Heading Home

The deep dive had been the previous day. The submersible was back on deck, salt-rimed and slightly battered, looking less like a steel pumpkin now and more like a steel pumpkin that had been to the bottom of the world and back. The crew worked through their post-dive checklist with the calm satisfaction of people whose ten-thousand-metre week had gone well.

Polly was leaving today. She had begun to feel the pull of the next destination the way migratory birds feel it, a low, persistent tug in the chest. Wherever she was going next, she did not yet know. She had learned, over the years, that the destination usually announced itself by being underfoot rather than ahead.

She made a slow tour of the ship. The galley first: a small sandwich was waiting on a paper plate by the door, and she ate it quickly. The mess: the photograph of the Trieste was still on the wall, with its two cloth-capped men on a winter morning sixty-six years ago. The lab: Yara had labelled the shrunken Styrofoam cup and put it in a small display case with the date and depth in neat script. The dive deck: the Limiting Factor sat in its cradle, gleaming, waiting to go back to its workshop on land.

At the bow, the captain was leaning on the rail. He looked at Polly with the same untroubled expression he had looked at her all week. "You'll be off then," he said. She tilted her red-orange head. He nodded.

She thought, briefly, about what she had seen. A small ship over a deep place. A fish whose cells held themselves together with a chemical brace. Two men in cloth caps in 1960, betting their lives on the chemistry of gasoline. A cup the size of a thimble. A scientist's calm explanation of pressure. A galley anchoring twenty-seven people through bad weather.

None of it had been an adventure. Nobody had needed saving. There had been no twist, no mystery, no chase. There had only been a vast and quiet place at the bottom of the ocean, and a small ship full of people who had decided, for various reasons, to spend their lives paying attention to it.

She did not think she had it in her to live that life. But she liked them very much.

The breeze freshened. Polly opened her blue-teal wings, glasses settled firmly on her beak, and let the ship's deck push her up. She climbed in a slow spiral until the Pressure Drop was a single white shape on the blue paper of the Pacific. Then she turned, picked a heading, and went.

Below her, the trench was as it had been a hundred million years ago: dark, cold, mostly empty, perfectly itself.