Chapter 537: The Deep Country

Luna came to me on a Thursday morning in the garden, not long after the light had decided to stay.

She had her coat on, which meant she had been up early and outside already, which with Luna meant something was turning over in her head. I was eating breakfast on the bench by the east wall. She sat beside me without asking, which was also a sign, and stole a piece of my toast, which was just Luna.

“I have a question,” she said.

“All right.”

“The deepbacks are Ister’s.”

“They are.”

She looked at the wall. She had the particular still quality she got when she was working toward something she wasn’t sure I’d understand yet, which had been her way since she was young. Luna’s gift was ice and cold, but the way she thought was actually water — she went around things rather than through them, until she found where they opened.

“But we’re on Avalon,” she said. “And Avalon has seas.”

I was quiet. I had not thought about it, which was embarrassing.

“Very large ones,” she said. “With a great deal of water in them. And we know almost nothing about what’s in them, except what the Kasrai told us about the channel crossings and what Theron does in the sea caves.”

Theron. The old Hyrrani man who rowed the glass-bottomed boats into the caves at the southern resort. He had been here for years and I still sometimes saw him setting out at dawn with his oars, easy as breathing.

“You think there are animals,” I said.

“I think there are probably animals,” Luna said. “I would very much like to know. Sabeth’s here, and Sabeth knows things about large animals in large amounts of water, and I would like to know if there is anything in Avalon’s sea that is worth knowing about before we all stop paying attention to other things.”

That was the longest straight speech I had heard from Luna in a week. She had been thinking about this for a while.

“Where would we look?” I said.

“The western coast past New Hearth,” she said immediately. She’d had an answer waiting. “There are cliffs out there and the water gets deep fast. The museum people have boats.”

There was something lovely about this, actually. I had made the bones of forty cities and laid rail between them and thought I had learned Avalon pretty well. And here was Luna telling me I had not been paying enough attention to the sea.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s ask Dory.”

Dory’s answer was: now.

She was on the high porch with her glass bird and she heard Luna’s proposal and said “now” before we had properly finished explaining. She was still in the grey coat she wore when she was not planning to be anywhere in particular, and she did not go to change it.

The three of us took the train west.

It is a beautiful stretch of line, the rail out toward New Hearth — Avalon’s western edge comes up slow and you stop noticing the horizon and start noticing the way the sky changes colour where it meets the sea. There is a particular kind of cloud that sits on the water out there that you don’t see inland, low and rounded, like something large is breathing under it. We had learned it together on that world, the three of us, in the early days when any sight of that sea had still felt new. It still did, actually. I didn’t think that would ever stop.

The museum district stood on the western cliffs — a curve of them, one per world, each one built by its people in the shape of what they’d brought to Avalon. Thole’s was underground and blue. Sallow’s was half in the sea. The Avalon museum sat at the centre, nearest the cliff edge, with Rory’s exact copy of the long table inside it and the first kit’s shell under glass.

The keepers there had a boat. It was a good one — a broad-hulled working boat with a low engine and cleats along the sides and a windscreen that had been mended with wire, the way working boats always are. The keeper who gave it to us was a tall Kasrai woman in her fifties who gave Dory a look that said I know who you are and I will not make a thing of it and said the channel went deep half a mile out and very deep two miles, and that if we wanted deep we should go south-southwest. Then she went back inside, which was exactly right.

I drove the boat. Luna sat at the bow, her coat pulled in, watching the water. The cliffs fell behind us. The sky opened.

Dory sat at the back and put her hand over the side.

She felt them in the first ten minutes.

I knew before she said anything, because she went very still in the particular way she went still when the net found something unexpected — not alarmed, but occupied, the way you look when you are reading something that requires your full attention.

“There,” she said.

“How far?” Luna said.

“A mile south-southwest. Deep.” She tilted her head. “They’re moving together. A pod.”

Luna said, “How big?”

Dory thought about this. “Big,” she said. “Not deepback big. But big.”

I turned the boat.

The sea was grey-green under a high cloud, the kind of day that shows you the water more than the sky. I brought the engine down to a low idle and we drifted. Dory kept her hand over the side. She had closed her eyes.

