by Kij Johnson
I knew they did. Corp ships liked to sink the competition, and they had a dozen different underhanded ways to do it.
Jorge Felipe said at my elbow, “Gonna let them chase us off?”
“No,” I said, but I nodded at the pilot and said, “Mary Magdalena, back us off.”
We moved round to the other side.
“What are you going to do?” Niko asked.
“We’re going to cut the engines and let the currents creating the Lump pull us into it,” I said. “They’re watching for engine activity. After it gets dark, they won’t notice us cutting. In the meantime, we’ll act like we’re fishing. Not even act, really.”
We broke out fishing gear. The mermaids had deserted us, and I hoped to find a decent school of something, bottom-feeders at least. But the murk around the Lump was lifeless. Plastic tendrils waved like uneasy weed, gobbling our hooks till the rods bent and bowed with each wave.
I wanted the corp ships to see our lines. Every hour, a buzz boat would whoosh by, going between two of the larger ships.
When the sun went down, I went below deck. The others followed. I studied the weather readout on the main console’s scratched metal flank.
It took longer than I thought, though. By the time we’d managed to cut our chunk free with the little lasers, draining the batteries, the sun was rising. Today was cloudier, and I blessed the fog. It’d make us harder to spot.
We worked like demons, throwing out hooks, cutting lumps free, tossing them into the cargo net. We looked for good stuff, electronics with precious metals that might be salvaged, good glass, bit of memorabilia that would sell on the Internet. Shellfish—we’d feed ourselves for a week out of this if nothing else. Two small yellow ducks bobbed in the wake of a bottle wire lacing. I picked them up, stuck them in my pocket.
“What was that?” Jorge Felipe at my elbow.
“What was what?” I was hauling in orange netting fringed with dead seaweed.
“What did you stick in your pocket?” His eyes tightened with suspicion.
I fished the ducks out of my pocket, held them out. “You want one?”
He paused, glancing at my pocket.
“Do you want to stick your hand in?” I said. I cocked my hip towards him. He was pissing me off.
He flushed. “No. Just remember—we split it all. You remember that.”
“I will.”
There’s an eagle, native to the islands, We call them brown-wings. Last year I’d seen Jorge Felipe dealing with docked tourists, holding one.
“Want to buy a bird?” he asked, sitting in his canoe looking up at the tan and gold and money-colored boat. He held it up.
“That’s an endangered species, son,” one tourist said. His face, sun-reddened, was getting redder.
Jorge looked at him, his eyes flat and expressionless. Then he reached out with the bird, pushed its head underwater for a moment, pulled it out squawking and thrashing.
The woman screeched. “Make him stop!”
“Want to buy a bird?” Jorge Felipe repeated.
They couldn’t throw him money fast enough. He let the brown-wing go and it flew away. He bought us all drinks that night, even me, but I kept seeing that flat look in his eyes. It made me wonder what would have happened if they’d refused.
By the time the buzz boats noticed us, we were underway. They could see what we had in tow and I had the Mary Magdalena monitoring their radio chatter.
But what I hoped was exactly what happened. We were small fry. We had a chunk bigger than I’d dared think, but that wasn’t even a thousandth of what they were chewing down. They could afford to let a few scavengers bite.
All right, I thought, and told the Mary Magdalena to set a course for home. The worst was over.
I didn’t realize how wrong I was.
Niko squatted on his heels near the engines, watching the play of sunlight over the trash caught in the haul net. It darkened the water, but you could barely see it, see bits of plastic and bottles and sea wrack submerged underneath the surface like an unspoken thought.
I went to my knees beside him. “What’s up?”
He stared at the water like he was waiting for it to tell him something.
“It’s quiet,” he said.
Jorge Felipe was atop of the cabin, playing his plastic accordion. His heels, black with dirt, were hooked under the rungs of the ladder. I’d let the plastic fray there, and bits bristled and splayed like an old toothbrush. His music echoed out across the water for kilometers, the only sound other than splash or mermaid whistle.
