Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  He threw an enormous shadow onto the screen.

  Sensing an Eddystone speech, Gabe signaled his assistant with his hand, but she was already ahead of him, flicking off the projector and raising the lights.

  “But something more happened. Think of it,” said Eddystone. “We can walk on the moon, but not live there. We cannot even attempt a landing on Venus or breathe the Martian air. But the waters of our own world are waiting for us. They cradled us when we took our first hesitant steps into higher phyla. Why, even now, in the womb, the fetus floats in la mer, the mother sea. Our blood is liquid, our bodies mostly water. We speak of humankind’s exodus from the sea as an improvement on the race: But I tell you now that our return to it will be even more momentous. I am not an explorer . . . not an explorer taking one giant step for mankind. I am a child going home some million years after leaving.”

  The speech seemed to have exhausted him. Eddystone slumped back into his chair. Gabe stood over him protectively. But his own thoughts warred with his emotions. Even for Eddystone it was a romantic, emotional outburst. A regular cousteau. Gabe knew that he had always been the more conservative of the two of them, but he worried anew that the Breather mechanism might be affecting Eddystone in ways that had not been calculated. He put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and was appalled to find it slippery with sweat. Perhaps a fever had set in.

  “That’s all now, ladies and gentlemen,” Gabe said smoothly to the audience, not letting his alarm show.

  “Tomorrow, tide and time willing, at 0900 hours, we will give you a demonstration of the Breather. Right now Doctor Eddystone has to be run through some last-minute lab tests. However, my assistants will see to it that you receive the information you need for the technical end of your reports. Each pack has scientific and historical details, charts, and a bio sheet on Doctor Eddystone, plus photos from the operation. Thank you for coming.”

  The reporters dutifully collected their material from the aides and tried to bully further answers from the staff while Gabe shepherded Eddystone out the door marked NO ENTRY/TECH ONLY. It locked behind him and would only respond to a code that Hydrospace workers knew.

  In the deserted back hall, Eddystone turned. “What last-minute tests?” he asked.

  “No tests,” Gabe said. “Questions. And I want to do the asking. You are going to give me some straight answers, Tommy. No romances. No cousteaus. What’s going on? I felt your shoulder in there. It’s all sweaty. Are you running a fever? Is there rejection starting?”

  Eddystone looked up at him and smiled. “Not rejection,” he said, chuckling a bit at a projected joke. “Rather call it an acceptance.”

  “Make sense, Tommy. I’m a friend, remember. Your oldest friend.” Gabe put out his hand as a gesture of goodwill and was surprised when Eddystone grabbed his hand—his friend’s palm was slick.

  Eddystone ran Gabe’s hand and up and down his arm, across his chest where it was exposed. The gill slits were closed but the tissue was ridged and slightly puckered. Gabe wanted to flinch, controlled it.

  “Feel this so-called sweat,” Eddystone said. “You can’t really see it, but it’s there. I thought at first I was imagining it, but now I know. You feel it, too, Gabe. It’s not sweat at all.”

  Gabe drew his hand away gently. “Then what the hell is it?”

  “It’s the body’s way of accepting its new life—under water. It’s the fluid-damping skin that Lemar and her kids have been trying for all these months. Seems you can’t build it in, Gabe. But once the body has been readapted for life in the sea, it just comes.”

  “Then we’d better test you out, Tommy. The lab is where you belong now.” Gabe started walking.

  “No, don’t you see,” Eddystone said to Gabe’s back, “that’s not where I belong. I belong in the sea.” His voice was almost a whisper, but the passion in his statement was unmistakable.

  “Lab first, Tommy. Or there won’t be any 0900 for you—or any of us—tomorrow.” Gabe continued to walk, and was relieved to hear Eddystone’s footsteps following him. He had surprised himself with the firmness of his tone. After all, Eddystone was the head of the lab while he, Gabe, was only the link with outside, with the grants and the news. Yet Eddystone was letting himself be led, pushed, carried in a way he had never allowed before. As if he had lost his willpower, Gabe thought, and the thought bothered him.

  They came into the lab and when Gabe turned at last, Eddystone was as pale as fishbelly and starting to gasp again.

