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I woke swaddled in the vast grayness of the sea, hovering in the waters. Above me stilled uplit, with neither a ripple nor a wave to cast a caustic. If you have ever plunged beneath the underbelly of the ice-capped seas, dizzyingly mineral and darkly mild, that was the world then, but bright and warm. None of us had yet dove into the trenches of the earth, sounded out their crenulations, and in our wake fertilized with silt and muck the great plantations. No haze or sediment obscured my sight, save for that mirrored plane that stretched on endlessly overhead, dividing middle water from higher--but not highest.

For several beatings of my heart I lay there in buoyant equilibrium. The flickering borders of my vision were tinged a mottled grey, with flecks of white here and there. Behind their idle movements I felt the subtle force of my embryonic will; this fin, this tail were mine. Calm washed over me, and I relaxed. Some bubbles startled upward, shrinking to vanishing points. I hummed at the novelty of it--and found I could hum, and tune with certain movements within my skull. These simple tricks every slippery calf learns at their mother's side but I had no such comforting presence, but then again nor did I fear any danger. Not even when the depths in darkness sung so very deeply.

Curious, I listened with juvenile fixation to that subtle prelude, five octaves down and unknown fathoms removed, more in the throat than through my ears. The consonance was too great for accident. Nothing met my gaze, the middle water faded clear down to black. Yet something there was singing, improvising even, and I caught more of the chorus each time it came around.

Who could resist? I didn't--I hummed along, by instinct in a range more hospitable to me, yet I hoped still harmonious to it.

The song trailed off. I fretted that I had caused some offense. With grave focus I projected the melody as low as my throat would thrum, making up the parts I had not heard. The wavering echo showed to me in passing a seafloor through the blackness: pockmarked here and there, sand yielding to impassive rock, rock divided then into grand mountains and benthic valleys absent any rhythm. All for unknown reason and unknown to light.

I hummed again, and louder, the better to hear the terrain's clarion response. There was a shifting there, and at first I thought the seafloor rearranged so as to make a folly of my cartography. Then the great chthonic chorus sprang up anew, univocal, outstretch in greeting:

"Child," it said, "I, who live beneath, bid you welcome."

I should explain, for few remember when every song had such plain meaning. Though I recall hearing once the erotic poetry of dolphins, of porpoises, and even the caesural verse of sharks... all of these are dissonant muddles now, to me mere noise, and the same to all of us. They were not then.

As I tried in vain to formulate a response, I traced, clicking, its outline incomplete. No part of it stayed still from stanza to stanza: here concave, there convex, either scaled or smooth. Any one of its protuberances we would mistake for a mobile island, but no island ever moved so swift, nimble as the eight-footed rogues scampering in the corals. As large as us to them was it to me, or more, for never did I comprehend its fullness. Perhaps its magnificent girth and breadth could not be so contained in one time, no different than that mysterious inland empire that remains to us an undiscovered country, no matter how many drag themselves across the damp sands of insanity and flail their death knell there, stranded by the tide.

"Who are you?" My pitiful offering, I admit.

"I twist and sprawl across all the lowest ocean, grappling with the bowels of the Earth until I die, and those to come shelter between my bones and consume my flesh." It said, or so I here transpose into our common key. "You are the first of your kind, great singer of middle waters, or if there were any made before you they are silent, and thereby remain unsung."

This place is Earth, I gathered from its speech.

"Who is the one that sings above you?" It asked.

"Who?" I could only echo.

Up there was just light, bright light and the mirror that separates middle from higher ocean, impervious to song--that being why some call it the supertonic world, and others the atonic one.

"Before you sang," it said, "I heard a whisper of another song. I cannot reach you, but perhaps you can reach it? I would like to hear it again; pray call it down, if not to my depth, then to yours."

I kicked my fluke and flipped about, and with such ease that its request seemed no hardship. A brief concern crossed my mind, if this plane of separation juxtaposed between the waters of my creation and the great light was indeed permeable, and with what difficulty. From the middling depths I rose, the rush of water roaring in my ears, those waters pregnant with indecision as to weigh me down or bear me up--up I went. Then burst! Through the curtain I flew, across the breech and then into a new world.

