Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  When she got closer, she noticed Corey staring at the boat. “Mom...”

  He jumped when his mom yelled, “You put out those candles and get rid of that thing right now!” Then she said to Corey, “Look! A cormorant on the channel marker drying his wings. That’s amazing!”

  They pulled alongside the sloop.

  Emile leaned over, holding his hat in one hand, and threw them a line. “Sorry.”

  “Maybe I should take him back.”

  “I am sorry. He is too young for all that.” He threw Corey a line, holding his hat in one hand.

  “Grandpa?” said Corey, staring up. “Is that a manatee on your chest?”

  “Uncle Emile?” said Abba.

  “Let me help you all up.”

  “Here’s dinner.” Zoe handed it up. “India made it.”

  Emile looked at the basket contemplatively, then smiled. “She was always a great cook.” He cleared his throat. “Well, shall we go below? Come on, Abba. Son, I won’t bite.”

  “I might,” said Jupiter.

  Corey said, “Mom, any juice in the galley?”

  Zoe hurried down after them and lit some candles. In the galley, before allowing Corey to go aft, she sat on a bench and took both of Corey’s hands. “Honey, your grandmother is—”

  He looked at her with an earnest expression. “I know. She’s turning into everything wild. Like it used to be. But I know what it was like.”

  Emile sat on the other bench. “Child, listen.”

  He leaned his forearms on his legs, clasped his hands, bowed his head for a moment, and then looked up.

  “Your grandmother—Zoe Raphael, Aphrodite, Love-of-the-Sea—is all that has died.” The candlelight deepened the shadows on his face. “You’re just a child. You don’t know how it was.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I’ve been in the Islamorada interactive environment—”

  Emile shook his head. “That’s just nonsense. Yes, it’s beautiful, but when they built that, most everything was already gone. They just didn’t give people the numbers, so nobody ever did anything about it while it was slipping away. By the time people started to wake up there were ten Florida panthers left. Tourists could see an itsy-bitsy patch of coral when they snorkeled and dove. Once they were back on the boat, they were encouraged to imagine it still stretched from the Dry Tortugas to Elliott Key. But it didn’t. No, child. It was gone.”

  Jupiter saw that he’d found her Scotch while she was gone. He picked up the half-full glass and took another sip. Tears stood in his eyes.

  She splashed some in a glass.

  COREY

  THE OLD MAN, my grandpa, was scary. So was grandma, like clowns are scary, but she smiled and waved at me from inside her glass. Then she closed her eyes and seemed to sleep. I didn’t know how she could sleep in the water. Her hair was long, wavy, green tubes of coral. She looked like she was all over strange flowers, all different bright colors and patterns. I thought I saw a skull on the berth next to her, kind of covered with a blanket.

  Mom looked really sad. “She’s tired, honey,” she said. “Maybe you can talk to her tomorrow.”

  Grandpa was drinking whisky. Abba was poking around. “What a cool lab! You have everything here. Do you know where the coral gardens are?”

  “Some old ones. Don’t know if they survived.”

  “Have you ever told anyone where they are?”

  He shook his head. “Do you know how many of them were ruined by tourists wanting to see the marvels? We grew the corals in plastic bags and then planted them in rock. But then she got... more strange. Stem cell stuff. We share a large number of genes and proteins with corals. We’re ancient animals ourselves. Zoe was brave enough to explore that.

  “I woke up one night and saw her injecting herself. Right away I knew what she was doing. I argued. I did my best. I mean, what could I have done? Have her committed? I couldn’t guard her day and night from herself. She persuaded me to try it once, but...” he shrugged.

  I kept looking at grandma. Aphrodite. That’s what grandpa called her. “How come she only has two fingers on that hand?”

  “The fingers? Ahhh. They grow back. Fast. She uses a pain patch. Never watch. You’d throw up. I used to cut them up, bag them, hung them. See? There’s some over there. No, you don’t have to look.”

  Abba went over and flipped on a little light so she could see them better.

