by Jerry
After she had gotten her hand onto the large soft arm she asked, “Are you all right?” The man nodded and kindly leaned a bit of his weight onto her. She was thankful, the figure stood a foot above her six foot three inch height, and its shoulders were broader than Abuwolowo’s Nigerian span.
Firmly ensconced on the sand the man made a magician’s pass at his neck and lifted the covering away from his face. He shot a quick look at the sky with black eyes that filled huge sockets and said, “Bright.” He looked down at the sand, and after a few stertorous breaths spoke. “Thank you,” he paused reaching into his armpit, and continued, “Basker hit me out there.”
Breathing more easily he was easy to understand. The liquid mumbling of his first words had disappeared, and he looked directly at her. “Pretty,” he said, “Pretty deserves an explanation. A basker drove me into the bottom. Something scared it from in the air and it dove.”
“Basker?” she asked, wanted to hear the strange soft cadences of the voice that issued from the round head with its huge eyes.
“Basking shark,” he said, “lying on the surface and it dove, I had no time to signal or to warn.” He fell forward, breathing easily, but she saw blood welling from a cut on his back as he slumped onto his knees. “Excuse,” he mouthed, when she gave a small touched cry. There was a long gash traversing his back from the left shoulder blade to his waist at his right side, and the rubbery material of his suit had rolled back and pulled the wound open. She tried to lift him, but his weight was too great, and all she succeeded in doing was to push him over into the sand. She straddled him and pulled at his long thick arm, trying to turn him over, but that too was impossible. Flat as he looked spread out on the sand, with long thin legs and a midsection that had no depth, he was still enormously heavy. She jumped away from him and looked out into the sea. Abuwolowo was coming in toward the shore and she frantically waved and shouted, throwing her long pigtail and the points of her body in spastic jerks until he rode his board up onto the beach. “There’s a man hurt there,” she said, turning her back to him until the sand blasting up from the vehicle’s air jets had subsided.
“Man?” Abuwolowo questioned, but he heaved at the collapsed figure. “He’s as heavy as a whale. It’s no use, I’ll go up to the house and get help.” He ran off in long loping strides that brought him to the elevator in the cliff with an instantaneous violation of distance that was dreamlike. She stayed to watch her charge, fascinated by the long breaths he took. Easy inhalations that moved down his length in a wave from his chest to midriff in a series that seemed to never stop. One breath starting before the other had finished.
She waited silently, foregoing her usual monkey chatter to herself, eschewing fashion in the presence of the impassive white straw colored hair, whose only life showed in the delicate flutter of petal nostrils. Finally, after no time had passed for her, Abuwolowo returned with four of the servants, strong squat men from neighboring Aegean islands. Puffing, their legs bowed under the weight, they half carried, half dragged the wounded man to the elevator and folded him into it under Abuwolowo’s direction. Abuwolowo climbed over him, and braced between the walls, walked up the sides of the car until he was perched above the body. He held the up button down with a strong toe, the doors closed, and the elevator whirred invisibly away.
Greta had prepared for dinner, dressing and making her face up with unusual care, and was coming down the great ramp that swept into the entrance hall when she heard her brother-in-law talking to some of the guests. She stopped, amused, he was not really talking, but lecturing in a voice that his Kirghiz accent made even more didactic than he intended.
“Amazing,” he was saying, “the recuperative powers they have. After we had gotten him off the kitchen truck, and onto the largest reclining ottoman in the casual room, he sat right up. He smiled at me. He stretched.” Her brother-in-law paused, either overcome with amazement or staling down someone who appeared to be about to interrupt. “As I was saying,” he went on in measured periods, “he stretched.”
Greta could not resist her chance, she slipped down the ramp, and crossed to the speaker. “He stretched, and then what?”
Hauptman-Everetsky gave her the limited courtesy of his chill smile. “He stretched, and his water suit opened up and came off like a banana skin. He checked under his arm, the gill slit, you know, and climbed off the ottoman. He ignored me and turned around, and the cut was healed. There was only a thin line to show where it had been.”
