Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Old book?” whispered Abasio.

  Bertram looked about, as though afraid to be overheard, and whispered, “Can I trust your discretion, sir?”

  Abasio smiled, feeling how wry the smile actually was. “A great many ­people seem to have done so, Bertram. If it’s a secret . . .”

  “The books are in a cave behind the shop. They’ve been there for more than a thousand years. Many volumes go back to the before time. You’ll have to wait until tonight to take a look. I never go into the cave until all the Gravysuckers are asleep. The books have been preserved, but I wouldn’t trust the towns­people to leave them alone. Many of them are like squirrels. What they can’t eat, they chew holes in! Or in this case, they’d use them to start fires. Or as toilet paper, though the Suckians seem to have found a dried leaf that works better. Flexible, soft, absorptive. They’re thinking of making it a market crop, sold in bundles of one hundred.”

  Abasio whispered. “Tonight or a later night would be fine. I’ve committed us to staying here near you, Bertram! I’ve upset the ­people below by threatening them with the King of Ghastain. I hope you don’t mind our camping here awhile and letting the horses rest while Gravysuck considers its position.

  “The pond is just a few yards from the wagon. The children will likely spend hours playing there. About half of what they’re eating is solid food, now, but Xulai really needs to wean them. Nursing them is wearying for her on top of everything else, and she needs some time to relax. We’re all filthy; we need to clean up. When that’s done, then you and I can spend some time in your cave.” He turned and raised his voice. “Kimbo-­niro can heal from his bruises a bit.”

  “I’m all right!” blurted Kim. He had come all the way from Tingawa to serve Xulai and he was determined to do his job well. He did not want to be sidelined because of injuries.

  Abasio shook his head. “I didn’t say you weren’t all right, Kim, but taking a little time off to heal is always sensible. It saves trouble later on. Go get some of Xulai’s special heal-­all tea and take a nap.”

  As Kim moved away, Bertram actually smiled. It was an exceedingly sweet smile, with some longing in it, and it came to Abasio suddenly that the tailor was probably an extremely lonely man. He asked, “About grazing for the horses?”

  The tailor said, “The area just through the trees, beyond the pond, excellent grass. And I mentioned the boiler out back. The water is piped down from a stream uphill where it’s perfectly clear. Tailors have to be clean, otherwise everything we stitch would be filthy by the time it is completed. There’s a tub, and a kind of shower-­bath arrangement there. If you build the fire under the boiler—­it holds enough water for two tubsful—­and get it started now, it should be quite hot within the hour. Several families in Gravysuck have similar arrangements. Not all. Some prefer being filthy to chopping wood for the stove.”

  Abasio thanked him, remarking, “You said you had to move up here onto the hill because customers had to fight their way to you down in the town. Was that the real reason?”

  Bertram ducked his head in chagrin. “Partly. ­People would come looking for me, meet somebody in town who’d snarl at them, utter a few ‘cata-­pull-­its,’ and direct the poor souls the wrong way—­”

  “Cata-­pull-­it? A local swearword, right?”

  “More or less. Definitely a localism. The way I understand it, they used to have a man in the town who was . . . well, not normal, shall I say, about women and little girls. He tried to make off with some female children, and another man in town, a visitor, told the inhabitants they should have a catapult. He built them one. They showed the rapist the catapult, put him in it, and catapulted him out into the middle of Gravysuck Pond. It does—­suck, I mean. Once in, you cannot get out.”

  “Don’t you get lonely up here?”

  “I do. But the books are here, and I moved here mostly so they wouldn’t find the collection up here in the cave. You see, for the last several centuries, it had been cared for by a local family of Volumetarians. Not tailors, needless to say! They had a farm a bit east of the village down there. All they had to do was keep an eye on the place, keep local ­people away from it. A few stories about ghosts and evil spirits, an occasional manifestation of weird lights and howling, that took care of keeping them away. Well, whenever the Volumetarian in charge died, the duty would be passed on to the next family member. Eventually the local family died out, word got passed to me, and in accordance with our usual vows, I came. I had a house built for me down in the village; one adequate also for the shop.”

