Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She pleaded, “Adam, I don’t want lunch, I want Jonah.”

  But silent, invisible servants entered, carrying a formidable array of dishware and flatware; it arranged itself with precision in front of the chair. Chowder was ladled into a clamshell; steamed scallops appeared on a scallop shell; boiled lobster was served in its own shell on a bed of tiny shrimp. Her chair shifted back, waited for her.

  She felt a moment’s revulsion, as if she were being served fillet of merman’s tail. But the smell of the chowder made her feel hollow. Everything eats and is eaten, she thought. I’d eat this at home. Except the lobster; we can never afford lobster. She sat down tentatively, ate a scallop. Nothing happened. She picked up one of three spoons, dipped into the chowder. Her goblets were filled: white wine, champagne, water. Somewhere above her, music began to play softly.

  This, she thought after a while, when the lobster was a litter of shell and she was finishing the champagne, is what they do to the condemned. Feed you all your favorite things, then send you out to die.

  She lowered her glass, and found a merman sitting on the other end of the table.

  She jumped, splashing herself, before she recognized Adam. It wasn’t so much the long, graceful, darkly glittering tail that disguised him, as his expression. He seemed remote, as he had in the tide pool: a wild, beautiful, unpredictable creature shaped by water and tidal forces, ruled by nothing human. She was surprised that he didn’t speak in bubbles, or in the language of whales.

  He said, “The dress and the starfish cloak are camouflage. You’ll need the lantern; sometimes the water is dark. The net and the trident may come in handy; I don’t know. No one has ever used them before.”

  “For what?” she whispered.

  “You want Jonah. For whatever reasons. You must ask the Queen of the Sea for permission to take him back to your world. You will find her in her tower, singing to him.”

  “Where—” Her voice jumped.

  He looked behind him, at a little ivory door that had just unlatched itself and begun to open. “Through there. If you must have him. If he wants you.”

  She tossed back the champagne and rose. “Come with me,” she pleaded suddenly, glimpsing the darkness behind the door. “Adam.” He didn’t respond. Perhaps, she thought hopelessly, he had discarded his name along with his humanity. She bundled everything into the net. She touched her glasses straight, looking at him uncertainly, then walked without looking at him into the dark beyond the door.

  Jonah stood in the ivory doorway, looking out over a wasteland.

  It reminded him of videos of a war zone at night, flashes of light revealing an indecipherable landscape, or of some dim, barren planet that was a constant open sore of volcanic activity. It was a sullen, mutant sea around the beautiful tower, and it seemed to have created its own crazed life. Dark, bulky scavengers patrolled the waters; their skeletons, like those of the tiny fish in regions light could not reach, were luminous. Figures that looked almost human, glowing eerie, phosphorescent colors that might have seeped out of rotting chemical barrels, prowled through the debris at the bottom. There were great, nightmarish piles of it, junk that cascaded in sudden avalanches to resculpt the shape of the waste. Ghostly jellyfish trailing endless tentacles bobbed like underwater torches around the distant black hillocks of debris that rose between Jonah and the tower. A step sideways would have hidden it from him, but not its gentle light, nor the mermaid’s voice.

  He realized that the prowling, phosphorescent figures were turning faces in his direction, scenting him as nothing else did in the sea. He ducked, moving as slowly as everything else in the strange, motionless water, as if it were heavier than the flowing sea beyond the door, or slightly viscous. He crawled, a bottom fish, hiding behind debris, behind dead coral colonies, within stunted, pallid kelp that grew no higher than his head. Once he saw eyes, a face drifting at him out of the murk. It was only a sad-eyed manatee. Its front flippers had been mangled; its back was badly scarred. It moved past him slowly, using its tail, to nose at some pallid sea grass. Things crept through the debris around him, showing a claw now and then, a glassy carapace over bright organs. Once the tentacles of a massive, glowing jellyfish touched a huge, upraised claw. In the electric flash, the scavenger was illumined. It was longer than Jonah.

