Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49

by Seanan McGuire

  “With what?” I ask.

  Either La Boca is fed up with my constant presence, or he has reached a particularly engrossing scene in his book. “Find the Captain, help him feed the boilers. Help Isidore with dinner. Just go. You’re driving me mad.”

  I go, resisting a childish urge to slam the door behind me. I imagine ripping the book from La Boca’s hands and beating him with it. That’s my ship! I would shout, but no, I’m going to give up on that ship anyway. Tonight. I swear I am. I stomp up to the deck, trying to take some of the anger out on my soles.

  The Canth has a Perpetual Motion Engine; I have only to crank it once, and then it can go forever, until the Canth comes to a stop. The movement of each part charges the movement of the next—one leg steps forward, powering the series of cogs and coils in her underbelly in preparation for another step. It is a perfect design, compact, fuel-less, and light.

  In the engine’s core, the epicenter of the perpetual motion machine, is the heart of my mother, Coelacanth Pearce, who—so long as I am here to crank that engine—will never truly die, nor cease to love me. But I cannot reach her now.

  The Jerónimo is larger and boasts a coal-fueled combustion engine. When I step out on deck, I can see a plume of black smoke rising from the stern. It is strange, to stand on the open while the waves spit spume at me, where my view is full of wheeling white seabirds instead of spiny scabbardfish and mottled eels. The sea is so flat, nothing at all like the slopes beneath it. The sky is so vast; it makes me feel minute and slightly nauseous. I can see one ship on the horizon, a few miles away, but that is all.

  Rios is at the stern, shoveling coal. He’s sweaty and soot-smeared. He’s singing in a dialect that I don’t know, but I can tell—from the way his voice drops into a smooth baritone before darting up to a soprano trill—that it is a love song. I have a stupid, angry urge to grab onto him and cry, or else shove him overboard and watch him drown. There has never been a time in my whole life that I felt so terrifically helpless as I feel now.

  When Rios sees me, he drops his shovel and grins, but all the while the music keeps pouring out of him. He sweeps toward me, snatches up my hand, perhaps expecting me to pull away. I don’t. Instead, I let him drag me into his parody of a Chotiça, stumbling woodenly in his wake. It’s hard to be angry, or even to think of the Canth, in the face of his mulish good mood.

  I am not much of a dancer, not with a partner. At home, in India, I learned another kind of dance, one composed of isolated movements: a jut of the hip, a roll of the shoulder, the toss of my hair, and subtle gestures of my hands. Rios is sloppy, full of feeling rather than precision. I’m not in the mood, but to push him away would be churlish. Besides, he is a good lead.

  I am not much of a follow.

  All at once he stops, stepping away from me. “Are you never happy, Captain?”

  I look up at the birds, down at the deck, anywhere but at him. “On my ship, yes. Always.”

  Worry chases annoyance across his face. I am ready to tell him what I have decided—but the smoke drops away and the deck shudders under us and the clouds don’t move so quickly through the sky.

  “What in Hell?” demands Rios, opening one of the copper tubes that lead down into the ship. “Why are we stopping?”

  La Boca’s voice rumbles up from the belly of the Jerónimo. “Because she has stopped, sir. Miss Pearce’s ship.”

  Rios throws his sooty hands in the air, stomps the heels of his boots on deck flamenco-style. He lets forth a baritone cry of delight. “You see! You see! I knew we’d find her!”

  I let him grab my hands and spin me in a circle; I let the grin engulf my face, I am so relieved. “My name is Captain Pearce,” I call into the piping. “And don’t forget it.”

  • • •

  The Jerónimo boasts only two sets of diving gear. Isidore explains, “Usually, the Captain and I are the only ones that use them. Heitor stays aboard, makes sure we are safe, keeps the ship on course, watches out for us.”

  “Heitor?” I ask. I am struggling with the arms of the suit.

  Isidore smiles. “My Heitor. La Boca.”

  “You’re married?”

  “Ugh, no!” Isidore pretends to gag. “He is my … boyfriend. Not the kind of man you want to marry.”

  “What kind of man is he?” I ask, fastening the suit below my chin.

