"They had these when I was your age. Things were built to last, back then. Ah, here." He massaged one of the golden plates that articulated the machine's skin, then pressed it, then squeezed. It popped open. He stuck his fingers inside and the machine went limp. "See here?" He lifted the fish, pulling the plates that formed its underbelly as far apart as they could go. Kay leaned in, reading the symbol for trademark and the kanji for fish. The kanji for device. She snorted. So it was a mechanical fish. She could see that. With two fingers, Kay unfurled one of the golden fins. Membranes as smooth and light as eggshell flexed between shining struts as fine as pins.
She coughed to clear the plug of phlegm out of her throat and took a deep breath. Pointing at the missing tail, she said, "Can you fix it?"
Her father's eyes dimmed. "Sorry, sweetie," he said. "I don't think anyone makes parts for these anymore." His long fingers picked at the clot of algae on the fish's stump. Puckered scars twisted the topography of his hands. Sometimes, on long nights, they would sit together and she'd point at the scars. One by one, he would tell her stories. "Why You Don't Take Bones from a Dog," or "Collecting Barnacles With Your Mother," or "The Night the Pump Broke." Once, she had asked about the round, white dimples in his chest. He wouldn't tell that story, so she got it from her mother: "When the Looters Came and Shot Your Daddy." That had been before she was born, and one of the last times anyone from out-of-town came to Silvaplana.
She gestured at the open panel in the fish's side, meaning that he should turn it back on and give it to her.
"Do you know what these were designed for?" he said. She shook her head. "They tracked shipping. Monitored the boats coming in and out of the harbor, before the breakwater washed away in a big storm. They made sure that no terrorists came to blow up the spaceport." He chuckled, but his eyes slipped away to the horizon. She looked, too, trying to see what he saw. Ships as big as the derelict that sheltered her fishing hole. She imagined ships too big for the harbor, ships attended by swarms of smaller ships, and those attended by ships smaller still, all the way down to dinghies manned by one sailor apiece. Perhaps those would be attended by swarms of sailing rats.
Kay laughed, a soft sound that bubbled past her twisted lips and stubborn tongue. Her father's eyes made the long trip back from the horizon. He looked at her, and his face crumpled just a bit, in that way that he'd never been able to hide from her. Her eyes, at least, worked perfectly. Before he died, the town's doctor had said that Kay would never need glasses if she stayed out of the sea.
The ringing of her mother's hammer paused. Her father said, "Go show that to your mom," and ruffled her hair, the one part of her that he wasn't afraid to touch.
"Can you turn it back on?"
"In a minute. Go on."
Dutifully, Kay picked up the fish and walked around the house to her mother's workshop. The tall woman stood at her forge, shirtless, her face set in an ecstasy of concentration. Sweat ran over her small breasts and down the long pink scar that divided the brown skin of her belly and dove under the waistband of her char-stained shorts. The corded muscles on her legs stood proud as she worked the foot pedal on the forge's leaf-blower. Impeller blades whirred, drawing air over the charcoal and the bar of cherry-red steel buried in it.
Once, Kay had asked why the machine was called a leafblower if it only blew on the fire. Her mother had laughed and explained that the machine hadn't always been attached to the forge. She had shown Kay how she had taken the old engine off when the gas ran out, and how she rigged belts to move the blower's driveshaft with manual power.
Her mother glanced up from the forge. "Not now, sweetie," she said. Kay lifted the fish over her head. With its trailing streamer of algae, it was almost as long as she was tall. But light, so light.
"Cool," her mother said, the way she and the other adults did when they weren't really paying attention. Kay knew that nothing good could come from disturbing her mother when she was immersed in a project; she and Kay were just alike, that way. So she tucked the fish back under her arm and went to show it to someone who would appreciate it.
She left through the broken wall that was the forge's back door. The path of cinderblock rubble behind her house let her avoid most of her neighbors. She took the trail around the two old tanks. The rusty smears that dripped through their peeling paint always looked wet to her, even during the hottest days of summer. Kay's mother had warned her to never, ever touch the tanks. Even the most tenacious barberry vines wouldn't grow next to them. Aside from the derelict, they were the tallest things that the hurricanes had not yet knocked down.
