Into the Drowning Deep

"Sure, it`s not likely, and sure, it would throw a lot of what we think we know into question, but we have strong enough evidence that it`s worth chasing," he said when pressed, expression calm and voice untroubled. This was a speech he`d been giving most of his adult life. He had it down pat. "The ocean is the last great mystery in the world. We may as well pursue every clue it contains. We`ll have all the questions answered soon enough, and things are going to get very boring after that happened."

The data was open to interpretation. She knew that. All data was open to interpretation, and there would always be people ready to disagree with any theory that arose, ready to argue that the water on Mars didn`t count because it was the result of slow geologic processes and not weather patterns, ready to argue that the bacteria clustered around volcanic vents was not proof of extremophilic life. Scientists liked to argue about discoveries almost as much as they liked to make them, and arguing about someone else`s discoveries was the best game of all.
And yet.

"I know you think this is an answer, and maybe it is; I don`t understand the kind of science you do, any more than you understand how the human body fits together," said Katherine. Her voice was grave; her eyes were even graver. "But baby, if it`s not an answer, if it`s not the piece you`ve been looking for, don`t let break you.
"It`s okay, Mom," said Tory. She deftly extricated her wrist, bending to press a kiss against her mother`s temple before she said, "I`m already broken," and followed Luis to the door.

"This," she said, touching the top line of waves and curves, "is the standard sonar reading for that area. We`ve had blips before -- surprisingly little whale song, given how remote it is and how rich the water has historically been; we`d expect a place like that to be a popular feeding ground, and it isn`t -- but most of the time, the water looks like this."
"And what is 'this'?" asked Katherine.
"The song of the sea," said Luis.
Brian raised an eyebrow. "That`s surprisingly poetic."
"Studying the ocean forces you to be poetic, because we haven`t worn all those ideas and concepts soft around the edges yet," said Luis. "The language is still mired in the maritime, and I don`t know that it`s going to catch up anytime soon."
"Water sings," said Tory. Luis could talk for hours about the words used to describe the ocean. If she let him get started, they were going to be here for a while, and she wanted to get ot the lab as soon as possible. "It`s a function of the way it moves. Everything makes a sound, and vibrations hang in water for much longer than they can hang in air. They travel further, too. It`s why whales can communicate with each other even when they`re miles apart." Air was too thin, compared to water, to really carry sound. There was no such thing as silence in the sea.

"Victoria!" he exclaimed, causing the heads in the pizzeria that hadn`t already turned to whip around, looking for the source of the disturbance. He ignored them, wading through the sea of tables until he reached the Stewart family.
Dropping himself into the one empty chair, Luis thrust his armload of papers at Tory. "You need to see this," he said.
Tory took the paperwork automatically. Several years of sharing lab space and research projects with Luis had taught her that if she didn`t accept what he tried to give her, he`d let it go anyway, resulting in papers everywhere. One cleanup too many had given her a very firm grab reflex.
"What is this?" she asked.
"I finally got those deepwater sonar scans broken down," he said. "You know, the ones centered on the Challenger Deep? I was able to get full analysis of audio signals going back five years -- oh, uh, hello, Mr. and Ms. Stewart."
"Hello, Luis," said Katherine, fighting to keep the laughter from her tone. "Would you like a piece of pizza? We have plenty, and seafood is so difficult to reheat."
"That`s because it has a very delicate index of 'done,'" said Luis. "Thermodynamically speaking--"
"Thermodynamically speaking, my partner is an enormous nerd," said Tory, and flipped open the first folder. "Eat pizza, Luis. Enjoy not being in a lab. It`s nice to not be in a lab sometimes."

"You know she`s wasting her potential."
"I do."
"Then why--"
"Because it`s her potential to waste." Brian walked over to his wife, putting his hands on her waist and tugging her toward him. She came willingly. "We made her -- and God, didn`t we do a remarkable job of that? -- but that doesn`t mean we get to dictate what she does. She`s looking for answers. She`s looking for peace. If this is what she has to do to find it, let her. Ahab tilted at that whale of his for a long, long time before he found it."
"And it killed him when he did," said Katherine. "Are you sure that`s the comparison you want to make here?"
"I don`t have a better one," said Brian. He rolled his shoulders in an easy shrug, taking his hands off his wife`s waist and pressing them to either side of her face. He smiled, waiting until she smiled back before he let his own smiled die and said, "Tory is young and angry and trying to figure out what she wants. Right now, she wants answers. She wants to know what happened to her sister. To be honest, I`m glad. I`d be doing the same thing if I were younger and had her training. Anne... The thought of her gnaws at me. Every night, it gnaws at me, because I didn`t save her. I`m her father. I should have saved her."
"If we lose Tory too, what will we have left?" asked Katherine. "She`s chasing a dream. She`s chasing a hoax. Whatever they`re covering up has to be so much worse than mermaids."
"She`s an adult. You can`t stop her. Learn to accept it, or we might lose her anyway."

Tory knew some of the people she worked with looked down on the tourists, calling them "flyovers" and laughing at their amazement. She thought that was uncharitable and, well, wrong. She`d lived next to the ocean for her entire life, had learned to walk with salt on her lips and learned to swim before she could read. She loved the Pacific as she loved nothing else in the world, and sometimes she worried she would start taking it for granted, letting familiarity wear away the sharp startling edges love needed in order to stay bright and strong. The tourists were seeing everything for the first time. Through their eyes, she could do the same. She could be amazed by things that might otherwise become less amazing, and she`d never be jaded, and she`d never forget how much she loved the hammered silver shine of the horizon.

"You really want to be the face of the cryptid mockumentary?" Tory had asked.
Anne had answered with a shrug. "I want to be the face of something. This is as good a place to start as any. I just wish you could come with us. We could use some more camera-ready scientists."
"Give me ten years and I`ll come on the anniversary tour." Tory had grinned, impish, and leaned over to tug on a lock of her sister`s sunset-red hair. It was a dye job, but it was a good one, years and miles and a lot of money away from the Clairol specials Anne used to do in the downstairs bathroom. "I`ll make you look old."
"By then, I`ll be so established that they`ll let me," Anne had said, and they`d laughed, and the rest of the afternoon had passed the way the good ones always did: too fast to be fair.

Tory had been born in the Monterey City Hospital. According to her parents, her first smile had been directed not at her mother, but at the Pacific Ocean. She had learned to swim in safe municipal pools by the age of eighteen months, and been in the ocean -- closely supervised -- by the time she was three, reveling in the taste of salt water on her lips and the sting of the sea spray in her eyes.
(She`d been grabbed by a riptide when she was seven, yanked away from her parents and pushed twenty yards from shore in the time it took to blink. She didn`t remember the incident when she was awake, but it surfaced often in her dreams: the suddenly hostile water reaching up to grab her and drag her down. Most children would have hated the ocean after something like that, letting well-earned fear keep their feet on the shore. Not Tory. The riptide had just been doing what it was made to do; she was the one who`d been in the wrong place. She had to learn to be in a better place when the next riptide came along).