Paragaea

by Chris Roberson

  The sailor looked at his mop and his bucket in turn, shrugged, and dropping the mop to the deck carried the bucket over to Leena.

  “Thank you.” Leena took the bucket from the sailor's hands and, without preamble, upended it over the trembling figure on the deck. The brackish water splashed over the fish man, partially soaking the robes.

  Leena turned, and handed the bucket back to the sailor. “More, please,” she said firmly, and then turned her attention back to the trembling figure.

  After a half-dozen buckets, at which point the sailor's rather slow-witted patience seemed to have been mostly exhausted, the fish man began to sputter, and rose up on its elbow.

  “Wh-where am I?” the fish man said, voice tremulous.

  “You're on board the Acoetes,” Leena replied soothingly. “A dhow sailing on the Inner Sea. Do you remember how you came to be here?”

  With Leena's help, the fish man rose into a sitting position, and then stood up on unsteady feet. On rising, the robes slid down off his slight frame, and standing unclothed, it was clear that he was a male of the species. Also, she could now see that fins ran along the back of his calves, and behind his scalloped ears were gills, swollen and reddish-raw. His skin was all over mottled and ashen, looking sickly and gray.

  “I was arrested? Wasn't it?” the fish man said uncertainly. He swayed unsteadily with the rocking of the ship, squinting his dark eyes at the sea all around them. “In some city or other?”

  “Masjid Empor,” Leena said, nodding. She gave the fish man an arm to steady him. “My name is Leena. My friends and I escaped from imprisonment, and you joined us.”

  The fish man's head swung around on his thin neck like a balloon in a high wind, and he regarded Leena with one eye squeezed nearly shut and the other one opened wide. “Did I now? That sounds like it must have been exciting.”

  Leena smiled. “Perhaps a bit. And what is your name, if you don't mind me asking?”

  “Kakere.” The fish man paused for a moment, as though considering whether that was true or not, and then nodded. “Yes. Kakere.”

  “It's a pleasure to meet you, Kakere.”

  “Likewise, I'm sure.” The fish man tried to take a step forward, and nearly pitched face-first onto the deck, saved from falling only by Leena's quick intervention. “Thank you kindly,” he said, nodding languorously. “Now, do you know where I might find a drink on this tub?

  That night, Leena sat in the forecastle, her eyes once more on the heavens. Benu was busy talking with the crewmen, while Balam grumbled about the quality of the ship's food and Spatha sharpened her gladius's edge on a whetstone. The fish man Kakere huddled against the railing, moaning for a sip of alcohol, clutching his head in pain.

  Leena glanced over at Kakere, a pained expression on her own face.

  “He'll dry out in time.” Hieronymus appeared out of the shadows, and dropped to a seated position at her side.

  “It's his drying out I'm worried about,” Leena answered, sounding more cross than she'd intended.

  “You know what I meant.”

  Leena shook her head, as though to knock loose dark thoughts. “I'm sorry, Hero,” she said with a slight smile. “It's just that I know how difficult these next days will be for him. Some cannot handle their drink, and should they attempt to turn their back on it, the thirst brings them to account in the hours and days that follow.”

  Hieronymus narrowed his eyes and looked at her thoughtfully. “It sounds as though you're speaking from experience.”

  “Oh, not me.” Leena rubbed her hands together, glancing at the stars overhead. “The bottle and I have never been anything but boon companions. But I've known one or two who could not master their thirst before their thirst mastered them, I'm afraid. One of them…” She broke off, her eyes on the middle distance.

  “Someone close to you?” Hieronymus leaned in, his voice dropping.

  “His name was Sergei Vasilevich Tabanov,” Leena answered after a lengthy pause. “We met in East Berlin, when…”

  “East Berlin?” Hieronymus interrupted, puzzled. “Some cognate metropolis in the Orient, perhaps, named after the Germanic original?”

  “No, merely the half of the original city which was given over to the rightful control of the Soviet after the Great Patriotic War, along with the east half of the German state, while the rest was divided up like slices of a fattened calf among the imperialist powers of the decadent West.”

