“I am what they made me,” Aracai said.
“Is that all you are?” Escalas asked. “Do you not also make yourself?”
Aracai dodged between two rocks. “We can always better ourselves.”
“I think,” Escalas said, “that it is almost a duty for a man to better himself, or a people to better themselves. We must swim forward, not be content to drift with the tides. That is almost a duty, don’t you think?”
There it was again, that secretive tone. Aracai wondered. Was he talking of genetic manipulation? That cost a lot of money, something that a mer, living off the bounties of the ocean, did not need.
But Aracai thought, I could make money. There are still treasures under the sea—Spanish Galleons full of emeralds, sunken Mayan ruins off the coast of Mexico, filled with artifacts. Humans pay well for such curiosities. Perhaps I could find a cure for the poisons.
But the old mer seemed to want to send a message.
“So,” Aracai said at last, “do humans actually die in these wars?”
“Some die,” Escalas admitted. “But there are various theories on war. The goal is not to kill, it is to demoralize, to alter the behavior of the enemy.” The old mer struggled to talk and breathe at the same time. He rose to the surface, gasped a deep breath, and continued. “To be honest though, I do not think that humans value life as much as you and I do. When I found you, Spirit Warrior, you were the first mer that I had met in two years. I felt so alone, and so I begged you, ‘Swim with me.’ Among the mer, we crave each other’s company. But with over two hundred billion human souls on earth, there are too many. If one of them dies, the others feel relief rather than loss. Why, there are sixteen million humans living along the Amazon’s banks alone. It is the largest river in the world, and holds one fifth of all the fresh water…” He droned on.
Ahead of them, Dulce was slowing. She had begun to sing in the way mer women will, a threnody whose tune was beat out in the lashing of her tail.
“Black River, poison river, rolling to the sea
Be my road, guide the way,
Avenge my daughter and me.”
The old mer glanced ahead and said, “She is a fine wife for a Spirit Warrior. I hope that at the end of this, you will be able to have the children you deserve.”
“Why do you call me ‘Spirit Warrior?’” Aracai asked.
The old mer slowed his swimming and did a roll, so that he could peer into Aracai’s face. “Among the humans, men contend with one another. But you fight your own weaknesses, your own inner demons. That is why I brought you.”
Aracai eyed Escalas. “You do not want to kill humans either, do you?”
Escalas admitted, “To take a life is…reprehensible. To even force another into a certain path…weighs on my soul. But we will not reach our destination for many days and so I have time to ponder.”
Aracai thought long. He realized that he need not make a decision to go to war now. He could abandon the bomb at any moment, let it sink into the mud. Changing course would be as simple as a flick of his tail.
But he plunged ahead, through the night, wondering.
* * *
By early dawn they had traveled many kilometers upriver, reaching the old gods that guarded its mouth.
The old gods came in the form of enormous ancient busts of men and monkeys, all grimacing, each perhaps sixty feet tall. A line of them had been discovered across the river channel back in the Twenty-second Century, sunk deep into the mud, but no one knew what civilization had carved them. Aracai worried for Dulce. The bomb she carried was very heavy. She held the disk clasped against her belly as she swam, near her womb, and he knew enough to be afraid for her, for them all.
How much radiation did the bomb emit? How much could they handle?
Did it even matter? When they set the bomb off, he might not have a chance to escape the blast. Even if he got away from the fireball, the detonation would create a wall of sound, a sonic boom that would carry downriver, stunning and killing fish, including him.
And he had to wonder, is there any life left in Dulce’s womb worth worrying about anyway?
He took the bomb, to give her a rest, but then determined that she would carry it no more.
The old mer, Escalas, continued to struggle in the swift water. Aracai was smart enough to wonder if the old man had brought him on this journey, planned it months or even years ago, just so that he’d have strong arms to carry the weapon. Aracai considered asking, but knew that he would not get a straight answer. Escalas was always forcing him to think for himself.