  There was no sign of that strange sweat on his body, yet when Gabe took his arm to lead him through the door, he could feel the moisture. The skin itself seemed to be impregnated with the invisible fluid.

  The lab was typical of Hydrospace, being half aquarium. It had small enclosed tanks filled with fish and sea life as well as a single wall of glass fronting directly on the ocean. Since the lab was on the lowest Hydrospace floor, resting on ocean bottom, the window let the scientists keep an eye on the fish and plants within the ecosystem without the necessity of diving. For longer, far-ranging expeditions, there were several lab-subs and for divers working within a mile radius of Hydrospace, a series of locks and wet-rooms leading off the lab.

  There was no chance of the bends if a diver came and went from the bottom floor of Hydrospace IV.

  Only two techs were in the lab, both in their identifying yellow smocks. One was feeding tank specimens, the other checking out the data on the latest mari-culture fields. They looked up, nodded briefly, and went back to work.

  “Look,” Eddystone said to Gabe in a lowered voice, “I’m going to go out there now and I want you to watch through the window. I’ll stay close enough for you to track me. Tell me what happens out there. What you see. I know what I see. But it’s like this skin. I need to know someone else sees it, too. When I come back in, you can make tests all night long if you want to. But you have to see what happens to me Down Under.”

  Gabe shook his head. “I don’t like it, Tommy. Let me get some of the techs. Lemar, too.”

  Eddystone smiled that crooked grin that turned his homely face into an irrepressible imp’s countenance.

  “Just us, Gabe. The two of us. It’s always been that way. I want you to see it first.”

  Gabe shook his head again, but reluctantly agreed.

  “If you promise to test . . . ”

  “I promise you anything you want,” Eddystone answered, a shade too quickly.

  “Don’t con me, Tommy. I know you too well. Have known you too long. You are the one person who isn’t expendable on this project.”

  “I don’t plan to be expended,” Eddystone answered, grinning. He walked to the door that led to the series of locks, turned, and waved. “And give those techs,” he said, signaling with his head, “give ’em the night off.” Then he was gone through the door.

  Gabe could hear the sounds of the pressure-changing device, clicking and sighing, through the intercom. He went over to the techs. “Doctor Eddystone wants me to clear the lab for a few hours.”

  “We were just leaving anyway,” said one. To prove she was finished, she reached up and pulled out a large barrette that had held her hair back in a tight bun. As the blondish hair spilled over her shoulders, she gave Gabe a quick noncommittal smile and shrugged out of the yellow smock. She folded it into a small, neat square and stowed it away in a locker. Her friend was a step behind. Once they had left the lab, Gabe turned on the red neon testing sign over the door and locked it. No one would be able to come in now.

  He went to the window and waited. It took ten minutes for anyone to go through the entire series of locks into the water, over a half-hour for the same person to return. The locks could not be overridden manually, though there was a secret code for emergencies kept in a black book in Eddystone’s file cabinet. He adjusted the special sea-specs that allowed him to see clearly through pressure-sensitive glass.

  Right outside the station grew a hodgepodge of undersea plants. Some had been set in purposefully to
act as hiding places for the smaller fish, to entice them closer to the window for easy viewing. Others had drifted in and attached themselves to the sides of the station, to the rock ledges left by the original builders of Hydrospace, to the sandy bottom of the sea.

  While Gabe watched, a school of ocean pout swam by, suddenly diving and turning together, on some kind of invisible signal. Though he knew the technical explanations for schooling—that the movement as a unit was made possible by visual stimulation and by pressure-sensitive lateral lines on each fish responding to the minutest vibrations in the water—the natural choreography of schooled fish never ceased to delight him. It was the one cousteau he permitted himself—that the fish danced. He was smiling when the school suddenly broke apart and re-formed far off to the right of the window, almost out of sight. A dark shadow was emerging from the locks. Eddystone.

