three people working in tandem. Nimura does most of the sample analysis for the area. All Ekaterina does is collect things, put small tubes into large machines and watch them spin. She asked to be by herself when she got there. Her bubble smells like rain. She used to be the kind of person that could say, something is wrong, I can feel it, I can feel myself standing at the edge and someone’s pushing. “What?”
“The bottom. Stalk cluster 847.” Oki stuffs in another mouthful of noodles, swallows. “We’re starting another sample chain, and Nim needs tissue. Stalks and roots, at least.” She looks at Ekaterina’s face, and something there changes her mind. “But it’s not important. We can keep working on the 667 group.”
Ekaterina thinks about the 847 trench. So deep and quiet, no lights. Nothing swaying amber-gold or burbling for her attention. “I’ll go,” she says.
Oki shrugs. “Watch your suit,” she says. “It was sluggish this afternoon.”
Dreaming, dreaming. Outside, the stalks are curled around each other, tumescent, red as lampreys. In the morning, they’ll be singing sunlight. Down in the trench will be safer. “Okay,” she says. “I will.”
Ekaterina never dims the bubble glass but tonight she does, blocking out the miles of open ocean. Most of the other bubbles, she understands, are dimmed all the time. Apparently the view is unsettling. The planet’s ecosystem is mostly fungal, stalks and spores and shelled things that quibble around like silverfish, tunneling through fleshy, brittle fallen stalks like silverfish destroying paper books, eating information. She used to study silverfish. They were her favorite insect, small and overlooked, dusty-shined. Starch and sugar eaters. Underappreciated. Now she studies “crustaceans,” what toxins or adaptations can be sucked out of them, modified for human use and sold. It doesn’t bother her. Maybe it used to bother her, but she doesn’t want to think about that.
Ekaterina double-checks the door locks, triple-checks. Selects soft music. Puts her hands on the soft sheets of her bed. Today she clipped a long tendril from a bulbous frond, a gelatinous creature reaching up, for her, and she cut it in half, wriggled it into a thin tube for study. It’s plasma now, at the bottom of the tube. It wasn’t alive. If someone cut Ekaterina’s hair, her fingernails, it wouldn’t hurt. Maybe she smells like the ocean, she thinks, and looks up, and there is a face.
For a moment, it’s just the stalks, half-amber and awake, and then she remembers that the bubble glass is dimmed to beige opacity, and she’s not seeing the outside.
A face in amber pieces, taking up the whole transparent wall, and it’s looking at her.
Ekaterina scrabbles back, falls hard off the other side of the bed and against the bubble wall. The face tilts, the eyes blink. She smells petrichor, then seawater, salt-hard and fishy, like it would smell on Earth, and she can feel its tentacles folding her back, so gently, opening her memories like the petals of a flower.
She says, “Oh.”
The sound leaves her lips and the face shatters, disperses like silverfish in sudden light, minnows fleeing from a predator. Silverfish have lots of predators. Like Scytodes thoracica, the spitting spider, a slow hunter. Stretching artfully toward its prey, so careful on its long and tender legs. Ekaterina stumbles up toward the dimmer switch and the bubble flares up, clear transparent glass like a beacon that even Oki and Nimura could see if they were looking. Nothing out there but darkness, not even sound. The glass feels both solid and empty against her hands.
Ekaterina breathes hard. There’s nothing there. Something was there. Something will come back. The ocean is dreaming, she thinks, dreaming, and for an instant she thinks she woke it up.
Ekaterina spends the morning staring out the window, refusing to move. She’s amazed she slept at all last night, didn’t think sleep was possible, not with the memory of that face. Staring. Bursting into scattered drops that fled where she couldn’t follow.
She decides she will go back to the amber stalks. It’s not a good decision, but she has to know. She used to be the kind of person that faced her problems, and so she’s facing them now, ocean-drunk and slipping into the suit. She’s going to march out there and sort this out.
At the door, the locks stop her.
She calls Oki. “Is there a problem?”
Oki takes a beat, and Ekaterina feels her foot tap-tapping in the hardsuit, staccato against the sheening floor. Everyone else uses drones but Ekaterina doesn’t like them, doesn’t trust the autonomous ones and doesn’t like the feel of the remote controllers. She needs to be out there herself. There’s nothing wrong with older tech. “Maybe?” Oki says at last. “Yes. Something’s up with the spores, there’s a lot more of them than there used to be. Are you seeing anything different?”
“No,” she lies. “I’ve been outside when there were spores before. Yesterday.”
“I know, but there are a lot more now. Ten times.” Twenty, Ekaterina hears: it must be Nimura, just barely heard over the comms.
“The hardsuit keeps them out.”
“Are you sure?” She can’t see Oki, but she can picture her shaking her head, saying no, frowning with concern. “Give us a minute, here. Let us get you some better data before we drop the lock.”
