Standing between the stone feet of the Giant statue of Primordial Time was like resting at the base of a black mountain that had forgotten the sky.
The dark rock was not cold in the manner of ordinary stone underwater beneath five hundred deep-water lengths of sea. It radiated an active, subtractive chill that seemed to draw the warmth out of the surrounding water. That created an invisible sheath of freezing stillness three inches thick around the entire ninety-arm-length monolith. Within that sheath, the suspended diatomaceous silt did not drift. It hung motionless, pinned by the total time heavy rush of the monument, each tiny grain of quartz frozen in liquid mid-air like a fly caught in dark Baltic amber.
Qiao Ming tilted his bronze helmet back until the neck-ring of his diving suit groaned against his collarbone. Through the central sight quartz viewport, he raised his Folded brass star-compass, adjusting the aiming sights to a height of seventy-four degrees twelve minutes. He closed his left eye, bringing the magnifying prism against his pupil to inspect the huge head towering eighty arm-lengths above the platform.
The face was his own, yet stripped of all mortal pause, carved with a brutal, plain honesty that held nothing back from the water.
