Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  There was a sudden confusion of lights below. The spear had been shot!

  The fish, long as a tall and short man together, rose through the ropes. He turned toward the depths, trailing his pursuers. But others waited there, tried to loop him. Once I had flung those ropes, treated with tar and lime to dissolve the slime on the fish’s body and hold to the beast. The looped ropes caught, and by the movement of the flares, I saw them jerked down their paths. The fish turned, rose again, this time toward me.

  He pulled around when one line ran out (and somewhere on the surface the prow of a boat bobbed low) but turned back and came on.

  Of a sudden, amphimen were flicking about me as the fray’s center drifted by. Tork, his spear dug deep, forward and left of the marlin’s dorsal, had hauled himself astride the beast.

  The fish tried to shake him, then dropped his tail and rose straight. Everybody started pulling toward the surface. I broke foam and grabbed Juao’s gunwale.

  Tork and the fish exploded up among the boats. They twisted in air, in moonlight, in froth. The fish danced across the water on its tail, fell.

  Juao stood up in the boat and shouted. The other fishermen shouted too, and somebody perched on a prow flung a rope. Someone in the water caught it.

  Then fish and Tork and me and a dozen amphimen all went underwater at once.

  They dropped in a corona of bubbles. The fish struck the end of another line, and shook himself. Tork was thrown free, but he doubled back.

  Then the lines began to haul the beast up again, quivering, whipping, quivering again.

  Six lines from six boats had him. For one moment he was still in the submarine moonlight. I could see his wound tossing scarves of blood.

  When he (and we) broke surface, he was thrashing again, near Juao’s boat. I was holding onto the side when suddenly Tork, glistening, came out of the water beside me and went over into the dinghy.

  “Here you go,” he said, turning to kneel at the bobbing rim, and pulled me up while Juao leaned against the far side to keep balance.

  Wet rope slopped the boards. “Hey, Cal!” and my abdomen did a mini-hiccup, which meant I’d gone from water to air. (In the other direction the transition is unnoticeable.) From fluttering gills, water ran down my back, my shoulders. The only time you really feel them. And Tork laughed, grabbed up the rope, and began to haul.

  The fish prised wave from white wave in the white water.

  The boats came together. The amphimen had all climbed up. Ariel was across from us, holding a flare that drooled smoke down her arm. She peered by the hip of the fisherman who was standing in front of her.

  Juao and Tork were hauling the rope. Behind them I was coiling it with one hand as it came back to me.

  The fish came up and was flopped into Ariel’s boat, tail out, head up, chewing air. More hics.

  I had just finished pulling on my trousers when Tork fell down on the seat behind me and grabbed me around the shoulders with his wet arms. “Look at our fish, Tio Cal! Look!” He gasped air, laughing, his dark face diamonded beside the flares. “Look at our fish there, Cal!”

  Juao, grinning white and gold, pulled us back into shore. The fire, the singing, hands beating hands—and my godson had put pebbles in the empty rum bottles and was shaking them to the music—the guitars spiraled around us as we carried the fish up the sand and the men brought the spit.

  “Watch it!” Tork said, grasping the pointed end of the great stick that was thicker than his wrist.

  We turned the fish over.

  “Here, Cal?”

  He prodded two fingers into the white flesh six inches back from the bony lip.

  “Fine.”

  Tork jammed the spit in.

  We worked it through the body. By the time we carried it to the fire, they had brought more rum.

  “Hey, Tork. Are you going to get some sleep before you go down in the morning?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Slept all afternoon.” He pointed toward the roasting fish with his elbow. “That’s my breakfast.”

  But when the dancing grew violent a few hours later, just before the fish was to come off the fire, and the kids were pushing the last of the sweet potatoes from the ashes with sticks, I walked back to the lifeboat shell we had sat on earlier. It was three-quarters flooded.

  Curled below still water, Tork slept, fist loose before his mouth, the gills at the back of his neck pulsing rhythmically. Only his shoulder and hip made islands in the floated boat.

  “Where’s Tork?” Ariel asked me at the fire. They were swinging up the sizzling fish.

  “Taking a nap.”

  “Oh, he wanted to cut the fish!”

  “He’s got a lot of work ahead. Sure you want to wake him?”

  “No, I’ll let him sleep.”

  But Tork was walking from the water, brushing his dripping hair back from his forehead.

  He grinned at us, then went to carve. I remember him standing on the table, astraddle the meat, arm going up and down with the big knife (details, yes, those are the things you remember), stopping to hand down the portions, then hauling his arm back to cut again.

  That night, with music and stomping on the sand and shouting back and forth over the fire, we made more noise than the sea.

  IV

  The eight-thirty bus was more or less on time.

  “I don’t think they want to go,” Juao’s sister said. She was accompanying the children to the Aquatic Corp Headquarters in Brasilia.

  “They are just tired,” Juao said. “They should not have stayed up so late last night. Get on the bus now. Say good-bye to Tio Cal.”

  “Good-bye.” (Fernando.)

  “Good-bye.” (Clara.)