The Claytons lived just past Silvaplana's unofficial borders, where barberry and eucalyptus swallowed the ruins of old houses and where tall grasses fought to choke the sandy ruts that passed for a road. The Claytons burned charcoal (which Kay's mother bought), kept a herd of goats smart enough to graze in the swamp without sinking (unlike the Peñas' goats, which gave fine wool but were too stupid to find their way home), and ran a still (which everyone thought Kay didn't know about).
From the road, the Clayton house looked like little more than a pile of broken road signs and scrap steel gone to rust and rainbows of old paint. The family was out, probably tending their goats or gathering wood or both, so Kay circled around the house to a little hummock of dry land where Matthew lay under his cairn of stones.
The measles had taken him during last year's outbreak, burning his skinny body down to nothing but pain and raw bone. Kay still shuddered to remember his parents' weeping. She had visited him then, defying the quarantine, and she visited him now. Good friends didn't let each other get lonely.
"Look what I caught," she said. She didn't struggle to speak correctly. Matthew had never pretended that he couldn't understand her. She told him all about the fish while she bent its body and spread its fins, testing the limits of its motion. She picked the algae off of the stump of its tail with her good fingers. The golden flesh beneath the algae was sealed off, impenetrable. She told Matthew that her father was drinking again. She said, "He gets bored," as if it was an excuse. "He says there isn't anything to do anymore but drink and fuck," which she admitted that she didn't understand but also didn't want to ask about, since her father hadn't realized that Kay was listening when he said it.
She missed Matthew.
The bleating of goats warned her of the Claytons' return. She didn't wait to see who it was. Kay bolted away, holding her fish tight, determined not to let one of Matthew's spiteful siblings ruin her prize. She was not fast enough.
"Whatcha got there, Kay-tee?" A girl's voice. One of Matthew's sisters must have been ranging ahead of the goats, which meant that someone was staying back to drive them. Kay shrank back as two girls stepped out of the tall grass by the road. They wore dresses that they had made themselves, the way the older girls in town liked to do, vying with each other for the most stylish design, the most cunning use of scavenged fabric. Kay couldn't sew. Her right hand could draw a needle, but holding fabric in the cupped flesh of her fingerless left hand made her arm cramp unbearably. After a few miserable failures, she'd given up. She decided that she'd rather fish, anyway, or help her mother at the forge.
"It's a fish," Kay said.
"What did you say?" The older sister leaned down to look in Kay's eyes. Her voice dripped sugar syrup and her smile shone as bright and hard as glass. Kay glared at her, and refused to repeat herself.
"Is it a toy? Did your mommy make that for you? Let me see."
Kay shook her head, and squeezed the fish more tightly to her chest. The golden scales gave slightly under the pressure of her arms, feeling not like dented metal, but like coiling springs.
"Come on," the other sister goaded. "Don't be so selfish."
"Yeah. Didn't your mommy teach you to share?"
Kay glared at them. She would not speak any more until they acknowledged what she had already said. Goats surged around them, bleating in irritation at being made to move through the grass without stoppin
g to eat. Some wore bells that Kay's mother had made.
"Brandeen! Mikarthy!" A woman's voice sliced through the bedlam of goats and bells. The girls flinched. Their mother, the Missus Clayton, shouted, "Come here, and leave her alone." She grabbed the younger girl's arm with her free hand. Her other hand held a willow-switch. "It's not like she can understand you, anyway."
Kay watched them go, dancing a little to keep her feet out from under the goats' hooves. She almost never tried to correct people who made that mistake anymore.
She skirted the edge of the town, past empty buildings and across crumbling streets. Rebar protruded from broken concrete like the roots of storm-tossed trees. Kay followed the road until the dunes swallowed it, then she followed the line of broken walls that stood proud above the sand until they marched into the sea.
