Pisces of Fate

by Pisces of Fate (retail) (epub)

  The Zyngus fish, Ascott mentally dictated, feeds on the tiny Aphish molluscs that swarm the broad leaves of seaweed in the sheltered lagoons and reefs of the Aardvark Archipelago. Using its specially adapted snout, the zyngus sucks up the shellfish whole and it is either a testament to the aphish’s sense of fatalism or an indication of their complete lack of perception that they do not seem at all concerned by this decimation of their numbers. It is yet to be determined if they view the zyngus fish with a sense of religious awe, or if, as the data suggests, they are less aware of this predator’s involvement in their life cycle than the seaweed is of the aphish that live on its fronds.

  The sudden awareness that he was in desperate need of air disrupted this train of thought. Ascott swam upwards through an exhaled stream of silver bubbles. Breaking the surface, he drew breath through the curved tube of his snorkel and resumed floating and observing the underwater landscape.

  With no sign of the zyngus, Ascott swam out from the reef and explored new territory. In the last year and a half, he had identified and named one hundred and thirty-six new species of sea life. Each one received an entry in his Encyclopaedia Brixichthyus.

  The bottom dropped away here in a long, steady decline to the deeper ocean. Ascott knew that the islands were a mountain range, with the summits broaching the surface of the water, and the slopes spreading gently out towards a distant submarine plain.

  The seaweed changed out here, becoming thicker and more gnarled, like old-growth forest. It obscured his view of any fish that might be down there. With one last intake of breath, Ascott swam down. The water pressed in on all sides as he kicked his way through the thermoclines. Reaching the bottom, he crouched in a patch of cold sand and waited.

  Without SCRAM (Self-Contained Reticulating Air Mechanism) gear, he could hold his breath for about three minutes. The water at this depth was still clear, though several degrees cooler than the layers above. Around him were rocky outcrops, covered in seaweed, coral and shells. The fish he saw bustling about were familiar to him and not worthy of closer observation.

  When the fire in his lungs became unbearable, Ascott pushed himself upwards. With a few quick strokes, he rose towards the light, sparks popping behind his eyes and waste air bubbling out of his snorkel. Breaking the surface, he puffed the last of the water out of the tube and took a deep breath. A pair of bare feet, sticking out of the bottom of a pair of white linen trousers, stood level with his eyes.

  Ascott spat the snorkel out of his mouth and peered upwards, shading his eyes against the bright sunlight.

  Drakeforth stood on the water, the sun silhouetting him in a dazzling halo as he regarded Ascott, mostly submerged at his feet.

  “It’s quite good,” Drakeforth declared. “And I don’t say that about anything.”

  “What?” Ascott asked, referring to both the vision before him and the cryptic statement.

  “Your book. The Encyclopaedia of Fish. I don’t imagine anyone will read it. At least not outside of a few zealous fish-fanciers and some half-senile academics. But kudos to you for giving it a go.”

  “It’s not finished,” Ascott said, unsure whether to be offended or just ignore everything after the initial compliment.

  “The problem with life’s works is that they take a lifetime to complete. The number of people who don’t know when to stop is ridiculous. Aspen, Guaco, Califralli, Meditch—all of them devoted their lives to creating the seminal work on their chosen subject and all died within a month of writing The End for the first time.”

  A strange sense of vertigo spun Ascott’s senses like a gyrotop. “I don’t quite understand your point,” he said.

  “Exactly.” Drakeforth nodded and sank into a crouch, the light waves barely sweeping over his feet. “There’s too much effort put into things that do not matter.” He extended a hand. Ascott took it, unsure what the gesture meant. Drakeforth stood up, pulling Ascott out of the water like a small child. His sense of unbalance grew as he found himself standing on the surface of the ocean.

  “You’re saying that I should stop writing the encyclopaedia?” Ascott asked.

  “Not at all. I’m saying you should stop making it the sum total of your existence. You came here to escape the world. Isn’t that enough? You don’t need to justify your hermitage by producing anything. Certainly not something that very few people are ever going to give a monkey’s mandible about.”

