|
The catastrophic floods in southern England of Autumn 2000 were not, as many believed, aberrations in the local weather; they were harbingers of global change. As tides rose inexorably around the world, people retreated to higher land, and new archipelagoes were created. Roads were lost, and railways were quickly made over into canals, but these too were soon inundated, reappearing almost as a mockery only at the lowest tides. And as the tides rose, so the populations shrank; after fifty years in a world of adapt or die, millions had died. Those left had adapted – some in the strangest of ways... ‘How is he?’ His mother’s voice, usually warm and low, now pitched high with worry, came to him as a meaningless buzz.
‘I know we’re desperate,’ his father replied, harshness
tainting his normal baritone, ‘but if he goes out in this condition,
you know full well we’re likely to lose him altogether.’ His
father’s tread was heavy on the stair, the door creak familiar. ‘Dad,’ he croaked painfully. "I’m fine. Tell me a story. If I can get some sleep, I’ll come out with you tomor…’ The words decayed into a hopeless rasp as the soreness in his throat defeated his attempt to speak. His father came to the bed and touched his son’s brow. ‘You’re burning up. You keep quiet, and keep to your bed until you’re better.’ He sat down. ‘So, you want a story?’ In his familiar storytelling gesture, as he raised his head to speak, his fingers and thumb unconsciously traced the scars on either side of his neck.
‘Well, this is a seasonal one. Once upon a time, when the piers stood
out above the ocean, there was a Fairly Lobster King called Stan Claws
who lived in the Palace at the end of the Pier in the West. Once a year,
on Christentide, when the days had drawn in and the nights were as long
and gloomy as could be, he would ride ashore in his magic coracle carried
on the backs of the wild white horses that live along the shore, and bring
presents for all the children who had brought in a good catch for their
families that year…’
Jansi skirted the station with its great glass panels, looking down into green emptiness, and headed on out towards the open sea. After the past few days’ storms, the sea was the calmest he had ever seen it, with only the slightest of swells. When he judged he was over the old pier, he attached his dive line to his waist and slipped over the side. The water stung his eyes as he swam downwards, while where the fire in his throat had been was now little more than a remembered ache. And there was the pier! He angled towards it, his pulse beginning to pound in his ears, when suddenly his dive line jerked violently at him. Inadvertently, he gasped out a mouthful of air and swallowed water as he jacknifed around the rope, and a dark shape darted away above him. Shark? Not this time of year, and there had been no warnings – and anyway it didn’t look like a shark. What was it then, he wondered as he turned about and began to swim back up – the lost mouthful of air was enough to curtail the dive. Another diver? But there had been no other boats anywhere near, and it was early yet. He had come out before dawn partly to avoid the crowds, but mostly to avoid his father. His family needed the catch, only children could dive, and he was their only child, so he had to bring it in, or there would be nothing for Christentide. He could see his coracle above, the long yellow dawn light throwing its shadow across the surface – but it was moving away! His dive line no longer stretched straight back up, but was tilting over into a catenary and dragging him along behind. He was being pulled up to the surface, but too fast. He spread his arms and legs out, and expelled half a lungful of air, to try to slow his ascent. As he rose towards the surface, he released the remainder of air from his lungs to slow his ascent more, ready to inhale as soon as he surfaced. Through the bubbles, in the green gloom beneath the dawn, he glimpsed a twisting line of white. Before he could investigate, he needed to breathe, but, as he pushed strongly for the surface, he saw a little circular shape – his coracle! – twisting down the white line, and then his dive line snaking after it. Quickly, he unfastened the line from his waist, and again tried to swim for the surface. His empty lungs were straining to pull in air, his pulse beat in his ears, his throat, suddenly sore again, clamoured to open, and the surface seemed as far away as ever – and then he was in the writhing white line – a downcurrent! – twisting, pulling him deeper, down, away from the light, away from the air, and he whirled and a dark shape whirled with him, green dots swam and sparked before his eyes, down, deeper, and at last he could resist no more, and he opened his mouth to the water and inhaled.
Green dots, his head swirled, and a calm voice, sleep and be well, but his mouth open, full of water, and blood in the water, he could taste it, but he slept.
