Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (366 page)

I pushed around in my pocket and fetched out the milky fragment I had brought from the beach. “Here. Do you like this one?” And they bent above my webbed and alien fingers.

* * * *

In the supermarket, which is the biggest building in the village, Juao bought a lot of cake mixes. “That moist, delicate texture,” whispered the box when you lifted it from the shelf, “with that deep flavor, deeper than chocolate!”

I’d just read an article about the new vocal packaging in a U.S. magazine that had gotten down last week—so I was prepared and stayed in the fresh vegetable section to avoid temptation. Then we went up to Juao’s house. The letter proved to be what I’d expected. The kids had to take the bus to Brasilia tomorrow. My godchildren were on their way to becoming fish.

We sat on the front steps and drank and watched the donkeys and the motorbikes and the men in baggy trousers, the women in yellow scarves and bright skirts with wreaths of garlic and sacks of onions. As well, a few people glittered by in the green scales of amphimen uniforms.

Finally Juao got tired and went in to take a nap. Most of my life has been spent on the coast of countries accustomed to siestas, but those first formative ten were passed on a Danish collective farm and the idea never really took. So I stepped over my goddaughter, who had fallen asleep on her fists on the bottom step, and walked back through the town toward the beach.

III

At midnight Ariel came out of the sea, climbed the rocks, and clicked her nails against my glass wall so that droplets ran, pearled by the gibbous moon.

Earlier I had stretched in front of the fireplace on the sheepskin throw to read, then dozed off. The conscientious timer had asked me if there was anything I wanted, and getting no answer had turned off the Dvo
ř
ák Cello Concerto, which was on its second time around, extinguished the reading lamp, and stopped dropping logs onto the flame so that now, as I woke, the grate was carpeted with coals.

She clicked again, and I raised my head from the cushion. The green uniform, her amber hair—all color was lost under the silver light outside. I lurched across the rug, touched the button, and the glass slid into the floor. The breeze came to my face as the barrier fell.

“What do you want?” I asked. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Tork is on the beach, waiting for you.”

The night was warm but windy. Below the rocks silver flakes chased each other in to shore. The tide lay full.

I rubbed my face. “The new boss man? Why didn’t you bring him up to the house? What does he want to see me about?”

She touched my arm. “Come. They are all down on the beach.”

“Who all?”

“Tork and the others.”

She led me across the patio and to the path that wound to the sand. The sea roared in the moonlight. Down the beach people stood around a driftwood fire that whipped the night. Ariel walked beside me.

Two of the fishermen from town were crowding each other on the bottom of an overturned washtub, playing guitars. The singing, raucous and rhythmic, jarred across the paled sand. Shark’s teeth shook on the necklace of an old woman dancing. Others were sitting on an overturned dinghy, eating.

Over one part of the fire on a skillet two feet across, oil frothed through pink islands of shrimp. One woman ladled them in; another ladled them out.

“Tio Cal!”

“Look, Tio Cal is here!”

“Hey, what are you two doing up?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be home in bed?”

“Poppa Juao said we could come. He’ll be here, too, soon.”

I turned to Ariel. “Why are they all gathering?”

“Because of the laying of the cable tomorrow at dawn.”

Someone was running up the beach, waving a bottle in each hand.

“They didn’t want to tell you about the party. They thought that it might hurt your pride.”

“My what…?”

“If you knew they were making so big a thing of the job you had failed at—”

“But—”

“—and that had hurt you so in failure. They did not want you to be sad. But Tork wants to see you. I said you would not be sad. So I went to bring you down from the rocks.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“Tio Cal?”

But the voice was bigger and deeper than a child’s.

He sat on a log back from the fire, eating a sweet potato. The flame flickered on his dark cheekbones, in his hair, wet and black. He stood, came to me, held up his hand. I held up mine and we slapped palms. “Good.” He was smiling. “Ariel told me you would come. I will lay the power line down through the Slash tomorrow.” His uniform scales glittered down his arms. He was very strong. But standing still, he still moved. The light on the cloth told me that. “I…” He paused. I thought of a nervous, happy dancer. “I wanted to talk to you about the cable.” I thought of an eagle; I thought of a shark. “And about the…accident. If you would.”

“Sure,” I said. “If there’s anything I could tell you that would help.”

“See, Tork,” Ariel said. “I told you he would talk to you about it.”

I could hear his breathing change. “It really doesn’t bother you to talk about the accident?”

I shook my head and realized something about that voice. It was a boy’s voice that could imitate a man’s. Tork was not over nineteen.

“We’re going fishing soon,” Tork told me. “Will you come?”

“If I’m not in the way.”

A bottle went from the woman at the shrimp crate to one of the guitarists, down to Ariel, to me, then to Tork. (The liquor, made in a cave seven miles inland, was almost rum. The too-tight skin across the left side of my mouth makes the manful swig a little difficult to bring off. I got “rum” down my chin.) He drank, wiped his mouth, passed the bottle on and put his hand on my shoulder. “Come down to the water.”

