Greta nodded. “You're very kind. But I do not have your name."
"Gunnar Bjornstrom-Cousteau, of the dome Walshavn.” He bowed, and she noticed how curious he looked covered by evening clothes. The short open jacket that barely reached the stretch tights exposed the rectangular expanse of his chest, a smooth fall of flesh without muscle definition that made her remember the tallow layer of fat his wound had exposed. She shuddered, and he asked, “Does my face disturb you?” and for the first time she noticed that his skin was peeling, and there were angry red welts under his chin. “I was careless to take such a long trip without going under the lamps at home first. But then I did not intend to come into the air then. I am not used to the sunlight."
"Into the air?” Rolf was off again, but Greta stopped him.
"Dinner must be ready.” She took the stranger's arm. “Will you take me in?” With Rolf tagging along behind, shaking his head and bouncing every few steps to see if he could bring himself to the sea giant's height, they entered the dining room.
The dining room was at the top of the chateau. It was open on all sides, and protected from the weather by polarized static fields that were all but invisible and brought the stars too plainly close.
"That fish.” Hauptman-Everetsky had passed from awe to condescension, as he answered someone's question. “I could not throw him back like an undersized trout.” He gestured. “And it's about time we had some amusement. We are beginning to bore one another."
Greta felt her companion stiffen, and held onto his arm tighter. He bent his head to her, and said, “Do not fear, I will not fall. It is long since I have walked. I must become accustomed to being unsupported by the friendly weight of water.” She noticed that he stressed the word friendly, and remembered that one of the few things she had heard about the underwater people was that they had brought back dueling. In the infinite reaches of the sea the enforcement of organized law was difficult, encounters with the orca and the shark common, and the lessons they taught strong.
Yet her companion was smiling at Everetsky and his circle of friends, shaking hands with him firmly, and appraising the women. “At least I will not be bored,” he said, staring at her sister Margreta's painted chest. Greta took his arm again, relieved, and glad she had chosen to wear her blue gown that completely covered all of her except her hands and face.
"Are we going to sit down now, Carl?” she said to Everetsky, and he led the way to the table, placing Gunnar at his right and her at his left.
The dinner went smoothly enough at first, the early conversation centered around the futility of investing money in the Moon mines, and the necessity of mollifying the government with sums small enough to be economic and yet larger than mere tokens. All of the men from the rich steppes and Russian mountain regions had recommendations: lobbyists to recommend, purveyors of formuli to complain about, and complaining tales of corruption. While Rolf was concluding a story that centered on a bribed official who refused to honor his obligations without further payments that would have nullified the capital payments he had agreed to save, he rediscovered Gunnar's spherical face amid the contrasting ground of the tanned guests with their pointed chins.
"Nasty little fellow he was—dishonest as the day is long.” Rolf stopped. “But you, my seaman friend, you don't understand any of this?"
"I,” Bjornstrom-Cousteau burbled laughter, “do not understand these problems, but we have our own with the government.” He seemed to like Rolf, but he spoke to his host. “They are difficult to explain."
"I suppose so,” Abuwolowo spoke, “but tell us anyway."
Gunnar shrugged, and the massive table trembled slightly as he shifted his knees. “They want us to farm more, and hunt less."
"Why not?” Abuwolowo challenged, “In the past my people adjusted to the changing times. They learned to farm and to work in factories."
"Yes.” He was quiet for a moment. “I suppose some day we must, but as Hagar the poet sang—"
"Poets.” Abuwolowo dismissed them. “We were talking of the government here."
"Hagar said,” the sea guest went on, inevitable as the tides, pleasurably quoting a beloved line, “The sea change suffered by we; Cannot make the airmen think free.” He chanted on, squaring his shoulders to expose more of his pale flesh, “For we have chosen deep being, not the ease of their far seeing.” He stopped to stare out into the night with the depthless stare of his great dilated pupils.
