by Janis Ian
They got pretty hilarious. They started talking about food after a while. None of them had eaten all day. Their raid on Piney Butte hadn't yielded them much, and I learned that one of them called Otis had been shot dead the day before, and Dan had been wounded.
At some point in this discussion Dan said, "I sure could eat me a mess of fried fish."
That got a lot of response. There was a lot of talk about fishing, and some wild-sounding claims as to expertise. But it turned out they didn't have any hooks, having lost their last one a few days ago.
They were pretty glum, thinking about that, but then Dan said, "Hell, we don't need no hooks, we got a fish woman. Stands to reason she can catch fish."
They all looked at me. I was about to say I had never caught fish in my life, when Dan gave me a big wink and he said, "You can do that, can't you, darlin'?"
I don't know why I trusted Dan. Maybe because he was wounded. But I had a feeling he was on my side. So I said, "I used to catch fish for the town."
One of the men, Jake, I think he was, said, "This is the craziest thing I ever heard. She's going to catch fish for us and bring them back of her own free will?"
"She'll have no choice," said Dan. He held up a coil of rope. "She'll be our captive fish catcher. If she doesn't do good, we'll just pull her in and spank her. You can do that yourself, Jake."
Jake looked puzzled for a moment, then said, "Don't sound too bad. Either I get to eat fish or spank a mermaid. And spankings not all I'll do to her."
Some of the others had some ideas as to what they'd do to me, too. Dan winked at me again and tied the rope around my waist, and cinched it tight.
"That'll hold her," he said. Then he grabbed me by one arm and pulled me over to the edge of the stream.
"Do a good job, girl, and maybe we won't be too hard on you." He pushed me into the water. As he pushed me, he slipped something into my hand. It wasn't until I was underwater that I saw it was a knife.
"Get to work, girl!" he shouted, and played out line. I dove. It felt natural and wonderful to be in the water. The knife was dull, but by prying with the point I managed to get the knot undone. And then I was swimming free, following the flow of the stream, knowing it would lead me at last to the sea.
I didn't think about anything but escape for the next few hours, swimming as hard as I could, and staying low in the stream. I couldn't figure why Dan had given me the knife. I finally decided maybe he had a sister, or even a wife, or maybe a girl-child of his own. Maybe he had loved her, once upon a time before the world turned crazy.
The stream fed into a river, and there I was at last, swimming toward the sea, because that's where all rivers wind up.
The river was wide and deep, and swimming in it was not much effort. It was like walking must be for regular people, with the added advantage of a current to keep me on my way when I wanted a little rest.
At one point I caught a fish, and ate it, all except for the head and spine. It tasted good. Later I caught and ate another one, and my appetite was satisfied.
~~~~~
After a while I just let the current carry me, making only an occasional correction to stay in the middle. I calmed down after a while. My experience with the raiders seemed now like a half-forgotten nightmare. Even Piney Butte was fading from my memory.
But other, older thoughts and memories were returning. I remembered a dream I had a long time ago, back when I lived with Allison, my real mother. In my dream, Allison had just given birth to my baby brother. I saw him lying in a white bassinet. He was very tiny, no bigger than a little bird. In fact he was a bird, with gray and brown-feathered wings. But his face was human.
He was saying something to me in a chirping little voice, but I couldn't understand his words.
"I don't understand," I told him.
He chirped again. Then he stood up. I thought he was saying, "I'll see you again, Lena." And then he flapped his wings and flew away.
I felt very blue, watching him go. He had been so nice. And so pretty. I wished he had stayed. I was sure we could have been friends.
~~~~~
Years later I told Meg my dream, and asked her if I really had a little bird brother.
Meg was a no-nonsense person. "You have no brother, bird or otherwise," she said. "Not by Allison and not by me."
"But I do!" I insisted. "I saw him in a dream. A tiny feathered manikin with wings."
Meg shook her head. "It was only a dream."
"And he was a bird, a tiny bird."
"No possible," Meg said, and that was the end of it for her.
~~~~~
Some time later I remembered telling my dream to someone else, a scientist, I think. A big man with a square gray face and thinning white hair.
He told me, "No, my dear, the authorities would never have let the scientists develop such an experiment. No sane person would have attempted it. The brain in a skull such as you describe would have had far too little room for computational capacity. Enough for a small animal, perhaps, but not enough for a human being. It was only a dream, Lena. Your little bother does not exist."
I wanted to ask him, how much brain does it take to make a person happy? But his expertise and air of certainty frightened me and I didn't say anything.
~~~~~
The river had widened, and the shorelines on either side were low and dim. The sun was almost down, and it was cool.
Maybe I did say something about happiness, because I could hear that man's voice in my dream saying to me, "Happiness is not everything, you know. A human being needs the capacity to cope with the changes this world of ours is undergoing. Our developers are working with several different alternatives for the human race. To pick the wrong one would put ourselves in an evolutionary dead end. With our world crumbling around us, it would be unwise to put any effort into unworkable solutions such as your bird boy."
"So creating a fish girl like me is a better answer?"
"That's how it seemed a few years ago. The oceans make up seven-tenths of the surface of the Earth. They are relatively unexplored territory. And unlike the planets that we presently know of, they are capable of supporting life like ours."
