Someone asked, “But how would these tiny people protect themselves from the dangers of the world?”
Mr. Slater shrugged. “Insects make out all right. They are a far more successful species than we are. And bacteria are even more successful.”
“Bacteria don’t write history,” someone objected.
“Bacteria are history!” Mr. Slater said. “If you have the real thing, why write about it?”
Mr. Slater was crazy, of course. But he was the only science teacher in a little town like Piney Grove.
So I drifted and dreamed, and after a while I noticed that the river was growing shallow. I wondered if while I was dreaming I had drifted out of the main current. I swam to the banks, but they were shallow, too. After a while I was trying to swim through water no more than a foot or so deep, and it kept on shallowing, until I had to hop and pull myself through soft mud. The deepest part was still in the middle, though it wasn’t deep enough for swimming.
I pulled myself along, squirming and hopping on my tail. Then I noticed that there were little islands in the river, some of them with trees. I could see something flashing on one of the islands. I studied it for a while, but couldn’t make out what it was. I was afraid of encountering more raiders, but the island looked too small for people. I finally decided to investigate. I dragged and hopped over to it.
At first all I saw was a fallen tree. Then I noticed something shiny and metallic half-covered by the tree. That’s when I met Mr. Spider. His body was about the size of a flattened football, and it glinted in the sunlight. He had six or eight metallic legs. He also had eyestalks growing out of his shell, and there were little black eyes at the end of them.
“Hello, Mr. Spider,” I said.
The eye-stalks twitched. The spider said, “You seem to be a standard model human creature, except for the tail and gills. Your secondary sexual characteristics argue that you are a female. Your tail tells me you have been considerably modified from the original human model. Am I correct?”
“You are, Mr. Spider.”
That was the start of our conversation. I was pleased that Mr. Spider didn’t seem to consider me a child. He just talked to me like one intelligence to another.
“What happened to you, Mr. Spider?”
“I was crossing the river, and when the storm came up I took refuge here for the night. Lightning inconveniently collapsed the tree I was sheltering under, and it pinned me to the ground. That was over a day ago. I’ve been trapped ever since, trying to dig myself out. Unfortunately, one of my flippers has been damaged. It will self-repair when I get unpinned, but for the present I am as you see me.”
“Let me see if I can help,” I said, and succeeded, with a great deal of effort, in lifting the trunk high enough so he could scramble out.
“And now,” I said, “let me take you ashore on my back.”
“It is uncommonly good of you,” said Mr. Spider. “I have an appointment to meet my friend Flash downstream from here, and, what with my damaged flipper . . .”
“Say no more, I’d be delighted,” I told him. “I’ve been longing for some company, and you seem to know your way around these parts.” I hesitated, then said, “You don’t look much like a human, Mr. Spider.”
“Not all humans are created in the human, homo sapiens model. I am one of a new generation of pseudo-human thinking/feeling machines. The feeling part is very important, you understand, because without feeling, how can you think? And to what purpose?”
“So you can think and feel?”
“Yes, and on my own. It used to be that me and others like me had our thinking done for us at a central point to which we all were attached. But micro-miniaturization made that no longer necessary.”
“Are you what your makers intended?”
“Probably not, but it doesn’t matter. Why should I accept one human’s conception of how I ought to be? I approve of myself, and that is enough.”
We continued across the river, and Mr. Spider showed me where he wanted me to take him. It was a nice spot, with old cypress trees near the water. “Flash should be along any time now. I dreamed last night that he was coming here.”
“You dreamed him? Is that a reliable way to meet somebody?”
“It’s the only sure way. You haven’t learned about dreams yet, have you, Lena?”
“I dreamed once of my baby brother. He was a bird. He said I would see him again.”
“Then you will.”
“Then he does exist?”
“I have never met him. But if you dreamed him, I’m sure he does exist.” He hesitated, then said, “This is a time of changes, you know.”
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I remember is Mr. Spider saying to me, “This is my friend, Flash, an example of photo-syntheticus man.”
I opened my eyes and looked. Flash was about five feet tall and shaped like a man. But you’d never mistake him for one. His body seemed to be made of vines and gourds, and he had an array of strange, pale plants on the top of his head.
“He takes in sunlight through his head plants,” Mr. Spider said, “and converts it inside himself into what he needs. He doesn’t talk. But he can make a few sounds. Those he’s making now mean that he likes you.”
“I like him, too,” I said.
Lights danced on and off on Flash’s head and body, in a pattern I could make no sense of.
“Yes,” Spider said, perhaps reading my mind, “he can communicate through light signals. But I can assure you, it’s not Morse code! I haven’t deciphered his light-language yet. I don’t need to. Flash speaks to me in dreams.”
From Spider I learned that Flash took in his nutrition from sun and rain. He did not have appetite in the usual sense. All food was the same to him, since there was no better or worse sunshine. Nor was his passion sex, since he seeded himself.
“Are there others like him?” I asked.