  Ascott frowned. “I like fish.”

  “I like cheese, but you don’t see me devoting my life to writing a pseudo-academic thesis describing every variety of coagulated curd from Albis to Zoostra.” Drakeforth’s gaze went to the horizon, where a tiny black dot was approaching. “You,” he said, putting an arm awkwardly around Ascott’s shoulder, “need a hobby.”

  Ascott sat up with a start. He blinked the salt water from his eyes and looked about. The dugout canoe he used for travelling to his dive spots rocked underneath him. The sea and sky, in their contrasting shades of blue, were calm and still. He frowned at a buzzing sound. A black dot on the horizon buzzed like an angry bee, bearing down on him. Drakeforth had vanished again.

  The approaching shape resolved itself into a long, flat-bottomed wave boat with an oversized outboard motor mounted on the back. Shoal, daughter of Sandy and Palm Smith, liked to drive with the throttle wide open and the spray pluming out the back. The narrow boat skidded sideways across the waves and Shoal cut the engine. The two craft bobbed and bumped together in the same way Vector’s Pygmy Whales do when they initiate courtship.

  “What are you doing way out here?” Shoal asked.

  She was close to Ascott’s age. More at home on water than land, Shoal kept her sun-bleached hair cropped short, which just made her piercing blue eyes seem even larger. Lithe and deeply tanned, she had the casual approach to clothing of most Montabanians, who believed it should be practical and easy to swim in.

  “Research,” Ascott replied, blushing harder under his tan.

  “Fish,” Shoal said dismissively. “I’ve always been more interested in eating them than watching them.”

  “I eat fish,” Ascott said.

  “No, you don’t. If I didn’t deliver these pizzas to you every couple of weeks, you’d starve to death.”

  Ascott shrugged. What Shoal lacked in common tact, she made up for in blunt honesty.

  “Anchovies don’t count,” she added, lifting a large chiller box out of the bottom of her boat. Ascott stood up, the canoe rocking underneath him, his knees automatically bending slightly as he moved with the sway. “Thanks,” he said, taking the box of frozen pizzas.

  “Did that fella find you?” Shoal said, her hands resting on her hips as she stood in her boat, swaying with the gentle motion of the swell.

  “White suit and hat?” Ascott replied. “Yeah, he showed up.”

  “I wondered what happened to him. I found his boat drifting off Beluga reef.”

  “He said it sank,” Ascott said.

  “It must have got better then.”

  “I guess.”

  “He’s a bit weird, eh?” Shoal said, scowling at the oarlock on the side of her boat.

  “Why? What did he say to you?”

  “He turned up on the weekly flight from the city and said he was looking for Ascott Pudding.”

  “He found me,” Ascott said again, and stowed the box at the pointy end of the canoe.

  “You don’t look like someone who’s been publicly flogged and had their ears chewed off by rabid leeches.”

  Ascott straightened up. “He said that?”

  “Yeah. I tried to start a betting pool on how disfigured you’d end up if he found you.”

  “He punched me in the nose,” Ascott said.

  “That’s it?”

  “It was enough to get his point across.”

  “Shipspit. That means I owe Curby two yellow pearls.�
��

  “So how much did you end up making from the betting pool?”

  “Nothing, Curby was the only one willing to place a bet. Everyone else is too busy preparing for the whale race.”

  The whale race. Every year, vast pods of whales passed through the archipelago, their numbers so great that the Montabanians held an annual race where competitors would travel across tracts of ocean by running along the behemoths’ backs.

  “Entries still open?” Ascott asked.

  “Yeah, till the end of the week, or until the first sighting. You gonna enter?” Shoal regarded him with an appraising eye.

  “Hah, no.”

  “I’m entering this year.” Shoal gave a slight tilt of her chin.

  “It seems dangerous to the point of being suicidal,” Ascott said.

  “Only if you don’t win.”

  “Well, thanks for the pizzas,” Ascott said.

  The pause that followed went so far beyond pregnant it saw its offspring graduate high school.

  Finally Shoal regarded Ascott with amused eyes that matched the impossible blue of the sea. “Did you find anything new?”

