The fish weren’t biting, but I wasn’t worried. I’d finished taking a tour group around the islands last week, and I had another scheduled for Sunday — or was it Tuesday? — that should at least keep me in Spam, propane, and bottled water for a few weeks. I wouldn’t have to rely on subsistence fishing until after then. Still, if I could land a nice fat yellowfin today, I could eat that and save the money for winter. If I saved money, I wouldn’t have to follow the fish. Instead of burning fuel, I could hunker down with the space heater for the few cold days and try to last until next tourist season. Maybe even sock away a few fifties in the old plastic-wrapped coffee tin I kept in the safe under the captain’s seat.
Still, the fish weren’t biting. It was the peak of the fishing season. The sea should be absolutely solid with hungry, horny fish, even with all the talk about ocean acidity and overfishing and so on. The ocean’s a big place, more than twice as much water as land on this rock. Ought to be plenty of fish in the sea, like the saying goes, but there weren’t, and I was puzzled. I might not have needed the catch, but I’d expected one, and it was unsettling me more than I’d care to admit that I wasn’t getting one. The weather was off, too. Hot, yes, but somehow dry and heavy at the same time. Flat, like the whole ocean was a can of cola left out too long. The clouds were a cheesecloth draped over a big yeasty globe, swollen and hostile.
I pulled my lines and decided to head out further than my usual grounds. Perhaps the summer traffic close to the islands was making the fish skittish, I reasoned. Even with the engine at full, the air was as dead and stuffy as breathing into a wool sock. I’d gone out another five miles or so, out where there’s nothing but nothing and the deep doesn’t mess around. Any further and I’d start to get worried that my third of a tank of gas wouldn’t quite get me back. With my lines cast out again, I settled in under the canopy to do some mending on my clothes and wait for one of the rods to twitch.
The water was a mirror. I’d never seen it so calm. It was as though I was fishing on a shallow pond in a sheltered valley, not on top of four kilometers of water. When the light abruptly changed, I looked up and saw the clouds. Where they had been a solid and dull gray sheet, unbroken and stifling, there was now an opening, perfectly circular. Even as I watched, it widened and formed a ring, then another. It looked as though someone had tossed a stone into the center of a pool. Beyond the clouds, the sky glowed with an unhealthy shade of blue: electric, radioactive, almost purple in its intensity.
It was right above me.
I was just off the center of the disturbance. I’d thought the sea was calm before, but now it was utterly still. The subtle rocking and shifting of the boat ceased entirely. My movements as I set aside my mending and stood were like an earthquake. I could see the ripples of my own motion inside a twenty-foot boat moving out across the surface of the water. Oddly, a couple thousand feet away, I could see the water still moving in choppy waves, stopping and flattening at the edge of the zone I was inside as though hitting the underwater wall of a bay.
Overhead, the ripples in the sky widened and the glow intensified. The light was wrong for my eyes, giving whatever I looked at a sharp-edged black outline. Everything solid seemed to be trembling slightly just under the surface. I looked at my own hands and felt them buzz like an industrial power line.
The light shifted again, darkening once more, and my gaze turned back to the sky to behold a horror. I was sitting on a boat beneath a mountain. The violet-tinged light and the horrible stillness made it nearly impossible to judge the size of the thing, but if my practiced eye was right and the zone of quiet water was a mile or two in diameter, the object in the sky filled all that space and more, pushing through the cloud layer like an awl punching leather. It moved with deceptive speed, seeming so slow and ponderous from my perspective, but I noted the jets of vapor streaming from its jags and crenellations, contrails born of speed and heat. I thought it would come down and crush me. A mass of that size impacting the planet? I was at ground zero of the destruction of all life on Earth, I was certain. I tried to fire up my engine, but the starter button and key might as well have been children’s toys; everything was dead, except the inexorable motion of the asteroid.
Then, impossibly, it stopped.
The clouds continued to ripple away from that penetrating spire, and the air grew almost molten with heat. The tip of the inverted mountain flared with white-green light and abruptly spouted a column of energy so bright it was blinding. I twisted my body away, my hands in front of my eyes. I could see my bones through the flesh, black on red, the thought of my own meat and blood somehow comforting in the unreal glow. After a few moments, the flare ceased and I blinked away the confounding aftereffects.
The sea was boiling where the light had impacted. I initially thought it was from heat, but the motion didn’t spread and dissipate like boiling water would. Instead, as I drifted helplessly nearer to the area of disturbance, I saw that it was seething with life. Fish and eels, sharks and octopodes, worms and stranger things that normally never saw the light, all were flopping and thrashing about on the surface, whipping the still waters into a foam. I saw teeth and tentacles, blood and mucous, a writhing, flailing clot of frantic sea animals. Then, from below, a darkness that glowed with its own light, a dim green illumination that made my eyes twitch and my teeth ache. I saw shadows inside that light, long and sinuous, a stretching and a reaching from below, a circle of grasping limbs surrounding a tooth-specked tunnel that went in and down, concentric rings like ripples in the sky, a mile across and more but rising, rising to meet the falling mountain, the rock and the sea straining to touch.
The awful green-black glow drew a line around every bit of living flesh in that dead spot of sea, and rose further, fumes, clouds, tendrils and trails up and up until it was no longer up but down, and I floated in the sky, looking below onto the mountainside toward which we all were falling. The light touched the actinic white tip of that ragged pyramid, and then…
Darkness.
When I woke, the sea was choppy and bedraggled. It looked exhausted, somehow. My fishing lines were tangled and might as well have been deliberately knotted. When I pulled them up and saw what clung to the ends, I cut the lines loose instead and let it all sink back into the dark and the silence and the ooze. My mouth tasted metallic, like old blood and burning.
The engine coughed and sputtered as though it hadn’t been used in weeks, but it functioned well enough to get me to shore. For weeks, I scoured the news for tales of an alien ship or an asteroid impact, but I never found any mention. Not from reputable sources, anyway. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, nothing had happened that day. And perhaps nothing had; I had no proof, other than the cut lines and the lingering symptoms, like a bad stomach virus: nausea and vertigo, weakness and fatigue, a persistent headache. My hair thinned out, as well, but I’m not of an age where that’s a surprise, either. No one had see it but me, and no one knew.
Perhaps it’s for the best. They came and they spoke to the sea, and neither party even noticed I was there. I don’t think I want them to know. This planet is old, far older than the chattering monkeys that cling to its driest and most remote protrusions. We call ourselves masters and claim dominion, but we keep to the rocks and skim over the depths like skipping stones. I prefer the comforting lie, even knowing it to be false. Let the true masters commune and depart and dwell in whatever privacy they prefer.
I do not think it will end well if we disturb them.