Thrust: A Novel

Mikael hands Laisvė a towel. Indigo places a pair of sneakers near her feet. They know her stories don’t necessarily have beginnings, middles, or ends. They fragment and accumulate, however they happen to appear in Laisvė’s head. They’ve learned to listen differently.

Laisvė steps into the sneakers and dries her hair, her head tilted sideways, still talking. A few aquanauts in full gear emerge behind her, their oxygen tanks and wetsuits and masks making them look like odd sea creatures. Some are missing an arm or a leg or hand or a foot, but Mikael’s aquaprosthetic designs make them look as if they are really a new species of water creatures.

Laisvė continues her narration, delivering information, objects, ideas: “The habitat power supplies all check out — ocean, sun, wind… But we need to talk about the underwater farms and the pods. The labs and medical bays are solid, but the dormitories are… well, they’re kind of ugly. They can’t be ugly. Living underwater should feel like the dreams children have. We can’t have ugly.” She dries her hair. “The moon pool is perfect, though.”

“Why is it called a moon pool?” Indigo’s question folds into Laisvė’s monologue as they walk back into the habitat, painted indigo, cerulean, aquamarine, and midnight blue.

“Good question. Because, on very calm nights, the water under the rig reflects moonlight. Like the ocean is glowing open,” Laisvė says, “like a perfect portal. You know, portals are everything. Even a single thought can be a portal. A single word. You know, the way poetry moves.”

A Bedtime Story

Most people think the future is unbelievable, but that’s only because they think the past, the present, and the future are like lines going in a single direction. What Laisvė knows in her heart is that everything that we might become at first sounds unbelievable, like a speculative story or a fairy tale, both in the world and lifted a little away from it. Imagination leaping from sea into sky and back, like a beautiful black orca.

When Laisvė tells bedtime stories to the children, they sound different from the stories other mothers or sisters or wives or daughters tell. They gather around her in all shapes and sizes, differently bodied, differently abled, untethered from their origins.

Today she brings a treasure in the form of a poem by Emma Lazarus:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The children clap or smile or make their faces into questions. A girl who stands up, in her bold curiosity, asks, “Are we the tempest-tossed? Tempest means storm.”

“I think yes,” Laisvė says. “And I think the ancient lands and storied pomp — well, all that kind of… drowned.” The children laugh.

“Is there still a lamp?” a shy boy ventures.

“Yes. It’s underwater sometimes. But we can go see it.” She pulls something from her coat pocket — a clod of dirt. She pokes her finger around within it, turning up a few mycelia and a worm. “See these?”

The children get up and gather around her hand. “Are those roots?” asks one child with a wandering eye.

“Good guess,” she answers. “But no. These are mycelia, from which grow mushrooms. Fungi are heterotrophs.”

“What’s a heteruff?”

“Heterotrophs get energy from their surroundings, just like humans. The largest living organism in the world is mycelium, a honey fungus in what used to be the Pacific Northwest. It might even be the oldest living mass on the planet. See that little creature?”

“A worm,” a kid with glasses says.

“Not just ‘a worm,’ ” another kid pipes up. “Eisenia fetida—tiger worm. Dendrobaena veneta—blue nose worm. Lumbricus rubellus—bloodworm. Eisenia Andrei—red tiger worm. Lumbricus terrestris—earthworm, Darwin’s favorite…”

Laisvė smiles.