Merfolk

by Jeremy Bates

  “In considering the technological achievements of merfolk, I believe they would be rather unremarkable. Assuming merfolk have a brain size on par with Australopithecus, and a similar level of manual dexterity, they would have the cognitive complexity and physical ability to use simple tools for acquiring and processing animal and plant food. Cracking mollusks, butchering carcasses, disarticulation, marrow extraction, cutting stalks. Nevertheless, the marine realm offers no fibers suitable for basketry or weaving clothing, and the lack of fire would make pottery and metallurgy impossible. These two facts alone would hamper any sort of cultural and technological innovation, preventing merfolk from evolving contemporaneously with the genus Homo beyond an early Paleolithic lifestyle. Sorry, folks, there’s no shining Atlantis down on the seabed somewhere.

  “You may be wondering where do merfolk live then? Given their lack of advanced weaponry, I propose they are forager-scavengers that move from location to location, subsisting on sea grasses and shellfish, carcasses leftover by larger predators, and small fish they hunt opportunistically. However, it’s also possible they group in particular areas for periods of time for central place foraging activities. A home base, if you will. Underwater island caves come to mind as a particularly likely location. These would offer shelter from their landlocked cousins—which would include modern humans—as well as dangerous marine predators, including invertebrates such as poisonous jellyfish.

  “So what happened to merfolk populations? Why are the creatures so rare and elusive? One hypothesis is that they’ve gone extinct. When modern humans set out on the Age of Discovery in the fifteenth century, and began to explore remote islands, we may have hunted merfolk to extinction just as we hunted Steller’s sea cows to extinction less than thirty years after first discovering the species. Indeed, the number of recorded merfolk sightings declined significantly in the following centuries, falling to nearly zero today. However, the broad scale hunting necessary to wipe out a species would not have gone undocumented, and unlike with sea cows, no records speak of this happening to merfolk.

  “The more likely scenario, if you ask me, is that there hasn’t been a decline in merfolk populations; there’s only been a decline in sightings or, more accurately, reported sightings. In the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a new bias in observation and reporting. Science had become the new faith. Pragmatic people no longer spoke of creatures from folklore for fear of being ridiculed, and the editors of scholarly journals refused to publish any references to them. This trend accelerated with industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries and continues into the present.

  “So I ask again: What happened to merfolk populations? Where did the creatures go? I posit they haven’t gone anywhere. They’re where they’ve always been. We’ve just stopped looking for them.”

  ∆∆∆

  Marty woke at 5:30 a.m., pleasantly surprised that he had slept through the night without waking. Sitting up, he recalled dreaming about the Netflix documentary, and his lips twisted in a scowl. “Correction, Fat Mike,” he muttered as he swung his legs out of bed and got up, anxious for the day to begin, “I never stopped looking.”

  Chapter 25

  PIP

  At 6:30 a.m. Pip stood on the starboard side of the Oannes’ main deck, watching Marty pilot the RIB through the rolling swell toward Demon Island. Dr. Montero, Radhika Fernandez, and Jacqueline DeSilva were also on the small boat, the latter two having decided over breakfast that a hike to the lava tubes would be more interesting than lounging about on the Oannes.

  Pip raised her hand in goodbye, unbeknownst to her that she would never see any of them ever again.

  Part 4

  The Dive

  “Aye, tough mermaids are, the lot of them.”

  —Blackbeard

  Chapter 26

  MARTY

  In the flooded cavern, Marty and Elsa performed a predive safety check of their equipment, went over their dive plan for the final time, changed into neoprene wetsuits, and geared up.

  Marty called to Rad and Jacky, who were filming the cave art with their phones.

  “We have three hours of air in our tanks,” he told them. “We’ll use one-third of that for exploring the lava tubes, and another third getting back here, meaning you should expect us in about two hours.”

  “What about the last third?” Rad asked.

  “That’s in case we get into any sort of trouble,” Elsa said.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Nothing will happen to us, Rad,” Marty told her. “Diving with extra air is a standard safety redundancy, that’s all.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Marty?” Concern showed in her eyes. “I mean, what if there really are merfolk down there…?”

  “I’m counting on it,” he replied, offering her a reassuring smile. He hiked the twin one hundred-cubic-foot steel tanks onto his back, then tossed a black ripstop nylon bag over his shoulder. He picked up the small diver propulsion vehicle (DPV) and fin-walked into the perfectly still water.

  ∆∆∆

  The boulder-strewn cavern slid away as he sank beneath the surface of the subterranean pool. Rad’s and Jacky’s chatter (“See you guys soon!” “Be careful!” “Don’t get eaten!”) faded. Marty clipped one end of the double-braided nylon guide reel to his buoyancy control device (BCD). The other end was attached to an anchor point in the cave so they could find their way out of the pitch-black lava tubes again.

