Undersea

Chapter 1: The Death of Grandma Part I

In those "Days of Adjustment", as father called them, grandma missed the sun, the moon, and the stars and sometimes sang about them. They were ancient, those songs: from ages long past, written in quite reflection about the universe, the people in it, and what it ment to live. Grandma sang songs to herself in those first days as she fell asleep and Sarah lay awake listening. Sarah heard those old songs and wondered at their strength, at the peace they brought, and wondered why it felt like they were written for her. The mention of sun, moon, and stars, the way grandma's voice wavered when she said their names and other names too, made Sarah miss them as well, but less so. She was young and had not seen them as many times as grandma. Still Sarah did her best to help.

The walls of the tiny room grandma and Sarah shared were windowless and bare, so Sarah decorated them with cutouts; hanging celestial shapes on bits of thread and fishing line strung about the room. But Sarah was to excited about everything just then to really miss the great lights above, for there was much to see and think about. For one thing the room they slept in was unlike any she had seen in her experience in the above world; every room was unlike any she had seen in her time above, for they were not really rooms. Caves, she thought, would be a better description, and in a sense they were. Carved in the rock beneath the sea was a city's worth of caves, with underground streets and buildings and houses: all chiseled from the living rock.

There were endless corridors and people everywhere, and always there was the humming of great grinding engines scooping out new spaces in the basalt at the edge of the city. It was maddeningly exciting to live in a city such as this, with it's steam powered turbines pushing air throughout the city in what felt like a gentle breeze; stale but not overly so Sarah thought, and then paid it no more mind.

Grandma did notice the staleness, and though she made regular trips to the white light baths for vitamin D treatments, her deep eyes always looked weary from the newness of it all. Of this Sarah was acutely aware: when grandma struggled to remember how to turn on the glass vase of bioilluminate fish that lit their room, when grandma misplaced her food vouchers, and when grandma forgot to go to the local offices for "patriotic lessons" (a requirement for adult newcomers). It was all a bit worrying to Sarah but her parents were to occupied to be much concerned.

Father had been put to work in a large office entering data into computer simulations while mother was used as a nurse's assistant at a clinic. Grandma was not of much use to the people of the under water city, and there were not many old people about with whom she could gather, so she stayed in with baby Jack. Sarah went to school.

At the dinner table there was little mother and father conversed about and Sarah wondered if they too missed the sun. For Sarah even meal time was an adventure, and though not much was said in the uneasy atmosphere of the dinning room the food was most definitely comprised of the strangest inventions. Sarah ate everything they put in front of her: bizarre green jelly-like blobs that tasted like the sea, bright cooked crustaceans steamed red but looking like they would walk off your plate at any moment, and strong tasting cakes of brown compressed algae smothered in fish sauce. At first the food required many swallows of water to get down but the more Sarah ate of it the better it went.

Grandma mostly pushed the new foods around on her plate and nibbled. Often she went into the bedroom early to either read from her old books or go to sleep before it was even late.

"Now eat you vegetables grandma!" said Sarah with a smile one day at dinner in a way she hoped would bring humor to the situation. Sarah felt terrible when grandma burst into tears. Father and mother looked down at their food and said nothing.

Still it felt good to Sarah to go to bed with the stomach satisfied, up on the surface that had not always been the case.

In Undersea food came from the ocean around them. Great harvesting machines traveled out into the kelp fields and algae beds to reap the underwater crops in season. Nearby, pen-like enclosures housed fish, mollusks, and crustaceans beyond count, fed daily by caretakers and eaten when they grew to the right size.