Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Went to smoke.”

  He grunted. “Shit, it’s hot in here,” he said. He swung his legs out from under the blanket’s basketweave, thumped onto the floor. “We got soup left?”

  “Thermos in the cupboard.”

  Behind me the microwave beeped out protests as he thumbed its controls. The display was a steady, grainy green, showing me the surface far below the boat. Drifts and ridges. They said you could spot a wreck by the unnatural straightness of a line, the oddness of a corner. Unlikely, but it had been heard of, in that friend-of-a-cousin-of-a-neighbor’s sort of way.

  “Heat me one,” I said.

  “Soup or coffee?”

  “Coffee,” I said, and he clanked another mug into the microwave.

  Niko came into the doorway. “Mermaids out there,” he said. “Be careful if you swim.”

  Jorge Felipe handed me my mug, so hot it almost bit into my skin as I cupped it.

  “Fucking mermaids,” he said. “I hate them even worse than sharks. One tangled with my sister, almost killed her.”

  “Everyone on the island’s tangled with your sister. I’m getting coffee and going back out,” Niko said, and did.

  Jorge Felipe watched him go. “He’s fucking obsessed with those mermaids.”

  Mermaids. Back before I was born, there were more tourists. There’s always tourists now, but not quite as many. Some of them came here specifically, even, for the beaches. Or for the cheap black-market bio-science. And one black-market bio-scientist specialized in making mermaids out of them.

  They paid a lot for it, I guess. A moddie body that they could go swimming in, pretend like they were always sea creatures. It was very popular one year, Mama Fig said.

  But the scientist, he wasn’t that good, or that thorough. Or maybe he didn’t understand all the implications of the DNA he was using. Some people said he did it deliberately.

  Because mermaids lay eggs, hundreds at a time, at least that kind did. And the natural-born ones, they didn’t have human minds guiding them. They were like sharks—they ate, they killed, they ate. Most of the original human mermaids had gotten out when they found out that the seas were full of chemicals, or that instead of whale songs down there, they heard submarine sonar and boat signals. When the last few found out that they were spawning whether they liked it or not, they got out too. Supposedly one or two stayed, and now they live in the sea with their children, twice as mean as any of them.

  I said, “Watch the display for me” and went up on deck. The sun was rising, slivers of gold and pink and blue in the east. It played over the gouges in the Mary Magdalena’s railing where I’d picked at it with a knife, like smallpox marks along the boat’s face.

  Niko was watching the water. Light danced over it, intense and dazzling. Spray rode the wind, stinging the eyes. I licked salt from my drying lips.

  “Where are you seeing them?” I asked.

  He pointed, but I didn’t see anything at first. It took several moments to spot a flick of fins, the intercepted shadow as a wave rose and fell.

  “You see them out this deep all the time,” I said. Niko hadn’t been out on the boat much. He got nauseous anywhere out past ten meters, but Jorge Felipe had enlisted him to coax me into cooperating, had supplied him with fancy anti-nausea patches. I looked sideways. One glistened like a chalky gill on the side of his neck.

  “Yeah?” he said, staring at the water. He wasn’t watching me, so I looked at his face, trying to commit the details to memory. Trying to imagine him as a photograph. His jaw was a smooth line, shadowed with stubble. The hairs in front of his ears tangled in curls, started to corkscrew, blunted by sleep. He had long eyelashes, longer than mine. The sun tilted further up and the dazzle of light grew brighter, till it made my eyes hurt.

  “Put on a hat,” I said to Niko. “Going to be hot and bad today.”

  He nodded but stayed where he was. I started to say more, but shrugged and went back in. It was all the same to me. Still, when I saw his straw hat on the floor, I nudged it over to Jorge Felipe and said, “Take this out to Niko when you go.”

  Looking out over the railing, I spotted the three corp ships long before we got to the Lump. For a moment I wondered why they were so spread out, and then I realized the Lump’s size. It was huge—kilometers wide. The ships were gathered around it, and their buzz boats were resting, wings spread out to recharge the solar panels.

  They must have seen us around the same time. A buzz boat folded its wings, shadows spider-webbed with silver, and approached us. As it neared, I saw the Novagen logo on its side, on its occupant’s mirrored helmet.

  “This is claimed salvage,” the logo-ed loudspeaker said.

  I cupped my hands to shout back, “Salvage’s not claimed till you’ve got tethers on it. Unless you’re pulling in the whole thing, we’ve got a right to chew on it, too.”

  “Claimed salvage,” the pilot repeated. He looked the Mary Magdalena up and down and curled his lip. Most of the time I liked her shitty, rundown look, but pride bristled briefly. “You want to be careful, kid. Accidents happen out here when freelancers get in the way.”

  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, pushe
d 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 a
s 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?”