  “Zyngus eating aphish.”

  Shoal gave a snort. “Why is it that just because you haven’t seen something before, you assume that no one else has ever seen it either?”

  “It’s science. I’m writing—”

  “A book, yes, I know.” Shoal rolled her eyes. “Take the day off and come fishing with me.” She managed to make the invitation sound like an order.

  “Sure, I guess. I’ll just drop the pizzas back.”

  Shoal secured a towline to the bow of Ascott’s canoe. The outboard motor on her skiff hummed and they jetted across the azure water and into the lagoon, bringing both boats to rest on the white sand of the beach.

  Tacus hopped from foot to foot, crumbs of chewed crayon spraying across the table. He flapped his wings, his brightly coloured feathers spreading. “Thoal! Thoal!” he squawked.

  “Hey Tacus, how’s my favourite little fella?” Shoal scratched under the parrot’s chin with one finger, making him purr deep in his throat.

  Ascott put the pizzas in the empathically powered freezer. He had switched the voice reminder function off. The idea of his fridge talking to him did not appeal.

  “Bithcuith!” Tacus demanded. Ascott handed Shoal a box of crackers. She took one and broke it into pieces, letting Tacus take them from her fingertips with dainty bites.

  They left Ascott’s canoe on the beach and took Shoal’s boat on the fishing trip. Two spear guns lay along the bottom of the craft, four-foot-long poles with thick rubber bands that stretched back along their length. When released, the thin harpoon that lay along the pole shot forward and into the target. Shoal could kill anything with her practiced arm. She caught more fish with a spear than with a net or line.

  Ascott left the snorkel in his canoe because Shoal always rolled her eyes if anyone suggested using SCRAM gear or even a snorkel. Watching her steer the boat as they zoomed across the lagoon, he wondered if she had gill slits hidden behind her ears.

  Urged on with a few kind words to the empathically powered outboard motor, the boat zipped through the gap in the reef and out into open water. Ascott turned so he faced forward, his back to the girl steering the boat. Watching the vast plain of the warm ocean allowed him time to think about Charlotte and what he could do.

  The boat purred to a halt on the vast, flat plain of gently rolling water. Peering over the side, Ascott saw fish going about their business. He wondered if they pondered the alien world above the way humans peered up at the unreachable stars.

  “Have you ever thought we should be trying to communicate with them?” he said.

  “With who?” Shoal lifted one of the spear guns off the bottom of the boat and sighted along the shaft of the harpoon.

  “The fish. We could teach them so much about the world above.”

  “You’re weird,” Shoal announced and slipped into the water, spear in one hand and a catch bag in the other. With a single flick of her legs she sped downwards, a thin line of bubbles trailing behind her. Ascott took a deep breath, and then remembered that he would be expected to bring the second spear gun. He exhaled and picked it up. The head on the harpoon was razor sharp, with barbs like dagger points. Holding it carefully he dropped over the side. Shoal already had two fish; as he swam downwards she slid the corpses off the back of her harpoon and into the catch bag.

  Feeling queasy, Ascott gave her the thumbs up. She shook her head and nodded a fist at him. Ascott waved his fist back at her, remembering that a thumbs-up meant I need to surface, not Okay.

  Shoal darted off, her legs together and flexing like one long fin. Feeling guilty, Ascott swam after her. Shoal speared another fish, a large gope, which Ascott knew had a stable relationship with the mouth crab, a shell-less crustacean that lived in the fish’s mouth and snacked on scraps of food passing through to the gullet. There was no evidence that it was a symbiotic pairing. Ascott’s current theory was that the crabs were parasites and only remained in the gope’s mouths because of a lack of fish dentists.

  Shoal swam out into deeper water; Ascott trailed her for a while longer and then pushed up for the surface. Taking a breath, he trod water and waited for her to pop up.

  When you are treading water in the middle of the ocean, a minute can seem like a long time. Two minutes feels like an eternity. After a minute and a half Ascott took a deep breath and dived down to see where Shoal had gone, the spear gun in his hand as superfluous as a centipede’s walking stick.

