The Waters Rising

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Xulai had only mentioned it, so while they swam, the Sea King told Abasio all the details, between stopping here and there for more sightseeing. When they arrived back at the beach, Abasio heaved himself out of the water and lay on the sand, feeling rather achy.

  “I’ll leave you now,” said the Sea King. “Oh, by the way, Abasio, for the past few hours, I’ve been carrying the face mask you borrowed. Would you mind putting it over behind the rocks when you’ve put your clothes on?”

  Abasio felt for the mask, felt of his face. Abasio looked at what he was feeling his face with. Abasio yelled, not quite a scream, and began to choke.

  The Sea King swarmed up the sand and shook him. “Breathe!” he commanded. “Change! You know you can. You have! Now change back!” He grabbed two of Abasio’s adjacent tentacles and pushed them together.

  Somewhere inside Abasio a bell rang, or a switch clicked, or a survival trait came screaming out of a cave, and the two tentacles joined. Arms and legs squirmed and thrashed. Bones clashed together like cymbals. Sounds fell on him like rocks, like metal, clanging like gongs. Sight, two of everything, jiggled, tumbled, coalesced. He felt as though he were being mangled, drowned, crushed, smothered, squashed, and then he gulped air.

  Blue, who had galloped as far back on the beach as was possible when he saw the two creatures coming out of the sea, tiptoed back and sniffed at Abasio, who screamed again.

  “Well,” Blue huffed. “You’re making made a great deal of fuss over nothing.”

  “I shall be happy to see how well you do when it comes your turn,” said Abasio in an acid tone as, carrying the mask, he went to reclaim his clothing.

  Xulai and Precious Wind went to interview Blue before choosing to believe Abasio’s version of affairs.

  Blue confirmed the episode. “Yes, he did. Yes, he did it without knowing it. Yes, the Sea King tricked him into it by making him think about something else. That’s it. And he made entirely too much fuss about it.”

  “So it took the sea egg,” Xulai said to Precious Wind with an enormous sigh. “And it did work.”

  Precious Wind repeated it, like a mantra. “Yes, it took the sea egg, and now we know for a fact that it works. Thanks be.”

  Sea eggs began to accumulate, some from the new sea-fertile females, some from Xulai. Everyone was waiting for the emissary to arrive. They needed the information the emissary had before they could complete their plans. While waiting, Xulai and Abasio took their first sea change together, exploring the Sea King’s castle and spending some time playing with the Sea King’s children. Infant octopi were not, strictly speaking, compensation for Xulai’s fisher, but they had a charm and attraction of their own. Blue came to the waterside to meet several of them but refused to repeat the adventure after one octo-child clamped itself firmly upon his nose and refused to let go, even after it started to dry out and Abasio and Xulai had to regrow frantic fingers so they could remove it safely.

  “It’s a boy,” said the Sea King apologetically. “My sons are curious and exploratory, like all males. I’m thinking of setting up a school.”

  “Schools are only for fish,” muttered Blue as they left the shore. “That octo-brat needs a reformatory.”

  “What’s a reformatory?” Xulai whispered to Abasio.

  “It was a mythical solution from the Before Time,” he answered. “The people in Artemisia say the people who lived in the Before Time preferred easy myths to rigorous analysis. Belief instead of reality. That’s why things so often went wrong.”

  “Couldn’t they tell the difference?”

  “People can’t tell the difference if they start with an ‘if’ statement. Myths always have an ‘if’ in them. ‘If people believed in Whifflepop, then we wouldn’t have Gloop.’ So then, instead of working on Gloop, which is the problem, they try to make people believe in Whifflepop.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “A lot of young people didn’t have schools that interested them. They got into trouble instead of going to school. So instead of fixing the schools, people said, ‘If all young people knew they would be locked up and punished for being bad, we wouldn’t have any more Gloop.’ ”

  “Getting into trouble was Gloop, and locking them up was Whifflepop?”

