The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  She said, “Uh...” and then sat silently masticating something she wanted to say, and swallowing versions of it. At last: “I’m not trying to be nosy.”

  “I didn’t think you... Nosy? You haven’t asked me anything.”

  “I mean staying here,” she said primly. “I’m not just trying to be in the way, I mean. I mean, I’m waiting for someone too.”

  “Make yourself at home,” he said expansively, and then felt like a fool. He was sure he had sounded cynical, sarcastic, and unbelieving. Her protracted silence made it worse. It became unbearable. There was only one thing he could think of to say, but he found himself unaccountably reluctant to bring out into the open the only possible explanation for her presence here. His mouth asked (as it were) while he wasn’t watching it, inanely, “Is your uh friend coming out in uh a boat?”

  “Is yours?” she asked shyly; and suddenly they were laughing together like a brace of loons. It was one of those crazy sessions people will at times find themselves conducting, laughing explosively, achingly, without a specific punchline over which to hang the fabric of the situation. When it had spent itself, they sat quietly. They had not moved nor exchanged anything, and yet they now sat together, and not merely side-by-side. The understood attachment to someone—something—else had paradoxically dissolved a barrier between them.

  It was she who took the plunge, exposed the Word, the code attachment by which they might grasp and handle their preoccupation. She said, dreamily, “I never saw a mermaid.”

  And he responded, quite as dreamily but instantly too: “Beautiful.” And that was question and answer. And when he said, “I never saw a—” she said immediately, “Beautiful.” And that was reciprocity. They looked at each other again in the dark and laughed, quietly this time.

  After a friendly silence, she asked, “What’s her name?”

  He snorted in self-surprise. “Why, I don’t know. I really don’t. When I’m away from her I think of her as she, and when I’m with her she’s just... you. Not you,” he added with a childish giggle.

  She gave him back the giggle and then sobered reflectively. “Now that’s the strangest thing. I don’t know his name either. I don’t even know if they have names.”

  “Maybe they don’t need them. She—uh—they’re sort of different, if you know what I mean. I mean, they know things we don’t know, sort of... feel them. Like if people are coming to the beach, long before they’re in sight. And what the weather will be like, and where to sit behind a rock on the bottom of the sea so a fish swims right into their hands.”

  “And what time’s moonrise.”

  “Yes,” he said, thinking, you suppose they know each other? you think they’re out there in the dark watching? you suppose he’ll come first, and what will he say to me? Or what if she comes first?

  “I don’t think they need names,” the girl was saying. “They know one person from another, or just who they’re talking about, by the feel of it. What’s your name?”

  “John Smith,” he said. “Honest to God.”

  She was silent, and then suddenly giggled.

  He made a questioning sound.

  “I bet you say ‘Honest to God’ like that every single time you tell anyone your name. I bet you’ve said it thousands and thousands of times,” she said.

  “Well, yes. Nobody ever noticed it before, though.”

  “I would. My name is Jane Dow. Dee owe doubleyou, not Doe.”

  “Jane Dow. Oh! and you have to spell it out like that every single time?”

  “Honest to God,” she said, and they laughed.

  He said, “John Smith, Jane Dow. Golly. Pretty ordinary people.”

  “Ordinary. You and your mermaid.”

  He wished he could see her face. He wondered if the merpeople were as great a pressure on her as they were on him. He had never told a soul about it—who’d listen?

  Who’d believe? Or, listening, believing, who would not interfere? Such a wonder... and had she told all her girlfriends and boyfriends and the boss and whatnot? He doubted it. He could not have said why, but he doubted it.

  “Ordinary,” he said assertively, “yes.” And he began to talk, really talk about it because he had not, because he had to. “That has a whole lot to do with it. Well, it has everything to do with it. Look, nothing ever happened in my whole entire life. Know what I mean? I mean, nothing. I never skipped a grade in school and I never got left back. I never won a prize. I never broke a bone. I was never rich and never hungry. I got a job and kept it and I won’t ever go very high in the company and I won’t ever get canned. You know what I mean?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “So then,” he said exultantly, “along comes this mermaid. I mean, to me comes a mermaid. Not just a glimpse, no maybe I did and maybe I didn’t see a mermaid: this is a real live mermaid who wants me back again, time and again, and makes dates and keeps ’em too, for all she’s all the time late.”

