by Dima Zales
“And when your neighbors are all also fishermen, you’ve gotta fish harder than them,” Ujarak added.
“Fish harder!” Billy echoed, as though it were a prayer in a gospel choir.
“We make a lot of money, but it’s in fleeting periods of time. The fishing season is always gone in minutes. Every single day of fishing that we lose is a massive amount of money lost as well, and it hurts,” said Doughlas. “I start getting really depressed if I don’t make money for a single day—you don’t even understand.”
“If you lost your life on one of these excursions, the pain of losing potential income would be the least of your concerns,” Trevain muttered.
Callder advanced on Trevain threateningly, speaking in a slow and steady voice. “We’re not all rich like you, big brother. Some of us need to work in order to pay our bills.”
“You mean you need to pay off those credit cards you maxed out gambling, right Callder?” Trevain shot back.
“Look bro—you haven’t taken a day off since you became captain. You’re a beast! It’s downright weird. You’re like some kind of demonic machine-thing.”
“Thanks. I believe you’ve taken enough days off for the both of us.”
“Look, shut up! I’m trying to be nice here. I mean… you’re getting pretty old. Someday, eventually, you’re probably going to retire, right?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Trevain asked with a modicum of panic. “Retire? Have you gone mad?”
“No, seriously—listen. You do a lot of other things. You read and you plant shit in your stupid garden. I do nothing except fish during the fishing season and gamble when I’m not fishing. I’m basically nothing if I’m not a fisherman. So just let me do it for once. Let me take over and be the captain for one fucking day while you relax at home. That way everyone gets what they want. The crew can keep fishing, and you can stay at home where it’s safe.”
“It’s not just about me! I want everyone to be safe. I have a very bad feeling about this.”
“About this beautiful day?” Callder asked, making grand gestures around himself. “Big brother, maybe you need a break. A sabbatical. I know you’ve been taking this Leander thing hard although you’re acting tough. Let me be the head honcho for this trip. We’ll turn around and drop you off then we’ll head over to fish near Kodiak. We’re good to go, right crew?”
Many of the crew members nodded. Trevain looked around, making eye contact with all of them and frowning. “You really want to be the captain?” Trevain asked the younger man slowly. “You want to act as my deputy, take charge of things?”
“Why not? I am your brother. It could be good practice for when you retire.”
Trevain sighed. “And when do you think that will be, kid? I could have retired at thirty if I really wanted to sit around on my thumbs.”
“But there’s a woman in your life now. Maybe you can relax a little.”
“It’s not like that, Callder. She’s just a girl.”
“The same way you were just a boy at her age?” Callder snorted. “She’s a woman if I ever saw one. Hell, her vocabulary even intimidates me!”
Doughlas nodded. “He’s right there, Captain. You need a woman.”
Trevain groaned. “Guys, my personal life isn’t up for discussion. Let’s keep this work-related. I’m only asking that we take a break for one day.”
Brynne smiled tenderly. “That’s ’cause you never have a personal life, Murphy. I hate to say this, but I think Callder’s right.”
“You do?” Trevain scowled, thinking to himself that he would rather put Brynne in charge of his ship than Callder. However, he could see on his brother’s face that beyond the confident words the younger man was seeking his approval and recognition. What kind of monster would he be if he withheld it from him? He was the only family that the boy had. Callder was his responsibility.
“Do you guys think he can do this?” Trevain asked his crew.
The first mate Doughlas had a skeptical look on his face, but he only shrugged. “He can’t make it worse. We know what our jobs are.”
“Let him give it a shot, Trevain,” Brynne said gently. She was smiling brightly at seeing Callder show a bit of initiative. Trevain knew that Brynne had always had a soft spot for his younger brother. She liked her men the way she liked her cars and houses—pathetic fixer-uppers that she could feel sympathy for initially and profoundly proud of after the renovations. She had never successfully renovated a man, of course.