“They know we’re here,” she said. “They’ve been watching us since the mouth of the channel. That one—” she pointed slightly, “—that one has been watching since we left the dock.”

We waited.

The first one surfaced fifty yards to starboard, and I felt the breath leave me.

It was not a deepback. The deepbacks are grey and very large and slow, and when they come up it is like watching a hill decide to look at you. This was something else entirely — built longer, darker, the colour of deep water, with a ridge along its back that caught the light as it rose and dove. It surfaced in the particular sideways-turned way of things that breathe air but live in water, the whole back rolling through without urgency, one dark eye visible for a moment and then gone.

“Oh,” said Luna.

Then a second one, and a third, and then — far out, maybe a quarter mile — several more in a low arc, their ridges breaking the water all at once and all in the same direction, like a question the sea was asking itself.

“Pod,” Dory said, eyes still closed. “Eight. Possibly nine. The furthest one I can’t quite—” She went quiet. Then: “Nine. The small one was behind the grandmother.”

Luna was not saying anything at all now. She was sitting very straight at the bow with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the water and her face was doing the thing it did when she was trying not to be overcome by something. Luna crying was not uncommon — she was generous with it and did not think of it as weakness — but this was the held kind, the kind where she was choosing to stay with the thing fully before anything else happened.

The creatures moved around us at a steady distance, not threatening and not performing, just present in the way that large animals are present — aware and unconcerned. The way the deepbacks moved in their southern sea, Sabeth said, was like that. At home in themselves.

One surfaced close — twenty yards — and held a moment before the ridge turned under. The eye was the colour of the deep channel: a very dark olive-grey with a ring of amber at the edge. I found out later this was the grandmother.

“They’re not afraid of us,” Luna said.

“No,” Dory said. She opened her eyes. “I don’t think they’ve seen a boat before. Not one with people in it who weren’t passing through. They came to look.”

We stayed two hours. The pod stayed with us for most of it, drifting south at the kind of speed that said they were not going anywhere in particular. The small one — Dory said it was about a year old, and young enough to be curious without manners — came within ten yards at one point and surfaced twice in quick succession in a way that felt demonstrative, and I thought I heard Dory say quietly “yes, I see you” and I thought she might have been talking to it.

When we came back, Luna was very quiet on the train. Not sad — something fuller than that. The way she was quiet when she had been given something she hadn’t known to ask for.

She went straight to Sabeth.

I did not go with her for that part. Luna had decided something and she had the right to tell it herself. I went home and sat on the bench and listened to the garden for a while, which I did when I needed to think without thinking.

About an hour later, Dory appeared at the garden gate.

“She’s coming,” Dory said.

“I expected so,” I said.

Dory sat on the wall — she still did that, still had that particular habit — and looked at me. “You know what happens now.”

“I have a suspicion,” I said.

“She’s going to want to study them.”

“Yes.”

“Properly,” Dory said. “With equipment. And a place to work. And people.”

I looked at her.

“I’ll go find Halvane,” I said.

Sabeth went to the sea the next morning.

She brought Luna and Dory. I am told — I didn’t go; this was theirs — that Sabeth sat in the bow of the same broad-hulled boat with the Kasrai keeper’s permission again, and she did not say much for the first hour. She had a small notebook and her old brass glasses and she wrote in a very small hand. When the pod came — and they did come; Dory had let them know, in whatever way Dory communicated such things — Sabeth watched them for a long time.

The grandmother surfaced near the bow, and Sabeth looked at her for thirty seconds and then wrote something down.

She said, later at supper, that the shape of the ridge was different from the deepback’s but served the same purpose, and the pod formation was the same as well — the grandmother and the young at the centre, the sisters and aunts in the outer ring. She said the diving pattern suggested they went much deeper than the deepbacks did. She said the colour was a form of camouflage she had not expected this close to the surface.

She said she wanted to know everything about them. That was how she said it. Not I’d like to study them or this is interesting — she said, with her glasses in her hand and her notebook open on the table, that she wanted to know everything.

The General, who was sitting across from her, smiled at his plate.

“You’ll need a base of operations,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, not looking up from the notebook.

“On Avalon,” he said. “Near the coast.”

