Stonefish

by Scott R. Jones

  Gregor had been telling the truth. I was fine. My knee was healed. For a moment, my memory superimposed the last view of the joint over what I was seeing and my whole body went stiff in response. Gregor laughed.

  “Like the man said, get up and walk, my son. C’mon and give that bad boy a bend.” I did. And it did. And with that action, Gregor commenced with his nickel tour.

  ***

  I was surprised to find that, once up and moving, I had considerable energy and almost an urge to move more, to go from a casual stroll to a brisk pace. I pumped my arms, extended my stride beyond normal. Testing the system, the limits. I held back from actually running, but I could have. Run. I wanted to run, but I decided I couldn’t trust the urge, not yet. Turned out that was the course of wisdom. Gregor noticed my energy but gave no signs of concern. If anything, he seemed more confident in the repaired knee than I was learning to be. I wondered, silently, about his doctors time and again as I was shown around.

  We left the medical pod and toured the facility. The entire complex—research and recreation pods, dormitories, maintenance facilities—had been built into a large ravine. Above, an underground hot spring exited the rocks and spilled into a waterfall, and the resulting stream coursed through the middle of the ravine. This was trimmed with walking paths of ridiculously white pebbles or gravel, and crossed by a network of printed bridges designed to blend with the environment. Spans of simulated bone and branch, quartz and feldspar, smoked glass.

  It was midday, and the perpetual fog had lifted until it cleared the tops of the tallest trees. The sun was a clean-edged ball of white. Patches of blue flashed on and off through the trees. Vegetation was everywhere, evidence of a once careful garden plan gone to chuckling chaos but still retaining some of the original vision. Ferns like viridian swords reached for the sky; the broad, thick leaves of rhododendrons so dark green as to be almost black cradling blooms of a doubtful plastic pink. Mosses and lichens encrusted most surfaces, moist carpets and profusions of scaled, burnt skin curling in on itself. Wherever there was decay—crumbling stumps and the sloughing bark of old trees—there was life; great phallic mushrooms, pale and glistening, rising from the rotting substrate, or girding the columns of ancient wood in crenelated disks. Soft clouds of spores catching the light. Every color was vibrant, pulsing with life and movement. Rich texture was everywhere in glorious cooperation and contention. The air smelled sweet, I realized, and in the same moment knew that I had never before actually smelled sweet, unscrubbed air. The stuff had layers to it: chlorophylls heating in the sunlight, black and red earth churned below by burrowers and aggressive root systems and creeping mycelial matts, cool water washing rough surfaces of stone and bark in gentle rolls, and beneath it all the tang of a well-balanced, nutritious boreal breakdown.

  The compound, Stonefish House itself, was beautiful.

  “This is amazing,” I said. “It’s like paradise.”

  “Pretty different, huh,” Gregor said. “Nothing like your trip up here. Or further south, I’m guessing.”

  “Nothing. Nothing like it.” I took in a deep breath, determined to savour the air while I could, half-suspecting that it could all pass in a moment of inattention. “How, though? How is it like this?”

  “Tusk knew some great realtors, I’m guessing. Location, location, location. Right? I mean, that’s what they say.”

  “Sure, but I don’t understand. You must have some serious climate tech running here. This is an oasis. Comparatively.” The country I’d come through to arrive here had been a typical late-stage Anthropocene coastal mistforest: uncomfortably hot and steaming, the dominant plant life reduced to prehistoric mega-ferns, horsetails the width of planks, and the monstrous trees, dry and stubborn and ancient.

  “Nope. No tech.” Gregor laughed, a short sharp sound. “Well. No artificial climate tech, anyway. The realtors again. Helps to have connections. Helps to have power. Speaking of which, it’s all geothermal here, with a bit of an assist from a vortex turbine further upstream. Helps if you need to stay off the grid. Aldo was very insistent.”

  “Tusk. Why was that?”

  He ignored the question, and I recalled the unhappy terms of their separation. The ideological split had been tabloid and industry rag fodder for more news cycles than a presidential assassination which happened around the same time. At least a week of breathless noönet stories. Unprecedented until then, but that was the kind of presence Tusk had in the public consciousness. I shuddered, thankful that we’d moved beyond tech guru worship on that level, and then decided to leave well enough alone; the Aldo Tusk shitshow was old news, and the man himself was long dead. Unlike Gregor, this man who abandoned the world, standing before me, conducting his tour.

