He pulled around when one line ran out (and somewhere on the surface the prow of a boat doffed deep) but turned back and came on.
Of a sudden, amphimen were flicking about me as the fray’s center drifted by. Tork, his spear dug deep, forward and left of the marlin’s dorsal, had hauled himself astride the beast.
The fish tried to shake him, then dropped his tail and rose straight. Everybody started pulling toward the surface. I broke foam and grabbed Juao’s gunwale.
Tork and the fish exploded up among the boats. They twisted in air, in moonlight, in froth. The fish danced across the water on its tail, fell.
Juao stood up in the boat and shouted. The other fishermen shouted too, and somebody perched on the prow of a boat flung a rope and someone in the water caught it.
Then fish and Tork and me and a dozen amphimen all went underwater at once.
They dropped in a corona of bubbles. The fish struck the end of another line, and shook himself. Tork was thrown free, but he doubled back.
Then the lines began to haul up again, quivering, whipping, quivering again.
Six lines from six boats had him. For one moment he was still in the submarine moonlight. I could see his wound tossing scarves of blood.
When he (and we) broke surface, he was thrashing again, near Juao’s boat. I was holding onto the side when suddenly Tork, glistening, came out of the water beside me and went over into the dinghy.
“Here you go,” he said, turning to kneel at the bobbing rim, and pulled me up while Juao leaned against the far side to keep balance.
Wet rope slopped on the prow. “Hey, Cal!” Tork laughed grabbed it up, and began to haul.
The fish prised wave from white wave in the white water.
The boats came together. The amphimen had all climbed up. Ariel was across from us, holding a flare that drooled smoke down her arm. She peered by the hip of the fisherman who was standing in front of her.
Juao and Tork were hauling the rope. Behind them I was coiling it with one hand as it came back to me.
The fish came up and was flopped into Ariel’s boat, tail out, head up, chewing air.
I had just finished pulling on my trousers when Tork fell down on the seat behind me and grabbed me around the shoulders with his wet arms. “Look at our fish, Tio Cal! Look!” He gasped air, laughing, his dark face diamonded beside the flares. “Look at our fish there, Cal!”
Juao, grinning white and gold, pulled us back into shore. The fire, the singing, hands beating hands – and my godson had put pebbles in the empty rum bottles and was shaking them to the music – the guitars spiraled around us as we carried the fish up the sand and the men brought the spit.
“Watch it!” Tork said, grasping the pointed end of the great stick that was thicker than his wrist.
We turned the fish over.
“Here, Cal?”
He prodded two fingers into the white flesh six inches back from the bony lip.
“Fine.”
Tork jammed the spit in.
We worked it through the body. By the time we carried it to the fire, they had brought more rum.
“Hey, Tork. Are you going to get some sleep before you go down in the morning?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Slept all afternoon.” He pointed toward the roasting fish with his elbow. “That’s my breakfast.”
But when the dancing grew violent a few hours later, just before the fish was to come off the fire, and the kids were pushing the last of the sweet potatoes from the ashes with sticks, I walked back to the lifeboat shell we had sat on earlier. It was three-quarters flooded.
Curled below still water, Tork slept, fist loose before his mouth, the gills at the back of his neck pulsing rhythmically. Only his shoulder and hip made islands in the floated boat.
* * *
“Where’s Tork?” Ariel asked me at the fire. They were swinging up the sizzling fish.
“Taking a nap.”
“Oh, he wanted to cut the fish!”
“He’s got a lot of work coming up. Sure you want to wake him up?”
“No, I’ll let him sleep.”
But Tork was coming up from the water, brushing his dripping hair back from his forehead.
He grinned at us, then went to carve. I remember him standing on the table, astraddle the meat, arm going up and down with the big knife (details, yes, those are the things you remember), stopping to hand down the portions, then hauling his arm back to cut again.
That night, with music and stomping on the sand and shouting back and forth over the fire, we made more noise than the sea.
4
The eight-thirty bus was more or less on time.
“I don’t think they want to go,” Juao’s sister said. She was accompanying the children to the Aquatic Corp Headquarters in Brasilia.
“They are just tired,” Juao said. “They should not have stayed up so late last night. Get on the bus now. Say goodbye to Tio Cal.”
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Kids are never their most creative in that sort of situation. And I suspect that my godchildren may have just been suffering their first (or one of their first) hangovers. They had been very quiet all morning.
I bent down and gave them a clumsy hug. “When you come back on your first weekend off, I’ll take you exploring down below at the point. You’ll be able to gather your own coral now.”
Juao’s sister got teary, cuddled the children, cuddled me, Juao, then got on the bus.
Someone was shouting out the bus window for someone at the bus stop not to forget something. They trundled around the square and then toward the highway. We walked back across the street where the café owners were putting out canvas chairs.
“I will miss them,” he said, like a long-considered admission.
“You and me both.” At the docks near the hydrofoil wharf where the submarine launches went out to the undersea cities, we saw a crowd. “I wonder if they had any trouble laying the –”
A woman screamed in the crowd. She pushed from the others, dropping eggs and onions. She began to pull her hair and shriek. (Remember the skillet of shrimp? She had been the woman ladling them out.) A few people moved to help her.