  “They grow very quickly in that hormone bath. It’s based on work done at the turn of the century, when volunteers planted coral gardens all around the world. It helped, some, but conditions changed so fast. She has a plan, though—”

  I asked, “Why isn’t she wearing any clothes?”

  “Clothing hurts her. She’s delicate. And her skin is the organ through which her corals grow. Needs light, but not too much. Too much sun kills corals. Coral is a symbiote. Every little polyp has its own stomach. The zooxanthellae—the algae that produces the color—gets CO2; the coral gets oxygen. It’s like a million little rain forests. If the water temp gets too hot, the algae take off for cooler parts. The corals bleach and then die.”

  “She’s really pretty.”

  He looked over his shoulder at her. “Her head is turning to brain coral. A complete conceit, of course; brain corals have no brain. It just looks cool, doesn’t it? She is her own work of art. Always changing. You should see her when she tethers herself to the sea floor and lets reef fish flock round her. It used to be my job to keep the lion fish away. Maybe she’ll let you do that sometime. She doesn’t want to scare you, though. Your grandma Zoe is a hermaphrodite—that is, she has male and female coral—and sunset is the best time for some of them. They swim toward the light and mate. Happens every spring. The spawning. Those creatures are called planulae. Some of them swim for weeks or months to find the right place to land and grow.”

  I kept staring at her, inside the glass tank. I wanted to climb in and hug her, but she looked sharp.

  “Grandma,” I yelled.

  She opened her eyes and looked at me.

  “I... she’s saying... something. I love you, I think.” I pounded it. “Grandma! I love you! Grandma!”

  “You do hear her, sometimes? Singing? Speaking? Whispery? I do. Yes! Don’t run away. I won’t hurt you. I love you. I’m your grandfather. I wanted to give you a hug. There. That’s better. Don’t cry. I know. It’s hard to take in. We’re just trying to take care of her the best we can. I mean, your mom—it’s what she does. That’s right. I’m crying too. Yes. You may go now. Remember. Just remember. It’s all going fast now. Every day we lose more of our own nursery, the world that birthed us.

  “Someday you might go away to a university and learn more. I’d be surprised if you don’t, child. Bring back something for us. Maybe there’s still hope, somewhere, somehow. Remember: you are a part of nature. Not outside of it. Whatever you love, remember: we are all connected.”

  AS COREY, WHO had just turned an uncelebrated thirty, descended near long-dead Conch Reef, the surface of the water billowed above him in a way he always found thrilling. He was entering a different atmosphere, away from the ruined concrete stilt homes on Plantation Key, and his past. First, the Mare Liberum had vanished in a storm, along with his mother and grandparents. The rest of his family died soon afterward when Islamorada’s seal failed during Hurricane Samantha. He didn’t know how he’d survived. He barely remembered those terrible times, and it made him sad to pass the house, where a bunch of drunks lived now. He should know. He’d been one of them for too long. Now he lived on his small boat.

  This was a different world than the one he served, Party Isle, a ten-acre floating tourist town. Nothing fancy. After Islamorada was destroyed, there was no interest in building another expensive high-tech place.

  He’d grown up hearing tales of the splendor of the Great Florida Reef, once almost two hundred miles long, which had stretched from Miami all the way to the Marquesas, rich with li
fe in the gin-clear shallow sea. Below him now was sea desert, a barren floor.

  His winch had broken. It was in the shop. In the meantime, he needed to check on his crates of farmed snapper. He’d fought for the coveted permit that allowed him to call them ‘wild’ when he sold them at the Fish Market at Party Isle, but in truth, there were no wild snapper. He set aside a few to spawn in his own home setup, and put them out here to grow. Native fish in the Keys had been wiped out long ago by overfishing, pollution, invasive species, and the changing habitat caused by the rising, warming sea.

  He wondered if he was in the right place. He looked up. Yeah, there was his float, bobbing above; here was the line, wavering in parallax. It disappeared behind what looked like a wreck. Must be pretty damned old. Wasn’t on any charts. When he was ready to set out the crates, a current had seized his boat and swept him along for a good fifteen minutes. He’d figured what the hell; a new spot might be better, let down the crates, and saved the coordinates. No one ever came out here. He often went all day without seeing another boat.