So Aracai swam, hampered by muddled thoughts, a heavy burden, and strong currents. The riverbed below him looked remarkably dead in the morning light. Escalas’ warnings about ferocious fish and deadly stingrays seemed to be without merit.
At dawn Aracai rose to the surface, drew a great breath, and peered about. The bank to the north was so far away he could make out only water, but to the south he saw buildings—squat and colorful in shades of lavender and canary and pearl, sitting in tiers along the bank. Peasants with mule carts walked along the roads in bare feet.
There had to be tens of thousands of them, freakish things. There were no gleaming hovercars with wealthy passengers, like he’d once seen in Chile.
Aracai dove deep and swam near the bottom.
Then came the new gods. Aracai was flapping his tail hard, driving upstream through the sepia waters, falling behind the others. Soot and algae beat against him like a storm, and suddenly he heard a ping. A brilliant blue beam of light struck his face and he squinted to see huge metal struts ahead that seemed to be covered by seaweed. He realized that it wasn’t seaweed at all, but strands of plasteet—a material used to capture energy from wave action—and he followed new movement as the barrel of a cannon swiveled his way.
His heart froze and he ceased swimming, only to hear the ping and a squelchy mechanical noise that he recognized as a droid’s demand for an identification signal.
“Watch out!” Escalas called a moment too late, and Aracai heard the grinding of massive metal beams, then something heavy hit the ground, raising clouds of mud.
Suddenly Aracai put the images together. There was a war droid ahead—a giant titanium crablike droid the size of a ship, scuttling on the river bottom, menacing them.
Aracai stopped to let the muddy tide carry him back from danger, just as a single shot seared through the water. An energy beam sent a tube of bubbling super-heated water toward Escalas, striking him just once. The old mer went limp as the cloud of muddy water engulfed them all.
Aracai froze, not daring to breathe, fearing a second shot. He squinted in order to avoid being blinded. He hoped the dark waters would shield him from the droid’s sensors.
No more shots followed; his heart pounded.
He heard a buzz and something whipped over his head. He squinted up to see a squid-like drone with a gelatinous body. Its infrared signature made it look like a fiery octopus.
Hunters!
Aracai recognized the tech. It was called a squill—an ancient assassin droid, perhaps a hundred years old.
He did not know what sensory array it might have. Motion detectors? Vision? Heat? Sound? Scent?
Could it hear his heartbeat, recognize his form?
He played dead, not daring to call out, hoping that his wife would be wise enough to do the same.
The huge war droid marched north, blocking their path, stirring up more muck, impenetrably dark.
The squill began to circle and was soon followed by dozens more.
Are they armed? he wondered. The drones often carried a sac of neurotoxin, so that their stingers could kill. He’d heard legends about squills with explosives built into them. But some, he knew, were built just for reconnaissance.
Aracai drifted downstream, and often the drones passed near in the darkness, but still he dared not move. So he floated, letting the current take him, until many kilometers later the buzzing of drones faded and he was left
merely floating. As the water cleared, he peered around, but his search showed him nothing.
Suddenly he caught movement: Dulce drove toward the surface, and Aracai saw a familiar form floating there.
Aracai raced upward, met them as Dulce wrapped her arms tenderly around the old mer and tried to drag him under, to safety.
When Aracai got near, the old man was a horror. Boiling water had made his skin bubble over on half of his chest and face, and skin tore away in tatters. His hair was burned off, as was his right eye. What flesh Escalas had left was red and blistered.
“Old man,” Dulce asked, “can you swim with me?”
The old man’s mouth was in ruins, and yet he spoke. “I can swim.” He gasped for several moments, gills flashing, and glanced down. “My flesh is burned. I cannot…last…”
“What can we do to help?” Dulce asked. The old mer shook his head. “My sight…” His mouth tried to work, but pieces of flesh tore away from the hole where his lips had been, showing teeth. He gasped and sang in broken thoughts. “You, go on. Up Rio Negro, to the town Dos Brujas, where smokestacks rise, and open sewers dump into the river from both banks. There you will find a pylon, a black tower, with a light on top like a single red eye. That is where you must detonate…”
He lost his train of thought. “Take my implant…” he said, offering his greatest possession, the silver band around his head.
