The Drowned Library

Liang went down into the drowned city the way she went down every morning, with forty pounds of scavenged gear on her back and a single breath of caution her grandmother had pressed into her at the hatch: the sea keeps what it takes, so do not love anything you carry up. The water over the old city was green and then it was grey and then, past forty feet, it was the deep settled brown of a place the sun had given up on. Liang knew the way by feel. Every diver in Tideglass knew their own quarter of the drowned city the way landlocked people in the old stories knew the streets of a town — by the shapes, by the turnings, by which collapsed tower meant you were close and which meant you had gone too far. Liang's quarter held the library. The floating town of Tideglass lived off the drowned. That was simply the truth of it, the truth Liang had been born into forty years after the seas rose and took the coasts and the coastal cities and most of the world the old people still talked about. Tideglass was a raft-town, a lashed-together drift of salvaged hulls and pontoon and decking, and it floated above what had once been a real city, and it survived by sending its divers down into that city to bring up what the dead had left. Metal. Glass. Wire. Sealed things, sometimes, that the water had not yet reached. The sea had taken the world, and the people of Tideglass made their living going down to ask for some of it back. You were taught a story about the flood. Every child in Tideglass was taught it, the same way, in the same words. The seas rose because the old world was greedy and blind and would not stop burning the things that warmed the air, and the rising was a punishment, and a cleansing, and the people of Tideglass were the humble remnant who had learned the lesson the drowned had died refusing to learn. Live small. Take only what you need. Love nothing you cannot carry. The flood was the worst thing that had ever happened and also, the elders said, the truest, because it had finally made people honest. Liang had believed the story her whole life. There had never been a reason not to. The library was a low broad building, and the water had been kind to it the way the water was sometimes kind, settling its silt gently instead of tearing the structure down. Liang swam in through a window long since glassless and moved through the brown dark with her hand-lamp, between shelves where the books had become soft grey shapes that dissolved if you touched them, looking for the metal, the wire, the sealed things. She found the sealed thing in a room behind the main hall, in a cabinet that the silt had buried to the latch. It was a case, hard-shelled, the old waterproof kind, and when she worked it free and got it open in the beam of her lamp there was a data drive inside it, and the drive was dry. A dry drive. Forty years down, and the case had held, and the drive inside it was dry. Liang's grandmother had told her: do not love anything you carry up. But Liang held the dry drive in the brown dark of the drowned library and felt something move in her that was not love exactly, that was older and sharper than love — the pull of a thing that has been kept a long time precisely so that someone, someday, would come down and find it. She should have known better. A diver who brought up an old-world drive brought up old-world voices, and the elders did not like old-world voices; the story of the flood was a finished story and finished stories did not want footnotes. The careful thing, the Tideglass thing, was to leave the drive in the silt and take only the case, which was good salvage and asked no questions. Liang took the drive. She tucked it into her chest pocket, against the wetsuit, against her own slow heartbeat, and she turned for the long brown swim back up toward the green and the grey and the surface. And the whole way up she was already wondering — in a way no good citizen of Tideglass was ever supposed to wonder — what a person from the drowned world had thought was worth sealing in a case, and drying, and leaving in a library, for someone exactly like her to find.