“Who taught you to weave like this, child?” she asked.
“No one,” said Mary, not looking up.
The old woman looked down at the cloth again. “It’s beautiful work, but—” She sighed and put the cloth away. “We have no place for it. Child, you weave so well, why can’t you weave the usual patterns?”
“They are dead. This one is alive.”
The old woman sighed again. “And how long is it that you have been demanding your Klef back, dear?”
“Seven months.”
“But now think.” The old woman paused, glanced over her shoulder. The black dot on the sea was much nearer, curving in toward the jetty below. “Suppose this Klef did receive one of your messages; what then?”
“He would know how much I love him,” said Mary, raising her head. Color came into her cheeks; her eyes brightened.
“And that would change his whole life, his loyalties, everything?”
“Yes!”
“And if it did not?”
Mary was silent.
“Child, if that failed, would you confess that you have been wrong—would you let us help you?”
“It wouldn’t fail,” Mary said stubbornly.
“But if it did?” the older woman insisted gently. “Just suppose—just let yourself imagine.”
Mary was silent a moment. “I would want to die,” she said.
The two elder Weavers looked at each other, and for a moment neither spoke.
“May I go now?” Mary asked.
Vivana cast a glance down at the jetty, and said quickly, “Maybe it’s best, your ageship. Tell them—“
Laura-one stopped her with a raised hand. Her lips were compressed. “And if you go, child, what will you do now?”
“Go and make more messages, to put into bottles.”
The old woman sighed. “You see?” she said to Vivana.
Footsteps sounded faintly on the jetty stair. A man’s head appeared; he was an island Fisher, stocky, dark-haired, with a heavy black mustache. “Your ageship, the man is here,” he said, saluting Laura-one: “Shall I . . .”
“No,” said Vivana involuntarily. “Don’t. Send him back.”
“What would be the good of that?” the old woman asked reasonably. “No; bring him up, Alec.”
The Fisher nodded, turned and was gone down the stair.
Mary’s head had come up. She said, “The man . . . ?” “There, it’s all right,” said Vivana, going to her.
“Is it Klef?” she asked fearfully.
The older woman did not reply. In a moment the black-mustached Fisher appeared again; he stared at them, climbed to the head of the stair, stood aside.
Behind him, after a moment, another head rose out of the stairwell. Under the russet hair, the face was grave and thin. The gray eyes went to Laura-one, then to Mary; they stared at her, as the man continued to climb the steps. He reached the top, and stood waiting, hands at his sides. The black-mustached Fisher turned and descended behind him.
Mary had begun to tremble all over.
“There, dear, it’s all right,” said Vivana, pressing her arms. As if the words had released her, Mary walked to the Fisher. Tears were shining on her face. She clutched his tunic with both hands, staring up at him. “Klef?” she said.
His hands came up to hold her. She threw herself against him then, so violently that he staggered, and clutched him as if she wished to bury herself in his body. Strangled, hurt sounds came out of her.
The man looked over her head at the two older women. “Can’t you leave us alone for a moment?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Laura-one, a little surprised. “Why not? Of course.” She gestured to Vivana, and the two turned, walked away a little distance down the promenade to a bench, where they sat looking out over the seawall.
Gulls mewed overhead. The two women sat side by side without speaking or looking at one another. They were not quite out of earshot.
“Is it really you?” Mary asked, holding his face between her hands. She tried to laugh. “Darling, I can’t see . . . you’re all blurred.”
“I know,” said Clef quietly. “Mary, I’ve thought about you many times.”
“Have you?” she cried. “Oh, that makes me so happy. Oh, Klef, I could die now! Hold me, hold me.”
His face hardened. His hands absently stroked her back, up and down. “I kept asking to be sent back,” he said. “Finally I persuaded them—they thought you might listen to me. I’m supposed to cure you.”
“Of loving you?” Mary laughed. At the sound, his hands tightened involuntarily on her back. “How foolish they were! How foolish, Klef!”
“Mary, we have only these few minutes,” he said.
She drew back a little to look at him. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m to talk to you, and then go back. That’s all I’m here for.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “But you told me—”
“Mary, listen to me. There is nothing else to do. Nothing.”
“Take me back with you, Klef.” Her hands gripped him hard. “That’s what I want—just to be with you. Take me back.”
“And where will you live—in the Fishers’ dormitory with forty men?”
“I’ll live anywhere, in the streets, I don’t care—”
“They would never allow it. You know that, Mary.”
She was crying, holding him, shuddering all over. “Don’t tell me that, don’t say it. Even if it’s true, can’t you pretend a little? Hold me, Klef, tell me that you love me.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Tell me that you’ll keep me, never let me go, no matter what they say.”
He was silent a moment. “It’s impossible.”
She raised her head.
“Try to realize,” he said, “this is a sickness, Mary. You must cure yourself.”
“Then you’re sick too!” she said.
“Maybe I am, but I’ll get well, because I know I have to. And you must get well too. Forget me. Go back to your sisters and your weaving.”
She put her cheek against his chest, gazing out across the bright ocean. “Let me just be quiet with you a moment,” she said. “I won’t cry anymore. Klef—“
“Yes?”
