The Light That Was Already There

The screen glowed blue in a cabin that smelled of salt and warm electronics, and Soren had his face close enough to feel the heat coming off the glass.

His aunt Reema was up on deck arguing with the winch. The camera was her job, the depth counter her job, the long cable her job. The watching was the part nobody wanted at one in the morning, so it had become his.

Numbers slid down the corner of the feed. One hundred meters. The water there was the color of weak tea held up to a candle. One hundred fifty. The candle dimmed. Two hundred, and the screen went the kind of black that pressed on his eyes.

The camera light was off. Reema had said to leave it off as long as he could stand it. She said the lamp scared things away, that it turned the whole ocean into a held breath. So Soren sat in the dark with the dark and waited to be bored.

He was not bored.

A spark crossed the screen. Pale green, smaller than a grain of rice, there and then not. He leaned in. Another. Then a slow curl of light off to the left, like someone drawing a comma with a glowing pen.

His hand found the notebook on the bench and his pen moved without him looking down. Comma. Then dot dot dot. Then a long smear.

Three hundred meters. The sparks were everywhere now, not crowded, just present, the way stars are present once your eyes give up on finding more. Some pulsed. Some streaked. One thing far back pulsed twice, paused, pulsed twice again, and Soren felt the back of his neck go cold, because that was not random. Random does not repeat itself on purpose.

He pressed his thumbnail into the bench and watched for the next one.

He had thought, before tonight, that the deep ocean was dark. Everyone said it. The sunless deep. The lightless trench. He had built a whole picture of it in his head, a flat black nothing with a few sad fish feeling their way around.

That picture was wrong, and the wrongness of it was opening under him like a trapdoor.

It was not dark down there. It was lit. Not by the sun, which had quit four hundred meters above, but by the things that lived in it, each one carrying its own small lamp, switching it on and off for reasons of its own.

Reema thumped down the cabin stairs, hair wet, a mug in her hand. She glanced at the screen.

"Camera light still off? Good man."

"I don't want to turn it on," Soren said. "If I turn it on I'll only see what my light hits. With it off I see what they're doing."

Reema stopped with the mug halfway to her mouth. "Huh," she said. "Yeah. That's exactly the trade."

She sat. She watched the green sparks for a while without naming them, which he liked, because he was not ready for names yet.

"Most of them make it themselves," she said finally. "The light. Down past two hundred meters it's the normal thing, not the strange thing. More of them light up than don't."

Soren turned that over. More of them light up than don't.

"So down there," he said slowly, "the dark ones are the weird ones."

Reema laughed, surprised. "Never thought of it backward like that. But yeah. Up here in the sunlight, glowing is the rare trick. Down there, the rare trick is staying dark."

He looked at the screen and felt the whole planet tip.

Most of the living space on Earth was down there. Not the thin bright skin of it where people and grass and gulls lived. The deep was the bigger part by far, miles of it, dark to anyone who brought sunlight with them, and almost everything in that bigger part had decided, in its own way, to glow.

Which meant the ordinary light of most of the living world was not the sun at all. The sun was a local thing. A surface thing. A thing for the small bright lid on top.

The real and common light, the light that most living creatures actually lived inside, was this. Cold. Green. Made by the bodies that needed it. Flicked on to lure. Flicked on to warn. Flicked on, that double pulse, to say something to something else.

"Reema," he said. "The one that flashed twice. Is it talking?"

She leaned in. "We honestly don't always know. Some of it's hunting, some of it's hiding, some of it's saying back off, and some of it we just can't read yet. Whole conversations going on in a language nobody's translated."

Nobody's translated.

Soren wrote down the two pulses, then the pause, then the two pulses, spacing them on the page the way they'd come.

The thing flashed again. Twice. Pause. Twice.

And then, off to its right, far enough that he almost missed it, a second light answered. Two pulses. Pause. Two pulses.

Soren stopped breathing.

"Reema," he whispered.

She had seen it too. She set the mug down very carefully on the bench, not looking away from the screen, as if a loud noise might end it.

The first light flashed. The second answered. The first again. The second again. Back and forth in the four-hundred-meter dark, two creatures Soren would never see, never name, never know the shape of, passing the same small green signal between them across the water.

He leaned toward the glass until the blue lit his face, and watched the two of them go on speaking in the only light that most of the living world has ever known.