The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  It’s sad, isn’t it? So many of our leaders are weak, and choose to take power from others rather than build strength in themselves. And then, having laid claim to what they have not earned, they wonder why everything around them spirals into chaos. But until the dragons someday return to take back their power and invoke vengeance on us all . . . well, I’d say we have time for a few more tales.

  Unless you’re tired? You do look peaked. Here, let me turn back your bedcovers. And here; shall I give you a goodnight backrub? That does not fall within my usual duties, but for you I shall make the sacrifice. Ah, forgive me; my hand slipped. Do you like that? Does it feel good? I told you; my purpose here is to entertain.

  So many dead to speak for. And in every palace I visit, so many tales to tell.

  Let me under the covers, my sweet, and I’ll tell them to you all night long.

  Silvia Park

  Poor Unfortunate Fools

  from The Margins (Transpacific Literary Project)

  The following is a compilation of articles, logs, recordings, and correspondence of the Conservation Action Plan for Merrows (CAP-Merrow) and their previous efforts to conserve the eastern black merrow (Nereida niger). The research conducted will be used at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology for the development and implementation of conservation measures to protect the southern gray merrow (Nereida glaucus), now classified as Critically Endangered.

  Merrows and Drive Hunting: The Ultimate Conservation Challenge Against Tradition

  JARED E. OLIVER

  Oceanic Preservation Society, 336 Bon Air Center, Greenbrae, CA 94904

  MARLA S. ROWLAND

  Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawaii, Kailua, Hawaii 96734

  ABSTRACT: There is a high risk that drive hunting, the traditional method of hunting by driving merrows to caves, will lead to extinction of the eastern black merrow (Nereida niger), a black-tailed merrow endemic to South Korea’s Jeju Island. In 2005 the Conservation Action Plan for Merrows (CAP-Merrow) banned the capture and sale of female merrows (mermaids) and immature merrows (merlings). Although efforts to implement the plan slowed the merrow’s decline, the goal of eliminating merrow hunting by 2010 was not reached. Unless a ban is enforced on hunting, gill-netting, and trawling in certain areas with relatively high densities of merrows, it will be too late to save the species, which already numbers fewer than 200 animals.

  KEY WORDS: Nereida niger • Drive Hunt • Bycatch • South Korea

  It was three months before the annual drive hunt when we received a call about a merman in distress. An American couple saw our staked sign, written in all-caps English and, beneath it, spiky Korean. By the time we reached Saekdal Beach, the sun peeked over the horizon like a cracked eyelid. Rocks glistened, clenched like obsidian fists. The wife greeted us, but the husband wanted to keep filming with his iPhone. “This is Jeju, Day Two,” he said to the camera. “Sarah and I went on a walk and ho boy, you won’t believe what we found—”

  The merman lay in the sand with his hands crossed over his chest, like a teenage girl prepared to die of a broken heart. His name was Alto, catalog number A14. He was one of Astra’s mates. He had a silken, hollowed torso and his tail, while long, was a silvered blue, a classic beta male color. Milky tears leaked from his eyes. His lips, tugged upward from the natural curve of his mouth, were crusted yellow.

  “He seems so peaceful,” the wife whispered.

  Alto’s tail rose, then fell restlessly. Once the sun hit its peak, he’d overheat within hours. His skin, rubber-smooth, had begun to flake. We filled our buckets with seawater. We soaked T-shirts. The husband proffered his own, which had the logo of a roaring tiger, but we told him, “We got this.” A seagull hopped past us, holding a cherry-red Coca- Cola cap in its beak.

  Marla, our head researcher, laid out the sling. She signaled us to lift Alto. We lifted him. He rolled over and rolled off the sling, baring a grainy, reddened back. Marla dug a hole underneath his tail flukes and filled it with water for ease of pushing. We pushed Alto. He flopped ineffectually. We urged him to live. We reassured him there’s always next season. We assumed he, as a beta, was lovesick. Betas remained unmated until an alpha position opened up.

  Alto peeled open a gummy eyelid. Merrows secrete thick, jellylike tears to blink underwater. His eye swiveled, then settled on us. The iris was luminous instead of the usual dark. The pupil shrank from pain and the sun. He was likely a deep-sea diver. Very few betas are. The merrows who hunt in the deadliest depths are often the strongest swimmers.