Greta moved away, not waiting to hear the inevitable repetition and embellishments her brother-in-law would give to his reactions. She passed through the archway that led to the casual room, undisturbed by the slight malfunction of the pressure curtain that allowed a current of air to lift the hem of her long skirt.
The man from the sea was standing in front of the panoramic glass watching the slow turning of the sights from the island’s perimeter. A passing flow of scenery that was magnified and diminished by the tastes programed into the machine. Just at this moment it was dwelling on the lights of the skyscrapers of Salonika. He was engrossed, but her cousin Rolf was questioning him with his usual inquisitiveness. Dwarfed by the figure next to him he blurted questions in his fluting high American tones.
The question she heard as she approached was, “And you came all that way?” Rolf’s voice did not hold disbelief, it held pleasure, a childish love for a reaccounting of adventure.
“Surely,” the huge man said, “I have said it. I came from outside Stavangafjiord. I was following an earth current. I hoped it might teach me something about the halibut’s breeding. But I felt that was foolish, and so I hunted down the coast until I came to here.” He turned back to the glass to catch the artistic dwindling of the city as the machine withdrew his view to a great height. “And,” he said, coming politely back to his interrogator, “and the dolphins told me, when they were racing off Normandy, that the waters here were warm, and,” he paused, noticing Greta, “and the women beautiful, with yellow hair, and brown limbs.”
Greta nodded. “You’re very kind. But I do not have your name.”
“Gunnar Bjornstrom-Cousteau of the dome Walshavn.” He bowed, and she noticed how curious he looked covered by evening clothes. The short open jacket that barely reached the stretch tights exposed the rectangular expanse of his chest, a smooth fall of flesh without muscle definition that made her remember the tallowy layer of fat his wound had exposed. She shuddered, and he asked, “Does my face disturb you?” and for the first time she noticed that his skin was peeling, and there were angry welts under his chin. “I was careless to take such a long trip without going under the lamps at home first. But then I did not intend to come into the air then. I am not used to the sunlight.”
“Into the air?” Rolf was off again, but Greta stopped him.
“Dinner must be ready.” She took the stranger’s arm. “Will you take me in?” With Rolf tagging along behind, shaking his head, and bouncing every few steps to see if he could bring himself to the sea giant’s height, they entered the dining room.
The dining room was at the top of the chateau. It was open on all sides, and protected from the weather by polarized static fields that were all but invisible and brought the stars too plainly close.
“That fish,” Hauptman-Everetsky had passed from awe to condescension, as he answered someone’s question, “I could not throw him back like an undersized trout.” He gestured, “And it’s about time we had some amusement. We are beginning to bore one another.”
Greta felt her companion stiffen, and held onto his arm tighter. He bent his head to her, and said, “Do not fear, I will not fall. It is long since I have walked. I must become accustomed to being unsupported by the friendly weight of the water.” She noticed that he stressed the word friendly, and remembered that one of the few things she had heard about the underwater people was that they had brought back dueling. In the infinite reaches of the sea the enforcement of organized law was difficult, encounters with the
orca and the shark common, and the lessons they taught strong.
Yet her companion was smiling at Everetsky and his circle of friends, shaking hands with him firmly, and appraising the women. “At least I will not be bored,” he said staring at her sister Margreta’s painted chest. Greta took his arm again, relieved, and glad she had chosen to wear her blue gown that completely covered all of her except her hands and face.
“Are we going to sit down now, Carl?” she said to Everetsky, and he led the way to the table, placing Gunnar at his right and her at his left.
The dinner went smoothly enough at first, the early conversation centered around the futility of investing money in the moon mines, and the necessity of mollifying the government with sums small enough to be economic and yet larger than mere tokens. All of the men from the rich steppes and Russian mountain regions had recommendations: lobbyists to recommend, purveyors of formuli to complain about, and complaining tales of corruption. While Rolf was concluding a story that centered on a bribed official who refused to honor his obligations without further payments that would have nullified the capital payments he had agreed to save, he rediscovered Gunnar’s spherical face amid the contrasting ground of the tanned guests with their pointed chins.