“Is that all you have to say to me?”
“It has to be all.” His eyes closed, opened again. “Mary, I didn’t want to feel this way. It’s wrong, it’s unhealthy, it hurts. Promise me, before I go. Say you’ll let them cure you.”
She pushed herself away, wiped her eyes and her cheeks with the heel of one hand. Then she looked up. “I’ll let them cure me,” she said.
His face contorted. “Thank you. I’ll go now, Mary.”
“One more kiss!” she cried, moving toward him involuntarily. “Only one more!”
He kissed her on the lips, then wrenched himself away, and looking down to where the two women sat, he made an angry motion with his head.
As they rose and came nearer, he held Mary at arms’ length. “Now I’m really going,” he said harshly. “Good-bye, Mary.”
“Good-bye, Klef.” Her fingers were clasped tight at her waist.
The man waited, looking over her head, until Vivana came up and took her arms gently. Then he moved away. At the head of the Stairs he looked at her once more; then he turned and began to descend.
“Dear, it will be better now, you’ll see,” said Vivana uncertainly.
Mary said nothing. She stood still, listening to the faint sounds that echoed up from the stairwell: footsteps, voices, hollow sounds.
There was a sudden clatter, then footsteps mounting the stair. Klef appeared again, chest heaving, eyes bright. He seized both of Mary’s hands in his. “Listen!” he said. “I’m mad. You’re mad. We’re both going to die.”
“I don’t care!” she said. Her face was glowing as she looked up at him.
“They say some of the streams are running pure, in the hills. Grass is growing there—there are fish in
the streams, even the wild fowl are coming back. We’ll go there, Mary, together—just you and I. Alone. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Klef—yes, darling.”
“Then come on!”
“Wait!” cried Laura-one shrilly after them as they ran down the stair. “How will you live? What will you eat? Think what you are doing!”
Faint hollow sounds answered her, then the purr of a motor.
Vivana moved to Laura-one’s side, and the two women stood watching, silent, as the dark tiny shape of the launch moved out into the brightness. In the cockpit they could make out the two figures close together, dark head and light. The launch moved steadily toward the land; and the two women stood staring, unable to speak, long after it was out of sight.
DRIFTGLASS
Samuel R. Delany
* * *
There are elemental things that do not change in kind, though they change in the specific—our relationship to them may alter, our perception and experience of them may blur when seen through the distorting mirror of society, but the things themselves remain the same. That is why we are fascinated with them, that is what gives them—not their power, for that indwells in them—a handle on our souls for that power to manipulate, a string to pull to make us jump. The sea is one of those things—living on the sea and from the sea, experiencing its storms and dangers, its calms and beatitudes. Neolithic fishermen, twenty-first-century mermen—the life is much the same: they would understand each other in that respect at least. Death is another such thing. Everybody understands death, eventually. And the rhythm of the generations: one up into sunlight and prominence, the other down into dusk and obsolescence; one knowing where the other has to go, the other knowing where the old one has been, and neither bit of knowledge making the slightest amount of difference to that ancient clock, which keeps on ticking rhythmically as it always has, regardless. That’s another.
Samuel R. Delany, one of the best modern SF authors, here gives us a vividly realized world, thoroughly in flux, elementally unchanged, a mirror and a window.
G.D.
* * *
Sometimes I go down to the port, splashing sand with my stiff foot at the end of my stiff leg locked in my stiff hip, with the useless arm a-swinging, to get wet all over again, drink in the dives with old cronies ashore, feeling old, broken, sorry for myself, laughing louder and louder. The third of my face that was burned away in the accident was patched with skin grafts from my chest, so what’s left of my mouth distorts all loud sounds; sloppy sartorial reconstruction. Also I have a hairy chest. Chest hair does not look like beard hair, and it grows all up under my right eye. And: my beard is red, my chest hair brown, while the thatch curling down over neck and ears is sun-streaked to white here, darkened to bronze there, ‘midst general blondness.
By reason of my being a walking (I suppose my gait could be called headlong limping) horror show, plus .a general inclination to sulk, I spend most of the time up in the wood and glass and aluminum house on the surf-sloughed point that the Aquatic Corp gave me along with my pension. Rugs from Turkey there, copper pots, my tenor recorder which I can no longer play, and my books.
But sometimes, when the gold fog blurs the morning, I go down to the beach and tromp barefoot in the wet edging of the sea, searching for driftglass.
It was foggy that morning, and the sun across the water moiled the mists like a brass ladle. I lurched to the top of the rocks, looked down through the tall grasses into the frothing inlet where she lay, and blinked.
She sat up, long gills closing down her neck and the secondary slits along her back just visible at their tips because of much hair, wet and curling copper, falling there. She saw me. “What are you doing here, huh?” She narrowed blue eyes.
“Looking for driftglass.”
“What?”
“There’s a piece.” I pointed near her and came down the rocks like a crab with one stiff leg.
“Where?” She turned over, half in, half out of the water, the-webs of her fingers cupping nodules of black stone.
While the water made cold overtures between my toes, I picked up the milky fragment by her elbow where she wasn’t looking. She jumped, because she obviously had thought it was somewhere else.