  “Live,” he said like a sigh, parroting us.1 “Live.”

  Every morning at the breakfast table, over a buffet of sliced whole-wheat bread, gummy sausages and eggs, and little green-capped Yakult drinks, our conversation turned to sex. We discussed courtships, we counted eggs, we sighed about couplings, we were rooting for Bloom and Anchor, we were nervous about Triton’s sperm count, and as always we put our heads together and schemed and plotted and prayed to our respective deities, from God to Goddess to Science, on how to boost the number of females.

  It was the summer of 2011. As part of the Merrow Conservation Action Plan (CAP), we’d partnered with the Jeju Marine Research Center to save the eastern black merrow species. After four years of dry breeding seasons, our sponsors’ patience and funding were wearing thin.

  We placed Alto, the nineteen-year-old beta, in a lanolin-infused tank to recover. The tank was 20×20×6 feet, which is now an illegal size for merrow tanks, but at the time we used it for transport. In the water, Alto was no longer a shriveled sardine. His hair loosened like curls of ink. His eyes gleamed pale. For a beta, he was a beauty, hauntingly unhappy. Even his merrow smile was mopey. We always warned the interns not to get too close. Don’t be fooled by their appearance, we’d say. They may look human, but they’re still animals.

  The merrow who falls in love with a human is a wishful tale. The only recorded incident of this is Fabio, who was captured in Iceland in 1986 as a two-year-old merling, then eventually rescued from Marine World. His rescuers named him Fabio as a joke because of his lush golden locks, but it turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a merling he’d imprinted on the Marine World trainers. He only wanted to mate with humans. There are clips of him still on YouTube, including one where he sidles up to a diver, a fiftysomething researcher named Melvin Fitzsimmons. Melvin jumps, understandably startled, when Fabio begins to rub against his lower back. Melvin’s research assistant, who filmed this, laughs nervously at 13:27, “There’s his penis,” as Fabio nudges Melvin to the ocean bed. Melvin’s neon flippers flail. Sand billows in generous clouds. Meanwhile Fabio waves his stiff penis like a flag.

  Using the VHF system, we tracked the A pod swimming past Beom Isle, about six miles from where Alto was stranded, heading east. Swallows swooped overhead as we loaded Alto’s tank on our research boat and left the facility in a hurry. Merrows swim on average forty miles a day. They can outrace boats, shedding their soft flaky skin every two hours, reducing drag, freeing themselves of anything that could weigh them down.

  As we neared Moon Isle, we were forced to slow down. South Korea’s Jeju Island had some of the deadliest currents, whimsically cruel, and we wanted to dampen the engine noise. Below in the tossed, dark waves, streams of silhouettes glided under the surface. The waters churned in a whirlpool of pinkish foam and flakes. Using a pole, we fished out what looked like plastic bags. For once it wasn’t plastic but transparent sheets of skin embedded with little chunks of rosy flesh. Our boat rocked like a lullaby as the merrows below rubbed their scales against each other in a frisky, swirling frenzy.

  It was the annual mass scratchathon. We fished more sheddings for samples,2 which are then tested for industrial toxins, including PCBs, DDT, mercury, and flame retardants.3 Not all the skins were silver. Some carried a rainbow tint, a sign of breeding potential.

  We lowered Alto on a sling. The scratchathon explained the rakes and abrasions we found on him. His tail flicked nervously.
Before the sling’s sagging bum could touch the water, Alto twisted his torso and leaped into the ocean. He swam toward the pod, his dorsal fin slicing the waves. Another, much larger male cut off his path. It was Triton, Astra’s primary mate.

  As he approached Alto, Triton clicked and whistled. Alto brushed past him, unthinkable for a beta, but he and Triton used to be “kissing pals,” immature merlings who pair up during puberty. They rub and grind against each other, practicing copulation. They bond for life and often one of the merling pair will transition into a female.

  Alto and Triton, however, belonged to Astra.4

  Marla, our leader, was the first to slip into a wetsuit. She bound her blond hair into a fistlike bun and pulled on her hood with a thwack. Loose hair is a risk when swimming with merrows. Alpha mermaids grow their hair long as a sign of authority and like to rip out the hair of perceived rivals.