  “To your left you’ll see the algae frames and the greenhouses. I call that shack there my delicatessen. I print all the protein I need in there, but when that gets dull I like to supplement with foraged meals. Wicked chanterelle patch above the ravine, and there’s a few old Douglas firs round here with insane chicken-of-the-woods growth. Ever tasted chicken-of-the-woods, Den? The laetiporus fungus?”

  “Can’t say as I have. Gregor, I’m from SoCal.”

  “Right. Well. It doesn’t taste like chicken. At least, not to my palate.” A guiding hand swept out over a swath of leafy emerald foam dotted with soft pinks and deep purples reflecting the sunlight off their dimpled surfaces. “Salmon berries, blackberries. Giant beetles around here, too. Sometimes I’ll get a deer. How are you around guns.”

  “Fine? I guess.”

  “What’s your diet like, Den? Anything I should know about.”

  “Pretty standard, no allergies or anything. Why is Stonefish House off the grid, Gregor?”

  “Security, natch. Kind of things Tusk and Eidolon were doing here, well.” He wagged a hand like a paddle in the air, squinted. “For the best, really. Most of the gym is built into the rock wall to your right. Not exactly modern but there’s a pool and steam room above it. All fed by the springs, of course.”

  “So I’m cut off here.”

  “Yessir, you are. Cut. Off.”

  “No noönet. Or...damn. What did they used to call it?”

  “A hardline?” Gregor offered.

  “Yeah. No hardline?”

  “Oh, I have one. Don’t use it much. Don’t worry about it, though. You’ll find everything you could possibly want here. Each year I open my nets for an hour or so and I scrape the seas clean.” Here Gregor made a horrible clawing motion in the air, bringing his fingers close to my face. I may have jumped. “I’ve got a dozen yottabytes of storage. At least. Not that I count them, but you know how it is with the super-rich. You don’t count, because it’s no longer about that.”

  I couldn’t take his inclusion of me within the insanely wealthy of the planet as anything other than condescending but decided to leave it alone. I was his guest, after all. There were questions, though, because he certainly wasn’t super-rich anymore.

  “Gregor, when you disappeared, everything you had was siphoned off, consumed by years of legal. There isn’t much left of whatever your estate was at the time. You had no protections on any of it. It’s all gone. The state, your creditors, they took it all away.”

  “Fine by me. Better that people more invested than I in this fucking world find some use for the stuff. See that outbuilding up there at the end of that path? The next-gen-at-the-time bioconcrete Aldo used for this place went a little squirrelly after everyone left. It’s been like that ever since. Neat, huh.”

  The building looked for all the world like a pile of fallen trees painted white, then splashed with lichen. Thick berry-heavy bramble obscured what might have been the roof and much of the west-facing walls. Rhododendrons exploded behind the structure.

  “Sure.” The place was falling apart, granted, but I couldn’t let the money go. “It’s got to cost something to run this place. You can’t be entirely self-sufficient.”

  He stopped, swung his great bearded head aro
und in exaggerated circles, flung out his arms and pointed to this moss-covered building and that. I followed his index fingers and really saw the place. Bioconcrete domes and spheres and jumbles of cube half gone to the moss and brush. Water features bright with algae, ringed in cages of young alder and bamboo, a satellite dish array bent at a weird angle, nearly rusted through.

  “Can’t I, though?” Gregor said. “Can’t I. It costs to be here. You’ve no idea. I pay and I pay.” He turned to me and placed surprisingly gentle hands on my shoulders. The sun broke through the combined efforts of fog and forest just long enough to light up the white gravel path. I imagined for a moment we stood on the back of an ancient worm, its gnarled hide breaching the loam.

  “Den. I’m in hiding for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is that I can afford to. I can afford all this. And I pay, gladly, because I need to. I need to do this, need to be here.” His hands lifted away from me like saucers, floating. “You, too. Can you afford to be here? Den?”

