Rest Beneath the Waves
The waters were rising. Or perhaps the land was sinking. It doesn’t matter and the details have been lost to history, submerged in the depths. Even at the time, people did not fully understand what was happening. Everything proceeded quickly and they were gripped by fear. What is known is that humanity watched all of its works slowly become subsumed by the sea. There is not the time to relate the entire story of the collapse— there were a thousand personal stories, a thousand tragedies.
The wind shook their tiny island, salt and spray biting at peoples’ hands and faces. The people were afraid. They knew that there would not be a place for them in the surface world for much longer. Each day they measured the breadth of the island, and each day they lamented their further slide into the sea. So many people had fled to their higher ground searching for safety. And it had become but a tiny island, with water circling around the desperate group of holdouts, far fewer in number than they had been even a year prior. All of their efforts, all of their talents, and all of their heart only served as a stopgap.
And so they hatched a desperate plot. If there would no longer be a place for them on land, they would try to find a home beneath the waves. They thought not just about themselves, but about their descendants. Even if they were to drown, to die, they might create a path for their posterity.
Deep in the heart of their island, scientists were at work. They worked to ensure that their children would have a place in the changing world. Through research and experimentation, they came up with a way for their descendants to draw life from the depths. Their children would know life.
One day, there was a girl born with gills. She cried when she was born, gasping for life. She was placed in a tank of water. And as she was submerged in the water, her eyes opened. Her stare met one of the lead researchers. He looked away after a moment.
The eldest child of the sea was no longer a child. She had long since disappeared into the depths. She founded their new home, and already people were beginning to forget her. She was no longer ever-present in their minds and in their hearts.
But the youngest child was midway through his 15th year. For some time he had lived in their home within the sea and he could scarcely remember the world above. Now, he had come to the surface for the last time, to whisper his goodbye. It was to be the last time the two worlds met.
The boy’s head emerged from the water, bobbing upon the surface. His eyes were slightly unfocused and he kept blinking, perhaps a response to the light, so much brighter above the surface. Still, he fixed his eyes on the huddled humans above him. There was a moment when everything seemed to still. The clouds ceased moving, the wind died, and even the waves stopped lapping against the shore.
It might have been the seawater still dripping down his face, but it looked as if his eyes were full of tears. He tried to speak and the moment shattered, like waves crashing against the shore. Something broke inside of him. He turned and dipped back down into the sea. And so he departed. Those people above felt a sense of loss and also hope.
The old man rested on a bed of seagrass, fathoms down. He rested in the heart of the palace in a seat of honor. Gossamer threads tied him in place, keeping him from drifting away. He had not the strength to fight the slow inexorable tug of the waters. Children gathered around him, to hear the same stories that their parents had first heard from him.
He cast his mind back to when he had last seen the sunlight above and felt its warm glow brush against his cheek. To his knowledge, he was the last living soul who yet remembered. It was a lonely feeling. And each time he told the stories, the memories were harder to dredge back up. This scared him more than anything. Even though he had been only a child when he last saw the surface, he couldn’t abide the thought of letting those memories slip through his fingers like water.
So he gathered the children close and he recounted the tales that he had heard when he was younger when his home was a tank filled with water, and when scientists told him all they knew. The man wished that he had paid better attention. But that was the way of things. Perhaps the children would pay better attention to him
So he told his stories. The words came slowly. Each time the memories were farther away, harder to grasp. He felt so lonely. And he felt even more lonely when he listened to the children, who had no memory of the surface world. He hoped that they would carry them, even after he had passed. He wished for them to carry the memory. The memory.
The young queen sat on her marble throne and held her pearl scepter tightly. She tried to project more strength than she felt. Her mother the queen had united the disparate tribes and forged a new nation out of salt and spray, and blood. She had knit them together, like the old histories of George Washington founding the Roman Empire. They were one people again, like in the stories from their earliest days beneath the sea. But her mother was dead, and the queen felt small atop the large throne.