  “Yes,” Hieronymus said, nodding sagely, “I remember well the imperial tendencies of nations. But Russia, too, had its empire, in my day.”

  Leena shrugged off the comment. “In any event, when I was old enough to leave the state-run orphanage into whose care I had been entrusted after the Battle of Stalingrad, I enlisted immediately in the Red Army. I excelled at hand-to-hand combat and languages, and was assigned to a radio listening post in East Berlin.” She paused, shaking her head slowly. “I was bored beyond comprehension almost immediately. Spending all day listening to static punctuated only occasionally by banal chattering, I quickly decided that I might better serve the Soviet in some other, more engaging capacity. It was during this tenure that I first met Sergei. He was twenty years old to my eighteen, and was a technician at the post, who kept all the electrics and equipment in working order. A genius of the first order, at least when his hands didn't shake too violently for him to manipulate his tools.”

  Leena glanced over at the shuddering Kakere, her eyes half-lidded.

  “Sergei and I, working in such close quarters, became naturally acquainted, and in short order our relationship progressed, as relations between young people in such circumstances always do.” She paused, and her eyes met Hieronymus's. “Have you ever been in love, Hero?”

  Hieronymus smiled, briefly, and then a cloud drifted across his face. “Once, perhaps.” He took a deep breath. “I've known women, if that's what you mean, but I've never felt the all-encompassing, all-consuming passion that the poets speak about. Never but once. Her name was Pelani, and she might have been the mother of my child. But it was not to be.”

  “Why? What came between you?”

  “Her family. Her culture. My duty.” He sighed. “It just wasn't in our stars, I suppose you could say.”

  “Duty,” Leena repeated, nodding. “Well, whatever was between us, me and Sergei, I don't know that I can say it was love. But it was as near as I have ever come, and it felt real enough to me.” She folded her arms over her chest, hugging herself tightly. “Sergei wanted to work on planes and rockets. He talked of nothing else. And he applied as often as he could to the Air Defense Forces of the VVS. He'd only been called to take the entrance exam once, though, and he'd had so much to drink in the days prior, to soothe his nerves, that he swore he'd not touch a drop just prior to the exam, and so when he went to complete the practical elements of the testing, his hands trembled so violently that he couldn't hold a screwdriver between thumb and index finger without dropping it. He passed it off as an ailment, some stomach flu, but it would be months before he could retake the examination and qualify for the transfer.

  “Sergei, laying beside me in my cot at night, made me swear to help him overcome his thirst for drink. I so swore, and the next night we began to sweat the spirits from his body.” Leena shuddered, and held herself tighter. “I cannot say they were the most unpleasant days of my life, having lived through the days following my parents' immolation during the Battle of Stalingrad, but they ranked high on the list, nonetheless. He vomited everything in his system, and was still racked with dry heaves. He convulsed. He hallucinated, and carried on conversations with those long dead. He sweated profusely, and stank of sickly sour desperation for days.”

  Leena's gaze drifted over to the suffering Ichthyandaro, and then looked back at the stars overhead.

  “In all, it took the passage of weeks before he would wake up in the morning and not beg me for a drink. It was a test of wills in the months that passed for Sergei not to return to the bottle,
and I did what I could to assist by abstaining from drink myself in those long days and nights. But when the time came for him again to take the practical examination, he passed with flying colors, and was transferred in short order, not to the VVS as he'd thought, but to the technical facilities at Star City, to work on the new generation of rockets. I stayed behind in East Berlin, for a time, getting reacquainted with my boon companion the bottle.”

  “Did you see him again?”

  “Only once,” Leena answered. “Inspired by Sergei's drive, I applied for and was accepted into the pilot training program of the Air Defense Forces. Women had served as pilots since the days of the Great Patriotic War, but our numbers were still small compared to the percentage of men fliers. As a result, though I scored highest marks on all examinations, and executed my test flights perfectly, after being fully certified as a pilot and parachutist I was given a desk assignment in the offices of the Air Defense Forces, tracking materiel requests and personnel movements. On leave, I traveled once to Moscow, where Sergei and I met, and spent a glorious week together, as though we'd never been apart. We swore that we'd meet again soon, and when we parted, he asked for my hand in marriage. Already a jaded woman of twenty-three years, I still felt a flush of thrill as I accepted.”