  “Well. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  Gregor smiled. “You are, you are indeed. All right then. Tell you what, son. If things turn out the way I think they will, and you find yourself unable to pay for your time here with me, I’ll cover you. How does that sound to you?”

  “Fine? I guess.”

  “Then you’ll understand me when I tell you that I’m financed by shadow corporations.”

  “By the what now?” But he was already walking again, hands flapping like injured birds, pointing, hooking, caressing the air. I followed. I would eventually become somewhat used to the standard Makarios rant, but my first real exposure was disorienting. I began to feel a migraine coming on.

  “The Freemasons, Scottish and Egyptian. Black ops groups. Globe-spanning networks of stealth governments. Dark, coke-fueled cabals of Hollywood producers keen to profit from the research. There’s a ganzfeld reactor in there, you know. Beats your E-Z Bake chambers all to hell.”

  “Shit! An entire reactor? Does it work?”

  “Why, you need to write the next John Chthonic bestseller?”

  “No, but it would make the article for New Heretic a literal snap. Tell me it’s functional.”

  “I wish I could, Den. It was an Eidolon prototype, understand. After it ate a test pilot, the forensic techs had to gut the thing. Also, it’s haunted? The pilot again. So, yeah...” He shrugged, like it was the most normal thing in the world.

  “Yessir, costly stuff! Over there we’ve got the cooling chambers for the mainframes that built Deep Trevor and Sophia Mars. Wells a hundred meters deep, straight down into the very living rock! Nothing but the best for our AI overlords, remember? Ah, bless ’em, may their shades find peace. Half empty now, of course.

  “Money flows to me from the bottomless coffers of fully authorized protectors of the status quo. The golden children! Anti-commanders of terrible reverse-universe military-industrial mega-complexes have me on their grim payroll. I am funded by the spare change that falls randomly into our world from the treasure-choked wallets of enlightened Tibetan Masters as they pass through adjacent bardos on their way to Nirvana. When the wealthy die, a portion of that which they can’t take with them is siphoned discreetly into myriad Swiss accounts in my name, as per my eternally binding contract with Satan himself.

  “I skim a little off the top of everything, Den. I can afford this place. I can pay. And I do. You’ll see.”

  I would learn to deal with the verbal spew in time, but now I was exhausted, and the migraine aura blossomed around me like a chrysanthemum made of pain. The jumpy energy I’d felt at the start of the tour had fled, and I found myself dragging my feet along the path. “I get it, Gregor.”

  “Do you, do you, do you true. I wonder about that. But okay.” He clapped me on the shoulder again, directed me to an arched doorway in a low, squat building. “And you know what, even if you don’t, you will, and soon enough. Here. Let me show you a thing.”

  ***

  The interior was dim, with recessed lighting in the ceiling and glowing strips in the floor. Easily half of these were burnt out and what was left flared every few seconds, then faded to almost nothing. The air was heavy and damp, rank with odours of salt brine and vegetation gone to rot. With my oncoming headache, I found it a heady mix and my gorge begin to rise. Gregor noticed.

  “Yeah, let’s leave those doors open.” He shoved first one, and then the other, deep into the forest detritus that littered the doorway. One of them stayed stuck, but the other began to close; Gregor darted outside and returned with a lichen-crusted rock which he dropped carelessly in the door’s path. “Apologies for the funk. I don’t air this place out much.” Satisfied that the doors would stay open, he walked past me into the gloom to jab at a panel of switches on a wall. More lights came up, but the improvement to the vision was minimal.

  “Come and meet the tenants.”

  The center of the room Gregor led me to was dominated by a low, squat enclosure of bioconcrete. The salty tidepool ambience was wafting from this and with good reason; it wasn’t so much an aquarium as an actual tidepool. Dense clusters of barnacle-encrusted stone dotted the surface of the filmy water, which rippled in a listless way when a humming jet pumped a minimal current into the tank. If there were filters, they couldn’t all be in use. The place was rank.

  “I wasn’t involved with this part of the operation when I worked here. Fuck knows what they were doing with the things, but Tusk sure had a lot flown in. I’d like to think it was for humanitarian reasons, toxicology research, better antivenoms and so on, but knowing him? Only seven of the things left, now.”

  I didn’t see anything moving in the tank and said so.