  “So is he” she said in intense agreement.

  “What I call it,” he said, leaning an inch closer and lowering his voice confidentially, “is a touch of strange. A touch of strange. I mean, that’s what I call it to myself, you see? I mean, a person is a person all his life, he’s good to his mother, he never gets arrested, if he drinks too much he doesn’t get in trouble he just gets, excuse the expression, sick to his stomach. He does a day’s good work for a day’s pay and nobody hates him or, for that matter, nobody likes him either. Now a man like that has no life; what I mean, he isn’t real. But just take an ordinary guy-by-the-millions like that, and add a touch of strange, you see? Some little something he does, or has, or that happens to him, even once. Then for all the rest of his life he’s real. Golly. I talk too much.”

  “No you don’t. I think that’s real nice, Mr. Smith. A touch of strange. A touch... you know, you just told the story of my life. Yes you did. I was born and brought up and went to school and got a job all right there in Springfield, and—”

  “Springfield? You mean Springfield Massachusetts? That’s my town!” he blurted excitedly, and fell off the ledge into the sea. He came up instantly and sprang up beside her, blowing like a manatee.

  “Well no,” she said gently. “It was Springfield, Illinois.”

  “Oh,” he said, deflated.

  She went on, “I wasn’t ever a pretty girl, what you’d call, you know, pretty. I wasn’t repulsive either, I don’t mean that. Well, when they had the school dances in the gymnasium, and they told all the boys to go one by one and choose a partner, I never got to be the first one. I was never the last one left either, but sometimes I was afraid I’d be. I got a job the day after I graduated high school. Not a good one, but not bad, and I still work there. I like some people more than other people, but not very much, you know?... A touch of strange. I always knew there was a name for the thing I never had, and you gave it a good one. Thank you, Mr. Smith.”

  “Oh that’s all right,” he said shyly. “And anyway, you have it now... how was it you happened to meet your... him, I mean?”

  “Oh, I was scared to death, I really was. It was the company picnic, and I was swimming, and I—well, to tell you the actual truth, if you’ll forgive me, Mr. Smith, I had a strap on my bathing suit that was, well, slippy. Please, I don’t mean too bad, you know, or I wouldn’t ever have worn it. But I was uncomfortable about it, and I just slipped around the rocks here to fix it and... there he was.”

  “In the daytime?”

  “With the sun on him. It was like... like... There’s nothing it was like. He was just lying here on this very rock, out of the water. Like he was waiting for me. He didn’t try to get away or look surprised or anything, just lay there smiling. Waiting. He has a beautiful soft big voice and the longest green eyes, and long golden hair.”

  “Yes, yes. She has, too.”

  “He was so beautiful. And then all the rest, well, I don’t have to tell you. Shiny silver scales and the big curvy flippers.”

  “Oh,” said
John Smith.

  “I was scared, oh yes. But not afraid. He didn’t try to come near me and I sort of knew he couldn’t ever hurt me... and then he spoke to me, and I promised to come back again, and I did, a lot, and that’s the story.” She touched his shoulder gently and embarrassedly snatched her hand away. “I never told anyone before. Not a single living soul,” she whispered. “I’m so glad to be able to talk about it.”

  “Yeah.” He felt insanely pleased. “Yeah.”

  “How did you...”

  He laughed. “Well, I have to sort of tell something on myself. This swimming, it’s the only thing I was ever any good at, only I never found out until I was grown. I mean, we had no swimming pools and all that when I went to school. So I never show off about it or anything. I just swim when there’s nobody around much. And I came here one day, it was in the evening in summer when most everyone had gone home to dinner, and I swam past the reef line, way out away from the Jaw, here. And there’s a place there where it’s only a couple of feet deep and I hit my knee.”