  Gabe had expected him to swim in the rolling overhand most divers affected. But, instead, Eddystone moved with the boneless insinuations of an eel. He seemed to undulate through the water, his feet and legs moving together, fluidly pumping him along. His arms were not overhead but by his side, the hands fluttering like fins. It was not a motion that a man should be able to make comfortably, yet he made it with a flowing ease that quickly brought him alongside the window. He turned once to stand upright so that Gabe could get a close look at him. With a shock, Gabe realized that Eddystone was entirely naked. He had not noticed at first because Eddystone’s genitals were not visible, as if they had retracted into his body cavity. Gabe moved closer and bumped his head against the glass, As if the noise frightened him, Eddystone jerked back.

  “Tommy!” Gabe cried out, a howl he did not at first recognize as his own. But the glass was too thick for him to be heard. He tried to signal in the shorthand they had developed for divers, but before he could lift a finger, Eddystone had turned, pumped once, and was gone.

  The second eyelid lifted and Eddystone stared at the world around him. The softly filtered light encouraged dreaming. He saw, on the periphery of clear sight, the flickerings of darting fish. Some subtle emanation floated on the stream past him. He flipped over, righted himself with a casual cupping of his palms and waited. He was not sure for what. She came toward him trailing a line of lovers, but he saw only Her. The swirls of sea-green hair streamed behind Her, and there were tiny conch caught up like barrettes behind each ear. Her body was childlike, with underdeveloped breasts as perfect and pink as bubbleshells, and a tail that resembled legs, so deep was the cleft in it. When She stopped to look at him, Her hair swirled about Her body, masking Her breasts, Her eyes were as green as Her hair, Her mouth full and the teeth as small and white and rounded as pearls. She held a hand out to him, and the webbing between Her fingers was translucent and pulsing.

  Eddystone moved toward Her, pulled on by a desire he could not name. But there were suddenly others there before him, four large, bullish-looking males with broad shoulders and deep chests and squinty little eyes.

  They ringed around Her, and one, more forward than the rest, put his hands on Her body and rubbed them up and down Her sides. She smiled and let the male touch Her for a moment, then pushed him away. He went back to the outer circle with the others, waiting. She held up Her hands again to Eddystone and he swam cautiously to Her touch.

  Her skin was as smooth and fluid as an eel’s, and his hands slipped easily up and over Her breasts. But he was bothered by the presence of the others and hesitated.

  She flipped Her tail and was away, the line of males behind Her. They moved too quickly for him, and when they left, it was as if a spell were broken. He turned back toward the station.

  “Tommy,” Gabe’s voice boomed into the locks. “I hear you in there. Where did you go? One minute you were here, then you took off after a herd of Sirenia and were gone.”

  The only answer from the intercom was a slow, stumbling hiss. Gabe could only guess that was Eddystone’s breathing readjusting to the air, as the implanted valves responded to the situation. But he did not like the sound, did not like it at all. When the last lock sighed open, he ran into it and found Eddystone collapsed on the floor, still naked and gasping.

  “Tommy, wake up! For God’s sake, get up.” He knelt by Eddystone’s side and ran his hands under his friend’s neck. The slipperiness was more apparent than before. Picking him up, Gabe had to cradle Eddystone close against his chest to keep him from sliding away. As Gabe watched, the gill slits fluttered open and shut under Eddystone’s collarbone.

  “I’ve got to get you to MedCentral,” he whispered into Eddystone’s ear. “Something is malfunctioning with the valves. Hold on, buddy. I’ll get you through.” He ran through the lab and was working frantically to unlock the door without dropping Eddystone when he looked down. To his horror, Eddystone had halfway opened his eyes and one of them was partially covered with a second, transparent eyelid.

  “Take me . . . take me back,” Eddystone whispered.

  “Not on your life,” Gabe answered,

  “It is on my life,” Eddystone said in a hoarse, croaking voice.

  Gabe stopped. “Tommy.”

  The membranous eyelid flicked open and he struggled in Gabe’s arms. “It calls me,” he said. “She calls.”

  “Tommy, I don’t know what you mean—she. The sea? I don’t even know what you are, anymore.”

  “I am what we were all meant to be, Gabe, Take me back. I can’t breathe.” His gasping, wheezing attempts at talking had already confirmed that.

  Gabe turned around. “If I put you down, could you walk?”

  “I don’t know. Air strangling me.”

  “Then I’ll carry you.”