“And on Ister.” She looked up then. “The deepbacks have been moving west for three pod-roundings now. Something is shifting in the southern sea. If I’m going to understand what’s happening in Avalon’s waters, I need to understand it in context. Ister and Avalon are sister worlds. What changes in one changes in the other.”

She looked at me across the table.

“Lucas,” she said. “I would like to talk to Halvane.”

Halvane listened.

He was good at listening — it was one of the things I appreciated most about him. He had the Aldri quality of full attention, the way they gave you all of themselves when you were speaking, without interruption or conclusion, and he waited until Sabeth had finished before he said anything at all.

Then he said: “Yes.”

No qualification. Just yes.

Then he said: “The deepbacks have been moving west. I had not known what to make of it. I had not known enough to make anything of it.”

He turned to me. He was wearing the long grey robe he favoured for these conversations, the formal one with the narrow braid at the hem, and his long hands were folded in his lap. “The university,” he said, “has everything we could need in terms of equipment. We also have researchers who have studied the southern sea for a very long time, but always from Ister’s shore. They have never had reason to look toward Avalon.”

“Until now,” Sabeth said.

“Until now.”

We worked at the long table for most of three days.

Halvane and I had always worked well together in the design of things. He thought in the way good architects think, which is to say he started with what a building was for before he started with what it looked like. He kept saying what does it need to do, and then we would talk about what it needed to do, and then he would draw a line on the sheet and I would adjust it slightly and he would look at the adjustment and add a second line and we would go from there.

The Avalon centre would be on the western coast, near the museum cliffs — the water was deep enough and the channel traffic was manageable. It needed to work with the sea, not beside it: Halvane insisted on this. Not a building that looked at the sea but a building that was partly of it. He wanted a low hull-shape in Ister white stone, with long windows that faced the water and a walkway along the cliff face that descended to a boat dock at the bottom. I made the foundations go into the rock itself, the way I made the foundations of the ridge wall go into the ridge — not imposed but grown out of what was already there. Halvane walked the cliff in his mind (Aldri architects do this; they build the building in imagination before they put a line down) and said the angle of the morning light would come through the east windows at a particular hour and hit the central study room at table height, which was correct and which Sabeth said was important.

“The light matters,” she said. “When you are comparing samples.”

“I know,” Halvane said, in the mild way that meant he had already accounted for it.

The Ister centre was different — it needed to be. Ister’s southern coast was different from Avalon’s: the land arm that jutted into the sea, the particular quality of Ister’s gold sky over the water. Sabeth had spent years at the end of that arm in her stone house. We did not build on the arm itself — she asked us not to, and we did not need to ask why — but we built nearby, where the arm broadened and there was a low cliff that looked out over the approach. The Ister centre would have its own boat dock and its own study room and its own equipment, and the two centres would be connected — reports going both ways, students moving between them, the picture of two seas building toward something that looked like understanding.

The buildings would take time. I could make them faster — a few days if I asked the stone to move with intention — but Halvane said they should be built the proper way, the way things worth having are built, and I agreed. Sabeth was content with this. She had the patience of someone who had spent two hundred years watching the same pod of animals come around the same point each spring.

She said: “I’ve waited longer.”

Halvane’s university was in the golden city on Ister, where the buildings rose in pale stone with tall windows and the streets were covered walkways because Ister’s people stood. It was the greatest and most advanced university in the galaxy — the lecture halls held thousands, the curriculum covered anything, and the most esteemed teachers in the known worlds taught there. I had spent time there after Ister came to Avalon’s orbit, and it still made me feel pleasantly out of my depth in the way that good universities do.

Sabeth had an office in the deep-water research wing within the month.

She began with a seminar. The university had four researchers in oceanic biology on Ister’s southern study, and two more who worked on the sea caves at Ister’s northern end, and Halvane gathered all of them and introduced Sabeth, and Sabeth stood at the front of the room with her old brass glasses on and said she had been studying the deepback pod at the end of the southern arm for two hundred years, and she was now also working on a related population of deep-water animals she had recently discovered in Avalon’s western sea.

She said she was not sure yet whether the two species were related, though she suspected they were. She said the question of whether a lineage could persist across a world-jump was the most interesting question she had thought of in forty years, and she had been thinking for a very long time.