Rolf, always jolly, rubbed his hands together, sniffing at the next course. “Ah, domestic venison,” he said, changing the subject, cutting Abuwolowo's rejoinder short. “But our new guest doesn't seem to be eating much, and mine host's cook is excellent."
"The food is cooked,” Gunnar said, as if it explained everything. It explained too much, and when he caught the expression on Hauptman-Everetsky's face he stood up and excused himself. “I am still tired from healing my hurts. You will excuse me.” The last was a statement, not a question, and he left, moving with a tired lagging stride. His powerful body pushed down by the force of unrelieved gravity.
* * * *
Morning came, and the first thing Greta did was to look for Gunnar. She had left the dinner party soon after him and started for his room, but Abuwolowo had overtaken her, and she had gone with him. Now she searched the gardens, moving through the regions of climate. She found him in the subtropical section standing in front of a red rubber plant grown to treelike proportions. He was fingering a paddle-sized leaf, pressing his finger tips deep into it as he regarded it with slightly parted lips.
"Like meat,” he said. “Whale meat,” he said, smiling at the picture she made coming down the cedar chip path between the walls of greenery. “You look very pretty this morning."
"And you looked like a child when you were touching that plant, with your mouth open as if you wanted to taste it."
"It does look edible.” He gave the leaf a last squeeze that pressed liquid out onto his hands. He licked the juice and made a face, and she laughed happily to see the soft corrugations that wrinkled around his head. “Well, it is bitter,” he said defensively, and reaching out, lifted her off her feet and into the tree. “Bite it and see."
Satisfied after she had clicked her teeth several times with mock gusto he set her down again, and she rubbed her sides. Seriously she looked up at him, appraising his bulk. “I was reading about you this morning,” she said, looking down with a strained intensity as if performing the unfamiliar task of following lines of print.
"So now I have become famous."
"Oh, no,” she said, “In the encyclopedia. It says you are homo aquatic—"
"Homo aquaticus, one of the old words.” He touched her bare shoulder, “Yes, and one of the better."
"That's it,” she said, dwelling on the pronounciation, “Homo Aquaticus. And a long time ago a man named Cousteau said that you were to be."
"Cousteau."
"Yes,” she altered her pronounciation. “Cousteau. A relative?"
"He is dead, and my surname is the way you pronounced it the first time."
"No matter,” she said, “I will show you the grounds now,” and took his arm. She started out chattering to him about the shrubbery, but she soon discovered that it was another subject she knew very little about. He was naturally silent, and her thoughts turned to the things she had found in the encyclopedia. It had said that the first colonies were set up in the Mediterranean. The warm water was perfect for man, and the sudden mistral-born storms were no trouble ten fathoms in the sea. The underwater colonies raised sea slugs, and clams, farmed algae and adapted fruits and hunted the smaller whales with hand weapons. She had read very quickly, scanning down the page in s-curves in her hurry to go and meet him, but womanlike, she did remember some things about human births under the sea. The children were born into the pressures they would live under, fitted with gill mechanisms that took oxygen from the water, and subjected to chemotherapies that prepared them for their lives.
"But why do
you live in the cold seas in the north?” she asked. The question was an outgrowth of her thoughts, yet he seemed to know what she meant.
"Because so many of our people live here?” he went on without needing to have an answer. “My great-grandfather felt the bottoms were becoming too crowded, that the life would become too easy, and so, we left.” He swiveled his head to sniff at the sea, offering her a view of the seal folding of his neck. “And now we could not live here at all. We have changed our bodies, and we have learned to love the hunt."
"But you come to the waters off this island."
"I came only for a short hunt. I would have returned very soon."
Further conversation was cut short by the interesting spectacle of wide-eyed gardeners dodging into the bushes to avoid their advance. The servants variously crossed themselves, or made the sign of the horns; some of them did both. They knew, if Greta did not, that there was a conflict between the sea peoples and the dwellers on the land. Servants listened to political conversations, but eighteen-year-old girls of good family were expert in oblivious attention. The gardeners had heard from the house staff how the world government in New Kiev, on the Baltic, was demanding more taxes in algae proteins from the independent sea states. Some of the servants’ relatives had served in the fleets of small boats equipped with grapple buckets that were sent in punitive expeditions against the algae beds and the sea slug pens. The duty was dangerous, the seamen darted to the surface in spurting pushes from shallows to rocks and overturned boats, they cut the grapple cables, and tied derisive messages to their severed ends. What the raiders did capture was diseased, or of thin stock that had gone to seed.
