by Jerry
Gunnar and Greta emerged from the tree lined walk as the matches were about to start. Gunnar blinked, and rocked his head as the forenoon heat bit into his sunburn. Halting he made an effort; Greta felt oil under her hand, and saw his skin flex and knead. His pores opened and a smooth layer of clear oil covered his body. He took several more of his curiously peristaltic breaths, and with each one squeezed more protective fluid onto his skin.
“Now,” he said, as she let go of him, “We can go on, but first tell me what is happening here.”
“They are wrestling,” Greta said shortly, either still angry at his unresponsiveness, or caught up in the combat.
They watched Hadji Abuwolowo win the first fight easily. Throwing his opponent with a hip toss and pinning him with a leap. The Nigerian nodded to Greta with a victory grin on his face. “And you Fish,” he said, “do you wrestle?”
“Not with you,” Gunnar said politely, intending to imply that Smyth was too practiced a hand for his small skill.
“I am not a worthy opponent,” Abuwolowo chose to misunderstand him. “Or perhaps you are afraid?”
Gunnar felt Greta’s small hand in his back and walked forward onto the sanded turf looming more and more over Abuwolowo as he went. The Nigerian regretted his impetuousness for a split second, but compensated with a bound that was intended to carry him to the seaman’s head. The leap was successful, but his ear-grab hold was not. There was nothing to grip. Gunnar’s ears were tiny, and set deep into his skull. Their pavilions were vestigial, the auditory canals covered by membranes, and the skin oil slippery. Abuwolowo’s planned knee drive spun him over on his back, and he lay spraddled with his ludicrous failure driving his anger. Rolling backward he bounced up once and came down to jump flat through the air with his legs doubled. Just as he straightened to strike his adversary with the full force of his flight, and kicking legs, Gunnar dropped under the trajectory, folding with the flexibility of an eel. Abuwolowo skidded along the ground, and rolled over to rub sand into his back, certain that the man had not moved his feet. It was too much for him, but his urge to kill made him calculating. He stood up and ran, with short hunter’s steps, silently to Gunnar’s back, and unleashed an ax-like swing at the neck using the full strength of his wide shoulders. The edge of his hand struck and rebounded, but he was gratified to note that he had staggered Gunnar.
“You forget your title, Hadji,” Gunnar said in deeper tones than he had used before. Abuwolowo moved forward a shuffling half step and was thrown four or five feet backwards by an open handed slap he did not see start. When he recovered himself, Gunnar was standing stock still waiting. It was too late to go back, and he charged hopelessly. He felt the long flexible arms, as thick at the wrist as the shoulder, reach out to pick him up, but he could do nothing about it, even though they appeared to be moving very slowly. For a minute Gunnar held him in a strangely compassionate embrace, but then threw him into the air straight up. He felt himself rise, and he floated for a long interval, but when he fell he could remember no more.
Hauptman-Everetsky leaped to his feet and ran forward, but Gunnar was there before him. He knelt by Abuwolowo’s side and twisted him in his hands.
“Guards,” Everetsky screamed and fearlessly rushed toward the seaman.
“Stop,” Gunnar’s words were commanding, either out of their awesome depth, or because of the certainty of knowledge. “He will be all right. His back was hurt, but I have fixed it.” These last words were the ones that broke Everetsky’s code of hospitality. They were too much like a repairman speaking about a robot toy.
He stammered, peering out of slitted eyes that accentuated his Mongol blood, but Gunnar could only command his control. His first thought was to stop the guards.
“Back, quiet now,” Everetsky’s diction was irregular, but his pitch was properly adjusted to the command tone of the mastiffs. The dogs, with the metallic crowns of their augmented skulls glittering, turned back and sat in their places under the chateau wall, once more becoming statues. Now that his first duty was accomplished, he could come back to the business of Gunnar.
“Sir,” he said, and now his voice was under control. “You have injured one of my guests. That would be permissible, but it is certain to happen again. There is enmity between you and him, and,” he paused, to collect himself, “I must be truthful, I do not like your kind myself. I ask you to leave. If you feel yourself insulted I offer you satisfaction.”