  “That’s right. So they did Whifflepop, and while they were being Whifflepopped the very worst young people soon taught all the others how to do more and worse Gloop when they got out.”

  “And the schools stayed the way they were.”

  “People preferred to believe in Whifflepop because it was easier to build prisons than to create good schools. No one expected prisons to do any good, but a good school makes demands on students and teachers and parents and communities. Prisons were easier and cheaper. A very large part of the problem was that no one tried to limit the number of children people had, so prudent parents had one or two and stupid, self-indulgent, egocentric, careless ones had however many happened. They always excused themselves by saying their god sent them, ignoring the sex that went on before their god presumably got interested. The prudent people resented trying to create schools to educate other people’s huge families. Belief that their god sends unlimited children is Whifflepop, and as long as you believe in unlimited Whifflepop, you’ll have unlimited Gloop.”

  “So they built prisons instead.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the Before Time.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I used to really feel bad about what happened to all the people in the Before Time. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe it was best most of them weren’t saved.”

  “As the Sea King pointed out, that opinion is widely shared today,” Abasio said angrily.

  “No.” She shook her head, unable to understand his anger. “No, Abasio. In his speech, he said historically there was discussion of whether we should be saved, but—”

  “It was more than a polite discussion, Xulai. There was something the Sea King didn’t include in his little speech, though he let us see enough that we should probably have figured it out on our own. You saw the seadogs?”

  “Yes, I did. And they’re going to transform horses, too.”

  “Right. They’re transforming dogs to be sea creatures and they’re letting them retain their doggishness. Wagging, sitting, fur, floppy ears: very dog.”

  “I know, yes.”

  “They’re trying to do the same thing for horses.”

  “I know that, Abasio.”

  “Don’t you think it’s strange, then, that they are not transforming humans into mermen and mermaids, letting us retain our humanity? We will have dog-shaped swimmers with gills and finned feet. Maybe horse-shaped swimmers. Why must humans transform into octopi? Why not human swimmers with gills and finned hands and feet?”

  She stared, stunned. “Why?”

  “I think your sea father made it clear: because the sea dwellers wouldn’t stand for it. They were willing to save us, but not as humans. Humans did too much damage. The only way they’ll let us live is if we don’t look like humans. We have to be willing to take a shape that’s totally unlike our own! A shape that may even be repulsive to many of us. We have to be willing to do that before they’ll accept us. Horses and dogs never hurt them. We did!”

  The ship bearing the emissary and the remaining members of the Tingawan embassy staff arrived late one afternoon. Lok-i-xan arranged a meeting for the following morning, which would give the emissary time to fulfill his duty as Xakixa for the Great Bear of Zol. Precious Wind and Xulai went with him to Zol—or to the place where Zol had been.

  During the long years Bear had been in Norland, Zol had vanished with the waters rising. Bear’s name tablet lay in the clan shrine beneath the waves. It was retrieved by a diver, brought up for the laying on of hands, then replaced by the diver, who reported the lantern had shown light. Precious Wind and Xulai took him at his word; they would have lied about it themselves if necessary to save Bear’s family from shame. Neither really blamed Be
ar for his betrayal, though both had felt it deeply. His end had redeemed him in their eyes, as it had in the eyes of the emissary.

  This return of the Xakixa was reported also to Bear’s betrothed, who paid a courteous visit to Bear’s clan. The following day Precious Wind learned Legami-am was soon to be married. Out of curiosity, Precious Wind went to visit her and asked the woman—for she was no longer a girl—if she had ever noticed something missing, something personal, even if it had happened years ago.

  Oh, yes, she said after considering the question. Yes. A tortoiseshell brush had been stolen from her bedroom when she was only eleven. She remembered it because the brush had been a gift from her grandmother, and she had grieved over its loss. Why?

  Precious Wind told her why, and on hearing, Legami-am shed her first tears for Bear.

  “I did not know,” she cried. “I thought he had forgotten me.”

