Beyond the Dead Reef

by James Tiptree Jr.

  My companion suddenly turned and gave a highly concentrated look.

  "You were in World War Two, weren't you? And afterwards you worked around quite a bit." He wasn't asking me, so I kept quiet. "Right now, I don't see anything," he went on. "But just possibly I might be calling on you," he grinned, "with something you may not like."

  "If it's anything I can do from a wheelchair, I won't forget."

  "Fair enough. We'll say no more about it now."

  "Oh yes, we will," I countered. "You may not know it, but you owe me something. I can smell a story when one smacks me in the face. What I want from you is the story behind this Dead Reef business, and how it is that Jorge knows you know something special about it. If I'm not asking too much? I'd really like to end our evening with your tale of the Dead Reef."

  "Oho. My error-I'd forgotten Marcial telling me you wrote… Well, I can't say I enjoy reliving it, but maybe it'll have a salutary effect on your future dealings in Spanish. The fact is, I was the one it happened to, and Jorge was driving a certain boat. You realize, though, there's not a shred of proof except my own word? And my own word-" he tapped the pocket holding his flask "-is only as good as you happen to think it is."

  "It's good enough for me."

  "Very well, then. Very well," he said slowly, leaning back. "It happened about three, no, four years back-by god, you know this is hard to tell, though there's not much to it." He fished in another pocket, and took out, not a flask, but the first cigarette I'd seen him smoke, a Petit Caporal. "I was still up to a long day's scuba then, and, like you, I wanted to explore north. I'd run into this nice, strong, young couple who wanted the same thing. Their gear was good, they seemed experienced and sensible. So we got a third tank apiece, and hired a trustable boatman-not Jorge, Victor Camul- to take us north over the worst of the reef. It wasn't so bad then, you know.

  "We would be swimming north with the current until a certain point, where if you turn east, you run into a long reverse eddy that makes it a lot easier to swim back to Cozumel. And just to be extra safe, Victor was to start out up the eddy in two hours sharp to meet us and bring us home. I hadn't one qualm about the arrangements. Even the weather cooperated-not a cloud, and the forecast perfect. Of course, if you miss up around here, the next stop is four hundred miles to Cuba, but you know that; one gets used to it… By the way, have you heard they're still looking for that girl who's been gone two days on a Sunfish with no water?"

  I said nothing.

  "Sorry." He cleared his throat. "Well, Victor put us out well in sight of shore. We checked watches and compasses and lights. The plan was for the lad Harry to lead, Ann to follow, and me to bring up the rear. Harry had Day Glo-red shorts you could see a mile, and Ann was white-skinned with long black hair and a brilliant neon-blue-and-orange bathing suit on her little rump-you could have seen her in a mine at midnight. Even I got some yellow safety-tape and tied it around my arse and tanks.

  "The one thing we didn't have then was a radio. At the time they didn't seem worth the crazy cost, and were unreliable besides. I had no way of guessing I'd soon give my life for one-and very nearly did.

  "Well, when Victor let us out and we got organized and started north single file over the dead part of the reef, we almost surfaced and yelled for him to take us back right then. It was purely awful. But we knew there was better stuff ahead, so we stuck it out and flippered doggedly along-actually doing pretty damn fair time, with the current-and trying not to look too closely at what lay below.

  "Not only was the coral dead, you understand-that's where the name got started. We think now it's from oil and chemical wash, such as that pretty ship out there is about to contribute-but there was tons and tons of litter, basura of all description, crusted there. It's everywhere, of course-you've seen what washes onto the mainland beach-but here the current and the reef produce a particularly visible concentration. Even quite large heavy things- bedsprings, auto chassis-in addition to things you'd expect, like wrecked skiffs. Cozumel, Basurero del Caribe!"

  He gave a short laugh, mocking the Gem-of-the-Caribbean ads, as he lit up another Caporal. The most polite translation of basure ro is garbage can.

  "A great deal of the older stuff was covered with that evil killer algae-you know, the big coarse red-brown hairy kind, which means that nothing else can ever grow there again. But some of the heaps were too new.

