Almost as staggering as the news that came to them after the ship had set out to sea once again. Lydia had been standing on the deck of the ship, her hands gripping the railing. The sun was hot but the spray was cold and damp as they headed back to the deep water where the wreck lay. She barely felt the pitching and yawing of the converted trawler as it sliced through the waves, her eyes fixed on a far spot on the horizon. The answer was out there, somewhere.
Tomson disturbed her reverie with a hand on her elbow. At first she was glad to see him. He was such an inquisitive fellow, so delighted by every puzzle, every discovery. But his face was closed, now. “Jackie just radioed in.”
He sounded like he was choking as he said it. Lydia saw the distress on his face. “What is it? Is it the blue fever? What did they find?”
“Karros died in the hospital, some kind of pneumonia-like symptoms, but they weren’t sure if it was related to the skin condition or not. But the CDC thinks it’s some kind of infectious agent. They’ve got Jackie in a bubble.”
For a moment, pure human emotion took over. “Oh, poor Karros . . .” She crumbled and he put his arm around her, held her for a moment. She coughed up a few tears, though she mostly held them back. But then she straightened up and looked into Tomson’s eyes. Like the ocean, their blue was brighter in the sun. “What do they want us to do?”
“For now, stay out here, and tell them if we have any more cases of it. We shouldn’t try to land anywhere, that’s for sure.”
She watched as his eyes roved the horizon like hers, and she felt their hips touch as they both leaned on the railing. “It’s just lucky we were out here when the news came,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because now we have no reason to stop operations,” Lydia said. “We can keep digging.”
Tomson nodded and a relieved almost-smile warmed his face. “I’m so glad you feel that way about it. Steve wants to keep going, too.”
“Who doesn’t?” Lydia asked, already suspecting the answer.
“Your partner,” Tomson answered. “Ambrose thinks we should head straight for the mainland and all get ourselves into a hospital right away.”
“A hospital didn’t do Karros any good.” Lydia stared back into the blue. “Do you feel it, Will? We’ve barely begun to investigate, but we’re on the verge of something quite extraordinary.”
“You sound quite sure of yourself.”
“It’s rare I find something so totally outside of my knowledge base.” Lydia liked the way her voice sounded when she said that, at last finding that note that reminded her more of a professor than of a student. “Whatever we find, they’ll be rewriting the history books, I’m sure of it.”
Will Tomson nodded then, and they both watched the sea roll under the ship for long minutes.
She opens her mouth to let the water dribble in, letting it run down her chin and over her closed eyelids. Her lips tingle where it touches, and she lets the tip of her tongue emerge. She touches her wet cheeks with her hands and then brings them together in front of her mouth – she looks like she is praying. She has never felt anything quite like this before. It must be the fever. Her chest heaves as she breathes, the water falling faster now, over her face, her breasts, and down her belly. Water, who would have thought water would be the key to it all?
Ambrose had fought her bitterly that night in their cabin. “You’ll get us all killed. Crazy woman . . .”
She had held her ground as much as she could. “They’ve ordered us to stay in quarantine. And no one else is sick. There’s no reason to stop the expedition. For all we know, Karros’s pneumonia wasn’t even related.”
Ambrose rumbled like gathering thunder. “It’s still too dangerous. I’m not handling anything that comes up from the wreck and neither are you.”
“What do you mean . . . ?”
“You’re my wife-to-be and you’re mine to protect. You’re not going near it. Let little Willie do it.”
She tried to deflect him by teasing, but it was a mistake. “You sound like those old Egyptologists, running from the curse of the mummy.”
“I’ll have to tell the others that you’re not feeling well, that you have a headache.” He left then, and she realized what he meant, as he bolted the door from the outside. The converted trawler was all steel – there wasn’t even a porthole for her to shout through.
