Fifty-Three Months

I have held this ledge for four years.

Not held as a rock holds. Held as breath is held. My arms make a low tent over the clutch, two sweeping, two cradling, the rest locked in the seams of the basalt, and the sweeping does not stop. Water has to move across the eggs. Stagnant water grows films, films grow bacteria, and the bacteria eat what I cannot spare. So I fan. I have fanned through close to three thousand of the tidal pushes, give or take. The count is not exact. I miscount often now, and the count does not matter except as proof that time still has edges.

Below me the plain runs out farther than I can taste. Black hills of nothing, spaced like fruit on a branch: polymetallic nodules, each one a slow mineral fist, each one growing at the pace of a sleeping continent, a millimeter or so in a million years. My eggs are stuck to six of the nearest. I chose those six. The stalks harden like scar tissue after laying, and each case hangs clear of its crown on a short stiff stalk. I have thirty-eight cases left. I laid many more.

The nodules are not dead stone. This is the thing I would tell another of my kind, if any came close enough to tell. Around each one the water tastes sharp, clean, like the electric skin of a fresh kill. Nothing kills here. The metal oxides on the nodule skins do the work: they split the water itself, slowly, on their own surfaces, and oxygen comes loose into a film you can taste if you hold your chemoreceptors against the rock. The survey work years back stirred a hundred meters up and the whole plain smelled of old iron. This I learned before I laid: the crowns of the nodules are oxygen gardens. I did not attach thirty-eight chances to bare basalt.

The first years were simple. Cold at one degree above freezing, which is warm for this depth and cold for everything else. My metabolism is a bank that does not accept deposits. I have not eaten since I finished laying. Four years of watching my own mantle thin against my ribs. This is not a hardship. This is the shape of my kind. A female goes into brooding once, spends everything, and either finishes the ledger or does not. I have fasted before, in the small hungers between lean years. I have never done it for four years while raising thirty-eight children in the dark.

My marker is the push. The bottom tide breathes on a schedule I can feel through the basalt: a slow firming of the water. Two pushes a day, near enough. I have watched the pushes change my fan. In year one, my sweep was fast, restless. Now the sweep takes longer. The water moves. It moves. There is no hurry in my arms anymore because hurry would spend what I have left.

One arm is failing. The left rear, the one that holds the deepest seam. It still grips. It does not grip well. When I flex, the tip answers a half-beat late, like a hand lifting something too heavy in the cold. I have shifted its work to the others without deciding to. The body makes these transfers the way old current moves around a ridge, without argument.

Above me, two hundred meters up in the black, there is nothing. Then there is something.

It arrives first as a pressure pattern, not a sound. The sea here is too deep for anything that loud to be honest. Something crosses the water column and the crossing folds the pressure on my skin, again and again, in a rhythm too even for an animal. Whales are irregular. Earthquakes are rude. This is metronome. It lasts six of the pushes, then stops for two, then comes back.

The water changes flavor after that, and it comes from above. A mineral grit that does not belong, the taste of cut rock bleeding down a long slope. Core samples. I have tasted this before, sparse, once in a blue year of human curiosity. This is not sparse. The grit comes in packets, several times per waking, and each packet carries a thread of something else: lubricant, faint and wrong, and the ghost of warm metal.

They are mapping the plain. I do not know the word mapping. I know that the grit falls in lines, as if whatever makes it is walking a pattern. Lines cross other lines, and the sampling intensity doubles. Then it doubles again.

On the fifteenth day of grit I feel a change in the far dark that my body understands before my senses do. The nodule field for a kilometer downcurrent of me goes quiet in the chemistry. A nodule does not stop producing oxygen. A nodule stops existing when something lifts it. The sharp film around a familiar stone, one I have kept my left rear arm near since the day I laid, simply ends. Not fades. Ends.

Then the taste of the lifting itself reaches me: a mechanical mouth, no saliva, no hunger. Something opens on the plain and closes on stone and the water above the wound clouds with a fine brown grief.

The sediment does not hurry. At this pressure and temperature, plumes have no hurry in them. The fine stuff lifts, spreads, and hangs. When it reaches my ledge it does not fall so much as arrive, layer by layer, like a door closing slowly.

My chemoreception goes first. This is the sense I was made of. The plume packs the receptor pits and hands back nothing useful. The oxygen film around my six crowns might still be there. I cannot tell. The clean electric edge is gone under the silt. I fan anyway. Fanning does not require taste.

The machine comes over the ridge ten pushes later. I see it as a pressure shadow and hear it as a grind that travels through the sediment as readily as through the water. A crawler. Legs, from the vibration pattern: something with more legs than anything alive, walking on the plain, dragging a mouth behind it. The survey years used hoses and small mouths; this is industrial, and the vibration through my ledge is strong enough to buzz the tip of my failing arm.

It is working upslope. Toward the ridge. Toward my six stones.

There is a slope outcropping east of here, a basalt shoulder where the current runs clean and there are no nodules. No oxygen gardens either. I could go. My arms could carry me, all of them working for once, and I could press into the shoulder’s lee and hold out. The bank has some balance left. A year, perhaps two, of slow spending. No second clutch. There is no second clutch. Once a female commits the body to eggs, the account is closed whether she keeps the eggs or not. Leaving buys me time and nothing else. Time without the push to mark it, without the crowns, without the soft internal tap of a heartbeat in a case that is almost ready.