We walked away from the fire. Some of the fishermen stared after us. A few of the amphimen glanced, and glanced away.

“Do all the young people of the village call you Tio Cal?”

“No. Only my godchildren. Their father and I have been friends since I was…well, younger than you.”

“Oh, I thought perhaps it was a nickname. That’s why I called you that.”

We reached wet sand where orange light cavorted at our feet. The broken shell of a lifeboat rocked in moonlight. Tork sat down on the shell’s rim. I sat beside him. The water splashed to our knees.

“There’s no other place to lay the power cable?” I asked. “There is no other way to take it except through the Slash?”

“I was going to ask you what you thought of the whole business. But I guess I don’t really have to.” Tork shrugged and clapped his hands together a few times. “All the projects this side of the bay have grown huge and cry for power. The new operations tax the old lines unmercifully. There was a power failure last July in Cayine down the shelf below the twilight level. The whole underwater village was without light for two days; three amphimen died of overexposure to the cold currents coming up from the depths. If we laid the cables farther up, we chance disrupting our own fishing operations as well as those of the fishermen on shore.”

I nodded.

“Cal, what happened to you in the Slash?”

Eager, scared Tork. I was remembering now, not the accident, but the midnight before, pacing the beach, guts clamped with fists of fear and anticipation. Some of the Indians back where they make the liquor still send messages by tying knots in palm fibers. One could have spread my entrails then, or Tork’s tonight, to read our respective horospecs.

Juao’s mother knew the knot language, but he and his sisters never bothered to learn because they wanted to be modern, and, as children, still confused with modernity the new ignorances, lacking modern knowledge.

“When I was a boy,” Tork said, “we would dare each other to walk the boards along the edge of the ferry slip. The sun would be hot and the boards would rock in the water, and if the boats were in and you fell down between the boats and the piling, you could get killed.” He shook his head. “The crazy things kids will do. That was back when I was eight or nine, before I became a water baby.”

“Where was it?”

Tork looked up. “Oh. Manila. I’m Filipino.”

The sea licked our knees, and the gunwale sagged under us.

“What happened in the Slash?”

“There’s a volcanic flaw near the Slash’s base.”

“I know.”

“And the sea is hypersensitive down there. You don’t insult her fashion or her figure. We had an avalanche. The cable broke. The sparks were so hot and bright they made gouts of foam fifty feet high on the surface, so they tell me.”

“What caused the avalanche?”

I shrugged. “It could have been just a goddamned coincidence. There are rock falls down there all the time. It could have been the noise from the machines—though we masked them pretty well. It could have been something to do with the inductance from the smaller power cables. Or maybe somebody just kicked out the wrong stone that was holding everything up.”

One webbed hand became a fist, sank into the other, and hung.

Calling, “Cal!”

I looked up. Juao, pants rolled to his knees, shirt sailing in the sea wind, stood in the weave of white water. Tork looked up too. The wind lifted his hair from his neck; and the fire roared on the beach.

“They’re getting ready to catch a big fish!” Juao called.

Men were already pushing their boats out. Tork clapped my shoulder. “Come, Cal. We fish now.” We waded back to the shore.

Juao caught me as I reached dry sand. “You ride in my boat, Cal!”

Someone came by with the acrid flares that hissed. The water slapped around the bottom of the boats as we wobbled into the swell.

Juao vaulted in and took up the oars. Around us green amphimen walked into the sea, struck forward, and were gone.

Juao pulled, leaned, pulled. The moonlight slid down his arms. The fire diminished on the beach.

Then among the boats, there was a splash, an explosion, and the red flare bloomed in the sky: the amphimen had sighted a big fish.

The flare hovered, pulsed once, twice, three times, four times (twenty, forty, sixty, eighty stone they estimated its weight to be), then fell.

Suddenly I shrugged out of my shirt, pulled at my belt buckle. “I’m going over the side, Juao.”

He leaned, he pulled, he leaned. “Take the rope.”

“Yeah. Sure.” It was tied to the back of the boat. I made a loop in the other end, slipped it around my shoulder. I swung my bad leg over the side, flung myself on the black water—

—mother-of-pearl shattered over me. That was the moon, blocked by the shadow of Juao’s boat ten feet overhead. I turned below the rippling wounds Juao’s oars made stroking the sea.

One hand and one foot with torn webs, I rolled over and looked down. The rope snaked to its end, and I felt Juao’s strokes pulling me through the water.

They fanned below with underwater flares. Light undulated on their backs and heels. They circled, they closed, like those deep-sea fish who carry their own illumination. I saw the prey, glistening as it neared a submarine flare.

You chase a fish with one spear among you. And that spear would be Tork’s tonight. The rest have ropes to bind him that go up to the fishermen’s boats.

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 out to sea, 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 of 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 the prow of a boat 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 on the prow. “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, I felt water run my back and shoulders—the only time you really feel them. And Tork laughed, grabbed the rope, and began to haul.