“Alright, alright, fine,” Trevain said, taking a deep breath in surrender. “Callder, I’ll give you the chance to do this. You can run the rest of the excursion.”
“Awesome!” said Callder gleefully. “You won’t be disappointed. You deserve to spend some down time with your new girlfriend.”
“I told you she’s not—”
“She will be. I like that Aazuria, even though she talks a bit funny. So go home. Take her out for dinner. Show her your stupid plants.”
10
“He is especially well-preserved for a land dweller of his proportionately advanced years. What if she falls in love with him?” Corallyn asked, wriggling to allow the jets of water better access to massage her back.
“She deserves the opportunity to ‘fall in love,’ but she is much too reasonable a person to lose her head about it. We need her, and she won’t neglect us,” Sionna answered, flipping a page of her book. She was seated on the edge of the hot tub and only allowed her calves to dangle inside. Her twin sister was, contrarily, completely submerged.
“What if we all mate with regular land-dwelling humans?” Corallyn asked. “We’ll… what’s the word? Hybridize? All of our children will be mostly human and our descendants will be regular boring ol’ terrestrials. They’ll live shortened lives and never even have a chance to see Adlivun. I would probably be dead already if I were a land-dweller!”
“There are negative aspects of that scenario,” Sionna answered distractedly as she continued her reading.
Corallyn became annoyed at being ignored and pulled Visola out from under the surface. “What do you think about that? Us hybridizing with humans?”
Visola blinked the water out of her eyes with her red eyelashes. “We are human, aren’t we? What’s the big fuss?”
“You know what I mean!” Corallyn said in exasperation.
“Well,” Visola said thoughtfully, “after working at the strip club, I’ve learned that men generally prefer us to land-dwelling women. If you want to go out and ‘hybridize’ when you look old enough, you shouldn’t have a problem finding a mate.”
“Why is that?” Corallyn asked.
Visola grinned. “The buoyancy of water keeps our breasts from sagging. Gravity, man. If I had lived on land for five hundred years my breasts would be dragging on the floor!”
“No. Technically they would be dust. You wouldn’t be able to live for five hundred years on land,” Sionna corrected.
“Well, hypothetically,” Visola explained jauntily. “But look at you, Coral. You’ve lived ninety years and you don’t even have breasts yet. Now that’s a superior lack of senescence.”
“Yes, yes, of course. We’re so superior,” Corallyn muttered, “but if we’re so great, why are there so few of us and so many of them? And why do they have television and the internet, but we don’t?”
Visola splashed water at the young girl in response, and they both laughed.
“Hey! Reading here. Don’t get my pages wet,” Sionna said sternly.
“Sorry,” Corallyn said. She leaned her head back against the concrete edge of the hot tub. “I know my questions sound silly to you two, since you’ve lived on land among humans before. It’s all just so new to me. One moment we’re calling ourselves human, and the next we’re saying that we’re superior. I’m having difficulty drawing the line between them and us. Sometimes there is no line. Sometimes there’s a canyon.”
“Homo sapiens marinus,” Aazuria said as she entered the room and app
roached the girls in the hot tub. Elandria trailed behind her with her hands wrapped around her braid.
“What’s that?” Corallyn asked.
“It is what I believe we would be identified as if they ever ‘discovered’ us,” Aazuria said with a smile, crouching down beside the hot tub. “We are human, but it is undeniable that we have diverged at least enough to warrant a subspecies.”
“Perhaps,” said Sionna curiously, looking up from her book. “Yet there are a lot of human beings with unusual traits. There have been Alaskan Inuit families with blue skin. One wouldn’t consider a person with that condition, although they look extremely unique, to be of a different species.”
“Yes, but that’s not really functionally any different,” Visola argued. “Our people have lived separate from land-dwellers for tens of thousands of years. Instead of treating our unique traits as a disease or unfavorable mutation, they were revered, preserved, and propagated. Additional changes have happened to our bodies over time, and we’ve been perfected. I believe it makes sense for us to have our own subspecies.”
