Oshenerth

by Alan Dean Foster

  “You are not asleep.” The cuttlefish, she noted, seemed more sympathetic to her condition than did the human—the merson, she corrected herself.

  Why can’t I wake up?

  She started to cry—only to discover that she couldn’t. How do you cry underwater? She felt herself sobbing, but no tears oozed from the corners of her eyes. Or if they did, she could neither sense nor feel them. What did the body need with moistening, cleansing tears when one’s eyes were permanently submerged?

  The merson came even closer. He did not have to brandish the bone spear he was holding in order to intimidate her. It was enough that he held onto it.

  “Do you think we are fools here? Sandrift is a small community but we are not provincial. Those of us who live in this corner of the plain are as aware of the wider world as those who dwell in the cities. Rumors of unpleasantness drift down to us from far to the north. Tales of ravaged societies and dead mersons, of unnatural alliances forged in the service of a threat implacable.” The point of the spear suddenly dipped toward her. “You are a spy!”

  Startled, she drew back. Her webbed feet and the narrow fins on the backs of her calves propelled her effortlessly, seemingly of their own accord. Always an excellent swimmer, her altered self had taken to their use without instruction.

  “A—what?” The dream had turned unpleasant again. “A spy for who? I’m not a spy. I’m a dental assistant, I live in a condominium with one and a half baths, a single garage, two aquariums, and a partial bay view, I have more than one occasional boyfriend, I …”

  It was not necessary to see tears to realize that she was on the verge of a complete breakdown. Hands over her face, her crying emerged from her mouth in the form of sporadic disturbances to the water column. Chachel and Glint experienced her sobbing as periodic pulses against their skin.

  Hovering nearby, Oxothyr had observed the exchange in silence. Now he glided forward, his body a uniform sienna from which thrust bobbing, sucker-lined arms held in loose coils. Behind him, Sathi and Tythe had discovered an errant blue-armed spralaker. Having successfully cornered the crab in a crevice in the rocks, they fought to see who would get to eat it. As they argued, the abject crustacean tried to fend them off with its comparatively useless claws while uttering, “Nonononono!” in a voice as pitiful as it was small.

  A tentacle capable of tearing out her throat slid around Irina’s neck. Its touch was at once rubbery and reassuring.

  “Whatever this changeling is, wherever it is from,” Oxothyr declared with sincerity, “she is no spy. Spies are calm, controlled creatures. This female is as confused in her apposite merson form as she was in the earlier one that breathed void.”

  Grumbling, Chachel returned his spear to vertical again and backed off. “Then if she is not a demon and not a spy, what is she?”

  “Lost, I should think.” Another arm came up and the tip touched Irina’s lips. “Restrain yourself, female, or you will swallow more than you can breathe.”

  Choking back sobs (it was perfectly possible to cough underwater, she discovered), Irina fought to regain control of her emotions. There was something mesmerizing about the intelligent, cephalopodan eyes that peered back into her own. The dark, S-shaped pupils imparted a sense of serenity she had encountered only twice before; once in the approving gaze of a much-admired professor and later in the course of a romantic relationship that had lasted, alas, all too briefly. She ought to have found it completely alien, that octopodal stare. Allowing herself to be drawn in by it, she found only reassurance and encouragement. A backbone, it seemed, was not a prerequisite for compassion.

  “That’s better, my dear.” Letting his comforting tentacles slide off her exposed skin, the sage drifted away from her so he could address them all.

  “I think the female’s supposition is correct. From what she has told us, I believe she was indeed caught up in a current. Not the predictable daily current that runs back and forth between Yellecheg and Singarol, nor even the powerful Jinakaloach that sometimes roars southward along the shelf, but one of those periodic mysterious currents that appears only when the flows of the entire realworld undergo a sudden shift.”

  As she listened to the sage’s careful appreciation of what had happened to her, a captivated Irina ceased her crying.

