Dusty's excitement withered. "They're not sharks!"
"Attention, everyone," said the MC. "Attention, everyone. Get out of the water. This is not a drill. I repeat: get out of the water. The Shark Squad is being called, and will arrive with the repellent shortly."
At the judging table up the beach, Zhaoping hung his head and spread a hand across his eyes.
"I said they're not sharks!" Nobody was listening. Or noticing the memory files Dusty tried to send out. "It says—it says—"
Behind Dusty, Dirk and his awful friends passed him and cruised to the sand. "Dude! Check it out. The mayor is watching videos of himself!"
Dusty whirled. The momentum threw him off his board and he plopped into the shallows like a drunken frog. When he pushed his head back above the frothing water, sputtering, whoops and high-fives were sailing through the air.
"Attention, everyone," said the MC. "Attention, everyone. Get out of the water. This means you, Number Zero."
Dusty splashed to his feet, infuriated, hauling the dripping board from the foam. He turned and ran smack into Roderick.
"Man oh man!" Roderick said, unfazed by the impact. "That was the best thing I've ever seen in my life! Dude! When you rode that wave? And I was standing on the beach, going like, Whoa? And then Dirk was right behind you? And I thought you were gonna die? But you just kept going. Like you were magic!"
Dirk and his friends were still laughing. "I was magic," Dusty snapped. "And it still wasn't enough!"
Roderick stepped close to Dusty, unperturbed by the matrix and foam churning around their calves. "I thought it was," said Roderick. "But if you don't think so—"
"I don't!—"
"Then let her go, man," said Roderick, serenely. "Let her go. Cuz if this isn't your best, then dude—I gotta see what your best is."
Dusty's frustration suddenly left him. He bowed his head.
Roderick gestured at his own ever-present board, tucked stalwartly under one arm. "How about you use Shelia for your last round? She can take you real far. I mean, look at me. I get real far all the time, in, like, everything."
"Oh, Roddy." Dusty sighed. "Maybe you're right." He glanced up the beach, at Zhaoping's predatory glare. "Maybe I never should've gotten myself mixed up into this at all. Okay. Give me Shelia."
"And why doesn't anybody stop that pounding kid?" shouted the MC. "Near Number Zero? Security!"
"Sure thing, bro," said Roderick. "Soon as they say you can go back in."
"I'm going back in now."
"But there are, like…sharks."
Dusty rolled his eyes. "There aren't any sharks. Look—I might not be able to rock Zhaoping Ho's board and show him something good enough to impress him, but I can still rock the waves. And that's what really matters. So just give me Shelia, okay?"
Roderick shaded his eyes with his free hand and squinted doubtfully into the Pacific.
"Okay?"
Roderick shrugged. "Okay."
Up the beach, Zhaoping leapt to his feet, eyes flaming. "What's Number Zero doing? Is he passing off his board?"
Dusty braced himself and turned away from him, to face the rest of the beach. Addressing them all, he held out a fist with thumb and pinky extended, and shook his wrist.
"Hang loose, everyone," he said solemnly.
The crowd parted. A pair of men in security vests marched up to Roderick. "Oh, hey. What's up, dudes?"
"Leave that kid alone!" Zhaoping shouted. "That board is an experimental prototype from the Edge, and if you damage it, I swear to God—"
"Calm down, Mr. Ho. Your property isn't—Wait. Is Number Zero going back in? "
Dusty turned and ran into the surf with righteous determination. He was away from the miraculous board, and his connection with the beach had disappeared. When he paddled out on Shelia and listened, he heard nothing. The signals from the matrix were once again limited to the dry, back there, in whatever small patch would be around his feet. Which was too bad.
But he could do this.
A dark blob drifted past Dusty, barely fifteen feet away. He grumbled and sat up on his board. "Stop thinking about sharks," he texted Roderick. The beach was too far away for his cyberneurons to link to Roderick's directly, so he had to do it the tedious, old-school way, thinking up an email and bouncing it off a satellite. "You're making them appear in the water on accident."
Roderick's reply text was a single word. "What?"
Dusty groaned in frustration. "Nobody's gonna notice my awesome surfing as long as they're there!"
"Dude. You're like, confusing."
"Oh, for Pete's sake—just quit interfacing with Zhaoping's board! Drop it onto the beach right now!"
"Uh…okay."