  He sighed. “However, I was a stranger to Gravysuck and did not resemble them in the way they all seem to resemble one another. You’ll note the lean muscularity, the strong cheekbones, the almost uniform straw color of the hair and the pale eyes. Long breeding within a restricted population, I should think. Strangers are anathema in Gravysuck. After putting up with them for a time—­a time and a half, actually!—­I hired a ­couple of carpenters who were traveling through. Volumetarians who relocate are always supplied with adequate funds. While we dare not move the book repositories, each of us can certainly arrange to put ourselves in an appropriate relationship to the one we guard! Pursuant to that, the carpenters and I took my house down, board by board, and rebuilt it up here, backed right up against the mountain. My cellar door opens up into the cave, so I can go back and forth unobserved. If Gravysuck ever found the books, someone would very probably yell, ‘Monster books,’ and they’d burn them all.”

  “And yet you mentioned them immediately to us?”

  Bertram’s mouth dropped open. “I did. I really did. At the moment it seemed to be the right thing to do. I’ve never, never done that before. I haven’t figured out why it happened this time!” He was quite pale, obviously upset over the lapse.

  “In this case, it was the right thing to do, and something probably told you that. Are you here alone? You have no family?”

  “I was only twenty-­four when I came. My brothers were both grown, off on their own, adventuring. Mother and my older sister, Linian, came here with me, but Liny first married a man in Flitterbean—­that’s the family she and mother taught to make sugar after waiting two years for a supply of beet seed to reach them—­and some little time after her husband died, she married a man from Saltgosh, next town south, on the east fork up in the mountains. Mother stayed in Flitterbean with Liny’s son—­they’d taken him into the sugar business—­but Mother passed on, five years now. I travel down south or up the hill—­isn’t it interesting that ‘south’ is down directionally but can be up altitudinally—­to see my nephew and his family or my sister Liny in Saltgosh when I get a chance. That’s about it.”

  “What did the villagers have against you?”

  “I’m an outsider, I don’t look like them, I’m not a farmer, and I’m a very good tailor who actually entices strangers to seek me out, isn’t that terrible? Why, I had ­people from Saltgosh and Flitterbean and south beyond the turnoff to Saltgosh about twelve miles from the town of Asparagoose, and—­”

  “Asparagoose?” said Abasio. “Asparagoose?”

  “Have you never seen a goose with green, sort-­of-­ferny feathers? Well, they had one hatch, so they named the town after it.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “I did. Looked like an asparagoose to me. It grew up and laid twelve eggs, hatched six regular geese and six asparageese. There were ganders and geese both in the hatch, and they’ve had flocks of asparageese ever since. I say green, but the goose color is really more toward the celadon. It shouldn’t be surprising—­the color, I mean. Many waterfowl are brightly colored. At any rate, at my suggestion, a few of the village women have taken to making couturier cloaks: asparagoose down on velvet! Special order only, and they’re selling quite well.”

  “Who in heaven’s name around here would have the money to buy—­”

  “Oh, not around here.
No. To the traders that come through. We’re on a main trade route for wagoners. Sugar, salt, wool, dried fruits, hand-­carved toys . . .”

  “And did you say Flitterbean?”

  “There was once an oddity called jumping beans. I found them mentioned in my books, back there.” He nodded furtively toward the back of the shop. “Actually, of course, it was the movement of newly hatched worms inside the shell of the bean that made them hop. It was very much the same kind of thing down in Flitterbean. They always raised crops of red beans—­with the usual green pods—­and apparently one year the pods grew wings and flew away, right off the vine. What actually happened was that a new kind of insect with a long green body and long green wings laid eggs inside the pods. The little ones matured and crawled out; the long green bodies looked like bean pods that took wings and flew away. The locals thought it was the beans that flew, so they named the town after the event. Prior to that time, the village was called Thwonkville after the Thwonk family there.”

