Her mentor and late husband had told her, “Moses, Akhenaton, Buddha, Christ, Muhammad all made retreats into the desert to find the beginnings of spiritual life. Away from the distractions of cities nature is reduced to the essentials of life and death. A desert wilderness becomes a strange sort of womb, where you become so lonely that you must face yourself, and then God.”

Her husband had found that special, inner peace. He seemed always to have possessed it. But Hollis was still searching. Outside the viewports, sea cucumbers blazed crisscrossing trails over the barren seabed. It was intensely peaceful, but illusory. If the port gave way, the inrush of water at three tons per square inch would instantly separate her body into its individual cells. Here in the deep wilderness, she had found a womb sterile to man, but fertile, perhaps, to God.

An ultrasonic voice called down from the support ship Calypso II. “Alvin, the crest should bear thirty-six meters to the east.”

As Hollis turned east, her sole passenger stopped dictating to his notebooks and nosed up to a forward port. The bottom began to slope upward. At first, with Alvin’s floodlamps penetrating only about twelve meters through the dark, Jonathan Wayville got the impression that they were ascending a tall mountain. But the pilot’s monitor, fed by cameras that could peer a hundred meters in every direction, showed it to be the lip of a manmade crater barely half a kilometer across.

With good lighting, visibility was better than forty-five meters, as long as one stayed upwind of the dredge outlets. Dozens of small robots, moving busily to and fro within the crater, sensed Alvin coming over the crest and automatically turned on their floodlamps. Hollis watched a false sunrise spreading far ahead in the dark, a ghostly pool of light that shifted from violet to deep blue and then to a greenish-white glare as she reached the center of the crater—a level plain of steel, all that was left of the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic.

She had looked nothing like this, Hollis thought, when her greatgrandfather first piloted Robert Ballard onto the forecastle deck, ninety years ago.

“It is a quiet and peaceful and fitting place,” Ballard had said, “for this greatest of all sea tragedies to rest. May it forever remain that way.”

“He should have known better,” Greatgrandfather had said. “How many sunken ships have been around for fifty or a hundred years or more and been left untouched? None. They found the Bounty’s anchor. They found the Pandora and the Roraima, the Cinque Chaqas and the Lusitania, with never a question about whether to bring things up or not, until the Titanic.”

But the Titanic was different, Ballard had insisted. Every four-year-old child somehow knew her name. Stories had been repeated for so many years that they had become part of the culture—a symbol for tragedy, blind arrogance, heroism, cowardice, even comedy, and sheer irony. Maybe you shouldn’t want to touch a symbol too intimately. At the very least, you didn’t want to spit on it.