by Dan Glover
"That is what Karen warned us about before she implanted the embryo. You know the risks as well as I do."
"We both wanted another baby, Maon. That was our only chance since neither of us could conceive again after Alpin."
At the time Alpin didn’t understand the depths of the discussion he overheard. It was only later that he learned how his mother and father became sterile after his birth, that a quirk of evolution rendered them both incapable of having more children of their own.
"Mom and dad wanted more children but they couldn’t have them. So they asked Grandmother Karen for help."
"But I don't understand, Maon. How could she help?"
"She experimented with making babies out of old bones."
Ena looked at him for a long time without saying a word. He saw puzzlement written on her face and unasked questions waiting in her eyes. She rubbed her arms as if making sure she was real.
"So I am one of Grandmother Karen's experiments. Is that what you're telling me?"
"Yes... I mean no, Ena. You are much more than that."
"What am I? I am not your sister. I am not a daughter to mom and dad. I'm a freak. Either that or you're lying about it all."
"I'm lying, Ena. You really are my sister. Please don’t tell mom and dad about this."
Now, stealing sideways glances at Ena's incredible body as she covered her nakedness with the towel he felt a desire which he doubted she shared. At the same time though, she insisted on coming with him on these journeys across the sea in search of trinkets he might use in his artwork; artifacts he carefully sequestered in caches for a later retrieval trip aboard the Nautilus, his grandfather's yacht.
They were polar opposites: while he wore his blonde hair short—barely touching his shoulders—Ena's sable tresses hung down to the middle of her back. Her eyes were so dark that they seemed all pupil while his were the color of the sky. He was husky and tall while Ena was a demur little thing who he could easily pick up and carry in his arms.
"You're looking."
"I can't help it, Ena."
He sat down next to her on the grass under the warm July sunshine. An inward smile formed as he noticed Ena stealing glances at him too when she must think he wasn’t looking.
"Mom told me the truth about who I am. Remember when you tried to tell me but I got all upset?"
"So you know we are not brother and sister?"
"I knew it all along. I knew you weren’t lying, not about something as important as that. Mom said how she and dad planned on having lots of children but after you were born they couldn’t. She said the Ladies are like that too. She thinks they must have inherited it from them.
"Mom told me how Grandmother Karen helped with the birth of Grandfather Nate. I knew that grandmother is a doctor but I had no idea of the extent of her expertise. She makes embryos in her laboratory and then implants them inside of women to grow into babies."
"Are you still upset?"
"No... I am happy mom and dad gave me a chance to live. And I'm glad you're not my brother."
"Why?"
"Because... otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do this."
Chapter 6—Seven Seas
She sometimes wondered if her vision for the future was the correct one.
Lily watched the grandchildren grow into adults, delighting in the time she and her husband Nate spent with them. Her son Maon and his wife Sileas made splendid parents taking the children swimming under the ocean while Lily lingered above with Nate aboard the Nautilus.
Neither of them cared for salt water while their children and grandchildren seemed to thrive in it. Karen postulated how this anomaly might have come about on account of the affinity human beings share for salt.
"Your tears are fresh water tears, Lady Lily. We cry tears of the sea."
"Why is this so, lovely Karen? Were your ancestors from the ocean?"
"Most likely they are, yes. As are yours, I presume. What's interesting is how you have lost that trait. Perhaps during your years of isolation in Lake Baikal your kind became so accustomed to fresh water that your bodies developed alternative substitutes for using salt.
"In human beings salt is vital for our health. It's a major ingredient in extracellular fluid which allows tissue perfusion and normal cellular metabolism. Chloride ions aid in our digestion and help destroy food-borne pathogens in our stomachs. Without salt our muscles cease to function properly.
"Your species seem to concentrate salt while our bodies excrete excess salt. Think of it this way: some fish live in fresh water and other fish live in salt water. If you take a fresh water fish and put it into the sea, it dies. The same happens with a salt water fish put into fresh water.
"Maon and Sileas are salt excreting beings so like humans they prefer a salty environment like the ocean to a fresh water lake like Baikal. It is apparently the same with their offspring, Alpin and Ena."
"So what are you saying, darling Karen? In the future they will have no need to visit Lake Baikal as do Lauren, Nate, and I?"
"I cannot say with certainty, Lady Lily... I suspect their source of rejuvenation and strength and that of their descendants will be found in the oceans and not in Lake Baikal. Rather than being an isolated species theirs will be a world-wide one capable of living anywhere on the planet.
"In time when—as they assuredly will—they move beyond this world and into the galaxy they will colonize planets both wet and dry, hot and cold. Theirs is a gentle demeanor welded to a unique intelligence that will allow them to far surpass anything human beings ever dreamed of doing."
"This future you paint seems intriguing and bright, beautiful Karen. Yet it troubles me that we still have such difficulties reproducing. Will this always be the case?"
"I don’t know, Lady Lily. Though you cannot give birth again, there is every reason to believe Nate is fully capable of doing so."
"If he was to be with someone else, one of the People... is that what you mean, precious Karen?"