  He switched on the diver propulsion vehicle, which was basically a bullet-shaped electric engine that powered a propellor. Since the range they could travel underwater was limited by the amount of breathing gas they could carry, the DPV would allow them to achieve a greater penetration distance in the time they had.

  Back on the Oannes, he had devised a tow rope with a large D-ring on one end for Elsa to hold onto. He passed this to her now. She gave him a thumbs up, and he clicked the DPV’s throttle on the stern handlebars. They began moving swiftly forward, the propellor wash parallel to and below them.

  With the dive underway, Marty’s nerves were on edge, and he realized he was incredibly grateful that Elsa had decided to accompany him. Cave diving solo, even for an experienced diver such as himself, was a dangerous activity. A dive buddy considerably lessened the chances of something going wrong. And Elsa wasn’t any run-of-the-mill dive buddy. Curious about her credentials, he had looked her up on the internet the night before and had been more than impressed with her accomplished career as an internationally acclaimed cave biologist. He had been saddened to learn about the death of her husband on what appeared to be her final dive. There wasn’t much information available on the exact circumstances of the tragedy, only that the man became tangled in their guideline and panicked and drowned. For something like that to happen to your spouse would be heartbreaking; for it to happen right before your eyes would be devastatingly traumatic. Marty thought he now understood why Elsa was living abroad in Sri Lanka. Presumably she’d wanted to reboot a life that had gone off the rails.

  She and he were not so different after all, it seemed.

  Pushing the tangential thoughts aside, Marty concentrated on the dive. The water was magnificently clear, offering twice the visibility one would expect in the open ocean on a perfect day. Horizontal layers of flow lines and ledges carved into the mineral-colored igneous rock walls marked the successively shallower depths at which the lava had flowed through the tube. The floor, created when the surface of the final stream of lava solidified, was flat and covered with a layer of muck washed down through the skylight from the rainforest above.

  At the far end of the pool, where the lava tube’s roof sank below the water, they entered a tunnel about the size of those in the London Underground. The high-intensity LED lights strapped to the back of their hands cut cones of white light through the blackness. In places the terrain was silky and rounded, and in others it was rough and jagged and festooned with psychedelic lavacicles. Some were
broad and tapering to points resembling giant shark teeth, while others were irregularly shaped like stretched taffy. Similar formations in limestone caves took thousands of years to develop; these would have been forged in a few anarchic hours.

  Marty recalled Elsa mentioning the lava tubes on the moon, and he could very easily imagine he was not on Earth but some alien, primordial celestial body, millions of kilometers from home.

  When the tunnel tightened to a narrow, elliptical restriction with a shallow roof, he slowed the scooter so he could navigate the space without knocking their heads or tanks on the rocky surroundings. The lava tube opened up substantially again on the other side, and it was there they spotted their first cave-dweller: a three-centimeter remipede lacking both eyes and pigmentation. The exotic encounters became more abundant the farther they went: an albino squat lobster; a snowball sea slug; numerous small shrimp-like crustaceans and segmented worms; a school of paeony bulleye fish, their bright red color reminiscent of the molten lava which had carved out their underwater refuge so long ago.

  Eventually they arrived at a gallery that was so large their lights barely reached the distant walls. At the farthest end it split into an upper and lower passage. Marty chose the upper one for the simple reason that it was the larger of the two. At the front of a lava flow, the lava behaves much like a river delta, branching off from the original flow to create smaller distributaries, and he knew that keeping to the main channel would yield the best chance of reaching the ocean.

  Thirty meters down the passage, they surfaced in an air pocket trapped above the water table. The concave chamber offered a bubble of headspace, the size of which would likely vary based on the rise and fall of the tides.

  Marty plucked his respirator from his mouth and said, “Having fun yet?”

  Elsa removed her respirator also. “Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

  He checked his pressure gauge. His stage cylinder was nearly two-thirds empty, and he suggested it was a good time to switch to their back-mounted tanks. They detached the pony bottles from their harnesses, tied them off on the guideline, and resumed the dive breathing from their main tanks.

  The morphology of the tunnels continued much the same as they had before, alternating between smooth and jagged surfaces that were ornamented with crystal formations and lavacicles and the occasional lava pillar. One cathedral-like cavern featured rippled walls that looked stolen from Antoni Gaudi’s gothic Sagrada Familia. Another smaller room had a sandy island in the middle of it. This reminded Marty of a tragic tale of a diver who had perished in the Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa. The young man had left the safety of his guideline and got lost in a maze of tunnels. With his air running dangerously low, he got lucky finding a small island at the end of one tunnel—or so he thought. Rescuers found his skeleton six weeks later. Marty could only imagine the terror and loneliness of sitting in the unrelenting black for days on end, starving, understanding no one was ever going to come for you. The young man clearly realized this was his sad fate, because beside his corpse, scrawled into the sand, was a message telling his wife and mother that he loved them.