  “Didn’t the Thwonk family object to the change?” asked Kim.

  “As I understand it—­and of course the tale may have been embroidered—­by that time, there were none of the Thwonks left to object. The towns­people had been killing them off for about twenty years. Killing Thwonks was, as I understand it, a collaborative though covert project undertaken as a civic responsibility. It took a long time because there were a lot of Thwonks, and whenever one of them was disposed of, the event had to look accidental. As the family shrank, I understand that some of the Thwonks seemed to feel a certain disquiet and moved away. The last pair remaining, Urgle and Orgle Thwonk, twins, were caught in a propitious avalanche just a week before the beans flew off. Extremely unpleasant ­people, the Thwonks.”

  Bertram was dead serious, but Abasio had to struggle with his face.

  “What’s all the business about monsters?” Kim asked. “They were bound and determined we were bringing in monsters.”

  “Oh.” Bertram shook his head. “That dates back a ­couple of decades, at least. There was a woman named Villy who lived here in Gravysuck. She fell in love with a traveler—­a man who moved about peripatetically, rather as you seem to be doing, sir,” he said, giving Abasio a long, analytical look. “She married the man—­his name was, I believe, Gurge, or perhaps Garge—­and went off with him. She was gone for quite some time—­he was killed, she returned pregnant. She gave birth to something that didn’t look human at all, and it died. Villy told ­people they’d been living in a place the locals called ‘the burn,’ where the animals were all wrong. The town claimed she’d brought back something bad with her, which proved prophetic. She died of it, too, about a year later. Nobody else has ever suffered as a consequence, but that has been the town’s excuse for screaming ‘monsters’ ever since. That and the Lorpists. I’m sure you’ve been warned about Lorpists.”

  “I think I’ve been near a place known as the burn,” said Abasio sadly. “Full of deadly radiation. If this all happened six or eight years ago, it’s not there anymore. Someone . . . something cleaned it up.”

  “Now, that sounds like a story.”

  “No reason you shouldn’t know, and I can make it a short story. North of Artemisia was the area called Manland, because there were still cities in it, including the one nearest my home: Fantis. It was a final survival, I guess, the only place where there were still . . . are still enclaves with a high level of technology, subterranean communities around the cities: the so-­called Edges. The city itself was divided into gang territories, even though the gangs were dwindling. The death rate was very high. The Edges remain, but the city is gone now.

  “Some days’ journey south of Fantis was the so-­called Place of Power. Some of the partly or mostly human creatures in the Place of Power were conspiring to start the Big Kill all over again. They were stopped by three very powerful beings who had been overseeing things there for several generations at least. In the end, they stopped the conspiracy from happening. There was a Kill, but it was mostly the killers who died.” He fell silent, musing.

  “And you know this because . . . ?”

  “Because I was there. I saw the place destroyed.”

  “Were the powerful ones good beings?” asked Bertram in a wondering voice.

  Abasio frowned. He tried to keep his voice level as he said, “Bertram, that’s a question! The old, powerful beings I’m talking about didn’t hesitate to act, and bad ­people died for what seemed good reasons. Good ­people died for what we hoped were even better ones. Terrible destruction happened. And in the middle of dire happenings on all sides, I could not say whether it was for good or ill. I could only wait and see what it all led to. My . . . my dearest friend helped them, and she died doing it. I hope desperately that it was for good. So far it seems to have been.”

  “Where was this Manland?” asked Bertram in a very gentle voice.

  “East of here, well north of Artemisia.”

  “Then Liny and Mother and I came may have come along the southern edge of it on my way here. We were told to avoid the cities, and we did so. Our ­people were originally a forest ­people, part of the Black and White Tribes from the east.”

  “But you had heard of Artemisia?”

  “Some good way south of here, and east. Let’s see, settled originally, someone told me, by an association of LIFFs: Librarians, Injuns, Friends, and Feminists.”

