This fact, coupled with an instinctive preference for solitude similar to that of the harlequin bass (S. tigrinus) and the reef shark (C. melanopterus), has prevented H. oceanus from evolving anything that H. sapiens would recognize as a civilized society. From the time they can safely fend for themselves at about the age of six, mer-children desert their parents to swim and hunt alone, often faring from one ocean to another in their wanderings. When one of these mer-children meets with another of approximately its own age, it will generally pair with that mer-child, whether it be of the same or of the opposite sex. Such a pairing, which seems to be instinctive, is the merman’s only means of social intercourse. It may last from a season or two to several years, but a couple with an infant commonly stays together until the child is ready to swim free. Legends exist of couples who swam faithfully together for decades, but as a rule, the enforced and extreme intimacy of telepathic communication comes to wear more and more heavily on one or both members of a pair until they are forced to part. Each mer then swims alone for whatever period of time fate and preference may dictate, until he meets with another receptive mer, when the cycle begins again.
Because of this peculiar behavioral pattern, the mer-folk can have no government, no religion, no community; in short, no possibility of developing a civilization even as primitive as that of a tribe of savages. Some legends they do have (vide Appendix A), some image-poems of transcendent beauty remembered and transmitted from pair to pair over the ages. But any new discovery made by a merman or a merwoman swimming alone may all too easily die with its maker or become garbled in transmission between pair and pair. For, except within the pair-bond, the mer’s instinct for cooperation is not strong.
• • • •
The more she learned about the customs of the mer-folk, the more conscious Miss Carstairs became of how fortunate she was that the merman had consented to speak to her at all. Mermen swimming solitary were a cantankerous lot, as likely to attack a chance-met pair or single mer as to flee it.
Though Miss Carstairs realized that the merman must look upon her as his companion for the duration of his cycle of sociability, she did not fully understand the implications such a companionship had for him. When she thought of his feelings at all, she imagined that he viewed her with the same benevolent curiosity with which she viewed him, never considering that their relationship might seem different from his side of the equation.
The crisis came in early December, when Miss Carstairs determined that it was time to tackle the subject of mer reproductive biology. She knew that an examination of the rituals of courtship and mating was central to the study of any new species, and no scientist, however embarrassing he might find the subject, was justified in shirking it. So Miss Carstairs gathered together her family album and a porcelain baby doll exhumed from a trunk in the attic, and used them, along with an anatomy text, to give the merman a basic lesson in human reproduction.
At first, it seemed to Miss Carstairs that the merman was being particularly inattentive. But close observation having taught her to recognize his moods, she realized at length that his tapping fingers, gently twitching crest, and reluctance to meet her eyes, all signaled acute embarrassment.
Miss Carstairs found this most interesting. She tapped on his wrist to get his attention, then shook her head and briefly covered her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she told him, then held out a sepia photograph of herself as a stout and solemn infant propped between her frowning parents on a horsehair sofa. “But you must tell me what I want to know.”
In response, the merman erected his crest, gaped fiercely, then dove into the deepest cranny of the pool, where he wantonly dismembered Miss Carstairs’s largest lobster. In disgust, she threw the baby doll into the pool after him and stalked from the room. She was furious. Without this section, her article must remain unfinished, and she was anxious to send it off. After having exposed himself on the occasion of their first meeting, after having allowed her to rummage almost at will through his memories and his mind, why would he so suddenly turn coy?
All that afternoon, Miss Carstairs pondered the merman’s reaction to her question, and by evening had concluded that mer-folk had some incomprehensible taboo concerning the facts of reproduction. Perhaps reflection would show him that there was no shame in revealing them to her, who could have only an objective and scientific interest in them. It never occurred to her that it might bewilder or upset the merman to speak of mating to a female to whom he was bonded, but with whom he could never hope to mate.
