Might as well bury herself. She folded the neoprene flap on her seal and zipped. I’m good, she told herself. Fine, thanks! Rand slid a hand toward her, a praying mantis perched on his finger. Hello there! she chirped, and it rotated its green-cube head in her direction. She wondered how she might appear, J-pegged into its dimension.
And then the weight of her rig seemed to drive her along the dirt footpath and onto a wooden platform and down a ladder to the spring. The water had a greenish-brown tinge in which gray particulate appeared like oversized dandruff—far less current charged this spring system than the one she observed last night, and less roaring discharge meant greater impurity but also an easier swim in and out. Also the cave was relatively shallow and she knew the site from previous dives. Given her rustiness, good for me, she thought as she flippered the surface to the far side and peered in. Disarticulated tree roots. Scabby suckerfish and bushy algal blooms. And a gash in the bank’s outcropping of limestone—another deception. Entrance to a Karst netherworld of conduits and drains. And yet so much more than mere plumbing—million-millennium-old passages carved by water. Rock beds for fossilized trilobites and ammonites—the earliest cave explorers—and relative-youngster mastodons, and the even more youthful Arawaks, the region’s extinct indigenous peoples. Sightless and translucent living arthropods and fish flicked among the fossils like the dead’s dreams. When overviewed on a map, the various passages—explored and surveyed by divers like Rand and Bowman—appeared dendritic, as if the cave were itself a neural system, a rock-creature alive in its own ancient mineral time older than wars and sex and beheadings over inaugurations and rights of return and every niggling Am I right? As she waited for her husband on the water’s surface, dangling above the cave opening, she felt like small bait.
Finally he showed. He hefted down the ladder and, in a few strokes, reached her. He immediately vented the air from his wings and dropped. Old times. She plunged after him only to wait on the muddy bottom as he tied line from his main reel to a thigh-sized root. Then he ran the line inside and down. Inside and down she went. Catfish trolled the cave’s large vestibule. She and Rand turned on their primary beams and swam farther in. Where daylight yielded to twilight he clipped his reel to the previously installed permanent line. Okay? he signalled. Okay. From here she led beyond all natural light. Not swimming—flying, shedding the vertical inclination of the species, the usual upright terrestrial posture. Her respiration deepened as if honeyed. Despite her suit she felt denuded, skin-sloughed. Alert-minded. Loosed into a tunnel fifty-five feet below the surface and thirty feet in diameter. Buff-coloured walls, deckle-edged like expensive invitations. Off the main passage layers of rock doorways and windows like infinitely replicating prosceniums and feints of perspective hinting at rooms hidden behind rooms. She knew that other mapped passages intersected this fenestrated promenade, but as planned she continued on the main route, flying her body, marvelling at rock-lunettes and false oculi in the ceiling. Twenty minutes in, the cave offered a set of curved ribs jutting from the fine silt bottom. Marilyn played her light over the remains. Once upon a time a turtle. Hungry and searching for food or curious and hankering for new sights but either way, run out of air—out of time. Reminder of rock’s indifference to the mortal razzmatazz, the sticky particulate, of those trapped in its vast slow yawn. Cave-time, creaturely time—best to keep them straight.
Seventy-five minutes from the start of her descent, she reached her turn pressure, having exhausted a third of her air supply. This left a third for her return and a third for a possible emergency. More-skilled Rand, who slid through the water with greater ease, hadn’t breathed down his third yet, despite his greater physical size. But he was accompanying her and so her restrictions governed. What was the body, she thought as they began their exit, but a sad breath-counting machine animated and simultaneously limited by each respiration? Not flying. Never free.
Nearing the entrance again, the backlit mouth of the cave was an azure stain. They spent their brief deco slow-bumping in the water’s gentle wash.
Then it was up and out. Leaves glowed like lanterns in the motionless trees.
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