The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  Wynn reports that they were just as welcoming the second time, even building him some sort of room out of fine yellow coral in their now-thriving garden. Why they were so keen for him to stay and study them remains a mystery. It was there that he wrote his most celebrated works, uncovering a great deal of information on mer-culture in conversation with his hosts. Not long after his arrival, he witnessed the event that inspired a series of writings eventually to be collected in Festivals and Rites of Passage among the Merfolk:

  The youngest daughter sat at the heart of the house, her hair entangled by tentacled flowers that writhed from the limpet-starred ceiling and her face scintillating with fins plucked from countless scarab-like fish. She was given a bowl, into which her sisters placed various lunar fruits. She ate these sitting upright, an awkward position for her species to eat in. Her family stood around, holding censers filled with a bladderwrack-like plant that smelled, when burned, like a summer’s sea-breeze, singing songs that appeared to ripple through the smoke in colours never seen on Earth.

  When she had eaten, she joined in the song, at which the woman of the house stepped forward with a silver tray holding fish-bones strange to the eye, as if they were of mercury, flowing inwardly while keeping their outward shape. The tentacles from the ceiling gripped the girl’s arms as the woman pierced her back, between the spikes of her vertebrae, with these unearthly bones. The child cried out, and the air around the holes was coloured by red spray.

  I observed the parents’ own piercings, quicksilver spines which seemed part of their flesh, significantly larger than the girl’s ornaments. After the ceremony, which ended with more singing and the drinking of a heady liquor made from pearls, the mother explained to me that they are a part of her. After piercing, one tidal cycle between mortal moon-form and elemental sea-form transforms the jewels first into a part of the merman’s soul and then of his living body. From what phrases of their singing I could glean, I believe this is somehow connected to their longevity, an area which still demands meaningful research. A merman can live for an astonishing 300 years, yet no established elficologist has provided a convincing study of this. I submit that my discovery of the piercing ritual is a possible key to understanding it.

  (FRPM, first edition, 34)

  The dig at the RAEI did not pass unnoticed, but by the time complaints were aired, Wynn had quite different matters on his mind. In his essays and books, he continued to call his favourite subject for observation “the youngest daughter of the house”, but in letters to friends, as the years went by, the descriptions of her changed. From “my pretty little saviour”, she was transformed into a variety of whimsical creatures, including “the bright pearlskinned flower-enchanting heart’s light of this cold moon” (Letter to Catherin Northcliffe, 1882). By the time she was eighteen, he had a name for her: “Opal”, which he claimed was wonderfully similar to the first syllables of her merish name (never recorded). It is hard to miss the significance of this, especially given her love of flowers and a curiosity about humanity that prompted him to travel to Earth and back just to bring her books – including the plays of Shakespeare. By all accounts she was a charming and innocent girl who loved to sing – Wynn would have lost no time in imagining her part in the favourite play of his youth and naming her after the “mermaid-like” Ophelia. Perhaps “Opal” herself embraced this association, uncommonly enamoured as she was of human poetry.

  As her womanhood bloomed, so did their romance. This is largely documented in the poems of Catherin Northcliffe, who controversially gained the title of Lunar Laureate in 1885, and treated Wynn’s adopted household as an idyllic writing retreat for some time. Two years previously, Wynn had written to her (then still in England) about Opal dancing:

  in a splendid squid-silk tent all sewn with dusky pearls. Since she came in on the last tide her arms are encrusted with the tiny peaks of silver barnacles that flare in the deep blue lamplight, like sequins or perhaps armour. Her tiny peacock-scaled feet twist in ways that jolt my eye, suggesting, in the corners of my vision, that they are not tiny at all. I never used to think of my feet, and now I do so only to regret their condition. What must it be to have toes that are really the fleshy, scaly shell of a vast, unworldly tail-fin? There is a subject for you! A mortal, upon seeing a mermaid dance, yearning to have such legs, such power, such strangeness. I will await the poem, sealed in a mottled glass bottle, on the next tide.

  (Letter to Catherin Northcliffe, 1883)

  Northcliffe was captivated. Their correspondence from then on focused on little other than the merfolk and their culture. When she came to the moon she stayed with Wynn for long periods of time. The mermaid figures in her poems are doubtless almost all Opal. The mortal lovers are often a version of Wynn.

  How far Wynn allowed the physical aspect of the relationship to progress is unknown. Some poems from Northcliffe’s “Siren” cycle hint at bizarre debaucheries, but one of her unpublished poems, apparently narrated from Wynn’s perspective, is far more frank:

  A mortal maid and an undine

  I spied amidst the coral ferns

  And knew not if I greater yearned

  To kiss the pink-lipp’d or the green.

  “Twin cups of rarest love I see”

  I cried – “I cannot choose my way”

  Twin bosoms, scale and skin, laughed “Nay,

  Love can full fill these vessels three!

  Think you we two would willing part

  That only one should take thy hand?