  Jane Dow inhaled with a sharp sympathetic hiss.

  Smith chuckled. “Now I’m not one for bad language. I mean I never feel right about using it. But you hear it all the time, and I guess it sticks without you knowing it. So sometimes when I’m by myself and bump my head or whatnot I hear this rough talk, you know, and I suddenly realize it’s me doing it. And that’s what happened this day, when I hurt my knee. I mean, I really hurt it: So I sort of scrounched down holding on to my knee and I like to boil up the water for a yard around with what I said. I didn’t know anyone was around or I’d never.

  “And all of a sudden there she was, laughing at me. She came porpoising up out of deep water to seaward of the reef and jumped up into that sunlight, the sun was low then, and red; and she fell flat on her back loud as your tooth breaking on a cherry-pip. When she hit, the water rose up all around her, and for that one second she lay in it like something in a jewel box, you know, pink satin all around and her deep in it.

  “I was that hurt and confused and startled I couldn’t believe what I saw, and I remember thinking this was some la—I mean, woman, girl like you hear about, living the life and bathing in the altogether. And I turned my back on her to show her what I thought of that kind of goings-on, but looking over my shoulder to see if she got the message, and I thought then I’d made it all up, because there was nothing there but her suds where she splashed, and they disappeared before I really saw them.

  “About then my knee gave another twinge and I looked down and saw it wasn’t just bumped, it was cut too and bleeding all down my leg, and only when I heard her laughing louder than I was cussing did I realize what I was saying. She swam round and round me, laughing, but you know? There’s a way of laughing at and a way of laughing with, and there was no bad feeling in what she was doing.

  “So I forgot my knee altogether and began to swim, and I think she liked that; she stopped laughing and began to sing, and it was...” Smith was quiet for a time, and Jane Dow had nothing to say. It was as if she were listening for that singing, or to it.

  “She can sing with anything that moves, if it’s alive, or even if it isn’t alive, if it’s big enough, like a storm wind or neaptide rollers. The way she sang, it was to my arms stroking the water and my hands cutting it, and me in it, and being scared and wondering, the way I was... and the water on me, and the blood from my knee, it was all what she was singing, and before I knew it it was all the other way round, and I was swimming to what she sang. I think I never swam in my life the way I did then, and may never again, I don’t know; because there’s a way of moving where every twitch and wiggle is exactly right, and does twice what it could do before; there isn’t a thing in you fighting anything else of yours...” His voice trailed off.

  Jane Dow sighed.

  He said, “She went for the rocks like a torpedo and just where she had to bash her brains out, she churned up a fountain of white-water and shot out of the top of it and up on the rocks—right where she wanted to be and not breathing hard at all. She reached her hand into a crack without stretching and took out a big old comb and began running it through her hair, still humming that music and smiling at me like—well, just the way you said he did, waiting, not ready to run. I swam to the rocks and climbed up and sat down near her, the way she wanted.”

  Jane Dow spoke after a time, shyly, but quite obviously from a conviction that in his silence Smith had spent quite enough time on these remembered rocks. “What... did she want, Mr. Smith?”

  Smith laughed.

  “Oh,” she said. “I do beg your pardon. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Oh please,” he said quickly, “it’s all right. What I was laughing about was that she should pick on me—me of all people in the world—” He stopped again, and shook his head invisibly. No, I’m not going to tell her about that, he decided. Whatever she thinks about me is bad enough. Sitting on a rock half the night with a mermaid, teaching her to cuss... He said, “They have a way of getting you to do what they want.”

  It is possible, Smith found, even while surf whispers virtually underfoot, to detect the cessation of someone’s breathing; to be curious, wondering, alarmed, then relieved as it begins again, all without hearing it or seeing anything. What’d I say? he thought, perplexed; but he could not recall exactly, except to be sure he had begun to describe the scene with the mermaid on the rocks, and had then decided against it and said something or other else instead. Oh. Pleasing the mermaid. “When you come right down to it,” he said, “they’re not hard to please. Once you understand what they want.”

