Ah, true love never dies. I guess.
The Moonies? Sure. I’d gone out to their sacred island—actually an artificial island in Florida Bay; all the real islands are drowned, landless mangrove flats. I’d never go on or around the spring full moon, though, which frustrated them. Jupiter takes me out to sea, to the gardens, and lowers me in a large, lionfish-proof cage so that I can spawn. Before that moon, I’m too tranced to perform, or to even be around people. A few nights following the full moon, my corals release their gametes—at least, the hermaphrodites do.
Language can’t show you how that feels, though. Better than the best sex ever? It is sex, of course, and for me, it is absolutely and literally ecstatic. I am out of my body, white spawn broadcast across the sea, swimming toward the light. Ecstasy. Ex-stasis. Rapture. My soul moves from my body into the great currents of life itself.
Jupiter pulls me up, eventually. Sometime during the next few days I come to, human again, but with the memory of that urgency, that animal joy, because I am a million animals, and I share their joy multiplied a millionfold, as they release for their own long journey. They tap into my nerves, my brain. Perhaps my humanity changes them too. I hear their voices, now, multi-fluorescing, for sea creatures communicate with color. Audience members can grab a patch of synth at the door, and see my voice. I’m told it’s like diving without the risk. They see things no longer in nature. Of course, they come to see the freak. That’s fine. I educate them. By the time I’m done, they are in love with the sea. Some of them become activists.
The process? It’s taken decades, obviously. At first, my face stopped people dead if they saw me in the street, abloom with changes that, in nature, would have been the work of centuries, but which, in me, was accelerated. In earlier years, after the long, languid sunset, ever more lurid since the Great Dust Storm, I’d climb the ladder from a good long soak under the pier, and make my way down breezy, atmospheric streets to Sloppy Joe’s™.
Jupiter, my protector, my stalwart, my dear heart, usually showed up about that time, having sold whatever lionfish she’d caught during the day. Lionfish, another creature invasive to the fragile Keys ecosystem, eat coral voraciously and have wiped out most native fish species. Fine human food, though.
Now, I’m completely dependent on water. I can barely function out of it.
But—wait—I can hear you, you say. There’s nothing strange about you. You’re speaking. You have language.
Ha! Don’t take that too literally. I’m doing this before I do what I need to do, for the record. If you hear this at all, it’s in your mind, not in your ears, and I have succeeded. Maybe you’re seeing this in pictures. Maybe it’s in music. It’s not easy to make this leap. But now I’m part of your brain, right? And this is centuries later, perhaps. Maybe light-years. I don’t know where you are, who you are, what you are. Maybe you’re hanging out in orbit or waking from a light-year of cryogenic sleep and being schooled. Maybe you’re a manatee, a parrot, or a child in Chile. Welcome.
But no, I can’t really speak. My body and mind are moving away from that. Singing takes place in a different part of the brain, and this is a great novelty, even for me. I can still take in a great breath of water-saturated air, and form word and sound but mostly sound. The sounds of sea creatures. My translation of wavelengths of color, or the clicking, chirping, singing voices of mammal cousins.
Emile didn’t really stand out in the Key West crowd. Everyone’s trying to outdo the other. But when I saw him, still handsome but oh, so old, shorts held up by a rope, barefoot, and he belted out “Who do you love,” every head turned.
Jupiter went ballistic. Poor Emile was curled up on the floor when the cops pulled her off. I was terrified! And mad.
Aphrodite bailed her daughter out of jail, but Zoe spent the night at the ER with her ex-husband while kind nurses doused her with a pail of salt water now and then. I made them believers, at least.
It is hard to be many. But then, it is also pretty hard to be one. I never was just one. Probably, no one is.
Jupiter got us loaded onto the Magic Penny Water Taxi in Key West Harbor, onto the Mare Liberum, and, anger in her every movement—she did not speak, and did not even look at us—out into the Atlantic, solar sails unfurled, and headed northwest, toward home, a trip that would take about 24 hours.
