The silence at four thousand

The descent is uneventful. It is supposed to be. We are on the inner line, a kilometre and a half off the eastern wall, drifting at the speed the pilot calls no speed at all. Outside the porthole there is the standard nothing of bathyal water: black, not because the water is black, but because there is no light here that did not come down with us.

At three thousand, the pilot kills the floods, and for a quarter hour we sit in the absolute dark and listen to the hull. This is a thing one does at depth. There is no scientific reason for it. It is something like prayer.

When the lights come back, the wall is closer than I thought, and the lurker is on it. Not on us — on it. Travelling along the rock with the slow grace of an animal that does not hurry because nothing in its life has ever hurried it. It is two metres, perhaps a little more, and entirely incurious. The pilot does not film. We watch.

Below the lurker, where the wall is no longer wall but begins to be a city, the lights of the Court begin. They are not bright. They are very precise. There is a difference, at this depth, between a light and a signal; everything down here is one or the other.

There is a difference, at this depth, between a light and a signal; everything down here is one or the other.

I take no notes. I have learned not to.

A descending fifth, held thirty-two seconds. A single pulse, two seconds. The descending fifth again, four seconds shorter than before. No identifiable response from our side. Trace amplitude consistent with Court-band emission from a source between three and four kilometres along the wall.

---

M. Vael, en route from Marker IX, the eastern observatory.