A clutch of men broke off and ran into a side street. I grabbed a running amphiman, who whirled to face me.
“What in hell is going on?”
For a moment his mouth worked on his words for all the trite world like a beached fish.
“From the explosion…” he began. “They just brought them back from the explosion at the Slash!”
I grabbed his other shoulder. “What happened!”
“About two hours ago. They were just a quarter of the way through, when the whole fault gave way. They had a goddamn underwater volcano for half an hour. They’re still getting seismic disturbances.”
Juao was running toward the launch. I pushed the guy away and limped after him, struck the crowd and jostled through calico, canvas, and green scales.
They were carrying the corpses out of the hatch of the submarine and laying them on a canvas spread across the dock. They still return bodies to the countries of birth for the family to decide the method of burial. When the fault had given, the hot slag that had belched into the steaming sea was mostly molten silicon.
Three of the bodies were only slightly burned here and there; from their bloated faces (one still bled from the ear) I guessed they had died from sonic concussion. But several of the bodies were almost totally encased in dull, black glass.
“Tork –” I kept asking. “Is one of them Tork?”
It took me forty-five minutes, asking first the guys who were carrying the bodies, then going into the launch and asking some guy with a clipboard, and then going back on the dock and into the office to find out that one of the more unrecognizable bodies was, yes, Tork.
* * *
Juao brought me a glass of buttermilk in a café on the square. He sat still a long time, then finally rubbed away his whit
e moustache, released the chair rung with his toes, put his hands on his knees.
“What are you thinking about?”
“That it’s time to go fix nets. Tomorrow morning I will fish.” He regarded me a moment. “Where should I fish tomorrow, Cal?”
“Are you wondering about … well, sending the kids off today?”
He shrugged. “Fishermen from this village have drowned. Still it is a village of fishermen. Where should I fish?”
I finished my buttermilk. “The mineral content over the Slash should be high as the devil. Lots of algae will gather tonight. Lots of small fish down deep. Big fish hovering over.”
He nodded. “Good. I will take the boat out there tomorrow.”
We got up.
“See you, Juao.”
I limped back to the beach.
5
The fog had unsheathed the sand by ten. I walked around, poking clumps of weeds with a stick, banging the same stick on my numb leg. When I lurched up to the top of the rocks, I stopped in the still grass. “Ariel?”
She was keeling in the water, head down, red hair breaking over sealed gills. Her shoulders shook, stopped, shook again.
“Ariel?” I came down over the blistered stones.
She turned away to look at the ocean.
The attachments of children are so important and so brittle. “How long have you been sitting here?”
She looked at me now, the varied waters of her face stilled on drawn cheeks. And her face was exhausted. She shook her head.
Sixteen? Seventeen? Who was the psychologist, back in the seventies, who decided that “adolescents” were just physical and mental adults with no useful work? “You want to come up to the house?”
The head-shaking got faster, then stopped.
After a while I said, “I guess they’ll be sending Tork’s body back to Manila.”
“He didn’t have a family,” she explained. “He’ll be buried here, at sea.”
“Oh,” I said.
And the rough volcanic glass, pulled across the ocean’s sands, changing shape, dulling –
“You were – you liked Tork a lot, didn’t you? You kids looked like you were pretty fond of each other.”
“Yes. He was an awfully nice –” then she caught my meaning and blinked. “No,” she said. “Oh, no. I was – I was engaged to Jonni … the brown-haired boy from California? Did you meet him at the party last night? We’re both from Los Angeles, but we only met down here. And now … they’re sending his body back this evening.” Her eyes got very wide, then closed.
“I’m sorry, Ariel.”
I’m a clumsy cripple, I step all over everybody’s emotions. In that mirror I guess I’m too busy looking at what might have been.
“I’m sorry, Ariel.”
She opened her eyes and began to look around her.
“Come on up to the house and have an avocado. I mean, they have avocados in now, not at the supermarket, but at the old town market on the other side. And they’re better than any they grow in California.”
She kept looking around.
“None of the amphimen get over there. It’s a shame, because soon the market will probably close, and some of their fresh foods are really great. Oil and vinegar is all you need on them.” I leaned back on the rocks. “Or a cup of tea?”
“Okay.” She remembered to smile. I know the poor kid didn’t feel like it. “Thank you. I won’t be able to stay long, though.”
We walked back up the rocks toward the house, the sea on our left. Just as we reached the patio, she turned and looked back. “Cal?”
“Yes? What is it?”
“Those clouds over there, across the water. Those are the only ones in the sky. Are they from the eruption in the Slash?”
I squinted. “I think so. Come on inside.”