  "I ended by getting fascinated and swimming lower to look, always keeping one eye on that blue-and-orange rump above me with her white legs and black flippers. And the stuff-I don't mean just Clorox and detergente bottles, beer cans and netting-but weird things like about ten square meters of butchered pink plas-tic baby-dolls-arms and legs wiggling, and rosebud mouths-it looked like a babies' slaughter-house. Syringes, hypos galore. Fluorescent tubes on end, waving like drowned orchestra conductors. A great big red sofa with a skeletonized banana-stem or something sitting on it-when I saw that, I went back up and followed right behind Ann.

  "And then the sun dimmed unexpectedly, so I surfaced for a look. The shoreline was fine, we had plenty of time, and the cloud was just one of a dozen little thermals that form on a hot afternoon like this. When I went back down Ann was looking at me, so I gave her the All's Fair sign. And with that we swam over a pair of broken dories and found ourselves in a different world-the beauty patch we'd been looking for.

  "The reef was live here-whatever had killed the coral hadn't reached yet, and the damned basura had quit or been deflected, aside from a beer bottle or two. There was life everywhere; anemones, sponges, conches, fans, stars-and fish, oh my! No one ever came here, you see. In fact, there didn't seem to have been any spearing, the fish were as tame as they used to be years back.

  "Well, we began zig-zagging back and forth, just reveling in it. And every time we'd meet head-on we'd make the gesture of putting our fingers to our lips, meaning, Don't tell anyone about this, ever!

  "The formation of the reef was charming, too. It broadened into a sort of big stadium, with allees and cliffs and secret pockets, and there were at least eight different kinds of coral. And most of it was shallow enough so the sunlight brought out the glorious colors-those little black-and-yellow fish-butterflies, I forget their proper name-were dazzling. I kept having to brush them off my mask, they wanted to look in.

  "The two ahead seemed to be in ecstasies; I expect they hadn't seen much like this before. They swam on and on, investigating it all-and I soon realized there was real danger of losing them in some coral pass. So I stuck tight to Ann. But time was passing. Presently I surfaced again to investigate-and, my god, the shoreline was damn near invisible and the line-up we had selected for our turn marker was all but passed! Moreover, a faint hazy overcast was rising from the west.

  "So I cut down again, intending to grab Ann and start, which Harry would have to see. So I set off after the girl. I used to be a fair sprint swimmer, but I was amazed how long it took me to catch her. I recall vaguely noticing that the reef was going a bit bad again, dead coral here and there. Finally I came right over her, signed to her to halt, and kicked up in front of her nose for another look.

  "To my horror the shoreline was gone and the overcast had overtaken the sun. We would have to swim east by compass, and swim hard. I took a moment to hitch my compass around where I could see it well-it was the old-fashioned kind-and then I went back down for Ann. And the damn fool girl wasn't there. It took me a minute to locate that blue bottom and white legs; I assumed she'd gone after Harry, having clearly no idea of the urgency of our predicament.

  "I confess the thought crossed my mind that I could cut out of there, and come back for them later with Victor, but this was playing a rather iffy game with someone else's lives. And if they were truly unaware, it would be fairly rotten to take off without even warning them. So I went after Ann again-my god, I can still see that blue tail and the white limbs and black feet and hair with the light getting worse every minute and the bottom now gone really rotten again. And as bad luck wo
uld have it she was going in just the worst line-north-north-west.

  "Well, I swam and I swam and I swam. You know how a chase takes you, and somehow being unable to overtake a mere girl made it worse. But I was gaining, age and all, until just as I got close enough to sense something was wrong, she turned sidewise above two automobile tires-and I saw it wasn't a girl at all.

  "I had been following a goddamned great fish-a fish with a bright blue-and-orange band around its belly, and a thin white body ending in a black flipperlike tail. Even its head and nape were black, like her hair and mask. It had a repulsive catfishlike mouth, with barbels.

  "The thing goggled at me and then swam awkwardly away, just as the light went worse yet. But there was enough for me to see that it was no normal fish, either, but a queer archaic thing that looked more tacked together than grown. This I can't swear to, because I was looking elsewhere by then, but it was my strong impression that as it went out of my line of sight its whole tail broke off.