  Isidore winks.

  Anselmo Rios does not struggle with the suit the same way I do; it’s one he’s worn before. So far from the ocean floor, this crew must have more use for dive suits than I do on the Canth—though what for, I’m not exactly sure. You don’t need a suit to fish for cod.

  “Ready, ready?” he asks. He is happy as a child, still dancing even in the metal and rubber armor of his dive suit.

  I heft my helmet, frowning at the thin hose that will be my only link to air. “When you are, Captain.”

  We salute each other. Unlike in his dancing, Rios’ salute is militarily precise.

  • • •

  The moment I’m submerged, I feel as if I have come home.

  The helmet is difficult, clunky—and, instead of the clever narrow window in the side of the Canth, it boasts twenty-five circular eyes through which, if I hold my head just right, I can look out onto the dark expanse of the seabed.

  This part of the reef is not deep, and the light filtering down from above makes it easy enough to see. It looks like the reef is an island pushing up out of the much deeper ocean bed, brilliant with coral. Through the small windows in my helmet I can make out the frown of a fat bonito, the ruddy spikes of a flying gurnard, flashing silver breams, and the grey-green freckles of live cod. I feel as merry as Captain Rios did: The Canth is close, and soon I will be home.

  Rios taps my shoulder. He is pointing down at the seabed with his gloved hand; I wish she could see his expression.

  At first I do not understand what he wants me to see. There are nothing but rocks below us. Ah, but they are more than rocks—I sputter in amazement—they are building stones. Now that I’m really looking, I can make out a square foundation, and an archway.

  “The Lost City?” I ask, but of course he cannot hear me, and even if he could, he wouldn’t know what I mean.

  We sink lower as Isidore lets out the ropes that tether us to the Jerónimo. It is painfully slow going, but it gives me time to examine the ruins beneath us.

  It is not just one building overgrown with posidonia and ringed by schools of alewives. It is a whole dead city.

  My throat clenches. It’s only a story, isn’t it? Still, it’s a story I remember from my childhood: the Lost City. Sea levels rise, cities disappear beneath the waves. And suddenly I’m thinking of Pompeii, that old Italian city whose dig reports my mother pored over. The German man, too, searching for evidence of the Trojan War and actually finding it. Is it possible, then? Is this lost city the one that she, and my father, had been hoping to find?

  She brought me here. Led me here. Showed me the way.

  I startle as a scowling John Dory swims just in front of me; if it weren’t for the helmet, I would be able to feel its wake against my nose. I watch it go, and while my eyes are still out of focus, I glimpse my ship.

  Her race across the ocean floor had ceased. Now she lies on the ocean floor, sheltered by a sloping wall, limbs tucked tidily beneath her as if sleeping. Waiting for me.

  There is a sudden jerk on the line, and the winch begins to haul us back up. I flail, finding myself suddenly off-balance. Our ascent is swift. My inner ears begin to burn with the relentless change in pressure. The Canth disappears from my view.

  • • •

  It is not Isidore’s hands that haul us from the water; there are three newcomers on the boat, two to drag Rios and me onto the deck, one to stand over Isidore and point the gun. One of the unarmed men wrestles me to the deck, prying off my helmet. The other does the same to Rios, who swears creatively.

  The stranger holding the gun, a young man with sandy hair—no more Portug
uese than I am—nods at me. “Hello, Miss Pearce.”

  I give him a cold stare, trying to gain some kind of control over the situation. “You are a stranger to me, sir.”

  “But I know you,” he says, “You are Aditi Pearce. Michael’s daughter.”

  On the heels of my recent discovery—the city below us, and the Canth within—this greeting is both overwhelming and entirely expected. “Yes,” I say. “I am.”

  “But what are you doing,” the young man asks—he has a slight Danish accent, “in the company of pirates?”

  “Pirates?” I ask. I catch a look of guilt on Isidore’s face. “Pirates?” Rios tilts his chin into the air and does not meet my eye. I shove at my captor; he backs away, looking to the Dane for confirmation. “These people,” I say evenly, getting to my feet and directing a frosty glance at each of our captors in turn, “are under my employ, helping me recover my ship.”