BRIAN W. ALDISS
The Worm That Flies
In many ways, Brian W. Aldiss was the enfant terrible of the late-’50s, exploding into the science fiction world and shaking it up with the ferocious verve and pyrotechnic verbal brilliance of stories like “Poor Little Warrior!,” “Outside,” “The New Father Christmas,” “Who Can Replace a Man?,” “A Kind of Artistry,” and “Old Hundredth,” and with the somber beauty and unsettling poetic vision – in the main, of a world where Mankind signally has not triumphantly conquered the universe, as the Campbellian dogma of the time insisted that he would – of his classic novels Starship and The Long Afternoons of Earth (Non-Stop and Hothouse, respectively, in Britain). All this made him one of the most controversial writers of the day … and, some years later, he’d be one of the most controversial figures of the New Wave era as well, shaking up the SF world of the mid-’60s in an even more dramatic and drastic fashion with the ferociously Joycean “acidhead war” stories that would be melded into Barefoot in the Head, with the irreverent Cryptozoic!, and with his surrealistic anti-novel Report on Probability A.
But Aldiss has never been willing to work any one patch of ground for very long. By 1976, he had worked his way through two controversial British mainstream bestsellers – The Hand-Reared Boy and A Soldier Erect – and the strange transmuted Gothic of Frankenstein Unbound, and gone on to produce a lyrical masterpiece of science-fantasy, The Malacia Tapestry, perhaps his best book, and certainly one of the best novels of the ’70s. Ahead, in the decade of the ’80s, was the monumental accomplishment of his Helliconia trilogy – Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter – and by the end of that decade only the grumpiest of reactionary critics could deny that Aldiss was one of the true giants of the field, a figure of artistic complexity and amazing vigor, as much on the Cutting Edge in the ’90s as he had been in the ’50s.
Few SF writers have ever had the imagination, poetic skills and visionary scope to write convincingly about the really far future – once you have mentioned Olaf Stapledon, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Cordwainer Smith, Michael Moorcock, and M. John Harrison, you have almost exhausted the roster of authors who have handled the theme with any kind of evocativeness or complexity – but Aldiss has almost made a specialty of it. The Long Afternoon of Earth remains one of the classic visions of the distant future of Earth, and Aldiss has also handled the theme with grace and a wealth of poetic imagination in stories like “Old Hundredth” and “Full Sun.” Never more vividly than here, though, as he takes us to a remote and terrible future to unravel the dread mystery of “The Worm That Flies.”
The Long Afternoon of Earth won a Hugo Award in 1962. “The Saliva Tree” won a Nebula Award in 1965, and his novel Starship won the Prix Jules Verne in 1977. He took another Hugo Award in 1987 for his critical study of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, written with David Wingrove. His other books include An Island Called Moreau, Greybeard, Enemies of the System, A Rude Awakening, Life in the West, and Forgotten Life. His short fiction has been collected in Space, Time, and Nathaniel, Who Can Replace a Man?, New Arrivals, Old Encounters, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, and Seasons in Flight. His many anthologies include Space Opera, Space Odysseys, Evil Earths, The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, and, with Harry Harrison, Decade: the 1940s, Decade: the 1950s, and Decade: the 1960s. His latest books are Dracula Unbound, a novel, and Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s, a memoir. He lives with his family in Oxford.
When the snow began to fall, the traveler was too absorbed in his reveries to notice. He walked slowly, his stiff and elaborate garments, fold over fold, ornament over ornament, standing out from his body like a wizard’s tent.
The road along which he walked had been falling into a great valley, and was increasingly hemmed in by walls of mountain. On several occasions it had seemed that a way out of these huge accumulations of earth matter could not be found, that the geological puzzle was insoluble, the chthonian arrangement of discord irresolvable: And then vale and rumlin created between them a new direction, a surprise, an escape, and the way took fresh heart and plunged recklessly still deeper into the encompassing upheaval.
Though the hour was only midday, the sky became the intense blue-gray of dusk. The Forces were nesting in the sun again, obscuring its light. Consequently, Argustal was scarcely able to detect when the layered and fractured bulwark of rock on his left side, the top of which stood unseen perhaps a mile above his head, became patched by artificial means, and he entered the domain of the Tree-men of Or.
As the way made another turn, he saw a wayfarer before him, heading in his direction. It was a great pine, immobile until warmth entered the world again and sap stirred enough in its wooden sinews for it to progress slowly forward once more. He brushed by its green skirts, apologetic but not speaking.
This encounter was sufficient to raise his consciousness above its trance level. His extended mind, which had reached out to embrace the splendid terrestrial discord hereabouts, now shrank to concentrate again on the particularities of his situation, and he saw that he had arrived at Or.
The way bisected itself, unable to choose between two equally unpromising ravines; Argustal saw a group of humans standing statuesque in the left-hand fork. He went toward them, and stood there silent until they should recognize his presence. Behind him, the wet snow crept into his footprints.
These humans were well advanced into the New Form, even as Argustal had been warned they would be. There were five of them standing here, their great brachial extensions bearing some tender brownish foliage, and one of them attenuated to a height of almost twenty feet. The snow lodged in their branches and in their hair.
Argustal waited for a long span of time, until he judged the afternoon to be well advanced, before growing impatient. Putting his hands to his mouth, he shouted fierecely at them, “Ho then, Tree-men of Or, wake you from your arboreal sleep and converse with me. My name is Argustal to the world, and I travel to my home in far Talembil, where the seas run pink with the spring plankton. I need from you a component for my parapatterner, so rustle yourselves and speak, I beg!”
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