I was below, in my ballast tank of sea water. Emile slept next to me in Jupiter’s narrow bunk, his scarred, dream-raddled body twitching.
Neither Emile nor I wanted to see my angry sisters. But Jupiter was pissed, and we were too tired to object.
i am alien
i am you
JUPITER
JUPITER LOVED THIS sail up the Keys in the Atlantic. She could pretend, for a few days, that things were almost like they were when she was a little girl, before the strongest hurricane on record, Victor, washed the thin land layer covering the limestone Keys out into the Gulf of Mexico and gave the coup de main to the environmental damage that humans had taken so far down the road.
Well, her cargo had tried. There they were, down there in the Mare’s research lab where they’d started it. She hoped Emile was getting a good look at the result of what he’d helped bring about. As far as she was concerned, they were a pair of addicts. No matter how her mother tried to tell her about how amazing it all was, when it came to watching your mother cut off her own fingers because they ached with new growth, because they were ready to be harvested, and cut up into tiny chunks to grow, a hundred times more quickly than non-humanized coral, in the chemical bath that accelerated their growth, to plant in one of the coral gardens they’d guarded for years—
Crap. She gave the wheel a vicious twist, and heard something heavy that she hadn’t secured crash, below. Her life was hopelessly snarled.
Yes. She’d had it. She was going to live with her family always now. Corey, her seven-year-old son and Paul, her husband, would be out of their minds with joy. She would be too. Let the two down there carry on.
They had never been any good for each other. She’d heard them arguing since birth—arguing, then making love, then working together like a dream for a few months. They’d had a little band, the hopeless hams—Aphrodite and Who Do You Love, wild characters singing eco-songs for tourist change. But they’d always seemed like an act to her. Never like normal people. But how, she asked herself, would she know? What was normal now? Groups of waterfolk living in tight colonies, living the self-sufficiency dream; big university research centers; companies still launching their ships to Mars; cities, sealed from their own pollution, and little in between. Yes, she’d been to the mainland. She’d found Paul there. He was from Minnesota. He always said he was glad he’d chosen this life, and her whole nutty clan, but sometimes she could scarce believe him. He’d put up with a lot. And found it all fascinating, he said. Sweet guy.
She blinked. Pushed autopilot and ran to starboard. Could that have been a sea turtle? They were extinct. Hurricane Victor and subsequent storms, increasingly frequent and harsh, had wiped away their nesting grounds ages ago.
She must have been dreaming.
Below, she grabbed a Green Iguana from the fridge, then made her way from the galley through the lab and aft.
There they were. Mom and dad. Mom sleeping in her ballast-tank, heartbreakingly beautiful, hair-tubes undulating as the Mare Liberum plowed through the waves. Her dad—well, he was good-looking. Maybe he’d really been as handsome and talented and smart and all as her mother had always told her. All she knew was that he’d never been around.
She emerged into the sunlight and the vast turquoise sea. She could see right across what had once been Big Pine Key into the Bay, where the water seemed divided into horizontal bands of blue and green. Hardy mangroves still grew in some spots, creating the illusion of tiny islands, but there was no land beneath the roots that sprang like fountains from the trunk, only submerged flats. Still, they provided shade and habitat for sea creatures and for birds.
It was somethi
ng. But probably not enough.
After some hours, she reached the Seven Mile Bridge. The channel markers were still there, more important than ever since they were all, now, water folk. The sea rushed beneath the Mare Liberum as she turned to port, toward the bay.
The bridge rose from water and descended into water. The road on each side was submerged—not deeply; just by a foot or so, but the Keys were once again the isolated islands they had always been, save for a brief century of train and road.
As on all the Keys, the remains of concrete stilt homes were scattered here and there, most empty. The bridge was a brilliant sight, covered with self-sustaining habitats and recycling technology developed via various space programs, festooned with native plants, some growing hydroponically and some in expensive imported soil. It was the hopeful counterpart to Key West™. Real life.