Jansi opened his eyes and thought, strange, it doesn’t sting, but my eyes always sting underwater… and realised he wasn’t breathing either! The moment’s panic gave way to the realisation that he wasn’t at all distressed. He was floating suspended in a transparent tube that gently held his head back and his mouth open, and he could feel the current of the water coursing past him – and through him! Where his throat had been sore, it now felt simply alive. He put his hand to his throat, felt the flaps, the panic leaping again as his hand held them closed and he ceased to breathe, and a shape outside the tube moved closer, green dots again, and his hand left his throat, rose, and pulsed a reply. ‘Are you are awake. Can you hear me?’ Jansi was baffled. He was under water, and yet he could hear this voice as clearly as his mother’s at the bedside. ‘I… I don’t understand.’ ‘Please relax. You have morphed; the after-effects are sometimes disorienting.’ ‘Morphed?’ ‘There is someone here to see you.’ The shape moved aside and another, smaller, lither, and altogether more enticing replaced it. Again the green dots, and the answering pulse from his own hand. ‘Are you all right? I feel so responsible.’ The words, Jansi now realised, were appearing directly in his mind. His ears were aware of little more than pressure fluctuations in the flow of water around him. ‘I’m… fine… I think! Responsible?’ ‘I was practising my speed swimming, and didn’t see your rope – your people are hardly ever out this early. I swam into it and stopped you diving, and then you got into the vortex and I couldn’t hold you up…’ ‘I don’t understand any of this.’ ‘Enough!’ The original, larger shape was back. ‘You see you have done no harm. Leave us to his orientation.’ Jansi had begun to see more clearly as his mind became used to the nictitating membrane that was keeping the water out of his eyes. Evidently, the larger shape was some kind of woman, and Janis was a strange but attractive girl. ‘Orientation?’ The "girl" slipped away, and the woman approached him, reaching above his head. A simple twist and the gentle control of his head was released. The tube peeled away, folding into a wall. She moved closer, and he saw eyes, misty behind third eyelids, examining him keenly. ‘Those who stay need orientation.’ And they always stay, Jansi thought he heard her whisper. A faraway, wistful look came into her eyes. All except that one, so long ago. She shook herself. ‘You know the town was not always under water; people once walked free in the air in the streets of Brighton?’ ‘I have heard the legends…’ ‘’Tis no legend, boy. Once men lived only on land, as you do; it was the undines were the stuff of legend and fairy tale. When the seas rose and took back the land, many people died, and many more would have – but wise men called scientists developed modifications to the human body that would allow it to live in the oceans. The vector was a simple ’flu virus that was seeded into the oceans. It lives all around us still, so any dryman can join us…’ ‘But what happens if you’re normal and don’t want to change?’ ‘Huh? Normal, is it? You’re no more normal than I am, Boy…’ ‘My name is Jansi!’ ‘And you can call me Sinja. But that is not my name, any more than I understood what you call yourself. My name is –’ a sudden uncomfortable pressure assailed his ears, accompanied by a squeal, a burbling eructation, a sharp scent of cinnamon and ginger, and a warm, wide, homely feeling, ‘– but we rarely share our names. We send ciphers that decode as a near anagram of your own cipher.’ ‘Is that why Janis’s name sounds like mine! But you’re not speaking. How do your words get into my head?’ ‘The scientists who made the alterations in our bodies possible also discovered that all humans are capable of telepathy, the ability to transfer thoughts directly from mind to mind. The alteration we underwent also triggered this ability. But it would be chaos if we could all read each other’s minds all the time. So you have to ask permission. When you want to speak to someone, you flash your fingers at them – yes, just like that. If they want to speak to you, they flash back, and you can talk as we are now, to a range of about twice your body’s length.’ Jansi’s mind was overflowing. He could swim and breathe under water; he could talk to other people in their heads; and not long before he had thought he was dead, drowned in some stupid accident. But how would his family manage without him now? ‘But how do you…’ ‘Come, I will show you our home, and that will answer many of your questions.’ Twist/flick, and she was gone, while Jansi floundered. She returned. ‘I’m sorry, it is easy to forget that you have not learned your new body yet. Let me show you…’ and she swam behind him, grasped his body firmly to hers, and, twist/ flick, they were moving, his body learning from the movements of hers against him. And they were out – into a vast underwater cavern that glowed and flickered and gleamed in myriad colours, that curved above and beneath him, and stretched away in either direction into invisibility. Greens pulsed into reds and golds, while brilliant blue lights threaded through them. Then he saw the lights were tiny fish of all colours, each with a glowing spot, just like his fingers. As they flicked and swam, twisted and floated in their shoals, they appeared to be an effortless kaleidoscope. Jansi tried to gasp, but he couldn’t anymore. His mouth flapped uselessly. ‘Do you like it? We try to brighten it up for the holiday season every year. Some say it is too gaudy, and not in keeping with our new way of life, but we try to keep some sense of the way we used to live.’ ‘It’s wonderful!’ The girl Janis joined them. She flashed, he responded, and her voice filled his head, but with no attempt at words; he felt her gladness he was alive, joy in his wonder at the display of light, and warm caring – and as he responded, so she traced his thoughts too, and sorrowed with him as he remembered his family. ‘This cavern is man-made, you know.’ Her brightness filled his mind, pushing out dark memories. ‘Before the great flood, they built this huge drain to try to cope with the rain. The intake vortex for the great impeller that keeps the water flowing fresh through the whole cavern was what dragged you down. Normally it’s dissipated by the tide and the waves. You were just unlucky.’ But Jansi was lost in wonder at the cavern and a civilization that had lain unsuspected beneath the sea during so many of his visits to the pier. He toured their hydroponics, their artificial lightning factory, the clever machines that harnessed the wave power, and came to understand how they ate, and eliminated waste, and how the flow of water was maintained and kept clean. When the tour was over, Jansi was exhausted. Sinja led him back to the sleeping tube, and as it unfurled around him, her voice carried gently into his mind. ‘The morphing is reversible until your lungs completely atrophy from disuse – they have already begun. All you have to do is climb onto the land and empty your lungs of water. But once you have reverted, you are immune, and can never return. Sleep well, boy Jansi, for tomorrow you must make the greatest decision of your life.’ And he slept.
‘Mrs Egel! Mr Egel! Jansi’s returned. He’s come back!’ The grieving couple stared open-mouthed at the urchin who had roused them with his frantic knocking. ‘They found him down the waterfront, all collapsed, and with the hugest catch you ever saw…’ ‘Where, boy? Where is he? ‘They’re bringing him up on a cart now, and his catch an’ all – the biggest I ever seen!’
‘"…and god bless you too," said Tiny Fish, and Ebenezer Pike and the whole school of Craychetts spent a wonderful Christentide and swam together happily ever after!’ Jansi opened unusually bleary eyes, and rubbed them with his knuckles. ‘So, you’ve returned to the land of the living.’ But for all his father’s deep voice, his ‘yo-ho-ho’ sounded hollow and strained. ‘And back just in time for the Christentide Roast, too. Mother –’ as he stood up and walked to the door, Jansi could see that his father was dressed in the full scarlet and ermine of the Fairly King – ‘he’s awake! Set another place for dinner!’ – and his father swayed, and leaned heavily on the door frame. Jansi leaped from the bed, and, weak though he was himself, supported his father back to the chair by the bed. ‘It’s the lungs,’ he said. ‘They’ve never been the same since I was your age and had to give up diving. It’ll come to you soon enough, and you’ll have to marry and have a whole swarm of children to keep us all fed.’ And even as his hand automatically adopted his storytelling pose, absently stroking the scars on his neck, he burst into tears. ‘You came back, Jansi, you returned!’
Jansi suddenly saw himself as his father in another ten years, weak-chested
and feeling useless, and yearning for the world underwater he had lost.
His heart filled with pride and sorrow and love and his hand unconsciously
mimicked his father’s, stroking the tracery of scars on the side
of his neck. He knelt at his father’s side, his mind a kaleidoscope
of images – a girl beneath the sea, a dreamschool of bright flickering
fish, and words unspoken in his mind – and he felt loss and love
and longing, and home, and he hugged his father close. ‘Merry Christentide, Dad,’ he whispered. ‘Merry Christentide.’
Inundination is copyright © 2000 Paul Brazier & Juliet Eyeions
Back to Xmas story index | home | Merry Christmas |