She beat futilely on the bulkhead door for a few moments and then sat back on the pallet bed, unable to believe that Ambrose would really keep her locked in there for long. He was touchy, she knew that. She had known it even when he had proposed, that he had a temper, fits of ego and irrationality. But he had courted her so earnestly, with flowers and dinners, and always on his best behavior, shaking hands with her father and asking his permission . . . how could she say no? All those years, college, graduate school, the Yucatan, she had never had time for a companion. Ambrose had seemed ideal in some ways. They could work together, live together, grow old together. He was what they called “old-fashioned” and she had liked that, at first. Before all this talk of protecting and property.
She licks the water from her lips. They had been chapped from sun and wind but now they feel like rose petals, the water droplets beading on her face like dew. She cranes her neck down to lick the water from her breasts, and leans back again to let the water rain down her midsection, pooling in the triangle of her crotch, her bush half-wet like a shore plant in a tide pool.
That night Ambrose had brought her dinner, canned stew heated in the galley with some crackers. He unbolted the door and swept in with the bowl in front of him, placing it on one corner of the bed with a flourish. So pleased with himself. The ship rocked slightly, but the seas were calm and there was little danger of spilling. “I thought you might be hungry,” he said.
“Not really,” she replied, just to annoy him. His face said he was expecting praise, as if he had forgotten she wasn’t really ill, forgotten that was a lie he had invented.
But then, she thought, she really was ill. While he had been gone she had examined the underside of her arm – the spot had grown bigger. There was another spot in the small of her back, as well.
He shrugged off the annoyance and came over to sit next to her. He took her hand in his. “Lydia, my dove, please don’t be angry. You have to realize how irrational you can be sometimes. It’s better this way – you’ll see how it will all work out. You’ll be glad . . .” He was leaning toward her, to kiss her. She pulled back almost involuntarily, as if he were the one with the contagion. He pressed forward more, his eyes closing, until their lips met.
She allowed him to kiss her for long moments, until she broke away saying, “That stew smells good.”
He straightened, remembering his pretense for being there. “Of course. Here you are.” He stood up and she gathered the bowl to her. Then he left, and bolted the door behind him.
She ate the stew, but didn’t taste it. She ate it because she supposed it was better to be fortified than not, but her mind was elsewhere. What was Tomson doing right now? He might be opening a basket brought up by a remote right this minute. The wreck was so deep human divers, even in submersibles, couldn’t reach it. But machines, guided from the deck with video monitors, could go anywhere. She felt sometimes that it was her hands, not the robot’s, picking through the wreckage, lifting an ancient astrolabe out of the silt, peeling apart the remnants of a wooden carton to find whatever lay inside.
She hesitates a moment, the rapture frightens her a bit, and she questions what is happening. But pleasure is a reassuring thing, it feels right rather than wrong, and she gradually separates her knees. Pooled water cascades between her legs, and her mouth quivers as the trickle touches a place she has only let Ambrose touch when he fumbles to insert himself in her. Unlike his hard knuckles the caress of the water opens her, and she feels an outflow of her own juices come forth to meet the cascade of water.
Lydia had been locked in the cabin two days when someon
e came to the door while she was sleeping. The knock woke her, a muffled voice.
“Open the door!” she shouted, her voice hoarse from sleeping. That sounded like Tomson. She banged on her side of the door.
With a clank the door came open, and Will Tomson stepped in with a wrench in his hand and a puzzled look on his face.
She grabbed him by the hand and pulled him down the corridor to the dark, empty galley. The room was lit only with the orange emergency light above the door and they blinked at each other. “Will, you have to tell me, what have you found?”
“Lydia, wait a minute, were you trapped in there?”
“That’s not important right now. Please Will, what’s been going on?”
“That’s why I came looking for you. I found something you’re not going to believe.” He shifted the sack on his back to the table, opened it carefully to reveal what looked to Lydia rather like a book. It looked to be some kind of leather, and Tomson folded it open once, then again like a road map, to reveal several sheaves of skin.
