Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

by Aiki Flinthart

  A bomb? War is a solution? Aracai studied Escalas. The old mer held a trace of a smile, as if he were amused. That was the problem with the old man. In the past months, Aracai had learned a lot, but Escalas always seemed to be three steps ahead.

  “Do not do this thing,” Aracai warned, “whatever you have planned.”

  “Oh, I am not going to do it,” Escalas said softly. “You are!”

  Aracai could not imagine himself harming another. “But—”

  Escalas raised a hand. “The feral humans who are poisoning our seas hurt themselves almost as much as they do us. Their society is toxic, and what do humans do when they perceive another society to be toxic? They go to war. History is full of toxic societies that are no more.”

  Aracai could hardly believe what he heard. He wanted to argue, but did not know where to start.

  The old mer swam lazily. “This is the answer. Pick it up.”

  Numb, Aracai pulled at the backpack and dumped out the bomb—a strange device, all metal, a heavy black disk. Soft, white lights displayed the time and the bomb’s GPS coordinates on top.

  He lifted it. The bomb was heavier than anything so small should be. Heavier than lead. Heavier even than gold. Uranium?

  Aracai trilled a warning to the others, “Stay back!” He suspected it was a nuclear device, but it was too small to have much in the way of shielding. Being this close could expose them all to radiation.

  He threw it back to the ocean floor, raising a cloud of filth, but Dulce swam near and wrenched it from the mud. There was sadness in her dark eyes. “Let me carry it,” she demanded. “She was my daughter, too…”

  An image flashed in Aracai’s mind—their infant daughter, cold and rigid, eyes and fingers gone equally white in death. The poisons had contained some sort of mutagen, so that she was born with only a small part of her brain.

  “Too many mer children have died,” she said.

  “We can try for another,” Aracai promised.

  But the gill slits along Dulce’s neck flared in anger. “No, no we can’t,” she said. They had been trying for five years. “You know that. I want to carry my vengeance in my own hands.”

  With a flick of her tail, she lunged forward, upstream through the brackish water.

  Old Escalas said, “It is not vengeance I seek, but change.”

  #

  In the night they swam, pushing through heavy headwaters, and Escalas sang to them of the dangers of the Amazon, a chant that formed dreams in Aracai’s mind. There were huge, black eels ahead that could emit a killing, electric jolt of blue light, and piranhas with bright-red bellies that hung like rubies in the slow waters until they smelled blood, when they would lunge and tear chunks of flesh from bones. He sang of coral-colored dolphins, anacondas, and other dangers. The fresh water itself was poison to the mer, for in time their kidneys would fail in the reduced salinity.

  So Aracai feared the river.

  The waters became quieter as they swam. The crackle of snapping shrimp died away and only the sloshing of waves could be heard.

  Aracai saw evidence of toxins. There were no snails or freshwater clams on the muddy floor. They passed no schools of fish—only a pair of huge bull sharks swimming upstream to spawn. The sharks eyed the mer hungrily.

  The waters at the mouth of the Amazon were deserted. Flecks of dark moss and white decomposing bits of dead insects and fish drifted about. The water was oxygen rich, but smelled of decay, and the toxins in it made his gills itch.

  So Aracai pleaded for reason as they swam in the darkness. “We cannot bomb the humans. Innocent children will be hurt.”

  “I do not want to hurt innocent children,” Escalas agreed. “But the humans must change their ways. I have done all that I know how in order to convince them. Now, we must go to war.” The old man seemed to change subjects. “The poison that killed your daughter is called C54.”

  The news sent Dulce into a wail of pain. Her tail thrashed, so that she surged ahead and became invisible in the cloudy water.

  Aracai had never heard of C54 and felt relieved that Escalas had put a name to the toxin.

  “In Venezuela, it is used as a chemical warfare agent. That is where we are going—to set the bomb off at the factory. The poison is colorless, tasteless. It was not meant to kill anyone, though it has unforeseen effects on the mer. It was designed as a mind-control weapon. The drug causes the victim’s brain to release the hormone dopamine, making victims carefree and happy, but over time the victim’s prefrontal lobes shrink, limiting their ability to plan ahead. This makes the Venezuelan’s enemies stupid.”