  “He would want you to be happy,” said Precious Wind, though, given Bear’s temperament, she was not at all sure of this. “Those of us who knew him want you to remember him kindly.”

  “The monster has to be killed,” said the emissary. “It is of such power and malevolence that it will, if able, kill every human being on the planet. I doubt such a creature can be satisfied, and it does not satisfy the creature to know all mankind has limited time.”

  “Now that his home and devices have been destroyed, he cannot go on for centuries, as he has in the past,” said Justinian.

  “Our problem, sir, is that we have no idea how long he can go on! A decade might allow him to destroy the world. A year perhaps. How do we know? He has to be destroyed, trapped. Since his particular animosity is toward Tingawa, if we bait a trap, it must be with Tingawans.”

  Precious Wind and Lok-i-xan exchanged glances. Precious Wind said, “Emissary, were you able to do as I asked in my message?”

  “You asked me to find Abasio’s wagon and get it to Wellsport. I sent a pigeon to the abbey, to the man Wordswell. I told him where the wagon was hidden. I asked him to send good men to find it, to bring it to the abbey, and then drive it to Wellsport. I received a message in return that the wagon was on its way to Wellsport from the abbey. I do not know if it has arrived there.”

  “My wagon?” asked Abasio.

  Precious Wind nodded. “Your wagon, yes. It is easily recognizable, and some of us have been working on a plan. Remember when we met the Nightwind, the Axan-xin?” She turned to the emissary. “The captain of that ship told me of the message they had received from you, sir. You said the monster likely could have been splattered with the duchess’s blood?”

  “From what the witness said, I would judge it likely, yes.”

  “We have a locator here in Tingawa, one of the old machines much like the one the duchess had. In itself, it is harmless. It can find someone by a genetic code. It uses the same technology that probably killed the duchess herself, in the end.”

  “How?” asked Abasio.

  Precious Wind shrugged. “The duchess’s hair was snagged on a tree—remember? When you first saw her in the woods behind Woldsgard?”

  “Yes. I do remember.”

  “Xulai gave me those hairs. When I went to the Vulture Tower, I substituted some of Alicia’s hairs for those Jenger had left in his hairbrush. Alicia used them to make a cloud to destroy Jenger, and in doing so, she destroyed herself. The clouds had to be released close to the victim. She couldn’t find him to use it, but she kept it and somehow in the conflict with the Old Dark Man the capsule must have been broken. We must suppose it was an accidental release, or that she destroyed the container thinking it of no further use to her. It does not matter which.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “From our people’s description of her body. The cause of death is unmistakable. What is of interest is that I did not use all of Alicia’s hairs. I have several left, enough to determine her pattern. I assume the place she died is utterly destroyed, nothing left of it at all?”

  The emissary agreed. “Those were my instructions. There is nothing left of the place.”

  “But if that creature left that place with her blood upon him, he is carrying her pattern around. Were you in that place when she died?”

  “My job was to destroy the place, the building, everything in it, everyone associated with it. I was told to stay away until I was sure of success. One of the surviving warriors was there when the woman died. He’s waiting for me outside . . .”

  “Can you ask him to join us?”

  The warrior came in, his face, body, and arms still bearing wounds that had not completely healed. The question was asked. He sat thoughtfully, trying to recall.

  “The stairs went down the right-hand wall into an empty room . . . a kind of entry room, with a door straight ahead. Inside that door, on my left, yes, there was a worktable of some kind. There were several things on it, mechanisms, I suppose. Two had round screens on them. One had a plan on it, like the plan of a house. The other was a map, yes, with many tiny red spots on it, a big blot of them, then more of them arcing away, like the tail of a kite . . .”

  “If she had been searching for Jenger, it would have located Jenger’s remains,” said Precious Wind. “You know Norland well. Did the map seem familiar?”

  “It showed roadways, dots that might have been towns, but nothing I could identify . . . no coastline. No body of water.”