  Some vast slanted wall appeared in front of him as he rounded a pile; it hid the tower. He recognized it finally, from old World War II movies: a sunken vessel lying on its side, crusted with gigantic mussels. It seemed safer to drift over it than go around; he clung close to it, guiding himself up across the deck from mussel to mussel. He peered over the top, saw other huge old scuttled ships like toys on the sea bottom. Liquid seeped slowly, constantly from their holds, turning the mussels vivid colors; whatever had been buried inside them wasn’t staying put. Jellyfish swimming through the seepage occasionally sparked flashes along their tentacles. One spark shimmered back down the seepage into the hold near him. He heard a muffled explosion. Mussels bounced off the side of the hulk, followed by a stream of black liquid.

  The mermaid’s song, low and gentle across the terrible waste, coaxed him; he gazed at her tower awhile, delicate and pale in the distance, ringed by a moat of empty water. Finally he pulled himself down the side of the ship. The ships lay end to end in a jagged line; he found only more debris in front of him. He crouched under the keel, watching for movement, then slowly crept forward. He found a huge turtle lying on its back, little more than an empty shell but for its head and the plastic bag over it. He shook the shell; the fragments floated away. A dark shadow looming overhead snapped up the head in its wrapper. Jonah dove under the shell. But the shadow had lost interest in food; it thrashed away, drawing the attention of crabs hidden around Jonah. He huddled under the shell until the shadow finally stopped writhing and drifted to the bottom. The crabs moved then, shifting out of the debris, rising out of the sand; one crawled out of an old bathtub. Jonah, turned turtle on all fours, snuck away under the shell while the crabs fed.

  He saw a pale, webbed foot and froze, clinging to the shell. Other mottled feet stalked past him on both sides. He felt a thump on the shell and waited in terror, for the kick that would wrench the shell from his grasp and leave him as defenseless as the turtle. But the ghostly mer-demons passed him silently. He moved finally, crawling over a lead pipe that must have bounced off the turtle’s shell.

  Another enormous shadow passed overhead, sending a plaintive moan reverberating through the water. Only an explosion within one of the sunken hulks answered it, as a passing jellyfish ignited something volatile. That silenced the whale briefly; Jonah heard the siren’s voice again, light, drifting, soothing, and he wondered for a moment which of them she sang to. The whale answered her, and then passed on, silent again, a solitary Ancient Mariner searching for its kind.

  Moving closer to the tower from garbage heap to garbage heap in his undignified scuttle, he began to hear the song more clearly. Sometimes he thought he understood a word, though the language she sang was older than the human voice. It enraptured him, her closeness; her voice teased his attention from the dangers of his journey; it seemed a caress of praise, of pride at his courage. I’m coming, he told her, picking his way past what looked like a demolished building tossed into the sea. He dodged pipes sticking crazily out of lumps of concrete and rounded a toilet standing upright with a baby crab’s eyes peering over the rim. I’m coming. . . . He saw the glistening rain of tentacles sweeping toward him half a second before they hit.

  He froze in horror. They struck; light flashed down them, hit the turtle shell, and then his face. He flinched, trying to scream, and nearly inhaled a tentacle. They kept coming, dropping down around him, surrounding the turtle shell. He cowered beneath it; pale ribbons massed against his face. Something bounced against the shell and rolled into the pile of tentacles. He tried to crawl; the tentacles had tangled around the shell. He shrugged the shell away finally, started to rise, and slipped into the massive body of the je
llyfish.

  It was dead. He stood up, staring at it, picking tentacles away from his body. It had been alive, charged, when it hit him. But he had never felt the shock. The jellyfish, it seemed, had not been so fortunate. Then he felt the shock of illumination throughout his body.

  It touched me and died, he thought. I killed it.

  He stared at it, then lifted his head at a movement, and found the eerie waste guardians gathering around him. He tensed, searching wildly for escape. But they came so far and no farther, just stood, scenting him, their blurred faces rippling with undecipherable expressions.

  They backed away from him slowly, left him to his kill.

  He gazed after them, bewildered; they glanced back at him now and then as they scattered, disappeared behind the debris. For a moment, his astonishment overwhelmed even the siren’s song.

  They’re afraid of me. I wonder why.

  Then the mermaid’s song whispered through him again, and he pushed blindly through the ruined sea toward its heart.

  SEVEN

  Megan walked into a sea of dreams.

