The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

  First we find two. Twins. Not quite fresh out of the womb, but nearly. We look through the water trying to find where they have come from, but they have drifted too far.

  We are nine in total now. Then we are sixteen. Then seventeen. Then thirty. It is only a few years later that we find some closer to my age. A pod of four. We cannot speak to one another, but their joy is plain. We are sixty now, then seventy. And yet we are one.

  For those not from my fold, it is difficult to get along at first. They are without language almost completely, with but fifty or fewer concepts. They learn.

  Ekren, when she learns to speak, sings a song to me and tells me to follow her. We do. Her purpose is clear. She wants to mate.

  There are so few of our kind that—should we know how to do this? We don’t.

  Ekren does, and she shows us. Our bodies move in the water in an awkward rhythm until a passion takes hold and we are in ecstasy. After finishing, we swim back to the pod. There is possibility here, for more, to make more. There could be zoti aleyu who know who their parents are, whose past is not a question mark.

  So we make more and more. We find more. We build. The deep is our home and we are filling it. This cold place will become a shelter for any stranded, abandoned thing. In this big wide sea, we are far from the only strange fish.

  We become queen of this place. One of the eldest among us, we know what most others do not. For that, they call us historian.

  * * *

  To protect ourselves from those who’d destroy this precious thing we’ve fashioned out of scraps and leavings, we build cities. The materials of our structures are mud, carnage, ship wreckage, and plants harvested from more shallow seawater. Our language flourishes until we’ve lost count of the words. We have words for every creature in the ocean. We have words for every region of the water.

  We hone our natural skills and learn how to hear one another across distances that span days of travel time.

  And yet we, the maker of all this, want more and more and more. We are collectors, and a collection is never complete. This vast city of ours must endure forever, which means it needs more reinforcements. Thicker walls. More huts to home and protect the growing families. And more zoti aleyu. Our population, roughly three hundred, is still too small to be considered robust. We remember the way our centuries-old pod was wiped out like a flash. When not properly fortified, a legacy is no more enduring than a wisp of plankton. It is our duty to ensure that the zoti aleyu survive, and that means we return to searching the ocean for any who are stranded.

  We are away now so often that children swim after us calling, “Zoti! Zoti! Stay! Stay with us! Tell us the story of the surface dweller on the brink of death you saved! Stay! Please!”

  “I am making it so no one of us will ever be without a home again,” we say, and shoo them off. We are in a hurry. We’ve planned for a several-week trip to the surface in hopes of learning the answer to our most pressing question: Where do the zoti aleyu come from?

  One of the more precocious of the lot grabs us by our tail fin and pulls, then bites savagely. “Stay!” it says. “I despise you. If you go, I hope you never come back.”

  Its mouth is full of our flesh.

  Injured now, we should have no choice but to obey the little zoti aleyu’s request that we remain in the city we’ve made at the bottom of the ocean. We don’t have time to nurse wounds, however. Every moment wasted is a moment toward our people’s destruction.

  Others come to gather the misbehaving pup, and we are off toward our lonely days of searching. It is a pleasant loneliness because in the end it will mean more togetherness. We are getting older and older, thinking more about what it is that makes a stable future when the world is so full of unpredictability.

  Weeks are spent at the shallowest depths. Ships pass us by and at times we follow them, but to no end.

  It’s been almost half a year when we find another of our kind, a seven-year-old feral thing recently taken in by a pod of fin whales. It’s blind and deaf, sensing only by its skin, which is heavily scarred and torn off in places. It recognizes, either by smell or feel, that we’re like it, and swims up to us curiously.

  We try to draw it to us so we can take it back to the deep before we continue our search for more zoti aleyu, but it will not leave the whales.

  “Come!” we say.

  It will not come.

  We reach out our fins to grab it but the whales intervene. They are easily four times our size. Not to be trifled with.

  We use our words so it might feel them against its worn skin, but the zoti aleyu is not having it. The whales hum in unison and we’re stunned into paralysis by the vibrations of the sound waves. While we’re immobile, the pod swims from us, the zoti included.

  We have known too much loss. Right now, the whale pod is all that pup knows, but in time, it will want for more, and will it be able to find us?

  It could find us if we were massive, if our dwellings stretched so high, their tips were in the shallow part of the sea. We need more workers. More builders. More zoti aleyu.

  * * *

  How disorienting it is to go most of your life wondering about a thing, only to happen upon the answer, and it is a horror.

  We knew we shared kinship with the surface dwellers. For what else could explain our similarities, our ability to speak their language, our memory of the face so like Waj’s during our infancy, floating still in the water?

  But the full truth is not as we imagined it.

  We lurk near the surfaces, hoping to find more zoti aleyu. We listen to the talk and chatter of two-legs on their massive ships. There are surface dwellers in the bottoms of these ships whose language we understand, whose words are the same ones Waj had used.

  They are suffering and scared. They have been robbed from their homes, stolen from their families. Their lives are no longer their own. They belong to the two-legs on the decks of the ships.

  We are descendants of the people not on the top of the ship, but on the bottom, thrown overboard, deemed too much a drain of resources to stay on the journey to their destination.

