Seaborn

by Chris Howard

  "The locks are a series of steps to bring the Maria Draughn to the level of Lake Gatun in central Panama—the lake is about eighty-five feet higher than the Pacific,” Aldrich explained. “Then there's another set of locks that step us down into the Caribbean. While we're going through, there's always a crew from the Panama Canal Authority aboard."

  Aleximor looked at him with more interest. “Now, why would you tell me such a thing?"

  Aldrich started to shake his head, not understanding her question. “I want to be here when you make your ... next move. Then I will stop you."

  "Next move?"

  "McHutcheon's missing. Officer McHutcheon. I know you had something to do with it."

  "Daniel? The doctor? Missing?” Aleximor put on his most convincing clueless posture and tone of voice. He covered his mouth with one hand, horrified. “And you suspect me? That I had something to do with it?"

  "More than suspect."

  It took a moment too long, but Aleximor managed to raise one of Corina's eyebrows. “Really?"

  "You killed Pinnet, Miss Lairsey. I knew Pinnet for a year—but I've known violent men like him all my life. I knew what he was capable of. Sure, he told us all stories, and he lied and exaggerated on a regular basis, but I have seen the real thing with my own eyes. I knew what he could destroy with his fists. I have been deceived by him—right under my own nose. And then you come along ... You didn't just kill him. You butchered him. Gouged his eyes out and shoved them down his throat. You cut the tendons in his arms so that he couldn't use them. I think you tortured him. I don't know how you managed to surprise him, but you did. He grew up in some of the worst boroughs of London, brawling and breaking bones since he was nine years old. There is simply no way you could have overpowered him without ... I don't know, some extraordinary ability."

  Aleximor stared at him, face expressionless. With some effort, he forced a weary smile. “Oh, very well, Mr. Aldrich. Think what you may. For now, I feel cramped in this box. If we are to be paired up, can you lead me outside? I would love to see the water. And these locks, these steps to the lake."

  Aldrich got to his feet, holding one hand to the door, still the gentleman with the enemy right in front of him. “After you, Miss Lairsey.” He said her name with a stiffness that discouraged familiarity. “We have passed Miraflores, and we're just about to enter the Pedro Miguel Locks. If you've never been this way before, it's worth seeing."

  The air was thick and moist, and squeaks and shrieks—strange to Aleximor's ears—came from the trees that lined the narrow channel leading to the Gatun locks.

  Aldrich pointed out one of the security boats keeping pace with the Maria Draughn, but Aleximor couldn't take his eyes away from the car carrier passing them, heading out of the Pacific-bound locks. It was larger than the Maria Draughn, not longer, but its hull towered over them, shiny blue and gray walls with long black slotted vents and windows.

  One of the carrier's crew—or one of the canal authority's line handlers—waved, and Aleximor lifted one open hand, webbed fingers stretched apart in the air.

  He had counted at least four handlers aboard the Maria Draughn and, as Aldrich had given away the plans, he had no intention of causing trouble before the ship finished its journey through the land of Panama.

  He was also interested in the skill and technology required to bring ships from one ocean to another by cutting channels through the land. The surfacers, he realized again, had progressed so far from his day.

  Small noisy machines on rails rolled along with the Maria Draughn, pulling the ship through the locks on braided blue cords as thick around as Corina's arm. Doors as large as the front gates of the Nine-cities opened and let the ship pass into another long narrow box.

  Every half hour one of the crew of the Maria Draughn stopped to convey orders from Captain Teixeira to Officer Aldrich, or receive a status from him. Aleximor watched them openly, taking in the kinds of clothes they wore, their hair and skin color. The surfacers’ skin ranged far beyond the medium browns of the Seaborn, from nearly black to pale like the inside of a shell. Some spoke English in accents so thick he couldn't understand their speech. They came from all over the surface of the world, mostly from places he had heard of, like England or India or Africa, but a few had come into the world on tiny islands in the Pacific or in central Asia from countries he didn't know existed.