“See?”
“What . . . what is it?” She raised her cool hand to mine. For a moment the light through the milky gem and the pale film of my own webs pearled the screen of her palms. (Details like that. Yes, they are the important things, the points from which we suspend later pain.) A moment later wet fingers closed to the back of mine.
“Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”
“I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”
“They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through a piece in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”
“Ohhh!” She breathed as though the beauty of the blunted triangular fragment in my palm assailed her like perfume. Then she looked at my face, blinking the third, aqueous-filled lid that we use as a correction lens for underwater vision.
She watched the ruin calmly.
Then her hand went to my foot where the webs had been torn back in the accident. She began to take in who I was. I looked for horror, but saw only a little sadness.
The insignia on her buckle—her stomach was making little jerks the way you always do during the first few minutes when you go from breathing water to air—told me she was a Biological Technician. (Back up at the house there was a similar uniform of simulated scales folded in the bottom drawer of the dresser and the belt insignia said Depth Gauger.) I was wearing some very frayed jeans and a red cotton shirt with no buttons.
She reached up to my neck, pushed my collar back from my shoulders and touched the tender slits of my gills, outlining them with cool fingers. “Who are you?” Finally.
“Cal Svenson.”
She slid back down in the water. “You’re the one who had the terrible—but that was years ago. They still talk about it, down—” She stopped.
As the sea softens the surface of a piece of glass, so it blurs the souls and sensibilities of the people who toil beneath her. And according to the last report of the Marine Reclamation Division there are to date seven hundred and fifty thousand who have been given gills and webs and sent under the foam where there are no storms, up and down the American coast.
“You live on shore? I mean around here? But so long ago . . .”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“I was two years older than you when the accident happened.”
“You were eighteen?”
“I’m twice that now. Which means it happened almost twenty years ago. It is a long time.”
“They still talk about it.”
“I’ve almost forgotten,” I said. “I really have. Say, do you play the recorder?”
“I used to.”
“Good! Come up to my place and look at my tenor recorder. And I’ll make some tea. Perhaps you can stay for lunch—”
“I have to report back to Marine Headquarters by three. Tork is going over the briefing to lay the cable for the big dive, with Jonni and the crew.” She paused, smiled. “But I can catch the undertow and be there in half an hour if I leave by two-thirty.”
On the walk up I learned her name was Ariel. She thought the patio was charming, and the mosaic evoked, “Oh, look!” and “Did you do this yourself?” a half-dozen times. (I had done it, in the first lonely years.) She picked out the squid and the whale in battle, the wounded shark and the diver. She told me she didn’t get time to read much, but she was impressed by all the books. She listened
to me reminisce. She talked a lot to me about her work, husbanding the deep-down creatures they were scaring up. Then she sat on the kitchen stool, playing a Lukas Foss serenade on my recorder, while I put rock salt in the bottom of the broiler tray for two dozen oysters Rockefeller, and the tea water whistled. I’m a comparatively lonely guy. I like being followed by beautiful young girls.
II
“Hey, João!” I bawled across the jetty.
He nodded to me from the center of his nets, sun glistening on polished shoulders, sun lost in rough hair. I walked across to where he sat, sewing like a spider. He pulled another section up over his horny toes, then grinned at me with his mosaic smile: gold, white, black gap below, crooked yellow; white, gold, white. Shoving my bad leg in front, I squatted.
“I fished out over the coral where you told me.” He filled his cheek with his tongue and nodded. “You come up to the house for a chink, eh?”
“Fine.”
“Now—a moment more.”
There’s a certain sort of Brazilian you find along the shore in the fishing villages, old, yet ageless. See one of their men and you think he could be fifty, he could be sixty—will probably look the same when he’s eighty-five. Such was João. We once figured it out. He’s seven hours older than I am.
We became friends sometime before the accident when I got tangled in his nets working high lines in the Vorea Current. A lot of guys would have taken their knife and hacked their way out of the -situation, ruining fifty-five, sixty dollars’ worth of nets. That’s an average fisherman’s monthly income down here. But I surfaced and sat around in his boat while we untied me. Then we came in and got plastered. Since I cost him a day’s fishing, I’ve been giving him hints on where to fish ever since. He buys me drinks when I come up with something.
This has been going on for twenty years. During that time my life has been smashed up and land-bound. In the same time João has married off his five sisters, got married himself and has two children. (Oh, those bolinhos and carne assada that Amalia of the oiled braid and laughing breasts would make for Sunday dinner/supper/Monday breakfast.) I rode with them in the ambulance ‘copter all the way into Brasilia and in the hospital hall João and I stood together, both still barefoot, he tattered with fish scales in his hair, me just tattered, and I held him while he cried and I tried to explain to him how a world that could take a prepubescent child and with a week of operations make an amphibious creature that can exist for a month on either side of the sea’s foam-fraught surface could still be helpless before certain general endocrine cancers coupled with massive renal deterioration. João and I returned to ‘the village alone, by bus, three days before our birthday—back when I was twenty-three and João was twenty-three and seven hours old.
A Day in the Life Page 9