“Flash buds prototypes of himself. But there are no new Flashes being created. It was decided by the human powers who decide these things that homo photo-syntheticus was too passive, didn’t have to work for a living like a human. This didn’t seem a good model for a new human, so it was discontinued.”
“But they let Flash himself live?”
“Well, actually he was thrown out. They thought he was dead and they consigned him to the junk heap. But it takes a lot to kill someone who is mainly plant. There was a mild winter with plenty of rain, and Flash recovered. I met him in the dumps of humantown and brought him away from there. He’s been doing fine ever since.”
“That was good of you, Mr. Spider.”
“We new humans have to help each other. Flash has a place in life, and a passion.”
“What is his passion, Mr. Spider?”
“Some spiritual thing, I think,” Mr. Spider said. “His bodily passions are few, if they exist at all. This frees up his love, his taste for a certain measure of fairness.”
“He seems to me an ideal sort of man,” I said.
“He’s not a man at all. Don’t let Flash’s human look persuade you. His human form is no more than anthropomorphic sentimentalism on the part of his creators. Actually he’s the most alien and strange of us all. Flash is not actuated by passions, which he does not have. Such a creature has no particular love of food, since he takes in sunlight. He has no sexual passion, since he is self-propagating. He has no aesthetic sense, since he is incapable of crafting objects, and if you can’t craft it, you can’t experience it, or love it.”
“So what does he love?”
“It seems to me,” Mr. Spider said, “that Flash has freed his mentality to where he can entertain and enjoy himself with thoughts of a high ethical, moral and aesthetic nature. His love is the play of life. And he is sentimental enough to favor the victory of the living. Unlike real men, he does not require death for an aesthetic outcome. Flash himself is to all intents and purposes immortal. He gardens himself, and the plants that he gives birth to are just like him. His only hu
man quality might be called love of the play. And the play he and others are producing now demands that you live, mermaid girl, and get to the sea and find your intended.”
“I’d like that myself,” I said. “What about you, Mr. Spider?”
“As for me,” Mr. Spider said, “I am not much like regular humans, either. My body takes in nourishment but does not rejoice in feeding. Sex is with me, but it is a mild drive, and not necessarily a pleasure. The metallic and mechanical nature of my body divorces me from the pleasures and pains of the flesh.”
Not long after that, Mr. Spider and Flash were gone, and I was alone again in the river.
I was musing on what I had learned, and thinking to myself that I had entered into a new age, an age of miracles. It was a time of new life, taking over from the old life-forms that had had their chance and failed. And I was one of those new life-forms.
I struggled on through the shallow water, flipping myself forward with my tail. I was growing very tired. The water stank from the sewage floating in it. I knew I was near a human settlement.
I stopped and dozed for a while, there in the shallow water. And I dreamed again.
I saw my brother again in a dream. This time I heard him speak. He said, “Sis, I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. But I can do it only in your dreams, and I’m still learning. It’s very hard, though. The Dreamer says I’m a natural, and I want to learn. There are difficulties ahead for you, and danger. You need to be ready for all that. I’ll talk to the Dreamer, see if he can help.”
“What sort of difficulty? What kind of danger? Who is this Dreamer?”
My brother didn’t answer at once. At last he said, “Sis, I can’t explain. But I’ll bring help. Just go on as you are, don’t detour, there’ll be help.”
Then I woke up. I had never felt so alone.
I continued to make my way down the river. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, there was a great splashing of water, and a loud, angry voice. I wanted to dive and conceal myself, but the water level was too shallow. Something was coming at me, a horse, galloping very rapidly. At first I thought it was a horse and rider, but then I saw that the human head was on the horse’s neck, broad and bearded. The face was twisted in an angry passion. I thought it looked insane.
At first I thought it was the raiders again, in some nightmare disguise. I screamed, “Leave me alone, raiders!”
The horse-man pulled himself to a halt and said, “I’ll show you a raider. Stand up! Let me look at you!”
I stood up on my tail. The horse-man was amazed. “What in hell are you?”
“A mermaid.” When he didn’t seem to understand, I added, “A fish person.”
“I never heard of those.”
“Well, I never heard of horse-people.”
He shook his head and frowned. He had a broad face. He could have looked nice if he’d only stopped frowning and grimacing.
“Yes, I’m a horse person. Do you know what that makes me in their eyes?”
“A centaur?” I asked timidly.
“No such luck,” he said. “They said I was a freak horse, and they whipped me when I wouldn’t pull their plow any faster. But not even that was the worst of it. Do you want to know what was?”
“Please tell me,” I said, although I really didn’t want to know.
“It was when they tried to mate me with a mare. Can you imagine the stupidity?”
“It’s difficult,” I said.
“I said to them, ’Bring me a horse woman like myself.’ They said, ’There are no horse women. No female centaurs.’ I said to them, ’How can that be? If you can create a male centaur, why not a female?’ They said, ’Money ran out before Phil could get to it.’ Can you imagine that?”