  The waters were dark, and Aracai’s gills itched. He swam briefly to the surface and flashed his gills, shaking his head, to try to rid them of grit.

  Aracai wondered long about the C54, horrified that such a weapon would be unleashed on others, crippling the minds of children.

  He thought of his daughter, her tiny fingers as rubbery as the tentacles of a dead octopus, her blind eyes, the malformed brain that would not work well enough to let her breathe.

  “The Venezuelans create this drug, and the other nations, they do not fight back?” Aracai asked.

  “Oh, they fight back,” Escalas sang. “Humans have never discovered a stick that could not be turned into a club. Venezuela’s enemies wage economic war, making their country the poorest of the world’s poor, and they bribe AIs to withhold information from them. Each of Venezuela’s enemies have iconic celebrities who mock the Venezuelans, weakening their spirits. They use viruses and nanobots…”

  “And if we go to war,” Aracai asked, “are we any better than they are?” The possibility that they weren’t frustrated Aracai. He did not know much about humans. He had seen the hulls of their boats above water, but had never wanted to meet one.

  Truth be told, he despised them. The humans had made him poorly. His eyes did not face forward like those of a human, which made it dangerous to swim too far, too fast, lest he crack his skull on something. He had no need for hair, and would have preferred to have flesh alone, or perhaps scales, instead of flowing locks that were always picking up bits of seaweed and becoming home to tiny crabs. His shoulders were too large, not sleek enough to slice through the water.

  It is the right of any creature to dislike his creators, he thought. The humans created us according to some nightmarish aesthetic instead of constructing something more elegant.

  “I am what they made me,” Aracai said.

  “Is that all you are?” Escalas asked. “Do you not also make yourself?”

  Aracai dodged between two rocks. “We can always better ourselves.”

  “I think,” Escalas said, “that it is almost a duty for a man to better himself, or a people to better themselves. We must swim forward, not be content to drift with the tides. Don’t you think?”

  There it was again, that secretive tone. Was he talking of genetic manipulation? That cost a lot of money, something that a mer, living off the bounties of the ocean, did not need.

  But Aracai thought, I could make money. There are still treasures under the sea—Spanish galleons full of emeralds, sunken Mayan ruins off the coast of Mexico, filled with artifacts. Humans pay well for such curiosities. Perhaps I could find a cure for the poisons.

  But the old mer seemed to want to send a message.

  “So,” Aracai said at last, “do humans actually die in these wars?”

  “Some die,” Escalas admitted. “But there are various theories on war. The goal is not to kill, it is to demoralize, to alter the behavior of the enemy.” The old mer struggled to talk and breathe at the same time. He rose to the surface, gasped a deep breath, and continued. “To be honest though, I do not think that humans value life as much as you and I do. When I found you, Spirit Warrior, you were the first mer that I had met in two years. I felt so alone, and so I begged you, ‘Swim with me.’ Among the mer, we crave each other’s company. But with over two hundred billion human souls on earth, there are too many. If one of
them dies, the others feel relief rather than loss. Why, on the Amazon alone, there are sixteen million humans living along its banks It is the largest river in the world, and holds one fifth of all the fresh water…” he droned on.

  Ahead of them, Dulce was slowing, and she had begun to sing in the way mer women will, a threnody whose tune was beat out in the lashing of her tail.

  “Black River, poison river, rolling to the sea.

  Be my road, guide the way,

  Avenge my daughter and me.”

  The old mer glanced ahead and said, “She is a fine wife for a Spirit Warrior. I hope that at the end of this, you will be able to have the children you deserve.”

  “Why do you call me ‘Spirit Warrior,’” Aracai asked.

  The old mer slowed his swimming and did a roll, so that he could peer into Aracai’s face. “Among the humans, men contend with one another. But you fight your own weaknesses, your own inner demons. That is why I brought you.”