  Leena's eyes dropped to the deck, and her mouth drew into a tight line.

  “Only a few months later, Sergei was working on a rocket launch when the unthinkable happened. There was a leak in the fuel tanks, or so the rumors go, and the launch team, of which Sergei was a senior member, was ordered to attempt repairs. They climbed the scaffolding, and attempted to weld closed the opened seam in the fuel tank.” Leena scowled, and twisted her hands into white-knuckled fists. “Though the official report placed no personal blame, in the corridors of Star City it is widely held that the fault lay with Field Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, for violating all standards of safety by ordering technicians to weld shut a leaky fuel tank. But blame is for courts and historians. What matters is that the second-stage engine ignited, causing a cascade effect as the fuel tanks of the first stage burst and covered the launchpad in a tidal wave of flames. Seventy-four people were killed immediately, and forty-eight more died in the ensuing weeks from burns or contacts with the toxic and corrosive propellants.” Leena bit her lip, her eyes glistening. “Sergei was one of the lucky ones, I suppose, and was consumed by the flames in the initial instants, probably not ever knowing what had happened.”

  In the protracted silence that followed, Hieronymus reached out a hand, laying it gently on Leena's knee. They sat quietly like that for a long time after.

  As the days blended slowly into weeks, the ship moving ever southward, the fish man Kakere was slowly transformed. Shedding his robes altogether, he began to spend hours every day in the water in an effort to keep hydrated, coursing along beside the dhow, slowly bringing a healthy blue-green pallor back to his cheeks, the gills behind his ears becoming less swollen and reddish-raw. The paunch and flab that had hung from his belly began to shrink, and he made friends among the crew by bringing up fresh fish and seaweed by the armload for their meals.

  Balam and Spatha spent the days sparring on the deck, honing their martial skills. Each was the product of a warrior society, now traveling abroad, and they grudgingly saw in one another a kindred spirit.

  During a break in one of their sparring sessions, Balam busied himself over a collection of urchins and fish that Kakere had brought up from the deep. Leena watched as the jaguar man, with a surgeon's skill and patience, carefully cut the fish and urchin into cubes and strips, marinated them in spices and oils, and laid them out on boards polished to a mirror sheen.

  “Behold,” Balam said triumphantly, beaming at his handiwork. “The bounty of the sea, prepared for you in the style of Drift.”

  “It looks like raw fish,” Leena said, wrinkling her nose.

  “It is raw fish,” Spatha Sekundus said, squatting on her haunches at her side.

  “In actual fact,” Balam said haughtily, “they are delicacies, and masterfully prepared delicacies, at that.”

  “Your humility is boundless.” Leena smirked across the polished boards at him, her arms crossed.

  “And I think thy sense of smell is impaired,” Spatha said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Is it supposed to smell like that?”

  “Savages.” The jaguar man craned his neck, shading his eyes with his hand as he peered up at the crow's-nest atop the mast. “Hero! I've prepared a masterpiece of Driftian cuisine. Come and pay proper homage, to provide an example for these uncivilized women!”

  Hieronymus peeked his eyes over the edge of the crow's-nest, and shook his head. “Can't eat!” he shouted back, cupping his hands around his mouth like a megaphone. “Working!”

  Balam shook his head, tsk-tsking under his breath. “I think our Hero has quite forgotten how to relax.”

  “Maybe he just doesn't have a taste for raw fish?” Leena put forth.

  “He can probably smell the foul stuff from up there,” Spatha said.

  The fish man, who'd been underwater for most of the morning, clambered over the side of the dhow, and dumped a net full of seaweed, urchin, and strange deep-sea fish onto the deck, to the delight of the crewmen.

  “Kakere's transformation these past days has been nothing short of remarkable,” Leena said admiringly.

  “They are a strange race, the Ichthyandaro,” Balam said, popping a cube of urchin into his mouth and humming appreciatively before continuing. “They have rarely interacted with the other races of metamen, even during the days of the Metamankind Empires. They keep to their submarine existence, and are seen above water most often in port cities, rarely out of sight of the sea.”