“You are a brave man,” Gunnar said, and with a sudden baring of his teeth. “Well fleshed too, so the spoils might be worth the fight, but your way is not ours. I cannot ask you to sport with me.” He showed Everetsky his teeth, opening his lips back to his neck, and dropping the hinges of his jaw. “I would have to ask you into the water so that we could play, and,” he asked with icy rhetoric humor, that amused no one but him. “what chance would you take?”
“Thank you,” Everetsky said, not holding his contempt, “but I must nevertheless ask you when you will leave my house.”
“I ask your indulgence to wait until tonight when the tide is good.” Everetsky nodded, and the seaman turned and walked toward the beach path as if he remembered using it before.
Down on the beach Gunnar studied the water, watching for the signs of the incoming tide: seawrack would soon be tossed up onto the shore, pieces of the sea’s jetsam, thrown there to waste away on the cleansing shore. The dead seaweeds, fish and bubbles would soon push ahead of the growing combers to outline the demarcation between his domain and Everetsky’s. “Lubber,” he said, “you do not understand,” and stopped, putting his hand, palm-down, flat on the sand. He felt the vibrations of approaching feet.
Two servants appeared carrying his water suit, signaling their trepidation with stiff backs and firm jaws. Behind them came two more servingmen, and a kitchen maid. The bearers put his suit down at his feet, at a distance they thought out of the radius of his arms. They backed off and squatted on their heels to wait for the others to come up, remaining, guardedly watching him, until the woman and her companions reached them.
“Greetings to you,” Gunnar said when the woman had come to a halt, spreading her legs to balance the weight of a waist thickened by years of carrying full water jars up steps cut from island rock.
“Greetings,” she said, in a Greek dialect as bastardized as the letters that appeared on ancient Scythian coins. She alone observed him with equanimity.
“Speak,” he said, viewing a full half circle of the beach and horizon, moving his eyes independently. He knew what was coming, three times now he had performed this rite.
She waddled up to him pointing the forefinger of her left hand at his face. When it touched his closed mouth a rapturous look transformed her thickened features and the Attic awe encompassed her functioning. Obediently he opened his lips, and, with a sharp snap, clipped the end of her finger off. The nauseating taste of warm blood, and dirty fingernail, filled his mouth, but he swallowed quickly and spoke again.
“I have accepted. Speak.”
The woman could not resist looking back at her entourage with triumph, and Gunnar thought, “Poor fellows, now she is a full fledged witch, ugly and to be obeyed in all things.” She would have the ultimate power over her fellows. Commands were to be her normal mode of speech. The mere pointing of her maimed hand, a gesture of pollarded horns, could call a man to her bed, or a maid to his; but, more important, it would fuse the serfs into a unit. They would be a group that would respond to the messages of Gunnar’s people when the time came. He knew that the inheritors and owners of the earth understood their world very well from its blueprints; but they could not find the switches and valves and all the simple tools to work them.
“Did you speak your true thoughts when you promised to eat the master, Great Fish?”
Gunnar made the obligatory answer. “You have prayed to us.”
“Demon of Poseidon, my people would be saved.” She too was familiar with the ritual.
“I am no demon, but a
servant,” he rose to his feet, and gave the toothy yawn that had impressed Everetsky. “Poseidon wants more servants who love the sea.”
“We will accept.”
Gunnar bit a piece of blubber from his forearm and spit it into the cup of her waiting hands. Immediately she kissed it ritually and squirreled it into the dirty fold of her blouse.
“When the appointed time is come I will return.” He watched them go, the woman leading, and the men with their heads inclined to the woman.