  Shafts of sunlight swept the barren seascape, modulated by wind-shifted clouds above. Tropical Storm Figaro had just been named, off Africa’s coast, and these storms had a much more statistical likelihood of becoming hurricanes than when he was a child, though the Key West™ Chamber of Commerce and the State of Florida said it was just a normal change in weather patterns, not to worry. He’d been hearing that his whole life. Hunker down; keblang! The big wind comes, the big surge follows, you’re wiped out again. And again. Save your money, water rat. Climb back out of the hole. If you live.

  He should have listened to his aunt Daphne. You have a good mind, Corey. You can only learn so much here, even from us. Do something with your life. Go to the mainland; go to school.

  His mother. Jupiter. He didn’t remember her at all. He’d hardly ever seen her.

  Ah. There they were. Five crates. Lucky that wreck hadn’t sawed off the cable. Another near-mistake: don’t take chances. Go with what you know. If he had the winch, he’d pull them up now. The storm might smash them.

  He hovered next to one of them, and studied the fish that came near him. No signs of disease. Good. If he had, he’d have to wrap each trap in plastic and infuse the bag with antibiotics, and to do that he’d have to hire help, which he couldn’t afford.

  Then, about fifteen meters away, something caught his eye. A trick of light? A human skeleton? A skull, at least, and other bones scattered about. Perhaps a long-ago diver trapped in this wreck.

  He moved closer, hankering to explore the wreck and irritated that his gloves had been stolen off his boat a few days earlier.

  He allowed the current to pull him around the side of the wreck.

  Sunlight swept the sea like a great chord.

  He held up a hand against a surge of color so powerful that it almost seemed like a blow. He was dizzy. Hearing things. A voice. Wild song.

  He closed his eyes and got his breath back into a low, steady pattern, then opened his eyes to a dream.

  It was, he realized, a living reef.

  He floated above it, seeing fish that, to him, had been only fairy tales. A school of yellow wrasses turned on a dime when he moved his hand. The names came to him easily. A parrotfish grazed on a brilliant pink fan coral, eating algae that might smother it. Elkhorn, staghorn, boulder stars. Sargent majors, sea urchins, damselfish. A large spotted ray flew past him, its great wings flapping into blue distance.

  He was pelted with language: names were joy, whispered in his mind. He held back the tears that would fog his mask. He forced himself to keep track of time. Three more minutes... two...

  He turned to ascend, and then—in the very center—

  A brain coral, surrounded by pink sea fans, waving gently in the current, extending into something so deliberately woman-shaped that he could scarce believe it.

  Grandma?

  But—much larger than a woman, her outlines bourgeoning as a coral garden that he could not see the end of.

  And then it all came back.

  A skull. Lit by a candle, held by a man with long white dreads, wearing a top hat. Something a little boy might well put from his mind. His mother, hugging him. “We’ll be back soon. Weather might kick up, but it’s a supermoon, and Grandma—” she had faltered, and then she squeezed him tight. “Grandma loves you.”

  He would come back and find, somewhere, the name, Mare Liberum. His mother was here somewhere, and his strange old grandfather.

  His family.

  He reached out and touched what seemed like Aphrodite’s outstretched hand, somewhere to the north of what seemed lively, smiling eyes that he knew must be a dream—

  A fire ran through him.

  The world spoke.

  Intimate... immensity...

  He streamed into the outer reaches of world and time. The colors were complex, multilayered, stuttering, then smooth, a series of signals that woke him. Images of beautiful sea, and beautiful life, surged through him like a shock. He floated in a cornucopia of astonishing life for he knew not how long, lost in awe.

  Go.

  No.

  Go.

  I can’t.

  Who... do... you... love...

  He considered.

  The sea. But also the sky. The land. But also the stars.

  His life, which now seemed precious. Like all life.

  The music he’d run from so hard all his life infused him. He moved to it as he ascended—carefully, slowly—toward light, a thing of the sea rising to what might be the light of the moon, in young, distant seas, in the far-distant time of early life.