The next morning, Miss Carstairs entered the conservatory to see the merman sitting on his rock, his face turned sternly from the ocean and towards the door. Clearly, he was waiting for her, and when she took her seat and lifted her eyes to his, she felt absurdly like a girl caught out in some childish peccadillo and called into her mother’s sitting room to be chastised.
Without preamble, the merman sent a series of images breaking over her. Two mer—one male, one female—swam together, hunted, coupled. Soon they parted, one to the warm coral reefs, the other to arctic seas. The merwoman swam, hunted, explored. A time passed: not long, although Miss Carstairs could not have told how she knew. The merwoman met a merwoman, drove her away, met a merman, flung herself upon him amorously. This exchange was more complex than the earlier couplings; the merman resisted and fled when it was accomplished.
The merman began to eat prodigiously. He sought a companion and came upon a merman, with whom he mated, and who hunted for him when he could no longer easily hunt for himself. As the merman became heavier, he seemed to become greedier, stuffing his pouch with slivers of fish as if to hoard them. How ridiculous, thought Miss Carstairs. Then, all at once, the scales covering the pouch gave a writhing heave and a tiny crested head popped out. Tiny gills fluttered; tiny arms worked their way out of their confinement. Claiming its wandering gaze with iridescent eyes, the merman’s companion coaxed the infant from its living cradle and took it tenderly into his arms.
• • • •
Three days later, Miss Carstairs sent John to the village to mail the completed manuscript of her article, and then she put it out of her mind as firmly as she could. Brooding, she told herself, would not speed it any faster to the editor’s desk or influence him to look more kindly upon it once it got there. In the meanwhile, she must not waste time. There was much more the merman could tell her, much more for her to learn. Her stacks of notes and manuscript pages grew higher.
In late January, “Preliminary Study of the Species Homo Oceanus Telepathicans” was returned with a polite letter of thanks. As always, the editor of The American Naturalist admired Mr. Carstairs’s graceful prose style and clear exposition, but feared that this particular essay was more a work of imagination than of scientific observation. Perhaps it could find a more appropriate place in a literary journal.
Miss Carstairs tore the note into small pieces. Then she went down to the conservatory. The merman met her eyes when she entered, recoiled, and grinned angrily at her; Miss Carstairs grinned angrily back. She felt that her humiliation was his fault, that he had misled or lied to her. She wanted to dissect his brain and send it pickled to the editor of The American Naturalist; she wanted him to know exactly what had happened and how he had been the cause of it all. But since she had no way to tell him this, Miss Carstairs fled the house for the windy marshes, where she squelched through the matted beach grass until she was exhausted. Humanity had always bored her and now scholarship had betrayed her. She had nothing else.
Standing ankle-deep in a brackish pool, Miss Carstairs looked back across the marshes to her house. The sun rode low in a mackerel sky; its light danced on the calm water around her and glanced off the conservatory glazing. The merman would be sitting on his rock like the Little Mermaid in the tale her father had read her, gazing out over the ocean he could not reach. She had a sudden vision of a group of learned men standing around him, shaking their heads, stroking their whiskers, and debating whether or not this so-call
ed merman had an immortal soul. Perhaps it was just as well the editor of The American Naturalist had rejected the article. Miss Carstairs could imagine sharing her knowledge of the merman with the world, but she could not share the merman himself. He had become necessary to her, her one comfort and her sole companion.
Next morning she was back in the conservatory, and on each morning succeeding. Day after day she gazed through the merman’s eyes as if he were a living bathysphere, watching damselfish and barracuda stitch silver through the greenish antlers of elkhorn coral, observing the languorous unfurling of the manta ray’s wings and the pale groping fingers of hungry anemones. As she opened herself to the merman’s visions, Miss Carstairs began not only to see and hear, but also to feel, to smell, even to taste, the merman’s homesick memories. She became familiar with the complex symphony of the ocean, the screeching scrape of parrotfish beaks over coral, the tiny, amatory grunts of frillfins. In the shape of palpable odors present everywhere in the water, she learned the distinct tastes of fear, of love, of blood, of anger. Sometimes, after a day of vicarious exploration, she would lie in her bed at night and weep for the thinness of the air around her, the silent flatness of terrestrial night.
