by Mira Grant
She stroked the mermaid’s hair again. It was a strangely tender gesture, until she picked up a bowl. With one quick, concussive motion, she lifted the mermaid’s head, breaking the seal its hair had formed against the sheet. Water cascaded out, washing into the bowl, carrying dozens of eyeless shrimp in its wake. They weren’t the only things to wind up in her artificial tide pool. Tiny crabs with shells like jewels tumbled into the water and scuttled to the edges of the tub, their claws raised in warning. Worms, segmented and delicate and no more than an inch long, curled in tight balls, apparently dying on contact with the light. One of the crabs grabbed a worm in its claws, retreating to the corner and stuffing it, segment by segment, into its waiting maw.
“Amphibians that learned to dive deeper and deeper, but never gave up the convenience of their adult forms. They kept their gills. They kept their lungs. They developed air bladders, to let them balance themselves in the water. And they developed secondary lungs, not to let them breathe better, but to filter the gas out of their blood. They use the secondary structures to purge themselves as they dive. That way, they don’t get sick. They don’t die. They can code switch faster than any other life form on the planet, and all because they were frogs who didn’t like the estuary they started in.”
Dr. Toth picked up her bowl, casting around until her eyes settled on Jason. “You,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Uh,” he said. “Jason Rothman, ma’am.”
“The plankton specialist; good,” she said, thrusting the bowl in his direction. He stepped forward to take it with shaking hands, staring in awe at the tiny creatures within. One of the crabs had a scrap of kelp in its claws, and was waving it like a terrible pom-pom. Dr. Toth ignored his expression as she turned back to the creature, saying, “I think you’re going to find some new species in here. Go. Sort through the microscopic debris and make a bigger name for yourself. I have bigger fish to worry about.”
“I believe the phrase is to fry,” drawled Michi. The cameras switched their eyes to her. She was striking: photogenic, dangerous, with an accent that threw American audiences off their stride. People who’d never left their hometowns might expect a woman who looked like her to have an accent. They wouldn’t expect it to be Australian. “Speaking of, remember, that’s our kill. If we’re slapping this prawn on the barbie, me and Jacques get first bite.”
“It’s your kill, and it would be more than happy to kill you,” said Dr. Toth dryly. “We haven’t done tissue analysis yet. For all we know, this creature is packed with heavy metals and novel toxins. Your first bite would be your last.”
“But we’d be the first people in history to eat a mermaid, so maybe that wouldn’t be such a terrible way to go,” said Michi. Her tone was mild; her eyes were cold, and while she was speaking to Dr. Toth, her gaze never left the mermaid. Neither she nor Jacques had been pleased that their kill was going to be dissected—or that their contracts with Imagine meant they had no grounds to object.
“There are issues with the word mermaid, but we’ll go into those in a moment.” Dr. Toth settled the creature’s head on the table, moving to the open wound of its chest cavity. She reached for her scalpel. “The location of the secondary lungs indicates a slow development cycle. The creatures probably start fully aquatic, and move closer to the surface in adolescence, as adult structures develop. This would account for their continuing awareness of the surface world, and the surface world’s continuing awareness of them. Lungs grow, creature rises. Sailors see creature, creature eats sailors, everyone remains aware of one another. It’s a novel hunting pattern. They got the whole damned sea, and it wasn’t enough for them. They wanted everything above it. If there’s anything that confirms their intelligence, it should be that. The only other creatures that push their habitat so hard are humans.”
Mr. Blackwell frowned. Tory tensed. If there was any point at which the rest of them would be tossed out of the room in favor of Imagine’s pet scientists, this was it. A gross biological study wasn’t the same as unraveling the secrets of the deep, but it was a start. All the NDAs in the world couldn’t cause them to unlearn something they’d learnt.
“You haven’t explained the vocal mimicry,” said Mr. Blackwell. “How are they copying our voices?”
“That’s going to be in the larynx,” said Dr. Toth. “I’m still trying to figure out—”
“Mimicry, please.”