  Come lay here on this lucent sand

  And learn to share thy brimming heart.”1

  Northcliffe, however, is known for her flights of fancy – and besides, better-substantiated accounts of mer–human sexual encounters2 are harrowing enough to suggest that Wynn would have reacted far more strongly than he did if her poems were true. They are clearly Northcliffe’s fantasy, fuelled at once by her jealous desire to compete with Opal in Wynn’s estimation and her own, presumably repressed, lesbian attraction towards Opal.

  It is far more likely that Wynn kept Opal at a physical distance, enjoying an idealised, non-sexual – yet always deeply passionate, in its way – romance.

  But even that was no match for their ultimate incompatibility.

  My Opal has come back from the sea wearing living beads in her hair, bubbles of light clasped amongst her locks, winking red, yellow and mauve. I have seen this on other merwomen, a sign of yearning for children. I have been feeling not dissimilar pangs myself. But what can we do? I cannot carry her eggs in my belly and she could not nurture my seed in her womb. Oh, if I could only change that!

  (Letter to Robert Creschen, 1887)

  Of course, he could not. But he grew obsessed with the idea, returning to the RAEI and bombarding its scholars with wild new theories. A doctor there, one of the first to notice the adverse effects of the lunar atmosphere on the human brain, kept notes on Wynn’s behaviour, from his initial visit as “a pseudo-elficologist raving about how he would become a merman if we gave over our valuable resources to his lunatic scheme” to the letters the RAEI started to receive from Wynn after his return to Opal’s family:

  He wrote again yesterday, saying he had, with the help of the poetess, undergone a version of the merfolk’s ritual piercing. This, he supposes, would transform him over time into one of them, if we were to help him travel between this plane of being and another over and again. It seems the mercury in those bones has only been fuel to his insanity1.

  After several fruitless months of mimicking every aspect of merish life and repeatedly asking the RAEI for various forms of aid, Wynn went suddenly quiet. Very little is known about his activities over the following year; the next record of his movements that we have is a final letter to the RAEI in October, 1888, stating that he was leaving and knew he would find better help in England. What was he up to in the meantime? In all likelihood, he wrote: friends that he spoke to upon his return to Earth report that he mentioned a work-in-progress entitled “This To
o Solid Flesh”, the manuscripts of which are lost. Robert Creschen was one of those Wynn met, and though Creschen only gives a cursory mention of their meeting in his diary, it was not long after that he penned his first literary success, horror classic The Mermaid Wife (1894). If this work was influenced by Wynn’s experiences, as it undoubtedly was, some disturbing conclusions about his final months on the Moon can be drawn from it. The passage wherein Creschen’s fictional Wynn-figure, William Elverson, relates his misfortunes to the narrator is particularly chilling:

  “You think you know things, that the concrete world and the aether are mapped in formulae by your alchemists.” He leaned close, gin and nightmares rank on his breath. “If you had seen a shadow, a mere reflection, heard a whisper of what I have, you would not set foot on that train. Your eye would flinch from the sight of the Moon in the sky. The night and the sea would be devilish to you, and you would not walk another easy step in your life. She ruined my mind, Crescent, and even that was not enough. She wanted to spread her corruption into our race, wanted to debase my humanity and my bloodline; she would have – good God! – shared me with a merman so he could carry the demons we created.”2

  Underneath Creschen’s melodramatic association of merfolk with demons, there is conceivably some truth in the suggestion of a surrogate father, and it is not unreasonable to conclude that such a demand would be sufficient to drive Wynn away for good. Once on Earth again, he became much calmer, and deeply absorbed in study.

  And that is where Opal’s story has ended – until now. But in February 1889, something happened to change Wynn completely. From then on his friends noted “inexplicable strangeness, prolonged waking dreams, frighteningly alien movements and utterances”1 which increased until the time of his disappearance. What was it that sent those first fine cracks across the surface of his sanity?

  What else? He received word of Opal’s suicide – a suicide we could not have known about until last year’s discovery of merish song-shells. These shells, holding songs sung on the moon over a century ago, are currently stumping our scientists by washing up on Earth’s beaches. One of these shells has just been dated to the thirteenth of February, 1889: the day before Wynn’s mental wellbeing took a drastic turn for the worse; the ninth anniversary of their first meeting. The song within the shell is English, which no other mermaids are known to have sung in. Now, her voice flies hauntingly across the years to us, and the song is all too familiar:

  Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day

  All in the morning betime,

  And I a maid at your window,

  To be your Valentine.

  Then up he rose and donned his clothes

  And dupped the chamber door,

  Let in the maid, that out a maid

  Never departed more.2

  The responses so far to this discovery have been speculative, tenuous at best.

  What seems to be an echo, perhaps a sort of feedback caused by the metaphysical transportation of the song-particles, has been seized on by some scholars who claim it is in fact a male voice singing faintly alongside her. Isobel Cutter even claims that it proves her (already widely discredited1) theory that Wynn succeeded at becoming a merman, writing that:

  The fluidity between mortal and merish form needed to be activated somehow, and with no outside help his only option was astral projection. To hear him singing a duet with Opal seems impossible – unless, of course, he was successfully projecting onto the moon. Northcliffe’s later work mentions a ghostly lover slowly becoming more solid – perhaps this is Wynn, at last becoming the merman he longed to be. His Earthly disappearance, in that light, is unsurprising – his Earth-bound self would have eventually become purely elemental.2

  As discussed, Northcliffe is hardly a reliable historic source – her refusal to join the human exodus from the moon at the turn of the century and the subsequent brain-damage and physical decay she must have suffered renders her late work (or at least, what has been recovered of it) particularly questionable. But besides this and Cutter’s flimsy science, the theory conveniently ignores the source of the song.