  “There are currents that run between homes,” Oxothyr continued, “and currents that run between mountains. There are powerful water forces that groom the outer shelves and others that can sweep the unwary into the void itself when the mirrorsky is seriously disturbed. Flows can drag a swimmer into the deep or thrust them into caves from which they cannot escape. And then there are those currents that only but rarely catch and carry the unknowing not merely between seas but between worlds.” Raising an arm, he gestured at the watching Irina.

  “It is my opinion that this female void-breather, whom I have made into a whole merson, is one such unfortunate.”

  As the shaman’s words began to sink in, Irina refused to accept them. “That’s crazy. This is all crazy. I was diving in the ocean. It’s the same ocean. You—you people are legends.” Her gaze traveled from Oxothyr to Glint to the two arguing squid. “Maybe more than legends.”

  “No.” Chachel had little sympathy for anyone who refused to accept reality, however harsh it might be. “You are the legend. Or were. Now you are normal.” His spear point gestured in Oxothyr’s direction. “You have yet to properly thank the shaman for saving your life.”

  “Perhaps,” the kindly octopod murmured to Irina, “you are right, in some way that neither of us realizes. Oshenerth is a very large place indeed. The largest of all places. Currents that flow from your part to ours may also flow in the opposite direction.”

  She seized on it. “Then there’s a chance—I could get home?”

  “The universe does not operate according to chance,” he corrected her authoritatively.

  “Could—would—you help me?” She held up a webbed hand. “You changed me so I wouldn’t die here. Thank—thank you. You would have to change me back or I would die when I returned to my own ocean. At least, I imagine I would.”

  Nearby, Glint shook his head sadly. “She wants to breathe void.” He could not imagine what it might feel like to inhale nothing but nothingness, and did not want to.

  “I regret that I am occupied with other matters.” Eight arms formed a loose halo around the shaman. “Rumors and stories drift down to Sandrift from the far north, from the Dark Sea where the tarazok reside. They speak of unsettling changes, of migrations unnatural and forced. These concerns have been much on my mind of late.” Sympathy for her situation dwelled in his voice as well as in those remarkable limpid cephalopodan eyes.

  Observing the female, Chachel thought disgustedly to himself. Tridacna’s toes—the thing is going to start crying again. But the changeling did not.

  “I can’t ask you to defer work that you think important just for me,” Irina mumbled. “Maybe—maybe if I help you in it, you’ll be able to find time to help me?”

  Glint’s body rippled with laughter: it was blue. Chachel almost smiled. The shaman’s startling response killed both the cuttlefish’s color and the merson’s expression.

  “I accept your offer, though I have no notion how you might help.” The octopus flashed an appreciative pattern of stripes. “In a time when disturbing changes are in the water, an entirely different outlook on reality might be welcome. As I ponder them, I will try to find time to consider your unfortunate circumstances and see what might be done about them.”

  This time it was the visitor who swam toward the octopus. She proffered a hand. “Thank you! Right now, I guess all I have to offer is my thanks.”

  The mage studied the extended arm. “Am I supposed to do something with that?”

  “It’s how my kind seal an agreement. We shake hands.”

  “If I had one, I would comply.” Oxothyr flashed mild amusement. “Fortunately, my grasp is not so limited as those of mersons.” Reaching out with a t
entacle, he wrapped the end of it around her fingers. She could feel the suction from its suckers. The sensation was not unpleasant.

  The shaman withdrew his arm. “The question remains; what are we to do with you now? You cannot stay with me. As I mentioned, I am consumed with other worries. Nor do I have the proper company to offer you.” One eye flicked to his right.

  Sage he was not, but Chachel was immediately defiant. “No one stays with me, revered one. Not merson, not manyarm, and certainly not a changeling demon.”

  “Who would want to stay with you?” Glint whispered under his breath—and he was Chachel’s best friend.

  Oxothyr considered. One could tell he was deep in thought from the line of dark bands that ran in measured waves through his boneless body. As he mulled possibilities, Irina felt something tickle the small of her back.

  Whirling in the water column, she found herself confronted by the shaman’s multiarmed assistants. Tentacles waving, Sathi and Tythe hovered before her. Having been granted an unexpected reprieve, the spralaker they had cornered in a rock crevice hastened to flee via the nearest available crack in the surrounding coral wall.