As she swept beneath the bridge, she held steady against the tidal current rushing out through the deep channel, and children leaned against the railing overhead, screaming and waving. A teddy bear landed on the deck next to her. An accident, but she could not stop to return it. She turned and waved her thanks. Corey was seven, probably a little too old for a teddy bear. But maybe not.
He’d never seen Grandma Zoe. She’d thought it would be too scary. Or Grandpa Emile. He was just a legend. Hoodoo. She snorted. Given her own reaction last night, she was realizing that this approach was probably a bad idea. Family dynamics could jump out and bite you, hard.
After sailing in the Bay for several hours, she was almost home. She passed through the cut. An egret hid inside the dark mangrove jungle like a bright white exclamation point. One, where there had once been many. This much was positive: humans were giving up, at last, on South Florida. Though Floating Miami had destroyed an immense amount of habitat despite the care the developers professed to take, no one, up there, lived outside its safe, self-sealing environs in this age of fiercer, more frequent hurricanes. It was against the law here, as there. No one would insure you, and no one enforced the law. You were just on your own.
The rapacious pillage of the Everglades had ceased, and nature—cautiously; gradually—was returning, adapting to the changed salinity and temperature of bay and sea, if it could. But invasive species still ruled, and many niches had emptied. The fragile web of life was torn, and perhaps would not mend. Joop was always reminded that they teetered on the edge of precipitous decline.
Emile emerged from below, clad in his rope-belted shorts. He helped anchor the Mare Liberum, then went below. He returned with two cold Green Iguanas. He gazed at their fair colony, about a quarter-mile away.
“Home, sweet home. It’s been a long time.”
“I’m going to introduce you to Corey. Your grandson.”
“Think he’d want to meet the bad guy? The unethical scientist who—well, whatever I did.”
“You were not alone, and nobody ever said that.”
“Are you telling me my grandson is stupid? Can’t pick up on the subtext?”
“I’ll bring him out in a few hours, and you can see for yourself.”
“You know, you’ve turned out all right. Kind of weird, but all right.”
He’d donned another iteration of his regalia: mutant albino crock hide top hat, secured with a big hat pin, iguanaskin string tie, lionfish cowboy boots. His torso effervesced a changing scenario of a healthy reef, dim in the sun, but hinting at its fluorescing power in the right light.
Jupiter examined her father with a long, careful look, the look of daylight. The first time she’d had a chance.
“Who’s weird? I’m the only grownup here.” She waved toward the cut. “Remember the Turkey Point nuclear plant up by Homestead? Hot water spawns giant mutant albino crocks. A forty-footer hangs out in the mangroves, so you might not want to swim. Or then, again, you might need a new invasive species hat.”
IT WAS SOOTHING to cast off the dinghy. It had drawn a good, full charge from the long sail. The shallow bay was smooth, crystalline green. The bay floor, covered with sea grass when she was a kid, was mostly a lifeless desert, but a mutation that found conditions favorable had put forth scattered, grassy clumps that sheltered tiny, near-transparent fish.
She headed directly toward the colony, where the windowless, roofless concrete stilt homes built to codes developed fifty years earlier, around 2030, were aligned along the watery path of old Route One. Each was the fiercely defended home of old Conch families who thrived in this new environment using cisterns and a hodgepodge of desalinization technologies.
Abba, her niece, had painted a reef mural on the south side of the house, which covered the seam between the original concrete wall and the rebar and concrete-filled block they’d scavenged to rebuild the side of the house. It had been smashed when Victor picked up a cruise boat in the most massive storm surge on record and pushed it across the reef, across four miles of shallow seas, and into Florida Bay, where its remains still rested, taking out a quarter-mile of homes along the way. The Keys had been under order of evacuation, but many Conchs, as was the custom, had stubbornly refused to leave, and their remains had been found as far away as Cape Sable, thirty miles northwest. There had been talk of distributing free nanotech building materials to restore their homes, but in the end it was decided that squatting—which is what it was called, even though they’d owned this property since the 1990s—should not be encouraged.
She reached the edge of the subdivision, where a few large bayfront homes had been made liveable, and her home assumed detail.
