Wonders of the Invisible World

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Val followed you,” the king said while all around him his daughters wept as if their hearts had broken. “He brought these back with him to show me.”

  “How could it have been real?” Aster whispered, shivering in her bed while tears slipped down her face. “We were—we pledged ourselves in marriage to—we danced with—”

  “Dead princes,” Val said. She stared at him, her face as white as alabaster.

  “Which dead princes?” she asked him. “The ones our father killed because of us?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered gently, though he shuddered, too, at the thought.

  She closed her eyes against a nightmare. “You might have died, too, Val, if you had not kept watch.”

  “I knew someone followed us,” Mignonette sobbed to her sisters. “I tried to tell you. And you would not believe me!”

  “You were all enchanted,” Val said.

  Aster opened her eyes again, looked at him. “Did I know you were there?” she wondered softly. “Or did I only wish it?”

  There was another sound, the clang of the king’s great sword as he drew it from the scabbard and flung it to the floor. Then he took the crown from his head and held it out to Val. “Take my kingdom,” he said with great relief. “You have broken the spell over my house, and over me. I no longer want to rule; there are too many innocent dead among my memories.”

  “Well,” Val said uncertainly, turning the crown, which looked too big for him, over in his hands. “There are worse things that could be.”

  He lifted his eyes, looked at Aster, for comfort, and for friendship. She smiled a little, through her tears, and he saw that she agreed with him: There were worse things that could be than what he had: a kingdom and a choice of flowers from A to M.

  Undine

  All my sisters caught mortals that way. I have more sisters than I can count, and they’ve all had more husbands than they can count. It’s easy, they told me. And when you get tired of them you just let them go. Sometimes they find their way back to their world, where they sit around a lot with a gaffed look in their eyes, their mouths loosing words slowly like bubbles drifting away. Other times they just die in our world. They don’t float like mortals anymore. They sink down, lie among the water weeds and stones at the bottom, their skin turning pearly over time, tiny snails clustering in their hair.

  Easy. When it was time for my first, my sisters showed me how to find my way. In our deep, cool, opalescent pools, our reedy, light-stained waters, time passes so slowly you hardly notice it. Things rarely ever change. Even the enormous, jewel-winged dragonflies that dart among the reeds have been there longer than I have. To catch humans, I have to rise up into their time, pull them down into ours. It takes practice, which is why so many of them die.

  “But don’t worry,” my sisters told me blithely. “You’ll get the hang of it. When you bring the first one home alive, we’ll throw a party.”

  I had to choose a patch of sunlight in my water and swim up through it, up and up in the light until it blinded me, while I kept a vision of mortals in my mind. What mortals I knew were mostly my sisters’ husbands and some mossy-haired, frog-eyed women who had accidentally fallen in love with my snarky water-kelpie cousins as they cavorted among the water lilies in human and horse disguises. But, my sisters assured me, as I moved from our time into theirs my hunger—and my loneliness—would grow. I would be happy to see the human face at the end of my journey. I should not expect to be in the same water there, but it would not be hard at all, they promised, for me to find my way back. I had only to wish and swim.

  They gathered so sweetly around me in the water, all languid and graceful, their long hair flowing as they sang me farewell. The singing helped shift me across time; I felt as though I were swimming through their voices as much as through water and light. When I saw the trembling surface of strange water, I could still hear them, the distant singing of water faerie, so lovely, so haunting.

  I should have turned at that instant, followed it back. But I felt the odd, shallow depths I had reached. My face and knees were bumping stones and I had to break the surface. I stood up, awkwardly, trying to find my balance in the rocky shallows and pulling my hair out of my face so I could see. I took a breath and smelled it first.

  “Yark!” I shrieked. “Gack! What is it?”

  I finally untangled the hair over my eyes and shrieked again. Dead fish. I was surrounded by dead fish. Big ones. Hundreds of them, in various stages of decay, wallowing in the water and reeking. They bumped me as I floundered through the stink, their eyes filmy with death where they weren’t covered with flies. I wanted to screech again, but I had to breathe to do that. I was panting like a live fish by then, taking short little breaths through my open mouth, trying to get out of the river as fast as I could. The stones were slippery with moss. I flailed, terrified of stumbling and falling into the dead fish. Wearing what I did wasn’t helping much; my long dress sagged, wrapped itself around my knees, caught underfoot. At every step, flies swarmed around me from the fish, buzzed into my eyes.