  It was very dark at first. The light from her living lantern revealed a great forest of mer-trees, the tall, gently swaying trees of glass she had seen in the garden, though these had fish-scale bark and leaves of kelp. Fish, shining like jewels in the dark, browsed among the leaves. She stopped there, laid her bundle on the sea bottom and drew out the starfish cloak. She put it on, trying to remember what ate starfish. Something slow-moving, she hoped, and small.

  She picked up the net again, and the trident of bone. The lantern, caught in a current, or unbalanced by some inner tumult, rolled away from her through the trees. She followed in a slow-motion sprint, the long gown flowing, the starfish a glowing, undulating wave behind her. The lantern was always ahead of her groping fingers. She had almost caught up with it when a mer-lion leaped out from between the trees and roared.

  The roar was a splash of light. Its tail was gold, its mane adorned with beads of tiny cowrie shells. Its teeth were shark’s teeth, huge, primitive, irregular. She hiccupped a bubble and dove under the starfish. After a while she lifted a corner of the cloak. The sea was dark again; the lantern had stopped moving. Still huddled, she crawled closer to it. It stayed still. She gripped it tightly and stood up.

  She walked into a storm of minute, glowing things as intricately formed as snowflakes. They whirled around her, a blizzard of light, then swarmed away. Something else flowed after them, leaving an impression on her mind’s eye of a flock of startled mer-ravens, with black wings and scaly tails. She stood still, uneasy in the quiet water, waiting. A great mer-unicorn bounded through the kelp trees, moon white, with a narwhal’s spiral horn and a fish’s tail that propelled it up through the water as its forefeet touched bottom. A small trident sped after it, touched its flank. Megan dropped again, but not before she had seen the wild hunt that chased the hind: the riders blowing conches, the pack of dogfish, the seahorses striving under the urging of the intent, beautiful, merciless hunters fitting tridents of fishbone into their bows. She hid, a mound of starfish, while the seahorses, their manes and tails elegant masses of colored filament, bounded through the water above her head.

  The sand settled; the water was finally still again. She rose, her eyes wide, her hair drifting around her, catching the interest of the tiny jewelfish, who darted through it as if it were seaweed. She went on through the forest. Now and then she caught the flash of gaudy wings as parrotfish and cardinalfish swam into her light, but nothing more disturbing. Finally she reached the edge of the forest and the water began to brighten.

  She stood among the trees, looking out over the edge of a cliff. Far below she could see the land beneath the waves. It was not made of glass, but of pearl and coral and pirate’s gold. Its banners were flying fish, its gate was the bone of some great fish’s mouth. The road leading into the gate was paved with scallop shells. She could see where it ended, but not where it began, nor how she could get from the top of the cliff to the city below.

  I could float down, she thought. Just step over and drop.

  But what rules prevailed in that mer-world she was uncertain. Things mirrored the earth too closely, and even covered with starfish, she was reluctant to fling herself over a sheer wall of stone. Besides, what might they make of her, the avid hunters with their bows and tridents, seeing her drift down, a trespasser without a tail? They might make target practice of her.

  She pondered, kneeling at the cliff’s edge, watching tiny movements, flickers of color within the city walls.

  Is Jonah in there? she wondered, her eyes on a tower taller than the rest, made out of moon shells, with round windows like portholes ringing the top. Adam said he was wandering around with snails in his hair, crying pearls. Is he with the sea queen now? Did he weep enough pearls?

  She stilled her thoughts, leaned over the cliff edge, straining to catch a note or two of the song that had lured Jonah out of the world. But she only heard the distant voices of whales.

  She rose after a while, walked slowly along the cliff edge, watching the road below for the hunters. The road was swallowed by forest before she saw them return on it. She wandered on. The cliff began to slope; the kelp trees thinned; bushes of coral grew among them: sea fans, mushroom coral, fire coral, oxblood coral, angel’s skin. She saw an angelfish overhead, its tail a pearly white, its wings of delicate, feathery tentacles. Its face resembled Adam’s. She stopped, wanting to speak to it, but its eyes were closed, as if it prayed.

  She closed her own eyes, briefly. What is this world? she thought. Where am I really?