Gunnar was ashamed of himself, not for his threats to his host and their outcome. He had planned that series of happenings, and, had in fact, played this role many times before. His people could not hope to fight the land dwellers if the war was to be fought on the basis of numbers and equipment. The sea cities were very vulnerable, the simplest sort of guided torpedo could destroy the domes, and economic sanctions would quickly disrupt the lives of the ocean bed farmers and their cities. He was not ashamed of his tactics, but of the unmanly squeamishness which had overtaken him. To feel his stomach turn at the mere taste of human kind. It was true that the heavy starch diet of the airbreathers and the dark cooked meats they ate gave their flesh an unpleasant, alien taste, but it was not so different from the savor of enemies he had killed in the days-long hunting duels in his home-ground.
He stopped his train of thought, and studied the sea with heightened awareness. Wondering what disturbed him would do no good. He knew it would be better to relax, but the strange dislocation of his abilities was still with him: He breathed deeply, sucking great mouthfuls of air, and held them until his chest and diaphragm puffed out in a rotund bladder. Slowly he let the air escape through his nostrils, a silent flow of aspiration, until any observer would have noticed the change in his posture. Everything about his body was lax, his legs lay separately on the sand, and his head lolled, but the eyes were alive. They turned in their, sockets independently scanning the surface of the sea. It was a look born in the middle twentieth century studies of frogs’ nervous systems. There were circuits spliced into the optical nerves that bypassed the brain and fed the sorted visual stimuli back to the eye muscles. Only the significant motions on the surface of the sea were allowed to reach the brain.
After a few seconds of this activity Gunnar’s legs twitched, his eyelids drooped, and the eyes themselves seemed to withdraw back into the skull. He brought his knees up, and hugged them, sitting in this childlike posture with a broad grin on his face.
“Hauptman-Everetsky was foolish,” he thought as he changed his position to stand, moving in a serpentine flow that ended in a run toward the surf. His last thoughts before he hit the water in a flat dive were of his hunger, and a mental note to come back to the beach to see if his calculations about Greta were correct. He hit near the bottom of a wave and let the undertow carry him toward the sudden deep just beyond the breakers. Turning in a free somersault he pushed for the boulder-filled bottom and found a current that carried him between the rocks. As he estimated his speed he slowed himself by pressing his heels into the sand, touching at chosen points much like a professional polo player guides his pony with touches of his spurs. When he saw the bathysphere that Everetsky had ordered sunk, he momentarily regretted not wearing his swim fins, but he did not dwell on the thought. It could hold no more than three men, he thought, and swam towards its hatch.
The three guards saw him as soon as he came into the bathysphere’s circle of light. They started out the open hatch. Gunnar caught the first man by the scruff of his neck as he came out, but they had expected to use the vanguard as a delay to allow others to come up on him. What they had not allowed for was the simplicity of Gunnar’s tactics. He held the man like a kitten and plucked the mouthpiece of his oxygen recirculator out of his face, pointed him toward the bottom, and, with a wide hand spread across his buttocks, pushed him under trampling feet. The second man tried to divert him with a shot from his speargun. Gunnar, feeling foolishly inept for his slowness, ducked and caught it just over his shoulder, and drove the blunt staff into the marksman’s solar plexus. He hauled this opponent out by a flopping arm, without time to watch his agonized contortions. The third member of Everetsky’s murder party refused to join the combat. Gunnar showed his grinning face at an illuminated port, and disappeared to the top of the sphere. He took the cable ring in his hands and threshing his legs swam the bathysphere over onto its side. With a little adjustment the hatch fitted neatly into the bottom and Gunnar surveyed his handiwork before he swam to the man curled on the bottom with his legs doubled up over his stomach. No matter how he struggled, the man felt himself being drawn straight out. A round face, suspended inches from his mask, gently studied his last reactions.
The beach was deserted when Greta finally escaped from the chateau to look for the seaman. She kicked a puff of sand into the night breeze in exasperation and would have left, but she saw something break out of the water amid the froth of incoming waves. A second later she could see Gunnar’s figure wading ashore. He bent and reached under the water, and taking a handful of sand wiped it across his mouth. As he drew closer she could see the flicker of his tongue picking at the crevices in his teeth.
