Song in the Deeps — Part Two
By Deborah L. Davitt
Dante wished he could raise the volume of the music playing inside his helmet—reggae and rap from home in Philadelphia, something with steel-drums and a good beat—but he couldn’t drown out the voices around him. A leviathan could shatter a helmet with a misplaced fluke. A laser activated with him standing in the wrong place could result in a suit breach. And while they all worked hooked to safety lines, those lines could snap in the cold, and again, a tail or fluke could sweep someone off the deck and into the frigid sea. So he listened to the voices, though he wished that he could drown them in song.
The camera zoomed around, its lens icing over as it captured an opalescent stone the size of a softball, falling into a gloved hand. “Yes,” the reporter said. “But exposure to the heat of your ship—the seawater in which it lives just boiled off on your deck. Aren’t you frying it?”
“Certainly not! Sustainability is our mantra. We keep the animal’s area at the same ambient temperature as outside. You saw the fluid hitting the elevated decking where the crew stands—that’s their liquid methane sea. Some of it sublimes up, sure.”
Dante sighed against his faceplate, fogging it. Every year, some group on Earth made indignant noises about the trade in Polluxian pearls, comparing leviathans to elephants on Earth. But no leviathan had ever been killed for its pearls. Some even seemed to loiter near human ships, like fish in Earth’s seas that stayed comfortably near a cleaner shrimp, trading a meal for parasite removal.
He worked his way around a fluke five times as long as he was tall, feeling for lumps under the mucus with a numbing, gloved hand. “Quinn, tell Ms. Rousseau here how long we can keep a leviathan this size out of the ocean,” the manager ordered as they advanced on him.
“They can hold their breath for up to an hour, but we hold them no longer than twenty minutes,” Dante replied. “This one’s O-1014, a regular of ours. I can tell by his flukes, even without the radio chip.”
“A regular?” the reporter asked.
“Yeah, they hang out near our ship lanes. I guess we’re like cleaner shrimp to them. We weigh them, take their vitals, and—holy sh—” Dante cut off his words, probing deeper into the mucus layer. “We’ve got a big one, boss.”
Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her Elgin-placing poetry collections, Bounded by Eternity and From Voyages Unreturning, see www.deborahldavitt.com.
Copyright © 2025 Deborah L. Davitt