  "But as I say, I was looking elsewhere. I had turned my light on, although I was not deep but only dim, because I had to ready my watch and compass. It had just dawned on me that I was very probably a dead man. My only chance, if you can call it that, was to swim east as long as I could, hoping for that eddy and Victor. And when my light came on, the first thing I saw was the girl, stark naked and obviously stone cold dead, lying in a tangle of nets and horrid stuff on the bottom ahead.

  "Of Harry or anything human there was no sign at all. But there was a kind of shining, like a pool of moonlight, around her, which was so much stronger than my lamp that I clicked it off and swam slowly toward her, through the nastiest mess of basura I had yet seen. The very water seemed vile. It took longer to reach her than I had expected, and soon I saw why.

  "They speak of one's blood running cold with horror, y'know. Or people becoming numb with horror piled on horrors. I believe I experienced both those effects. It isn't pleasant, even now." He lit a third Caporal, and I could see that the smoke column trembled. Twilight had fallen while he'd been speaking. A lone mercury lamp came on at the shore end of the pier; the one near us was apparently out, but we sat in what would ordinarily have been a pleasant tropic evening, sparkling with many moving lights-whites, reds, and green, of late-moving incomers, and the rainbow lighting from the jewel-lit cruise ship ahead, all cheerfully reflected in the unusually calm waters.

  "Again I was mistaken, you see. It wasn't Ann at all; but the rather more distant figure of a young woman, of truly enormous size. All in this great ridge of graveyard luminosity, of garbage in phosphorescent decay. The current was carrying me slowly, inexorably, right toward her-as it had carried all that was there now. And perhaps I was also a bit hypnotized. She grew in my sight meter by meter as I neared her. I think six meters-eighteen feet-was about it, at the end… I make that guess later, you understand, as an exercise in containing the unbearable-by recalling the size of known items in the junkpile she lay on. One knee, for example, lay alongside an oil drum. At the time she simply filled my world. I had no doubt she was dead, and very beautiful. One of her legs seemed to writhe gently.

  "The next stage of horror came when I realized that she was not a gigantic woman at all-or rather, like the fish, she was a woman-shaped construction. The realization came to me first, I think, when I could no longer fail to recognize that her 'breasts' were two of those great net buoys with their blue knobs for nipples.

  "After that it all came with a rush-that she was a made-up body-all sorts of pieces of plastic, rope, styrofoam, netting, crates, and bolts-much of it clothed with that torn translucent white polyethylene for skin. Her hair was a dreadful tangle of something, and her crotch was explicit and unspeakable. One hand was a torn, inflated rubber glove, and her face-well, I won't go into it except that one eye was a traffic reflector and her mouth was partly a rusted can.

  "Now you might think this discovery would have brought some relief, but quite the opposite. Because simultaneously I had realized the very worst thing of all-

  "She was alive."

  He took a long drag on his cigarette.

  "You know how things are moved passively in water? Plants waving, a board seesawing and so on? Sometimes enough almost to give an illusion of mobile life. What I saw was nothing of this short.

  "It wasn't merely that as I floated over, her horrible eyes 'opened' and looked at me and her rusted-can mouth smiled. Oh, no.

  "What I mean is that as she smiled, first one whole arm, shed-ding junk, stretched up and reached for me against the current, and then the other did the same.

  "And when I proved to be out of reach, this terrifying figure, or creature, or unliving life, actually sat up, again against the current, and reached up toward me with both arms at full extension.

  "And as she did so, one of her 'breasts'-the right one-came loose and dangled by some tenuous thready stuff.

  "All this seemed to pass in slow motion-I even had time to see that there were other unalive yet living things moving near her on the pile. Not fish, but more what I should have taken, on land, for rats or vermin-and I distinctly recall the paper-flat skeleton of something like a chicken, running and pecking. And other moving things like nothing in this world. I have remembered all this very carefully, y'see, from what must have been quick glimpses, because in actual fact I was apparently kicking like mad in a frenzied effort to get away from those dreadful reaching arms.