“There’s one problem with that, Viso,” Sionna said, closing her book and placing it aside. “We have never really completely been separate from the land-dwellers. Perhaps it’s due to some innate nostalgia, or sentimentality, but our culture has always been intricately tied with theirs. We have always interbred with them, even when it was disallowed. Many of us have chosen to live among them, and I would argue that our true differences are much more political than biological.”
“Stop, stop. You guys are confusing me,” Corallyn complained, putting her hands to her head. “I just asked a simple question, and now my thoughts are even more muddled than before.”
Elandria smiled and lifted her hands to contribute. “That was not even a slightly simple question, Coral. As you can see, there are very conflicting opinions on the matter. Just remember: your mother was a completely human land-dweller. Father said she hated the water with a passion, was afraid of it, and would never go near it. The twins were fathered by a man, a great warrior, who was one of us but chose to live on land and leave his daughters below. That being said, you have lived your entire life, from just shortly after your birth, immersed in the sea with us. Whatever stance you choose, remember to honor the balance of our connection to the land and those who dwell on it in addition to the separation from it which makes us unique.”
Corallyn nodded as she processed the words which rolled off Elandria’s fingers. She moved closer to the silent woman who had seated herself on the edge of the hot tub, and leaned her head on Elandria’s knees. Corallyn had never known the land-dwelling mother that her sister had mentioned. She knew that she was named after the woman, Koraline Kolarevic, who had been a tall blonde ballerina with whom Aazuria had taken private lessons. However, it had been Elandria herself who had raised and educated Corallyn. Corallyn respected and loved Elandria as much as she could have loved any mother. The two shared a father, but had been born hundreds of years apart to different women.
“You never cease to amaze me, Elan,” Aazuria commented. “Balance between separation and unity with humans and the land. It sounds like the perfect purpose to aspire to.”
Visola shrugged and asked, “Don’t we have that already? We walk amongst them and they can’t tell we aren’t like them. Some of them probably have our abilities and will never even know they are anything special. Humans look at other humans of different skin tone or gender, or as Sio points out, even political alignment, as far more different than us.”
“That’s only because they lack knowledge of our people,” Sionna said, stretching her arms, “but you know, we truly do not have balance. The Alaskan Inuit families with the blue skinned people—there was nothing really wrong with them, they just appeared different. They were missing a certain enzyme in their blood called diaphorase. In fact, some of them lived longer and healthier lives and had more children than people with regular skin tones. But that trait was so rare that it has been basically lost now. It was preserved when the blue people lived in closed off communities and intermarried with cousins or close relatives who had similar genes… but as soon as they began to travel out into the world, the trait pretty much dissipated. It’s too bad. It was rather special.”
Visola quickly added, while staring pointedly at Aazuria, “Not as special as being able to breathe underwater.”
“Exactly,” Sionna said. “That’s why we need to be careful, and protect it. It’s our gift… we should not throw it away. Do you understand what we’re saying, Aazuria?”
“Yes. Yes, of course I do,” Aazuria answered halfheartedly.
“Some rather large decisions need to be made rather soon about our future,” Sionna reminded her. “I only hope that you will…”
“We will make those decisions together, and as wisely as we can manage,” Aazuria said.
“They’re both implying that you shouldn’t fall in love with Trevain even though he’s super nice and has a great house with an awesome hot tub,” Corallyn said bluntly. “You will eventually have to return to Adlivun and go through the coronation…”
“I know,” Aazuria said firmly, “I know.”
“Sweetie,” said Sionna gently, “just don’t do anything with him physically. It will break your heart if you have to leave him after that.”
Aazuria nodded.
“Oh, for sure!” Visola said adamantly. “Considering you’ve never been with a man—not in six hundred years? No way. You will attach far too much emotion to the first person you sleep with, and if it’s a land-dweller then he’ll be dead in a few years and you’ll be mourning him for centuries more. Gosh, Zuri—do anything but that! The first man you sleep with should be your king. It should be a sea-dweller who can remain in Adlivun with you. Someone who will be around as long as you will be.”