  So, half blind, cursing furiously and gasping like a fish, I rose out of the river, and a mortal caught me in his arms.

  “What are you doing in there?” he shouted.

  I could feel his startled heartbeat, his dry shirt rapidly dampening with me. I opened one eye cautiously. I stood in mud now. I could feel it oozing up between my toes, which didn’t improve my mood, but at least I could catch my balance. The mortal I had snared was very cute, with straight golden hair that flopped above one brow, eyes the gentle blue of our limpid skies rather than of the fierce blue-white blaze above our heads. He wore a shirt with a frog sitting on a lily pad and unrolling its enormous tongue to catch a tiny flying horse. A conversation starter, that would have been, if I hadn’t just waded out of a river full of one.

  I had to answer something, so I said, “I got lost.”

  “In that dress?”

  I looked at it. My sisters had woven it for me out of mosses and river grasses, decorated it with hundreds of tiny bubbles. In this world, it looked like some kind of shimmering cloth overlaid with pearls.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I demanded, trying to kick away the ribbon of greasy fish scales decorating the hem.

  He stared at me, goggling a bit, like the fish. Then his eyes narrowed. “Did you—did you, like, jump off something? After a party? Like a bridge, or something? And instead of drowning you came to in all this—this—” He waved at the appalling river, which was making a sort of gurgling noise as it drained through the fish jammed across it. “What was it? Some guy made you do this?”

  I nodded cautiously after a moment. Some guy, yes. I pushed at my hair, trying to make it more presentable. A nasty odor wafted up from it. I couldn’t cry—why bother with tear ducts if you are born in water? But I had seen mortals do it, and now I knew why. My first human, and here I was, sinking in mud and stinking while vicious little flies bit my ankles.

  Extremely sorry for myself, I sniffed and whuffled piteously, “Yeah. And now I don’t know my way home.”

  “Don’t cry—”

  “What did you do to all these fish?”

  “Me?” he said incredulously. “I just came out here to throw a line in the water. Fishing’s great here when the salmon are running. I could smell this all the way out to the highway. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Fish can’t run,” I said crossly; he seemed more interested in them than in me.

  “It’s an expression,” he explained with exasperating patience. “It’s what they call it when the salmon swim upriver trying to get back to the waters where they were born so they can spawn.”

  “Spawn?”

  “You know—lay their eggs and fertilize them. Propagate. That’s when they’re supposed to die.” I nodded. That happened to mortals often enough where I lived. “Not like this,” he went on. “Not halfway upriver before they’ve gotten home. And look at this water! It should be deeper and fas
t-flowing. It’s like they couldn’t breathe or something in this shallow water. This is all wrong.”

  He was still fixated on them, staring over my shoulder. I saw his point, though. I could never have dragged him under those pathetic shallows. I sniffed again, to reclaim his attention. His eyes came back to me; he touched my bare arms lightly with his fingers. “Ah, poor kid. What a nightmare. Where do you live? I’ll take you home.”

  I had to think, then, which is not something my sisters warned me would be necessary. “Farther upriver,” I said, pleased at my cleverness. I would make him take me to some deep pool where I could lure him under, steal him away from his world, take him back into mine. “But I can’t go home like this. Reeking and covered with fish scales. Do you know a place where I can swim it off?”

  He considered, torn between me and the dead fish. I rolled my eyes in mortification, hoping none of my sisters had followed to watch. But then, considering myself, I could hardly blame him.

  “Sure.” He bent down to collect his fishing gear. “I know just the place.”

  He took me in his truck to his home.

  It was a little cottage not far away beneath some immense trees. His dog came out to greet us, wagging its tail politely until it caught a whiff of me. Then it bounded into my arms, howling joyously, nearly knocking me over.