“Quiet,” I said, somewhere between statement and question.
“Gives you time to think.”
“Think about what?”
“I was born not too far from here.” He stared at the twitch and pluck in the sun-splattered water.
“Yeah?”
He turned to look at me. His eyes were chocolate and beer and cinnamon. “My mother said my dad was one of them.”
I frowned. “One of what?”
“A mermaid.”
I had to laugh. “She was pulling your leg. Mermaids can’t fuck humans.”
“Before he went into the water, idiot.”
“Huh,” I said. “And when he came out?”
“She said he never came out.”
“So you think he’s still there? Man, all those rich folks, once they learned that the water stank and glared, they gave up that life. If he didn’t come out, he’s dead.”
I was watching the trash close to us when I saw what had sparked this thought. The mermaids were back. They moved along the net’s edge. It shuddered as they tugged at it.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Picking at it,” Niko said. “I’ve been watching. They pick bits off. What for, I don’t know.”
“We didn’t see them around the Lump. Why now?”
Niko shrugged. “Maybe all that trash is too toxic for them. Maybe that’s why we didn’t see any fish near it either. Here it’s smaller. Tolerable.”
Jorge Felipe slid onto his heels on the deck.
“We need to drive them off,” he said, frowning at our payload.
“No,” Niko protested. “There’s just a few. They’re picking off the loose stuff that makes extra drag, anyhow. Might even speed us up.”
Jorge Felipe gave him a calculating look. The look he’d given the tourist. But all he said was, “All right. That changes, let me know.”
He walked away. We stood there, listening to the singing of the mermaids.
I thought about reaching out to take Niko’s hand, but what would it have accomplished? And what if he pulled away? Eventually I went back in to check our course.
By evening, the mermaids were so thick in the water that I could see our own Lump shrinking, dissolving like a tablet in water.
Jorge Felipe came out with his gun.
“No!” Niko said.
Jorge Felipe smiled. “If you don’t want me to shoot them, Niko, then they’re taking it off your share. You agree it’s mine, and I won’t touch a scale.”
“All right.”
“That’s not fair,” I objected. “He worked as hard as us pulling it in.”
Jorge Felipe aimed the gun at the water.
“It’s okay,” Niko told me.
I thought to myself that I’d split my share with him. I wouldn’t have enough for the Choice, but I’d be halfway. And Niko would owe me. That wouldn’t be a bad thing.
I knew what Choice I’d make. Niko liked boys. I liked Niko. A simple equation. That’s what the Choice is supposed to let you do. Pick the sex you want, when you want it. Not have it forced on you when you’re not ready.
The Mary Magdalena sees everything that goes on within range of her deck cameras. It shouldn’t have surprised me when I went back into the cabin and she said, “You like Niko, don’t you?”
“Shut up,” I said. I watched the display. The mermaids wavered on it like fleshy shadows.
“I don
’t trust Jorge Felipe.”
“Neither do I. I still want you to shut up.”
“Lolo,” she said. “Will you ever forgive me for what happened?”
I reached over and switched her voice off.
Still, it surprised me when Jorge Felipe made his move. I’d switched on auto-pilot, decided to nap in the hammock. I woke up to find him fumbling through my clothes.
“What you pick up, huh? What did you find out in the water?” he hissed. His breath stank of old coffee and cigarettes and the tang of metal.
“I didn’t find anything,” I said, pushing him away.
“It’s true what they say, eh? No cock, no cunt.” His fingers rummaged.
I tried to shout but his other hand was over my mouth.
“We all want this money, eh?” he said. “But I need it. You can keep on being all freaky, mooning after Niko. And he can keep on his own loser path. Me, I’m getting out of here. But I figure you, you don’t want to be messed with. Your share, or I’m fucking you up worse than you are already.”
If I hadn’t turned off her voice, the Mary Magdalena would have warned me. But she hadn’t warned me before.