“How could something like this survive in the water all that time?” she asked, even as she began to take in the drawings and symbols.
“Have a look at this,” he said, taking out his flashlight and flooding the table with white light. The pages were blue. “Tell me, please, Lydia, did Ambrose lock you away because you’ve been infected?”
She shook her head. “No, to keep me from being infected. But Ambrose be damned, do you realize this is a map?” In human measure of time, the coastline of Spain and Portugal looked essentially the same. But this showed some land one did not see in the modern era. The drawing detailed a tiny map-size city, and a route from the mainland to it. A route that they had followed to arrive at the site of the wreck.
He nodded and turned the sheaf over. “And it looks like an instruction manual, as well.” On the other side were drawings of a man and a woman, the odd-shaped whale-oil jars, and more. Lydia was reminded of the safety instruction cards in airplanes. The final picture in the sequence, if they were reading the correct direction, was of the two humans swimming with two dolphins.
The other page also had a sequence of pictures on it. Lydia felt almost dizzy as she looked at them. “Can I be interpreting these correctly?” she thought. It appeared to tell a story of a city being engulfed by the sea, the same drawing of the city as on the facing sheaf, with the water level going up and up and up.
“It’s not possible,” she said, her voice so low Tomson was not sure she spoke. “A lost civilization? Who had the know-how to make a book that would not decay after thousands of years under water?”
Tomson put his hand on hers. “That’s not all. We got word from Georgia.”
“Oh no, not Jackie.”
“She’s alive. They said she’s almost completely blue now, though. Antibiotics, antivirals, they aren’t effective. They are assuming now if it’s an organism, it’s something like a prion, something they haven’t seen before. They say her cellular structure is changing. Not just on her skin. They are seeing changes in her brain.”
“What sorts of changes?”
“Cognitively she still appears the same, but they are seeing increases in activity in some very unlikely areas . . .” Tomson was blushing red again. “I have some theories . . .” He shook himself a little. “But this is the important thing. They’re keeping her alive by keeping her wet.”
Lydia’s hand went to the small of her back of its own accord. “Oh my.”
Tomson grimaced as he saw it. “Lydia, there’s something else you should know.”
She heard the tremble in his voice and looked up from the diagrams. He was unbuttoning his shirt, his head down, his blond curls hanging over his eyes as he pulled the garment out of his pants and opened it.
Lydia could see the blue creeping up out of his waistband, climbing his stomach and up his chest.
“I won’t be able to hide it from the others much longer,” he said. “It’s spreading upward and outward.”
Almost without thinking, she reached a hand toward him and touched the skin of his stomach. It felt smooth, hairless, soft. He gasped and she pulled back. “Did that hurt?”
“No, no . . . it’s just, very, very sensitive.” He quivered then, as if her touch reverberated throughout his body.
She rubs the water on her thighs, splashing up handfuls of it from the puddle around her. The pleasure is unlike anything she has felt before. She rolls over now, letting the water run over her back, then rolls over again, letting it bounce off her stomach. She lets her knees fall apart and invites the droplets to fall there, as well. She is soaked now, wet over every inch of her skin, and she reaches for the jar.
We must keep away from Ambrose. That was her only thought as she and Tomson made their way to the hold where the recovered objects were prepped. If she was reading the diagrams correctly, then what Tomson needed to survive was there. She located one of the jars with the curlicue top as shown in the drawings, and opened it. The scent of some extinct flower filled the small room, and the slight motion of the ship made her grip the jar tighter.
Tomson pulled his shirt completely off and Lydia stood close to him. She dipped two fingers into the jar and came up with a dab of something with the consistency of honey. She smeared it into his back where the blue part of his flesh met the pink, and began slathering it upward. As she watched, she could see the blue edge beginning to spread. “It’s working,” she said to him. “The ointment is encouraging the blue to grow.”
He trembled under her touch and when she tried to come around the front of him he shied away. “Let me do it,” he said, holding his hand out for the jar.