The snow fell without Miss Carstairs’s noticing, melted and turned to rain, which froze again, then warmed and gentled toward spring. In her abandoned study, the ink dried in the well and the books and papers lay strewn around the desk like old wrecks. Swimming with the merman in the open sea, Miss Carstairs despised the land. When she walked abroad, she avoided the marshes and clambered over the weed-slick rocks to the end of the spit, where she would stand shivering in the wind and spray, staring into the waves breaking at her feet. Most days, however, she spent in the conservatory, gazing hungrily into the merman’s pearly eyes.
The merman’s visions were becoming delirious with the need for freedom as, in his own way, he pleaded with Miss Carstairs to release him. He showed her mermen caught in fishermen’s nets, torn beyond recognition by their struggles to escape the ropes. He showed her companions turning on each other, mate devouring mate when the social cycle of one had outlasted the patience of the other. Blinded by her own hunger, Miss Carstairs viewed these horrific images simply as dramatic incidents in his submarine narrative, like sharks feeding or grouper nibbling at the eyes of drowned sailors.
When at last the merman took to sulking under the rock, Miss Carstairs sat in her wicker chair like a squid lurking among the coral, waiting patiently for him to emerge. She knew the pond was small; she sensed that the ocean’s limitless freedom was more real to him when he shared his memories of it. She reasoned that no matter how distasteful the process had become, he must eventually rise and feed her the visions she craved. If, from time to time, she imagined that he might end her tyranny by tearing out her throat, she dismissed the fear. Was he not wholly in her power? When she knew the ocean as well as he, when she could name each fish with its own song, then she would let him swim free.
• • • •
One spring morning, Miss Carstairs came down to the conservatory to find the rock empty. At first she thought the merman was hiding; only when she moved toward the pool did she notice that the floor of the conservatory was awash with water and the door was ajar. Against all odds, her merman had found a way to escape her.
Miss Carstairs groped for her wicker chair and sat, bereaved and betrayed as she had not been since her father’s death. Her eye fell on the open door; she saw blood and water smeared over the steps. Rising hurriedly, she followed the trail through the garden to where the merman lay unconscious at the head of the beach stairs. With anxious, delicate fingers, she caressed his mouth and chest to feel the thin breath coming from his lips and the faint rhythmic beat under his ribs. His tail was scored and tattered where the gravel garden path had torn away the scales.
Somewhere in her soul, Miss Carstairs felt dismay and tenderness and horror. But in the forefront of her brain, she was conscious only of anger. She had fed him, she thought; she had befriended him; she had opened her mind to his visions. How dare he abandon her? Grasping him by the shoulders, she shook him violently. “Wake up and look at me!” she shouted.
Obediently, the merman opened his opalescent eyes and conjured a vision: the face of a middle-aged human woman. It was a simian face, slope-jawed and snub-nosed, wrinkled and brown.
The ape-woman opened her mouth, showing large, flat teeth. Grimacing fearfully, she stooped toward Miss Carstairs and seized her shoulders with stubby fingers that stung and burned her like anemones. Harsh noises scraped over Miss Carstairs’s ears, bearing with them the taint of hunger and need and envy as sweat bears the taint of fear. Miss Carstairs tore herself from the ape-woman’s poisonous grasp and covered her face with her hands.
A claw gripped her wrist, shook it to get her attention. Reluctantly, Miss Carstairs removed her hands and saw the merman, immovably melancholy, peering up at her. How could he bear to look at her? she wondered miserably. He shook his head, a gesture he had learned from her, and answered her with a kind of child’s sketch: an angular impression of a woman’s face, inhumanly beautiful in its severity. Expressions of curiosity, wonder, joy, discovery darted across the woman’s features like a swarm of minnows, and she tasted as strongly of solitude as a free-swimming mer.