  “Whoa!” my mortal said. “Down, Angel. She loves company.” Angel was big and golden, with a stupid grin on her face; she acted like she wanted to roll around on the ground with my dress. “Down! My name’s Mike, by the way. Mike Taylor. What’s yours?”

  “Undine.” At home we have our private names of course, but to mortals we are all Undines. “Ah—what are we doing here?”

  “Undine. Pretty. Come on in. You can wash off in the bathroom; I’ll give you some dry clothes to change into. Then I’ll take you home. Okay?”

  But he wasn’t thinking about me as he led me into his house. It was sunny, cluttered and full of dog hair. He waved me into a tiny room which contained a tank, a basin, and a big porcelain mushroom. I had never seen anything like it. Luckily, he turned the water taps on himself. Some gunky water spurted out. And then it ran clear, so clear I had to reach out and touch it, smell it.

  “Sorry I don’t have a shower, just this tub. The pipes pick up dirt sometimes,” he said unintelligibly. “You have to clear them out. There’s lots of hot water though. I’ll bring you some clothes in a minute. First I have to make a phone call.”

  I filled the tub to the top, managing to stop the flow before I made a waterfall over the side. As it was, I slopped plenty on the floor when I pulled my dress off and got in. I submerged myself completely, rolling and rolling in the warmth, my hair growing silky again, coiling around my naked limbs. I heard Mike’s voice now and then when my ears came out of the water. Fish, he was talking about. Not the mysterious, enchanting young woman he had met on the river’s edge.

  Dead fish.

  “I called the Forestry Department,” he announced, breezing in with his arms full of ugly clothes. “And the Fish and Wildlife Department. And—” He stopped abruptly, the absent look fading from his eyes as I stood up in the water. “Oh,” he whispered. “Sorry.” He didn’t move. I hummed softly, lifting my streaming hair away from my neck with upraised arms. The clothes dropped onto the floor. I held out my hand. He stepped into the water, forgetting even that he was wearing boots. The splash we made as I pulled him down hit the ceiling and pretty much emptied the tub, but neither of us cared.

  But there was nowhere for me to take him except down the drain.

  He lay in my arms afterward, spellbound, contentedly talking, even though he had to balance his drenched boots on the faucets and he was squashing me. I let him ramble, while I tried to think of a way out of our predicament.

  “I don’t make much,” he said, “at the Sport ’n Bait Shop. But I don’t need much to keep up this place, and my truck’s paid for, and there’s just Angel and me... I hunt and fish whenever I can. I love the outdoors, don’t you?”

  “Water,” I murmured. “I love water.”

  “Yeah... That’s why this thing with the fish is so upsetting. Turns out it’s all political, that’s what Fish and Wildlife told me. The water that normally comes downriver got diverted fifty miles upriver. Can you believe that? To water crops in the Saskill Valley, which got hit by drought this summer. Dead crops or dead fish, take your pick. Well, fish don’t vote.” He had begun to fidget; in another moment he would realize he was lying with his pants down and his boots on in a bathtub with a stranger.

  I kissed him, felt his muscles slacken. He babbled on, his voice dreamy again. “You don’t have to go home right away, do you? I’ll take you home later. We can build a fire, grill some burgers, go for a moonlight swim....”

  “Moonlight swim, yes.”

  “Well, we could have anyway, except that I doubt there’s enough water anywhere along the river around here to do much but wade in.” He was beginning to brood again. Then this noise rattled through my spell, some kind of weirdness clamoring for attention that made all his muscles tense. His boots jumped off the faucet; he rolled and floundered clumsily against me, groping for balance.

  “Sorry, babe, gotta get that. It’s probably Sam. She’s always on top of stuff like this.”

  He sloshed out of the bathroom to go talk about fish again, leaving me in a puddle on the bottom of the tub.

  That was the last I saw of water until dawn.

  Another shrillness woke me when it was still dark. I didn’t remember where I was, and something moist was prodding my cheek and panting dankly. Then Mike switched on a light, and Angel, her grin inches from my eyes, licked my face.

  “Garf,” I said, wanting to cry again because this was not supposed to happen.

  “Sorry, babe. Gotta go.” Mike pulled a shirt over his head, popped out again, looking hopeful. “Come with me?”