Most of Abba’s mural was obscured by hanging vegetable gardens. Her extended family—aunts, their husbands, children, and grandchildren who had not lit out for the mainland—occupied several linked, rehabbed houses. In rooftop container gardens, they sowed soybeans for a steady supply, and grew lettuces under a shade lattice on the north side of the house. Nets of farmed clams hung in the shallows in which the houses stood, and orchids flowered in the shade of bean, cucumber, and big-leaved squash vines. The wind farm set up by Keys Electric long ago still produced power, and several houses were covered with solar panels. Potted citrus trees shaded some rooftops. They paid Islamorada, a nearby floating city shaped like a ray that sheltered them in hurricanes, for any fuel they couldn’t otherwise produce; it was their biggest expense.
She zipped between unsalvageable houses, over the remains of bayside streets—Heron, Osprey, Cormorant—where she had once skateboarded. Now, their heaved remains shimmered a foot below the dinghy for a few seconds. She crossed submerged lots and deeper canals and tied up at the floating dock lashed to concrete stilts. Across the straight, watery stretch of Route One were more ruined houses, then the green Atlantic, where distant oil rigs labored. Just not for them.
Daphne’s flats boat was missing; she’d probably picked up some tourists at Islamorada for an eco-tour of Florida bay.
“Hey!” she yelled, as she climbed the stairs.
“Joop!” Abba, eighteen, ran down the stairs, long black hair streaming behind her, wearing shorts and a halter top. “How’s grandma?”
“Okay,” said Jupiter, hugging thin Abba tightly for a second. No one but Daphne knew the full scope of Project Aphrodite, and she had always disapproved.
She yelled, “Corey?”
He barreled down the stairs and ran into her so hard that she had to grab the railing.
She hugged him with her free arm. “Hey, kiddo.”
“Mom!” He pulled her up the stairs.
“You’re pretty strong for seven. Where’s your dad? I haven’t seen him for weeks.”
“Gathering data and calibrating the instruments.” Corey was a sturdy, deeply tanned boy with tight brown curls. “He said it was too rough to take me. He won’t be back for a few days.”
They reached the fourth floor, the living level, open to breezes and spectacular views of the ocean and the bay. Comfortable, cushioned bamboo furniture was scattered here and there. Jupiter took a deep breath. Home. She wished there was someone to take
the second shift out on the Mare Liberum. Couldn’t she just leave them there? No. Emile didn’t know how to take care of Aphrodite. Each of her corals required a different feeding protocol. Tomorrow they’d be oceanside, and she’d go down in her cage. Some pillar corals were ready to be anchored in Garden #3. Emile could go. He’d be astounded. Maybe she should be proud of them both. She’d consider it, anyway.
“Package here?” she asked Abba.
“Drone’s late.”
More of the family drifted in, hugged. Then she dropped her bombshell.
“Emile’s back.”
“What?” India, her mother’s youngest sister, sprang out of her chair, grabbed the binoculars, and went over to the bayside railing. “I sure wouldn’t recognize him. A top hat? How does he keep it on his head? Where’s Zoe?”
“I think I’m going to take Corey out to meet them,” said Jupiter.
“Well,” said India, giving her a look, “it’s up to you. I’ll pack you a dinner.”
“I’m coming too,” said Abba.
“I wish Paul were here,” Jupiter said.
Corey ran over to the balcony and yelled, “Grandma and Grandpa, I’m coming to meeeet you!”
“Come here,” said Jupiter. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“I know all about her.”
“Yes. Well. We’ll see. Just remember that they both love you.”
“They’ve had a hard life,” said India.
When Jupiter bowed her head and started shaking, India said, “Honey, I’m only trying to—”
Jupiter raised her head. Tears streamed down her face, but she was laughing, hard. “You—don’t—know—the half of it!”
IT WAS LATE by the time the drone brought the necessary supplies, and they headed out to the Mare Liberum. They flew toward a splendid sunset, and Jupiter flipped on the running lights.
Drowned Worlds Page 12