  The crew members glanced at Corina repeatedly in the few minutes they spent with Officer Aldrich. Pinnet was dead, Officer McHutcheon had vanished. The trouble was obviously caused by the mermaid they'd mistakenly—or stupidly—taken aboard. The question was clear on all their faces: Who will be her next victim?

  The Maria Draughn entered a large forest-lined lake with clumpy islands at the edges, a steady slow ridge of green water left in her wake.

  Aldrich leaned on the railing, watching his charge.

  Corina Lairsey stared out at Lake Gatun, her focus darting to every boat, every shadow under the surface, like a child who has never seen so much water in one place. Her obvious sense of wonder took him back to his teens in Portsmouth where—not paying attention—he nearly ran down a young Royal Marine standing on the shoreline, staring out at the wide sea. Instead of getting angry, the Marine simply asked him if he “lived around here.” When he nodded, the Marine called him lucky, explaining that he'd never seen water wide enough to not “have land at the other end."

  "Have you any ships that go under the water, Officer Aldrich?"

  "Have I been on one, a submarine? Never."

  "Submarine.” Aleximor said the word slowly, savoring it. “How deep do they dive?"

  He shook his head, frowning with a guess. “Regularly, a thousand meters, probably more if they wanted to. Research subs go much deeper, to the abyss, the bottoms of the deepest trenches in the Pacific."

  Aleximor pressed the heels of his palms into the railing, looking along the Maria Draughn's hull. “Meters?"

  Aldrich shook his head. Americans. “Thirty-nine inches. About this high.” He held his hand flat at hip level.

  "To the ship's deck? Half of a fathom or so?"

  He nodded, his brows rolling into a suspicious scowl at the question. Who understood a fathom's length but did not know what a meter was? He shook off the obvious answer.

  A mermaid.

  He saw the fear in the crew's eyes, and where there was fear, there would be hatred and violence. Half the crew were as certain as he that Corina had something to do with McHutcheon's disappearance. The other half went all the way over to the other side, declaring Corina to be a sea-demon in the form of a woman. This brought Aldrich's mind around to the reason he was guarding her. He paused. Or was he guarding the rest of the crew from her?

  Aldrich cleared his throat, and let his angry scowl settle into place. “You know, there is a very old rule that goes back to Admiralty Law, and probably earlier, that goes something like, “He who kills a man on shipboard, shall be bound to the dead man and thrown into the sea."

  Aleximor leaned away from the railing and looked down at his host body, thinking that it was fortunate that it would not apply to Corina, being a woman.

  He lifted his gaze and smiled, saying instead, “Well, that would be something to experience—at least once.” His gaze dropped again, but to Gatun's swirling dark green water. “I imagine it is quite painful to hit the water from this height—especially since everything falls so easily through this thin air."

  Aldrich's focus swung to the lake—but only for a moment. “Probably break half the bones in your body."

  "How do you get off of a ship, once on one?"

  "The tugboats push us up against the pier, we tie up, and lower the walkway."

  "And when there is an urgent situation?"

  He hesitated over explaining emergency procedures, finally deciding to just point the lifeboats out. “The orange boat there, mounted on those rails—that's the starboard lifeboat. There's another on the portside."

  Aleximor stared hard
at the two bright orange elliptical pods, trying to guess how they were used, but decided to cut his curiosity short. Aldrich was suspicious. There was no sense in handing him fuel for more suspicion—or any other advantage.

  He mimicked Aldrich and leaned on the rail, watching the other canal traffic pass them in the opposite direction, a gleaming white yacht, a sharp gray military vessel with missile tubes and a forest of antennas, and two other cargo ships with orange, red and blue boxes stacked high on their decks.

  The pilot boat came alongside just before the Gatun Locks, and another pilot boarded. A security boat made a pass as the ship slipped into the first chamber, and Aldrich led Corina to the bow where they would be able to look over the top of the lock gates, into the chamber below. The Port of Cristobal stuck up through the haze in the distance, and beyond that, the Caribbean.

  "I love the Pacific,” whispered Aldrich, almost to himself. “But this is my side of the ocean. I'm just more comfortable here."