  “Librarians? Really? I didn’t know that about the original settlers, but I should have guessed at it. There were places called ‘burns’ still scattered around, but ­people there know enough to stay away from them. The walkers were beings that created burns every time they stood still. I’m surprised nobody told Villy’s man.”

  “Oh, Gurge or Garge had been told, but he thought they were using the threat to hide treasure. He was that kind of man. Never believed anything, always supposed that the other man had some ulterior motive for his warning. Gurge could talk the leg off a lamb without the creature knowing it was gone. You could follow Gurge’s trail by the three-­legged sheep left limping around behind him, not one of them with any idea what had happened. Unfortunately, he usually talked himself into the same kind of situations. Poor Gurge never gave himself a chance, according to Ma, and of course he passed his death on to Villy.”

  Abasio nodded to himself. “So, since then, anyone coming into Gravysuck is supposed to be bringing monsters or changing ­people into them, that right?”

  “If they’re strangers, that’s more or less it.” Bertram placed a friendly hand on Abasio’s, and Abasio surprised himself by gripping it strongly. Yes. They would be friends. He had not had a true male friend with only two legs for a very long time.

  “Now, getting back to business,” said Bertram. “I can make you some trousers for the babies, wool linings and canvas outside, I can treat the canvas with beeswax. Make it pretty well waterproof. Then you can dump all that water and have less weight in the wagon, and—­”

  “Abasio!” Xulai spoke from the door she had opened just a crack, her voice suspiciously sweet. “We have visitors.”

  Abasio put on his meeting-­questionable-­strangers smile and went outside. There, shifting nervously from foot to foot, were three men and three women, with Willum behind them, dancing up and down in joyous expectancy. He cried, “They come to see the sea-­babies, Basio. My ma and pa, Aunty Enna and Unka Gum, Lorp and Aunty Liz.”

  Abasio went to the wagon and brought out two sleepy babies. The three ­couples stood at a distance. One baby woke up and put a thumb in its mouth.

  “Oooh,” said Ma. “It’s a tweety baby.” She turned to Xulai. “May I feel its hair?”

  “His hair,” said Xulai. “That’s Bailai: a boy. The other is Gailai: a girl.”

  “Ooh,” twittered Liz, “how can you? I mean they don’t have . . . there’s no . . . How do you know which is which?”

  “They actually have two le
gs,” said Abasio. “The legs fit together closely when they’re swimming. They’ll learn to walk before long, and it will be more obvious. Also, Bailai seems to have a little red in his hair, as I did when I was younger. And when Gailai is older . . .”

  “The girl will have . . . ?” Aunty made a curving gesture toward her chest.

  “We believe so, yes,” said Xulai. “Except for the arrangement of the legs and the gills along their sides, everything else is completely human.” She did not mention the extensive rearrangement of internal organs discovered by the doctor in Tingawa. “Since these babies are the first ones, we’re not completely sure how early they will mature. They’re doing what completely human babies do at the same ages, so we’re guessing about age fifteen or so.” She put on her own “let’s be friendly” smile. “I was about to put on some tea. Would you like a cup?”

  Abasio left Xulai serving tea and cookies to Ma, Aunty, and Liz—­their stock of cookies was running very low. As Bernard later informed him, a sibling of a parent was a named person, as were Aunty Liz and Unka Gum. Liz and Gum were siblings of Pa or Ma, Gum’s wife was Aunty, or Aunty Enna, but Lorp had not been accorded the “uncle” because, so Abasio gathered, the others, including Aunty Liz, did not consider him family. What was immediately more important was that Ma was cuddling Gailai and Aunty was rocking Bailai, and Liz was passing cookies. Both the babies had gone back to sleep. Pa, Gum, and Lorp stood apart, Lorp muttering and waving his hands about.

  Willum had worked his way around to Abasio and now tapped him on the arm, whispering, “Uncle Lorp thinks they’re monsers. He said so. That’s why my ma made him come along. He just told Pa they’d die, like that other one did that got borned before.”