"So why aren't there more like me?"
He shrugged. "Maybe there are. The undersea experiment was discontinued a few years ago. Funding was withheld. People in the government decided that the new underwater species wasn't developing to hoped-for specifications. You see, it's not challenging enough to live in the ocean. All drive is lost in the relative ease of underwater life. Living in the ocean is too easy. Just swim around, eat fish, do no real work, do nothing to enhance and improve the race and its environment. It smacked too much of a romantic idealism. You must be one of the last of the sea people to be created. In terms of the future of the human race, the prospects for you and your kind are poor, at best."
I felt he was wrong, but I had no words with which to argue my conviction.
~~~~~
And then I heard another voice, a familiar voice. It was saying, "Yes, the project is possible. But not likely to happen until nanotechnology is developed beyond the point it's at now."
It was Mr. Slater's voice. Mr. Slater taught science in our school in Piney Grove, and he was into nanotechnology and miniaturization. He wanted passionately to breed a race of smaller people. A creature the size of my dream brother would have delighted him.
"There need be no loss of quality in a change of scale," he used told us. "And the advantages would be immense. Imagine how much longer the Earth's resources would last if we were smaller! The way to achieve this is clear. Take a nanofactory programmed to produce an exact copy of itself. Set your controls so that each succeeding generation produces a size smaller than itself. Combine that with what we know of the human genome. Soon enough you'd have a factory capable of producing miniature humans. From there it's an easy step to micro-miniaturization. In theory, at least, there's no limit. Or the limit is only bounded by the size of the protein molecule. Or maybe
the only real limit is the size of the atom!"
Someone asked, "But how would these tiny people protect themselves from the dangers of the world?"
Mr. Slater shrugged. "Insects make out all right. They are a far more successful species than we are. And bacteria are even more successful."
"Bacteria don't write history," someone objected.
"Bacteria are history!" Mr. Slater said. "If you have the real thing, why write about it?"
Mr. Slater was crazy, of course. But he was the only science teacher in a little town like Piney Grove.
~~~~~
So I drifted and dreamed, and after a while I noticed that the river was growing shallow. I wondered if while I was dreaming I had drifted out of the main current. I swam to the banks, but they were shallow, too. After a while I was trying to swim through water no more than a foot or so deep, and it kept on shallowing, until I had to hop and pull myself through soft mud. The deepest part was still in the middle, though it wasn't deep enough for swimming.
I pulled myself along, squirming and hopping on my tail. Then I noticed that there were little islands in the river, some of them with trees. I could see something flashing on one of the islands. I studied it for a while, but couldn't make out what it was. I was afraid of encountering more raiders, but the island looked too small for people. I finally decided to investigate. I dragged and hopped over to it.
At first all I saw was a fallen tree. Then I noticed something shiny and metallic half-covered by the tree. That's when I met Mr. Spider. His body was about the size of a flattened football, and it glinted in the sunlight. He had six or eight metallic legs. He also had eyestalks growing out of his shell, and there were little black eyes at the end of them.
"Hello, Mr. Spider," I said.
The eye-stalks twitched. The spider said, "You seem to be a standard model human creature, except for the tail and gills. Your secondary sexual characteristics argue that you are a female. Your tail tells me you have been considerably modified from the original human model. Am I correct?"
"You are, Mr. Spider."
That was the start of our conversation. I was pleased that Mr. Spider didn't seem to consider me a child. He just talked to me like one intelligence to another.
"What happened to you, Mr. Spider?"
"I was crossing the river, and when the storm came up I took refuge here for the night. Lightning inconveniently collapsed the tree I was sheltering under, and it pinned me to the ground. That was over a day ago. I've been trapped ever since, trying to dig myself out. Unfortunately, one of my flippers has been damaged. It will self-repair when I get unpinned, but for the present I am as you see me."
"Let me see if I can help," I said, and succeeded, with a great deal of effort, in lifting the trunk high enough so he could scramble out.
"And now," I said, "let me take you ashore on my back."
"It is uncommonly good of you," said Mr. Spider. "I have an appointment to meet my friend Flash downstream from here, and, what with my damaged flipper..."
"Say no more, I'd be delighted," I told him. "I've been longing for some company, and you seem to know your way around these parts." I hesitated, then said, "You don't look much like a human, Mr. Spider."
"Not all humans are created in the human, homo sapiens model. I am one of a new generation of pseudo-human thinking/feeling machines. The feeling part is very important, you understand, because without feeling, how can you think? And to what purpose?"
"So you can think and feel?"
"Yes, and on my own. It used to be that me and others like me had our thinking done for us at a central point to which we all were attached. But micro-miniaturization made that no longer necessary."
"Are you what your makers intended?"
"Probably not, but it doesn't matter. Why should I accept one human's conception of how I ought to be? I approve of myself, and that is enough."
We continued across the river, and Mr. Spider showed me where he wanted me to take him. It was a nice spot, with old cypress trees near the water. "Flash should be along any time now. I dreamed last night that he was coming here."
"You dreamed him? Is that a reliable way to meet somebody?"