Escalas sang more, but his words became a soft slur, like wind lashing the water, until it died and went silent.
Dulce cried out, a barking sound, as if she had taken a mortal wound.
“Quiet,” Aracai warned, swimming up to put a hand over her mouth, but she twisted her head away and wailed in frustration.
He removed the band from off Escala’s head, put it on his own. The band was a silver wire, but almost as soon as he put it on, he felt a pinch at the base of his neck as nanobots began to send out probes to establish a link with his mind, one that would take days to form.
He let go of the old mer’s body and let him drift away, bouncing against the muddy bottom of the river.
Dulce made a juddering cry, more of a moan than a song, and together they clasped hands and swam toward the south bank before sneaking upriver, and thus passed the warbot unseen.
He wondered why the warbot was even posted there. It was ancient, this war crab, perhaps left by governments that had fallen a century ago, during some old war. Perhaps it was as forgotten now as Aracai and his people.
* * *
Hour after hour Aracai and Dulce pushed ahead, Dulce shaking in fear and grief. He could not get the image from his mind of Escalas floating downstream, his mouth a gaping maw. He tried to calm his wife as they swam together, her holding his shoulders so that they spooned, swimming in unison.
He drifted into a waking dream, haunted by images of squills and warbots. They swam close to shore, where water gurgled through half-submerged trees and a howler monkey hooted overhead. The sunlight piercing the mud turned the river into a golden road.
They dared not slow or stop. Aracai’s gut suggested that the squills might still be hunting. He suspected that they had quickly used up their energy in the initial hunt, but that after re-charging, they would be loosed again.
A boat plied the water overhead, and Aracai rose to the surface, searched the river as he cleared gunk from his gills.
To the south, he saw houses—built so close together that they glimmered like pebbles upon a beach. Children were out playing in the rain, two girls twirling a rope so that a small brown boy could jump.
Guilt weighed in Aracai’s stomach as he considered what his bomb would do to them.
He dove again, lugging his burden, and began to wonder. How many days would it take to reach the target? Did he really want to kill people—children?
Was it self-defense, or something more like revenge?
He imagined Escalas talking to him, in his old reassuring tones.
Have you considered the benefits of war? the old man asked in Aracai’s mind. It sweeps away toxic societies.
Aracai exercised his imagination, tried to find a rebuttal. What if the toxic society wins? he asked, for if he started a war with the humans, he knew that he personally would surely die.
Indeed, it seemed that too often the most toxic society would win the battle and thus spread.
And yet we must try, the old mer replied. We are not just trying to save ourselves, we are hoping to save uncounted billions of people in the future.
Aracai recalled the children out skipping and playing jump rope in the streets beside the river and pictured what would happen to them when the bomb blew. Even if he did manage to set it off, he would lose his soul.
Our species is dying, he thought. Soon we will all be as dead as the whales.
Does it really matter? Extinction? Every man must face his own personal extinction.
After long hours, Dulce said, “I’m hungry.” He could feel pangs in his own belly. It was empty and he felt ravenous.
But the river was dead.
Aracai had once hunted briefly in fresh-water, in crystalline streams that tumbled from the Andes. Cold as ice and clearer than rain-drops, thick with trout.
An idea struck, and he took Dulce’s hand and led her along the riverbank until they found a tributary, a small river that twisted through a jungle.
They swam upstream for a mile until the river came alive. Overhead, huge ferns and trees shadowed the water. Pollywogs wiggled among rushes, while frogs whistled in the trees. Water beetles buzzed in whirligig patterns and fish began to sing.