“It was bad,” I said. “Very bad.” Because that is what I thought he wanted to hear, and I didn’t want to get him angry.
“Well, I got even when I got ahold of the Winchester.” He had two arms growing out of his sides, and in one of them he held a rifle, and there was a bandolier of ammunition around his neck. “I don’t like to spend too much time down here in the river. It’s not my element. I’m going away now—back to the hills and mountains. That’s the proper element for a centaur. Goodbye, fish woman.”
I don’t want to remember the final part of journey down the river, but I have sworn to myself to tell everything.
The river continued to widen, and it became even more shallow. I never imagined before that a river could run out of water, but this one did. Oh, you could see a little movement on the surface, but this was no more than an inch deep. Below that was mud, sand, and rock. Mostly mud where I was. I no longer looked like a girl or a mermaid. I was plastered with mud from head to tail. I must have looked like a statue of a mermaid, or an effigy of one.
I thought I was near the sea when the mud became mostly sand and rock, and water started flowing again. I guess it had filtered itself through all that mud. But it was still pretty foul, and I tried to breathe as little as possible as soon as I was able to swim again.
The river now narrowed suddenly, and turned into a channel. The sides were paved with cement, and now the water was rushing. It carried me along at a healthy clip, I can tell you. I was trying to keep my head above the surface so as not to have to taste that noxious water, and I kept dodging tree trunks and bodies.
Then I heard a voice on the shore bellowing, “Hello there, fish girl!”
I swam toward the shore. There was the centaur again, standing on the bank. I cautiously stopped thirty feet from him.
“Hell, girl,” he said. “I didn’t come here to harm you.”
“Then why did you come?”
“To warn you.”
“About what?”
“Well, fish girl, I guess you were born unlucky. You’ve gotten yourself to the one place on the Carolina coast where you can’t get through to the sea.”
“Why are you lying to me?” I shouted at him.
“No lie! God’s honest truth! Maybe you were too young to remember, about fifteen years ago, the big sea monster scare in these parts?”
“No, I never heard of it.”
So he told me. I can’t reproduce his words. I had to ask him to repeat parts of it over and over, and clarify other parts. But what he told me came to this:
About fifteen years ago, there was a big invasion scare in these parts. Stories of weird underwater monsters coming up on the shore, dragging off men and women to their underwater lairs, storing them like alligators, to eat later, when they were ripe enough. Whether they believed it or not, the State government had to do something about it. So, with some Federal aid, they created a Zone of Interdiction. This part of the coast, for fifty miles in either direction, was barricaded and mined. Barbed wire, self-firing guns on watch towers, keyed to respond to movement. Other stuff.
But the worst of it was, just downstream from where we were, there was the gigantic blockhouse. At first it had been a fortress, with weapons facing out to sea. But when no invasion came, it was changed into a sewage plant, and made to operate on the polluted river. Everything the river brought to it was chewed up and fumigated and sterilized. And through the plant was the only way to the sea!
“Thanks for nothing,” I told him. “Why did you go so far out of your way to tell me this?”
“Well, fish girl, I thought I’d offer to take you another way. You can ride on my back. I’ll find a safe way for you.”
“And why would you do that?” I was beginning to take a dim view of the motives of men. And something in this crazy horse-man frightened me and put me on my guard.
“I thought we could team up,” centaur said. “Two freaks without anywhere to go . . . I’d be good to you, fish girl. Come out of the water, get on my back.”
It was tempting, even though I found the centaur hateful. He had a crazy mind full of terrible thoughts. But I was in a desperate situation, and I needed help badly.
But I remembered my brother had told me not to deviate. I didn’t
know quite what that meant, but I thought it meant just go on by myself.
“No,” I shouted, “I’m going on!”
“Then you’re a damn fool and to hell with you!” And with that the centaur wheeled and galloped away.
And so I continued down the river, now a narrow rushing channel. I stayed near the surface so I could see what was coming up. The water was half solid with waste. Plants and dead animals floated in it.
And then I saw, ahead of me, a gigantic concrete structure. It looked like a fortress. The river ran under it, and it was moving faster and faster. Where the water disappeared there was a dirty froth, and I could see that the water was running under the structure.
As I approached, I saw that there was a huge steel cylinder in the middle of the factory, half in the water. It was toothed, and it was pulling flotsam from the river. As I approached, I could hear a mixture of terrible grinding noises and rolling sounds.
I knew then a ghastly fear. I didn’t want to be killed, and certainly not like that. As I came into the final stretch, I could see the rolling cylinder turning, reaching for me. I tried to swim away from it, but I could make hardly any progress against the current. I knew I was finished . . .
And then I saw a bright light just above me. I blinked and resolved it into a tiny winged shape that seemed to be made of light. My brother!
It was too loud to talk in the crashing and thundering and grinding of that giant cylinder. But I could hear a voice in my head, saying, “Hang on there, sis. Help is on the way. Swim to your right . . .”
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