by Ron Miller
Where am I? she wondered in sudden panic. “Where am I?” she attempted to say aloud, but could only produce a gargling, strangled sound. The fish, alarmed by this, shot off like a startled hummingbird. My stars! I’m under water! and with this thought came sudden panic, since she knew that no one could remain under water for as long as she must have and still be alive. And with that thought she involuntarily gasped. Instead of a deep breath that might have calmed her nerves, her lungs would not expand; nothing seemed to happen from her throat down. Rather, a cool, dense substance flowed into her mouth and out of louvres that had inexplicably appeared on her neck. In lieu of feeling the pain she expected upon breathing water, she found herself involuntarily appreciating its smoothness; it was like a crystal liqueur.
The big man smiled; his teeth looked exactly like pearls.
“Welcome, Bronwyn,” he said. “You’re looking well.”
“I don’t feel at all well,” she bubbled.
“Come, come!” said the big man, in a jovial tone altogether too jolly to suit the princess’s mood. “You look absolutely splendid!”
“I doubt it,” Bronwyn answered, and began to examine her body, or, rather, what was left of it. She almost immediately discovered that something very peculiar had happened to it. She put her hands to her head. It was covered with a soft and leafy substance that only superficially resembled hair; thick, green strands instead of the expected coppery waves. Continuing down she discovered, below where her ears should have been, strange flaps of skin that were opening and shutting in rythm with the gulps she was taking of what was now passing for air. Her skin felt sleek and glossy and when she held her hands in front of her face, she saw that they now had pretty translucent webbing between the fingers. Relunctantly, she turned a fearful gaze toward her legs and feet, or where her legs and feet would have been if they had not been replaced by a thick, muscular, tapering green cone that finished off in a broad, spatulate pair of fins, their translucent tips wafting gently in the undulating current like the huge leaves of some tropical plant. There was a smooth transition between her original skin and the skin of her new caudal appendage, the change seemed complete around the level of her hips, whose iridescent scales sparkled in a fashion that under any other circumstance, or on anyone else, she would have thought very pretty.
She was still terribly confused and not a little frightened, but what amazed Bronwyn most was that she thought she looked splendid, she who seldom thought twice about the appearance of her body, both thoughts usually disparaging. Whatever was possessing her, she wondered, that she thought she looked better as a fish than as a human?
By his magic, this stranger had, for some yet unscrutable reason, done this thing to her.
“Why have you done this?” she gurgled.
“Why not?” replied the uncanny being, shrugging his massive shoulders. “It seemed the thing to do, I suppose. Actually, it wasn’t even my idea.”
“Well, then, who are you, anyway, who has the time to engage in such unique frivolities?”
“I? I am Sithcundman . . . merely an ordinary Triton . . . as you are, now, yourself.”
“Triton? Tritons are gods!”
“Well, minor gods, if you will. If we were mortal, we’d probably only be certified public accountants or dentists,” he replied, modestly.
A Triton? thought Bronwyn. And I’m a Triton? A god? Even if only a minor one? What does that make me, then? An honorary god? A godlet? A godling?
“Well,” said the Triton, who had been looking increasingly impatient since her awakening, “enjoy yourself!” and began to swim away with powerful, lazy strokes of his broad flukes.
“What a moment!” bubbled Bronwyn.
“What?” came the reply, relunctantly spoken over a broad retreating shoulder.
“What am I supposed to do now?”
“You can do whatever you want. Look here,” he said, a little more patiently. “My associates decided to bestow a wonderful gift upon you; they must have had good reasons, but what those were I can only speculate; I’m only their instrument. After all, one of the prerogatives of godhood is arbitrariness.
“The waters of a hundred rivers are now pouring over you, washing away your mortality. What you do with this gift, as with all gifts of the gods, is up to you.”
