‘Some sort of cnidarian?’ Dave asked.
‘I don’t think so. Let’s rise a bit and descend on the next one with the thrusters up.’
‘All right.’
‘Just focus, please.’
His lips moved silently. I shifted my eyes from his face to the illuminated field beneath us, then back to his face.
We rose twenty feet and drifted down the narrow canyon. The walls dropped off. We passed a lava column, lonely and rugged. Everything was covered with silt and floc. There was no motion except for the fall of bacterial snow; still and empty, lost in a billennial quiet.
My hand twitched inside the glove. The manipulator responded with a grinding outward push.
‘Careful,’ Dave said.
I wanted to tell him screw you, but he was right. Easy does it. Focus.
Dave let rip with a long and heartfelt fart.
‘Jesus, I’m sorry,’ he muttered.
His stink filled the sphere. It was lush and green, like a jungle, but gassy, like corpse-bloat. I had never really smelled a fart quite like it, to tell the truth, and I wanted to gag.
‘I don’t feel very good,’ Dave said. ‘This is nothing like rice and pepper.’
My tickle of anger became a nettlelike scourge. Little sparks of resentment and frustration came and went like stinging fireflies. I could not focus. I glared at Dave, and he shot me a screw-faced look from the corner of his eye that totally grounded me.
We both turned away. We had been homing in before a fight. We couldn’t get up and circle and bristle in the pressure sphere, so we had just glared – then agreed to back down.
Sweat soaked my armpits.
The sub crept over the sea bottom. I took control of the lower bar of lights and fanned them out.
Something big, round, and long came into view, lying horizontal on the seafloor like a toppled ship’s mast. ‘What in hell is that?’ I asked, startled.
Dave practically jerked control of the lights from me, then chuckled. ‘That is a condominium dropped from heaven. Take a look.’
Clams, boring worms, polychaetes studded the mystery shape like maggots on a corpse.
‘It’s a log,’ Dave said. ‘We’re not that far from some big forests, the Olympic Peninsula, Vancouver Island.’
‘Right.’
A few tens of meters east, we came across another log. A chain drooling rivers and ponds of orange rust tied the log to at least seven more, all thick with life, all broken loose from a raft who knows how many years or even decades ago. It takes a long time for deep scavengers to move in on such riches, but when they do, organisms gather from miles around to share the feast.
We churned our way east a few more yards, following the rust rivers until they faded into the silt. I lifted the bar and spread the lights again. Dave did not object.
Ahead, dozens of little blobs wobbled on the ooze and sediment like dust bunnies under a kid’s bed. I rotated the entire light bar, flooding the seafloor with daylight glow. ‘There they are,’ I said. Xenos by the dozens cast long shadows. The DSV glided over them, lazy as a well-fed manta. Our lights picked out hundreds more, then thousands, jiggling on the silt. I could barely make out the blurred tracks of their slow, rolling movement.
‘Got ‘em,’ Dave said. ‘What next?’ Everything was fine again. The smell was going away or I was able to ignore it.
I kept moving the lights. Dave gently precessed the submarine.
‘See those?’ I asked. ‘Those fans…and over there, gelatinous mounds – way over there.’ I drew back the manipulator and armed its claw tip with a revolving suck tube. ‘What do they look like to you?’
‘Sea daisies?’ Dave asked, as if eager to confirm my hopes.
‘Some would call them that. A little yellow tinge in the lights. But they are not siphonophores. They’re something else.’
I sucked my lips, afraid I might just be looking at loose debris, deluding myself. But they were not debris. They were real.
‘I’ve never seen anything like them,’ Dave admitted. ‘They look like little squashed balloons.’
‘Swim pillows,’ I said. ‘Bubble wrap.’
Dave’s eyes were perfectly normal for this situation: wide with speculative interest. ‘They aren’t jellyfish or corals. And no algae – not this far down.’
‘Rack your brain,’ I said, giddy. ‘Think back. Way back. Think living fossils.’
‘Ediacara?’ Dave asked, and immediately shook his head: couldn’t be.
‘You got it,’ I said. My hands trembled.
The earliest known large fossils, from tens of millions of years before there were shelly or bony animals, are either lumpy bacterial colonies called stromatolites, or the peculiar formations that Adolf Seilacher named the Vendobionts. Another group name is Ediacara, from the Australian outcropping where type specimens were first found. These ancient life-forms had sat on the floors of shallow seas about six hundred million years ago. All they had left behind were sandy casts, impressions, little more than ghosts in stone. Until now.
I noted large chambers arranged radially or in grids, some rooted, some floating just above the seafloor. Mushroomlike bells; graceful, waving fronds; jointed blades; gelatinous air mattresses spreading over the silt. And all around them, perhaps their cousins and successors – possibly even their larvae, their propagules, the form which they assumed while spreading themselves to favored habitats – the xenos.
I was just guessing. I did not know whether xenos had any connection with these ancient marvels. But there they were – cozy chums at the bottom of the sea, just around the corner from Eden. If these were indeed the last Vendobionts, they had found a safe niche away from six hundred million years of evolution. Metazoan predators – our ancestors among them – had driven these ancients into hiding, forcing them into the ocean deeps.
I was getting way ahead of myself. Too much leaping and not enough looking, not enough science.
‘Is that a jellyfish – on a stalk?’ Dave asked.
Our lights were heating up the area, forcing some of the organisms to expel fluid and contract into wrinkled little raisins. ‘Dim the lights,’ I suggested.
Dave cranked down the rheostat. The seafloor became suffused in a golden glow, absolutely spectacular for mood. I wanted a room that color to sit and dream in. To dream of the Garden of Eden.
Nobody knows what the Ediacara organisms were, precisely, and where there is mystery, there is speculation, and where there is speculation, scientific careers can be made. Colleagues can debate, friendships can dissolve in argument. Wonders come and go and theories die a dozen