  "It was not till I shot to the surface with a mighty splash that I came somewhere near my senses. Below and behind me I could still see faint cold light. Above was twilight and the darkness of an oncoming small storm.

  "At that moment the air in my last tank gave out-or rather that splendid Yank warning buzz, which means you have just time to get out of your harness, sounded off.

  "I had, thank god, practiced the drill. Despite being a terror-paralysed madman, habit got me out of the harness before the tanks turned into lethal deadweight. In my panic, of course, the headlight went down too. I was left unencumbered in the night, free to swim toward Cuba, or Cozumel, and to drown as slow or fast as fate willed.

  "The little storm had left the horizon stars free. I recall that pure habit made me take a sight on what seemed to be Canopus, which should be over Cozumel. I began to swim in that direction. I was appallingly tired, and as the adrenalin of terror which had brought me this far began to fade out of my system, I realized I could soon be merely drifting, and would surely die in the next day's sun if I survived till then. Nevertheless it seemed best to swim whilst I could.

  "I rather resented it when some time after a boat motor passed nearby. It forced me to attempt to yell and wave, nearly sinking myself. I was perfectly content when the boat passed on. But someone had seen-a spotlight wheeled blindingly, motors reversed, I was forcibly pulled from my grave and voices from what I take to be your Texas demanded, roaring with laughter,"-here he gave quite a creditable imitation-" 'Whacha doin' out hyar, boy, this time of night? Ain't no pussy out hyar, less'n ya'all got a date with a mermaid.' They had been trolling for god knows what, mostly beer.

  "The driver of that boat claimed me as a friend and later took me home for the night, where I told him-and to him alone-the whole story. He was Jorge Chuc.

  "Next day I found that the young couple, Harry and Ann, had taken only a brief look at the charming unspoiled area, and then started east, exactly according to plan, with me-or something very much like me-following behind them all the way. They had been a trifle surprised at my passivity and uncommunicativeness, and more so when, on meeting Victor, I was no longer to be found. But they had taken immediate action, even set a full-scale search in progress-approximately seventy kilometers from where I then was. As soon as I came to myself I had to concoct a wild series of lies about cramps and heart trouble to get them in the clear and set their minds at ease. Needless to say, my version included no mention of diver-imitating fish-life."

  He tossed the spark of his cigarette over the rail before us.


  "So now, my friend, you know the whole story of all I know of what is to be found beyond the Dead Reef. It may be that others know of other happenings and developments there. Or of similar traps elsewhere. The sea is large… Or it may be that the whole yarn comes from neuroses long abused by stuff like this."

  I had not seen him extract his flask, but he now took two deep, shuddering swallows.

  I sighed involuntarily, and then sighed again. I seemed to have been breathing rather inadequately during the end of his account.

  "Ordinary thanks don't seem quite appropriate here," I finally said. "Though I do thank you. Instead I am going to make two guesses. The second is that you might prefer to sit quietly here alone, enjoying the evening, and defer the mild entertainment I was about to offer you to some other time. I'd be glad to be proved wrong…?"

  "No. You're very perceptive, I welcome the diverse-the deferred offer." His tongue stumbled a bit now, more from fatigue than anything he'd drunk. "But what was your first guess?"

  I rose and slowly paced a few meters to and fro, remembering to pick up my absurd snorkel bag. Then I turned and gazed out to the sea.

  "I can't put it into words. It has something to do with the idea that the sea is still, well, strong. Perhaps it can take revenge? No, that's too simple. I don't know. I have only a feeling that our ordinary ideas of what may be coming on us may be-oh-not deep, or broad enough. I put this poorly. But perhaps the sea, or nature, will not die passively at our hands… perhaps death itself may turn or return in horrible life upon us, besides the more mechanical dooms…"

  "Our thoughts are not so far apart," the tall Belizan said. "I welcome them to my night's agenda."

  "To which I now leave you, unless you've changed your mind?"

  He shook his head. I hoisted his bag to the seat beside him. "Don't forget this. I almost left mine."

  "Thanks. And don't you forget about dogs and mothers," he grinned faintly.

  "Goodnight."

  My footsteps echoed on the now deserted muelle left him sitting there, I was quite sure he was no longer smiling.