The Deep

by Nick Cutter

That’s how it went with the ’Gets: you forgot the little things first, then the not-so-little things, then the big ones. Next, the critical ones. In time, your heart forgot how to beat, your lungs how to breathe. You die knowing nothing at all.

“Your brother…” he said falteringly. “They say he might have the answer to all this. Whatever he’s doing down there in the deep. You think that’s possible?”

But during the Bad Years, she became truly cruel. In time, Luke realized that cruelty was an implicit facet of her nature; she’d simply taken a while to express it.

Luke knew she was right. Your child doesn’t owe you loyalty or obedience. You owe your child love and understanding, owe it unconditionally, and if you love them strongly enough, eventually that love may be returned.

It’s as if something is trying to stop us from reaching the Trieste.

He held up a piece of notebook paper that said: YOU ARE NOT WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE.

I will not scratch. I WILL NOT. Update: I scratched. Hah.

Okay, Luke thought, what’s the list? Get the hell off this station. Mission be damned. Take Clayton. Drug him if necessary. Get back home. Bring LB.

The darkness pushed against his eyes and flitted against his shut lips, seeking entrance; it was so thick that he could feel its weight in his lungs. It was a different, horrible breed of darkness: brooding, knowing, full of all those things that as a child you were certain it must hold. But beyond that there was the sheer terror of that dark itself—its immensity, its incalculable isolation. And that’s what Luke felt most

keenly: his abrupt and total isolation, as if he’d opened his eyes to find himself floating in deepest space, beyond the light of a single guiding star.

Luke was entirely alone.

In the dark, a man’s thoughts described an unhealthy spiral.

The world did not hold to any standard of fairness that Luke could comprehend. All his life stood testament to that. Good men die in wretched agony and bad men die happily in their beds. Creatures live and die never knowing love.

He wanted her to take that one physical memory with her wherever she was going. The imprint of his hands on her. He wished it to be a reminder that she was a good creature, and loved, and that there were places on the continuum where love and kindness still existed, even if she did not share that world presently. She did not deserve this. But things happened. They happened.

You had to suffer to reach those you loved. To suffer was to care.

It’s very nice to be loved, Luke thought. Is there anything nicer in life?

Luke realized for the first time in his life that there are things on earth, or beyond it, who are careless in the most quotidian terms: they lack the inclination or desire to care for anything. They are pitiless in the most simplified fashion, as they simply lack the ability to feel it.

But their natures must have gotten them in trouble with the higher ups. And so they had been put in a place where they could do the least harm.

It’s about the trying. The not-giving-up. We’re all going to lose. So it’s about losing and going on, keep going on, even though you may lose again and again. You may never win, buddy, not at some things. So it’s about working as hard as you can, every day, to find your spot on the mountain. And then it’s about being okay with where you are so that you can get some enjoyment out of that, and out of the things in life that are more important than whatever place you end up on that silly old mountain, anyway.