The four researchers were very quiet. Then one of them — a young woman with long Aldri fingers and a very serious face, who Halvane told me later was considered the best oceanic biologist on Ister under sixty — said: “That’s not been tested.”

“No,” Sabeth said. “I’m going to need help.”

The class she taught was on Thursdays.

She insisted on Thursdays. I didn’t ask why, but I suspected it was because Thursday was the day she and the General had their morning walk, and Thursday morning and Thursday afternoon had a certain quality of continuation that she liked.

It was a graduate seminar, twelve students, in a room with one good table and high windows that faced the gold sky. The students were from six worlds — four Aldri, three human (two from the Hedge, one from Caul), two from one of the smaller Ister arches, three Hyrrani who had come to the university after the families arrived on Avalon. She taught them what she knew, which was two hundred years of watching a single pod in great detail, and she taught them what she did not yet know, which turned out to be most things about Avalon’s sea.

She said — this was relayed to me by one of the Hyrrani students who had come to the red glass one afternoon and was looking for someone to tell — that the most important skill in the study of large animals in large amounts of water was patience, and that patience was not the same as waiting. Waiting was what you did when you thought something was coming. Patience was what you did when you didn’t know yet what you were expecting. The sea was full of things you had not expected, and your job was to stay present until you understood what they were.

The student had written this down. She showed me the page.

“She said to tell you,” the student said, “that there’s one that surfaces at the same time every morning at the cliff end of the museum district. Five-thirty. She says you have excellent water instincts for someone who has spent most of their life on land.”

I did not know Sabeth had noticed me at the sea, but Sabeth noticed most things.

The Hedge Centre for Marine Biology opened in the following spring.

There was a ceremony, which Luna organised and which Halvane attended in his best robe and which Sabeth bore with her usual mixture of private amusement and mild impatience with any formal occasion that wasn’t the business of the actual work. The building was everything we had drawn at the table — the low hull-shape in Ister white stone, the walkway descending to the dock, the study room that caught the morning light at table height. Halvane stood at the east window at the right hour and watched the light come in and said nothing, but the quiet had a satisfied quality.

Rory had made the shelves. I had not asked him to — he had simply arrived one morning with the lumber and his tools, and by the end of the day there were shelves in every room, good ones, the kind that fit the walls the way good shelves do. He had built them to hold wet things, he said, which meant the joins were done with compound rather than glue and the wood was sealed. He had also made a low bench by the east window for the kind of work that required sitting for long periods with something spread out in front of you.

The long Kasrai keeper came from the museum and said she was glad the building was for the sea, and that she had thought for years someone should be paying closer attention, and she had a boat and three good charts she had drawn herself of the deep channel, and she offered them on the spot.

“I’d been waiting for someone to ask,” she said.

Sabeth looked at her across the room with the expression she reserved for things that were right.

The two of them sat with the charts for two hours.

In the spring and autumn now, Sabeth moved between the two centres — Avalon in the summer months when the pod came north, Ister for the deep-winter roundings when the deepbacks came south past the arm. The General went with her when she went to Ister, and had stopped apologising for taking the southern train. He had a desk in Sabeth’s Ister office. It was not entirely clear what he used it for, except that Sabeth’s graduate students addressed him very seriously as “Professor General” for about three weeks before he had a conversation with one of them about what exactly a general was for, and after that they called him Alaric.

He bore this with dignity.

Luna went to the Avalon centre most weeks. She had no title there — she did not want one — but she helped with the morning observations and she kept a chair in the study room, and she and Sabeth had developed the habit of sitting at the east window in the early light, before the students arrived, with tea, and not saying very much.

“Is it what you wanted?” I asked her, one morning in the garden.

Luna thought about this. She had Elin’s old school drawing of a seabird in her hand — Elin had drawn animals beautifully at nine and had given this one to Luna years ago and Luna had kept it. She looked at it, and at the garden wall, and at the sky over the east field.

“I wanted to know if something was there,” she said. “And it was. And now there are people learning it properly. And Sabeth is very happy.”

She gave me a sideways look. “And the General has a desk.”

“Very seriously acquired,” I said.

