Undersea Garden

. In an age that has lost its calendar and knows only that the end is not far off, a submarine grinds to a halt at the mouth of a deep-sea region no human has yet explored. The water down there does not surge; if anything, the stillness is terrifying. Yet in this zone fixed as though in gelatin, some abnormally tall seaweed keeps fingering the half-loosened paint on the hull. 'I suppose only these little things have no idea what we are facing,' mutters Sai Leng, the expedition member climbing out of the cabin. With funding nearly spent and nothing to bring home but consolation, she seems to hold little hope for this dive. Her hands move briskly through the last round of equipment checks, but she sets the searchlight to its lowest beam — as if she had long decided the deep sea is exactly what humanity believed it to be centuries ago: nothing at all. She walks a few perfunctory steps forward and, seeing nothing but seawater, is about to turn back. Suddenly Wei Mo, the little assistant back inside the cabin, cries out: 'There is a fish skeleton ahead — no, a giant fish skeleton!! And the scanner is showing more…' Sai Leng sighs and cuts off her companion, who has the excitement of a discoverer of new continents. 'Don't be silly. This is the deep sea. And that antique is not fully trustworthy either — the other day it reported a Parthenon down here.' Wei Mo has no intention of yielding to her dispirited partner, and goes on: 'It is not entirely impossible, you know. A small continent fell down here centuries ago, with Renaissance buildings on it. If this is architecture in imitation of that style, it is quite plausible…' Sai Leng walks on, listening to this 'walking archive' chatter. Just as she notices that the eager voice on the intercom has gone quiet for a long while, she opens her mouth — and is stopped by Wei Mo's disbelief: 'Look… look up.' Filling her eyes is an enormous fish skeleton. It has plainly been buried for some time; the soaking has dulled its color. The flesh that was once fresh has been picked clean by deep-sea creatures, and the residue that remains still draws schools of fish to this day. Its former fangs have become its best ornament — soft-bodied creatures of every color have settled between the teeth, as if the fish had been set with a row of tooth diamonds. The animals of the deep all seem to carry their own shadow; ash-grey seaweed takes root on the fish's lower jaw, its spiked edges swinging at intruders like a sword defending home. None of which works on Sai Leng and Wei Mo. The two stride straight into the fish's mouth. Out of sight from outside, the fish's oral cavity holds a cluster of creatures even Wei Mo cannot name. Bright-yellow lumps pulse up and down in rhythm with their steps, producing unnameable sounds, and stop only once the two walk out of the shadow. Only then does Sai Leng dare mutter, 'They say the deep sea is uncanny, but this is too uncanny.' The passage ahead is, as Wei Mo said, a Renaissance building in imitation of the ancient Greek style. The once milk-white columns are overgrown with algae; through her helmet, Sai Leng can almost smell their particular brackish green. The dark-green plants are the best cover for the little things living here. Walking the corridor, the two keep glimpsing small tails poking out of the kelp and darting back as they approach. Sai Leng means to ignore them, but Wei Mo suddenly tugs her dive-suit sleeve and signals a stop, closing her eyes and reaching out a hand, waiting for something. Their stillness soon emboldens the little ones in the seaweed; they gather into a ball and swim up before Wei Mo. Seeing that she still does not move, they nudge her fingertips with their heads. It must tickle — Wei Mo suppresses a laugh and keeps playing with her fingers among them. At her fingers' motion the seahorses bob up and down, perfectly willing to cooperate. 'They are seahorses — look at their heads and tails, aren't they lovely?' The seahorses' heads and tails are studded with irregular spikes, trembling like volcanoes about to erupt; deep blue dotted with rose-red spots, they blink on and off in the dark. Sai Leng does not find anything lovely about a creature that looks like an alarm in the night. But watching life flourish so unreservedly this far down, she decides the trip has been worth it. At the very least, far from any human, it has handed the two of them a thread of hope. At the end of the corridor stands a small pavilion. Its patterns look exquisite at first glance, though the endless soaking has blurred them somewhat. The pavilion is domed — built, most likely, with a particular structure that gathers sound. Beside it, schools of fish give off a faint glow, circling outside the pavilion. Perhaps it is spring: the fish strike Sai Leng as unusually playful. She watches for a while and counts their colors — red, yellow, orange, pink. The saturated hues warm the two of them, standing in freezing water, by sheer psychology. A bench grown from a mutated fish skeleton: Wei Mo, long past tired, sits down without a word. The spikes have been thoughtfully shaped by nature into armrests, and she sprawls back without ceremony. The fish keep swimming; the seaweed keeps growing. Sai Leng thinks: even having lost its life, this fish is still taking part in nature's cycle, in the universe's proceedings. Put that way, perhaps there is hope for humanity too.