  "This is my side also,” said Aleximor. His prison had been in the Pacific. This was like coming home after a two-hundred-year absence. He looked back along the rail, most of his view blocked by cargo containers. “Extraordinary, Officer Aldrich. That you surface—that someone had the skill to cut a channel of water through the land, joining two oceans—and for ships of this size. Magnificent."

  He stared at her, getting the I'm-not-from-this-planet feeling again, along with a deep out-of-time vibe. “Where in California are you from? I've visited the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach many times. I have sat in the backseat of a car on a six-lane road full of cars that did not move for fifteen minutes. I've walked down Hollywood Boulevard, seen a movie at Grauman's Chinese Theater. I don't know much about Californians, but, Miss Lairsey, you have ... unsettled me several times with your questions and replies."

  Tell him you're from Berkeley.

  "I am from Berkeley.” Aleximor said it flatly as if that would settle all manner of bizarre behavior. Aldrich nodded, accepting this.

  That was easier than ... What is that?

  A spasm of pain swept through Corina's middle, cutting deeply, as if someone had shoved a spinning circular saw blade into her kidneys and let it rip up through the bottom of her rib cage. She felt heat and a dull thudding in her bones, then something hot and wet leaking inside her.

  Aleximor clutched at the railing, fingers slipping on the thick paint. The red metal deck swung into view. He fell into it, and everything went dark.

  * * * *

  Corina shoved her hands into the gray slabs of stone. She was on her knees, sobbing because the glow around her in the lightless space had doubled.

  "Why? Another one!” she shouted into the night.The question filled a deep cup of anger and she stirred in the answer. She didn't want to ask who. Officer McHutcheon—dead Officer McHutcheon—had killed someone and passed the bound soul to her.

  "I am as bad as you are, you fucking monster! You have done this to me!"

  The wind howled past her, throwing smaller chips of stone into the air and over the edge into nothingness. A rain of gray flaky material dissolved into clouds in the gusts. She picked a few bits out of her hair, twisting one braid around to examine its white tip. More of her hair had lost its color.

  "Corina, please.” Aleximor's voice came from the black space beyond the edge of her prison. She heard clicking sounds as he moved. “You have succeeded where I expected you to fail. I have given you the chance to live for a thousand years or more."

  "I am not alive. This is not living!” She looked down at the doubly bright glow coming from her body. There were deeper shadows at the edges of the flat gray stones under her feet. Shadows from the light coming from me—from two souls I have stolen from their original owners.

  "This is your life, Corina.” Aleximor's voice was calm, bordering on amused. “You made this place. This is you. The black sky, this roaring wind, the stones underfoot."

  Her anger died and her voice came out in a whisper. “You see this as I see it? This place is mine?"

  "We all build the worlds in our own souls."

  "But then why is this place ... so wrong?” My favorite things are music and the Pacific. Where are the violins and surf? Where's the concert hall in my head? Where's the ocean? Where's my damned Pacific Ocean? She spun away from Aleximor's direction and walked to the other end of her plot of soul-space. There was something right in Aleximor's words. She could feel it. The deaths of my mother and father are here, not buried in memories, but part of the air I breathe, part of the earth under my feet. Everything, it's here.

  She felt a flash of shame at the thought that her parents might show up, like something out of a dream, and boy would they be disappointed when they found out their daughter's GPA had slipped to 3.24 last semester, not to mention she was now joyriding through Panama on a cargo ship, stealing the souls of the crew.

  After a minute of appraisal, Aleximor answered her. “Interesting. It is not unformed. You are a complicated soul."

  "Go fuck yourself,” she muttered.

  She reached the edge, the sharp line separating rock from nothingness, then turned and walked back. She looked up from the the gray stones to the clicking in the darkness.

  "What are you? Why are you making that noise? Are you walking?"

  "In a manner of speaking."

  A bright star blazed into existence a little to the left of the direction she was facing. She squinted against the stab of light, its beams fiercely attacking the pure black space, clawing for something to perceive it.