  “Oh yes,” she said in a controlled tone. “I found that out.”

  “You did?”

  Enough silence for a nod from her.

  He wondered what pleased a merman. He knew nothing about them— nothing. His mermaid liked to sing and to be listened to, to be watched, to comb her hair, and to be cussed at. “And whatever it is, it’s worth doing,” he added, “because when they’re happy, they’re happy up to the sky.”

  “Whatever it is,” she said, disagreeably agreeing.

  A strange corrosive thought drifted against his consciousness. He batted it away before he could identify it. It was strange, and corrosive, because of his knowledge of and feeling for, his mermaid. There is a popular conception of what joy with a mermaid might be, and he had shared it—if he had thought of mermaids at all—with the populace... up until the day he met one. You listen to mermaids, watch them, give them little presents, cuss at them, and perhaps learn certain dexterities unknown, or forgotten, to most of us, like breathing under water—or, to be more accurate, storing more oxygen than you thought you could, and finding still more (however little) extractable from small amounts of water admitted to your lungs and vaporized by practiced contractions of the diaphragm, whereby some of the dissolved oxygen could be coaxed out of the vapor. Or so Smith had theorized after practicing certain of the mermaid’s ritual exercises. And then there was fishing to be eating, and fishing to be fishing, and hypnotizing eels, and other innocent pleasures.

  But innocent.

  For your mermaid is as oviparous as a carp, though rather more mammalian than an echidna. Her eggs are tiny, by honored mammalian precedent, and in their season are placed in their glittering clusters (for each egg looks like a tiny pearl embedded in a miniature moonstone) in secret, guarded grottos, and cared for with much ritual. One of the rituals takes place after the eggs are well rafted and have plated themselves to the inner lip of their hidden nest; and this is the finding and courting of a merman to come and, in the only way he can, father the eggs.

  This embryological sequence, unusual though it may be, is hardly unique in complexity in a world which contains such marvels as the pelagic phalange of the cephalopods and the simultaneity of disparate appetites exhibited by certain arachnids. Suffice it to say, regarding mermaids, that the legendary monosyllable of greeting used by the ribald Indian is answered herewith; and since design f
ollows function in such matters, one has a guide to one’s conduct with the lovely creatures, and they, brother, with you, and with you, sister.

  “So gentle,” Jane Dow was saying, “but then, so rough.”

  “Oh?” said Smith. The corrosive thought nudged at him. He flung it somewhere else, and it nudged him there, too... It was at one time the custom in the Old South to quiet babies by smearing their hands liberally with molasses and giving them a chicken feather. Smith’s corrosive thought behaved like such a feather, and pass it about as he would he could not put it down.

  The merman now, he thought wildly... “I suppose,” said Jane Dow, “I really am in no position to criticize.”

  Smith was too busy with his figurative feather to answer.

  “The way I talked to you when I thought you were... when you came out here. Why, I never in my life—”

  “That’s all right. You heard me, didn’t you?” Oh, he thought, suddenly disgusted with himself, it’s the same way with her and her friend as it is with me and mine. Smith, you have an evil mind. This is a nice girl, this Jane Dow.

  It never occurred to him to wonder what was going through her mind. Not for a moment did he imagine that she might have less information on mermaids than he had, even while he yearned for more information on mermen.

  “They make you do it,” she said. “You just have to. I admit it; I lie awake nights thinking up new nasty names to call him. It makes him so happy. And he loves to do it too. The... things he says. He calls me ‘alligator bait.’ He says I’m his squashy little bucket of roe. Isn’t that awful? He says I’m a milt-and-water type. What’s milt, Mr. Smith?”

  “I can’t say,” hoarsely said Smith, who couldn’t, making a silent resolution not to look it up. He found himself getting very upset. She seemed like such a nice girl.... He found himself getting angry. She unquestionably had been a nice girl.

  Monster, he thought redly. “I wonder if it’s moonrise yet.”