“Okay,” Ekaterina says, and cuts the comms. She has a workaround, an easy one, because Ekaterina’s bubble is one of the older ones, they told her, kitted out before the switch to drones, and her hardsuit still has overrides. She fiddles with a few controls, presses her hand against the doorlock—emergency, she tells it, let me out, and it hisses, opens just a crack. Both locks at once, inner and outer. The ocean starts to sinuate itself inside the bubble, making soft puddles at her feet that smell like petrichor and start rising.
Someone calls her on the comms and she ignores it.
Her entire body tingles, thrums like it’s energized for something, something that will fill her up, and she snaps the hardsuit’s visor down and seals it, more out of habit than anything else. Maybe the ocean can smell her. No toxins, nothing that can get through the suit, and she wants again to tumble as herself through the rippling fray of the sporing stalks, wrapped in amber cilia touching everywhere; a gentle anemone, holding her like a thousand arms, touching her face, her eyes, her inside parts. Her comms read urgent, urgent but it barely registers as she pulls herself through the ocean rushing inside to flood the bubble, pulls herself out the chamber lock, one foot in front of the other through the viscous not-water, the casual bounce she’s perfected, so many hours out there not-quite-floating, until she reaches the amber stalks, singing, like she’s standing on the skin of the ocean.
Her comms are screaming and she turns off the suit’s sensors entirely.
Ekaterina pushes forward. Her hands spread the fronds, like kids in a cornfield in an old horror movie, but this isn’t horror, it’s the thing she’s been waiting for without even knowing it. She pushes even farther in, slows down because the ocean’s getting heavy or the stalks are pushing her down, a fish caught in an anemone’s embrace which is sometimes predatory, sometimes home, and is it hard to tell which? The hardsuit opens, one little button pop after another, and she shivers as the stalks around her become a face, many faces, as the faces take up the whole of what she can see, a whole amber ocean, faces that are hers, not hers, as the hardsuit locks unravel and the ocean slithers in, she slithers out, feels it finally against her skin, underneath her skin, inside her bones, as she feels the water not like water at all inside herself and making something new.
Later, she comes to herself as a seal, an octopus, an arcing sailfish. Ekaterina flips and warbles in the sun, speeds through stalk forests as a trail of bubbles. The ocean is a woman and it’s dreaming of her, Ekaterina knows, dreaming her into something rich and strange, entirely new. She barely notices the hardsuit stumbling a little as it lope-walks out of the stalk forest and aims itself five hundred meters to the west.
The human part of her still wants to see. Ekaterina burbles after it, shedding spores from her new skin as her old hardsuit plods toward the bubble, step by step. When they open it, Oki and Nimura will find a husk, or maybe nothing. There will be tears, recrimination. They’ll leave and then the bubbles will be packed up and their bones deserted, plasticine spears for the ocean to reclaim. She’d like to see that, Ekaterina thinks, would like to feel a mark on the stellar maps saying danger, no, leave this one alone. She slices down, transparent in the not-water, to hear the sound of the locks, the rush of decompression, can remember but not see the disinfectant and blasting sand that never quite gets rid of the smell of the sea. Ekaterina puts both hands on the bubble’s surface and watches, near-invisible as the hardsuit’s helmet opens and Oki and Nimura come to see.
Inside there is a woman and the woman is the ocean, smiling, with Ekaterina’s face.
For the first time since she’s been on the planet, Ekaterina snaps awake.
She has one moment of doubt, one stab of wait-what-have-I-done as the woman steps out, cool and wobbling, brand new as a kitten in the bubble’s warm sterility. Are you okay? Nimura’s lips move, and Ekaterina can imagine how she sounds. Your whole bubble’s flooded. What happened?
I’m fine, the new woman says, and looks briefly out at Ekaterina’s face. The ocean is a woman and she is no longer dreaming, she is planning, going somewhere else.
Ekaterina burbles to herself. It’s fine, this is all fine, and it’s sporing day, she remembers, a day when mothers send their children out to new places, maybe to dry planets, planets that need water and could use an ocean dreaming, dreaming, growing bigger by the day. She looks behind her at all those amber stalks and sees them change, are they changing? A hundred thousand hardsuits, coming like spores, a hundred thousand Ekaterinas, lope-walking toward every bubble in the sea, every human being that could pilot a shuttle offworld. Heading up and out.
Are you sure? Oki says, and Ekaterina turns. That must have been a tough few minutes. They don’t look like they feel right, Oki and Nimura. Like their bubble smells different than it should, just now. Like they’re having trouble standing up.
I’m fine, the new woman says again, smiling, I’m just looking forward to getting back to Earth.
And Ekaterina decides, with the last of her burbling thoughts, that that’s fine. Water is life. New oceans are good. She spreads her thinning fingers and pushes off the bubble because she’s home, even though she’s dissolving, flipping away among the stalk forests as the last of her consciousness fades, happier here than she ever was as a scientist, she’s home at last, and maybe now it’s safe to fall asleep.