  “Looks like a merson now,” Sathi observed thoughtfully, “but still talks funny.”

  “Say something funny,” Tythe urged her.

  “I wish I could.” Irina managed a smile.

  “So many teeth.” Zooming in sharply, Sathi made her flinch. Tentacle-tips reached out to poke all around the rim of her mouth. It felt as if she was being probed by a clutch of educated worms. “Like all mersons.”

  “Beak is better,” Tythe agreed. His skin flushed pink with orange dots.

  “You know, you two are kind of cute.” Reaching out, she began to caress the nearest squid, starting behind Tythe’s head and stroking back along the mantle toward the tail. The manyarm responded by staying motionless in the water while alternating bands of dark blue and purple ran through his body, following the touch of her webbed fingers. Admiring the dramatic color changes the cephalopod accomplished without effort, she found herself thinking of the phenomenon as visual purring.

  “I don’t care what you do with me,” she told Oxothyr. As she shifted her attention to Sathi, the two squid began pushing and shoving as each sought the caress of her soft but firm fingertips. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’m just happy to be alive.” Holding up her other hand, she marveled at the webbing that now connected its fingers. “Even if you had to change me into something—weird.”

  Oxothyr snapped out his contemplation. “I am sure we can find some kindly soul to take you in. In the meantime, I forget my manners. You must be famished.”

  “I am,” she admitted readily. “It’s been days since I had anything to eat or drink.”

  Glint flashed confusion. “What is ‘drink’? Is it like an oyster?”

  “No,” she started to explain, “it’s …” She stopped. In this world, none of her new acquaintances drank. If anything, their world drank them. Come to think of it, in the course of her dreamlike transformation her thirst had also vanished. Parting her lips, she sucked in a mouthful of salty water. There was no sensation of quenching. The utter absence of thirst, of any desire to drink, was unsettling—and not a little liberating. But she was still hungry.

  “I have all manner of victuals,” a gracious Oxothyr assured her. “Sathi! Tythe!” The two curious squid immediately snapped to attention; parallel to the mirrorsky, tentacles held out straight in front of them. “How would you like yours prepared?” Oxothyr asked her. “My kitchen is a simple one, but I myself am very fond of spices.”

  “I’m hungry enough to eat a whole mackerel raw!” she told him. Which, the sage’s comment about spices notwithstanding, was quite possibly to be the case. It was self-evident that she was going to have to get used to eating uncooked food. A good thing, she mused, that she liked sushi. She turned to her rescuers, merson and cuttlefish.

  “You’ll stay and eat with me, won’t you? There are so many questions I need to ask.”

  “Ask them of one whose business it is to dispense answers.” His tone curt as ever, Chachel spun and finned back toward the entrance to the shaman’s home. “I have wasted enough time here.”

  “Yes,” murmured Glint, “you mustn’t let courtesy and company, conversation or conviviality, keep you from an afternoon of solitary melancholic contemplation.”

  The merson stabbed his spear in the manyarm’s direction, a half-hearted thrust the agile cuttlefish avoid easily. Then the gruff one-eyed merson was gone, swallowed up by the blackness of the tunnel. Altered among marvels, transformed in body and perception, a bewildered Irina still found time to wonder at the source of the merson’s undeviating irritability.

  “He doesn’t like me,” she muttered.

  “He doesn’t like anybody.” Sidling up alongside her, Glint turned a reassuring maroon. “And nobody likes him. Except me.”

  She eyed the hovering cephalopod. “Why do you like him?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Lateral fins rippling like strips of clear plastic held horizontal in a steady breeze, the cuttlefish moved forward to gaze after his departed companion. “I’m mad. Why else would I go on pair-hunts with an insufferable outcast like Chachel and risk the jeers of my peers?”

  “You strike me as perfectly sane.” Extending an arm, she used her fingers to stroke him the same way she had the shaman’s assistants. His color and body pattern changed immediately in response to her touch.