  Every time we swam with the merrows, it was a fresh shock. Merrows are much larger than us. Their skin, brown and rubbery, fades into a ghostly silver underwater. Their wide eyes are more fish than mammal, their tastes more shark than dolphin. They could surround us. They could herd us into a trap. They could grab our ankles and tug us into the darkness.

  A dark tail whipped past Marla, who seized the scuba rope out of reflex rather than fright. Astra circled us. She nuzzled her cheek against Marla’s arm, then glided past the boat like a giant stingray, wings spread. She chirped a greeting, and like an orchestra, her pod replied with groans and clanks. We held our breath until our snorkels fell silent, as the last of the bubbles slipped away. Surrounded by the wisps of skin and feces, the clicks, shrieks, and cries, we listened to the merrow songs, reverent and reverberant.

  They communicated through echolocation. They could see through us. They could see through our bones. They could see our hearts, beating faster.

  Astra rose with us to the surface. Strands of her hair, so dark it could be green, clung to her fluttering gills. Her face was a silken deep brown. Her cheekbones were terrifying. Her smile reached her ears. Merrows have wide mouths and their corners are naturally fixed into a smile, a friendly effect undermined by their sharp teeth.

  Since the 1980s, CAP’s photo-ID catalog had swelled to seven merrow groups, lumped under two pods, with over forty members. More than a hundred of them, of crisp Grade 5 quality, belonged to Astra, our most receptive merrow to date.

  Triton and Alto joined her. In simple English, we told Astra we found Alto stranded on the beach. We didn’t mention his reluctance to be saved. Looking back, perhaps we should have.

  Astra looped her arms around them both and laughed, full-throated: “My poor unfortunate fools.” A magnificent voice. Her underwater cries haunted us, but when she spoke in our tongue, she carried a lilt so persuasive, it was no surprise fishermen used to drown in the past, lured under the waves. She had a voice like sea glass, the edges weathered from years of tidal beatings. But it was her laughter we treasured. She cackled and giggled. She chattered and shrieked. She laughed, unheeding, like a child.

  She was the alpha of the pod. She was their matriarch. She was our star.

  In 2001 we’d picked her up when she was neither Astra nor he nor she, but a young merling with dark fins, black as a slippery eel. We’d tracked the A pod for weeks along the coast of Kyushu. The September drive hunt was looming forth where fishermen herded merrows into coves, strangled them in nets, and dragged them by the flukes. The most attractive mermaids were captured and sold. The rest were slaughtered. The Japanese believed in longevity from the consumption of merrow flesh, advertised as Ningyo Sashimi! in neon-trimmed Shinjuku bars, often with the painting of a splayed mermaid, bite-sized chunks of her pink marbled flesh laid out on her ivory skin.

  Our methods of rescue were still primitive back then. We’d select the most vulnerable members of the pod and keep them safe in our sea pens until the drive hunt ended. Astra was one of these rescues. The rest of her pod watched us with accusing eyes, corralled behind the net, a bobbing of wet heads. We promised we’d return her, safe. But Astra’s mother, a mermaid with yellow eyes and a scarred mouth, wouldn’t stop screaming, her gills flaring obscenely.

  Astra was five years old, the size of a young child but with the strength of an adult man. It turned out to be the perfect age. She wasn’t so immature she’d imprint on us and turn deviant like Fabio, but she was young enough to be curious and calm. We had to return two of the merlings within hours. One became so agitated his gills shut and he sank unmoving to the bottom of his tank.

  Astra was different from the moment we hauled her in. We bundled her in our net like a swaddle. Instead of squeaking in fright, Astra smiled up at us through her seaweed hair.

  Now we know better. Merrow smiles are an anatomical lie, arising from the configuration of their jaws. Their smiles drag humans down bottomless spring pools. Their smiles convince us they’re happy.

  After the scratchathon we invited Astra for a health check due to the risk of open wounds and infection. Some members of her pod were coerced into following, including Triton, her mate. Oh, Triton, we’d often sigh. Triton, t-A13, was a survivor of a measleslike viral epidemic that decimated his pod, the T pod from the Great Barrier Reef, in 2002. Before we traced his lineage, we used to call him Flame, or catalog number X13.5 He had a braided mane, dark as coagulated blood, and when he reached sexual maturity, his silver tail deepened into a royal blue mottled with flakes of crimson, like a fire flickering between red and blue, hot and hotter.