Bronwyn was left alone, suspended like an orphan plankton, alone with her thoughts, which were poor enough company. Minutes or years may have passed, she had no way of telling. She was now an immortal living in a timeless environment where everything was equitable and changeless, with neither seasons, pulse nor pendulums. For a long time she dwelt in astonishment, mindless of purpose, moving with the great ebb and flow, pulled this way and that in the complex gavotte of the dancing moons, like an inexperienced square dancer passed from partner to partner. She was but one more anonymous corpuscle among the countless billions circulating in the sluggish, inexorable currents that formed the veins and arteries of a great, somnolent, infinitely powerful body, larger than all of the continents together and seething with life. like a newly-fledged bird testing its unfamiliar wings in the morning chill, an apt if inappropriate simile, she fearfuly and tentatively tried the pinions of her courage. She was a sea nymph among the periwinkle and intricate coral polyps, staghorn brittle as glass, the contemplative sponges; peaceful, pale anemones that bloom forever; a sweetly singing nymph that wove bright curtains of sunlight, winding like a thought in a philosopher’s passing fancy, flickering thoughts of phosphorescent beauty, among the crypts of everlasting change. Immediately, she discovered the freedom the gods had granted her. She set out to test the fathomless boundaries of her new abysses.
Bronwyn’s euphoria was a little spoiled by the realization that she did not know much about being a mermaid. Perhaps, it may be because I had always assumed that fish were so dumb that it could be neither too demanding nor very entertaining to be one. After all, how much can a fish expect of life, other than to live a life devoid of hooks, nets and bigger fish?
Fortunately, she wasn’t as alone as she had originally thought. She did not again see the Triton who had introduced her to her newly aquatic life, but there were many others, she discovered, and, if they were not actually Tritons they were at least merpeople, which is all that she asked. She first met her fellow mermaids when she finally dared to push her head through the membrane that separated the ocean from the air above. At first she felt as though she had emerged into a vacuum, and gulped and gasped at the insubstantial gas like a hooked grouper. This must be what it would have felt like had I given in to the urge to shed my spacesuit while on the moon. Her unused lungs, however, eventually reinflated and she breathed with more ease, though not before spewing up gallons of seawater. A ringing in her ears that she had at first associated with her imminent suffocation continued and after a moment she realized that what she was hearing was singing: a kind of wordless, tuneless a cappella. She rotated and saw that there was a mossy pile of wave-rounded rocks a few dozen yards away. Sunning themselves, draped over the slimy surfaces like a half dozen indolent seals, were mermaids (or merwomen, for who could tell?). Their brilliant-hued bodies glimmered in the sunlight like sequined cocktail dresses as their cauda flicked absently at the flying fish that arced over the picturesque group like startled grasshoppers.
“Look! It’s Bronwyn!” cried one and the others, shading their eyes against the glare of the mirror--like sea, strained to see the newcomer. “Come on over!” they invited. “Where have you been all this time?”
She cruised over to the islet and, with considerable difficulty, hauled herself out of the water, feeling, with much justification, as silly and awkward as a seal. It was the first time that she missed having legs. She managed a half-sitting, half-reclining position, the dangling tips of her tail still in the water, that she hoped was at least picturesque. It was uncomfortable to lie directly on her back because she knew there were a pair of dorsal fins decorating her spine and where the crack of her buttocks would have been
had she still possessed buttocks. She critically examined what she could see of herself as she lay stretched across the smooth, warm stone. The lower half of her torso, from approximately the line of her hips down, finished in a long, gracefully tapering cone that must have added two or three feet, at least, to her original not inconsiderable length. The blue-green scales of the cone merged almost imperceptibly with the rose quartz skin of her stomach. The sinuous curve of her tail as it draped over the boulders made her believe, rightly, that she had no joints (as a legged person in a mermaid costume would necessarily have, a fault that always spoiled the verisimilitude of such theatrical efforts), but rather that her spine continued on down to the very tip of the tail. She felt as though she still possessed her pelvis, however, and wondered briefly, if morbidly, what the mounted skeleton of a mermaid would look like. She noticed that she still possessed her navel, oddly enough, which winked back at her conspiratorially like the eye of a whale. From just below either hip fluttered pretty pelvic fins that she could open and close like translucent green paper fans. Doing this amused her for a minute or two. Her fingernails had a distinct aquamarine cast as so did her aureolæ and nipples, a color that, she thought, looked rather nice against the rosy cream of her skin. Her hair, so far as she could tell, was as lush as ever, but now possessed a lustrous berylline patina that shimmered as iridescently as a raven’s wing in the brilliant sunlight, like strands of green spun glass.
