“I’ve been better.”
“Seamus…”
Oh, please don’t use my name unless you mean it.
“Seamus, I’m pregnant. I thought it best if you heard it from me…and well, we’re getting married. Seamus…”
But I’d already put the phone down, shaking.
The doctor unwrapped the blood pressure band from my arm. The reading was slightly high but nothing to stop me making the dive. It was my silence that disturbed him.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine, Doc, fine. I’d just like to get on with it,” I snapped.
Scribbling on my chart, he gave me clearance.
The computers had mapped out my descent and the diving tables had told me the exact mixture needed for my body weight at that depth. The Heliox had to be exact to avoid narcosis—the rapture of the blue, Jacques Cousteau called it. This dive was particularly dangerous as the rusting cable was right near the bottom of the rig, a good sixty meters down. Every move was a mathematical calculation. Aside from the tremendous water pressure pressing down on me the whole time, the other big problem with these oil rig dives was the possibility of getting lost in the murky waters of the North Sea and panicking. Elements that have a rational man talking gibberish in a matter of seconds. I know because I’ve seen it myself.
Personally, the more dangerous a dive the more I like it. Visibility is limited to the narrow beam shining from the lamp clamped to your mask, illuminating a black-and-white murky world, while at that depth the air you’re breathing becomes thick like molasses. But I loved the solitary atmosphere. The sense of possibility in the total silence, the unknown, the feeling of being suspended in eternity.
I climbed into the dry suit required for deep dives and put on a full helmet with built-in radio and a light. There was not an inch of my skin exposed. I always imagined this was what it would be like back in the embryonic sac. Floating, fully protected, fully insulated.
Then they lowered me into the freezing waters of the North Sea. Clutching the welding equipment attached to a separate cable, I began to slide down the shotline.
It only took a few minutes to reach the break in the cable. On the way down I passed through shoals of fish darting around the clumps of mussels, oysters, and mollusks that had grown around the pylons of the rig. The struts created a false reef, which the sea creatures were happy to colonize and the divers happy to harvest.
Thirty meters deeper and I finally saw the cable through the misty waters. The broken line lashed slowly in the current like a sleepy sea snake. I caught hold of it; a section of about eighteen feet was missing, broken off due to rust. I radioed the information to the surface and was cheered to hear Nick’s voice radioing back down as clear as if he were standing right next to me.
I had almost finished the repair welding when I first saw it—a glint of silvery-bronze caught in the luminous hexagon of my light. My first thought was that it was the tail of some large fish. I ignored it and continued welding, the dull glow lighting up the area. The creature swam through the beam again and this time I saw enough to make me drop the welding torch.
Long tendrils of red hair drifted through the water like seaweed; the copper of a sea perch, light fragmenting off the scales and illuminating the white-blue skin. At the top of the tail, where the body of a fish would naturally widen out, were the unmistakable broad hips of a woman. Her sex, neatly located in the center of the tail, was hairless. She had no thighs, just a crevice where evolution had fused land legs together. Nauseous with shock, I dived after the descending welding torch, catching it just in time. I returned to the shotline, hanging on for dear life as I collected my wits.
“Seamus, what was that noise? Are you all right?” Nick’s voice echoed in my head.
“It was nothing, I dropped the welding torch, that’s all. Had to get it back.”
She was floating at the edge of the beam, dipping in and out of shadow. There was just enough light for me to see the full breasts tipped with mauve nipples like those I’d seen on sea cows and the delicate bone of her neck, more pronounced than a human’s, arching out like white coral. Her face had broad cheekbones that were almost Asiatic only more pronounced, a nose that I suspected was decorative rather than functional, and lips that were the same color as her nipples. Her eyes, which appeared to have no pupil or iris but were entirely blue from lid to lid, stared straight at me displaying an intelligence that was so other I had absolutely no way of reading her.
Even more frightening was her size; she looked to be taller than myself, which made her about seven foot in length.
“Seamus?” Nick’s voice pulled me back to the reality of the luminous world above. But she was still there, swaying with the current as naturally as a dolphin.
“Seamus, you sure you’re all right? You sound a little strange.”
“There’s something down here, something wonderful….”
As I spoke, still locked on those incandescent blue eyes, she opened her mouth and blew out a large air bubble that shimmered and danced like a silver balloon before ascending out of sight. Then, with a twitch of her tail, she disappeared into shadow.
Without thinking I broke free of the surface supply of Heliox and turned on my emergency supply cylinder.
“Seamus, you’re not making sense. I suggest you begin your ascent as soon as possible. Do you hear me?”
“Later, Nick, I have to follow…I’ve got to…”
“Seamus!”
I dropped the welding torch again and, now breathing air from my bail-out cylinder, freed myself from the shotline. The decision surged through my body like liberation. A fine red hair trailed across the glass of my mask and I was off, following the glint of her tail, pinning her with my light. The line above me drifted loose—a broken umbilical cord to the humanity I had abandoned. Or had it abandoned me?