  We know this because we see it. One day we are swimming but a few feet down from the surface in pleasantly cool waters, when there’s a plop from above, a struggle causing the water to stir, and then a sinking.

  The surface dweller is in our arms, heart still beating, but we are too far from any land for us to think of dragging it to an island. It is unconscious, and its belly is round with child. We bring it to the surface so it might breathe, but it never comes to. Underfed and malnourished, this is no surprise. We wonder how close it was to death already before whatever devil who captained that ship abandoned it to the seas.

  The two-legs dies in our arms, but not moments later, its body starts moving, taken over by a spirit or some other thing of the next world.

  Afraid, we let go. We don’t wish to intervene with the dead. We watch from a distance, feel its convulsions in the water against our skin.

  Its eyes are closed. It is dead, isn’t it? Yet it moves as if something is inside of it, using its body as a vessel.

  As we see the two-legs’s belly move and bend, something inside of it indenting the flesh, we understand its baby is trying to get born. The poor thing is trapped inside, and we want to help, but how? How can the body even push? We worry for the two-legs’s pup and wonder if we should claw open the two-legs’s belly. We can save the child in a way we couldn’t save the parent.

  We bring our teeth toward the belly of the dead, but we cannot bring ourselves to desecrate the flesh in this way. The fat round belly gives under our touch as we lay our cheek against it. We can hear the two-legs baby inside.

  “Come out,” we sing. “The world is ready for you, and you are ready for the world.”

  It’s the birthing song we zoti aleyu sing for our little ones, and there’s a chance that something in our voice will reach a two-legs pup too.

  “My body is preparing milk for you,” we sing
. “You are hungry. Come to this world, so you might eat.”

  We look for the place where the baby is to come out. The ashti. The tunnel.

  There’s a round button on its belly that looks promising that we feel with our front fins, and we wonder if we have to nudge it to open. We press and press, but it does not yield. Then the surface dweller’s legs begin to splay apart, and we come under it. We see it: the head. Our eyes widen, struck. It is not a two-legs head.

  There are fins at the center of its back, on its sides, and at its front. Hairless. And darker than any land creature. It is zoti aleyu. It is zoti aleyu!

  What magic had intervened to transform the pup in the womb? Was it the ocean itself, the progenitor of all life? Did the zoti aleyu have a god after all?

  “Come!” we sing. “Come. We have been preparing for you. We have feasted so you will be strong.”

  The pup is coming. Head, shoulders. Then we grab hold and pull it out into our embrace. This close to the surface, we see its features so clear. Black eyes. Brown, nearly black skin. Beautiful dark scales.

  We sing to it to rejoice, overtaken. We have never seen a zoti aleyu this new. This small. This fragile. How many who’d been just like this were swallowed whole? “Precious pup,” we say.

  We cannot think about its origins. We cannot think of what sickness plagues surface-life affairs that they throw living creatures to the sea to die alone. We must not think of the surface dwellers and two-legs at all. Only zoti aleyu.

  “I will call you Aj,” we say. It means small. This little thing in front of us is the tiniest of our kind in this moment. One day it will be full-grown. One day it will take over where we’ve left off.

  Overtaken with happiness, forcing any trace of sadness that might ruin it away, we take the new pup to the bottom of the sea, along with its two-legs parent. We must bury the surface dweller. Our kin.

  We are headed to the city at high speed. We are not slowed down by the weight of the pup or the two-legs. With determination, we plow through the water, diving through the icy depths. Blackness and cold welcome us. The city we’ve built together with the other zoti aleyu thrums. Our body shakes from it, and it is the most welcome vibration. It has been one year since we left in search of where we came from.

  When we are near enough that many will begin to hear and feel our approach, we slow down. What of this body? What would they think of it?

  “I cannot bring this sadness to them,” we say, and turn toward the outskirts, swimming deeper, to where there is ocean floor.

  When a zoti aleyu dies, we bring it to shallow waters, where plant life grows, and wrap it in layers and layers of whatever we can find. Coral, seaweed, kelp. When it’s done, the body is ovoid and thick, looking like a plumped, filled bag of waters. Or an entire womb. We then take it to some bit of seafloor and weigh it down with rocks.

  We are prepared to do none of this with the two-legs, so we go to a small hut we’ve built outside the city and take off pieces of the wall to wrap the surface dweller in, till her form is concealed, so she may rot in some kind of peace if the ocean doesn’t erode away the wrappings too quickly.

  We set her off into a strong, cool current, saying farewell to our kin.

  * * *

  Over the years, we raise so many pups. We find more zoti aleyu. The strength of our people is our togetherness. Many of us lurk in the deep, yet we are one, and as the years pass and we grow old and decrepit, we remember that we are young, too, thriving, because we live on in this legacy of strange fish we’ve made.

  In these last moments of our life, we try not to linger upon the horrors, of which there were many. We do not think about the secret of our origin and how easy it became to find zoti aleyu once we’d learned it.