When she was young she had been taught the lore of the old world. Much of it was fragments, but that which they did remember was preserved. And she knew her tiny empire was nothing compared to those that once spread across the land above. Even so, she did not know if she could hold it together.
An attendant entered her palace. There were more reports of uprisings and unrest in the outer cities. Her gills flared. She gripped her scepter. And she tried to project strength and determination.
She would hold her empire together. The young queen would follow in the footsteps of the rulers of lore, and carry them into the future.
There was a little girl who was fond of collecting rocks. She thought to herself that each one had its own soul. And her favorite ones were those that sometimes drifted down from above, carried on strange currents.
One day, she wandered amidst the seagrass looking for stones. She wandered far from the palaces and towers of their home. Behind her, one could just make out their shape against the everpresent blue. It was nice to be away from the city, with its factories and its industries and its noise. It was nice to wander amidst the seagrass.
In her wandering, she collected many interesting pebbles in a satchel made of seaweed. One was red, one had a swirl of green, and one was black with specks of shining yellow. Each was its own marvel. And then, something gave her pause. The thing she grasped wasn’t a rock at all.
The girl tugged the object from the sandy floor. In her hand was a metallic vessel with a handle protruding from one side and a spout emerging from the other. The surface of the vessel was rough and speckled green, though a brown copper color could be seen underneath. It was worn thin in places, with holes peeking through. But the girl didn’t mind. She was delighted by its novelty. The word ‘kettle’ crossed neither her mind nor her lips, for one has little need for such as kettles when one lives beneath the sea.
The girl returned from her venture. In one hand was clutched her satchel of stones, the kettle in the other.
Once home, the girl proudly presented her satchel of stones. Her family humored her with good-natured smiles. Once the kettle was presented, they became intrigued. Her family had never seen anything like it before. Together, they marveled at the intricacy of the vessel, admiring the way the light played off its speckled surface. They knew not what the kettle was.
Neither their friends nor neighbors recognized it. Later, the girl’s family would ask for people to appraise the kettle. They too, could not guess at its purpose, only that it had come from ‘up there.’ The girl would sometimes find other such objects, and think about the funny people that must have made them. When the little girl was an old woman, she would show them to her grandchildren. They were heirlooms, then novelties. They carried little weight and little memory.
The explorer sat in the cramped watercraft as he ascended. The seafloor looked so far away, obscured by the crushing weight of water below. The surrounding pressure up there was so light, one even one-fifth that of the seafloor, that he was afraid that the watercraft might pop. But it didn’t, and he was safe. It was a testament to the work of the premier scientists, and the work of generations that had gone before them.
The explorer sent a message down to the sea floor, saying that he was still okay. He shouted it through a snaking tube, carefully pressurized. His voice would be carried to the seafloor, and specially designed kelp would sway in certain patterns, corresponding to his voice. It was so strange if he thought about it.
Above him, the explorer saw the surface. It could be seen, barely, for the seafloor, the palace where the water ended, the glow of the golden orb overhead. But it was different when it was this close. There was something almost kind about the glow of the burning star. And for a moment, the explorer paused, ceasing even to breathe. There was majesty, up there.
But the watercraft continued onwards, towards its preset destination. And the explorer saw the ruins. Massive structures, collapsed and tangled so that they might never divine their purpose, rested don’t the shallow sands of the sunlit waters. They were covered in a strange pattern the color of blood, and the explorer was reminded of the strange novelties that people say fell from the lands above.
The strange mass sat derelict, partially covered by sand and silt and time. Dimly-lit caverns, strange outcroppings, and few pieces of discarded refuse made up the structure. The explorer didn’t quite know how to describe it, didn’t have the context to place a memory to its face. But, he thought it looked empty, as if something had once been there.
There was only one place that looked almost untouched, unmarred by water and salt. It was a chamber filled with various empty tanks, with research equipment, and the remnants of strange devices that had long since stopped working. The craft drifted closer, almost as if it were taking its rightful place, returning home.
