Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  WHO DO YOU LOVE?

  – KATHLEEN ANN GOONAN –

  APHRODITE WAS PERFORMING on a tiny, wooden stage at Sloppy Joe’s™ when he walked in. Who Do You Love. Hoodoo, they called him out west, where he had achieved strange, postapocalyptic fame. Sounding the great chords of a dying planet, or some such nonsense. But fame had kept Emile Raphael busy for a good thirty years, the time that had elapsed since he had fled his wife’s transformation into this amazement, and before whom he was now deeply humbled. He had stumbled on their shared path. She had persevered.

  Knowing the spotlights would blind her, he stood in the doorway, watching. A small sign above her read Do not touch Aphrodite. She stings.

  Tiny, round purple zoanthid polys, rimmed with waving lime-green tendrils, surrounded her eyes. Her body was a coral garden incorporating many, many species, crowded in a riot of color and shape over her lush, still womanly body. Wilderness, taken into herself in processes they had developed together a half-century ago, before the Great Extinction.

  It was a wonder Zoe Raphael-Aphrodite had survived this long. She was a living experiment, a long-running research project, hawking herself as a tawdry sideshow. Probably paid for her life support. Well, his fame, and the money he’d sent back for wife and child, had definitely subsided in the past ten years. He could not even imagine the breadth of all she must have learned since then, what she might contribute to an understanding of marine life. Of all life.

  Emile had arrived in Key West™—a self-sealing, completely artificial theme park floating on the now-submerged site of the old, flimsy town—a week earlier, performing on the street, working up the courage to see her.

  He shifted the human skull he held from right side to his left. The candle that flickered inside made it uncomfortably hot. He felt the heat through his Burmese python-hide jacket, and through his lionfish-skin gloves, which were quite thin.

  His jacket hung open to reveal his ever-changing body-show of extinct life. Hoodoo, of Haitian descent by way of wealthy Palm Beach parents, with his long, white dreads, was tough as his mutant albino crocodile hide top hat after years out in the ruined west, in Asia, and in his favorite city, Paris. Emile Raphael, though, deep inside him, wept at what he saw, at what he’d refused to share, after that first, stinging dose.

  He wondered—could she even see?

  She reclined, propped on one elbow, in a clear, curved chute down which flowed water. The parts of her above water were enveloped in salt mist that gave the bar’s close air the heady scent of sea. He figured it held nutrients, for the thin, long tendrils behind what might pass for her right ear darted in a languid, mesmerizing symphony of hunt. Her chromophores —he did not differentiate between her identity and that of her colonies—were bathed in blue light, and emitted an undulating display of dazzling, fluorescent colors.

  Many corals could live without water for intervals of time. Before the Great Extinction, tidal corals might be dry and exposed to sun for several hours a day. He imagined that, over these decades, Aphrodite—Zoe—had further tweaked many of these qualities in the corals she chose to...

  To what? To support. To manifest. To merge with. To become.

  Small storms of color rushed through her corals, swift as time-lapse clouds. He had, perhaps, come to find out, called by whispers in his mind; a siren enchantment across time and space.

  Color was language, on a reef, as was seaborne scent. What was she saying? How could he, now, ever know? The tones assaulted, compelled, and pulled from him unparsed, long-lost, responses. At this moment, he realized they had always fed his art, just below his knowing.

  The outline of her old, dear face, with its small, pointed chin, was still apparent, though submerged in blooming, moving crenellation. Her blue eyes, when she lifted them and turned her head to stare with all the others—yes! were hers! and yet—

  Of course, she was deeply, irrevocably changed.

  Oh, she was stunning. Her head wasTrachyphyllia geoffroyi, an unfurled brain coral that looked like a tricorner hat, an intense, constantly modulating green in its center, magenta around its rim. Tube corals, azure, gold, and amethyst, undulating like snakes, revealed small living, salmon-hued fan corals dangling below disc anemones.

  A rainbow of a woman, a living work of scientific art. A mature tropical reef in the shape of a voluptuous woman, a wild, fluorescing lost world realized, rippling with life. Conscious in every waving polyp. Her mind, if things had gone as they had boldly predicted, if only to themselves, had permeated the sea animals as they had colonized her body.