"I'm sorry, Lady Lily... I shouldn’t have insinuated that. I only meant that he should be compatible with the girls of the People as well as with the Ladies of the Lake. I haven’t tested that hypothesis, however."
"What you are saying sweet Karen is that our marriage is preventing Nate from procreating the way we once imagined. Perhaps because of his upbringing he feels a fidelity to me that is foreign to my species."
"I think anyone can see the two of you were meant to be together, Lady Lily."
"Meant by whom?"
"By you, Lady Lily... you're the one who came to me with the idea of creating a male who would be able to procreate with both species: yours and mine."
She had been selfishly keeping Nate as her own. Until that moment, Lily never realized the consequences of such actions nor had she consciously been subverting the opportunities arising from time to time for Nate to copulate with the girls of the People.
Her folly would mean the end of both species. Yet to divert from the road they had chosen together, her and Nate, would mean heartache and suffering for the both of them. She sensed that her giving Nate permission to become the father of a new species would fall upon deaf ears. He loved her too much and he had been raised around human beings whose cultural mores were far different than those of the Lake.
More than anything, however, it was her fault. She had chosen Nate even before he was conceived. All the time he was growing to adulthood it was understood that Nate was hers. Natalia and Lauren watched over him constantly, guiding him away from the more malignant influences that lay in store for the unwary.
Lily was not unhappy to hear of the demise of the girl Lucy. If left unchecked, her interference might well have led Nate down paths better left untrodden. The fact that the girl went willingly to her death was not lost on Lily... for Nate to reproduce with such a sullen and unintelligent being made no sense yet the ways of love were not for the rational.
"My people were in danger of disappearing all together as were yours, sweet K
aren. If we had not acted as precipitously as we did the People would have lasted only as long as the sole male of your species stayed alive. Once Kirk met his demise, as he most assuredly will sooner or later, no more babies would have been born. Now, our future—while it may not yet be guaranteed—is brighter. Don't you agree?"
"Of course I agree, Lady Lily. Still, unless we can generate greater diversity among the hybrid males like Nate, Maon, and Alpin, we still face a future dulled by inbreeding. What we desperately need is an influx from your species to couple with mine.
"If we had the good fortune to have a living male of your species available to the gene pool I believe we could make much better progress. I hoped the material I extracted from the bones you brought to me might help alleviate the bottle neck we now face but either my expertise has yet to become great enough or else I am mistaken in the assumptions I am working under.
"We are developing new ideas every day. Amanda is becoming a top notch scientist in her own right. She teaches me things I never imagined possible. If I had a team of twenty scientists such as her there is no end to the insights we might gather and the discoveries we might make."
"Perhaps it is time you began to think of creating a school, my sweet Karen. Have you thought of inquiring among the People if they are interested in your studies? Maybe there are others both with knowledge to share and a desire to learn."
"I have not considered this, Lady Lily. I think it is a wonderful idea. Perhaps I can present it at the next meeting of the People. It seems a shame no one other than myself and Amanda accesses the Archives as we once hoped."
Lily remembered that The Archives was another of Nate's inventions when he was just a boy. Concerned the old computers would one day cease functioning he delved into the mechanics behind them, making use of advanced technology that might have been deemed too expensive to be put into general use before the Great Dying.
Rather than using metal and plastic, Nate made use of ultra-hard ceramics for his processors and hard drives. Making trips to what once were top-secret government facilities such as the London Center for Biomechanical Technology allowed him to discover ways to magnetically excite otherwise non-magnetic materials. In this fashion he was able to construct computers that would store information virtually forever as opposed to the old style hard drives which tended to fade in a few decades.
By transferring as much data onto his ceramic hard drives as possible, Nate told her that he felt certain the knowledge so painstakingly obtained during humanity's last few years of dominance would not go the way of the Library of Alexandria when it was burned.
Lily watched as Nate and Maon spent years scouring the centers of learning in old London and Europe, making stops at cities along their way to Lake Baikal. Of late he often lamented how the People did not seem interested in their own heritage. Lily assured Nate that the day would arrive when the Archives were used extensively but sometimes she wondered if she was merely diminishing his grief by offering platitudes which they both knew would never occur.
"I will come to your meeting too, sweetest Karen. Perhaps by adding my voice to the choir we may yet persuade the People to take an interest in such a vast store of knowledge."
Chapter 7—Castles in the Sea
He always thought of Babylon as a myth.
When it came to the gods Maon felt a conflict building within him that was hard to give voice to. He had spent years trolling through the old Archives that Grandfather Nate had so painstakingly preserved only to discover deep and profound reservations about what he learned.
Being a mixture of the species lent Maon a variety of misgivings about the belief systems of both cultures, though with humans those customs ran far more diverse. As a boy he became intrigued with the plethora of religious principles which seemed to permeate every civilization that arose during the past ten thousand years and which seemed nearly inseparable from the social mores of those peoples.
Each religion proclaimed it taught the one true god yet Maon wondered if there really was a god, why everyone didn’t believe. He read of many and diverse arguments against religion, or rather the belief in god, as he came to understand religion in the truest sense of the word did not necessarily pertain to any god.