A black shape glided not five feet away, tail undulating. Except it wasn't quite black. More like dark bluish-gray. And its eyes were kind of yellow.
Sharkskin brushed Dusty's calf.
Dusty dropped down on the board, kicked up his legs, and paddled madly for the next swell, thinking a flurry of texts. "Pick up the board! I changed my mind! Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!"
"Okay, okay, I'm picking it up. See?"
"No I can't see!" The swell moved past him, unridden. The water thickened with curious, cruising shadows. "Just pick it up and—and—command light. Command light! And noise! Blinding light and noise! Can't you feel the whole beach through that thing?"
"Whoa," texted Roderick. A piece of his dramatically expanded perception of the beach was attached to his text. "This is majorly gnarly."
"Light!" Dusty paddled like a drowning fool. The next swell came, its tip just starting to fold. What he wouldn't give to be able to feel that funny, building pressure now. Dusty pumped for his life, riding to the top, leaping onto the board as the wave began its roar. "Light, Roddy, light!"
The wave was born. For one long, singing moment, Dusty was safe, astonished, and on top of the world. The beach spread out ahead, packed with people, the orange-vested members of the Shark Squad throwing freeze-dried sticks of concentrated repellent into the shallows. Video jangled around them as the thousands of data streams in the dry of the Smart sand rose and disintegrated, like the pulsing waves in the Pacific at Dusty's back.
Beneath his board, the blue of the ocean flared up into an intense, painful white.
Dusty couldn't look at it. He closed his eyes, just as a voice, familiar but as loud as the bellow of a god, vibrated across the length of the beach in a deafening rumble.
"Dude…is this thing on?"
The vibration was extreme. Dusty's entire world was quivering. Actually, his entire world was downright shaking. Actually, his entire world was starting to tip over.
The wipeout was totally lame.
THE JOURNEY TO SHORE felt long. Shelia's leash held, so at least Dusty didn't lose Roderick's board, but the light and sound had done their job all right, and the sharks weren't the only things that had been stunned and confused. Dusty must've gotten turned around in the surf somehow, because at one point some dude on shore definitely yelled at him, "The beach is this way, you moron."
When Dusty got to the wet, Roderick was waiting between the pair of security guards, both scowling and gripping one of Roderick's elbows. Zhaoping was standing nearby, scowling harder, clutching his beautiful board. "You idiot," he snarled.
Dusty coughed and ran his tongue over his lips. He spat out salt and sand. "…What?"
Zhaoping's fists clenched as hard as his teeth. "I didn't want you to ride in on seaweed. I didn't want you to hand over my board to someone else for certain reasons we had discussed. And I sure as shock didn't want to sit on my thumbs up there while the entire pounding Smart sand matrix, which some people were interested in experimenting on, got blown out!" Zhaoping stamped a foot on the beach. Sick, irregular zags of color popped out, along with a ghastly warble like a dying crane. "It'll take weeks for the tide cycles to fully recharge it!"
Dusty shrank where he stood. "Oh," he mumbled.
"Whateve
r they teach you in school these days," Zhaoping said, "the definition of 'Top Secret' isn't it." He retreated up the beach with his prototype. "Screwheaded, volt-filled, orbital-hoping pile of wire…!"
Dusty shrank even further.
"Okay, kid," said one of the security guards. "Time to go."
"Sweet," said Roderick. "Where are we going?"
The guards didn't answer. Grimly, they towed him up the beach, and Dusty slunk along after.
They passed the Coastal Gang on their way. The three of them stood within a cluster of girls who were cooing and handing them water bottles. Between sly smiles and earlobe-nibbles, everyone in the group looked down and laughed. The weakened matrix at their feet played fuzzy, flickering video of Dusty's totally lame wipeout, and the accompanying garbled audio from the MC: "Oh! An unfortunate upset for Number Zero, who fought seaweed and sharks to come this far. But that's a wipeout, and a disqualification."
Not even one single girl looked up to admire Dusty as he walked by.
The security guards deposited Roderick at the edge of the beach, by one of the many suck-shower stations. "Use it," ordered a guard, and he stayed to make sure Roderick and Dusty did.
After they next rinsed off beneath a regular shower, Roderick tucked Shelia beneath his arm and they stepped onto the sidewalk, dripping. "So now what?"