The water shone blue in the late morning light. The sun touched the edge of each wave, turning them into knives of silver fire. She stopped just beyond the reach of the ocean. The mechanical fish she set down in front of her, facing the sea, as though the sight of its home would revive it. Of course, nothing happened. Kay picked at the barnacles clogging the port in its head. She would need a tool to clean them, she decided. Waves ran up the beach, edged in oilslick rainbows.
As she watched, a line of ribbed clouds crept into the bowl of the sky. She frowned at them, and at the wind blowing inland from the sea. She picked up the metal fish and turned for home. Hopefully she wasn't the only one who had seen the stormclouds.
She spotted one of the Peñas' long-haired goats chewing a mouthful of grass in the shade of a stunted tea tree. Listening for a moment, she couldn't hear any voices or the bells of other goats. A stray, then. Kay set her fish down. She slipped off her belt and coiled it around her left hand. Hiding her belt behind her back, she held out her other hand in the universal sign for, "I have a handful of goat food."
The goat stared at her with yellow keyhole eyes. It ambled forward a few steps, then a few more. She shook her empty hand at it temptingly. When it was close enough, she lunged, looping her belt over the goat's head and cinching the slipknot tight. The goat bleated in outrage at her betrayal. Soon she had the goat trailing behind her and the fish under one arm as she walked back toward the inhabited parts of town.
The eldest Peña daughter, along with two smaller girls and one boy, were carding wool in the shade of their palm-frond porch. Kay's heart swelled with pride to see the intricate metal carding brushes that her father had made, though he had needed instructions from the Peñas' grandfather. The old man knew everything about raising his long-haired goats, but Kay's father knew where to find wire of the right stiffness, how to draw it through a mesh, and how to attach the mesh to handles. The eldest daughter, whose name was Mary, looked up from instructing her siblings when she heard the goat's bell.
"I found your goat," Kay said.
"What?" Mary said. Kay waited.
"Oh, the goat," Mary said. She looked down at her lapful of wool and tools, then poked one of her sisters with her toe. "Trisha, go put Ammy back in the paddock." The little girl leaped up and snatched Kay's belt from her hand, then started to lead the goat away. The animal sighed heavily at the injustices of its life. "And say thank you!" Mary called.
Trisha spun around, scuffing her feet in the dirt. She looked down. "Thank you, Kay," she said. Then she ran, dragging the goat behind her. Kay sighed. She would get her belt back later, probably. She did not want to drag the conversation out long enough for Mary to get annoyed.
Kay waved to get Mary's attention, which had slid back to the other children. Eventually, Mary sighed and put her brush down.
"Yes, Kay?" she said, sounding exactly like her mother. Kay pointed up at the sky, where rows of white clouds now marched from the horizon up to the zenith.
"Storm coming," Kay said, enunciating as clearly as she could.
"Hm," Mary said, squinting up at the sky. She shrugged with one shoulder, and looked back down at Kay, smiling. "Thanks for bringing Ammy back. She's trouble."
Kay shrugged and smiled back. She waited until Mary began packing her things before turning and running for home. Mary would tell her parents, who would warn the rest of the town; it was better to let them do it. People would believe them. Everyone knew that the Peñas could predict the weather.
The wind picked up. Kay's throat constricted. She coughed and spat, which would have made her father scold her if he'd seen. But with the weather sending cold spikes of fear into her gut, she couldn't stop running to clear her throat like a good girl.
She found her father out on the front porch, staring up at the sky through a pair of glasses with black plastic lenses and one missing earpiece. Sunglasses, she reminded herself. It was one of the words that her father didn't like her to forget, even though he was the only person in town who had them.
"Where have you been?" He snapped. "Your mother has been looking for you everywhere." He moved as though to cup her around her waist and hurry her along, but stopped just a hairsbreadth away from touching her. She did not reach for him. If she was in trouble, she didn't want to make it worse. She tucked her fish in the corner of the front room and then dashed out the back door to where her mother was clamping a cover over her forge.