He read of endless wars being fought over what to believe, and each warring party seemed to think that god was on their side. He remembered Marilyn and how she had lured him and his family into a trap, leaving them to suffocate, and for what? Because she thought Karen was going against the will of god.
On the other hand, the people of the Lake had developed no rigorous belief system pointing to the divine... they had invented no gods to lend them succor during the endlessly cold winters that sometimes froze the surface of the Lake to a depth of many meters. Nor did the people of the Lake seem to have sensed a need to ground their morality in the substance of higher knowledge. They lived simply and close to the waters.
Maon wondered if living beneath the waves would perhaps lend him some of the peace of mind that the ancient ones seemed to have possessed for millions of years. It was only upon leaving their ancestral home in Lake Baikal that their troubles seemed to have mounted, though of course he had heard stories that went against that notion too.
Despite Grandfather Nate's misgivings, Alpin and Ena took to the ocean before they learned to walk on land. From the time their children were first born, Maon and Sileas would bring them to the beach behind Orchardton Hall to swim in the sea. The salty depths were alive with myriad flora and fauna which thrived in the wake of humanity's demise.
"The predators on land are nothing compared to the ones beneath those waters. There are sharks out there that will swallow those children whole, and you too, Maon."
Maon knew his father disliked the ocean. When they went sailing on his yacht, the Nautilus, Nate rarely dove into the salt water. Yet he felt an affinity for the sea that was hard to put into words his father could understand.
"I know how the creatures in the ocean sense our being there, father, and yet I doubt they will ever attack us without provocation. I'm not sure how, but we communicate with them. Believe me when I say we would never put the children or ourselves in danger."
The great depths of the ocean and its shear expanse made Lake Baikal seem like a mud puddle in comparison. Maon remembered the first time he entered the sea, the way the salt water conducted the electrical currents emanating from his body allowed him to sense the minutest changes in the environment.
The ability to close off their nostrils, gills which regulated inner and outer pressures, along with the lack of human ears allowed the Ladies of the Lake to submerge to depths of a couple hundred meters yet like his father they shunned the sea.
Maon and Sileas routinely dove three and four kilometers beneath the surface of the sea to explore the intricately carved valleys and submerged forests that once grew on land but were now fossilized trees.
"I'd like to construct a home on the bottom of the old English channel, father. I think I can use the petrified trees down there for the walls. I found a large flat rock which would work for a foundation. All I have to do is figure out what to use for a roof."
"I don't understand why anyone would wish to live under the ocean, son. Aren't you happy here?"
"Of course I'm happy here, father. That has nothing to do with wanting to build something beneath the water. I wouldn’t actually live there. It would be like a vacation place, a sanctuary perhaps. Grandmother Lily told us how she lived in a castle under the waters of Lake Baikal."
On one of their trips to the Lake, Maon dove deep in an effort to discover the old castle. In his mind, it seemed more a fairytale than fact. Yet there on the bottom, beside a gapping fissure, he discovered ruins of a cavernous building that must have once acted as a home for his grandmother and her people.
Enormous and intricately carved sandstone blocks twelve meters square were strewn down a slope where at the top he discovered an old foundation of bedrock which a recent earthquake must
have disturbed causing the walls to collapse.
"I found your castle, mother. It has collapsed."
"The Lake is ancient, darling Maon. My ancestors constructed that castle somewhere in the dim recesses of time to protect our kind from the Lake monsters that roamed the depths. I remember coming of age there... oh it was a sight to behold then! I believe it was bigger than Orchardton Hall but I was small then and the world seemed enormous."
"Wasn’t it cold living there? What did you do for fun?"
"The castle was constructed near the hot vents in the great fissures under the Lake. Now those vents have collapsed like the walls of our old castle. The earth is constantly rearranging itself beneath the Lake and above too. Nothing is permanent.
"As for fun, we did much like we do here. We danced. We gathered together to talk. We were happy living our lives in peace and solitude. We didn’t have the amenities we have above the surface but neither did we know about them, so they were not missed."
"How long will we live, mother?"
"Such a question, my darling Maon... and how can I respond to it when I do not know the answer. When we lived beneath the waters, it was rare for anyone to grow old, though as time progressed some of us diminished. We never got ill, until the monkeys in the trees came down onto the land and began fouling our water. Since we now live on the land, we still do not grow old like the monkeys did.
"That doesn’t mean we will live forever, though. In time, as the world grows old perhaps we will as well. Our fate is tied to the earth and its waters in ways we cannot fathom. You and darling Sileas and my sweet grandchildren are also descendants of human beings. Perhaps on account of that, our future together will be sundered, but perhaps not.
"You will share a love of the sea with your children. If that is your destiny, then I and my kind cannot follow. The saltwater does not agree with our constitutions. We are a freshwater species. However, if we all stay together upon the land, we may watch as the sun grows bigger and bigger in the sky and the stars wink out one by one and the oceans boil and we are burnt up along with our precious earth."