The pull is in the mantle, a loosening of the arm-seam on the east side, the body’s simple arithmetic reaching for the slope. I have felt that pull twice before, in real hungers, and both times the plain provided something small and I lived. This is not a small hunger. The pull stays. I do not answer it.

What I do is adjust the fan. I cannot taste the oxygen films anymore, so I fan on memory: the crowns, their spacing, the height of the water above them. I put the strong arms on the sweep and the weak arm where the failing grip still functions best, low in the seam. I fan as if the taste were still there to justify me.

The crawler takes the first of my stones on a day I mark only by the pushes. It is not one of the six. It is the neighbor, a meter downcurrent, the one I would have chosen if the six had not been enough. The vibration changes pitch as the mouth engages. A shudder climbs the rock under me. The nodule tears free of the plain and the water where it was becomes a hole in my knowledge. My left rear arm twitches toward the wound and finds silt.

Two pushes later, the plume thickens. I cannot see. I have never seen, not as the surface world means it. I taste, I feel pressure, I know the geometry of my ledge from four years of holding it. Now the geometry is mud. When I shift weight I displace sediment over my own back and it resettles on my mantle like a slow burial that keeps changing its mind.

The machine works through the night-pushes and the day-pushes without resting. Things that live tire. The plain itself tires, in its long mineral patience. The crawler does not, and it does not get bored either.

I lose track of my count. The pushes keep coming, I am sure of that, but the plume smooths every signal until a strong push and a weak one feel alike. I keep fanning. My good arms are slower than they were in year three. The silt is in my gills now, working its way into the delicate frills, and I clear them with short sharp flexes that cost more than they save. Somewhere under the silt, thirty-eight cases hang from their crowns. Thirty-seven. I find an empty case when I go down the row by touch, and I do not know if the embryo failed or the case tore. I keep fanning.

The machine takes a stone two rows above the clutch, a plain stone with no eggs on it. I feel the tearing through the basalt as a single hard note. The silt from it mushrooms over the crown where I counted twenty of the strongest embryos. Their oxygen film, if the film was still working under the murk, is now under a moving layer of the plain’s own bones. Microbial films do not need much encouragement. If the silt smothers the crowns’ electric work, the bacteria will come in and they will be thorough.

My arm-seam loosens again toward the east. The shoulder is thirty meters of bad swimming away. I could go now and the silt would hide me from the machine’s simple senses. I would die clean, eventually, on basalt with no stories attached.

Instead I do something I have not done since laying. I leave the tent.

I do not go far. I pull off the clutch long enough to work downslope to the crown of the lowest of my six, the one the machine has not touched, and I press my chemoreceptors against the nodule’s skin through a finger of silt. Hold. Breathe water over it with a thin arm-sweep.

There. Under the grit, faint as a distant lamp: the sharp film. Still working. The machine has buried the taste of it, not the work.

I go back. I fold over the thirty-seven and I fan, and the fanning is slower, and the silt keeps settling on my back, and the grind upslope keeps its own time. My time is measured in pushes and in the internal taps of a case that is almost ready, and neither of those clocks cares about the machine.

On the day I stop counting altogether, I find the first dark egg.

It is in the middle row, third from the end, and it reaches me as touch, not sight: a softer chorion, a faint give under the arm-tip where before there was only firm jelly. Inside, I can feel what has formed. Eyespots, hardening. A mantle that answers pressure. The tiny pumping of a heart I have warmed for four years with nothing but a fan.

Black-eyed. Loose.

I fan harder for exactly the length of one sweep, then ease off, because hard fanning now spends blood I do not have. My gills grit with silt. My left rear arm has gone half-numb. I have not felt hunger in so long that its absence no longer frightens me. There is only the work and the row and the give of the case under my tip.

The machine upslope grinds on. The plume thins a little. Whether from the machine resting or the sediment running out of things to lift I cannot say. In the last few pushes the water over the eastern crowns has begun to taste of something again, thin and silted but present.

The first larva leaves its case between two pushes, and I feel it more clearly than anything in years: a prick of movement against my fan-sweep, a tiny body kicking free into water I cannot inspect. Paralarva. Small enough to ride the water as if the water were wind. It does not know I am here. It will not know. It kicks once and is gone upward, into the thinning dark, carried by a current that runs under the plume and upslope in the opposite direction from the falling silt. The plain’s old water, older than the crawler. It has always carried the fine dust and the chemical ghosts and the larvae of things that live in the cold.

I do not follow it with anything. There is nothing in me that can follow. There is only the fan.

Another prickle. Another. The middle row is coming loose in a small procession, each departure a touch on my sweep-arm, and I keep the sweep even because even sweeps move water and uneven sweeps do not. The silt on my mantle has compacted into a second skin. I do not shake it off. There would be no point.

My left rear arm stops gripping the seam. It stays curled where it was, a dead curl, and the others do not notice the missing help because they had already taken its work. The bank is nearly empty. What remains goes to the fan, arm by arm, sweep by sweep.

The water over the crowns tastes sharper now. The silt is settling, falling the slow fall of this depth, and where it falls it takes the plume’s blindness with it. More prickles on the sweep-arm. The row below the middle has started. They rise on the upslope current in a thin living dust that my receptors, clogged as they are, still register as movement: a scatter of small determined pressure-signals climbing out of the tent.

The tidal push firms under the basalt. It has been a long time since I felt one cleanly.

I fan. The crowns keep their slow electric breath beneath the silt. The young go up in the current that has no name for them. My arms keep time.

Another push is coming. I have not counted it yet.