The servants did not hate the seamen, they feared them as they feared the storms, and rages of nature. They did not respect them as they did their masters: the seamen were unnatural feats of nature. Not to be dealt with except through the practice of the magics that had come back in the few short years of barbarism after the Two Months War.
Gunnar had some idea of what the men who had run away were thinking, but that part of the problem did not concern him. After all, his dome did not farm enough to be involved in the commercial disputes. He looked at Greta. She was still caught up in the uniqueness of the servants’ scuttling disappearance.
"It has been a long time since we went into the sea,” he said, touching her on the shoulder again, knowing that physical contacts reassured her, “and they do not remember us. We are strangers.” She leaned her weight against his side as soon as he had touched her, he noticed, and she made many movements with her hips and torso, but he attached no significance to her wriggling.
Greta became silent and swayed away from him. She had worked the individual muscles her governesses had trained her to use. Trained in long gymnasium sessions when she was young for the pleasurable obligations of adulthood, she accepted her expertness, and was piqued by his callous indifference. She almost believed that the sea women were more expert, but, on second thought, she disregarded that. Her instructors, and Abuwolowo, had assured her that she was perfectly trained in the amatory arts.
Hadji Abuwolowo Smyth watched them from a freestanding balcony that projected, fingerlike, out over the gardens. “The girl is infatuated with the Fish,” he thought. “It is nothing more than his difference.” Abuwolowo remembered the long hours of dancing that had trained him. The great factories that his parents managed, and Greta's brother-in-law's desire for new markets for his heavy machinery, and concluded that he had nothing to worry about. He went into the house to have a suppling rubdown to prepare him for the prelaunch wrestling.
Every day all the young men but Rolf wrestled for the amusement of the other guests. They fought in a combination of styles, jiu-jitsu coupled with the less dangerous holds of Greco-Roman wrestling. They were full of energy, had little to do, and they passed the time waiting for the day when they would assume the managerial offices their parents held in the automatic factories.
Gunnar and Greta emerged from the tree-lined walk as the matches were about to start. Gunnar blinked, and rocked his head as the forenoon heat bit into his sunburn. Halting, he made an effort; Gerta felt oil under her hand and saw his skin flex and knead. His pores opened and a smooth layer of clear oil covered his body. He took several more of his curiously peristaltic breaths, and with each one squeezed more protective fluid onto his skin.
"Now,” he said, as she let go of him, “We can go on, but first tell me what is happening here."
"They are wrestling,” Greta said shortly, either still angry at his unresponsiveness, or caught up in the combat.
They watched Hadji Abuwolowo win the first fight easily. Throwing his opponent with a hip toss and pinning him with a leap. The Nigerian nodded to Greta with a victory grin on his face. “And you, Fish,” he said, “Do you wrestle?"
"Not with you,” Gunnar said politely, intending to imply that Smyth was too practiced a hand for his small skill.
"I am not a worthy opponent,” Abuwolowo chose to misunderstand him. “Or perhaps you are afraid?"
