The Gardener of Nahi

Chapter 41

Cassidian

Knowing that Myria and I would not be able to speak to each other once our wetsuit masks were on, my final words before we entered the tank were not ones of affection but of practicality.

     I told her that it would be best if she didn’t look down.

     Seconds later we were fully suited up, standing close to each other in the airlock as I sealed the internal door.  While the water slowly rose up and passed over our wide and clear visors I put my hands on her shoulders, mouthing words of encouragement.  I purposely let her get adjusted to the feeling of near weightlessness for a good minute before opening up the external door’s emergency lever.  The small cube, although clear, still somehow conveyed the nature of shelter.  Once through the external door, I knew that the blue vastness of the tank would become immediately apparent and the sensation of falling would be inescapable.

     She did far better than I expected.  Almost better than I did, since after we rose up and out of the underwater airlock I immediately ignored my own advice and looked down.

     Earlier when I had been standing behind the clear wall in the staging area and looking out upon the blue water, I had never realized that it had been artificially illuminated.  Perhaps I simply assumed that the blue water was brilliant and bright out of its own doing, although such a thought seems childishly simplistic to me now.  All there would have been was blackness, were it not for the floodlights mounted into the curved walls as far as I could see.

Floating inside the tank and looking down as I was, it was these lights which were immediately apparent to me.  Like a spiral of white dots, the huge flood lamps circled the tank as they illuminated it for hundreds of meters into the deep.  But with this distance also came cloudiness.  I could barely see another airlock beneath us – presumably level minus five hundred.  But the one after that (assuming there was one) I could not discern.

As Lin promised, there were short black marks on the curved wall in front of us, easily noticeable now that we were inside the tank.  These painted lines rose out of the darkness and continued on into the brighter heights like an unending ladder.  Every ten ticks there were numbers written into the wall as well.  Minus three-ninety.  Minus three-eighty, and so forth.

We let our suits’ buoyancy controls do most of the work as we gradually ascended, using our fins sparingly - mostly to maintain balance.  I had grabbed onto Myria’s hand earlier in the airlock, and since that time I had never let go.

Within twenty minutes time we passed up two airlocks - level minus three hundred and minus two hundred.  As we reached each of them I could see through the clear cubes and curved walls, noticing they were dark and empty.  If Myria could hear me, she would have heard a sigh of encouragement.

Besides the two cubes which we passed, the slow climb was silent and uneventful.  At most times it was hard to tell we were even moving, unless we fixated on the measured black markings on one side of the curved tank wall.  However a predictable five minutes after we passed the second airlock, a thick red horizontal line ringing the tank could be seen far above us.  As we neared it, large block lettering which was also in red was readable on either side of the line.  Below the line read “TORSO,” with an arrow pointed downwards.  Similarly, above the line with an upwards pointed arrow read “CANOPY.”