  “And yet they fester in places like Masjid Empor.” Spatha spat on the deck planking at her feet. “Spirits are their principal vice. The tolerance for it is not bred in the bone as it is in other species, where a weakness for alcohol makes one more apt to die early and less fit to produce progeny, thus weakening the species. The only Ichthyandaro who imbibe spirits are the drifters and outcasts who leave their people behind, drinking their lives away in port cities as they slowly desiccate their bodies from the inside out.”

  “Perhaps everyone deserves a chance at redemption,” Leena observed. “Even Kakere.”

  At the mention of his name, the fish man's eyes turned towards them, and he approached them across the deck.

  “It is those damned seashell ears,” Spatha hissed.

  “They're intended to hear underwater calls from leagues away,” Kakere said, drawing near. “My hearing is more than sufficient to pick out your words from across this little boat.”

  “I offer no apology.” Spatha looked up at the fish man from beneath knitted brows.

  “Nor do I ask for one,” Kakere answered. “Nothing you've said was untrue. Drink had nearly killed me before I found myself trapped on this abstemious craft. But I know full well that, were a bottle before my eyes at this very instant, I'd not be able to keep my hands from reaching for it. That I've fallen from grace I cannot contest, but my own life carries little weight.” He paused, glancing at the open seas around them. “The heaviest burden to bear is the knowledge that I've disappointed my people, whose numbers dwindle in the deep with every passing generation.”

  Spatha's eyes had opened wide when Kakere had mentioned disappointing his own people, Leena had noted, and now her face flushed angry and red.

  “Enough of this prattle!” Spatha shouted, leaping to her feet. “Come, Sinaa! Spar with me!”

  Balam slipped another sliver of fish wrapped in seaweed into his mouth, and shook his head. “I'm eating,” he mumbled around a mouthful.

  “Spar with me, or be damned!” Spatha shouted back, stomping away across the desk.

  Balam shrugged, and shoveled another handful of urchin into his mouth. He dusted off his hands, and climbed slowly to his feet.

  “You'll excuse me?” he said to Leena and Kakere, giving a courtly bow from
the waist before turning and following Spatha across the deck.

  Leena looked to Kakere, an awkward smile on her face.

  The fish man watched Spatha's retreating back for a long moment, and then he glanced at Leena with a sorrowful look on his face. Without another word, he took two long strides towards the prow, vaulted over the railing in a smooth arc, and sliced into the water with scarcely a splash.

  Leena shrugged, and reached for some of the raw fish on the board. She was hungry enough that she could ill afford to be particular.

  High in the rigging overhead, Hieronymus noticed none of it.

  Leena sat in the forecastle with Hieronymus, as she did most evenings now, watching clouds roll across the moon. He'd spent his day hard at work, turning his hand to the noisome tasks of the lowly sailor as though he had won some contest, and this was his prized sweepstakes. She'd not seen him happier during all their travels together, and his smile was often infectious. At the end of his long day's labors, his scent was laced with the sweat of his exertions, but Leena found it strangely appealing: an honest, earthy musk.

  “The moon…” Leena said, and then paused. They'd sat side by side for some time, not speaking, just gazing at the heavens, the only sound the creaking of the rigging and the muffled voices and laughter of the crew belowdecks. In speaking suddenly, Leena felt that she'd shattered some reverie; in silence, the crystalline moment could have lingered on indefinitely, but speaking only dragged them back into the flow of time.

  “Yes?” Hieronymus finally said at length, casually.

  “It's just…,” Leena smiled awkwardly. “It just seems to me that Paragaea's moon is so much smaller than that of Earth. And I fancy that I can see bands of green across its body, punctuated by areas of pale blue.”

  “Hmmm.” Hieronymus nodded thoughtfully. “I've heard legends about the moon. It's said that the wizard-kings of Atla, in unimaginable antiquity, traveled to the moon and transformed it into a living world. I'd always dismissed the stories as stuff and nonsense, sure that living beings could never pierce the vault of heaven. But, having met you…” His voice trailed off, and he gestured deferentially towards her.