Gunnar felt Greta's small hand in his back and walked forward onto the sanded turf looming more and more over Abuwolowo as he went. The Nigerian regretted his impetuousness for a split second, but compensated with a bound that was intended to carry him to the seaman's head. The leap was successful, but his ear-grab hold was not. There was nothing to grip. Gunnar's ears were tiny, and set deep into his skull. Their pavilions were vestigial, the auditory canals covered by membranes, and the skin oil slippery. Abuwolowo's planned knee drive spun him over on his back, and he lay spraddled with his ludicrous failure driving his anger. Rolling backward he bounced up once and came down to jump flat through the air with his legs doubled. Just as he straightened to strike his adversary with the full force of his flight, and kicking legs, Gunnar dropped under the trajectory, folding with the flexibility of an eel. Abuwolowo skidded along the ground, and rolled over to rub sand into his hands. He looked up, and found himself looking at Gunnar's back, certain that the man had not moved his feet. It was too much for him, but his urge to kill made him calculating. He stood up and ran, with short hunter's steps, silently to Gunnar's back, and unleashed an axe-like swing at the neck using the full strength of his wide shoulders. The edge of his hand struck and rebounded, but he was gratified to note that he had staggered Gunnar.
"You forget your title, Hadji,” Gunnar said in deeper tones than he had used before. Abuwolowo moved forward a shuffling half step and was thrown four or five feet backward by an open-handed slap he did not see start. When he recovered himself, Gunnar was standing stock still, waiting. It was too late to go back, and he charged hopelessly. He felt the long flexible arms, as thick at the wrist as the shoulder, reach out to pick him up, but he could do nothing about it, even though they appeared to be moving very slowly. For a minute Gunnar held him in a strangely compassionate embrace, but then threw him into the air straight up. He felt himself rise, and he floated for a long interval, but when he fell he could remember no more.
Hauptman-Everetsky leaped to his feet and ran forward, but Gunnar was there before him. He knelt by Abuwolowo's side and twisted him in his hands.
"Guards,” Everetsky screamed, and fearlessly rushed toward the seaman.
"Stop,” Gunnar's words were commanding, either out of their awesome depth, or because of the certainty of knowledge. “He will be all right. His back was hurt, but I have fixed it.” These last words were the ones that broke Everetsky's code of hospitality. They were too much like a repair man speaking about a robot toy.
He stammered, peering out of slitted eyes that accentuated his Mongol blood, but Gunnar could only commend his control. His first thought was to stop the guards.
"Back, quiet now,” Everetsky's diction was irregular, but his pitch was properly adjusted to the command tone of the mastiffs. The dogs, with the metallic crowns of their augmented skulls glittering, turned back and sat in their places under the chateau wall, once more becoming statues. Now that his first d
uty was accomplished, he could come back to the business of Gunnar.
"Sir,” he said, and now his voice was under control, “You have injured one of my guests. That would be permissible, but it is certain to happen again. There is enmity between you and him, and,” he paused, to collect himself, “I must be truthful, I do not like your kind myself. I ask you to leave. If you feel yourself insulted I offer you satisfaction."
"You are a brave man,” Gunnar said, and with a sudden baring of his teeth. “Well fleshed too, so the spoils might be worth the fight, but your way is not ours. I cannot ask you to sport with me.” He showed Everetsky his teeth, opening his lips back to his neck, and dropping the hinges of his jaw. “I would have to ask you into the water so that we could play, and,” he asked with icy rhetoric humor that amused no one but him, “what chance would you take?"
"Thank you,” Everetsky said, not holding his contempt. “But I must nevertheless ask you when you will leave my house."
"I ask your indulgence to wait until tonight when the tide is good.” Everetsky nodded, and the seaman turned and walked toward the beach path as if he remembered using it before.
Down on the beach Gunnar studied the water, watching for the signs of the incoming tide: sea-wrack would soon be tossed up onto the shore, pieces of the sea's jetsam, thrown there to waste away on the cleansing shore. The dead seaweeds, fish and bubbles would soon push ahead of the growing combers to outline the demarcation between his domain and Everetsky's. “Lubber,” he said, “you do not understand,” and stopped, putting his hand, palm down, flat on the sand. He felt the vibrations of approaching feet.
Two servants appeared carrying his water suit, signaling their trepidation with stiff backs and firm jaws. Behind them came two more servingmen, and a kitchen maid. The bearers put his suit down at his feet, at a distance they thought out of the radius of his arms. They backed off and squatted on their heels to wait for the others to come up, remaining, guardedly watching him, until the woman and her companions reached them.
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