“He measured it,” Luna said, with the dry edge she had perfected over years of observing the General. “Twice.”

She tucked the bird drawing back in her coat pocket. She stood up and stretched.

“I’m going to the coast,” she said. “The grandmother surfaced three mornings in a row on the north side of the channel. Sabeth thinks she’s looking at something.”

I watched her go, through the garden gate and down toward the train line, with her coat on and her hands in her pockets and her particular unhurried walk.

Dory came and sat on the bench beside me.

“She’s going every morning now,” Dory said.

“I know.”

“She named one,” Dory said. “The small one. The curious one that came close to the boat.”

I looked at Dory. She was watching the garden gate with the calm that meant she was pleased about something.

“What did she name it?” I said.

“She hasn’t told anyone yet,” Dory said. “But I know.”

She said nothing else, in the way she said nothing else when she was going to let something stay where it was for a while.

I let it stay. The garden was warm. The wall behind us was the same wall it had always been, with the same stones. Somewhere past the ridge, Pebble was in the hollow, and Okafor was on the ridge with her knee better now and her arm in a scar she did not mind, and Halvane was at his long table in the golden city drawing lines for the next version of things. The stars, Wren told me that morning, were still not yet.

The grandmother surfaced every morning on the north side of the channel. Luna went to see her. That was what the morning was for.

Dory told me one morning, about three weeks after the centre opened, that she had been back to the sea alone.

Not to look — she had been, by her own account, sitting in the boat with her hand over the side and not doing very much of anything, which I had learned to understand as Dory’s version of a walk in the garden. The net went everywhere. It was the nature of her gift that it was always present, the way hearing is always present — she could not quite turn it off, and over the years she had learned to live with it the way you learn to live with the particular sounds of a house. The garden at night. The roots under the orchard. The queens in their places.

The sea was different.

She said it was quieter. Not in the way that nothing was there — the opposite. The sea had a different quality of aliveness than land, a fullness that was lateral rather than deep, spreading rather than layered. The land, she said, was like listening to a conversation happening in several rooms at once. The sea was like standing inside the conversation.

“Do they know you?” I asked.

“The pod does,” she said. “Not the way the garden does. The garden has been listening to us for years. The pod is—” She thought about it. “They know I’m a person. They’ve decided to make a place for that.”

There was something in the way she said it that told me she had not expected it to matter as much as it did. Dory had spent years on the net in the particular way of someone carrying a great deal — the queens in pieces, the calls from past the Watch, the grey ones’ silver. She had learned to hold it without drowning in it. But she was also, still, a woman who had come from water.

She looked at me over her glass bird.

“I’m going to help Sabeth with the mapping,” she said. “The bathymetry — the depth charts. She’s been trying to do it with lead lines and instruments. I can feel where the floor is.”

“Does Sabeth know that?” I said.

“I’m going to tell her today,” Dory said. “I think she’s going to have thoughts about it.”

Sabeth had, in fact, a great many thoughts about it. I heard about them at supper. The depth chart she had drawn of the first mile of the channel was, apparently, twelve meters wrong in three places — this was an acceptable margin of error for lead-line work, but it was exactly the error that had been puzzling her about the pod’s diving pattern, and when Dory told her what the floor actually looked like in those three places she had gone very still in the way that meant a piece of something had just found its proper location.

She said: “I’ve been trying to understand why they went left before the deep turn.”

Dory said: “There’s a shelf. About this wide.” She indicated with her hands.

“A shelf,” Sabeth said.

“It goes from here to—” Dory indicated further. “The grandmother’s taking them along the edge of it. It goes all the way to the point.”

Sabeth looked at her notebook. Then she turned to the beginning of the notebook, the one she had been keeping for two hundred years, and found a particular page.

“The deepbacks do the same thing on Ister,” she said. “Before the southern turn. I could never find the feature.”

She looked up. She looked at Dory the way she sometimes looked at the sea — with the full attention and the patience underneath.

“You’ll need a notebook,” Sabeth said.

“I have one,” Dory said.

The Ister centre opened the following autumn, three weeks after the deepbacks came south past the arm.