  When she opened her eyes, she saw a flock of goatfish gamboling along the cliff, pausing to eat eelgrass and sea cucumbers. She waited for the damselfish who herded them, but the goatfish, black and amber-eyed, were apparently wild. They cast slitted glances at her starfish cloak, but did not come close. As they browsed through the coral, they startled butterflyfish, who swarmed up and darted toward the kelp forest.

  She continued along the slope. It leveled for a while, into a meadow of grasses and sea lilies, but it was high above the floor where the city stood, and still she saw no way down. Beyond the meadow stood another dark kelp forest. Leaning out over the cliff as far as she dared, she saw the wall of rock stretch into the distance, with not a hint of road winding down from it. She had left the city behind. All she could see of it was the high tower made of pearl; the rest was hidden by forest, and by the misty shadow of the cliff.

  Now what? she wondered, sighing. Turning, she saw a rabbitfish on the meadow grass.

  Its back to her, it nibbled something between its paws, balanced on its green mer-tail. She felt something in her grow focused, very still. For this, she had the net. For this, she carried the trident. To pin down the changing sea and look into its eye to see what it truly saw. She crept up behind it so quietly she thought it must hear her stillness. She held out the net, weighted it with her body, and fell with it over the sea hare.

  It struggled beneath her; she held it tight, and felt it change. She clung fast, spreading the net with her hands, gripping the tail between her knees. It stopped moving then. She felt a face against her face.

  She angled the trident swiftly against his throat. She sat up carefully, keeping him tangled in the net: the merman caught by the fisher, the hare caught by the hunter. She said, “You must be worth something. A wish or two, at least.”

  For a moment he was silent, looking at her out of alien eyes. Then he surrendered a human smile of acquiescence and amusement. “Only if you drag me out of the sea into your boat and threaten to cast me ashore.”

  “Can you make an exception?” She was smiling now, for he had never really left her alone in the sea: he had given her the net and himself to catch.

  “Perhaps. For you. What do you wish, mortal maid?”

  “I wish, merman, for you to guide me through your sea.”

  His smile faded; he considered her wish. He lifted a finger through the net, shif
ted the trident from his throat. “You don’t have much to bargain with. And you already owe me.”

  “I’ll pay you later. This sea is full of human words.”

  “So humans made it.”

  “I want to see your sea. Out of your eyes. I want to see what you are made of, what you are behind all your faces.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said softly, “you came into my drawing for a reason, and you haven’t told me what it is. All you’ve given me is what I’ve read about, what I’ve drawn.”

  He was silent again; nothing of the smile lingered. “It costs,” he warned her. “More than you can imagine. It may cost you your heart.”

  She held his eyes. “I’ll pay it,” she said recklessly, not sure any longer what her heart was worth in the sea. He shook off her net and rose.

  “Come.”

  Jonah stood in a snowfall of plankton.

  He assumed it was plankton, vaguely recalling pictures in Megan’s books. Microscopic plants and animals with intricate, transparent structures: They looked like lilies, or space stations, or roulette wheels radiating strands of light. Alive they floated on the waves; dead they drifted down until they were eaten, or until they reached the sea bottom. These were drifting, but either he had shrunk or they were huge as cars. Some had legs, some had chambered shells, some carried a Catherine wheel of filaments. They bounced down around Jonah, stirring up storms of sand and mud. Caught in an open ring between the tower and the ships and piles of debris, he dodged them wildly. There seemed no end to the fall. He crawled finally beneath what looked like an egg, heaving one bulky, liquid side up, as if he were trying to lift a water bed. Whatever had been growing in it was dead, chewed apart by something dark and cloying inside.

  After a long time the drift came to an end. He crawled out. The crabs were beginning to move among the plankton; their great claws mowed a ragged path through it. Jonah, finding it easier to dodge them, shifted to let them pass, then followed after them. Others came up behind him, surprising him, but they seemed uninterested. Withdrawing their eyestalks, clicking claws at him, they scuttled away sideways. He moved among them, barely noticing their cleanup operation, only that they were clearing his way to the tower, which always, he noticed, was farther than it looked, as if perspective changed constantly in that fluid world. He was working his way toward it patiently when the water became very dark.