“Would you like a mirror?” asked one of the mermaids, after she and the others had allowed the newcomer her moment’s introspection.
“Thank you,” Bronwyn replied, taking the proffered glass from the mermaid’s slim-fingered hand. Bronwyn had noticed that she, herself, was considerably larger than the others, though it had not been obvious at all until their hands had approached. The mermaids were scarcely more, tail to crown, than five or six feet in length, dwarfed by the nearly ten feet or eleven commanded by the sea-Bronwyn. She felt like a whale among porpoises. They all looked very young, like attractive teenage human girls, though the princess knew that in fact they were immortal and were probably as old as the ocean itself. They also all looked very much alike; except for slight differences in coloring and size they could have been (and for all that Bronwyn knew, were) sextuplets. Bronwyn realized, with a blush that she hoped would go unnoticed, that she knew nothing of the sexual habits of merpeople; if they laid eggs in the hundreds, like frogs, it wouldn’t surprise her in the least. The mermaid’s faces were uniformly as fresh and round and vacuous as the glass globes that some fishermen use to bouy their nets.
Bronwyn gazed into the salt-tarnished looking glass and was both surprised and not entirely displeased by what she saw. Her face had suffered no major change, her eyes always had been green, other than the tint of her hair and the addition of the pulsating louvres on the sides of her neck, just below her ears, which latter had been reduced to mere token presences, like those of a seal’s. The gills were quiet now, she supposed because she was in the open air and breathing more or less normally, and were scarcely noticable slits. It was, all in all, the same peregrine face to which she had become both accustomed and resigned.
Had she ever had an experience with anyone that had not changed her in some way, though perhaps not so drastically as this last? It was a novel thought for the princess, she had for a very long time concerned herself, and had even, to her credit, worried, about the impact she had had on other people’s lives. Yet she had seldom considered how much she was herself an amalgam of experiences. Layer upon layer, like an onion or strudel: gypsies and fortune tellers; soldiers and cold-blooded hunters; madmen and madder princes; woodcutters and stonecutters; pirates and adventurers; villains and heroes; cowards and rapists; murderers and priests; faeries and changelings; gods and monsters and kings and scientists and monks and bears and children . . . Layer upon layer. like the iridescent chambers of the cowrie, nautilus or abalone, built up patiently layer by infinitesimal layer, -like the tissue-thin pages of a book, each one of which could be torn away until nothing was left but the empty boards. She looked down the glimmering length of her new body and thought of the cowrie’s shell: a beautiful compilation of pearl but entirely hollow inside.
“We thought you’d never show up,” said one of the mermaids. They were so indistinguishable that Bronwyn made no effort to single out who was talking at any particular time. She was unable to be certain whether one was doing all the talking, or whether, in rotation, they all took part in the conversation. It didn’t really seem to matter.
“We heard about your change ever so long ago,” said another.
“Ever so long!” emphasized either a third mermaid or the first one, not that it made any difference.