  Aracai eyed Escalas. “You do not want to kill humans either, do you?”

  Escalas admitted, “To take a life is…reprehensible. To even force another into a certain path…weighs on my soul. But we will not reach our destination for many days and so I have time to ponder.”

  Aracai thought long. He realized that he need not make a decision to go to war now. He could abandon the bomb at any moment, let it sink into the mud. Changing course would be as simple as a flick of his tail.

  But he plunged ahead, through the night, wondering.

  #

  By early dawn they had traveled many kilometers upriver, reaching the old gods that guarded its mouth.

  The old gods came in the form of enormous ancient busts of men and monkeys, all grimacing, each perhaps sixty feet tall. A line of them had been discovered across the river channel back in the twenty-second century, sunk deep into the mud, but no one knew what civilization had carved them. Aracai worried for Dulce. The bomb she carried was very heavy. She held the disk clasped against her belly as she swam, near her womb, and he knew enough to be afraid for her, for them all.

  How much radiation did the bomb emit? How much could they handle?

  Did it even matter? When they set the bomb off, he might not have a chance to escape the blast. Even if he got away from the fireball, the detonation would create a wall of sound, a sonic boom that would carry downriver, stunning and killing fish, including him.

  And he had to wonder, was there any life left in Dulce’s womb worth worrying about anyway?

  He took the bomb, to give her a rest, but then determined that she would carry it no more.

  Escalas continued to struggle in the swift water. Aracai was smart enough to wonder if the old man had brought him on this journey, planned it months or even years ago, just so that he’d have strong arms to carry the weapon. Aracai considered asking, but knew he would not get a straight answer. Escalas was always forcing him to think for himself.

  So Aracai swam, hampered by muddled thoughts, a heavy burden, and strong currents. The riverbed below him looked remarkably dead in the morning light. Escalas’s warnings about ferocious fish and deadly stingrays seemed to be without merit.

  At dawn Aracai rose to the surface, drew a great breath, and peered about. The bank to the north was so far away he could make out only water, but to the south he saw buildings—squat and colorful in shades of lavender and canary and pearl, sitting in tiers along the bank. Peasants with mule carts walked along the roads in bare feet.

  There had to be tens of thousands of them, freakish things. There were no gleaming hovercars with wealthy passengers, like he’d once seen in Chile.

  Aracai dove deep and swam near the bottom.

  Then came the new gods.

  Aracai was flapping his tail hard, driving upstream through the sepia waters, falling behind the others. Soot and algae beat against him like a storm, and suddenly he heard a ping. A brilliant blue beam of light struck his face and he squinted to see huge metal struts ahead that seemed to be covered by seaweed. He realized that it wasn’t seaweed at all, but strands of plasteet—a material used to capture energy from wave action—and he followed new movement as the barrel of a cannon swiveled his way.

  His heart froze and he ceased swimming, only to hear the ping and a squelchy mechanical noise that he recognized as a droid’s demand for an identification signal.

  “Watch out!” Escalas called a moment too late, and Aracai heard the grinding of massive metal beams, then something heavy hit the ground, raising clouds of mud.

  Suddenly Aracai put the images together. There was a war droid ahead—a giant titanium crablike droid the size of a ship, scuttling on the river bottom, menacing them.

  Aracai stopped to let the muddy tide carry him back from danger, just as a single shot seared through the water. An energy beam sent a tube of bubbling super-heated water toward Escalas, striking him just once. The old mer went limp as the cloud of muddy water engulfed them all.

  Aracai froze, not daring to breathe, fearing a second shot. He squinted in order to avoid being blinded. He hoped the dark waters would shield him from the droid’s sensors.

  No more shots followed; his heart pounded.

  He heard a buzz and something whipped over his head. He squinted up to see a squid-like drone with a gelatinous body. Its infrared signature made it look like a fiery octopus.

  Hunters!

  Aracai recognized the tech. It was called a squill—an ancient assassin droid, perhaps a hundred years old.

  He did not know what sensory array it might have. Motion detectors? Vision? Heat? Sound? Scent?