  Her song was alien as the sea.

  Just as they had planned.

  He almost dropped his skull when he saw her hands. One rested on her stomach, and had two fingers; the other lay open on her forward-turned haunch, and it had three. His own hands throbbed in sympathetic pain. There was the link. Yes, it was surely real. The inserted gene, activated in certain conditions of light... communication with it much as those with prosthetics moved their limbs through thinking...

  Jupiter—Joop, their daughter—perched on a tall stool behind her mother, in the shadows. He’d met her in Key West Cemetery™ day before yesterday when she was conducting the Conch Train Tour™.

  “CLIMB ABOARD THE Conch Train™,” Jupiter announced, facing the audience in the facsimile of the old tour train, her light-brown, tight-curled hair splendidly long and big, her face nearly as dark as Raphael’s mother’s, with her strong nose and snapping, pure black eyes. He felt a pang: he had missed much. She’d been ten when he had left.

  Of course, she gave the tour the human touch, that extra soupçon of Keys Native; Conch. Her voice, when she spoke, was rich and deep. “All of you know about Ernest Hemingway, of course,” (a hologram of a young, black-haired Hemingway sitting at a bar stool manifested, turned, smiled, and raised a glass before vanishing) “but Elizabeth Bishop, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, lived over on White Street, and Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote a poem about riding his bike through the cemetery—”

  He slipped aboard behind her. “Hoodoo!” yelled one woman at the back. “Love those great tattoos.”

  Removing his python-skin jacket and draping it over one arm, holding his candlelit skull aloft with his other hand, he said, in his deep gravelly Hoodoo voice, “All that you see are extinct. Sea turtles. Key deer. Bald eagles. Schaus butterflies. Florida panthers. Cowhorn orchids...”

  His many tiny scars from skin cancer excisions gave his bodyshow a rough, flickering quality that he thought gave it more depth, so he did not have them removed. “This candle burns in the skull of a member of the most destructive invasive species, humans. We are completely responsible for the destruction of the river of grass, the Everglades, of Florida Bay, of the Great Florida Reef—”

  Jupiter turned, and stared at him with a deepening frown. “Dad?”

  He cleared his throat. “I walk the world doing penance for an ancient wrong we all—”

  “Get off my fucking tour!” She pushed him in the chest. He staggered backwards and fell off the Conch Train. He dropped his skull, which bounced against a tombstone. The train glided silently away, floating on its magnetic path. “And stay away from us, you coward,” she yelled out the door. “I bet you don’t even know you have a grandson!”

  STAY AWAY? NOT possible. Not any longer. He was too old to feel guilty, and he had just found he possessed an unknown, undeserved gift. As he stood in the doorway of Sloppy Joe’s™, he could believe his blood had changed to seawater as he absorbed through sight and sound the haunting songs of myriad corals, whose harmonies and rhythms reminded him of the music of many distant cultures.

  Then Joop rose from her stool, held one hand over her eyes, and stared straight at him, her face suffused with rage. What a strong woman she’d become! He felt a great deal of pride.

  “Who do you love?” he belted out. His and Zoe’s old song, back when they started a just-for-fun act with another prof at the University of Miami, and then it was just t
hem, newlyweds, Aphrodite and Who Do You Love, Live! crashing festivals and political speeches with performance art about the death of their beloved sea.

  Zoe—no, Aphrodite—turned her head and stared at him, leaning forward, aglow and flashing with intent and love that rushed into his brain. Who... do you love? Who... do you love? Who... do you love? Haunting minor tones. Wilderness. Sun-shot depths. Barracuda funnels a full fathom deep; ocean-spanning social networks; creatures that thought in light; plants that fought with color. The long-gone world; the sweet, lost voice of the once-living sea. Well, they both knew her answer to his question. She’d chosen long ago.

  Joop was right. He’d lost his nerve. He had let them both down. He didn’t deserve to be here. He turned to slip out the door.

  “I told you to stay away,” Joop hollered as she pushed through the crowd. She grabbed a chair, carried it overhead, reached the door, and brought it down upon her father’s head.