She knitted her brows in puzzlement, but then saw the embarrassment on his face. She turned away as his trousers dropped, but she could still hear the sounds he made in his throat. He could not stop himself as he covered his legs and private parts, and then huddled away from her, hiding his crotch with his hands.
“Now we need to wet you down,” Lydia said, her eyes still averted by studying the diagrams. There were hoses with small nozzles here, made for rinsing away sediment on artefacts. She turned the spigot on one and brought it over to where he was sitting in a ball.
He cried out as the water hit his back. “Not too hard!”
She reduced the flow to a dribble and let the droplets spatter softly over him. He moaned and then sighed, the tension seeming to go out of his body as she wet him. He let her run the water down his chest, and she saw that he had been hiding a rampant state of turgidity from her. His eyes were closed now, and she watched his penis curiously. It was thoroughly blue, standing up like a finger of coral, and he whimpered a bit when the water sprayed it.
“Will,” she said in a hushed voice. “What do you know about dolphins?”
He lay back into the puddle and let out a long breath, his shyness gone. “A bit. Why?”
“Do you think it’s possible that the transformation taking place here is to make us more like them?” Lydia began to untuck her own shirt. “To survive the day when our home is overrun by water?”
Will sat up and blinked water from his eyes. The blueness was creeping up toward his neck and she wondered if they would remain the same color when it reached them. “No one will ever believe it.”
She shook her head. “I believe it.” She turned to show him the spreading patch of blue on her back, her shirt hiked up. His wet fingers traced the edges of it and she knew then why he had moaned. His hands reached around her then, and she felt his cheek pressed against the small of her back.
“I’m sorry, Lydia, I just can’t help it . . .”
“It’s all right, Will.” Dolphins, she thought. “Help me with it, now.”
He helped her to shed her clothes and then handed her the jar, so she could slather herself. But then she came to her back, and he helped her with that as she had with his. And then she tilted her head back and waited for the water to come down.
She opens her eyes to see him standing
above her, the hose still in his hand. She reaches up and pulls him down to her, wanting the feeling of his water-slick skin against hers. Their still-red lips meet, and she feels like they are drinking each other. She laps at his mouth, her hands buried in his curls, as his hands run up and down her back. She licks him, licks at his cheeks, kisses his eyelids. His mouth answers, making its wet way down her neck, to the delicate nipples, standing erect from the water and from rubbing against his so-slick torso. He rubs them with oil, his thumbs brushing across the tips, and then he lowers his mouth to them, wetting them, his tongue lapping at the flower scent mingled with the taste of her skin.
His tongue follows the trail of water down her belly, down to the triangle between her legs. She is wet and slick there by more than just oil and droplets from the hose. As she reaches her hands down to spread her lips apart some part of her knows she has never blossomed this way for Ambrose. Will’s fingers dig into the jar of oil and he slicks her from anus to clitoris with the fragrant stuff. Lydia writhes under the touch, her hips rising up until he sinks his fingers deep into her, the pleasure rippling outward from her center. She clings to his neck, wanting skin on skin, wanting wetness on wetness.
She wraps a leg around him and almost before either of them realizes it, he mounts her. Every part of her is slick, both inside and out, and she sucks in a breath. No, it was never like this with Ambrose. She reaches a hand between their pumping bodies, curious to feel if something else in her anatomy has changed. The breath keeps getting deeper, and her fingers slide over her clitoris, fundamentally unchanged and yet . . .
The intensity of it makes her want to cry out, and yet she does not want to exhale. Breathing has become a secondary thing to the urgent need between her legs, and she clings to him hard with three limbs, the fourth a moving blur between them even as he speeds up the rhythm of his own motion.
And then suddenly she feels him break loose, she feels the burst of hot salt liquid inside her, and her own pleasure cascades throughout her body, rippling from one end to the other. They cling together as the spasms quake through their muscles, and then, as one, they exhale.
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