I had not known I held my breath, then exhaled, and then sent heavenward shimmering motes as when, after the storm, grains of sand sluice back the current returning to the sea. With joy I sang, or tried to sing but for the errant sideways pitching, which in the higher ocean makes all tones clang. Then crashed back, half-submerged in the familiar and half in the strange, so dry and hot. And felt how the eye curdles in its socket to bring this second world into senseate relief. I heaved, ridding all things stale, and took account of my position on the verge.

If this was the limit of my upward reach, well then, I would content myself to float and let what sight I had traverse what I bodily could not. What was above? No clouds, for sure, but one great light seeming somehow higher than it was from my perch below. Yet it did not sing; the crash of waves is no song.

A cry went out and I whirled round to catch a flock of creatures swimming in formation, rapidly beating against their own water, which spread so thin it could not bear me. The largest caught my eye, and I caught his. He blinked and chirped and whistled, though if it was a greeting to me or a warning to his kin I could not tell. They crossed above, passing toward the sun, and who knows to what end. I could discern no difference between the horizon whence they came and that to which they went.

I slapped my tail impatiently, for the presence of these living things multiplied our questions instead of resolving them. For if they could not sing, they were not the creator that we sought. I filled my lungs with a great breath, stretching forth my pliant breast even as my ribs creaked pleasantly. And learned the purpose of our kind: though called singers of the middle ocean, I straddle three worlds. One is our natural home, and there we are most free to sing and swim wherever place can fit our bulk, and there we weigh no more than the birds weigh among their clouds. But there we cannot rest. The higher ocean gives us breath, and from the lower we draw the fertile fluidity that feeds our food, on whose happy harvest we are sustained.

To test this last, I dove. The spring's heat sloughed off my skin as I pierced through the middle, not stopping where I started but continuing on, swallowed in darkness, trusting what I heard to lead then way. The unseen landmarks I felt before directed me back to the audience of that great beast, with whom none can compete in titanic extent, not even the quarrelsome machinations that drown our chorus. It would drown them, instead--if it still lived.

"Deep one, are you there?" I ventured, suddenly aware of miniature I must have seemed, a bit of sponge for a dolphin to prod this way and that.

"I was here before you were," it reminded me gently, "and here I will remain: the deep is both my durance and demesne. Though you, dear singer, I permit to come and go as you will, for your song is like to mine and eases the strain of my labor."

"I see." I said, though much was obscured.

"I sent you to search for a song beyond our hearing, and now you click at my antechamber--what has occurred? Who is the third beside you?"

"I'm sorry," I said. "All I found was noise and light and little creatures who do not sing, or at least not as we do."

"What is this light?"

"A disc, bright but silent, and by my reckoning far remote. For in the central view of my concerted sight, it does not budge as nearer things do if they happen to sit closer to one eye than the other."

"So you have two. I understand." Did it not? "It is no matter," it sang, resolving the cadence left slightly ajar.

"For here I was, and you are there, and this world will be wide enough for two such as us. Now, I beg you, leave me for a while. It is an effort to draw myself together here, and this leaves my yawning periphery neglected. These parts I will now awaken, parts unknown to you, to search for others yet to arrive."

I murmured my assent and deserted the sightless sea, preoccupied with such concerns as could be answered in a second and some that yet trouble our dwindling species. Where I roamed, aimless, other creatures made themselves known by sight or sound or swift movements stirring. None made much in the way of counterpoint, but all were gentle, friendly even, with outstretched fin or nuzzling snout in fond regard. No matter the difference in size or shape, or hunger yet to come.

They seemed to like my songs. I wrote so many then, some few still sung. Before the light sank as though into the middle ocean, I finally lit upon the far extent of our domain: land, but not the one that sends us only curses. I secluded myself within a deep bay and floated free, wondering now what would become of the highest ocean absent its brightest light. First, the bright speck later called the most beautiful; she that smiles at the night, and blesses all generations. Then, second-born, that perfect disc of wave-crest hue, mottled as the floor of the sea and more mysterious. Half-asleep, the fifth day set. Waves lapping at my sides, I mutely watched as the great sea of stars unfolded overhead.