  Could it hear his heartbeat, recognize his form?

  He played dead, not daring to call out, hoping that his wife would be wise enough to do the same.

  The huge war droid marched north, blocking their path, stirring up more muck, impenetrably dark.

  The squill began to circle and was soon followed by dozens more.

  Are they armed? he wondered. The drones often carried a sac of neurotoxin, so that their stingers could kill. He’d heard legends about squills with explosives built into them. But some, he knew, were built just for reconnaissance.

  Aracai drifted downstream, and often the drones passed near in the darkness, but still he dared not move. So he floated, letting the current take him, until many kilometers later the buzzing of drones faded and he was left merely floating. As the water cleared, he peered around, but his search showed him nothing.

  He caught movement: Dulce drove toward the surface, and Aracai saw a familiar form floating there.

  Aracai raced upward, met them as Dulce wrapped her arms tenderly around the old mer and tried to drag him under, to safety.

  When Aracai got near, the old man was a horror. Boiling water had made his skin bubble over on half of his chest and face, and skin tore away in tatters. His hair was burned off, as was his right eye. What flesh Escalas had left was red and blistered.

  “Old man,” Dulce asked, “can you swim with me?”

  The old man’s mouth was in ruins, and yet he spoke. “I can swim.” He gasped for several moments, gills flashing, and glanced down. “My flesh is burned. I cannot…last…”

  “What can we do to help?” Dulce asked. The old mer shook his head. “My sight…” His mouth tried to work, but pieces of flesh fell from the hole where his lips had been, showing teeth. He gasped and sang in broken thoughts. “You, go on. Up Rio Negro, to the town Dos Brujas, where smokestacks rise, and open sewers dump into the river from both banks. There you will find a pylon, a black tower, with a light on top like a single red eye. That is where you must detonate…”

  He lost his train of thought. “Take my implant…” he said, offering his greatest possession, the silver band around his head.

  Escalas sang more, but his words became a soft slur, like wind lashing the water, until it died and went silent.

  Dulce cried out, a barking sound, as if she had taken a mortal wound.

  “Quiet,” Aracai warned
, swimming up to put a hand over her mouth, but she twisted her head away and wailed in frustration.

  He removed the band from Escalas’s head, put it on his own. The band was a silver wire, but almost as soon as he put it on, he felt a pinch at the base of his neck as nanobots began to send out probes to establish a link with his mind, one that would take days to form.

  He let go of the old mer’s body and let it drift away, bouncing against the muddy bottom of the river.

  Dulce made a juddering cry, more of a moan than a song, and together they clasped hands and swam toward the south bank before sneaking upriver, and thus passed the warbot unseen.

  He wondered why the warbot was even posted there. It was ancient, this war crab, perhaps left by governments that had fallen a century ago, during some old war. Perhaps it was as forgotten now as Aracai and his people.

  #

  Hour after hour Aracai and Dulce pushed ahead, Dulce shaking in fear and grief. He could not get the image from his mind of Escalas floating downstream, his mouth a gaping maw. He tried to calm his wife as they swam together, her holding his shoulders so that they spooned, swimming in unison.

  He drifted into a waking dream, haunted by images of squills and warbots. They swam close to shore, where water gurgled through half-submerged trees and a howler monkeys hooted overhead. The sunlight piercing the mud turned the river into a golden road.

  They dared not slow or stop. Aracai’s gut suggested that the squills might still be hunting. He suspected that they had quickly used up their energy in the initial hunt, but that after recharging, they would be loosed again.

  A boat plied the water overhead, and Aracai rose to the surface and searched the river as he cleared gunk from his gills.

  To the south, he saw houses—built so close together that they glimmered like pebbles upon a beach. Children were out playing in the rain, two girls twirling a rope so that a small brown boy could jump.

  Guilt weighed in Aracai’s stomach as he considered what his bomb would do to them.

  He dove again, lugging his burden, and began to wonder. How many days would it take to reach the target? Did he really want to kill people—children?