"Bring me the wrench, please," her mother said, sharp and distracted. Kay unlatched the little box that held the precious implement. It caught the light that filtered down through the racing storm clouds, shining as bright as the first time Kay had seen it, years ago. Only its serrated jaws showed any sign of wear. For all her mother's cleverness, she had never been able to duplicate the old trick of making metal shine forever, like the wrench and the ribs of the starship.
Kay handed the wrench to her mother and then stepped back to watch. Her mother spun the worm gear in the wrench's head with one thumb, barely glancing at it before she set about tightening the mismatched bolts that held down the forge cover. With the forge secured and all of her fuel and tools sealed into a box made of scavenged bricks, Kay and her mother retreated into the house proper.
Kay slid her feet across the concrete floor and waited for her eyes to adjust to the mid day darkness. Her father had already brought the chairs inside and closed the storm shutters. He banked the hearth fire, but the air still felt over-warm and heavy. She felt the heat of her father's body beside her, and in the gloom saw him reach out and take her mother's hand. Kay's mother wrapped one long arm around Kay's shoulders. Their sweat mingled. They waited.
The storm flung itself against the walls like a maddened animal. It howled. It tried to claw the shutters loose from the windows and moaned through the cracks it found in the walls. Lightning exploded over their heads. Kay imagined the sea rising up, sucking sand away from the foundations of her house, washing away the street and swallowing Silvaplana the way it had swallowed the old city.
Sometime during the night, she fell asleep. Kay dreamed of the golden fish. She laid it on a bed of ashes. Its metal skin peeled back. The flesh underneath glistened like cut glass. She scooped out handful after handful—somehow there was always more, and her hands did not burn—slurping down the fish's flesh. It tasted of salt and strawberries.
She woke hungry. She struggled against her father's grip for a moment before she remembered where she was. Cold sweat trickled down her back where her mother had been. She heard the grunt and thump of sandbags being moved. She could not stop the thick-voiced whimper that squeezed its way out of her throat. The silence outside only meant that the worst was yet to come.
The storm roared. Kay sobbed, pressing her face into her father's chest. She felt him yelling, felt the throb of his voice in her bones. He started to push her away so she clung harder, pawing his skin with the stubs of her hands. Lightning illuminated everything for one instant. Her mother, scrambling toward them on her hands and knees. Her father's arms flung out towards his wife. The hole in the roof. The rent in the wall. The old bird-ofparadise tree, flying.
Then darkness, and her father's heartb
eat, and the scream of hurricane winds long into the night.
She woke again, lolling across her father's chest as he slowly stroked her hair. Kay sobbed when she saw her mother standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the morning light that slanted through the rain. Kay rose and went to her. Together, they went to see what the storm had left for them.
A few sheets of corrugated steel had been torn from their roof. Maybe they would turn up, and maybe not. The seaward wall was in worse shape, but at least the forge had survived. Kay's mother shook her head.
Soon, their neighbors, the Castanedas, arrived with cold breakfast for both families. They ate together as the rainclouds drifted away. By noon, Kay and her father (her mother and the Castanedas were left to plan the mending of Kay's house) made their way to the main road through down, which the storm had transformed into a canal of green water. A perfect black triangle, a fish's tail, broke the surface of the water, then vanished. Kay frowned, thinking.
The water receded. The Claytons arrived with strips of metal (dull silver on one side, iridescent green on the other) to make a patch for Kay's roof. She helped her mother relight the forge, pumping the bellows while her mother fussed with her antique Zippo and carefully-hoarded tinder. That night, the town came together for a bonfire and a feast. Some of the goats had panicked during the storm, and it would be a shame for all that meat to go to waste. The bonfire lit up the night and turned the swarms of insects drawn to its light into flecks of fire.
Kay sat in the sand, a little way back from the rest of the children. Hours after sunset, the sky cleared. Licking grease off of her hands, Kay looked up at the stars. The bright splash of the Milky Way looked close enough to touch. She reached up.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact - March 2014 Page 11