  Rios makes a face at me. I ignore him.

  “And where is your ship?” demands the Dane.

  I point between my feet. “Below,” I say, “in the dead city, where she led me.”

  The Dane lowers his gun, reaches out to shake my hand. “My name is Japetus Fixe. I work with your father.”

  • • •

  We find La Boca folded into a chest in the kitchen. “Have they gone?” he asks. “I was going to sneak out under cover of darkness and see to them.” This might well be a coward’s bragging, but he is holding a large fishing knife in each large hand. I believe that this may well have been his intent.

  “Get out of there,” snaps Rios. “You are crushing the potatoes.”

  Isidore helps him; La Boca’s legs appear to have gone numb. “We’re not really pirates,” Isidore explains. “We are … ”

  “Venture capitalists,” grunts La Boca.

  “Entrepreneurs,” mutters Rios.

  I suggest, “Hired help.” My tone is so dry it makes the salt cod seem damp by comparison.

  “Our work is only illegal,” says Isidore, “when we are hired to do illegal things. Which isn’t all of the time.”

  “Just now, for instance, we are looking for your clever ship,” says La Boca.

  Isidore nods. “Exactly. Not piratical in the slightest.”

  I sigh. “No,” I tell La Boca, “they are not gone. Their ship is pulled alongside ours. Yours.” I shake my head and sink into one of the kitchen chairs. “They want to come with me, to see the Lost City.”

  “And retrieve the Canth,” reminds Rios.

  I bite my lip. This is, almost certainly, not what the men on the other ship have in mind. They might know my father, or at least of my father, but they are not here to help me.

  Rios, Isidore, La Boca—I trusted them to help me, because I was paying them to do so. Fixe is another matter.

  “Who are they?” asks Isidore.

  I rub my eyes. “Cryptozoologists.”

  La Boca frowns. “Monster hunters?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.” When they keep staring at me, I continue. “My father was one of them. Some of these people, they get an itch under their skin, they start looking for something and it takes over their lives.” I don’t mention my mother.

  “I don’t understand,” says Rios, leaning toward me. “Are they looking for the dead city? Or for something in it?”

  “My father believed that there was a city—a Lost City, perhaps this one—swallowed by the waves. He thought that its inhabitants became part fish and managed to survive.”

  La Boca gives me a skeptical look. “He was hunting mermaids?”

  “Maybe he was mad,” I say. “I won’t deny it. But these men claim to know him, and so they must be looking for the city, too.”

  “Then perhaps they are also mad,” suggests Rios.

  • • •

  Having combed my hair back into its neat braid, straightened my uniform, and pulled one of my piratical companions out of a potato bin, I head up on deck. One of the sailors on Fixe’s ship salutes me and helps me across to the larger ship. It is much larger than the Jerónimo, and rides much higher in the water.

  “Greetings, Miss Pearce,” says the sailor, and does not introduce himself. He leads me to the captain’s cabin.

  The cabin is more like a stateroom, with a mahogany table and gilt etchings of rare fish. The Dane is sitting at the desk, scribbling in a thick log. He closes it when we enter—I wonder if the book is just for show. “Come in,” says Fixe, closing the door after me so that we are alone. The larger ship moves less with the waves—the stillness gives me a kind of reverse seasickness.

  I turn toward this other captain. It occurs to me that three captains are too many for such a little patch of ocean. “You said that you know my father.”

  Fixe grins. “You look just as he described you.”

  “Why would he describe me to you?”

  “So that we would know you when we found you.”

  “You were looking for me?”

  Japetus Fixe holds up his hands. “No need to be so spiny, Miss Pearce. We were following you.”

  I sink into one of the straightbacked chairs and cross my ankles. “How reassuring.”

  Fixe squints. “At your father’s request! He was sure that your clever machine would find its way to the dead city, and that you would follow at all cost.”

  A little muscle in my jaw jumps as I realize what he is saying. “You cranked her engine, my—the Canth’s. You made her leave me.”