  Here was a mermaid who had loved a man – who had been named after Ophelia by that man, maybe even driven mad by him; who knows what lasting psychological damage may have been caused by this passion for a man of the wrong species, and one who could only ever fail to live up to her society’s ideal of masculinity? The answer, then, to the question of what possible reason she could have to sing one of Ophelia’s mad songs is woefully clear: unable to find him after his return to England, she chose to end her life in a way that she hoped would connect them. He had seen her as an Ophelia, so she would live out his ideal to the very end. We can imagine her wreathing herself in living flowers and walking, singing as she went, to the centre of Melzun, to the water-house with its tanks of clean water. We can picture her slipping quietly inside, opening a tank and climbing in and – singing still – closing the lid on herself even as she began to disintegrate, turning the fresh water to brine. Later, the tank would have been checked, found to be contaminated, and drained off outside the dome. And when the moon next released its absorbed water back into the sea, Opal’s particles would have returned with it, nothing more than foam on the high tide.

  Here, perhaps, Northcliffe is at last a dependable chronicler – for what else could she have been alluding to in the last section of her final, incomplete work, “The Mortal Lover?”

  Night, its pearls strewn on the air

  Confines me to this reeling shore—

  These long grey tides ebb you from here

  Transformed beyond the dreams of form.

  1 Hamlet 1.1.118-9. How Shakespeare knew of the mer-people’s tidal migration to the moon remains a mystery, but these lines show that the Bard knew even more of Faery than we have given him credit for. Hamlet is not usually considered an elficological play, but in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Faeries C.C. Temple uncovers a wealth of hidden references and makes a compelling argument for Hamlet as a radically Faery-based text.

  1 Hunt, Diary of a Man in the Moon, 17

  2 Ulysses Wright, quoted in Early Accounts of Moon Exploration, ed. S. Banerjee, 87

  1 Northcliffe, ‘The Moon-Jewel’

  1 Northcliffe, ‘The Three of Cups’, c.1886

  2 As collected in True Nightmares: Sex on the Moon vols I, II and III, ed. Jared Norman

  1 Notes collected from the RAEI by Lucien Farrell, British Library

  2 Creschen, The Mermaid Wife, 149

  1 Creschen, Memoirs, 624

  2 Hamlet 4.5.48-55, recorded in song-shell, Luna 13 February 1889, accessed by the author at the St. Ives Ocean Observatory

  1 See the author’s review of Cutter’s Children of the Air: The Lost Lunar Settlers in the Times Literary Supplement, 19 September 2006

  2 Cutter, “Notes on a Late Nineteenth Century Song-Shell”, Metaphysics Quarterly, October 2008

  SPIDER THE ARTIST

  Nnedi Okorafor

  Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go

  Zombie!

  Zombie!

  Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop

  Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn

  Zombie!

  Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think

  —from Zombie by Fela Kuti, Nigerian

  musician and self-proclaimed voice of the voiceless.

  My husband used to beat me. That was how I ended up out there that evening behind our house, just past the bushes, through the tall grass, in front of the pipelines. Our small house was the last in the village, practically in the forest itself. So nobody ever saw or heard him beating me.

  Going out there was the best way to put space between me and him without sending him into further rage. When I went behind the house, he knew where I was and he knew I was alone. But he was too full of himself to realize I was thinking about killing myself.

  My husband was a drunk, like too many of the members of the Niger Delta Peop
le’s Movement. It was how they all controlled their anger and feelings of helplessness. The fish, shrimps and crayfish in the creeks were dying. Drinking the water shriveled women’s wombs and eventually made men urinate blood.

  There was a stream where I had been fetching water. A flow station was built nearby and now the stream was rank and filthy, with an oily film that reflected rainbows. Cassava and yam farms yielded less and less each year. The air left your skin dirty and smelled like something preparing to die. In some places, it was always daytime because of the noisy gas flares.

  My village was shit.

  On top of all this, People’s Movement members were getting picked off like flies. The “kill-and-go” had grown bold. They shot People’s Movement members in the streets, they ran them over, dragged them into the swamps. You never saw them again.

  I tried to give my husband some happiness. But after three years, my body continued to refuse him children. It’s easy to see the root of his frustration and sadness … but pain is pain. And he dealt it to me regularly.

  My greatest, my only true possession was my father’s guitar. It was made of fine polished Abura timber and it had a lovely tortoiseshell pick guard. Excellent handwork. My father said that the timber used to create the guitar came from one of the last timber trees in the delta. If you held it to your nose, you could believe this. The guitar was decades old and still smelled like fresh cut wood, like it wanted to tell you its story because only it could.