“Are you going to be good?” Jorge Felipe asked. I nodded. He released my mouth.
“No one’s going to sail with you, ever again.”
He laughed. “World’s a whoooooole lot bigger than this, freaky chicoca. Money’s going to buy me a ticket out.”
I remembered the gun. How far would he go in securing his ticket? “All right,” I said. My mouth tasted like the tobacco stains on his fingers.
His lips were hot on my ear. “Okay then, chicoca. Stay nice and I’ll be nice.”
I heard the door open and close as he left. Shaking, I untangled myself from the hammock and went to the steering console. I turned on the Mary Magdalena’s voice.
“You can’t trust him,” she said.
I laughed, panic’s edge in my voice. “No shit. Is there anyone I can trust?”
If she’d been a human, she might have said “me.”
Being a machine, she knew better. There was just silence.
When I was little, I loved the Mary Magdalena and being aboard her. I imagined she was my mother, that when Mami had died, she’d chosen not to go to heaven, had put her soul in the boat to look after me.
I loved my uncle too. He let me steer the boat, sitting on his lap, let me run around the deck checking lines and making sure the tack was clean, let me fish for sharks and rays. One time, coming home under the General Domingo Bridge, he pointed into the water.
At first it looked as though huge brown bubbles were coming up through the water. Then I realized it was rays, maybe a hundred, moving through the waves.
Going somewhere, I don’t know where.
He waited until I was thirteen. I don’t know why. I was as skinny and unformed that birthday as I had been the last day I was twelve. He took me out on the Mary Magdalena and waited until we were far out at sea.
He raped me. When he was done, he said if I reported it, he’d be put in jail. My grandmother would have no one to support her.
I applied for Free Agency the next day. I went to the clinic and told them what had been done. That it had been a stranger, and that I wanted to become Ungendered. They tried to talk me out of it. They’re legally obliged to, but I was adamant. So they did it, and for a few years I lived on the streets. Until they came and told me my uncle was dead. The Mary Magdalena, who had remained silent, was mine.
I could hear Jorge Felipe out on the deck, playing his accordion again. I wondered what Niko was doing. Watching the water.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said to myself. But the boat thought responded.
“You can’t trust him.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.
On the display. the mermaids’ fuzzy shadows intersected the garbage’s dim line. I wondered what they wanted, what they did with the plastic and cloth they pulled from us. I couldn’t imagine that anyone kept anything, deep in the sea, beyond the water in their gills and the blood in their veins.
When Jorge Felipe went in to make coffee, I squatted beside Niko. He was watching the mermaids still. I said, urgently, “Niko, Jorge Felipe may try something before we land. He wants your share and mine. He’d like the boat, too. He’s a greedy bastard.”
Niko stared into the water. “Do you think my dad’s out there?”
“Are you high?”
His pupils were big as flounders. There was a mug on the deck beside him. “Did Jorge Felipe bring that to you?”
“Yeah,” he said. He reached for it, but I threw the rest overboard.
“Get hold of yourself, Niko,” I said. “It could be life or death. We’ve got sixteen hours to go. He won’t try until we’re a few hours out. He’s lazy.”
I couldn’t tell whether or not I’d gotten through. His cheeks were angry from the sun. I went inside and grabbed my uncle’s old baseball hat, and took it out to him. He was dangling an arm over the side. I grabbed him, pulled him back.
“You’re going to get bit or dragged over,” I said. “Do you understand me?”
Jorge Felipe grinned out of the cabin. “Having a good time there, Niko? You wanna go visit dad, go splashy splashy?” He wiggled his fingers at Niko.
“Don’t say that!” I said. “Don’t listen to him, Niko.”
Something flapped in the water behind us and we all turned. A huge mermaid, half out of the water, pulling itself onto the trash’s mass. I couldn’t tell what it was trying to do—grab something? Mate with it?
The gun went off. The mermaid fell back as Niko yelled like he’d been shot. I turned, seeing the gun leveling on Niko, unable to do anything as it barked. He jerked, falling backward into the cargo net’s morass.