  MY NAME IS Corey Raphael. I am fifty-five years old at this time, an astronaut-scientist. I am on my way with some of my very close relatives to Kepler 382b, but our ship will adjust course as it receives new information.

  We aim to form a planet-spanning reef that communicates with humans, so that humans will care. We’re going to try and do it right this time.

  Of course, there may be other life there. Or perhaps we can start over. We’ll see how it all works out.

  These are all stories that my Grandma Zoe saved. They are stories of non-human life, but, as you will see, all life is related. There are millions of stories. Build, tear down, learn, build again. Maybe by the time we get there, we will do better.

  Enjoy.

  Wake me when it’s time.

  BECAUSE CHANGE WAS THE OCEAN AND WE LIVED BY HER MERCY

  – CHARLIE JANE ANDERS –

  1. THIS WAS SACRED, THIS WAS STOLEN

  WE STOOD NAKED on the shore of Bernal and watched the candles float across the bay, swept by a lazy current off to the north, in the direction of Potrero Island. A dozen or so candles stayed afloat and alight after half a league, their tiny flames bobbing up and down, casting long yellow reflections on the dark water alongside the streaks of moonlight. At times I fancied the candlelight could filter down onto streets and buildings, the old automobiles and houses full of children’s toys, all the waterlogged treasures of long-gone people. We held hands, twenty or thirty of us, and watched the little candle-boats we’d made as they floated away. Joconda was humming an old reconstructed song about the wild road, hir beard full of flowers. We all just about held our breath. I felt my bare skin go electric with the intensity of the moment, like this could be the good time we’d all remember in the bad times to come. This was sacred, this was stolen. And then someone—probably Miranda—farted, and then we were all laughing, and the grown-up seriousness was gone. We were all busting up and falling over each other on the rocky ground, in a nude heap, scraping our knees and giggling into each other’s limbs. When we got our breath back and looked up, the candles were all gone.

  2. I FELT LIKE I HAD ALWAYS BEEN WRONG HEADED

  I COULDN’T DEAL with life in Fairbanks any more. I grew up at the same time as the town, watched it go from regular city to mega-city as I hit my early twenties. I lived in an old decommissioned solar power station with five o
ther kids, and we tried to make the loudest, most uncomforting music we could, with a beat as relentless and merciless as the tides. We wanted to shake our cinderblock walls and make people dance until their feet bled. But we sucked. We were bad at music, and not quite dumb enough not to know it. We all wore big hoods and spiky shoes and tried to make our own drums out of drycloth and cracked wood, and we read our poetry on Friday nights. There were bookhouses, along with stinktanks where you could drink up and listen to awful poetry about extinct animals. People came from all over, because everybody heard that Fairbanks was becoming the most civilized place on Earth, and that’s when I decided to leave town. I had this moment of looking around at my musician friends and my restaurant job and our cool little scene, and feeling like there had to be more to life than this.

  I hitched a ride down south and ended up in Olympia, at a house where they were growing their own food and drugs, and doing a way better job with the drugs than the food. We were all staring upwards at the first cloud anybody had seen in weeks, trying to identify what it could mean. When you hardly ever saw them, clouds had to be omens.

  We were all complaining about our dumb families, still watching that cloud warp and contort, and I found myself talking about how my parents only liked to listen to that boring boo-pop music with the same three or four major chords and that cruddy AAA/BBB/CDE/CDE rhyme scheme, and how my mother insisted on saving every scrap of organic material we used, and collecting every drop of rainwater. “It’s fucking pathetic, is what it is. They act like we’re still living in the Great Decimation.”

  “They’re just super traumatized,” said this skinny genderfreak named Juya, who stood nearby holding the bong. “It’s hard to even imagine. I mean, we’re the first generation that just takes it for granted we’re going to survive, as like a species. Our parents, our grandparents, and their grandparents, they were all living like every day could be the day the planet finally got done with us. They didn’t grow up having moisture condensers and myco-protein rinses and skinsus.”