  “Ummm … a little lower and to the right. That’s it,” he hummed as he drifted closer to her. “Just behind my siphon.”

  Food soon appeared in plenty. While Irina devoured everything that was set before her and the two squid used their tentacles to wave off (and occasionally eat) the small fish and krill-like crustaceans who occupied the same ecological niche as terrestrial flies, she periodically interrupted her meal to ask questions of Glint. Having retired to his study to brood on the meaning of the disturbing rumors from the north, Oxothyr was no longer available to supply answers. Irina did not mind. She actually preferred to query the cuttlefish. Despite his unambiguous friendliness, the great bulk and penetrating gaze of the octopodal shaman was more than a little intimidating.

  As she nibbled her way through the salty center of a decapitated butterfish (everything here was salty, she mused), she finally thought to ask Glint directly about what had been troubling her ever since their first meeting.

  “What’s wrong with your friend? With Chachel? Why is he so rude to everyone? And why is he, as you said, an ‘insufferable outcast’?”

  “He’s not rude.” Fragments of chitinous shell spiraled lazily downward from beneath the cuttlefish’s mouth as he methodically demolished a crab. “He’s brusque. He is an outcast because that’s the life he’s chosen for himself. The reason’s the same, I think, for the ‘insufferable’ part.”

  “But why?” Sitting on a shelf of plate coral that grew outward from the inner wall of the greeting chamber, she found herself using her teeth to scrape the last bits of flesh from bone as naturally as a chef preparing the ingredients for a chowder. “He’s more than unfriendly: he’s openly hostile. Why? I never did him any harm.”

  Finishing the last of his crab, Glint turned toward her. As he spoke, he used his sensitive tentacles to clean the area around his beak. Indicative of his sudden seriousness, his body turned a dark yellow.

  “It’s not you,” the cuttlefish explained in a tone turned suddenly somber. “It was a mob that made him what he is. It all happened many years ago.”

  So solemn was the cephalopod’s manner that Irina felt compelled to set the remainder of her own meal aside. “A ‘mob’?”

  “That’s what is called a school of sharks.” Pivoting, Glint used both hunting tentacles to gesture back the way they had come. “In Chachel’s case, they were mostly oceanic whitetips and makos, working together as a gang.” Reflecting his feelings, his body turned white with unsightly black splotches. “It was ugly, it was bloody
. I know: I was there.”

  Sitting cross-legged on the pale blue shelf, illuminated by the light that was still pouring in through the open top of the chamber, Irina stared at the cuttlefish. “You were there? But that’s impossible. Your—you people—only live a couple of years or so, and Chachel is at least my age.”

  One eye regarded her intently. “What are you saying? My people live as long as yours.”

  “Maybe here they do.” She considered thoughtfully. “That might explain why despite showing so much intelligence, cuttlefish like you, and octopods like Oxothyr, and squid where I come from, don’t have any higher skills like communication. They don’t live long enough to learn. I wonder—if you took an octopus from where I come from, from my ocean, and extended its lifespan by a factor of ten or twenty, how much knowledge would it be able to acquire? How smart could it become? As smart as its older counterparts here?”

  “Ask Oxothyr. He is ‘of an age.’” Pivoting, Glint gestured upward toward the open water and the mirrorsky above. “I will tell you how Chachel became the way he is.…”

  — IV —

  The crimson feather star was graceful, beautiful, and lost. Multiple downy bright-red arms propelled it slowly through the water. Though some of its kin favored the depths, that was not the case with the red wanderer. It had been carried away from the reef by a sudden surge of strong current. Now it found itself out in open water without a potential hiding place in sight. It could not avoid the hand that reached for it.

  Tempting toxins, a youthful Chachel flicked his fingertips playfully at the ends of the feathery arms but did not quite make contact. The weak-swimming echinoderm bobbed in the water, unable to escape. It tried curling its fragile arms in upon its body, which was miniscule in comparison to the spray of furry limbs. Grinning, the young merson continued to toy inoffensively with the creature. In the open ocean, anything was a diversion.