  But kids are never their most creative in that sort of situation. And I suspect that my godchildren may just have been suffering their first (or one of their first) hangovers. They had been very quiet all morning.

  I bent down and gave them a clumsy hug. “When you come back on your first weekend off, I’ll take you exploring down below at the point. You’ll be able to gather your own coral now.”

  Juao’s sister got teary, cuddled the children, cuddled me, Juao, then got on the bus.

  Someone was shouting out the bus window for someone at the bus stop not to forget something. They trundled around the square and then toward the highway. We walked back across the street where the café owners were putting out canvas chairs.

  “I will miss them,” he said, like a long-considered admission.

  “You and me both.” At the docks near the hydrofoil wharf where the submarine launches went out to the undersea cities, we saw a crowd. “I wonder if they had any trouble laying the—”

  A woman screamed in the crowd. She pushed from the others, dropping eggs and onions. She began to pull her hair and shriek.

  (Remember the skillet of shrimp? She had been the woman ladling them out.) A few people moved to help her.

  A clutch of men broke off and ran into a side street. I grabbed a running amphiman, who whirled to face me.

  “What in hell is going on?”

  For a moment his mouth worked on his words for all the trite world like a beached fish.

  “From the explosion . . . ” he began. “They just brought them back from the explosion at the Slash!”

  I grabbed his other shoulder. “What happened!”

  “About two hours ago. They were just a quarter of the way through, when the whole fault gave way. They had a goddamn underwater volcano for half an hour. They’ re still getting seismic disturbances.”

  Juao was running toward the launch. I pushed the guy away and limped after him, struck the crowd and jostled through calico, canvas, and green scales.

  They were carrying the corpses out of the hatch of the submarine and laying them on a canvas spread across the dock. They still return bodies to the countries of birth for the family to decide the method of burial. When the fault had given, the hot slag that had belched into the steaming sea was mostly mol
ten silicon.

  Four of the bodies were only slightly burned here and there; from their bloated faces (one still bled from the ear) I guessed they had died from sonic concussion. But several of the corpses were almost totally encased in dull, black glass.

  “Tork—” I kept asking. “Is one of them—?”

  It took me forty-five minutes, asking first the guys who were carrying, then going into the launch and asking some guy with a clipboard, and then going back on the dock and into the office to find out that one of the more unrecognizable figures was, yes, Tork.

  Juao bought me a glass of buttermilk at the café on the square. He sat still a long time, then finally rubbed away his white mustache, released the chair rung with his toes, put his hands on his knees.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “That it’s time to go fix nets. Tomorrow morning I will fish.” He regarded me a moment. “Where should I fish tomorrow, Cal?”

  “Are you wondering about . . . sending the kids off today?”

  He shrugged. “Fishermen from this village have drowned. Still it is a village of fishermen. Where should I fish?”

  I finished my buttermilk. “The mineral content over the Slash should be high as the devil. Lots of algae will gather tonight. Lots of small fish down deep. Big fish hovering over.”

  He nodded. “Good. I will take the boat out there tomorrow.” We got up.

  “See you, Juao.”

  I limped back to the beach.

  V

  The fog had unsheathed the sand by ten. I walked around, poking clumps of weeds with a stick, banging the same stick on my numb leg. When I lurched up to the top of the rocks, I stopped in the still grass. “Ariel?”

  She was kneeling in the water, head down, red hair breaking over sealed gills. Her shoulders shook, stopped, shook again.

  “Ariel?” I came down over the blistered stones.

  She turned away to look at the ocean.

  The attachments of children are so important and so brittle.

  “How long have you been sitting here?”

  She looked at me now, the varied waters of her face stilled on drawn cheeks. And her face was exhausted. She shook her head.

  Sixteen? Seventeen? Who was the psychologist, back in the seventies, who decided that “adolescents” were just physical and mental adults with no useful work? “You want to come up to the house?” The head shaking got faster, then stopped.

  After a while I said, “I guess they’ll be sending Tork’s body back to Manila.”

  “He didn’t have a family,” she explained. “He’ll be buried here, at sea.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  And the rough volcanic glass, pulled across the ocean’s sands, changing shape, dulling—

  “You were—you liked Tork a lot, didn’t you? You kids looked like you were pretty fond of each other.”

  “Yes. He was an awfully nice—” Then she caught my meaning and blinked. “No,” she said. “Oh, no. I was—I was engaged to Jonni . . . the brown-haired boy from California? Did you meet him at the party last night? We’re both from Los Angeles, but we only met down here. And now . . . they’re sending his body back this evening.” Her eyes got very wide, then closed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I’m a clumsy cripple; I trip all over everybody’s emotions. In that mirror I guess I’m too busy looking at what might have been.

  “I’m sorry, Ariel.”

  She opened her eyes and began to look around her.

  “Come on up to the house and have an avocado. I mean, they have avocados in now—not at the supermarket. But at the old town market on the other side. And they’re better than any they grow in California.”

  She kept looking around.