His hands beat the water like dying birds. Something pulled him under, maybe the mermaids, maybe just the net’s drag.
I tried to grab him, but Jorge Felipe’s hand was in my collar pulling me back with a painful blow to my throat. The hurt doubled me over, grabbing for breath through the bruise’s blaze.
“Too bad about Niko,” Jorge Felipe said. “But I need you to keep piloting. Go inside and stay out of trouble.” He pushed me towards the cabin and I stumbled into it, out of the wind and the sound of the water.
I stood, trying to catch my breath, my hands on the panels. I wondered if Niko had drowned quickly. I wondered if that was how Jorge Felipe intended to kill me. All around, the boat hummed and growled, mechanical sounds that had once felt as safe as being inside my mother’s womb.
I waited for her to say something, anything. Was she waiting for me to ask her help? Or did she know there was nothing she could do?
Underneath the hum, I could hear the mermaids singing, a whine that echoed through the metal, crept into the Mary Magdalena’s habitual drone.
When I said, “How much farther?” she didn’t pretend she didn’t understand the question.
“Fifteen hours, twenty minutes.”
“Any weapons on board I don’t know about?” I pictured my uncle having something, anything. A harpoon gun or a shark knife. Something wicked and deadly and masculine.
But she answered, “No.” The same flat voice she always used.
I could have wept then, but that was girlish. I was beyond that. I was the master of the Mary Magdalena. I would kill Jorge Felipe somehow, and avenge my friend.
How, I didn’t know.
Outside splashing, something caught in the netting. I pushed my way out the door as Jorge Felipe stared down into the water. I shoved my way past him, unsure for a moment whether or not he’d hinder me. Then his hands were beside me, helping me pull a gasping Niko onto the boat.
“Welcome back, man,” he said as Niko doubled over on hands and knees, spewing water and bile across the decking.
For a moment I thought, of course, everything would be fine. He’d reconsidered killing us. We’d pull into port, sell the cargo, give him the money and go
our separate ways.
I saw him guessing at my thoughts. All he did was rest his hand on his gun and smile at me. He could see the fear come back, and it made him smile harder.
Behind me, Niko gasped and sputtered. There was another sound beside the hiss and slap of the waves. Mary Magdalena, whispering, whispering. What was she saying to him? What was going on in his head, what had he seen in his time underwater? Had the mermaids come and stared in his face, their eyes as blank as winter, his father there, driven mad by solipsism and sea song, looking at his son with no thoughts in his head at all?
I stood, Jorge Felipe looking at me. If I locked myself in the cabin, how long would it take him to break in? But he gestured me away as I stepped towards the door.
“Not now,” he said, and the regret in his tone was, I thought, for the time he’d have to spend at the wheel, awake, more than anything else.
She was whispering, still whispering, to Niko. Why hadn’t she warned me? She must have known what was brewing like a storm beneath the horizon. I couldn’t have been the first.
I started to turn to Jorge Felipe, Mary Magdalena’s voice buzzing under my nerves like a bad light bulb. Then weight shifting on the deck, Niko’s footprints squelching forward as he grabbed at Jorge Felipe, backpedaling until they fell together over the side in a boil of netting and mermaids.
In a fairytale, the mermaids would have brought Niko back to the surface while they held Jorge Felipe down below, gnawing at him with their sharp parrot beaks. In some stories, dolphins rescued drowning sailors, back when dolphins were still alive. And whales spoke to the fishing boats they swam beside, underneath clear-skied stars, in waters where no mermaids sang.
But instead no one surfaced. I turned the boat in great circles, spining the cargo net over and over again. Finally I told the Mary Magdalena to take us home. It had started to rain, the sullen sodden rain that means winter is at elbow’s length.
I took the yellow ducks out of my pocket and put them on the console. What did Jorge Felipe think I’d found? I stared at the display and the slow shift and fuzz of the earth’s bones, far below the cold water.