  “I think we can assume that device was a locator,” said Precious Wind, looking at the emissary, who nodded agreement. He had seen it. It was.

  Lok-i-xan spoke. “One thing more before you go, warrior. Can you describe the creature for us?”

  The man drew a deep breath, though it obviously hurt him to do so. He clasped his wounded right shoulder with his left hand, tipping his head in that direction as though to relieve a constant pain.

  “I can only try,” he said. “It was shaped like a man. Taller than any man I have ever seen, perhaps a third again my height, and I am thought to be tall. He was thin, as the trunk of a tree is thin, and strong in that same way, as though made of layers of hard wood rather than flesh. He bled when we wounded him, which not many of us managed to do, though his blood did not run red but oozed a pale orange color. His flesh was gray, the color of dark ashes, and it seemed that his wounds healed almost at once, for the strange blood never showed for more than an instant.” The man eased his position, lowered his head in recollection. “I managed to strike him with my sword, across the back of his hand. In that wound, for a moment, I saw metal . . .”

  Precious Wind waited briefly, then prompted him. “As though his bones might be of metal? Was he covered in blood? Not his own. Perhaps the woman’s blood?”

  The warrior looked up, his face betraying a kind of empty desperation. “I thought I was seeing things. He had knocked me across the room and I was stunned, but I did see it. The memory is clear. His clothes were soaked, clinging to him, and that blood on his clothing was red, yes. Where I cut him, it glinted like metal, as if the bones in his hand were of steel.”

  “Anything else?”

  His head went down again. “Behind him, there was a . . . Would you think me mad if I said an open coffin? On end? A kind of packing case? It was taller than he was, wider, padded inside, full of tubing and little lights and sounds. I remember thinking, So, that’s the box he came in, as though he had been something manufactured that had been delivered there. I wanted to believe that!”

  “Ah, yes,” said Precious Wind and Lok-i-xan simultaneously.

  Lok-i-xan said, “You wanted to believe he was a machine, yes, but you were right to believe so. Though it has flesh and needs flesh to continue working, it is mostly a machine. He was created in the Before Time. He and the others of his kind were responsible for the Big Kill. You are very fortunate to have survived him, and we are fortunate that you did so, for you have told us something of great value.”

  The warrior looked his question, unable to ask it.

  “The thing like a packing ca
se,” said Lok-i-xan, laying his hand on the man’s shoulder. “We’re virtually sure he—it had been inside it. Not merely recently, no, but repeatedly, over and over again, we don’t really know how long. Perhaps for a thousand years. The case looked nothing like the ones we found elsewhere, but it had the same function. It kept him alive . . .”

  “And now his packing case is gone,” said the emissary with a little satisfied nod. “Now it is gone!”

  “But the thing is still alive,” cried the warrior in an agonized voice. “It chased my comrades up the stairs. I got out while it was gone . . . I should have—”

  “Shh,” said Precious Wind. “You should have done no more than you did. Do not despair! We know it lives now, but it needs that ‘packing case’ to continue living. His time is limited, but we don’t know limited to how long!” She made an aversive gesture. “Why do we say ‘he’? We know the creature is male, in a sense, but we should not say ‘he,’ for it is not truly human. Its time is shortened, and we must devise a way to shorten that time even further.”

  They thanked the warrior and let him go—which he did standing a bit taller than when he had arrived. The few survivors would have given much to forget that battle, though they knew they never would. It had been a failure. The only thing that redeemed it was that no fault lay with those who had fought there or died there.

  “Now,” said Lok-i-xan. “You say we have the beginning of a plan.”

  “We have more than that,” said the emissary. “Before we destroyed the place, we took a few things. We took another of the tubes that were used by the coffin device. And, we have a very interesting book.”

  “A book?” cried Lok-i-xan.

  The emissary laid the book on the table before them, turning the encased pages one by one.

  “Pictures,” said Precious Wind. “By all that’s holy! You found pictures.”

  “More than that,” whispered the emissary. “We found the creature’s name.”