Naïda

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3

The water was teacup-warm as Sakiko Matthews plummeted backward through a volcano of hissing bubbles. When the turbulence began to clear, she saw the dive boat above her like a Dali-painting against blue sky—a toddler-Dali: distorted, but the colors too bright for the adult painter. With a bass crash and sibilant fizzing Yuri Hutchings plunged into the ocean three meters away clutching his dive mask and Olympus camera, his left arm holding hoses tight to his ribs. Sakiko’s blood surged with delight to be in the ocean again, the first time she’d been back to the Great Barrier Reef since her sophomore year, far too long ago. She’d dived many seas in the intervening years, but the Great Barrier Reef was special in its vastness, like an undersea continent of its own instead of the fringed skirt so many other reefs provided to the islands they adorned.

After exchanging an OK sign with Yuri, she pointed down with her thumb and saw his small nod. Rolling into a spread position like skydivers, they bled air from their buoyancy vests and dropped toward the breathtaking landscape ten meters below. It was impossible to imagine the splendor of a coral reef in sunlit waters without having seen it. A palette of color never experienced in the world of air, in fantastical shapes like the doodles of a madman.

She goosed her inflator button to hover over patches of vivid pink Acropora coral in polka-dotted nubs separated by plate corals of neon green. A few kicks of her fins took her around blades of fan corals like lacy elephants’ ears, except a dusky-mint color with red veining underneath. Yuri swam on the other side of the coral, as if they were two children playing hide-and-seek. They’d dived together dozens of times since he’d signed on as her research assistant, and many times she’d let him lead; but this time she chose their path. A few meters beyond the fans, a school of orange fairy basslets playfully circled a giant barrel sponge: a cauldron of moss green that held a small yellow damselfish and a pair of blue-girdled angelfish within its convoluted bowl.

Yuri pointed behind Sakiko and she turned to see a stream of silvery paddlefish, their burnt-orange fins seeming to stroke almost in unison—hundreds of them making their way over the seascape: a giant serpent of many parts. She gently swam toward their flow. Skittish at first, they gradually allowed her into their midst. Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Yuri raised his camera, and she lifted her hand in a regal wave. The paddlefish led her between outcrops of tube sponges, one of royal blue, its partner sun-yellow. She was sorely tempted to linger, especially when she saw a clownfish and his mate peeking shyly from the middle of the sprouting tubes. A Disney-influenced childhood made every clownfish a Nemo in her mind, even now. But she and Yuri had come to the reef for a reason, and it wasn’t sightseeing.

The dull gray-green shadow in the distance was probably the rise they’d been told about. She slipped out of the river of paddlefish and swam toward the drab mound, passing over some large, grooved brain coral, nearly ringed by sea whips writhing like gorgon's hair. The rising slope was terraced by plate coral decorated with crimson feathers, yellow staghorns, box-fire coral in various shades, and a few green mermaids’ fans.

As she neared the crest of the mound, she braced herself, but it wasn’t enough.

Her stomach twisted in dismay.

For as far as she could see, the seascape had been drained of color like a sunbleached photograph. The familiar shapes were there, but dulled, as if rendered in ash. And ash wasn’t far from the truth. The life in the coral's calcified structures had fled leaving algae-coated bones.

Bleached coral and dead coral were everywhere she looked, dark gray-green, shading to the color of slate. Shapes that seemed so wondrous in blooms of color appeared horribly grotesque without it. The Australian Institute of Marine Science estimated that the Great Barrier Reef had lost half of its living coral, or more, but she hadn’t been able to truly conceive of it. Not until now. The dry compressed air from her tanks caught in her throat and she almost choked, working hard to summon some saliva.

More than half of the die-off had been caused by storm damage. Increasingly malevolent cyclones pounded the shallow coral with heavy surf that stirred up the bottom and coated living polyps with silt that blocked the sunlight they needed. That would be the darker coral, dead for some time. Other corals were victims of predatory crown-of-thorns starfish, a scourge that biologists had so far been unable to stop. Without the starfish, the coral might have recovered from the injury of the storms.

There was also another factor, one that had brought Sakiko and Yuri halfway around the world. It was responsible for the champagne-colored terraces nearest to her in shallower water, stretching as far as she could see to her left.

Coral bleaching. It was a scourge caused by warmer water temperatures and increasing acidity as the world’s oceans absorbed atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Humans had done this, she thought, a cold knot in her chest. Greenhouse gases freed from ancient oil beds and shale beds and coal veins and forests by humans ravenous for energy. Those gases had warmed the planet, made the ocean waters more acidic, and probably created the conditions that had allowed the starfish to thrive in their path of destruction too.

As a scientist, her greatest cause for hope was that bleaching could be reversed if conditions improved soon enough. Her greatest challenge was the precarious symbiotic relationship between the coral and a certain species of algae that lived within the coral cells. The algae turned sunlight into food used by the coral polyps which, in turn, nourished the algae. But if the water temperature rose too much, the algae became poisonous to the coral, forcing the polyp to expel the very thing that provided it with food. The coral avoided immediate death but condemned itself to slow starvation. Making matters worse, young coral couldn’t survive to replace the old if the water was too acidic.

Sakiko caught Yuri looking at her and realized that she’d been slowly shaking her head. Sucking a deep breath from her regulator she pointed to his camera and swept her arm toward the darkened plain. He nodded and swam forward while she watched, teeth clamped more tightly than necessary onto her mouthpiece. She removed some vials from the pocket of her vest and kicked slowly toward a nearby outcrop to take water, algae, and coral samples.

This wasn’t the first time she’d seen bleached and ravaged coral—far from it. A dive trip off Belize had been the original impetus for her career path. But she’d never witnessed bleaching on such a scale, and in a place she’d fervently hoped was too large to suffer so much damage so quickly.

If the harmful temperatures and acidity could be changed, the bleached coral still had a chance of recovery—it would cultivate a supply of algae again and find a new lease on life. That was the focus of Sakiko’s research.

She’d put together an ambitious project proposal: to sample acidity and temperature of waters in various seas of the world, learn as much as possible about individual factors affecting those measures, and try to discover some means of mitigating the changes. The future of coral reefs depended on that. Her plan outline represented months of work—thoroughly researched, carefully costed, and backed by some of the most highly-credentialed scientists she knew.

The Foundation had turned it down.

As long as she lived, she’d never understand that. The application was bulletproof—she was sure of it—one of the best she and her advisors had ever seen; but the answer had still been No.

How could the Foundation funders be so short-sighted? Or was it simply that she wasn’t one of the “stars” of marine biology—hadn’t made a name for herself with flashy documentaries that attracted money to the universities? That shouldn’t matter—couldn’t be allowed to matter—when the threat to the reefs was so desperate.

She tightened the cap on the last of her sample vials and waved to catch Yuri’s attention. Then she moved her extended index finger in a circle, finishing with it pointing in the direction of the dive boat. Yuri nodded and swam up to her side. They were still good for air and bottom time, but she couldn’t bear to stay. She hurried through the zone of devastation and then slowed her kicks over the still-healthy coral bed and tried to fix every single tendril, blade, spike, and blossom, every one of its thousand color shades indelibly into her memory, as if doing so might save them.

Sakiko was thirty-eight years old. She had never received one of the really prestigious grants, most-respected awards, or big-name publication credits in her field. And the places she loved most in the world were dying. She had dedicated her career to them—they were what gave her life purpose. She could not stand by while they vanished.

Which was why she decided to risk everything and forge the grant documents she needed.