Dusty looked over his shoulder at Nana'ite Beach, at the tittering girls and oiled-up dudes. He firmly turned his back. "We're going to surf some more with Shelia," he declared. "I'm not done for the day."
"We are?" Roderick turned in a confused circle, cutting a wide swath on the sidewalk with his board. Dusty automatically stepped back while nearby tourists cursed. "And you're not?"
"No."
"Oh."
"We're going to 'ìpuka Beach." Dusty jerked his head down the street. "You know. On the west side of the island?"
"'ìpuka Beach?" Roderick frowned. "How come?"
"Well," said Dusty coolly, drawing himself up. He let his glossy zero catch the light and scatter it like diamonds, so anyone else with a pure, authentic surfer's soul could see how real he was. "It's like you said. Who cares about rocking the Smart sand? Rocking the waves is what matters. The sand at 'ìpuka's mute, but the swells are still pretty killer."
"Huh," said Roderick. "Okay." He set off down the sidewalk with Dusty. "Are there girls there?"
Dusty shook his head. "No, my man. Where the sand's mute, there are women. "
* * *
Olfert Dapper's Day
By Peter S. Beagle | 11917 words
Herman Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne "In token of my admiration of his genius." T. S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to "il miglior fabbro," Ezra Pound. And Peter Beagle dedicated The Last Unicorn to Dr. Olfert Dapper and to Robert Nathan. Most F&SF readers are likely to recognize Robert Nathan as the author of Portrait of Jennie, but Dr. Dapper? Who dat?
Read on, friends, and you'll soon see.
DR. OLFERT DAPPER HAD never attended any medical school: neither in Amsterdam, where he was born, nor in Utrecht, where he had first begun employing the title, Doctor Medicinae, after two years of occasional attendance at the university. Nor, in candor, had he ever visited India, China, Persia or Africa, about all of which lands he had nevertheless published voluminously detailed and well-received books. A placid, sedentary, somewhat portly man by nature, he had seen no reason to disturb a peaceful existence by crossing undependable oceans, conducting tedious expeditions, or otherwise placing the said existence at risk of discomfort or termination. Much better to write out of a fecund imagination, an even more bountiful fantasy life, and the rich sense of survival that had served him so well for nearly forty-five years. He was, take him for all in all, a pleasant soul who had always trusted in the trust of others, and who had, until quite recently, never found that faith misplaced.
Unfortunately, his confidence in the gullibility of country bumpkins from Eck en Wiel had lately been badly shaken when one bumpkin turned out to be related—who could have known?—to a seriously powerful member of the States-General capable of recognizing a very slightly fraudulent land contract when he saw one. On the whole, as a presumed man of medicine, Dr. Dapper recommended travel to himself: travel for reasons of health and longevity; travel to destinations that seemed a good deal less important than the swiftness of his departure. The beadle, summons under his arm, was knocking on Dr. Dapper's front door as that good entrepreneur slipped out the back way, his quickly packed valise firm in his grip.
But the beadle, a practiced hand in such matters, had thoughtfully stationed two large men halfway down the muddy alley that led from Olfert Dapper's rear door to the street. Both men carried heavy bludgeons, which twitched very slightly as they waited, like the tails of stalking cats. Dr. Dapper never hesitated at the sight of them, but walked slowly forward, one hand held up in a sign of hopeless surrender, which his shamed-spaniel expression mirrored. The other arm hung limply at his side, as though he had forgotten the battered valise dangling at the end of it. The two bullies grinned at each other, anticipating quick remuneration from their employer and an early night at Fat Mina's on the Zuilenstraat. They even glanced momentarily over Dr. Dapper's shoulder, calling their triumph to the beadle as he lumbered through the open back door. This was a mistake.
Olfert Dapper disapproved of running on both general and practical principles, but in a real sense his entire life had been made up of exceptions to rules. He was almost on the beadle's men when his forlorn shuffle turned into a sprinter's burst from the blocks. He swatted one half-raised club away with his valise, simultaneously kicked the second man reprehensibly low and lunged between them to race away down the alley. The beadle shouted to him to come back, but Dr. Dapper could not believe that he was truly serious.
He was briefly impressed with his own turn of speed, since he had not had to flee physical attack since his earliest youth. Unfortunately, he had not bargained for his pursuers' endurance and determination. Hulking they were, and stupid they undoubtedly were; but they saw Fat Mina's slipping away, and they came pounding tirelessly after a plump middle-aged man. He could not lose them. His breath was coming hard now, and he began to be afraid.
