What It Is

Djúpr.

The word is in Roman’s four pre-compact documents and in the oldest strata of the Vein, and over the next three days they will find it in six other Foundation texts that were catalogued as mythological in 1809 because their content did not fit any available taxonomy and a conservator made a judgement call that stood for two hundred and sixteen years.

Not mythological. Historical.

The oldest bloodline. Not sixth in sequence first. Present before the five, before the compact, before Isadora sat down with a piece of vellum in 1287 and wrote her own people into a law as a threat in order to end a war. Before any of the history the Folklore has spent seven hundred years treating as its foundation.

The original.

The Djúpr live in the deep Atlantic and the Arctic waters and they have been present in the Vein since before any living member of any bloodline was born, broadcasting on a frequency so low and so continuous that five separate peoples built an entire hidden civilisation on top of it and mistook it, comprehensively, for silence.

Veira learns this over three days, and the learning is unlike anything she has done.

The communication is not language. It is not telepathy either, in the sense the word usually carries there are no sentences, no voice, nothing that could be transcribed and read back. What there is: meaning arriving through the Vein in a form that requires her to render it, the way you render a foreign idiom rather than translate it word by word. She receives, and rebuilds it in English, and knows every single time that the rebuild is lossy and that she is losing something she cannot identify.

She is the only one who can do it.

That is the exhausting part, and it becomes clear within the first hour. Roman can feel that something is occurring. Emre gets fragments texture without content, which he describes on the second morning as “standing outside a room where someone is speaking a language I nearly recognise.” Joon-Ho’s instruments register the frequency and precisely nothing else.

Everything that passes between the deep and the boat passes through one woman standing at a rail.

By the second afternoon her hands have started shaking in a way she does not mention to anybody, and which Sebastien notices within about four minutes and also does not mention, and she catches him not mentioning it and understands it as a deliberate act of restraint that costs him something.

It is the most interesting thing she has ever done and she is aware that this is not an adequate reason to keep doing it.

There are four of them at the surface. How many below is a question the four answer with something she renders as sufficient, which she suspects means more than you can count and possibly means more than exists in any number you have a word for, and she does not press.

They have known about the conduit. They have known since the first one.

They have been waiting not passively, not in the human sense of the word, but in the deep-water sense, which involves a relationship with time she cannot get her hands around and stops trying to on the second day. Waiting for the compact to arrive at a condition in which contact was possible. A condition in which the surface-side of the Folklore was capable of encountering something it had not accounted for without immediately attempting to govern it.

The compact has been restructured, she sends, on the second morning. The clause that excluded the hybrid line has been struck. The system is trying to become more honest about what it is.

The response takes a long time. Long enough that she begins to wonder whether the framing has failed to translate at all.

We know. We felt the restoration.

And then, with something in it that she cannot render and will think about for years afterward:

We knew the conduit was choosing.

She stands with that for a while, holding the rail, in a wind that is doing something to her face she is choosing to attribute to the wind.

Because that is the whole thing. That is the entire argument of the last seven months, arriving unprompted from two hundred metres down, from something that has watched four conduits and never once been able to tell any of them anything: we knew you were choosing. Not: we felt the Vein return. Not: the system stabilised.

We knew the conduit was choosing.

She waits until her voice will work.

Did you send the cat? she asks.

The response is not a word. It is closer to a very old, very gentle version of amusement, arriving from the bottom of the North Atlantic in January.

She takes it as a yes.