  “Well, you wouldn’t. They don’t like to move if they can help it.” Gregor fumbled in one of his pockets, withdrew a small penlight. Shining the beam into the water, he picked out a rust-colored rock. “There’s one.” Then another, flatter rock. That one was more a grey-green, with strands of sickly algae stuck to it that swayed a bit in the slight current of the tank’s circulation system. “And there’s her buddy. Can’t find the others but they’re in there. This here’s your basic stonefish. Den Secord, meet Syanceia verrucosa. Let’s have a look at this big bitch here.”

  Gregor slipped on a pair of heavy industrial rubber gloves that were folded over the rim of the tank. Plunging his hands into the water, he worked his fingers into the sand below the rusty rock and hauled it out of the tank. There was an eye somewhere in there that caught the light.

  “Fuck. You’re going to kill it?”

  Gregor laughed, walking the thing over to a wretched table half-covered in black mould. This place had clearly not been used in years. “We should be so lucky.” He dumped his prize on this with no ceremony. “No, the stonefish can survive for up to a day out of the water. Most of its human victims aren’t even wading in the shallows when they meet one.”

  I had a concern when Gregor used that word. Victims.

  “Oh, you don’t know? Well. All right. So, let’s just get something under one of the dorsal spines...um. Hold on.” Gregor had been about to grab the spine with his hands. “These gloves are tough but I think maybe...” He disappeared beneath the table and came back up with a battered toolbox. “Yeah. Better.”

  He worked a screwdriver beneath what for all I could tell was just a chunk of rock. Understand that by this point I’d seen the eye of the fish, looking at me with something I imagined was reproach, and I’d heard Gregor reference it as a fish, and of course he’d pulled it out of an artificial marine environment. It looked like a rock, though. Completely. A stone, if I’m going to edge toward the correct term.

  Then Gregor pressed down on the handle of the screwdriver and a part of that stone detached and extended upward at an angle, slowly revealing a thin, yellowish spine of bone or cartilage. The stonefish eye showed itself again, too, clear and dark in the centre, growing wider and rotating in offense or excitement. A thin line at the base of the creature appeared. The mouth
, wide across what was obviously the head or at least the front of the thing and extending nearly halfway down the length of the body.

  Gregor selected and pressed on a foul-smelling bump on the fish’s skin. “It’s covered in these tubercles. Instead of scales.” A milky fluid welled up from the tubercle and spread out over the fish. “And it’s a moulter. New skins for old. This ganky seminal stuff is fertilizer. Get a whiff of that? Nice. Attracts the microscopic plants and corals and what have you, so they’ll settle down and colonize the fucker. She’s shaped like a rock, tough like a rock, why not look like a rock while it’s at its business.”

  I had to ask. “What business is that?”

  “Getting to that. First, though, the spines along the dorsal ridge.” Once again, Gregor bent below the table and came back up with another box. From this he withdrew a case of glass vials, hypodermic needles and a block of black foam. The block was stained with a whitish, crusty substance that flaked away where it was touched.

  “Revolting, I know,” Gregor sighed. “Reminds a man of the tube socks best left beneath his teenage bed, stiff and fragrant with use, if you get my meaning.” Bracing the stonefish by its squat, barely-there tail, he brought the foam block down upon the lead spine, which slipped inside the material with no resistance.

  “Imagine that’s your foot, Den.” Gregor grinned, teeth flashing. “You’re on holiday. New Zealand, or maybe Goa. You like to dance, Den? Never mind. Maybe you’re holidaying here, even; this girl and her friends have moved into the north Pacific in record numbers over the last couple decades. Anyway, there you are, lazy vay-cay times, and you thought you’d go for a wade. No risk there, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Hell, you’re wearing something on your feet, even. Something sturdy. Nice pair of decent sandals with the rubberized soles. Could be actual hiking boots for all this thing will care.” He pressed down on the foam block and the tip of the spine appeared from the top, between his gloved hands. “Slips right in. It’s like a butterfly needle, thin and strong. You barely feel that part, this is all happening in less than a second, understand. Swish, up it goes, deep into your foot! Soon as pressure is applied to the venom sacs on either side of the spine, like this—”