“Hello,” she said, not finding anything else to say for the moment, and wrapped her long cloak tighter around her.
“Hello,” he said, noticing her shivers. “Come, you are not used to the night air without screens to protect you.” He led the way to the shelter of the cliff, and continued, “What are you doing here?”
Greta did not know, except that she was attracted to him, and that he was the first man she could remember feeling anything but familiarity for, but she said, “Well, you beat Abuwolowo so easily.”
“In the jousts of love,” Gunnar said declaratively, having thought better of finishing his statement questioningly.
Greta gave him her best arch smile. “But I could talk my brother-in-law into letting you stay. He owes something to me.”
Gunnar would have told her about the affair he had just ended in the sea, but the strange repugnance overtook him again. “He would not really want me,” he said, but even he, not given to nuances of this sort, noticed the hesitant tone in his own voice.
“But his concern is always for the amusement of his guests,” Greta said, and giggled fetchingly at some private joke, “and they are getting bored. Very bored,” she said masterfully.
“And I would soon be boring too, Little Greta.” He rumpled her hair with a touch of rough power, and she stepped closer to him.
“You couldn’t bore me. Ever.” She turned her face up and Gunnar saw the plumb line of her throat. Thin, but adolescently rounded with a touching surplus of young fat. The strangest rules of his dialectic told him that he should destroy her as an incipient breeder.
“No,” he said, “I can do better.” He explained himself to the elders in the dome under the sea.
Greta was tired of waiting for an embrace that never came. She changed her posture, and spoke with irritation. “What was that?”
“Nothing.” Plausibly, he said, “I must go back to my family. I have been gone very long.”
“Your wife you mean.”
“I am too young to swim in the breeding tides.”
The metaphor’s meaning escaped Greta, but the surface of the statement could be turned into the small victory of a compliment.
“You will come back when you are ready?”
Gunnar found the source of his weakness. Somehow she had taught him to find the meaning behind simple words. He smiled.
“Of course. Where else would there be for me to go now?”
Greta had forgotten all her careful training: the sophistications that her governesses had taught her. She beamed, threw her arms around his waist, and leaned her head on his sternum. “Thank you,” she said, appreciating a compliment with coquetry.
“You are very welcome,” Gunnar said, and managed to keep his laughter out of his voice. “But you can do me a favor.” Before he spoke he studied the water.
Now he must leave, he decided, and turned back to her. “It is very simple.” He said, “Remember to tell your brother-in-law this: war will be fought in places he has not yet thought of.”
“Yes?” Greta said, bewildered.
“No more.” Gunnar patted her head kindly, and sat down, smoothed his suit onto his body, and put his fins on his feet. When he had his mask in place he could no longer speak and he walked silently into the breakers to vanish. Later that same night he talked with the porpoises, chased a school of silvery fish out into the moonlight and then dove to flirt in swirls in a whirlpool current that spun him out in the direction of home.
Greta gave Hauptman-Everetsky her cryptic message; he took little notice of it, and she remembered less and less of Gunnar with the passing years. When she did recall, it was too late, the figures coming out of the surf, to be greeted by the servants, were not Gunnar, but triumphant victors. The island was without power, the servants in revolt, and nostalgia was not a shield.
The war had been fought; neither she nor her brother-in-law had known it. In the subterranean tunnels the ripped ends of power cables spluttered hopeless sparks, water poured from torn mains, and bells and voices, however loud, brought no servants back from their welcoming songs. The always obedient chattels only watched, with blank dark eyes, as the fish came to play their game with Greta.
I AM BONARO
John Starr Niendorff
Once you start the process of change, something is bound to be lost along the way.
ONLY the ticket agent saw the old man as he was thrown from the motionless boxcar and tumbled crazily to the gravel-covered earth. The train hissed and wheezed for a moment as it gathered energy for movement then began crawling away from the station.
Slamming the lid of his cash-box closed, the agent ran from the tiny office to track-side where the old man lay. He paused for a long breath then called, “You okay, Mister?”