"It's the only sure way. You haven't learned about dreams yet, have you, Lena?"
"I dreamed once of my baby brother. He was a bird. He said I would see him again."
"Then you will."
"Then he does exist?"
"I have never met him. But if you dreamed him, I'm sure he does exist." He hesitated, then said, "This is a time of changes, you know."
~~~~~
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I remember is Mr. Spider saying to me, "This is my friend, Flash, an example of photo-syntheticus man."
I opened my eyes and looked. Flash was about five feet tall and shaped like a man. But you'd never mistake him for one. His body seemed to be made of vines and gourds, and he had an array of strange, pale plants on the top of his head.
"He takes in sunlight through his head plants," Mr. Spider said, "and converts it inside himself into what he needs. He doesn't talk. But he can make a few sounds. Those he's making now mean that he likes you."
"I like him, too," I said.
Lights danced on and off on Flash's head and body, in a pattern I could make no sense of.
"Yes," Spider said, perhaps reading my mind, "he can communicate through light signals. But I can assure you, it's not Morse code! I haven't deciphered his light-language yet. I don't need to. Flash speaks to me in dreams."
From Spider I learned that Flash took in his nutrition from sun and rain. He did not have appetite in the usual sense. All food was the same to him, since there was no better or worse sunshine. Nor was his passion sex, since he seeded himself.
"Are there others like him?" I asked.
"Flash buds prototypes of himself. But there are no new Flashes being created. It was decided by the human powers who decide these things that homo photo-syntheticus was too passive, didn't have to work for a living like a human. This didn't seem a good model for a new human, so it was discontinued."
"But they let Flash himself live?"
"Well, actually he was thrown out. They thought he was dead and they consigned him to the junk heap. But it takes a lot to kill someone who is mainly plant. There was a mild winter with plenty of rain, and Flash recovered. I met him in the dumps of humantown and brought him away from there. He's been doing fine ever since."
"That was good of you, Mr. Spider."
"We new humans have to help each other. Flash has a place in life, and a passion."
"What is his passion, Mr. Spider?"
"Some spiritual thing, I think," Mr. Spider said. "His bodily passions are few, if they exist at all. This frees up his love, his taste for a certain measure of fairness."
"He seems to me an ideal sort of man," I said.
"He's not a man at all. Don't let Flash's human look persuade you. His human form is no more than anthropomorphic sentimentalism on the part of his creators. Actually he's the most alien and strange of us all. Flash is not actuated by passions, which he does not have. Such a creature has no particular love of food, since he takes in sunlight. He has no sexual passion, since he is self-propagating. He has no aesthetic sense, since he is incapable of crafting objects, and if you can't craft it, you can't experience it, or love it."
"So what does he love?"
"It seems to me," Mr. Spider said, "that Flash has freed his mentality to where he can entertain and enjoy himself with thoughts of a high ethical, moral and aesthetic nature. His love is the play of life. And he is sentimental enough to favor the victory of the living. Unlike real men, he does not require death for an aesthetic outcome. Flash himself is to all intents and purposes immortal. He gardens himself, and the plants that he gives birth to are just like him. His only human quality might be called love of the play. And the play he and others are producing now demands that you live, mermaid girl, and get to the sea and find your intended.
"
"I'd like that myself," I said. "What about you, Mr. Spider?"
"As for me," Mr. Spider said, "I am not much like regular humans, either. My body takes in nourishment but does not rejoice in feeding. Sex is with me, but it is a mild drive, and not necessarily a pleasure. The metallic and mechanical nature of my body divorces me from the pleasures and pains of the flesh."
Not long after that, Mr. Spider and Flash were gone, and I was alone again in the river.
~~~~~
I was musing on what I had learned, and thinking to myself that I had entered into a new age, an age of miracles. It was a time of new life, taking over from the old life-forms that had had their chance and failed. And I was one of those new life-forms.
I struggled on through the shallow water, flipping myself forward with my tail. I was growing very tired. The water stank from the sewage floating in it. I knew I was near a human settlement.
I stopped and dozed for a while, there in the shallow water. And I dreamed again.
~~~~~
I saw my brother again in a dream. This time I heard him speak. He said, "Sis, I've been trying to get in touch with you. But I can do it only in your dreams, and I'm still learning. It's very hard, though. The Dreamer says I'm a natural, and I want to learn. There are difficulties ahead for you, and danger. You need to be ready for all that. I'll talk to the Dreamer, see if he can help."
"What sort of difficulty? What kind of danger? Who is this Dreamer?"
My brother didn't answer at once. At last he said, "Sis, I can't explain. But I'll bring help. Just go on as you are, don't detour, there'll be help."
Then I woke up. I had never felt so alone.
~~~~~
I continued to make my way down the river. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, there was a great splashing of water, and a loud, angry voice. I wanted to dive and conceal myself, but the water level was too shallow. Something was coming at me, a horse, galloping very rapidly. At first I thought it was a horse and rider, but then I saw that the human head was on the horse's neck, broad and bearded. The face was twisted in an angry passion. I thought it looked insane.
At first I thought it was the raiders again, in some nightmare disguise. I screamed, "Leave me alone, raiders!"