“Nasty little fellow he was—dishonest as the day is long.” Rolf stopped. “But you my seaman friend, you don’t understand any of this?”
“I,” Bjornstrom-Cousteau burbled laughter, “do not understand these problems, but we have our own with the government.” He seemed to like Rolf, but he spoke to his host. “They are difficult to explain.”
“I suppose so,” Abuwolowo spoke, “but tell us anyway.”
Gunnar shrugged, and the massive table trembled slightly as he shifted his knees. “They want us to farm more, and hunt less.”
“Why not?” Abuwolowo challenged. “In the past my people adjusted to the changing times. They learned to farm and to work in factories.”
“Yes.” He was quiet for a moment. “I suppose some day we must, but as Hagar the poet sang—”
“Poets.” Abuwolowo dismissed them. “We were talking of the government here.”
“Hagar said,” the sea guest went on inevitable as the tides, pleasurably quoting a beloved line, “The sea change suffered by we; Cannot make the airmen think free.” He chanted on, squaring his shoulders to expose more of his pale flesh, “For we have chosen deep being, not the ease of their far seeing.” He stopped to stare out into the night with the depthless stare of his great dilated pupils.
Rolf, always jolly, rubbed his hands together, sniffing at the next course. “Ah, domestic venison,” he said, changing the subject, cutting Abuwolowo’s rejoinder short. “But our new guest doesn’t seem to be eating much, and mine host’s cook is excellent.”
“The food is cooked,” Gunnar said, as if it explained everything. It explained too much, and when he caught the expression on Hauptman-Everetsky’s face he stood up and excused himself. “I am still tired from healing my hurts. You will excuse me.” The last was a statement, not a question, and he left, moving with a tired lagging stride. His powerful body pushed down by the force of unrelieved gravity.
Morning came, and the first thing Greta did was to look far Gunnar. She had left the dinner party soon after him and started for his room, but Abuwolowo had overtaken her, and she had gone with him. Now she searched the gardens, moving through the regions of climate. She found him in the subtropical section standing in front of a red rubber plant grown to treelike proportions. He was fingering a paddle sized leaf, pressing his finger tips deep into it as he regarded it with slightly parted lips.
“Like meat,” he said. “Whale meat,” he said smiling at the picture she made coming down the cedar chip path between the walls of greenery. “You look very pretty this morning.”
“And you looked like a child when you were touching that plant, with your mouth open as if you wanted to taste it.”
“It does look edible,” he gave the leaf a last squeeze that pressed liquid out onto his hands. He licked the juice and made a face, and she laughed happily to see the soft corrugations that wrinkled around his head. “Well, it is bitter,” he said defensively, and reaching out lifted her off her feet and into the tree. “Bite it and see.”
Satisfied after she had clicked her teeth several times with mock gusto he set her down again, and she rubbed her sides. Seriously she looked up at him, appraising his bulk. “I was reading about you this morning,” she said, looking down with a strained intensity as if performing the unfamiliar task of following lines of print.
“So now I have become famous.”
“Oh, no,” she said, “in the encyclopedia. It says you are homo aquati—”
“Homo aquaticus, one of the old words.” He touched her bare shoulder. “Yes, and one of the better.”
“That’s it,” she said, dwelling on the pronunciation, “homo aquaticus. And a long time ago a man named Cousteau said that you were to be.”
“Cousteau.”
“Yes,” she altered her pronunciation, “Cousteau. A relative?”
“He is dead, and my surname is said the way you pronounced it the first time.”