Sabeth stood on the cliff above the approach and watched the pod come through, the same pod she had been watching for two hundred years, every member known to her by name. She had her brass glasses on. She had her notebook. She had the graduate students behind her — the twelve from the Thursday seminar, plus six from the Ister side of things who had come down on the train.

The grandmother led, as she always did.

“That’s the fifth time,” one of the Hyrrani students said, quietly, to the young Aldri woman who had asked the right question in the first seminar.

“The fifth calf,” Sabeth said, without turning. “She’s had five. The second one has two calves of her own now. If you watch the formation, you can see the second generation in the outer ring — there, the one that angles right before the turn.”

The students looked.

“She always angles right,” one of the Aldri students said.

“Her mother’s habit,” Sabeth said. “Which is what you want to know. Whether habits carry. Whether they teach their young the same routes, the same depths, the same choices. Whether the pod has memory. That’s the question.” She turned then, in the way she turned when she had been patient long enough and was now ready to teach. “And this is where you start. Right here. Watching the same thing. For long enough that you understand what same means.”

The building at her back was Halvane’s design and my hands and Rory’s shelves, and the sign above the door said in Aldri first and then in every language of the Hedge: Hedge Centre for Marine Biology — Ister Station.

Halvane had written the Aldri. He had used an old word that meant something like the deep country — the country that is below the country you can see, where the full life is.

The deepbacks moved south past the arm.

The pod from Avalon’s western sea had come north that same morning, Sabeth told us later, within the same hour.

Sabeth joined the faculty of the university formally the following spring, as Director of the Hedge Centre for Marine Biology, which was a title she had been offered twice and refused twice on the grounds that she had work to do and titles took mornings. She accepted on the third offer, on the condition that the title came with no additional meetings that could not be held on a boat.

Halvane agreed to this condition in writing.

She taught the Thursday seminar every term, and a second seminar in the winter term that was open to anyone, which she called The Deep Country, after the Aldri word on the sign. The winter seminar drew more people than the room could hold the first year, and Halvane quietly extended the room into the corridor, and by the second year they held it in a larger space near the main hall, and by the third year it ran in four rooms at once with Sabeth in the main one and three of her graduate students running the others. She said this was not what she had meant. Halvane said he thought it was going to keep happening.

She had the desk in the Avalon centre, and the desk in the Ister office, and a third desk in the Thursday seminar room that the students had put there without being asked, with good light and a shelf for wet notebooks, and a view of the gold sky.

She kept her stone house at the end of the arm.

In the evenings, sometimes, the General would walk down to the cliff above the approach and stand looking at the sea. He had not, before Sabeth, been a man who stood looking at the sea. He had been a man who stood looking at the horizon to see what was coming. But the sea was different from the horizon, and he had learned the difference.

Sabeth would come and find him there, and they would stand together for a while, and then one of them would say something about supper, and they would go in.

Luna told me he had started reading the deepback observations — the ones from Sabeth’s notebooks, the two hundred years of them, all written in Sabeth’s small hand and now being carefully transcribed by the most careful of the Thursday students. He read them in the evenings. He had not told Sabeth he was doing this.

Sabeth told Luna she knew.

“How?” Luna asked.

“He asks better questions now,” Sabeth said. “And his hand goes to the left side when he’s thinking about something he doesn’t understand yet. That started about six weeks ago.”

Luna had told this to me, and I had stored it somewhere warm, the way you store things that show you exactly what people are, in the specific quiet way their love works.

The stars said Not yet this morning. 1,109. N.

Wren added the marine count to the morning slate this week — the pod position, north or south. Everyone reads it now. The General goes to the wall first.

The grandmother: north side of the channel. As expected.

Days 13791–13850. The Marine Centre. Luna asked about creatures in Avalon’s sea. Lucas, Luna, and Dory took a boat to the western coast; Dory found a pod of nine deep-water animals, long and dark-ridged, different from the deepbacks but moving in the same pod-shaped way. Luna and Dory brought Sabeth, who watched the pod and said she wanted to know everything. Lucas and Halvane designed marine biology centres on Avalon’s western cliff and on Ister’s southern approach; Sabeth joined the university faculty and became Director of the Hedge Centre for Marine Biology, teaching the Thursday seminar and the winter course called The Deep Country. The General acquired a desk.