  “None of the amphimen get over there. It’s a shame, because soon the market will probably close, and some of their fresh foods are really great. Oil and vinegar is all you need on them.” I leaned back on the rocks. “Or a cup of tea?”

  “Okay.” She remembered to smile. I know the poor kid didn’t feel like it. “Thank you. I won’t be able to stay long, though.” We walked back up the rocks toward the house, the sea on our left. Just as we reached the patio, she turned and looked back.

  “Cal?”

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “Those clouds over there, across the water. Those are the only ones in the sky. Are they from the eruption in the Slash?”

  I squinted. “I think so. Come on inside.”

  The Sea Change

  Neil Gaiman

  Now is a good time to write this down,

  now, with the rattle of the pebbles raked by the waves,

  and the slanting rain cold, cold, pattering and spattering

  the tin roof until I can barely hear myself think,

  and over it all the wind’s low howl. Believe me,

  I could crawl down to the black waves now,

  but that would be foolish, under the dark cloud.

  “Now hear us as we cry to Thee

  For those in peril on the sea.”

  The old hymn hovers on my lips, unbidden,

  perhaps I am singing aloud. I cannot tell.

  I am not old, but when I wake I am wracked with pain,

  an old sea wreck. Look at my hands.

  Broken by the waves and the sea: and twisted,

  they look like something I’d find on the beach, after a storm.

  I hold my pen like an old man.

  My father called a sea like this “a widow-maker.”

  My mother said the sea was always a widow-maker,

  even when it was gray and smooth as sky. And she was right.

  My father drowned in fine weather.

  Sometimes I wonder if his bones have ever washed ashore,

  or if I’d know them if they had,

  twisted and sea-smoothed as they would be.

  I was a lad of seventeen, cocky as any a young man

  who thinks he can make the sea his mistress,

  and I had promised my mother I’d not go to sea.

  She’d prenticed me to a stationer, and my days were spent

  with reams and quires; but when she died I took her savings

  bought myself a small boat. I took my father’s dusty nets

  and lobster pots,

  raised a three-man crew, all older than I was,

  and left the inkpots and the nibs forever.

  There were good months and bad.

  Cold, cold, the sea was bitter and brine, the nets cut my hands,

  the lines were tricksy, dangerous things; still,

  I’d not have given it up for the world. Not then.

  The salt scent of my world made me sure I’d live forever.

  Scudding over the waves in a fine breeze,

  the sun behind me, faster than a dozen horses across

  the white wave tops,

  that was living indeed.

  The sea had moods. You learned that fast.

  The day I write of now, she was shifty, evil-humored,

  the wind coming now and now from all four corners

  of the compass,

  the waves all choppy. I could not get the measure of her.

  We were all out of sight of land when I saw a hand,

  saw something, reaching from the gray sea.

  Remembering my father, I ran to the prow and called aloud.

  No answer but the lonely wail of gulls.

  And the air was filled with a whirr of white wings, and then

  the swing of the wooden boom, which struck me

  at the base of the skull:

  I remember the slow way the cold sea came toward me,

  enveloped me, swallowed me, took me for its own.

  I tasted salt. We are made of seawater and bone:

  That’s what the stationer told me when I was a boy.

  It had occurred to me since that waters break to herald

  every birth,

  and I am certain that those waters must ta
ste salt—

  remembering, perhaps, my own birth.

  The world beneath the sea was blur. Cold, cold, cold . . .

  I do not believe I truly saw her. I can not believe.

  A dream, or madness, the lack of air,

  the blow upon the head: That’s all she was.

  But when in dreams I see her, as I do, I never doubt her.

  Old as the sea she was, and young as a new-formed

  breaker or a swell.

  Her goblin eyes had spied me. And I knew she wanted me.

  They say the sea folk have no souls: Perhaps

  the sea is one huge soul they breathe and drink and live.

  She wanted me. And she would have had me; there

  could be no doubt.

  And yet . . .

  They pulled me from the sea and pumped my chest

  until I vomited rich seawater onto the wave-wet shingle.

  Cold, cold, cold I was, trembling and shivering and sick.

  My hands were broken and my legs were twisted,

  as if I had just come up from deep water,

  scrimshaw and driftwood are my bones,

  carved messages hidden beneath my flesh.

  The boat never came back. The crew was never more seen.

  I live on the charity of the village:

  There, but for the mercy of the sea, they say, go we.

  Some years have passed: almost a score.

  And whole women view me with pity, or with scorn.

  Outside my cottage the wind’s howl has become

  a screaming,

  rattling the rain against the tin walls,

  crunching the flinty shingle, stone against stone.

  “Now hear us as we cry to Thee

  For those in peril on the sea.”

  Believe me, I could go down to the sea tonight,

  drag myself down there on my hands and knees.

  Give myself to the water and the dark.

  And to the girl.

  Let her suck the meat from off these tangled bones, transmute me to something incorruptible and ivory:

  to something rich and strange. But that would be foolish.

  The voice of the storm is whispering to me.

  The voice of the beach is whispering to me.

  The voice of the waves is whispering to me.