“No matter,” she said, “I will show you the grounds now,” and she took his arm. She started out chattering to him about the shrubbery, but she soon discovered that it was another subject she knew very little about. He was naturally silent, and her thoughts turned to the things she had found in the encyclopedia. It had said that the first colonies were set up in the Mediterranean. The warm water was perfect for man, and the sudden mistral born storms were no trouble ten fathoms in the sea. The underwater colonies raised sea slugs, and clams, farmed algae and adapted fruits, and hunted the smaller whales with hand weapons. She had read very quickly, scanning down the page in s-curves in her hurry to go and meet him, but womanlike, she did remember some things about human births under the sea. The children were born into the pressures they would live under, fitted with gill mechanisms that took oxygen from the water, and subjected to chemotherapies that prepared them for their lives.
“But why do you live in the cold seas in the north?” she asked. The question was an outgrowth of her thoughts, yet he seemed to know what she meant.
“Because so many of our people live here?” he went on without needing to have an answer. “My greatgrandfather felt the bottoms were becoming too crowded, that the life would become too easy, and so, we left.” He swiveled his head to sniff at the sea offering her a view of the seal foldings of his neck. “And now we could not live here at all. We have changed our bodies, and we have learned to love the hunt.”
“But you come to the waters off this island.”
“I came only for a short hunt. I would have returned very soon.”
Further conversation was cut short by the interesting spectacle of wide eyed gardeners dodging into the bushes to avoid their advance. The servants variously crossed themselves, or made the sign of the horns, some of them did both. They knew, if Greta did not, that there was a conflict between the sea peoples and the dwellers on the land. Servants listened to political conversations, but eighteen year old girls of good family were expert in oblivious attention. The gardeners had heard from the house staff how the world government in New Kiev, on the Baltic, was demanding more taxes in algae proteins from the independent sea states. Some of the servants’ relatives had served in the fleets of small boats equipped with grapple buckets that were sent in punitive expeditions against the algae beds and the sea slug pens. The duty was dangerous, the seamen darted to the surface in spurting pushes from shallows to rocks and overturned boats, they cut the grapple cables, and tied derisive messages to their severed ends. What the raiders did capture was diseased, or of thin stock that had gone to seed.
The servants did not hate the seamen, they feared them as they feared the storms, and rages of nature. They did not respect them as they did their masters: the seamen were unnatural facts of nature. Not to be dealt with except through t
he practice of the magics that had come back in the few short years of barbarism after the Two Months War.
Gunnar had some idea of what the men who had run away were thinking, but that part of the problem did not concern him. After all, his dome did not farm enough to be involved in the commercial disputes. He looked at Greta. She was still caught up in the uniqueness of the servants’ scuttling disappearance.
“It has been a long time since we went into the sea,” he said, touching her on the shoulder again, knowing that physical contacts reassured her, “and they do not remember us. We are strangers.” She leaned her weight against his side, as soon as he had touched her, he noticed, and she made many movements with her hips and torso, but he attached no significance to her wriggling.
Greta became silent and swayed away from him. She had worked the individual muscles her governesses had trained her to use. Trained in long gymnasium sessions when she was young for the pleasurable obligations of adulthood, she accepted her expertness, and was piqued by his callous indifference. She almost believed that the sea women were more expert, but, on second thought, she disregarded that. Her instructors, and Abuwolowo, had assured her that she was perfectly trained in the amatory arts.
Hadji Abuwolowo Smyth watched them from a free standing balcony that projected, fingerlike, out over the gardens. “The girl is infatuated with the Fish,” he thought. “It is nothing more than his difference.” Abuwolowo remembered the long hours of dancing that had trained him, the great factories that his parents managed, and Greta’s brother-in-law’s desire for new markets for his heavy machinery, and concluded that he had nothing to worry about. He went into the house to have a suppling rubdown to prepare him for the prelunch wrestling.
Every day all the young men but Rolf wrestled for the amusement of the other guests. They fought in a combination of styles, jiu-jitsu coupled with the less dangerous holds of Greco-Roman wrestling. They were full of energy, had little to do, and they passed the time waiting for the day when they would assume the managerial offices their parents held in the automatic factories.