  Eddystone grinned up at him, a grin as familiar as it was strange. “Good. I carried you long enough.” Gabe tried to laugh but couldn’t. When they reached the locks, Gabe kicked the door open with his foot.

  “You’re slippery as hell, you know,” he said. He needed to say something.

  “The better to sneak through the corridors of the sea,” said Eddystone.

  “God, Tommy, don’t cousteau me now.”

  Eddystone shook his head slowly. “But he was right, you know, Jacques Cousteau. The poetry, the romance, the beauty, the longing for the secret other. Someone sang, ‘What we lose on the land we will find in the sea.’ It’s all out there.”

  “Fish are out there, Tommy. And reefs. And the possibility of vast farms to feed a starving humanity. And sharks. And pods of whale. The mermaid is nothing more than a bad case of horniness or a near-sighted sailor looking at a manatee. Sea creatures don’t build, Tommy. There are no houses and no factories under the water. Dolphin don’t weave. Dugongs don’t tell stories. And whale songs are only music because romantics believe them so. Come on, Tommy. You’re a scientist. You know that. Metaphors are words. Words. They don’t exist. They don’t live.”

  Eddystone gave him that strange grin once more and threw out an old punch line at him. “You call this living?” He tried to laugh but began to wheeze instead.

  Gabe hit at the lock mechanism with his elbow, and the door shut behind them. “I’m going Down with you this time, Tommy,” he said.

  “Yes and no,” Eddystone answered cryptically.

  Eddystone lay on the bench and watched as Gabe picked out one of the fits-all trunks from a hook. He slipped out of his clothes and got into the swimsuit, placing his clothes neatly on a hanger. When the timer announced the opening of the next lock, he was ready.

  He picked Eddystone up and walked through into the second room.

  Depositing the little man on another bench, Gabe got into the scuba gear. There were always at least six tanks in readiness.

  “Remember the first time we learned to dive?” Gabe asked. “And you were so excited, you didn’t come off the bottom of the swimming pool until your air just about ran out and the instructor had fits?”

  “I don’t . . . don’t remember,” Eddystone said quietly in a very distant way.

  “Of course you
remember, Tommy.” Eddystone did not answer.

  They went into the next room, Eddystone leaning heavily on Gabe’s arm. This was the first of the two wet-rooms, where the water fed slowly in through piping, giving divers time for any last-minute checks of their gear.

  No sooner had the water started in than Eddystone rolled off the bench on which he had been lying and stretched out on the floor. The rising water puddled around him, slowly covering his body. As it closed over the gill slits in his chest, he smiled. It was the slow Eddystone smile that Gabe knew so well. Eddystone ran a finger in and around the gill slits as if cleaning them.

  Gabe said nothing but watched as if he were discovering a new species.

  When the door opened automatically, mixing the water in the first wet-room with the ocean water funneled into the second, Eddystone swam in alone. He swam under water, but Gabe walked along, keeping his head in the few inches of air. In the last lock, Eddystone surfaced for a moment and held a hand out toward Gabe. There was a strange webbing between the thumb and first finger that Gabe could swear had never been there before. Blue veins, as meandering as old rivers, ran through the webbing.

  Gabe took the offered hand and held it up to his cheek. Without meaning to, he began to cry. Eddystone freed his hand and touched one of the tears.

  “Salt,” he whispered. “As salty as the sea. We are closer than you think. Closer than you now accept.” Gabe bit down on his mouthpiece and sucked in the air. The last door opened and the sea flooded the rest of the chamber.

  Eddystone was through the door in an instant. Even with flippers, Gabe was left far behind. He could only follow the faint trail of bubbles that Eddystone laid down. A trail that was dissipated in moments. There was nothing ahead of him but the vast ocean shot through with rays of filtered light. He kept up his search for almost an hour, then turned back alone.

  He quartered the ocean bottom, searching for Her scent. Each minute under washed away memory, till he swam free of ambition and only instinct drove him on.

  At last he slipped, by accident, into a current that brought him news of Her. The water, touching the fine hairs of his body, sent the message of Her presence to his nerve cells. His body turned without his willing it toward the lagoon where She waited.