How long, Bronwyn wondered, is ‘ever so long’ to someone who is immortal? She recalled how the passage of time had been fearfully distorted during her sojourn with the faeries and, with a shiver, realized that, for all she knew, years or even decades might have passed since she had dropped into the ocean. Yet that hardly seemed credible; now that she thought of it, she had not even gotten hungry yet, at least not until this moment, when these first thoughts about food made her stomach give a playful little frisk of anticipation. And the little moon, she realized, looked scarcely different last night, imbedded like a phosphorescent spider in a cobweb of meteors, than it had when she and the professor had visited it. If much time had passed, and if Wittenoom were correct, surely there would have been noticeable differences in size and appearance. Wringing as much comfort from these reasonable deductions as she could, she returned her attention to her companion mermaids.
“I don’t suppose that there’s anything to eat around here, is there?”
“Eat?”
“Yes, I’m getting hungry and I don’t know when the last time was that I ate.”
“Eat? Well, I suppose so. Why not?”
“Is there something the matter with that?”
“Oh no! Of course not. It’s just that it’s something that doesn’t come up very often.”
“Don’t you eat, then?”
“Well, certainly, sometimes, for the fun of it. But, you see, being immortal there’s not actually any need for food or eating or any of that sort of thing. I mean, we’re immortal regardless; it’s actually pretty convenient. Musrum! I’d have to worry all the time about getting fat!”
“I must not be a full-fledged immortal, since I’m definitely getting hungry.”
“Of course you’re not a full-fledged immortal . . . ”
“You couldn’t be full-fledged anyway,” put in a mermaid who hadn’t before spoken, “since of course only birds can be fledged.”
“ . . . although there is, of course, no need to be embarrassed about this since this happens to mortals every now and then; that is, mortals in whom the Tritons have taken an interest. It is, in fact, a considerable honor . . . ”
“Get to the point, for heaven’s sake!” hissed one of the speaker’s companions.
“ . . . Well, as I was about to say, we’re quite used to mortal or even semi or demimortal peculiarities. Will this help?” The mermaid slapped the surface of the water with the flat of her flukes, making a sharp, shotgun--like report that was so unexpected that it made Bronwyn start. Simultaneously with the mermaid’s action a school (or flock) of flying fish shot from the waves like a covey of frightened quail. Each mermaid plucked a fish from the air as neatly as a professional baseball outfielder snatching an easy fly ball.
“Here you go,” the nearest mermaid said, offering her wriggling catch to the princess, who accepted the gift a little uneasily, wondering what she was now expected to do with it. She glanced at the others, but got little help other than expectant and eager expressions. With considerable relish the mermaids sucked the flesh from the bones of their fish like a child would suck a popsicle from its stick.
Great heavens above! They’re expecting me to eat this fish right now! She looked at the still-struggling fish, half hoping to detect in an eye th
at was, in actual fact, as devoid of expression as a spoonful of eggwhite, an imploring that would allow her to conscientiously return the poor animal to its home. But the creature only flopped mechanically, its gills pumping like a pair of bellows.
“Thanks very much,” she said, “but I think that I’ll save this for a snack later since, now that I think about it, I’m not as hungry as I thought.” With which words she deposited the fish into a basin of tidal water by her side, where it immediately and ungratefully began swimming in circles as though nothing had happened.
“That’s an excellent idea,” agreed the mermaid who had initiated the roundup, also tossing her fish into the little pool, as did the others. This proved to be so novel and fun that they caught another round of fish and tossed these, too, into the pool. They did this until the water had been entirely replaced by a pile of wriggling animals.
Bronwyn felt her tail begin to itch and when she looked at it, noticed that the scales were losing some of their luster. She swung the graceful appendage over the side of her rock to allow the waves to splash against it. The water was cool and the rehydrated scales were quickly soothed and regained their original shimmer. Brownyn admired how much they looked like tiny, bright sequins, clinquant under the golden light of the lowering sun.
Suddenly there was a kind of crackling in the air, like Musrum balling up a mile of cellophane in His fist, and at the same time a peculiar prickling came all over Bronwyn’s skin. The air became strangely tense and metallic, awakening an odd memory somewhere within the princess’s entranced brain.