  We discovered which ships to follow. We memorized their routes. We learned their accents, their languages, and heard them through the water like an alarm. We followed ships where none went overboard, but this brought its own grief, for we knew the lives of those on the ship would not be good ones.

  At times, we did more. We could not hide the truth of what happens on the ocean surface from all the zoti aleyu, many following us to discover our secret truth. The first such time, a group of them followed us and watched as a ship cast all of its cargo into the deep, the enslaved having been taken by some sickness. We and the other zoti aleyu now present gathered together to trouble the waters, to sink the ship. This did not come about by plan, but by anguish. As all of us wept and raged, we noticed the way our fury made the water pulse and rise. Swept up in the power of our newly discovered abilities, and engulfed by the grief over the immense loss of life, we let our ache fill the water. The effort of it left us and the other zoti aleyu spent for days, but when we recovered, we buried the bodies from the ship on the ocean floor.

  We never wanted our people, our kindred, to suffer the loneliness we have known. Over the years, when others came to us desperate to talk about it, we encouraged them to forget. “Focus on what we have together. Here. Now.” Not all could manage it, and they required extra help to let go of those terrible memories. We reached into their minds and searched, taking away the hurtful moments when we found them.

  That is what we think about now, the peace we imparted, the togetherness we brought. We have absorbed many lifetimes of pain, but it is no matter compared to the good.

  “Tell me a story,” Aj says, fifty years old now. Hard to believe we witnessed his birth from the two-legged surface dweller, cast into the sea. “A happy one. Something that will comfort me in these next coming days, when I am to lose you, Amaba.”

  We nod. “I will tell you more than just a story. I will tell you every story. Happy and sad. But you must promise to tell no one else. I do not wish to burden them with these things I have to say. We cannot falter on our mission. Some things… weigh. I fear if they know the truth of everything, they will not be able to carry on, or they’ll swim to the surface to learn things for themselves I do not want them to learn. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you, Amaba,” Aj says.

  “When I pass, you must tell them my wish for them,” we say. “That they live lives of togetherness, in the present. That the many of them who started out their lives in loneliness and solitude, they must put it away, and remember where we are now. Together. Safe. Do you promise?”

  “I promise,” says Aj. “Now come on. Begin. Before it’s too late.”

  “Do not forget any of this,” we say, though our voice is weakening.

  Aj touches his fins to ours, lays his cheek to our cheek. We communicate how pups communicate. In electricity, in charges. No need to speak. Aj sees all. Our memories transfer to him as we lived them.

  We close our eyes in Aj’s arms, listening to the water, to the noise of the city, to our kindred all around us.

  There are so many of us now, we could hardly be called strange fish anymore. We have made a place in this sea. All the fluttering, building, loving, hunting, embracing, mating, we hear it all, our presence unmistakable. A whole chorus of the deep. Wajinru. We are not zoti aleyu. We are more vast and more beauteous than that name implies. We are a song, and we are together.

  * * *

  We remember.

  5

  YETU HURTLED THROUGH THE WATER, away from the shadow of her people. Her tail fin jutted left and right to propel her to startlingly fast speeds. Her heart beat so fast, she couldn’t tell one pulse from another. The steady thrum resounded like the hum of a whale.

  She’d spent large swaths of time over the last year immobile, floating, lost in rememberings, and her body wasn’t used to this level of performance. Muscle, fat, and cartilage had withered away, leaving behind a faint impression of what a wajinru should look like.

  Yetu’s will thrived where her body faltered. The only thought on her mind was go, go, go. Forward, never backward. Flee. The place she’d gone from was a world of pain, and there was no distance she could swim where that past wouldn’t haunt her. Right now the wajinru were lost
in the Remembrance, but they wouldn’t always be, would they? Surely one among them would realize it was time to transfer the rememberings back, and that realization would spread. Without Yetu to signal when this was supposed to happen, it might take longer than usual, but not too long.

  In such sparsely populated waters, Yetu stood out, her body creating unique patterns of waves that a wajinru tracker would be able to spot. The wajinru would come for her to return the rememberings once they recovered—and they would recover. Most assuredly they would. If Yetu could survive the rememberings intact, weak as she was, they could too.

  She didn’t let herself consider the possibility that they would be as lost in the face of it as she’d always been. To think such a thought for even half a moment would be to admit accursing them to immeasurable suffering. What if, like her, they all waned to shadows? Yetu shook her head. That wasn’t going to happen. They would awaken and search for her so they could return the rememberings to their proper place. If she wanted to survive, she couldn’t let that happen. They’d have to learn to adapt to them.

  Yetu needed to go where they couldn’t sense her, where they wouldn’t search. She turned her body sharply upward and began her ascent to shallower waters. She was so tired that she put little effort into avoiding predators who could make easy work of her in her weakened, brain-addled state. All that mattered was escape.

  She curled her body to make it move faster and faster, and with each swim stroke she became more and more lightheaded. She wasn’t sure she was breathing properly, or at all. Water glided over her gills, but it was different water than what she was used to. Had she risen higher in the ocean waters at a more reasonable rate, her body would’ve naturally adjusted, but she was swimming at top speeds.