Dr. Toth paused. Looking at her, Tory couldn’t help but think that if anyone else had tried to shift her area of inquiry, they would have been at risk of getting that scalpel jammed into their eye.
Finally Dr. Toth said, “All right. But I’m going to need someone to photograph everything in the central cavity as it is now, in case of tissue loss. These structures were never intended to be exposed to air. Victoria, get over here and help me steady the head.”
That was all; with those words, Dr. Toth put down her scalpel and moved a foot to her left, palpating the skin of the creature’s throat with her thumb and forefinger.
“The throat contains rigid structures which feel analogous to the structures found in mammalian throats. There are no known structures of this type in amphibians.”
“So you’re saying you’re wrong, and it’s not a giant frog after all?” asked Michi.
The look Dr. Toth shot her was pure irritation. Mr. Blackwell had the authority and history to contradict her. This Australian upstart in her khakis and her bloodlust did not.
“I never said it was a giant frog,” she said. “It may not be an amphibian at all, according to modern definitions of the word. The trouble with nature is that nature doesn’t care about us. The world made us, and it was done. Sink or swim, we’re on our own. The thing people forget about survival of the fittest is that it doesn’t work. You really think the giraffe was the fittest? Or the kakapo? Even our friend the axolotl has no business existing. Nature has made and rejected and lost and remade more biological diversity than currently exists. These creatures are amphibious as we understand the word, because we need to put things into the framework of what we know. I’m still making guesses. I’m sure at least one of them is going to be wrong enough to make me look pretty damn stupid when we understand these creatures better.”
“You keep saying ‘creatures,’” said Olivia. “Why not call them ‘mermaids’?”
“As I said before, we’re going to get into why that word is inaccurate in a moment. Mr. Blackwell would like to know how they’re able to mimic human voices. That has to take priority, as he speaks for Imagine’s interests on this voyage, and they’re paying the bills.” She tilted the creature’s chin up. “Victoria, steady the head.”
“Yes, Doctor,” said Tory, moving into position. She was grateful to be out of the line of fire, even as she was sure it wouldn’t last. Clamping her fingers around the curve of the creature’s skull, she held it fast and watched Dr. Toth begin palpitating the gills.
Inaccurate. Why would the word mermaid be inaccurate? The creature was clearly the truth behind the myth. Even if there were similarly formed cousins in its family, things that resembled it as humanity resembled apes and chimpanzees, it was so much closer to the myth than anything else had ever been that there was no question. It had a hominoid upper body and a piscine lower body; it had clouds of flowing hair surrounding a face that was simultaneously alien and distressingly human. Nothing else could have been the source of the mermaid myth.
Tory paused, eyes going wide. Dr. Toth glanced up, catching the change in her expression, and nodded approvingly.
“Now you’ve got it,” she said, voice pitched low. “I knew you were a clever one.” More loudly, she said, “I’m going to open the throat. This will almost certainly sever some of the connections between the gills and the breathing structures; we’re going to need another specimen to determine how those work.”
“Maybe you should stop,” said Dr. Lennox. “We can do a more thorough examination of the intact specimen, and then—”
&nb
sp; “We still won’t know how they achieve their mimicry.” Dr. Toth looked to Mr. Blackwell. “What do you want me to do?”
“Proceed,” said Mr. Blackwell. He silenced Dr. Lennox’s objections with a raised hand and a mild, “I have absolute faith that this creature won’t be the last one to land on a lab table before we’re done here. No matter how intelligent they are, we’re going to fight back if they attack us, and now that contact has been made, we can’t retreat and leave them to be exploited by people with fewer scruples. We need to understand them.”
It’s hard to get less scrupulous than killing intelligent creatures and taking them apart just to understand how they work, thought Tory, and said nothing. This was Dr. Toth’s show. Tory might have resented that once, when all she’d been thinking about was revenge on something as vast and implacable as the sea itself, but that had been a lot of miles ago, standing on solid ground. This was the middle of the sea. Things were different here.