  APHRODITE

  EVEN THOUGH HE had changed, I knew him. Emile Raphael, the handsome, brilliant guy I married when we were doctoral candidates in marine biology. Face sharp and sorrowful. Still tall, but his chest not as broad. More sinewy, perhaps, and the visions flowing over him echoed mine, in more prosaic ways.

  I could hear him clearly, now.

  He was all my memories of the apocalypse, of when the tragedy unfolding was still fresh, during the years when the data became clear: despite our work, the work of all of us committed to the sea, despite all we’d said and proved and tried to change, the Great Florida Reef was nearly gone.

  Miami, having consumed and destroyed the Everglades and Florida Bay, was repentant. Dutch architects were hired to transform the city into the new model, the floating, self-sufficient, scientific wonder that nanotech and brilliant engineering had built along drowned coastlines everywhere; the ones that could afford it. Still, the oil rigs pumped along the coast of Florida; still we sucked fossil fuel to stoke our sickness, our lack of understanding that we were not alone; that we never had been, and that we could not live without those others, however small.

  We and our colleagues were not entirely rational during the long time of mourning, back in the thirties when we knew for sure the reef would not recover. Everyone walked the halls with tears in their eyes, but Emile and I had a plan; had done research for five years that we called something else.

  We were ready. In the chaos of the changing city, we moved quickly.

  We’d talked about it. Lots. When we met as grad students at a heart-wrenching climate change conference in Copenhagen, we got mad drunk and threw desperate ideas at the wall until some stuck. That was in 2026, before the Florida Keys were drowned, back when we still had hope. Our coral gardens, a statewide effort, where accelerated-growth corals were transplanted, looked as if they would succeed. Long-stalled funds to restore the Everglades were finally released, but they came far too late. We were fighting to save the world, of course, not just our little stretch of South Florida, but it’s all connected. I used to think everyone was, but I was wrong.

  These days, Joop and I sailed down from our compound, about eighty miles to the northeast of Key West, every six weeks or so to make some money, and it was good money. I’d heard about Hoodoo, along with Tall Man, a fire juggler, and Twisted Woman, but I thought the guy in Key West was a copycat, not my ex, who was an international star, ‘The Conscience of the Planet.’ Ha! No, I didn’t give him much thought at all. He was just another performance artist eking out the end-days in the simulacra of Old Key West™. Our beautiful old former state capital was now a state-of-the-art Dutch-designed and Russian-financed floating city that recycled everything and had successfully sealed against hurricanes Christopher, Zena, and Witt. That brought even more tourists, who hoped they would have the chance to ride out the big one for big bucks.

  We had Category 3 storms regularly now, and Category 5 storms at least once a year, and one Cat 6, which hit 310 kph.

  My Moonies were out in force that night I saw him. They came from everywhere. They loved me. Of course, I wanted all of them to Change, but they didn’t know what I was, really, deeply. They simply loved my beauty and my mystery, and were drawn to my song because of their own love of the sea and of nature. The irresistible change was embedded in my genes—as was all the painstaking research I and Emile had done and linked with a wealth of scientific information—but I couldn’t reveal it, and dared not use it. That would have been scientifically unethical. Still, I wanted to point to it.

  Perhaps you know now: I was, indeed, of two minds. Or more. All right, now: many, and those without the human ‘ethics’ that were blind to so much. Was I right?

  Only Jupiter knew. And my sister Daphne, who had finally accepted the decision I’d made so long ago.

  And, of course, Emile.

  He left because he couldn’t take it; it was too painful to watch me. His excuse for his restlessness, and the growing fame that pulled him away. “Too radical for you?” I remember laughing, incredulous. “After all I’ve put up with? All Jupiter and I have put up with? Isn’t this what we planned?”

  He’d pleaded with me not to continue with my transformation, but for more than ten years he hung in there, my partner in crime, my colleague, my intellectual double, my loved one. We spirited equipment and supplies from University labs being replicated in Floating Miami as it neared completion. They would have been thrown away. In the chaos of the transformation, where the vast sums of money being thrown about beggared belief, no one noticed that an old, out-of-date research sloop had gone missing—or maybe the responsible colleague did, and failed to report it. His way of supporting the cause. There was the inevitable storm; it was lost at sea, along with two researchers. We changed the name to Mare Liberum; created a new chain of ownership. There you go.