  They came to their second restriction twenty-five minutes into the dive. He couldn’t see how far the narrow shaft went before opening up again, and he didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of it with the scooter, so he tied it off on the guideline. He gave Elsa an okay hand signal, she okayed back, and he entered the restriction using what was known as the bent-knee kick. Propulsion was limited, but the technique worked well in cramped areas. Most importantly, it minimized the disruption of silt on the cave floor, which could turn gin-clear water into a soupy brown mess, the last thing a diver wanted when there was no direct access to the surface.

  The initial twenty feet into the restriction went smoothly, but then the shaft flattened to a horizonal wedge, forcing Marty to wiggle through, scraping his chest and tanks on the rock and stirring up the fine silt that had gathered there over the years. His visibility deteriorated to two meters. As he fumbled deeper along the squeeze, it dropped to zero. He couldn’t see his hands when he held them before his face, forcing him to feel his way forward.

  Quiet panic nibbled at his insides, and he told himself to remain calm. Panic led to fear, and fear shut down rational thought.

  After another twenty or twenty-five feet of slow progress through the blackout, the passage corkscrewed, becoming more vertical than horizontal. Marty twisted his body to compensate—and at some point realized he no longer knew up from down.

  The panic returned, louder and hungrier. Marty’s breathing became more rapid. Thoughts of hypoxia and carbon dioxide poisoning snowballed the panic, causing the mildly stressful situation to spiral into full-blown anxiety. He began kicking faster and clawing at the rock to escape the claustrophobic space. His throat felt clogged with coppery pennies, and his hand went to his respirator, instinct shouting at him to yank it free. He nearly followed the fatal advice, but some higher-level cognitive process stopped him.

  Stop—think—breathe.

  He forced himself to stop flailing.

  Stop—think—breathe.

  He forced himself to take deep, even breaths.

  Stop…think…breathe…

  His heartbeat slowed. The heaviness in his chest subsided. The sense of impending doom faded.

  And before he knew it, he could see his light again, and his elbows and knees were no longer slapping against rock.

  He was out!

  The relief was immeasurable, yet he remained completely disoriented. Only when he noted which direction his bubbles were traveling did he once again know up from down. He quickly finned back the way he had come, concerned that Elsa might have panicked too. He was steeling himself to swim back into the cloud of silt when she emerged from it. Behind her mask, her eyes were intense yet calm.

  He gave her the okay sign; she okayed back.

  Jesus H. Christ, he thought, realizing just how close he had come to killing them both.

  ∆∆∆

  Over the next half an hour, they were faced with numerous forks in the tunnels and nearly as many dead ends. This disheartened Marty, as he began to resign himself to the fact they would never make it to the mouth of the cave, which would be the most likely location for the merfolk to reside.

  Now they were floating in proper trim in a passage about three meters wide and five high. Ahead of them it shrank into yet another restriction…from which he could feel a slight current. This buoyed his spirits, as he believed the current meant it likely connected back to the main conduit from which they had deviated at some point. Even so, proceeding would be chancy. The two previous restrictions would be classified as “minor” in diving terminology. This one would be classified as “major,” meaning they would need to unbuckle their tanks to get through.

  Marty checked his dive computer: they had ten minutes before they had to turn back.

  Was the major restriction worth exploring given how little time they had left and the high risk involved? Or should they play it safe, cut their losses, and call it a day?

  Marty knew the answer right away, but he wasn’t going to endanger Elsa again.

  He signaled for her to wait where she was, then removed his tanks from his back. She tapped him on the shoulder and shook her head. He thought she was telling him not to proceed, but then she signed that she was coming with him.

  There was no time to debate the matter, or even a way to do so, and he simply nodded.

  Pushing his tanks ahead of him, he entered the shaft first.

  ∆∆∆

  He had to swim sideways to fit through the tight space. After a short distance the passage doglegged. He twisted his body to swim upward, his tanks scraping the rock the entire way. Thankfully there was little silt due to the current, and his visibility remained good. Then the tunnel leveled out again, but it was so shallow that even with perfect buoyancy he was dragging his belly on the ground and hitting his head on the ceiling at the same time. Ther
e wasn’t room to look behind him to see how Elsa was doing.

  He tried not to think about what they would do if the squeeze tightened to a point that they couldn’t pass through.

  And then it did just that.

  He hesitated a moment, then shoved his tanks through the basalt sphincter. They became wedged.

  Cursing to himself, he shoved again.

  They popped through.

  Marty exhaled to make his chest smaller, sucked in his belly, and bullied his way through too.

  ∆∆∆

  Finally the exit passage swelled to a comfortable size. When Elsa joined him, they swam side-by-side against the current, following an upward gradient. The tunnel became larger and larger, the current stronger and stronger. On the other side of a duck-under, they came to a cavernous area about the size of a small house.