  She whispered in awe. “Is that you? I can't even look directly at you.” The cause suddenly hit her. “Holy shit! How many souls have you ... taken?"

  Aleximor stood up, his long black hair twisting around his shoulders in greasy clumps, a thin black cloak tossed over one shoulder and across his body, one hand raised in greeting. The ground at his feet was smooth, flat, and gave off a metallic sheen. Then she realized he was standing on top of a huge machine with legs like a crab. It was a giant version of his familiar, the crab thing he had summoned to walk all over Pinnet, cutting tendons and gouging eyeballs as it went. He had been inside it, driving it—inside her soul-space, and then like an armored-division commander surveying a battlefield, he popped the hatch and climbed out to take in the view.

  "I have lost count, Corina. Tens of thousands at least."

  Stepping away from the edge, she headed toward the center of her space—giving new meaning to mooning. Kiss my glowing ass, Aleximor. Over her shoulder she asked, “Who is Melinoe? You called me that just before I left this place the last time."

  "Melinoe is a beautiful queen of the dead."

  "Really?” she asked, distracted by an unexpected flash of color in her empty black and white and gray world. She nearly tripped over the leg of a burgundy velvet chair with carved wood legs and back. The chair looked familiar. She had sat in this very one ... somewhere.

  She stopped and grabbed the chair for support. In front of it was a music stand and her cello. She leaned forward to read the sheets. Beethoven's String Quartet, Opus 130, Second Movement at the top of the page.

  "One of the last things I remember hearing before you showed up."

  She resisted the urge to sit and play, but not for long. “Oh, all right. One time through.” She took her cello off its stand, tuned it, and closed her eyes. As soon as she jumped into the first bar, the sound of a violin began accompanying her. Then another. Then a viola.

  Her tears started halfway through, but didn't run down her cheeks. They drifted off her face into the air. She slumped over the cello after the last note, exhausted, the bow slipping from her fingers to the rounded gray rocks.

  Her head shot up when the sense of disembodiment returned, the feeling of being inside her body without control over it. The view of her soul slid away and when her eyes opened, a chipping, dull-red painted surface came into view, unfocused at first.

  Aleximor dragged her body to its knees. Aldrich, wary
of a trap, had let Corina slide off the railing and fall to the deck. He'd left her there after turning her over and calling for an ice pack for the swelling on her forehead.

  "How long?” Corina's voice was dry and choked with mucus. Aleximor looked over at Officer Aldrich's shiny black shoes and coughed. “How long have I been lying here?"

  "Thirty minutes.” His voice was slow with indecision.

  Aleximor waved away Aldrich's help and climbed to the ship's railing. “You left me lying on the deck? Exposed to Hel—the sun? A gentleman would have carried me to my room."

  A gentleman would have caught me, said Corina as Aleximor gingerly touched the knot on her forehead.

  Aldrich stood back, his arms folded, glaring at her. “I had one of the crew carry you into the shade.” He indicated a pair of shipping containers stacked two high and casting a slightly cooler shadow over the bow.

  "The crew? I find your behavior to be nothing like a gentleman's."

  I think you're overdoing it.

  "And I find yours to be nothing like a lady's. It was my opinion that you were faking an illness—and that I was again to be the dupe. Pinnet fooled me a few days ago. You have fooled us all—including Captain Teixeira, whom I consider near unfoolable. I won't let it happen again.” He paused, his manners kicking in. “If you are truly not well, and this is not part of some plot of yours, then I apologize."

  Aleximor looked up into his clear gray-blue eyes and held them defiantly for a moment. “I accept your conditional apology, Officer Aldrich."

  Aldrich nodded, swallowing dryly. Despite all, he found something innocent and ... melancholy about her that made him clamp his teeth shut to keep anything he might say from being said.

  Aldrich nearly choked when, in a quiet, lost voice, Corina said, “A gentleman would have caught me.” But then Aleximor spoiled the moment by adding, “Everything falls so quickly in the Thin—through the air."

  Aldrich replaced his I'm-babysitting-an-alien scowl. Or mermaid, or whatever-monster-from-Berkeley-in-human-form.