Through her grief and remorse, Miss Carstairs recognized the justice of each of these portraits. “Beast and angel,” she murmured, remembering old lessons, and again the merman nodded. “No, I’m not a mer, am I, however much I have longed for the sea. And it isn’t you I want, but what you know, what you have seen.”
The merman showed her a coral reef, bright and various, which seemed to grow as she watched, becoming more complex, more brilliant with each addition; then an image of herself standing knee-deep in the sea, watching the merman swim away from her. She smelled of acceptance, resignation, inwardness—the taste of a mer parting from a loved companion.
Wearily, Miss Carstairs rubbed her forehead, which throbbed with multiplying thoughts. Her notebooks, her scholarship, her long-neglected study, all called to her through the merman’s vision. At the same time, she noted that he was responding directly to her. Had she suddenly learned to speak visions? Had he learned to see words? Beyond these thoughts, Miss Carstairs was conscious of the fierce warmth of the spring sun, the rich smell of the damp soil, and the faint green rustle of growing leaves. She didn’t know if they were the merman’s perceptions or her own.
Miss Carstairs pulled herself heavily to her feet and brushed down her skirts with a shaking hand. “It’s high time for you to be off,” she said. “I’ll just ring for Stephen and John to fetch the sling.” Unconsciously, she sought the savor of disapproval and rum that was John’s signal odor; it lingered near the kitchen door. At the same time, she had a clear vision of Stephen, wrapped in a disreputable jacket, plodding with bucket and fishing pole across the garden to the seawall. She saw him from above, as she had seen him from her bedroom window early that morning. So it was her vision, not the merman’s. The scientist in her noted the fact, and also that the throbbing in her head had settled down to a gentle pulse, discernible, like the beating of her heart, only if she concentrated on it.
A laughing school of fish flashed through the ordered currents of her thoughts, and Miss Carstairs understood that the merman found her new consciousness amusing. Then a searing sense of heat and a tight, itching pain under her skin sent her running into the house shouting for John. When he appeared—from the kitchen, she noted—she said, “Get a bucket and a blanket and wet down the merman. You’ll find him in the garden, near the sundial. Then bring the stretcher.” He gaped at her uncomprehendingly. “Hurry!” she snapped, and strode off toward the seawall in search of Stephen.
Following his scent, she found him hunched over his fishing pole and his pipe. He tasted of wet wool, tobacco, and solitude. “Stephen, I have learned everything from the merman that he is able to tell me. I have decided to release him.”
Ste
phen began to pull in his line. “Yes, Miss,” he said. “About time.”
• • • •
The tide was going out, and the men had to carry their burden far past the tidal pool where the merman had first washed ashore. It was heavy going, for the wet sand was soft and the merman was heavy. When they came to water at last, Miss Carstairs stood by as they released the merman into the shallows, then waded out up to her knees to stand beside him. The sun splintered the water into blinding prisms; she turned her eyes inshore, away from the glare. Behind her, Stephen and John were trudging back toward the beach, the conservatory glittering above them like a crystal jewel box. Sharp tastes of old seaweed and salt-crusted rocks stung her nose. Squinting down, Miss Carstairs saw the merman floating quietly against the pull of the sea, one webbed hand grasping the sodden fabric of her skirt. His crest was erect, his mouth a little open. Miss Carstairs read joy in his pearly eyes, and something like regret.
“I shall not forget what you have shown me,” she said, although she knew the words to be superfluous. Mentally, she called up the ape-woman and the scientist and fused them into a composite portrait of a human woman, beast and angel, heart and mind, need and reason; and she offered that portrait to the merman as a gift, an explanation, a farewell. Then he was gone, and Miss Carstairs began to wade back to shore.
© 1989 by Delia Sherman.
Previously published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
and in the collection Young Woman in a Garden (Small Beer Press).
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Fantasy Magazine Issue 58, Women Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue Page 11