  With long strokes of his arms and legs, he cut through the water, reaching the bottom and then pulling himself along over rocks and bulbous corals, looking for the familiar mop of blonde hair as he went.

  He saw it then, mostly buried in the sand and encrusted with coral—the kind of regular shape that nature doesn’t bother with. The momentary distraction passed and he swam on; even a strong swimmer like Shoal could get in trouble. After swimming in a wide circle Ascott surfaced, took a deep breath and went down again. The cross shape, sticking out of the sand at an odd angle and covered in coral growth, was his starting point. Beyond it, he saw the dark outline of an old wooden ship, heavy with coral and seaweed that waved in the currents like green hair.

  With the warning fire in his lungs beginning to rise, he swam deeper, pulling himself to the edge of the wreck and peering inside.

  Chunks of the hull had rotted away, and the coral’s steady advance over anything that wasn’t fast enough to swim away had already engulfed most of the old timbers. It was dark in there and Ascott’s lungs were insisting he take them somewhere nice, a place where fruit cocktails come with umbrellas and the air is free.

  Letting go of the mouldering edge of the wreck, Ascott prepared to swim upwards. A surge of pale something burst out of the wreck and shot skyward. Ascott screamed. The last of his air gushing out of his mouth, Ascott scrambled for the surface, inhaling salt water that burned like fire.

  Stars exploded, and the steel band around his chest cinched tighter. Ascott flailed, his arms and legs losing strength and coordination. As he rose towards the light, everything around him grew steadily darker.

  Chapter 3

  The aphish crawled along the wide expanse of the seaweed, its tiny circular mouth scraping a groove in the marinated surface of the flesh-like frond. A swirl of current washed over the tiny shell and it gripped tighter with its mouth parts, clinging to the only home it had ever known, to no avail.

  Torn from the salty flesh, the aphish felt itself rolling over, larger mouthparts pressed against its coiled shell as something tried to slither in and suck the life right out of its calcified exoskeleton. The aphish struggled against the probing, and then life flowed in instead of out. Ascott broke the surface of consciousness and coughed hard, the splash of salt water heaving out of his lu
ngs burning his throat again.

  He floated on his back, Shoal tangled around his head and shoulders, her upside-down face regarding him with concern.

  “Thought you might’ve checked out,” she said. Ascott closed his eyes against the bright sunshine and felt the warm water carrying him.

  “I lost you,” he croaked.

  “No, you nearly drowned yourself. I knew exactly where I was.”

  Ascott didn’t argue. Every muscle ached and his throat felt like a sword-swallower’s who had sneezed at the wrong moment.

  “So, are we going to float here all day?” Ascott opened his eyes again at Shoal’s voice. He became aware that she was holding him, keeping him afloat, and had breathed life into his drowned lungs.

  “It’s nice,” he offered. “We should go drowning more often.”

  Shoal gave a snort. “You’re useless at it. All that flailing and panicking.”

  “I just need more practice.” Ascott lifted his head away from Shoal and got himself floating upright. Treading water, he turned to face her. “Got enough fish?”

  “Sure. Did you see that wreck?”

  Ascott nodded. “You went inside?”

  “Yeah, it’s the fruit.”

  “The fruit?”

  “Yeah, it’s fruity, you know, the best.”

  Ascott nodded again. “The fruitiest fruit.”

  Shoal pulled down the edge of the boat that floated behind her. Reaching in she retrieved a milknut with a stick jammed in the shell hole. Pulling the twig out with her teeth, she spat it away and handed the nut to Ascott. “Drink,” she said.

  He did. The sweet watery milk inside the hairy brown shell soothed his throat and when it was empty, he gasped for air.

  “Better?” Shoal asked with a wry smile.

  Ascott nodded and dropped the empty shell back in the boat.

  “We should head back,” Shoal said. With an easy grace she gripped the side of the skiff and launched herself out of the water and onto the flat deck. Ascott followed suit, the long drink of milknut juice rolling in his stomach as the boat nearly swamped.