  He was a troublemaker. He had a track record of being netted. At first we wrote it off as low intelligence, which was why some of us, Marla included, were disappointed when Astra chose him as her primary mate. Later we learned it was recklessness. After the T pod was wiped out, Triton traveled hundreds of miles as a solo merling before the A pod accepted him. Aside from Astra and Alto, he never bonded with the pod.6 He hunted alone, targeting fish farms where he risked entanglement. Instead of waiting for someone to cut him loose, he lashed out with his tail. Once he broke a fisherman’s ribs. We apologized on Triton’s behalf, but we knew Triton had held back. We’d seen him hunt, stunning a school of sardines with a whip of his tail, like a shockwave.

  Despite this streak of aggression, we tried to avoid sedating Triton, or any of the merrows, when we checked them for possible injuries from the scratchathon. He was devoted enough to follow Astra to the outer rim of our facility. Astra pulled herself onto the dock, familiar with the squeaking wooden planks.

  Triton protested. Leaving the waters was deemed too dangerous. He rammed against the dock. He slapped his tail on the surface. He screeched and clanked like the chains of a shipwreck. Alto treaded about five feet away. He eyed Astra and Triton with a quiet, gleaming look. As the beta, his duty was to support Triton, but in almost every triad, tensions between the alpha and beta male bubbled.

  Now Triton began to whimper, holding out his arms. Astra, with impatience in her smile, lunged for his neck. Her teeth sank into his shoulder. Alto reared up, but the shock passed and he sank back down, tucking his chin under the water.

  Triton winced but his smile didn’t waver. There was an almost gratefulness to his pain.

  Even after the 2001 September drive hunt, we’d kept Astra, a sexually immature merling, in a sea pen by the dock. Our volunteers taught her signs on laminated flashcards and rewarded her with fish, mackerel being her favorite. She liked to mimic us.7 “Good morning!” she’d crow. “Hello! Do you want fish? Yes, you want fish. What do you want? I want to go back.”

  She liked to perform for us. Once she threw up her mackerel8 and waved it at us, gripping the fish at the base. A week into her rescue, she tore into the fish instead of swallowing it whole. Astra was mimicking how we ate. We scolded her. We didn’t want her to pick up unnatural habits, invasive to her way of life. Astra responded to our chiding with a furtive, bloodied smile. But she was eager to please. She learned to swallow. She learned to ask for fish. She learned over two thousand verbal words, but
what made Astra truly remarkable was her grammar. By Day 41 her level of grammatical orderliness and conceptual complexity was typical of a three-year-old human child.

  Jared, the head researcher at the time, was thrilled. He had Astra tested at the Jeju research center. Using a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, we made a tremendous discovery. Astra had a portion of the brain that was missing in even humans. Her anterior cingulate cortex, the language center, was unusually dense, twice as heavy as the average bilingual’s.

  Some of us held the childish belief we’d cultivated Astra’s exceptionality. Again, this was 2001. We used to play mermaid films to impressionable merlings, hoping to massage their gender predisposition. Marla hated the films, especially Splash!, which spawned the multibillion-dollar industry in Marine World, but we were desperate for more females. All merrows are born protandrous hermaphroditic, meaning they’re born male.

  We snagged Astra’s interest by filming her and playing home videos on a television box, a waterproof extension cord trailing down the dock. She’d rise from the sea pen and watch herself with a parted, teething smile. The mermaid movies weren’t as successful. She yawned through Splash! She farted bubbles during Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid.

  But every time we played The Little Mermaid, Astra surged out of the waters, dimpled elbows on the dock. She’d lean in so close, the tip of her nose smeared a teardrop on the screen. She’d peek, pupils shot, through the wet seaweed of hair.

  We moved Astra from the sea pen to the tank for blood tests. Marla circled marks along Astra’s arm with a ballpoint pen. For hours Astra rubbed her forearm, trying to erase the marks. To distract her, we’d turn on the movie.