“Viso, I get it,” Aazuria said with a smile. “I know what is required of me.”
“Do you, Zuri?” Sionna asked, looking at her friend inquisitively. “I have never seen you show so much interest in a man as you seem to be showing to this Captain Trevain Murphy. There are plenty of male sea-dwellers at home, hundreds. If no one there suits your taste—and I am quite sure no one does—we could travel. We could go to Japan and live amongst the Ningyo for a time, meet new people. If we need to travel further…”
“Stop this!” Aazuria said, grimacing. “Do I seem that desperate for a man that we must make it a priority and travel the whole undersea world for it? Please. I just killed my father, and a girl does not get over such a thing so easily. Let us focus on what is important.”
There was a heavy silence for several lengthy minutes.
Aazuria cleared her throat and began speaking to break the silence. “The book that Elandria gave me earlier was intriguing. It suggested that the main difference between human beings and other apes is that our bodies are so well adapted to aquatic life: because we had an aquatic ancestor. It mentioned the way that our bones and organs are better suited to functioning when submerged.”
“That’s true. Land-dwelling elderly have issues with arthritis in their joints from chronically moving on land,” Sionna added. “They perform exercises underwater because it’s gentler.”
“Is it any wonder that we live so much longer?” Visola asked. She rubbed her neck idly. “So, your book posits that the secret ingredient which makes all of humanity special is our ancestral connection to the water? Therefore, our bodies and our way of living is closer to the ancestral condition and more natural? I believe the correct celebratory term here is ‘boo-yah.’”
Sionna winced at the use of the word and made a horrified face, but with a great effort she refrained from reprimanding her sister.
“I guess that’s why they have hot tubs in their houses,” Corallyn said with a chuckle as she lightly splashed the surface of the water.
“That is true,” Aazuria said. “They find comfort in the same things that we do. They are quite akin to us.”
“Yes,” Sionna said, “and that’s why they’re dangerous. They are similar enough to assimilate us completely! Our numbers are dying. There are hardly any of us left who have all of the pure sea-dweller traits like you do, Princess Aazuria. All of our children could eventually just blend in with them, and we would lose our culture and disappear.”
“I sometimes wonder… about my daughter,” Visola said uncomfortably. Everyone else quieted down, for this was a subject that the warrior never felt comfortable enough to address. She had already begun staring forward vacantly when Aazuria reached out to touch her shoulder. Visola gave her friend a sad smile. “I suppose my little girl already has blended in with land-dwellers.”
Sionna closed her eyes, feeling her twin sister’s pain as if it were her own. “It is not such an inadequate life, to live among humans,” she said softly. “For some, it’s what they would choose.”
“No,” Aazuria said, shaking her head. “It was only under Father’s tightening regime that we fell apart. The largest allure of being a sea-dweller is the feeling of freedom. You are liberated from land constraints and borders—or at least there is an illusion of such. If you are forbidden to leave your home whatsoever, the whole ‘freedom’ aspect severely suffers.”
“It certainly made our charmed life much less charming,” Elandria responded. “Even a glorious ice palace can be hideous when you are incarcerated within it.”
Sionna sighed. She reached out to touch her sister’s arm. “Sweetie, we should probably take a cab back to work.” Visola nodded, her eyes still empty and forlorn. She was evidently immersed in thoughts of her lost daughter.
“Good luck, you two!” Corallyn said with a shudder. “I’m so glad I don’t look old enough to work in that awful sounding place.”
Visola forced herself to smile and put on an energetic voice as she rose from the hot tub. “Coral, dear! It’s quite a lot more fun than you’d expect—the unparalleled sense of power you get! A bit of breath on a man’s neck, just enough to rustle the tiny hairs there, and he’s putty in your hands. Quite easy really.”