At one time—fifteen minutes ago, perhaps—Olfert Dapper had known very nearly every grand street and unpaved lane or alleyway in Utrecht, as well as each dwelling, tavern, shopfront or business of every possible degree of legitimacy and possible usefulness. Now they blurred and ran thickly together like spilled paint before his eyes as he wheezed by, and the only clear impression he had of any of them was that no door swung open for him, and not a single soul ran out to his aid. But it was not in his nature to feel wounded or abandoned; he was too busy hoping that he would at least not disgrace himself by throwing up when the beadle's men ran him to earth. He was a proud man, in his way.
But then a diligence rumbled around an approaching corner, with the driver's tip of his tall hat signifying that the small coach was unoccupied and available for hire. Dr. Dapper wrenched the door open, scrambled inside, and sprawled out over the seat while the diligence was still moving. It was some while before he was able to sit up and breathe without pain; consequently, he never had the chance to wave blithely back at his frustrated pursuers, as he would have preferred to do. But their furious shouts carried to his ears for a surprisingly long time, so he did have that satisfaction.
The diligence, after some intense negotiation, took him by a circuitous route to the great—and hearteningly anonymous—seaport of Rotterdam. Coachman and passenger had developed a companionable rapport during the journey; and Dr. Dapper's driver, on arriving at their destination, recommended an inn, counseled against certain others, and suggested that a man as much in demand as Dr. Dapper appeared to be might be well-advised to consider the harbor at his first opportunity. "You can't go back to Utrecht. Not for a year, maybe two years, maybe never. Rotterdam's no place for you, either—your little chums'll track you here, sooner or later. And t
here's too many of your sort here already." His eyes grew unfocused, and seemed momentarily to change color. "Me, I'd be looking at the ships."
Dr. Dapper, for all the writing he had done about traveling to strange foreign lands, had in fact never been aboard anything larger than a duckpond raft, and that as a child. Wandering slowly along the waterfront the next day, and the days after, studying the schooners, frigates, merchantmen, whalers and fishing boats—all so imposing at their quays, so small when he looked out at the rain-gray water beyond—he felt strangely lonely, and very far from all he understood. He looked in the windows of chandlers' shops, recognizing almost nothing he saw there; he heard songs he had never heard in his life; he cautiously sampled fruits and shellfish he did not recognize from barrows manned by peddlers clad in bright colors, who spoke no language he knew; he sidestepped invitations from girls who needed no language. But most of all, he smelled the sea.
A burly, one-eyed captain with a Frisian accent eventually agreed to ferry him across the Atlantic to make, like so many other passengers, a fresh start in the New World. The fare was remitted on Dr. Dapper's agreement to serve as ship's physician; even surgeon, if this should prove necessary. The voyage, fortunately, turned out to be a remarkably tranquil one, except for Dr. Dapper's stomach, which had loudly announced its distaste for a life on the rolling deep before the ship had even cast off in Rotterdam harbor. For the next seven weeks, he was his own best patient—and, fortunately for all concerned, very nearly the only one. He did, in mid-Atlantic, have to coax the ship's cat down from the rigging, into which it had been deposited and abandoned by a malicious sailor. Dr. Dapper, who liked cats, tripped the sailor overboard not long afterward. The ship lost half a day's progress coming about to pick the man up, and the captain was quite cross.
Dr. Dapper disembarked in the Americas at Falmouth, on the northeastern coast, and spent a weary, anxious week trying to decide where to go from there. Back to Utrecht would have been his most fervent choice: never having ventured beyond the Netherlands, except in his excellent imagination, he had no difficulty picturing himself being murdered by any of the raw-faced, raw-voiced people thronging the muddy streets and unspeakable inns, or being torn to pieces by wild animals, or being tortured at the stake by Red Indians. But Utrecht remained out of the question, and staying in Falmouth was just as frightening, since he had no faith that the men he had offended would let three thousand miles of ocean keep their hands from his collar: for all he knew, the next sail on the horizon might convey his continued pursuit. Despite the lure of Falmouth's many ingenuous gulls, veritable canvases for an artist like himself, there was nothing to do but bury himself for as long as necessary in the forests and backlands of this so-called New World. The hunt would surely cool down, sooner or later…surely.
Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition Page 12