  “And now,” says Fixe, “you have her back, we have the city, and soon we shall have the Monk.”

  I hold up one hand. “The Monk?”

  “The Sea Monk,” says Fixe. “The colossal merman. The reason we’re all here.” He points to one of the etchings; it shows a dramatic and improbable creature, with a man’s head and a Monk’s garb, and a hundred boneless legs.

  I stare, a little taken in by the unsettling image. “And how will you capture your merman?”

  Fixe shrugs. “We cannot take him alive, and we cannot allow him to decay on our return journey. It will be the harpoon for him, Miss Pearce, and then we shall pack him in salt. Then it’s home to your father, where at last he will have his prize.”

  “The Portuguese may not be happy to find you poaching legends along their coastline.”

  “They won’t mind terribly, when I bring them a few local pirates.”

  I feel the sickles of my fingernails cut at my palms. “That man and woman,” I am careful not to mention La Boca, not to give Japetus Fixe an inch, “are under my employ.”

  “No longer. You have found your ship, Miss Pearce. The moment it is retrieved, your contract with these miscreants comes to an end.” He is trying to sound fatherly, evidently failing to grasp my feelings on the subject. “Surely you see where your duties lie.”

  After a pause, I nod. “I do, Mr. Fixe.”

  • • •

  Sometimes I wish to be the kind of girl who could fall in love with Anselmo Rios. Over dinner I watch him, thinking how much easier it would be to dance with him on the upper decks, shovel coal into the engine, eat salt cod, and forget the Canth and my father and the city. We could set sail under the cover of darkness … but Fixe would find us, and the crew of the Jerónimo would be imprisoned, and I would never get my ship back. As it is, I have the claustrophobic impression that after tonight, I will never again set foot on the Jerónimo.

  Now that I know about Isidore and La Boca—Heitor—I see that they are always touching, always flirting, always aware of each other. I don’t want Fixe to tie them up, to take them away from each other. I want them to be happy. They matter to me. I wonder when that happened.

  “You are not eating,” says Rios. “The cod must be very bad tonight.”

  I give him a smile that feels butter-thin. “Actually, I was enjoying it.”

  • • •

  I know three things:

  Fixe, at the suggestion of my father, stole my ship, and I am going to get her back. Michael Pe
arce has tried to break my mother’s heart. He has tried to capture it. In spite of this, she is an infinite engine, and she is waiting for me.

  If the Canth fled this far under her own power, then the Sea Monk, Fixe’s merman, must be here. I am not going to let him kill it; my mother did not want that, and neither do I.

  And last, that my father is never going to see his abulia, the creature which he chose to love more than he loved me. But I will.

  • • •

  When I leave my room that night, I am careful to tiptoe. Even so, it is a small ship, and I am not entirely surprised when another door opens and a quiet figure slips out.

  I am surprised to realize that it’s La Boca.

  He takes my elbow and leads me out to the deck. The diving suit is there already, hidden beneath a frayed tarp. He is church-silent as he puts it on me, piece by piece. With him kneeling before me, helping me into the boots, I feel like Joan of Arc going into battle.

  As I am wiggling my arms into place, La Boca suddenly says, “‘I opened my heart to you, and you skimmed one hand over the wax forest of my ventricles and flicked one finger to find out what would bruise.’“

  I gape at him. What a line!

  La Boca stands, reaching into the pocket of his trousers. He has brought his copy of The Warm Damp of Miss Eulalia. “I know you love your ship, Miss Pearce. I hope you are kind to one another.”

  Not knowing what to say, I take the book without a word. I tuck it into the front of my diving suit so that it rests against my chest.

  La Boca nods, then helps me wrestle the helmet into place. When it is firmly attached, he salutes me. His voice is tinny through the helmet. “Be careful, Captain.”

  • • •

  This descent is speedier, less breathtaking. In the dark water it is almost impossible to see. He might be lowering me into anything; there might be merfolk in the water all around me and I’d never know.

  I remind myself that the Canth did not abandon me. She was looking for something, and having found what she sought, my ship may love me yet.

  “Please,” I breathe, “please, please … ”