Dr. Toth sliced into the throat. The skin opened like a seam. It was thicker than human skin, clinging to a thin layer of yellowish subcutaneous fat. The opening revealed the complex folds and creases of the larynx, the soft flaps of the vocal cords. Dr. Toth put the scalpel aside and slipped her fingers into the opening, moving smoothly. There was no hesitation on her part; she knew what she was looking for.
“Structurally, this is like nothing I’ve seen before,” she said. “There are aspects that mirror the human throat, to a certain degree; they would certainly be able to replicate most of the sounds we make. But there are structures closer to the breathing apparatus of the octopus. Essentially, the creatures can mimic us because they have a sophisticated organ designed for that exact purpose nestled in their throats. Why? I don’t know. Why not might be the better question, evolution being what it is.”
She removed her hands from the throat, nodding to Tory to indicate that the younger woman could release the creature’s head. Calmly, she moved back to the cavity of its abdomen, reaching inside and moving the liver out of the way.
“It’s almost nice to have a specimen so damaged,” she said conversationally. She knew the cameras were drinking in her every word; she didn’t look at them, but she smiled as she spoke. “Normally, we’d be concerned about cross contamination. The bullets did so much damage that it’s moot now. We can just work. It’s a brute force form of biology, and it’s a good reminder of where we came from. This may be the most sophisticated necropsy ever performed on one of these creatures. It’s still close kin to every procedure performed in the belly of a whaling ship. We have better lighting. That’s about it.”
Dr. Toth lifted an object that looked something like a bladder. “It would be foolish to assume these creatures were live-bearers just because they superficially resemble primates. But it would be equally foolish to assume they wouldn’t have some sort of system for storing eggs. This is a sperm sac. More importantly, if you look lower in the body, you’ll find something that looks very familiar to anyone who knows anything about cephalopod anatomy.”
There was a long pause before Jason asked, sounding scandalized, “Are you telling us this thing is a male?”
“I am,” said Dr. Toth. Her voice was mild, her gaze steady; she knew what she was saying, and had already looked at it from all possible angles. She was confident of her conclusion. “A male of breeding age. We knew they weren’t mammals. They don’t have breasts; they have curved ribs, giving the illusion of an appealing form. This has always been about mimicry. They want to look attractive so we’ll lower our guard. What better way to accomplish that than by looking sexually available? But they’re not. They’re not mammals; even if some of them are females, not all of them are, and they’re not mermaids.”
A sound broke the pause that followed her words. It took a moment for Tory to realize that Mr. Blackwell was laughing. Every head turned toward him.
He smiled without humor. “Two ships,” he said. “Millions of dollars, hundreds of lives, and for what? We still haven’t found the mermaids we were looking for.”
“Perhaps not,” said Dr. Toth. “But we’ve found sirens. They’re real. And more, they’ve found us. What comes next … That’s what’s going to determine whether any of this was worth it.”
“Do you think it was?” asked Olivia.
Dr. Toth turned to look at the smaller woman. She raised her eyes to the camera, looking into the lens for a long moment before she said, calmly, “No,” and turned back to her necropsy.
“Dr. Toth, this is all fascinating, but what is it going to tell us about these things?” Michi stretched. She was like some large predatory cat, waiting for the opportunity to kill something. It was difficult not to watch her, not out of admiration, but out of a sense of self-preservation. “I can go get you another one, if you need a basis for comparison.”
“Oh, you don’t need to go get me another one; I’m sure they’re on their way,” said Dr. Toth. “We’ve killed one of their own.”
“They’ve killed two of us,” snapped Olivia, professional façade breaking for a moment.
Dr. Toth turned to look at her. Not at the camera; at her. There was sympathy in the older woman’s eyes. It would have surprised many of her students. It didn’t surprise her husband, who watched her from his seat as he had watched her from the decks of environmentalists’ antiwhaling ships. He’d fallen in love with her because of that sympathy, which was as bottomless as the living sea.