  “Will there be water?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Which is why, an hour later, I was back with the dead fish, wearing Mike’s clothes, standing on the riverbank with a sign in my hands that said PROTECT THE WILDERNESS IN YOU along with dozens of other dour, cranky humans, some wearing badges, others watching us through one-eyed monsters on their shoulders from a big truck labeled KNOX NEWS TEAM.

  Mike keeps promising me that soon, soon, we will go out and find that moonlit pool, or that deep, deep sunlit lake, and we will float together, locked in one another’s arms, our breaths trailing bubbles behind us as we kiss, and then we will swim beyond the boundaries of mortal love. Soon. But then, on our way to that magical place, the truck will suddenly detour to follow a creek that’s turning all the colors of the rainbow and smelling like garbage. Or it will find the lake with the signs along its shores Warning of the Dangers of Swimming Here. Then he spends hours on the phone with Sam or Kyle or Vanessa, and then wakes me at dawn to walk in circles carrying a sign. And I still hope, because what else can I do?

  But I am beginning to wonder if I’ll be stranded here like a fish out of water for a mortal lifetime with this human, sweet as he is, before I can ever swim my way back to that deep, sun-stained pool where I was born.

  Xmas Cruise

  It was one of those “Rediscover Gaia” cruises, with forty-four cabins, fourteen lecturers, bars fore and aft, a swimming pool, views of quaint towns, icebergs, whales. I gave the cruise to Alex for Christmas. On Christmas day we sailed south from the tip of South America. I found Alex studying her short black hair for gray and her green eyes for wrinkles in a hand mirror by the light of the porthole, and murmuring dreamily, “Strait of Magellan. Tierra del Fuego. Cape Horn. I’m o-o-old, Jeff.”

  “You’ll never be as old as the world,” I said.

  We ate cheese Danishes and drank coffee on the deck, shivering in the bite of breeze off the ice floes. Other passengers sat inside the big dining room, eating scrambled eggs and sausages at tables surrounding a huge old-fashioned tree decorated with colored balls and popcorn
and topped with a golden star. They couldn’t smell the cold fishy brine in the air, or see the distant feathery puffs the whales blew just before they sounded. I didn’t know what they were; I didn’t know where we were. We were somewhere on a planet covered three-quarters with water, and the water was wrinkled like a rhinoceros hide, and a blue that must have been the first shade of blue in the world, because I don’t think it had a name, and I never saw it again.

  We kissed a while; whales dove around us and gulls like chips of white iceberg flashed low over the blue. Then we went into one of the lectures. Alex consulted the program guide; I just followed her, not caring, just wanting to be told anything—the names of birds, or icebergs, whatever—as long as it connected me with that blue.

  Skin, the lecturer talked about. The skin of the ocean. The lecture room had no corners; the chairs were soft, the floor carpeted with patterns of scallop shells and undulating kelp. The soft lights dimmed to a friendly underwater dark, that special, moneyed museum dark, where nothing bad can ever happen to you, and you get lulled into thinking that thinking is easy.

  The ocean’s skin, which was where water touched air and turned that blue, was more than just a color. Living stars, glass-blown eggs, garish snowflakes, strips of light with transparent digestive systems appeared on the viewing screens. “Protozoans, microalgae, minute snails, jellyfish, shrimp, literally thousands of strange, colorful species inhabit this rich, fluid, constantly moving sheen that is at once delicate and enormously flexible,” the lecturer said. He was small, dark, with a voice like a sea lion, and one of those faces that seems to generate light. “Whale sharks feed on it.” He showed a slide of a monster vacuum cleaner inhaling fish bouillon along the surface of the sea. “It’s the incubator for billions upon billions of eggs, which grow up to be the fish fillet on your plate.” He chuckled. We chuckled back. Billions of eggs, blown by Tiffany and Lalique. Billions of fish fillets. I glanced at Alex. Like the lecturer, she was rapt. Rapture of the blue. When the lecture was over, we went out to look at it again. But it was gone. The water was glittery now with sunlight glancing off ice. We joined a group by the rail, not knowing why, just that they were people gathered together and all looking the same direction.