  I know that the injections burned like fire, because I recorded that data, and that I screamed every time, in our boat out on the wide, sparkling, barren Atlantic, for hours. Sometimes days. I just don’t remember that pain. I know that Emile nursed me on our ever-rocking sloop for months, frantic. I even looked like a monster; the whites of my eyes swelled, leaving my pupils flat, surrounded by raised, red tissue. My face puffed up. I shook uncontrollably; I had seizures. I refused to go to a hospital, afraid they’d flood me with drugs that would stop the process. A doc Emile found who kind of understood turned out to be Catholic. He just made the sign of the cross and left. Webs of light flowed over dying coral stands below the Mare Liberum. The minute rise in water temperature raised waterspouts that spurled erratically across the warmer seas and, more than once, nearly battered us to death. It was always hot. The warmer waters around the Turkey Point Nuclear Plant up near Homestead spawned giant albino sharks that further strained resources. Oil tankers out in the shipping lanes continued their procession, along with ever more gigantic cruise cities that damaged fragile ports.

  But I came through. Changed. Joyous! Infused with this new music, this changed sense of time, this mind extending beyond my small, human self, which built hereditary walls between itself and all the rest of the world, and thought itself the pinnacle of evolution. But evolution is, quite simply, change. That’s all. I am that change; change in the face of sure death.

  In the midst of this, our birth control failed. We were terribly afraid. Emile too, had taken one injection, and it had frightened him. But so far, our girl’s good, and she’s forty—strong, beautiful, smart, and understandably grouchy. She has sacrificed too much. My fault; my own guilt.

  Genetically, she is a mosaic, with strange genes inherited from Emile and I, chimeras. Amazingly, she has a good marriage! Paul, who works on protecting and increasing our native fish, lives in our family compound with my two sisters, Daphne and India, their spouses, and their kids and grandkids. She has a child, Corey, whom I’ve never met. This makes me sad; even angry. He needs to know that both his grandparents are... different.

  Our Key West trips on the Mare Liberum pay for drone shipments of the drugs
and minerals I need.

  I’m just hanging on, though. For Joop. The last time she ran the tests, her tragic face crushed me. My lungs are crackly; my organs are failing. One more supermoon spawn, when we release our gametes into the sea, would do it, I think; move me into that Gaia toward which I so deeply yearn. I’d let go.

  I’m using all my strength and concentration to remain in human mind, to make this record for you, whoever you might be—perhaps a consciousness more strange than mine. It’s the endgame. Stage Four Aphrodite, if you will. I won’t miss living above the sea, except for the people. I might miss me, if that turns out to be possible; if ocean-distributed me turns out to have the vestige of human memory Emile and I planned for, if ever we might re-emerge to a pristine, recovered world.

  All of my research is embedded in the genetic code of every coral I host. They all fight to emerge. I am tired of being a battleground. We all need more room. Joop and I have found four sites that may allow us to survive and thrive, based on analysis of immense data.

  Joop knows it all inside out, and much, much more. She has a doctorate in marine biology, like my sisters. Love of the sea has been in our blood for the five generations we’ve lived in the Keys, and with every generation we’ve learned more; done more. Daphne pushed Joop off to school before you could say But what about Mom? three times fast. They stopped speaking to me for a long time after I became cross-species. But came around; rallied for Joop, to give her her own main chance, and they maintained their crazy sister. I think they were hoping she would make a life elsewhere. I don’t think she would take my path, but the heart of another is a dark forest. Hers, particularly, I’m afraid, when I think of her relationship with her father.

  Emile’s certainly was. Taking off like that. Dirt roads. Barbed wire. Stardom.

  It had been all I could do to keep from laughing (it might have sounded like porpoise chirps) when I saw him across that room, over the heads of those faithful Moonies forever trying to spirit me away to their ceremonies. But it would have hurt his feelings.