“When someone kills an American citizen, we don’t say, ‘Oh well, we killed one of theirs last week; we’re calling it even,’” she said. “We declare war. We sweep civilizations off the face of the globe. They won’t care that they started it. They’re only going to care who finishes it, and to be honest, I’m not sure it’s going to be us.”
She turned back to the body. “Scalpel,” she said, and the necropsy went on.
ZONE FIVE: ABYSSOPELAGIC
I guess I just wanted my sister to be proud of me. That’s what sisters want, right? They want to be good enough to be proud of.
—Victoria Stewart
I’m not a reporter. I’m a propaganda machine, and I’ve never written my own script.
—Olivia Sanderson
We know Imagine—acting under the auspices of failing CEO James Golden—has launched a follow-up to the doomed Atargatis mission. What we don’t know is exactly why. However …
You may remember last year, when we managed to get on a whale-watching tour hosted by none other than Victoria “Tory” Stewart, younger sister of Anne Stewart, the Imagine “television personality” who died on the Atargatis. She was fun, savvy, and unwilling to discuss the Mariana mermaids … even though we knew she was working with cryptid enthusiast Luis Martines (whose parents have essentially been funding her research for the last few years). News flash, Victoria: we know you’re looking for the little mermaid who can give you back your sister’s voice. You’re not going to find her.
Now the question becomes, can anyone find Tory? We went to inquire as to her feelings about the Imagine mission, only to discover that she’d been fired by the whale-watching business. She’s no longer telling tourists what an orca looks like. What’s more, both she and Luis are missing from the aquarium where they’d been conducting the bulk of their work. Add the absence of Dr. Jillian Toth from her teaching position, and, well …
Whatever Imagine is looking for out there, they appear to have collected the world’s experts on mermaids to help them find it. Maybe we’re about to find out what happened to the Atargatis after all.
—From Looking for Bigfoot: A Cryptozoological Journal, by Alexander Townsend, originally posted 2022
I’ve spent my life looking for mermaids. And I’ve found them. Oh yes, I’ve found them. I’ve found them in the spaces between stories, in the breaks in the fossil record, and in the oral histories of a hundred civilizations. I don’t think we forgot them on purpose. I think we did it because we had to. These were monsters we could neither fight nor flee. Our only
choice, if we wanted to claim the seas and hence the world, was to learn to pretend that they weren’t there.
We ignored them out of our daily existence. Only now, when airplanes have freed us from the seas, do we have the luxury of believing them back into being.
—Transcript from the lecture “Mermaids: Myth or Monster,” given by Dr. Jillian Toth
CHAPTER 24
Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 3, 2022
The clock in the closed wet lab ticked toward three in the morning. The necropsy was done, the air smelling of fish and the deep. Dr. Jillian Toth stood silent and alone, eyes playing along the wreckage of the monster she’d pursued for most of her life.
Nothing would be wasted. Even now, technicians were sectioning and preserving the organs. They’d be coming soon to claim the rest of the body and strip it to nothing. The bones would be articulated, strung like a classroom skeleton, minus the ribs smashed by the Abneys’ bullets. The flesh would be packed for later analysis.
(Jillian was sure Michi Abney was arguing with Theo, defending her right to at least a few fillets from the siren’s tail. She respected the hunter’s single-minded determination to taste her kill, even as she knew it was a terrible idea. It would be weeks before the siren could be fully analyzed. No meal, however unique, was worth dying over. But there were people in the world who thought nothing of preparing their own blowfish sushi, so she supposed if Michi died of this, at least she’d be in good company.)
Mermaids had become Jillian’s obsession after her husband’s injury left them marooned on the great island of North America. Theo had said, again and again, that he’d understand if she went back to sea; they’d been reaching a point where they’d need a terrestrial home regardless of their health, because Lani needed to go to school with children her own age, needed to learn how to live in the world, not move alongside it, rendered alien by cultural illiteracy.