A mile up, Aracai met schools of fish—silver perch that darted in front of him like a moving screen. Huge red-tailed catfish plied the muddy bottom, using whiskers to taste for food. A parrot bass, half as long as him, hid in the shadows of a pool, the yellows and greens around its gills muted as it emitted a sonorous snoring sound.
Here, Aracai watched freshwater crabs of deep mossy green march among some stones, then he gathered water lettuce and taro roots. Dulce offered a blessing on the meal.
As they ate, Aracai tried to speak delicately. “This will be a long journey, and hard.”
Dulce peered at him with exhaustion in her dark eyes. “And you wonder if there is honor in killing humans?”
“No,” he said. “I know there is no honor in it.”
She knew his moods. She bit her lip and a lightning flash made her eyes glow startlingly green.
“It is not about honor,” he said. “I just wonder if it even makes sense. I do not want to hurt anyone. What good can come of it? Our species…is doomed.” Dulce remained pensive. Aracai continued, “We could leave the bomb, hide it in the mud.”
Anger flashed in Dulce’s eyes, “Don’t even think of it.” Her tone brooked no argument. She held his gaze, her dainty nose beguiling him. She drew close and kissed his lips, pressing hard and long. “Promise me. Promise you won’t turn back.”
“If we do this, the humans will hunt us down.”
“Everyone dies,” she said.
So they ate and for a while they slept in the forest shadows, cradled in one another’s arms.
The journey stretched long after that. After their nap, Aracai felt a sharp pain in his urethra. He recognized from the rhythmic motions that it was a fish. It had swum up an inch or more into him, and so he tried to pee it out.
But the tiny fish had barbs and could not be extricated, so he suffered the pain.
For four days they continued swimming along the shore of the Amazon, sometimes stopping to rest in an estuary. He saw the promised anacondas overhead and fell afoul of an electric eel. He saw colorful birds flashing over languid pools and swam unharmed through schools of piranha. There were giant arapaima longer than he and his wife, and alligator longer than any mer. The trees overhead, dripping with bright blossoms, were a marvel.
As they swam, he grew sicker. On the third day, he could no longer pee, nor could his wife. It was not the fish that had done it. Th
eir kidneys were failing.
His body began to ache as uric acid built inside, so that every muscle felt beaten and bruised. His scales took on a milky coating. With each passing hour, he felt more certain that this journey would kill them. Freshwater was deadly. On the fifth day, he could no longer eat. His gut had given up digesting and it felt better to starve than to take nourishment.
As sick as he felt, Dulce was worse. Dulce wept as she fought her way upstream, and each day she grew slower and slower. She held to his back often as they swam, and he pushed for both, so that sometimes he blanked out and swam blind from fatigue.
He judged that they had come a thousand kilometers when they reached the junction to Rio Negro, full of its poisons.
Wearily, they stopped and tried to get a breath in a small lagoon upstream from the Rio Negro. The place was magical, pristine, the water far cleaner than any they had encountered. It was as if they were entering a lost world, the great green jungles rising above the water, vast trees streaming epiphytes. A pair of dolphins swam along the river briskly, laughing as dolphins will, their coral-colored hides a delight.
He felt as if he had found some primal place that man had never touched and marveled that such jungles still existed.
They swam into a flooded creek. Blue crayfish scuttled among tree roots and clung to floating duckweed. The day was windy, and Aracai could hear roots groaning as the trees swayed and stretched. The waters in the lagoon were golden, and huge red-bellied pacu as long as his arm swam about.
As the trees stirred, dark round nuts fell, and the pacu would bite the nuts, crunching them with powerful teeth, so that though the fish looked like enormous piranhas, they seemed like gentle giants.
Here, Aracai gazed into Dulce’s eyes and said goodbye. “I want you to go back downstream,” he begged. “You won’t have to fight the current, and you can swim swiftly. Once you hit the saltwater, you will begin to heal.” He did not know if it were true, but hoped that it was.
To his astonishment, she did not fight him. She peered deep into his eyes, reached out and stroked his beard, and apologized. “I don’t have the strength to go on.”
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